Free Republic

The below article appears in our "Police Under Fire" special report. (Click here to download a PDF of the full report.) On December 18, 2014, President Obama signed an executive order creating the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. In May 2015, the task force came out with its Final Report, which is commonly given the title “21st Century Policing.”One of the report’s recommendations, which the Obama-friendly media fixated on, concerns greater restrictions on transfers of military equipment to local police agencies. However, as we reported in a related article ("What's Happening to Our Police?"), the new “accountability” rules...

The below article appears in our "Police Under Fire" special report. (Click here to download a PDF of the full report.) The federal government has been busy creating unconstitutional agencies co-opting policing while simultaneously using a “carrot and stick” approach — unconstitutional federal aid and federal mandates — to absorb and coerce the local police, transforming them into instruments of an emerging national police force.This subversive transformation of America’s way of policing has been under way for a long time. The American ideal of local police — locally funded and locally controlled — whose job it is to protect the...

Harlem (1964). Watts (1965). East Coast, West Coast. A police shooting and an attempted arrest provide the pretexts for days of massive rioting, looting, arson, death, and destruction. Racism and police brutality, say the rioters/looters (and their supporters in political office, the media, and academia), are responsible for the violence and devastation. The Harlem riots provided the spark for additional riots that year in Chicago, Philadelphia, Rochester, and the New Jersey cities of Paterson, Elizabeth, and Jersey City. The war zone-like wreckage of Watts, a black neighborhood in Los Angeles, became the symbol “inspiring” similar rioting in more than...

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...