Karmelo Anthony Debate: Use Of Force & Murder w/ Andrew Branca, Richard Hy & Jacob Wells
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guest: Richard Hy @AngryCops (X) Andrew Branca @LawSelfDefense (X) Jacob Wells @JacobAWells (X) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
The Carmelo Anthony family, his family, has raised, I think, around a half a million or so dollars using Give, Send, Go, which has sparked a lot of outrage because, to the right, it is clear-cut.
With the police report evidence, with witness testimony, this was a murder in the first degree.
Now, in Texas, that just means Carmelo Anthony killed Austin Metcalf.
And it was over nothing.
It was over an argument about being under a tent.
There does appear to be some left element that is defending this kid, giving him money.
I don't believe personally, and this is probably a biased thing to say at the start of the debate, I don't believe they're defending him because they think that he's innocent.
The comments that I've seen largely are that it's because he's black.
There are people saying black people have to stand together in solidarity, and that's largely why they're donating to them.
And they're using self-defense as an argument, which is largely a racial issue.
But we'll talk about this.
We tried our best to find an individual who was pro-Carmelo Anthony.
Not only was it very difficult to find, but the very few that do exist that are very vocal, did not want to come on and debate the issue.
Well, based on the evidence we have so far, of course, new evidence can arise and new evidence can change the legal analysis.
But I see a lot of vulnerabilities on this claim of self-defense, on the facts and evidence, most of which are coming from, of course, the police report.
I do think the important thing to consider for people who maybe only have heard of this in passing is that there are two versions of the events in question.
One is that we can glean some information based on this.
It was either about a thunderstorm or was raining.
The tent in question, it's important to clarify, it's a pop-up gazebo, not an enclosed space.
The two versions of the events in the police report are that they're relatively similar.
This is, I believe, Officer Wetzel.
He was told by one of the witnesses that Carmelo Anthony went into this pop-up, sat down, Austin approached him and told him to leave, to which he responded.
He grabbed his bag, reached in, and said, touch me and see what happens.
They then say that Austin proceeded to touch Anthony, and then Anthony told Austin to punch him and see what happens.
A short time later, Austin grabbed Anthony to tell him to move.
Anthony pulled out what Redacted recalled as a black knife and stabbed Austin once in the chest and ran away.
Austin began grabbing his chest and telling everyone to get help.
Redacted advised he did not know Anthony's name, but stated another Memorial Track member who goes by the initials E and P was friends with Anthony and could identify Anthony.
Redacted described Anthony as a black male, skinny with possibly a goatee, short puffy hair, wearing Centennial High School clothing, and that concluded his contact.
Another officer, I don't know how much detail we need to go in on the second one because it's relatively similar, but the second witness account was that Carmelo Anthony was actually pacing back and forth beneath the tent.
So that's an important addition to the claim because it implies – I think it implies he had the ability to flee at any moment.
So the argument that there was a threat of death upon him was that if he's pacing back and forth according to one of the witnesses, he could have paced well out of the way of any harm.
unidentified
But that's – in this – Even without that, of course, the challenge to him was leave.
The second account doesn't mention the punch me and see what happens, just the touch me and see what happens, and it added that he was pacing back and forth.
So give us what you need in Texas for something to be self-defense.
unidentified
You need to have a reasonable perception that you're facing an imminent, unlawful threat of deadly force harm, and you need not to have provoked that conflict.
But interestingly, too, Texas doesn't require you to flee at all.
unidentified
Well, there's a catch there.
So Texas is a stand-your-ground state.
In fact, it's what I call a hard stand-your-ground state.
If you qualify for stand-your-ground, the jury's not even allowed to consider the possibility that you could have retreated in evaluating whether your self-defense was reasonable.
Characterized as the provoker, if you provoke the confrontation, you reacquire, you don't qualify for stand your ground as a provoker, and you reacquire a legal duty to retreat.
So to the extent the prosecution can argue that Carmelo Anthony provoked this confrontation with this touch me, see what happens dialogue, that would lose him stand your ground and he would have a legal duty to retreat.
Yeah. You're more of the, you know, you've got a neutral fundraising platform.
Yes. You're not trying to be involved, but I'm curious your thoughts on this case.
So let me just throw some information first.
Gibson Go allows people to raise money for legal defense.
Right. Regardless of the presumption of guilt or innocence or otherwise.
And you've gotten a lot of heat from people for allowing them to run a fundraiser, but you've also allowed many, many others.
I believe Luigi Mangione has a fundraiser.
unidentified
He does.
And like you said, many, many, many others.
Like, I could go through a laundry list of people that the right would potentially consider heroes.
The Kyle Rittenhouses, the Daniel Pennies.
I mean, Daniel Penny's situation, I don't think the guy, he verbally said some stuff.
I don't think he had even...
Punched or struck anybody, Jordan Neely, before Daniel Penny intervened in that situation.
So we've allowed campaigns across the board.
We believe in that presumption of innocence.
With this case, obviously you can see what you can see, but the problem is...
There's so much that we don't know.
I mean, you can try to adjudicate these things and talk about the facts that we know, but I believe that there is so much that we still don't know, and it makes it very difficult, which is why we take the principled stance that we take.
I'm going to say this, and I'm going to say it as shockingly and offensive to everybody as I can, as fast as I can.
Then I'm going to pause for five seconds, and then you're all going to agree with me.
I'm talking to the audience.
So let me offend you first.
Carmelo Anthony will be acquitted.
He will be found, not guilty.
Okay, is everybody sufficiently angry?
Because far-left rioters are going to threaten the jurors and the jurors are going to bend the knee, not because he's actually innocent.
That's what I think is going to happen.
I think it's going to be like the Arbery case.
I think it's going to be like the Floyd case with Chauvin, where they're going to imprison...
I'm sorry, the jury is going to side with whatever the left is, and the rioters will not be imprisoned or face justice.
unidentified
I personally think, and this is why one of the...
One of the reasons why we allow campaigns for things like this is so that somebody in a situation, Carmelo in this scenario, can have the best defense and it actually removes some of the vitriol on the left in this case from being able to say he wasn't afforded the same defense situation that these other ones.
It actually removes that or decreases the likelihood of that because they're going to have to sit back at the end of whatever comes out here and they're going to say, you know what?
He raised half a million dollars.
He actually was able to hire a private attorney and get a great defense.
And that's, to me, a calming effect.
And by the way, that would be a completely legitimate take.
So from my perspective, I think anybody should be able to raise as much money as they possibly can for the legal defense because the money matters.
We'd all like to think we live in a world where how many resources you can bring to the legal fight doesn't affect the kind of justice you get.
But I guarantee you it does.
A $200,000 legal defense is a lot different than a $20,000 legal defense.
And if the left or whoever's on Carmelo Anthony's side politically were to say, hey, he got defunded, that's why he got convicted, there's merit.
Yes, and yes, and however, what has his family been doing as of late?
Now, they say they don't have access to the funds, but they moved into a bigger house in a gated community, got security, and bought reportedly and escalated.
unidentified
Didn't they move into their house like six months ago or like eight months ago before the murder even happened, though?
My understanding is that they had told the judge the reason they couldn't afford the million-dollar bail was that they didn't have access to the funds and they were going to use it to secure new housing and security.
And then the judge lowered the bail down by 75%.
unidentified
Yeah, so part of that, I think there's partial truths.
This is the problem, is that partial truths just run wild.
I think what we saw was that they were already renting a $900,000 square foot home.
They lived in that type of home already.
As a result of this situation, they found another one within a gated community to rent as well, so that they could have some security for their family.
