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Tag: South Carolina

South Carolina Attempts to End Policing for Profit

Written by Remso Martinez on . Posted in Capital Punishment, Personal Liberty. No Comments on South Carolina Attempts to End Policing for Profit

Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF), in which law enforcement can tie inanimate objects to crimes without a charge and confiscate them from innocent civilians and criminals alike, is a bipartisan issue which has been an issue Americans across the aisle have taken a negative look at for several years now. Currently, in the South Carolina general assembly, steps are being taken to end this foul practice once and for all. According to the Tenth Amendment Center, a “bill introduced in the South Carolina House would reform the state’s asset forfeiture laws to prohibit the state from taking a person’s property without a criminal conviction in most situations. Passage of the bill would also close a federal loophole that allows police to circumvent more strict state forfeiture laws by passing cases off to the feds.” The loophole described is in regards to a federal practice known as “equitable sharing” which allows state prosecutors to bypass certain laws preventing CAF abuse by passing the buck to federal law enforcement, who then shares a piece of this theft flavored pie with the state since now the case regarding the stolen property is within the jurisdiction of both state and federal law enforcement. CAF as a practice is wrong because it enables policing for profit since most private property obtained is auctioned off and sold so the money comes back to certain agencies and departments. According to the Pulitzer Center “The practice skirts the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that Americans are free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and it provides a potentially corrupting incentive for police to circumvent the law to fund their departments.” A report from the Institute for Justice has stated this legal and controversial law enforcement practice “has all the hallmarks of an inviting target for public-interest litigation and advocacy: a cutting-edge legal controversy, sympathetic property owners who have little or no involvement in criminal activity, and simple, outrageous facts that show ordinary Americans facing the loss of their property.” With this program allowed to run amok, cops can turn law-abiding citizens into criminals for any reason in order to seize their property. Police have seized everything from letters traveling through the postal service with cash to even a person’s own car. This injustice is currently under well-earned scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans since the current state of policing for profit has turned the entire citizenry into a criminal cash pot where only through the legislative process can this wretched legal plunder be stopped once and for all.
Fired

FIRED! SC School Resource Officer Assaults Student

Written by Chloe Anagnos on . Posted in Liberator Online, News You Can Use. No Comments on FIRED! SC School Resource Officer Assaults Student

FIRED! SC School Resource Officer Assaults Student

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. On Monday, Oct. 26, a video surfaced on the Internet of a South Carolina school resource officer throwing a female student across a classroom.

The incident occurred at the Spring Valley High School in Columbia, witnesses said, when the unnamed African-American student refused to put away her cell phone and then refused to leave the classroom after being asked by the teacher and school principal. The officer was then summoned and asked her to leave again. She refused, and he told her she was under arrest. The video then shows the officer violently knocking the student down, flipping her desk over her, and pulling her across the floor. The incident was filmed by a fellow student and was uploaded to YouTube. The video made its way around social media, prompting the hashtag #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott suspended Deputy Ben Fields after the incident, and fired him Wednesday. Lott said that Senior Deputy Ben Fields “did not follow proper procedure”. He “should not have thrown a student – he could have done a lot of things he was trained to do, he was not trained to throw a student,” Sheriff Lott said. Lott said he had received expressions of support for the officer from some parents and school officials. Officer Fields had received a “Culture of Excellence” award last year by an elementary school where he was also assigned. But Sheriff Lott said the officer had “lost control” and had not handled this incident correctly. “That is not proper technique and should not be used in law enforcement. And based on that, that is a violation of our policy and approximately 20 minutes ago Officer Ben Fields was terminated from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.” He said complaints had been made about Officer Fields during his time at the school – some had been upheld and some had not. Legal action has been taken three times against the officer, according to Associated Press:
  • 2013: An expelled student claims Fields targeted black students and falsely accused him of being a gang member in 2013. Fields will go to trial in January.
  • 2009: A woman filed a lawsuit, which was later dismissed, accusing Fields of battery and violating her rights during a 2006 arrest.
  • 2005: A federal jury found in Officer Fields’ favor after a black couple accused him of excessive force and battery during a noise complaint arrest.
The deputy has not been criminally charged but the Federal Bureau of Investigation and justice department have opened a civil rights investigation into the arrest. Fellow students at the school have tweeted claims that they have seen him behaving in a similar manner in the past, but this was the first time such an incident was caught on camera. Sheriff Lott has said the girl was unhurt in the incident aside from a carpet burn. However, the girl’s attorney, Todd Rutherford, told ABC’s Good Morning America that she “has a cast on her arm, she has neck and back injuries” as well as a plaster on her forehead because of the carpet burn. Sheriff Lott said he would “not describe the officer as remorseful, but he was sorry that the whole thing occurred”.

