"Maybe we should round up all the poor people and put them in the Army"
No, Border Guard!
"Maybe we should round up all the poor people and put them in the Army"
No, Border Guard!
Xceler8x wrote: "Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither." BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Busted
You (and most people pressing a point) leave out a few words to that quote. The real quote is as follows:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
Modifies the meaning a bit, don't you agree?
That said, this: "As far as I'm concerned, at 3 o'clock in the morning, nobody has any business being on the street, except the law," Councilman Eugene "Red" Johnson said. "Anyone out at 3 o'clock shouldn't be out on the street, unless you're going to the hospital."
Is unacceptable.
I agree Osterkraut. I can think of plenty of scenarios where I was out with friends during the wee hours of the morning doing completely legal things. Who the hell does this old bastard think he is to force his out of touch with reality beliefs on people.
How about this.
Those who are citizens of this great nation deserve the right to walk about their community without fear of being bullied by any thugs in or out of uniform no matter what time of day it is.
Leaving out the D and R fingerpointing, I see in this thread that one side says 'lower the boom on the crooks, no matter what it takes, so that the law abiding citizens can be safe'.
Then the other side says, 'But to slam the lid on the shootin' and killin' we might have to temporarily violate the bad guys' constitutional rights.'
So which way would you rather go if you were sleeping on the floor to avoid getting shot in your sleep? Knock off all that 'idealistic law school' crap, just try to imagine if it were your kids and it was happening in your 'hood.
[My fingerpointing]
I watched my dad do his best to clean out the dope dealers in an apartment complex he owned. The cops wouldn't do E36 M3 (at least the police chief in this Arkansas town is showing some balls). Lawyers kept telling my dad he couldn't evict someone unless he could prove they were dealing, etc. The cops wouldn't show up, so how could he prove it? Then a crusading Democrat attorney general decided to make a 'slumlord' example of my dad and seized the property, claiming the drug dealing violated racketeering statutes.
The attorney general was later proven to be wrong and the property was returned.
Me, I think of it this way: the dope dealers are violating the citizenry's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness so pardon me if I do not give a tin E36 M3 about the dope dealers' 'constitutional rights'.
All you liberal wussies have brought us to the point where things like this curfew are neccessary. Thanks a lot.
[/My fingerpointing]
First they came for the drug dealers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a drug dealer.
Then they came for the street gangs, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't in a street gang.
...
Admittedly, I'm stretching it a bit, but what Jensenman calls "'idealistic law school' crap," I call upholding my oath to support and defend the Constitution. That's right, lawyers are sworn to support and defend the Constitution, just like elected officials, soldiers, sailors, marines, and LEOs. My oath wasn't limited to upholding Constitutional rights for people I think deserve them, and I'm pretty sure nobody else's was either.
While limited curfews will sometimes pass Constitutional muster, suspicion-less detention for questioning of otherwise law-abiding citizens who happen to be in a bad neighborhood is really pushing the envelope.
yeah well DUI checkpoints never had a chance in the supreme court but look what happened with that
billy3esq wrote: First they came for the drug dealers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a drug dealer. Then they came for the street gangs, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't in a street gang. ... Admittedly, I'm stretching it a bit, but what Jensenman calls "'idealistic law school' crap," I call upholding my oath to support and defend the Constitution. That's right, lawyers are sworn to support and defend the Constitution, just like elected officials, soldiers, sailors, marines, and LEOs. My oath wasn't limited to upholding Constitutional rights for people I think deserve them, and I'm pretty sure nobody else's was either. While limited curfews will sometimes pass Constitutional muster, suspicion-less detention for questioning of otherwise law-abiding citizens who happen to be in a bad neighborhood is really pushing the envelope.
Like I said, put aside the idealistic law school crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some dope dealer who thinks an AK47 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot. How would YOU feel about that?
Yeah, I thought so.
I realize you were taught in law school to step outside of a situation and view it dispassionately. Unfortunately that backfires badly at times.
Jensenman wrote: Like I said, put aside the crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some trigger-happy police officer who thinks a badge and an AR15 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot or illegally imprisoned. How would YOU feel about that? Yeah, I thought so.
FTFY
Josh wrote:Jensenman wrote: Like I said, put aside the crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some trigger-happy police officer who thinks a badge and an AR15 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot or illegally imprisoned. How would YOU feel about that? Yeah, I thought so.FTFY
I figgered someone would twist the whole thing out of shape to say 'I trust the dope dealers more than I trust the cops'.
