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More and more aspects of American life becoming a police matter

BobStackFan4Life

BobStackFan4Life

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It starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior—doodling on a desk, farting in class, a kindergartener's tantrum—can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such "criminals" can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn't do it.)

Though it's a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on schoolchildren for "crimes" like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of "zero-tolerance" discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.
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Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing—you will be sent the bill later.
Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than "security theater." As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away—a case that is hardly unique.
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Office and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee targeted by a federal prosecutor for the "crime" of incorrectly processing a travel agency's bid for state business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George Norris, sentenced to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.

Increasingly, basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance, Human Rights Watch reports that a new law funnels delinquent (or allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal courts, where failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and incarceration, even though debtor's prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth century.
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Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world, triple that of the now-defunct East Germany. The incarceration rate for African American men is about five times higher than that of the Soviet Union at the peak of the gulag.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/american-society-police-state-criminalization-militarization?page=2
 
As a general rule, when MS is leading the way somewhere, you're probably on the wrong path.

Those had to be a rough 17 months for George Norris.

What are you in for?
Illegally selling Orchids you?
Bend over
 
RJKarl said:
You hire basically minimum wage workers and what do you get?
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Criminals who hide behind badges? Ask 10 TSA screeners what the rules are on carry-ons and you'll get 15 different answers.
 
Law and order society desired by scared shitless old white people who watch sensationalized news who think there's a criminal behind every hedge and who hate government and loathe taxes but want the tax-funded government to protect them at every turn this is what you get see gun thread for more!!!
 
WakeandBake said:
Law and order society desired by scared shitless old white people who watch sensationalized news who think there's a criminal behind every hedge and who hate government and loathe taxes but want the tax-funded government to protect them at every turn this is what you get see gun thread for more!!!
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You and others on the left wanted more government, and you're getting it.
 
RaleighDevil said:
You and others on the left wanted more government, and you're getting it.
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And you on the expect that millions of people each month will fly without any mistakes being made by over-zealous wannabe cops.

Or you'd like to get rid of airport security and put a gun shop between the Chili's and the McDonald's at every airport. After all if everyone on board had gun, we'd be safer.
 
RJKarl said:
And you on the expect that millions of people each month will fly without any mistakes being made by over-zealous wannabe cops.
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Isn't the fact that we've put over-zealous wannabe cops in charge of airport security the issue? They are ineffective at their actual job of finding terrorists and just cause unneeded problems for the rest of us.
 
The government should require El-Al to train our TSA agents. They've operated an airline in the middle of every country that wants to kill them without a problem for decades.
 
Something else no one wants to admit. When you have tens of millions of passengers each year at US airports, it's inevitable that some gung ho silly TSA Agents will go overboard.

I know the naysayers will indict the entire system over 5 or 10 or 25 or even 500 incidents out of 642M US passengers in 2012 (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/press_releases/bts016_13), but it's not as bad as is decried by them.

Without question we need to keep up to date with training and should pay the agents more so as to get better people.
 
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