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From Neighborhood Cops To Robocops: The Changing Face Of American Police
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ? Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and scan-and-frisk searches.
Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we’re about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons, super-vision contact lenses, computer-linked visors, and mind-reading helmets.
Similarly, just as military equipment created for the battlefield has been deployed on American soil against American citizens, we’re about to see military technology employed here at home in a manner sure to annihilate what’s left of our privacy and Fourth Amendment rights.
For instance, with the flick of a switch (and often without your even being aware of the interference), police can now shut down your cell phone, scan your body for “suspicious” items as you walk down the street, test the air in your car for alcohol vapors as you drive down the street, identify you at a glance and run a background check on you for outstanding warrants, piggyback on your surveillance devices to listen in on your conversations and “see” what you see on your private cameras, and track your car’s movements via a GPS-enabled dart.
That doesn’t even begin to scrape the surface of what’s coming down the pike, with law enforcement and military agencies boasting technologies so advanced as to render everything up until now mere child’s play.
Once these technologies, which used to belong exclusively to the realm of futuristic sci-fi films, have been unleashed on an unsuspecting American public, it will completely change the face of American policing and, in the process, transform the landscape of what we used to call our freedoms.
It doesn’t even matter that these technologies can be put to beneficial uses. As we’ve learned the hard way, once the government gets involved, it’s only a matter of time before the harm outweighs the benefits.
Imagine, if you will, self-guided “smart” bullets that can track their target as it moves, solar-powered airships that provide persistent wide-area surveillance and tracking of ground “targets,” a grenade launcher that can deliver 14 flash-bang grenade rounds, invisible tanks that can blend into their surroundings and masquerade as a snow bank or a soccer mom’s station wagon, and a guided mortar weapon that can target someone up to 12 miles away.
Or what about “less lethal weapons” such as the speech jammer gun, which can render a target tongue-tied; sticky foam guns, which shoot foam that hardens on contact, immobilizing the victim; and shock wave generators, which use the shockwaves from a controlled explosion to knock people over.
Now imagine trying to defend yourself against such devices, which are incapable of distinguishing between an enemy combatant and a civilian. For that matter, imagine attempting to defend yourself or your loved ones against police officers made superhuman thanks to technology that renders them bullet-proof, shatter-proof, all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.
Does rendering a government agent superhuman make them inhuman, as well, unable to relate to the mass of humanity they are sworn to protect and defend?
Pointing out that the clothes people wear can affect how they act, Salon magazine reporter Geordie Mcruer notes that “when clothing has symbolic meaning – such as a uniform that is worn only by a certain profession – it prepares the mind for the pursuit of goals that are consistent with the symbolic meaning of the clothing.”
Mcruer continues:
When we dress our police officers in camouflage before deploying them to a peaceful protest, the result will be police who think more like soldiers. This likely includes heightening their perception of physical threats, and increasing the likelihood that they react to those threats with violence. Simply put, dressing police up like soldiers potentially changes how they see a situation, changing protesters into enemy combatants, rather than what they are: civilians exercising their democratic rights…
When police wear soldiers’ clothing, and hold soldiers’ weapons, it primes them to think and act like soldiers. Furthermore, clothing that conceals their identity – such as the helmets, gas masks, goggles, body armor and riot shields that are now standard-issue for officers at peaceful protests – will increase the likelihood that officers react aggressively to the situation. As a result of the fact that they are also dressed like soldiers, they are more likely to interpret the situation as hostile and will more readily identify violence as the best solution.
While robocops are problematic enough, the problem we’re facing is so much greater than technology-enhanced domestic soldiers.
As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’re on the cusp of a major paradigm shift from fascism disguised as a democracy into a technocratic surveillance society in which there are no citizens, only targets. We’re all targets now, to be scanned, surveilled, tracked and treated like blips on a screen.
What’s taking place in Maryland right now is a perfect example of this shift. With Congress’ approval and generous funding (and without the consensus of area residents), the Army has just launched two massive, billion dollar surveillance airships into the skies over Baltimore, each airship three times the size of a Goodyear blimp, ostensibly to defend against cruise missile attacks. Government officials claim the surveillance blimps, which provide highly detailed radar imaging within a 340-mile radius, are not presently being used to track individuals or carry out surveillance against citizens, but it’s only a matter of time before that becomes par for the course.
In New York, police will soon start employing mobile scanners that allow them to scan people on the street in order to detect any hidden objects under their clothes, whether it be a gun, a knife or anything else that appears “suspicious.” The scanners will also let them carry out enhanced data collection in the field—fingerprints, iris scans, facial mapping—which will build the government’s biometric database that much faster. These scanners are a more mobile version of the low radiation X-ray vans used to scan the contents of passing cars.