Call me stupid. I would rather the cops hold the AR15's than the dope dealers hold the AK47's.
captainzib wrote:confuZion3 wrote: I cannot believe that we are coming up with better ideas here on an internet forum than expert councils in the actual places in which this is taking place. Give me Liberty or give me death. (Trivia: who coined this famous expression?)Teddy Roosevelt, right? I think the answer to why this E36 M3 is happening is corruption. These politicians are in the game for their own gain. A public official has the task of "serving the public". It is not the publics concern for elected officials to drive luxury cars, or live in mansions.Tim Baxter wrote: Ethan Allen. My mother served on the city council of a town not all that far from Helena/West Helena. Calling the people on those small town city councils "experts" is pretty generous. She has stories...And we have time...
Sorry folks.....Patrick Henry.
Dammit. I said Patrick Allen, then knew that was wrong and went back and edited it to be even more wrong. I knew it was the vermont dude (read a biography of him when I was a kid).
Now I just know I'd lose on "are you smarter than a fifth grader"
Jensenman wrote:Josh wrote:I figgered someone would twist the whole thing out of shape to say 'I trust the dope dealers more than I trust the cops'. Call me stupid. I would rather the cops hold the AR15's than the dope dealers hold the AK47's.Jensenman wrote: Like I said, put aside the crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some trigger-happy police officer who thinks a badge and an AR15 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot or illegally imprisoned. How would YOU feel about that? Yeah, I thought so.FTFY
i think his point was more in the direction of, you're trading one tyrant for another
Strizzo wrote: i think his point was more in the direction of, you're trading one tyrant for another
Being terrorized by thugs with guns when you're just trying to go about your daily business like a normal free human does probably suck. Somehow I don't feel like the best way to solve that problem is to send in thugs with guns to terrorize people just going about their daily business. Then give them the authority to imprison as many people as they can get their hands on.
What they really need there is after school music programs and teachers that care.
Jensenman wrote:Josh wrote:I figgered someone would twist the whole thing out of shape to say 'I trust the dope dealers more than I trust the cops'. Call me stupid. I would rather the cops hold the AR15's than the dope dealers hold the AK47's.Jensenman wrote: Like I said, put aside the crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some trigger-happy police officer who thinks a badge and an AR15 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot or illegally imprisoned. How would YOU feel about that? Yeah, I thought so.FTFY
While I won't say "I trust the dope dealers more than the cops...yadda yadda," I will say that I've lived in "duh hood," and have had this conversation with a cop at 3AM on MULTIPLE occasions while living in south florida:
Cop: "Whutchu doin' in dis part o' town, at 3 in duh moanin' BOY?"
Me: "Driving home."
Cop: "Whayyou comin' from?"
Me: "I just got off work."
Cop: "Whay you work at?"
Me: (name bar on beach.)
Cop: "Whay you live?"
Me: "10th street and Jamaica."
Cop: "It don't say dat on yo' license."
Me: "I don't plan on living there long."
Cop: "You got any drugs o' alcohol in heeyuh?"
...And so on and so forth. Anyway, someone was on the right track earlier with the welfare thing. Check out the stats., particularly median income, and unemployment rate (15.9 berkeleying percent!)
http://www.city-data.com/city/Helena-Arkansas.html
Where's the damned "League of Shadows" when you need'em?
Anyway, in a roundabout way, my point is, these berkeleyers are going to do what they do. Chiefly, work just enough to stay at poverty level and pound out more kids for more foodstamps...excuse me, more credits on there 'EBT' cards, as foodstamps are embarrassing :rolleyes: If they wanted to move, they could. If they wanted to have a more meaningful existence, they could. They choose not to.
No need to go all Nazi Germany on 'em and throw the one baby out with the billion gallons of stinky, nasty, lazy, worthless bathwater.
Dr. Hess wrote: What they really need there is after school music programs and teachers that care.
You forgot midnight basketball. Oh. Wait, there's that curfew. Oh well.
Dr. Hess wrote: What they really need there is after school music programs and teachers that care.
lol 
Strizzo wrote:Jensenman wrote:i think his point was more in the direction of, you're trading one tyrant for anotherJosh wrote:I figgered someone would twist the whole thing out of shape to say 'I trust the dope dealers more than I trust the cops'. Call me stupid. I would rather the cops hold the AR15's than the dope dealers hold the AK47's.Jensenman wrote: Like I said, put aside the crap and imagine YOU are the one whose constitutuional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being violated by some trigger-happy police officer who thinks a badge and an AR15 is the proper intimidation machine. Think about YOUR kids laying on the floor so they won't get shot or illegally imprisoned. How would YOU feel about that? Yeah, I thought so.FTFY
Hmmm. So cops carrying weapons to protect the populace from dope dealers carrying weapons means they are tyrants?
Here's the problem: the average E36 M3head will do his/her best to conceal a weapon. That means it's really difficult for the officer tasked with seeking out the baddies to easily tell one from the other. With me so far?
