United Police States of America – Page 21

Justice Department Announced It Will Keep All Federal Slave Laborers

Private prisons have been controversial. A lot of people believe that for-profit prisons are evil and that all prisons should be owned and operated by the government. Somehow people think slave labor is morally superior when the government owns the slaves. I don’t understand that mentality. A cage is a cage and a slave is a slave. Regardless of my opinion, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced that it will keep all future federal slave laborers for Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR):

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

Since this announcement private prison stocks have fallen pretty hard even though most private prisons hold contracts with state or county governments:

While any reduction in the federal prison population will be welcomed by those released, their families, and by reform advocates, the majority of inmates reside in state or county facilities. Only one in eight federal inmates was in a private facility in 2015.

So this change doesn’t affect many prisoners and won’t put Corrections Corporation of America or GEO Group out of business. But the falling stock prices weren’t unexpected and I bet many of the higher ups in the DoJ as well as those in the know in Congress made a good deal of cash shorting those stocks.

There is also the question of how long this decision will last. In December of last year the DoJ announced that it would stop paying civil forfeiture money under the Equitable Sharing Program. A lot of people heralded the decision as a victory over civil forfeiture. Only a few months later the DoJ announced that it would resume those payments. It’s quite possible the DoJ will announce plans to continue using private prisons in a few months, perhaps around November 4th when everybody is distracted by the election.

One thing is certain, nothing meaningful has changed. The DoJ didn’t announce that it would stop enslaving people or that it would stop using private prisons and abolish UNICOR. It merely said it would stop handing out slave laborers to UNICOR’s competitors.

Putting You in Danger to Protect You

When a suspect attempts to flee from the police should the officers pursue? Most people will instinctively say they should. But one has to ask whether it’s more dangerous for the police to enter into a high-speed chase with a suspect or allow the suspect to flee. Oftentimes in the zealous pursuit of suspects the police end up putting a lot of lives in danger:

More than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979, and tens of thousands more were injured as officers repeatedly pursued drivers at high speeds and in hazardous conditions, often for minor infractions, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The bystanders and the passengers in chased cars account for nearly half of all people killed in police pursuits from 1979 through 2013, USA TODAY found. Most bystanders were killed in their own cars by a fleeing driver.

Police across the USA chase tens of thousands of people each year — usually for traffic violations or misdemeanors — often causing drivers to speed away recklessly. Recent cases show the danger of the longstanding police practice of chasing minor offenders.

5,000 people killed primarily in the pursuit of revenue from traffic violations and misdemeanors. This is especially ridiculous when you consider that ever car has a government mandated unique identifiable number bolted to the vehicle. An officer could just call in the make, model, and license plate number and wait for a safer time to deliver the citations.

Whenever somebody argues that the police do something to keep us safe we must ask whether the tactics being used by the police are more dangerous than whatever they’re supposedly combatting. Is heroine really more dangerous than no-knock raids leading to dead pets or family members? Are people who exceed the arbitrarily posted speed limit really more dangerous than having a police car with bright flashing lights on the side of the road causing chaos on the highway? If the tactics are more dangerous than the activity being policed then the police aren’t keeping anybody safe, they’re needlessly putting them in danger.

Cash, Baby

Some people think that the war on drugs is about protecting the American people from the effects of drugs. Regardless of what your D.A.R.E. program officers told you in school that isn’t the case. The war on drugs is about the money and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is done pretending otherwise:

WASHINGTON — Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.

Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.

[…]

It is a lucrative endeavor, and one that remains largely unknown outside the drug agency. DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade after concluding the money was linked to drug trafficking, according to Justice Department records. Most of the money was passed on to local police departments that lend officers to assist the drug agency.

The best scams are the ones that cut everybody in on the action. Local law enforcement agencies get a cut, the DEA gets a cut, and the State gets a cut so none of them are motivated to fight against this kind of theft.

With all of the news of corruption surround the drug war it amazes me that so many Americans are still being suckered by the claim that it’s about protecting people. Using drugs certainly caries the chance of developing negative side-effects or dying. But having men with guns who are too lazy to verify an address kick in your door at oh dark thirty and shoot you is a guarantee of negative side-effects or death. And if that wasn’t enough the drug war also opens the door for rampant corruption. Police officers can blackmail drug dealers and users, steal large quantities of cash without any justification other than the quantity of cash being large, ignore laws against unreasonable searches by claiming a dog “signaled” that there were drugs in the car or house, etc.

