We will spend a few days looking at current events and tie public policy goals to those media headlines. A perfect transition from the goal of moving the US to a far-right authoritarian, militaristic corporate state like Singapore and International Economic Zones around the world is the article below. People think some of what I say is conspiracy theory but it becomes easy to follow when we look at the BIG GLOBAL PICTURE. As I said Baltimore is ground zero for much of this SINGAPORE SLING----because we are captured by Wall Street Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins which are the movers and shakers of these ONE WORLD global corporate rule policies.
All International Economic Zones have global military security forces and policing and I have shouted that is to where US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones are going----1% Wall Street is privatizing our community police forces these few decades of BUSH/OBAMA and this is behind the spike in open police abuses in our US cities beyond the stop and frisk unconstitutional policing in earlier decades. We know some US cities like Baltimore have contracted out police training to global militarized security forces and this is why Baltimore is central in increased police abuses. I identified the source of BLACK LIVES MATTER as the United Nations/Wall Street global neo-liberal organizations with US media using the national movement to put its own leaders at the front. This was done in the 1960s and 70s during the civil and labor rights movement as well. Al Sharpton was always that Wall Street player placed in the media to be the voice of all local populist movements. Sharpton has through CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA been that ACCUMULATING EXTREME WEALTH AND CORPORATE POWER PLAYER ---not a civil rights leader. We see the same with our labor and women's leaders at the national level as well.
The American people knew the level of police violence was not the norm for the US and as we see it created a crisis -----a manufactured crisis----where now 1% Wall Street is using these abuses as an excuse for a NATIONAL POLICE FORCE. This will become that global militarized security in our communities and will move community police training of our police to privatized global security forces. Here we have more power being given our National Executive branch -----US military troops and now our local community policing. This is the structure third world nations use -----and it is the very picture of authoritarian power.
'A leaked document has exposed a billionaire's plan to fuel police protests in order to spark a national movement. The movement, the man hopes, will abolish local police and put in place U.S. federal police force that would answer directly to the president. The fact that the man has significant influence over a current U.S. presidential candidate reveals there may be a major plot cooking'.
Here is far-right billionaire SOROS----who spent decades over in Eastern Europe creating these same authoritarian societal structures.
Billionaire Soros In Hot Water After Leaked Emails Show What He Hopes BLM Riots Will Accomplish
By Mackenzie Wright on 2016-09-21
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A leaked document has exposed a billionaire's plan to fuel police protests in order to spark a national movement. The movement, the man hopes, will abolish local police and put in place U.S. federal police force that would answer directly to the president. The fact that the man has significant influence over a current U.S. presidential candidate reveals there may be a major plot cooking.
George Soros is a Hungarian-American business entrepreneur and political activist. The multi-billionaire has long had a hand in manipulating politics and world events. He's known as the man who 'broke the Bank of England' after he manipulated finances to force England to pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.
A memo that was leaked by Soros last month shows that Soros hopes to 'take advantage of the crisis' that has strained relationships between police and people of color as a way to 'create a national movement.' He's funded a number of progressive organizations, including BLM, in hopes that fueling the fires will help further his agenda. "The police killings of African-American men in Ferguson, Staten Island, most recently in North Charleston, Baltimore, and many other American cities, highlight that reform of policing policy and practice must be integral to our criminal justice agenda," reads the memo, according to 'Breitbart News.'
Soros's ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton go way back and make his efforts to manipulate politics according to his own agenda questionable. He's donated some $8 million to Clinton's presidential campaign, as well as millions to other Clinton-backing super PACs. He's donated $25 million in total to Democratic candidates.
In a series of leaked Clinton emails from when she was Secretary of State, Soros apparently sent her orders on how to conduct U.S. foreign policy. An email forwarded to Clinton from Soros outlined what look like step-by-step instructions for Clinton to take after a situation in Albania. Days after the email was sent, Clinton took the exact actions Soros had listed.
Soros ultimately would like to see all country borders dissolved and a one-world nation run by the UN. The United States is not the only country in which he has a heavy hand manipulating key political players and causes. Some speculate that Clinton, if elected, would be just another puppet with strings for Soros to pull.
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Here is a right-leaning news source saying the same-----these are not Republican/Democratic stances -----it attacks our sovereignty and cripples our rights to a public policing/military. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA will outsource these functions to a global corporation and say this is simply our Federal government acting. OUR GOVERNMENT AT NATIONAL, STATE, AND LOCAL LEVELS HAVE BEEN OUTSOURCED TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS. Baltimore City has outsourced every city agency and we know these policies and actions do not come from an elected official working for WE THE PEOPLE.
Democratic voters must stop allowing CLINTON WALL STREET PLAYERS be sold as left-leaning. If one follows International news we see SOROS creating these same conditions across Eastern Europe where authoritarian, criminal leaderships are also always installed.
Sharpton's Call for National Police Force Ill-Advised
By John Fund
Monday, 13 Apr 2015 08:21 AM by John Fund
Al Sharpton gave a sermon at a South Carolina church service on Sunday that mourned the death of Walter Scott, who was killed by a North Charleston police officer last week. A video shot by a bystander showed Scott being shot in the back while fleeing. The police officer involved is in jail while the killing is investigated.
Sharpton was uncharacteristically subdued in his sermon, in part because the family of Walter Scott asked him not into inject himself into the tragedy. “We don’t want another Ferguson type of circus here,” a source close to the Scott family told the New York Daily News.
Ferguson was the scene of protests and violent demonstrations for weeks after teenager Michael Brown was shot by a white cop in an incident in which the Obama Justice Department ultimately concluded there was no civil rights violation. Sharpton was a major polarizing speaker at Brown’s funeral, which was attended by a crowd of thousands.
Scott family attorney Chris Stewart told the Daily News “the funeral is only to close family members.”
Sharpton may have shown restraint in the Scott case while in South Carolina, but back in New York City last week he used the platform of his annual National Action Network convention to take his demands to a new level.
“There must be national policy and national law on policing,” Sharpton thundered at the event’s kickoff. “We can’t go from state to state, we’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.”
After his audience gave him thunderous applause, he continued: “We cannot have a justice system that hopes we have a mayor in the right city or a police chief. We have to have one policy that is national.”
Despite local incidents that are often are disturbing or outrageous, the last thing the country needs is a national police policy. Over 100 federal agencies already have the equivalent of their own SWAT teams, and the history of such teams is rife with abuse.
Adding to that record is the horrific “Fast and Furous” scandal in which the Obama Justice Department allowed illegal guns to be infiltrated into Mexican drug gangs, resulting in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and hundreds of Mexican civilians.
Nor was that the first time that a national police policy overrode the sensible conclusions of local law enforcement officials. Jack Cashill, a writer with the American Thinker, recalls how the FBI ignored the advice of local Texas officials and tried to end a siege that began with a botched and suspect raid by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) launched a tank attack on a Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco in 1993.
“The assault did not work quite as planned. The wood frame buildings caught fire, and seventy-four Davidians died, twenty of them children,” Cashill recalls. Thirty-nine of those who died were racial minorities. “I do not know how much Sharpton knows about Waco, but he can be confident his followers know nothing at all. If they knew the truth, they might not have applauded his call for nationalization of the police.”
Al Sharpton has had a checkered career when it comes to law enforcement, ranging from his involvement in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax to his fiery speeches that preceded the fatal arson attack on a fashion store in Harlem in the 1990s.
When it comes to recommendations on police policy, common decency would suggest he restrain himself. But that has never been Al Sharpton’s style.
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The American people must WAKE UP to the degree our US military is being dismantled, privatized, and restructured. A colonial America was not allowed to have a NAVY or standing army and we have watched these few decades as Bush/Obama have privatized our US military into a global mercenary force complete with branches covering global security policing. This is what Al Sharpton is trying to sell to black citizens once again filling America with DIS-INFORMATION FOR WALL STREET.
Why Afghanistan Might Be the Marines’ Last Fight
Is It Time to Abolish the U.S. Air Force?
A political scientist says yes.
Read more: http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/air-force-robert-farley-interview-180956612/#V6kGx8zblgP8WdAK.99
We have watched these few decades as our NAVAL vessels have been de-commissioned with no replacements.
We know the restructuring these few decades is expanding a NATO alliance to that geared towards protecting INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES with nations allowing these zones tied to this global policing structure.
THIS IS WHAT SOROS, AL SHARPTON, AND WALL STREET CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS ARE SELLING WHEN THEY PUSH THIS NATIONAL COMMUNITY POLICING POLICY.
A COOPERATIVE STRATEGY FOR 21ST CENTURY SEAPOWER,
MARCH 2015
America’s Sea Services—the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—uniquely provide presence around the globe. During peacetime and times of conflict, across the full spectrum—from supporting an ally with humanitarian assistance or disaster relief to deterring or defeating an adversary in kinetic action—Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are deployed at sea and in far-flung posts to be
wherever we are needed, when we are needed. Coming from the sea, we get there sooner, stay there longer, bring everything we need with us, and we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Our founders recognized the United States as a maritime nation and the importance of maritime forces, including in our Constitution the requirement that Congress “maintain a Navy.” In today’s dynamic security
environment, with multiple challenges from state and non-state actors that are often fed by social disorder, political upheaval, and technological advancements, that requirement is even more prescient. The United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are our Nation’s first line of defense, often far from our shores. As such, maintaining America’s leadership role in the world requires our Nation’s Sea Services to return to our maritime strategy on occasion and reassess
our approach to shifting relationships and global responsibilities. This necessary review has affirmed our focus on providing presence around the world in order to ensure stability, build on our relationships with allies and partners, prevent wars, and provide our Nation’s leaders with options
in times of crisis. It has confirmed our continued commitment to maintain the combat power necessary to deter potential adversaries and to fight and win when required.
Our responsibility to the American people dictates an efficient use of our fiscal resources and an approach that adapts to the evolving security environment. The adjustments made in this document do just that. Looking at how we support our people, build the right platforms, power them to achieve efficient global capability, and develop critical partnerships will be central to its successful execution and to providing that unique
capability: presence.
Seapower has been and will continue to be the critical foundation of national power and prosperity and international prestige for the United States of America. Our Sea Services will integrate with the rest of our national efforts, and those of our friends and allies. This revision to A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower builds on the heritageand complementary capabilities of the Navy-Marine Corps-Coast Guard team to advance the prosperity and guarantee the security of our Nation.
The demands of a changing world and the defense of the American people and our interests require nothing less
_____________________________________
Baltimore and Philadelphia outsourced their police training several years ago to global military policing corporations and below we see community colleges tied to what are global police and fire corporations in their training. We are told these connections are simply outsourced training but we know these police and fire departments are being privatized. I wrote a few years ago that was what all policies coming from the Maryland Assembly introduced by BALTIMORE POLS had as a goal. Baltimore City Hall pols as well moved all these gradual single policies through marching towards a global security force in Baltimore as a US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone.
Each time Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations would bring citizens out to shout for what was sold as a protection from overreaching police. It was never about that---it was always about deregulating how and who polices. I testified against our Baltimore pols trying to give arresting power to parking ticket employees---then we had the police cameras sold as protecting citizens when it is all part of what the global militarized police force needs in controlling WE THE PEOPLE.
All of this is wrapped under HOMELAND SECURITY and it has moved every kind of militarized equipment and security into our US cities. All one has to do is read how overseas International Economic Zones have be secured to see the same structures overseas being moved into our cities. If authoritarian dictators have populations of citizens SCARED TO DO ANYTHING----this is why.
'Cubic equipped the training facility with its Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System – Individual Weapons System (MILES - IWS) and its Miles After Action Review System (MAARS).
MILES has been a staple of military training for many years, but this is the first facility for police and first-responder training using MILES gear'.
More security firms getting police powers / Some see benefits to public safety, but others are wary
Amy Goldstein, Washington Post
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 7, 2007
2007-01-07 04:00:00 PDT Raleigh, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio sprouting with wires.
"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latinos he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.
A gang initiation, Watt thought.
With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night in December. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.
Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state Legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen arrests.
Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres -- complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the sole province of law enforcement agencies.
The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.
"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems, a leading security consultant.
"It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."
The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenant rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.
Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenant groups have complained that "special police," hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.
In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault after they approached a man talking on a cell phone outside his front door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.
Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher, who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.
Private police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher said, recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.
In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired Wackenhut police to work in the main terminal in tandem with city police officers stationed on buses.
"There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief, who said some of his requests for additional officers have been turned down in recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham police work privately while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand for off-duty police outstrips the supply.
In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the Minneapolis Police Department three years ago started a project called "SafeZone" with private security officers downtown, estimated to outnumber the police there 13 to 1. Target and other local companies paid for a wireless video camera system in downtown office buildings that is shared with the police. The police department created a shared radio frequency. So far, the department has trained 600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how to write incident reports and how to testify in court.
When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.
In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department with 11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year helped solve a string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail, identifying the burglar with images from the department's video camera when he drove out of the resort with a stolen car.
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying to foster closer ties between security companies without police powers and the police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun training and certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and soon plans to send security companies e-mails with unclassified Homeland Security threats and crime alerts.
Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have expanded in part because of shrinking local and federal resources. The nation's largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as its corporate security executive last year when he retired as assistant director of the FBI. Even as identity theft and other fraud schemes have been booming, Swecker said, fewer federal investigators are devoted to solving such crimes, and many U.S. attorney's offices will not prosecute them unless their value reaches $100,000.
As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that helped police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that defrauded 800 bank customers of $11 million.
In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They have full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.
Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy Taylor, had been chief of three small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers, some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.
They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service weapon, Taylor said
Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors' employees, Capt. Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to loiter in the parking lot. Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the Raleigh police to handle the arrest.
Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend testifying in court.
"I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt, the officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The company's marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for backup help or computers to check immediately for outstanding warrants or criminal records.
After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously and shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.
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Baltimore installed these policies as well and it is this widespread stop and search of cars that created many abusive police encounters with citizens stating just as this article states-----searches often lead to seizures that are deemed improper. As this article shows---these are private police training firms---we know they have global policing connections.
'The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back'.
It appears that roughing up the drivers in some cases is a pretense to creating conditions of 'passive assault' to justify these car searches. Officers are doing this because that is the global corporate police training ----and it has nothing to do with American community policing where our officers are employed to serve and protect.
'Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases -- 4,455 -- where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money'.
Citizens living in US cities that have not installed these kinds of policing policies as Baltimore has may not understand how these policies create bad situations for citizens who are guilty in most cases of nothing.
Crime
posted: 9/7/2014 2:01 AM
Police seizures of cash rise, fueled by private training firms
The Washington Post
After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called onLocal officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.
The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.
Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of "highway interdiction" to departments across the country.
One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists -- criminals and the innocent alike -- including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.
Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government's burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems -- despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.
A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing "trophy shots" of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.
"All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine," Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Illinois wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Oklahoma whose founders also created Black Asphalt.
Hain's book calls for "turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods."
Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is a powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owner to prove their possessions were legally acquired.
The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposes and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation's highways since 9/11.
"Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money," said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Florida who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. "It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road."
To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Washington Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police, prosecutors and motorists.
The Post found:
• There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.
• Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases -- 4,455 -- where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.
• Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Washington Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.
• Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.
• State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.
Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Washington Post's overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are "adopted" for inclusion in the program.
"Adoptions of state and local seizures -- when a state and local law enforcement agency requests a federal seizing agency to adopt a state and local seizure for federal forfeiture -- represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007," Carr said.
The Justice Department data released to The Washington Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. In 400 federal court cases examined by The Washington Post where people challenged seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority.
For many innocents caught in the seizure net, the biggest misstep was carrying more cash than police thought was normal for law-abiding citizens.
A 55-year-old Chinese American restaurateur from Georgia was pulled over for minor speeding on Interstate 10 in Alabama and detained for nearly two hours. He was carrying $75,000 raised from relatives to buy a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He got back his money 10 months later but only after spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer and losing out on the restaurant deal.
A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search. They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire a lawyer to get back his money.
Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Virginia, was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his money back but lost his business because he didn't have the cash to pay his overhead.
"I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money," Stuart said. "Why should I give them my money?"
- - -
Steven Peterson, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arranged highway interdiction training through a company called the 4:20 Group, said that patrol officers used to try to make their names with large drug busts. He said he saw that change when agency leaders realized that cash seizures could help their departments during lean times.
"They saw this as a way to provide equipment and training for their guys," Peterson said. "If you seized large amounts of cash, that's the gift that keeps on giving."
There is no question that state and federal forfeiture programs have crippled powerful drug-trafficking organizations, thwarted an assortment of criminals and brought millions to financially stressed police departments.
Advocates of highway interdiction say it plays a important role in protecting the public and that officers take care to respect the rights of citizens.
"We don't go hunting for money in general," said Officer Mike DeWald, a member of the police department in Sandy Springs, Georgia who has served as a trainer for 4:20. "I never have been pressured to go after money. We are in pursuit of the criminal element."
Police trainers said that their work has helped make the country safer by teaching police to be more vigilant in identifying drug smugglers and terrorists.
"9/11 caused a lot of officers to realize they should be out there looking for those kind of people," said David Frye, a part-time Nebraska county deputy sheriff who serves as chief instructor at Desert Snow and was operations director of Black Asphalt. "When money is taken from an organization, it hurts them more than when they lose the drugs."
Frye and Desert Snow's founder, a former California highway patrolman named Joe David, defended Black Asphalt, which David started in 2004. They said they have taken steps in recent years to ensure that the informal police network complies with state and federal laws. David declined to speak to The Washington Post.
"The Black Asphalt is not flawless, however the intent behind it is," David and Frye wrote in a letter in 2012 sent to police and obtained by The Washington Post. "The information being moved through the system has proven itself reliable on hundreds of occasions. Much more reliable than any criminal informant. The results have been staggering. It has proven itself an extremely valuable tool for law enforcement."
Hain, Desert Snow's marketing official, said "the operational and software platforms of the Desert Snow site and Black Asphalt site are completely separate." He said Black Asphalt is "a secure system for intelligence sharing" and does not store information.
"No personal identifying information from seizure reports have ever been collected or stored by the Black Asphalt," Hain said. "The Black Asphalt software is simply a pass-through system that allows the user to input data, which is then sent directly, via email, to a select group of law enforcement (i.e. local investigators, ICE Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, DEA agents, etc.). Again, none of the personal information is held within the system, only the summary of the seizure. And then the seizure narratives are only maintained for 21 days before they get purged."
The Washington Post obtained hundreds of Black Asphalt records from law enforcement sources with access to the system.
Among Black Asphalt's features is a section called BOLO, or "be on the lookout," where police who join the network can post tips and hunches. In April, Aurora, Colorado Police Officer James Waselkow pulled over a white Ford pickup for tinted windows. Waselkow said he thought the driver, a Mexican national, was suspicious in part because he wore a University of Wyoming cap.
"He had no idea where he was going, what hotel he was staying in or who with," Waselkow wrote. The officer searched the vehicle with the driver's consent but found no contraband. But he was still suspicious, so he posted the driver's license plate on Black Asphalt. "Released so someone else can locate the contraband," he wrote. "Happy hunting!"
Waselkow's department did not respond to a request for an interview.
The Washington Post's review of 400 court cases, which encompassed seizures in 17 states, provided insights into stops and seizures.
In case after case, highway interdictors appeared to follow a similar script. Police set up what amounted to rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling. They quickly issued warnings or tickets. They studied drivers for signs of nervousness, including pulsing carotid arteries, clenched jaws and perspiration. They also looked for supposed "indicators" of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks or air-fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors.
One recent stop shows how the process can work in the field.
In December 2012, Frye was working in his capacity as a part-time deputy in Seward County, Nebraska. He pulled over John Anderson of San Clemente, California, who was driving a BMW on Interstate 80 near Lincoln. Frye issued a warning ticket within 13 minutes for failing to signal promptly when changing lanes.
He told Anderson he was finished with the stop. But Frye later noted in court papers that he found several indicators of possible suspicious activity: an air freshener, a radar detector and inconsistencies in the driver's description of his travels.
The officer then asked whether the driver had any cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin or large amounts of cash and sought permission to search the BMW, according to a video of the stop. Anderson denied having drugs or large amounts of cash in his car. He declined to give permission for a search. Frye then radioed for a drug-sniffing dog, and the driver had to wait another 36 minutes for the dog to arrive.
"I'm just going to, basically, have you wait here," Frye told Anderson.
The dog arrived and the handler said it indicated the presence of drugs. But when they searched the car, none was found. They did find money: $25,180.
Frye handcuffed Anderson and told him he was placing him under arrest.
"In Nebraska, drug currency is illegal," Frye said. "Let me tell you something, I've seized millions out here. When I say that, I mean millions. . . . This is what I do."
Frye suggested to Anderson that he might not have been aware of the money in his vehicle and began pressing him to sign a waiver relinquishing the cash, mentioning it at least five times over the next hour, the video shows.
"You're going to be given an opportunity to disclaim the currency," Frye told Anderson. "To sign a form that says, 'That is not my money. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. I don't want to come back to court.' "
Frye said that unless the driver agreed to give up the money, a prosecutor would "want to charge" him with a crime, "so that means you'll go to jail."
An hour and six minutes into the stop, Frye read Anderson his Miranda rights.
Anderson, who told Frye he worked as a self-employed debt counselor, said the money was not illicit and he was carrying it to pay off a gambling debt. He would later say it was from investors and meant to buy silver bullion and coins. More than two hours after the stop had begun, he finally agreed to give up the cash and Frye let him go. Now Anderson has gone to court to get the money back, saying he signed the waiver and mentioned the gambling debt only because he felt intimidated by Frye.
A magistrate has ruled at a preliminary step in the case that Frye had reasonable suspicion to detain Anderson. Frye said he always follows the law and has never had a seizure overturned.
Legal scholars who viewed the video of the stop told The Washington Post that such practices push constitutional limits. Officers often are taught not to tell the driver they have a right to leave at any time after a traffic stop is concluded. But extended stops in which the officer uses psychological pressure on the driver without charges or Miranda warnings can cross the line.
"Encouraging police to initiate searches for the purpose of seizing cash or other assets, rather than to seize evidence to be used in a prosecution, is a dangerous development," said Clifford Fishman, a law professor at Catholic University and former New York City prosecutor. "It is particularly troubling if police officers are trained to manipulate the suspect into forfeiting the assets or waiving the right to contest the search."
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said Frye's stop crossed the line when he detained the driver while summoning a canine.
"You cannot elongate the stop to bring in the dogs," he said. "In doing that, you're detaining the person without probable cause. That ain't kosher."
- - -
Civil asset forfeiture law is among the more unusual areas of American jurisprudence. It does not involve evidence of a crime or criminal charges. It is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a boat, rather than a person. It has its basis in British admiralty law, which allowed the taking of a ship to recover damages.
In 1970, Congress turned the federal civil asset forfeiture law into a weapon against the illegal drug trade, allowing for the seizure of aircraft, boats and vehicles used to transport drugs. The federal law was eventually expanded to include cash tied to drug trafficking and to allow the money to be shared with local and state police, who could keep up to 80 percent of the seized assets.
It was a much more effective tool for federal prosecutors than criminal forfeiture, which required the conviction of a defendant with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Most significantly, the law places the burden of proof on the property owner to demonstrate that an object is not tied to criminal activity.
As the drug trade ramped up throughout the 1980s, Justice's federal forfeitures increased from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993. (They reached $2.6 billion in 2007.) Some of that increase was driven by Operation Pipeline, a nationwide DEA program launched in 1986 that promoted highway interdiction training for state and local police.
Several newspapers later wrote exposes about innocent people being caught up in the forfeiture net and police spending on luxuries. The Orlando Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for pointing out that the Volusia County Sheriff's Office had used state seizure laws to take $8 million from motorists, nine out of 10 of them minorities.
The attention prompted Congress to reform federal seizure laws in 2000, allowing owners to be reimbursed for their legal fees after successful lawsuits. But a key reform was cut. It would have removed what some lawmakers called the "perverse incentive" to target cash -- the sharing of money between the feds and locals. It died after police and Justice waged a "voracious lobbying" campaign, according to former Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
"We didn't have the votes," said Frank, who is still an ardent critic of asset forfeiture. "There is this terrible unfairness. It is about as fundamental a denial of their constitutional rights as I can think of."
After Sept. 11, 2001, civil forfeiture and the war on drugs became entwined with efforts to improve homeland security. Smugglers of all kinds turned away from airports because of the tightened security and took to the nation's interstate highway system. With federal encouragement, police from small towns, rural counties and big cities sought specialized training.
Among those that met the demand was Desert Snow, a family-owned company founded in 1989 by Joe David, a California highway patrolman. Other firms also stepped up, including the 4:20 Group, Caltraps, Hits, Diamondback Training, and Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants. Soon more than a dozen companies were competing for millions in state and federal grants and contracts, along with fees from local departments across the country.
The training had an immediate effect in some areas.
After the Kansas Highway Patrol arranged sessions through Desert Snow for state and local police in 2005 and 2006, the amount of cash flowing into police budgets from seizures nearly doubled, from an average of $2.6 million a year between 2000 and 2006 to $4.9 million a year after 2007.
After 25 Wisconsin State Patrol officers received training from Desert Snow in 2010, the agency's cash seizures the following year more than doubled to $585,657. "It creates a surge period," said Sgt. Nate Clarke, a state patrol supervisor. "These guys get all fired up because they're seeing photo after photo of seizures on the PowerPoints."
The number of agencies participating yearly under Equitable Sharing went up 22 percent to 2,842 between 2003 and 2007, while cash seizures without search warrants or indictments during that period rose more than 50 percent, to $242 million. Under the Obama administration, police have made more than 22,000 such seizures worth about $1 billion through the Justice Department program.
Federal support helped drive the surge. In Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin alone, police spent a total of at least $1 million during the last decade in Justice and Homeland Security grants for Desert Snow training. The DEA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and others spent another $2.3 million in contracts on Desert Snow training for police, records show. The DEA also paid more than $2 million for training from the 4:20 Group. Individual local and state police forces across the country paid millions more for the training using seized cash, one of the uses permitted by Equitable Sharing rules.
The police trainers estimate they have taught more than 5o,000 police officers in the more aggressive techniques during the last decade.
Some trainers say they worry that an overemphasis on seizing money has distorted policing.
"Over a period of a single decade, the culture was now totally changed," said Shawn Pardazi, a detective in Pearl, Mississippi and owner of Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants and a former Desert Snow trainer.
As the demand for training grew, the competition among the firms for business became fierce.
"It's all about the money," said James Eagleson, owner of the 4:20 Group, who also once worked at Desert Snow.
- - -
Decisions that police make during brief roadway stops take motorists who challenge the seizures a year on average to undo, according to a Washington Post analysis. For 350 owners, it took more than two years to get their money back.
Last year, Ming Tong Liu, 55, a Chinese-born American from Newnan, Georgia was stopped on I-10 in Alabama for driving 10 miles over the speed limit while heading to Louisiana to buy the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles for himself and his investors -- two daughters and another relative.
A Mobile County sheriff's deputy gave Liu a ticket for speeding and asked for permission to search the car. The deputy found $75,195 in a suitcase in the back seat, neatly wrapped in white napkins and placed in a black plastic bag and then took the money after the deputy said Liu gave conflicting accounts of his travel plans.
The deputy took Liu to a sheriff's department office and called for an officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which stood to share in the money.
Liu's attorney, Rebecca Ding-Lee, said the officers overstepped their authority, held Liu for nearly two hours and searched his car unlawfully without a warrant. "He cannot speak English," she said. "He didn't understand what the police said."
Ten months after the cash was seized, customs officials agreed to return the money, documents show.
Police often rely on drug-sniffing dogs to justify warrantless searches when a driver refuses to give consent. In 48 cases examined by The Washington Post, dogs alerted to the presence of drugs but the officers found only money.
In October 2008, Benjamin Molina, 40, a permanent resident from El Salvador, was traveling through Virginia on I-95 when an Emporia police officer pulled him over for tinted windows. A carpenter, Molina was going from North Carolina to his home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The officer wrote him a warning ticket and began asking him questions, including whether he had cash in the car.
Molina told the officer that he was shopping for a used car and had $18,000 in his pockets. Molina's face began to tremble, which police said they took as a sign of possible wrongdoing. Molina said his cheek twitched from medication he was taking for a health condition that included kidney disease. Molina also had duct tape in his car, which police said is "commonly used by traffickers."
