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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Vanishing Data on Tax Migration

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Oh so quietly, the Obama Administration has removed embarrassing data from the public eye. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) no longer provides information on tax migration within the U.S. There was no announcement from either the IRS or the Census Bureau, which co-operates in compiling data. The reports have simply ceased.

In 1991, the IRS began to offer statistics on the number of people who relocated from and to every county in America during the preceding fiscal year. When combined with the aggregate incomes of those who relocated, the information gave analysts a sense of how taxation was impacting demographics. In September of 2012, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research published a report entitled ?The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look?. The report used ?data from the Census, the Internal Revenue Service...and other sources? to ?map in detail where in California the migrants come from, and where they go when they leave the state.? The report also attributed the migration to a series of ?cost drivers? with taxes topping the list.

The other cost drivers: ?regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs.? All of them have a strong tax component. Consider ?union power.? In California, the Public Employees? Retirement System (CalPERS) provides retirement benefits for over 1.6 million current employees, retirees, and their families. One way or the other, these benefits are at tax expense. For example, employee's salaries and their union dues come from taxation. Every dollar so confiscated is a dollar yanked out of private pockets and production. Such factors make California extraordinarily hostile to business, the wealthy and anyone who strives to join their ranks. No wonder the home of choice for California tax migrants was Texas whose Constitution prohibits a state tax on personal income.

The Manhattan Institute called the IRS data the ?most useful tool? it had for analysis. That tool is no longer available. The government reacts to embarrassing facts as heartless people used to react to idiot relatives in the olden days; they locked the embarrassment into an attic and never spoke of it again. Thus the state-by-state interactive tax migration table maintained by the Tax Foundation ends with the year 2010. The same fate awaits the nationwide county-by-county map offered by Forbes. Thus, the American public will be a little less informed. The American government will be a little less transparent as statistics are fed into an Orwellian memory hole.

Why the information blackout? There are several reasons, none of which are mutually exclusive.

The first reason is the same one that prompted Stalin to shoot his census takers. The truth can be politically embarrassing. In the late 1930s, Stalin commanded that an accurate census be taken to give him the information he required to prepare for a possible war with Germany. He got what he asked for but not what he wanted. The census reflected the politically engineered and deliberate murder of millions of Kulaks (farm-owning peasants) in the Ukraine from purges, planned starvation and disease. The data showed the deadly devastation of communist policy upon an entire class of Russians who simply disappeared. Stalin did not want that level of accuracy; he certainly did not wish it to be public knowledge. And, so, the census takers were abruptly executed and inflated population figures were released.

In America, it is still considered poor taste to line civil servants up against a wall and shoot them. When politically awkward data is exposed, the data rather than the collectors are destroyed. After all, what is not known does not exist. Nothing to see here, folks, move along and no one needs to be hurt.

The Crony Capitalism site states, ?When taxes are high enough for people and businesses to pull up their stakes and move halfway across a continent something is wrong.? Something is terribly wrong at the very heart of America. Crony Capitalism continues, ?the data [on tax migration] is no longer public due likely to the embarrassing nature of the information. Polls in high tax states want the tax bases of their respective states to think that they have no option but to pay even higher rates.?

That is a second reason to hide the data. Information is power; it allows individuals to know their options and to act on them. Ignorance is power as well because it allows those who impose it on others to manufacture the truth because no evidence to the contrary is allowed to exist.

A third reason for the Orwellian memory hole is to discourage what could become a dangerous trend ? at least dangerous to the government. So far tax migration is occurring on an individual-by-individual basis. Many who migrate do so quietly and without contacting anyone beyond the circle of people necessary to relocate, such as lawyers or real estate agents. If people believe they are alone in their opinions and behavior, they are less likely to speak out or organize into an effective force. They may well continue to act as individuals but their inconspicuous actions will not inspire others. They will not ring a bell in the night -- either to alarm or to encourage.

Silence and ignorance are friends to the state. And whatever the state wants you not to hear, not to know is important to your well-being. The government does not want you to know how popular an option leaving has become.

Everyone needs to weigh options for themselves, and many people will ?stand their ground? because that ground is shared with family and friends who cannot or will not move. I cannot disagree. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but being informed is never the wrong choice. I can disagree with ignorance.

