Either the automatic weapons used by the SWAT teams belong to the police --in which case the SWAT teams are certainly government entities,-- or they belong to the 501(c)3, in which case we should lock everyone up for just as long as we would lock up a gangbanger who's killed multiple people and gets caught with a fully automatic weapon.
I obviously do not know how these LECs are setup legally speaking, but it is possible to own and operate fully automatic weapons legally as a civilian or business. You can get a tax stamp from the ATF for a few hundred dollars. As an example, my local commercial gun range offers rentals for fully automatic assault rifles and submachine guns at their ranges.
That said, this LEC charade is sickening and they should be punished as severely as the law allows. Of course it's America and the police can and do get away with murder so that'll never happen.
If they're private corporations, shouldn't they be open to competition from other private corporations? I.e., shouldn't any organization that wants to be able to incorporate as a 501(c)(3) and have the same law enforcement privileges they do?
If their answer to that is "well, we have this special contract from the government...", then they are agents of the government and can't hide behind the "private corporation" shield for activities they undertake as such agents. Certainly that's how it works for Federal government contractors: if the GAO audits a Federal program, the contractors who implement it can't hide their records from the auditors with the excuse "oh, we're private corporations".
I think this is more like if you and your software engineering buddies incorporate some kind of organization to own your kayaks, and then someone asks for the log of the kayaks' usage, and you're like:
"we may have paid for those kayaks, but we gave them to this other organization that is basically us, but it is not the organization that owes you transparency, so fuck off."
The developments in the US around surveillance, domestic use of force and the way the politicians allow this to happen reads more and more like the introduction chapter to a dystopian science fiction novel.
Don't forget to read Greg Lukanioff's Unlearning Liberty[1], a very detailed examination of basically the same forces at work in education and free speech. I read it not long after reading Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain[2], and was really disturbed by the parallels between what's happening naturally in universities (basically because individual actors such as administrators have no personal disincentive against violating the rights of their students) and what the soviet union systematically did to the universities when they were establishing their foothold in the Eastern Bloc. There's a whole chapter on education in Applebaum's book, and it's essentially a perfect description of what's happening in US universities. It's deeply chilling, and the same thing is causing the militarization of the police - individual police are never held liable for wrong-door raids, for killing innocent civilians, for violating the rights of US citizens, so they have no incentive to try and stop it happening.
We already knew America's police was getting militarized at a rapid rate. Now they're getting corporatized too. Its prisons are already corporatized. The full circle is almost there.
Living in a developing country like India, I'm sometimes half-thankful that our police is inept, woefully ill-equipped with weapons and government-controlled.
Living in a developing country like India, I'm sometimes half-thankful that our police is inept...
Isn't it great to be a man?
[edit: I realize this flippant remark probably makes little sense for those who don't live in India. Ineffective policing is a very serious problem here, primarily for women. If I stay out late with a girl, it's almost automatic that I will escort her home regardless of the inconvenience to me. Black women often wear a keffiyeh at night to avoid racially motivated attacks. Physical security is a significant electoral issue.]
When you file with the IRS with a LLC, and you are the sole member, the IRS doesn't consider that a 'real' corporation, and you have to take that earnings on your 1040.
Likewise, just because these police organizations are using 501(c)3 to provide a corporate shield, a reasonable judge should say that the shield is unlawful.
I kind of get a feeling that national security will eventually be trotted out here.
The IRS may not consider an LLC a corporation for tax purposes, but this has nothing to do with whether a court will consider the LLC as an entity that provides its owners with liability protection. Courts do not give IRS classification any weight. Tax liability and liability for other corporate debts are not the same thing. (It is a common misperception, though.)
However, that is not the issue here. The ACLU is arguing (rightly) that even though these entities are corporations, they are acting as agents of the government, and thus should be required to follow laws pertaining to government agencies.
The government regularly gives public property to private entities and claims they no longer have possession. Then they make a contract so they can have access. (Obviously, you don't get access without paying the price.) They do this with The Law (tm)(c) for example. California (the Office of Administrative Law) doesn't even have possession of the codified regulations they make (the California Code of Regulations). Which is why you have to be wealthy to have bulk access to California law (regulations are a form of secondary or delegated legislation) or otherwise have to agree to a license for the "free" (as in beer not as in freedom) Internet version where you give up your rights to your first unborn child etc. (Though the website is practically unusable for any layman who hasn't already read most of it. Of course to encourage you to buy the CD-ROM.)
