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What's Behind the Riots? A Federal Police Force: "Everything else has been nationalized, so why not the police?" Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. And who could forget? Trayvon Martin. It’s no secret that the likes of Attorney General Eric Holder, his replacement Loretta Lynch, President Obama and Al Sharpton have been dwelling upon these cases, while others with similar dimensions and often more tragic circumstances remain ignored. Scores of members in Congress joined in the chorus as well. But why are they driving these cases at all? These are not altruistic players. What is their agenda? In the wake of the chaos of riots and the mass movement of protests taking over cities across the nation, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge. All the justified anger over police abuse isn’t brewing more justice, but more power for the federal government. Let’s rewind… Police abuse has become so epidemic that the streets are filling with protests against its most publicized cases. Yet, who gave police the tanks, weapons and military equipment of war? The Pentagon, under its surplus program. Who trained police to regard every individual as a potential terrorist in America? Homeland Security and the FBI issued the definitions, wrote the propaganda, put out the memos and conducted the training exercises. Who funded police to increase arrests and fill the jails with non-violent offenders? Washington and their federal grants, that’s who. It’s what paid off local police departments to do so. The Justice Department and Washington want more control over local police forces, and may be building a national police force as well. They are trying to change things, once again, through a popular groundswell and a series of civil rights lawsuits. The St. Louis Dispatch reported:
Godfather Politics made the case for this data reporting legislation as a means to an end – to use evidence of systematic racism in police departments to, in turn, justify federal reform. Ultimately, the U.S. could even see a national police force using the leverage of federal aid money to establish control. Is that the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders had?:
A National Police Force? Before that becomes a visible, oppressive uniformed SS force imposed across the country (perhaps it will someday), it will rear its ugly head from the inside-out, using more federal money to address the problem-reaction-solution at hand, using federal policy to establish federal control over police. The trend is already underway, and with dangerous consequences. Consider what has already happened under Clinton’s crime bill and Bush’s PATRIOT Act… President Clinton instituted a sweeping federal initiative to reform police, famously pledging to put an additional 100,000 police on the streets by 2000 through COPS, the Community Oriented Policing Services launched in 1994. In theory, it addressed some of the same problems that Obama, Holder and the Ferguson case are attempting to address. Following the 1991 Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, the Justice Department began to use “pattern or practice” lawsuits against police departments. Only a few short years later, the COPS program used federal dollars and the guise of “community policing” to grant huge “gifts” to thousands of police departments, and with it, strings attached. And with it, a backlash of the surface intentions of the program:
At best, the COPS program was a misguided solution to crime. As Slate pointed out, violent crime peaked in 1994, just when COPS was introduced, and murder was already falling by 1991:
But, of course, centralized power was the real agenda. The Heritage Foundation pointed out the unconstitutional concentration of federal power under the COPS program, seriously infringing upon the separation of powers framed in the Constitution:
Reuters just published a report warning of the “unintended consequences” of the Justice Department “fixing” what is wrong with Ferguson and the other cases:
While arguing that the federal government “can and should” influence changes in criminal justice policy, Reuters also points out the drastic damage that has already been done:
The federal government would indeed love to establish a viable national police force. The feds are now, with the left hand, scolding police for their shameful examples of excessive force and civil rights violations while, with the right hand, giving local departments new toys, “gift money” and ideology to regard average citizens as mortal enemies and potential terrorists. Some form of a national police is underway, and it doesn’t look pretty. In steps towards that end, the feds have drastically increased their “joint efforts” and “shared visions” with local and state police in the wake of 9/11 and the creation of Homeland Security as the overarching umbrella organization. Expensive and technological advanced Fusion Centers have been set up across the country to share information up and down the chains of command and across jurisdiction, allowing local, as well as private, police to use federal data not only to track criminals, but to profile individuals before they become suspects and without warrants – including political activists and community groups. More recently, the use of “sting ray” technology and other forms of extrajudicial cell phone data collection has been used controversially by local police and other entities – and these new toys have been given to departments by the FBI, under the Justice Department, with the condition of oversight and training by the feds. A Justice Department presentation on COPS identified how increasingly, the approximately 18,000 local police departments are entering into private-public partnerships with the more than 2 million private security/police forces and the 90,000 federal law enforcement officials in a “shared vision” that includes plenty of shared data and power.
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