This is a nice, short article in The Atlantic on turning Mayberry R.F.D into a total police state. The authors have done a stellar job of describing how 9/11 provided the impetus for moving counterterrorism efforts from a national strategy for combating terrorism on U.S. soil to a strategy for moving military deployments into our [...]

A fantastic article has been published on RSN: “Cops Ready for War.” If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready. In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there [...]

The drug war insanity is teaching the publik-skooled-children all about the good deeds of the federal government and its militarized police state in their great moral case against using substances that make one feel temporarily euphoric. In case you are prone to think this is satire, this really happened. A public school in Connecticut played host [...]

You can film the cops. But obedient folks are ascared. Although this is a district ruling, and it’d take the Supreme Court to make okayed cop-filming the law of the land, this is a terrific victory for the free use of technology, transparent society, and sanity. Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Once again, the militarized police state is preparing for civil unrest in America, which appears more likely than ever. The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, one of the department’s online and gang gurus, has been put in charge [...]

This police chief (see 00:35 of the video) in Midway, Georgia looks like she belongs to the TSA more so than a militarized police force, and she states that the team of little girls who had set up a lemonade stand to sell to neighborhood customers were “breaking the law,” and “the law is the [...]

Here’s yet another aggressive and costly campaign to protect you from the bogeyman. For someone who almost never watches television, I cannot believe how many times I saw this commercial on TV over the course of a few days as I was passing through public places, or just watching the news late at night. Then [...]

“Don’t spray me, bro!” probably won’t become a popular t-shirt anytime soon, but, thanks to the video culture, we have all of these unbelievable moments captured for a lifetime of viewing. Once again, an embarrassing moment from a guy with a plastic badge and a plastic Glock in the cause of “protecting the children” from an [...]

In yet another government move to pit citizen against citizen, the UK is developing a voluntary force of resident despots, including young children, to shoot radar speed guns at their fellow human beings. The Community Road Watch scheme, which is designed to put the skids on inconsiderate drivers in speeding hot-spots around the town, is being [...]

Don Cooper tells me: I was on campus at Georgia Tech a few weeks back and they were hosting an Police Explorer “thing”. In other words they had teenagers all dressed up in Police Explorer t-shirts wearing badges, cuffs, guns (fake I assume), and going through some sort of collection of perverse drills. One was where the [...]