You’d think this would be good training… (Updated)

This surprised the hell out of me…

FBI sends agents to Holocaust museum

We send every one of our agents to the Holocaust Museum before they’re agents to know and understand what happens when an agency goes rogue,” ex-FBI director Robert Mueller explained recently.

Agents take a private, guided tour of the museum. Then there’s a specialized class that highlights how everyday law enforcement played a key role in Germany’s descent into authoritarianism. It wasn’t only elite military units, like the infamous Schutzstaffel, or SS. […]

Then he brings up dark moments in American history. Japanese-Americans were sent to World War II internment camps. Civil Rights protestors were beaten by cops. And the FBI’s own covert surveillance program, COINTELPRO, targeted athletes, journalists, politicians and grassroots movements for being “subversive.”

“We can’t afford to think we’re different, just because of our DNA or upbringing,” Friedman said. “If we’re not careful, all of us can slide down that slippery slope.”

The FBI isn’t alone. Nearly every federal law enforcement agency sends new recruits to the museum. The 90,000 who have been there since 1999 include agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

What a great idea.

And yet, from the things we read every day in criminal justice stories, it seems that the intended lessons may not have taken hold all that well.

Makes one wonder if some have come away from the experience mistakenly thinking that the admonition was, instead, a suggestion.

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This video, which is getting some serious play, points out the problem we face today and the failure of law enforcement to learn those lessons. It’s not all cops, for certain — I work with a number of law enforcement officers who do amazingly good community policing. But it’s becoming the perception of how law enforcement generally works, which means that it’ll take a huge effort on the part of the entire profession itself to change that image.

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23 Responses to You’d think this would be good training… (Updated)

  1. thelbert says:

    they may not be goose stepping around the museum and they probably don’t wear jackboots, but instead of racial purity they equate blood purity with civic virtue. alcohol is ok since it only consumed for fun, not to get “high”.

  2. N.T. Greene says:

    “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

  3. Dano says:

    It’s probably like one of those employment seminars that everyone has to attend, but everyone including the management moans about it. Like sexual harassment seminars.

    Unfortunate, but nobody believes that they will be the offender.

    • Duncan20903 says:

      .
      .

      There was a college frat house that had to send its residents to a seminar to learn how to make sure that they didn’t end up unintentionally raping their dates. They ended up on double secret probation because after 15 minutes they started and wouldn’t stop chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!”

      Hey, if you don’t believe me go look it up in the fictionary!

  4. Jean Valjean says:

    i bet the rookie Michele was there taking notes…

  5. DdC says:

    Nazism or WoD

    CONFISCATION OF PROPERTY & assets are seized from people who are in targeted groups. It may be divided between the informer and the state.

    LIES – ‘Facts’, which cannot be verified, pseudo scientific studies are used as propaganda against the targeted group. History is rewritten.

    PREJUDICE – Selling the public on the idea that all members of the targeted group are ‘bad’ people.

    NO PUBLIC DEBATE – “These people have no right to have their views aired.” and ” Anyone who disagrees or questions us must be one of them!”

    DEHUMANIZATION – Characterizing all members of a targeted group as subhuman and typically capable of monstrous deeds and/or crimes.

    PROTECT OUR CHILDREN –
    “They corrupt, seduce and or destroy our children.”

    CIVIL LIBERTIES SACRIFICED – “We must give up some of our freedoms, liberties, and rights in order to combat this menace to society.”

    LEGAL DESCRIMINATION – Laws criminalize targeted groups. Denied jobs, the right to rent, own property. Restricted to where they may live.

    INFORMERS – Citizens are urged to ‘turn in’ friends, neighbors, co-workers and family members.

    SECRET POLICE – Non-uniformed police squads set up to wage war on targeted groups utilizing deception, infiltration, espionage & entrapment.

    REMOVAL FROM SOCIETY – Prisons, rehabilitation camps, ‘hospitals, executions and genocide.

    Zero Tolerance – Kill Them All.

    • Windy says:

      That’s really a good comparison, I posted it to my FB page. However, please correct the spelling of “discrimination” (I corrected it in my FB post). People pay more attention to something when there are no spelling/grammatical errors in it.

