It was only a few years ago that police in this country were arresting people for not wearing masks in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But a newly surfaced video from last summer shows Florida police detaining a man for walking down the street while wearing a ski mask and listening to music from a radio he was carrying.
The Titusville police officers told the man they received a call about a man wearing a mask and carrying a gun, but an audio recording of the call to dispatch shows the caller was not even sure she saw a gun.
“There was a guy in a ski mask and a backpack, and I don’t want to say he put a gun in the bag, but it just looked really suspicious,” the woman told the dispatcher in a recording that can be heard in the video below.
Furthermore, a controversial state law that went into effect in 2023 allows citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit, so even if he had a gun, it would not have been illegal as long as the citizen is a legal resident of the United States and over the age of 21 without prior felony or drug convictions and other conditions — the same criteria required for Floridians applying for a concealed weapons permit.
And while there are laws in Florida forbidding citizens from wearing masks in public, those laws are antiquated and require other actions like intimidation, threats, abuse, or harassment to make it a legal arrest because they were designed to crack down on masked Ku Klux Klan members from terrorizing Black people.
However, law enforcement officers from around the country have begun using these “arcane laws” to arrest people peacefully protesting against the U.S. Government, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
Arcane laws banning people from wearing masks in public are now being used to target people who wear face coverings while peacefully protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. That’s a big problem.
In the 1940s and 50s, many U.S. states passed anti-mask laws as a response to the Ku Klux Klan, whose members often hid their identities as they terrorized their victims. These laws were not enacted to protect those victims, but because political leaders wanted to defend segregation as part of a “modern South” and felt that the Klan’s violent racism was making them look bad.
Now these laws are being used across the country to try and clamp down on disfavored groups and movements, raising questions about selective prosecution.
The man in the recent video who told police he was exercising was handcuffed and detained after he refused to provide identification, telling the officers his name was “John” without elaborating on a surname or date of birth.
However, once the cops searched his backpack, finding several bottles of water and nothing else, they had a conversation amongst themselves that was either muted by the officers at the scene or muted afterward before releasing the video to the public.
But they chose to release him after that 18-second conversation, probably realizing there is no Florida law that forbids wearing a mask in public without the other underlying factors like intimidation, threats, and harassment, which was not the case here.
The Detainment
The incident took place on July 8 after police received a call from a woman who was not sure she saw a gun but was concerned about the mask. The woman who was driving when she spotted the man also told the dispatcher he was hiding behind a bush, which increased her concerns.
Police detained the man as he was walking down the sidewalk and not wearing a mask and asked if he was carrying a gun, which he denied.
“Somebody said they thought they saw a gun,” the officer said. “I’m asking you if you are armed.”
“I don’t have a weapon,” the man said. “I’m walking, I’m exercising. I would like to go now. Is that alright with you?”
But the cop demanded to know why he had been wearing a mask, which was when he pulled the mask up from his neck over his face.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” the man said. “I’m legally allowed to exist. I’m legally allowed to cover as much as I would like to.”
However, the cop demanded his identification as other officers pulled up to the scene but he insisted he was not carrying any identification.
Meanwhile, other Titusville officers drove to the bush he was supposedly hiding behind, only to encounter a woman hiding behind the bush because she was afraid of the man in the mask.
However, that woman made no mention of a gun.
“Did you see anybody out here with a face mask or something?” a cop asked the woman.
“There was a guy who had a big radio,” she said, saying she was afraid but not because of any gun. “And I think he went that way.”
But once police confronted him, he exercised his constitutional rights to be free from illegal search and seizure.
“Can you verify without stripping me naked and violating my rights that I don’t have a gun,” he said.
At one point during the detainment, the man opened his backpack and pulled out several bottles of water to show the cops he had no gun, but the cops handcuffed him, fearing he may be pulling out a gun.
But there was no gun, so they released him without charges.
The video of the detainment was discussed by YouTuber BP Cast, who analyzes unlawful arrests on video and has more than 101,000 subscribers.
