William Horning
pathfinder87@yahoo.com
If you turn on your TV, which I don’t recommend you do often, it is likely you will have a police theme show as one of your viewing choices. Growing up, the police were your friends, there to protect and serve. These days, you have to wonder since law enforcement appears to be their main job, and there are too many laws.
Some of the situations I see look innocent enough: pictures of police in uniform with National Honor Society students celebrating their awards, with the kids getting shots. Then you see stories about SWAT Teams being formed on college campuses such at Georgia Tech, supposedly in response to the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus, and you wonder what our country is coming to. SWAT teams are everywhere and police are becoming more military like including even buying surplus military vehicles.
Why do we have to have "traffic cameras" everywhere these days? Are we ready to be "watched" 24-hours a day? How about the British company Internet Eyes that wants to pay up to $1,740 to people that detect shoplifting watching a live feed. How long before we have agents for Homeland Security watching your street as you come and go? Just up the road in Frisco, Texas, police and firemen can watch the school cameras from their police cars and fire trucks.
Why are the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts being trained with Homeland Security? Why is the Ellis County Sheriff’s Office working with the Law Enforcement Explorer youth program? Are we recruiting our children for the police state? Can our economy create no other jobs?
I don’t believe there are many of us that fail to appreciate what police do and the risks they take in the line of duty, but have we gone overboard in our "worship" of them to allow them to get away with almost anything? The sheriff’s department in Hardin, MT was recently found to be allowing a private paramilitary unit called APF and headed by a guy with a Russian accent, to patrol the city streets in vehicles with "Hardin Police" stenciled on the vehicles.
The head of APF, Michael Hilton, has served time in jail and has outstanding judgments in a fraud case out of California. This story made the CBS news, but not most others. Are they preparing for a re-run of the TV series JERICHO and bringing "Ravenwood" back?
Talking about a police state, what about Senate bills 773, 778 introduced by Jay Rockefeller? This is the guy that said "we would all be better off if the internet had not been invented." I wonder what Al Gore thinks? What Jay means is that "he" would be better off if the American people didn’t have a way to find out what the crooks in Washington, D.C. are doing using the internet. His solution, give Obama the power to have a Cyber Czar in the Commerce Department with the power to shut down the internet to keep us (him) safe. That’s scarier than Freddie Kruger showing up for Halloween!
