The Police State Versus The Market
The police state has only grown worse in recent decades and there is a nationwide cover up of the true details about how many police officers kill people each year. Many newspapers have recently reported the number as 400, but I highly doubt this is accurate and it seems to me to be grossly under reported. Of course it is coming from the mainstream media.
A journalist has been attempting a nationwide database on police killings for some time, but the information is not readily available, as I myself have noticed as I have many times tried to find information to bring us such numbers. As the journalist writes about this experience:
“The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government–not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force–wants you to know how many people it kills and why.”
Killing citizens isn’t the only thing local police is good at. They’re great at theft, too.
Philadelphia Coming For Your Home
The city of Philadelphia is trying to steal Chris Sourovelis’ home, and the homes of thousands of others in Philadelphia.
In March 2014, Chris’s son was caught selling $40 worth of drugs outside of the family home. His son had no previous arrests nor a prior record, but still he was ordered to attend rehab. On the day Sourovelis was driving his son to his first rehab, a frantic call from his wife came through – the police were evicting the family and seizing the house. How? A little known clause known as “civil forfeiture.”
The family was locked out of their home for one week by law enforcement, and the family was only allowed to return home once they banned their son from visiting and gave up some of their human and constitutional rights. The son has since completed his court-ordered punishment of rehab.
“If this can happen to me and my family, it can happen to anybody,” Sourovelis said.
Civil forfeiture laws make it so property owners can lose their property for no reason. That’s not hyperbole. No reason whatsoever. The government can steal your property if it says your home has “facilitated” a crime. The government doesn’t sue the owner, it sues the property itself. This leads to bizarre case names: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. The Real Property and Improvements Known as 2544 N. Colorado St.
Doila Welch, also of Philadelphia, faces the same thing as the Sourovelis family. Her family home of 17 years is under threat of state-theft because her estranged husband, without her knowledge, sold negligible amounts of marijuana from the home. Welch has not been charged with any crime and her family has joined the Sourovelis family as plaintiffs in a class action against Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is collecting $6 million per year from forfeiture laws. Between 2002 and 2012, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office reportedly stole over 3,000 vehicles,1,200 homes and other real estate properties and $44 million in cash.
Philadelphia is gangster. It’s also taken in $64 million in forfeiture proceedings, equaling one-fifth of the DA’s overall budget. Not only a problem in Philadelphia, civil forfeiture takes place across the country.
Co-Habitate, Go To Jail
The state doesn’t just steal property. It makes criminals out of peaceful people. Have you cohabitated with a girlfriend or boyfriend? That is, have you lived with someone of the opposite sex? Well, that’s a crime in Florida…
According to Chapter 798 of the Florida Statutes:
798.02?Lewd and lascivious behavior.–If any man and woman, not being married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, engages in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, they shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.
That means fine or imprisonment…
The ancient law dates back to more than a century ago when the state wanted to make sure people got permission to be together and marry from the government. The law is still enforced. According to WCTV, almost 770 Florida residents were charged with misdemeanors for living together from 2007-2011. In an interesting twist, the law doesn’t apply to same-sex couples.
As the United States has become a police state, new technologies have appeared on the market which aim to help people survive life in the US and western police states. Here is a list of apps at Cop Block. We highly recommend taking a look there to see if something fits your needs. They include apps which scan police radios, alert you when a police unit is in your area, and other innovative free-market uses.
Possibly the best of them all is just in the development stages. I interviewed the developer of the Sidekik App which is a great tool to survive the police state. Imagine that when the police pull you over you press a button on your phone, it instantly begins recording and streaming to numerous secure data banks, records and announces your GPS coordinates and immediately pulls up a lawyer waiting on call who can immediately see what you are seeing and shows up live-streaming in video on your phone. When the police officer approaches the car you just hold up the phone and tell him, “I have nothing to say to you, please speak with my lawyer”.
Yes, this technology is almost here! If you or a family member of yours finds yourself in these sort of situations from time-to-time because the police in your region are extra-aggressive, or maybe you have a skin tone other than pearly white or maybe you are under 40 and wearing a baseball cap… you have to get them this app as soon as it is available! It actually comes free on a pay-as-you-go service or you can just pay a small annual charge if you find yourself in these situations more than once in a blue moon and want the security of knowing the service will be there when you need it.
The government has created a problem: the police. The reaction has been mostly terror. And the private market is coming up with non-violent, pre-emptive solutions.
If a few months from now you see a police officer looking disgruntled as he speaks into a mobile phone to a lawyer who informs him his search is illegal and walks away… you can thank apps like this and many more sure to come.
Of course, even being videotaped, live-streamed and facing a lawyer won’t stop even the most bloodthirsty of cops but even in that case it will be clear as the cop becomes aggressive, grabs the phone and the last image is of a police issue boot stomping on it… when they find the victim or body the whole world will already know what happened.
Riots aren’t needed. Violence isn’t needed. Private enterprise and crypto-anarchists worldwide are finding solutions to peaceably sidestep state aggression.
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