The officer asked Molina, who had no criminal history, to hand over the cash. The officer placed the money in an envelope, which he set down on the ground alongside two empty envelopes.
A dog called to the scene sat down next to the envelope with the cash, indicating the presence of drugs, according to police.
The police took the money, but Molina took steps to get it back.
He hired David Smith, an Alexandria, Virginia attorney and former federal prosecutor who once headed the federal government's forfeiture program in the Eastern District of Virginia.
After Molina appealed, a federal prosecutor refunded the money. It took four months.
Smith said the Molina case is an example of the kind of overreach that the civil asset forfeiture reforms passed by Congress in 2000 were aimed at preventing.
"This type of police bounty hunting is antithetical to everything our criminal justice system is supposed to stand for," said Smith, who helped craft the reform legislation.
Among the indicators police look for are rental cars, which are often used by smugglers.
On Nov. 1, 2011, Jose Jeronimo Sorto and his brother-in-law, Victor Ramos Guzman, were driving a rented sedan on I-95 south of Richmond, Virginia when a state trooper stopped them. Both were lay leaders of the Pentecostal Nuevo Renacer church in Baltimore. They were carrying $28,500 in church funds meant for the purchase of land to build a church in El Salvador and a trailer for a new congregation in North Carolina.
Their experience has been cited as a case study in civil forfeiture abuse by The Washington Post's editorial page, The New Yorker magazine and others. Unknown until now in the public debate is the fact that the trooper who made the stop, C.L. Murphy, is a top interdiction trainer for Virginia State Police and Desert Snow, as well as a member of Black Asphalt.
Murphy told Sorto and Guzman that they were speeding and following too closely. Murphy said Guzman told him about the cash and consented to a search of the car.
Guzman, 39, of Sterling, Virginia, said he showed the trooper documents indicating that he belonged to a tax-exempt church, and he said the cash had been collected from congregation members. But Murphy disregarded their explanations, saying they contained inconsistencies. He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which accepted the seizure for the Equitable Sharing Program, and he escorted the men to a nearby police station. He did not issue a ticket but seized the cash after Guzman signed a waiver.
Three lawyers agreed to represent the church members for free. Three months later, they received a check from ICE for $28,500.
Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller would only say, "The facts of the stop speak for themselves."
ICE spokeswoman Marsha Catron defended the seizure, saying in a statement "the situation was indicative of bulk cash smuggling" and that Guzman consented by signing a waiver for the money.
"Both the male driver and passenger disclaimed ownership of the money and provided inconsistent and contradictory statements," Catron said. She added: "Money was ultimately returned to Mr. Ramos Guzman after he provided documentation that the cash belonged to his church."
Guzman told The Washington Post he was truthful to the trooper the entire time. The experience left him shaken.
"They didn't give me a chance to explain," Guzman said. "There was no way out."
________________________________________
It is no coincidence that this article was written by a FAR-RIGHT LIBERTARIAN and I leave his open ended question for citizens to ponder. If one believes these few decades of policing was public and not private policing----I would suggest we look at the transition during Clinton era ----when zero tolerance and privatized prisons with prison pipelines soared. Indeed, NYC Police Commissioner Bradley was that start towards privatized policing and THAT is why policing went from protect and serve---to policing stats that made police encounters soar.
Every organization has memberships having all kinds of political stances----I hope my friends with CopBlock do not lean far-right Libertarian.
We cannot get police accountability because we have city halls filled with Wall Street players ----not because public police departments are bad.
Public vs. Private Police: Which Would You Choose?
May 7, 2010 by Ademo Freeman COPBLOCK
As a believer in removing government from just about every aspect of our lives, I wanted to write about the differences in public police vs. private security forces. To understand this you must realize that several things need to change before this is even possible. Allowing people to own land (like roads, parks, ect.), to conduct business (trash collection, policing, ect.) as they see fit (even if done poorly) and not allowing government the authority to preside over any of it would be a great start.
A good source for understanding negative impact of government on society is Murray N. Rothbard’s book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifest.
In this post I intend to cover several aspects of policing/protection. From how it’s funded, accountability, customer service and more. I hope to show you that even though policing will never be perfect, there are ways to limit the hardships the current system is often responsible for. I’ll try not to bore you with an endless amount of facts or quotes from others who share the same belief. Instead I’ll just try to highlight some basic points on each topic, explaining how today’s public police force could be better served in the private sector. This is a very controversial topic, one that could take a series of posts to explain, but I’ll do my best.
Funding
The difference in funding of public police to those that are private is simple: one is backed by force and the other is voluntary. Taxation is the payment method of the public sector, where budgets balloon and collectivism is the constant bailout for those who fail to properly manage their department. The public option of policing is paid before you receive any good or service, and still taken if you refuse or fail to use such service. The public sector of police does a horrible job of managing their growth, budget and needs of the consumer. Their budgets, power, and influence grow without the checks and balances of those who operate private businesses.
A company that makes widgets (for example) would base future investments, whether that be hiring more employees, investing in equipment or building space, on research that would show areas of needed growth and areas that can be scaled back based off the demands of their consumers. Failure to realize these trends and growth of the times would be disastrous for a private company. They would lose customers and therefore jeopardize the entire business.
That’s exactly why the private sector is a better answer. Companies who choose to do business as private police forces would know this. They would only provide services which people agree to pay for, e.g, conducting investigations of break-ins, working with other agencies (presumably private) to retrieve stolen property, or monitoring the property (such as roads, businesses, and homes) of their customers.
The private police would have to worry about maintaining relationships with its consumer for fear going out of business. Public police don’t have to worry about being put out of business and it’s proven in how they treat their consumers, which brings me to the next point.
Customer Service
As any business owner knows customer service is a critical factor in maintaining a business. Even those with a highly demanded product know customer service tops everything. Failure to keep customers happy only leads to a ‘going out of business’ sale. At least in the private sector.
It’s hard to talk about the public police and the customer service they have, as it’s pretty much non-existent. Not to mention the ‘duties’ of public police would be broken into several different fields of private policing/security forces (some might police private roads, businesses, ect.). For this example we’ll use a traffic stop to highlight the difference in customer relations.
The public police, whom you’re paying for regardless, pull you over for speeding. The officer comes to your window, states that s/he’s pulled you over for speeding and demands ID. If you’re lucky the incident ends with a warning and you’re mildly inconvenienced. For most, one or several of the following things happen; you’re asked to step out of your car, you and your property are searched extensively, you’re questioned and/or threatened, you’re taken away to booking or even to jail. The public police demand respect and answers to their questions, along with your cooperation — no matter how immoral, illegal, or insane the request.
Then there is the court process you, in most cases, must go through. Again, you lose time, money, and possibly your right to travel or even your freedom. The process favors the public police because those who partake in this system all work for the same organization: the state. They also create the man-made “laws” they claim you’ve broken, even benefiting from the result (if putting something on paper deems it just). Even though money generated from tickets does go back into the system, rarely does it cover the cost of the system, making the justice system one of the poorest run businesses on the planet.
When you speed on a private road, owned by Company X, that has ‘police’ patrolling to ensure the safety of other customers, it would be a day and night experience. First of all, the private officer would most likely treat you with respect, instead of demanding it from you. They wouldn’t have the right, let alone the desire, to search your personal belongings. They would attempt several options like, educating you, offering discounts for consecutive safe driving days and more as opposed to taking you to arbitration. As a business that relies on you to drive on their roads to make a profit, they would realize that lengthy court hearings are expensive. If you ending up abusing their rules, you would either pay a higher price to travel on their property or not be allowed to at all. If the company instituted an aggressive policy of searching property, violating rights and abusing people physically, their reputation would suffer. And so would the profits, making the business worthless and likely to be sold off to better investors/business men.
Which brings us to the next topic.
Accountability
Accountability can be tricky when talking about public vs. private policing as both are accountable for their actions in monetary terms. The difference though is who pays for that accountability and how it differs from the organization to the employee.
In the public policing system when an employee uses bad judgment or commits a physical offense against someone, rarely do they pay for it directly. Normally in lawsuits against public police departments it’s the taxpayers who foots the bill for the actions of abusive police. I know there are some lawsuits paid for by insurance companies, but who pays the increased premium next billing cycle? Yep, taxpayers. So you’re not only paying for a service you rarely use, but one that’s more likely to aggress on you, then still stick you with the bill for their misbehaving employees on top of it. From a business perspective, this is not only wrong, it’s downright evil, as all of it is backed with force.
IS THIS REALLY HOW OUR PUBLIC POLICE DEPARTMENTS EVER WORKED BEFORE THESE FEW DECADES?
The accountability only gets worse when you try to get an employee of public police held accountable for their actions. With a monopoly on policing it’s easy for other public police to cover the bad acts of other employees. Even when found in the wrong, through whatever means, rarely do public police face the same punishments or hardships that those without badges do. Police commonly get reduced sentences, fines, and often keep their jobs. The lack of accountability and the double standard in police is an extremely dangerous combination, especially when you add the endless income from taxation.
IS THAT HOW OUR SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK? OF COURSE NOT.
On the other hand, private police companies would be responsible for their employees. Employees might be responsible in extreme cases where they flat out defy company policy. Private police wouldn’t have such an aggressive policy, therefore reducing the risk factor that public police often put themselves into.
YOU MEAN LIKE GLOBAL BLACKWATER ET AL KNOWN TO FLAUNT EVERY LAW IN ALL NATIONS?
Then there is the all mighty dollar, where if a company protected its own by hiding evidence or engaging in rights violating activities that public police do, they would lose customers. And unlike the public police they don’t have money given (stolen if you ask me) to them to cover such acts. They know they could be held financially responsible to the fullest and would do everything to prevent costly payouts that public police seem to have no problem paying, seeing as how it’s not their money.
Conclusion
If you fear that one of these private protection agencies could take over the world or have bigger guns than you, that’s no different than what we have today. The public police seem to be doing one hell of a job at limiting our rights and taking our money at the same time. The fact is that it would be almost impossible for one company to grow to the size of the police state in this country due to the beauty of competition.
To me it is clear: privatization and removal of government as our protectors is a must. After looking into how the police system works, it’s beyond me why anyone would allow a monopoly on something as important as protection. It’s obvious that funding, customer service and accountability would improve across the board. That 100’s or 1,000’s of competing business would provide a better, safer service for us all.
Which would you choose?
_______________________________________
As this article states it was NYC, Boston ---and here is Oakland CA that went to privatizing police early on. When Police Commissioner Batts was brought to Baltimore we discussed his connections to Oakland----to what was then a global surveillance structure tied to Johns Hopkins and its security corporations. Batts was sent to Harvard---Boston for training then coming to Baltimore when police abuses soared. Here we see the chain of pushing police cameras as good for citizen protection when police cameras are a militarized policing tool used for decades and they are part of the global militarized policing equipment. So, Batts was always tied to moving to install privatized policing policies and we should not worry that he was fired----he will no doubt move to the next US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone to install global military policing or back to Harvard to teach these policies----
'Oakland, California is one of many municipalities like Boston, Massachusetts that are handing over general policing responsibilities to private armed guards'.
'He said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif'.
The reason 1% Wall Street needed to make this police camera policy about protecting citizens is our US Constitutional rights to privacy has always protected police cameras inside our private residences---------they deregulated our rights to being filmed in our homes by making it appear to be about protecting us. Rawlings-Blake with Batts who sat silent as some of the worst cases of police abuses unfolded in Baltimore these few years is then in the national media sounding like they want to protect citizens.
article
Navy SEAL Helmet Cams: Obama Watched bin Laden Raid Video
Obama and officials in the White House Situation Room were able to watch the raid against bin Laden live, the Washington Post confirms. Ian Yarett on how helmet-cam combat video works.
Ian Yarett
05.06.11 5:20 PM ET
Baltimore mayor supports body cameras on cops amid criticism
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake rejected a bill in November to equip nearly 3,000 cops with body cameras. But the mayor, however, created a task force to look at a pilot program for cops to wear body cameras.(Cliff Owen/AP)
BY Nancy Dillon
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 7:28 PM
Body-worn police cameras are a focal point in Baltimore again, with many questioning why the riot-rocked city isn't using them yet.
Embattled Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is adamant she supports their use and convened a task force that proposed a $1.4 million, six-month pilot program for 100 officers in February.
The recommendation came after she vetoed a bill passed by the City Council in November that would have required Baltimore's nearly 3,000 police officers to wear them.
Rawlings-Blake called the bill "well-intentioned" but said it failed to adequately address legal, privacy and funding issues.
"Make no mistake, this mayor is very committed to a body camera program," lawyer and task force co-chair James R. Benjamin Jr. told the Daily News Wednesday.
He said the pilot program should start this year and lead to a full roll-out in 2016.
"The mayor believes 100 percent in transparency and accountability — and she wanted it done right," he said.
Critics, meanwhile, say it's taking too long.
"I think this process has been unbelievably delayed. She didn't really need a committee," Tyrone Powers, a former FBI agent and professor in the Criminal Justice department at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, told The News.
Tyrone Powers, a former FBI agent and professor in the Criminal Justice department at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts (pictured) in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif.(Patrick Semansky/AP)
He said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif.
"He already knows how to do this. All he needed was the funding. Now he's in the position of not having had cameras to help determine what happened to Freddie Gray," Powers said, referring to the man whose death in police custody has sparked violent protests.
"This unfortunate situation that we're in now may finally speed up the process," Powers said. "Just allow Commissioner Batts to say we need these cameras and find the money. Show that you have faith in him to get it right."
For his part, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio voiced his support of Rawlings-Black on Wednesday.
"She's a very capable leader, a very thoughtful leader," he said, adding that he spoke to her by phone on Saturday.
"I think this was a tough moment, obviously, for Baltimore. I think they were quick to make adjustments and obviously last night went a lot better," he said.
"We know the history of Baltimore well before she got there. It's a city that's been through a lot. It's a city that really dealt with some of the worst crime dynamics of any city in America, some of the toughest economic changes and she's been trying to push that city forward, and I really wish her luck, and I think mayors all around the country stand in solidarity with her," he said.
