Tag: police militarization

Federal Judge Restricts Use of Tear Gas, Other Anti-Riot Measures in Chicago

A federal judge has restricted the federal government’s use of tear gas and other types of anti-riot measures in Chicago.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said during a hearing that government witnesses’ claims of violence at protests in Chicago were not credible, citing several occasions where she said video recordings contradicted immigration officials’ accounts about what happened.

“The government would have people believe instead that the Chicagoland area is in a visehold of violence, ransacked by rioters, and attacked by agitators,” she said. “That simply is untrue.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a statement from a spokesperson on the ruling described protesters in the city as “rioters, gangbangers and terrorists” who pose a threat to federal agents.

“Despite these real dangers, our law enforcement shows incredible restraint in exhausting all options before force is escalated,” the DHS spokesperson said, noting that the government would appeal the decision.

The spokesperson described the injunction as “an extreme act by an activist judge that risks the lives and livelihoods of law enforcement officers.”

Ellis has seen at least one of her earlier rulings related to immigration enforcement in the city overruled, and this latest ruling could face similar challenges if the judge is found to have overstepped her authority by an appellate court. If it isn’t overturned in a higher court, Ellis’s ruling will stay in effect as proceedings related to this issue move forward.

The court hearing comes amid escalating showdowns between protestors opposed to the administration’s immigration enforcement operations and federal agents in America’s third-largest city.

For weeks, protestors and civil liberties groups have alleged that tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have become increasingly aggressive in the city.

Ellis agreed with these allegations in her ruling, finding that the government’s use of force in several cases wasn’t merited by the circumstances on the ground.

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Militarized Law Enforcement Reaches a New Level under Trump

Law enforcement in the United States has exhibited an exceptional degree of harshness, if not outright brutality, during the initial months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.  A majority of the most flagrant examples have involved enforcement actions by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division.  Numerous stories have appeared in the news media about ICE agents appearing at workplaces and schools to apprehend individuals suspected of being in the United States illegally. Suspects have been approached by agents dressed in civilian clothes and refusing to identify themselves or present badges.  They have dragged suspects off the street and held them in captivity for hours or in some cases, even days.  The result is an ugly image that is becoming more and more ingrained with the American public.  It is an image of U.S. law enforcement personnel engaging in arbitrary, police-state tactics typical of dictatorships, not a country that has ostentatiously prided itself on respect for civil liberties and the rule of law.  

Such alarming conduct is neither new, however, nor confined to ICE.  That agency’s especially odious recent behavior is the culmination of a long-developing trend of blurring the distinction between domestic law enforcement tactics and those of foreign warfare conducted in the name of national defense.  Such alarming militarization of law enforcement has been underway for decades, although it has reached a new peak under Trump. 

Nasty immigration raids are hardly unprecedented.  ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), frequently used heavy-handed enforcement tactics that smacked of intimidation.  During the late 1990s, a friend and colleague of mine (a native born U.S. citizen) was stopped at a checkpoint on a highway in Arizona leading northward from the U.S. border with Mexico. He was detained for over an hour as the INS sought to determine if he was an American citizen.  Such episodes (and worse) became far more frequent after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the transformation of INS into a more powerful agency, ICE, in 2003.  President Barack Obama’s supporters hailed him as the “deporter-in-chief” because of the record number of undocumented immigrants apprehended and expelled from the United States during his presidency.

The alarming militarization of law enforcement began long before then, however.  A key development took place during Ronald Reagan’s administration when local police forces gained much greater access to military hardware. That aspect became even more important in 1990 with the expansion of the Pentagon’s 1033 program.  It enabled local and state police departments to obtain even sophisticated, heavy-duty weaponry and equipment at bargain basement prices—or sometimes for free.  The new federal largesse led to an acquisition frenzy.  

With Washington’s subsidies, the number of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) programs ballooned throughout the United States.  Increasingly, such units were established not just in major cities with very high violent crime rates, but also in generally peaceful medium-sized and small cities. The number of SWAT raids also soared from about 3,000 in 1980, to a whopping 50,000 in 2014. That total has continued to climb.

SWAT personnel did not look like the public relations image of the local police as “Officer Friendly,” and were not armed in that fashion.  Instead, they became indistinguishable from heavily armed combat personnel in the Army or Marines.  Worse, SWAT units often behaved like hardened combat personnel, treating suspects and sometimes even bystanders as the equivalent of enemy troops.  That tendency became even more pronounced when police units in American towns and cities underwent training from foreign police or military establishments, including Israel’s notoriously heavy-handed security forces.  

The “SWAT disease” has gradually infected other law enforcement entities, federal, state, and local.  ICE has proven especially susceptible.  That agency’s behavior epitomizes the growing mentality in the U.S. legal system of regarding ordinary civilians not as people to be protected and served, but as potential enemies to be punished and neutralized.

