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The Unmarked Federal Agents Occupying Washington, D.C
- solotronics 6y agoIs this relevant to hacker news?
- angel_j 6y agoDepends, has the majority libertarian sect of HN commentariat decided to join the fascists yet, to protect their lawns and defend their table manners?
- jerf 6y ago"majority libertarian" Are you reading a different HN than mine? You can barely find a libertarian post on here anymore.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ianleeclark 6y agoIt seems "libertarian" followed suit of most other political labels: more definitions than adherents. First you had the left libertarians, who, in typical left fashion, were splintered a million ways. Later you had right-libertarians who gradually splintered a million ways: I remember Gary Johnson being accused of being a statist for being a fan of driving licenses, I've seen minarchists at constitutional libertarians throats, and ancaps who choose to wear a different label. Don't even get me started on what makes justified property and how that divides this label even further. If I didn't include this sentence here, I'm sure I'd get a comment about how none of those are real libertarians or how there is only one true libertarianism.
- ianleeclark 6y agoSeems on-topic to me, but you never know until the the arrow buttons start to be clicked.
- floatingatoll 6y agoGuidelines para 1: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I found this story interesting. I didn't know that we had all of these disparate police forces roaming around. I haven't visited DC and they aren't really featured in the media. Seeing some of these various forces show up at protests, and having them behave unexpectedly when asked to identify themselves, has attracted my curiosity. I'm glad that someone took the time to write about them. Note that I'm not prepared to blindly trust Politico's opinions about these policing forces, but opinions are part of what makes this interesting to read.
- jacobush 6y agoIt's not even 100% clear that all of them are police forces. I could be out there larp-ing and blend right in.
- Kapura 6y agoFrom the Hacker News Guidelines[1]: >What to Submit >On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I found the story intellectually stimulating, and thought others might too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- throw55432 6y agoAnd yet posts on Kobe Bryant’s death were all flagged.
- mywittyname 6y agoPerhaps individuals should have contributed posts that discuss interesting and lesser known aspects of the man's life and accomplishments. 60 posts of "Extremely Famous Person Dies in Accident" is boring. But learning that said person had a little-know passion for bird conservation or something is interesting.
- hprotagonist 6y agoIf there is one group of people who are constitutionally (heh) ill-equipped to monitor free citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights to petition their government for redress of grievances, it's people whose entire job history has been the exercise of power over incarcerated federal offenders, who do not have the right to peaceably assemble. Doubly so when they're prison riot control officers who all look like they're clones of Byron Hadley, The Screw Everyone Hates from "Shawshank Redemption". When a prison guard sees a crowd chanting protests, they are going to react very badly. Get them out. And get badges on the rest of them. Then get them out, too.
- Gibbon1 6y agoMy feeling is being in uniform and acting under color of authority without a badge and name tag should be a felony.
- dragontamer 6y agoEven if it were a felony, who would enforce it? Consider that NYPD, for all of its faults, actually has the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Which provides citizens the ability to officially complain about bad behaviors of various cops. However, review boards do not exist for all police forces. And many review boards have insufficient power to properly reprimand a specific cop who does a bad job. We need a specific organization to police the police. FBI kinda-sorta does it (but not under this administration. Under Obama, the FBI was charged with investigating police brutality). Since the FBI's orders changes with the whims of the President, it is clear we need a long-lasting organization that provides oversight even when a Republican is in office.
- beojan 6y ago> Since the FBI's orders changes with the whims of the President, it is clear we need a long-lasting organization that provides oversight even when a Republican is in office. That would require a constitutional amendment, right?
- pavlov 6y agoPutin brought “little green men” into Ukraine in 2014. Trump and Barr now do the same in Washington. It’s not a surprise if inhabitants feel like under an occupation force.
- zeveb 6y agoThe District of Columbia is not a state; it belongs to the federal government. Federal forces there are no more an occupying force than the Georgia National Guard would be an occupying force in Georgia.
- TMWNN 6y agoI suspect pavlov would be shook to learn of the Military District of Washington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Military_District_of_Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Military_Di...
