Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Where to begin amongst this strange mishmash of distorted information??
I don't think they had the authority to pull you over in an unmarked vehicle. Your offensive gesture is protected under the first amendment meaning you did not have to exit the vehicle or submit to a search.
Mostly, no. That's not correct. An officer can pull you over and, in an unmarked vehicle, presumably had "take down "lights to identify the vehicle and occupant as LE -- or why would Strider have pulled over? The offensive gesture might be protected if it went to court, but if you refuse to pull over you're just setting off a whole chain of stuff you don't want. You have to obey all lawful orders, and you're not really in a position to determine what's lawful until the officer tells you why you've been pulled over. If it is unlawful, then you can complain, file a civil action, whatever you want.
Yosemite has its own police force (straw hats, horses, and badges), its own legal classifications, its own jail, its own judge, and its own specific procedures for handling any infringing situation,
The "police force" are called rangers, both then (1970) and now. The "legal classifications" are called, um, laws -- they're federal and not unique to Yosemite. You went into a jail -- exactly what kind of security do you think a jail has, whatever jurisdiction you're in? Let's not over dramatize it because it's in the bucolic setting of Yosemite. There's a lot of authentically bad, unpleasant people in the world. When you get those sorts of numbers of visitors, X% of them are going to need some level of intervention from law enforcement (aka rangers). So when someone is arrested, would you rather they hang out in jail and are then transported 2 hours to the one in Merced, then wait a day or more to be seen by a federal judge or, as in Yosemite, seen by the resident federal magistrate?
The building itself imposes its somber presence on any who dare enter there.
The building used to be the maintenance shop. Get a grip... .
There we were, in the green soft meadow, diverse groups of people, circles… in the tall grass sitting, playing music, “grooving on the scene”, and getting high. .....
From out of the north hidden, out from behind the trees, unannounced, 30 – 50 mounted police charged violently into the previously peaceful “hippie” circles. Riot helmets now replaced the familiar straw ranger hat, batons swinging freely…horses galloping…vengeance rampant. Not seeming to care whether they attacked innocent or guilty, anybody in the meadow, Stoneman Meadow, became fair game for anyone caught under the federal police onslaught.
Well, you get some points. It was badly handled in the sense that rangers then weren't trained for riot or crowd control. Neither were the police in Berkeley or the National Guard at Kent State. There's an unfortunate learning curve.
You forgot to mention the bikers out in Stoneman Meadow with their motorcycles. You seem to have missed several rangers who spent the previous day and the day of what became a riot out talking to people and asking them to leave the meadow because of the damage being done, the garbage being left and the overall effect of having 300+ people getting high and grooving in a fragile meadow in a National Park. And the haze of THC may also have caused you to forget the warnings and orders to disperse delivered by bullhorn ahead of the "charge." This is all on film.
Markskor's recount is a profound commentary and I believe should not be minimized by anyone. We are a country of laws and what happened was illegal, criminal, brutal, absolutely unacceptable and a lesson to ALL of us.
I don't want to come down too hard here, but the lesson is try to get the facts right. It was none of those things.
No question it was a bad day for NPS rangers and their image. It's likely it could have been handled much better but poor training on the part of the rangers and unreasoning defiance on the part of the gathering doomed the whole thing. Reasoning with the people in the meadow was not working. The Berkeley Barb had been running articles encouraging
young, opinionated, stupid, and cocky
people just like you to go to Yosemite and take over the park. How do you think that was going to go?
The semi-good news is NPS radically changed their training and standards starting shortly after that. They tried to gear programs more towards the "young, stupid & cocky" to educate them on what parks are about and why certain things are not allowed. And, best of all, they hired me to "better relate to youth" -- ta da!
There's this disconnect in accepting the fact that parks need law enforcement rangers to protect the parks from all sorts of people running amok -- drunks on roads, vandals, people with guns etc. Two weeks ago, a guy who had just shot several people had blown past a chain control at Mount Rainier. When a ranger set up to stop him, he shot and killed her. The road ended at a snow play area where families were enjoying a day in their park. He was stopped before he got there. What do you suppose might have happened had trained law enforcement rangers not responded to stop him?
She left behind a husband (also a ranger) and two small children.
They (in my opinion) need to err on the side of liberty nearly every time because power corrupts.
Sure, there's a few (a very few) bad rangers out there but I gotta say, incidents such as are implied here (gestapo tactics...) are incredibly rare when actually examined. Rangers have an assault rate on them almost the equivalent to that of a city police department. I'm not sure what is meant by "erring on the side of liberty" but I do know that the FBI determined it was the friendly, trusting officer (all officers nationwide) who was most likely to get killed in the line of duty.
Jeez, this was way too long. But this black helicopter, jack-booted thug paranoid nonsense drives me absolutely buggy. By any standard you'd care to name, we have a much more open, enfranchised and freer society than, say, 30 years ago.
George