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Moment Border Patrol use huge explosion to blast their way into house with woman and two children

A California mother-of-two was left in tears after Border Patrol agents used a massive explosion to blow down her front door during a terrifying early-morning raid caught on camera.

The shocking scene unfolded in Huntington Park, Los Angeles, where Jenny Ramirez and her two young children, ages one and six, were jolted awake by a deafening blast before a dozen armed agents in full tactical gear stormed the home.

Surveillance footage obtained by NBC Los Angeles shows agents planting an explosive device on the door before detonating it – shattering a window and sending shockwaves through the quiet neighborhood.

Moments later, around a dozen federal agents charged toward the house with weapons drawn.

Inside were Ramirez, her boyfriend Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, and their two children. Speaking through tears, Ramirez told NBC it was one of the loudest explosions she’d ever heard.

‘I told them, ‘You guys didn’t have to do this, you scared by son, my baby,’ Ramirez told NBC. 

Ramirez said she was given no warning about the raid and insisted that everyone in the home is a U.S. citizen.

According to Ramirez, the agents said they were searching for her boyfriend, who she claims was recently involved in an accidental collision with a truck carrying federal officers.

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Department Of Homeland Security Q-9 Reaper Drones Are Orbiting Over Los Angeles

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been flying its Predator B drones, also known by their military designation as MQ-9 Reapers, over Los Angeles as part of the U.S. government’s response to the unrest there, the agency confirmed to us on Wednesday. The flights are in response to protests that escalated to violence on multiple occasions, following a massive operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last Friday.

Persistent aerial surveillance like this has long been controversial, with civil rights advocates saying it violates the right to privacy and undermines the Constitution. At the same time, the fact that a drone is doing it largely evokes a uniquely upsetting response. While using the Reapers over urban locales is rare, it’s not unprecedented, and manned platforms do this kind of work every day across the country.

CBP’s Air and Marine Operations (AMO) “MQ-9 Predators are supporting our federal law enforcement partners in the Greater Los Angeles area, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with aerial support of their operations,” spokesman John Mennell told us Wednesday afternoon in response to our query earlier this week. “Additionally, they are providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers. AMO is not engaged in the surveillance of First Amendment activities.”

CBP had been mum about the issue for days, even though open-source reporting on social media had already presented compelling evidence of the drones’ orbits. On June 9, user @Aeroscout on X posted air traffic control (ATC) audio stating that two “Q-9s” – call signs TROY 703 and TROY 701, had passed each other in airspace over Yuma, Arizona, as one was replacing the other over Los Angeles. @Aeroscout had previously posted ATC audio of TROY 701 checking in on Los Angeles Center Sector 09. A short time later, Alaska Flight 1020 was given a traffic advisory for “drone traffic.”

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The National Guard and the Militarization of D.C.

Fox News recently published a story entitled “Defense Secretary Austin overruled National Guard chief on keeping troops at the Capitol: memo.” To many readers, this may have appeared to be a sensationalized article throwing fuel on the embers of an already charred military issue in our nation’s capital. But the story captures a troubling divide between the new defense secretary and the chief of the National Guard Bureau over the appropriate use of the Guard. Yet, amid this break in ranks, the story suggests a much larger and more concerning dilemma. And it is what the Founding Fathers feared most.

The article references a defense memo or coordination sheet normally used to “concur” or “non-concur” on issues within the Defense Department. In this instance, a policy memo from the defense secretary’s office requested an “Extension of NG [National Guard] support to U.S. Capitol Police” with an additional 2,280 guardsmen to support the U.S. Capitol Police security detail beyond March 12. However, there are several issues with the request.

From my experience in the Pentagon, this type of appeal is not easily granted. It usually requires a stringent justifying rationale and reason that explains the request’s urgency. Each submission is officially petitioned through a formal request-for-assistance and sent to the DoD’s executive secretary, where it is staffed for coordination — an arduous process involving rigorous approval criteria that can take weeks.

Here is where the problem begins.

The latest Capitol Police request to extend Guard support was coordinated in two days and failed to give a convincing case for approval. Laying out its rationale, the Capitol Police referenced the Department of Homeland Security’s National Terrorism Advisory System, particularly the Jan.  27, 2021, threat bulletin, as the chief reason for the augmented security support.

The bulletin summary describes a “heightened threat environment” using words like “believes” or “suggests” that “ideologically-motivated violent extremists [domestic violent extremists] …could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence” – a somewhat anemic threat assessment to justify the continued military presence in our Capitol.

Also, federal statutes and defense directives come into play when the military is used in direct support of law enforcement, which is the case here. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, and other federal laws limit the powers of the government to use U.S. troops to “execute the laws,” including “search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity” — a concerning legal quandary.

