In which President Obama’s I.C.E. plan some new tactics for escalating their deportations of undocumented immigrants — destroying lives and separating families — for the sake of keeping up their stats. To keep up their stats, they implement a combination of the worst sorts of profiling and police-state dragnets. From USA Today (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON – U.S. immigration officials laid out plans last year that would ratchet up expulsions of immigrants convicted of minor crimes as part of an urgent push to make sure the government would not fall short of its criminal deportation targets, new records obtained by USA TODAY show.

Among those new tactics – detailed in interviews and internal e-mails – were TROLLING STATE DRIVER'S LICENSE RECORDS for information about foreign-born applicants, DISPATCHING U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) AGENTS TO TRAFFIC SAFETY CHECKPOINTS CONDUCTED BY POLICE DEPARTMENTS, and PROCESSING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS [sic] WHO HAD BEEN BOOKED INTO JAILS FOR LOW-LEVEL OFFENSES. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps.

President Obama's administration has made deporting convicted criminals a central feature of its immigration policy, while also saying it would halt some efforts to remove low-priority immigrants who pose little risk to public safety. [sic — see above; see below] . . . By the time the government's fiscal year ended in September, ICE had deported 225,390 criminal immigrants [sic] – a record, and well above the agency's target of 210,000. ICE has not specified how many of those deportations were based on minor offenses; the year before, it reported that MORE THAN A QUARTER OF THE PEOPLE IT CLASSIFIED AS CRIMINALS HAD BEEN CONVICTED ONLY OF TRAFFIC OFFENSES. . . .

— Brad Heath Immigration tactics aimed at boosting deportations, in USA Today (17 Feb 2013)

Now I should take a moment to say that even if this sort of quota-filling violence, data-mining surveillance and police-state dragnets only netted people guilty of major criminal offenses (and not bullshit traffic offenses or drug beefs), then this would still be absolutely appalling, because the police-state means are appalling whatever results you might be able get from them; and also because there is no reason at all other than pure discrimination for immigrants convicted of crimes to be punished not only by the usual jail sentence, but also by then being exiled from their homes and banished from the country, when non-immigrants convicted of similar crimes are not.

However, as it stands, the claim that the administration's tactics are targeting those who pose a risk to public safety are purely propagandistic lies. In either case, adopting these tactics in order to destroy people's lives and livelihoods, for the sake of meeting bureaucratic statistical targets is despicable.

This story comes via Flavia Isabel’s A Really Complicated Chart About Deportation Policy, which is also great, and well worth reading.

Here is the creepiest bit of dystopian legal language that I have heard in the past month or so:

mental hygiene warrants

and

Real Time Crime Center

Keep in mind that one of the main activities of the Real Time Crime Center right now is to watch, chase down, arrest, imprison and force unwanted psychiatric treatment on people who specifically have not been accused of committing any crimes (The city [sic] is making a major push to sweep the streets of dangerous, mentally ill New Yorkers–and has even compiled a most-wanted list. … Those [mental hygiene] warrants mean that the patients are not wanted for a crime but instead are being sought because they are not getting their court-ordered treatment.)

This bit of overtly totalitarian mental health fascism has been brought to you by the New York Police Department..^[1]

Also.

• GT 2007-10-29: For her own good.
• GT 2008-11-10: On sound and fury.
• GT 2009-12-03: Without remorse.

1. ^[1]Content warning, for slurs from the headline on down, fear-mongering, ignorant scapegoating, and general police-state fascism. I apologize for the really very offensive and generally awful source article; I hate the New York Post in basically every possible way.↩

From the West Coast to the East, here’s some news from occupied New York. After a great deal of stonewalling and under intense pressure from New York civil liberties groups, the NYPD has finally released reports on the results of its recent revival of random warrantless stop-and-frisk. Not surprisingly, the results demonstrate that not only is this police power fascist in principle, but also the application of the program is overwhelmingly racist in practice.

The NYPD last night released a report on its controversial stop-and-frisk procedure that breaks down by precinct — and by race — those who've been targeted.