Google Glass, being considered for use by officers, would allow police to access computer databases, as well as run background checks on and record anyone in their line of sight.
One program, funded by $160 million in asset forfeiture funds, would equip police officers and vehicles with biometric smartphones that can scan individuals’ fingerprints and cross check it against criminal databases. The devices will also contain real-time 911 data, warrant information from federal, state and city databases, photographs of missing persons, suspects, Crime Stoppers posters and other persons of interest, and the latest cache of information on terror suspects.
Stand-off lasers can detect alcohol vapors in a moving car. “If alcohol vapors are detected in the car, a message with a photo of the car including its license plate is sent to a police officer waiting down the road. Then, the police officer stops the car and checks for signs of alcohol using conventional tests.”
Ekin Patrol cameras, described as “the first truly intelligent patrol unit in the world,” can not only detect the speed of passing cars but can generate tickets instantaneously, recognize and store the license plates of stopped, moving or parked vehicles, measure traffic density and violation data and engage in facial recognition of drivers and passengers.
Collectively, all of these gizmos, gadgets and surveillance devices render us not just suspects in a surveillance state but also inmates in an electronic concentration camp. As journalist Lynn Stuart Parramore notes:
The Information Age … has turned out rather differently than many expected. Instead of information made available for us, the key feature seems to be information collected about us. Rather of granting us anonymity and privacy with which to explore a world of facts and data, our own data is relentlessly and continually collected and monitored. The wondrous things that were supposed to make our lives easier—mobile devices, gmail, Skype, GPS, and Facebook—have become tools to track us, for whatever purposes the trackers decide. We have been happily shopping for the bars to our own prisons, one product at a time.
Unfortunately, eager as we are for progress and ill-suited to consider the moral and spiritual ramifications of our planned obsolescence, we have yet to truly fathom what it means to live in an environment in which we are always on red alert, always under observation, and always having our actions measured, judged and found wanting under some law or other intrusive government regulation.
There are those who are not at all worried about this impending future, certain that they have nothing to hide. Rest assured, soon we will all have nowhere to hide from the prying eyes of a government bound and determined to not only know everything about us—where we go, what we do, what we say, what we read, what we keep in our pockets, how much money we have on us, how we spend that money, who we know, what we eat and drink, and where we are at any given moment—but prepared to use that information against us, whenever it becomes convenient and profitable to do so.
Making the case that we’re being transformed as citizens, neighbors and human beings, Parramore identifies six factors arising from a society in which surveillance becomes the norm: a shift in power dynamics, in which the “watcher” becomes all-seeing and all-powerful; an incentive to turn citizens into outlaws by criminalizing otherwise lawful activities; diminished citizenship; an environment of suspicion and paranoia; a divided society comprised of the watchers and the watched; and “a society of edgy, unhappy beings whose sense of themselves is chronically diminished.”
As Parramore rightly concludes, this is “not exactly a recipe for Utopia.”
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heheheheh.........now that's some funny shit man
Just imagine how fear-full the people that designed such systems in the first place must be.
And imagine the state of mind of the overlords who order that such things be made must be.
It is no wonder that we are called the "DEscendents" of our forefathers...if we were on our way up, we would be their ascendants...
My sympathies to all the "normal", "good" and especially aware people of the ango-saxon dominated western world....here in India our serfdumb is not so technocratic, it's just bad air, bad food, bad water, the screech of metal, noise pollution..that kind of overt, in your face jack-bootery....
The BIG ONE is coming, the crash to end all crashes, so we need robocop creeps to protect the elites from the cattle.
Here's the problem for these fat fucks. When they start going full Nazi, they still have to go back to their homes among the rest of us. Their families may abandon them, their families may be kidnapped or worst of all killed. These traitors are going to lose everything they cherish so they can play Nazi at Auschwitz.
Which fat fucks? The po-po, elites, or the cattle?
That, and all of those toys require a logistical machine.
You have trampled on the rights and freedoms of people around the world.....now, its your turn
As ye sow so shall ye reap.....s'true honest injun
ORI, "My sympathies to all the "normal", "good" and especially aware people of the anglo-saxon dominated western world..."
lol, you used the word "Anglo-Saxon". funny, that word, I found out early here on ZH that many of our American Cousins have lost it's meaning, or find it distasteful
from a continental european perspective, there is "a peculiar Anglo-Saxon drive to more surveilliance". example:
the British conservative Prime Minister Cameron, is talking about a complete survelliance in the UK, to the point that he wants to ban all encryption on all things that have to do with the internet, including WhatsApp, while all the other EU countries are talking of the opposite, and want more personal and individual privacy from the states, both their own and the foreign ones
this might result in further clashes in the EU Parliament, which is still quite mad about all that spying that was found out in Brussels
idiots -can't wait until the House of Saud comes crashing down. Even ISIS would be an improvement.