______________________________________
Here we see the progression towards authoritarian policing. Maryland Assembly passed these laws targeting cities like Baltimore for these police swat teams---if citizens think what these US cities as Foreign Economic Zones will look like if installed-----they will be GREATER BALTIMORE----this means huge. As well, most citizens living around these regions will be moved inside these zones so the laws passed for Baltimore as a Foreign Economic Zone will expand to the entire state.
Warrentless entry with broadly written criteria for these entrances already have some city police departments abusing these policies.
4th Amendment?
What 4th Amendment?
Supremes Say Police Can Create Conditions To Enter Home Without A Warrant
from the did-they-really-say-that? dept
About Techdirt.
Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog uses a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies' ability to innovate and grow.
We've been discussing various ways that our government and the courts have been slowly chipping away at the 4th Amendment, what with warrantless wiretaps, searching laptops, TSA agents groping people, etc. And the Supreme Court just took a huge chunk out of the 4th Amendment in saying that police can raid homes without a warrant if there are "exigent circumstances" -- even if those "exigent circumstances" are created by the police themselves.
The law, to date, had been that police cannot enter a home without a warrant unless they had both (a) probable cause and (b) "exigent circumstances" in which getting a warrant would not make sense. In this case, police were searching for a drug dealer who had gone into an apartment complex. Outside of one apartment, they smelled marijuana -- which created probable cause. At this point, they should have obtained a warrant. Instead, they banged on the door and shouted police. At which point they heard a scramble inside, and busted in the door, claiming that they believed the scramble was the possible destruction of the drugs. The argument then was that this noise -- even though it was entirely created due to police action -- represented exigent circumstances that allowed them to bust in the door without a warrant. The Kentucky Supreme Court said that while the noise might be exigent circumstances, since it was illegally created by the police, it could not be used.
Tragically, the Supreme Court -- by an 8-to-1 vote -- has now disagreed, saying that this is perfectly consistent with the 4th Amendment. With all due respect to the 8 Justices and the Court, I can't see how that's reasonable at all. This sets up a dreadful situation which will be abused regularly by law enforcement. It lets them create yet another situation where they may avoid oversight, by creating their own exigent circumstances, and then using that as an excuse for avoiding a warrant and any required oversight or limitations. I believe that Justice Ginsburg's dissent is much more compelling. Her dissent points out that exigent circumstances are only supposed to be used in very rare circumstances when getting a warrant is not possible or practical. Yet, in this case, the police easily could have secured a warrant quickly upon smelling marijuana.
That heavy burden has not been carried here. There was little risk that drug-related evidence would have been destroyed had the police delayed the search pending a magistrate�s authorization. As the Court recognizes, "[p]ersons in possession of valuable drugs are unlikely to destroy them unless they fear discovery by the police." ... Nothing in the record shows that, prior to the knock at the apartment door, the occupants were apprehensive about police proximity.
In fact, she notes that "Home intrusions, the Court has said, are indeed 'the chief evil against which . . .the Fourth Amendment is directed.'" So it seems positively ridiculous to claim that such a home invasion is acceptable under the 4th Amendment. This is a tragically bad ruling by the Supreme Court that will have massive and dangerous consequences. We already have law enforcement pushing the boundaries of individual privacy rights, and now they have even more tools to take that further.
_____________________________________
Citizens in third world nations have no protections and expectations of privacy----that is our US Constitutional Bill of Rights unique to America. We have a right-wing Supreme Court who thinks corporations have rights to privacy while chipping away at our rights as citizens to our privacy. Police and video/camera issues have been through history on the side of the citizens.
'The Wahchumwah case exemplifies this: on suspicion of nothing more than the benign misdemeanor of selling eagle feathers, the government got to intrude inside the home and record every intimate detail it could: books on a shelf, letters on a coffee table, pictures on a wall'.
In the Smart Cities technology of BIG DATA every aspect of our life is now sold as data---the only thing they haven't done is actually film us in our homes-----think about drone surveillance technology---the hummingbird drones and how they can film inside homes with no one knowing.
Ergo, police camera policies.
ThinkProgress
Moving news forward.
Dec 3, 20123 min read
Police Can Record Video Inside Your Home Without A Warrant, Appeals Court Says
By Nicole Flatow
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court provided some comfort to those fearing the seemingly limitless potential of new technologies to enable government privacy invasion. In holding that police could not attach a GPS device to a car and track it for 30 days without a warrant, the court said, “At bottom, we must ‘assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.’”
But don’t get too comfortable. A federal appeals court ruled last week that police can secretly videotape a suspect’s home without a warrant. In a case about the suspected sale of bald eagle feathers and pelts — a misdemeanor crime — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that undercover police admitted into the suspect’s home as interested buyers of pelts did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly videotaped the suspect’s home:
We are persuaded that it is not “constitutionally relevant” whether an informant utilizes an audio-video device, rather than merely an audio recording device, to record activities occurring inside a home, into which the informer has been invited. When Wahchumwah invited Agent Romero into his home, he forfeited his expectation of privacy as to those areas that were “knowingly expose[d] to” Agent Romero. Wahchumwah cannot reasonably argue that the recording violates his legitimate privacy interests when it reveals no more than what was already visible to the agent.The decision doesn’t entirely break new ground. At least one other federal appeals court has upheld the use of video recordings inside the home, and just last month, a lower federal court reached a similar conclusion.
But the case raises the same sorts of concerns that several concurring justices emphasized in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last term in United States v. Jones: What scope of surveillance will not violate our present understanding of a “reasonable expectation of privacy”? At what point are we, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor cautions in Jones, “making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track, may ‘alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society’”? Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury elaborates on this concern:
[T]he sad truth is that as technology continues to advance, surveillance becomes “voluntary” only by virtue of the fact we live in a modern society where technology is becoming cheaper, easier and more invasive. The Wahchumwah case exemplifies this: on suspicion of nothing more than the benign misdemeanor of selling eagle feathers, the government got to intrude inside the home and record every intimate detail it could: books on a shelf, letters on a coffee table, pictures on a wall. And we’re entering an age where criminal suspicion is no longer even necessary. Whether you’re calling a friend’s stolen cell phone and landing on the NYPD massive database of call logs, driving into one of the increasing number of cities using licenseplatescanners to record who comes in or out, or walking somewhere close to hovering drones, innocent people are running the risk of having their personal details stored in criminal databases for years to come.The fractured majority in United States v. Jones didn’t provide much guidance about where the court will draw future lines on surveillance, relying instead upon the fact that the Jones case involved a physical trespass — a type of privacy violation of particular constitutional concern. Of course, the Ninth Circuit case involved a physical intrusion in the place subject to the greatest Fourth Amendment protection — the home. Whether it became something other than a trespass — and sufficient grounds to authorize invasive surveillance — because the suspect unknowingly admitted the undercover officer into his home is another question that may be for ripe for Supreme Court consideration.
___________________________________________
I don't have time to format this article but it is critical that the American people see that it is not a Trump that is trying to take the US authoritarian----it is the morphing of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NEO-CONS/NEO-LIBERALS ----into this far-right Wall Street Libertarianism that is trying to take the US authoritarian. Both Democratic and Republican voters know this is happening and neither the right wing or left wing citizens WANT AN AUTHORITARIAN AMERICA----NO FREEDOM AND JUSTICE THERE! Yet we see over and again media trying to say it is US citizens pushing towards authoritarian policies----as with the growing Homeland Security and global militarized policing policies-----they are doing all this to protect WE THE PEOPLE while WE THE PEOPLE are shouting STOP THESE AUTHORITARIAN POLICIES.
THIS IS AUTHORITARIAN NEO-LIBERALISM FOLKS---FAR-RIGHT 1% WALL STREET EXTREME WEALTH AND EXTREME POWER----no American citizen should want to go there.
Wall Street has Trump acting like the authoritarian Republican when it is the CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA march to authoritarian neo-liberalism of which Trump is the same team-----to confuse US and global citizens. This is why Al Sharpton, Libertarians, and other progressive posers are pretending we need a Federal community police force----
Below you see why 1% Wall Street global pols are trying to codify these authoritarian policing laws while using the pretext they are doing it for the safety of US citizens-----A LEGITIMATE AIM.
Universal Periodic Review
Stakeholder Report: 24th Session, Singapore
The Right to Privacy
in Singapore
The right to privacy
3.
Privacy is a fundamental human right, enshrined in numerous international human rights instruments.
1
It is central to the protection of human dignity and
forms the basis of any democratic society.
4.
Activities that restrict the right to privacy, such as surveillance and censorship, can only be justified when they are prescribed by law, necessary
to achieve a legitimate aim, and proportionate to the aim pursued.
Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies
, Issue 5 (2012)
114
.
Authoritarian Neoliberalism, the Occupy Movements, and IPE
Ian Bruff
In the absence of any kind of hegemonic aura, neoli
beral practices have proved
increasingly unable to garner the consent, or even
the reluctant acquiescence, necessary
for more ‘normal’ modes of governance. Of particula
r importance in the post-2007 crisis
has been the growing frequency with which constitut
ional and legal changes, in the name
of economic ‘necessity’, are seeking to reshape the
purpose of the state and associated
institutions.
This attempted reconfiguration is thr
ee-fold:
(1) the more immediate appeal
to material circumstances as a reason for the state
being unable, despite ‘the best will in
the world’, to reverse processes such as greater so
cioeconomic inequality and dislocation;
(2) the deeper and longer-term recalibration of wha
t kind of activity is feasible and
appropriate for ‘non-market’ institutions to engage
in, diminishing expectations in the
process; and
(3) the reconceptualisation of the sta
te as increasingly non-democratic
through its subordination to constitutional and leg
al rules that are ‘necessary’ for
prosperity to be achieved.
This process, of states reconfiguring themselves in
increasingly non-
democratic ways in response to profound capitalist
crisis, is what I view as the rise of
authoritarian neoliberalism.
Authoritarian neoliber
alism does not represent a wholesale
‘break’ from earlier neoliberal practices, yet it i
s qualitatively distinctive due to way in
which dominant social groups are less interested in
neutralising resistance and dissent via
concessions and forms of compromise that maintain t
heir hegemony, favouring instead
the explicit exclusion and marginalisation of such
groups. However, the global crisis has
intensified the crisis of legitimation
already
confronting various capitalist states – for
instance, declining voter turnout and party members
hip, greater electoral volatility,
growing mistrust of the political elite – meaning t
hat authoritarian neoliberalism is
simultaneously strengthening
and
weakening the state as the latter reconfigures int
o a less
open and therefore more fragile polity.
As a result
, the attempted ‘authoritarian fix’ is
potentially a sticking plaster rather than anything
more epochal.
The question, therefore, is whether the contradicti
ons inherent to
authoritarian neoliberalism – especially with regar
d to the strengthening/weakening of
Authoritarian Neoliberalism
, Bruff
115
the state – will create the conditions in which a m
ore progressive and radical politics can
begin to reverse the tide of the last three decades
. As things stand, the crisis has
ambiguous implications for radical/progressive poli
tics of the Left, not least because
radical politics is often being practised most succ
essfully by radical Right movements and
parties. This is the case if one considers the rise
of xenophobia and racism in Europe, the
Tea Party in the US, or indeed the more general ‘an
ti-party’ dominance of charismatic
figureheads such as Putin in various countries. How
ever, the occupy movements have
proved to be a welcome corrective to the pessimism
that the above observations
encourage (regarding Putin, too, as we have seen in
recent weeks). In particular, they have
forced onto the agenda a fundamental challenge to t
he dominant narratives of the crisis,
which – combined with the decline of mass political
parties and the imbrication of all
main parties with a system in crisis – has made the
state an increasingly direct target of a
range of popular struggles, demands and discontent.
This is crucial, because the state and its associat
ed institutions have often been
viewed as somehow inherently more progressive and d
emocratic than the ‘market’. As a
result, ‘Left’ politics has frequently been guilty
of taking the law to be somehow neutral,
ignoring in the process how ‘non-market’ social for
ms have been
central
to the rise of
neoliberalism and thus the growing inequalities of
power which characterise the world in
which we live. This was expressed vividly in the cl
earing of Zuccotti Park in New York,
which not only displayed clearly (despite the attem
pts to herd journalists into one part of
the park) the brute coercive capacities of state po
wer, but also the denial of the
constitutional right to expressive protest in the n
ame of ‘democracy’. However, it is not an
isolated case, with justifications of police violen
ce and the mobilisation of juridical power
against the occupy and other movements being a rout
ine part of events across the globe
(see for example the rather different response, com
pared to several months earlier, by the
Egyptian security apparatuses to the occupation of
Tahrir Square in late 2011). In
consequence, the occupy movements have exposed the
authoritarian neoliberal state to
protest and struggle, and its continued delegitimat
ion, from a radical/progressive
perspective that
continues
to affirm the values embodied in notions of solida
rity, equality
and cooperation. This alerts us in a more expansive
way to how inequalities of power are
produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, en
abling us to consider how other, more
emancipatory and progressive, worlds are possible.
So what of IPE? As with many aspects of the broader
discipline of Political
Science, IPE has been comfortable with dividing our
world into distinct spheres, each
with their own ‘intrinsic’ properties and norms. Th
erefore, now would be the time to
overcome these artificial dichotomies and reinvigor
ate the study of the international
political economy; even if the scholar in question
is not interested in emancipatory issues,
then surely the need for more adequate, holistic an
alyses is now necessary as well as
desirable. Apparently not: journals and conferences
continue to talk of ‘the market’
over here
and ‘the state’
over there
, ‘interests’
over here
and ‘values’
over there
, ‘economic
crisis’
over here
and ‘political responses’
over there
, ‘democracy’
over here
and
‘authoritarianism’
over there
. I could go on... As things stand, IPE asks intere
sting
questions about the world, but it is increasingly u
nfit for the purpose of exploring these
questions.
Ian Bruff
Ian BruffIan Bruff
Ian Bruff is Lecturer in International Relations in
the Department of Politics, History and
International Relations at Loughborough University.