The figures, all from 2011, show the precinct with the most stops by sheer numbers was Brooklyn's 75th, which includes East New York and Cypress Hills.

More than 31,000 people were stopped, 97 percent of them either black or Hispanic.

Brooklyn's 73rd Precinct, covering Brownsville, was the next highest, with 25,167 stops. About 98 percent involved minorities.

The 115th Precinct — which includes East Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights in Queens — ranked third, with 18,156 stops. Nearly 93 percent of those involved minorities, the figures show.

The 40th Precinct in The Bronx, which covers Mott Haven and Melrose, racked up the next highest number — 17,690 — with 98.5 percent involving minorities.

And at No. 5 was the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where there were 17,566 stops, with 88.6 percent involving minorities.

The New York Civil Liberties Union had fought for release of the stats last year.

After getting them, the civil-rights group said they show a pattern of racial profiling — a charge that the NYPD denies.

— Natasha Velez, NYPD releases stop-frisk data, New York Post (Feb 5, 2013)

The NYPD, like most police forces, routinely issues blanket denials of obvious empirical facts, and expects to be believed because the press conference is called in an alternate dimension, where 98+% of all stops just happen to be directed at harassing black or Latin@ victims because of some objective and racially neutral standard of Reasonable Suspicion. In the real world, of course, outside of political power-trip la-la land, Reasonable Suspicion is an entirely meaningless standard, which in practice means nothing more than a police officer’s unreflective and unsubstantiated gut feelings about whether or not someone looks like they are up to no good. And whatever the intentions of NYPD management may have been in designing the policy, or the criteria, the overwhelmingly obvious practical effect of this kind of massive discretionary police power is a campaign of in-effect discriminatory racial harassment by police, which is fueled by the subtle and not-so-subtle sorts of racialized anxiety, tension, and suspicion that set off police officers’ gut reactions. (This is of course why giving police the power to use force, detain, threaten and search people, based on nothing more than their inchoate suspicions is a fundamentally terrible and deeply dangerous idea.)

While it appears at first blush to be a slick, fact-filled response, nothing in the report can dispute the reality that stop and frisk NYPD-style is targeted overwhelmingly at people of color, so innocent of any criminal wrongdoing, that all but 12 percent walk away without so much as a ticket, NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement.

. . . A total of 685,724 people — 8.6 percent of the city's population — were detained by cops for reasonable suspicion. [sic] . . . Of that number, 9 percent were white, and 4 percent Asian, the figures showed.

The No. 1 reason for stop-and-frisks that year was possible weapons possession, the report released yesterday said. . . .

— NYPD releases stop-frisk data…

You might be tempted to call racist harassment the occupational disease of police. If not for the fact that it is their occupation.

This is, incidentally, partly a story about how government policing, and police-state tactics like stop-and-frisk, are assaults on civil liberty in principle, and deeply structurally racist in applied practice. Also, though, — pay attention to the punchline at the end — I have to note that this is also a story about how the immediate practical effect of gun control laws in New York has been to provide the Number One legal pretext for a campaign of highly racialized police harassment. Like drug laws, and like any other law that serves to increase the legal power of police to threaten, coerce or arrest people for contraband possessions, gun control laws also are deeply structurally racist in their immediate practical effects.^[1]

Also.

• GT 2010-08-20: Your authorization says shoot your nation
• Anthony Gregory, Who Goes to Prison Due to Gun Control? in The Beacon (2012-12-21),

1. ^[1]See also Anthony Gregory’s important Who Goes to Prison Due to Gun Control?↩

To-day’s clipped stories, from the Opelika Auburn News (September 20, 2012).