My opinion? I cannot say it with more pith or elegance than Crony Capitalism: ?Get ? Out ? Now.?
_
Wendy McElroy is a renowned individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a co-founder along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith of The Voluntaryist in 1982, and is the author/editor of twelve books, the latest of which is "The Art of Being Free". Follow her work at http://www.wendymcelroy.com.

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Why Can't Schools Secure Themselves?

My inbox has been slammed with notes concerning the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Given the accessibility of information, and the pace at which it travels, people have treated this event as not just a case of a ghastly local crime, but much more than that, a signal and a wake-up call to the culture at large.

There is no harm in such reflections. The 500-year-old trend toward ever less violent societies ? a trend that continues to go in the right direction in our time ? should be pushed further in the right direction through education and cultural change.

Still, it might be beneficial to ask more focused questions about the problem of security at schools in particular.

In the days that followed the killing, my browser kept taking me back to a Wikipedia link about the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. The law, still intact after many challenges and rewrites, reads: ?It shall be unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone.?

Guns of all sorts are banned anywhere near schools. If the government?s laws had worked, this killer would have realized that his plan was unachievable. After all, the world?s most powerful government had banned the whole idea of guns at school.

But the law did not work, at least not as intended. On the contrary. The killer could be pretty sure going into this that he would be the only one at the school with a gun.

Think of this: Schools in particular have been singled out as a place without the ability to defend against violence. The law has been challenged and revised and debated ever since, but the bottom line stands. Have school shootings declined? Most major shootings now occur in gun-free zones, and nearly twice as many since the act passed than in the 20 years prior. (See the full list.)

People have wrongly tended to reduce the debate to more gun ownership or more gun control. It?s clear where the Obama administration wants to take this: toward more centralized control and fewer gun rights. The right responds by pointing to the example of Israel where teachers are heavily armed. That?s the choice the mainstream gives us.

Actually, the framing of the whole debate is wrong. It is not about whether teachers should be armed or whether guns should be banned for everyone but state-employed cops. The real issue is whether any institution in society is going to be in charge of its own security, and not be forced to obey the government?s plan.

Schools face a problem not different in kind from any other issue of security affecting banks, convenience stores, jewelry stores, theaters, homes, or churches. All these institutions are constantly threatened with violence from random sources. They must all make judgments about the risk of violence and how best to deal with it. There is no one aggregate solution that applies in every case. Each institution needs to determine security for itself.

Just days after Sandy Hook, a shooter attempted to gun down people at the Mayan Palace Theatre in San Antonio, Texas. An off-duty deputy whipped out her own gun and blasted him before the killer could reenact the rampage at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo. This is probably the first you have heard about this precisely because the tragedy was averted. The institution will learn from the event and respond in a way that is rational and not injurious of human rights and liberties.

Because school killings engender special social outrage, legislators made them an exception, and this was before airports and airlines received similarly treatment 11 years later with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Guns of any sort, unless carried by a cop, were not permitted to be part of anyone?s security solution. The federal government knew best, even to the point at which the federal law trumped state laws on guns.

Does this figure into the calculation that would-be killers make as they plot their malicious acts? Certainly. Advertising a place as gun-free by law is an invitation to killers. The law says to them that if they can get in, they will have a monopoly on violence. No efforts at defense will be available on the premises to protect the teachers and the kids. I don?t see how it could be controversial to suggest that this law is a very bad idea.

To be sure, these killings might have happened anyway. Dealing with violence was the last thing on anyone?s mind in this quiet and prosperous community school. All the events might have transpired as they did regardless. The point is that the law removes viable options for the school in dealing with security concerns. It says: We, the government, know what is best, and our way is the only way.

This is a terrible way to deal with any issue of security.

I am not saying that the school in question should have armed the teachers, the principal, or the students. What matters is who is in charge of security. What kind of incentives does the surety of the absence of effective security grant would-be murders?

Think of this in the case of your home. Let?s say your community passed a Gun-Free Home Act. Is such a law going to be something taken note of by would-be intruders? Is a criminal going to be more or less likely to enter a home knowing with certainty that all law-abiding citizens will not have the means to protect themselves?

Some people might respond that they don?t want to live in a society in which school administrators have to carry weapons. I completely agree. But wishing does nothing to deal with the problem of anti-social behavior on the part of a tiny minority. A tiny group is capable of ruining the social order for the rest of us, which is why we need mechanisms in place to deal with them.