The supposed prescription is far worse than the disease in this case. But it was never about curing the disease, it was always about milking the patient for every dime they have.

They Call Her Killary for a Reason

Everybody who believes in the political process necessarily believes in the death penalty. Death is the inevitable outcome of breaking one of the State’s decrees and not cooperating when armed men with guns come to kidnap you (and cooperating won’t guarantee you avoid the death penalty). However, many politicos, especially on the Democratic Party side, will say they oppose the death penalty. Hillary Clinton is not one of them:

Asked her position on capital punishment, Mrs. Clinton said she did not support abolishing the death penalty, but she did encourage the federal government to rethink it.

“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way,” she said. “So I think we have to take a hard look at it.”

Mrs. Clinton added, “I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states.”

They call her Killary for a reason.

The problem with the death penalty isn’t that it’s used too often, it’s that it exists at all. Executions performed by the State are collectivist nonsense. When the State executes somebody it does it under the auspices of justice. But the State’s justice doesn’t involve best efforts to right a wrong. Instead it involves whatever words were written on a piece of paper and voted on by a committee. Justice would require asking if killing a convicted individual would be an appropriate way to right whatever wrong he committed, not whether some suit-clad mother fuckers in a marble building said it was okay to execute somebody for violating one of their decrees.

Transporting prohibited drugs, for example, isn’t even a crime since there is no victim and even if one considers it a crime killing the transporter wouldn’t right any wrongs. But the State is willing to issue death sentences for transporting prohibited drugs. Issuing death sentences for such arbitrary reasons must be opposed entirely. Since everything the State does is arbitrary by nature allowing it to issue death sentences must be opposed entirely.

Not the Exercise They Were Expecting

Yet another person has been killed by a police officer. This time the victim was a 73-year-old retired librarian. There was no crime, real of fictions, involved in this shooting though. Instead negligence during a citizen academy lead to live ammunition being used during a shoot, no shoot scenario:

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. (AP) — A police “shoot/don’t shoot” demonstration in Florida went shockingly awry when an officer shot and killed a 73-year-old former librarian with what police said was real ammunition used by mistake at an event designed to bring police and the public together.

Authorities didn’t immediately say how a gun with a live round came to be used at Tuesday evening’s demonstration, noting blank rounds are typically used in such classes. The officer has been placed on administrative leave, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating.

“We were unaware that any live ammunition was available to the officer,” Punta Gorda Police Chief Tom Lewis said at a news conference Wednesday. “The officer involved is grief stricken. We’ve got officers assigned to him to make sure he’s psychologically stable.”

Training scenarios like this are why non-lethal ammunition such as Simunitions exist. Most training ammunition requires the use of a conversion kit that is also unable to chamber live ammunition. Why was live ammunition available to the officer? Why was he using a firearm capable of chambering live ammunition? There had to be multiple layers of people not giving a shit for this kind of death to occur.

But, perhaps, this exercise wasn’t really a shoot, no shoot scenario. Perhaps it was an exercise in investigating yourself and finding that you did nothing wrong. Either way, I doubt the officer will face the same punishment that you or I would if we negligently killed somebody.

Things are Different When You Have a Badge

If you’ve ever been the victim of online harassment and have tried to get the police to intervene you’ve probably been told that, “There’s nothing we can do.” It seems that police departments are entirely powerless when it comes to tracking down online miscreants. Except when somebody online criticizes the police. When that happens they seem to have no problem tracking the person down and sending heavily armed men to kick in their door at oh dark thirty:

AFTER A WATCHDOG BLOG repeatedly linked him and other local officials to corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

Isn’t it funny how the police are more than capable of identifying anonymous bloggers when they’re the ones being criticized? Things are a bit different for people in the big club.

This is another example of the legal system being used to punish dissent. The First Amendment supposedly covers the right to protest. If your police department is corrupt you’re supposed to have the right to point that out. If you simply don’t like what your police department does you’re supposed to have the right to protest them. But here in the United Police States of America such activity can get your home raided, your computers stolen, and put you in a position where you have to spend money on a lawyer.