What is more, the defense department’s support of civil authority’s directive provides ruling guidance for any assistance in missions normally carried out by civil authorities. The defense regulation has six approval criteria to “examine” and “assess” the need for support. If we use the regulation’s six criteria — legality, lethality, risk, cost, appropriateness, and readiness — an argument can be made that any one of them would disqualify the Capitol Police application.

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‘Cop City’ Leads US Buildup in Police-Training Bases

After years of intense opposition that left one protester riddled by police bullets, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City is set to begin operations in the next few weeks. The city’s police chief hosted a tour of the campus last week and training programs are expected to start during the first quarter of 2025.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, as it is officially known, is an 85-acre campus with a price tag of at least $110 million and another $1.7 million recently approved by Atlanta’s City Council for its security. 

Most infamously, it includes a mock city, for which the site gained its Cop City nickname, for “real-world” training that includes a convenience store, two-story house, apartment and commercial-style building. 

There is also a military vet training center, leadership institute,  lab to develop and test technological innovations, training field, 12-acre emergency vehicle operations course.

It also comes with burn towers, a shooting range, horse stalls, police-dog kennels and training grounds, and 40 acres of horse pasture, according to a video published by the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Foundation’s website. 

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A Gift America Can’t Return: The Police State Is America’s New Crime Boss 

The American police state has become America’s new crime boss.

Thirty years after then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, its legacy of mass incarceration, police militarization, and over-criminalization continues to haunt us.

It has become the gift that America can’t seem to return.

We are now suffering the blowback from the triple threats of the Crime Bill: police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later.

Too often, that “triple threat” also manifests itself in deadly traffic stops, the use of excessive force against unarmed individuals, and welfare checks turned fatal.

The Crime Bill fueled the rise of the police state by pouring funding into law enforcement agencies, particularly for military-grade weaponry and the expansion of police forces. It also laid the groundwork for mass incarceration by incentivizing the construction of more prisons and enacting harsh “three strikes” laws that mandated lengthy sentences for repeat offenders.

Most critically, the Crime Bill led to the explosive growth of SWAT teams across the country.

It’s estimated that more than 80,000 SWAT raids are carried out every year. That translates to over 200 every single day in the U.S.

Among the tens of thousands of raids that leave in their wake the wreckage of lives, homes and trust in the nation’s so-called peacekeepers, some are so egregious as to cut through the apathy and desensitization that has settled over the nation regarding police violence.

Such tragedies are not isolated incidents.

They are the direct result of a system built on policies like the 1994 Crime Bill.

The unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

These warrior cops, who have been trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public and believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens, are increasingly outnumbering the good cops, who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace.

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IRS Expands Its Armed Wing To Highest Level In Nearly A Decade

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) division, the armed enforcement wing of the IRS tasked with combating financial crimes, has expanded its workforce by nearly 11 percent, bringing staffing levels to their highest in nearly a decade and boosting the division’s conviction rate to 90 percent, according to the IRS-CI’s latest annual report.

As Tom Ozimek reports, via The Epoch Times, the fiscal year 2024 report, released on Dec. 5, outlines a year of intensified enforcement for the IRS-CI, which serves as the tax agency’s law enforcement branch that focuses on tax violations that cross into criminal territory.

The report shows that the division achieved several firsts over the past year, including the first sentencing for syndicated conservation easement schemes, the first cryptocurrency tax fraud indictment, and a record-setting financial settlement with Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, for anti-money laundering violations.

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Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

It’s happening already.

Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

What exactly is going on?

Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

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LAPD expo shows latest in less-than-lethal police robots, devices

The Los Angeles Police Department hosted an expo on Thursday that demonstrated the future of non-lethal policing.

Some 70 vendors came to the police academy to demonstrate robots, advanced Tasers and other devices that can de-escalate dangerous situations without the use of deadly force.

The robots were available in two-legged humanoid versions as well as four-legged canine simulators.

“What this individual has the capability of doing is they have full range of motion,” said Michael Plaskin, whose company Alchera X develops police robots. “They can go ahead and communicate. They have the technology to raise their hands and walk around and be able to deter and detract from another individual.”

The LAPD and other law enforcement agencies were shopping around here seeing what’s available. The Police Commission has to approve major LAPD equipment purchases.

The LAPD is looking into less than lethal equipment to reduce the number of fatal officer-involved shootings

“We’re having more and more incidents with people suffering from mental illness,” said LAPD Capt. Christopher Zine. “Also people that are addicted to drugs and alcohol. So using effective less-lethal options gets us to effectively de-escalate the situation. And that’s our goal. We’ve been de-escalating for as long as I can remember. And we’re gonna continue to do so.”

One of the less lethal options on display was the latest in Taser guns. The Taser 10 carries up to 10 cartridges.

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