Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.
The goal won’t be to arrest troubled people but to get them help before there’s violence, Bradshaw said. As a side benefit, law enforcement will have needed information to keep a close eye on things.
“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’ ”
I totally support this, so long as the somebody is the mayor. But they better have some serious staffing if they seriously want to get a call about everyone who hates the government. By my reckoning, that’s about 100 million Americans these days.
The euphemistically named “Child Protective Services” doesn’t protect children, it is one of the most dangerous lines of attack in the government’s ongoing war on American liberties:
In the Land of the Free recently, a California couple had their child kidnapped by the state. At gunpoint.
It all started in mid-April when Anna and Alex Nikolayev took their 5-month old son Sammy to the hospital in Sacramento to be treated for flu symptoms. The parents didn’t particularly care for the treatment that their son was receiving. Doctors were pumping him full of antibiotics and soon began talking about performing surgery.
Anna and Alex argued with the doctors and said that they were going to get a second opinion; they took the baby and went to another hospital where another physician deemed it perfectly safe for the child to return home with his parents without the need for surgery.
The next day, with the family resting comfortably at home, the police showed up with Child Protective Services.
Alex, the father, went outside to talk to them where he was thrown to the ground by police. Officers then relieved him of his house keys and proceeded to let themselves into the house with hands on their pistols.
Then, still with their hands on their pistols, they told the mother “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist and don’t fight me…” The child was then ripped from his mother’s arms and placed into state custody, where he remained for a week.
This sort of abuse shouldn’t even be possible, and yet I know of equally egregious offenses that have occurred on the basis of homeschooling and even spanking. Like The War on Drugs, CPS is one of those evils where the cure is much worse than the disease. It is far better for the occasional unfortunate child to be abused by his parents than for every single child, parent, and guardian in the country to be privy to this sort of abuse by bureaucrats.
CPS not only doesn’t reduce the amount of child abuse that takes place, it actually increases it because children in the foster care system are much more likely to be abused than are children who are not in it. It can’t even be justified by its own purported rationale for existence. And as for those police, this just underlines the fact that they are the bad guys, every bit as evil and far less accountable than the everyday criminals.
The police in America are not the “thin blue line” defending civilization from savagery, as they would have you believe, they are now little more than the enforcement arm of the authoritarian state. The short-term occupation of Boston is, from their perspective, the ideal state of affairs towards which we should all aspire. Yes, there are the occasional righteous throwbacks, but this doesn’t change the observable fact that they have become the American Ofstapo, the not-even-remotely secret state police.
Ron Paul is absolutely right to criticize the horrific abuse of American civil liberties in the pursuit of men who killed fewer people than died sitting on toilets the day of the Boston Marathon:
Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.
These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.
What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.
Paul’s criticism is strong, but it could be stronger. The fact is that President Obama should be ordering a federal investigation of the violations of the Constitution by the city and state police, as well as any federal agencies involved. It is depressing to think that we might have had a President Paul responding to this unprecedented attack on the American people by the police forces of the State if only the Republican Party had not insisted that Mitt Romney was “electable”.
Moreover, as Karl Denninger points out, not only were the Boston police not heroic, they were both incompetent and dishonest about their incompetency:
The cops unconstitutionally locked down a 20-block area. This was not a case of “hot pursuit” where a valid exception exists to the 4th Amendment — they had no idea where the bad guy was, other than the general area where they saw him last. That does not give license for what was done in Watertown.
But then to add to that they were both incompetent in that they didn’t search a street inside the perimeter, they lied about the fact that the boat was inside the perimeter and in addition the cops fired without having acquired a target and without having taken fire themselves when they shot up the boat.
The defendant had no weapon; he clearly did not shoot at the cops first.
In addition remember that the cops claimed the boat was outside of the perimeter. That, it turns out, was a lie.
The fact that the police are always full of praise for themselves after an incident such as the Boston Marathon doesn’t mean that they actually merit the praise. In most cases, a closer look will reveal that they are attempting to rewrite history and conceal their customary bumbling.
A former justice of the peace is reportedly set to be charged with three murders, including a former Texas district attorney and assistant DA, after he was arrested on Saturday. Eric Williams, 46, has been arrested by authorities investigating the murders of District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, last month – and the fatal shooting of ADA Mark Hasse in late January.
Keep in mind, these are the very government agents that the progressive, gun-grabbing Left want to entrust with a legal monopoly on gun violence.
