DIY Law Enforcement in Cash-Strapped Oregon County

"They will not send an officer out, so we are on our own totally," says Sam Nichols, co-founder of Citizens Against Crime. CAC is a group of around 20 armed volunteers who have been conducting routine patrols in and around O'Brien, Oregon since last summer. CAC patrols "are always a minimum of two people," says Nichols, precisely because they want to avoid the kind of thing "that happened in Florida, the case where Zimmerman shot the boy."

Why are the citizens of O'Brien patrolling their own streets? Josephine County is a rural area in south western Oregon with serious budget problems. Back in 1916, the federal government bought up millions of acres of land that had been owned by the railroads. The move left 18 Oregon counties without a significant source of property tax revenue. To make up for the lost taxes, the feds began giving the Oregon counties a share of the timber revenues in 1937. The program worked until environmental regulations severely curtailed logging in Oregon. By 1998, timber revenues had dropped to just a third of what they were in 1989. Temporary federal timber subsidies filled the gap, but those subsidies were phased out last year.

This year, Josephine County slashed its public safety budget from $20 million to less than $9 million. As a result, the county was forced to release 39 prisoners, including people charged with assault, burglary and rape. Only three sheriffs patrol Josephine County, an area larger than Rhode Island, and those sheriffs only respond to life-threatening calls.

The self-reliant folks who live in Josephine County aren't likely to raise their own taxes any time soon, but lots of citizens are willing to do their part to deter criminal activity. Sam Nichols and the other members of Citizens Against Crime strap on guns, turn on flashing lights mounted on their vehicles and keep an eye out for suspicious activity. Former deputy sheriff Carol Dickson maintains a Facebook page called To Catch a Thief as a kind of virtual neighborhood watch program. The page currently has more than 1600 followers.

"Some people are taking the law into their own hands, which obviously scares the heck out of me," says Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson. But because of the severity of Josephine County's budget problems, Gilbertson isn't complaining too loudly. As he puts it, "law enforcement in this community is weak at best."

Approximately 6.5 minutes.

Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.

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This is how law enforcement should be run by volunteer citizens not by donut coffee chugging police who rip off the taxpayer when you see their salary. so if a citizen takes the law into their own hands it scares the hell out of him.but cops doing the same?

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Is It 'Assault,' or 'Enforcement'? That Depends on the Costume

by William Grigg

Every night, 23-year-old Seattle resident Benjamin John Francis Fodor kisses his sleeping children, embraces his live-in girlfriend, then suits up to hit the streets as a crime fighter. During one recent evening patrol Fodor came upon what he believed was a fight outside a nightclub. He claims that when he intervened to break it up, some of the participants turned on him, and he was forced to use pepper spray in self-defense.

The people on the receiving end of the pepper spray said they were dancing, rather than fighting, when the oddly dressed stranger wearing body armor materialized and attacked them without provocation.

"In this particular case [Fodor] perceived that this group was fighting and when we contacted them, they said they weren't fighting," said Seattle Police Department spokesman Det. Mark Jamieson. However, one member of the group -- a young woman who actually tried to defend the pepper spray victims -- later said that there was a fight taking place. She did complain that Fodor's actions were excessive and unwarranted.

Complicating matters further was the presence of a film crew, which was on the scene to document Fodor's patrol. It's possible that Fodor succumbed to "Showtime Syndrome" -- an irresistible urge to play to the camera that led him to intervene when it wasn't necessary. He claims that the video clearly documents that a fight was underway.

In short, Fodor made a snap judgment -- apparently, the wrong one. Usually, when a police officer makes a mistake of that kind, he can expect to receive no more than an administrative sanction. However, Fodor was arrested. That's because he's not a police officer, but rather a self-styled "superhero" called "Phoenix Jones." He is affiliated with the "Rain City Superhero Movement," which is part of a loosely organized national movement inspired by the Justice League (or, less charitable people might conclude, the Mystery Men).

"Unfortunately, he used force," insisted Det. Jamieson. "He committed a crime, an assault against these individuals. That's against the law.... Just because he's dressed up in costume, it doesn't mean he's ... above the law." Fodor may have acted with good intentions, Jamieson continued, but "it was so unnecessary. He didn't need to insert himself into that situation."

That's right: Seattle can't afford to have oddly dressed people prowling the streets, ready to wade into ambiguous situations and use unnecessary force. Unless, of course, they're government-licensed purveyors of mayhem, such as Ian Birk -- the Seattle Police Officer who murdered local artist John Williams on a street corner in August 2010.

Williams, a woodcarver and chronic inebriate, was carrying a carving knife in a crosswalk when Birk pulled up in a cruiser. Seven seconds later, Williams was dead. While Birk was forced to resign from the department, no criminal charges were filed against him.

Fodor's problem, you see, was that he wasn't wearing a government-issued costume.

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i wanna see the video of the alleged fight to judge myself whether he acted correctly in that situation.

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MPAA Directly Lobbies Law Enforcement To Be Its Own Private Police Force

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt

For years, we've discussed how questionable it is that federal law enforcement, including the Justice Department and Homeland Security, often acts as the private police force of the entertainment industry. At times there's been a bit of a revolving door, with the RIAA/MPAA hiring former federal law enforcement officials to head up their "anti-piracy" efforts, and the existing federal groups sometimes seem to return the favor by taking on cases that clearly should be civil matters between the private companies in the entertainment business and those it feels infringed on their rights.

Over the last few years, the fact that the feds have effectively been working as the entertainment industry's private police force has grown more and more obvious. No one from Homeland Security seems willing to explain (and trust me, I've asked multiple times) why it is that when ICE did its domain seizures, it relied solely on claims from the industry and (even more ridiculous) announced the first round of seizures from Disney headquarters. Can you imagine how people would react if the FTC announced it was filing antitrust charges against Google... from Microsoft's offices? Or if the FCC announced it was blocking the AT&T-T-Mobile merger from Sprint's offices? Such scenarios seem preposterous, but ICE doesn't seem to recognize the clear conflict of interest in acting as the private police force for an industry, rather than actually doing its job.

Perhaps part of that is because the entertainment industry is spending a ton of money lobbying law enforcement agencies directly. Most of the time when you think about lobbying activities, you think about talking to politicians to try to get them to pass certain laws, or talking to regulators to have them adjust or change certain rules and regulations. You don't tend to think of lobbying law enforcement directly in order to convince them to do your private bidding. But, the MPAA does.

According to a disclosure report, the MPAA spent $400,000 lobbying a wide range of US government departments in the first quarter of 2011 including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Vice President?s Office. Issues on the table include so-called ?rogue sites? including RapidShare, streaming, graduated response (3 strikes) and domain seizures.

There are no real surprises in the content covered. It's the same stuff the MPAA has been pushing for a while now. But the fact that they're directly lobbying the FBI, the Justice Department, Homeland Security and ICE should raise some eyebrows. Law enforcement should not be influenced by the desires of private companies -- especially ones with a long history of failing to adapt to changing technologies and trying to get those technologies declared illegal. Imagine if, rather than a civil lawsuit, when the VCR was introduced, the movie industry could have just had the FBI declare the things illegal?

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