Paramilitary policing in the US

Discussion in 'World Events' started by jps, May 10, 2003.

  1. jps Valued Senior Member

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    I found this interesting as it regards the erosion of civil liberties that had been occuring prior to 9/11. This is the first story of its type I've seen for a while(I suspect because it hasn't happened to anyone prominent enough to be included in the news over the various wars), but its hardly an uncommon occurance.
    I know people who have been subject to similiar behavior on the part of the police(albeit less dramatically).
    How is is possible in a free country to have government forces break down your door in the middle of the night, put guns to your head, tear apart your home and destroy your property, and then upon finding nothing incriminating, just leave taking no responsibility for the damage?
    What about this statistic from the last paragraph i quoted?
    "the number of people who have died at the hands of police increased 230 percent between 1990 and 1999"
    How can this be viewed as in any way acceptable?


    http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=59732&group=webcast

     
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  3. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    They'll probably win their law suit and get more than enough money for it to have been worth their trouble.
     
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  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    (Insert Title Here)

    Warrior Cops is a Cato Institute paper by Diane Cecelia Weber. I found the hyperlinked page before I could find the PDF I read and posted a couple of times at Sciforums in the past.
    I think it's a nifty little article that speaks much on toward what has happened. Consider it the prelude to a War on Terror that some knew was inevitable; with our policies, we knew that sooner or later the raving "terrorists" we heard about overseas on the evening news would eventually decide to hop the pond and take a swing at the American Kings of Fools. The American War on Drugs served as a perfect "dress rehearsal" for what many knew was coming and some even looked forward to.

    Think about it: a vague and nebulous enemy with no specific nation of origin, complex schemes to hide doings from authority, sophisticated financing, reasonably sophisticated intelligence operations and the ability to infiltrate target institutions. An invisible enemy, built on fiction over the course of years, civic leaders pushed drugs into the limelight and exacerbated the problem through irresponsible policy. Someone recently told me that the persistent and anti-Constitutional crime wave that Rudy Giuliani ran in New York City was "worth it" because it transformed New York into a city more suited to his tastes. (And I emphasize it here: Tell that to the Dorismond and Diallou families, among others.)

    Remember that the nation's Golden Boy, Rudy Giuliani, has run the kind of operations examined in this topic. Remember that some people actually think it's okay, just as long as they're not the victims of law enforcement.

    Here's a countervalent proposition: Quite frankly, I think America needs an overhaul, and while I disagree with Bin Laden's methods, why should I be angry? The US needs to spend some time with its tail between its legs, so while I think it's a little rough to take down the towers, and while I'm sure to disagree with the toll of the next kick in the sac, maybe it will be worth it in the end. If the world lines up against us and puts us in our place ... well? We shouldn't abuse our 9/11 credibility, but that's no longer a problem since we have none left. Why the hell should I be angry with bin Laden?

    The method doesn't matter to some, as long as they see a certain result. So as a comparative proposition I wonder why I should be angry with Bin Laden? The US is hurting its own reputation so badly that we will, eventually, be called to answer by a more legitimate process than flaming towers.

    If, in the end, the United States and its People come to be a little more understanding, a little more humble, a little more responsible and--horror of horrors--perhaps even a little more compassionate in their dealings with the world, maybe I can look back on 9/11 and look at Bin Laden and shrug and say, "It was worth it."

    (And if that day genuinely comes, yes, I will stand before the families of the 9/11 victims and tell them to their faces. If that day genuinely comes.)

    All I want people to think about is the idea that if they license violence and impropriety, they license violence and impropriety. Sure, people can say what they want about "us" and "them" and such. That's their right. But I will laugh at the petty distinctions and always remember who I'm dealing with in those cases.

    Honestly? What good is it to go forth in the name of justice if "justice" looks like the injustices we protest? "Because we are doing it," does not suffice. "Because we have no other choice," is either an admission of failure or an outright lie.

    One of the reasons so many Americans seem numb to the stunning and naked abuse of the Constitution put forth by this administration and it's "Long Arm" of Justice is simply that we're conditioned by three decades of a Drug War that have become increasingly savage simply because there was a war afoot.

    When the defenders of the law break the law, they ought to be punished accordingly; I think the tendency to go easy on law enforcement is obscene. Violators of such a trust ought to be punished more severely for their transgressions. If the defenders of the law must break the law, it is time to change the law. If the law cannot be changed because of the Constitution, it is time to consider changing the Constitution. If public and political authority prevents the amending of the US Constitution, it's time for law enforcement to shut up and do its job. In the meantime, agents of law enforcement who violate the law ought to be punished severely.

    Seriously, though ... it's time to start considering the methods. Or else we have no justification for our anger at Osama bin Laden. All's fair in love and war, and that's why we call it terrorism: so we can say it's unfair.

    From Doonesbury: October, 1989 ... use the calendar and scroll on through the week.

    :m:,
    Tiassa

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  7. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    All is not fair in love and war. I am not allowed to kill the boyfriend of my ex-girlfriend whom I still love and I am not allowed to go into a contry and kill every single civilian.

    Sure we are flawed and we are working on that but please tell me who is less flawed. Just about every country in the world has similar offenses occur in it. I dont allways agree with what happens here but ours pale in comparison to what you will find elsewhere.

    If the police do something you think is wrong bring it up with internal affairs. They make their living hunting down such offenses.
     
