WP: The Private Arm of the Law (Mercenary Cops)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100665.html

Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out.

"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.

A gang initiation, Watt thought.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen's arrests.

F'ck this crap - you just knew this is the train coming down the tracks. We'll have Blackwater and their ilk now trying to enforce the law on the rest of us.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Remember Soylent Green?

Armed guards in the apartment stairwells - rent-a-cops with M16s. That was one of the most disturbing images from a disturbing movie, and it was just set dressing.

But that's what it's coming to.

[jody]

2. Thanks for posting. The growth of private cops really militias is scary.

:hi:

[alfredo]

3. Corporate militias. CEO/warlords

[w4rma]

4. Exactly. Multinationals want their own police and military. They don't want to have to work through

or with nations.

[alfredo]

5. This is what multinationalism is all about. The corporation is a

nation. Its logo is its flag. Its constitution is its articles of incorporation.

[rwenos]

It's the Logical Next Step

We've had private firms running prisons in Cali for awhile. How else to get away from those DAMNED prison guard unions?!

Gettin' more like the original "Rollerball" with John Housman and James Caan all the time.

[Stargazer99]

6. Like I've posted before the more corps can lull the average

person with acquiring, buying and watching "important" things on TV the easier it will be to have corporate police. Just think of how little justice the big boys now received, it will be a living hell if this is allowed to go further.

[bananas]

7. This should be prosecuted as "impersonating a police officer"

Send some of these assholes to jail.
Need to get the police unions involved.

[happyslug]

8. Can't he is a "Police Officer" as made by the State of North Carolina.

He is NOT imposting an Officer, he is one even through he is NOT in the employ of the Federal, State or Local Government.

[happyslug]

10. I see the old "Coal and Iron" police are back

In the 1800s and into the 1900s, many States (Pennsylvania for one) made "Police Officers" by private bills of the State Legislature. These Officers had the same power as any other Officer, but where to be paid by private corporations. The collective name for such officers was the "Coal and Iron" Police, often called the only true terrorist organization in American History.

http://home.earthlink.net/~hilltj/ColverPolice.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_and_Iron_Police
http://www.library.pitt.edu/labor_legacy/Coal&IronPoliceReport.html
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5661/
http://www.nantyglo.com/postcards05/mar0105.htm
http://www.refuseandresist.org/resist96/police_brutality.html

History of the Molly McQuires:
http://www.aoh61.com/history/molly_coal.htm

[rwenos]

9. No Fourth Amendment Protection?

A fascinating and chilling aspect of this whole trend was raised in my law school course in Criminal Procedure.

The professor asked, "Where's the state action if a private security guard, bounty hunter or private investigator finds the drugs/guns/contraband?" (A requirement to trigger Constitutional protections is "state action" -- i.e., the government is limited, but the Bill of Rights does NOT limit non-government actors.)

I'm still wondering what the courts would say. I don't think anyone knows -- and thus lies a power-seizing opportunity for the corporatist crowd.

[Capn Amerika]

18. Just shoot them, they have no authority.

Merely gun them down then take your chances in court. The Constitution would be on your side. False arrest, kidnapping, illegal search and seizure. Of course the people won't do that and they will be herded up by their corporate masters.

[wakeme2008]

11. Some are good

I am on contract to Norfolk Southern railroad, and NS has it's own (like all railroads) Police Force. They are to protect the railroad property and the freight that moves over the rails. Yes they carry guns but because of that these people are expensive. LOL, when I got to Roanoke a year ago we had in lobby of the 10 story NS building a NS Officer, they were replaced with a cheap rent-a-cop no gun to save money.

So in limited cases I can see the use of private cops and in the case of the railroads they do save local cities money.

Their power comes from the Feds because of the nature of the railroads. And they have always been around and are not something "new".

[bananas]

12. Yeah, google "Pinkertons" etc. nt

[happyslug]

13. See my comment above on the Coal and Iron Police.

n/t

[Robbien]

14. No common law. Just law bought by the rich elite

Scary

Once started down this path, it is so hard to go back.

[Morgana LaFey]

15. Another item for my "Fascism NOW" collection of links

:cry:

[formercia]

16. Death by Rent-a-Cop

They even make money off of suicide.

