On April 4, 2022. Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old Black man, was shot by a white police officer after an attempted arrest led to a scuffle for the officer’s Taser. There were no warrants for his arrest.

After community protests led by Atty Ben Crump took place, on Wednesday, the Grand Rapids Police Department in Michigan hosted a press conference where they released a redacted, remixed video of the officer’s body-cam, which cuts out right before the shooting of Mr. Lyoya. The police claim the bodycam malfunctioned at the moments prior to the shooting.

Mr. Lyoya was fatally shot by a police officer following a traffic stop on the southeast side of Grand Rapids, Mich. Grand Rapids police said Mr. Lyoya fought with the officer after his vehicle was pulled over. Initially, the circumstances that led to the traffic stop weren’t clear, but police said after further inspection the vehicle had a license plate not registered to the vehicle. However, police stops cannot be justified after the fact. In order for the police to stop you the Supreme Court has ruled that police must have reasonable articulable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot and that you are involved in the activity. Police may not act on on the basis of an inchoate or unclear and unparticularized suspicion or a hunch - there must be some specific articulable facts along with reasonable inferences from those facts to justify the intrusion. Here, the stop would be lawful only if police puled him over because of the discovery of the unregistered vehicle (or some other traffic infraction) before the stop. To discover that the vehicle was unregistered after the stop would be an unconstitutional violation of so called 4th Amendment rights - in so far as laws are usually applied to white citizens.

Mr. Lyloa had not committed any felony (unregistered vehicle is a minor traffic misdemeanor) and the white cop was not authorized to use deadly force to apprehend him as a fleeing felon. Nevertheless, in the system of Authority all “laws” are threats backed by the use of deadly force against those who disobey. As Dr. Blynd explains, obedience to authority or jail is the actual reality; an individual may willingly comply with authorities but they really have no choice in the matter. To comply or not comply is a false choice because all laws and commands from authorities are threats backed by the use of physical violence. Additionally, in most states it is unlawful for citizens to resist an unlawful arrest. The legal system is anchored in violence, nothing more. “Authority” is the right to rule over people, the right to initiate unprovoked acts of violence on others. The idea that some people have the moral right to forcibly control others, and that, consequently, those others have the moral obligation to obey is what killed Mr. Lyoya. Authority caused his murder, which is the ultimate slavery.

As undeceiver Michael Huemer explains,

Government is a coercive institution. Generally speaking, when the state makes a law, the law carries with it a punishment to be imposed upon violators. It is possible to have a law with no specified punishment for violation, but all actual governments attach punishments to nearly all laws.  Not everyone who breaks the law will in fact be punished, but the state will generally make a reasonable effort at punishing violators and will generally punish a fair number of them, typically with fines or imprisonment. These punishments are intended to harm lawbreakers, and they generally succeed in doing so.

Direct physical violence is rarely used as a punishment. Nevertheless, violence plays a crucial role in the system, because without the threat of violence, lawbreakers could simply choose not to suffer punishment. For example, the government commands that drivers stop before all red lights. If you violate this rule, you might be punished with a $200 fine. But this is simply another command. If you didn’t obey the command to stop before all red lights, why would you obey the command to pay $200 to the government? Perhaps the second command will be enforced by a third command: the government may threaten to revoke your driver’s license if you do not pay the fine. In other words, they may command you to stop driving. But if you violated the first two commands, why would you follow the third? Well, the command to stop driving may be enforced by a threat of imprisonment if you continue to drive without a license. As these examples illustrate, commands are often enforced with threats to issue further commands, yet that cannot be all there is to it. At the end of the chain must come a threat that the violator literally cannot defy. The system as a whole must be anchored by a non-voluntary intervention, a harm that the state can impose regardless of the individual’s choices.

That anchor is provided by physical force. Even the threat of imprisonment requires enforcement: how can the state ensure that the criminal goes to the prison? The answer lies in coercion, involving actual or threatened bodily injury, or at a minimum, physical pushing or pulling of the individual’s body to the location of imprisonment. This is the final intervention that the individual cannot choose to defy. One can choose not to pay a fine, one can choose to drive without a license, and one can even choose not to walk to a police car to be taken away. But one cannot choose not to be subjected to physical force if the agents of the state decide to impose it.

Thus, the legal system is founded on intentional, harmful coercion. To justify a law, one must justify imposition of that law on the population through a threat of harm, including the coercive imposition of actual harm on those who are caught violating the law. In common sense morality, the threat or actual coercive imposition of harm is normally wrong. This is not to say that it cannot be justified; it is only to say that coercion requires a justification. This may be because of the way in which coercion disrespects persons, seeking to bypass their reason and manipulate them through fear, or the way in which it seems to deny the autonomy and equality of other persons. [MORE]

Grand Rapids police said Mr. Lyoya’s vehicle was also occupied by another person, who witnessed and filmed some of the incident on their cellphone. [MORE] The police and their dependent media obviously have disregarded his/her account of what took place - the official government version is always the defacto truthful version when cops harm people.