That terror study group thing about terrorists
Crooks and Liars are jumping up and down with joy and Hot Air is building bunkers over a new report from some group of pointy-headed profs at the University of Maryland which claims that their poll of law enforcement officers indicates that “sovereign citizens” are those LEOs’ main focus for fighting terror in this country.
Everyone is comparing this to the Homeland Security Department’s 2009 report that warned the law enforcement community about war-addled veterans and right wing loons. That report might have a little to do with this one – but this one is nothing more than a poll of law enforcement officers’ opinions – it’s not calling sovereign the greatest threat to our national security.
Crooks & Liars in their unbridled joy, fails to mention that jihadists come in at #2. Of course, I’m thinking that the cops probably have reason to worry about sovereign citizens what with all of the anti-cop chatter around the internet and the Open Carry folks flaunting their hardware in public. But the police don’t help themselves much when they buy armored vehicles for their quiet little one-horse towns.
But right wing nuts are generally better behaved than some of the other choices – the Bundy Ranch are a good example. They were a little on the crank side of things, but no one got hurt. Just like the right wingers flocking to the Mexico border these days. They’re more law abiding than those criminals flocking across the border. And less of a security threat.
But here’s the report of the poll (in .pdf) that the study group START_UnderstandingLawEnforcementIntelligenceProcesses_July2014 wrote while they were cloistered in their little world at the University of Maryland. Just keep in mind, that it doesn’t proclaim sovereign citizens a threat, it says that’s the opinion of some LEOs.
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
Did Gidduck’s Archangel Inc do the study?
Still and all, it IS the opinions of LEO’s polled, and it reinforces the belief that the majority of cops view our own citizens as their greatest threat.
Remember back a couple months when one cop justified the acquisition of MRAP’s by stating he feared returning veterans because they knew how to build IED’s ?
It goes hat in hand with the left’s attempts to portray veterans of all stripes as “damaged goods” as potential time bombs waiting to go off and slaughter the innocents.
No, there ARE some good cops out there, and a couple post here. I have no truck with them personally. My complaint is that police departments across the board have morphed from being the good guys to a force designed to protect themselves and their elected officials from the citizenry at large.
I worry about too many cops getting (for lack of a better word) a “military” mindset. They are indeed the sheepdogs of the community, but some need to be reminded that shepherds put sheepdogs down when they start growling at the sheep.
“Battlestar Galactica” is a great show that was admittedly written by liberals. An early episode had Edward James Olmos’s character CDR Bill Adama dispensing this bit of wisdom: “There’s a reason why you seperate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other protects and serves the people. When the military becomes the police, the enemies of the state usually become the people.”
I like the Sheriff’s Deputies who police the town I live in. They are local residents and work hard to be a part of the community they patrol. They don’t approach the public with a power trip or an adversarial mindset. As a result, they are very effective and receive pretty good cooperation from the public. This used to be the norm for law enforcement. It should be again.
Exactly my point.
The police are fast becoming the “standing army” that the colonists feared. Back in those days the army WAS the police.
Since the federal government cannot use the military to enforce the law absent a declaration of Martial Law, it has, under this administration, began to assemble it’s own army in order to crush the citizens if needs be and enforce whatever laws or executive orders they choose.
The fact that so many of our own police are falling for this idea should be causing alarm bells to go off across this nation.
The advent of personal video recording on everybody’s cell phones are leading to more proven incidents of police brutality and are indicative of the never trust anybody policies of a lot of cops all over the country.
I got into a bad situation with a cop and I didn’t even do anything illegal although at the time they said I was a crook, thief and general ne’erdowell…
The real problem is that the number of bad cops is much smaller than the good cops but when it comes time for the bad ones to be put out in full public view their higher ups back them to the hilt even in the face of damning video proof.
Some of them are completely out of control and the good cops stay silent which leads to the opinion that cops are bad and getting worse.
Isn’t it interesting that they consider the “Sovereign Citizens” nutjobs to be a terror threat? Exactly how many bombs have “Sovereign Citizens” set off? How many shooting have they perpetrated? How many acts of violence?