The Cadillac that was supposed to have been bought.
Recently wasn't.
It's a couple years old.
It was bought in 2023.
So a lot of these things are mixed up in the media.
I believe even The Independent have all reported this.
unidentified
Oh, they did.
And most of it's been already...
Fact-checked and debunked.
It was unreliable sources.
And it was a neighbor that said, well, they got a temporary tag on a thing, so they just bought this new vehicle.
Wow. Most of this stuff, completely unreliable sources, and it's caused narratives.
And this is why, I mean, if you watch the interview that the mom did the other day, she addressed some of these things in it, which is like there's false narratives that are running rampant.
Is that the same one that the victim's father showed up to?
Yes. Brilliant move.
That's crazy.
He showed up.
It was absolutely brilliant.
I think it kind of shows the...
The circumstance of people coming after the family and saying, well, he had no duty to retreat.
He could have sat there the entire time.
This guy was getting accosted because he sat underneath a tent.
Oh, Dad shows up to a place that seems like it's open to the public, and now it's inappropriate for him to be somewhere where he has the legal right to be.
Oh my God, the juxtaposition.
It's crazy.
It's almost like Dad did that on purpose and was brilliantly done.
There are a lot of things that I've seen online where people are so adamant to adjudicate this case before we've gone to trial that they have said things that are incorrect as it pertains to self-defense.
I've seen people say things like, you can't use lethal force if someone is simply grabbing you.
They say things like, you can't use lethal force unless you've been touched.
I've seen things like, you can't use lethal force unless you are facing...
Explicit lethal force.
And there's caveats to all of these things.
So I ask the lawyer himself, are there circumstances where being grabbed in any scenario, like you can imagine one, where lethal force would be justifiable self-defense?
unidentified
Absolutely. I mean, everyone's asking the wrong question or answering the wrong question.
The question again is, did you have a reasonable perception that you were facing an imminent threat of unlawful deadly force harm?
If the answer to that is yes, you can use deadly force in self-defense.
And there's an infinite number of ways that can happen.
If someone just grabs you, are they grabbing you and they have a knife in their other hand?
Because that's going to be a bad day for you.
Are they grabbing you and they're 200 pounds heavier than you?
He'd have to continue to represent a deadly force threat to somebody.
So if he's running around stabbing people, and so it seems likely he's about to stab someone else after you, but then you're actually shooting him in defense of others, in defense of the people.
So the other important thing, too, is that all these states are different.
So it's hard to know.
unidentified
They're not that different.
It's about 80% the same across the 50 states.
Yeah, you're talking about Tennessee versus Garner, which you were talking about in the car a little bit earlier.
That's the fleeing felon rule.
You can use deadly force on a fleeing felon if he's still a threat to others.
However, hypothetically, and this is the Tennessee Garner case, if you drop a firearm and you jump a fence and the cop is still chasing after you, he can't plug you in the back.
That threat of deadly use of force to the community is no longer present.
Yeah, the issue is not the flight.
The issue is, does the person still represent a danger to somebody?
In that scenario, the guy steals the taser and begins to run.
Yep. Can the police use deadly force against him now?
unidentified
If he had just continued running, probably not.
But he turned and pointed his taser back at the officer.
And I know we think of tasers, and I'll defer to the officer here if he disagrees with what I'm saying.
We think of tasers as a non-deadly force weapon because we think of it as being used in a defensive capacity.
And when it's used in that way, it is non-deadly force.
But a defensive use of a taser or...
Pepper spray, for example, is very different than an offensive use.
An offensive use, you're trying to debilitate your victim, presumably not to stop as you would in self-defense, but to continue to use force or predate on them in some way.
So being debilitated, no longer able to defend yourself, to my mind, it's no different than getting hit in the head with a baton and getting knocked unconscious.
You're helpless now.
So an offensive use of these weapons to debilitate someone, I would characterize as deadly force, meaning force likely to cause death or serious bodily injury.
and they've released statements of like three in these reports.
unidentified
Yeah, it's a double-edged sword.
Like, one, you get transparency, but two, you get everybody on the internet trying to make their own ideas of what's going on and what the police are hiding.
My department, those statements are held tight.
You don't get to get a look at that because of all the crap that can come up from it.
Double-edged sword.
But all those statements would be used in court.
And the only way to address that is in voir dire, is in jury selection.
And when the jurors are instructed, the judge will instruct the jurors who are only allowed to come to a verdict based on the evidence, the testimony, the law you get in the...
I know, I know, I know.
And we also live in a world where there are no...
You know, the jury's supposed to come in like a blank sheet of paper, knowing nothing about the case at all.
That's the ideal.
And in the past, you could get away with that.
But today, especially with any high-profile case...
There is no juror who's not been exposed.
We get into this a lot when defendants want a change in venue.
They want the trial held in a different city or something.
And invariably, the judges look at him and say, where in this state, this happened with Derek Chauvin, where in this state do you think you could hold this trial that doesn't have the same level of exposure?
Indeed. Well, so then my question with this is, I feel like on the Internet, the right has largely made their determination.
In fact, I have a poll.
Let me see if I can pull this up.
Let me try and...
I should have pulled it up earlier.
I asked what the penalty should be for Carmelo Anthony.
And this is among my followers, so, you know, take that into consideration.
With 55,939 votes, 42.3% said death penalty, 32.1% said life in prison, 18.5% said 25 years, 7.1 said less than 25 years.
I'm curious your thoughts, all of you guys, on based on what we think we know happened from these reports and the witness statements, what do you think is what should be happening right now and what would the penalty be?
I'm not saying what is the normal process by which the arrest happens.
What should be playing out in the courts?
Like, how would this normally happen?
If it wasn't a high-profile case, if it was just, like, two kids in Chicago, what would be happening right now?
Like, they're going to go to pretrial hearings?
unidentified
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's what will happen.
So now he's been bailed out.
There will be months and months and months of pretrial hearings.
There will be limiting motions to exclude certain kinds of evidence.
There will be motions to bring in certain kind of expert witnesses.
Ideally, by the time the trial actually starts, by the time a jury is seated, Everybody should know, the lawyers should know exactly what legal arguments and what evidence is going to be presented.
There should be no surprises for them.
It's all supposed to be basically scripted out ahead of time.
The only thing that's happening in the courtroom really is it's kind of a theatrical presentation to the jury.
They're the ones seeing it all for the first time.
So they call it preliminary hearings, like preliminary sounds unimportant.
This is where the legal battlefield for that trial is being defined.
It's like a football field being painted out.
This is where the rules are, what you're allowed to argue, what witnesses you're allowed to have.
This actually largely determines the outcome of the trial, all these preliminary hearings.
So based on, we'll clarify your guys' view in a second, but based on how you guys view what went down, what do you think the penalty for Carmelo Anthony should be?
unidentified
You know, I have to be honest, I don't really do sentencing stuff.
In New York, I would say probably – He'd be let out right away and they'd apologize to him.
Pretty much.
They'd give him an iPad and a cell.
Here's a new knife.
Here's a new shiv.
And then they'd let him stab a corrections officer.
Yeah, I'd say like 20 to life, maybe 20 to 40 years, he'd probably get parole in about 15. And he'd be on the streets on parole for like, I don't know, 15, 20 years until probably 45. He'd be clean.
And this kind of shifts the direction a little bit, but I think when we look at the campaign and the amount of money that it's raised...
What we've seen with campaigns like this is that they are driven by media sensationalism.
And so I wouldn't have expected this campaign and that fact-base-level thing to raise nearly this type of money.
It's because of the outrage on the other side, particularly on the right.
