The grainy nighttime video starts off ominously.

An irritated young man named Jesus Padilla, sitting behind the wheel of his car, argues with a San Antonio police officer on the shoulder of a road. The situation deteriorates fast.

“Cállate, cállate, cállate,” Padilla barks at the officer, Spanish for “Shut up!”

In the online world of “constitutional auditing” — the often confrontational recording of police and government workers to test the limits of First Amendment freedoms — the San Antonian has a following under his nom de guerre, “Mexican Padilla.”

The video, popular on YouTube but recently taken down, shows his verbal assault continuing for two minutes.

But instead of getting in his face, the officer takes a breath and calmly tells Padilla that he is free to continue what he was doing — shooting video of the exterior of an unidentified government office at night for no apparent reason — and that she will be leaving momentarily. No ticket. No arrest.

Padilla’s anonymous supporters have cheered him through this and other videos, watching him confront authority figures at courthouses and post offices or lurk outside higher-security redoubts such as the San Antonio offices of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Many of their online comments have encouraged violence against the cops, particularly after Padilla posted video of his arrest May 9 at Leon Valley City Hall on a charge of criminal trespass. He had walked into the Police Department wing of the building and refused to leave when ordered to do so by Police Chief Joe Salvaggio. The chief then wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him.

The violence threatened by Padilla’s supporters didn’t materialize, but a loose network of libertarians, First Amendment activists and self-styled anarchists from as far away as California, Florida and Ohio gathered at Leon Valley City Hall repeatedly last month to denounce the arrest.

Last week, 11 of them sued Salvaggio and the city in federal court, saying police illegally seized their cameras and cellphones, broke the ribs of one activist and used stun guns on nonviolent protesters.

For some disaffected Americans, the escalation has cast Leon Valley, population 11,000, as a battleground for personal liberty, as potent a symbol as Waco or Ruby Ridge, Idaho, were in the 1990s within a somewhat similar strain of anti-government sentiment.

With some caveats, First Amendment lawyers and even some police groups embrace the auditors’ right to monitor police without interfering in their work and to define, with their sheer pushiness, what a “public” building means under the law.

“They are most valuable when they document and show the lawless, authoritarian behavior of some police officers,” said Bill Aleshire, an attorney and former Travis County judge who specializes in government accountability. “They are most divisive and least valuable when they, themselves, become nothing more than reality TV producers.”

“When immature, hateful auditors attempt to create a scene for their reality TV notion, I wish cops would learn to laugh at them, and, while remembering their oath of office, avoid handcuffs, Mace, fists and clubs until these creeps have really threatened public safety,” he added.

Salvaggio, a former San Antonio Police Department lieutenant, said he had never heard of First Amendment auditors until two months ago. Now they regularly mock him and his 35 officers with their online bravado. Some posted his home address on YouTube and threatened him by name.

“Good God Almighty!” wrote someone identified as “rockit730” in a comment thread on YouTube. “Where is a talented sniper when you need one.”

“Kill pigs,” responded “SkyPup.”

Another wrote: “I would like to personally thank the person who gave out this pigs address…Make sure that you melt down whichever medium (hard drive) you used. Also remember never use your own IP address.”

Salvaggio, who provided a sampling of the comments to the San Antonio Express-News, said he is taking the threats seriously enough to attempt to make them the basis of criminal cases. He cited the need to gather evidence as the reason he confiscated cellphones from activists he invited to a fake news conference at Leon Valley City Hall on June 23.

Padilla was charged again with criminal trespass, along with another activist, Nguyen Bao, during the June protests. Salvaggio said other activists faced no charges after they were briefly detained.

Texas is fertile ground for auditor groups. Their activities, including some arrests and litigation, have been chronicled in San Antonio, Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, Galveston, Austin, Round Rock, Dallas, Bridgeport and Decatur, among others locales. The cities of Olmos Park, Hollywood Park and Alamo Heights were targets this year of demonstrators who had a firearms focus and wanted to test local governments’ adherence to Texas’ open carry laws.

Some auditors sue city governments. One in Colorado Springs, Colorado, received $41,000 from that city last month after he claimed that he was unlawfully detained and his camera and cellphone seized because he was recording marked police cars outside a secured police parking lot. Krista Hemming, a California-based attorney representing Padilla, said she was aware of settlements or jury verdicts in lawsuits brought by auditors that ranged from $1,000 to several million dollars.

The 12 to 15 activists attracted to Leon Valley last month were a fairly typical cross section of the national movement, some of them said. They ranged from college-age skateboarding males wearing backwards ball caps to middle-aged men and women, mostly Anglo, who could put their actions in some historical context.

Every auditor interviewed agreed that few in the group, if any, voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016. They skew libertarian, anarchist and nonconformist. Nearly all had a run-in with authorities — often child support or divorce-related — that they said ignited their anti-government passion.

“I got involved with video activism after my daughter and granddaughter died in a house fire. The police were very disrespectful to my family,” said Theresa Richard, a disabled mother from Crowley, Louisiana. “After I filed an internal complaint, the local police relentlessly harassed me.”

Richard said her letters to public officials in the past, on myriad topics, never elicited the response she gets from the video crusades. She was detained by Salvaggio and her cellphone seized, but she was not arrested.

Salvaggio, who referred to many of the auditors by their first names and has spoken to some on camera like they were misbehaving middle schoolers, implored the Express-News not to give them coverage, saying any attention in the “legitimate” news media would give them credibility.

Only recently, he said, have Texas police departments begun to share intelligence about those they suspected were capable of violence.

But some police agencies also are circulating a different set of best practices.

“Many smarter cities have learned to simply smile and give (auditors) what they want, and then they go away in 48 hours,” said Greg Prickett, a lawyer and former University of North Texas police officer.

Salvaggio’s confiscation of cellphones and cameras without a warrant “had no basis in law,” but Padilla’s initial arrest for criminal trespass inside City Hall might be valid, Prickett said.

“Once he was told to leave, he needed to leave. The police were on good grounds. He was in an area (in a hallway) that was not considered a traditional public forum,” Prickett said.

He agreed with Salvaggio on another point: Inevitably, the video activism will result in someone getting seriously hurt or killed.

“As these ‘audits’ become more common,” Prickett said, “guys will start showing up at government buildings at 2 a.m. and things will go badly.”

If that happens, the pushback could complicate the jobs of traditional news-gathering organizations, said Kelly McBride, senior vice president of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes journalism education.

“If you’re a jerk about all this, you will lose in the court of public opinion,” McBride said. “If they’re deliberately provoking government employees just for the thrill of it, and not being respectful, I think that will hurt those of us who depend on access to do our jobs.

“But challenging the sensibilities of government is not a bad thing at all,” she continued. “If you don’t routinely challenge what the government thinks should be public or private, it will always default to private, and we will lose that privilege.”

Many Texas police departments need better training on how to handle an anti-government group that is within its rights entering a public building with video cameras, said Kevin Lawrence, director of the Texas Municipal Police Association.

“They will go away if you ignore them,” Lawrence said. “But these officers have to know the law. Many do not. Don’t intervene simply because you don’t know why they’re doing something.”

Lawrence said he would like to interview auditors, to understand what makes them tick.

“I’d like to know what their endgame is,” he said. “I’d like to know what victory looks like for them.”

bselcraig@express-news.net