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Florida Sovereign Citizens Learn The Hard Way They Do In Fact Need A Driver's License

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Erin Marquis
·2 min read
A gif of a woman talking to police through a car window. She tries to roll up the window, but a police officer grabs the top and stops it. Another officer breaks the window and the woman is dragged from the driver's seat and arrested.
A gif of a woman talking to police through a car window. She tries to roll up the window, but a police officer grabs the top and stops it. Another officer breaks the window and the woman is dragged from the driver's seat and arrested.

Officers from the Volusia Sheriff’s Department in Florida managed to snag two sovereign citizens in one traffic stop after a man’s partner-in-incoherence arrived at the scene to argue with police officers over the weekend.

That’s just a whole list of what not to do during a traffic stop. Volusia Sheriff’s deputies initiated the traffic stop on Saturday due to spotting allegedly fake paper plates on a truck driven by Detry Wogerman. In the original 11-minute video from body cams on the officers, the officer who initiated the stop called the truck out as a potential SC right away to dispatch.

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Sovereign Citizens are a group of people who believe pseudo-legal mumbo jumbo releases them from following any rules or laws. They declare themselves separate from the “straw man” of their official identity and will even send back their social security cards to the Social Security office in order to establish themselves as extra special citizens beholden only to themselves. They will often use fake license plates to avoid registering their vehicles. Since most people interact with police at traffic stops, such stops have become opportunities to spew their personal philosophy at cops. They get arrested anyway, of course, but they get to feel an extra surge of indignation because their magic words are supposed to stop arrests from ever happening. After the arrest, a SC will often file mountains of frivolous paperwork, refuse to acknowledge the court’s ability to levy fines or jail time, and even attempt to charge police hourly for the pleasure of interacting with them.

Such interactions don’t always end peacefully. Police killed a sovereign citizen with a fake license plate earlier this year during a traffic stop that turned violent after the driver refused to exit the vehicle and seemed to reach for a weapon. In 2021, a group of Black sovereign citizens engaged in a hours-long stand off with police after their vehicle broke down on the way to a private “training” facility.

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