It should be noted that this incident isn’t unique:

This isn’t the first time that Louisiana law enforcement officers have challenged those who criticize them. In 2012, Bobby Simmons, a former police officer, was arrested and jailed on a charge of criminal defamation for a letter he wrote to a newspaper regarding another police officer. The charge was later dropped, and Simmons filed a civil suit alleging that his civil rights were violated.

If you’re harassing people online the police will leave you alone. If you’re exercising your supposed First Amendment right to protest the police they will find you and they will use the court system to punish you for being an uppity slave.

Guilty by Association

The State of Texas is preparing to execute a man (I know, what else is new). His crime? Being acquainted with a murderer:

They were there to call for Gov. Greg Abbott to halt the impending execution of Been’s uncle, Jeff Wood, who is scheduled to die on August 24, just five days after his 43rd birthday, for a crime that everyone, including prosecutors, admits he did not commit.

[…]

Wood was sitting in a truck outside the Texaco when Danny Reneau went inside and shot Keeran dead. Wood has said he had no idea that Reneau even had a gun or that Reneau would shoot his friend. Yet under the law of parties, prosecutors were allowed to impute to Wood the same level of responsibility for Keeran’s death as Reneau, the triggerman.

An extension of the theory of accomplice liability, the law holds that if two or more conspirators agree to commit one crime — say, a robbery — but instead, one of them commits another crime — say, murder — each party can be held responsible for the murder, regardless of individual intent, based on the notion that the conspirators should have anticipated that the crime committed would actually happen.

Guilt by association isn’t a crime. While Jeff Woods may have been friends with the murderer and in the vehicle with the murderer he wasn’t the murderer and therefore isn’t at fault for the murder. But in the magical Neighborhood of Statist Make-Believe the rules are made up and logic doesn’t matter. Things like having victims or causing damage aren’t necessary for putting a man to death. All that is needed are some arbitrary words written on a piece of paper and voted on by suit-clad mother fuckers in a marble building and suddenly a person can be executed for simply being acquainted with a criminal.

The fact that the State is willing to murder somebody for a murder he didn’t commit should be enough to illustrate the fact that the State doesn’t dispense justice.

The Sex Offender Registry is Bullshit

The sex offender registry, like all government registries, is bullshit. How can I say that? Do I want neighborhoods to be ignorant of the sexual predators living within them? Do I want sexual predators to be free to roam the streets and prey on the innocent? These are the kinds of questions I’m asked when I state my opposition of the registry. Obviously I don’t want any such things. But I subscribe to Blackstone’s formulation, which states “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

When people think of the sex offender registry they think of creepy middle-aged men fondling children or raping women. The reality is far different. What’s the most common age of people charged with sex offense? It’s not 40. It’s not 50. It’s 14:

But in fact, the most common age that people are charged with a sex offense is 14. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Why so young? I explain:

Because people tend to have sex with people around their own age, which means young people tend to have sex with other young people. And much under-age sex is illegal.

So we keep throwing kids on the registry and labeling them sex offenders, as if they’re incorrigible monsters. But in Britain, a study recently commissioned by Parliament has recommended a totally different course: Trying to understand, treat and refrain from labeling the kids, since children often “make mistakes as they start to understand their sexuality and experiment with it.”

If a teenager takes a picture of their junk and consensually sends it to another teenager then both are in possession of child pornography and therefore fall under the criteria of the sex offender registry. The sex offender registry is ruining the lives of people who have done nothing wrong and aren’t even old enough to buy a cigarette or even face trail as an adult. In other words, we have a lot of innocent people suffering.

Nobody should be surprised by this. This is how government registries always work. They’re sold as a mechanism to keep track of the bad people in society but they end up filled with innocent people. I’m sure many of the teenagers who are listed as sex offenders got on the list because some judge decided that teenagers having sex is immoral and that putting them on the list would make an example of them.

