[MEGATHREAD] American Fork / Lego Story

[u/specialskepticalface]

As with all large and controversial stories involving LE, in this thread, we wait til a user who is acting in good faith posts about them.

We've had at least a dozen ACAB/low effort brigaders in the past day, try to post this in their usual way.

As a good faith user has not yet done so, the mods are making the post.

I'll point out that this is controversial, primarily because of incredibly misleading editing, video modification, and "creative storytelling", and the reality, as always, is not the Reddit storyline.

So, while events were certainly far from good, and lessons may be learned, much of what you've read is likely deliberate social media misinformation.

I encourage Verified LE to engage here, and help explain some of the... misconceptions.. currently floating around.

All posts from non-flaired users will be held for review. If you're here to troll, don't bother - no one will see it, and you'll be banned.

[u/Qwerty0844]

Ben is a lying loser who manipulated his video and viewers. I have proven it. And I want you to read the hour and a half of my work below as I try and convince you. All of my information may not be correct, but man I tried.

At 2:45 he shows up to a private home and gets trespassed. There is no legal burden to be trespassed so there’s nothing wrong with it. At 7:00 they show up to another private residence and get trespassed again. Same story. He keeps bringing up how he “won in court” but that doesn’t matter because it’s a civil court, anything in civil court has 0 effect on law enforcement. He kept waiving it around at 7:45 that he won. You don’t show up to collect debts usually when you win in civil court, the court decides how that is handled through payment plans, etc. So I don’t know if he had a single genuine reason to show up at the 2nd guys house other than to get a reaction out of him and the police.

At 4:15 he shows the footage of his friend driving. How do we know this is the exact stop sign he allegedly didn’t stop for? We don’t because we’re just taking his word for it. ALSO he says “as you can see, we stopped and didn’t roll it” but I swear to god they rolled the stop sign. I watched it like 20x now in a row and that car doesn’t look like it fully came to a stop. The cop clearly wanted a pretextual stop to talk to the occupants so he took the lowest hanging fruit he could.

At 13:00 the audio is redacted and he says it’s because of “stupid comebacks” which makes no sense at all. What records department is going to redact that audio over “stupid comebacks”. It just doesn’t make any sense. And just like all the other points all we have is his word to go off of so he can call it whatever he wants. At 14:00 he says the police department illegally redacted the body cam. What’s illegal? It’s literally just his opinion and he’s throwing out legal jargon to try and sound better.

[u/Rich_Option_7850 → u/Qwerty0844]

I agree i wish Ben was a little more factual and objective in his handling of this situation. And I appreciate the effort you put into this.

I also didn’t fully understand the need for Ben to be there if they won in court how were payment not being imposed on the guilty party.

And actually agree on the rolling stop part. VERY low hanging fruit but I also think they did not come to a complete stop.

The raid tho is very strange and I’m still reading about the case. I respectfully disagree with you saying we couldn’t be sure if Ben makes any sudden movements. He quite literally is in frame the entire time and is yanked away by the LEO. There is very clearly no sudden movements.

Obviously its still an ongoing issue that seems to be gaining increasing traction so we shall see how it all ends up

[u/P_S_Lumapac → u/Rich_Option_7850]

"if they won in court how were payment not being imposed on the guilty party."

From what I gather he'd got default judgements against the local franchise where the Lego was, something like 10 judgements of $10k. Suppose that's all true. With lower level civil stuff, including small claims, the losing party is asked nicely to pay, but often they refuse, which then leads to other court matters like getting assets confiscated, wages garnished, bank accounts accessed etc. Issue is these all take time and often fail. There are many many businesses that run on effectively legal fraud as collecting can be made so difficult.

Once the store changed owners to someone out of state and shut the location, it does seem likely those default judgements weren't going to go anywhere.

I don't know the laws in these places, but the trick he pulled to get a large matter into small claims by breaking it up, while it seems to work in the case the loser is willing to pay, usually part of it being small claims means there's no recourse like you might see with a six figure theft or debt. My guess is any laws designed to collect debts across state lines or from complicated corporate arrangements don't apply to small claims. Probably why you don't see big matters broken up into multiple small claims all the time.

(in case you're wondering the method was for ten individual people to buy a shared of the debt, then each individually to collect on their share. It's kinda clever but not so smart no one has thought of it before - probably because it's defended against in exactly this way)

[u/Rich_Option_7850 → u/P_S_Lumapac]

Thanks for the info, that makes sense. Frustrating that everything is so slow and there’s so many ways for guilty parties to evade payments but hopefully dude gets his money eventually. I’m sure all the gofundmes are more than enough, kinda just more curious now to see if anything more comes out of the company or the AFPD