I feel as though the nation I love is becoming a police state. I want it to stop.
George Cross, 40, in costume
Lynn police arrested George Cross, 40, after Mr. Cross committed the horrific crime of standing on a public sidewalk across the street from an elementary school while wearing a Star Wars costume last Wednesday. Police spokesman Lt. Rick Donnelly said that “the way things are today, you can’t have that”. Mr. Cross was arrested on charges of “disturbing a school” and “loitering within 1,000 feet of a school”. Meanwhile, the school principal put the school on lockdown during the “incident”.
I’m a parent of five children. I think the lockdown and arrest created the “disturbance”, and caused far more trauma than a character in a costume. The increasingly out-of-control behavior of police is getting worse.
Two videos surfaced this morning, one in Boston (Roslindale) and one in Texas.
Usaamah Rahim shooting
Embed link is above the caption in my original post
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s office has released surveillance video of the police killing Usaamah Rahim in Roslindale. The shooting happens at 1:14 in the video. We know, and the agents involved knew at the time, that Mr. Rahim was armed with a combat knife. I see five agents surrounding Mr. Rahim. I see Mr. Rahim shot and killed while four agents watch from a safe distance. I see an execution. I’m sure all the agents involved will be exonerated after full and thorough “investigation”.
Police action in McKinney, Texas
Embed link is above the caption in my original post
Meanwhile, officer Eric Casebolt of the McKinney, Texas police enforces the breathing while black ordinance by harassing black teenagers. His takedown of a 15 year old young woman (starting at 3:00) is illustrative, as is his decision to draw his service revolver at 3:13. His racism is palpable. Foul language, harassment, physical abuse, and threatening with lethal force — all directed exclusively at black teens, while he ignores the whites.
Our police and law enforcement agencies are out of control. Wearing a costume on a public street, even near a school, should be a non-event (perhaps ask him to move along). Five agents do not need to shoot and kill even the most radical suspected terrorist when that man is armed only with a knife. Black teenagers, even in Texas, should not be subject to abuse like that of Eric Casebolt. Racism — whether against Muslims or Blacks — is all too rampant among our nation’s law enforcement agents. Arbitrary and excessive police harassment, to the point of homicide, is rampant.
In my view, this period began with formal policies of abuse, kidnapping and torture ordered from the Oval Office and subsequently ignored. I wonder when, and if, it will end.
I wouldn’t group the three issues. The Texas incident is really unfortunate, but I’m not sure it’s indicative of a larger problem in the way that, say, the Eric Garner case is. It appears to be mostly one guy losing it.
The Cross thing is, frankly, kind of funny. I think he could have left the gun at home. (I know it’s not a real gun.) And you’re right, he shouldn’t have been arrested.
But the Rahim shooting is really disturbing. He hadn’t actually done anything yet. He was considered a threat because his private conversations were being monitored. He might not have done anything if he hadn’t been confronted. (We can say we know he was going to do something, but we don’t really know and never can.) This case is a potential watershed moment and deserves a lot of scrutiny.
Each of them has the common thread of law enforcement getting out of hand, and likely facing no meaningful consequences for it.
I want to know more about what kind of surveillance Rahim is supposed to have been under. What is the program under which the content of his conversations was being intercepted? Was it a formal electronic wiretap under Massachusetts’ wiretapping statute? Was it a bug placed on his phone pursuant to a warrant? Or was it derived from NSA mass surveillance, which would not have any individualized warrant attached? How did they get that information?
I ask this primarily because it’s already known that JTTF monitors social media in an ongoing way; what’s not publicly known is how JTTF is monitoring phone audio.
I appreciate marthews articulating the reason I group the three incidents. I agree that the execution of Mr. Rahim is the most disturbing, and not just because it happened here in Boston.