He has been Chair of the Critical
Political Economy Research Network of the European
Sociological Association since
2009, and a member of the Steering Committee for th
e Standing Group on International
Relations of the European Consortium for Political
Research since 2010. He recently
joined the editorial team for the Routledge/RIPE Se
ries in Global Political Economy, and
from 2012-14 will be the Chair of the Book Prize pa
nel of judges for the International
Political Economy working group of the British Inte
rnational Studies Association
All International Economic Zones have global military security forces and policing and I have shouted that is to where US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones are going----1% Wall Street is privatizing our community police forces these few decades of BUSH/OBAMA and this is behind the spike in open police abuses in our US cities beyond the stop and frisk unconstitutional policing in earlier decades. We know some US cities like Baltimore have contracted out police training to global militarized security forces and this is why Baltimore is central in increased police abuses. I identified the source of BLACK LIVES MATTER as the United Nations/Wall Street global neo-liberal organizations with US media using the national movement to put its own leaders at the front. This was done in the 1960s and 70s during the civil and labor rights movement as well. Al Sharpton was always that Wall Street player placed in the media to be the voice of all local populist movements. Sharpton has through CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA been that ACCUMULATING EXTREME WEALTH AND CORPORATE POWER PLAYER ---not a civil rights leader. We see the same with our labor and women's leaders at the national level as well.
The American people knew the level of police violence was not the norm for the US and as we see it created a crisis -----a manufactured crisis----where now 1% Wall Street is using these abuses as an excuse for a NATIONAL POLICE FORCE. This will become that global militarized security in our communities and will move community police training of our police to privatized global security forces. Here we have more power being given our National Executive branch -----US military troops and now our local community policing. This is the structure third world nations use -----and it is the very picture of authoritarian power.
'A leaked document has exposed a billionaire's plan to fuel police protests in order to spark a national movement. The movement, the man hopes, will abolish local police and put in place U.S. federal police force that would answer directly to the president. The fact that the man has significant influence over a current U.S. presidential candidate reveals there may be a major plot cooking'.
Here is far-right billionaire SOROS----who spent decades over in Eastern Europe creating these same authoritarian societal structures.
Billionaire Soros In Hot Water After Leaked Emails Show What He Hopes BLM Riots Will Accomplish
By Mackenzie Wright on 2016-09-21
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A leaked document has exposed a billionaire's plan to fuel police protests in order to spark a national movement. The movement, the man hopes, will abolish local police and put in place U.S. federal police force that would answer directly to the president. The fact that the man has significant influence over a current U.S. presidential candidate reveals there may be a major plot cooking.
George Soros is a Hungarian-American business entrepreneur and political activist. The multi-billionaire has long had a hand in manipulating politics and world events. He's known as the man who 'broke the Bank of England' after he manipulated finances to force England to pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.
A memo that was leaked by Soros last month shows that Soros hopes to 'take advantage of the crisis' that has strained relationships between police and people of color as a way to 'create a national movement.' He's funded a number of progressive organizations, including BLM, in hopes that fueling the fires will help further his agenda. "The police killings of African-American men in Ferguson, Staten Island, most recently in North Charleston, Baltimore, and many other American cities, highlight that reform of policing policy and practice must be integral to our criminal justice agenda," reads the memo, according to 'Breitbart News.'
Soros's ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton go way back and make his efforts to manipulate politics according to his own agenda questionable. He's donated some $8 million to Clinton's presidential campaign, as well as millions to other Clinton-backing super PACs. He's donated $25 million in total to Democratic candidates.
In a series of leaked Clinton emails from when she was Secretary of State, Soros apparently sent her orders on how to conduct U.S. foreign policy. An email forwarded to Clinton from Soros outlined what look like step-by-step instructions for Clinton to take after a situation in Albania. Days after the email was sent, Clinton took the exact actions Soros had listed.
Soros ultimately would like to see all country borders dissolved and a one-world nation run by the UN. The United States is not the only country in which he has a heavy hand manipulating key political players and causes. Some speculate that Clinton, if elected, would be just another puppet with strings for Soros to pull.
____________________________________________
Here is a right-leaning news source saying the same-----these are not Republican/Democratic stances -----it attacks our sovereignty and cripples our rights to a public policing/military. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA will outsource these functions to a global corporation and say this is simply our Federal government acting. OUR GOVERNMENT AT NATIONAL, STATE, AND LOCAL LEVELS HAVE BEEN OUTSOURCED TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS. Baltimore City has outsourced every city agency and we know these policies and actions do not come from an elected official working for WE THE PEOPLE.
Democratic voters must stop allowing CLINTON WALL STREET PLAYERS be sold as left-leaning. If one follows International news we see SOROS creating these same conditions across Eastern Europe where authoritarian, criminal leaderships are also always installed.
Sharpton's Call for National Police Force Ill-Advised
By John Fund
Monday, 13 Apr 2015 08:21 AM by John Fund
Al Sharpton gave a sermon at a South Carolina church service on Sunday that mourned the death of Walter Scott, who was killed by a North Charleston police officer last week. A video shot by a bystander showed Scott being shot in the back while fleeing. The police officer involved is in jail while the killing is investigated.
Sharpton was uncharacteristically subdued in his sermon, in part because the family of Walter Scott asked him not into inject himself into the tragedy. “We don’t want another Ferguson type of circus here,” a source close to the Scott family told the New York Daily News.
Ferguson was the scene of protests and violent demonstrations for weeks after teenager Michael Brown was shot by a white cop in an incident in which the Obama Justice Department ultimately concluded there was no civil rights violation. Sharpton was a major polarizing speaker at Brown’s funeral, which was attended by a crowd of thousands.
Scott family attorney Chris Stewart told the Daily News “the funeral is only to close family members.”
Sharpton may have shown restraint in the Scott case while in South Carolina, but back in New York City last week he used the platform of his annual National Action Network convention to take his demands to a new level.
“There must be national policy and national law on policing,” Sharpton thundered at the event’s kickoff. “We can’t go from state to state, we’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.”
After his audience gave him thunderous applause, he continued: “We cannot have a justice system that hopes we have a mayor in the right city or a police chief. We have to have one policy that is national.”
Despite local incidents that are often are disturbing or outrageous, the last thing the country needs is a national police policy. Over 100 federal agencies already have the equivalent of their own SWAT teams, and the history of such teams is rife with abuse.
Adding to that record is the horrific “Fast and Furous” scandal in which the Obama Justice Department allowed illegal guns to be infiltrated into Mexican drug gangs, resulting in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and hundreds of Mexican civilians.
Nor was that the first time that a national police policy overrode the sensible conclusions of local law enforcement officials. Jack Cashill, a writer with the American Thinker, recalls how the FBI ignored the advice of local Texas officials and tried to end a siege that began with a botched and suspect raid by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) launched a tank attack on a Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco in 1993.
“The assault did not work quite as planned. The wood frame buildings caught fire, and seventy-four Davidians died, twenty of them children,” Cashill recalls. Thirty-nine of those who died were racial minorities. “I do not know how much Sharpton knows about Waco, but he can be confident his followers know nothing at all. If they knew the truth, they might not have applauded his call for nationalization of the police.”
Al Sharpton has had a checkered career when it comes to law enforcement, ranging from his involvement in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax to his fiery speeches that preceded the fatal arson attack on a fashion store in Harlem in the 1990s.
When it comes to recommendations on police policy, common decency would suggest he restrain himself. But that has never been Al Sharpton’s style.
__________________________________
The American people must WAKE UP to the degree our US military is being dismantled, privatized, and restructured. A colonial America was not allowed to have a NAVY or standing army and we have watched these few decades as Bush/Obama have privatized our US military into a global mercenary force complete with branches covering global security policing. This is what Al Sharpton is trying to sell to black citizens once again filling America with DIS-INFORMATION FOR WALL STREET.
Why Afghanistan Might Be the Marines’ Last Fight
Is It Time to Abolish the U.S. Air Force?
A political scientist says yes.
Read more: http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/air-force-robert-farley-interview-180956612/#V6kGx8zblgP8WdAK.99
We have watched these few decades as our NAVAL vessels have been de-commissioned with no replacements.
We know the restructuring these few decades is expanding a NATO alliance to that geared towards protecting INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES with nations allowing these zones tied to this global policing structure.
THIS IS WHAT SOROS, AL SHARPTON, AND WALL STREET CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS ARE SELLING WHEN THEY PUSH THIS NATIONAL COMMUNITY POLICING POLICY.
A COOPERATIVE STRATEGY FOR 21ST CENTURY SEAPOWER,
MARCH 2015
America’s Sea Services—the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—uniquely provide presence around the globe. During peacetime and times of conflict, across the full spectrum—from supporting an ally with humanitarian assistance or disaster relief to deterring or defeating an adversary in kinetic action—Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are deployed at sea and in far-flung posts to be
wherever we are needed, when we are needed. Coming from the sea, we get there sooner, stay there longer, bring everything we need with us, and we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Our founders recognized the United States as a maritime nation and the importance of maritime forces, including in our Constitution the requirement that Congress “maintain a Navy.” In today’s dynamic security
environment, with multiple challenges from state and non-state actors that are often fed by social disorder, political upheaval, and technological advancements, that requirement is even more prescient. The United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are our Nation’s first line of defense, often far from our shores. As such, maintaining America’s leadership role in the world requires our Nation’s Sea Services to return to our maritime strategy on occasion and reassess
our approach to shifting relationships and global responsibilities. This necessary review has affirmed our focus on providing presence around the world in order to ensure stability, build on our relationships with allies and partners, prevent wars, and provide our Nation’s leaders with options
in times of crisis. It has confirmed our continued commitment to maintain the combat power necessary to deter potential adversaries and to fight and win when required.
Our responsibility to the American people dictates an efficient use of our fiscal resources and an approach that adapts to the evolving security environment. The adjustments made in this document do just that. Looking at how we support our people, build the right platforms, power them to achieve efficient global capability, and develop critical partnerships will be central to its successful execution and to providing that unique
capability: presence.
Seapower has been and will continue to be the critical foundation of national power and prosperity and international prestige for the United States of America. Our Sea Services will integrate with the rest of our national efforts, and those of our friends and allies. This revision to A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower builds on the heritageand complementary capabilities of the Navy-Marine Corps-Coast Guard team to advance the prosperity and guarantee the security of our Nation.
The demands of a changing world and the defense of the American people and our interests require nothing less
_____________________________________
Baltimore and Philadelphia outsourced their police training several years ago to global military policing corporations and below we see community colleges tied to what are global police and fire corporations in their training. We are told these connections are simply outsourced training but we know these police and fire departments are being privatized. I wrote a few years ago that was what all policies coming from the Maryland Assembly introduced by BALTIMORE POLS had as a goal. Baltimore City Hall pols as well moved all these gradual single policies through marching towards a global security force in Baltimore as a US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone.
Each time Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations would bring citizens out to shout for what was sold as a protection from overreaching police. It was never about that---it was always about deregulating how and who polices. I testified against our Baltimore pols trying to give arresting power to parking ticket employees---then we had the police cameras sold as protecting citizens when it is all part of what the global militarized police force needs in controlling WE THE PEOPLE.
All of this is wrapped under HOMELAND SECURITY and it has moved every kind of militarized equipment and security into our US cities. All one has to do is read how overseas International Economic Zones have be secured to see the same structures overseas being moved into our cities. If authoritarian dictators have populations of citizens SCARED TO DO ANYTHING----this is why.
'Cubic equipped the training facility with its Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System – Individual Weapons System (MILES - IWS) and its Miles After Action Review System (MAARS).
MILES has been a staple of military training for many years, but this is the first facility for police and first-responder training using MILES gear'.
More security firms getting police powers / Some see benefits to public safety, but others are wary
Amy Goldstein, Washington Post
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 7, 2007
2007-01-07 04:00:00 PDT Raleigh, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio sprouting with wires.
"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latinos he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.
A gang initiation, Watt thought.
With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night in December. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.
Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state Legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen arrests.
Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres -- complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the sole province of law enforcement agencies.
The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.
"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems, a leading security consultant.
"It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."
The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenant rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.
Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenant groups have complained that "special police," hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.
In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault after they approached a man talking on a cell phone outside his front door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.
Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher, who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.
Private police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher said, recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.
In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired Wackenhut police to work in the main terminal in tandem with city police officers stationed on buses.
"There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief, who said some of his requests for additional officers have been turned down in recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham police work privately while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand for off-duty police outstrips the supply.
In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the Minneapolis Police Department three years ago started a project called "SafeZone" with private security officers downtown, estimated to outnumber the police there 13 to 1. Target and other local companies paid for a wireless video camera system in downtown office buildings that is shared with the police. The police department created a shared radio frequency. So far, the department has trained 600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how to write incident reports and how to testify in court.
When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.
In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department with 11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year helped solve a string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail, identifying the burglar with images from the department's video camera when he drove out of the resort with a stolen car.
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying to foster closer ties between security companies without police powers and the police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun training and certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and soon plans to send security companies e-mails with unclassified Homeland Security threats and crime alerts.
Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have expanded in part because of shrinking local and federal resources. The nation's largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as its corporate security executive last year when he retired as assistant director of the FBI. Even as identity theft and other fraud schemes have been booming, Swecker said, fewer federal investigators are devoted to solving such crimes, and many U.S. attorney's offices will not prosecute them unless their value reaches $100,000.
As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that helped police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that defrauded 800 bank customers of $11 million.
In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They have full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.
Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy Taylor, had been chief of three small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers, some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.
They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service weapon, Taylor said
Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors' employees, Capt. Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to loiter in the parking lot. Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the Raleigh police to handle the arrest.
Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend testifying in court.
"I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt, the officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The company's marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for backup help or computers to check immediately for outstanding warrants or criminal records.
After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously and shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.
________________________________________
Baltimore installed these policies as well and it is this widespread stop and search of cars that created many abusive police encounters with citizens stating just as this article states-----searches often lead to seizures that are deemed improper. As this article shows---these are private police training firms---we know they have global policing connections.
'The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back'.
It appears that roughing up the drivers in some cases is a pretense to creating conditions of 'passive assault' to justify these car searches. Officers are doing this because that is the global corporate police training ----and it has nothing to do with American community policing where our officers are employed to serve and protect.
'Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases -- 4,455 -- where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money'.
Citizens living in US cities that have not installed these kinds of policing policies as Baltimore has may not understand how these policies create bad situations for citizens who are guilty in most cases of nothing.
Crime
posted: 9/7/2014 2:01 AM
Police seizures of cash rise, fueled by private training firms
- Drivers enter the town of Waldo, Fla., where motorists can encounter many different speed limits in a roughly two-mile drive. The AAA auto club named the tiny town between Jacksonville and Gainesville one of only two "traffic traps" nationwide. The other town is nearby Lawtey. Now Waldo is facing a scandal over its traffic tickets.
