Schoolyard Police State?

The National Security Agency’s voracious surveillance of Americans shows what the federal government thinks of privacy. But local law-enforcement agencies and school administrators nationwide are also destroying We the People’s Constitutional rights with impunity.

In his TomDispatch.com blog “The Over-Policing of America,” lawyer Chase Madar details how oppressive our country has become: “There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust smalltime bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amount of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members.…But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.”

Madar continues with the transmogrification of America into a dictatorship like the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin: “It starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior—doodling on a desk, farting in class, a kindergartener’s tantrum—can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school or even booked at the local precinct. Such ‘criminals’ can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn’t do it.)”