military doing work of local police? good read
Expanding Executive Power
By Doug Hornig
Americans, or at least those Americans in love with liberty, have always been suspicious--rightfully so, we would say--of attempts by Washington to extend its police powers into the states or to turn over law enforcement tasks to the military.
With regard to the latter, Sam Adams gave us fair warning well over two hundred years ago when he said, "Where there is a necessity of the military power, a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and a jealous eye over it; for the maxims and rules of the army are essentially different from the genius of free people, and the laws of a free government."
This sentiment was solidified in law with the Insurrection Act of 1807, which carefully circumscribed the president's ability to use the military to deal with civilian unrest; and with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbade the military to make arrests and do other routine police work.
The present administration has been chipping away at these principles since 9/11, often under the guise of prosecuting the so-called War on Terror (which Doug Casey more correctly terms the "Forever War").
Most insidious was a revision of the Insurrection Act that got attached as a rider to last year's Defense Appropriations Act. Apparently seeking to avoid the kind of confrontation that developed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina--when President Bush tried to federalize the Louisiana National Guard and Governor Blanco resisted him--the administration got Congress to pass an amendment to the Insurrection Act that permits the president to seize control of the National Guard during times of natural disaster, disease outbreak, terrorist attack or, ominously, "other conditions" where "authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order."
Who gets to make that call? Well, the president.
These few phrases, in one brief stroke of the pen, override centuries of American history. That they were deeply buried in another bill makes them all the more suspect. Why not have separate legislation introduced, fully debated in Congress, and extensively covered by the media? There is only one answer: the administration didn't want that kind of exposure.
Our governors noticed, though. They objected, all 50 of them, Democrat and Republican alike. And they were successful in defeating an even broader proposal that would have allowed the president to federalize the Guard without even invoking the Insurrection Act. Nevertheless, they were deeply disappointed, writing a letter to Congress calling the surviving changes "a dramatic expansion of federal authority [...] that could cause confusion in the command-and-control of the National Guard and interfere with the states' ability to respond to natural disasters within their borders."
True enough. But confusion aside, the further implications are even more ominous, in our opinion. The whole reason we don't want the military doing law enforcement in the first place is that they are fundamentally different from the police. Cops are bound by the Constitution of the United States and the country's laws; soldiers aren't. Cops exist to protect civil, personal and property rights; soldiers are taught to ignore them.
Might this, or some future unpopular president decide to unleash the Guard on political demonstrators? American governors would be highly unlikely to do it; they learned a lesson from Kent State. But there will probably come a time when the president thinks he knows better how to handle a demonstration in San Francisco than the governor of California does. Even if there are no tragic consequences on the order of Kent State, the message will still have been clear: if you dissent, we'll send in the troops.
This federal power grab would be bad enough by itself, but it's been accompanied by another development that should be of equal concern: the increasing coordination of local and state police work under federal direction.
There have been other related signs, such as the push for a national ID card, encoding drivers' licenses with owners' personal information, the creation of massive databases to keep tabs on citizens.
But it doesn't get any more blatant than Operation Falcon.
Operation Falcon (early April 2005) and its successors, Falcon II (late April 2005) and Falcon III (October 2006), made no attempt to hide what they were, since "Falcon" itself is an acronym for "Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally." That is to say, the Falcons employed a chain-of-command structure that originates in Washington and radiates outward until it reaches Your Town, USA.
This flies in the face of, again, over two centuries of tradition that held that law enforcement was best, most effectively, and most honestly done by those on the scene. Exceptions were made, such as the use of the FBI in cases reaching across state lines. For the most part, though, local law enforcement was, simply, local. Nobody, least of all city and state police, wanted the feds to arrive from a thousand miles away and start tromping around all over their turf.
Enter Falcon. Hatched by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (he who believes that Americans have no basic "right" of habeas corpus) and U.S. Marshalls' Office Director Ben Reyna, the scheme involved a rounding up of known criminals in a series of three publicity-heavy, week-long sweeps, employing federal, state and local authorities, and directed out of D.C.
Each sweep netted about 10,000 arrests, and targeted were "gang-related crimes, homicides, crimes involving the use of weapons, crimes against children and the elderly, sexual assaults, organized crime and drug-related fugitives, and other crimes of violence."
Wow. 10K hoodlums off the street. What's not to like about that?
Well, a couple of things, actually. First, it sets a troubling precedent, as noted, with feds extending their reach to the local street level.
Next, we have to ask, why were these people so dangerous that they merited such an operation to nab them? Gonzales crowed that Falcon showed "President Bush's [...] and the Justice Department's dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime." Wrong on both counts, Al.
The ops swept up exactly zero terrorists. And violent criminals? Falcon I (nationwide, involving 3,100 officers from 659 agencies) got 162 murder suspects, 68 kidnapping suspects, 638 armed robbery suspects, 553 rape/sexual assault suspects, 1727 assault suspects, and 12 extortionists. Good. But that's only 3,160 out of 10,340 arrests (assuming no overlapping charges). The missing 7,000 include burglars, car thieves, and the big umbrella, "narcotics violation suspects." All of whom surely deserved the attention of such a huge, pricey task force.
Falcon II (western U.S., 2,100 officers, 793 agencies) fared even worse, nailing 860 murder suspects or sex offenders, leaving over 8,000 in the "other" category. And Falcon III (eastern U.S., 3,000 officers, 1,063 agencies) cleared 140 homicide warrants and nabbed 1,659 sex offenders. Out of 10,773 arrests.
Tellingly, although the official Falcon website prominently displays photos of automatic weapons confiscated from these ultra-violent felons, the 30,150 arrests yielded a grand total of 586 firearms (1.9%).
And consider this: Could it be that local authorities were persuaded to ignore essential public safety considerations and wait for the feds and the media cameras to arrive, before moving on the 400 murder suspects in their sights? A very disturbing thought.
So, what's really going on here?
Clearly, the three Falcons represent test runs for Washington-directed "law enforcement" operations that utilize a top-down command structure reaching to the local level, and that can roll up tens of thousands of Americans at a moment's notice.
Why they might want to do this is the stuff of conspiracy theories, and perhaps best left to individual conjecture. But it's wise to remember that local police autonomy, once ceded to a federal government, is not easily regained. Nor are recent historical examples of an all-powerful national police apparatus particularly confidence-inspiring: KGB and Stasi come to mind.
Incidentally, both of these are acronyms or contractions that roughly translate into English as "Department of Homeland Security"...
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. -- James Madison (1788).
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