PITTSBURGH — Aside from the actual ‘what happened’ during Wednesday’s hours-long standoff with police, there were many questions about a claim the suspect, William Hardison Sr. made about being a sovereign citizen.
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In a video from 2019, you can hear Hardison shouting at police from his truck window.
“I’m a moor!” he said.
A moor is another name for a Moorish sovereign citizen, a faction of so-called sovereign citizens.
“Sovereign citizens are an anti-government group that believes that the United States is not legitimate, or that the laws apply to them,” said Dr. Christina Sarteschi, a professor at Chatham University who has studied sovereign citizens extensively, writing a book and articles on her research.
In particular, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Moorish sovereign citizens believe they are descendants of the Moors in Morocco.
These individuals tend to cite a treaty from the 1700s between the U.S. and Morocco recognizing the U.S. as a sovereign nation.
Sarteschi said Moors claim the U.S. is Morocco, and that they’re entitled to the land.
She said it often leads to squatting situations.
“Sometimes people think, “I have the right to go live in this property because my people essentially own all of this country,’” Sarteschi said.
Often, the public gets to see so-called sovereign citizens make these claims in court. It’s something Sarteschi said has never gone the way the so-called sovereign citizen wants it to, because the sovereign citizen theory is a ‘pseudo-legal’ argument.
“They’re so persistent, which I think can be trouble for a lot of people,” Sarteschi said.
Because the suspect here in Garfield was killed, there won’t be a court aspect to this sovereign citizen case.
But, Sarteschi said it shows what she’s often warned -- so-called sovereign citizens can be dangerous, and need to be taken seriously, especially by police.
She even posted online Wednesday that she had just been writing an article about the dangers they pose to police.
“The less time you spend arguing with them and maybe having a department policy where you say, ‘hey, look. We’re going to tell you three times, if you don’t do a, b, or c, we’re going to arrest you then,’ instead of spending a half hour trying to educate that person,” Sarteschi said.
Sarteschi said the sovereign citizen extremist movement has grown in recent years, especially during COVID. She said with misinformation so readily available on the internet, the movement will likely continue to grow.
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