  6. kaptinemo says:

    They almost certainly never read this: Themes in Chemical Prohibition by William L. White, From: Drugs in Perspective, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1979

    The basics:

    A review of chemical prohibitionist literature reveals eight themes which appear to emerge from the tactics of most such movements. The tactics utilized to produce these themes are as follows:

    1. The drug is associated with a hated subgroup of the society or a foreign enemy.

    2. The drug is identified as solely responsible for many problems in the culture, i.e., crime, violence, and insanity.

    3. The survival of the culture is pictured as being dependent on the prohibition of the drug.

    4. The concept of “controlled” usage is destroyed and replaced by a “domino theory” of chemical progression.

    5. The drug is associated with the corruption of young children, particularly their sexual corruption.

    6. Both the user and supplier of the drug are defined as fiends, always in search of new victims; usage of the drug is considered “contagious.”

    7. Policy options are presented as total prohibition or total access.

    8. Anyone questioning any of the above assumptions is bitterly attacked and characterized as part of the problem that needs to be eliminated. (Emphasis mine – k.)

    No, no jackboots. No thunderbolts and death’s-heads on their collars…yet. No belt buckles with Gott mit uns! stamped on them…though a lot of them really do believe, with dangerously fanatic religious fervor, they are doing God’s work in whupping up on ‘druggies’. No need for any overt symbols at all. For, as the old saying goes:

    “By their works, ye shall know them.”

    They can send agents there by the frakkin’ trainload, and they still won’t come away with the lesson they so badly need to learn.

  7. Russell Olausen says:

    I hope they compare uniforms and tactics. I do not care for the all black look.

    • Windy says:

      It should be mandatory for ALL cops regardless their jurisdiction (fed — including those in non law enforcement agencies, State, and local) to wear cams that cannot be turned off or tampered with in anyway, which stream live 24/7. This is why:
      http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/eric-garner/
      The dude was an asthmatic and they put him in a chokehold which they maintained even after he was handcuffed, they accused him of selling cigarettes.
      FTA:

      Officials seem to be preparing to cast this off as a death from natural causes, yet it is impossible to argue that Mr. Garner would have died that afternoon had he not been assaulted by five government agents. Needless deaths like Mr. Garner’s should never happen, because voluntary transactions and entrepreneurship should not be criminal offenses in the first place. This tragedy reminds us that all laws, big and small, are ultimately backed with violence and can claim lives needlessly.

  8. Francis says:

    Nearly every federal law enforcement agency sends new recruits to the museum. The 90,000 who have been there since 1999 include agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration….

    Just think, guys: one day, in the hopefully-not-too-distant future, a new generation of law enforcement may be required to visit the “Drug War Museum” to learn about your crimes against humanity. Sort of a neat “circle-of-life”-type thing, you know?

    • Duncan20903 says:

      .
      .

      C’mon Francis, you’re off your game old chum. The jack boots raided the Drug War Museum in 2008:
      The Police Are Raiding the Drug War Museum in Vancouver

      • Francis says:

        Good point. I should have been more specific. They’ll be required to visit and to refrain from acts of violence while onsite.

        • allan says:

          They’ll be required to visit and to refrain from acts of violence while onsite

          Dreamer…

          I keep seeing Ahnold and Terminator (it was on the tube the other night) in my mind. And in my state of mind it’s pretty darn funny.

          And that’s funny on the Calvina scale.

          Strayan made the comment that he’d like to see the table turned on debates (like Judge Gray and Kev-kev) so the topic is framed to question Prohibition’s validity, not legalization’s.

          But this thing here… wtf? That’s not just a disconnect, that’s a galactic chasm in conscienceness. And isn’t it the crux of our biscuit? Who sends a terminally cancer patient to jail for gardening? Pardon my french but wtf?

          But reaffirming my positivity os just looking at how we have managed to turn the aircraft carrier I’m amazed we are where we are. It took years to get the word ‘prohibition’ tied to the drug war and darn near as long to get the phrase ‘war on drugs’ into the main stream. And bless each and every one of you that have ever typed “the War On (some) Drugs.” It (and its derivatives) is such a fine snark… and it works, people see it and it’s so obvious. Doih!

