What’s Happening to Our Police?

What’s Happening to Our Police?

Not only are federal agencies such as the Departments of State, Energy, and Agriculture forming police units, Washington is nationalizing our local police. ...
William F. Jasper

The federal government has been busy creating unconstitutional agencies co-opting policing while simultaneously using a “carrot and stick” approach — unconstitutional federal aid and federal mandates — to absorb and coerce the local police, transforming them into instruments of an emerging national police force.

This subversive transformation of America’s way of policing has been under way for a long time. The American ideal of local police — locally funded and locally controlled — whose job it is to protect the public against violent and fraudulent criminal elements that will always be found in every society, is being radically changed. Over the past decade, this process has accelerated dramatically, with every terrorist incident, riot, police shooting, or upsurge in criminal activity serving as an excuse to further nationalize.

All of us who fly have become accustomed (willing or otherwise) to TSA pat-downs, body scans, interrogations, and other indignities and violations. That is part of the political fallout of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: the birth of another federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration, TSA. But as is always the case with government, it seems, it did not take long for mission creep to set in. Federal Homeland Security officials soon had TSA units in black military gear leading multiple federal and local agencies in police sweeps of Amtrak and Greyhound bus stations, as well as other “transportation infrastructure” nationwide. By 2011, according to TSA chief John Pistole in testimony to Congress, the TSA was carrying out more than 8,000 of these sweeps a year.

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