It?s true in every aspect of life, whether our homes or online forums or banks or schools. Ownership is what allows the security calculation to be rational. Without private property, the destructive element rules.

In the online world, these people are known as trolls. In the online world, they can?t be violent, but they can wreck a good thing. A forum that cannot control them or kick them off is not long for this world. If the federal government had passed the No-Troll Act as a way of securing online communities against them, the forums would be all destroyed by now.

It is right and proper to wish for a society of perfect peace. But it is also very smart to have institutions in place that deal with those who do not want peace. Traditionally, people have relied on government to provide this service. This is a grave mistake. Security is inseparable from private property and the institutions of the market economy.

The reason violent crime has fallen by 65% since 1993 has not been government. It has been the private sector?s creation of advanced technology in the hands of private enterprise: surveillance cameras, private security, alarm systems, increasingly sophisticated systems of screening, and so on. Guns in the hands of private owners have been part of that solution.

The best path forward for schools in particular is to get out from under the protection of government and be put on the same status as regular commercial establishments. Private establishments that own and control their own space provide better security.

Whenever any institution is singled out for special protection by government and called too important to manage itself, that institution needs to worry about its future. That?s why the ultimate solution to public school violence is the full privatization of security and of the schools themselves.

At the very least, we need a repeal of the laws that make it impossible for schools to find their own solutions to the threat of violence. In the name of human rights, security needs to be privatized, whether government likes it or not.
_
Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, the Primus inter pares of the Laissez Faire Club, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo, It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, and A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Build Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age, among thousands of articles. Click to sign up for his free daily letter. Email him: tucker@lfb.org | Facebook | Twitter

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Jeffrey, is it not the case that in these mass shootings the gunman turns the gun on himself, so I doubt cameras and the like will effect much change (Actually the egos of some may be even more tempted). The simple fact is the more guns there are, the more killings there are. Your interpretation otherwise is just another twisted imagining of 'how so wonderful things might be' in the dreamt land of AL. In such imaginings you only ever look for dreamy positive. How about getting real about some dreamy negatives too. At least then your dreams will have some balance to them, though they will still be but dreams. I honestly can't see any difference but positive dreamy communists and positive
dreamy AL's. GET REAL and stop being impressed by philosophical idealism. More guns more killings does not correlate with less guns = less killings.

The big problem people always skip over when proposing any sort of gun control is that laws don't stop criminals. Simple as that. That's why criminals exist - because they disobey laws. Allow people who want to bear their arms to bear them when and wherever they choose - and I assure you gun violence will drop, if just due to deterrence knowing plenty of people will pop someone full of lead before he can get his killing on. If not, then he is dead, and one less psycho to murder children.

I see plenty of people - hundreds if not thousands - when i visit gun shows - every single one packing heat. Not once has any of them attempted or threatened to attempt to kill everyone there. For one of two reasons - 1) They aren't an insane psychopath who wants to kill soneone - 2) As soon as that gun leaves the holster and anyone hears a slide click, he'll be hit with more full jacket hollow points than pumpkins after halloween in Alabama.

And actually, in most cases the gunman DOES turn the gun on himself. Look at all of the last major gun incidents - in each and every one the gunman killed himself or was killed by police/armed bystander before they could finish their rampage.

Actually the United States has 300 million guns but only about 10,000 gun homicides each year. A country like Brazil has 15 million guns but has 35,000 gun homicides per year. Mexico has 15 million guns but only 10,000 gun homicides a year.

So to recap,
Brazil guns < United States guns
Brazil gun homicides > United States gun homicides

Most of the gun killings in the U.S. are gang related, aka drug war related, so the gun violence statistics are a fraud. If people really cared about "gun violence" they'd advocate abolishing the war on drugs, not stealing law abiding citizens guns leaving them at the mercy of armed criminals. Of course, this doesn't include the "gun violence" carried out by the government against it's own citizens, that's one situation where I am in favor of gun control, namely taking guns out of the hands of police. School should now be taught at home, no doubt about it, everyone just about has an internet connection and it would save the state millions on transportation of students and save billions on upkeep of buildings that are only used 3/4 of the year! Teachers could teach from a sketch pad from a facility and at each days end computers could automatically compute all students actions and grades without the teacher having to waste all afternoon going over work! Seems like a lot of shit has been created to fill pockets of the oil companies as you can see in front of us right fucking now! @ keudo

That's what hypnotized shooters are supposed to do for their programmers, they do the dirty work and then they are programmed to suicide!

