Tag: United Police States of America

How to Write a Civil Forfeiture Christmas List

Christmas is right around the corner and many police departments are writing their wish list. But police departments don’t have to beg parents to buy them the things they want, they need only accuse people of possessing property suspected (by a random cop with no need to acquire a warrant or even have evidence of his accusation) of being related to a drug crime. This is the wonderful world of civil forfeiture and there are seminars that help police departments write their lists:

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.

In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.

“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”

This is why I’m glad I don’t drive anything flashy. I very much doubt the police are drooling over a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix or a 2005 Ford Ranger. People with nice things just make themselves targets for state sponsored theft. And the theft is so beloved by police departments that they give each other tips on maximizing profit.

Arnold Abbott Arrested Again for Feeding the Homeless

The government of Fort Lauderdale, Florida really hates homeless people. In fact it hates them so much that it recently passed a law aimed at preventing people from feeding the homeless. Arnold Abbott and a few of his friends decided to keep feeding them in spite of the law and were actually arrested by, what I imagine are, the biggest assholes to ever become police officers (seriously, if you’re a police officer and you’re arresting people for feeding the homeless then you are part of the problem). The city cited Mr. Abbott and he decided to give them a rightly deserved middle finger by continuing on his mission to make the lives of homeless individuals slightly better. Needless to say he was arrested again:

Arnold Abbott, the 90-year-old advocate for the homeless who was issued a citation earlier this week for feeding the homeless without adhering to new rules that would require him to obtain a permit and provide portable toilets, was cited again Wednesday night for the same reason.

This is an example of civil disobedience done right. An erroneous law was passed because a city government believes that the best way to deal with the homeless is to make their lives more miserable so they mosey on to the next city. To demonstrate how shitty the law is people have decided to publicly disobey it, which requires the police and city government to either demonstrates the fact that they’re raging asshole or back down.

The people of Fort Lauderdale would be right if they decided to arrest and detain both the members of the city government and the police for their attempts at restricting voluntary association.

Controlling the Message

When the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared Ferguson, Missouri a no-fly zone I immediately thought it did so to suppress media coverage of police brutality. I’m cynical by nature so it’s nice to be surprised once in a while. But this isn’t one of those cases:

The FAA records official phone conversations at its air traffic facilities, a policy that is known to employees. The initial flight restrictions hindered planes from landing at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport unless they violated the no-fly order. The recordings show FAA officials seeking police agreement the next morning to change the designation of the restricted area to allow air traffic into Lambert and then struggling with the wording of the no-fly order in an effort to prevent media from entering of the restricted area.

[…]

Second Kansas City manager: “I went into the system and picked law enforcement … and of course it puts the one in that says nobody can be in there except the relief aircraft. …

Unidentified FAA employee: “Now what’s relief aircraft? …”

Manager: “It’s whoever the police want in there at that point when it’s a law enforcement one. The problem is, this is a very unusual situation … because normally these are, you know, a mile (radius) and 1,000 feet (in altitude), you know, to keep media out …”

FAA employee: “Hang on. Why are we even having that? Because, I mean, if it’s just for media, like you said, then why is it so big? And, otherwise, we thought that it might’ve been for them trying to take pot shots at somebody. You know anything about that or anything?”

Manager: “I was talking to Jim, the FLM (front-line manager) in the tower, and I was talking to Chris at St. Louis County Police. The commander at St. Louis County wanted 3 (nautical) miles and 8,000 feet and I talked him down to 3 and 5. They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out … but they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.”

Manager, later in the same conversation: “I’d like you to talk to the tower and get the coordination going again with the police department. They did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there. … There’s no option for a TFR that says, you know, ‘OK, everybody but the media is OK.'”

This shouldn’t surprise anybody considering all of the other ways police in Ferguson were abusing reporters. It should, however, make you upset because it shows yet again how corrupt modern policing is and how little the so-called freedom of the press matters. As with most cases of police corruption the likely outcome of this mess will go without consequences for the police who were suppressing news coverage.

