โThere were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasnโt the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.โโProfessor Robert Gellately
If you see something suspicious, says the Department of Homeland Security, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone.
(If youโre a whistleblower wanting to snitch on government wrongdoing, however, forget about itโthe government doesnโt take kindly to having its dirty deeds publicized and, God forbid, being made to account for them.)
For more than a decade now, the DHS has plastered its โSee Something, Say Somethingโ campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Now colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas are lining up for grants to participate in the program.
This is what is commonly referred to as community policing. Yet while community policing and federal programs such as โSee Something, Say Somethingโ are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing.
After all, the police canโt be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there arenโt enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States?
The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded โTerror alerts,โ keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats and staged โtrainingโ drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets, acclimatize them to being surveilled โfor their own good,โ and then indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can save the nation from another 9/11.
As historian Robert Gellately points out, a Nazi order requires at least some willing collaborators to succeed. In other words, this is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.
Itโs a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, theyโre incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to homeโnamely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.
โCommunity-Oriented Policingโ is a Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between police agencies and members of the community. Unfortunately, these programs are not making America any safer. Instead, theyโre turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing, bystander nation content to report a so-called violation to the cops and then turn a blind eye to the ensuing tragedies.
Apart from the sheer idiocy of arresting people for such harmless โcrimesโ as raising pet chickens, letting their kids walk to the park alone, peeling the bark off a tree, holding prayer meetings in their backyard and living off the grid, thereโs also the unfortunate fact that once the police are called in, with their ramped up protocols, battlefield mindset, militarized weapons, uniforms and equipment, and war zone tactics, itโs a process that near impossible to turn back and one that too often ends in tragedy for all those involved.
Nevertheless, in much the same way the old African proverb โit takes a village to raise a childโ was used to make the case for an all-encompassing government program of social welfare, the DHS and the DOJ are attempting to make the case that it takes a nation to catch a terrorist.
To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct โpartnersโ in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits, churches and service providers, private businesses and the media.
Together, these groups are supposed to โidentifyโ community concerns, โengageโ the community in achieving specific goals, serve as โpowerfulโ partners with the government, and add their โconsiderable resourcesโ to the governmentโs already massive arsenal of technology and intelligence.
The mainstream mediaโs role, long recognized as being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as โpublicizingโ services from government or community agencies or new laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime.
Amazingly, the Justice Department guidelines sound as if they were taken from a Nazi guide on how to rule a nation. โGermans not only watched out for โcrimesโ and other deviationsโ of fellow German citizens, Gellately writes, โbut they watched each other.โ
Should you find yourself suddenly unnerved at the prospect of being spied on by your neighbors, your actions scrutinized, your statements dissected, and your motives second-guessed, not to worry: as I point out in my bookย A Government of Wolves, this is par for the course in the American police state.
