Is Shoplifting A Crime?

To hear Atlanta's Top Cop, maybe not so much. Or like cops everywhere it really isn't worth the time and effort. Emphasis on time. And this defective Blue Gene is also found right here in the daVille where our top cop doesn't feel he can make enough money enforcing some laws, so, well, those laws might just as well not even be on the books. Except when he wants to enforce them.

While Dunwoody does not have nearly the similarities to Buckhead, ground zero for ATL's crime wave, that Dunwoody Poser's would have you believe, there are some. Dunwoody has a major mall, not Lenox plus Phipps but a significant shoe shopping and dining destination nonetheless. And we have what the AJC refer to as "well-heeled" folk thereabouts. Think: Manhattan Condos. There is even a gas station, a popular pit stop for car jacking.

Should we be worried about a wave of shoplifting and car jacking descending on our slice of heaven? Probably not. See, the Dunwoody PD is not going to waste time schlepping perps down to Decatur. Unlike the ATL this isn't because they'll not make the arrest but because DPD has a "take no prisoners" shoot first policy. Make an offensive left turn? Bang. Making the fool outside a bookstore? Bang-bang. Fleeing another jurisdiction and even thinking about crossing into daVille? Boom! While this may be news to you, rest assured, the hoodlums know what they're up against in daVille.

Trump's Military

After the Ferguson shooting Obama took a break from funneling military equipment to local yokel police, a policy Trump is expected to reverse before his first tweet from the oval office. In anticipation of a renewed opportunity to abandon serving as a community police force in favor of joining a local army of Dukakis-like posers Dunwoody intends to ante up for a mobile SWAT command center. Not to worry, the Dunwoody taxpayer share is only $42K hardly putting a dent in the City's recent tax hike and now you know what they needed that money for.

Dunwoody was an early trendsetter in police shooting citizens so it is little surprise that their ambition extends beyond onsey-twosey open field plinking. Now that Dunwoody is a joint task force with the other li'l cities aspiring to re-create Milton County maybe they can get all their military regalia  together for our parade on the 4th. With this new command center, everybody's bearcats and maybe a few of Trump's MRAP's we can put on an inspirational display the likes of which are not seen outside of Tiananmen Square. Given the city has delegated neighborhood protection to neighbors you may find yourself inspired to get a Georgia Weapons Carry License. While you can.

Lying In Your Own Bed

The rhetoric emanating from police chiefs near and far is heating up of late and comes across as something of a knee-jerk reaction to the Black Lives Matter campaign. It is a classic case of "pound the table" because your argument is so full of holes you cannot "pound the case." And if people were not actually dying out there the back and forth would almost seem like a school yard argument. "Cops are out there shooting people!" "Oh, yeah, well cops are getting shot too!" Tragic. Cops are in the line of danger and they do get killed. But the inconvenient truth is the number of cops killed on the job has declined, precipitously of late, whilst the other side is seemingly unbounded.  Facts have a way of deflating rhetoric.

We are also hearing from these top cops how "good officers are leaving the profession." Initially this comes as a thinly veiled threat. "You think it is bad now, if you don't shut up it is only going to get worse." But underpinning this statement is the fact that police chiefs know they have good cops and by implication are knowingly retaining not-so-good cops else they'd just have a smaller force.

At the same time we seem to have a never ending stream of folks shot by cops in circumstances that simply cannot pass the reasonable man test. Even in the wild west shooting someone in the back was pretty much a slam dunk hanging offense. Until video surfaced that was not so much the case in North Charleston. Nowadays when it is a service weapon that is fired the blue wall comes up and it is a clean kill. Some will even brag about their marksmanship after killing a woman they've pinned down in a car as if they were some dentist taking a wild beast. Sadly some seem more outraged at the latter than the former.

And we've yet to hear a coherent explanation of officer shootings of drivers. How does it make sense to draw your weapon, drop the safety, take aim and fire at and kill an oncoming driver only to have to jump out of the path of what is now a completely uncontrolled vehicle? Wouldn't it make more sense to cut to the chase and get out of the SUV's path rather than subject bystanders and other occupants of the vehicle to your marksmanship? Deemed a clean kill nonetheless.

Normally the Defense Of All Things Police Contingency would trot out the "bad actor" explanation. But they can't. At least not in the Dunwoody case as we would certainly get rid of a bad actor wouldn't we? And beyond Dunwoody there have been too many incidents over too great a span of time and geography to blame this on a few bad apples or a couple of mismanaged departments. This is systemic. It is nationwide.

And it has been coming for some time.

It started when police departments became profit centers. Wielding firearms for pay is the very essence of mercenary and has no place in a civil society. Some would argue it has no place at all. They started with excessive ticketing then added fine increases and were emboldened by the lack of pushback from our elected officials, their bosses. A system of property confiscation without due process before and damn little after blew the lid off any concept of revenue caps. If it was out there it was theirs for the taking with no one to stop them. It is no wonder some officers think the badge places them above laws that bind the general public because apparently it does.

