Detectives Kory Flowers and Rob Finch
of the Greensboro, N.C., Police Intelligence Squad were both involved
in tracking white supremacists when, a couple of years ago, a new threat
started to show up on their radar. After receiving phone calls from
several officers whose routine traffic duties had brought them into
contact with hostile drivers spouting bizarre nonsense about being
exempt from U.S. laws, the detectives realized their county had become a
destination for “sovereign citizens” — particularly self-proclaimed
followers of Noble Drew Ali, a black separatist from the early 20th
century whose “Moorish” ideology has been selectively adopted by many
sovereigns.
Determined to protect their county against
the avalanche of fraudulent property liens and other baseless paperwork
(“paper terrorism”) sovereigns were filing against public officials they
felt had wronged them, Flowers and Finch developed a comprehensive
training system whose purpose was to arm officials with the information
they need to combat the problem. The detectives, who have spent hundreds
of hours interviewing sovereign ideologues, emphasize that it is not
only police that need training, but clerks of court, registrars of
deeds, district attorneys, judges, fire inspectors, and other public
officials involved in enforcement.
The effort by Flowers
and Finch comes as the number of sovereigns expands rapidly along with
the larger antigovernment “Patriot” movement. The Southern Poverty Law
Center has estimated that there are some 100,000 hardcore sovereigns
operating in the United States, along with an estimated 200,000 more
people who are dabbling in its bogus legal techniques. The number of
Patriot groups, including sovereign organizations, has exploded in the
last three years, from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 last year. The ideology,
which was birthed by white supremacist groups and originally said only
white Americans could be sovereigns, has expanded rapidly in recent
years in the black community, typically among the black nationalist
so-called Moorish groups, as well as in many other populations.
The Intelligence Report
spoke with Flowers and Finch about what they’ve seen, what they teach,
and what steps they think are needed to manage the problem.
Was there a specific incident that prompted you to look into the ‘sovereign’ movement?
KORY FLOWERS: We had two different traffic stops where our guys stopped
sovereigns, and then minutes later other sovereigns were showing up and
handing them documentation and talking about suing our officers,
talking about immunity and aboriginal rights and various things. Our
[officers], while they weren’t completely ignorant, were just
overwhelmed, and they contacted us in the Intelligence Unit, hoping we
had answers for them.ROB FINCH: Then a couple of our guys got
sued. We caught two different lawsuits in excess of $70 million each
where the sovereign sued the officer, sued the officer’s direct
supervisor, the police department, the police chief and the city of
Greensboro. That caught the attention of some of our administrators who
were beginning to pay attention, and really drove home our resolve to
get dialed in on this movement and create some training to keep officers
safe.
And you train police officers for the most part?
FINCH:
Law enforcement is only one piece of this entire puzzle. If you don’t
have the other elements of the criminal justice system or of government
as a whole, up to speed, these guys are going to still be effective with
their paper terrorism tactics.
So we started training the
registrar of deeds, the clerks of court, our district court and Superior
Court judges, our assistant district attorneys. We even trained defense
attorneys so they would understand, you know, this is not just a crazy
person who they are representing, [that] this is actually somebody who
believes that the government is illegitimate and this is why they
believe that.
We are to the point now where if sovereigns decide
they want to file a fraudulent lien against an officer or anybody in law
enforcement or the criminal justice system or city government, or file a
lawsuit, that information is brought to us immediately. In Guilford
County, if a sovereign comes in the registrar of deeds’ office to file
any type of sovereign paperwork, whether it’s a lien, lawsuit or an
affidavit renouncing their citizenship, we will get that information
typically within 20 or 25 minutes of that sovereign leaving the office.
And that allows us to be preemptive with the liens and the lawsuits that
they are trying to file against judicial officials, our patrol guys, or
anybody in the criminal justice system, because then we can take that
information to the district attorney’s office [where it’s decided]
whether to prosecute, and we can bring it to the city attorneys and make
sure they can [seek] summary judgments dismissing those lawsuits. So
it’s made the process quicker and it’s allowed us to be proactive
instead of being reactive to it.
What do you do when you realize that someone who filed a lien is a sovereign?
