 |
| Heather Has Two Mommies: Liberty and Justice for All. |
“The protesters surrounded all the doors to the Atheneum where I was supposed to speak, so none of the students who had signed up to attend my lecture could get in. I was hustled from my guest suite by several police officers from Claremont PD into the lecture hall. It was decided that I would give the speech for live streaming to a largely empty hall. The organizers moved the podium so that it would not be visible through the windows to the students surrounding the building once night fell. We jumpstarted the timing of my talk as the crowd seemed to be getting more unruly.
During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking. An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.
Unless the false narrative about endemically racist police ends, we are going to see more black lives lost. And while the protesters likely didn’t show up to these scenes of carnage, the cops did. They are the only government agency that works every day to ensure that black lives matter.".......
From 2003:
"The 9/11 bombings were classic decapitation strikes, designed to take out America’s political and financial leadership.
Recognizing that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were acts of war entails certain consequences. First, the campaign against al-Qaida and other Islamic terror organizations is really war, not a metaphor, like the “war on drugs.” Second, it is a war unlike any the U.S. has ever fought. The enemy, mostly but not exclusively foreign, is hidden on American soil in the civilian population, with the intention of slaughtering as many innocent noncombatants as possible. The use of military force abroad, while necessary, is by no means sufficient: domestic counterterrorism efforts by the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies are at least as essential to defeating the enemy.
When these agencies are operating against Islamic terrorists, they are operating in an unprecedented war mode—but most of the rules that govern them were designed for crime fighting. Yet, (critics) will not allow the department to budge from the crime paradigm, refusing to admit that surveillance and evidence-gathering rules designed to protect the rights of suspected car thieves and bank robbers may need modification when the goal is preventing a suitcase bomb from taking out JFK."
Ironically, none of the changes instituted by Attorney General Ashcroft comes anywhere near what the government could ask for in wartime, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, as Lincoln ordered during the Civil War.
The government may expand its powers to detect terrorism without diminishing civil liberties one iota, as long as those powers remain subject to traditional restraints: statutory prerequisites for investigative action, judicial review, and political accountability. So far, these conditions have been met. ...[A]ll threats to freedom...do not emanate from the White House. Nothing the Bush administration has done comes close to causing the loss of freedom that Americans experienced after 9/11...preserving security is essential to preserving freedom.".......
It matters who we elect to oversee our surveillance, however. Obama was too busy spying on journalists and senators to prevent the Snowden, Manning or recent CIA Wiki Leaks.
And Susan Rice was busy single-mindedly poring over candidate Donald Trump's lunch menus instead of Bashir Assad's Sarin recipes. The Trump Administration was able to pinpoint Assad's nerve gas bunkers in days, something that evaded Rice for years. Or something Rice evaded for years.
Heather Mac Donald, 2009 City Journal:
"On July 24 at around 3 pm., 17-year-old Lily Burk was walking down a midtown Los Angeles street on an errand for her mother. A 50-year-old homeless parolee with a three-decade-long rap sheet confronted the high school senior as she approached her Volvo. Moments later, Charles Samuel was driving the Volvo away with Burk in the passenger seat. Samuel took Burk to an ATM on Los Angeles’s Skid Row, where she volunteered at a needle-exchange program and where he was enrolled in a drug rehab program as punishment for a parole violation. Burk tried several times to withdraw cash on a credit card without success, according to the Los Angeles Times. Over the next 25 minutes, she would separately call her mother and her father seeking help in getting cash on the credit card, but her father told her that doing so was not possible. At 4.52 pm, Samuel pulled the Volvo into a Skid Row parking lot at Alameda and 5th Street and abandoned it. Burk had already been murdered, her head beaten and throat slashed open with a broken bottle; her body was left in her car.
Samuel then walked nearly a mile through Skid Row, drinking beer from a paper bag in violation of L.A.’s open container law. Two LAPD officers on horseback stopped him for the public-drinking offense and questioned him. He told them that he was on parole and agreed to be searched, according to the police. They found a crack pipe in his pocket and arrested him. The post-arrest search of Samuel turned up a Volvo key and a cell phone. The next morning, a worker from a Skid Row business discovered Burk’s car with her body in it. Samuel’s prints were in the car; his clothes had blood on them.
Samuel’s apprehension shows the enormous power of broken-windows policing, which the American Civil Liberties Union has fought against on L.A.’s Skid Row and throughout the country. Enforcing quality-of-life laws not only restores a sense of order and safety to an area, it also nabs serious offenders. There is a great chain of being, it turns out, in criminal behavior. Hardened criminals are not usually scrupulous about obeying a whole range of laws—whether littering, loitering, or traffic codes. ...
In 2003, LAPD Chief William Bratton launched a campaign to reclaim the 50-block area of downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row from the squalor and violence that had engulfed it for two decades. He announced that he would use broken-windows policing to restore order and to help locate the thousands of violent parole violators and absconders who hid among the area’s filthy, lawless homeless encampments. The ACLU and L.A.’s large retinue of professional cop scourges promptly unleashed what became a rolling series of federal lawsuits to shut down Skid Row policing. Merely questioning the homeless for littering, selling illegal merchandise, and jaywalking, they said, constituted illegal harassment of the poor. UCLA law professor Gary Blasi charged the LAPD with trying to “ethnically cleanse” downtown to make way for gentrification. A hostile federal judiciary lapped up every preposterous charge the advocates leveled against the police, but the LAPD continued enforcing public-order laws on Skid Row, producing some of the largest crime drops in Los Angeles and bringing a modicum of sanity to streets that had resembled bedlam just five years earlier. The beneficiaries of this crime drop included elderly residents of the neighborhood SROs, vagrants seeking to get clean and turn their lives around, and low-income workers in the area’s intrepid small wholesalers and factories, who no longer found themselves victimized by psychotic drug users as a matter of course.
And now Charles Samuel will be taken off the streets and brought to justice, thanks to two Skid Row officers’ willingness to ignore ACLU propaganda and accost a vagrant drinking in public. ...
Other budget-related prison proposals—including Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to put an end to parole for nonviolent ex-convicts and to release 27,000 prison inmates, or a recent federal court order to release as many as 43,000 inmates—all take on dire new significance in the wake of the Lily Burk murder. To date, policing and incarceration are the only known social programs that can be shown to reduce crime; others may eventually be found, but until they are, it is folly to undermine them for fiscal or ideological reasons. California’s enormous prison costs should be reduced by radical pension reform, not by the wholesale release of prisoners. And even today, in the aftermath of the Samuel arrest, Los Angeles’s anti-cop forces continue to attack misdemeanor enforcement in high-crime areas such as Skid Row: “The LAPD doesn’t deserve any praise when it comes to the needs of the homeless,” anti-police attorney Carol Sobel told the Los Angeles Times following Bratton’s resignation announcement.
These activists are dangerously wrong. Attention to broken-windows disorder must remain a vital component of proactive policing.".......
 |
| #LivesMatter |
No comments:
Post a Comment