If it weren’t for the dead victims of “law enforcement”. The Cleveland police make the arson-happy LAPD look downright competent by comparison:
A November car chase ended in a “full blown-out” firefight, with glass and bullets flying, according to Cleveland police officers who described for investigators the chaotic scene at the end of the deadly 25-minute pursuit.
But when the smoky haze — caused by rapid fire of nearly 140 bullets in less than 30 seconds — dissipated, it soon became clear that more than a dozen officers had been firing at one another across a middle school parking lot in East Cleveland. Soon after the shooting stopped, one officer rushed to check the two occupants of the 1979 Chevrolet Malibu that the cadre of Cleveland cruisers had followed into the lot.
Officer Wilfredo Diaz, a former city EMS worker, had fired the first shots at the Malibu after bailing out of his car. He felt for passenger Malissa Williams’ pulse. There wasn’t one.
Diaz moved Williams’ leg slightly to look for a gun. Again, there wasn’t one. Dead next to Williams in the driver’s seat was Timothy Russell, 43. No officers were injured.
My favorite part is the way they were so desperate to find a gun in order to try to pin the blame on the corpses that they sent divers into the river, never mind that a gun in the river couldn’t have been involved in the parking lot shootout.
A former police officer emails his perspective on the end of the Dorner manhunt:
Observations/Questions
I’m not sure of the circumstances concerning what the media said as to why the truck had burned, but why would Dorner have burned out his own truck along with survival gear, etc. knowing he would be on foot in snow territory? He wasn’t worried about concealing evidence of a crime.
When my wife and I saw the first pictures of his truck days ago, she said…. “his body will be found in a burned out building.”
I was watching media coverage of what was called a “raid” on Dorner’s mothers house. I don’t recall the timing, but my first thought was..”they should have been there days ago.” During the raid, the camera angle was from directly in front of the house. The “team” that was moving in on the house was one of those you see that are wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and tennis shoes as opposed to the “black ops” with helmets and shields and battering rams…..
They ALL walked up to the front of the house… the front door…. My thought was…. they KNEW this guy wasn’t in there. The other cops are shooting at ladies in trucks and these guys walk up to the front door of Dorner’s mothers house??? Go figure.
We are entertaining the notion that they got him earlier (drone practice?) and the rest was for show.
People do strange things when they are on the run. Foolish and insensible things that in retrospect look downright crazy. And Dorner might have been marginally more intelligent than the average LAPD member, which quite clearly isn’t saying much. And knowing that Dorner isn’t at his mother’s house shouldn’t be confused with knowing where he was or his health status.
I very much doubt they got him earlier and were simply going through the motions for public consumption. This is my opinion: The police bumbled around until Dorner’s carelessness caught up with him. Having already been outshot by him twice, and with the police-only body count standing 3-0 in Dorner’s favor, (remember that the daughter’s fiance was a cop), they weren’t about to take any chances with him. So, they chased away the media and set fire to the building, hoping that he’d either come out and get shot or shoot himself before the flames got too hot.
That is, of course, assuming that Dorner isn’t much more clever than he appears to be and the body in the building is a black man of similar build that he took hostage. But there is no reason to believe that to be the case, unless LAPD police suddenly start dropping dead in a few months.
I’m a little surprised Dorner tried to go to the wilderness when he could have simply stocked a hiding place somewhere in the city, then emerged only at night to hunt police.
Dorner was engaged in a shootout with federal authorities in the Big Bear area Tuesday, a law enforcement source told The Times. The shooting occurred after Dorner burglarized a home, tied up a couple and stole their car, the source said.
Unless, of course, it is merely an Asian woman who was delivering a newspaper…. Apparently all that police training didn’t do him much good.
It is clear that due process no longer applies in the United States, at least not under emergency circumstances such as “war” and “the police are really, really scared of the bad, bad mans”:
It’s official: The drone war has come home to America. Wanted fugitive Christopher Dorner, the homicidal former cop currently at war with the LAPD, has become the first known human target for airborne drones on U.S. soil. Their use was confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed the government’s fear that Dorner will make a dash for the Mexican border. The fugitive has already killed three people, according to police, and has a $1 million bounty on his head.
That certainly didn’t take long. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was warning this was bound to happen sooner or later and the self-appointed defenders of the State were dismissing the notion as the usual declinist alarmism. But this news should certainly harden the opposition to gun control; no one with even one-tenth of a brain is going to be willing to be disarmed by a government that is not only claiming a right of assassination without due process, but is actively making use of drones to hunt, and presumably kill, Americans in the United States.
