MANDATES-LAW-&-POLICING IN AMERICA

 Dear George, 

In reading our history Mr. Washington, if you thought law and order was a challenge for you - The Whiskey Rebellion was merely a noisy picnic by comparison today...

Policing in each of our united-states is a serious business - very serious. There are more than 17,000 state, municipal, county, tribal and regional law enforcement agencies - all with their own regulations.

Federally there's an additional 65 types of law enforcement agencies as well as 27 offices of inspector general/Treasury staffed by 120,000 full time personnel who are authorized to make arrests and carry a gun.  [Of those in public office who question our right-to-bear-arms, I wonder how many of those same politicians know who around them - are armed at all times?]

Okay...After the war of independence there were still Dutch, French, Spanish and British spies - but a policing standard in the 13 original colonies began far less complicated. After the turmoil of the American Revolution, the newly formed U.S. Treasury was only concerned with creating a functional currency based on an actual value of measure, because starting a new nation on the worth of say turnip crops or sheep herds was not considered a solvent basis. [Though comparing the paper money first issued by the new Continental Congress and todays techno-crypto, turnips and sheep had more value...Moving on...]

President Washington realized that going forward it wasn't prudent long term to rely on local volunteer militia to keep domestic peace. So, then enter the office of the U.S. Marshal and Deputy Marshals with the Judiciary Act of 1789 - which in the same legislation established much of our federal judicial system. AND that 'fellow-travelers' this is where the U.S. Congress should have stopped with a national policing authority. Congress gave the early Marshals a broad brush of duties including census taking. But oh no, with each passing decade peace-keeping morphed into law-enforcement with specialized badge carrying agents trained to enforce new laws for new crimes.

Further, after the Civil War when the printing of paper 'money' between the northern states and southern states was a free-for-all the Secret Service was formed as part of the Treasury Department to identify and root out counterfeit currency. Soon though, responsibilities broadened to include bank and land fraud, illegal distillers, smugglers and mail robbers. [Guess this gave the U.S. Marshals more spare time?] 

Anyway, I'm tempted to blame an immigrant Scotsman named Allan Pinkerton for giving too many possible ideas to early members of our Congress, who felt compelled to legislate the be gibers out of everything - as if the new nation might spring leaks they needed to patch.  

This private security contractor soon loomed large on America's policing horizon even before Washington got the marshals organized. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency provided Lincoln with personal security during the Civil War. And well ahead of it's time hired women and minorities from the year of it's founding in Chicago. But later the agency became more noted for providing goon-squads, guards and security during the1877 Great Railroad Strike, union steel workers, coal, iron and lumber disputes as well as the 1892 Homestead Strike and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. However, I note Pinkerton here - because - regardless of the 17,985 state and federal policing agencies from-sea-to-shining-sea that have evolved steadily for the last 200 years [supported by taxpayers] private "risk-management" contractors are still used. 

As the calendar flips over to 1924 sports-fans we find and John Edgar Hoover the law enforcement administrator for the Bureau of Investigations. However, as he oils his way from corridor to corridor in DC he envisions something far grander. With new limitations placed on the Secret Service, likely due to a concern that Congress themselves did not wish to be investigated - J. Edgar - who over the previous 10 years made [low] friends in high places initiated an expansion of his department. Enter 1935 and the F.B.I. [Federal Bureau of Investigations]. Expanding on new developing crime fighting technology from London and Paris, Hoover created a centralized fingerprint file system then forensic labs in key locations nationally. J. Edgar established a national blacklist with names of known spies, union agitators and suspected terrorists. [Yes, there were terrorism threats 100 years ago. Between the rise of communism after WWI and organized crime the list of names was a who's who of terror.]  However, like the controversy after the 2016 election of FBI investigative-overreach, Hoover too was found to have abused his authority to threaten political critics.

And - speaking of WWI before the C.I.A. [Central Intelligence Agency] there was the O.S.S. [Office of Strategic Services] Does the C.I.A. investigate fellow citizens? Not according to the 1947 National Security Act passed by the U.S. Congress. Their mandate was/is foreign policy and intelligence analysis...Key word 'foreign' but there have been beige and grey areas? [See January 7, 2021 blog post: History In America] 

Immigration issues are not new, only 21st Century media reporting of our immigration issues is new.

Also in 1924 while Hoover was reorganizing the Bureau of Investigations to become the FBI, Congress created the Border Patrol initially 'not' under the Bureau of Immigration, but under the Department of Labor. This oversight was soon corrected and expanded into 35 immigration districts, [and you guessed it] further divided into sub-districts to cover 328 [official] Ports of Entry [where only legal/honest people enter]. But even more [un]impressive is additional designations like BORTAC [Border Patrol Tactical Unit] and ICE [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] who's MISSION STATEMENT is: "Protect the American people, safeguard our borders and enhance the nation's economic prosperity." ...Wow, seriously... The Border Guard/Coast Guard is charged with guarding and rescue. Have you got all that? [See January 26, 2021 blog post: Immigration In America] 

Besides a host of military investigative agencies like N.C.I.S. - skipping from the banner policing expansion decade of the 1920s to the 1970s I truly do not have enough paper and you do not have enough time to delve into the 'host' of other major monitoring agencies like ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] or EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] or FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. So, I'm going to l-e-a-p to 2003 and to one of my all-time favorite useless-let's look like we're doing something the creation of DHS [The Department of HOMELAND SECURITY]. 

This department with an additional 240,000 federal employees had/has no hope of ever making our homeland more secure. Our homeland 'stays insecure' because it's the foreign [Iraq invasion] and domestic [defund police & open border] 'policies' of state and federally elected people in public office that keep the criminal element thriving.  

After 9/11 all Bush W./Chaney had to do, was direct Congress to remove the communication blocks between the policing agencies - we already had - so they could share information and compare notes. That need should have been evident after the U.S.S. Cole bombing, but in retrospect it appears as if the only agency that accumulated and communicated information was the international and national news media! Go figure...

Now for the grand finale - which should not come as a surprise to any of you if you're still reading at this point in my rant. Let me introduce the C.I.S. [Center for Internet Security]. 

Excuse me? If we have such an organization then why is hacking such a problem? [See January 20, 2021 blog post: Infrastructure In America] Why isn't everyone, everywhere backing up their work every 30 minutes -or- working with proprietary and classified information off-line. Good grief even "I" know that much.

True leadership accountability has/is missing and has been for decades from the dubious invasion of Iraq to Benghazi to 20 years in Afghanistan to Covid...   

Amazing...With so much policing one would expect that long before 2022, the United States would be crime free or at the very least crimes solved timely, and criminals brought to justice swiftly...Hmmm, one might 'think' that. 

Sherrie Todd-Beshore is an award winning mystery-suspense novelist and former journalist

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