“The First 48” is an excellent reality TV show that follows homicide detectives in various cities as they try to solve murders, most of which seem to be committed primarily by blacks and secondarily by Latins, typically over drug dealing.
The show is not sanitized by political correctness. It shows the moral depravity of a frightening element of society, one in which young men and teens, mostly raised in households devoid of fathers, have no qualms or remorse about killing someone over a drug deal gone awry or because they were disrespected. Oftentimes innocent people get caught in the crossfire, including young children.
The show indirectly calls into question the nation’s housing and welfare policies. Some of the coldblooded killers live in what appears to be middle-class neighborhoods, despite no one apparently having a job. This suggests that they are using government housing vouchers, in a reflection of the cockamamie notion currently in vogue among progressive intellectuals that placing the “disadvantaged” in nice neighborhoods will change their behavior for the better instead of changing the neighborhood for the worse.
The bad guys are heavily armed. Who can blame law enforcement, then, for also being heavily armed? And who can blame local police for calling in the Fugitive Task Force to apprehend suspects?
What is the Fugitive Task Force? It is one more federal police force in a long list of federal police forces, including not only such well-known agencies as the FBI, Border Patrol, and Park Rangers but also the law enforcement arms of the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, and heaven knows what else.
Actually, there are multiple fugitive task forces. They are part of the U.S. Marshalls Service. According to the official website of the Service, regional task forces were established under the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000. To quote, “The purpose of regional fugitive task forces is to combine the efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to locate and apprehend the most dangerous fugitives and assist in high profile investigation.”
Of the 88,432 fugitives arrested last year by the task forces, 63,811 were state and local fugitives. And of the 107,933 warrants cleared by the task forces, 79,930 were state and local warrants. Clearly, the task forces spend most of their time on state crimes, not federal crimes.
The website doesn’t explain how it passes constitutional muster for a federal police force, dressed and armed like paramilitaries, to be running around on city streets to handle local criminal matters. However, it does explain that a lot of money is involved. Much of the cost of the task forces, as well as the Marshals Service in general, is funded through asset forfeitures; that is, the confiscation of assets of suspected criminals, oftentimes prior to the accused having their day in court. As of Sept. 30, 2016, the Marshals Service had $1.5 billion in forfeited assets, and it shared $305 million in proceeds from the forfeitures with local police forces.
The agents have good job security. According to the Bureau of Justice, 2.1 million Americans were in prison at the end of 2015, and another 6.7 million were under correctional supervision (parole). Three out of four former prisoners are re-arrested within five years of their release.
This is not the sign of a healthy society.
Nor is it a sign of a healthy society for “resource officers,” which is a euphemism for “cops,” to have a full-time presence in public high schools, including suburban schools. Evidently, parents have become desensitized to their presence, for there is not an outcry over this visible sign that something is woefully wrong inside the schools; nor is there an outcry over the fact that the resource officers are arresting children for minor infractions that used to be handled by school staff. As someone who attended Catholic schools, has a son who attended Catholic schools, and has done pro bono work for Catholic schools, I find it bizarre and very troubling that cops are required to maintain order and discipline in public schools.
Order and discipline were maintained in my Catholic high school, in a bygone era, in a way that worked with testosterone-crazed boys—and in a way that today’s estrogen-crazed parents of both genders are incapable of understanding. Miscreants would be sent to the principal’s office, where the door would be slammed behind them and the office wall would soon begin vibrating as they were knocked against it by the principal.
My ability to concentrate stems from such discipline. I still vividly remember the day I was daydreaming in English class, when the burly teacher and football coach called on me and I couldn’t answer his question. When it happened the second time, he picked up my desk with me in it and threw me into the hallway. I’ve never lost my place since. Granted, as critics say, I may have other mental problems, but these aren’t due to high school discipline.
Oops, I’ve lost my place. Where was I? Oh, I was talking about police forces.
Pop quiz: What is the largest federal law enforcement agency in the USA? Answer: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has a staff of 21,000.
But that’s not big enough. President Trump has said that he will increase the agency’s staffing by 20,000—which raises the question of why the additional staffing is needed if building a border wall will be effective in keeping out illegal immigrants and drugs.
The current issue of Reason Magazine has an in-depth cover story on the reasons why the wall won’t work. But its construction will probably proceed anyway, for it is a political placebo instead of a real cure for the real (and imagined) problems of illegal immigration and drug smuggling.
The article mentions something that my family and I have encountered as residents of Arizona—namely, being stopped by border agents at a checkpoint in a border zone miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. It seems that the CBP has the authority to make warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border. As a result, almost the entire geographical area of many states is a border zone; and for the State of Michigan, the entire state is a border zone, due to the state being almost totally surrounded by the border with Canada.
The article also includes statistics showing what happens with increased border security: one, illegal border crossings and drug smuggling move to remote areas where there is less security; two, the price charged by coyotes increases, which keeps illegal immigrants from returning home and then going back and forth as seasonal workers; four, drug smugglers come up with creative and expensive ways to bypass the security, considering the efforts to be just a small cost of doing business; and four, the number of foreigners overstaying their visas increases as they disappear into the nation’s woodwork instead of returning home and then not being able to get back into the states.
On the last point, it has been suggested by noted conservatives that a concerted effort be made to track and find visa violators. But they don’t give an estimate of how many law enforcement agents it will take to do this or how effective the effort would be. Judging by the difficulty in tracking parolees, it won’t be very effective. I can’t find statistics on the percent of parolees who stop checking in with their parole officers and disappear into society, but I suspect that the number is high. For sure, there are tragic consequences of parolees violating their paroles.
For example, a recent episode of “The First 48” was about homicide detectives in Kansas City, Missouri, tracking down a serial killer of six women. It turned out that the killer was a parole violator who, previous to being released on parole, had been incarcerated for 20 years for killing his wife. And in a chilling twist, his mother had murdered someone in front of him when he was a kid, his brother had been executed by the state for murder, and his sister had also murdered someone.
If law enforcement can’t keep tabs on a dangerous ex-con like this, even with the resources of the fugitive task force and other agencies, then it is doubtful that they will be able to keep tabs on an East Indian who overstays his visa and finds work in the business of a relative who is a U.S. citizen.
Without debating it here, one would think that there would be better immigration policies than turning the country into a police state. Perhaps a guest-worker program could be one of them, although no program would be without a downside.
And there has to be a better way of stopping or at least slowing the smuggling of hardcore drugs without creating a police state. At the risk of sounding naïve, part of the answer might lie with the so-called progressives who rail against social injustice, who bemoan the fact that minorities are imprisoned at higher rates than whites, who repeat the mantra of “Black Lives Matter,” who demonstrate against white privilege on college campuses, and who are otherwise pious and sanctimonious about being enlightened and caring people—but who, at the same time, buy illicit drugs and thus trigger an avalanche of misery and crime on the very same segments of society they say they care about.
Instead of the super-rich on the Upper East Side snorting coke while donating to progressive causes, instead of movie stars doing the same while they star in Stella Artois beer commercials about water for Africans, and instead of college students consuming crack, heroin, and amphetamines while demanding speech codes and trigger warnings—instead of such hypocrisy, maybe they can just give up their drug use and begin railing against their peers for the harm they are inflicting on society through their use of drugs.
The alternative, I fear, is a police state.
