Officer/Inspector Safety: Understanding The Sovereign Citizen
As the uncertainty of our nation continues to evolve, individuals who identify themselves as Sovereign Citizens are becoming more visible and vocal as time goes on.
With their pseudo-legal arguments, they claim to be travelers rather than drivers as they drive about our communities without either drivers licenses or registered vehicles. They flood municipal mailboxes with legal documents littered with strange punctuation. Unfortunately, they are also associated with scams, fraud, and acts of violence including standoffs, shoot outs, and terrorist plots.
The Sovereign Citizen Movement, an anti-governmental extremist movement, is based on the ideology that the participants can ignore laws, regulations, court orders and such because they have “divorced themselves” from what they believe to be an illegitimate, tyrannical government. They also use identification terms such state citizen, constitutionalist, or “free person” upon the land.
The “true” nature of government was the basis of the ideology of the Sovereign Citizen movement:
Posse Comitatus: A movement that began in the 1960s, participants professed an anti-sematic, anti-government and conspiracy-minded message paralleling the lines of white supremacy. They participated in survivalism and formed armed militias. The Posse Comitatus started the practice of false liens and paper terrorism. They believe that there is no form of legitimate government above that of the county sheriff. They claimed that Americans do not have to pay federal income taxes.
Moorish sovereign citizen: Based on the teachings of the Moorish Science Temple of America, the founder, Noble Drew Ali, professed that African Americans are descendants of the Moabites, “Moorish” by nationality and Islamic by faith. Over times, members of the Moorish group have practiced hostile possession of properties, citing reparations for justification of their actions.
Over the years, anti-government extremists from both movements developed theories about the “true” nature of government, in that at the time of the early United States, they claimed, humans had lived under God’s law and the common law, not under what they believed to be the heavy hand of “statute law.” The Constitution and early American government, they said, enshrined these principles.
For decades, the sovereign citizen movement has been dominated by theorists or “gurus” who invent the pseudo-legal theories and tactics of the movement and market them to followers. Sovereign citizen gurus hold seminars around the country and online, compose filings and instruction manuals and offer “legal” advice and guidance, all for a price.
The oldest and most popular tactics used by adherents of the sovereign citizen movement are “paper terrorism” harassment tactics wielded against law enforcement officers, public officials, businesses, and private citizens. A term used early in the 1990s by Nick Murnion, a county attorney in Montana who long battled an aggressive group of sovereign citizens known as the “Montana Freemen”— “paper terrorism” is the use of bogus legal documents and filings, or the misuse of legitimate documents and filings, by a sovereign citizen to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against their perceived enemies.
With an extremist ideology, the sovereign citizen movement has a well-deserved reputation for threats and violence. Sovereigns most often direct their anger at law enforcement officers and government officials. Sovereign citizens can be equally volatile in the courtroom, engaging in a variety of disruptive behaviors or even violent acts.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was the foundation for the new sovereign citizen resurgence. Many people on the right and the far right emerged early in the pandemic as opponents of public health measures taken by federal, state and local governments; it was based on anger over perceived government overreach and “medical martial law” or fear and anger caused by the spread of anti-vaccination sentiments.
The most important new sources of recruits for the sovereign citizen movement over the past several years have been the MAGA and QAnon movements. The MAGA movement can be described as a loose movement of die-hard Donald Trump supporters, while QAnon is a Trump-centric conspiracy movement. The January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol was a significant point in that collaboration came together between many QAnon and MAGA.
The growth of sovereign citizen activity continues today, spreading to Canada, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
Interested in learning more? Register for the Understanding The Sovereign Citizen webinar on Wednesday, February 7, 10 am to 1 pm (CST).
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