Adam Kokesh Arrested for Dancing

May 30, 2011 · Posted in Government · Comment

Tags: adam kokesh, police, police brutality

Police Arrest Man for Filming

November 30, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

I know Adam’s trial is coming up so I wish him good luck!

Tags: copblock, police

San Carlos Considers Outsourcing Police Duties

June 4, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

Cash strapped and troubled with shortfalls, the city of San Carlos is considering outsourcing its police force:

The city of San Carlos, facing a multimillion-dollar budget deficit brought on by the recession and rising employee costs, is considering a money-saving measure that is all but unheard of in the Bay Area – dissolving its Police Department and outsourcing the job of law enforcement.

After 85 years of having its own police force, supporters of the idea say, it’s time for San Carlos to hand the job either to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office or to neighboring Redwood City to eliminate nearly two-thirds of next year’s $3.5 million deficit.

But critics say having an outside agency handle local law enforcement would cost “the city of good living” control over its affairs. Dissolving the 32-member force, they maintain, would be a rickety fix for years of bad budget decisions.

San Carlos is not a high-intensity policing assignment. The number of violent crimes in an average year is 27, and there have been only three homicides in the city of 28,000 over the past decade.

Still, “we certainly do have issues that are of concern to local residents who are hoping to maintain their quality of life and the property values here,” City Manager Mark Weiss said.

“We certainly recognize that and respect that,” Weiss said. “And yet the fact of the matter is, the city does not have adequate revenue to maintain the current business model to provide municipal service.”
Deputies as cops

There’s plenty of precedent in the Bay Area for outside agencies policing small cities. Dublin’s police officers are Alameda County sheriff’s deputies. In Contra Costa County, the sheriff patrols Danville, Lafayette, Oakley and Orinda. Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies handle crime in Cupertino, Los Altos Hills and Saratoga.

However, none of those cities ever had its own police force. Locally, only Sonoma, which dissolved its police department in 2004 and turned to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department to save money, has ever done what San Carlos is considering.

“There’s no question in my mind that this is the wave of the future,” said Redwood City Mayor Jeff Ira. “We all want to have our domain and protect our own domain, and that’s what really kept us from doing a lot of these things many years ago. Unfortunately, it’s the crisis that brought us here.”

In May, the San Carlos City Council held a special session to review policing proposals by the sheriff’s office and Redwood City police. The city is expected to decide this month whether to disband the force and select one of the agencies.

“We have two attractive offers from two professional organizations,” said Mayor Randy Royce, who believes the city should scrap its force. “I am just elated to have two great proposals. We can’t go wrong either way.”
Raising funds proposed

But Ken Castle, who leads San Carlos’ largest neighborhood watch group, said having an outside agency police the city in a “work-for-hire arrangement really abrogates that kind of localized control.”

He said San Carlos should consider charging fees for recreational use and installing parking meters downtown to help raise the $2 million a year that outsourcing police services could save the city.

The sheriff’s department and Redwood City are also experiencing budget cuts, and choosing either would be like “jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Castle said. “Tossing this over the fence in a bidding war, I think, is absolutely the wrong way to do this.”
Competing suitors

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office already patrols Woodside and Portola Valley. Sheriff Greg Munks noted that his agency’s SWAT team, Office of Emergency Services and air squadron are based in San Carlos.

San Carlos and Redwood City police routinely work side-by-side, said Redwood City police Officer Mike Reynolds, president of that city’s Police Officers Association. San Carlos officers are part of the Redwood City SWAT team.

“Criminals don’t care where jurisdictional boundaries are,” Reynolds said. “They’re not going to stop at a line drawn across El Camino Real because it says San Carlos.”

San Carlos, which has cut its budget for 11 years in a row, is also considering outsourcing its fire and parks maintenance services. Police and fire now make up 60 percent of the city’s $26 million budget.

The San Carlos Police Officers Association objects to any outsourcing and is blaming city officials for failing to manage budget challenges.

“It’s a bad idea, because they’re losing their department. It will never be the same as being policed by your own department,” said Officer Gilbert Granado, president of the San Carlos police union.

All San Carlos officers would also be offered full-time, higher-paying jobs with the sheriff’s office, which now has 462 deputies, officials said. There is no such guarantee if San Carlos chooses to go with the 87-member Redwood City force.
Keeping the city’s identity

Regardless of which agency would handle San Carlos police services, the officers would keep the city’s identity by driving the same San Carlos police cars and wearing the same uniforms. Indemnity agreements would hold either the county or Redwood City liable.

San Carlos City Councilman Matt Grocott said he supports the idea of a joint powers authority under which the city would maintain its police force but partner with another agency.

Munks, however, said he didn’t believe a regional approach would be feasible. “That would be way too confusing,” the sheriff said.

I say: Better yet – disband the entire police force, cut local fees and taxes accordingly, and let the people vote with their dollars whom to purchase protective services from!

Tags: oursource police, police, privatize police, san carlos

To Serve and Protect …

May 19, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

Some more police brutality, this time these heroic guys beat helpless women and teenagers into submission:

Tags: police

Police State Fascism on the March – Texas Police Secretly Deploy Spy Drones

May 16, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

Keep this in mind. Whenever the government deploys new methods as a result of more expansive powers granted, like in this case the Patriot Act of 2001, their creativity and rigor in finding other applications in the service of advancing their power and diminishing your privacy and freedoms, will know awfully few boundaries.

Don’t ever give credence to the specific reasons stated at the moment a law is passed. Those are nothing but expedient excuses to help corrupt people push the enactment of exploitative and abusive powers past the finish line. Once this is done it’ll be too late.

Think of the long term opportunities that any new law opens up to people who are behind the trigger of an unbelievably massive force of arms and guns pointing at you, and you will get a much clearer picture of what it going on around you and what will happen in the long run.