Associated Press/Aug. 29
The Washington Post
After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called onLocal officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.
The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.
Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of "highway interdiction" to departments across the country.
One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists -- criminals and the innocent alike -- including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.
Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government's burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems -- despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.
A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing "trophy shots" of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.
"All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine," Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Illinois wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Oklahoma whose founders also created Black Asphalt.
Hain's book calls for "turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods."
Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is a powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owner to prove their possessions were legally acquired.
The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposes and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation's highways since 9/11.
"Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money," said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Florida who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. "It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road."
To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Washington Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police, prosecutors and motorists.
The Post found:
• There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.
• Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases -- 4,455 -- where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.
• Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Washington Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.
• Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.
• State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.
Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Washington Post's overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are "adopted" for inclusion in the program.
"Adoptions of state and local seizures -- when a state and local law enforcement agency requests a federal seizing agency to adopt a state and local seizure for federal forfeiture -- represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007," Carr said.
The Justice Department data released to The Washington Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. In 400 federal court cases examined by The Washington Post where people challenged seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority.
For many innocents caught in the seizure net, the biggest misstep was carrying more cash than police thought was normal for law-abiding citizens.
A 55-year-old Chinese American restaurateur from Georgia was pulled over for minor speeding on Interstate 10 in Alabama and detained for nearly two hours. He was carrying $75,000 raised from relatives to buy a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He got back his money 10 months later but only after spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer and losing out on the restaurant deal.
A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search. They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire a lawyer to get back his money.
Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Virginia, was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his money back but lost his business because he didn't have the cash to pay his overhead.
"I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money," Stuart said. "Why should I give them my money?"
- - -
Steven Peterson, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arranged highway interdiction training through a company called the 4:20 Group, said that patrol officers used to try to make their names with large drug busts. He said he saw that change when agency leaders realized that cash seizures could help their departments during lean times.
"They saw this as a way to provide equipment and training for their guys," Peterson said. "If you seized large amounts of cash, that's the gift that keeps on giving."
There is no question that state and federal forfeiture programs have crippled powerful drug-trafficking organizations, thwarted an assortment of criminals and brought millions to financially stressed police departments.
Advocates of highway interdiction say it plays a important role in protecting the public and that officers take care to respect the rights of citizens.
"We don't go hunting for money in general," said Officer Mike DeWald, a member of the police department in Sandy Springs, Georgia who has served as a trainer for 4:20. "I never have been pressured to go after money. We are in pursuit of the criminal element."
Police trainers said that their work has helped make the country safer by teaching police to be more vigilant in identifying drug smugglers and terrorists.
"9/11 caused a lot of officers to realize they should be out there looking for those kind of people," said David Frye, a part-time Nebraska county deputy sheriff who serves as chief instructor at Desert Snow and was operations director of Black Asphalt. "When money is taken from an organization, it hurts them more than when they lose the drugs."
Frye and Desert Snow's founder, a former California highway patrolman named Joe David, defended Black Asphalt, which David started in 2004. They said they have taken steps in recent years to ensure that the informal police network complies with state and federal laws. David declined to speak to The Washington Post.
"The Black Asphalt is not flawless, however the intent behind it is," David and Frye wrote in a letter in 2012 sent to police and obtained by The Washington Post. "The information being moved through the system has proven itself reliable on hundreds of occasions. Much more reliable than any criminal informant. The results have been staggering. It has proven itself an extremely valuable tool for law enforcement."
Hain, Desert Snow's marketing official, said "the operational and software platforms of the Desert Snow site and Black Asphalt site are completely separate." He said Black Asphalt is "a secure system for intelligence sharing" and does not store information.
"No personal identifying information from seizure reports have ever been collected or stored by the Black Asphalt," Hain said. "The Black Asphalt software is simply a pass-through system that allows the user to input data, which is then sent directly, via email, to a select group of law enforcement (i.e. local investigators, ICE Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, DEA agents, etc.). Again, none of the personal information is held within the system, only the summary of the seizure. And then the seizure narratives are only maintained for 21 days before they get purged."
The Washington Post obtained hundreds of Black Asphalt records from law enforcement sources with access to the system.
Among Black Asphalt's features is a section called BOLO, or "be on the lookout," where police who join the network can post tips and hunches. In April, Aurora, Colorado Police Officer James Waselkow pulled over a white Ford pickup for tinted windows. Waselkow said he thought the driver, a Mexican national, was suspicious in part because he wore a University of Wyoming cap.
"He had no idea where he was going, what hotel he was staying in or who with," Waselkow wrote. The officer searched the vehicle with the driver's consent but found no contraband. But he was still suspicious, so he posted the driver's license plate on Black Asphalt. "Released so someone else can locate the contraband," he wrote. "Happy hunting!"
Waselkow's department did not respond to a request for an interview.
The Washington Post's review of 400 court cases, which encompassed seizures in 17 states, provided insights into stops and seizures.
In case after case, highway interdictors appeared to follow a similar script. Police set up what amounted to rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling. They quickly issued warnings or tickets. They studied drivers for signs of nervousness, including pulsing carotid arteries, clenched jaws and perspiration. They also looked for supposed "indicators" of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks or air-fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors.
One recent stop shows how the process can work in the field.
In December 2012, Frye was working in his capacity as a part-time deputy in Seward County, Nebraska. He pulled over John Anderson of San Clemente, California, who was driving a BMW on Interstate 80 near Lincoln. Frye issued a warning ticket within 13 minutes for failing to signal promptly when changing lanes.
He told Anderson he was finished with the stop. But Frye later noted in court papers that he found several indicators of possible suspicious activity: an air freshener, a radar detector and inconsistencies in the driver's description of his travels.
The officer then asked whether the driver had any cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin or large amounts of cash and sought permission to search the BMW, according to a video of the stop. Anderson denied having drugs or large amounts of cash in his car. He declined to give permission for a search. Frye then radioed for a drug-sniffing dog, and the driver had to wait another 36 minutes for the dog to arrive.
"I'm just going to, basically, have you wait here," Frye told Anderson.
The dog arrived and the handler said it indicated the presence of drugs. But when they searched the car, none was found. They did find money: $25,180.
Frye handcuffed Anderson and told him he was placing him under arrest.
"In Nebraska, drug currency is illegal," Frye said. "Let me tell you something, I've seized millions out here. When I say that, I mean millions. . . . This is what I do."
Frye suggested to Anderson that he might not have been aware of the money in his vehicle and began pressing him to sign a waiver relinquishing the cash, mentioning it at least five times over the next hour, the video shows.
"You're going to be given an opportunity to disclaim the currency," Frye told Anderson. "To sign a form that says, 'That is not my money. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. I don't want to come back to court.' "
Frye said that unless the driver agreed to give up the money, a prosecutor would "want to charge" him with a crime, "so that means you'll go to jail."
An hour and six minutes into the stop, Frye read Anderson his Miranda rights.
Anderson, who told Frye he worked as a self-employed debt counselor, said the money was not illicit and he was carrying it to pay off a gambling debt. He would later say it was from investors and meant to buy silver bullion and coins. More than two hours after the stop had begun, he finally agreed to give up the cash and Frye let him go. Now Anderson has gone to court to get the money back, saying he signed the waiver and mentioned the gambling debt only because he felt intimidated by Frye.
A magistrate has ruled at a preliminary step in the case that Frye had reasonable suspicion to detain Anderson. Frye said he always follows the law and has never had a seizure overturned.
Legal scholars who viewed the video of the stop told The Washington Post that such practices push constitutional limits. Officers often are taught not to tell the driver they have a right to leave at any time after a traffic stop is concluded. But extended stops in which the officer uses psychological pressure on the driver without charges or Miranda warnings can cross the line.
"Encouraging police to initiate searches for the purpose of seizing cash or other assets, rather than to seize evidence to be used in a prosecution, is a dangerous development," said Clifford Fishman, a law professor at Catholic University and former New York City prosecutor. "It is particularly troubling if police officers are trained to manipulate the suspect into forfeiting the assets or waiving the right to contest the search."
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said Frye's stop crossed the line when he detained the driver while summoning a canine.
"You cannot elongate the stop to bring in the dogs," he said. "In doing that, you're detaining the person without probable cause. That ain't kosher."
- - -
Civil asset forfeiture law is among the more unusual areas of American jurisprudence. It does not involve evidence of a crime or criminal charges. It is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a boat, rather than a person. It has its basis in British admiralty law, which allowed the taking of a ship to recover damages.
In 1970, Congress turned the federal civil asset forfeiture law into a weapon against the illegal drug trade, allowing for the seizure of aircraft, boats and vehicles used to transport drugs. The federal law was eventually expanded to include cash tied to drug trafficking and to allow the money to be shared with local and state police, who could keep up to 80 percent of the seized assets.
It was a much more effective tool for federal prosecutors than criminal forfeiture, which required the conviction of a defendant with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Most significantly, the law places the burden of proof on the property owner to demonstrate that an object is not tied to criminal activity.
As the drug trade ramped up throughout the 1980s, Justice's federal forfeitures increased from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993. (They reached $2.6 billion in 2007.) Some of that increase was driven by Operation Pipeline, a nationwide DEA program launched in 1986 that promoted highway interdiction training for state and local police.
Several newspapers later wrote exposes about innocent people being caught up in the forfeiture net and police spending on luxuries. The Orlando Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for pointing out that the Volusia County Sheriff's Office had used state seizure laws to take $8 million from motorists, nine out of 10 of them minorities.
The attention prompted Congress to reform federal seizure laws in 2000, allowing owners to be reimbursed for their legal fees after successful lawsuits. But a key reform was cut. It would have removed what some lawmakers called the "perverse incentive" to target cash -- the sharing of money between the feds and locals. It died after police and Justice waged a "voracious lobbying" campaign, according to former Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
"We didn't have the votes," said Frank, who is still an ardent critic of asset forfeiture. "There is this terrible unfairness. It is about as fundamental a denial of their constitutional rights as I can think of."
After Sept. 11, 2001, civil forfeiture and the war on drugs became entwined with efforts to improve homeland security. Smugglers of all kinds turned away from airports because of the tightened security and took to the nation's interstate highway system. With federal encouragement, police from small towns, rural counties and big cities sought specialized training.
Among those that met the demand was Desert Snow, a family-owned company founded in 1989 by Joe David, a California highway patrolman. Other firms also stepped up, including the 4:20 Group, Caltraps, Hits, Diamondback Training, and Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants. Soon more than a dozen companies were competing for millions in state and federal grants and contracts, along with fees from local departments across the country.
The training had an immediate effect in some areas.
After the Kansas Highway Patrol arranged sessions through Desert Snow for state and local police in 2005 and 2006, the amount of cash flowing into police budgets from seizures nearly doubled, from an average of $2.6 million a year between 2000 and 2006 to $4.9 million a year after 2007.
After 25 Wisconsin State Patrol officers received training from Desert Snow in 2010, the agency's cash seizures the following year more than doubled to $585,657. "It creates a surge period," said Sgt. Nate Clarke, a state patrol supervisor. "These guys get all fired up because they're seeing photo after photo of seizures on the PowerPoints."
The number of agencies participating yearly under Equitable Sharing went up 22 percent to 2,842 between 2003 and 2007, while cash seizures without search warrants or indictments during that period rose more than 50 percent, to $242 million. Under the Obama administration, police have made more than 22,000 such seizures worth about $1 billion through the Justice Department program.
Federal support helped drive the surge. In Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin alone, police spent a total of at least $1 million during the last decade in Justice and Homeland Security grants for Desert Snow training. The DEA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and others spent another $2.3 million in contracts on Desert Snow training for police, records show. The DEA also paid more than $2 million for training from the 4:20 Group. Individual local and state police forces across the country paid millions more for the training using seized cash, one of the uses permitted by Equitable Sharing rules.
The police trainers estimate they have taught more than 5o,000 police officers in the more aggressive techniques during the last decade.
Some trainers say they worry that an overemphasis on seizing money has distorted policing.
"Over a period of a single decade, the culture was now totally changed," said Shawn Pardazi, a detective in Pearl, Mississippi and owner of Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants and a former Desert Snow trainer.
As the demand for training grew, the competition among the firms for business became fierce.
"It's all about the money," said James Eagleson, owner of the 4:20 Group, who also once worked at Desert Snow.
- - -
Decisions that police make during brief roadway stops take motorists who challenge the seizures a year on average to undo, according to a Washington Post analysis. For 350 owners, it took more than two years to get their money back.
Last year, Ming Tong Liu, 55, a Chinese-born American from Newnan, Georgia was stopped on I-10 in Alabama for driving 10 miles over the speed limit while heading to Louisiana to buy the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles for himself and his investors -- two daughters and another relative.
A Mobile County sheriff's deputy gave Liu a ticket for speeding and asked for permission to search the car. The deputy found $75,195 in a suitcase in the back seat, neatly wrapped in white napkins and placed in a black plastic bag and then took the money after the deputy said Liu gave conflicting accounts of his travel plans.
The deputy took Liu to a sheriff's department office and called for an officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which stood to share in the money.
Liu's attorney, Rebecca Ding-Lee, said the officers overstepped their authority, held Liu for nearly two hours and searched his car unlawfully without a warrant. "He cannot speak English," she said. "He didn't understand what the police said."
Ten months after the cash was seized, customs officials agreed to return the money, documents show.
Police often rely on drug-sniffing dogs to justify warrantless searches when a driver refuses to give consent. In 48 cases examined by The Washington Post, dogs alerted to the presence of drugs but the officers found only money.
In October 2008, Benjamin Molina, 40, a permanent resident from El Salvador, was traveling through Virginia on I-95 when an Emporia police officer pulled him over for tinted windows. A carpenter, Molina was going from North Carolina to his home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The officer wrote him a warning ticket and began asking him questions, including whether he had cash in the car.
Molina told the officer that he was shopping for a used car and had $18,000 in his pockets. Molina's face began to tremble, which police said they took as a sign of possible wrongdoing. Molina said his cheek twitched from medication he was taking for a health condition that included kidney disease. Molina also had duct tape in his car, which police said is "commonly used by traffickers."