Centuries of hypnotic experiments and people still have to get a clue... Are you guys serious? you want to compare USA with Brazil and Mexico, I should think that's comparing apples with pears, (no disrespect to B and M intended). How about comparing yourself to any Euro country and you get a very different answer. Australia also can offer you guys a very clear example of regulation working. Regulation came in after we had a tragedy and its been very effective. Now our only shooting problems are with gangs shooting each other with illegal weapons. Thats the thing about 'illegal' weapons, not so easy
for just anyone to get hold of them.
And for you dreamy guys that are so certain that private home education is the be end and end all for kids education, well turns out that children that go to school earlier, develop better then those who don't. Even the over populated classroom concerns turn out to be a fallacy as those kids show even greater social IQ, hardly surprising.
Good luck with your prison schools. I can promise you that all us in the first world don't wish for armed guards at our kindy school nor teachers needing to be trained shooters.
Time to grow up america and leave your cowboy mentality behind. And chris I agree, lets get guns out of the hands of police too. In Australia we unfortunately do have armed police but New Zealand our comparative neighbor doesn't and I don't believe there is any difference in policing outcomes. Both also have comparative Gov'ts. And just to clarify, I'm not against home schooling, if you know its right for your child, go right ahead. I used to be adamantly anti early schooling too, believing
some hippy notion that home and family is best. But I tell you my child just loved school immediately. Kids learn from each other best, not from long legged mums and dads. And regular school is loved by very many children, I caution you not to deprive them because of some 'western prairie' philosophical idealism. And Keudo you live in a hollywood movie logic world. Hysterically funny scene with all that holster pulling gaff, but in reality just nonsense.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Interventionism and the Connecticut Horror

Following up on my blog post of December 17 on the shootings in Connecticut, "Those Government Gun-Free Zones," I wish to make a supplemental point, one about interventionism.

It appears increasingly likely that the Connecticut massacre will lead to some sort of gun-control measure being enacted by Congress.

Will whatever measure they enact mean that there will be no more massacres? Of course not. There have to be underlying reasons as to why these types of horrors occur here in the United States and not, say, in Switzerland, where most everyone owns assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols and keeps them in his home. (See my article "The Banality of Evil," for one possible explanation.) And since murderers here in the United States will always be able to find guns, including in a black market, whatever measure they enact is not going to bring an end to mass shootings. It would be far wiser to address and confront the root causes of such horrors rather than impose gun control on the citizenry.

When the next massacre does occur, what will statists say? Will they say, "Well, our gun-control measure has obviously failed. It's time to repeal what we did back in 2012"?

Nope. There is no way that any statist would ever acknowledge the failure of statism. Instead, what they're going to say is, "This only goes to show that the gun-control measure we enacted was too weak. We need to strengthen it with tighter gun controls."

And then, what happens if another massacre occurs? Will they then admit failure and repeal the previous gun-control measures? Not on your life. They will do the same thing as before, enacting a much fiercer gun-control measure.

How do we know that this will happen? Because that's the nature of interventionism. An initial intervention inevitably becomes a series of new interventions whose purpose is to fix the failures and problems of the previous interventions, with the outcome being ever-more government control over the lives of the citizenry.

Consider two examples -- the war on drugs and the war on immigrants.

At first, they made possession and distribution of drugs illegal. But that intervention didn't stop people from violating the law. Instead of simply admitting failure, which statists never do, they just began enacting an endless series of drug-war interventions. Things like warrantless searches, tightening the border, mandatory-minimum sentences, financial reporting requirements, no-knock raids, spying on people, encouraging snitches, asset forfeiture, framing innocent people, sending the army into the U.S. border regions and into Latin America, and much, much more.

The result has been ever more failure, death, destruction, and violence that emanates from the drug war itself and ever more control over the lives of the American people. Yet, the last thing statists want to do is just admit that it was wrong to enact the initial intervention by making the possession and distribution of drugs illegal. Despite decades of manifest failure and destructiveness, they still won't re-legalize drugs.

