The Unmarked Federal Agents Occupying Washington, D.C
politico.com
politico.com
Doubly so when they're prison riot control officers who all look like they're clones of Byron Hadley, The Screw Everyone Hates from "Shawshank Redemption".
When a prison guard sees a crowd chanting protests, they are going to react very badly.
Get them out.
And get badges on the rest of them. Then get them out, too.
Consider that NYPD, for all of its faults, actually has the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Which provides citizens the ability to officially complain about bad behaviors of various cops.
However, review boards do not exist for all police forces. And many review boards have insufficient power to properly reprimand a specific cop who does a bad job.
We need a specific organization to police the police. FBI kinda-sorta does it (but not under this administration. Under Obama, the FBI was charged with investigating police brutality). Since the FBI's orders changes with the whims of the President, it is clear we need a long-lasting organization that provides oversight even when a Republican is in office.
That would require a constitutional amendment, right?
Its actually relatively easy to change the structure of the executive branch. An executive order would do, but each President can overturn executive orders as they get elected.
So it needs to be an Act of Congress if we want the organization to last between presidential terms. Of course, a future act of Congress could wipe it out, but that seems like a hard sell if we ensure that Americans remember the lessons from today's unrest.
What if the law says explicitly that an officer in uniform without a badge and name tag has no legal authority and can be presumed to be committing a felony?
The most important part of law, is law ENFORCEMENT. If you do not assign someone to enforce a law that is written, then it will be ignored.
Maybe have the top-level official be elected at a very-fine granularity, but with the power to enforce across locality lines? Like—elect at the county level, but can enforce anywhere in the State?
Frankly, the American people don't care enough to know their own President, Representative, Senator, Mayor, Governor, Sheriff, School Board, HOA committee members, county commission, and PTA board.
If anything, we need more power consolidated into fewer people. So that Americans know who to blame. In many cases, these "police brutality" issues are extremely local, caused by the local Sheriffs of each individual location. And yet, people don't know who to blame when these things happen.
There are too many positions, so officials can hide behind the confusion and avoid responsibility.
Ultimately anyone can arrest anyone comitting a felony. Lighting a habitable structure on fire, or causing great bodily harm are ethical reasons to use any force necessary.
But I would argue that Bureau of Prisons riot units may well be better equipped to handle civil unrest of this sort than most conventional police depts on the following grounds:
The US doesn't have much institutional experience dealing with rioters or massive protests of this nature. What little there is, is in the hands of local agencies, and hasn't necessarily spread to other departments. The closest thing to a law enforcement agency with significant crowd control experience is the Bureau of Prisons.
Your average beat cop is trained for day-to-day enforcement actions, and is accustomed to a certain level of respect or deference not typically granted to prison guards. They're also accustomed to significantly outnumbering the belligerent actors they encounter. The stress of operating in situations where you're significantly outnumbered by contemptuous and openly hostile people is more than likely alien to them.
Conventional police forces - to my knowledge - do not train riot control techniques with any regularity. Comparing livestreams of the Floyd protests with Greek and German crowd control operations, the American police tend to be less coordinated in their advances (more gaps in their lines, they tend to be spread out from one another, they respond less quickly in a coordinated manner), and are quicker to react to potentially hostile actions with violence. Though I'll admit that this could be a difference of crowd control philosophy, or an adaptation to America's wider streets but it does strike me as being more likely to result in unnecessary injury to protestors, and vulnerable to charges by rioters. I believe that the near ubiquitous misuse of rubber bullets by LEOs during the protests are evidence of this.
The Bureau of prisons riot control units may not be accustomed to the scale of the current protests and unrest, but I expect them to be better equipped to coordinate police actions, and operate on the front lines than somebody that writes tickets, and occasionally has to deal with Karen, or an angry junky.
I am guessing by your spelling that you are not American so maybe you are not familiar with American history or politics, but this statement could not be more wrong.
While I'm certain that there are any number of smaller contrapoints to this, especially in college towns with vivacious activist communities, I can't recall any situation where so many municipal LEOs have been so wrongfooted and outmanned in recent memory.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not aware of any widespread protests that are coordinated by activists AND the government.
A good example of how this is somewhat standardized among more professional organizers is the March For Our Lives planning Toolkit, wherein they propose having dedicated liasons to serve as intermediaries between the organizers, city, and police. [0]
The collaboration needn't necessarily be initiated by the organizers, however. It's just as, if not more likely that local government reaches out to event planners in order to assess any potential security needs.