The officer asked Molina, who had no criminal history, to hand over the cash. The officer placed the money in an envelope, which he set down on the ground alongside two empty envelopes.
A dog called to the scene sat down next to the envelope with the cash, indicating the presence of drugs, according to police.
The police took the money, but Molina took steps to get it back.
He hired David Smith, an Alexandria, Virginia attorney and former federal prosecutor who once headed the federal government's forfeiture program in the Eastern District of Virginia.
After Molina appealed, a federal prosecutor refunded the money. It took four months.
Smith said the Molina case is an example of the kind of overreach that the civil asset forfeiture reforms passed by Congress in 2000 were aimed at preventing.
"This type of police bounty hunting is antithetical to everything our criminal justice system is supposed to stand for," said Smith, who helped craft the reform legislation.
Among the indicators police look for are rental cars, which are often used by smugglers.
On Nov. 1, 2011, Jose Jeronimo Sorto and his brother-in-law, Victor Ramos Guzman, were driving a rented sedan on I-95 south of Richmond, Virginia when a state trooper stopped them. Both were lay leaders of the Pentecostal Nuevo Renacer church in Baltimore. They were carrying $28,500 in church funds meant for the purchase of land to build a church in El Salvador and a trailer for a new congregation in North Carolina.
Their experience has been cited as a case study in civil forfeiture abuse by The Washington Post's editorial page, The New Yorker magazine and others. Unknown until now in the public debate is the fact that the trooper who made the stop, C.L. Murphy, is a top interdiction trainer for Virginia State Police and Desert Snow, as well as a member of Black Asphalt.
Murphy told Sorto and Guzman that they were speeding and following too closely. Murphy said Guzman told him about the cash and consented to a search of the car.
Guzman, 39, of Sterling, Virginia, said he showed the trooper documents indicating that he belonged to a tax-exempt church, and he said the cash had been collected from congregation members. But Murphy disregarded their explanations, saying they contained inconsistencies. He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which accepted the seizure for the Equitable Sharing Program, and he escorted the men to a nearby police station. He did not issue a ticket but seized the cash after Guzman signed a waiver.
Three lawyers agreed to represent the church members for free. Three months later, they received a check from ICE for $28,500.
Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller would only say, "The facts of the stop speak for themselves."
ICE spokeswoman Marsha Catron defended the seizure, saying in a statement "the situation was indicative of bulk cash smuggling" and that Guzman consented by signing a waiver for the money.
"Both the male driver and passenger disclaimed ownership of the money and provided inconsistent and contradictory statements," Catron said. She added: "Money was ultimately returned to Mr. Ramos Guzman after he provided documentation that the cash belonged to his church."
Guzman told The Washington Post he was truthful to the trooper the entire time. The experience left him shaken.
"They didn't give me a chance to explain," Guzman said. "There was no way out."
________________________________________
It is no coincidence that this article was written by a FAR-RIGHT LIBERTARIAN and I leave his open ended question for citizens to ponder. If one believes these few decades of policing was public and not private policing----I would suggest we look at the transition during Clinton era ----when zero tolerance and privatized prisons with prison pipelines soared. Indeed, NYC Police Commissioner Bradley was that start towards privatized policing and THAT is why policing went from protect and serve---to policing stats that made police encounters soar.
Every organization has memberships having all kinds of political stances----I hope my friends with CopBlock do not lean far-right Libertarian.
We cannot get police accountability because we have city halls filled with Wall Street players ----not because public police departments are bad.
Public vs. Private Police: Which Would You Choose?
May 7, 2010 by Ademo Freeman COPBLOCK
As a believer in removing government from just about every aspect of our lives, I wanted to write about the differences in public police vs. private security forces. To understand this you must realize that several things need to change before this is even possible. Allowing people to own land (like roads, parks, ect.), to conduct business (trash collection, policing, ect.) as they see fit (even if done poorly) and not allowing government the authority to preside over any of it would be a great start.
A good source for understanding negative impact of government on society is Murray N. Rothbard’s book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifest.
In this post I intend to cover several aspects of policing/protection. From how it’s funded, accountability, customer service and more. I hope to show you that even though policing will never be perfect, there are ways to limit the hardships the current system is often responsible for. I’ll try not to bore you with an endless amount of facts or quotes from others who share the same belief. Instead I’ll just try to highlight some basic points on each topic, explaining how today’s public police force could be better served in the private sector. This is a very controversial topic, one that could take a series of posts to explain, but I’ll do my best.
Funding
The difference in funding of public police to those that are private is simple: one is backed by force and the other is voluntary. Taxation is the payment method of the public sector, where budgets balloon and collectivism is the constant bailout for those who fail to properly manage their department. The public option of policing is paid before you receive any good or service, and still taken if you refuse or fail to use such service. The public sector of police does a horrible job of managing their growth, budget and needs of the consumer. Their budgets, power, and influence grow without the checks and balances of those who operate private businesses.
A company that makes widgets (for example) would base future investments, whether that be hiring more employees, investing in equipment or building space, on research that would show areas of needed growth and areas that can be scaled back based off the demands of their consumers. Failure to realize these trends and growth of the times would be disastrous for a private company. They would lose customers and therefore jeopardize the entire business.
That’s exactly why the private sector is a better answer. Companies who choose to do business as private police forces would know this. They would only provide services which people agree to pay for, e.g, conducting investigations of break-ins, working with other agencies (presumably private) to retrieve stolen property, or monitoring the property (such as roads, businesses, and homes) of their customers.
The private police would have to worry about maintaining relationships with its consumer for fear going out of business. Public police don’t have to worry about being put out of business and it’s proven in how they treat their consumers, which brings me to the next point.
Customer Service
As any business owner knows customer service is a critical factor in maintaining a business. Even those with a highly demanded product know customer service tops everything. Failure to keep customers happy only leads to a ‘going out of business’ sale. At least in the private sector.
It’s hard to talk about the public police and the customer service they have, as it’s pretty much non-existent. Not to mention the ‘duties’ of public police would be broken into several different fields of private policing/security forces (some might police private roads, businesses, ect.). For this example we’ll use a traffic stop to highlight the difference in customer relations.
The public police, whom you’re paying for regardless, pull you over for speeding. The officer comes to your window, states that s/he’s pulled you over for speeding and demands ID. If you’re lucky the incident ends with a warning and you’re mildly inconvenienced. For most, one or several of the following things happen; you’re asked to step out of your car, you and your property are searched extensively, you’re questioned and/or threatened, you’re taken away to booking or even to jail. The public police demand respect and answers to their questions, along with your cooperation — no matter how immoral, illegal, or insane the request.
Then there is the court process you, in most cases, must go through. Again, you lose time, money, and possibly your right to travel or even your freedom. The process favors the public police because those who partake in this system all work for the same organization: the state. They also create the man-made “laws” they claim you’ve broken, even benefiting from the result (if putting something on paper deems it just). Even though money generated from tickets does go back into the system, rarely does it cover the cost of the system, making the justice system one of the poorest run businesses on the planet.
When you speed on a private road, owned by Company X, that has ‘police’ patrolling to ensure the safety of other customers, it would be a day and night experience. First of all, the private officer would most likely treat you with respect, instead of demanding it from you. They wouldn’t have the right, let alone the desire, to search your personal belongings. They would attempt several options like, educating you, offering discounts for consecutive safe driving days and more as opposed to taking you to arbitration. As a business that relies on you to drive on their roads to make a profit, they would realize that lengthy court hearings are expensive. If you ending up abusing their rules, you would either pay a higher price to travel on their property or not be allowed to at all. If the company instituted an aggressive policy of searching property, violating rights and abusing people physically, their reputation would suffer. And so would the profits, making the business worthless and likely to be sold off to better investors/business men.
Which brings us to the next topic.
Accountability
Accountability can be tricky when talking about public vs. private policing as both are accountable for their actions in monetary terms. The difference though is who pays for that accountability and how it differs from the organization to the employee.
In the public policing system when an employee uses bad judgment or commits a physical offense against someone, rarely do they pay for it directly. Normally in lawsuits against public police departments it’s the taxpayers who foots the bill for the actions of abusive police. I know there are some lawsuits paid for by insurance companies, but who pays the increased premium next billing cycle? Yep, taxpayers. So you’re not only paying for a service you rarely use, but one that’s more likely to aggress on you, then still stick you with the bill for their misbehaving employees on top of it. From a business perspective, this is not only wrong, it’s downright evil, as all of it is backed with force.
IS THIS REALLY HOW OUR PUBLIC POLICE DEPARTMENTS EVER WORKED BEFORE THESE FEW DECADES?
The accountability only gets worse when you try to get an employee of public police held accountable for their actions. With a monopoly on policing it’s easy for other public police to cover the bad acts of other employees. Even when found in the wrong, through whatever means, rarely do public police face the same punishments or hardships that those without badges do. Police commonly get reduced sentences, fines, and often keep their jobs. The lack of accountability and the double standard in police is an extremely dangerous combination, especially when you add the endless income from taxation.
IS THAT HOW OUR SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK? OF COURSE NOT.
On the other hand, private police companies would be responsible for their employees. Employees might be responsible in extreme cases where they flat out defy company policy. Private police wouldn’t have such an aggressive policy, therefore reducing the risk factor that public police often put themselves into.
YOU MEAN LIKE GLOBAL BLACKWATER ET AL KNOWN TO FLAUNT EVERY LAW IN ALL NATIONS?
Then there is the all mighty dollar, where if a company protected its own by hiding evidence or engaging in rights violating activities that public police do, they would lose customers. And unlike the public police they don’t have money given (stolen if you ask me) to them to cover such acts. They know they could be held financially responsible to the fullest and would do everything to prevent costly payouts that public police seem to have no problem paying, seeing as how it’s not their money.
Conclusion
If you fear that one of these private protection agencies could take over the world or have bigger guns than you, that’s no different than what we have today. The public police seem to be doing one hell of a job at limiting our rights and taking our money at the same time. The fact is that it would be almost impossible for one company to grow to the size of the police state in this country due to the beauty of competition.
To me it is clear: privatization and removal of government as our protectors is a must. After looking into how the police system works, it’s beyond me why anyone would allow a monopoly on something as important as protection. It’s obvious that funding, customer service and accountability would improve across the board. That 100’s or 1,000’s of competing business would provide a better, safer service for us all.
Which would you choose?
_______________________________________
As this article states it was NYC, Boston ---and here is Oakland CA that went to privatizing police early on. When Police Commissioner Batts was brought to Baltimore we discussed his connections to Oakland----to what was then a global surveillance structure tied to Johns Hopkins and its security corporations. Batts was sent to Harvard---Boston for training then coming to Baltimore when police abuses soared. Here we see the chain of pushing police cameras as good for citizen protection when police cameras are a militarized policing tool used for decades and they are part of the global militarized policing equipment. So, Batts was always tied to moving to install privatized policing policies and we should not worry that he was fired----he will no doubt move to the next US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone to install global military policing or back to Harvard to teach these policies----
'Oakland, California is one of many municipalities like Boston, Massachusetts that are handing over general policing responsibilities to private armed guards'.
'He said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif'.
The reason 1% Wall Street needed to make this police camera policy about protecting citizens is our US Constitutional rights to privacy has always protected police cameras inside our private residences---------they deregulated our rights to being filmed in our homes by making it appear to be about protecting us. Rawlings-Blake with Batts who sat silent as some of the worst cases of police abuses unfolded in Baltimore these few years is then in the national media sounding like they want to protect citizens.
article
Navy SEAL Helmet Cams: Obama Watched bin Laden Raid Video
Obama and officials in the White House Situation Room were able to watch the raid against bin Laden live, the Washington Post confirms. Ian Yarett on how helmet-cam combat video works.
Ian Yarett
05.06.11 5:20 PM ET
Baltimore mayor supports body cameras on cops amid criticism
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake rejected a bill in November to equip nearly 3,000 cops with body cameras. But the mayor, however, created a task force to look at a pilot program for cops to wear body cameras.(Cliff Owen/AP)
BY Nancy Dillon
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 7:28 PM
Body-worn police cameras are a focal point in Baltimore again, with many questioning why the riot-rocked city isn't using them yet.
Embattled Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is adamant she supports their use and convened a task force that proposed a $1.4 million, six-month pilot program for 100 officers in February.
The recommendation came after she vetoed a bill passed by the City Council in November that would have required Baltimore's nearly 3,000 police officers to wear them.
Rawlings-Blake called the bill "well-intentioned" but said it failed to adequately address legal, privacy and funding issues.
"Make no mistake, this mayor is very committed to a body camera program," lawyer and task force co-chair James R. Benjamin Jr. told the Daily News Wednesday.
He said the pilot program should start this year and lead to a full roll-out in 2016.
"The mayor believes 100 percent in transparency and accountability — and she wanted it done right," he said.
Critics, meanwhile, say it's taking too long.
"I think this process has been unbelievably delayed. She didn't really need a committee," Tyrone Powers, a former FBI agent and professor in the Criminal Justice department at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, told The News.
Tyrone Powers, a former FBI agent and professor in the Criminal Justice department at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts (pictured) in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif.(Patrick Semansky/AP)
He said Rawlings-Blake hired police chief Anthony Batts in part due to his experience implementing body cameras in Oakland, Calif.
"He already knows how to do this. All he needed was the funding. Now he's in the position of not having had cameras to help determine what happened to Freddie Gray," Powers said, referring to the man whose death in police custody has sparked violent protests.
"This unfortunate situation that we're in now may finally speed up the process," Powers said. "Just allow Commissioner Batts to say we need these cameras and find the money. Show that you have faith in him to get it right."
For his part, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio voiced his support of Rawlings-Black on Wednesday.
"She's a very capable leader, a very thoughtful leader," he said, adding that he spoke to her by phone on Saturday.
"I think this was a tough moment, obviously, for Baltimore. I think they were quick to make adjustments and obviously last night went a lot better," he said.
"We know the history of Baltimore well before she got there. It's a city that's been through a lot. It's a city that really dealt with some of the worst crime dynamics of any city in America, some of the toughest economic changes and she's been trying to push that city forward, and I really wish her luck, and I think mayors all around the country stand in solidarity with her," he said.
