Police come to Hardyville


One of my favorite libertarian activists/writers brings us up to speed on an attempted coup
Claire Wolfe is one of those noisy libertarians that most people ignore until it is too late. She is a thinker and a great read though.

I've never seen the whole SWAT issue put in perspective like this. Not even by Radley Balko, who probably has the best overall look at our soon to be runaway police state. But Claire has done something that Radley hasn't yet.

Claire brings it home.

I skipped the normal formating on this, although I did change the color of the quoted text. There is just too much to convert and I can't do it and still do justice to the quote.

As it turns out, the next move was "their way." Without Dora to sit in on their meetings and tell us of the new town government's plans we didn't see it coming.

They hired cops.

Cops. Real ones. Not like our pair of old mostly harmless deputies. Spit, polish, and swagger cops. Paid for by ... oh, as we pieced it together afterwards, a couple of them were funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (And no, I am not kidding about stuff like that.) A couple others came to us courtesy of a side of pork grant from the notoriously (and I mean notoriously) porky Department of Homeland (Achtung!) Security. One was inflicted hired via some other federal program to control enhance "community-based policing."

All their equipment was FBI and Pentagon-donated. We found out that. And they had equipment never before seen -- or needed -- in Hardyville. Facemasks and shields. "Non-lethal" crowd-control devices. CS gas. Tasers. Flash-bang grenades. And an array of weaponry that -- almost -- matched our own. We didn't even see, until later, their phone-tapping gear and other bugging devices (they had to do that stuff the old-fashioned way, since HardyTel wasn't about to collaborate with them)..

All that stuff I just told you wasn't even the worst of it, though.

Nearly all of them had been hired from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, Incompetence, Dishonesty, and Entrapment. Or. Get this. They were rejects from the ATF hiring pool. People not good enough to be the fedgov's worst thugs.

Yeah. Scary.

Read the rest of the article.

There are some points here that I want to stress, just as Radley and Claire have done before me.

Why is the Federal government equipping and funding heavily armed police in rural communities?

What happens when these police overstep their bounds?

How do we get rid of them if we don't need them?

What do we do to the lawmakers and judges who made it possible?

By the way, I loved the solution in the article. I can hardly wait for the next one.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - December 29, 2006 at 06:11 PM  Tag


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