Which of course leads to a breakdown in law and order.
Are you saying that there's law in California (i.e. something you can violate that the justice system has the authority to punish you over) that is not freely (as in freedom) available to any citizen (for whatever purpose, reading, distributing, etc)?
Seems foolish, on the part of the LEC's. IANAL, but I assume they that if they are non-governmental organizations, it dramatically changes their profile regarding lawsuits, that is no personal immunity, etc.
IANAL, but I think I can address that somewhat. While the organization itself may not have governmental immunity as a private corporation -- which it probably doesn't, having incorporated as a 501(c)(3) -- the individual police officers are still government employees and still have the immunity they would have in that role.
The Massachusetts police have privatised part of their operations. And the 'general counsel for the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association' has said that they're immune to information requests because they're private corporations. The article positions the purpose of the privatisation as secrecy. This seems like a very Bad Thing, so it's not surprising that the ACLU have stepped in.
But I'm going to play devil's advocate, because I want to know the truth:
I wonder if there are other, possibly more important reasons for forming these private corporations. Maybe the existing police system doesn't function optimally, and provisioning resources (such as trained officers with appropriate equipment for drug busts) is a process that's too slow, or inadequate. Maybe this is a way of detouring the bureaucracy and systemic bullshit that encumbers civil servants whose job is ultimately to keep people safe.
The article says that Tewksbury, MA paid $4600 for membership to NEMLEC. That town has a population of around 28 000. It doesn't make sense for a small town like that to have a police force with a dedicated SWAT team, computer crimes unit and schools incident response team. It also doesn't make sense for a larger jurisdiction to serve the smaller community when it [the smaller community] needs it, and get nothing in return. It seems as though it's a way for police departments to share resources. I'd imagine that if a small town's police department found themselves unable to deal with a time-critical scenario, like a shooter in a school, they'd call in backup pretty damned quickly. Perhaps the quality of response a small town could get through NEMLEC would be better than going through traditional police channels?
To me it seems like the primary purpose of forming these private NPCs is not secrecy. As the article says, government police agencies already do that - "police agencies have broadly interpreted open records laws to allow them to turn down just about every request."
So, if it is actually easy for police agencies to turn down requests in the first place, why go to all the effort to form, finance, and manage a 3200 member [1] corporation?
I don't think the article positions secrecy as the primary, let alone sole, purpose of this effort at all. It is clearly, as you say, to get around all sorts of 'inconvenient' things in government bureaucracy.
The thing is that a lot of that bureaucracy is there explicitly to slow down and provide scrutiny over one of the most vulnerable to corruption parts of government. The people who enforce the law, without supervision, can easily become the law, and that's extremely dangerous for civil society.
That's why, in a sane world, there'd be a state-level organization that does the things that are too big for small towns, not a private corporation. The excuse is that the state authorities are too backed up - essentially, that they're underfunded. How transferring tax money to a private LEC helps with that is not entirely clear to me.
The most important question here is, who exactly authorizes the use of force by NEMLEC? This, as is, allows undisclosed use of force whenever the powers that be (I believe police chiefs) feel like it, without the need for disclosure.
This is essentially an unregulated regional army. Paid for with taxes, but not actually beholden to the tax payer.
Why would somebody form that? That depends on how paranoid you want to think.
The Massachusetts police have privatised part of their operations.
I don't think the term "privatize" reflects the situation as described in the article or as described in the organization's website. According to all the descriptions, everyone involved in the organization is a public employee acting in their official capacity. This makes all of it's activities the activities of the government.
Maybe, this consortium was originally formed to save some money. Police and fire departments band together in a variety of forms. But contrary to your line of reasoning, this is neither a justification for secrecy nor is that a reason not to be interested in this situation. What is important and disturbing is that this isn't privatization as such but rather this is a public entity relabeling activities as private and claiming immunity to public scrutiny on that basis (not that overt privatization doesn't have it's own problems).