The same thing has happened in the war on immigrants. First they made it illegal for foreigners to enter the United States without official permission. Soon, however, U.S. officials discovered that many foreigners were simply not complying with the law. Rather than admit that the intervention was a failure and repeal it, they instead began enacting a series of ever-tightening interventions. Things like roving border searches of automobiles, warrantless searches of farms and ranches along the border, tightened inspections at border checkpoints, inspection checkpoints inside the United States, requiring dark-skinned Americans to carry their papers with them while traveling away from the border, raids on American businesses, making it illegal to transport or harbor illegal immigrants, and constructing a Berlin-Wall type of structure along the Texas-Mexican border.

Through it all, statists simply refused to admit that the initial intervention had failed. No statist is ever going to do that. Instead, they always say that the problem is "There is still too much freedom" or, in other words, that the previous interventions haven't been "tough enough." In the meantime, their drug-war and immigrant-war interventions have succeeded in turning the U.S. border regions into a police state, not to mention the wasteland of death, violence, and corruption that the drug war has brought to Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

The Connecticut horror also provides a good example of how statists seize upon crises to expand government control over people's lives and fortunes, especially through interventionism. They did it during the Great Depression. They did it in World War II. They did it in the Cold War. They did it with 9/11.

But hopefully, as more people see how the interventionist process works, especially compared to the free society, the tide can be turned in favor of liberty, not only with respect to guns, drugs, and immigration, but also with the rest of our lives.
_
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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Monday, January 14, 2013

San Diego Cops Beat & Pepper Spray Innocent Man With Down Syndrome

A 21-year-old man who is developmentally disabled was hit and forced to the ground, as well as pepper sprayed, before he was taken into custody by California sheriff's deputies.

According to CNN, Antonio Martinez was taken to the hospital and he was also detained for possible obstruction of justice, but San Diego County Sheriff's Department spokesman Jan Caldwell said that there was no citation or charge filed on that or other counts.

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It is only going to get worse here in San Diego as these worthless,brainwashed,myopic,pigs continue to be allowed to act as they have by their command and the public. The mindset of the New World Order thugs is such that the peons are guilty until proven innocent. Nice to see the police spokesman apologize. Still hope the abusive cop loses his job. So much for human rights or even disabled rights, they sure do know how to always take it to a whole mother level! Good job dumbass! Wonder what will be the strand that breaks the camels back?

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US Has 330,000 Drug Offenders in Prison

The number of people in prison in America declined last year for the second year in a row, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of prisoners at the end of 2011 dropped to just under 1.6 million, a 0.9% decrease over the previous year.

More than 300,000 were doing prison time for drugs in the US at the end of 2011. (supremecourt.gov)Of those 1.6 million prisoners, some 330,000 were doing time for drug offenses, including nearly 95,000 doing federal time.

There were 15,023 fewer inmates at the end of 2011 than a year earlier, but that number is more than accounted for by a single state, California, which reported a decline of 15,493 prisoners due primarily to an incarceration realignment program that has sent what would have been state prisoners to county jails instead. Counting just state prison populations, 2011 saw a decline of 21,164 prisoners, or 1.5%, again with California accounting for 72% of the decrease.

Overall, 26 states reported declines in prison populations, while 24 reported increases. While overall state prison population numbers are declining slightly, the federal prison population continues to increase, largely offsetting the decline in the states. The federal prison population increased by 6,591 prisoners, or 3.1%.

The growth in the federal prison population is largely driven by drug war prisoners. Drug offenders constitute 48% of all federal inmates, or some 94,600 inmates. By contrast, only 7.6% of federal inmates are doing time for violent crimes.

Among state prisoners, drug offenders accounted for 17%, or slightly fewer than one out of five. That means some 235,000 were doing state prison time on drug charges at the end of 2011, bringing the combined state and federal total to 330,000. That's a slight decline over a decade ago, but still represents incalculable human costs, as well as easily calculable financial ones.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Martial Law in One City: The Case of Paragould, Arkansas

"The fear is what's given us the reason to do this," insisted Todd Stovall, the head functionary of the paramilitary occupation force afflicting Paragould, Arkansas, as he announced that the city would be placed under martial law for the supposed purpose of deterring crime. "Once I have stats and people are saying they're scared, we can do this. It allows us to do what we're fixing to do."

What Stovall and his fellow tax-feeders are "fixing to do" is to leave the city's streets clotted with SWAT operators toting AR-15s and official permission to harass anybody who comes within eyeshot.

The marauders "are going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck," grunted Stovall at a town hall meeting held last Thursday at the West View Baptist Church. "If you're out walking, we're going to stop you, ask why you're out walking, check for your ID."