Should there ever be a slip-up, say getting caught on camera whilst planting evidence, we see police and prosecutors circling the wagons to protect their own, until irrefutable evidence surfaces that exposes the now-standard-procedure police-prosecutorial conspiracy. No matter how blatant or egregious the offense they see only a "thin blue line" separating police from increasingly uncivil civilians.

And then there's that.

Just when did we, the protected and served, become "civilians" and if we're civilians, then what are they? Make no mistake, that rhetoric drives a wedge between the public and the armed forces patrolling our streets. This is no thin blue line.

It seems like we became civilians around the time they armored up. First they started, in all their regalia and assault weapons, to SWAT at us. They continued their paramilitary expansion with tank-like armored vehicles. No doubt drones are next.

Then, police chiefs, at least in this area, decided a special kind of training was needed for their departments. The kind of training that is best found in a place like Israel which is under constant siege by governments and militants sworn to wiping them and their country from the face of the earth. Pretty much sounds like Dunwoody Village, don'tchathink? What could possibly be wrong with training a metro Atlanta suburban force how to treat the general public like they are Hezbollah? Given this, how can any police chief be so removed from reality as to think this would NOT engender public suspicion?

It would be easy to say "They made their beds. Now they have to lie in them." It would also be dismissive and deflective. We have allowed our politicians, police chiefs and their high ranking police staff to create an explosive situation just one spark away from blowing up our lives. The have hollowed out our forces with poorly trained and improperly deployed SWAT ninjas at the bottom and pumped up police potentates at the top. They have been left to their own devices, which has proven dangerous and when supervised by our current crop of elected officials they have been misguided and misdirected.

This fish has rotted at the head. It is time to remove many top ranking police officials and replace the rest. We need aggressive de-militarization. Where there are bad actors they must go. We need community integrated policing with more indians and fewer chiefs. And we need to be prepared to pay for it because the average officer out there doing the right job the right way is disgracefully under-compensated. 

At The Other End Of The Barrel

Since the recent episodes of Cops Gone Commando the world, and by that we mean politicians, have focused an increased but insufficient amount of attention on the para-military "police" force they have created across the country. Naturally this forced the commanders of the Commando Cops to retaliate.

This includes some of our local Andy's and Barney's.

A neighboring city has taken up the "we're in an arms race" mantra. This harks back to the 1997 North Hollywood shootout where cops faced long gun and machine gun fire with .38 calibre handguns and the occasional shotgun. The official response seems to have been "I want a machine gun! Everybody else has one!" Of course this has a rather undesirable knock-on effect. Especially if you're of the belief that only the chosen ones should own guns and normal, free people in the U.S are certainly not "chosen." You see, there is a public reaction to firepower wielded by cops: if that's what a cop needs to protect me from the Bad Guys[TM] then that's what I need to protect myself from the same Bad Guys[TM]. Chicken-Egg. Vicious Circle. Take your pick. But when the cops start sporting AR-15's don't be all that surprised to find "ordinary people" doing the same thing.

But Dunwoody is best of all. Billy says Military Training is a great policing tool. OK... So would that be "tactics?" Like we see when our military forces are doing a sweep thru a village in Afghanistan? Coming soon to a neighborhood near you! Can't wait.

Then there is the military equipment. Our arsenal includes an Armored Personnel Carrier: such a big toy for our little boys. But Billy claims it is just a "ride" and not as "militarized" as what the real army has.That it just looks menacing. But isn't that exactly the same argument coming from the cold-dead-handers? The ones who say their AR-15's are not the military, fully automatic version. That they just look like a military weapon.

And that is where it get's funny.

Many of the folks who want you to hand in your gun are the same ones doing a Michael Dukakis in their tanks whilst sporting a uniform from the Idi Amin estate sale and now they're using the gun nut's argument to keep their toys.

You can't make this stuff up.

Setting Expectations

While there is the theory of unmet expectations and the injustice of low expectations what we are witnessing in Missouri is people meeting expectations. Just not the expectations we would hope for.

By militarizing thieir police forces governments, large and small, are clearly setting the expectation that mere citizens are untrusted combatants. We are the[ir] enemy. It is not surprising to find that mere citizens react like combatants when treated like combatants yet these police statists use that behaviour for a post-facto justification of their inciteful tactics and policies.

There is some hope.

The ongoing tragedy in Missouri is peppered with such gross missteps by the local LEOs that is becoming clear that we should no more be giving these folks this kind of fire power than we should ISIS. And it is by no means certain which group intends to do the average American more harm. This has been so blatant that it has gotten the attention of politicians across the country and on both sides of the aisle. Perhaps now someone will investigate this ill conceived plan to militarize U.S. police forces and pull the plug on this insanity.

