Troops officially came home from Iraq on Dec. 31, 2011, but they were
coming back in a steady stream since 2010, and they were bringing their
equipment with them.
The website Public Intelligence
diagrams the stark increase in military dollars transferred to our
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies from 2010.
The
amount in Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 came to about $223 million, then in
2011, with withdrawal from Iraq in the air, that amount more than
doubled to $498 million.
Seven officers and a supervisor at the Milwaukee police department
have had their badges taken away after allegations surfaced that police
have been conducting body cavity searches on suspects with no authority
to do so.
Reports
of officers arresting suspects then subjecting them to cavity searches
first surfaced in local media in March. On Monday, after getting access
to a police report, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that officers allegedly performed these searches on a routine basis.-[Full Article]
Last year I reported on the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, wherein local law enforcement agencies can obtain surplus military hardware through a website, only having to pay to pick up the equipment.
Now, according to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), law enforcement will be even further militarized through the use of hundreds of military robots acquired by the Department of Defense over the past decade.
According to the head of the eastern team of DLA’s disposition services office, Dan Arnold, the older and more heavily used items will likely be robots for explosive ordnance disposal and surveillance, although some of the hardware is nearly brand new and never been deployed overseas.
According to National Defense, Arnold said to the attendees of the GovSec conference in Washington, D.C., that these robots are just one instance of the surplus equipment that will likely become available as the conflict in Afghanistan supposedly winds down.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The CIA said Friday its internal watchdog found nothing wrong with the spy agency's close partnership with the New York Police Department.
The agency's inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was "no evidence that any part of the agency's support to the NYPD constituted 'domestic spying'," CIA spokesman Preston Golson said.
The inspector general decided to do a preliminary investigation after a series of stories by The Associated Press revealed how after the 9/11 attacks the CIA helped the NYPD build domestic intelligence programs that were used to spy on Muslims. A CIA officer also directed intelligence collection and reviewed reports, according to former NYPD officials involved.
The revelations troubled some members of Congress and even prompted the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to remark that it did not look good for the CIA to be involved in any city police department. Thirty-four lawmakers have asked for the Justice Department to investigate but so far that request has gone nowhere...[Full Article]
A decade of billions in spending in the name of homeland security has armed local police departments with military-style equipment and a new commando mentality. But has it gone too far? Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting report.
Nestled amid plains so flat the locals joke you can watch your dog run away for miles, Fargo treasures its placid lifestyle, seldom pierced by the mayhem and violence common in other urban communities. North Dakota’s largest city has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there’s not been a single international terrorism prosecution in the last decade.
But that hasn’t stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars.
Every city squad car is equipped today with a military-style assault rifle, and officers can don Kevlar helmets able to withstand incoming fire from battlefield-grade ammunition. And for that epic confrontation—if it ever occurs—officers can now summon a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. For now, though, the menacing truck is used mostly for training and appearances at the annual city picnic, where it’s been parked near the children’s bounce house.
“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” says Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”
Like Fargo, thousands of other local police departments nationwide have been amassing stockpiles of military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34 billion in federal grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Daily Beast investigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Atlanta Police S.W.A.T. members searched a building for a shooting suspect in July of 2010., John Bazemore
The buying spree has transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. And that is raising questions about whether the strategy has gone too far, creating a culture and capability that jeopardizes public safety and civil rights while creating an expensive false sense of security.
“The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios,” says Mark Randol, a former terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. “Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”
Local police bristle at the suggestion that they’ve become “militarized,” arguing the upgrade in firepower and other equipment is necessary to combat criminals with more lethal capabilities. They point to the 1997 Los Angeles-area bank robbers who pinned police for hours with assault weapons, the gun-wielding student who perpetrated the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, and the terrorists who waged a bloody rampage in Mumbai, India, that left 164 people dead and 300 wounded in 2008...[Full Article]
[Webmaster - There is strong evidence that Virginina Tech and Mumbai were false flag operations. Crisis-Reaction-Solution... Militarizing the domestic police state is the "end game".]