Gun Control Fear Mongering Rings Hollow

Written by JJones on . Posted in Gun Rights, Liberator Online, News You Can Use, Personal Liberty. No Comments on Gun Control Fear Mongering Rings Hollow

Gun Control Fear Mongering Rings Hollow

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. It didn’t take long for President Barack Obama to politicize the tragic shooting Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon on Thursday, October 1. Just hours after the news of the shooting broke, he appeared before reporters and demanded more gun control laws. gun control “[W]hat’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws,” Obama said. “Does anybody really believe that? There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country — they know that’s not true.” “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America. So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer? We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence,” he added. No one denies that what happened at Umpqua Community College is a terrible tragedy. But it doesn’t appear that the gun control laws that President Obama and like-minded members of Congress have tried to advance could’ve prevented this incident. The shooter didn’t have a record of mental health problems or past legal problems, unlike the Charleston, South Carolina church shooter, who slipped between bureaucratic cracks. Bad things can and do happen. Some of them are preventable and some of them aren’t. But no legislative proposal that has been discussed or actually introduced will stop tragedies like these from happening. In addition to the anti-gun bias of our President, part of the problem, of course, is a media that isn’t honest about the ineffectiveness of gun control proposals or how they wouldn’t stop shootings like the one at Umpqua Community College from happening. Let’s be clear, we know that gun violence has declined significantly over the last 20 years. What we know is that the Centers for Disease Control, in 2013, recognized the private ownership of firearms as a deterrent to crime. And we know that states with concealed carry laws, known as “shall issue” states, have fewer murders than those that severely restrict these permits. There is no cure-all to stop shootings, and President Obama and the media should be honest about that, rather than trying to push outrage and raise emotion to pass policies that promote their long-standing views against guns.

Whoa: Donald Rumsfeld Criticizes George W. Bush’s Iraq Policy

Written by JJones on . Posted in Foreign Policy, Liberator Online, News You Can Use, War. No Comments on Whoa: Donald Rumsfeld Criticizes George W. Bush’s Iraq Policy

Whoa: Donald Rumsfeld Criticizes George W. Bush’s Iraq Policy

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. Hell may have just frozen over. Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 and again from 2001 to 2006, says that President George W. Bush’s attempt to bomb Iraq into accepting “democracy” was “unrealistic.” Rumsfeld made the comments during an interview with The Times of London. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words,” Rumsfeld told the paper. “I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories.” The comments are surprising. Rumsfeld was one of the major figures promoting the Iraq War. In fact, he was one of prominent administration figures who tried to connect the Middle Eastern country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. In September 2004, Rumsfeld, who has since denied making the connection, said the ties were “not debatable.” President Bush announced Rumsfeld’s resignation November 8, 2006, a day after Republicans were shellacked at the ballot box in that year’s mid-term election and lost control of both chambers of Congress. In August 2006, only 36 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War while 60 percent, the highest number at the time, opposed it due to almost daily reports of violence in Iraq. By the end of that year, more than 3,000 American soldiers were killed in the line of duty, according to iCasualties.org. With the rise of the Islamic State and Levant, which has taken control of swaths of Iraq, Rumsfeld may have had a change of heart. The question is, will Republicans currently pushing for war with other countries heed his words? It’s not likely. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has firmly supplanted himself as one of the top Republican war hawks in the upper chamber, which isn’t an easy task considering that he serves alongside Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. Although Cotton is frequently touted as a fiscal conservative, his doesn’t seem to understand that perpetual war is inconsistent with limited government. Last week, Fred Boenig, an antiwar activist whose son, Austin, committed suicide in May 2010 while serving in the Air Force, confronted Cotton during an event at the Johns Hopkins University campus in Washington, DC. “When do we get to hang up the ‘mission accomplished’ banner,” Boenig said, referring to the May 2003 photo op and speech by President Bush, “and when do I get my kids to come home safe again?” “There’s no definite answer because our enemies get a vote in this process,” said Cotton. “In the end, I think the best way to honor our veterans…” “Is to have more killed?” asked Boenig, who interrupted Cotton. “[I]s to win the wars for which they fought,” the freshman Arkansas senator said.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is also trying to position himself as Bush-style foreign policy hawk. During a recent appearance on Fox News, obviously, Rubio gave an unusual answer to a question about Iraq. “I think we have a responsibility to support democracy. And if a nation expresses a desire to become a democratic nation, particularly one that we invaded, I do believe that we have a responsibility to help them move in that direction,” said Rubio. “But the most immediate responsibility we have is to help them build a functional government that can actually meet the needs of the people in the short- and long-term, and that ultimately from that you would hope that would spring democracy.”

When a host said that Rubio sounds like he backs nation-building, the freshman Florida Republican said: “Well, it’s not nation-building. We are assisting them in building their nation.” That’s a distinction without a difference, senator. Maybe Rumsfeld’s comments, which are only now getting traction in American media, will put Republican hawks on the defensive, forcing them to answer tough questions about the failed the failed foreign policy Republicans all too frequently promote. But don’t hold your breath.