How do you claim sovereignty

Point out to them that there is a social contract between the people using the roads and the people keeping the roads open for travel. Someone needs to pay for the cost of the roads, so license plate costs are not a tax, they are a user fee.

The sovereign citizens and the CopBlock movement both love this question. People who got their law degrees by reading Facebook comments feel that being detained is the same as an arrest. Yet real lawyers can explain the difference between the two.

Yes, a traffic stop is a short investigative detention. An officer with reasonable suspicion that a violation has taken place may stop someone for a short time to establish facts related to that violation. How brief that short time will be is decided solely by the citizen. If they want to play games, they are the one making the contact last longer. Remember, sovereign citizens have the propensity for violence. Make sure you have backup.

Keep your eyes open for threats. Just because they are dumb enough to get brainwashed into some crazy belief system does not mean they are too stupid to learn tactics to hurt us.

Their tactic is to cause confusion with the officer. Turn the tables on them and confuse them. Make them question what they have learned by watching videos on YouTube. Twice I have used the example of the fire department on a sovereign citizen. Both times they were so flummoxed they forgot all the other rhetoric. More Police1 Articles. More Patrol Issues News. It is based on their reinterpretation of the law and there are many legal document templates on the internet for SovCit use to, for example, avoid paying fines or rates they see as unfair.

SovCits tend not to follow conventional legal argument. Some have engaged in repeated court action and even been declared vexatious litigants by the courts. The SovCit movement has many local variations but there are some key commonalities across the Australian SovCit movement. A central belief, according to news reports , is that the Australian government, the police, and other government agencies are corporations. According to Sarah Seo, an associate professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and the author of Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom : "It's not at all surprising that where sovereign citizens interact with the police is in their cars.

Almost all citizens' interactions with police take place in the context of cars. On the road, sovereign thought is expressed as the "right to travel. To reach this conclusion, sovereigns often draw a distinction between being able "to drive," which they say is the privilege of using a vehicle to conduct commercial activity, and being able "to travel," which they assert is a right inherent in the Constitution.

The website FreedomFromGovernment. Multiple attempts to contact Trent Goodbaudy, a writer who apparently runs the site, were unsuccessful. But the online store linked to the site sells a set of replacement license-plate tags proclaiming that the vehicle is private, traveling without commercial purpose, and not subject to insurance or licensing requirements. No one in the office has volunteered to mount them to their vehicle. Constitution, the [Uniform Commercial Code], the Magna Carta, the Articles of Confederation, and numerous other quasi-legal documents to support their assertions.

Although authoritative sounding , the true basis for a citizen's constitutional rights is found in the Constitution itself. The U. Supreme Court is the only legal body that can interpret and give legal effect to the Constitution. Accordingly, Sovereign Citizens' citation to—and reliance on—dictionaries, state-court opinions, specific capitalization, or state records are misplaced and unavailing.

Seim's reprimand of deputy Canfield is a good example of this. Though he seems well informed, his interpretation of the law is misguided.

After the video went live, Grant County sheriff Tom Jones took to Facebook to explain that even if the cruiser was in violation of the state law cited by Seim, there's no ticket to write or arrest to make.

That particular law requires such violations to be handled by an agency head. It's administrative. Nothing more. Under admiralty law, they are slaves, and secret government forces have a vested interest in keeping them that way. And the ideology sprouts from eccentric interpretations of the Constitution. It often includes religious elements seasoned with minutiae from ancient legal cases and broad appeals to individual freedom.

Sovereign citizens have several explanations of where America went wrong, but the basic thinking argues that, at some point, popular sovereignty was abandoned in favor of admiralty law—the law of the sea and international commerce. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center : "Under common law, or so they believe, the sovereigns would be free men. For many, their misguided membership in the movement is an immersive and heady experience. In a Feb. Members of the movement are not a homogenous group.

What unites them is their belief that the federal government is illegitimate, and they have officially left its purview. Members use various means to pledge their allegiance to what they consider a legitimate jurisdiction. Many file legal notices announcing their intentions to change citizenship. Others give verbal or written oaths to the group they have joined and change their names to one advocated by the group or its leaders.

Although individuals maintain that they are sovereign after completing these steps, none of these are legal ways to relinquish American citizenship, and the faux nations they join cannot provide them with legal citizenship either. Once they have declared sovereign citizenship, most individuals will attempt to utilize it to their own advantage. Some refuse to apply and pay for state licenses, registration or insurance — or pay their traffic tickets.

Some attempt to defraud the government or corporations by filing fraudulent forms or making falsities on legitimate forms that save or secure them money. Others attempt to exact revenge on public officials or private citizens through the use of criminal complaints or financial liens filed against those individuals.

These are the most prevalent activities used by sovereign citizens. But the similarities between sovereign citizens often ends there. Sovereign believers come in a variety of ethnicities and religions. Some live in urban areas while others are off the grid, living in rural areas. They all share core beliefs, but the leaders they follow and the ideas that animate them tend to differ widely. These are the most commonly known types of sovereign citizens that exist in America, some of which have cross pollinated and fit within multiple sub-types:.

Common Law Court and National Assembly Members: These individuals use a patchwork of misinterpreted old English law, constitutional text and Bible verses to form pseudo-courts, which they call common law courts, or entirely new governments, which they describe as assemblies. They believe these new governments will be put to use once our current government fails. They believe the U.

They bring their grievances, primarily against the state and federal government to their common law courts. These pseudo courts typically provide them with the outcomes they are looking for, which can be anything from bogus indictments, filing commercial liens to arrest warrants, multi-million or billion-dollar judgments or calls for execution against the person or government agency they are aggrieved at.

Constitutional Sovereigns: These individuals use the constitution to make claims that the federal government is illegitimate and overreaching its intended authority. They have used this belief to justify extreme and illegal acts against the federal government and its assorted agencies. The Bundy family is an example of this particular ideology. Galactic Sovereigns: A small number of sovereigns hold a concurrent belief that friendly aliens will visit earth and they are actively planning for this occurrence or believe that public officials and other individuals are reptilian aliens.

They think this law would have abolished the IRS and income tax, returned the form of constitutional law to America that sovereigns believe was secretly replaced by maritime law, end war and establish world peace. Sovereigns think powerful groups have kept this law secret through gag orders and sabotage, and when it looked like it would be publicly introduced on September 11, , there was a coordinated an attempt to stop it. Moorish Sovereigns: These individuals are both Moors and sovereigns.

Members are almost always African-American. Moorish sovereigns have their own set of gurus who they study and groups they can join, including the Washitaw and the United States of America Republic government. They also offer items for members to purchase, including fake identification cards and license plates listing the name of the territory they claim to belong to.

A tactic used predominantly by Moorish sovereigns is adverse possession, which involves squatting in foreclosed and other properties.