So what does the officer do?
He/she stops a suspected baddie who turns out to be exactly that. At trial, some smartass lawyer claims it was an illegal search, turns the cops into the bad guys, gets the bad guys off. Hey, it happened with OJ, right?
-OR-
He/she DOESN'T stop a suspected baddie who goes on to shoot and kill innocents along with maybe not-so-innocents. Now our officer(s) are excorciated for not doing their jobs and protecting the citizenry.
-OR-
He/she stops a suspected baddie who immediately puts a slug through their forehead. I suppose that solves all the problems; everyone gets to go to a nice funeral. It's a nice little social outing and a photo op for the politicians to bluster about getting hard on crime.
I wouldn't be a cop for anything. Every sonofabitch out there is looking to put a fast one over on them and the liberal weenies cry harder for a dead dope dealer who 'never had a chance' than a cop who dies in the line of duty.
As far as getting stopped at 3AM: sure there are lots of folks out at that time who are getting off work late etc (I used to tend bar, BTDT) but I'll tell you something else: the vast majority of car break ins and similar happen at around that same time. So since the nice ossifer can't tell from the outside if it's Mr. Bartender going home or Mr SlimJim looking for a easy buck, what is he/she supposed to do? Grow a sixth sense or X ray vision?
Ok guys, here's the big problem with pretending to subject everyone to the same laws, and then enforcing said laws with military stringency in one community and basically not enforcing at all in others - yes, there are bad, bad, people in this neighborhood for sure. But when you cast such a wide net to catch the big fish, you also end up catching a lot of stuff you otherwise wouldn't. In any community there will be a percentage of people who are currently disobeying the law. Carrying a little weed, drinking underage, illegal tint, blah blah blah. Small time stuff that isn't worth the effort on its own. Let's say this is 10% of the average community, maybe it's a little more in the "bad" communities, but it's certainly not zero in the upper middle class white ones. Hell, if the DEA searched the golf bags of the guys I went to high school with, half of them would still be in prison.
So in "good" community A, people do dumb, illegal stuff, but they rarely ever get caught, and when they do, they are much more likely to get away with it if they aren't really stupid, because the cops are not taking a military enemy sort of attitude toward them. So maybe .5% or less of the population here ends up in prison. This doesn't have a huge effect on the function of the community over time.
In "bad" community B, people do dumb, illegal stuff, and get caught with much greater frequency. They get little to no mercy when they do, even if they are not the big fish the net was supposed to catch. So people who make minor mistakes have a FAR greater chance of ending up in prison than people in community A. And when subject to the federal laws that severely punish even small drug crimes, they go away for a long time, and end up not having many career options aside from "criminal". Let's say 5% or more of this community ends up in prison. If you don't think this has a long term, compounding, destructive effect on the community, you are nuts.
My point is not that the truly bad people should get away with what they do, just that casting a wide net like that, and dragging in whatever you can find, in a way that would NEVER be done in a well-to-do community, essentially dooms that community. Equal protection and all that. IMO, it's the disease (the drug trade) that needs to be treated in communities like this, not the symptoms (drug abuse and violence). The best way to kill a dangerous underground economy is to bring it back above ground. It would certainly be more effective than continuing to expect it to just go away.
So that means you retract your earlier twisting of my statement about dope dealers into a condemnation of 'cops carrying AR15's' shooting at kids?
If you break the law, you should be prepared to deal with the consequences, no matter your socio-economic status. 'If ya can't do the crime, don't do the time'.
So why do the folks in the higher strata of society (like the guys carrying crap in their golf bags) get away with stuff? They hire sleazebag lawyers to find them loopholes. There's your TRUE cause of inequality of punishment and its resulting destructive effect on society. I can cite many instances, not the least of which is a senator's son down here who got a slap on the wrist for cocaine possession and trafficking real recently. He could have done 20 years, instead he got 10 months in one of those 'nice' slammers. http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/may/28/ravenel_start_journey_prison42412/
Every law abiding citizen should expect and receive police protection, regardless of socio-economic status. The bald truth: cops don't like the lower end housing because they are more likely to get killed there. Guess it has something to do with all those dope dealers, don't ya think? Plus, the high end folks bitch more than the low end.
Maybe it's time to quit hamstringing the police we pay to protect us and let them do their jobs in ALL instances. I bet then you'd see a big change in things. You want your home, family and possessions safe? You are a damn sight better off supporting your local sherriff than your local dope peddler.
I applaud again this Arkansas cop who has the balls to ID a problem, stand up to the whiners and clamp down. It's long overdue all across the country.
I will admit I was being a smartass when I "re-quoted" you, but the point I was trying to make was that from the inside, you could see either of them as thugs and a real threat to your freedom. It's not like there isn't ample evidence of the systematic incarceration of society's "undesirables" under the guise of drug prevention.