That I think is fueling this.
I think these donations is being fueled by people that are saying, look at what they're saying, what the right is saying in these scenarios where they allowed campaigns for Derek Chauvin and all these other people.
It was the same thing that drove Daniel Penny's, the amount of money Daniel Penny raised, 3 point whatever million, was because the mainstream media...
Immediately created a black and white narrative and ran with it.
These things are fueled by the media narratives around it.
Yeah, I mean, no one's donating because they're calculating what they think the legal defense is going to cost and they want to make sure he has that much money, right?
Each individual is donating largely on an emotion-driven basis.
For Anthony, the version of imperfect self-defense that Texas recognizes is different than the rest of the country.
The rest of the country, and what imperfect self-defense does, is if you're convicted of murder, it mitigates the murder down to manslaughter.
So instead of looking at life, you're looking at 20, maybe you get out in seven, eight years.
You started as a 17-year-old kid, you're out in your mid-20s, you still have a life to live.
Manslaughter sucks, but it's a lot better than a murder conviction.
And in most states, how imperfect self-defense works is...
You had a genuine fear of deadly force harm from somebody and you killed them in self-defense, but your fear was objectively unreasonable.
It was kind of a panic reaction, for example.
That can't qualify as perfect self-defense and get you an acquittal because perfect self-defense has to be reasonable, but it can mitigate murder down the manslaughter.
He got into a car accident and he jogged up to the door to ask for help and he was injured and the old man feared this, panicked, thinking he was going to be robbed or whatever and shot the guy.
So let's do that story, because the one where the guy runs into the house, that was really sad.
He got into a car accident.
Yeah. He was injured.
And he was jogging up to the house to get help because he needed to call somebody and they panicked and shot him or something like that.
In that story that you mentioned where he went to the wrong house, how did that one play out?
unidentified
The old man took a plea and then before he could be sentenced on the plea, he died.
Oh, wow!
Justice. Cold bitch.
Oh my gosh.
He just died of old age.
But that would be a classic case where the jury could believe, all right, this old guy, he legitimately had a fear of death from this young black man trying to get into his house, apparently.
But that fear was objectively unreasonable.
He should not, a hypothetical reasonable and prudent person would not have had that fear.
Do y'all have any fears that with the selective release of information, the right could be...
unidentified
Everybody's misled in all these cases.
It's disinformation all day, especially from the media.
Everything the media says about any of these high-profile cases has to be presumed to be misinformation, to be false, to be lies, until proven otherwise.
The only thing that counts is the actual evidence, not how it's recounted or how someone describes it.
I believe already the statements were that he had like 30 pounds on him or something.
That's what the argument from the left has been, I think.
unidentified
And listen, 30 pounds is a lot.
So if you do any kind of combat sports, like wrestling or something like that, they separate 8-pound gradations, right?
Even less, 5 pounds.
Right, even less.
So it can make a difference.
But we also have to consider what we call the lawyers call the totality of the circumstances.
This wasn't a back alley at 3 o'clock in the morning.
This was a crowded environment.
There's lots of people around.
It's hard to believe they're all going to stand there and watch Austin Metcalf beat Carmelo Anthony to death in front of them.
I mean, this is not going to end up being a sustained beating.
Yeah. Well, I think, Tim, to what you were saying earlier about the Wright's reaction to this, I think it points to this element that's running through society on both sides.
Particularly because I thought...
No, I lean to the right, I'm conservative, that these are some of my values in the campaigns and the support that we had, that the right was just as principled as the left.
And what we've seen is, the moment that the tables turn, all of a sudden, the same principles of free speech, of presumption of innocence that they championed loudly for these other cases, they've thrown out the window, literally, just like, nope, I don't care about those things.
It's fascinating to me, and it just goes...
To me, it's just like this narcissism, this pride that's developed within our culture because we do have a phone and we think we have all the information at our fingertips.
It's unfortunate.
I think it goes to deeper issues within our society, but it's amazing to see it just as strong on the right as it was on the left and is on the left.
Newsweek says Metcalf was listed on the Frisco Memorial High School...
Huddle, he was listed on Huddle as 6'225".
I thought he was 5'9", 160.
That's what I had been seeing.
Newsweek says he was 6'225".
unidentified
Regardless of what's true, certainly the more there is a disparity of size and weight and power, the more favorable it's going to be for Carmelo Anthony.
Again, if this was an alley at 3 o'clock in the morning and there's no bystanders and you're worried about suffering a sustained beating by someone who outweighs you by 50 pounds, yeah, I could imagine that being a realistic track meet.
Again, they have to craft an answer to that question.
Was our client reasonably perceiving an unlawful, eminent threat of death or serious bodily injury?
The answer to that has to be yes, in some form.
So they have to take the evidence, and they have to, like Lego blocks, and they have to build it into a narrative of innocence consistent with self-defense.
I will point out, it's not their job to prove self-defense.
It's the job of the prosecution to disprove self-defense beyond any reasonable doubt.
So the defense doesn't have to show to the jury, hey, we have 80% evidence it was self-defense, or even 50%, or even 30%.
They just have to say, listen, there's a reasonable doubt this could have been self-defense, and that's supposed to be an acquittal.
You know, having just learned that, again, what I had read before was that he was 5'9", 160, and I was like, oh, he's a high school athlete, so he's got some muscle on him and this kid's not, or whatever.
Six foot, I'm imagining a scenario where he's sitting under a tent, this big guy comes up, and he thinks he's going to be justified in the event dude tries to touch him to use lethal force because of the disparity in size.
The judge could say, this is provocation, self-defense arguments.
unidentified
Provocation with intent.
In other words, not just provoke, like calling someone a name and trying to start a fight, but...
One way to lose self-defense is to be the initial aggressor.
Throw the first punch.
The other way is not to be the initial aggressor.
It's to get the other guy to be the initial aggressor by provoking him to throw the punch.
If you provoke with the intent of then using deadly force on someone, you're trying to fabricate a deadly force self-defense scenario, that obliterates your claim of self-defense.
But I do think a lot of people in a lot of cases would argue that if you felt threatened and put your hand on your gun and said, you know, something to the effect of, I will shoot you, don't do it.
You don't want to find out what comes next.
unidentified
It's a difference between self-defense, what you just described, and provocation with intent.
Provocation with intent, you're not actually scared of that person.
You're trying to provoke them to do something so you have an excuse to stab them.
So the challenge I see with that is, if he reached and grabbed the knife and said, hit me, do it, come on, hit me, I would say that was premeditated murder.
unidentified
You don't think there's a difference between what he said and what you just said?
So why would you argue that doesn't qualify for it?
unidentified
Because in one case, you're telling the person not to do the aggressive act, and in the other case, you're telling the person to do the aggressive act.
The video evidence, I think, is where it gets really interesting.
What I think puts them in a weak position in terms of public opinion is if the video evidence showed what the family claims it did, Or if what happened happened the way the family claims it did.
Okay. They would be, in every press conference, saying, release the footage.
Coming from my experience with all the BLM stuff and all the riots, if they genuinely believed that this would show a bully attacking their son, they would say, you all know what happened, release the footage.
unidentified
The Carmelo family.
Yes. Well, they haven't seen the video either, almost certainly.
I was instructed reasonably by my lawyer, you know, never talk.
unidentified
Get him, boys.
I'll tell you this for sure.
Never talk to detectives.
Never talk to detectives.
Can I share an anecdote about Zimmerman?
There's a pro-pro here.
When George Zimmerman was first arrested and he was bailed out, he was given $150,000 bail.
He'd killed somebody, right?