Disturbing as the present efforts to evade scrutiny are, we should take note that this sort of deceptive relabeling of government activities can potentially open the door to local government evading any and all regulations that the courts and state laws might place on them (though hopefully this stuff will fall apart "in the light of day").
The military and government in general makes extensive use of contractors for specialized tasks, but manages to audit and limit their behaviors to the degree that they're performing work on behalf of the government, recognizing that contracting out government work doesn't make it not government work.
How are these any different?
Even if they are contractors for specialized policing (something I find dubious, but am not sure is actually a bad idea), why wouldn't they still be subject to regulation as government employees while performing government work?
This is why cops and prosecutors should be bonded. Bonding would track and price individuals' risk. It would pay for settlements up front, and not rape the taxpayer for cops' misdeeds, and it would enable liability to function as it should.
that is interesting, i will say that the reason i haven't sued the city of oakland over my treatment at the hands of their police is that paying out more settlements per year than SF and LA combined has not done anything to change their course, and surely hurts the local education budget.
If they consider themselves private corporations wouldn't that mean their "employees" are breaking laws by a) using the weapons they have access to b) breaking into people's homes and c) arresting people...
One expects that judges will sort this mess out. In the meantime, what is the governer's statement on this? The only acceptable response to a 5-minute inquiry is "Massachusetts Police Departments are hereby ordered to publish their LEC records or withdraw from LECs immediately"
Don't let reporters mystify you with all these things people "claim" and say. It's just one PR department relaying a message from another PR dept.
It's all the US. It's all the current system. Yes, the constitution has been drastically weakened by money interests. Yes.
I went to Austin, TX a couple weeks back to be my Brother's best man. I didn't realize he was marrying a cop's daughter in a rural area outside the city limits, because all he told me about the guy was he's a skydiver. I fly paragliders, so I figured we had a lot in common.
There's a really good reason all the souveneirs in the area say "Austin City Limits"! It's because if you're a beta male, you really shouldn't stray too far outside into the Red State. You really, really shouldn't.
Within an hour of getting to the house, I got in a minor verbal spat with my own sister. My ridiculous mother decided to call the police department to ingratiate herself with my brother's new family. Well, I'm 150 lbs (but still pretty tough) and a 270 lb gorilla showed up to learn me some manners about how to act when in Rome.
He practiced some Krav Maga on me, probably something he just learned and was aching to demonstrate. He twisted my carpal tunnels around, bend my injured knees around a bit, damaged nerves in my left hip and left wrist. Stood on my scoliosis, stretched a tendon in my left shoulder....
And then the police department itself put me in a hospital! I could have walked it off in a couple hours, but the cops run this hospital. They have the doctors and orderlies continue to be very abusive so as to keep you in shock for days (5 for me) and then they try to have a doctor threaten you with institutionalization because you had a delusion about police persecution!
That's their system, and apparently the Red Staters really truly like it that way. Keeps the outsiders and Mexicans out! Or so these fools think. They think they can keep the Mexicans out! They'll be in for quite the shock themselves when they find out Rupert Murdoch has been lying.
And that it's them that have to learn spanish after all. Glad I speak it, that's for sure.
You're operating under the assumption that there are rules in place here that are the same for everyone, and that everyone has to follow the rules.
The sooner Americans stop fooling themselves into believing that nonsense, the sooner they can start to fix their broken country. Until then (and it will probably be a long time), try to avoid cops, because they can shoot you for free.
[+] [-] hamiltonkibbe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 67726e|11 years ago|reply
That said, this LEC charade is sickening and they should be punished as severely as the law allows. Of course it's America and the police can and do get away with murder so that'll never happen.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Firearms_License
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
[+] [-] pdonis|11 years ago|reply
If their answer to that is "well, we have this special contract from the government...", then they are agents of the government and can't hide behind the "private corporation" shield for activities they undertake as such agents. Certainly that's how it works for Federal government contractors: if the GAO audits a Federal program, the contractors who implement it can't hide their records from the auditors with the excuse "oh, we're private corporations".
[+] [-] justizin|11 years ago|reply
"we may have paid for those kayaks, but we gave them to this other organization that is basically us, but it is not the organization that owes you transparency, so fuck off."
[+] [-] bjelkeman-again|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x1798DE|11 years ago|reply
1. http://www.unlearningliberty.com/ 2. http://www.anneapplebaum.com/iron-curtain-the-crushing-of-ea...
