Law Enforcement

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfieldduring the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar acts around the country, where taking pictures on public land in the bright of day is mistaken for “surveillance.”

On Monday this week, the New York Times announced that its investigation of NYPD “stop and frisk” practices from 2006 through 2010 found police stopped 52,000 people in a small eight-block predominantly black neighborhood called Brownsville. That’s one stop per year for every one of the neighborhood’s 14,000 residents. Police claim that almost half of those stops were prompted by “furtive action” of the resident.

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative. Unfortunately, although SAR is meant to help intelligence analysts “connect the dots,” it has a major flaw: it encourages police to gather and share information about completely legal activities in which thousands of people engage every day.

When police brutally beat an African American transsexual the black media turns away; but homo- and transphobia in the media hurt the entire community.

Since the successful street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, police and federal agencies have relied on aggressive and unconstitutional tactics to disperse, disrupt, and dissuade popular protest. Last week, the ACLU of Colorado, and attorneys from the NLG People’s Law Project, filed suit on behalf of bystanders, activists, and legal observers to hold Denver accountable for an arbitrary roundup during the 2008 DNC.

The discovery this month that anarchist “John Jacob,” an activist in anti-militarist organizing in the Pacific Northwest, is really civilian Army intelligence analyst John Towery II, shows that those concerned about civil liberties must remain vigilant in the Obama era. The gathering of domestic intelligence by Army agents highlights real dangers for civil liberties.

So Boston police troll the Criminal Record Information system to find personal information about local movie stars and sports heroes. We know that from a state audit released on May 6, 2009.

Hot Air Leads to Violence? Homeland Security apparently thinks so. The Department of Homeland Security recently warned law enforcement that disenchanted, angry Americans are like kernels of corn under heat, ready to pop at any time.

If the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC) isn’t careful, people might think its intelligence analysts are America’s thought police. Take a look at its 2009 Threat Assessment, which talks about “subversive thought” as a marker for violent terrorism and identifies “university based student groups as a radicalization node for almost every type of extremist group.” (pp. 9, 17).

According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released on April 3, 2009, 75 percent of voters say that safety is more important than fairness in determining what countries the US government sends freed Guantanamo inmates. While some element of N.I.M.B.Y. thinking is likely at work, this figure reflects misinformation about detainees at Guantanamo and the high degree of indiscriminate fear drummed up by the government.