- pavlov 6y agoThe problem was unmarked troops who refuse to identify themselves.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoThis post should be removed. Its misleading propaganda. These federal agents have been a DC thing for as long as I've been alive and longer. They aren't occupying anything. The agents protect federal buildings, government officials, foreign dignitaries and facilities, and they perform other law enforcement tasks. That some/many have been TDY'd for crowd control makes sense given the numbers of protestors and the reluctance to use the active military for that purpose.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> The agents protect federal buildings, government officials, foreign dignitaries and facilities, and they perform other law enforcement tasks. Probably not the ones "belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas". Read the article more closely. > On the darker side, the roughly 20,000 federal prison guards known formally as the Bureau of Prisons—whose riot units apparently make up a sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. and who represent the single largest component of federal officers in the Justice Department—are concerning to see on the streets in part because they’re largely untrained in civilian law enforcement; they normally operate in a controlled environment behind bars with sharply limited civil liberties and use-of-force policies that would never fly in a civilian environment. (A significant part of the issue is the "unmarked" part, too. The folks guarding buildings in DC have indications of which agency they're with. Going unmarked makes it difficult to even tell if you're a legit Federal agent, or someone posing as one. It also generates substantial difficulty in reporting misconduct; who do you complain to?)
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. // Imported under whose behest? Is it the local police head who decides to call in others, do they decide the composition of the force called in?
- ceejayoz 6y agoThat's answered in the article. > Nearly all of these agencies are headquartered in and around the capital, making it easy for Attorney General William Barr to enlist them as part of his vast effort to “flood the zone” in D.C. this week with what amounts to a federal army of occupation, overseen from the FBI Washington area command post in Chinatown.
- adamfeldman 6y agoThis article uniquely gives a deep historical perspective on the story. > What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to protect blacks against white protestors. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for instance, deputized officers from the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons to work as U.S. marshals and secure the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect James Meredith as he enrolled at the school after desegregation. Similarly, the Border Patrol once watched over the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.
- webwielder2 6y agoIt’s interesting that the anti-government, pro-guns-to-protect-us-from-a-tyrannical-government right wing has absolutely no qualms about ballooning military and police forces. Anti-government rhetoric is usually just code for anti-social services, which is usually just code for racism.
- ian0 6y ago>> There are more gun-carrying agents employed across the federal government by inspectors general .. than there are ATF agents nationwide; the roughly 4,000 inspector general agents nationwide, in fact, is roughly equivalent to the entire size of the DEA. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ police department, who guard the nation’s veteran hospitals, facilities and cemeteries, is larger than the entire U.S. Marshals Service. Why don't security guards guard hospitals and normal investigators work in watchdogs? Why are they all police-style groups? Is there some historical reason?
- masterofpuppets 6y agoNote: I performed security audits of VHA facilities for a couple of years. Unlike non-federal hospital, this is due to jurisdiction. VHA Hospitals are federal land so local police departments wouldnt have any jurisdiction, and the federal government typically looks at its responsibility to enforce laws within the land it owns. Also, some VHA facilities are on large campuses in more rural/less urban areas which effects the size of the police forces there.
- smkellat 6y agoThis is an outgrowth of the excess proliferation of federal laws. Taking a page from the UK and appointing a Law Reform Commission to simplify, consolidate, and reduce the body of federal laws would reduce the need for so many policing forces.
- 0x8BADF00D 6y agoIf the court system was doing their job, they would strike down many unconstitutional laws and decrees that enabled the growth of big government.
- sitkack 6y agoUnconstitutional laws are only struck down when someone with standing challenges it, if it is never challenged, it gets to remain even if obviously unconstitutional.
- PeterStuer 6y agoSo, how are you to distiguish between one of these "Police Forces" and some rogue vigilante militias? Is there some secret hand-signals they use to cross-identify?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mike_d 6y agoFederal law enforcement are obligated to present printed ID cards identifying the officer and their agency. Anyone unwilling or unable to do so is an armed civilian in violation of DCs open carry laws, and the DC Metro Police should be notified.
- MagnumOpus 6y agoThe law obligates them to present ID, but they have refused and faced no consequences from either DC Metro Police or their own superiors. Laws are worth zero if the law enforcers ignore them with impunity - a lesson familiar from Caribbean and African banana republics.