Fighting Drugs is Patriotic

The USA PATRIOT Act is one of the most blatant examples of police state legislation. When it was passed we were told it was necessary to protect us from the terrorists. Not surprisingly, since terrorism isn’t really a big threat to those of us living in the United States, it has been used far more to fight the war on unpatentable drugs:

Out of the 3,970 total requests from October 1, 2009 to September 30, 2010, 3,034 were for narcotics cases and only 37 for terrorism cases (about .9%). Since then, the numbers get worse. The 2011 report reveals a total of 6,775 requests. 5,093 were used for drugs, while only 31 (or .5%) were used for terrorism cases. The 2012 report follows a similar pattern: Only .6%, or 58 requests, dealt with terrorism cases. The 2013 report confirms the incredibly low numbers. Out of 11,129 reports only 51, or .5%, of requests were used for terrorism. The majority of requests were overwhelmingly for narcotics cases, which tapped out at 9,401 requests.

Advocates of legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act tell us that law enforcement needs some exceptions to the rules in order to fight whatever boogeyman is being used to justify those expanded powers. Then law enforcers turn around and use those powers indiscriminately to fight everything with the possible exceptions of that boogeyman.

I think the USA PATRIOT Act is the best example of what police should never be given additional powers.

Warrants? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Warrants!

For being the freest country on Earth the United States sure reflects a police state more and more every day. While the heavily armed nature of the police is an easy piece of evidence to point to in support of this claim another piece of evidence is the rapid disappearance of legal protections. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Warrants, expressly mentioned in this amendment, have long been considered a legal protection against government searches. But warrants are becoming less relevant as law enforcers concoct new ways to bypass them. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) may have just pulled off one of the most blatant scams seen so far by a law enforcement agent to bypass the legal need of obtaining a warrant to perform a search:

When the FBI applied for warrants this summer to raid three $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino, it omitted some key investigatory details that eventually resulted in the arrest of eight individuals, including an alleged leader of a well-known Chinese crime syndicate, defense lawyers maintained in Las Vegas federal court documents late Tuesday.

The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested. At various points, an agent of the FBI and a Nevada gaming official posed as the cable guy, secretly filming while gathering evidence of what they allege was a bookmaking ring where “hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal bets” on World Cup soccer were taking place.

Cutting an establishment’s Internet connection and then posing as the repair guys is certainly one way to get yourself invited into a place you want to search to collect evidence in order to obtain a search warrant. If the charges are upheld it will also render warrants entirely irrelevant as a legal protection.

The angle the FBI seems to be working here is the fact that a warrant is unnecessary if an officer is invited into the place they wish to search. By posting as cable repairmen the FBI agents were able to get invited in and thus avoid the need for a warrant. Of course it first required disrupting the target’s Internet access, which leads one to question whether or not the FBI has a right to purposely damage infrastructure in order to create a scenario its agents can exploit. And if that’s legal one has to wonder how much further the FBI could go in pursuit of gaining entry without a warrant.

Could an FBI agent cut off a home’s Internet access and use a fake cellular tower to intercept the homeowner’s call to his or her Internet Service Provider (ISP) and act as a representative of the ISP? That would allow the agent to arrange a time to arrive at the home, search it, and head back to the courthouse to submit that evidence as probably cause for a search warrant.

The Police are Still Out of Control

Zerg539 was good enough to tweet me a very interesting article by none other than Frank Serpico. In it he discusses what is probably the biggest problem in policing: a total lack of accountability:

y personal story didn’t end with the movie, or with my retirement from the force in 1972. It continues right up to this day. And the reason I’m speaking out now is that, tragically, too little has really changed since the Knapp Commission, the outside investigative panel formed by then-Mayor John Lindsay after I failed at repeated internal efforts to get the police and district attorney to investigate rampant corruption in the force. Lindsay had acted only because finally, in desperation, I went to the New York Times, which put my story on the front page. Led by Whitman Knapp, a tenacious federal judge, the commission for at least a brief moment in time supplied what has always been needed in policing: outside accountability. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. But the commission disbanded in 1972 even though I had hoped (and had so testified) that it would be made permanent.

And today the Blue Wall of Silence endures in towns and cities across America. Whistleblowers in police departments — or as I like to call them, “lamp lighters,” after Paul Revere — are still turned into permanent pariahs. The complaint I continue to hear is that when they try to bring injustice to light they are told by government officials: “We can’t afford a scandal; it would undermine public confidence in our police.” That confidence, I dare say, is already seriously undermined.