  8. jps Valued Senior Member

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    No doubt. How nice for them that they happen to be able to afford such legal options.
    Many who this kind of thing happens to have no such options and must live with the damage as best they can.

    Much of the social democratic western world likely has nothing of the sort. In the UK the cops don't even carry guns let alone threatening people with assault rifles(which is not to say they don't commit their share of abuses).

    Um..right...y'see the problem with this is internal affairs has no business in matters of this sort because they are entirely legal until a court rules otherwise, just an honest mistake. What internal affairs does is go after individual cops who break the rules(i.e. smoking the pot they confisctated rather than turning it in to be destroyed)
     
  9. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    In this kind of case the lawyer is almost always paid a percentage of the damages that are awarded, usually something around 10%. You don't pay them anything if they don't win the case for you. If it's pretty obvious that the police (or whoever) behaved inappropriately and the case can probably be won easily, you won’t have any trouble finding a lawyer to work on commission.
     
  10. jps Valued Senior Member

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    1,872
    I don't know about that, but there definitely have been cases where people have had things like this done to them and never recieved reperations...maybe they didn't know they coudl get a lawyer on commission...but in any case, what of cases in which the police break into someones home on the tip that theres' a drug dealer there, and find only a drug user, but, having found a gram of weed their property destruction is justified and no judge would grant the people reperations?
    The penalty for drug posession is far less than the damage that can be done to onese home by police ransacking
     
  11. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    6,231
    If the police wreck your home searching it and don't find anything then you can certainly sue them. If they do find something illegal then you're pretty much out of luck. Hey, they shouldn't have been caught with drugs. Most people don't have a lot of sympathy for actual criminals.
     
  12. WasiGermany Banned Banned

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    does somebody knows the famous speech of Jello Biafra about exactly this topic ?
     
  13. aghart Registered Senior Member

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    At least the people involved live in a country where they have the right to redress
     
  14. Carnuth i dont Registered Senior Member

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    some should realize that the police(or most of them) are citizens with families. All they want to do is protect them and get paid. The main problems are the MEDIA and the (minority of) PROTESTORS. THe MEdIA for all there stupidity, FOXNEWS, no one seems to realize that crime is down but television coverage of violent crime is over 150-400+% ABOVE what it used to be. And some of the protestors piss me off when they organize "peaceful" protests and start throwing bottles and rocks at the cops. What do you expect? pretty much what everyone sees from the media are the pictures of cops harrassing kids and bludgening them but you dont see the rocks bouncing off the back of some cops head right? Im not saying EVERY protestor or even MOST protestors are at fault, because i myself participated in some of the ones in Los Angeles, particularly in Westwood where some kids in the crowd started throwing rocks and bottles and kicking cops so they got arrested. ANways, if the cops violate your rights, there are more lawyers in the US than in every country combined so i dont think you will have a problem getting your case served

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    Last edited: May 12, 2003
  15. Carnuth i dont Registered Senior Member

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    id also like to see the stats from '99 to 2003, i heard deaths in police hands were actually DOWN which negates the whole thread... i dont have any solid sources with me now but if i remember correctly...yeah =)
     
  16. spookz Banned Banned

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    Early on the morning of July 23, 1999, cops burst into homes all over this tiny town in the Texas panhandle. Forty-six people—a few whites and almost half the town's black adult population—were indicted for drug trafficking. Dozens of children became virtual orphans as their parents were hauled to jail. In the coming months, 19 people would be shipped to state prison, some with sentences of 20, 60, or even 99 years.

    http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0131/gonnerman.php

    http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/03/02/1046540066770.htm


    all have been released if i am not mistaken

    Consider Texas, where, under former Governor Bush, a regional narcotics task-force system evolved into a $200 million arrest machine. In mid-December, the ACLU of Texas released a report documenting a grim pattern of racial profiling and large-scale corruption among the drug task forces. Nationally, journalists have covered a few of these scandals — most notoriously in the town of Tulia, where 10 percent of the community’s African-American residents were rounded up on the word of a corrupt informant. But the new ACLU report makes it clear that Tulia is far from an exception: African-Americans make up 12 percent of Texas’ population yet count for 70 percent of the nonviolent drug offenders in the state criminal-justice system. The ACLU report documents 24 major Texas drug scandals involving agents’ falsifying of evidence, lying under oath and other corrupt behavior. “People have lost their jobs, families have been broken up, and children have been virtually orphaned as a result of the massive racial profiling and corrupt practices of the task forces,” says Graham Boyd, director of the national ACLU’s drug-litigation project, who has given the Texas task forces relentless scrutiny.

    The state of America’s war on drugs
     
  17. jps Valued Senior Member

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    Its very hard to win a case against the police.
    Activists who have been subject to police violence(and the violence at demonstrations is almost always started by the police) have an especially hard time.
    There are constantly lawsuits against police departments for their brutality, very few of them even get a serious hearing....right now the NYPD is being sued for their misconduct on the 2/15 demo in NYC, which was quite significant. We'll see if that goes anywhere. In cases where police misconduct or violence is not so extreme people often don't even file suits due to the small chance of success and the responsibilities that go with it.

    Carnuth,
    From what I've seen the media ALWAYS shows whatever footage they can of protestors breaking things or attacking police, the thing is its hard to get footage of this because it almost never happens. Whenever they show footage of the police attacking people their commentary is never critical of, and usually explains why it was "necessary"

    What are the exaxct numbers in the decline in deaths at police hands? I'm sure it doesn't approach 230%
     

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