          Unless of course you can go to the holocaust museum and then come home, bust down doors and shoot kids’ dogs. Then (obviously), not so obvious.

  9. DdC says:

    Open Letter to The Police Officers Who Want to Legalize Drugs
    http://www.uniformstories.com/stories/police/law-enforcement-against-probihibition

    I just submitted a response to your open letter to LEAP. As the author of the article that you referenced I am hoping that you will publish it. My question is when did dissent become traitorous? I am hoping that you are not afraid of engaging in a healthy public debate on this complex subject.
    Diane Goldstein
    Lieutenant Retired (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition)

    Guess Who’s Profiting From Pot Prohibition?
    http://endingcannabisprohibition.yuku.com/sreply/878

    • Windy says:

      I got a notification from FB that Jack A. Cole had posted a comment on that op-ed (I had posted a few last night), so I went to the site to read his comment and every single comment was gone from the site, there had been over 100 comments, the vast majority of which were telling that fat prohibitch his op-ed and thoughts on this situation were absolutely wrong. I’m actually surprised that the comments I made, which were obviously deleted from that page along with the rest, were still showing on my FB page. So I made a few more, calling him out for the cowardice of deleting all those comments, they’ve now disappeared, too. Since then I’ve received notification that others posted comments, too but NONE of them are showing.

      • Crut says:

        The comments are showing up to me. I even cleared my cache and used a different computer… Of course, I am browsing privately and don’t stay logged into facebook either…

  10. DdC says:

    WHO calls for drug use to be decriminalised | The Sun |News|Politics http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/5762923/who-calls-for-drug-use-to-be-decriminalised.html

    Neill Franklin ‏@NeillFranklin
    Watch this very sad, yet enlightening video of a drug war gone horribly wrong for our kids & retweet it far & wide. http://www.vice.com/weediquette-show/the-war-on-kids
    This is the story of Jesse Snodgrass, a kid with Asperger’s syndrome who was arrested by an undercover cop posing as a student at Jesse’s high school. This is the story of how the war on drugs preys…

  11. Pingback: Chief David Oliver of Brimfield Ohio is part of the problem « Drug WarRant

  12. DdC says:

    Bill Maher Slams Militarized Police Culture In America http://huff.to/1yHEikP via @HuffPostComedy

  13. MudBud1 says:

    I am a targeted individual. My crime was accessing Public Records and receiving 1400 pages of fraudulent PR, and reporting embezzlement of a public employees pension fund, to the council members for the city of Grand Junction, Colorado. And the State of Colorado Attorney Generals Office.
    I was date raped 4 times in my rural secluded home. Micro chipped in all orifices, sexually assaulted beyond belief. Gang stalked and perpetual shot with direct energy weapons 24/7. Gang raped 24/7 by electronic assault weapons.
    All just to protect the criminality of the public corrupt Public Servants. Human experimentation has been amply reported to a number of political and law enforcement agencies.
    Clearly operating under the color of law. As a acceptable, form of Risk Management and law suit. prevention. Promoting murder and the destruction of any quality of life. By those sworn to uphold Our Constitution.
    The last Law enforcement agent I had talked in regards to this Monstrous crime against Humanity, was a Rape Advocate by the name of “Tracy”, Mesa County Colo. Sheriffs dept. She clearly stated to me, ” We don’t give a DAMN, weather a crime has or has not occurred”.
    Murder of whistle blowers seems to be the norm here. One knows this by the poor unprofessional practices of Mesa County Coroners office.

  14. Kemp Woods says:

    Right now I’m too tired to elaborate; but I think the Holocaust pales in comparison to the world wide 112 year old drug war–in victims, horrors, insanity, evil, —I can’t use enough negative adjectives.

    I’d appreciate some viewership of my new website/blog—end the drug war action center–it’s an ongoing effort.
    Peter–could you list me–link me –I’ve got your site as one of my top sites.

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