About the biggest threat these idiots seem to pose is cheating on their taxes, refusing to give ID to the cops, and generally being ridiculous assholes when they get hauled into court. Yeah, they’re dumb. Yeah, they’re a pain in the butt. But terror threat? Sounds to me more like those polled were wishing those jerks would commit some serious crime so they could bash em up a little.
Very true. Say what you will about them, but the sovereign types are pretty much the epitome of “leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.” Though some of them love to hear themselves talk, they generally don’t care to affect the affairs of others.
People may want to actually read the survey (or at least skim it) before commenting on its merits. First, normal “cops” weren’t asked the questions in survey. In fact, the paper says “using a random sample of a broad population of law enforcement officers, generally, would provide no valuable results.” The authors (who were not from the University of Maryland, btw) looked at two “schools” or “training centers” that instructed LEO’s in intelligence gathering for terrorism. It is easy to see how if the two schools believed that the sovereign movement was a greater threat, that would trickle down to the students. Furthermore, while the number of people surveyed was rather small when considering the number of LEO’s and the number of overall agencies, answers and rates of answers were multiplied / weighted if the person responding interacted with multiple agencies. That means that if New York City sent one guy to these training centers and he returned to the NYPD, he got one “voice” in the survey. If a guy from a county attended the training and returned to train and interact with towns, municipalities and agencies within his county, his voice was weighted greater even though he might not have interacted with as many people / citizens. It’s a bad survey, but what does one expect? Truth? While most in the sovereign citizen movement are peaceful in that they will not physically terrorize a person, lawsuits and paperwork are the bulwarks of the movement. In fact, there is a name for it – “paper terrorism.” (see http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/sovereign_citizens_plaster_courts_with_bogus_legal_filings/ for a good look at the legal costs and read the comments as they are enlightening.) The movement has also been responsible for direct attacks and deaths of LEO’s and innocent people within the last years. “Sovereign citizens” cannot be reasoned with and think they are above the law or that their “brand” of law is the only legitimate law in town. In some ways, it may be fair to say that Islamic terrorists are “imported” into the US. The sovereign movement is homegrown and are already here. Whether they may… Read more »
“The movement has also been responsible for direct attacks and deaths of LEO’s and innocent people within the last years.”
Care to cite any sources? Or are you just dropping turds in the cow field?
And “paper terrorism”? Seriously? What an absolutely stupid thing to say. If filing a lawsuit counts as terrorism, then there are a massive number of law firms that could be considered worse than al Qaida.
As a side note, I DO find it funny that “Sovereign Citizens” would appeal to the legal system of a government they claim not to recognize or be a part of for remedy. It reminds me of anarchists who complain their “rights” are being violated. Anarchists who want government to protect their rights really don’t understand irony.
Perhaps the poll was actually conducted after OK City and just released.
If the govt did things like securing the border, cracking down on real criminals and just doing their jobs, the “sovereign” nutjobs wouldn’t be such a perceived threat.
Considering that sovereign citizens have traditionally been the group with whom local PD’s have dealt, who else would anyone expect them to see as their greatest threat? Rather like asking undergrad college professors if most of their students are CEO’s or recent HS graduates.
Yeah, this isn’t surprising. They may as well have asked cops “who do you think is the greatest terrorist threat to YOU?” Sovereign citizens engage in plenty of anti-law enforcement chatter. Statistically, a cop might be more likely to deal with an armed sovereign citizen than an Islamic terrorist (maybe, I don’t know). But who’s a bigger threat to kill large numbers of American citizens? My bet’s still on Al Qaeda and their brethren.
You hit the nail on the head before I could. We have these nuts try to get video of us, our personal vehicles and any other PII they can get. Some of the extreme ones will make threats that they’ll ambush us or otherwise shoot it out if we try to serve them with anything.
On a day to day basis, we’re more likely to have encounters with sovereign citizens so it’s more on the patrol guys’ minds. That said, most people in my agency at least would agree that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are a greater long term threat to large numbers of people.
