Flex Your Rights

12/18/2023

After 21 years of service, Flex Your Rights will close at the end of December. 💪🫡

As we say goodbye, please share your Flex success stories in the comments!👇

How did our content help you deal with a stressful police encounter? 🚓 Did you share our videos with your family and community? We'd love to hear it! 👂

For more background about why we're closing, go to the link below.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/closing-time-heartfelt-farewell-from-flex-your-rights-steve-silverman-ppxtc

12/06/2021

Abolish civil asset forfeiture.

Stephen Lara did everything right. But, as subscribers of our YouTube channel know well, even innocent people aren’t safe from civil forfeiture.Stephen is a ...

11/01/2021

Dear Henderson, Louisiana, if traffic ticket revenue is the only thing propping up your town, you shouldn't be a town.

From NYT: "... Henderson, La., a town of about 2,000 people perched along Interstate 10 that collected $1.7 million in fines in 2019 — 89 percent of its general revenues — and where officers were accused of illegally receiving cash rewards for writing tickets."

Busted taillights, missing plates, tinted windows: Across the U.S., ticket revenue funds towns — and the police responsible for finding violations.

10/26/2021

Cops can't force you to reveal your phone passcode. And if you refuse, they can't use that against you in court.

The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF’s roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege against self-...

07/15/2021

Mr. Sankofa and Ms. Thomas bravely refused to consent to a suspicionless search of their vehicle. If they had agreed to a search, the Michigan State Police troopers might have dismissed them more quickly. But by waiving their rights — they’d otherwise have little or no chance for success in court.

For years MSP has ignored urgent pleas to hire expert to review trooper traffic stop practices and implement plan to end racist policing FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DETROIT – Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU) filed a federal lawsuit against the Michigan State Police (MSP) for r...

07/13/2021

McGruff the Crime Dog has a new rights-flexing message!

McGruff the Crime Dog was created in 1980 to fight crime by appealing to children, but he’s been adopted by Means TV and is now providing the standard ACLU-approved advice on dealing with pol…

07/01/2021

This cop thought he was clever. Lucky for us, he didn't anticipate that the video would go so viral that the bosses at YouTube would selectively override their Content ID automated takedown system. 😆

He was apparentely trying to trigger an automatic takedown.

06/16/2021

Imagine if your local fire department kept a secret list of arsonist firefighters. Would that be more or less outrageous than a DA with a confidential list of cops who are too crooked to testify in court?

Prosecutors in many jurisdictions maintain such lists to keep track of officers with disciplinary or criminal backgrounds that could make them unreliable witnesses.

03/31/2021

Confronting “the most awful thing she’s ever seen,” Darnella Frazier could have done the safest thing and walked away. Instead, she gazed into the heart of darkness, holding her hands steady for 10 minutes and nine seconds, capturing the last moments of a man’s life. Although her video changed the world forever, she suffers from survivor’s guilt.

“It’s been nights, I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life,” she told the courtroom. Of course, no rational worldview would expect her to jump headfirst into the jaws of state power to save a stranger caught in its teeth. That burden of guilt belongs to the police. But facing a moment of horror beyond her control, Frazier did the wisest and most heroic thing within her power: she filmed the police.

Darnella Frazier said that when she rewatches the video, she thinks of Black loved ones who could have been under a police officer's knee.

11/17/2020

The people have spoken.

These local ballot measure wins are just a first step in a "multi-year" fight to rethinking policing, activists say.

10/29/2020

President Trump is an enemy of police reform. Pass it on.

Law enforcement’s problems could get even worse.

10/22/2020

Here are five tips to keep cops from breaking into the “window to your soul.”

1) Never consent to a search. Cops don’t need a warrant or fancy technology to crack your phone if you hand it over at their request. So don’t let them trick or threaten you into giving verbal or written consent to search it.

2) If you can shell out the extra bucks, buy an iPhone. They’re more challenging to crack than Android devices.

3) Whether you’ve got an iPhone or Android, encrypt the contents of your device.

4) Ditch Face ID or Touch ID and go with a passcode entry. More digits = more security. For example, a six-digit iPhone passcode takes on average about 11 hours to guess. A 10-digit code takes 12.5 years to crack.

5) Make them work for it. If you encrypt your device with a strong passcode and refuse to consent to a search, cops might threaten to get a warrant to crack it. Again, never agree to a search. I’m repeating this because your security will fail you 100% of the time if you consent.

At least 2,000 law enforcement agencies have tools to get into encrypted smartphones, according to new research, and they are using them far more than previously known.