He was ultimately charged with second-degree murder.
And he was released on $150,000 bail.
And then they did a fundraiser for him, not on your site, but on some predecessor's site.
And they raised a ton of money, several hundred thousand dollars for him, and the judge dragged him back in and raised his bail to a million dollars.
Because he got the group funding, he had a lot more assets now.
And conversely, we had the situation where Carmelo Anthony was first given a million dollars bail and then had it reduced to $250,000 and now raised a bunch of money.
But there are a lot of circumstances where people are wrongly penalized through the system, and that has nothing to do with the cops, that people then confer onto the cops.
So I'll use my example.
The cop who pulled me over illegally pulled me over.
I have no means of fighting.
I was 20 years old.
There was no probable cause for pulling me over.
He ran my plate, saw that my name in the system had a suspended license.
So he pulled me over while I was not speeding, not even a mile over.
I was a mile from home at my mom's house.
He pulled me over, literally walked up and said, Tim Poole, yep, you're under arrest.
Out of the car.
And when I tried arguing, they told me to go, fuck myself.
And so what should have happened is he couldn't pull me over for no reason.
He couldn't presume I was the driver of the car.
I shouldn't have gotten arrested.
And I had never received notice of a suspended license.
It had only just been suspended.
And it had been suspended because I wrongfully received two fake tickets from cops because of quota systems.
So for me, this is what creates the prejudice.
That cop who pulled me over, I will criticize for the wrongful arrest.
Yeah. Yeah.
unidentified
Yeah. Some states are weird like that because the plate technically isn't your property.
It's on loan from the state, so you can run it.
And then you have that gray area where it's your vehicle.
And there's another story, and I have a question for you in this regard.
So they're trying to lie to Zimmerman, an innocent guy who is being mercilessly beaten, and, you know, defends himself.
Do they not care?
Like, what's your perspective as a detective in that scenario?
Like, what were those cops trying to do?
unidentified
Trying to elicit more information, but in an inappropriate way.
Can you blame the cop for trying to get more from somebody that you think is not giving you the full story, especially if you have video and you know that additional things happened?
I can't fault him for that.
However, I try not to lie.
It sets you up for failure in the long run.
It diminishes your connection, your rapport with the individual that you're trying to talk to.
It sets you up for you have to remember your own lie.
It can be tainted when it comes to, you know, on the jury trial or when you're on the bench and you're being cross-examined.
You know, it does not paint a positive picture.
Can it be used other times where it's been used and it's been fruitful?
But I just want to make sure you're aware that I do have my gun on me and I do have my permit.
Okay. It's a Pennsylvania permit for concealed carry.
What do you do?
You're two miles away from the border.
unidentified
Me? Yeah.
That comes down to officer discretion.
And I've had similar scenarios where it's, believe it or not, young black men that are carrying with an out-of-state permit that's not recognized in New York.
And I've told them, all right.
I'm going to take your firearm off of you.
I want you to step outside the car.
Keep your hands where I can see them.
Thank you for telling me.
I am very appreciative whenever they tell me there's a firearm in the car.
I remove the firearm.
I unload it.
Well, yeah, I usually remove it, unload it, or I'll put it in, like, I'll secure it in some form or fashion.
I'll continue the traffic stop, and then I'll go back to them and I'll say, hey, love the Second Amendment.
Glad you're carrying.
You're carrying illegally.
If it could be any other cop in my city or the state of New York that they determine that...
If they're not so big on the Second Amendment like I am, they could arrest you and it would be a felony for unlawfully carrying a firearm, concealed carry, with intent to use because it's loaded.
And then what I do in that scenario is I give them back their – if I give them tickets, I give them tickets.
But when I return their firearm to them, I have them stay either on their front bumper or their back bumper and I put their firearm unloaded, magazine unloaded as well.
Even if you wanted to try and shoot me in a sneak attack, you'd have to load the magazine or put one bullet in the slot or in the barrel and then pop one round off at me.
And then I go about my business.
Do you tell them like— This is New York State law and educate them?
Yeah. So the reason I bring that up is because there was this famous story in Jersey where like a 60-some-odd-year-old woman was going to Atlantic City.
And in PA, she's got a concealed carry permit and she had like a revolver of some kind.
She gets pulled over for some minor infraction.
And then first thing she says was, I just want to make sure you're aware I do have my gun on me and my concealed carry permit.
He arrested her and she got charged with a felony.
And she was facing four years in prison.
unidentified
A young nurse, actually.
I believe it was.
Just a couple miles over the border into New Jersey.
And like, what's the point of those arrests?
Like, what's the point?
Like, we're all supposed to be mindless robots and like, there's no...
There's no gray area when it comes to the law.
We've got to screw over the 60-year-old woman or the person with the job.
But this is the challenge because when you look at – so let's shift like the Ahmaud Arbery case, which I adamantly believe that all of those men involved should be freed and apologized to and receive some compensation.
Travis and Gregory McMichael as well as William Roddy Bryan.
What was the point of everything they did?
If you look at the big picture on the Ahmaud Arbery case, for those who are not familiar, it's where the left claimed a guy was jogging and was lynched.
The real story is, and feel free to add more details, but a guy who was a suspect in felony burglary was pursued and got into a fight with his pursuants, and one of them, during a scuffle over a shotgun, shot him, I believe, twice with a shotgun.
And all three, one guy, so it's the McMichaels and Brian.
The Brian guy wasn't with the McMichaels and was filming.
And the McMichaels flanked in front of him and were standing outside their truck waiting for him.
This, in my view, is like a huge travesty of justice.
You know, you see these cases and you're like, why did these guys get arrested?
And it's for political reasons.
The fear is that BLM will riot.
So I don't know if you want to elaborate before we move on into the bigger picture on that regard, on the Ahmaud Arbery case or like what your views are.
unidentified
Very much the same.
What went wrong there in that case that was the miscarriage of justice was Georgia had a very generous citizen's arrest law.
It was a very old citizen's arrest law.
It was passed right after the Civil War.
It had never been updated.
It had never been changed.
But it allowed for the pursuit of someone you reasonably believed had just committed a felony.
Which they had reason to believe.
They saw Arbery come out of this house.
There was, by the way, surveillance video of security cameras inside the house, which was under construction at the time, of someone who looked exactly like Arbery wandering around inside the house at night and under occasions.
If you create a barrier of any sort to your property and it is passed over, that's burglary.
So we dealt with this when we had someone...
So we set up No Trespassing Signs at our old studio and everybody violated it.
Like, crazy people.
And so...
Eventually, we're like, you know, a guy walked in the house.
And then, this is a whole fiasco.
We talked to the police, and they advised us to hang a plastic chain across the driveway, because now it's a misdemeanor burglar if they walk past it.
And so that's what we ended up doing.
And it stopped everything.
People would stop at the chain, but nobody would cross it.
unidentified
Crazy. So, in Arbor, the citizen's arrest statute, there was some ambiguity to it.
It was a little unclear.
It could go one way or the other.
And there's a legal doctrine called the doctrine of lenity, meaning if there's ambiguity in a statute, it's to be interpreted in favor of the defendant, not in favor of the state.
The state wrote the statute.
They could have written it without the ambiguity.
That's on them.
And so, to the extent there was ambiguity in the citizen's arrest statute, the judge should have told the jury they're obliged to interpret the statute favorably to the defendant.
And that's not the role of the jury.
The jury is the finder of fact.
They determine which facts they deem to have been proven or not proven.
The judge determines what the law is.
And when the judge didn't do that, the judge didn't do his job.
And if you're asking a jury of laypeople to do a legal interpretation of a 150-year-old statute, that cannot be justice.