FINCH:
We go ahead and send them a letter from the Intelligence Squad saying
that it’s come to our attention that you recently attempted to file
“sovereign” paperwork, and [this is] basically just to advise you that
none of that is legitimate.
Do they respond?
FINCH:
[Sometimes] we get phone calls from some of these folks that literally
were duped. We have actually unconverted a couple of up-and-coming
sovereigns, “amateur” sovereigns, I guess you can call them.
Our
police attorney is a very proactive guy. He also sends a letter on
behalf of the city legal department saying, “Just so you know, if you do
ever anticipate filing a lawsuit or false lien on any of our officers,
we advise you already we will countersue.” That’s been the position of
our police attorney since he came in six months ago or so. It’s been
very, very persuasive.
FLOWERS: We insulated our county, I think,
as best you can. We train everybody from parking enforcement to
meter-reading folk who will see the tags and contact us immediately. We
[also] trained our dispatchers to pick up some of these buzzwords so
they can then notify the officer to be aware on calls for service or
traffic stops, and we’ve trained all levels of our command staff. It’s
been a pretty big net we have thrown out, which has been very effective.
How do you collect information about sovereigns?
FLOWERS:
We go out after our patrol guys run into [them, or] after we get an
E-mail from a parking guy or the registrar of deeds, and we talk to
these folks in a very congenial, nonaggressive manner — basically,
telling them that we want to understand their political and ideological
stance in order to train up our folks. We spend hours sitting down at
sovereign kitchen tables and on their couches, in their backyards
sipping lemonade. And they’ll just talk to us. A lot of them haven’t had
anybody that would spend the time to listen to them. They will tell us
everything we need to know in order to predict their behavior the next
time they’re run into by officers.
We have infiltrated some of
their meetings in an undercover capacity also. But a lot of our best
intelligence is just very overt intelligence gathering, just questions
and answers.
Can you talk a little more about the nature of the movement in your area?
FINCH:
The Washitaw Nation and the Moorish Nation [both predominantly black
groups], those are our most prominent and dominant sovereign groups in
North Carolina as a whole.
You hear [references to] Timothy Drew
[who is also known as Noble Drew Ali]. He started the Moorish Science
Temple in New Jersey, but he’s originally from North Carolina. As with
any movement, folks always want to flock to the homeland.
How are people getting into the movement to begin with?
FINCH:
Kory and I believe that a lot of these black sovereigns are getting
indoctrinated in the prison system in New Jersey, and elsewhere, on a
very basic level. Because there is such a large contingency of black
sovereigns in this area, they can come down here and already have that
sovereign support system in place. So there’s a huge influx of New
Jersey folks coming to North Carolina — that’s why the movement is
growing daily.
FLOWERS: When we identify a new Moorish apartment
building a lot of times, we go do surveillance there and we notice
there’s an overwhelming number of New Jersey tags. And some of our
partners from New Jersey say that they’ve noticed a lot of North
Carolina tags amongst the New Jersey Moors. So it’s not coincidental.
Do you have any sense of how many sovereigns are in your area?
FINCH:
In just this center part of North Carolina, I would be comfortable with
a conservative number of around 300. And I think there’s more. I think
that for every one that Kory and I go out and interview and identify,
there are probably three or four more that just got indoctrinated and
haven’t yet had a law enforcement encounter.
And they’re all active — filing liens, confronting officers and so forth?
FLOWERS:
They’re on a continuum. Sixty to 70% of them are not going to be
combative. They’re not going to sue officers, they are just going to
give us lip service and give the standard paperwork. And then you’ve got
the others, 25-30% that are going to actively resist arrest, fight
officers, sue officers.
We try to identify the threat level of
each one. We try not to just make a blanket statement, “Sovereign equals
danger,” [as in] physically dangerous, because a lot of them are not.
We hope to dissuade a lot of them before they kind of get to that point.
Has there been any violence?
FINCH:
What we have been dealing with is your roadside traffic stop where
[individuals] are resisting, they are actively fighting, they are trying
to hurt the cop on the side of the road. But we haven’t had any large
organized group of sovereigns try to harm anybody.
