A view from behind the badge with Chief Deputy Ray Whited

And now for the rest of the story: Part 2

Chris Reiter and Tiffany Napier's mug shots from their arrest in Meade County on disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

The vast majority of society wakes up, leaves their house for work, and at worst, worries about dealing with a drama queen of a coworker or a disgruntled customer that awaits them. We don’t give things like mutilated bodies, murder scenes or individuals hopped up on drugs trying to kill us a second thought in our workday. For law enforcement officers, these are just some of the many things that they have to encounter all too often. And then in the middle of all that, especially in today’s world, they have to deal with individuals whose sole intention in life is to bate them into conflict while they video record to their social media audiences to make a quick dollar. Sadly, the more outlandish the videos and claims; the more views and ad money they make. But for a law enforcement officer, there are no quick dollars, and what they have to do on a daily basis would shake many to their core. [What follows may be more graphic than what should be printed, but if we are to pass judgment on someone’s career, we should know the whole story, not just the framed part that fits a narrative or our comfort zone. Also please note that the video below is full of graphic language unfit for any children to hear but is deemed necessary to this investigative series to show the true character of all parties involved.]

Chief Deputy Ray Whited talks about scenes he's worked where human bodies were found in states that scar one's mind. There is a long, litany of these horrific stories that he recalls that are sadly, consistent with almost any other officer's career who has served and protected their community for any given time. He goes on to talk about an accident scene that involved a semi versus passenger vehicle head-on collision that he worked.

“The best and most accurate way I can describe it to you without exaggerating is, you know when you're traveling down the interstate highway and see a deer carcass that’s been splattered by a semi, that’s what this individual looked like in this car. You couldn’t tell what was what,” Whited explained. “No human being should have to see another human being’s body in the condition that we see some of these people in.”

Then there are some who want to harm an officer. Whited says he responded to a domestic call once where the man was amped up on meth with no intentions of going back to jail, no matter what the cost.

“I got one cuff on him, and he came up swinging. And the fight was on,” Whited recalled of the suspect who kept trying to grab his gun until he was finally taken into custody. “I found out later that he had made the comment to his wife at the time that his full intention was to grab my gun and kill me because he wasn’t going back to jail on his birthday.”

These are just a few of the countless similar stories that are shared by law enforcement officers when it comes to the terrible, tragic, horrific, and sometimes life-threatening interactions that they must face and then suppress to the back of their mind during a regular shift at work. This could go on for pages just with Whited’s experiences. And we won’t even get into the innocent children that get caught up in this world that officers are called to intervene in. Then enters the self-appointed Constitutional “auditors” that have sprung up at alarming rates over the last several years, like Chris Reiter and Tiffany Napier, the couple Whited arrested on disorderly conduct and resisting arrest charges last fall.

These “auditors” run YouTube and other social media accounts and instead of traditional work, go around trying to catch or provoke government officials into “violating” their constitutional rights. They support their ventures with monetized YouTube channels that pay channel owners based on the volume of views they have. In fact, Reiter’s channel is estimated to possibly earn somewhere between $3,100 to $49,200 a year at his current viewership rate, according to Social Blade (which is an estimate far less than what it was just a few short months ago before the channel began having YouTube privacy strikes on his videos for, ironically, violating other’s rights). Napier’s channel is currently estimated to earn somewhere between $34 and $537 on the same site. As you can see, it is a highly volatile means of earning a living that is totally dependent on not just getting views but maintaining those views for advertisement dollars. This, in part, possibly explains why so many of these auditors end up arrested. One, they often don’t appear to know or understand the law nearly as well as they claim to. And two, they appear to get bolder and bolder with their actions and recordings in an attempt to maintain their viewership (see the attached video of Reiter recently trying to force access into a restricted area at LMPD and manhandling an office assistant in the process, but PLEASE use caution as it contains very graphic language).

In the case of Reiter and Napier, they also have multiple GoFundMe accounts as part of their money-making scheme. Their “We need your HELP in Meade County” one has raised $7,730 and claims they “were attacked by the Sheriff’s chief of staff (Ray Whited) at the Meade Co circuit clerks office…” and need help securing a lawyer but if you can’t afford to donate, “your views, subscription, and support of the channels is AMAZINGLY helpful too.” It would be worth pointing out that the Sheriff has no “chief of staff” position, and it was also proven by the complete video that not only did Whited not attack them but didn’t lay a hand on the couple other than putting their hands in cuffs. Another account of theirs has raised $3,407 to help Reiter fight charges in Hardin County. A third account is raising money ($1,472 so far) to help the couple pay for public information requests that they claim are overcharged in order to suppress transparency to the public by charging hundreds of dollars for public information to be provided by government agencies. It is worth noting that it is against the law for government agencies to charge unreasonable amounts for the production of public records and therefore, very unlikely that these claims are true. The agencies can only charge what it costs to produce said requests (printer paper, ink, etc.). Then there is a fourth account that has raised $1,893 for the couple to obtain a law firm to take over the lawsuit they have against Clark County, IN.

Reiter and Napier have had run-ins with law enforcement officials in multiple agencies in Indiana along with Meade, Hardin, Carroll and Jefferson Counties in Kentucky through their “auditor” exploits, along with the Kentucky State Police, Kentucky Attorney General’s Office and Federal Bureau of Investigation. There seems to be but only one consistent theme with all these unconstitutional violations claimed to be perpetuated by all of these multi-state and even national agencies — Christopher Reiter and Tiffany Napier.

But this isn’t the first time Reiter has had issues with law enforcement. Before he started making money portraying officers as “violators of his constitutional rights” for his receptive anti-government and anti-law enforcement crowd, he had a long criminal record dating back decades before he decided to become a social media “auditor” or frauditor, as others claim him to be.

He was arrested last year by the Kentucky State Police for an outstanding warrant in Hardin County that dated back to 1998 for a parole violation on a previous marijuana charge. Then in 1999, he was charged and pled guilty to assault, 4th degree with injury here in Meade County because he violently hit a female victim in the head several times, causing bruising to her left ear, and then put a gun to the victim’s head and threatened to kill her, all while a five-year-old girl witnessed the abuse. Then in 2002, Reiter pled guilty to the battery of another woman in the Clark County Superior Court in Indiana. In 2010, Reiter was charged with home improvement fraud and theft by the State of Indiana in the Harrison County Superior Court for taking advantage of an elderly woman. These charges were eventually dismissed after Reiter was ordered to have his $5,000 cash bond turned over to the prosecutor’s office as restitution to the victim. In 2021, Reiter was charged with confinement and intimidation of a third woman in the Scott County Circuit Court of Indiana, but these charges were eventually dismissed.

One of the obtained documents showing that Chris Reiter was accused and later charged and convicted of assaulting a woman.

So, it is ironic that Reiter and Napier would post videos slanderously claiming Chief Deputy Ray Whited is a “Woman Beater.” Whited is a decorated officer of the law and military veteran who has never even been charged, little alone been accused of such a heinous crime, yet Reiter has been charged three times and pled guilty twice to perpetuating violence upon women, even at gunpoint. This is why thoroughly vetting sources before passing judgement on another individual's career and character should always be carried out by us all, but especially by news sources. Breaking news should never trump accurate news.

Stay tuned as this series continues. Today, it veered away from the Chief Deputy Ray Whited interview (outside the introduction) to delve into the separate findings of an investigation into the credibility of the couple making unsubstantiated claims against the distinguished careers of law enforcement officers here in Meade County and abroad. But there is still much more to cover in the coming days.