Let me offer an analogy for my mentioning them together. A lonely carpenter ant walking across the bathroom floor one morning is an isolated incident. Another carpenter ant walking across the kitchen counter later that day is another isolated incident. A half-dozen more carpenter ants in the dining room that evening is a wakeup call. There’s probably a carpenter ant infestation someplace. Treating the symptoms as “isolated instances” only delays addressing the problem — the infestation will only get worse, the worse the infestation is the more difficult it is to eradicate, and the carpenter ants will destroy the structure in short order if unchecked.
America has a problem with the way we treat law enforcement and the way our law enforcement officials treat us. We have too many “isolated incidents”. We too easily dismiss those incidents. Most of the time, the incidents happen “somewhere else” (unless we happen to live in Watertown, or Roslindale, or McKinney, or …). Because the abuses happen “somewhere else”, we too easily demand “increased security” and ignore the abuses that follow as night follows day.
We need to restore the primacy of freedoms, for ALL of us. Freedom to peaceably assemble. Freedom to read and listen to what we choose. Freedom to write and speak what we choose. Freedom to embrace and openly practice the spiritual tradition of our choice (including “none”). Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure (and in today’s world, secretly collecting data from our laptops and phones is an unreasonable search and seizure).
America should not be a police state.
I’m afraid we are playing right into the terrorist’s hands when we give up our freedoms. Thank you Tom!
as you note, would have been a good idea. Police are trained to quickly look at “weapons” to see if they have a red tip, a sign they are a toy. In the pic ST provided, there is no red tip. In either case, every department has protocols to follow and I want ALL officers to ALWAYS follow them and not play Lone Ranger as the nitwit did in Texas. The only damage to Cross is that he looks pretty stupid to most people and like a hero to others. The kids in Texas suffered real trauma.
Kids, and grownups, play with toy guns. Surely we don’t want or need to lock down each elementary school each time a kid (or grownup) walks around the neighborhood with a toy. I see no indication from the many reports that the Lynn police had any serious concerns about Mr. Cross’s toy gun. It was not mentioned in any of the charges that were filed. In the arrest report, the principal of the school stated “he was carrying a gun that appeared to be fake and plastic, [but] you can never be too safe”.
I haven’t heard anybody describe Mr. Cross as a “hero”, certainly don’t use that term characterize him. I view him as an innocent citizen wrongly harassed by a society in the grip of excessive hysteria and panic.
In my view, the trauma suffered by the children who witnessed the arrest and removal of Mr. Cross greatly exceeded any other risk. I think the children of that school learned a lesson about the role of police that we should not be teaching them.
The first police car on the scene (“Car 14”, from the report) quickly established that the gun was fake. I think a more appropriate response would have been for Officer O’Connell to ask Mr. Cross to please move along.
Thank you
That ranks right up there with “zero tolerance” and “three strikes and your out” on my “gee, I refuse to use standard logic and reason to make a reasonable judgement” scale.
The incentives are always loaded the other way– no official gets penalized for “being too safe” but they would lose their jobs if the storm trooper turns out to have a real gun. So, they go nuts. Same thing for your other excellent examples, all of which are bureaucratic attempts to deflect the massive stupidity of the public mob.
Politically I mean, I get that the game of CYA is still fresh and most politicians want to go out of their way to appease a paranoid public-but I question how paranoid it is. I once thought I was part of the enlightened minority for opposing the Iraq War, Gitmo detentions, terror torture cases, and the Patriot Act but now a majority of my fellow Americans are with me on those issues. Ditto legalizing pot and criminal justice reform. Soon, maybe even the death penalty. We are living at probably the safest point in human history with crime at historic lows.
The 50s were a far more dangerous time. And perhaps the many ugly tradeoffs we have been making both abroad and domestically are finally recognized as the paper tiger and bear patrol they are, even the TSA.
Everytime the police state rears it’s ugly head the terrorists win. I’d say more but this blog is probably having its data mined by the feds!
