SEDONA—Sedona Police Officer Steven Willadsen dragged a salt-and-pepper-haired man in his thirties out of a blue SUV, forcing him to the pavement of an Arizona roadway flanked by strips of the world’s iconic purple soil.
“No, no, no,” Matthew Paul Tucciarone pleaded as he was rolled over and handcuffed. “I didn’t do something.”
Minutes earlier, Willadsen had stopped Tucciarone for driving with a fictitious license plate that includes a model of the U.S. flag on one facet and a bald eagle clutching arrows and olive branches on the opposite. Tucciarone failed to supply a authorized driver’s license, registration or insurance coverage, and ignored the officer’s orders to depart the automotive.
“I’ve requested you 10 occasions to get out. Get out by yourself then,” Willadsen advised him after backup arrived. In whole, he warned Tucciarone practically 20 occasions that he might both get out or be compelled out earlier than pulling him from the automotive, based on physique digital camera footage obtained by AZCIR.
Tucciarone is one in every of a rising variety of folks within the U.S. whose mistrust of presidency and different mainstream establishments has led them to embrace the conspiracy-laden, anti-government ideology of the sovereign citizen motion. That progress has turn out to be more and more evident in Arizona, as adherents typically put themselves in direct battle with legislation enforcement and the courts.
In Tucson, a surge of sovereign filings has inundated workers on the Pima County Recorder’s Workplace. Nevertheless it’s amongst Sedona’s iconic sandstone towers the place the motion’s extra aggressive ways have led to bogus authorized filings designed to intimidate and harass public officers, requests by court docket officers to extend constructing safety and growing tensions with native police.
Although Sedona officers have publicly downplayed the expansion of the motion, an AZCIR evaluation of inner communications discovered the Sedona Police Division has issued inner bulletins highlighting particular person members, alerting officers to widespread sovereign ways and warning of threatening rhetoric concentrating on public officers. A number of members of the pressure additionally accomplished a coaching on “Sovereign Citizen Extremists” provided by the Arizona Peace Officer Requirements and Coaching Board in 2021.
“The sovereign citizen stuff leads folks in a way more harmful and determined path,” stated Devin Burghart, president and govt director of the Institute for Analysis and Training on Human Rights, an advocacy group that combats white nationalism and different types of bigotry. “Their lives all of a sudden turn out to be rather more risky—a easy visitors cease might turn out to be a shootout.”
Whether or not sovereigns act independently or establish with one in every of its many loose-knit teams, their ideology relies on a conspiracy principle that the U.S. was subverted by an illegitimate authorities greater than 100 years in the past, and consequently, its legal guidelines don’t have any actual authority over them.
This perceived independence leads followers to do issues like surrender their U.S. citizenship or cease paying taxes. In additional excessive situations, sovereigns have armed themselves to defend their beliefs—as in 2014, when the Arizona Division of Public Security stopped a sovereign who had a loaded AK-47, pipe bombs and different explosive elements in his car.
Police interactions with sovereigns in different states have turned lethal. In March of this yr, as an illustration, police shot and killed 25-year-old sovereign citizen Chase Allan in Farmington, Utah.
Like Tucciarone, Allan was pulled over for driving with a fictitious license plate and refused to depart his automotive when an officer ordered him to get out.
However not like Tucciarone, who stored a gun in his glove compartment, Allan had a holster beneath his coat. Because the arresting officer went to take away Allan from the automotive, a supporting officer noticed the holster, calling out “gun, gun, gun!” Officers opened fireplace.
Matthew Paul Tucciarone poses for a portrait in Sedona on March 15, 2023.
Tucciarone’s 2021 visitors cease was not his first run-in with Sedona police. In late 2020, in the course of the top of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was arrested for trespassing at a Pure Grocers after he and others refused to put on masks whereas inside.
“The second that I received arrested for a masks was it for me,” Tucciarone stated, acknowledging that the incident was a tipping level for what he considered as a collection of presidency failures.
It wasn’t lengthy after that incident when Tucciarone attended his first sovereign citizen assembly. He moved between totally different native and nationwide sovereign teams, every with their very own taste and course of for changing into free from what they view as an illegitimate authorities. He ultimately soured on their strategy, believing a number of the self-described lecturers had been scamming followers.
By April 2021, he was one in every of a number of sovereigns on the Sedona Police Division’s radar.
Then-Sedona Police Chief Charles Husted referred to as for an inner bulletin to alert officers to threats allegedly made in opposition to metropolis officers by Tucciarone and one other Sedona-based sovereign citizen.
“When out and about, preserve situational consciousness and stay significantly conscious of the potential officer security risk” posed by Tucciarone and others, Lt. Stephanie Foley wrote in an electronic mail to workers the next day. “File and doc encounters with these people and any related situations. Be vigilant and keep secure.”
Different Sedona Police communications obtained by AZCIR revealed a familiarity with sovereign ways and ideologies, typically centered on points round fictitious license plates.
