Profile of ex-narc who's declared war on the "War on Drugs"

Here's a great, long profile of Barry Cooper, the ex-narc whose new reality TV show sets up stings for dirty drug cops and videos them making illegal busts and searches:

Several months ago, Officer Nassour had stumbled upon a little black bag at a self-serve car wash in Liberty Hill. Inside, he discovered a drug ledger written in Spanish, a glass stem seemingly burned on one end, $45, some beers, a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, a pair of red and blue 3D glasses and various other personal effects. Wedged in the top of the vynil lunchbox, a cleverly disguised GPS tracking device.
In the words of Admiral Ackbar, it was a trap, laid by Cooper who'd called in an anonymous tip about a suspicious package.
Cooper said that Nassour was specifically targeted that evening because he'd seen video, sent to his Web site by a reader, which showed the officer forcing his drug dog to false alert on a vehicle, thereby giving probable cause for a search.
Crouched behind bushes near the car wash, Barry had his camera leveled at the officer. The goal was to catch Nassour on video stealing the money, then pick a time later on to confront the officer with a camera crew, ambush-news style.
On the video, Officer Nassour can be seen flipping the top of the box open and peering inside, then returning to his car and driving away.

Barry Cooper: Drug War Insurgent (via Beyond the Beyond)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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hisdevineshadow

“SQUIRREL!”
Anonymous

He reminds me of the know-it-all assholes that ruin a nice vibe because they can’t shut up and have to win every argument.

If he does good things, that’s great but I hope to never chill with friends of his friends.
benher

I’d rather watch this than COPS anyday!
Anonymous

Barry Cooper is dangerous. He tells people – irresponsibly and without any good reason – to actually CONSENT to police searches. What kind of legal advice is that? Bad advice.
Anonymous

Barry Cooper got arrested on Tuesday night. Cops are holding him for making a false police report and possession of marijuana.

http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/03/03/police-raid-never-get-busted-hq-barry-cooper-arrested/
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

People are talking here about illegal stops and searches. This video has absolutely nothing to do with that. It’s deadly dull and trivial in the extreme.

I got $45 on you not having watched the video to the end yourself!
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

P.S. I got bored and skipped past his description of putting the peanut butter sandwich in the bag myself, so I didn’t watch it all either.
Kerov

That turned out way better than I expected, particularly after having watched this epic-length video of mafia-worthy police misconduct in similar situations.
(Cliff Notes: dude with hidden camera walks into various police stations, asking the desk officer for a “complaint form”; spectacular displays of police abuse-of-power ensue: lies, threats, and even arrest. All for simply asking for a complaint form.)
Anonymous

We need way more people out there exposing police for what most are now adays . Nothing more than thieves with badges. until we stop asset forfiture laws for drug suspects this type of corrution will continue. why does some one with a bag of weed loose his asets but a child rapist or a killer gets to keep his? the war on drugs is a joke and a disgrace and should never have been allowed in what is supposed to be a free country .. good work guys keep cathing those low life narcs in the act we all need to know what they are doing in our names
Anonymous

Prohibition is a sickening horror and the ocean of human wreckage it has left in its wake is almost endless.

Based on the unalterable proviso that drug use is essentially an unstoppable and ongoing human behavior which has been with us since the dawn of time, any serious reading on the subject of past attempts at any form of drug prohibition would point most normal thinking people in the direction of sensible regulation. By its very nature prohibition cannot fail but create a vast increase in criminal activity, and rather than preventing society from descending into anarchy, it actually fosters an anarchic business model – the international Drug Trade. Any decisions concerning quality, quantity, distribution and availability are then left in the hands of unregulated, anonymous, ruthless drug dealers, who are interested only in the huge profits involved.