Women's march: >_A spokeswoman for the city told Philadelphia magazine that officials had discussed security measures with the march’s organizers “prior to and during planning for the march, and organizers understood the public safety concerns and our responsibilities in ensuring a safe event” but confirmed that “permitting was not contingent on agreeing to these measures.”_[1]
More Recently:
>_"We do not tolerate these acts of protest. We celebrate these acts of protest," Hogsett said. "And just as with yesterday we will continue to work with event organizers to ensure they have a venue to deliver their nonviolent message without interference."_[2]
[0]https://everytown.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/March-For-O...
[1]https://www.phillymag.com/news/2018/01/19/womens-march-phila...
[2]https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/indianapolis/2020/...
Surely you're joking! Grab a history book. Now where would you like to start? I'd suggest you begin 1861 (or a little before) when US Americans went on a four-year mad spree to kill each other which they did in such huge numbers that the death toll tallied more than that of all other wars the US has fought in (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.).
(From my observation of the present troubles, it seems to me that many of the issues that caused the 1861-65 War Between the States still aren't resolved 155 years later.)
Crowd control - especially when that crowd is being adversarial - is its own art, separate from the typical functions of law-enforcement, and one rarely called upon. My point was that few LEOs have experienced real riots/unrest or regularly trained for that function, because it is such a rare occurence. Most of those who have are likely retired, and their successors largely operating on second-hand knowledge.
Paying attention by throwing Bureau of Prisons Riot Control officers at free, protesters is very clearly doing the exact opposite. Frankly, if anything, it vindicates the need for more and potentially more extreme protest.
At this point, 0eople need to be sitting down with lawmakers. Law enforcement needs to chill the he'll out, and clean house, and communities need to collect themselves, and get their composure restored.
You don't "handle" large scale protests/riots with the application of more thug. That's how you escalate it. You get people talking. If people are talking, you're getting things on the way to a peaceful resolution. For Christ, sake, the entire damn chain of events started because a bunch of cops ignored all protestations and pleadings from the public around them.
Can we stop proving these people have a bloody point please?
I guess you've grown up in a pretty privileged low/no-crime place. Go to any high crime neighbourhood. The cops could be arresting someone for murder & rape and lots of neighbours and community folk will gather round screaming at cops to not arrest them amongst other nonsense.
Focusing on the task at hand and ignoring public protestations would be self learned by a cop within a couple months on the job even if it was not in their training.
I fear that is the exact point of putting them there in the first place.
Well, I doubt they have better options avail. I doubt active soldiers trained to kill as fast as possible would be any better. Let's be honest, they cannot let major buildings and institutions in DC get overrun...
If someone thinks that's a healthy part of a democracy, I'd be real curious about your reasoning.
>Police who refuse to identify themselves and carry no markings used against an administration's political opponents
The point to needing to identify police is that without that rule and the accountability that comes with it the "police" become just another gang on the streets. None of that is relevant to investigatory law enforcement.
Obviously both kinds of anonymity can be abused, but only one has an easy and obvious solution.
Seriously: no one sane thinks that riot cops should be operating in street clothes and refusing to identify themselves. This whole subthread is a ridiculous digression.
When bandits become indistinguishable from cops, cops become indistinguishable from bandits.
Enforcers should should be clearly identifiable.
Knowing what happened, I think it's clearly better for all of us that the park was held by hippies with spray cans.
So he obviously thinks the guns were the differentiator and not the privilege enjoyed by being a bunch of old white men with the support of the authorities.
A number of cops were shot at during these recent protest. Our mayor was discussing this very fact this morning. Turn out, all that body armor is highly effective at stopping small arms fire. (There was no elaboration on who did the shooting though, so I guess it could have been friendly fire)
Image: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It doesn't need to. Just as it doesn't need to have a provision for yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. But such actions will have consequences.
Congress has the authority "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;". Assembling for the purpose of violence is by definition an insurrection. So if the First Amendment said nothing of peaceably assembling, we can assume it is meant so, otherwise the Constitution would say nothing of insurrections.
Your interpretation is not compelling (as well as not relevant, due to the presence of the term).
