I’m sure this scene plays out in cities and towns across America. It’s frightening and terrifying for citizens who go through it and something I don’t quite get is why law enforcement types don’t get that yet……or is it they simply don’t care? In today’s America however, where everyone and every circumstance is enough to justify even the most strident militant response from ‘officers of the law’, it might be a good thing that municipalities are cash starved and considering layoffs of their law enforcement personnel. I for one am a firm believer that people are responsible for their own protection and police’s role in society should be one of monitoring, reporting and assisting citizens when needed.
Police bust in to a house that had a teenaged girl and her grandmother, looking for someone who had used the internet to issue threats against the town’s police department. In none of the reports that I read about this tragedy was there any link to the threats made besides a mention that they were personal in nature and that was enough to make the police department embark on a course of terror against its citizenry. Unfortunately for the victims of this story, their internet connection is on an unsecured router that anyone can use to receive and post information. But what’s regrettable for the citizens of Evansville, Indiana is their police department personalized insults and uncivil language that was on the internet to intimidate and infringe on the rights of the citizens of that city. In other words speech that some may see anonymous and even protected was used by the police department of Evansville to justify physically intruding upon and even potentially harming people who had no relationship with that speech at all. Instead of carefully determining who were the residents of the house, police decided based on the accusation that threats were made to raid the house in a manner befitting any shock and awe operation run during the Iraq war. Later on, realizing the error of their ways, police went to a second suspect’s house in a much more appropriate manner…..knocking on the door, which possibly yielded more promising results. Check out the video below
There was a lot of news about the New York City police department spying on Muslims in the NYC area and now I understand what motivated the police department. Like others in government who have reaped immense financial rewards from America’s war on terror, WOT, the NYPD has too! With money funded by the federal government they have acquired a state of the art helicopter they say will help them in the terror fight. They claim that they are becoming increasingly more dependent on helicopters, a very high ticket item for fighting terror…and in order to justify such huge expenditures they ,NYPD , have to conjure up a threat sufficient enough to get governments, local, state and federal, as well as tax payers to want to appropriate the funds necessary. That bogeyman for the NYPD has been the tri-state area Muslims.
The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the elite Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Police talked to local authorities about professors 480 kilometres away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.
This helicopter is supposed to be able to detect radiation and any other kind of threat from the sky…..and I’m sure the mantra will be if it makes us secure it’s worth the investment, but the question to ask is at what cost to American citizens do we want to get our hands on this type of equipment? How far in demonizing one group of Americans, lying about them and their existence among us all the while stretching the limits of time worn freedoms and privileges do we want to go to justify getting our hands on this? The point has been made with alarming alacrity there is no threat to America by American Muslims; in fact they are the least threatening group to inhabit our shores, yet time and time again imagery of an Islamic terrorist threat is used and its end result is usually the investment of large sums of money to those who sound this exaggerated threat, much like the communism scare of 50 years ago which resulted in a lot of empty bomb shelters and a cold war atmosphere that saw America spend money and fight wars against a virtually impotent and even non-existing enemy. The sons of the leaders of America’s cold war with communism are now leading the war against Muslims with almost the same empty results. Is it no wonder if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it?
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