Prohibition ideology is based on lies and the ‘War on Drugs’ is a de facto ‘war on people’ (some might even successfully argue that it’s a de facto race war). Prohibition has decimated generations and criminalized millions for a behavior which is entwined in human existence, and for what other purpose than to uphold the defunct and corrupt thinking of a minority of misguided, self-righteous Neo-Puritans and degenerate demagogues who wish nothing but unadulterated destruction on the rest of us!
sf

Hope they get a bit slicker at media production as that was a little frustrating to watch at times.
davidasposted

These sort of stings require considerable follow-up which I suspect will never occur. The ‘busted’ cops won’t be more than inconvenienced by a sting unless their boss is willing to take meaningful disciplinary action against them. If they’re charged with a crime for their behavior their sentence will be minimal, unless their local prosecutor and/or judge is willing to throw the book at at a defendant with whom they work on a regular basis to put other folks in jail. Unless it’s politically convenient, local elected officials won’t raise a stink. Cop breaks the law, gets suspended with pay, returns to work a month later; rinse, wash, repeat. Mr. Cooper and his TV show will be filming somewhere else by that time. This program, like COPS, seems like nothing more than ‘bread and circuses’ to me, whatever Mr. Cooper’s intentions.

It’s not just a clever plot device for The Wire: LEO take care of their own.
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

I like how everyone leaves long philosophical comments on a video they didn’t even bother to watch. This is totally meaningless. If I left a paper sack with the remains of my lunch and $45 in cash in front of anyone’s house and hid in the bushes to watch, I’d see the same thing every time- the person would pick it up, pocket the cash and throw the rest out. Filling out the forms to enter the bag into evidence would probably take more manhours to do than the $45 was worth. It’s obvious no one is going to come claim it since there was a crack pipe in the bag.

I don’t want cops to be inhumanly robotic in the way they carry out their job. I just want them to be fair. There’s no unfairness in the way the cop handled this, but there is plenty of unfairness on the part of the boring blabbermouth who set this all up. Quite frankly, when I watched him blathering on about one camera or two, all I could think of was Spinal Tap.
- davidasposted
  
  Not me.
  
  I like folks who make presumptuous statements about how “everyone leaves long philosophical comments on a video they didn’t even bother to watch,” when of course they have no idea whether someone has watched the video, and when many of the comments hardly fall into the “long and philosophical” category.
  
  That’s what I like.
Anonymous

This guy again? Wasn’t his shadey advice scam already discredited?

http://nallforgovernor.blogspot.com/2007/02/loretta-nalls-review-of-never-get.html
Anonymous

I thought probable cause got you a warrant and a warrent got you a search. No search without a warrant or consent. (Stop & frisk can be done without a warrant because the frisk is supposed to be for the officer’s safety – looking for weapons)
RedShirt77

I believe the words of the good Admiral were “It’s a trap!” not “It was a trap”
Red Leatherman

Personal experience is that they ask to search, you say no they search a hour or so take half an hour to get some dog then search another 30 minuets with the dog then say the dog alerted several times, search another 45 minuets then have you strip while your wife strips for the on duty female cop then let you go with a warning.
no consent given, implied or needed.
Anonymous

A friend of mine who has been buying drugs at concerts for over 20 years once told me that he prefers people with dreadlocks, and barring that, a missing tooth. Apparently his experience has taught him that people with those characteristics are more “dedicated” and honest drug dealers….Not sure if Police use the same profiling.

FWIW….
Red Leatherman

and due respect for a situation where drugs had been used in a car previously possibly causing a alert, unless someone at the factory or the dealership 4 years ago smoked weed in ours then it had nothing to do with that either.
Anonymous

it would be great if one could download and watch the video offline later, youtube seems to have gotten paranoid, even using a cute little trick involving wget and grep I can’t save the thing and my connection is too sketchy to watch it streaming.

All is well, I know the cops are crooked, they kept me chained to the push bumper of a cop car for 2 hours in 23F temperature threatening to “disappear” me because I wouldn’t let them search my van.
IronEdithKidd

Does anyone have a short-list of states where a person is more likely to get pulled over for a bogus drug-bust? What kind of vehicle draws the most ire? Day or night more likely to be a problem? Do these false detentions and illegal searches happen more in locales without dash-board cams?
- nutbastard
  
  “What kind of vehicle draws the most ire?”
  
