Probably a bit of a 'baby with the bathwater' situation here. At almost no point has that institution been a net positive - at times snooping on 'political dissidents' (like MLK Jr.), and at others bungling cases so bad they become moments of national shame (Ruby Ridge).
You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.
> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive
Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.
You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
You're right that I'm taking a bit of a shortcut - my assessment is based on what I know to be true in both directions, the things they've done right versus the things they've done wrong. The CARD program, stopping the times square bomber, Don C. Miller, Zazi versus COINTELPRO, Stingray, MLK, Ruby Ridge, basically everything J Edgar Hoover ever touched (like the Palmer Raids), Steven Hatfill and Brandon Mayfield.
If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.
My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.
So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.
Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.
If you choose to engage law enforcement personnel, it's "thank god, some extra protection" (hopefully!), but if there is a situation where law enforcement personnel engage you, it's either "huh?" or "oh fuck". This isn't different for the FBI than for local or state-level police.
If some law enforcement personnel show up that you didn't invite, they could be there for a large number of reasons. How worried you'll be depends on how likely you think they are to do what they're supposed to do instead of what they're not.
If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?
If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?
If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?
If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.
I think most people would have essentially the same reaction to either FBI or state/local police showing up at their door with "[Police|FBI], open up!", and it depends more on whether they believe they've done something illegal than the reputation of the agency. This was my disagreement with GP(stavros).
Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?
You can ask the same questions about a local law enforcement agency but the answers won't be the same for every one of them.
And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.
Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.
If this was true, the Miranda rights would read something like “anything you say will be used to obtain justice” rather than “anything you say can and WILL be used AGAINST you.” The police and justice system are never your friend. They are always your adversary, and should be treated as such. Under a different regime, they could be your ally if you’re innocent, (and this is the case in many countries) but in the US, they are always hostile to everyone, including innocent people. Even if individuals in that system don’t fancy themselves in that light.
I engaged law enforcement personnel as the victim of a violent (unarmed) home invasion robbery by people I knew. What did they do? Debate whether I should have been arrested instead on a technicality. That would look good for their stats, right? At least the criminals had to repay 90% of my lawyer's fees.
I assume that’s why the original argument is that it’s not been a net positive. I.e. the assumption is that lots of work can be good and necessary, while even more that is evil and excessive can end up with a net negative.
Anticorruption work is good and necessary. If the FBI's work was any good, they would be investigating the funding of the destruction of the White House, or AIPAC and Qatari influence in DC, not Comey and Obama. Right now, they are working for Evil.
Or the Trump coin crypto rugpull and money laundering scheme. Or the open insider trading. Or the $400 million jet "gifted" from Qatar. This year has been one grift after another.
I already live there because the only enforcement that happens is trying to extract money from poor people to fund the local court and cops. Pulling over every car coming down a particular road and trying to charge them with DUIs for smoking weed 8 hours beforehand does not make me safer, it just makes me late for work and is used to justify tax increases on me to further fund the bogus drug war.
This thread is about the FBI, yet you're referencing strawman arguments about DUI checkpoints from local police. Do you have any experience with crimes against children?
US law enforcement "clears" about 1 in 4 robberies and more than 1 in 3 aggravated assaults/batteries, and similar numbers for other crimes. On average, a criminal's career is 3 serious crimes. You can imagine how much awesomer your life would have been if they were able to run uncaught for years and years. But you won't because you have "net negative" bullshit blocking your vision.
Now compare that to that to US peer countries like throughout most of Europe or Australia and see that the US has piss poor clearance rates for crimes. Along with the US having far higher crime rates in general on par with countries that lack stable governance.
Despite topping the world with incarcerations and arrests and law enforcement funding, the US is not a particularly safe place, so obviously US law enforcement isn't focused on safety and justice, which leaves the monetary factor.
If you arrest someone for a drug crime and get a plea deal out of them they get jail fees, processing fees, court minimum fees plus any additional court costs, probation costs and fees, multiple "X state specialty tax fee", plus kickbacks from the mandatory court ordered drug/anger/traffic class, cost of drug test fees, etc. If you arrest someone from murder and imprison them for life, sure you can claim to charge them those fees, but they will never be free of prison to ever pay them. So it should be no surprise that cops are incentivized to go for easy drug charges from non-dangerous citizens that puts money in their pockets over actual dangerous criminals who will only reduce department revenue.
typical bootlicker mentality; all criticism of state violence is rejected out of hand because the idea that power can and should be held to a higher standard is anathema to the authoritarian mindset.
I'm sure police (when they aren't fighting over jurisdictional issues) find it helpful, that doesn't mean that it's helpful for the population, especially when it (and police generally) are used as a tool for domestic influence operations and to basically shunt some people aside in the name of business and landowners.
i could absolutely be wrong since your post was kinda vague, so forgive me if i’m wrong, but are you implying we shouldn’t attempt mitigation of bad things because other bad things are happening elsewhere?
If you read the chain of posts I directly responded to, then there's nothing vague about what I said. Here, I'll help you out:
That chain was in response to:
>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
So in that context, there's nothing "vague" about my somewhat tongue-in-cheek response. Neither, you'll find, is there any attempt by me to say that one SHOULDNT stop the FBI from doing anything bad.
The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know.
(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
I think neither "righteous" nor "evil" are appropriate words in this context. It's a real-world institution with the expected biases, missteps of authority, episodes of getting embroiled in political machination, etc. Demonizing it is just as naive as idealizing it. And there's probably much more of the former than the latter today, when a lot of unearned, easy cynicism is either unconsciously performative, or even worse, the outcome of a caricatural conspirative worldview.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.