Posted on 05/18/2013 7:06:20 AM PDT by Rennes Templar
A program in Palm Beach County intended to encourage residents to report suspicious behavior is attracting resistance from around the state.
Under the proposed "Violence Prevention Program," anyone who sees a potentially dangerous situation a schizophrenic person with weapons, a war veteran making threats to passersby could call a 24-hour hotline. Legitimate-sounding calls would trigger a visit by specially trained deputies in plain clothes or by mental health professionals.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff says violence prevention unit could thwart would-be killers like the recent mass shooters in Connecticut and Colorado. The program will cost $3.2 million in the first year. The Florida Legislature agreed to pay $1 million of it.
Despite Sheriff Ric Bradshaw's ostensibly good-willed intent, the plan has been compared to Big Brother, the KGB, Castro's Cuba...
Conservative bloggers around the country are condemning this as a First Amendment violation. They say the government of Palm Beach County is trying to encourage residents to tell on their neighbors for anti-government speech. Email messages have spilled into Gov. Rick Scott's inbox, where hundreds of Florida residents urged him to line-item veto the state funding for the program.
~snip~
In the article, Bradshaw said, "We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he's gonna shoot him. What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, 'Hey, is everything OK?'"
~snip~
Dmitry Levin, of Boca Raton, grew up in the Soviet Union, where he said the government encouraged neighbors to "snitch on everybody."
"It's a specific telephone line to report your neighbor who doesn't like the government," Levin said. "When I read that, my jaw dropped. That's KGB in its finest form. The next step would be, what, bonuses for reporting?"
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
I think George Zimmerman tried that and look where that got him.
With all the geezers living there these are going to be busy folks.
Geezer from Sunny Side Retirement Home: "Please send someone I think the guy in the next room wants to kill everyone because they ran out of tapioca at lunch".
They would have to answer that call in case it might actually happen.
What we really need is a specialized police unit that apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge. If we had a “PreCrime” unit we could remove all guns and their’d be peace in the world.
Why hasn’t somebody done something like this, yet?
I don’t know why it hasn’t been done before. Sounds brilliant. You may want to copyright that and sell it to the gummit. ; )
I would call and tell them that obama is trying to impersonate a president.
With all due respect, who would want to answer, facing a squad (or stack) of testosterone junkies ready for CQB and armed to the teeth?
More likely, the "knock" will be a breaching round, and the survivors might be available for questioning.
Not to mention the potential for "SWATting"...
Truly amazing! My husband’s Dad passed away last month.... He was a WWII Hero....this crap is an insult to the service he gave to this country. damn these traitors and may they reap what they deserve.
If somebody is ranting and raving about wanting to shoot somebody in the government for some alleged grievance, I don’t think “knocking on their door” is quite the safe way to go about it.
Or to paraquote a character from “Die Hard”, “You’re gonna need some more police types”.
Secondly, if the person involved is stupid or mentally ill enought to stand on a street corner and make those kinds of threats, they should be reported by any concerned citizen. This is not a Kitty Genovese situation any more.
However, this type of program can be so mismanaged that it would be like the “old settle some scores” programs in the past, in various countries, including the Soviet Union, Cuba, Red China, and East Germany.
Interestingly, the American Left criticized one of our more successful counter-intelligence programs in Vietnam known as “Operation Phoenix”, which was used to gathering information about the Viet Cong Infrastructure’s deep cover members so as to arrest them in order to get information from them, and even to turn them against their former comrades.
It worked very well despite the Left’s disinformation programs to portray them as just setting up “revenge” actions by pissed off neighbors.
However, in the US, esp. a leftist craphole like eastern Florida, esp. Palm Beach, Miami, Broward County, etc., it would be a “turn in a conservative” program par excellance. Just drop a “dime” on your Tea Party or GOP member and watch the cops pay them a visit.
And any guy named “Chad” would be jailed just because of his name.
There re good cops, bad cops and stupid cops. Looks like Florida has a winner on two of the three kinds.
Before anyone goes off in a tirade against what I’m saying, my son is a cop, and I’ve worked on an Organized Crime Task Force. We know the crazies and the crooks.
How to handle them is much more complicated than just making a phone call. You need good, reliable information or someone is going to get killed.
And as regards this type of program having stopped the killers at Newtown or Aurora, Colorado, doubtful. Lanza didn’t go out and proclaim his desire to kill anyone, nor did the Aurora shooter send out printed announcements. Neither did Starkweather in Texas, Ted Bundy, or Jeffery Dahmer.
You have to understand the criminal mind, esp. the mentally ill criminal, in order to try and protect against them. This is not being done enough and most small town police departments don’t have that type of specialist on their staffs. That is the weak link in serious crime prevent.
That’s a lot of words used to ask, “What could possibly go wrong?”
I’ve had to deal with some Palm Beach LEO’s in my employment. PB LEO’s and Miami LEO’s are lazy, overpaid donut munchers. They are absolutely the laziest group of people I have had to deal with.
(aka future resupply opportunities ;^)
LOL! Been awhile since I heard that :)
Sheriff looking for assets to seize...?
That sounds like a GREAT plot for a movie. What, Spielberg made it in 2002...?
I hope that this plan will include children reporting on their parents. It’s always good to be consistent.
Sounds like our local democrat sheriff. He is an idiot, anti-gun, dim loving liberal. And I don’t like him even though I am kin to him. Had to come from the other side of his family blood line.
I wonder whatever happened to Dr. Demento?
Seems he’s still at it! - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Demento
I think the last I remember listening to him was on the Armed Forces Network in the late-80s.
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