The history of police militarization in the US in 12 minutes
While the issue of police militarization has become more and more pressing a public policy matter since 9/11, in the wake of billions of dollars in federal funding to state and local cops, it's not actually a new problem. The New York Times put together a pretty excellent video documentary on the history of this transformation.
DOJ censure local police departments, yet still give them military grade weapons:
A Pentagon program that distributes military surplus gear to local law enforcement allows even departments that the Justice Department has censured for civil rights violations to apply for and get lethal weaponry.
That lack of communication between two Cabinet agencies adds to questions about a program under review in the aftermath of the militarized police response to protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.
The Pentagon, which provides the free surplus military equipment, says its consultation with the DOJ will be looked at as the government reviews how to prevent high-powered weaponry from flowing to the untrustworthy.
It's hard to determine exactly how much tactical equipment was received by a single police department because the federal government releases only aggregate totals by county.
The Defense Department views the program, which has handed out more than $5.1 billion in military property since it started, primarily as a way to get rid of equipment it no longer needs. Equipment, much of it nontactical gear such as sleeping bags and filing cabinets, is provided first-come, first-served.
The DOJ has opened civil rights investigations into the practices of some 20 police departments in the past five years, with the Ferguson force the latest. The investigations sometimes end in negotiated settlements known as consent decrees that mandate reforms. Yet being flagged as problematic by Washington does not bar a police department from participating in the program.
"Given the fact that they're under a consent decree it would make sense that the Department of Defense and Department of Justice coordinate on any such requests, but that is currently not the state," said Jim Bueermann, who heads the nonprofit Police Foundation.
But to Peter Bibring, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, it should not get to that point.
"One arm of the federal government is restricting the departments based on a history of constitutional violations, and the other arm is feeding them heavy weapons. That's absurd," he said.
Blackwater-like private "security" contractors want to legalize private police in the U.S.
A report out of Mendocino, California admits that Blackwater-like private "security" contractors are now being used to "police pot." Mysterious soldiers repelled out of unmarked helicopters fully armed for war to raid legal medical cannabis gardens last month. They didn't identify themselves or present paperwork of any kind. They just destroyed the garden and left. Other witnesses claim this invading army is also "confiscating" product.
This is the ultimate "feeler" story in the unfolding Totalitarian Tip-Toe if I've ever seen one. A quirky local story of "mystery men" used to raise the public threshold of acceptable tyranny, a.k.a. legitimizing private-sector soldiers for law enforcement.
The war machine seems to be gauging how much terror they can inflict on peaceful Americans before they say WTF ( and, perhaps more importantly, to see if the public will allow this vast new market for war profiteers.
It should be a massive media story "private war profiteering at home to terrorize citizens fight crime". Helicopters, weapons of war, and tactical gear are expensive. Who's seeding these start-ups anyway?
The manipulation continued a day after this story was reported, when Alex Altman of TIME wrote "Californians Turn to Private Security to Police Pot Country" as if all the citizens of California have agreed to this type of policing. Subtle manipulation.
Over the summer, residents claimed men in military gear had been dropping onto private property from unmarked helicopters and cutting down the medicinal pot gardens of local residents. Local law enforcement have conducted helicopter raids in the area, but some worried the culprit this time was different: a private-security firm called Lear Asset Management.
In the wildlands of California’s pot country, the workings of law enforcement are hard to track, and the rules for growing pot are often contradictory. TIME magazine legitimizes Lear Asset Management and the practice of private policing with a matter-of-fact job description:
They are hired by large land owners to do the work of clearing trespass gardens from private property, and perform forest reclamation, sometimes funded by government grant. Deep in the woods, they cut down illegal pot plants and scrub the environmental footprint produced by the backwoods drug trade. They carry AR-15 rifles, lest they meet armed watchmen bent on defending their plots.
LEAR Asset Protection and Management are security contractors, just like the ones who work in Afghanistan, Iraq and other war zones. According to Paul Trouette, spokesman for the LEAR team on Saturday and president of the Mendocino County Blacktail Association, members of his crew do have experience in places like Baghdad and Tora Bora. Their skills encompass combat and interrogation as well as identifying and handling hazardous materials.