The Saudis behead people for witchcraft and socery and when they stone a women they tie her to a stake in the ground and dump a flatbed full of bolders on the woman, killing her.
Anyone who thinks that our future isn't going to look a lot like "Person of Interest" is kidding themselves.
Oh, it's going to be worse than that!
- New wall?
- There are lots of new walls, all around!
- They won't keep me out!
- They were built to keep you in.
Walls sound schizophrenic. I say they should build on one end and tear it down on the other as a process and really get into it for the experience. They might even consider to make it musical and have adjacent sections built up and taken down to represent vibrations at various frequencies.
ISIS will flank that wall by going through Jordan. Also likely, the incompetent Saudi Military will just allow the wall to be breeched.
I think it's a waste of money (they're feeding their own MIC). It's been over 60 years since Maginot-line-type defenses have been rendered useless. This wall is susceptible to mortar fire, and $5,000 of damage will be caused by $20 in mortar ammo.
check the Facebook files
peak corporate welfare+dying debt-based fiat currency=police state
this. the elites know the party is coming to an end and must keep things in order.
Our dystopia gets more perfect everyday.
740 prisoners per 100,000 in the land of the free as compared to about 50 in Japan and Sweden and 30 in India.
All the new technologies will ensure that many more will be imprisoned in the land of the free.
If Japan did not have the Fuki stuff I would look for a job there even though I'd never fit in being a Son of a Viking. However, no one bothers you there, the pop is homogenoius with almost zero crime, great food and beautiful women. Plus, I'd be taller then 99% of the folks there which is kind of fun!
Wrong on one cout Loki (Son of). At a little over 6'2" myself (1.86 meters for the metric), I thought the same till I went there.
60 years of American steroid laden beef, steroid laden milk + Mickey D's have done a number on Japan. The numbers of really tall men (and women) of th enewer generations would stun you. In my own company, my two closest colleagues were both 6 feet plus ann there was one 6 foot 4 mutant (in an office of 15 people).
And those beautiful girls? Haaah...
Japanese are A Sexual.
They cannot B sexual.
They only C sexual...
Nice dream, based on some false undertandings. Glad I could shatter it for you ;-)
This is happening in China as we write. In the past 3 years young men have shot up in height, many 2.0metres tall.
Shoes for sale online just began selling dozens of mens's styles up to size 14 US, 50EU.
6 months ago, only up to size 9 US, 43EU was common for sale online
No more.
The protein intake ages 10-15 of the boys has pushed the height of those with the genetics up to that of your median North American, if not Dane, Dutch or Swede.
In just the past 3 years.
Within 10 years you will see many tall Chinese men.
I'd be taller then 99% of the folks there which is kind of fun!
Tall poppy, you die!
Immigration 1.0: Give us your hungry, oppressed but skilled and ambitious masses.
Immigration 2.0: Give us your convicts, mentally ill, and unmotivated welfare types.
..and diseased.
Don't forget diseased.. with stuff we thought we wiped out years ago and new stuff we never had to deal with.
Maybe everyone should commit a minor offence and overwhelm the system.
That would have to bankrupt the state in a hurry.
This is one of the bullshit articles that you should not give the time of day......
Yet you did........
Bring enough gun?
Bring enough gun!
Soon the cops will have fully-nuclear semi-automatic assault rifles of the belt-fed revolver style. They can fire six million hollow-points per second. Funding will be provided by DHS and training will come from the USPS. These weapons can be mounted on MRAPS, helicopters, Cessnas, or deployed as a handheld "Peacemaker on a Stick".
I guess they think this gargantuan, artificial apparatus runs off of magic.....
"not exactly a recipe for Utopia" - well, not for the humans on the planet, no ... but the PTB are spooing all over themselves....
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102342793
Another faceless funded benefactor supported dipsiht outfit to tell me what the NWO is doing to me. Big help you bunch of fakester assclowns. What exactly has the Ruthorfodians ever done to stop NWO? Pray tell.
"The persons you really want to arrest are next door officer. We're just visiting. The actual owners are...
Snitches get stitches and end up face down in ditches...
...along with the rest of the punk-ass bitchez.
Oh no, Crawdaddy, tell me you didn't say that....
Rutherford Instutute and John Whitehead are the tip of the legal spear through relentless pro bono court challenges against fucked up government and police actions against private citizens, like the Bundy Ranch. They are very successful and set precedents protecting individual rights. Just the mere mention of their name can now get individuals released.
This is one group that should be at the top of everybody's list to give a decent donation.