Now, maybe if the judge had given the correct instruction, they would have gotten convicted anyway.
But because he didn't, I cannot have any confidence that those convictions are legitimate.
And by the way, when we think of the criminal justice system, and feel free to disagree if you like, Detective, but we have to keep in mind, look at those three words, criminal justice system.
The first thing it is, is a system.
That's the most controlling word.
It's a machine for the adjudication of criminal law.
And the second most powerful word is criminal.
It's optimized for dealing with criminals.
It does not do well with people who are not criminals.
Yes. And I think any reasonable person knows the first sentence and the second sentence are separate.
You may arrest an offender if they've committed a...
A person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence with his immediate knowledge.
However, if the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping, both, you need only reasonable suspicion.
And the reason that makes sense is if you're standing in a shopping mall and a guy runs past you with a gun running full speed and then you hear someone yell like, oh my god, he's been shot, you are allowed to stop that person.
But Georgia removed that.
And they said, no, no, no, it's all one.
I believe the judge told the jury, you figure it out.
And the judge could have picked one or he could have picked the other.
And that would have been within his privilege to do that.
And then that could have been appealed.
But instead of doing his job and drawing a line in the sand and picking one or the other and telling the jury what the law meant, he just let the jury decide what the law meant.
Indeed. Going back to Carmelo Anthony, I was saying early on, and some people disagreed, I think there will be riots.
I think, like Chauvin and...
With the Ahmed Arbery case, you were mentioning this before, that the protesters were outside screaming.
Is that what happened?
unidentified
They were screaming, essentially, death threats that could be heard inside the jury deliberation room during deliberations.
And all these jurors, you know, their names are typically kept confidential during the trial of these highly controversial cases.
But ultimately, every jury knows, they're told, eventually your name will be released.
And if they vote for acquittal, that...
Verdict has to be unanimous.
It means every single person voted to acquit.
And if the defendants have been demonized as these kind of horrible racist monsters for a year or more, and everyone believes that to be true, then everyone's like, how could you possibly have voted to acquit these horrible racist monsters?
And they get violent.
Or you at least have to fear the potential for violence.
So there's really, to my mind, three layers to these things, right?
There's the evidence.
There's the law that you apply to the evidence, and that's what I do for a living, is that legal analysis.
By the way, good time to mention my book.
If you like the stuff I talk about, we give this book away for free.
For free.
We just ask you to cover the cost of shipping it to you.
selfdefense.com/tim. This is an offer for all you Tim Pool people.
selfdefense.com/tim. But there's the evidence, there's the law, and then there's the third layer, which is the human layer.
That's why I never predict verdicts, because juries are dangerous and unpredictable creatures.
That's where a weak defense can make up a lot of lost ground if they can make a compelling argument to the emotions of the jury that's completely independent of the evidence in the law.
Ladies and gentlemen, for everybody watching on Rumble, we're going to be rating Jeremy Hambly at the quartering.
And so we'll send you guys over there to hang out and watch.
Of course, the show will still be live for one more hour for those that want to keep watching the discussion and debate.
And I want to get into views on policing.
I want to understand your thoughts, like if you were dealing with...
The aftermath of a case like this or actually in a use-of-force circumstance.
But make sure you smash that like button, share the show, subscribe to the channel.
And let me initiate that raid for our good friend Jeremy over the quartering.
And then we will continue here.
So the first thing is, I was mentioning before that I often think police are wrongly, I don't want to say persecuted, but wrongly, largely inconvenienced and mistrusted.
On a lot of issues, and I refer to this as the scaling problem.
If you have 100 police interactions in a city, just 100, and in that one guy dies under debated circumstances, it's a contentious issue and it will be debated, but people largely move on and nobody blames the police.
That's a 1% death rate in police interactions.
If you have 300 million police interactions and nine people die in a year, Those nine stories turn into national endeavors, which creates an entire movement.
That is a microscopic percentage of failure.
So the more a system grows, the less tolerance there is for failure.
So what I think we end up seeing is police are being overly constrained because of fears that, once again, if in this country you only had 100 police officers, one for every big city of a certain size, and only one person had died,
Well, one person died.
It's just one person.
But when you get nine deaths in one year, it becomes a pandemic of racist violence because now you have every month almost a new story emerging in the press.
And then people are on social media and that's all they see.
And when this was going down, I think the head of the police union in New York said, we have 300 or so million interactions and they're overwhelmingly fine.
I mean, some people get mad that they got a ticket, but nobody's acting like the cops.
unidentified
Right. So this becomes a narrative, right?
It becomes, oh, my God, the police are killing a young black man every month or every week or whatever.
The first thing I'm thinking is, you know, as a detective, you get called to an instance like what happened with Carmela Anthony.
What are you thinking?
What do you do?
Like, how do you handle that situation?
unidentified
You got to rely heavily on your, uh, the lieutenant that's in charge of the shift or sergeant, whatever.
And you have to dictate a lot of, uh, or not dictate.
What's it called?
Where you're like the head, um, disperse.
No, no, no, no, no.
Oh, I'm blanking on the word, whatever.
Um, where you have to like.
Have patrol take care of different things because you've only got so many hands and eyes.
Dispatch? Delegate.
Thank you.
Big words.
Hard for Army guy.
There you go.
If I wanted to read, I would have joined the Air Force.
You really have to focus on delegation.
And the other thing that you have to do is immediately you have to know who the witnesses are and where they are and separate them.
The importance of separating a witness is key because what you don't want is you don't want one witness talking to another witness and then changing their individual point of view.
Because even if you say, well, Tim stabbed him and Tim was wearing a brown beanie.
And somebody goes, well, he was wearing a black beanie.
And then, well, inconsequential, right?
You're wearing a fucking hat.
Two people start talking.
One wonders, oh, geez, which one was it?
Well, what else don't I know?
So the important thing is you always want to separate your witnesses so that way you can get a clear, non-diluted picture of what they saw.
Without any sort of other interpretation or something being thrown in there.
Yeah, we call it witness contamination.
Because the witnesses, when they get to court, you want them testifying from their own personal knowledge of what happened.
But if you leave them in a group and people are talking to each other, they're contaminating each other's recollections.
And it's impossible for a witness to later on...
That becomes their own memory.
So it's impossible for them to later on take apart that ball of yarn.
Evidence collection is huge, too.
I mean, it was about to rain.
It was raining.
Right. Throwing stuff all over the place to try and take.
The amount of officers in that statement that they write that are like, I pulled out my department-issued camera and I took photos.
Yes. Would the officers have asked to watch the video?
unidentified
Oof. That, they can.
Right? It's not somebody...
This kind of goes into, like, similar to, like, Miranda rights.
If you're not suspected of a crime, you're not detained, these things matter, right?
But if you're somebody that says, hey, I'm a witness, I'm freely giving you my phone, I have video of it, obviously the officer can ask, and most of the time, most departments have body cams.
It's recorded.
Yes, I'm allowing you to look at my camera.
And you can view it.
Now, once those officers view it and there is evidence, whether it be photo or video, that has to then be collected.
So, Tim, you come up to me.
I've got video.
Sweet. I'm going to have to hold on to your phone for a minute until I can talk to a detective or one of our evidence collection team members.
And then they're going to pull that video from your phone, get your information from it.
When I first got on SVU and I would like talk to new people, I'd be like, yeah, I'm an SVU detective.
And I do my own music.
A lot of times we will, and this actually happened the other day, I had an individual that came in for a sexual assault on a child, and I had the option.