The other two I can see or at least would need more info. The Star Wars one I think is especially understandable. I see an unidentifiable person brandishing what appears to be a weapon, which I can’t tell is fake from the photograph. I’d probably arrest him too and I can definitely understand locking down a nearby school, though I would hope the penalty would be proportional once the facts were known.
One thing that strikes me about white cops dealing with black citizens in this environment you would think they would become more careful. Given all the recent incidents if I were a cop in a similar situation I would wait until I knew a weapon was actually being pointed at me before firing. The absolute LAST thing I would want to be right now is the latest white cop who shot a black kid who turns out to be unarmed.
If someone was pointing a gun at me the first thing I would think is ‘it’s probably a toy’ so I would move in closer to get a closer look. THEN I’d say … ‘is that a real gun?’
Then and I mean ONLY then, when I have Iron clad, rock solid, beyond a reasonable doubt proof, would I fire my service fire arm at the person.
I’m not sure you read the links I posted above. The principal, who called in the report, thought it looked like a toy. The first cop that responded was talking to Mr. Cross. My children went through lockdowns while in grade school. The situations that provoked them were similarly overblown. The lockdown process itself terrified them.
I’m not sure how much more information we’ll receive about the execution of Mr. Rahim by members of the Boston FBI. They’ve already flooded the media with self-serving reports about the awful deeds Mr. Rahim was allegedly plotting. What they haven’t responded to — and I suspect won’t respond to — is why, given the video clip now available, the FIVE agents were unable to subdue Mr. Rahim without killing him.
Fortunately, nobody was physically harmed in the Texas episode.
The physic and emotional damage — from all three — continues unabated until we demand that it stop.
If the choice is panicking kids over a lockdown that turned out not to be necessary, or not secure the school and end up with injured or God forbid murdered children, I know which one I would take.
Surely your logic course addressed the “False Dichotomy” fallacy.
There are numerous alternatives to a lockdown that could have applied in this case. There was never any indication that Mr. Cross represented a threat to the school. No threatening moves or gestures were reported.
The principal called in the police, and the police responded. That was enough (even the police response was an over-reaction, perhaps worsened by the lockdown).
This lockdown prevented NOTHING. You are advocating the kind of hysteria that is causing the abuses we’re discussing here. Your too-casual dismissal of the trauma caused to the children strikes me as narcissistic rather than caring — you are projecting your own insecurity and hysteria on children who expect authority to be a calming, rather than upsetting, influence.
It is the job of grownups to act like grownups, and exercise discretion. Neither the principal nor the police did that in this episode.
I thought all schools were basically locked down? As in the doors are locked … no one can get in.
My guess is “lockdown” must mean a higher state of security, like say ‘no one in or out.’ Can someone explain this with a little more detail?
Here you go:
…the exterior doors are always locked and people have to be buzzed in. In the event of a lockdown all interior doors that are lockable are locked, especially including doors to classrooms. Anyone in the hallway is instructed to move into the nearest securable room and teachers are supposed to check the hall outside their classroom and pull any straggler in. Windows are closed and locked, blinds are closed, and lights are turned off. Everyone in the classroom sits silently on the floor in a designated area not visible to anyone who looks in the window on the classroom door. There are coded ways to communicate that all are present and accounted for, a student is missing, an extra student is present, or there is an injury. Sometimes there is a coded message to indicate when the lockdown begins and ends.
You don’t necessarily know anything else at that point. You don’t know, for example, that the next Sandy Hook wasn’t imminent. Don’t lecture me about children – I substitute teach at the elementary level as I’ve mentioned many times. We usually stress that we are taking an abundance of precaution and take pains to keep kids calm. Do you really think the responsible for thing for the principal to do was ignore it and think it is probably nothing? By all means lift the lockdown as soon as more is known.
I’ll lecture you about children as much as I want, thank you very much. After raising five children, each of whom is a reasonably well-functioning member of society, I claim at least as much insight into children as any substitute teacher at an elementary school.