______________________________________
Here we see the progression towards authoritarian policing. Maryland Assembly passed these laws targeting cities like Baltimore for these police swat teams---if citizens think what these US cities as Foreign Economic Zones will look like if installed-----they will be GREATER BALTIMORE----this means huge. As well, most citizens living around these regions will be moved inside these zones so the laws passed for Baltimore as a Foreign Economic Zone will expand to the entire state.
Warrentless entry with broadly written criteria for these entrances already have some city police departments abusing these policies.
4th Amendment?
What 4th Amendment?
Supremes Say Police Can Create Conditions To Enter Home Without A Warrant
from the did-they-really-say-that? dept
About Techdirt.
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We've been discussing various ways that our government and the courts have been slowly chipping away at the 4th Amendment, what with warrantless wiretaps, searching laptops, TSA agents groping people, etc. And the Supreme Court just took a huge chunk out of the 4th Amendment in saying that police can raid homes without a warrant if there are "exigent circumstances" -- even if those "exigent circumstances" are created by the police themselves.
The law, to date, had been that police cannot enter a home without a warrant unless they had both (a) probable cause and (b) "exigent circumstances" in which getting a warrant would not make sense. In this case, police were searching for a drug dealer who had gone into an apartment complex. Outside of one apartment, they smelled marijuana -- which created probable cause. At this point, they should have obtained a warrant. Instead, they banged on the door and shouted police. At which point they heard a scramble inside, and busted in the door, claiming that they believed the scramble was the possible destruction of the drugs. The argument then was that this noise -- even though it was entirely created due to police action -- represented exigent circumstances that allowed them to bust in the door without a warrant. The Kentucky Supreme Court said that while the noise might be exigent circumstances, since it was illegally created by the police, it could not be used.
Tragically, the Supreme Court -- by an 8-to-1 vote -- has now disagreed, saying that this is perfectly consistent with the 4th Amendment. With all due respect to the 8 Justices and the Court, I can't see how that's reasonable at all. This sets up a dreadful situation which will be abused regularly by law enforcement. It lets them create yet another situation where they may avoid oversight, by creating their own exigent circumstances, and then using that as an excuse for avoiding a warrant and any required oversight or limitations. I believe that Justice Ginsburg's dissent is much more compelling. Her dissent points out that exigent circumstances are only supposed to be used in very rare circumstances when getting a warrant is not possible or practical. Yet, in this case, the police easily could have secured a warrant quickly upon smelling marijuana.
That heavy burden has not been carried here. There was little risk that drug-related evidence would have been destroyed had the police delayed the search pending a magistrate�s authorization. As the Court recognizes, "[p]ersons in possession of valuable drugs are unlikely to destroy them unless they fear discovery by the police." ... Nothing in the record shows that, prior to the knock at the apartment door, the occupants were apprehensive about police proximity.
In fact, she notes that "Home intrusions, the Court has said, are indeed 'the chief evil against which . . .the Fourth Amendment is directed.'" So it seems positively ridiculous to claim that such a home invasion is acceptable under the 4th Amendment. This is a tragically bad ruling by the Supreme Court that will have massive and dangerous consequences. We already have law enforcement pushing the boundaries of individual privacy rights, and now they have even more tools to take that further.
_____________________________________
Citizens in third world nations have no protections and expectations of privacy----that is our US Constitutional Bill of Rights unique to America. We have a right-wing Supreme Court who thinks corporations have rights to privacy while chipping away at our rights as citizens to our privacy. Police and video/camera issues have been through history on the side of the citizens.
'The Wahchumwah case exemplifies this: on suspicion of nothing more than the benign misdemeanor of selling eagle feathers, the government got to intrude inside the home and record every intimate detail it could: books on a shelf, letters on a coffee table, pictures on a wall'.
In the Smart Cities technology of BIG DATA every aspect of our life is now sold as data---the only thing they haven't done is actually film us in our homes-----think about drone surveillance technology---the hummingbird drones and how they can film inside homes with no one knowing.
Ergo, police camera policies.
ThinkProgress
Moving news forward.
Dec 3, 20123 min read
Police Can Record Video Inside Your Home Without A Warrant, Appeals Court Says
By Nicole Flatow
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court provided some comfort to those fearing the seemingly limitless potential of new technologies to enable government privacy invasion. In holding that police could not attach a GPS device to a car and track it for 30 days without a warrant, the court said, “At bottom, we must ‘assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.’”
But don’t get too comfortable. A federal appeals court ruled last week that police can secretly videotape a suspect’s home without a warrant. In a case about the suspected sale of bald eagle feathers and pelts — a misdemeanor crime — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that undercover police admitted into the suspect’s home as interested buyers of pelts did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly videotaped the suspect’s home:
We are persuaded that it is not “constitutionally relevant” whether an informant utilizes an audio-video device, rather than merely an audio recording device, to record activities occurring inside a home, into which the informer has been invited. When Wahchumwah invited Agent Romero into his home, he forfeited his expectation of privacy as to those areas that were “knowingly expose[d] to” Agent Romero. Wahchumwah cannot reasonably argue that the recording violates his legitimate privacy interests when it reveals no more than what was already visible to the agent.The decision doesn’t entirely break new ground. At least one other federal appeals court has upheld the use of video recordings inside the home, and just last month, a lower federal court reached a similar conclusion.
But the case raises the same sorts of concerns that several concurring justices emphasized in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last term in United States v. Jones: What scope of surveillance will not violate our present understanding of a “reasonable expectation of privacy”? At what point are we, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor cautions in Jones, “making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track, may ‘alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society’”? Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury elaborates on this concern:
[T]he sad truth is that as technology continues to advance, surveillance becomes “voluntary” only by virtue of the fact we live in a modern society where technology is becoming cheaper, easier and more invasive. The Wahchumwah case exemplifies this: on suspicion of nothing more than the benign misdemeanor of selling eagle feathers, the government got to intrude inside the home and record every intimate detail it could: books on a shelf, letters on a coffee table, pictures on a wall. And we’re entering an age where criminal suspicion is no longer even necessary. Whether you’re calling a friend’s stolen cell phone and landing on the NYPD massive database of call logs, driving into one of the increasing number of cities using licenseplatescanners to record who comes in or out, or walking somewhere close to hovering drones, innocent people are running the risk of having their personal details stored in criminal databases for years to come.The fractured majority in United States v. Jones didn’t provide much guidance about where the court will draw future lines on surveillance, relying instead upon the fact that the Jones case involved a physical trespass — a type of privacy violation of particular constitutional concern. Of course, the Ninth Circuit case involved a physical intrusion in the place subject to the greatest Fourth Amendment protection — the home. Whether it became something other than a trespass — and sufficient grounds to authorize invasive surveillance — because the suspect unknowingly admitted the undercover officer into his home is another question that may be for ripe for Supreme Court consideration.
___________________________________________
I don't have time to format this article but it is critical that the American people see that it is not a Trump that is trying to take the US authoritarian----it is the morphing of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NEO-CONS/NEO-LIBERALS ----into this far-right Wall Street Libertarianism that is trying to take the US authoritarian. Both Democratic and Republican voters know this is happening and neither the right wing or left wing citizens WANT AN AUTHORITARIAN AMERICA----NO FREEDOM AND JUSTICE THERE! Yet we see over and again media trying to say it is US citizens pushing towards authoritarian policies----as with the growing Homeland Security and global militarized policing policies-----they are doing all this to protect WE THE PEOPLE while WE THE PEOPLE are shouting STOP THESE AUTHORITARIAN POLICIES.
THIS IS AUTHORITARIAN NEO-LIBERALISM FOLKS---FAR-RIGHT 1% WALL STREET EXTREME WEALTH AND EXTREME POWER----no American citizen should want to go there.
Wall Street has Trump acting like the authoritarian Republican when it is the CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA march to authoritarian neo-liberalism of which Trump is the same team-----to confuse US and global citizens. This is why Al Sharpton, Libertarians, and other progressive posers are pretending we need a Federal community police force----
Below you see why 1% Wall Street global pols are trying to codify these authoritarian policing laws while using the pretext they are doing it for the safety of US citizens-----A LEGITIMATE AIM.
Universal Periodic Review
Stakeholder Report: 24th Session, Singapore
The Right to Privacy
in Singapore
The right to privacy
3.
Privacy is a fundamental human right, enshrined in numerous international human rights instruments.
1
It is central to the protection of human dignity and
forms the basis of any democratic society.
4.
Activities that restrict the right to privacy, such as surveillance and censorship, can only be justified when they are prescribed by law, necessary
to achieve a legitimate aim, and proportionate to the aim pursued.
Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies
, Issue 5 (2012)
114
.
Authoritarian Neoliberalism, the Occupy Movements, and IPE
Ian Bruff
In the absence of any kind of hegemonic aura, neoli
beral practices have proved
increasingly unable to garner the consent, or even
the reluctant acquiescence, necessary
for more ‘normal’ modes of governance. Of particula
r importance in the post-2007 crisis
has been the growing frequency with which constitut
ional and legal changes, in the name
of economic ‘necessity’, are seeking to reshape the
purpose of the state and associated
institutions.
This attempted reconfiguration is thr
ee-fold:
(1) the more immediate appeal
to material circumstances as a reason for the state
being unable, despite ‘the best will in
the world’, to reverse processes such as greater so
cioeconomic inequality and dislocation;
(2) the deeper and longer-term recalibration of wha
t kind of activity is feasible and
appropriate for ‘non-market’ institutions to engage
in, diminishing expectations in the
process; and
(3) the reconceptualisation of the sta
te as increasingly non-democratic
through its subordination to constitutional and leg
al rules that are ‘necessary’ for
prosperity to be achieved.
This process, of states reconfiguring themselves in
increasingly non-
democratic ways in response to profound capitalist
crisis, is what I view as the rise of
authoritarian neoliberalism.
Authoritarian neoliber
alism does not represent a wholesale
‘break’ from earlier neoliberal practices, yet it i
s qualitatively distinctive due to way in
which dominant social groups are less interested in
neutralising resistance and dissent via
concessions and forms of compromise that maintain t
heir hegemony, favouring instead
the explicit exclusion and marginalisation of such
groups. However, the global crisis has
intensified the crisis of legitimation
already
confronting various capitalist states – for
instance, declining voter turnout and party members
hip, greater electoral volatility,
growing mistrust of the political elite – meaning t
hat authoritarian neoliberalism is
simultaneously strengthening
and
weakening the state as the latter reconfigures int
o a less
open and therefore more fragile polity.
As a result
, the attempted ‘authoritarian fix’ is
potentially a sticking plaster rather than anything
more epochal.
The question, therefore, is whether the contradicti
ons inherent to
authoritarian neoliberalism – especially with regar
d to the strengthening/weakening of
Authoritarian Neoliberalism
, Bruff
115
the state – will create the conditions in which a m
ore progressive and radical politics can
begin to reverse the tide of the last three decades
. As things stand, the crisis has
ambiguous implications for radical/progressive poli
tics of the Left, not least because
radical politics is often being practised most succ
essfully by radical Right movements and
parties. This is the case if one considers the rise
of xenophobia and racism in Europe, the
Tea Party in the US, or indeed the more general ‘an
ti-party’ dominance of charismatic
figureheads such as Putin in various countries. How
ever, the occupy movements have
proved to be a welcome corrective to the pessimism
that the above observations
encourage (regarding Putin, too, as we have seen in
recent weeks). In particular, they have
forced onto the agenda a fundamental challenge to t
he dominant narratives of the crisis,
which – combined with the decline of mass political
parties and the imbrication of all
main parties with a system in crisis – has made the
state an increasingly direct target of a
range of popular struggles, demands and discontent.
This is crucial, because the state and its associat
ed institutions have often been
viewed as somehow inherently more progressive and d
emocratic than the ‘market’. As a
result, ‘Left’ politics has frequently been guilty
of taking the law to be somehow neutral,
ignoring in the process how ‘non-market’ social for
ms have been
central
to the rise of
neoliberalism and thus the growing inequalities of
power which characterise the world in
which we live. This was expressed vividly in the cl
earing of Zuccotti Park in New York,
which not only displayed clearly (despite the attem
pts to herd journalists into one part of
the park) the brute coercive capacities of state po
wer, but also the denial of the
constitutional right to expressive protest in the n
ame of ‘democracy’. However, it is not an
isolated case, with justifications of police violen
ce and the mobilisation of juridical power
against the occupy and other movements being a rout
ine part of events across the globe
(see for example the rather different response, com
pared to several months earlier, by the
Egyptian security apparatuses to the occupation of
Tahrir Square in late 2011). In
consequence, the occupy movements have exposed the
authoritarian neoliberal state to
protest and struggle, and its continued delegitimat
ion, from a radical/progressive
perspective that
continues
to affirm the values embodied in notions of solida
rity, equality
and cooperation. This alerts us in a more expansive
way to how inequalities of power are
produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, en
abling us to consider how other, more
emancipatory and progressive, worlds are possible.
So what of IPE? As with many aspects of the broader
discipline of Political
Science, IPE has been comfortable with dividing our
world into distinct spheres, each
with their own ‘intrinsic’ properties and norms. Th
erefore, now would be the time to
overcome these artificial dichotomies and reinvigor
ate the study of the international
political economy; even if the scholar in question
is not interested in emancipatory issues,
then surely the need for more adequate, holistic an
alyses is now necessary as well as
desirable. Apparently not: journals and conferences
continue to talk of ‘the market’
over here
and ‘the state’
over there
, ‘interests’
over here
and ‘values’
over there
, ‘economic
crisis’
over here
and ‘political responses’
over there
, ‘democracy’
over here
and
‘authoritarianism’
over there
. I could go on... As things stand, IPE asks intere
sting
questions about the world, but it is increasingly u
nfit for the purpose of exploring these
questions.
Ian Bruff
Ian BruffIan Bruff
Ian Bruff is Lecturer in International Relations in
the Department of Politics, History and
International Relations at Loughborough University.
He has been Chair of the Critical
Political Economy Research Network of the European
Sociological Association since
2009, and a member of the Steering Committee for th
e Standing Group on International
Relations of the European Consortium for Political
Research since 2010. He recently
joined the editorial team for the Routledge/RIPE Se
ries in Global Political Economy, and
from 2012-14 will be the Chair of the Book Prize pa
nel of judges for the International
Political Economy working group of the British Inte
rnational Studies Association
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