• Front Page. Nothing to clip here, actually. The biggest real estate is occupied by a story about how some super-millionaire said something in private that turned out to be aired in public that may or may not hurt his chances on the margin in his attempt to go from being one of the most massively privileged people in the entire world to the single most massively privileged person in the entire world. This may or may not help out the chances of his super-millionaire opponent to remain the most massively privileged person in the entire world, if it convinces more people that the super-millionaire challenger cares less about ordinary folks than the incumbent super-millionaire does. Somebody is supposed to care about this. I don’t: it couldn’t possibly matter less how much the most massively privileged person in the entire world cares, or who he or she cares about, because the existence of such massive, ruinous and lethal structures of social and economic privilege is exactly the problem, and it is the one problem which such debates over the less-worse of a pair of party-backed super-millionaires will never raise.

• 2A. Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. A fairly typical police puff piece to announce that the police force occupying Auburn, Alabama has a new dog that they are going to use to hound people who are trying to get away from them, and to get or fabricate probable cause for harassing people suspected of nonviolent drug offenses.

  Bo has a nose for finding trouble. But in his line of work, that’s a good thing.^[1]

  The Auburn Police Division welcomed Bo, an 11-month-old Belgian Malinois, to the force on Wednesday.

  Trained in both narcotics detection and human tracking, Bo was officially introduced to members of the media at Auburn Technology Park North.

  For years, we have called on (Lee County) Sheriff Jay Jones and (Opelika Police) Chief Thomas Mangham for use of their tracking K-9s, for which we’re thankful, but we felt like it was time for us to have our own, Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson. We’re very excited about putting this dog to work.

  … Dawson said Bo was purchased last month from the Alabama Canine Law Enforcement Officers Training Center in Northport with approximately $10,000 in seized assets from drug arrests.

  … The acquisition of Bo puts the APD’s number of K-9 officers at four, said Dawson, a former K-9 handler.

  –Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. Opelika-Auburn News, September 20, 2012. A2.

  Well, that’s a damn shame. The primary purpose that they will use Bo for, as they use all police dogs, will be to provide pretexts to justify what are essentially random sweeps, searches and seizures; to harass, intimidate and coerce innocent people on easily fabricated, often mistaken and incredibly thin probable cause, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, in order to prosecute a Drug War that doesn’t need to be prosecuted and to imprison, disenfranchise, and ruin the lives of people who have done nothing at all that merits being imprisoned, disenfranchised, or having their lives ruined by tyrannical drug laws. It’s not the dog’s fault, of course; he looks like a perfectly nice dog. But the people who bought him (with the proceeds from their own search-n-seizure racket), and who are using him, are putting him to a violent and degrading use, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Muslim religion should be feared in US. Rudy Tidwell, of Valley, a God-and-Country fixture on the Op-Ed page, decides that he doesn’t like Church-State integrationists when they aren’t part of his favorite church. Then, by means of an insanely ambitious collectivism, he assimilates the actions of his least favorite hypercollectivists to the thoughts and feelings of literally all 1,600,000,000 (he rounds up to 2 billion) Muslims in the world.

  The phrase Arab Spring has become a catchphrase for the media and other liberals to minimize the real dangers of the actual enemy of America.^[2] The so-called Arab Spring is actually a Muslim Spring, meaning that the growing takeovers we see in various Middle Eastern countries^[3] are Muslims rising up worldwide.

  Why is this aspect of the Middle East unrest not recognized for what it is? The euphemism^[4] made between so-called radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims. Islam is a dangerous body of more than 2 billion people who are determined to convert or kill, and there is no compromise to be made?

  It’s not just a few radical Muslims who make terrorist attacks. How then do you account for the fact that when the attacks on 9/11 occurred, Muslims around the world rejoiced and danced in the streets?

  More recent events in Libya and Egypt have been recognized as and declared to be planned attacks, not benign protests. Were all the people burning the embassies and tearing down and burning the American flags peace-loving Muslims?

  We have a growing number of Muslims in the United States. There are enclaves of Muslims who rule with rigid and brutal Shariah law. Dearborn, Mich, is perhaps the most notable. Muslims are entering the U.S. in numbers that would shock us if we knew the full extent.

  I encourage you to get a copy of the Quran and read it. It is a frightening book that demands faithfulness to its teachings to the point of death. It is the guide book for a worldwide takeover, not by reason and diplomacy as Communism said it would do over time,^[5] but by conversion or death.