- jedimastert 6y ago> Laws are worth zero if the law enforcers ignore them with impunity - a lesson familiar from Caribbean and African banana republics. I think it's a lesson America is currently learning...
- yazan94 6y agoPresident Andrew Jackson famously shrugged off the US Supreme Court decision in Worcester v. Georgia by (probably not) saying "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!". Like you said, "Laws are worth zero if the law enforcers ignore them with impunity". This is why we need a system to police the police. At some point, we as a society need to commit to forcing those who swear to uphold the laws to also live by them.
- mywittyname 6y ago
- carolina_33 6y agoInteresting story, but I don’t know why the writer had to put so much emphasis on the race of the officers, activists, etc.
- Pfhreak 6y agoMaybe you aren't from the US -- there's a long history of systemic racism here, The protests that are happening across our nation are in response to those systemic issues, particularly how policing and race interact. Race, therefore, is a core part of the conversation going on in our country right now.
- Pfhreak 6y agoPolice who refuse to identify themselves and carry no markings used against an administration's political opponents sure sounds like something everyone should be opposed to, no matter their political camp. If someone thinks that's a healthy part of a democracy, I'd be real curious about your reasoning.
- 4gotunameagain 6y agoSadly USA seized to be a democracy quite some time ago
- DiffEq 6y agoThe USA was never a democracy and was never meant to be a democracy. The U.S. is a Constitutional Republic.
- Retric 6y agoThe existence of DC and territories means it’s not a Republic either. The US is it’s own thing neither a union of states or any specific type of government, which seems oddly appropriate.
- DiffEq 6y agoSo on Hacker News I know get down-voted for stating a patently true and undeniable fact. This forum has devolved into Reddit.
- madengr 6y agoSearching the FBO.gov you can find interesting solicitations, like the Department of Education needing 125 shotguns.
- alexandercrohde 6y agoSo I guess my proposal is that any officer who carries a gun should be required to wear a "badge number" of some form, readable from 15-feet, on their back. The badge-number should be a ID that can be matched against a public website to identify the individual, name, bureau, and a picture of course. After all... If they aren't doing anything wrong they have nothing to hide... I'd also add that failure to do so should result in a $1,000 penalty, half of which should go as a $500 reward to anybody who reports the case (photo would suffice as proof). Officers should have their whereabouts tracked via there phones for accountability purposes, which could be used to verify such reports or identify officers.
- Gibbon1 6y agoNah! Failure to do so should result in being fired, loss of pension, prosecution, imprisonment, and a felony record.
- tantalor 6y ago> failure to do so... How do you enforce the penalty if the perpetrator is anonymous? Fine their management instead? That doesn't work when the executive branch is above the law.
- luckylion 6y agoVery good point. Would also make spotting undercover cops easier. Finally, we'd be at the point 90ies Warez kids thought we were at. "If he wears no badge number on his back, he can't be a cop, otherwise nothing can be used in court. We're safe, boys".
- s3cur3 6y agoThis is the least charitable interpretation of GP's proposal possible. A small amendment to GP's comment to apply only uniformed officers operating in public—as the D.C. troops from the article are—negates this reductio ad absurdum.
- sitkack 6y agoAnd body camera footage should be always streaming to a well known bucket, encrypted of course, but with publicly verifiable keys. Anyone should be able to "backup" body camera footage for any cop for any time range. Getting access to the decryption keys should be a matter of filling out the proper forms.
- gadders 6y agoLooks like Government bloat and unconstrained regulation growth applies to law enforcement as well.