"We're going to do it to everybody," Stovall explained, anticipating objections. "Criminals don't like being talked to."

The same is true of citizens, of course -- but like most members of his paramilitary tribe, Stovall divides the world between enlightened agents of State "authority" such as himself and the Mundane population, which is to be intimidated into submission.

Stovall insists that constitutional quibbles over probable cause don't apply, because the "crisis" justifies imposition of a city-wide curfew and garrison state measures.

"I've got statistical reasons that say I've got a lot of crime right now, which gives me probable cause to ask what you're doing out." He admits that he didn't consult an attorney before reaching that conclusion, and that "I don't even know that there's ever been a difference" between what he's proposing and undisguised martial law. To those who might complain about being harassed by Stovall's minions, the chief offers an unqualified promise" "We have a zero-tolerance. We are prepared to throw your hind-end in jail, OK? We are not going to take a lot of flack."

Paragould historically has a very high burglary rate, but the violent crime rate is substantially below the national average: In 2010, the last year for which stats are available, there wasn't a single murder in the town of roughly 26,000 people. But political elites and their enforcers are adept at manufacturing fears, and the bullet-headed militarist who heads the police department -- and appears to be building his own little private army -- assumes that government derives its "just" powers from whatever fears it can instill and exploit in its subjects.

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- Arizona Police Officer Caught Hiding Evidence In His Garage, Lying About It -- Keeps Job
- Denver Police Officer Found Guilty Of Using Badge To Sexually Assaulting Woman

So according to Mr. Stovall the definition of a criminal is someone that doesn't "liked being talked to." That seems to be a rather low threshold of culpability. I suppose this is the logical conclusion when the collective deem their rights bestowed upon them by the whims of government rather than endued by Omnipotent God. I hope the good citizens of Paragould run these bush league tyrants out of town. I do believe only the President of the United States or a State governor can declare martial law - and the Governor only within his state. So, unless the Governor of my state (Arkansas) intends to declare martial law, I do believe this will constitute an attempt to perform a coup by whoever thinks they can declare it. I could be wrong, but I'm doing some research to find out. Well, I don't have any hard sources, most of what I have is from online encyclopedias and such, but it looks like city officials and police chiefs can't legally declare martial law. I could be wrong, but it does appear any attempt to force citizens into this would be illegal, if not unconstitutional. Also, 'scared people' and 'statistics' do not probable cause make. I may take a ride over there in the next week or two and walk around a bit, see what happens...

View the original article here

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Caught On Tape: Cops Tase Man In Case of Mistaken Identity, Joke About Planting Drugs On Him

Happy birthday from the police state!

Via Delaware Online:

Two Seaford police officers pulled over a Dagsboro man on the night of his 43rd birthday, fired a stun gun into his ribs and roughly handcuffed him, mistakenly believing he was someone else, according to a federal lawsuit complaining about the 2011 incident.
After the man protested that he had done nothing wrong, officers were heard laughing on a surveillance video after one suggested placing drugs in the man?s car, according to the lawsuit filed by Reginald G. Johnson. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Wilmington last week against the city and two officers, alleges excessive force and malicious prosecution, among other charges.
[...]While Johnson was being held, officers searched his car and an officer, identified as Cpl. Aaron Mitchell, could be heard on the video saying, ?Somebody drop the dope in here.? That was followed by laughter in an apparent reference to planting drugs in the car, according to the suit.

Watch the video:

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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

Latest Tyranny/Police State
- North Carolina: Driving While Nervous is Not a Crime
- Indefinite Detention Without Trial: Completely Unconstitutional, Yet Routine
- Not So Merry Christmas Drug Busts
- Utah: Traffic Stop Valid Even When Cop Causes Violation
- Santa Claus Arrested by DPS Capitol Police for Chalking Sidewalk
- San Diego Cops Beat & Pepper Spray Innocent Man With Down Syndrome
- Arizona Police Officer Caught Hiding Evidence In His Garage, Lying About It -- Keeps Job
- Denver Police Officer Found Guilty Of Using Badge To Sexually Assaulting Woman

People in this country better wake up. We are steadily turning into a police state like pre ww2 nazi Germany. Cops need to be taught they aren't above reproach or above the law. It's sad when they get away with crap like this.

View the original article here

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