I didn’t suggest that the principal “ignore” the figure. I instead suggested that she call the police and let them handle it.
Sandy Hook did not involve a perpetrator in an eye-catching costume from a favorite movie loitering for an extended period on a sidewalk across the street from the school.
Your responses here exemplify the hysteria that is creating our police state. The “security” you advocate as an “abundance of caution” is a direct cause of a police state. Such “security” is routinely cited by governments of such states as a motivation for their tyrannical measures.
In my view, it is long past time for the rest of us to rein in precisely the approach you advocate.
If I’m not mistaken, the loiterer lives in the neighborhood. I do not think there is a law against cosplay within sight of a school, or against carrying a toy gun near one, either. If there had been such a law, several generations of boys would be in violation of it for brandishing replica firearms in their neighborhoods.
This is hysteria, and it’s gone beyond silly and entered into disturbing. Children are being sent home from school for such things a s pointing a finger and saying “bang.”
Tom is not being paranoid; all of this is teaching all of us, and especially our children, to be compliant and to conform to what the authorities consider normal. It’s so far from what Americans think their country is all about that the cognitive dissonance is deafening.
…but when I am responsible for the safety of children that’s the risk I’ll take. I CANNOT TELL from the photo you provided that the gun is a fake, but maybe it was more obvious to a direct witness. I don’t care what particular costume it was, but not being able to identify the person raises my suspicions a couple of notches. By all means, call the police, but until they arrive for crying out loud secure the school.
Simmer down you two, nothing personal about this debate. Contrasting experiences occasionally lead to contrasting ideas.
By and large they take it in stride in my experience rather than being terrified. There will always be the occasional kid who is more sensitive and anxious, but you’re right about adults needing to be a calming influence, which we do everything in our power to be and are generally successful in that regard.
Do you think a scared kid is going to let a substitute teacher know what they’re feeling? Sorry, but this kind of claim on your part demonstrates to me that you greatly exaggerate the wisdom of your “experience”. The grade school kids I know take great effort to maintain their “cool” while around authority figures, strangers, teachers, and peers in school. It is when they get to the safety of their home that they are able to unburden, to listening ears, how they really feel.
A child being compelled to spend the majority of every day in an allegedly “safe” environment should not be “given credit” for pretending to be unfazed by being forced to cower in a locked room with shades drawn and lights out:
NOBODY — neither children nor adults — should “take in stride” such experiences. Residents of London “took in stride” being forced to cower in underground stations and tunnels during WWII air raids — nobody pretends those experiences were anything but traumatic.
My children went through lockdowns in their grade school. WHEN THEY GOT HOME, they talked about each for extended periods with us. We helped them calm down. We helped them see the need for the necessary ones and the context for the un-necessary ones. We respected their privacy and their explicit desire that we not share their feelings with the school.
Your arrogance, combined with your breathtaking insensitivity to the interior lives of the children in your care, makes me glad that you were not involved with any of my five children. The fact that you don’t have a clue about what the children in your care are actually feeling does not mean that such lockdowns are ok.
I very rarely get so irritated with a fellow BMGer, but it’s not like I’m making the rules either! Your accusations of arrogance and insensitivity are WAY OUT OF LINE. As adults in a school environment NOTHING, not academics, life skills, or anything else schools are designed to provide is more important than the safety of children in our charge. Again, traumatized vs. dead given limited information – it’s no contest. Yes, I’ve been around long enough that feelings will come out in school, but I don’t doubt it’s the subject of much discussion at home. At this point I think I’m at least as glad that you are not responsible for school safety as you are that I wasn’t responsible for your children.
It sounds like perhaps we need some face time, in hopes that we can better learn how to interact with each other without getting so hot.
In the meantime, perhaps this exchange is itself revealing about the larger issue I raised in the thread topic. Conflict, like this, can be constructive if we are able to examine the conflict itself.