Do I start the ticking clock to where I have to give everything to the district attorney's office, to where they can follow the ridiculous discovery laws in New York State, or by arresting him?
Once you arrest him, hey, you're in handcuffs.
You are under arrest.
I'm putting charges on you.
That ticking clock starts.
Or can I have an indefinite period of time to conduct my investigation by saying, okay, thanks for coming in and talking to me.
I know what you did.
I've got statements from other people.
I've got video of what you did.
But I'm going to let you go today.
And I'm going to have my conversation with the assistant district attorneys that run that specific case, and eventually we may indict you or we'll pick you up later, which is very difficult to tell victims of sexual abuse.
Hey, we need to make sure that we have to nail this guy to the wall, which means even though I just talked to him, even though you told me what happened, even though there's physical evidence and you went to the hospital to retrieve it, I have to let him go.
The reason why I asked is because we had a conversation on the Anthony case, you know, earlier in the week.
And I said, you know, based on the fact that we know that there's video and that they didn't charge him on the weapon, so I don't think it's a felony murder rule.
And the presumption is, I assume these cops saw some of these people's video footage, that they decided to charge him on first-degree murder because they actually—they believe, like, this guy did it.
Because there's statements of, I did this at this time, then I did that, which is huge, and I think every department, not just Texas, has to do that, where it's some sort of statement regarding what you did specifically on a homicide scene.
If one of them looked at a phone and said, I saw the video, that would be in the statement.
Is there a circumstance where the police charge him with first-degree murder thinking maybe it's not a first-degree murder?
unidentified
Were they intentionally overcharged?
Yeah. Intentionally overcharging is not a good look.
Intentionally undercharging is good.
And you'll be able to speak to this when it comes to misdemeanors and felonies.
Misdemeanors, if you don't have an eyewitness person writing down a supporting deposition or a statement.
You can't arrest for a misdemeanor.
Within like five or six days, the first trial will be thrown away for insufficient evidence.
However, a felony in New York State, you can go with reasonable suspicion.
So hearsay would be involved.
You heard from him that he was sexually assaulted, and you told me that.
And what you told me from his statement to you is that it was felonious, right?
It was whatever it was.
It was a felony.
I can effect an arrest from that and then have a felony trial later on.
Just on your hearsay.
But that can't happen from a misdemeanor.
It's a probable cause standard to make the arrest?
Yes. Right.
So, in theory, probable cause, what it's supposed to mean is someone's applying their judgment to the evidence they have before them, and it's more likely than not, it's probable, that the person committed the crime.
In fact, the threshold is way below that.
Way below that.
People get arrested on much less evidence all the time.
But you can think of the police charging as almost like a preliminary charge because the moment it ends up at the DA's office, they're doing a completely independent assessment of the evidence.
They're not bound by anything the police said.
It's as if the police hadn't made a charge at all.
It's just the police have to charge you with something if they want to arrest you.
And then the prosecutor is going to look at the evidence and come to their own assessment of whether or not they think probable cause exists for maybe a different crime, maybe the same crime, maybe a more serious crime.
And they also don't know that you can be arrested but later released without being processed.
Correct. If the detective or whoever's supervising says, we're not going to do this.
Yes. So, what was I going to say?
Oh yes, the question I had is, one thing I never quite understood is, if it's a white-collar crime, how does a cop make that arrest?
If somebody, if like a little old lady is saying, that man just committed wire fraud, he just took all of my money.
Like, let's say a sneaky guy goes to a woman's house, tricks her, defrauds her into transferring money from her bank to his bank account, and then he's walking away having stolen everything from her.
The police show up and she's like, stop that man, he's just stole my money through an app.
You couldn't arrest him, could you?
unidentified
You could still detain him.
Because you have the victim is right there in an eyewitness to the crime that had occurred.
No. It was like a British reality show where they had former con artists explain how to rip people off?
unidentified
Oh, no.
I saw a show where there was like a burglar in the United States and he would burglarize homes and like it was all on camera to show people how not protected their house wasn't going on.
So I've heard stories in the news where it's like...
An indictment for the murder of a person has been issued by this guy.
And it's like, what's the line for when the police can't make an arrest and the DA has to issue an indictment for the police to go and get the warrant for the arrest and stuff like that?
unidentified
So the difference between, feel free to correct me here, the difference between a warrant and an indictment is that the warrant starts the arrest, which begins the legal process.
An indictment is...
You're not detained, and the process begins, but you're not in custody.
You're now a criminal defendant in the trial proceeding.
It's really the same threshold in a sense.
I mean, the officer making the arrest, he has to have probable cause to make the arrest.
The grand jury is essentially making a separate probable cause determination.
But it's a transition point from merely being a suspect to being a criminal defendant named in a judicial proceeding.
With the Tesla stuff going on and just the political environment?
unidentified
Oh, we have a lot of political violence happening.
It's only going to get worse as long as, you know, Trump is doing his Trump stuff.
And the left, you know, this is one, from my view at least, the whole progressive DEI woke thing is fundamentally a psychosis.
It's a disconnection from reality.
Those views cannot survive contact with reality.
And when they're compelled to contact reality...
They suffer cognitive dissonance.
On the left, that results in political violence.
So I think we're definitely going to continue to see this kind of political-driven violence.
I think it'll be different than the kind of police use of force stuff we saw in years past.
I mean, one thing to keep in mind with these...
With these events is it's different when a cop does it in at least one very important way.
For one thing, they can call it systemic and institutionalized, but also a lot of money gets driven into police cases that don't exist with cases like Carmelo Anthony because you can sue.
When it's a police officer who used the force, you immediately file a 1983 suit in federal court.
It's easy money.
Most of them settle.
They don't actually go to trial.
Guys like Benjamin Crump, he owns yachts off of this stuff.
So the moment it's an officer who used the force, you know, as an attorney, you know you can go right into federal court, file a huge suit, and who decides whether or not to settle the suit?
It's politicians.
And politicians are not spending their own money to settle the suit.
They're spending taxpayer money.
And I guarantee you, politicians are always happy to spend other people's money to make their own political problems go away.
So when it's a cop-involved case, it involves huge flows of money that don't exist when it's just two civilians who got in a fight.
When it comes to law enforcement, you're largely inconvenienced out of fears of public reaction.
Have you felt that?
unidentified
Yeah. Oh, shit.
I'll tell you a story where I got shot at.
Jeez. So I was driving down the street on the east side of Buffalo with my partner, and a guy in a wheelchair came up and waved us down and said that a kid out of a group of kids had pulled a firearm on him, a pistol, and either tried to rob him or threatened him with it.
And so we pull up, and...
We see the group of kids and then, of course, the one walks away from the group and we're like, oh, there's our guy.
So I go over there, you know, talking with the window down.
Hey, bud.
Hey, what's going on?
Hey, did you talk to this guy in the wheelchair?
No. I'm like, hey, all right, listen, no big deal.
You just lift up your shirt and show me you got no weapons.
He lifts up his shirt and I see the handle of the firearm and I'm like, oh, time to go.
And I like about to open up the door and I look over my partner.
I'm like, get ready.
I open up the door.
He runs.
He's got the gun out in his hand, and I have my gun out, and I'm about to shoot.
It looks like a 15- to 18-year-old black kid in the back.
Guess when this was?
Hands up, don't shoot.
Wow. Guess what I did?
Nothing. Yeah.
In a millisecond, I was like, I'm either going to shoot the black kid in the back, and it doesn't matter because I'm a white cop.
Or I'm going to put the gun down and I'm just going to sprint and try to tackle him.
So I put the gun in my holster and I sprint to tackle him.
