Free Republic

Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz slammed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” agenda in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller on Friday, focusing specifically on one bullet point that suggests the GOP should subsidize the hiring of 200,000 new police officers through recruitment bonuses. ... “So if you see, like, the third bullet point in whatever this is suggests that the federal government needs to fund incentives for 200,000 new law enforcement. I do not believe in the federal government being excessively entangled in state and local law enforcement. It is not practical,” Gaetz told the Caller....

A federal law passed in February 2012 to help middle class families by creating jobs and cutting payroll taxes included a section mandating the creation of a nationwide interoperable broadband communications system for law enforcement and first responders. The system, which is being created under the direction of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), seeks to create a nationwide broadband network capable of being used for a variety of law enforcement purposes including remote surveillance, mobile biometric applications like field fingerprint scanning and facial recognition, as well as automated license plate reading. The system is currently in a pilot phase...

President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice will be launching new efforts involving court-appointed monitors who oversee police departments across the United States, expanding already-existing tools the DOJ uses to force departments’ compliance with its standards. During a speech at the 2021 International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference on Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the expansion, asserting that more is needed than current consent decrees, monitorships and investigations of police departments. Garland said a review conducted by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta led to the DOJ establishing 19 new actions that are designed to improve the “efficiency and efficacy”...

Following the death of George Floyd we’ve had months of rioting, looting, thuggery and terrorism. In over a dozen cities around the country police chiefs have been fired, retired or resigned. Look at all these racist police chiefs; shocking! Abolish the racist pigs! And so the demands to defund police continue, only one problem: real “folks” are having none of it – not even Al Sharpton (“Latte Liberals” want to defund NYPD, “but people living on the ground need proper policing”). The only people going along with the shuck and jive of the BLM these days are the usual suspects:...

The family of George Floyd, the black man killed while in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, has sent a letter to the globalist United Nations to ask for its help in disarming police officers in the United States of America. The family’s legal team facilitated the letter, which was sent on Wednesday, according to NBC News: The group sent a letter on June 3 to one of the international body’s working groups asking for support for the end of the provision of military equipment and military-type training for police, the teaching of deescalation techniques, independent prosecutions and autopsies...

In August 2014, in the immediate aftermath of a violent incident wherein police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot a young black man named Michael Brown, outraged and agenda-driven agitators — many from out of town — seized on the news as an excuse to run wild, steal, destroy property, and more. Businesses were burned to the ground and looted. Even a local church was not spared by the frenzied and violent mob. According to news reports, more than 160 gunshots were fired by “protesters,” too. At least one man died amid the chaos. Pictures that emerged after the late...

“The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has provided oversight and recommendations for improvement of police services in a number of cities with consent decrees. This is one of the most effective ways to reduce discrimination in law enforcement and it needs to be beefed up and increased to cover as many of the 18,000-plus local law enforcement jurisdictions.” That was United Nations Rapporteur Maina Kai on July 27, a representative of the U.N. Human Rights Council, who on the tail-end of touring the U.S., endorsed a little-known and yet highly controversial practice by the Justice Department to...

Behind the orchestrated riots that were allowed to strike Baltimore in recent weeks, and Ferguson, Missouri, before that, lies an agenda that has nothing to do with the fact that “Black Lives Matter.” As the Obama administration and more than a few race-mongers allied with the White House have already made clear, the real goal involves further chipping away at local self-government and community control over police departments — and expanding federal control over local law enforcement in its place. In between fanning the division and unrest with racialist rhetoric, Obama is also exploiting the chaos he is helping to...

For close to 20 years now, I’ve been observing and reporting on a disturbing trend in law enforcement – the federalization and militarization of local police forces. Until recently, practically no one noticed what was happening. But with the focus on police shootings and the civil disturbances that have followed – sometimes involving tanks, military-style gear and Kevlar – it’s hard not to notice that local cops don’t exactly look like Officer Joe Bolton anymore. It was none other than Al Sharpton (I won’t call him reverend) who suggested recently that the answer to the use of excessive force by...

(You will hear and obey me) Baltimore will soon be the first national police force that Obama promised and Al Sharpton has been promoting. (I’m waiting for the IRS to announce they made a mistake and instead of owing taxes, Sharpton has a 20 million dollar refund coming) For a while it looked like Ferguson would hold this distinction after Eric “Fast and Furious” Holder announced that the police force there was racist, but they weren’t willing to roll over. Obama will force it on them eventually, but Baltimore will be the first. The mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has...

President Obama on Thursday signed an executive order officially creating a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing,” a high-level group that will report directly to the president with recommendations on how to strengthen ties between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Mr. Obama first announced the task earlier this month on the heels of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, where the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers further fractured ties between police departments and citizens. The task force will be chaired by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, a professor...

WASHINGTON — As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds. The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. “The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the...

From Ministry of the Interior Ad Hoc Paramilitaries to Professional Carabinerie The development of the Iraqi Police, at the local, provincial, and national levels, is crucial to the counterinsurgency campaign and allowing security to transition to the Iraqi Security Forces. The Iraqi police, particularly the National Police units, have had numerous problems, including infiltration by Shia militias, a lack of professionalism and leadership, poor training and logistics, a lack of equipment and ammunition, and a lack of Coalition supervision. While 2006 was designated as The Year of the Police, the sectarian violence brought about by al Qaeda’s destruction of the...