When there is a question, entertained by a court and an emduring legal precedent, ipso facto there was a legal question. An assumption about what needs to be enumerated to exist, is the doctrine of strict constructionism.
This is such a mentally lazy platitude. All arming the population has done is incentivize them to use their arms against their fellow countrymen.
of course it does. bombs or tanks dont help you hold a city - it is singly people with firearms to kill the other people with firearms.
its a different story if youre talking total war, but theres basically no scenario where american military would decimate american cities.
> This is such a mentally lazy platitude
interesting opinion considering all you have to do is look at the last two decades of failed intervention in the middle east.
EDIT: additionally, many places in the middle east were occupied against their will by the terrorist forces we were there to fight. thats not the same as a citizen militia resisting occupation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIS4C7ym5YM
If there is to be an alternative to the distant and aloof police state, it will have to be in the form of attentive and caring locals possessing sufficient enforcement power. Their look may vary based on local demographics, but I think that's okay as long as they are accountable to their neighbors.
When the NRA and their allies advocate for an armed citizenry, they emphatically don’t mean “our political enemies”
Any law abiding citizen should have whatever arms they want. I don’t care what their politics is.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nra-california-open-carry-...
Claiming that something that happened in 1967 is the current position of an organization on record opposing that sort of thing for at least the last 40 years that I'm aware of is also pretty silly.
Claiming that a political organization that is mostly concerned with how pretty Wayne's suits are and how nice his mistress' apartment in Fairfax is reflects modern gun owners' opinions is again -- pretty silly.
The NRA is a Fudd gunner's organization, they're an anachronism of the past, they're being abandoned in droves by anybody born since the 1960s, and quite frankly I don't give a shit what they think about anything -- and I especially don't care what they may have thought in 1967.
The only problem is that international law doesn't govern how a country conducts activities on their own people. But it reflects a widespread consensus nonetheless.
Note: I'm not accusing the police of terrorism -- that would be pretty massively inflammatory and not my intent -- but simply giving examples to support a widespread discomfort with using non-uniformed forces.
This is not problematic on the face of it -- police are expected to use non-lethal tactics whenever possible, and the laws of war are hugely biased towards killing rather injuring because overwhelming your opponent with casualties is considered inhumane in war.
Do you really think there aren't an infinite number of heavily armed spooks ready to materialize from the ground under Washington, D.C. on a moment's notice? Do you really the think the agencies they work for all officially exist? Do you think they haven't been there since at least Reagan?
There were fires near the White House. The leviathan is starting to feel a little bit threatened. Now if these guys are actually mixing it up with protestors I will be deeply worried. But while they are just a small presence on the sidelines, standing at at attention in their G-Man sunglasses and coiled earpieces, I will be reassured that the deep state functions exactly as I expect it to.
Hollywood has no need to make shit up.
I'd also add that failure to do so should result in a $1,000 penalty, half of which should go as a $500 reward to anybody who reports the case (photo would suffice as proof). Officers should have their whereabouts tracked via there phones for accountability purposes, which could be used to verify such reports or identify officers.
How do you enforce the penalty if the perpetrator is anonymous? Fine their management instead? That doesn't work when the executive branch is above the law.
Finally, we'd be at the point 90ies Warez kids thought we were at. "If he wears no badge number on his back, he can't be a cop, otherwise nothing can be used in court. We're safe, boys".
If an officer who isn’t armed kneels on someone’s neck and kills them, they then wouldn’t be identifiable.
I wonder if they are exempt from punishment or oversight if they screw up (which I presume will happen).
It doesn't matter what laws they break because it's pretty clear that the executive branch has no intent of abiding by any laws; they won't do so unless forced and clearly no one has the power to force them to do so.
I have no idea how this will end, but I'm fairly sure it won't involve justice for the people.
> What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to protect blacks against white protestors. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for instance, deputized officers from the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons to work as U.S. marshals and secure the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect James Meredith as he enrolled at the school after desegregation. Similarly, the Border Patrol once watched over the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.
Laws are worth zero if the law enforcers ignore them with impunity - a lesson familiar from Caribbean and African banana republics.
I think it's a lesson America is currently learning...
It might not be the justice people want, but taking away people's money is the most effective means of instituting change in the USA. It's entirely the reason that company's try to eliminate our right to sue them.
Basically it sounds like her understanding is that they are only required to present ID when they take a police action? But I don't understand why blocking a street would not be a police action.