Report Wrongthinking Children to the Ministry of Love

How dangerous are small children? Most rational adults would say that small children are’t very dangerous. The State, however, thinks that every child is a potential terrorist. Because of its irrational paranoia it often uses its ~~public indoctrination camps~~ schools to monitor children for wrongthink:

Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

[…]

Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

While there’s no similar government-imposed duty on American schools, U.S. CVE initiatives are based on the Prevent model. Due to this, a core component of the U.S. CVE plan tasks teachers, social workers, and school administrators with monitoring and reporting to law enforcement on children in their care. An FBI document released earlier this year tells teachers to spy on their students’ thoughts and suggests that administrators essentially turn schools into mini-FBI offices. Rights Watch’s report shows what might happen if American schools actually follow the FBI’s proposals.

I wonder if teachers who turn in students receive a reward like people who call one of those crime tip lines?

When I express hatred for public schools I’m usually accused of wanting a world where only wealthy children can afford an education. It’s a straw man argument because I’ve never expressed an interest in restricting education to wealthy children. In fact, I’ve pointed out that education today is cheaper than ever before. My problem with public schools, besides the fact that they suck at providing education, is that they’re used as government indoctrination centers.

I remember a lot of my time in school was wasted with mindless flag worshipping. Until I entered middle school we were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. It was our mandatory morning prayer to the religion of statism. History was almost always focused on the United States and it wasn’t viewed with any critical thinking. The United States was almost always in the right and always the greatest country in human history. Geography wasn’t much different. We spent a tremendous amount of time learning the geography of the United States. Beyond that we covered a few European countries here and there and maybe one or two South American countries. What little economics education we received was, of course, nonsense Keynesian bullshit. You know the usual. A gold-based currency cannot work, inflation is good and deflation is terrible, only governments have the right to create money, etc. And there was D.A.R.E. Supposedly a program to keep kids off of drugs, D.A.R.E. was really a program to trick children into trusting the police. I still remember several police officers coming to the school under D.A.R.E. to tell us that the police are our friends (yet anything you say to them can and will be used against you).

More concerning than the indoctrination though was the pursuit of wrongthinkers. I was one of those wrongthinkers and was therefore specifically targeted. Were I going through high school today I’m sure my principal would have reported me to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) instead of the local police department and my entire existence would have been surveilled for the remainder of my life.

If you put your children into the public education system the State is going to do its damnedest to turn them into unthinking patriotic boot lickers. If your children fail to take to the programming they will be labeled wrongthinkers and may get themselves an FBI record before they’re old enough to buy a beer. Keep your kids out of the fucking public indoctrination camps if at all possible. They won’t get an education there but they will come to the attention of Big Brother.

Police Blast Yet Another Nonthreatening Person

In addition to having a carry permit while black, being a therapist while black is also grounds for being shot in the United Police States of America:

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, told WSVN television he was helping a patient who had wandered away from a facility.

Mobile phone video shows Mr Kinsey lying down with his hands in the air, and his patient sitting in the road with a toy truck.

The latest shooting follows weeks of violence involving police.

North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said officers were called out on Monday, following reports of a man threatening to shoot himself.

Police ordered Mr Kinsey and the patient to lie on the ground, he told The Miami Herald.

The video shows Mr Kinsey lying down while trying to get his patient to comply.

It seems therapists lying on the ground trying to help mentally disabled patients who have toys trucks is grounds for an office fearing for his life now. These officers are either the biggest cowards on the face of the planet or they’re the most psychotic. Either way, they shouldn’t be given power over others.

The progression we’re seeing is as interesting as it is alarming. Before this year the people being gunned down by the police tended to have a criminal history for boot lickers to use to justify the shooting. But now the police are becoming so brazen that they’re gunning down people who have little or no criminal background to speak of. Since they’re not being punished for their actions they’re also not motivated to stop escalating situations to deadly force.

This situation also demonstrates that the boot lickers’ claim that people won’t get shot if they obey the orders of officers is false. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air as the officers had ordered him to do and they still shot him. When you use threats of violence as a compliance mechanism and you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, that is to say you still attack your victim even if they do comply with you, you wreck what little trust you have between yourself and your victim. That makes future scenarios more difficult. Your new victims may decided to fight back instead of complying because they believe you’ll kill them either way but they might possibly survive if they resist. By shooting a complying person the officer increased the danger of future situations involving officers using threats of violence as a compliance mechanism.

The problem of police brutality will only continue to get worse since few seems to have the will to take action to curtail it.