[+] [-] unchocked|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sybhn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r0h1n|11 years ago|reply
Living in a developing country like India, I'm sometimes half-thankful that our police is inept, woefully ill-equipped with weapons and government-controlled.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|11 years ago|reply
Isn't it great to be a man?
[edit: I realize this flippant remark probably makes little sense for those who don't live in India. Ineffective policing is a very serious problem here, primarily for women. If I stay out late with a girl, it's almost automatic that I will escort her home regardless of the inconvenience to me. Black women often wear a keffiyeh at night to avoid racially motivated attacks. Physical security is a significant electoral issue.]
[+] [-] DrewRWx|11 years ago|reply
Also, while the school to prison pipeline is a dire issue in parts of the country, private prisons are still a fraction of total US prisons.
[+] [-] rtpg|11 years ago|reply
If you're talking about private prisons only something like 2% of inmates are in private prisons.
[+] [-] ryanobjc|11 years ago|reply
Likewise, just because these police organizations are using 501(c)3 to provide a corporate shield, a reasonable judge should say that the shield is unlawful.
I kind of get a feeling that national security will eventually be trotted out here.
[+] [-] joshuaheard|11 years ago|reply
However, that is not the issue here. The ACLU is arguing (rightly) that even though these entities are corporations, they are acting as agents of the government, and thus should be required to follow laws pertaining to government agencies.
[+] [-] DenisM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k2enemy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esbranson|11 years ago|reply
The government regularly gives public property to private entities and claims they no longer have possession. Then they make a contract so they can have access. (Obviously, you don't get access without paying the price.) They do this with The Law (tm)(c) for example. California (the Office of Administrative Law) doesn't even have possession of the codified regulations they make (the California Code of Regulations). Which is why you have to be wealthy to have bulk access to California law (regulations are a form of secondary or delegated legislation) or otherwise have to agree to a license for the "free" (as in beer not as in freedom) Internet version where you give up your rights to your first unborn child etc. (Though the website is practically unusable for any layman who hasn't already read most of it. Of course to encourage you to buy the CD-ROM.)
Which of course leads to a breakdown in law and order.
[+] [-] parley|11 years ago|reply
Are you saying that there's law in California (i.e. something you can violate that the justice system has the authority to punish you over) that is not freely (as in freedom) available to any citizen (for whatever purpose, reading, distributing, etc)?
[+] [-] JackFr|11 years ago|reply
Anyone who is a lawyer know?
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] daniel-levin|11 years ago|reply
But I'm going to play devil's advocate, because I want to know the truth:
I wonder if there are other, possibly more important reasons for forming these private corporations. Maybe the existing police system doesn't function optimally, and provisioning resources (such as trained officers with appropriate equipment for drug busts) is a process that's too slow, or inadequate. Maybe this is a way of detouring the bureaucracy and systemic bullshit that encumbers civil servants whose job is ultimately to keep people safe.
The article says that Tewksbury, MA paid $4600 for membership to NEMLEC. That town has a population of around 28 000. It doesn't make sense for a small town like that to have a police force with a dedicated SWAT team, computer crimes unit and schools incident response team. It also doesn't make sense for a larger jurisdiction to serve the smaller community when it [the smaller community] needs it, and get nothing in return. It seems as though it's a way for police departments to share resources. I'd imagine that if a small town's police department found themselves unable to deal with a time-critical scenario, like a shooter in a school, they'd call in backup pretty damned quickly. Perhaps the quality of response a small town could get through NEMLEC would be better than going through traditional police channels?
To me it seems like the primary purpose of forming these private NPCs is not secrecy. As the article says, government police agencies already do that - "police agencies have broadly interpreted open records laws to allow them to turn down just about every request."
So, if it is actually easy for police agencies to turn down requests in the first place, why go to all the effort to form, finance, and manage a 3200 member [1] corporation?
[1] http://www.nemlec.com/who.htm
edit: clarified a sentence by adding 'through NEMLEC'
[+] [-] stormbrew|11 years ago|reply
The thing is that a lot of that bureaucracy is there explicitly to slow down and provide scrutiny over one of the most vulnerable to corruption parts of government. The people who enforce the law, without supervision, can easily become the law, and that's extremely dangerous for civil society.