It isn't just the ability to lawyer up that saves folks like the senator's son up there, it's also some fun stuff built into the federal drug statutes themselves. Like punishing traffickers/possessors of crack cocaine as if they were carrying 100x the same amount of powdered cocaine. What kind do you think the senator's kid got caught with? And what kind do you think is more prevalent in low-income minority communities? This one shouldn't be too hard to figure out.
I stand by my statement that the easiest way to curb drug related violence substantially and immediately would be to make the drug trade much less lucrative. This is as much an economic problem as it is a social one.
DILYSI Dave wrote: This isn't a D or R thing. It's both. The Democrats want programs that encourage men to walk out on their families, women to become urban brood mares, and neither of them to work. The Republicans insist on continuing the stupid war on drugs bullE36 M3 which turns people who have no family and no reason to work into criminals.
The more I read this, the more I agree.
But actually on a different angle. Neglect.
How many times do you hear the complaint that someone in a poor neighborhood calls the cops for something minor, and nobody shows up. Why? Who, knows- for some reason.
Over time, people start to think on one side of the legality isle "I can't trust the cops" and on the other side of the legality isle "I can get away with doing my business here".
Over time, that escalates to minor turf battles over the ilegal business, and while the police have started to react, it's not quite enough, and the legals are not exactly phoning in regularly (what's the point).
That then escallates to a full out war over an area. Which is what is happening now, and then the general public reaction is that something has to happen. So some draconian idea is proposed, people love it, cops are threatened with ACLU lawsuits, and we all discuss how good/evil the D/R's all are- blaming each other.
How about the police stop enforcing the speed laws to tight (which is basically a road tax) and do what is on the side of their cars- "Serve and Protect". If they become PART of the neigborhood, and prosecute (legally) what is ilegal, then the escallation would never happen.
What's kind of funny about this is that a local community near where I work voted to have a speicfic ratio of police to citizens for security reasons. No idea why- nowhere in this community was there a real risk that could not be handled... But the end result is that this community has large numbers of cops in small speed traps, and all of this has produced enough money to build a state of the art court house. (I did get a ticket- along with probably 30 other people that session- average settlement- $100- and this for the peope who went to court and didn't just pay it).
Many communities have police that is a revenue generating system and not a serve and protect system. Seems kind of out of whack.
Eric
'From the inside' of a prison the I'm sure the inmates see cops and guards as thugs.
'From the inside' of a community under siege from dope dealers I bet the fuzz look a wee bit different.
Legalizing drugs might be a good idea, but here's the thing: where do you draw the line? Should we just say 'the hell with it' and let people kill themselves any way they wish, or should there be some curbs? Doc Hess's LD100 is a LOT different for different people.
What about PCP? That crap is an animal tranquilizer which has, in some people, a startlingly different effect. It makes them act, well, wild and they don't seem to feel pain. If it were only themselves at risk, maybe it wouldn't be so bad but those around them are at tremendous risk. So now what do you do? No nebulous idealistic answer, now- just imagine it's YOUR neighbor lit up on this E36 M3 and threatening YOUR family. I bet you'll look at a blanket legalization of drugs a little differently.
Or maybe you are willing to take that chance. Bravo. You are willing to sacrifice your family for an ideal. You go, boy.
Did a quick google search, here's Helena's 2006 crime:
Remember, that's in a city of about 6500. http://www.city-data.com/city/Helena-Arkansas.html
Judging by some other info there, I think some of this may be racially based, but no matter how you look at it, Helena's got problems.
Helena compared to Arkansas state average:
Tim Baxter wrote: Maybe we should round up all the poor people and put them in the Army.
We tried that during Vietnam. It was called the draft. If you had money your parents got you a job in the National Guard. Then you and your coke sniffing buddies went AWOL. Later you became the President of the United States. 
Not everyone who's unemployed is a criminal. Not everyone who is on welfare wants to be there or is working the system.
Drug legalization is the only other choice to our irrational "War on X" Fill X in with whatever fictitious threat you can think of to scare the citizen's into agreeing with you. If you call it a war you don't have to have a rational plan for any action you propose. A WAR IS ON PEOPLE!
D vs. R's? They've both taken their turn running the country. Neither worked. Not much difference between the two now. Except one side wants to rip the constitution in half while the other side wants more socialism. Socialism doesn't sound so bad when we start talking about burning the Bill Of Rights.
John Hancock said "Give me liberty or give me death." He said it in a church in my hometown. Richmond, VA. If you guys want to see it I'll drive you by there. It's got a sizable graveyard all around it. Surprisingly, the graves are very old considering the quote above.
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