Police arrest a woman for standing up for her rights

On Oct. 2, Catherine Bleish was one of a handful of speakers who revved up a crowd of 2,000 at the St. Charles (Mo.) Tea Party. Ten days later, she found herself in jail in the South St. Louis city of Maplewood.

“I was standing in line outside,” the 25-year-old told me Monday afternoon during an interview on the porch of her South St. Louis home where she lives with her two Rottweilers, Harley Davidson and Ed Norton.

In this case, “outside” is the area just outside the Maplewood (Mo.) Police Station/Traffic Court where approximately 45 to 50 people — most of whom had been summoned as a result of traffic citations — waited to make appearances.

Why was Bleish, a 2005 communications graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, in that line in the first place? She said she was accompanying her boyfriend, Josh Carter — a man mentioned in a post I published March 29 — who had come to deal with the matter of expired license plates for his car. According to Bleish, Carter refuses to pay taxes on his state-issued license plate and believes such a tax is un-Constitutional.

The weather was getting colder at the thrice-monthly Monday night event, Bleish explained, and, according to National Weather Service data found here, the temperature around 7 p.m. — the midway point of the 2-hour event — was in the mid- to upper-40s with winds below 10 miles per hour.

People were starting to get a little frustrated, she explained, but remained in good spirits.

“We were joking about it, but everyone was talking,” she said, adding, “When you’re standing in line that long, you start to communicate with people around you.

“The next thing we know, an officer comes out and lets about 15 people in,” she explained. That prompted the remaining 30 or so people to crowd up closer to the door an under an overhead light not far from a security camera capturing video images above and around the entrance. But it didn’t last long.

“We’re just kind of talking and the officer comes back out and starts demanding that we all line up against the wall.

“I turned to the girl who was standing next to me — I later found out her name was Kymberly — and I made the comment, ‘Get in line. Show your papers. Give us your money. Welcome to the New America.”

Should the officer have taken a more tactful approach to dealing with those assembled outside? I’m sure Bleish thought he should have.

“The officer heard me say that, and he did not like it,” Bleish continued. “He looked over a couple of people’s heads and said, ‘What did you say?’ So I repeated myself. Then, she said, he came “storming up to me, saying, ‘Do you want to go to jail tonight? Do you want to go to jail tonight?’

Instead of defusing the situation, however, she responded to the officer’s question by saying, “Why? I haven’t done anything.”

Perhaps, the assertive former Ron Paul campaigner felt emboldened by the Gadsden Flag (a.k.a., “Don’t Tread On Me”) image emblazoned on her hoodie. More likely, though, her reaction was fueled — at least in part — by her familiarity with Constitutional rights and state sovereignty issues she deals with regularly as founder and executive director of the nonprofit Liberty Restoration Project.

Next, she said, the officer did something that was, if nothing else, unexpected. “He turns to the crowd and says, ‘Does anyone have a leash? If so, put it on her?’”

Immediately, Bleish said, the girl standing next to her asked the officer if he was calling Bleish a “b_ _ _ _?”

Several times, according to Bleish, the officer repeated his question, “Do you want to go to jail?” and Bleish responded by saying, “I have a right to be here sir. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not breaking any laws.”

The officer responded, she said, by telling her, “I will make something up to put you in jail.” After casting a verbal threat toward Kymberly and saying, “I’ve got something for you,” the officer walked inside and Bleish began thinking ahead and got out a piece of paper.

She said she wrote down words to the effect of, “I was just told that an officer would make up a reason to arrest me,” and handed it to her boyfriend with the instructions for him to have people sign it if that happens as a means of collecting contact information of people who witnessed events that had transpired.

Eight people — all with 314 area codes in their phone numbers — wrote their names and numbers on the paper. A handful of others, perhaps only wanting to appear as if they were willing to help, wrote down names only.

Within minutes, the officer came back out and told Bleish she had two minutes to leave or she would be arrested. Not surprisingly, the woman one witness described as “five foot tall and a hundred pounds” didn’t take kindly to the threat.

Why didn’t she leave at that point and avoid further confrontation? Apparently, she was willing to fall on her ideological sword.

“I said, ‘Sir, you just told everyone here you would make up reasons to arrest me; why do I have to leave?’” she said, explained that without a legitimate reason, “I have every right to be here.”

Apparently, the officer disagreed. “He turned around, went back inside and the next thing I knew there were three officers coming out,” she explained, using hand gestures and body movements to animate her description of events. “They grabbed me by my arms and literally lifted me off of my feet and pinned me up against the guard rail and started cuffing me.”

Seeing Bleish in trouble prompted Kymberly to raise concerns such as “Why are you being so rough with her?” and “Don’t hurt her!” Bleish recalled, adding that her just-made friend tried to get in between her and the officer putting on the cuffs, but that effort yielded nothing good.

Don't Taze Me, Bro!“She ended up having a taser pointed right at her chest,” Bleish said, noting that the threat of electric shock was enough to convince Kymberly to depart the property.

Bleish concluded her description of events by saying she was never told why she was arrested until after she was bailed out by friends — at a cost of $750. The charge: Failure to comply, an ordinance violation that, in the overall scheme of things, is a pretty minor violation.

Bear in mind, this wasn’t the first time Bleish has had an ideological run-in with the law. She said she was once “thrown out” out of the Missouri governor’s office by members of the Missouri Highway Patrol — the agency that provides security for the state’s highest office holder — “for trying to schedule a meeting with him.”

In addition, she is known by many in statewide political and law enforcement circles as a staunch opponent of the Department of Homeland Security-funded “Fusion Centers” which entered the public discourse in March. It was then that the Missouri Information Analysis Center issued to members of the Missouri law enforcement community what one writer described as “chilling instructions” about how to identify members of the “modern militia movement.” (For more details, see Yikes! I Might Be Part of the Militia Movement, a piece that earned me an interview by Fox News.).

Using phone contact information they provided Bleish, I contacted others in the line who witnessed the events of that evening. By and large, they corroborated Bleish’s recollection of events with little variance — even the part about officers handling the petite woman in a rough manner.

At the other end of the spectrum, sources close to the department spoke to a reliable friend of this blog under conditions of anonymity, since the matter is under investigation. They told him Bleish — and, probably, the officer himself — could have prevented events of that night from escalating to the level they did simply by using a little discretion and common sense.

Original report here



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