Having A Blast?

How ironic is it that the most recent victim in what appears to be American Society's favorite drama, Cops Gone Wild, is pronounced "Boo Boo"? Some apologists would like to dismiss this as a little fuquey uppey. You know--shit happens. Others point to a trend often citing the Kathryn Johnston disaster that resulted in the temporary disbanding of the special force whose members murdered her. Sadly that group has been recently re-formed. Or they look to the strikingly similar case of Trinishia Dukes who was also bombed with a flash-bang grenade and whose lawyer has made it clear this is out of control: "It has just become 'If SWAT goes out we're using flash bangs.' They think it is a toy." It is also epidemic with Clayton SWAT grenading citizens at a rate of over one per week. For over three years.

All this leaves many of us asking:

Others are beginning to ask why but as is so often the case this can be explained by money. Drug busts lead to property confiscation with due process denied in practice and afforded only as a legal theory. Increasingly police agencies are funding not only their peccadilloes but their core operational budgets from this revenue source. Attacking the public is now for fun AND profit.

They have also co-opted confidential informants who have been falsely identifying innocents and worse yet running entrapment schemes in order to avoid threats of punishment should they not meet quotas handed out by their police handlers. Using what would normally be seen as blackmail police handlers are using these informants to violate Constitutional Rights entrapping otherwise law abiding citizens while maintaining the one degree of separation they feel indemnifies them.

In militarizing the force the police (with our negligent approval) have done what is necessary in all military conflicts: dehumanize the enemy. And in this case the public is enemy number one. They speak in vague characterizations--the Bad Guys--terms that can be applied at their discretion to anyone they see. Those that buy into this view, who bandy about the chimerical threat of these mysterious Bad Guys to assist in expanding the military nature and capabilities of what should be a civilian law enforcement operation are the real Bad Guys. The public are the Good Guys and increasing the police are, well...

Some say these are isolated incidents that are being blown out of proportion by those with anti-government proclivities. The Cato Institute begs to differ and offers an online map to help elucidate the extent of these abuses of power. This is a serious and growing problem and measures must be taken:

• Issuing no-knock warrants must be taken more seriously as it is a clear violation of Constitutional Rights. We must stop issuing these warrants to any agency below the state level--no more city or county LEO's playing warrior. Judges issuing these warrants should be at no less than the state level as well. There should also be a minimum 48 hour period between issuance and execution--if the cops are afraid the suspect will flee then that is an excellent time to apprehend--w/o a no-knock warrant. 
• A minimum of two law enforcement agencies must be involved in executing these warrants with at least one being at the state level or above. When cops misbehave (as they apparently have in bombing beds and bassinets with their flash-bangs) there needs to be someone at the scene of what has become another crime to preserve the integrity of the evidence. Yes, this will always be problematic.
• Body and vehicle cameras must be a mandatory prerequisite for mission-go and must be operational and active before vehicles roll and cannot be disabled in the field. Un-redacted video is proactively supplied during discovery and is available to the public under FOIA requests within 48 hours. 
• The use of confidential informants must be curtailed. While it has become quite the commercial ecosystem with all the for-profit operations providing training and seminars those are exactly the kinds of operations that indicate this practice has become excessive and long detached from its original usefulness. Severe penalties, greater than what the cops can hold over informants, need to be applied to cases of entrapment and equal responsibility and punishment must be afforded any handler whose informant is successfully prosecuted. Informant and handler must hang together.
• We must stop paying law enforcement to behave badly by ending property confiscation as it exists today. All confiscated assets must go to the State and not local agencies. This money must be dedicated, in order, to: a) victim compensation; and b) programs to deter or rehabilitate offenders. Any left over assets (there should be little or none) must go to the general operating fund. Furthermore any seized assets must be held in escrow (IE: impounded) until the owner of that asset has been convicted of any charges brought against them. As a part of their sentencing, the presiding judge will determine what assets can be seized, which must be returned in whole or in part to others with claims on those assets and determine the allocation of seized assets according to the guidelines above. 

This will not be well received in some quarters but let's apply the logic so often used when government wants us to freely give up our Constitutional Rights: if they're not doing anything wrong what are they afraid of? Where cooler heads prevail there will be an understanding that these efforts will do as much to protect police officers as it does anyone else. Unnecessary use of paramilitary tactics (keep in mind the Habersham suspect was captured later at a different location without the need for Seal Team Six) puts officers as much at risk as it does the public.

If we as a society do not take direct, firm action we run the risk of benignly supporting the political creation of an oppressive police state.

Can You Tell The Difference?

Been away so long I hardly knew the place

Gee it's good to be back home

Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case

Honey disconnect the phone

I'm back in the U.S.S.R.

You don't know how lucky you are boy

Back in the U.S.

Back in the U.S.

Back in the U.S.S.R.