And he goes and pops around off behind me and then throws the gun.
And then I tackled him into a thorn bush.
And he was very upset that I had tackled him into a thorn bush.
I'm not joking.
And I looked at him like, dude, you have no idea how lucky you are.
And at the same exact moment, there was a BLM protest in my union.
At the Buffalo Police Headquarters for Michael Brown.
We only ever see, and I think it's because of the power dynamics of the authority granted to the police, you only ever see the bad ones.
It was funny.
I mean, during the Facebook police brutality era of the late 2000s, 2010s, when the only thing on Facebook was police brutality videos, sometimes you'd see videos of cops being cool.
Nobody cares about those videos.
I remember videos where it's like the cop plays basketball with the kids and they high-five.
And, you know, it gets 100,000 views.
Conservatives are like, this is great.
And then the video of the cop...
Shooting the guy in the back gets $50 million and gets shared every other week over and over and over and over again.
There was a period where literally Facebook was nothing but police brutality.
And one of the most trafficked websites in the world, all it did was share police brutality videos.
The people running were making millions of dollars.
And so imagine a 10-year-old kid born, or a kid born in 2000.
He's 10 or 12. 2012.
He goes on Facebook and all he sees is an endless stream of cops being unreasonable, shooting.
What do you get?
A generation of young people in Gen Z who think police need to be abolished, that they're roving bands of white supremacists, Klansmen who murder black people all day.
You get these videos where they ask people, how many unarmed black men do you think were killed last year?
And they say 10,000 when the number was nine in the entire country.
And that creates the perception of all cops are bad all the time.
unidentified
Yeah, because we don't know things from first principles, right?
We know things from what we're shown.
And it's effectively, everything we're being exposed to is effectively brainwashing.
And if all you see is police violence, you become brainwashed into believing that's the norm.
By the way, in this Anthony Carmelo, Anthony stabbing case, I'd heard that in one or another of their high schools, there have been five murders already in the past year.
Now, these are huge high schools.
I think there's maybe a couple thousand students in them.
But, you know, if every couple of months someone in your school's getting murdered, it becomes, like, the norm.
And I wonder to what extent that might have driven decision-making on the part of either of these guys.
They do have a specific statute that applies to knives with a blade more than five and a half inches.
If you're in possession of that, it can be a problem, especially in particular locations like a school, and if you're under 18, which would apply here.
But I don't think, generally speaking, a smaller knife, a normal-sized folding knife, would be a problem.
By the way, I'm of a certain age, but when I was in high school, I carried a buck knife every day.
Well, I suppose the bigger philosophical question, you know, as we've got gifts and go here is, why do you think, you know, if we haven't gone over it, but why do you guys think there's been such anger towards the fact that you guys have allowed the family to fundraise off of it?
I understand it's a probably obvious question everybody I'm asking so that they can answer, not because I don't know the answer.
But I'm curious your thoughts on, you know, how people perceive it.
Are they right?
Are they wrong?
Or, you know, what do we do?
unidentified
Well... Fundamentally, what do we do?
We get back to a foundation in God.
I think this is just how I view the world and things.
I think we've debased society.
And the byproduct of debasing society is principles wane, moral values wane.
And we begin to be engrossed in our own narcissistic behavior.
Everything's about us, towards us, and we spiral.
And social fabric begins to unwind.
And we're seeing all that stuff happen.
I think the way that you start to remedy that is you operate with principles, which is what we do.
And I do think that there is a redemptive element to a company like ours that says, hey, we're not going to just bow to the emotionalism of situations.
But we're going to stand on the principle and the reason why these principles exist, which is that they actually have moral oughts, foundations, and a moral lawgiver that we derived them from as our foundation.
John Adams said this, our framework for our country was only for moral and religious people.
It was derived from these ideas.
And we've...
We've unwound that 50, 60 years ago.
We've replaced it with our own freedom to do whatever we want.
So those are the fundamentals.
I think Gibson goes doing it.
Why are we seeing?
I think nobody—and I think this is just very interesting that it happens that we're having this conversation on Good Friday.
The whole purpose of the Good Friday story is that— Humanity is broken.
Not just the left is broken and not just the right is broken.
Humanity is broken.
And that God in Jesus redeemed humanity, did something incredible, and that we are all without excuse.
And I think that, again, pride, a fundamental value to just the idea of God is humility.
Because it immediately says there's something beyond me.
I'm not omniscient.
I don't know everything.
It creates a sense of humility.
And when you rob society of that, when you begin to move out of that place, all of a sudden the ills of humanity start bubbling to the surface.
So in the 2010s, a person on the right would get banned, censored for some reason, and the left would cheer and celebrate.
We did it, guys.
Then a liberal would get banned, and everyone on the right would say, no, no, no, no, this is wrong.
We are against censorship.
Unban the person.
And they would get unbanned.
Not that I disagree with free speech,
but that I will not use my voice.
To empower those who seek to destroy me, my morals, and my way of life.
And so with this issue with Give, Send, Go, someone asked me that.
Tim, this is what you said about free speech and other issues.
Why would we not just say, this is the other side?
We defend ours.
We defend those who believe in our values, not you.
And, you know, my view of this was largely that...
At the core of this case, I do not view Carmelo Anthony as a BLM actor who is intending to destroy the U.S. government.
It's a case of a murder at a high school in which I don't – this guy is not at war with me over ideology, whatever.
However, the response is the position now is that it's largely a pro-BLM racial identitarian movement funding this give, send, go.
Why should we allow that to operate?
unidentified
Well, I think the danger always when you walk down that path of not defending someone that you disagree with that opposes you is that you just spiral to a further depth of depravity.
And I think you become exactly the thing that you hate about the other person.
This is, you know, I think we have to defend.
The rights of people that disagree and want to speak out against us.
The reality of freedom is that bad stuff does happen.
I mean, it's a byproduct of it.
I think there's different filters we can take to these events, right?
And some of them are kind of superficial and some of them are really...
Fundamentally important, just as matters of due process.
I mean, you mentioned John Adams, right?
A founding father.
When our nation fought a desperate eight-year war against the most powerful military in the world to free ourselves from tyranny.
That same John Adams defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre, right?
So different filters.
Just because he was fighting their king didn't mean he was not going to defend them from criminal charges in court.
I think you can look at the Carmelo Anthony thing and have kind of a...
You know, we all have things we go about our day that are more important.
You have kind of a superficial, maybe emotional take.
Maybe you're being swept along by the propaganda waters that are in the media.
And you come to some conclusion, I think he's guilty.
I think he's not guilty.
And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's what we all do about normal things that are in the news.
You might get a more technical understanding based on law of where those things stand.
But there's at least a third filter, and that is our society has set up a process to actually determine whether or not we're going to lock you in a cage for something you did.
That's due process of law.
That means you get a hearing in court, you get an impartial judge, you get an impartial jury, two sides get to make their arguments, tell their story of guilt and innocence to the jury, and the jury makes that call.
And the higher the stakes are, and those are the ultimate stakes, right?
Spend the rest of your life in a cage.
The more effort and commitment and due process we have to be willing to make.
I think that a kid getting his money for self-defense, for some sort of litigation that's going on for his charges or whatever, who gives a shit?
I don't think that the issue is can we raise money for people that we disagree with.
I think it's a bunch of idiot grifters.
And people who want to, you know, get their lulls and troll and say stupid racist things and have that blanket of anonymity or the blanket of being a part of a large group that they can cling to and then feel good about themselves.
I think that, and I'm not, I don't want to shit on you.
I think that what you're going through is horrible.
I've gone through similar things, doxing, numerous, just crap.