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office is weeks away from launching an unmanned aerial asset to help deputies fight crime. The ShadowHawk helicopter is six-feet long, weighs fifty pounds and fits in the back of an SUV.
“We can put it over a fire, put it over ahazmat spill, put it over a house with a suspect barricaded inside and literally give the incident commander the ability to look at the entire scene with a bird’s eye view, ” Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel said.
Sheriff’s deputies will fly the ShadowHawk with nothing more than a laptop computer and a remote control similar to that used for video games.
It’s equipped with an infrared camera that can clearly read a license plate from an elevation of twelve hundred feet. The helicopter cost upwards of $300,000 and was purchased with a grant from the federal government.
Vanguard Defense Industries built the helicopter. The company has also supplied aerial assets to US forces over seas.
Critics argue the drone-like vehicle isn’t safe, because it’s unmanned.
“I gotta tell you, it sort of looks like boys and their toys, ” said Terri Burke, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas. “We’re giving up our privacy, we’re letting the government have way too much power.”
The ACLU is concerned that technology used by law enforcement officials in general is getting ahead of people’s privacy. No one has complained to the ACLU about the Montgomery County helicopter, but some fear it could be used to spy on people.
“The Constitution spells out very clearly that we have a right to privacy, ” Burke said.
“This sheriff’s office has better things to do with its time then spy on people, ” McDaniel argued. "That’s not our mission. The only way that it’s going to be an invasion of their privacy is if they are committing some type of a criminal act where we might utilize this to catch them.”
WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally...
In what has to be one of the biggest violations of common sense and burden of proof in motoring news this year, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that officers can “visually estimate” how fast a person is driving… and give them a ticket for it.
Thanks Ohio Supreme Court for giving cops the green light to make up speeding tickets.
Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor said “Rational triers of fact could find a police officer’s testimony regarding his unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed, when supported by evidence that the officer is trained, certified by (the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy) or a similar organization, and experienced in making such estimations, sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant’s speed. Independent verification of the vehicle’s speed is not necessary to support a conviction for speeding.”...
MADISON, WIS.: For soldiers patrolling in Iraq and Afghanistan, death can come from a bomb hidden in a trash pile or an innocent-looking face in the crowd. Returning home alive can depend on the quick turn of a steering wheel or pull of a trigger.
Those heightened survival instincts don't always translate well when those soldiers come home to their jobs as police officers.
In interviews with the Associated Press and in dozens of anecdotes compiled in a survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, officers described feeling compelled to use tactics they employed in war zones after they returned to work in the United States and feeling less patient toward the public they serve...
As part of a new crime-fighting initiative unveiled yesterday, Boston police now have the ability to witness shootings, robberies, and even homicides on many city streets from computer screens at headquarters and then distribute crucial information about the suspects and the crimes to officers heading to the scene.
The program uses existing technology such as cameras focused on major city streets, the department’s gunshot detection system, and the 911 dispatch center to relay information about a crime almost instantaneously to investigators.
The $500,000 intelligence hub, known as the Real Time Crime Center, is the latest in the department’s efforts to combine shoe-leather police work with technological savvy to monitor and thwart criminals...
Arapahoe County will become the first law enforcement agency in Colorado to begin identifying criminals, missing children and seniors using biometric analysis of the human iris.
A technician from the software and hardware developer demonstrated how their device analyzes the iris, which has 235 identifying points of reference, versus a fingerprint's 65.
"Fingerprints change but irises stay stable throughout your life," said Patricia Lawton of Biometric Intelligence and Identifying Technologies, "Which is why it's a great biometric to identify somebody with."
Lawton helped develop this new technology application.
She said the iris is 12 times more reliable for identification than a fingerprint...
El Paso County Sheriff's Office will identify people not by fingerprints or DNA, but with a retinal scan.
The National Sheriffs' Association has awarded the El Paso County Sheriff's Office a grant of $10,000 to be among the first 45 law enforcement agencies in the nation to use retinal scanning to identify people.
The grant provides, at no cost to the taxpayers of El Paso County, an iris biometric system that is part of a nationwide network and registry that uses iris recognition biometric technology to confirm a person’s identity...
Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.
But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically...