A passion to preserve and protect the safety and well-being of our children is universal among healthy adults. Christopher and I are perhaps representative of two starkly contrasting views of how to best accomplish that shared vision. Viewed through that lens, it is perhaps valuable to at least examine the conflict itself, rather than continue belaboring it.
I get that Christopher is expressing his honest and sincere perception of his personal and professional duty. I hope Christopher gets that I am expressing my honest and sincere perception of my personal duty as a parent. Each of us is striving to determine the best approach for society as a whole.
Perhaps one difference between us is our relative ranking of the risks and threats our children face. It appears that, for Christopher, physical safety (“traumatized vs. dead given limited information – it’s no contest”) is his dominant concern. For me, the risk of “dead” is so low that other aspects are more important.
Beyond that, I doubt that I am unique in bringing my personal “baggage” — accumulated from a lifetime of dealing with school authority as both student and parent — to this already volatile question. Perhaps this is a factor in my perhaps unfair characterization of Christopher’s comments as “arrogant” and “insensitive”.
Because I can only view exchanges like this through the lens of my own life experience, I don’t know how else to characterize his comments. I read his title (“BTW, you don’t give kids enough credit”) as a direct and personal criticism of me. I read it as presuming that he knows more about “kids” then me. The body of his comment presumes that the correct answer is for kids to “take [lockdowns] in stride”. In so doing, his comment essentially ignores my very different world view and value system. I internalize that, perhaps inappropriately, as arrogance and insensitivity.
At a deeper level, his commentary pushes buttons in me that I perhaps overreact to. My own public school experience was dominated by teachers, principals, and other school authority figures who were, in fact, insensitive and arrogant. That was decades ago in a different place and culture, so perhaps they are irrelevant, but they still color the way I react today. My experiences as a parent of five children in Massachusetts public schools was far better, yet still retained elements of the same disrespect for views other than their own. Those first experiences with very local governmental authority presaged my later experiences with a federal government that has grown increasingly insensitive and arrogant since the mid-20th century. This has, in my view, crossed over into “police state” since 9/11.
I do not wish to insult Christopher or anyone else. I do wish to express that not only do I disagree with his premises (which I do), but also the value system, risk structure, and resulting priorities that produce those premises. Because I strongly suspect that Christopher and I are representative of large and very different segments of American society, it seems important to me that we find a way to constructively engage each other even while not being asked to abandon either our core values or our respective life experiences.
If these issues were easy, I think they would have been resolved differently a long time ago. I therefore hope that we can view this as a constructive conflict and perhaps gain insight from it.
Christopher and I share a passionate desire to preserve and protect the wellbeing of the children in our care. I suggest that we differ in what that means, and therefore in how best to accomplish it.
I too was starting to feel like the argument was becoming more about me than about the issue, and I appreciate your comment immediately above.
As with fire evacuation, a lockdown is drilled from time to time, so kids know what to expect and how to react.
Save for law enforcement’s bureaucratical respsonse, it was a no-brainer situation.
I think that we will eventually learn that that guy is suffering from PTSD. Everyone in the video is milling around, and there are various cops who are talking quietly with kids, who are in fact dispersing. Except for the one guy who is charging around in full-on Fallujah mode, complete with a random combat tactical roll. And he gets more and more wound up as he runs around, despite being the only one to do so. I have experienced that sort of random rage that spins up for no reason at all, and despite all social context once, and it was a veteran suffering from what we now call PTSD. I am guessing that that cop is an Iraq veteran, and is likewise suffering from undiagnosed and untreated PTSD.
This phenomena is all too common in combat veterans exiting military service, and has been for a very long time.
Our military has long and intensive entrance training — boot camp, “special services” training, and the rest. We have a well-trained military, well-prepared for combat. Sadly, we do essentially nothing to undo or reverse that training as our veterans exit the military.