Yeah gwar I can't believe I said it either. I know who John Whitehead is. I used to LOVE these guys back before the scales dropped from my peepers and I connected a few of the dots re:NWO. They did (and still do) a lot of good things that I agree with but unfortunately on balance I can't get on board with them anymore. I finally parted ways with them once I decided they support pro-NWO churches and their huckster leaders. See, they fight for the little guys against the .gov side but then turn around and support pro-NWO agendas on the religion side. Maybe I'm missing something; I would love to find out I was wrong about this opinion.
"Abandoned [USA] mall was once the worls largest"
Once a symbol of American retail, many shopping malls have begun to decline and even close in recent years. Randall Park Mall shut its doors in 2009 after being hit hard by the recession. When the mall opened in 1976 in North Randall, Ohio, the town had a population of just 1,500. Though only two floors high, the mall spanned a whopping two-million square feet and employed 5,000 members of staff. These haunting images show the dust-covered remains of what were once thriving shops and even a movie theatre.
Photographer Matthew Christopher visited the dilapidated Randall Park Mall just months before demolition work.
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/abandoned-mall-that-was-once-the-largest-in...
Merika has changed its 'face' alot in the last decade.
High tech weapons systems are most commonly defeated with simple solutions. The Star Wars program was defeated in a number of ways:
by glass packs exploded into space rendering targeting with radar useless
By simply launching a bunch of dummy warheads in addition to the real ones
Probably a thousand different other ways.
Telling people to imagine themselves facing down some new gizmo threat expecting them to shiver in their boots is shameful and non-productive. It's also stupid. The Militarized police are paper tigers. If they ever face any real resistance, they will run screaming in fear, or they will lose, period.
Hope you are right. The Resistance held their own pretty well against Skynet. Most people are cowardly, ignorant sheeple. The remaining 5 to 10%, when properly motivated, can take down Big Brother.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xekM6Cn5brc
They won't like it when some of the tools they use are used against them.
Most of the time you just need a nail and a hammer to disable a safety camera.
A child with sling can also do the job.
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=estilingue+fotos&espv=2&biw=1242&bih=...
A neighbor who has a truck also makes decent service while maneuvering.
I say this because, in my city, put "security camera" and a speed radar next to a Motel where things happened.
In two months the municipality had so much damage that the cameras are gone and the radar.
The Motel was.
hehe.
No offense intended, but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
I will translate:
In his town, the police installed a camera adjacent to the local love no-tell motel. Since many people did their business there and they did not want to be recorded, the camera, and radar, experienced many spontaneous failures.
One of his friends has a truck, and his friend is able to disable said cameras while driving by hitting the camera with the truck.
So is a child with a slingshot and a rock.
So is someone with a hammer and a nail.
Lol +1
3%, Thats all it took to overthrow the last occupying empire.
3%.
This one's got lasers. You can't beat lasers...
and cloud computing...
and enough military hardware to blow the world up 3003 times over..
Any tech can be beaten if you know how it works, what it needs and where it lives.
Same as any life form.
Hack that shit.
boattrash:
Above all trust in God and in my sixth sense.
I'm not a guy goer church (my wife is).
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than our vain philosophy imagine it was for the philosopher.
What you posted is nothing more or nothing less than a piece of the great puzzles of this life where we are today.
I say "today" because I am sure that in a few years I'll be back this bagaça.
I said I'm an old guy who believes in reincarnation even though Roman Catholic Apostolic, Brazil is so.
Has an official religion but believes what he wants to believe.
I do not know if you understand this text with translation horrible but I think it has sensitivity.
One thing I tell you, always fight for its principles until the aura was fading.
Kind Regards.
Alexandre.
Thanks Karaio, and likewise to you as well. Translation program a bit rough, but I still get the message. Take care, I'll see you around. BT
I thought the government was here to help. No?
No
'You're all going to die down here'
Then we'll just get more Brooklyn shootings. This whole problem is up to the cops and no one else...how do they want things to end?
Vooter - Government police states expand until they can't. The private sector slows down first in downturns but larger governments eapecially the reserve currency can keep expanding for years as we have seen in the U.S. But that peg has now gone to China who will become the next global policeman.
Meanwhile, as China accelerates, the police state here cannot be funded by unlimited deficits. That is why asset seizures are accelerating to fund state and local police because the federal government can no longer print to he moon and hand some to the states.
Also the police state discourages business formation damaging confidence which in turn leads to lower tax collection. It will get a little worse before it gets better though.
You're probably right, but so what? As I said in my previous post, if the bullshit continues, people will continue to fight back--it's not that complicated. And it doesn't matter WHY the cops are doing what they're doing, it just matters THAT they're doing it. Their bad behavior is up to them...
Robots cops don't like steroids.
Real cops do.
Local communities should also beware of states forming Municipal Protection Authorities. The poorer cities will succumb first, taken over by power hungry politicos.
http://www.globaldeflationnews.com/u-s-cities-should-beware-of-states-es...