Law Enforcement

Jonathan has a thoughtful post about the problems that should be discussed in the immigration debate. It is worth your time to read the whole thing. However, I’d like to discuss the 2nd paragraph.

“You also have to add likely enforcement costs into the equation. These include grand abuses of civil liberties, national ID cards (which will be completely ineffective for their ostensible purpose), rampant criminal extortion of employers, etc. How does anyone propose to track down all of those illegals — house-to-house searches?”

Any discussion of enforcement must, by necessity, take in to account the application of force. This is an issue that everyone seems to be ignoring, willfully or otherwise. The reason why is probably because our border guards are already outgunned and certain to lose if there is a confrontation.

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Lame. Something tells me the cops aren’t going to stop many terrorists this way. OTOH it seems likely that they are going to annoy a lot of people who don’t appreciate this kind of official attention. Reminds me of the police department that was in the news a while back for stopping law-abiding motorists to congratulate them on being good drivers.

I suspect that the new Miami police initiative will not last very long.

This news article discusses how some police departments are rethinking their policy of requiring off duty officers to be constantly armed. According to the author, the reason why has been some friendly fire incidents where uniformed officers mistakenly killed their brethren.

That doesn’t seem to be a sufficient reason, though…

“According to the FBI, 43 police officers have been killed since 1987 by friendly fire. Some were caught in crossfire, or killed by firearms mishaps. A handful, like Young, were mistaken for criminals and shot by fellow officers.”

Every single death was a tragedy, but 43 in 18 years? This webpage states that there are about 20,000 police agencies in the US, with about 1 million employees. Of course, not all employees are sworn police officers.

This article from the Rand Foundation states that the US has 2.3 police officers for every 1,000 people. If I’m punching the numbers into the calculator correctly, that’s about 130,000 police officers, a number which seems plausible.

At any rate, there are an awful lot of police officers in a population of 300 million. And “a handful” of those officers have tragically lost their lives due to off-duty incidents in the past 18 years. This doesn’t seem to be a sufficient justification to disarm trained, motivated people who have dedicated their lives to serving the public. And that is what the author of the AP article admits even with all of the talk of friendly fire deaths.

“The policy is at the center of a $20 million civil rights lawsuit being heard this month in Providence, where Sgt. Cornel Young Jr. was killed in 2000 while he was off duty and trying to break up a fight.”

I’ve written before how departments make policy decisions that are clearly against the best interests of the public in order to avoid lawsuits. I think this is yet another example.

Police officers are held to a higher standard than the public they serve, both in and out of uniform. (Which is a constant source of griping whenever cops talk shop.) This is considered justified because of the nature of the job, and the people we require to perform the service. It makes perfect sense to require those same people to be ready to act in an emergency 24-7.

Unless there’s money on the line, that is.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Steven den Beste sent me a private Email with a link to this article by John Lott. In the op-ed, Lott discusses how Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin brought the subject of gun control up during a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This is after badgering the new US Ambassadore on the same subject when he arrived in Canada to fulfill his duties.

Steven asked a question in his Email.

“Why is it that gun control activists have so much trouble with this
concept?”

I started to answer that question in the reply, but decided that it was long and involved enough to rate a post.

I’ve been a self defense advocate and active 2nd Amendment supporter for the past 14 years, and in that time I’ve debated a number of people who support gun control. It’s been my experience that the majority of the hard core true believers, the people who donate the majority of the time and money needed to keep the movement going, have lost a loved one to suicide by gun.

This makes sense when one considers that the majority of all gun deaths are suicides (close to 60%). I’m not qualified to render a psychological profile of the people with which I’ve come in contact, but it seems that they are uniformly extremely emotional about the issue. They also tend to be convinced that their program of abolishing all private gun ownership will reduce all levels of violence, from crime to suicides.

It’s obvious that the persons who provide the greatest impetus for the gun control movement are moral, concerned individuals that are genuinely convinced that they are attempting a great good for all of us. Unfortunately, the record shows that they are wrong.

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Europe suffered from international terrorist organizations in the 1960’s and 1970’s. French terrorists got into the game early, with several diverse groups trying to assassinate Charles de Gaulle through his long political career. I’m probably hopelessly biased, but I think the main reason why those groups were dismantled and the major players either caught or killed was due to aggressive and professional law enforcement.

But, of course, times change. A pair of France’s most notorious and dangerous criminal bosses were freed from prison a few years ago by their henchmen. One of the prison breaks, that of Italian mobster Antonio Ferrara, closely resembled a military operation, with machine gun fire being used to suppress the guards while RPG’s were reportedly used to blow open the gates of the facility. What is troubling is that this all took place at Fresnes Prison right outside of Paris, arguably the most secure in the entire country.

This news item reports that gangs of youths have been rioting after dark for the past two days in Clichy-sous-Bois, which is yet another suburb of Paris. The spark that caused this urban unrest was the deaths of two youths who reportedly climbed the fence of an electric substation and were electrocuted. They did this while fleeing the scene of a suspected burglary after the police showed up.

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