Tag Archives: Police

Raging Bulls in Blue: The Deadly Toll of Warrior Policing on Steroids, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on February 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

A lot of cops already have power complexes. The worst thing you can do is put that on steroids. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“This is warrior policing on steroids.”—Paul Butler, law professor

That the police officers charged with the beating death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols are Black is a distraction.

Don’t be distracted.

This latest instance of police brutality is not about racism in policing or black-on-black violence.

The entire institution is corrupt.

The old guard—made up of fine, decent, lawful police officers who took seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—has given way to a new guard hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

Memphis’ now-disbanded Scorpion unit provides a glimpse into the looming crisis in policing that has gone beyond mere militarization.

Unfortunately, while much has been said about the dangers of police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later, little attention has been paid to the role that “roid rage,” triggered by anabolic steroid use and abuse by police, may contribute to the mounting numbers of cases involving police brutality.

Given how prevalent steroid use is within the U.S. military (it remains a barely concealed fixture of military life) and the rate of military veterans migrating into law enforcement (one out of every five police officers is a military veteran), this could shed some light on the physical evolution of domestic police physiques.

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How Local Cops Get Your Bank Records, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on January 26, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to keep up with all the ways all levels of government are shredding the Fourth Amendment. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

This column has recently outlined the specious arguments offered by the feds when they have been caught spying on ordinary Americans. They argue that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution — which requires a search warrant prior to spying — only applies to law enforcement and not to domestic surveillance. This argument not only defies the plain language of the amendment; it defies history and common sense.

The language of the amendment protects the privacy of all “people” by affirmatively declaring that the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” may only be violated by the government by the use of a search warrant, signed by a judge, based on probable cause of crime, and which specifically describes the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.

The language of the amendment, and the language of statutes and court rules written at the state and federal levels to implement the procedures for seeking search warrants, makes no distinction on the nature of what the government seeks — evidence of crime or evidence of foreign interests.

Stated differently, a fair and neutral reading of the amendment makes it clear that the probable cause and specificity requirements were intended not only to protect privacy from Big Brother but also to compel the government to focus on crimes after they occur and not on predicting them.

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Anarchy in America: We’re Being Gunned Down Like Dogs in the Street, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on November 2, 2022 | 2 comments

Speaking of dogs, some of the things police do to dogs is horrid. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Things are falling apart.

How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.

Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making.

No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.

The death toll is mounting. The carnage is heartbreaking. The public’s faith in the government to do its job—which is to protect our freedoms—is deteriorating.

With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later, and all the government does is shrug and promise to do better.

Things are not getting better.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Law, Morality, Politics, Tyranny

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US Police Track Innocent People’s Movements With Troubling New App, by Anne Toomey McKenna

Posted on October 22, 2022 | 1 comment

Great news, they’re rolling out yet another way to curtail our liberty! From Anne Toomey McKenna at consortiumnews.com:

Fog Reveal raises enormous privacy and civil liberties concerns, writes Anne Toomey McKenna. Yet it may be permissible because the U.S. lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law.

Government agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal.

The tool enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” – where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from over 250 million U.S. mobile devices.

Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for online civil liberties, was investigating location data brokers and uncovered the program through a Freedom of Information Act request.

EFF’s investigation found that Fog Reveal enables law enforcement and private companies to identify and track people and monitor specific places and events, like rallies, protests, places of worship and health care clinics. The Associated Press found that nearly two dozen government agencies across the country have contracted with Fog Data Science to use the tool.

Domestic law enforcement agencies also use technology for surveillance, but generally with greater restrictions. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and federal electronic surveillance law require domestic law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before tracking someone’s location using a GPS device or cell site location information.

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Rogue Cops: The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on July 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Constitutional provisions meant to protect our individual rights from the government apply to the government and its agents. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.

In Egbert v. Boule, the Court gave total immunity to Border Patrol agents who beat up a bed-and-breakfast owner, in the process carving out a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment for border police (and by extension, other federal police) who unconstitutionally use excessive force. As journalist Ian Millhiser concludes, “Egbert v. Boule is a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.”

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Why You Can Never Count on the Cops To Protect You, by L. Reichard White

Posted on June 7, 2022 | 1 comment

When every second counts, as Ulvade demonstrated, the police are only an hour or say away. From L. Reichard White at lewrockwell.com:

Do United States cops have a duty to protect you?

On June 27th, 2005, in Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the Supreme Court found the police have no Constitutional obligation to protect individuals from private individuals. In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court found in South v. Maryland that law enforcement officers had no affirmative duty to provide such protection. In 1982 (Bowers v. DeVito), the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit held, …there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. …The Constitution…does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order.”