FLOWERS: We had
a couple sovereigns that climbed up on furniture in court and yelled at
judges, thrown paperwork toward the judge, to the point where they
would have to get tased multiple times, double-restrained and dragged
out of court. They just don’t play by the same rules as even our most
hardcore, run-of-the-mill criminals. Run-of-the-mill criminals, even if
they are real badasses, they don’t yell at the judges, and throw stuff
at judges. These guys are just a different breed. Their mindset is
totally different.
FINCH: We have had a couple of our white
sovereigns and a couple of our black sovereigns threaten district court
and Superior Court judges verbally and with letters. Not actually
saying, “I’m going to kill you,” but “I don’t respect your authority.
You have no authority as a judicial official and harm is going to come
to you.” And we have had a couple situations of harassment where they
have constantly sent E-mails and letters to a couple of judges’ houses.
We have had to go out and investigate and do threat assessments on those
folks.
How much of a threat is this to law enforcement and other officials in your area?
FINCH:
I don’t think it’s the No. 1 violent threat, but it’s definitely the
most intrusive threat to law enforcement, because of paper terrorism and
the associated paperwork.
FLOWERS: It’s much more intimidating
and corrosive than threats of physical violence. You know, our guys,
they aren’t afraid of bullets and knives — but the idea of losing their
house, losing their livelihood; it’s propagated because it’s worked. We
get calls from officers who are discouraged from stopping sovereigns,
because they know of their reputation.
Do you think the movement will fade away eventually?
FLOWERS:
We don’t believe that we will ever get rid of it, but we can definitely
[affect] it. Word is getting out among the sovereign circles in the
Southeast that this is not the place to be. It’s our hope to just move
them. And if everybody else would just work to insulate their counties
and states, then they will eventually run out of places to be.
We
probably trained 5,000 cops or so in the last couple of years. We get
calls pretty regularly after a training session [from officers who run
into sovereigns], who tell us they handled the encounter safely because
of the training. That’s the payoff for us — a big-time payoff.
Does North Carolina have a paper terrorism law?
FLOWERS:
It’s a misdemeanor right now to file a false lien, or a lien that has
no merit whatsoever. It’s a step above a heavy speeding ticket.
Rob
had a meeting in March with the attorney general of North Carolina,
just to sit down and talk about this, about what we can do to create
more proactive laws to squash a lot of this stuff. [And] we ran a
training session for the North Carolina governor’s crime commission in
November. They are intrigued and wanting to do something about it.
Hopefully, North Carolina will be enacting some cutting edge legislation
in the months to come.
Do you have a sense of how many fraudulent liens and other documents have been filed in your area?
FLOWERS:
In every training we hold, classes of 40 to 50 guys, there will be
eight or nine who are either currently being sued, have been sued or had
had a lien put on their property. It’s really thick.
FINCH: In
North Carolina, the laws are so lax and there are so many loopholes that
they could effectively threaten law enforcement and scare law
enforcement away by filing these frivolous liens and lawsuits. And it’s
worked to a certain extent, you know, every 100 traffic stops on
sovereign citizens, 10 or 15 are going to result in liens and lawsuits.
Eventually, word gets around.
What steps should be taken to reverse this trend?
FINCH:
The most effective thing to do is train and educate. Don’t just keep
the training in-house. Don’t just train law enforcement. You have to
train everybody from the courthouse personnel, all the way down to your
parking enforcement folks.
FLOWERS: We even trained a bunch of
fire inspectors, fire department building inspectors, because these guys
are going into houses and running into sovereigns.
FINCH: If our
guys feel comfortable and prepared when dealing with these guys then we
have done our job, because then they will do their job safely and
effectively.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/fall/dealing-with-sovereigns
It is not improper to suggest that ALL of those who sat the bench on the Mabo case should have recused themselves due to self interest in the form of financial joinder to the Crown – which was, after all, a party to the proceedings in various forms and guises.
There is also the fraud of Native Title which then flowed from those cases, and the fact the Crowns minions have secreted the rights of the Tribes to establish their own separate sovereign States and establish their own political and other structures – protected by International law.
The High Court has demonstrated, and this matter now further exacerbates the evidence of corruption on the bench in respect of the Crowns lack of jurisdiction over Tribal peoples. Not to mention the severe harassment of the people and their families who are standing up to the Crown on these matters by the Crowns’ police and other agents – contrary to UN resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 Oct 1970…..to which the Corporate State of the COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA and its’ States are bound.