[+] [-] groby_b|11 years ago|reply
The most important question here is, who exactly authorizes the use of force by NEMLEC? This, as is, allows undisclosed use of force whenever the powers that be (I believe police chiefs) feel like it, without the need for disclosure.
This is essentially an unregulated regional army. Paid for with taxes, but not actually beholden to the tax payer.
Why would somebody form that? That depends on how paranoid you want to think.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|11 years ago|reply
I don't think the term "privatize" reflects the situation as described in the article or as described in the organization's website. According to all the descriptions, everyone involved in the organization is a public employee acting in their official capacity. This makes all of it's activities the activities of the government.
Maybe, this consortium was originally formed to save some money. Police and fire departments band together in a variety of forms. But contrary to your line of reasoning, this is neither a justification for secrecy nor is that a reason not to be interested in this situation. What is important and disturbing is that this isn't privatization as such but rather this is a public entity relabeling activities as private and claiming immunity to public scrutiny on that basis (not that overt privatization doesn't have it's own problems).
Disturbing as the present efforts to evade scrutiny are, we should take note that this sort of deceptive relabeling of government activities can potentially open the door to local government evading any and all regulations that the courts and state laws might place on them (though hopefully this stuff will fall apart "in the light of day").
[+] [-] DerpDerpDerp|11 years ago|reply
How are these any different?
Even if they are contractors for specialized policing (something I find dubious, but am not sure is actually a bad idea), why wouldn't they still be subject to regulation as government employees while performing government work?
[+] [-] Zigurd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jqm|11 years ago|reply
Far too many bad actors blend back into the group and repeat their misdeeds over and over again.
[+] [-] justizin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frostmatthew|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul_Dessert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gohrt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betterunix|11 years ago|reply
Who expects that? Judges failed to stem the growth of militarized police forces for decades.
[+] [-] Calcite|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opendais|11 years ago|reply
Maybe I should work on founding the OCP today...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andywood|11 years ago|reply
It's all the US. It's all the current system. Yes, the constitution has been drastically weakened by money interests. Yes.
I went to Austin, TX a couple weeks back to be my Brother's best man. I didn't realize he was marrying a cop's daughter in a rural area outside the city limits, because all he told me about the guy was he's a skydiver. I fly paragliders, so I figured we had a lot in common.
There's a really good reason all the souveneirs in the area say "Austin City Limits"! It's because if you're a beta male, you really shouldn't stray too far outside into the Red State. You really, really shouldn't.
Within an hour of getting to the house, I got in a minor verbal spat with my own sister. My ridiculous mother decided to call the police department to ingratiate herself with my brother's new family. Well, I'm 150 lbs (but still pretty tough) and a 270 lb gorilla showed up to learn me some manners about how to act when in Rome.
He practiced some Krav Maga on me, probably something he just learned and was aching to demonstrate. He twisted my carpal tunnels around, bend my injured knees around a bit, damaged nerves in my left hip and left wrist. Stood on my scoliosis, stretched a tendon in my left shoulder....
And then the police department itself put me in a hospital! I could have walked it off in a couple hours, but the cops run this hospital. They have the doctors and orderlies continue to be very abusive so as to keep you in shock for days (5 for me) and then they try to have a doctor threaten you with institutionalization because you had a delusion about police persecution!
That's their system, and apparently the Red Staters really truly like it that way. Keeps the outsiders and Mexicans out! Or so these fools think. They think they can keep the Mexicans out! They'll be in for quite the shock themselves when they find out Rupert Murdoch has been lying.
And that it's them that have to learn spanish after all. Glad I speak it, that's for sure.
[+] [-] afandian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|11 years ago|reply
That will stop this cold.
[+] [-] deciplex|11 years ago|reply
The sooner Americans stop fooling themselves into believing that nonsense, the sooner they can start to fix their broken country. Until then (and it will probably be a long time), try to avoid cops, because they can shoot you for free.
[+] [-] trhway|11 years ago|reply
I'd think that FOIA wasn't the main law they were setup to dodge, it is just a side benefit. My bet would be about some finance related limits/laws.
[+] [-] charonn0|11 years ago|reply