Is the U.S. turning into a police state?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Does MS count as living in a poor area of the country? Would that give my opinions more weight?

If you lived in a poor area of Mississippi. What's your experience with police?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Adalbertus
Stalins terror (and maybe the one during the French revolution) were the only terror systems I know of where *nothing* helped.

I would add: Ida Amin's Uganda and Pol Pot's Kampuchea, maybe Mbutu's Zaire.

[Felch]

I was on my way back from school yesterday for spring break, and on the radio people were discussing the installation of video cameras on the Mall in DC.

Now the rich parts of DC are ridiculously safe. Occaisional pickpocketing, shooting sprees into the halls of Congress, and other such problems notwithstanding, the high crime sections of the District are largely as a result of the WoD, and poverty among the black residents. The hundreds of video cameras being proposed will for the most part only help in establishing a further measure of police control in the safest parts of the city.

Paranoia, leading to increased surveillance of safe areas, is one of the key steps towards the creation of a police state.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by MrFun
In some limited, partial ways, the United States has some aspects of what a true police state would have.

For instance, today, it is legal in some states for police to break into a person's house and arrest two people engaged in sex if they are both of the same gender even though they are both mutually consenting adults. Then, those two people can be legally prosecuted even though their right to privacy was violated.

Historically, you can also look at lynching. Lynching was a legal institution until the 1940's, after World War II ended. But lynching was carried out mostly by civilian mobs who almost never had to worry about being prosecuted for lynching.

I'm sorry about this, but now I have a question. Does anyone on Apolyton live in a state in the United States that allows police to legally break into someone's house when they suspect of sex between two people of the same gender, and then allow for legal prosecution based on that arrest??

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by MrFun
Does anyone on Apolyton live in a state in the United States that allows police to legally break into someone's house when they suspect of sex between two people of the same gender, and then allow for legal prosection based on that arrest??

No, I don't. Police usually try to go after real criminals. The consenting adults that are arrested under sodomy laws are only arrested because of thier own stupidity, ie getting it on in public or something like that.

[MrFun]

DinoDoc, that is where you are partially wrong.

There was an actual case a couple years ago where an apartment was broken in, and the police arrested two mutally consenting adult men engaging in sex after a suspicious neighbor called the police.

So for some reason, in that case, the right to privacy did not apply.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by MrFun
DinoDoc, that is where you are partially wrong.

Was that in MS?

[MrFun]

I'm not sure if it was in that state or not. I thought it was in Texas -- you know, that backward state that uses the Bible for law instead of the Constitution??

But seriously, let me try to locate the article from a website I visit. I will put a copy on here when I locate it.

[Ramo]

Does anyone on Apolyton live in a state in the United States that allows police to legally break into someone's house when they suspect of sex between two people of the same gender, and then allow for legal prosection based on that arrest??

There are anti-sodomy laws in Texas.

AFAIK, though, the police doesn't actively search for sodomy anywhere in the state. I've never heard of any cases of the police breaking into someone's house because they were hoping to catch somone in the act of sodomy.

[chequita guevara]

I believe Georgia is such a state. In know Illinois has anti-sodomy laws (as well as laws that prevent unrelated people of the opposite sex living together), but not only are they unenforced, but discrimination based on gender-preference is illegal in many Illinois cities.

[MrFun]

According to the article provided via the link below, the police broke in initially for suspecting of an intruder. Check the article out for the report on what I mentioned earlier, DinoDoc and anyone else interested.

Sodomy Laws, Arrests, and Violation of Right to Privacy

[Ramo]

Yep, I've heard of that before.

Of course, if the gov't tried to pull that kind of crap in Austin, they'd get lynched.

[Semo]

Refutation of Police State Claim - Part I

I originally wrote a much longer, more detailed post, but I didn't feel like breaking it up and spamming the message board with ten posts. I will try to deal with one of the major points I read in one of Chegitz's recent posts, but it'll require some patience. I apologize for the amount of space I'm taking up.

First of all, I don't buy into the notion that only people who have lived in poor neighborhoods, or have had bad experiences with the police are the only ones who can comment on whether or not the U.S. is a police state. I don't buy into that notion even though I grew up poor, in a poor neighborhood, and have had some unpleasant experiences with police officers.

I also don't believe that organizing a "mass demonstration against Globalization" gives one the automatic moral or intellectual authority to brand a given country as a police state.

With that being noted, I disagree strongly with your classification of the U.S. as a "police state". By any reasonable definition, a police state is a political entity in which police power is used in a repressive, intrusive and often arbitrary manner to facilitate governmental control of the social, political and economic lives of its citizens. Historically, police states have been single-party republics with underdeveloped court systems. Such states tend to field large secret police forces and blur the distinction between police and military personnel. In such states, social and political dissent is often crushed in a brutal manner with long jail terms or death sentences (either in stacked, "kangaroo courts" or through the use of police power) for relatively minor, often politically-oriented offenses. Such offenses would include the writing or publishing of materials critical of the government, speaking out against the state's leaders, or protesting against the state's policies.

The facts just don't support such a label.

[Semo]

Refutation of Police State Claim - Part II

Noam Chomsky (a linguist at MIT) has written dozens of books that are extremely critical of the government. Edward Said (a literary theoretician at Columbia University, I believe) was involved with, and speaks out on behalf of, elements within the revolutionary Palestinian liberation movement. Bill Ayers, member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. The organization he was part of planted bombs. Several members blew themselves up building a bomb which was intended to blow up U.S. servicemen at a dance. He's currently a professor of education at the University of Illinois. Many of the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, have lived out their lives since the 60s in relative peace and prosperity. Bobby Seale, one of the most prominent members of the Black Panthers, which also advocated violent revolution, teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and sells his own brand of barbecue sauce.

Jane Fonda. Tom Hayden. H. Rap Brown (yeah, he was convicted of a murder committed long after his activist days). I could name names for hours, and still not produce an exhaustive list. It's really, really difficult to come up with bona fide political prisoners in the United States.

Indeed, the two people in the United States who are most often referred to as political prisoners by Leftist and Left-leaning groups are Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. Both were convicted by a jury of their peers for particularly brutal murders (in both cases, the individuals were convicted of shooting already seriously wounded law enforcement officers in the face from very close range).

[Semo]

Refutation of Police State Claim - Part III

I think it was Eldridge Cleaver who described an encounter he had with a police officer who pulled him over. The officer removed his hat, smiled at Cleaver and said something like, "Hey Eldridge, you remember me?" The cop had been a Black Panther back in the 60s.

We just don't have legions of political prisoners! This would be absolutely crucial to supporting the accusation that our police apparatus wields its power in an arbitrary and repressive fashion.

Yes, there are black marks in our history, and I'm not denying that. The police went buck wild at the '68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. National Guardsmen fired upon protestors at Kent State in the early '70s, killing four and wounding several others. This was at a time when domestic terrorism was on the rise, and the late '60s and early '70s were the peak of a cultural revolution in the U.S.

(And yes, I'm fully aware that federal government still has quite a few individuals in custody as part of its ongoing investigation into the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Despite claims by various groups that these people haven't been charged with any crime, they were -- they were in the country illegally, which is actually a crime.)

This all leads to the issue of organizing protests "against Globalization". It is true that federal, state and local authorities actively spy on dissident groups in America (on the Right and the Left). However, spying does not a police state make. There are elements under the umbrella of the anti-Globalization movement that actually do advocate the violent overthrow of the American government.

Hell, indymedia.com, one of the more influential far Left websites on the internet, actually keeps a scoreboard of police equipment damaged or destroyed in "direct actions"!