[Greyskye]

17. Sounds like...

...a plot point from many of the dystopian science fiction books I've read. Fiction precedence tells us that this isn't a good idea. :evilfrown:

[Hubert Flottz]

19. The GOP wants to turn back the clock to Robber Baron heaven!

The Hatfields and the Baldwin-Felts

by Desmond Kilkeary, English Division



The following is a footnote to the Battle of Blair Mountain recounted in last month's issue.


The John Sayles movie Matewan ends with the historical gunfight between the representatives of the Stone Mountain Mining Company (the hired guns of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency) versus the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and assorted citizens of the town of Matewan who were opposing the illegal evictions of striking workers from rentals owned by the Mining Company but which were within the "city" limits of the town.

When the shooting ended, two miners and seven detectives including Albert and Lee Felts were dead. The mayor, Cabell Testerman, whose last words were, "Why did they shoot me?...I can't see why they shot me," would shortly die.

The mining company and Thomas Felts, understandably grieving for his two dead brothers, sought swift retribution even though there was good reason to think that the evictions leading up to the incident were illegal and that bribes had been paid to Mingo County and Matewan officials to overlook the niceties of the law.

Tom Felts' lust for vengeance would would rank right up there with another local but much better known vendetta—the one between the Hatfields and McCoys. MORE...

http://www.glendale.edu/chaparral/may05/hatfields.htm

Baldwin-Felts

The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was a private detective agency in the United States, founded in 1900 by William Gibboney Baldwin and Thomas Lafayette Felts and based in Bluefield, West Virginia.

Agents were hired by railroads and other companies to investigate train robberies and other crime, but Baldwin-Felts became best known for being willing to be hired to violently attack labor union members in such places as Ludlow, Colorado and Matewan, West Virginia. Thus, the agency continues to have an extremely poor reputation among labor union members to this day and are thought of as union busters and hired thugs. Seven detectives were killed in Matewan, West Virginia in 1920 during a shootout, two of whom were brothers of Thomas Felts; three townspeople were also killed, including the mayor. Following the events in Matewan, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated Matewan Sheriff Sid Hatfield on the steps of the Welch, West Virginia Courthouse in retribution for Hatfield's support of the coal miners during the strike. MORE...

http://www.answers.com/topic/baldwin-felts

America's best defense against terrorism, like this, is to remember what has happened in the past! To "Move On" and forget about it, like some always advise, is to have it happen again and again!

[Hubert Flottz]

20. The New PNAC Gilded Age

"You can't mine coal without machine guns." --Richard B. Mellon, Congressional testimony quoted in Time, June 14, 1937

I guess you can't pump oil without them either?

THE LUDLOW MASSACRE

A favorite era of American history for laissez-faire capitalists to draw on as approximating their "ideal" society is the so-called Gilded Age, the period from the post-Reconstruction era up to the Great Depression. At no point in American history (to date) has capitalism come closer to dominating all of American society. Capitalists claim that theirs is a system of freedom. Let's look examine that claim more closely, shall we?

The following is excerpted from Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology; his own source is Samuel Yellen's American Labor Struggles, published by Harcourt Brace in 1936.

------------------------

I was still in college studying history when I heard a song by folksinger Woody Guthrie called "The Ludlow Massacre," a dark, intense ballad, accompanied by slow, haunting chords on his guitar. It told of women and children burned to death in a strike of miners against Rockefeller-owned coal mines in southern Colorado in 1914.

My curiosity was aroused. In none of my classes in American history, in none of the textbooks I had read, was there any mention of the Ludlow Massacre or of the Colorado coal strike. I decided to study the history of the labor movement on my own. MORE...

http://a4a.mahost.org/ludlow.html

Do a search on "Baldwin Felts Ludlow" for more information on how it was and how it will be again if we tolerate corporate terrorism!

[Jcrowley]

21. More crazy shit in The Homeland

K&R

[Odin2005]

22. This shit should be illegal.

Corporations are trying to turn themselves into states (one on the characteristics of states is the monopoliziation of the legal use of force), this is obcene.