In a single alternate, Sedona Justice of the Peace Decide Paul Schlegel requested the division to step up hours for a court docket safety guard, voicing his concern about an “elevated inflow of sovereign residents and First Modification auditors.”
“Sovereign residents have been overheard commenting about their information of when our court docket safety officer is working and so they are available in when he’s gone,” Schlegel wrote. He talked about that one court docket clerk had already left as a result of the worker now not felt secure working there.
In 2022, Schlegel was one in every of a number of metropolis staff focused in what court docket paperwork described as a “paper terrorism” assault by a gaggle of sovereign residents. The group was led by Shelley Evans, who hosts a mixture of various wellness applications and lectures with sovereign citizen-type coaching on the Final Mild Mission in Sedona.
The group is dealing with prison expenses after submitting a collection of bogus liens alleging that metropolis officers dedicated 391 violations of the Structure and Invoice of Rights and demanding cost of greater than $12 million.
Isaac Stone Simonelli | AZCIR
Publicly, town of Sedona maintains that sovereign citizen exercise in the neighborhood has not considerably modified. In an electronic mail to AZCIR, spokeswoman Lauren Browne indicated the police division “doesn’t consider there’s heightened consciousness of the motion.”
“As has been for fairly a while, the police division encounters individuals who say they’re sovereign residents,” Browne wrote. “They don’t really feel there was an uptick in these interactions.”
Division emails, nonetheless, present the company has leaned on an Arizona Peace Officer Normal and Coaching Board-certified coaching on “Sovereign Citizen Extremists” to organize its officers.
The course, created in 2015, was designed to “present peace officers the knowledge to assist them perceive the sovereign citizen motion and the extremist faction of it.” It outlines methods to establish sovereign residents, the forms of encounters officers might need when participating with them and security suggestions, in addition to retaliation strategies sometimes utilized by sovereigns and countermeasures legislation enforcement could take.
A Sedona Police Division electronic mail despatched on Feb. 14, 2021, requested officers in coaching to look at the course inside 5 days of receipt, indicating the company would quickly be conducting its personal “Actuality Based mostly Coaching … involving a visitors cease on a Sovereign.”
The script for the AZPOST coaching video emphasizes the necessity for peace officers and public officers to raised perceive the motion because it “grows in Arizona.”
Sedona’s sandstone towers are mirrored within the glass of a metropolis constructing entrance on June 26, 2023. Photograph by Isaac Stone Simonelli | AZCIR
The Arizona Division of Public Security issued an identical bulletin about sovereign residents in 2008 by means of its Counter Terrorism Info Middle. AZCIR contacted the division looking for any updates on the motion’s presence within the state, however a spokesman declined to remark, citing the age of the bulletin and workers turnover.
Tucciarone was in the end charged for resisting arrest and making a “substantial danger of inflicting bodily harm to the peace officer,” displaying a fictitious license plate, and failing to supply proof of identification after the June 2021 incident in Sedona.
Like many sovereigns, he represented himself in Yavapai Superior Court docket.
Although he was uncertain of how the decide would rule, Tucciarone stated he was assured in what he realized by means of his sovereign research. Finally, the state moved to dismiss the case and refile it as a misdemeanor on the Justice Court docket.
Information present Tucciarone additionally filed a 77-page discover of declare in opposition to Sedona, alleging damages and hurt in the course of the visitors cease and subsequent arrest. Naming then-Police Chief Husted and 4 different officers, together with Willadsen, within the declare, he indicated he was “prepared to settle” for $20 million.
The decide presiding over Tucciarone’s case dismissed it with out prejudice and ordered that the Sedona Police return Tucciarone’s handgun, which was confiscated after his arrest. The case was refiled in Sedona Court docket as a misdemeanor, however Tucciarone failed to look in court docket.
Officers issued an arrest warrant in response. And on Could 13, 2023, as he returned from an occasion by bicycle, Tucciarone once more discovered himself being dragged to the bottom by Officer Willadsen after failing to adjust to an order to place away his telephone in the course of the arrest, based on bodycam footage obtained by AZCIR.
“The rationale I can’t mean you can name someone is as a result of if someone exhibits as much as the cease and shoots me within the head whereas attempting to arrest you,” Willadsen stated earlier than getting cut-off.
“Nobody goes to shoot you,” Tucciarone stated.
“I don’t know that, that’s why I stated to cease,” Willadsen replied.
Tucciarone faces a brand new cost of resisting arrest. This time round, although, he stated he plans to observe former President Donald Trump’s lead through the use of an lawyer. He believes that far too many sovereigns go into courtrooms and are belligerent and disrespectful of judges, harming the picture of the motion.
Even earlier than his most up-to-date arrest, Tucciarone stated he was altering his ways when coping with police, citing the deadly sovereign citizen capturing in Utah as a cautionary story.
“Do I need to sit on the facet of the highway and argue with a police officer? No, I do not—not anymore,” Tucciarone stated on the time.
AZCIR’s Brendon Derr contributed reporting to this story.
This text first appeared on Arizona Middle for Investigative Reporting.