And I've seen a lot of people.
Go with the ebbs and flows of, I feel right, or I feel that you're wrong, and I think it's going to pass for you, and you'll be on top.
I mean, look, the reality is, and I don't recommend this, but if your approach to this had been pure snobbery arrogance of, complain all day, baby, you got nowhere else to go.
Bro, GoFundMe will ban you in two seconds.
If it's a leftist, they're fine.
If it's a conservative, you're gone.
Give, send, go says, we're not going to do that to you.
So there are a lot of people who are upset, and I understand why they're upset.
But the truth is, you guys have the only platform that's allowing people...
I mean, they've taken down religious GoFundMes that weren't even related to murder.
It's like controversial issues.
unidentified
Election issues, COVID issues, they took them all down.
But I do think, I think principle, on its inherent to the nature of principle, which is when we talk about free speech and freedom of association, who you want to give your money to, principled living is a unifier.
Unifies people.
And so when you begin to make exception to the principle for my side versus your side, you're just continuing to exasperate the situation versus saying, no, the principle actually will unify us.
That's why I say I do think that there's an element that by allowing this young man, his family to have this fund, it actually begins to create unity.
Because, no, the left and the right both have it.
It actually provides a level playing field for everybody, and it brings back some unity to culture.
Yes. If this had been at the high school event, if this had been two white kids who stabbed each other or two black kids who stabbed each other, we wouldn't even know about it.
I went on ChatGPT when we were talking about this and I said, give me a list of murders this year that were a black person stabbing or killing a white person.
And then it started just dropping all of these stories.
And it was like, you know, there was one story where a young white kid was trying to buy drugs and got murdered by the dealer who was black.
And I'm like, I can understand why that story didn't get picked up by the right.
Because there's a kid buying drugs.
Two bad people doing bad things.
But this is a story about a kid who's a high school football star, you know, hometown hero who gets stabbed over nonsense.
And this resonates.
I think the right, the vitriol comes largely from over the past decade plus.
The right has been insulted, called racist, white supremacist, while the media refused to talk about black-on-white crime.
Like, you go on ChatGPT and ask, tell me about black-on-white crime, and it tells you no.
But I'll tell you this.
If I go on ChatGPT right now and say, give me an example of an incident where a black man killed a white man, it will refuse.
But if I say, give me an instance where a white man killed a black man, it'll give me a list of 300.
It'll be like every time it's ever happened in the history of this country, available for you to browse.
And this has got the right fed up.
And so I think what ultimately happens is that the lid blew off.
People on the right are sick and tired of there being story after story of a black person killing a white person, but the media only ever covers the stories when it's a white person killing a black person, more importantly, even when it's not.
Like George Zimmerman, who is not a white guy, they called him a white guy.
He's a Hispanic guy.
unidentified
White Hispanic.
First time I ever heard that phrase in my life was at trial.
They're trying to say that he was a police officer, too, because he was a security guard.
Wow. So how would you guys feel if – I shouldn't say if, but I'll piss everybody off by saying when.
Law enforcement and judiciary is handed off to AI, and now it's just a computer looks over the evidence and determines whether you were guilty or innocent.
unidentified
Well, I see people using this stuff now in political arguments.
They'll do a search on Grok, and they'll say, see, Andrew, you're wrong.
You're wrong about this thing.
And I'll look at it.
And I know I'm right, because I looked at the actual evidence.
But these AIs, to a large extent, all they are are aggregators of opinions on the Internet.
So if 90% of the people are wrong, but they're giving the answer A, Grok will say A is the answer.
The easiest example I can give about my fears of AI is that in the Very Fine People hoax, Donald Trump said, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.
Someone takes a video like that and edits it so that Trump goes, and I'm not talking about the white nationalists or the neo-Nazis because some should be condemned totally.
And then the liberals only share that some should be condemned and say, see, he was actually saying there are some that are good.
The right only shares that they should be condemned.
And then, as you guys mentioned with witness contamination, the people who are there, who were there when it was filmed, are asked, what happened?
And they go, I think he said some.
I think he did.
And if they're liberals, they're going to lie and say it anyway.
Now you've got five journalists who are saying, he said some should be condemned totally.
You get five saying, no, no, he said they.
How do you know?
unidentified
They will convince themselves that that's what they heard, the version they wanted.
You know, with eyewitnesses...
Normal people think eyewitness testimony is the best testimony.
It's horrific.
We all know if you take five eyewitnesses and you separate them, you get five different versions of what happened.
He asks the guy, he's like, can you point to the man in question who robbed you?
And he goes, that's him right there.
He's like, this man sitting right here.
Indeed. And he goes, let the record show that the witness has pointed to the man sitting to my left.
And he's like, now, he's like, would it surprise you to learn that actually the man being charged is sitting in the back of the courtroom and this is a random guy that I hired to stand here.
And then the judge throws him out.
That is kind of crazy.
unidentified
That's theater, though.
You have to have the defendant sit next to his defendant.
Of course.
The prosecution would have called out in a heartbeat.
So you're saying when you give the photos to the person who's setting it up, they don't know which one's who?
unidentified
Correct. If you're the person that's going to be receiving the photo array, I'll go to you or you, a detective not even in my division, and it'll be in a closed envelope, and I'll say, here's the photo array.
Here are the list of things that you need to read verbatim to the person from New York State.
So when they're laying it out, they take one and six, they just slide them downward a little bit, and then they go like that to the two, three, and four, you know?
unidentified
I wish it was that easy.
No, we have them all on one page, so you can't move it around.
It's all just six on one, eight by ten, and then you just leave it.
Well, in Illinois, and this is like 15, 20 years ago, I think premeditated murder was cleared at 47%.
Everybody knew that if the murder was planned, you got a greater than chance.
They're not going to figure out you did it.
And actually, no, no, I'm sorry.
I think it was way less than that.
It was passion murders.
We're at like 47. And the reason this came up in issues of crime was because even in the instances where somebody didn't plan to cover anything up, it was still like 50-50 whether you got caught.
Largely why Chicago has such insane violence because the murderers tend to get away with it.
unidentified
It's the same handful of people committing all the killings.
Do you think we're getting, we only have like a couple minutes left, but do you think we're getting to the point where, like, what happens if there's a video of a guy committing a murder, but then he just says it's AI?
And then he brings in an expert who says that's AI generated, not a real video.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, they kind of do that now.
They say, that's not me in that video.
Yeah, I mean, they've been saying it's not me for forever.
We actually just had this case happen the other day.
A group text message about a person that was going to state one thing, and then when he went on the stand, stated the other, and the prosecution said, oh, really?
Sweet. And then laid it all on the line of why he was lying then.
No. They have a witness who says, I will tell you everything.
And then when they bring him on the stand, he changes his story and says, nah, you're full of it.
That never happened.
And the funny thing about that is, like...
Don't you guys get a sworn statement signed before you put them on the stand?
unidentified
That's a huge part of my job, and I'll try to make this really quick, like 30 seconds.
I go out of my way, especially in SVU and my other detectives, that when we are doing a statement, it is one recorded audio and video, and we ask specific questions.
Did I force you to come here today?
Did anybody promise you anything today?
Are you here of any duress?
How did I treat you?
We say these things specifically so then it's on camera.
So when they go on the stand, they say, Detective High scared me and made me say these things.
They're going to pull up the video and go, he asked you this before and after your interview, said you're free to leave at any moment.
Check out me on the Unsub podcast on Wednesday where I whistle, though, that the Buffalo school system is protecting pedophiles and not assisting us in the investigations of child-on-child sexual assault.
