With Americans’ attention focused on the civil liberties encroachments coming from the federal level — the Patriot Act, the Pentagon’s domestic surveillance, the FBI’s secret warrants — we’ve hardly noticed the dangers in our own backyard, U.S. News and World Report says in an important new piece: local police.With half a billion dollars in federal spending, new high-tech “intelligence” centers, and a mandate to catch terrorists in their hometowns, local police are in danger of returning to the days of the “Red Squads,” when local cops took heavy-handed tactics to catch alleged communists in the 1960s and 70s:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=183503