  The kind that looks like it belongs to a drug dealer/user. so firstly, any american car from the 80′s or 90′s with aftermarket rims, excessive tint etc, OR a super crappy hooptie. men with excessively long hair and/or beards are generally targeted more often, as are young men with shaved heads. tattoos will work against you as well. having been pulled over, an excessively messy car interior won’t help, nor will an ashtray packed full of butts.
  
  always carry an audio recorder and turn it on whenever you get pulled over. im about to go to court tomorrow to beat a 55mph in a 50mph ticket ($250 in cali) One of my key pieces of evidence is an audio recording where i get the cop to admit that i wasn’t going any faster than anyone else. (also, i submitted bail mid december and demanded a speedy trial, which was ignored, so i may be able to get it thrown out in the interest of justice, given that they’ve held my money for 100+ days when under the const. of cali they have to hear your case within 30-45 days (im not clear which))
  - Anonymous
    
    I would strongly advise against surreptitiously audio recording the police unless you live in a state that allows for one-party consent to record two-party conversations.
- Anonymous
  
  This is 12 years old so may not (or may?) still reflect current practice: I-44 near Springfield, MO, highway patrol pulled me over for “not keeping right except to pass and not signaling lane changes” when I did. My car, very discreet nearly new Kia Sephia, dark green; me about 60, balding white male. Extenuating factor: out of state license plates- California. After lecture about following California rules about not getting back into the right lane fast enough, he sighed and said, “It looks like all your paperwork is order, so I won’t write you up. But, if I asked to look in your trunk, what would you say?”
  
  Well, what would you say? If I said no, he had the power to delay my trip considerably. I traveled this road 4 or 5 times a year and had seen many out of state cars pulled over by LEOs, with all the contents of their trunks on the ground, and had no reason to believe mine would not be there too if I didn’t agree to a search. Fortunately my agreement to a search yielded a pass, and I was on my way. I consider this an abuse of LEO power; we really do need a change in laws to reduce useless stops of innocent citizens.
manicbassman

oh boy… has he ever made himself a target for a mysterious disappearance or random car accident or what…

nothing is more desperate than a dirty cop trying to escape being exposed.
querent

copwatch!!!

fuck yeah guys. much love.

eastern tennessee cops walked a k-9 up and down my car, and it didn’t bark till they bounced a tennis ball off of it.

no weed in the car, though a little had been smoked in it, several days ago, with the windows open. and it wasn’t a smoke-out or anything.

anybody know if that was a “forced false alert?” I always assumed so.
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

This isn’t really a TV show is it? It’s more like “Huell Howser” than “Cops”. If police corruption is this tame, we don’t have a heck of a lot to worry about. In any case, I’ve solved the mystery here… the girl with the video camera on the bus with epic beard man stole the $45 and half a peanut butter sandwich.
zyodei

I want to like this guy. But I just don’t.

In part it’s because his personal style is kind of obnoxious, and this video is boring as molasses.

But all of this misses the point. The problem is not bad cops. The problem is not even the war on drugs, as harmful as that is.

The problem is the whole legal system as it is set up. We give, in effect, a monopoly on providing necessary policing services to some select group of people. This monopoly is enforced with unlimited violence, and no competing systems or policing agencies are allowed to exist.

Because of this, these groups do not have any strong incentives to actually look out for the public welfare. The citizens do not have the ability to not buy shoddy or abusive police services. Not matter how bad the police may get, the citizens are forced at gunpoint to buy their services, and prevented from providing any alternate service.

So, we have laws and behavior which are grossly in violation of the public desire and public interest. Speeding cameras, drug laws, forfeiture, etc.

Police officers are just human beings, who respond to incentives, expectations, and their environment. Of course, there is a certain self-selecting process going on with police, where if you say you will give a certain group of people unlimited license to use violence without serious consequence, it just so happens to draw in those with violent inclinations.

But the problem is not the individuals. If we did not grant them access to violence, it is not likely they would act violently, because most violent people are cowards.

A monopoly is almost always an awful answer to an economic problem. The police and court system is not exception.

We need to be more creative thinking of an entirely different way to fill this need in society.