  Rudy Tidwell
  Valley

  Well, then. 2,000,000,000? Really? Did they all do the converting and killing and rejoicing and dancing all at once, or do they maybe take it in turns? Well I suppose the gigantic hive mind that they all link up to when they join that dangerous body no doubt ensures that such problems of coordination don’t really arise.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Today in History.

  On Sept. 20, 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

  . . .

  In 1884, the National Equal Rights Party was formed during a convention of suffragists in San Francisco.

  In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent.)

  In 1973, in their so-called battle of the sexes, tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.

  In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that he was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill outlawing same-sex marriages, but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination,^[6] violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians.

  In 2011, repeal of the U.S. military’s 18-year-old don’t ask, don’t tell compromise took effect, allowing gay and lesbian service^[7] members to serve^[8] openly.

Section A contains no international news at all today, unless you count the collecto-eliminationist letter from Rudy Tidwell on the Op-Ed page.

1. ^[1][For whom? –R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. Of course what he means, as he makes clear, is the enemy of the United States government. Which is not true either, but in any case obviously not the same thing. –RG.]↩
3. ^[3][Sic. Of course all governments are usurpers, and thus are ongoing takeovers by nature. That includes transitional and revolutionary states; on the other hand it also obviously includes the hyperauthoritarian regimes recently challenged or thrown out. What the hell was the Mubarak regime, say, if not a constantly repeated, jackbooted takeover of innocent people’s lives? –RG.]↩
4. ^[4][Sic. What he describes is not a euphemism, but rather a distinction that he regards as being misapplied. –RG.]↩
5. ^[5][Rudy Tidwell is speaking outside of his area of expertise. –RG.]↩
6. ^[6][. . . –R.G.]↩
7. ^[7][Sic. –RG.]↩
8. ^[8][Sic. –RG.]↩

From Rikki Cheese and Spencer Lubitz at ABC 13 Action News:

Civil rights advocates want those treated unfairly by police to speak out

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) — A group of civil rights advocates want to hear from people who feel they’ve been mistreated by Metro police.

People have been shot, beaten and tasered by Metro officers across the department’s jurisdiction. Civil rights groups hope airing those stories in public forums could help change police behavior.

Mitchell Crooks was beaten by a cop for videotaping a burglary investigation across the street from his home near Desert Inn and Maryland Parkway. Erik Scott was shot and killed at a Costco in Summerlin. Both Caucasian men. Civil rights advocates say they’re not Metro’s usual suspects in officer-involved shootings, or accusations of excessive use of force.

I can’t say whether there’s a conscious racial bias, but certainly the evidence reveals a disproportionate impact on minority populations, and that’s just brought out by the data, Staci Pratt with the ACLU said.

Pratt says 2010 census data shows the largest proportion of officer-involved shooting occur in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods in Clark County.

Advocacy groups also want to hear from people who feel they’ve been mistreated by law enforcement in all ways, and who feel their complaints have not been heard.

Pratt applauds Metro’s recent changes in their use of force policy and for accepting recommendations from the ACLU and NAACP but says officers need to be more sensitive to the people they police.

That may not be a conscious thing on Metro’s part, Pratt said. But it certainly is an issue that needs to be raised and addressed.

It is good that they are doing this. Legal reforms and use of force policies don’t do a damn thing, but here and elsewhere they may be reflections of, and concessions to, something much more poewrful. The only thing that is ever going to restrain police abuse is a culture of popular resistance, public exposure and social accountability for abusive cops, and hard driving community activism.

Support your neighborhood CopWatch.

See also:

• GT 2011-10-10: Your constitutional rights have nothing to do with the law.
• GT 2009-09-16: The Police Beat: Shot in the Back
• GT 2009-02-23: The Metro Police Beat
• GT 2008-12-05: Don’t turn your back on the Wolfpack
• Nevada CopBlock: Keeping Police Accountable in Nevada