Further, most crimes and other harms don’t happen with a cop present — unless of course, it’s part of another justice system Handschu Scam or F.B.I. false-flag entrapment scheme.

The best you can hope for is that the cops eventually identify and capture the “perp(s).” The cops aren’t very good at that — police solve just 2% of all major crimes. And, when they do, it rarely helps the victims and in fact may cost them more time and/or money if they have to testify etc.

So the best you can hope for is that the so-called “justice system” scares criminals into not being criminal — and the crime statistics prove they’re not good at that either.

You’ve probably heard the meme, “Dial 911 and die?” If you can face how unprotected you really are, well, check out Warren v. District of Columbia.

So, if the cops aren’t there to protect you, what ARE they for?

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“Law Enforcement”, by Eric Peters

Posted on May 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

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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How Defund the Police backfired, by Michael Shellenberger

Posted on December 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Turns out the trendy theories about the why police are unnecessary don’t hold much water in real life. From Michael Shellenberger at unherd.com:

After a spike in crime, progressive cities are reversing cuts

Over the last two decades, progressives have established a new consensus on crime. Nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession should be reclassified as misdemeanours. Cities should defund the police and spend the money on nurses, psychologists and social workers instead. Offenders should have minimal involvement with the justice system — and be kept out of jail wherever possible.

But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

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LAPD Targets “Follow-Home” Robbery Crime Wave, by Jill McLaughlin

Posted on November 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Flaunting one’s wealth is not a good idea in Los Angeles anymore, if it ever was. From Jill McLaughlin at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Police are ramping up efforts to crush an escalating wave of violent crime in the Los Angeles area targeting popular shopping districts, wealthy residents, and celebrities.

A spate of “follow-home” robbers turned deadly this week, resulting in the murder of a 23-year-old man outside of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard Nov. 23.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) responded to the homicide by announcing the formation of a “Follow Home Task Force.” The county sheriff also declared his intention to do what it took to stop the growing trend.

Violent crimes are on the rise in Los Angeles. Area law enforcement reported an increase of nearly 4 percent since 2019, according to the latest law enforcement numbers released in October.

Police Chief Michel Moore said gang violence was an underlying influence.

The department had identified 133 robberies connected to the trend of suspects following victims home from Melrose Avenue, the Jewelry District, and high-end restaurants and nightclubs, Moore said this week.

“The victims were being targeted based on the high-end jewelry they were wearing or the high-end car they were driving,” the LAPD said in a Nov. 24 release.

Last week, the LAPD reported that six gangs were involved in the violent “follow-home robberies” spree.

“When we look at the underlying influences of that street violence … Those involved with gangs continue to be the highest area of concentration,” Moore told NBC Los Angeles in June.

Los Angeles, nicknamed the “Gang Capital of America,” has about 450 active gangs operating in the county, the LAPD reported in September.

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Oregon Police And Firefighters Sue Governor Over Covid Vaccine Mandate, by Tom Ozimek

Posted on September 5, 2021 | 1 comment

What happens if police and firefighters are fired en masse? Nothing good. From Tom Ozimek at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

A coalition of Oregon police officers and firefighters have sued Gov. Kate Brown over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for state employees.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown (Getty Images)

The plaintiffs—including the Oregon Fraternal Order of Police and the Kingsley Firefighters Association—argued in a lawsuit filed Friday in a Jefferson County court (pdf) that Brown’s executive order violates a number of laws and want it blocked.

“Plaintiffs seek an order declaring EO No. 21-29 is unenforceable because it conflicts with Oregon statutes, would result in a common law wrongful discharge of the Plaintiffs, conflicts with the Oregon Constitution’s guarantee of free expression, and conflicts with the United States Constitution guarantee of equal protection, free exercise, and due process,” the complaint states.

Brown issued an executive order (pdf) on Aug. 13 that imposed a mandatory vaccine requirement on all executive branch employees. In the order, Brown said that, to date, around 70 percent of the state’s executive branch employees had taken the vaccine voluntarily, prompted in part by state efforts like organizing onsite vaccine clinics and financial incentives.

Citing the rise in COVID-19 infections and noting that both private and public employers across the United States have imposed mandates, Brown said it was time for tougher measures in Oregon.

“With the Delta variant raging in Oregon, with the state’s ability to fully return to in-person work continuing to be hampered by the risks from COVID-19, having implemented a series of incentives aimed at achieving voluntary compliance, and with full FDA approval of the COVID-19 vaccine expected within weeks, the time has come for any remaining state employees and those who work alongside them in state government to get vaccinated,” she wrote in the order.

The order gives Oregon state workers until Oct. 18 to provide proof of vaccination or face consequences that could include dismissal.

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