Minnesota Police Moving to Legalize Illegal Searches

While the police state is most prominent in states like New York and California it has slowly been making its way to Minnesota since, at least, the Republic National Convention that took place in St. Paul in 2008. Now the enforcement arm of the state is demanding that they be given the authority to perform warrantless searching of Minnesota citizens:

Law enforcement officials plan to ask the Legislature this year for the right to collect intelligence information on citizens without having to publicly disclose who they are monitoring or why.

It’s a proposal that drew sharp warnings and concerns from public records and transparency advocates at a meeting today where a variety of changes to state public data laws were discussed.

The head of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, Dave Pecchia, said the proposal to collect intelligence information on suspected terrorists, gang members or other suspected criminals is essential to ensure public safety to citizens in Minnesota. He said Minnesota is one of two states that doesn’t have that classification of data and it hinders the ability to share information with law enforcement officials in other states.

What’s interesting is the fact the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association aren’t just demanding this power to spy on “terrorists” but also gang members and “other suspect criminals.” In other words every dissident group is going to find itself subject to Stasi-esque searches. I wonder when they will start asking for the power to indefinitely detain Minnesotans without charges?

You know what? New Hampshire is sounding better every day.

6 thoughts on “Minnesota Police Moving to Legalize Illegal Searches”

  1. Somebody needs to get out there and restore the live free or die. After they nominated McCain and then Romney I am tempted to say they need to revoke that and say NH pretend to by liberty oriented while voting for the status quo.

    1. Somebody needs to get out there and restore the live free or die.

      That’s what the Free State Project is trying to do. While New Hampshire may not be a bastion of freedom at this point there is a large base of people fighting for it, something far different than here in Minnesota.

  2. Yeah but so far with only about 5,000 people having done that it doesn’t seem like the free state project has been very successful from my perspective. I considered looking into moving up there at one point, but with my wife having family in Dallas it is easy to just work on making Texas a freer state (as we are already so far ahead of MN in so many areas).

    1. I think it’s actually doing pretty well considering the movement started in 2001 and New Hampshire was only selected in 2003. Getting 5,000 people to uproot and move in eight years isn’t too shabby.

  3. About the Free State Project, well over 1000 have moved already. More than 11,000 have signed the statement of intent to move. Its a community like no other. Plan on attending porcfest.com

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