Headline of the Day

This One Weird Trick Could Keep the Feds Out of Your City

 —The American Prospect

This article suggests that municipalities should end all participation in the Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

Given the degree to which federal law enforcement has been corrupted and politicized in just a few months, I am inclined to agree.

I would also suggest that any officers who had been working on these task forces be kept away from hot-button law enforcement issues, because they are more likely to free-lance for the feds anyway.

One day after President Trump’s inauguration, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memorandum to the Department of Justice activating a much-maligned network of spies that civil liberties advocates have pilloried for the grave threat it poses to basic constitutional rights.

Bove directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local governments, “to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives.” This series of interconnected task forces, expanded in the wake of 9/11, seeds local and state law enforcement with the powers (and paranoia) of federal agencies.

The directive also ordered multiple federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons to “review their files for identifying information and/or biometric data relating to non-citizens located illegally in the United States.”

It remains to be seen how this directive has been applied to assist in the abduction of foreign students, Venezuelan green card holders, and others snatched off the streets by immigration officials. But the intelligence underlying those abductions could only come from a few sources, and one of them is the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

………

But since their inception, JTTFs have been criticized for overriding the standard operating procedures of local law enforcement, and incentivizing cops on the street to act less like members of the community they are policing, and more like federal agents parachuting in to communities they know nothing about to stop the next attack. 

………

Since the birth of the JTTFs, three local governments have voted to terminate police force agreements with the FBI to participate in information-sharing. The city councils of Portland, San Francisco, and Oakland all took votes to terminate the memoranda of understanding granting the FBI access to local police, and waiving the state laws that would otherwise safeguard residents.

……… 

While the FBI has used JTTFs in the past to investigate citizens whose activities generally do not conform with the status quo—environmentalists upset with the state of climate change, socialists upset with the state of capitalism, or Muslims perfectly content with the state of things who just want to worship in peace—the Trump administration has blown past these so-called “threat groups.”

Now, the Justice Department is issuing guidance left and right that explodes threat categories and makes clear that enforcement priorities include any citizen who steps out of line. The new federal law enforcement orientation sees any deviation from the policy platform of Donald Trump as a potential act of terrorism and subversion. This includes people who peaceably protest in front of a Tesla dealership, or who write op-eds in favor of Palestinian rights. 

Working with the Feds has been a losing proposition for human rights since (at least) the BW Bush administration. 

If you are wondering if this is just a Republican thing, it isn't.  The Obama administration went all in on a massive law-enforcement take-down of the Occupy movement that rivaled anything that his predecessor did.

If you as a community value the constitution and our civil rights, disband your JTTF.