DC Metro attempting to arrest Bureau of Prisons employees when they fail to identify sounds like a complete mess.
Why don't security guards guard hospitals and normal investigators work in watchdogs? Why are they all police-style groups? Is there some historical reason?
Unlike non-federal hospital, this is due to jurisdiction. VHA Hospitals are federal land so local police departments wouldnt have any jurisdiction, and the federal government typically looks at its responsibility to enforce laws within the land it owns. Also, some VHA facilities are on large campuses in more rural/less urban areas which effects the size of the police forces there.
OTOH, I think that comments such as 'What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to protect blacks against white protesters,' 'D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser … finds herself in the odd position of not controlling the police forces patrolling her own city' and 'ou read that right: The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police was considered too liberal for the GOP' stoke fire rather than illuminate. The first sentence is unsurprising: the police are not on the streets of DC because of protesters but because of rioters; they are there to keep the peace. The second comment, too, is unsurprising: the federal district … belongs to the federal government. It is no more surprising that the mayor of DC is subordinate to the federal government than it is that the mayor of Chicago is subordinate to the state of Illinois. Nor is the third comment particularly helpful: I imagine that the concern with the nominee could very well be that a former police chief is too authoritarian to helm an agency which has been accused of some pretty serious mis-steps since the Bush years.
I'm not taking any position here on the goodness of any of this, just noting that the author is not making the most of his opportunity to discuss substantive issues and make reasoned arguments.
Wow! I really applied myself to looking for a motivation for regulation but failed. Any hints?
Edit: I take it all back. It turns out that you only have to read 21 CFR §150.160(b)(2) to see it, and it turns out that that law is just unreasonably prescriptivist.
>(2) The following combinations of fruit ingredients may be used:
>(i) Any combination of two, three, four, or five of such fruits in which the weight of each is not less than one-fifth of the weight of the combination; except that the weight of pineapple may be not less than one-tenth of the weight of the combination.
It's against the law to make a jam with more than 5 fruits because the law only explicitly allows jams with up to 5 fruits. Bizarre.
Which is partly backed up by 21 CFR § 150.160 (e)(1):
(e)
>(1) The name of each preserve or jam for which a definition and standard of identity is prescribed by this section is as follows:...
>(2) The following combinations of fruit ingredients may be used:
>(i) Any combination of such fruits in which the weight of each is not less than one-fifth of the weight of the combination, or in which the weight of each part is no less than half the weight of any other part; except that the weight of pineapple may be not less than one-tenth of the weight of the combination.
I'm not quite sure what the right legal wording is for or such that you can comply with whichever half works for you is, but that would both allow for everything the existing law allows and allow for arbitrary numbers of fruit without requiring that they be mixed in exactly equal ratios.
The relationship is not the same, so this doesn't seem like a "reasoned" argument either. Perhaps it is also time to reconsider how that relationship is structured - residents of DC should probably have a say over whether the military is brought into their city and whether they have to pay to have them quartered.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I found this story interesting. I didn't know that we had all of these disparate police forces roaming around. I haven't visited DC and they aren't really featured in the media. Seeing some of these various forces show up at protests, and having them behave unexpectedly when asked to identify themselves, has attracted my curiosity. I'm glad that someone took the time to write about them.
Note that I'm not prepared to blindly trust Politico's opinions about these policing forces, but opinions are part of what makes this interesting to read.
>What to Submit
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I found the story intellectually stimulating, and thought others might too.
60 posts of "Extremely Famous Person Dies in Accident" is boring. But learning that said person had a little-know passion for bird conservation or something is interesting.
If one substitutes one's original uniform for the enemy's (or another) to pretend to be other than what one is then the Geneva protocols don't apply—in essence, you're shot rather than be taken prisoner or war.
What these guys are doing is similar. When a State resorts to such action/deception then it's hard to see how the rule of law can apply. Essentially, anarchy has broken out.
From an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that the US is now so polarized that it's almost become ungovernable.
Heaven help the the rest of the free world let alone the poor unfortunate law-abiding US citizens who cannot help but be caught up in this damned mess.
The law of war doesn’t work the way you claim. At all. The Geneva convention specifically addresses non uniformed combatants and people wearing the wrong uniform, and does not permit them to be shot rather than taken prisoner.