Tag: police state

New York wants to ban the sharing of violent crime videos online

Leaders in the state of New York are calling for the criminalization of sharing videos of violent crime.

While the proposals are seemingly ignorant of the First Amendment, and were spurred by a mass shooting, they also could be used to stop people from sharing videos of crimes that take place in the city.

Overall indexed crime in New York City increased in July 2022 by 30.5% compared with July 2021 and, after a recent uptick in crime in New York over the last two years, social media users are sharing videos of violent crime to draw attention to a reversing trend.

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Cities Sidestep Property Rights With This One Trick

The world needs creative problem solvers. But small-business owner Jeremy Sark was not impressed when city officials in Mauldin, S.C. used out-of-the-box thinking to sidestep the state constitution and jeopardize his livelihood.

People have a right to use their property in safe, reasonable ways. And if the government wants to revoke that freedom, it must meet two conditions: It must ensure that the interference serves a public use, and it must provide just compensation before destroying someone’s business. Yet Mauldin plans to shut down Sark’s U-Haul rental franchise, which opened in 2013, without honoring either constitutional protection.

Instead of compensating Sark through eminent domain or following other normal procedures, the city simply declared his business illegal with a gimmick called “amortization.” The scheme is basically retroactive zoning.

Normally, regulators establish rules in advance and grandfather in safe, reasonable, preexisting enterprises. But amortization flips the process upside down. It allows cities to adopt rules after the fact, and then pick and choose which businesses can stay open.

Typically, enterprises marked for elimination get a grace period to prepare for the setback. Governments claim the delayed enforcement counts as compensation. But even in slow-motion, the hit does permanent damage once it arrives.

Entrepreneurs who launch and grow legitimate businesses suddenly find themselves out of bounds. They follow the rules, but the rules change. It’s like moving the goalposts after a kicker attempts a field goal. Or redefining words after a debater sits down. Or altering documents after a notary public stamps them.

One day a business is legal, and the next day it is not. And all the owner can do is watch the clock wind down.

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FBI Raids Star ABC News Producer’s Home

At a minute before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

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Don’t Believe the People Blaming Crime on Defunded Police

Police budgets are up in cities across America. It’s a tale as old as time that politicians benefit by whipping up crime panic and accusing opponents of being soft on the issue. And so it goes in 2022, with candidates—mostly conservatives, but also some Democrats trying to position themselves as centrists—insisting that 1) crime is rising, and 2) it’s the fault of criminal justice reform policies. Both claims are highly suspect (see this recent Roundup for more on crime data), and especially so the flavor of blame that suggests this mythical crime wave is the fault of liberals and progressives “defunding the police.”

Yes, “defund the police” became a popular rallying cry in the summer of 2020, as people all over the country took to the streets to protest police brutality. And, yes, it can still be heard as a refrain in some activist circles. But even as some mainstream politicians briefly flirted with this rhetoric, it’s never been a serious policy proposal, nor one that many (if any) leaders—local or national—have acted upon.

President Joe Biden—long a friend of the police and proponent of dubious crime panic policies—recently proposed in his Safer America Plan some $37 billion in federal funding for cops. “President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget requests a fully paid-for new investment of approximately $35 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention – in addition to the President’s $2 billion discretionary request for these same programs,” noted the White House.

Cities and counties, too, have been raising police budgets. ABC News “examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019.”

The ABC News analysis included most major big and mid-size metropolitan areas, including Albuquerque, Anchorage, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boise, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, Omaha, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Wichita, among others.

Of the 109 areas examined, 49 raised law enforcement funding by more than 10 percent and 91 raised it by at least 2 percent. Only 8 places cut funding to law enforcement by more than 2 percent.

Nonetheless, politicians, pundits, and police persist in spreading the politically convenient myth that law enforcement agencies have been massively defunded. “Despite what the public record shows, an analysis of broadcast transcripts reveals that candidates, law enforcement leaders and television hosts discussed the impact of ‘defunding the police’ more than 10,000 times the last two years and the mentions aren’t subsiding this campaign season, ABC found.

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OAKLAND COPS HOPE TO ARM ROBOTS WITH LETHAL SHOTGUNS

IN A SERIES of little noted Zoom meetings this fall, the city of Oakland, California, grappled with a question whose consequences could shape the future of American policing: Should cops be able to kill people with shotgun-armed robots?

The back-and-forth between the Oakland Police Department and a civilian oversight body concluded with the police relinquishing their push for official language that would have allowed them to kill humans with robots under certain circumstances. It was a concession to the civilian committee, which pushed to bar arming robots with firearms — but a concession only for the time being.

The department said it will continue to pursue lethal option. When asked whether the the Oakland Police Department will continue to advocate for language that would allow killer robots under certain emergency circumstances, Lt. Omar Daza-Quiroz, who represented the department in discussions over the authorized robot use policy, told The Intercept, “Yes, we are looking into that and doing more research at this time.”

