“the real threat to public order”

You know you’re really living in a police state when NRO conservatives sound like libertarians.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

Too much law enforcement in America has lost all sense of proportion: If you need six armed officers to police a nonagenarian in an old folks’ home, seven armed officers to police a 20-year-old female you suspect might have a beer in her shopping bag, thirteen armed officers to terminate Giggles the baby doe, you’re doing it wrong — and you’re the real threat to public order.

Absolutely right. I already wrote about the 95 year old, and it is beginning to look like the police may have (surprise) made up the stuff about him brandishing a knife.

As to the killing of Giggles the fawn by 12 heavily armed thugs who raided an animal shelter, it’s another grotesque outrage of the sort which is becoming an everyday fact of life in the mindlessly bureaucratic modern police state.

Helpless animals are not the only victims. Another horrifying incident recently in the news involved a 2-year-old girl who was snatched by CPS from her loving (but marijuana-smoking) parents because they smoked pot. The CPS bureaucrats then casually handed over the child to a “foster” parent who murdered the girl before the parents could get her back.

Little wonder that parents will do almost anything — including signing away their rights — to save their children from being seized:

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

The war on drugs is the root of the problem. It is the foundation of the modern police state. Without the war on drugs as the rationale, most of the abuses and unaccountability we see today would not have become possible. Whether it’s the Fourth Amendment being thrown out, financial privacy being gutted, and Americans’ private lives under surveillance as never in the history of this country, the war on drugs is the Great Rationalization for what has become a war on freedom.

The situation is getting worse. I can barely keep up with developments.

 


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4 responses to ““the real threat to public order””

  1. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    “Without the war on drugs as the rationale, most of the abuses and unaccountability we see today would not have become possible.”

    I disagree with that. I think they would have found another way. But that was the policy rational of choice at the time.

    The political class is up against the wall, and they’re going to try to confiscate everything to prop up their failed state. And I do mean “everything”, and I do mean “failed”.

    The pressing question is whether it’s possible to stem the tide by ending drug prohibition. I suspect not, but IANAL.

  2. Bill Quick Avatar

    Drugs, pedophiles, porn, hackers, terrorists, national security – they have an entire laundry list of justifications for trashing the constitution and the liberties it guarantees “for the good of the country.” The War on Some Drugs was the first justification for the growth of the police state, but not the last one.

  3. JustMe Avatar
    JustMe

    I think we’re very close to the tipping point of people just giving up entirely on our government. When you start to think that they are subject to different laws than you are and are ham handed in all things then you start to ignore all kinds of laws great and small. This is a very dangerous place to be. Sadly, I have no solution. I can only hope the collapse isn’t into total anarchy.

  4. […] formulation, it’s Home Invasion Teams rather than SWAT, explained here), we might as well touch on this: The war on drugs is the root of the problem. It is the foundation of the modern police state. […]