While the battle at Waco was obviously a horrific incident, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the police response. Which was, apparently, to arrest every biker on the scene and sort it out later. All these people have bond set at $1M, which practically means they will be in jail until they can get bail reduction hearings, which can take weeks or months. It’s also been reported that all their vehicles, currently being held as evidence, are going to be permanently seized under civil forfeiture laws.
I’m not any sort of expert on biker gangs, but from everything I’ve read they contain an assortment of people, including a lot of violent thugs as well as people who like biking and the biking culture. And in this particular incident, it appears that there were people present from other biker clubs that were not involved with the war altogether, but apparently all have been swept up in the net.
[I gather that there has been complaining that the police were less heavyhanded in Waco than they were in dealing with police-brutality protestors, but ISTM that the exact opposite is true. At least from what I’ve read, I don’t recall seeing this type of mass group punishment being imposed on protestors in those other situations.]
I can’t disagree with you that the $1M bonds and the potential civil forfeiture (those laws are a disgrace as thier original intent has become a lcense to steal, but that is another rant) are probably excessive.
That said, given that the cops were given a situation with multiple fatalities and injuries, dozens of bikers still in the area and no guarantee that the violence was over, getting everybody in the area into a controlled situation (with the police in control) was their over-riding thought at the moment and once you have them under control, you don’t want to let them go until you are sure they were not involved.
Hopefully, those folks that were caught ‘in the middle’ will be interviewed and released shortly. Then again, they may not be.
I had thought the police needed reasonable suspicion (specific to the person being arrested) to arrest people, not that you can just keep people in jail “until you are sure they were not involved”. But if that’s not the law, then it should be IMO.
The irony of these types of situations is that for the ones who are thugs, these things are part of their way of life and are not a huge deal. It’s the guys trying to keep 9-5 jobs that find spending a month in jail a lot harder.
I live for the day when an entire upper management of a Fortune 500 company, including the Board of Directors, is thrown in jail until the police can figure out exactly which of them were involved in a stock manipulation scheme or somesuch.
While I’m sure there are lots of average folks who just want to get out and ride in a group setting, the groups have a strict “no snitch” policy which everyone is expected to adhere to. I think the government is trying to break that down.
The civil asset forfeiture is likely legal under Texas law, though potentially unconstitutional depending on how it is administered. Lots of groups are challenging such laws right now, which are completely unjust even if they turn out to be constitutional if administered properly.
The legality of the mass arrest turns on exactly who was rounded up and what they were charged with. They claim to have arrested “members and associates” of the two relevant gangs and charged them with organized criminal activity. They may well have probable cause to arrest them on that charge, which likely only involves joining the gang, traveling with them, and knowing that some members planned to commit crimes.
And mass arrest does indeed occur in the blacklivesmatter protests in very similar circumstances.
Yet they allow the street gangs to roam free in the inner cities shooting the loved ones of those who refuse to be recruited as the newspapers complicitly call it “caught in the crossfire”.
There’s lots of money in drugs and the rich get a cut (the biggest). There’s no money in motorcycle gangs so there won’t be newspapers there to defend the innocent. Newspapers will be too busy with their hearts bleeding for the murdering thugs in the cities.
Sure…but you will probably be swept up in the resultant mass arrest and have to sort things out later. The good thing is if they set a million dollar mass bond you’ll probably get out, assuming at least a few of the surviving board members who have deep pockets don’t get capped.
The operable difference, Czarcasm, is that the upper management of a Fortune 500 company did not join the company knowing it’s purpose was to commit illegal acts, and the police have probable cause to believe that the members of the gang were well aware that the gang’s mission was to commit illegal acts.
The destruction of wealth is exactly equivalent to the result of murder. Most of the people who don’t exist because the means of earning a living or feeding them no longer exists were never born at all, but manyothers die because of the actions of these boards to promote their own welfare at the expense of humanity, products, and the company’s “good” name.
Of course when you own government itself you get to define what’s illegal and which laws are actually enforced.
As noted in the OP, there were apparently other gangs at the meeting who were not involved in the war (or who at least are not known to have been involved). And they apparently arrested everybody from all gangs, based on the link in the OP and pictures of the scene.
It’s not completely clear - at least from media reports - what happened, or even if anyone knew any crimes were going to be committed. The emerging picture seems to be that the Cossacks are the upstart gang in Texas, challenging the dominant Bandidos, and they showed up uninvited to this meeting looking to confront them. (Didn’t work out too well for them, as 8 of the 9 dead were Cossacks.) But that doesn’t mean that anyone specifically intended in advance for this type of fight or any other crime - I imagine with people of this sort in a situation where tension is running high it doesn’t take a lot to set them off, and once they get set off a lot of violence ensues. And it certainly doesn’t mean that Joe Schmo Cossack knew that some of his fellow Cossacks intended to start a gun battle, let alone that people from other gangs knew anything about it.
Similar to the way you described it - where they were part of a group and knew some other members intended to commit or were committing crimes - or just based on the notion that they were standing around when a fight broke out and dressed similar? And what was bail set at for those people?
That’s not what the link in the OP says, actually. It says:“In affidavits to support the arrests of the bikers issued by Peterson on Monday morning, Waco police Officer Manuel Chavez officially identifies the groups as ‘members and associates of the Cossacks Motorcycle Club and the Bandidos Motorcycle Club.’” Obviously, if they didn’t have probable cause to believe that, that’s a big problem. But I don’t see anything in the OP’s links that contradict it.
They don’t need to have planned this particular crime. They need only have been part of a conspiracy to commit some crime to which this is related. It is entirely conceivable that no one joins one of those two gangs without knowing the kind of crimes they are regularly engaged in.
The latter. And I don’t know what bail was set for them. I believe they were typically released without bail. I’m not aware of mass arrests that also included high bail, outside of circumstances like this when the arrests might have been proper.
If you are a rider with a “group” I am pretty sure you know damn well if you are part of a gang with questionable legal activities or part of a group of guys who like to ride around showing off leather and beer bellies.
I have little sympathy for those caught in the net because I doubt any of them didn’t know exactly what kind of group they were in.
Life leason. Don’t be a shady character. Also don’t hang around with shady characters.
I’m wondering how the confiscation of weapons will play into the penalties and sentencing. If I understand correctly (and there is a lot of ambiguous information out there) in addition to the hundred or so weapons confiscated immediately after the fight, presumably from the persons of those involved, another hundred or so additional weapons have now been found stashed on the motorcycles and in the passenger vehicles of those arrested.
It seems that transport and ownership of these weapons could be used to imply they had prior knowledge a criminal act was going to occur, but then my legal chops equal exactly squat.
