Tag Archives: Law enforcement

“Law Enforcement”, by Eric Peters

Police behavior is always a big issue, but people seldom look at the laws the police are enforcing. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Law enforcement is a terrible idea. A worse idea is that we owe thanks to those who enforce laws.

And that those who enforce them are “heroes.”

Why is it heroic to enforce tyranny – which is the case with regard to countless – arguably, most – laws? Is it even necessary to describe some of these? How about some of the recently enforced laws that weren’t even laws – such as the “mandates” that small business owners close their doors and stop doing business (and so go out of business, in many cases) because a “health” bureaucracy so ordered?

Who is empowered to give you a “ticket” – i.e., to take money out of your pocket – for not wearing a seatbelt – or helmet on your motorcycle?

Who enforces “checkpoints”?

Who can simply – under the law – seize any amount of cash money found on your person or in  the glovebox of your car during a traffic stop by claiming it could be “drug money”? Who seizes people who’ve not caused harm to others but have been found in possession of arbitrarily illegal “drugs.”

Who manacles and cages them?

Who will enforce the law when the law says it is no longer legal for people who’ve not shot anyone to be in a position to shoot back when they are attacked by thugs with guns? Including those with badges?

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“Keyword Warrants” – Feds Secretly Ordered Google To Identify Anyone Searching Certain Information, by Tyler Durden

Google is not “free” in any sense of the word. You’re the product and Google is under no obligation to hold your information confidential. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

An accidentally unsealed court document reveals that the federal government secretly ordered Google to provide data on people searching specific search words or phrases, otherwise known as “keyword warrants,” according to Forbes.

According to the report, the Justice Department inadvertently unsealed the documents in September (which were promptly re-sealed), which were reviewed by Forbes. In several instances, law enforcement investigators asked Google to identify anyone searching for specific keywords.

The first case was in 2019 when federal investigators were on the hunt for men they believed sex-trafficked a minor. According to a search warrant, the minor went missing but reappeared a year later and claimed to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Investigators asked Google if anyone had searched the minor’s name. The tech giant responded and provided law enforcement agents with Google accounts and IP addresses of those who made the searches.

There have been other rare examples of so-called keyword warrants, such as in 2020 when police asked Google if anyone searched for the address of an arson victim in the government’s racketeering case against singer R Kelly. Then in 2017, a Minnesota judge requested Google to provide information on anyone who searched for a  fraud victim’s name.

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An Open Letter to Law Enforcement Officers, by Freed Radical

Law enforcement officers and military personnel have to ask themselves: do I want to be part of a corrupt system? From Freed Radical at theburningplatform.com:

Portland, Police, Protest, Riot, Demonstration

This article is addressed to law enforcement officers, but will also be of interest to members of the military in their various roles. For the purposes of this article, I’ll just use the broad term, law enforcement, if you will forgive me. I’m not in law enforcement, but I am thankfully the beneficiary of good law enforcement in society, as are our other readers. Obviously, some bad things happened in 2020 in the law enforcement universe, what with all the riots and support of the riots by liberals. Our National Guard was also insulted during the inauguration just recently. My purpose here is to suggest a remedial course of action that has no doubt occurred to you, and I prompt you to explore this option, with your family.

Why a Law Enforcement Career?

I am sure you got into law enforcement for a very good reason. Maybe your family has a history in law enforcement. Or you preemptively joined the good side before the bad side got its hooks into you. Or you took the bait at the local police job fair. Or you wanted to make your mama proud! Lots of good reasons for that career choice.

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Why Are US Troops Fit for Streets of Afghanistan, but Not for Streets of America? by Marko Marjanović

The same politicians who have no problem sending our troops all over the world don’t want them on American streets. From

If it’s distasteful to see them patrolling America’s streets, why should they be inflicted on lands they’re not even from?

58% of Americans want regular military deployed to help police control riots and looting. That still leaves 30% who are opposed.

On the opposed side is also the entire Democrat establishment, the liberal media, the never-Trump Republicans, including George Bush, the retired torturer of Fallujah detainees, Jim Mattis, as well as the National Endowment for Democracy, and presumably Nike and JP Morgan and other corporate entities who have sided with the protest despite its violent and criminal elements. Moreover privately the military establishment itself does not want it.

Just as there are some good reasons why you would want the military to move in, there are also many very good reasons why you would not. The police have largely abandoned shops to the mercy of the looters. If you had the military standing on commercial streets to deter looting that is something many business owners and their patrons would welcome.

On the other hand, that is probably not how the military would be used. Most likely the military would also (or primarily) be used to enforce curfews, and control and limit those protests which are peaceful. They would crack down on looters, but they would also crack down on law-abiding people and usher in a soft occupation and martial law.

This is to say that both sides have valid arguments, and if anything my personal hunch is that those who are opposed are correct in erring on the side of caution. That said the “opposers” are also extraordinarily hypocritical.

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The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It, by Kashmir Hill

The advances in facial recognition technology get creepier and creepier. From Kashmir Hill at nytimes.com:

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

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Revenue Collection and Something Else, by Eric Peters

Tickets use to be revenue collection devices. Now they’re part of a design to make driving as painful as possible. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It used to be that roadside mulctings were primarily, even exclusively, motivated by simple money-lust. Traffic enforcement as a kind of random tax-raising effort.