Law enforcement officers are supposed to identify themselves by name or badge number, provide a business card, or leave behind documentation when destroying a pot garden.
These men, he says, repeating the story he told over Labor Day weekend to the county sheriff and a meeting of 100 graying longhairs like him, had no badges. The only identification presented was one man pulling up a sleeve to show the words "POLICE" stenciled on a thermal top.
That was troubling. "This is unincorporated land," he says, rattling off DEA, U.S. Forest Service, and Mendocino County Sheriff's deputies as the local lawmen. "We've never had a quote-unquote policeman up here."
Saturday's effort was funded by part of a $78,000 grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the first of its kind devoted to cleanup of marijuana trespasses, said Paul Trouette, owner of LEAR, and president of the Blacktail Association. Trouette, also sits on DFW's Big Game Advisory Committee.
Currently, asset-forfeiture money divided among local law enforcement agencies does not prioritize picking up trash and hazardous materials. Budgets, like those of the state and federal agencies involved, make enforcement a priority, but not cleanup.
"Sometimes funded by government grant"? That's when "private security" becomes "law enforcement." This is the RED ALERT buried in this story. Our tax dollars are being used to fund private armies for large land owners.
Altman quotes official statistics about how successful Lear and law enforcement are in raiding marijuana farmers, measured in the "street value" of the forbidden crop seized at gunpoint, as if that is still acceptable behavior by society's peace keepers in the era of legal weed. But Altman just uses it as a segue into a broader "problem" of policing environmental vandalism on large stretches of open land, including "public" land.
More recently, the trespass grow sites have migrated from public land onto the vast plots owned by private citizens and timber companies. Some of them have hired Lear to deal with the problem. The company has run about nine missions across California’s pot country this year, with more planned this fall, Trouette says. And while the company’s special-ops aspect gets much of the attention, most of the work focuses on environmental reclamation.
The public is supposed to believe Lear is merely an environmental clean-up team doing community service who just so happens to have military special ops capability. How quaint. I didn't know litter maintenance required AR-15s. But who would be opposed protecting the environment? Smart marketing.
The group has also published a brochure showing Lear’s Asset operatives, many of them former law enforcement and military officials, in camouflage. The brochure also says it “works with” the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, and state wildlife officials, among others.
However, Trouette told TPM that his organization only shares “intelligence” with those agencies.
“We don’t contract with them,” he said. “We work with them collaboratively.”
TIME goes for the hard close to sell this tyranny by providing legal cover for these raids without warrants, before ending the article as a sponsored post for "regulation" of Lear's "flourishing" domestic mercenary business as the "best thing for locals."
Under the so-called “open fields doctrine” set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment does not protect undeveloped property from warrantless searches. As a result, police may be permitted to cut down private gardens without a warrant.
"In Laytonville, California, Wednesday, July 23 and Thursday July 24, a PMC (Private Military Company) made its way through the Woodman Canyon area in a blue and white helicopter. This helicopter had armed personnel dangling from a cable below. These men were not law enforcement. The helicopter was unmarked, and these men did not announce themselves and did not serve warrants. There was no sheriff incident reports filed. Instead, they lowered themselves into legal medical gardens with Proposition 215 doctors recommendations on the gates, and proceeded to cut down private citizens legal medical gardens." The full letter may be found in the Wednesday August 13 issue of the Ukiah Daily Journal.
There are aditionally some discrepancies in a few details between the letter, and what had been gathered by The Willits News, specifically as to the absolute 215 compliance of all the gardens. In describing the unusual nature of recent raids sources around Laytonville had commented on the fact that while water lines were cut, and plants cut down, supposedly nothing was hauled away, no warrants were served, no arrests made and no samples were taken.
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/09/blackwater-like-private-contractors.html
http://www.mendocinobeacon.com/ci_26208627/dealing-lasting-effects-trespass-grow