A Michigan police chief was in for a rude awakening when he was fired within three days after making an unlawful arrest of a man recording in public, telling the man that, “I don’t give a f*ck about your rights.”
“I’m not politically correct so shove that up your ass,” Corunna Police Chief Nick Chiros said as he was arresting Matthew Wrosch on Friday. “I can give a f*ck less what you think.”
Chiros told Wrosch he was going to learn the “hard way” about refusing unlawful orders.
“I’m not going to learn the hard way,” responded Wrosch, a First Amendment auditor who runs the YouTube channel, Michigan Constitutional Crusader.
“You are.”
“No, I’m not,” responded the chief. “F*ck you.”
But now Chiros is out of a job, ending a law enforcement career spanning more than two decades.
It appears the chief had no idea that Wrosch was live streaming to his subscriber list of more than 3,000 people.
“Everybody start bombing the Corunna police with phone calls cause he’s illegally arresting me right now,” Wrosch said as Chiros was handcuffing him, many who started calling immediately to complain about the unlawful arrest.
The video was mirrored to other YouTube channels resulting in even more calls to the police department. By the time Wrosch was released from jail 22 hours later with no charges, more than 15,000 people had called to complain.
On Monday, the Corunna City Council unanimously voted to terminate Chiros who has been chief since 2015. He was set to retire in January anyway. He will receive full retirement benefits, including a pension.
Had it not been for the fact he was live streaming, the chief would likely never have been terminated.
According to the Argus Press:
Council member John Lawson Monday said police work is changing, and Corunna has to have a “softer” approach when it comes to law enforcement. He added he was deluged with messages and emails following Friday’s incident.
“We’ve been thrown into kind of a global spotlight on this, all through the internet,” Lawson said. “I’ve been getting emails mostly from a fringe group. They want to see some kind of stock put up in the town square where people can throw tomatoes at (Chiros).”
The “fringe group” described by the councilman are members of YouTube’s First Amendment auditing community which evolved from PINAC’s very own Jeff Gray and his Honor Your Oath YouTube channel. They tend to be very vocal and passionate about the First Amendment. Perhaps more people should be.
Wrosch had been standing in a field recording the interaction between several police officers and a man standing on a utility tower threatening to jump which was his legal right. At one point during his live stream, a few Michigan state police officers confronted him about recording but left him alone after after he agreed to move back a few hundred feet.
But Chiros decided to confront Wrosch with his unlawful orders, threatening to arrest him for “interfering.”
We don’t need a camera here,” Chief Chiros said as he stepped into Wrosch’s personal space without wearing a mask, possibly putting him at risk for Covid-19.
“Out of here!”
The chief went on to say, “This is city property, I can tell you to leave.”
“Yeah, it’s public property,” Wrosch asserted.
But none of that mattered to Chiros who was under the impression his badge allowed him to do as he pleased.
“You’re going to jail, you’re going to learn the hard way, I told you about four times,” the chief said.
Watch the shortened video above or the full, unedited video here on Wrosch’s YouTube channel.