Many towns and even cities in the United States are extremely dependent on the “revenue” – as it is styled – which is generated by the fleecing of motorists. This is why there are so many “infractions” – and it is why many of them are deliberately contrived so as to assure almost every motorist will be “guilty” of at least one “violation” every time he drives.

Examples include absurdly under-posted speed limits that are often functionally impossible to comply with – unless you want to get run over. And pedantic requirements about exactly where one must stop at a stop sign – and how long one must stop. The touching of a yellow line, etc.

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Beware The Wrath Of Patient Men, by the Raconteur Report

Just because somebody doesn’t advertise their political views doesn’t mean they don’t have them, that they’re not strongly held, and that they won’t, if push comes to shove, shove back…with firearms if necessary. From the Raconteur Report at raconteurreport.blogspot.com:

Dear Leftards:

You irrepressible commie halfwits think you’ve got the cards. You’re the idiot talking tough with the shotgun in your hand, and you’re about to get comeuppance. In Louis L’Amour’s memorable phrase, you’re about to have your meathouse torn down. With a mere couple of nutbags (mainly your own nutbags, nota bene) doing what nutbags do, you imagine you’ve got enough pull now to leverage your way into more asinine abridgments of the Constitution.

You haven’t, you won’t, and you really, really need to knock it off.
I remind you of this while you’ve got your limbs and most of your teeth all still attached.

We’re really not kidding.
You’ve had all the slices of our cake you’re ever getting.

Step. AWAY. From the table.
STFU, keep your hands in plain sight, and walk away, and you might live through this.

And for the cynical timid souls on the other side suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and normalcy bias, desist.
Re-think.

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The Breakdown Of Law In American Cities, by Samantha Biggers

It’s one thing if a police force is simply overwhelmed by crime. It’s another thing altogether if it simply stops enforcing certain laws. From Samantha Biggers at backdoorsurvival.com:

There is a disturbing trend in the cities of America. This trend is the complete disregard of the law and a persistent ignoring of very serious problems that affect the health, safety, and wellbeing of all that live, work, or do business in them and the surrounding suburbs. This cannot go on without some very serious consequences. When people are forced to take the law into their own hands, the situation can get out of hand quickly. Violence and chaos are far too easy to start and difficult or even impossible to stop without massive devastation.

When there is no law then that is anarchy and many of the larger cities in the United States are descending into it.

Anarchy is a slippery slope. When leaders issue orders to not arrest people for crimes, that is a warning sign that things are going downhill at a rapid rate.

What laws are not being enforced?

Shoplifting

Stores are being told they are on their own when it comes to stopping shoplifters. Everyone can just hire their own security force right? That is totally affordable for the small business owner in the eyes of some.

Vagrancy

There was a time when people would be told to move on or go to jail. Now there is no jail and police are not allowed to break up homeless camps in cities, even when they are literally on the sidewalks.

Smaller amounts of hard drugs like meth and opioids

Cities such as Seattle have told their police to not even bother booking someone unless they have more than about 30 doses of heroin. That is considered a personal amount and not anything anyone should worry about.

Property rights

One would think they have the right to say that someone cannot live on their property without permission or paying rent. More property owners are finding that they have a much harder time ridding their property of squatters.

People can make fun and scoff at celebrity LA landowners like Johnny Rotten for complaining about homeless encampments on their front yard but the man has a legitimate complaint. His wife has Alzheimer’s and a bunch of people in the front yard that are on drugs and unstable is not a safe situation.  Just because someone is wealthy doesn’t mean they don’t have a legitimate complaint if property laws are not enforced.

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What it Means to be a Law Enforcer . . . by Eric Peters

Law enforcers enforce the law, no matter how idiotic or unjust. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:

It is no accident that police have become more brutal – in appearance as well as action – since they became law enforcement.

The term itself is a brutal syllogism. The law exists and must be enforced because it is the law. I am just doing my job, only following (lawful) orders. People were hanged for using such reasoning to justify the enforcement of vicious, evil laws and went to the gallows baffled as to why.

Victor’s justice, they called it. And perhaps they were right, if a bit prematurely.

Today’s defendants – well, one hopes that they will be that, one day – are just as guilty in kind if not degree.

They enforce the laws. All of them. They do not question the rightness of any of them. The law is the law.

It ought to raise hairs on the back of any thinking person’s neck.

Law enforcement countenances anything, provided the law says so. It is what has made it possible for law enforcers to seize people’s property without charge or due process of any sort – because the law (civil asset forfeiture) gives them the power to do it. Some do it perfunctorily – the banality of evil Hannah Arendt wrote about. Others do it zealously – this includes the rabid little man who is the chief law enforcement officer of the state, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

It is what enables “good Americans” (the same as “good Germans”) to stand in the middle of the road, halting every car at gunpoint (implied, even if not actually drawn; see what happens if you do not stop) and demanding “papers” be presented.

Without feeling ashamed of themselves.

Because the law says it is “reasonable” to do this. (If so, then it is not-rape to briefly penetrate an unwilling victim – which action by the way law enforcers also perform under color of the law but call it “looking for contraband” rather than rape.)

To continue reading: What it Means to be a Law Enforcer . . .