On the plus side, it looks as if we’re getting a real-time lesson in how effective the fully mobilized and equipped police are when waging war against the people. We will have to hope that the drone operators have trigger fingers that are less twitchy than the LAPD officers; otherwise we should not be surprised if LL Cool J and half of USC’s defensive line are killed by Hellfire missiles before the end of the week.
I don’t think many people are actually condoning the fact that this guy killed innocent people.
They’re just glad that somebody is taking a violent stand against the police/government and are living vicariously through him.
Our government is so fucked up and out of control, and everyone knows it, that something like this has a bit of a Robin Hood element to it. People generally feel powerless to do anything about government overreach, so when a guy like this stands up and says, “Enough! Fuck you. I’m not taking anymore!” that resonates with the frustrations of a lot of people.
That people are willing to overlook the fact that this guy has killed innocent people is a stinging indictment of how low the police and the government stand in the eyes of citizens. A large percentage of public opinion is sympathetic to a (seemingly) crazed murderer over the government. That’s pretty goddamned pathetic and makes our government and the LAPD look like shit, but deservedly so, because they’ve earned that contempt through years of corruption, abuse of power and trampling on the rights of citizens.
This is true. I noticed how much things had changed when I started hearing conservative white business executives in their sixties talking about the police in a manner all but indistinguishable from NWA. Something is wrong, something is deeply and structurally wrong, when the mere fact of being involved in the law enforcement system at any level is enough to engender contempt in the eyes of those who are upstanding, law-abiding citizens.
Forget the cops for the moment. When you think of a judge or a district attorney, what is your first thought? Pillar of the community or corrupt tool of an evil and unjust system?
Another thing that strikes me. It seems as if every drama on television about either doctors or police. I wonder if the constant repetition of the heroic portrayal of the police saving the day and blowing away the perp, who is usually a white men, has not only programmed the target audiences to believe that white men are evil, but has also helped convince older white men to see police as the enemy.
This is how the nation descends into a “dirty, unconventional civil war” folks. It happens when the so-called “law enforcement” people do what a handful of NOLA cops did after Katrina, where they shot an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.
But those cops were (eventually) brought up on charges and tried for their felonies.
There is utterly no indication that the LAPD officers involved in this will face any sanction whatsoever.
It is exactly this rabbit hole that I have repeatedly warned of — when the so-called “law enforcers” are free to break the law without punishment, whether it be through “gun-walking”, money laundering or blatantly assaulting and killing innocent people (as, you remember, occurred in Detroit) there comes a point where the people will not only refuse to assist but will turn on the government and its visible agents and edifices along with the infrastructure that it, and we all, depend.
Heads up folks — one guy provoked this “response” among the so-called “public servants” that believe they’re entitled not only to fraudulently-promised and extorted pensions but that they’re also entitled to shoot citizens without consequence.
This is a loud, clear warning that exactly the nightmare scenario that I have repeatedly cautioned against and urged the people and our government to stand up and put a stop to has become uncomfortably close to realization.
If you haven’t figured out that these so-called “law enforcement officers” will herd you into a gas chamber or just shoot you on the spot given this incident you’re not very bright.
And if you are a law enforcement officer and you do not stand with these thugs in LA and their acts you had damned well better stand up and differentiate yourself in a loud, clear and unwavering voice, lest you get lumped in with them whether you deserve it or not.
Today, I fear not our so-called “law enforcement” agencies but rather our nation’s future and the dark abyss we stand on the edge of, peering downward, without apparent recognition of exactly how close we are to an irretrievable descent into the dark.
The fact that Karl’s rhetorical approach is impassioned doesn’t mean he isn’t correct. The time is approaching when everyone, in and out of uniform, is going to have to take a stand. If you’re not Team Blue, are you going to give aid and comfort to the police when they are lashing out blindly at “civilians” like wounded animals? If you are a member of Team Blue, are you going to turn a blind eye to the criminal acts of your fellow officers?
The discussion for most of us has been completely hypothetical to date. But barring an unexpected economic recovery, the issue is likely to become less and less hypothetical as time goes on. We in the West have been hugely fortunate to be spared, for our entire lives to date, the historical state which most of humanity has endured. But our good fortune increasingly appears to be running out and each of us is eventually going to have to decide who we are and with whom we stand.