[…]

But an even more serious problem — police violence — has probably grown worse, and it’s out of control for the same reason that graft once was: a lack of accountability.

[…]

Today the combination of an excess of deadly force and near-total lack of accountability is more dangerous than ever: Most cops today can pull out their weapons and fire without fear that anything will happen to them, even if they shoot someone wrongfully. All a police officer has to say is that he believes his life was in danger, and he’s typically absolved.

Serpico was one of those rare officers who tried to do the right thing and hold his profession accountable to the public. For his sins against the thin blue line he was basically made persona non grata at the New York Police Department where he worked and other departments throughout the country. And when you become persona non grata amongst police it often results in your being killed when you fellow officers refuse to render you assistance when it’s needed most (Serpico, fortunately, survived when his fellows decided not to act as backup when his life was in peril).

Many people are quick to dismiss any advocacy of private policing. Critics say that private policing would guarantee that the wealth enjoy police protection while the poor would end up under their boots. Truth be told we already live in the distopia that those critics warn us about. It’s the inevitable outcome of hierarchy. The police, who are the state’s weapon of choice when wielding its monopoly on coercion, ensure that the people live under the boot of the politicians and their corporate partners. Because of their monopoly we the people have no real recourse. If we take issue with the actions of police officers we are free to bring them up to the police officers and they will choose whether or not to investigate themselves. Usually these self performed investigations lead to the accused officer(s) receiving a paid vacation before they are found innocent of all wrongdoing. They can stomp on us and there’s nothing we can realistically do to stop them (at least within the system).

What Serpico’s story shows us is that the lack of accountability exists internally as well. People, especially when referring to politics, talk about changing the system within. In the case of policing the internal system guards against such attempts. So policing is entirely unaccountable. Externally we the people can’t do anything because the police have been granted a legal monopoly on coercion and we have no. Internally genuinely good officers can’t do anything because the wicked police officers will ostracize the good and even put their lives in jeopardy.

Sometimes the War Against the Homeless Becomes Literal

Usually when I talk about the state’s war against the homeless I’m speaking figuratively. But from time to time the state’s figurative war becomes a very real one:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released a disturbing video of a police shooting. It shows eight officers of the Saginaw, Michigan Police Department lined up against Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man. There’s a brief stand-off in a vacant parking lot, in which Hall pulls out a pocketknife, then the law enforcement agents fire 45 bullets at Hall, hitting him 14 times, even as he drops to the pavement, but it doesn’t end there.

“One policeman, after [Hall] was on the ground, turned him over, handcuffed him, and put his foot on his back,” says Jewel Hall, the mother of the 45-year-old homeless man. “And his blood is running down the street like water.”

A knife is a deadly weapon, there’s no denying that. But us tax payers are forced to pay for a lot of less-likely-to-be-lethal weaponry for police officers so you would think they would humor us by attempting to use it from time to time on somebody other than small children. Especially when there are eight officers so if something like a Taser fails to be effective you still have seven sets of hands free to either bring in another Taser or a firearm.

As a side note we should also take a moment to look at the hit ratio. 14 out of 45 rounds is approximately a 31 percent hit ratio, which is pretty terrible. Criticizing their poor marksmanship isn’t just my attempt at taking a cheap shot at the officers. Having that poor of marksmanship in a town is dangerous since it means 31 rounds went who knows where. That’s a sizable risk to the people the police are supposedly there to protect.

When You Phish it’s Illegal, When the FBI Phishes it’s Law Enforcement

The biggest problem I have with law enforcers is that they enjoy a level of privileges above the rest of us. Whereas it’s illegal for you or I to lie to a law enforcement agent they can lie to us with impunity. Heck, it’s considered part of their job. But that differences in legally permissible actions doesn’t stop there. Let’s consider the act of phishing, which is an attempt to acquire personal information from a target using a fake version of a legitimate website. It’s illegal in the United States. Unless, of course, if you have a badge:

The FBI in Seattle created a fake news story on a bogus Seattle Times web page to plant software in the computer of a suspect in a series of bomb threats to Lacey’s Timberline High School in 2007, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco.

