MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Philando Castile’

Maybe We Should Stop Giving the Minneapolis Police Military Equipment | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on May 30, 2020

What will it take to end the militarization of police?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/maybe-we-should-stop-giving-the-minneapolis-police-military-equipment/

The death of George Floyd reminds us how easy it is to kill and why law enforcement and the armed forces must remain separate.

A protester holds a sign, showing an image from the video of George Floyd’s arrest, outside the Third Precinct Police Station on May 27, 2020 in Minneapolis,Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday demonstrates how easy it is to end a life. Floyd wasn’t shot with a firearm, as was Philando Castile during a traffic stop four years ago. He wasn’t even tossed in the back of a police van, as was Freddie Gray before that. The weapon was a simple knee to the neck. The video of his arrest is chilling precisely because it’s casual, quotidian almost, just another day on the job for his badge-bearing assailants, a stark contrast to the victim gasping on the ground.

Floyd’s killing has touched off yet another of that most depressing of sequences: a video emerges showing a black man being brutalized by police; his community protests peacefully; those demonstrations are hijacked by rioters and professional anarchists; Molotov cocktails fly; flames erupt. An act of harm by the authorities is followed by a city-wide act of self-harm.

Afterwards the question is always: now what do we do? And certainly there are plenty of good policy reforms that can help restore trust between law enforcement and local communities. Donald Trump in 2018 signed into law the First Step Act, which ordered changes to the prison and sentencing systems. In the meantime, though, how about we start with some low-hanging fruit? How about we stop arming police departments with military-grade equipment?

Philip V. McHarris writes at the Washington Post:

Such protests have become common in a country where more than 1,000 people annually are killed by police, with black people three times as likely as whites to be the victims. Also common is what happened soon after demonstrators gathered to protest Floyd’s death: Police in riot gear shot tear gas canisters into the crowds and fired stun grenades and “nonlethal projectiles” at demonstrators, injuring many. It was stunningly easy to point to the same department’s gentle treatment weeks ago against white anti-lockdown protesters while those protesting against police violence were met with militarized violence.

But this too should not surprise us. Police departments have come to resemble military units, contributing to deadly violence disproportionately against black Americans. While many policies related to policing and mass incarceration happen at the local level, the militarization of police has been promulgated by federal policies.

At issue is the Pentagon’s so-called 1033 program, which allows police to obtain military surplus equipment from the Defense Department. Among the gear that’s been transferred over the years are grenade launchers, armored troop carriers, M16 rifles, and helicopters. And while it’s difficult to find data on the Minneapolis PD specifically, the Star Tribune reported six years ago that police in Minnesota had received about $25 million in defense hardware. (It’s worth pointing out that not all of the military-grade equipment used by law enforcement comes from the Pentagon—some of it is privately purchased by the departments themselves.)

The result has been the creeping militarization of our police. This trend made national headlines in 2014 after cops in Ferguson, Missouri, used armored vehicles to suppress riots sparked by the death of Michael Brown. That next year, President Obama signed an executive order that stopped the Pentagon from transferring some hardware to police departments. This forced Ferguson to send back, among other things, two Humvee armored trucks.

Alas, President Trump reversed Obama’s order in 2017, allowing Pentagon equipment to proliferate once again. So now we have another episode of police brutality, this one courtesy of a simple knee to the neck. But that only raises the question: if police are human like the rest of us, and if all it takes for them to kill is a little bodily force, shouldn’t we refrain from upping the ante with, say, grenades? Shouldn’t the balance between guardian and ward be evener than that, lest it instead become a balance between bully and victim? Isn’t an armored truck a barrier to the kind of involved community policing we should be encouraging? And can anyone seriously say that the presence of military equipment in Ferguson all those years ago did more good than harm?

The looting and burning that took place in Minneapolis last night was senseless, no question. But the solution is not to turn the police into an occupying army. Such powers of last resort force are better left to an impermanent force like the National Guard, which Minneapolis’s mayor said he was calling in.

After Reconstruction, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which provided that it “shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.” That law has plenty of loopholes and blurs. It doesn’t cover the Navy or Marines (though other statutes do); it also doesn’t restrain the lawful deployment of the National Guard. Yet its spirit is worth preserving. The military and the police should be kept distinct, one for overseas combat, the other for domestic enforcement. To give the latter the destructive potential of the former is to vault over a very important line.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Racial Revenge? – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

https://www.takimag.com/article/racial-revenge/

Last Friday, the day after two whites in Georgia were arrested in the vastly publicized killing of the black jogger/prowler Ahmaud Arbery, a young black gunman murdered two octogenarian whites, Paul and Lidia Marino, while they were visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery in Delaware. After a six-hour firefight with the police, the shooter, a 29-year-old black man, was dead—whether at police hands or his own remains unknown.

In contrast to Arbery’s killing, this second interracial killing case has gotten virtually zero national media attention through Tuesday morning, even though it’s fairly spectacular in scale and quite curious in motive. For example, an eyewitness speculated that the killer appeared to have brought extra ammunition for his planned shoot-out to the death with the police.

