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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: You too can be a snitch " It wasnt the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors. -Professor Robert Gellatel There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasnt the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.Professor Robert Gellately If you see something suspicious, says the Department of Homeland Security, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone. (If youre a whistleblower wanting to snitch on government wrongdoing, however, forget about itthe government doesnt take kindly to having its dirty deeds publicized and, God forbid, being made to account for them.) For more than a decade now, the DHS has plastered its See Something, Say Something campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Now colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas are lining up for grants to participate in the program. This DHS slogan is nothing more than the governments way of indoctrinating we the people into the mindset that were an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens. This is what is commonly referred to as community policing. Yet while community policing and federal programs such as See Something, Say Something are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security. The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing. After all, the police cant be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there arent enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States? The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded Terror alerts, keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats and staged training drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets, acclimatize them to being surveilled for their own good, and then indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can save the nation from another 9/11. As historian Robert Gellately points out, a Nazi order requires at least some willing collaborators to succeed. In other words, this is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other. Its a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, theyre incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to homenamely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners. Community policing did not come about as a feel-good, empowering response to individuals trying to take back their communities from crime syndicates and drug lords. Rather, Community-Oriented Policing or COPs (short for Community Partnerships, Organizational Transformation, and Problem Solving) is a Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between police agencies and members of the community. (Remember, this is the same Justice Department which, in conjunction with the DHS, has been providing funding and equipping local police agencies across the country with surveillance devices and military gear. These same local police have been carrying out upwards of 80,000 SWAT team raids a year on individuals, some of whom are guilty of nothing more than growing tomatoes, and breeding orchids without the proper paperwork.) Mind you, this is a far cry from community engagement, which is what I grew up with as a kid. Then as now, there were always neighbors watching what you bought, what you said, what you did, who you did it with, etc. My own mother proudly peered out our living room window with a pair of military-issue binoculars to keep an eye on the goings on in the neighborhood. The difference was that if there was a problem, it was dealt with as a community. When my neighbor spied me running through his flower garden, he didnt call the copshe called my mother. When I sassed the manager of the general store, he didnt turn me in to the copshe reported it to my mother. Likewise, when my next-door neighbor (who happened to be the police chief) caught me in the act of egging cars one Halloween, he didnt haul me down to the precinctIm taking you to a far worse place, he said, your Dad. So, if theres nothing wrong with community engagement, if the police cant be everywhere at once, if surveillance cameras do little to actually prevent crime, and if we need to take back our communities from the crime syndicates and drug lords, then whats wrong with community policing and See Something, Say Something? Whats wrong is that these programs are not, in fact, making America any safer. Instead, theyre turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing, bystander nation content to report a so-called violation to the cops and then turn a blind eye to the ensuing tragedies. Apart from the sheer idiocy of arresting people for such harmless crimes as raising pet chickens, letting their kids walk to the park alone, peeling the bark off a tree, holding prayer meetings in their backyard and living off the grid, theres also the unfortunate fact that once the police are called in, with their ramped up protocols, battlefield mindset, militarized weapons, uniforms and equipment, and war zone tactics, its a process that is near impossible to turn back and one that too often ends in tragedy for all those involved. For instance, when a neighbor repeatedly called the police to report that 5-year-old Phoenix Turnbull was keeping a pet red hen (nickname: Carson Petey) in violation of an Atwater, Minnesota, city ordinance against backyard chickens, the police chief got involved. In an effort to appease the complaining neighbor and protect a nearby elementary school from a chicken on the loose, the police chief walked onto the Turnbulls property, decapitated the hen with a shovel, deposited the severed head on the familys front stoop, and left a neighborhood child to report the news that the cops killed your chicken! Now things could have been worse. The police chief could have opted to do a SWAT-team style raid on the Turnbulls chicken coop, as other police departments have taken to raiding goat cheese farmers, etc. The Turnbulls could also have been made to serve jail time or pay a hefty fine for violating an established ordinance. In fact, this happens routinely to individuals who grow vegetable gardens and install solar panels in violation of city ordinances. At a minimum, the Atwater city council needs to revisit its ban on backyard chickens, especially at a time when increasing numbers of Americans are attempting, for economic or health reasons, to grow or raise their own organic food, and the police chief needs to scale back on his aggression towards our feathered friends. But what about the complaining neighbor? Its fine to be shocked by the convergence of militarized police in Ferguson, Mo., its appropriate to be outraged by the SWAT team raid that left a Georgia toddler in the ICU, and its fitting to take umbrage with the inane laws that result in parents being arrested for leaving their 10-year-old kids in air conditioned cars while they run into a store, but wheres the indignation over the police states partners-in crimethe neighbors, the clerks, the utility workerswho turn in their fellow citizens for little more than having unsightly lawns and voicing controversial ideas? In much the same way the old African proverb it takes a village to raise a child was used to make the case for an all-encompassing government program of social welfare, the DHS and the DOJ are attempting to make the case that it takes a nation to catch a terrorist. To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct partners in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits, churches and service providers, private businesses and the media. Together, these groups are supposed to identify community concerns, engage the community in achieving specific goals, serve as powerful partners with the government, and add their considerable resources to the governments already massive arsenal of technology and intelligence. The mainstream medias role, long recognized as being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as publicizing services from government or community agencies or new laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime. Amazingly, the Justice Department guidelines sound as if they were taken from a Nazi guide on how to rule a nation. Germans not only watched out for crimes and other deviations of fellow German citizens, Gellately writes, but they watched each other. Should you find yourself suddenly unnerved at the prospect of being spied on by your neighbors, your actions scrutinized, your statements dissected, and your motives second-guessed, not to worry: as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves, this is par for the course in the American police state. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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