[…]

The EFF documents reveal that the FBI dummied up a story with an Associated Press byline about the Thurston County bomb threats with an email link “in the style of The Seattle Times,” including details about subscriber and advertiser information.

The link was sent to the suspect’s MySpace account. When the suspect clicked on the link, the hidden FBI software sent his location and Internet Protocol information to the agents. A juvenile suspect was identified and arrested June 14.

Double standards are fun! The problem with allowing law enforcers to perform illegal actions without repercussions is that it sets a bad precedence. We’re witnessing these repercussions today as police officers use levels of force far and above what any sane person could justify, confiscate property of people who haven’t even been convicted of a crime, and hack into computers in order to obtain evidence, often against suspected hackers. Allowing law enforcers to act illegally also attracts people who want to perform illegal acts to the job, which is part of my theory of why we have so many violent individuals staffing many modern police departments.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Gun control loons always seem to make an exception for their hatred of guns when it comes to police. As far as many of them are concerned the police are paragons of all that is good and wholesome. You and I? We’re scum that can’t be trusted with a firearm. If allowed to carry a firearm we would pull it on whoever made us even slight perturbed. Meanwhile police officers, because of their advanced training and upstanding moral character, would never act irresponsibly with a firearm. Well except maybe this guy:

(KUTV) The passenger, who allegedly pointed a gun at the head of an Uber driver, is a federal police officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

[…]

Brothers said he picked up McDonald and three other people from a downtown Salt Lake bar that night, after they called for a lift. He says he dropped off three passengers first, then drove McDonald to his hotel as he had a disagreement with one of the other passengers. Right after he pulled into the hotel entrance, Brothers said McDonald looked at him and said, “Do you want to live or die?” At first, Brothers said he thought it was a joke because McDonald appeared drunk. Then his passenger asked him the question again and pulled out a gun and pointed it at his head. Brothers said he tried to run but McDonald grabbed him by the collar and pulled him so hard he ripped his shirt and jacket and left scratch marks. Brothers pulled away, ran out of the car and called 911.

The District Attorney said surveillance video from the hotel supports Brothers’ story. McDonald was arrested in the hotel.

But that’s just one exception. The rest are all super upstanding. In fact they’re so upstanding that they are the only ones we could trust to be in possession of firearms. That will ensure incidents like this one will never happen again… who am I kidding? I can’t even keep up this level of sarcasm. Seriously though, be cautions of who you give a ride to.

Suicide Assistance Hotline

There are few things, at least in my opinion, more tragic than somebody being pushed to the brink of suicide. It seems I am not alone in my thinking since resources have been set aside for things like suicide hotlines where people contemplating suicide can call and hopefully get talked out of it. Unfortunately a call to a suicide hotline can result in police officers being dispatched to your location. At that point the suicide hotline may very well become the suicide assistance hotline:

The 35 year old man, who neighbors describe the as a quiet, friendly man, was divorced and now lived in the home with his girlfriend and her children. According to Detective Matthew Gwynn of the Roy City Police Department, the man called a suicide hotline around 4 a.m. and threatened to kill himself. The Weber County Consolidated Dispatch Center sent officers to the resident.

“There were people in the home at the time the call was placed,” Det. Gwynn told ABC4 News. “They left the home shortly thereafter.”

Roy City Police and the Weber Metro SWAT Team tried to convince the man to surrender and get help but seven hours after the initial call, something dramatic occurred in the garage causing SWAT officers to open fire.

People whose training mostly focuses on using force are probably not the type of people you want to send to a person who just declared that they are suicidal. What is interesting about this case though is that the police are investigating it as a suicide by cop incident. In order for that to be a possible reason for the call it would require the caller to know that the suicide hotline would dispatch police officers. Furthermore it would be reliant on having officers dispatched that are more prone to shoot a suicidal man than attempt to dissuade him on committing suicide. It’s also interesting that the police, so far, haven’t released any information regarding the actions the caller took that instigate the police opening fire (or, for that matter, what a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team was dispatched instead of regular police officers).

Hopefully the media actually covers the details of this case because I believe they could be very interesting.