The cops don’t have an explanation for the killer’s actions yet. It wasn’t a robbery. It doesn’t sound like a contract killing. (I can’t rule that out, but I did check if the victims, a retired lithographer and a housewife, were close relatives of any mafioso of the same surname, but found zero connections.) It could be some kind of personal beef, but nobody has found a connection between the killer and the killed at this point.

No confession note, social media, or interviews with the shooter’s family have yet emerged to explain his motivations. Although, to be frank, the press doesn’t seem to be all that motivated to get to the bottom of this seemingly random slaughter. There isn’t even much talk about what kind of weapon the killer used, in contrast to the gun porn after similar mass shootings.

Imagine that the circumstances were reversed and if on Friday a young white man had hunted down an elderly black couple visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery.

“What happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer?”

The national media would be in full cry over this racist atrocity. President Trump would attend the funeral. The prestige press would demand that whatever web sources of information and opinion the gunman had followed should be, First Amendment or not, permanently exterminated.

But what happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer? For example, a search of the New York Times archives finds 104 articles mentioning the name of Ahmaud Arbery so far just in the month of May. That’s even more saturation coverage than the Times normally devotes to late-breaking developments in the Emmett Till case.

The possibility that the cemetery killer was inspired to shoot some random whites by the enormous media hoopla over the still-ambiguous death of Arbery is not something that the prestige press is rushing to look into. We are never supposed to consider whether The Establishment getting all hyped up over the shooting of blacks by whites (or by nonwhites in the case of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile) might inspire other blacks to shoot whites.

In contrast, the shooting by a homely white in Georgia of handsome young black criminal Ahmaud Arbery immediately after Arbery chased him down and punched him in the head while grappling for his gun has been promoted into an enormous story by the prestige press, because, after all, when has Black Twitter ever led the media astray? If you can’t trust Black Twitter for a disinterested, objective evaluation of a complex, fast-happening event, who can you trust?

I mean besides in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray cases… Sure, the media falling mindlessly for the various Black Lives Matter fiascos was central to the national homicide rate leaping a record 24.8% from 2014 to 2016 and perhaps getting Trump elected president. But it’s racist to know those facts.

It turns out that there is much security video of Arbery, who was arrested for bringing a gun to a high school basketball game and for stealing a TV from Walmart, engaged in what looks like casing the joint for a burglary.

But the subsequent Delaware shooting is of no interest to the press. The concept that some blacks might take seriously press incitements about how they should hate whites simply doesn’t exist. The text string “Black Lives Matter terrorism” has almost never appeared in the news media, even though there have been multiple high-profile assassinations carried out by BLM supporters.

For example, after the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014, a Black Lives Matter advocate murdered two NYPD officers in retribution for the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown of Ferguson, as the killer explained on Instagram.

The most lurid Black Lives Matter terrorist attack occurred on July 8, 2016, soon after President Obama’s speech from Poland denouncing police bias against blacks following the shootings of Castile and Alton Sterling. Obama cited numerous tendentious statistics to encourage blacks to feel that their problems are the fault of white people, the way Obama always blamed his speeding tickets on racist cops. The ex-president, who is not really a math person, summed up:

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

Now, these are facts.

Sure, but what fraction of crimes do they commit? The Obama Administration’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2011 that from 1980 to 2008, blacks alone made up 52 percent of homicide offenders, despite being only about 13 percent of the population.

Not surprisingly, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast soon shot fourteen cops in Dallas, murdering five. A week later, three more cops were slain in Baton Rouge.

This may have been a key turning point in the history of the last decade because it helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by demonstrating that the Democrats were encouraging cop killers.

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

If your Party controls the media, you can have all these unfortunate events memory-holed, so that you never get confronted with tiresome questions about just how much blood you have on your hands in the murders of elders visiting their son’s grave.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Crack Down on ‘Money Laundering’ and ‘ISIS’ – More Government and Killer Cops

Posted by M. C. on June 27, 2017

https://lewrockwell.com/2017/06/daisy-luther/congress-crack-money-laundering-isis/

bill introduced in Congress on May 25th would make it illegal to keep your money outside of the bank unless you file paperwork explaining where you’re keeping it.

This includes cash, Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, prepaid mobile phones, retail gift vouchers, or even electronic coupons.

Always remember that registration is the first step toward confiscation. This is true whether it’s guns or whether it’s money.

Loathsome Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be thrilled with the bill, as it also greatly expands the government’s reach in Civil Asset Forfeiture (theft without due process). Sessions is a huge proponent of Civil Asset Forfeiture, which to me negates anything positive he could ever bring to any position of power.

So, let’s assume this bill passes. If you don’t fill out their forms and you get caught, they can take everything you own. Without a trial or any due process of law…

Speaking of war, there is a dangerous trend in police training that could be responsible for the death of innocent men like Philando Castile.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »