Carrboro Police
Two weeks ago, we in Orange County, NC learned that six armored personnel carriers had been made available to law enforcement in our county. We are told, two weeks later, that elected officials within our county are still trying to track them down. Still trying. Two weeks later.
Let me deal with the immediate, and then I'll wax about conspiracy.
The immediate: I can forgive elected officials for not knowing where six armored personnel carriers might be. Maybe. Just. But, after two weeks, if you truly can not find them, and do not know what to say to your citizens about them, then you have no business serving.
Someone sold them. Someone bought them. Someone has a receipt. Some body of elected officials looked at some document saying, we want 'em, or we bought 'em.
And if not the latter, then who exactly is policing the police in our county, and cf. no business serving.
Unless, and here is where we get to conspiracy.
I remember back in 2011, when SWAT was deployed in Chapel Hill, to the anger, consternation, bemusement of the citizenry. As in, really, we have a team like that, why?
In the wake of the President's call to re-examine the militarization of police in the US, I go one step further, and wonder if it is not time now actively to consider disarming front-line police officers?
In August 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of North Carolina Foundation filed public records requests with all 100 North Carolina counties and all police departments in municipalities with populations larger than 30,000. The requests were part of a nationwide effort coordinated by the ACLU to determine under what circumstances law enforcement agencies are tracking cell phones. Both the Orange County Sheriff's Office and the Chapel Hill Police Department received the requests, and here's what the ACLU found.
Carrboro’s controversial four-year-old anti-loitering ordinance, which prohibited people from lingering at the intersection of Jones Ferry and Davie roads past 11:00 am, was rescinded in a unanimous decision Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen before a full chamber of community members.
This semester I have served OrangePolitics as a student intern to complete a minimum 30-hour service-learning requirement for a sociology class entitled “Social and Economic Justice.” The course is a capstone requirement for all social and economic justice minors like myself and has allowed my professor the opportunity to chronicle the development of the Occupy movement over the course of the semester. Admittedly, I am privileged. But, having studied the birth and spread of this movement, I was shocked when a local demonstration against corporate hegemony of the wealthiest Americans (unaffiliated directly with the Occupy Chapel Hill demonstrations) took a dramatic turn a little more than a week ago, as a police tactical team of more than 25 officers arrested eight demonstrators in a vacant Franklin Street building.
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