- mywittyname 6y agoIt applies almost entirely to law enforcement and military, where budget cuts are rare and accountability is negligible. There's an entire cottage industry devoted to exposing wasteful government spending and they'll expose $600k going to some research scientist at a university, but ignore police departments wasting 100x that amount on equipment that can never really be used.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zeveb 6y agoThe article is a mixture of useful and distracting information. The ever-increasing number of federal crimes really is an issue (the example of it being a federal crime to sell jam made from more than five types of fruit is remarkable). The growth in federal law-enforcement agencies is also something which deserves some attention, as is using prison guards to police the streets. OTOH, I think that comments such as 'What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to protect blacks against white protesters,' 'D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser … finds herself in the odd position of not controlling the police forces patrolling her own city' and 'ou read that right: The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police was considered too liberal for the GOP' stoke fire rather than illuminate. The first sentence is unsurprising: the police are not on the streets of DC because of protesters but because of rioters; they are there to keep the peace. The second comment, too, is unsurprising: the federal district … belongs to the federal government. It is no more surprising that the mayor of DC is subordinate to the federal government than it is that the mayor of Chicago is subordinate to the state of Illinois. Nor is the third comment particularly helpful: I imagine that the concern with the nominee could very well be that a former police chief is too authoritarian to helm an agency which has been accused of some pretty serious mis-steps since the Bush years. I'm not taking any position here on the goodness of any of this, just noting that the author is not making the most of his opportunity to discuss substantive issues and make reasoned arguments.
- macleginn 6y ago> the example of it being a federal crime to sell jam made from more than five types of fruit is remarkable Wow! I really applied myself to looking for a motivation for regulation but failed. Any hints?
- 0xffff2 6y ago~~I'm not a lawyer and the citation provided in the article is too much text for me to try to parse, but I have to assume this is a case of unintended consequences. I expect that each individual section of the law makes sense, and it's only when you read them with an eye to finding gotchas that you realize they work together to prohibit this. In other words, congress needs better QA.~~ Edit: I take it all back. It turns out that you only have to read 21 CFR §150.160(b)(2) to see it, and it turns out that that law is just unreasonably prescriptivist. >(2) The following combinations of fruit ingredients may be used: >(i) Any combination of two, three, four, or five of such fruits in which the weight of each is not less than one-fifth of the weight of the combination; except that the weight of pineapple may be not less than one-tenth of the weight of the combination. It's against the law to make a jam with more than 5 fruits because the law only explicitly allows jams with up to 5 fruits. Bizarre.
- coldcode 6y agoI don't care who brought them there, prison guards have no business working in public, they are not trained to do so, have no idea what legal protections ordinary citizens have, and refuse to identify themselves in violation of laws all other agents of the Federal government have to follow (though some might flaunt that too). I wonder if they are exempt from punishment or oversight if they screw up (which I presume will happen).
- mywittyname 6y agoThere's no need to wonder: yes they are exempt from punishment and oversight. It doesn't matter what laws they break because it's pretty clear that the executive branch has no intent of abiding by any laws; they won't do so unless forced and clearly no one has the power to force them to do so. I have no idea how this will end, but I'm fairly sure it won't involve justice for the people.
- empath75 6y agolaws are that which the legal system enforces. Doesn't matter what is written on a piece of paper.
- euroderf 6y agoWhat's the chance the DC police chief would ask for volunteers to go surround these "officers" and demand identification ?
- jki275 6y agoIt is unlikely that the DC police Chief is a moron, so probably zero.
- Ansil849 6y agoWhat I am confused about is why does no one who is in the area follow (at a safe distance) some of these unidentified agents to see where they go after they are done with their patrol?
- hilbert42 6y agoIn armed conflict/warfare, if one deliberately hides or removes one's uniform, or pretends to be a combatant of an force other than one's original allegiance—and if caught by one's enemy—then one is deemed to be a spy and the usual penalty is death. If one substitutes one's original uniform for the enemy's (or another) to pretend to be other than what one is then the Geneva protocols don't apply—in essence, you're shot rather than be taken prisoner or war. What these guys are doing is similar. When a State resorts to such action/deception then it's hard to see how the rule of law can apply. Essentially, anarchy has broken out. From an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that the US is now so polarized that it's almost become ungovernable. Heaven help the the rest of the free world let alone the poor unfortunate law-abiding US citizens who cannot help but be caught up in this damned mess.
- jki275 6y agoAll of your premises are incorrect. The law of war doesn’t work the way you claim. At all. The Geneva convention specifically addresses non uniformed combatants and people wearing the wrong uniform, and does not permit them to be shot rather than taken prisoner.
- balletto 6y agoI'm guessing the actual reason why the guys in question are dressed in mixed uniforms is that someone in the department of justice hit the "send everyone" button, which included investigators typically not kitted out for field duty.
- coronadisaster 6y agofascism is getting closer everyday