My grandfather, who died at 98 in 1986, served as a Marine in WW1 in Germany. His combat experience included the Battle of Belleau Wood. He was very old for a Marine (nearly 30 when he joined), and was proud to have qualified. He lived a long and marvelously varied life — he was a railroad worker, steel worker (he told many stories about walking the beams of skyscrapers under construction in NYC and throughout the northeast), transit worker, museum guide in Washington DC, and countless other experiences. He spent a total of about 18 months in the Marines, a tiny fraction of that rich life. Yet, for the rest of his life, he self-identified as a “Marine”.
I, like my father, am proud of Sam’s service in the Marines. At the same time, all of us in the family were struck by how disproportionate his memories of his Marine service were in comparison to everything else he did.
My late father was combat veteran of WWII, serving in the Pacific theater. My mother, who grew up with him and knew him well before he joined the Army (he was an Army Engineer), says that he came back from the war a broken and devastated man. His mother (Sam’s wife) says the same. It took my father decades to heal to the point where he could even talk about his combat experiences. He got NO help from the military whatsoever.
PTSD did not start with Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. The emotional damage done to our veterans — both in training and in combat — is barely acknowledged even today.
We should do far more to assist returning veterans with re-entry into civilian life. In my view, EVERY veteran should participate in an exit process as carefully designed and rigorously pursued as any boot camp. Every veteran should have life-long access to therapy and counseling in addition to treatment for physical injuries.
Our collective unwillingness to recognize (never mind address) this gaping hole in our treatment of the men and women who serve in our military is a significant factor in my cynical rejection of much of the media-driven folderal about “remembering our veterans”. My grandfather and father needed help — no amount of flags (whether the Stars and Stripes nor the black POW flags), parades, white crosses, nor sappy public speeches will compensate for the lifelong suffering with which my grandfather and father paid for their service to the rest of us.
We need exit training and life-long access to therapy and counseling for our combat veterans.
By far the best approach to PTSD is to not expose our youth to warfare unless it is absolutely necessary. That means not sending our military to places they are not going to be protecting American citizens directly. The list of American wars that meet that criterion is very short. None of the rest should have happened, and the people who made them happen have done a great evil.
…at least not without a thorough evaluation and/or a mandatory time gap between military service and police service.
A lot of these guys go into uniformed service, such as law enforcement. A lot.
from 1993-2003, according to… um Breitbart…. Breitbart:
Based on those years, he may not have been in combat. Regardless, I have some sympathy for the guy.
seems to have been almost completely racially motivated. Evidently, fights over public pools go back to the Civil Rights era. This wasn’t a public pool, but the problems seem to have started by white parents telling black kids to go back to their own neighborhood.
The cop’s behavior was bizarre. Not only was there no apparent threat, the scene wasn’t even that confusing. Pulling a gun in a non-life threatening situation? Sitting on a kid in a bikini? It would be hard to be a threat barefoot, never mind in a bikini. Any cop will tell you it’s hard to know what’s going on when you aren’t there, but I’ve worked with kids 180 days a year for the last 23 years, and I can tell these kids are just kids. Probably most people can tell. But I’ve dealt with all kinds of misbehavior and bad attitude, and I’m not seeing in McKinney.
resigned.
http://www.fox4news.com/story/29279422/mckinney-officer-resigns-due-to-video-of-pulling-gun-on-teens
Almost all of the successes against abusive policing have been due to video. Without that video, this cop would still be there.
The only people I know opposed to this are the police.
1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
–Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, London, 1829
We let our police degenerate to thugs in blue uniforms that murder and shakedown the citizens at will. Maybe someone can reverse the process by bringing back the Nine Principles.
The writing on the wall is that once the police are militarized they will be conscripted en mass into the military to enhance federal control. Most of the world has federal control of police. America doesn’t.
“Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.” –Byron R. White
I think that might be part of the problem. You don’t hear tales of the Irish Garda or the two French national forces, involved in incidents such as this. Al Sharpton endorses it, and many right wing sites are utterly paranoid at the thought President Obama might actually propose it. We know during the Civil Rights era that many local police jurisdictions were fronts for the Klan or operated by Klan members, and could never be counted on to provide justice to it’s citizens. We know that a lot of the issues in Ferguson were due to a lack of accountability beyond the locality.
It is evidently not alone. It would allow us to standardize recruitment and training, recruit a police force that looks like America, standardize the kind of weapons and equipment a force is allowed to have, end funding inequities and end staffing inequities. It also allows police to be directly accountable to the Department of Justice, Congress, and ultimately the President. It will end nutjobs running for law enforcement positions and controlling significant departments. It would also limit the political pull police unions have over local chief executives they are ostensibly supposed to take orders from.
I recognize there are a host of constitutional issues preventing this, Posse Comitatus, legitimate civil liberties concerns, and less legitimate ones that would derail it politically (not to mention the French do it!), but it is something worth thinking about.
Federal agents (FBI) killed Usaamah Rahim. Federal authorities are hounding Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. It was the US government that decided to ignore well-documented war crimes committed in the White House by the prior administration. It is the US government that refuses to close GITMO. It is the US government that has been shredding our Fourth Amendment right to protection from government searches, in the form of the exploding NSA and now FBI electronic surveillance programs. The NSA is building, not dismantling, huge facilities for storing the massive quantities of personal data they are gathering. The “austerity” narrative and “sequester” fire-drills do not apply to the NSA.
We know that the prior administration stuffed the DoJ chock-full of right-wing extremists, as an intentional effort to leave a “legacy”, with no countermeasures taken afterwards by the incoming Obama administration.
The Supreme Court is very much in the balance, with the right-wingers chomping at the bit at opportunities to strengthen law enforcement authority (except when that authority involves protecting the rights of minorities).
I’m just not that confident that the federal government is qualitatively different from local authorities, and is if anything harder to control. I think Massachusetts is likely (not certain, by any means) to be less egregious in its assaults on our freedom than some other places. I worry more about the federal government forcing Massachusetts compliance with intrusive programs like the misguided Real ID attack than about similar efforts at the state level. I note that both McKinney, TX and Baltimore, MD seem to be doing the right thing in the aftermath of the incidents in those two cities.
I think we need to take back our culture. I think we need to start by reversing the increasing hysteria, fear, and panic by the public. I suspect that our government — both local and federal — will follow, rather than lead, that movement.
Lotta people are angry, and it’s time for them to vote. Lot of friends who thought Obama/McCain or Obama/Romney was a tweedle dee/tweedle dum race are working for Bernie. That said, it’ll take more than one campaign to change America, and I am hoping we have a real mass movement that focuses on these issues. The fact that most white people in my age bracket are outraged about this. Even the white kids in McKinney who saw their friends harassed and got angry. So, I am hoping for a real change. Cautious optimism has to be where we go, the cynics in power want us to feel helpless and hopeless so we tune out. And I give you a lot of props for your consistency on bringing attention to these issues.
n/m
In this context it probably makes more sense for local forces to look like their communities than look generally like America.
and worse by far. Federal criminal law is so vague that they can target just about anyone at any time and destroy them. You and I have both violated at least some federal criminal law since yesterday, and so has everyone else. They put Martha Stuart away for “lying” about a crime she didn’t commit. They just put away a college kid, for a 10-year sentence, because he didn’t assume, when his roommate asked him to to move his laptop, that his roommate was the Marathon bomber. Once they decide they want to destroy someone, they will just grind away until they do. And they are no less corrupt or more interested in actually protecting and serving: just ask the residents of South Boston.
Never mind the super-surveillance state noted by tom, which is surely deployed whenever the feds make the political decision to destroy someone. I say political because they pick and choose who they decide to go after– in my own professional life I have seen crazy bank fraud that elicits no response whatsoever– which means that no one is prosecuted unless there is a political reason to do so.
So, ugh. No.