Tags: police, police state, spy drones, surveillance

Police State Fascism on the March; Obey and Convey

May 15, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

Police Brutality – A Never Ending Saga

Some people take offense when I define government as nothing but a gang of people that periodically and perpetually aggresses with impunity against individuals who have done no harm. That is fine, decades of indoctrination are likely to provoke offense to such a statement. But it has no bearing on whether or not it describes with 100% accuracy what happens in reality.

This sounds silly and it kind of freaks me out a bit too: But a lot of people really seem to derive their knowledge and opinions about the police from cop dramas on TV and in the theaters! It’s not like there is a shortage of those, that’s for sure. (In fact, I have the TV running as I write this and “The Capture of the Green River Killer” is on LMN.) I’m serious. Ask anybody what they think it is the police does. They will tell you something along the lines of that they are here to serve and protect us, and yes there are some bad apples here and there, but we shouldn’t let isolated incidents delude us, bla bla bla. Then ask them how many times they were actually protected by a cop vs. how many times they themselves have, on the contrary, been inconvenienced by cops for doing harm to nobody, for such things as driving with a cracked windshield, expired registration, doing illegal U-turns, J-walking, etc. This is a great example of concepts clouding people’s reality.

We can talk all day long about taxes, and deficits, and health care bills, financial reform, “freeing” Iraqis in wars, Social Security, and the Federal Reserve Bank, etc. etc.

But it really all comes down to one simple thing: If you don’t agree and thus prefer not to hand over your property to support any of these programs, or if you dare to peacefully compete with government enforced monopolies, or if you do whatever else the state orders you not to do, armed people in uniform will come to your house to kidnap you, lock you up, and steal your property. If you raise a gun to defend yourself against this intrusion, you will be shot down.

Here are some clips of incidents involving cops across the country.

These friendly cops break into a family home and shoot the owner’s dog in front of his children. The reason they did this is because they think he is in possession of a certain vegetation:

These cops harass a filming bystander while throwing grenades into empty buildings in residential neighborhoods:

4 Cops brutalize 2 young female school protesters:

Oakland BART Cop shoots unarmed man lying on the ground in the back:

Support CopBlock

Pete Eyre just invited me to a new site he is involved with, CopBlock, go check it out:

The idea behind Cop Block is to highlight the double standard within police departments. We hope to accomplish this by documenting police actions, whether they be illegal or just a waste of time and resources, then having supporters call into the police stations highlighted (hopefully recording their conversations). On top of the direct pressure we hope to put on police departments we want to be an educational resource for those with rights violating police officers. A place where several different techniques, view points and courses of action can be displayed.

Obey and Convey

There is no point in “standing up” against brute force. There is no point in arguing over “constitutional rights” with someone who can brutalize you with impunity. In doing so one actually sanctions a fundamentally corrupt process. By invoking legality or morality, one implies that the purpose of a police force is to be moral and follow universally preferable behavior.

Well, of course it’s not. The police are the henchmen of the state. Do you think this system of interventionist fascism would work if cops were moral?

Why do you think it is that so many times abusive cops get away with impunity? It’s because brutalizing innocents is one of the big perks for potential new cadets. The state needs those bonehead cops who follow orders without questions and who enjoy beating up on the weak and powerless, because those are the guys who “get things done” for them and who scare potential competitors and “tax dodgers” into submission!

Here is some more on the nature of the police and the military:

And here is how the police would work in a stateless society:

There is nothing wrong with obeying brute force. It is a perfectly valid and natural response to overwhelming aggression.

But what we can and should do is to convey the message, spread clips such as the above, inform people that there are much more viable and intelligent alternatives out there than giving young and abusive (and probably abused) people guns, tanks and blue costumes, and over time people will wake up to reality from their all too long slumber. Ideas will shape the future, guns only shape the present. The power is with us.

Tags: copblock, police, police brutality

Call the cops …

January 30, 2010 · Posted in Government · Comment

A friend called the cops today because he thought they would help him for some reason. I then asked him and two other friends: “Tell me, when did cops ever help you and NOT bully, harass, or fine you for not hurting anyone?” – Two remained silent, one said: “This one time, a cop helped me because he was going to fine me for driving fast, but then let me off.”

If I put on a blue costume and a hat, does that allow me to stop anyone whose speed I don’t appreciate on some road? What if I stop my neighbor and tell him that it is only through my own goodwill that he will be able to move on. Does that mean I helped him? Didn’t I much rather waste his precious time??

This is how mentally brainwashed and deranged we are today. We justify the most violent and intrusive of acts, so long as they are performed by the almighty armed people in blue costumes.

Tags: Government, police

Government

November 12, 2008 · Posted in Government · Comment

In order to elaborate on the essence of government, nothing more is needed than the explanations by the two economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Regardless of how unpopular and unconventional, every single word of their definitions is true, and nothing viable has ever been raised in objection or refutation against them:

Ludwig von Mises:

“Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.” (Mises, Human Action, Chapter XXVII, Part 2)

Murray Rothbard:

“The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self-defense. The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power. The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence; all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products. This use of violence to obtain its revenue (called “taxation“) is the keystone of State power. Upon this base the State erects a further structure of power over the individuals in its territory, regulating them, penalizing critics, subsidizing favorites, etc. The State also takes care to arrogate to itself the compulsory monopoly of various critical services needed by society, thus keeping the people in dependence upon the State for key services, keeping control of the vital command posts in society and also fostering among the public the myth that only the State can supply these goods and services. Thus the State is careful to monopolize police and judicial service, the ownership of roads and streets, the supply of money, and the postal service, and effectively to monopolize or control education, public utilities, transportation, and radio and television.” (Rothbard, War, Peace, and the State)