Thanks CavScout, those are great points. I do appreciate the crap that cops put up with from those nut jobs. You do have to be aware of them and I don’t blame you for being concerned. But yeah, I still don’t see them as an overall terror threat comparable to Al Qaeda, etc.
Well, gee, it’s been 40 years since I ‘returned’ to civilian life. I don’t know how to ‘build IEDs’, nor do I wish to know, although I do know a great deal about kitchen chemistry because I cook.
I think the places where you’ll see this kind of LEO paranois most displayed is in major cities, where the cops can’t hit the broad side of barn if it’s got an arrow pointing to it, and they shoot women delivering newspapers in a pickup truck. Those areas seem to collect the largest number of trigger-happy, jumpy, skittish, and sometimes downright crooked individuals, not smaller places.
If the cops get called around here, one or two squads show up. No MRAPS, no SWAT-mimics, nothing like that. On the other hand, it may be that some people simply should not be police officers.
Ex-PH2…Well said. The police where I live are far different than those in say, Portland or Seattle. One thing I have noticed and I didn’t notice it until last week. Officers on routine patrol duty use to wear a quality sole, dress low quarter shoe. Now I have noticed all wear combat style boots and most go with bloused trouser legs. I don’t know why but it seemed odd when I noticed that I said to myself, hey, that’s what’s been sticking out in my mind for some time. Combat boots.
One of the reasons why I wore a boot, rather than low quarter shoes, is safety. I was wearing shoes one night, on a prowler call and slipped on motor oil on the ground. I knew it was going to be bad when I landed, cuz it seemed to take 3 days for me to hit the ground. I broke my ankle, just above the shoe, ended up with a plate and 3 screws in the bones, after about a 2 hour surgery. The doc told me, “wear boots, if you had, you’d never have broken your leg”.
That said, I never bloused my trouser legs, neither did anyone else.
I think the results of the survey are probably heavily dependent on which of these ‘threats’ a cop has to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Every cop has either run into a sovereign citizen or knows someone who has and they are a giant pain in the ass. “I don’t recognize your authority and I don’t have a driver’s license, registration or insurance because I don’t recognize your laws or courts but if you continue to ‘harass’ me, I’ll sue you with the laws I don’t recognize in the courts whose authority I don’t acknowledge.”
In comparison, 52 percent of respondents agreed and 34 percent strongly
agreed that sovereign citizens were a serious terrorist threat.
The meat of the reports are always in the details of the data.
There is additional data that suggest that the likelihood of these groups manifesting into violence is less likely than an incident of cyber terrorism which was ranked as the highest perceived likelihood of a terrorism related crime, with explosives and military grade weapons in 2nd and 3rd respectively.
I’m sure the Eco and PETA movements are thrilled to know law enforcement considers them more of a threat than the KKK and only slightly less (.02 and .06 less dangerous than Skinheads and Nazis).
Basically the real results are that LEOs recognize Sovereigns/Jihadists/Militias/Skinhead/Nazis/Rainbow Warriors/PETA/KKK/Commies might be dangerous to society….wow, folks get paid good money for these studies I think some of us might have been able to draw the same conclusions and taken only half the grant money to figure it out….that would have left some money for studying something useful like a better methodology to treating cancer….
The report’s numbers are interesting. The report indicates that there were only 363 respondents not much of a sample and 2/3 came from the training from the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism which was set up after Oklahoma City bombing. Possibly a built in slant from the training. Only 2/3 were LEO’s and there assignment was not given but it was probably non street. No breakdown on department size or location. Could possibly come from smaller department and mid country. I think if the respondents were from NYC the foreign terrorism number would be a lot higher,if LA, Newark or Chicago it would be gang related. Pacific northwest domestic would probably be higher due to anarchists, white supremacists and ELF. Southwest illegals, which was not a choice. BTW this looks more like a master’s thesis than anything else.
I’m just going to leave this here:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/08/04/nanny-state_mindset_leads_to_police_brutality_123537.html
(Aren’t most of us here sovereign citizens? This seems to be yet another term coopted for inappropriate use. Could we/they at least capitalize it when referring to a specific group with which the rest of us sovereign citizens may have no wish to associate?)