Despite Austin Voting to Stop Arresting People for Cannabis, Police Chief Vows to Continue Arrests

By Matt Agorist

Austin, TX — For the last two months, cops across the state of Virginia made national headlines when they came together to tell lawmakers that they would refuse to enforce tyrannical and unconstitutional gun laws. This got them praise for many reasons, but it also made many skeptics point out the fact that all of these cops would still arrest you for a bump stock, fully automatic weapon, or any other number of gun bans enforced on a national level. It was essentially little more than a dog and pony show politicized into a circus. Now, we are seeing a similar refusal take place in Austin, Texas this week. In this case, however, instead of refusing not to arrest people, the Austin police department is promising to keep arresting people—despite the city council voting to increase freedom by halting marijuana arrests.

Just one day after Austin City Council approved a resolution to stop kidnapping, caging, and extorting people over marijuana, the chief of police fired back, proudly exclaiming that he would refuse to uphold the new law and will still conduct arrests and tickets of those dangerous marijuana smokers.

“[Marijuana] is still illegal, and we will still enforce marijuana law if we come across people smoking in the community,” Chief Brian Manley said during a news conference Friday afternoon.

Spoken like a true patriot…

Manley said that his cops will continue to either issue tickets under the city’s “cite-and-release” policy or arrest people if officers “come across it.”

Essentially, Manley and his team of badged enforcers inside Austin PD say they will continue to violate the rights of innocent people because the devil’s lettuce is still illegal at the state level. However, Manley’s promise to disobey Austin’s new resolution is futile for many reasons, especially considering the fact that the city plans on doing nothing with the citations and letting go everyone the police arrest without charges.

As the Texas Tribune reports:

The difference, according to City Council member and resolution sponsor Greg Casar, is that the council’s move now guarantees those actions will come with no penalty. Tickets will be meaningless pieces of paper, and any arrests will result in a quick release with no charges accepted from prosecutors, he told The Texas Tribune after the news conference.

“What has changed since yesterday is that enforcement, almost in virtually all cases, is now handing someone a piece of paper with no penalty or no court date,” Casar said.

Nevertheless, innocent people will still be kidnapped by Austin cops refusing to obey their democratically elected leaders, and this is little more then insubordinate tyranny.

This change in Austin’s law comes after hemp was legalized at a federal level. Because cops on the street can’t tell the difference between federally legal hemp and its psychoactive counterpart, Austin city council came up with the logical decision to stop all enforcement. This is the opposite of what other states like Louisiana are doing. In Louisiana, despite the state legalizing the growing of hemp, possessing the non-psychoactive flower or attempting to smoke it, can and will land you in a cage.

Organically Grown CBD Oil and Products Available (Ad)

Manley is apparently just like the cops in Louisiana and is too addicted to going after this plant that’s never killed anyone, so he and his Austin police department will continue to arrest people for it.

Doubling down on his tyrannical act, Manley then claimed at the press conference that the Austin police department is above any petty city ordinance. “A City Council does not have the authority to tell a police department not to enforce a state law,” he said.

Sadly, the Austin police department is representative of many other departments across the country who are so addicted to the war on drugs that they are willing to openly disobey the democratic process that tells them to stop enforcing it. This is not only a boon for the prison industrial complex, but it’s also a gift to violent criminals who get to act in the background as cops go after weed.

As TFTP has reported, when cops stop going after people for possessing substances deemed illegal by the state, real crimes are actually solved.

In fact, a study out of Boston showed exactly that. The study indicated that the Boston Police Department has drastically increased the number of homicides they solved since they stopped making arrests for marijuana. The homicide clearance rate increase by 10% following the decriminalization of marijuana in the area.

“The BPD homicide unit increased the yearly Boston homicide clearance rate by nearly 10 percent […] and by more than 18 percent when the clearance rate definition was extended to include those cases awaiting grand jury decisions,” the study said.

Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates; these are the things that pay — solving murders does not pay.

Sadly, many cops in Austin are perpetuating actual crime by continuing this war on weed. Hopefully they wake up to this reality soon enough so they end up on the right side of history.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.

Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month at Patreon. Follow us on SoMee, Flote, Minds, Twitter, and Steemit.

Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.