The controversy began at the September 21 meeting of an Oakland Police Commission subcommittee, a civilian oversight council addressing what rules should govern the use of the city’s arsenal of military-grade police equipment. According to California state law, police must seek approval from a local governing body, like a city council, to determine permissible uses of military equipment or weapons like stun grenades and drones. Much of the September meeting focused on the staples of modern American policing, with the commissioners debating the permissible uses of flash-bang grenades, tear gas, and other now-standard equipment with representatives from the Oakland Police Department.

Roughly two hours into the meeting, however, the conversation moved on to the Oakland police’s stable of robots and their accessories. One such accessory is the gun-shaped “percussion actuated nonelectric disruptor,” a favorite tool of bomb squads at home and at war. The PAN disruptor affixes to a robot and directs an explosive force — typically a blank shotgun shell or pressurized water — at suspected bombs while human operators remain at a safe distance. Picture a shotgun barrel secured to an 800-pound Roomba on tank treads.

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Democrat Lawyer: ACLU ‘Defended Terrorists, Nazis, And They Would Not Touch Covid Issues’

Democrat lawyer Scott Street quit his law firm to legally defend from Joe Biden’s federal vaccine mandate Americans’ right to make their own medical decisions, he told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview for Fox Nation. Medical freedom cases “probably made up two-thirds of my practice last year,” The Federalist contributor and California resident explained.

“I couldn’t sit by and see people get away with this,” he said, “but it was tough, no question.”

Street “couldn’t believe anyone was going along with” lockdown mandates, “because I thought it was blatantly illegal,” the civil rights lawyer told Carlson.

The longtime Democrat strategist and campaign staffer told Carlson he’d worked with liberal legal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel for years and couldn’t believe they refrained from contesting what he saw as obvious mass infringements of Americans’ civil liberties after Covid-19 reached the United States.

“These are groups that defended terrorists after 9/11, Nazis, they’ve defended everything, and they would not touch any of these Covid issues,” Street said.

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All of Us Are in Danger When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition

Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.

Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.

Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”

It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.

It’s been almost a decade since the government tried to make a seditious conspiracy charge stick—against a small Christian militia accused of plotting to kill a police officer and attack attendees at his funeral in order to start a civil war—and it lost the case.

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Central Bank Digital Currencies Would Let Governments Control What People Spend Money On: IMF Official

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could potentially allow a government to control what people spend their hard-earned cash on.

Speaking at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting on Oct. 15, Deputy Managing Director Bo Li said that a CBDC could improve “financial inclusion” through programmability.

“A CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program, to create smart contracts, to allow targeted policy functions,” Li explained. “For example, welfare payments, for example, consumption coupons, for example, food stamps.”

“By programming CBDC, that money can be precisely targeted for what kind of people can own [CBDC] and for what kind of use this money can be utilized, for example for food.”

Li, who stepped into the role of deputy managing director at the IMF on Aug. 23, 2021, added that by allowing the government to precisely target what people need, this will enable said government to “improve financial inclusion.”

However, his comments were quick to garner a reaction from experts, including Nick Anthony, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.

Anthony wrote on Twitter that the IMF executive’s comments revealed how a CBDC would “allow the government to precisely control what people can and cannot spend their money on.”

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Woman who escapes month-long captivity says other Black women killed by abductor

A 22-year-old Black woman in Missouri who escaped after a white man abducted, tortured and held her captive for weeks in a basement has said several other Black women were killed by her captor – less than a month after police dismissed community concerns about a serial killer as “completely unfounded”.

The woman, who has not been named, escaped on 7 October after about a month in captivity, still wearing a metal collar locked with a padlock that authorities had to remove.

She told Kansas City police that 39-year-old Timothy M Haslett had imprisoned her in a basement room in Excelsior Springs – a city just north-east of Kansas City – where he whipped and raped her repeatedly. She escaped while Haslett was dropping his child off at school, and she sought help from neighbours whom she told that her friends “did not make it out” and were killed by Haslett.

Around the time she went missing, several prominent community leaders raised concerns about the disappearance of multiple Black women and girls. Last month, the Kansas City Defender, a nonprofit newsroom, published a video of Bishop Tony Caldwell saying that he had received information that the missing women had all been kidnapped from Prospect Avenue in Kansas City.

The police dismissed the concerns outright as “completely unfounded”, saying in a statement that “there is no basis to support this rumor”.

In fact the survivor, who is referred to as TJ in court documents, said Haslett picked her up on Prospect Avenue in early September.

Haslett, a scruffy looking white man with dark brown hair and a greying beard, was detained and last week pleaded not guilty to charges including rape, kidnap and assault.

Excelsior Springs police are now investigating the possibility that at least two more women were similarly victimized.

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