Poll of the Day > Article on James King (police brutality victim) and state-federal task forces

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/14/state-federal-task-forces-are-out-control/

On Friday, July 18, King was walking from one of those jobs to the other in Grand Rapids, Mich., when he was stopped by two men leaning against a black SUV. It was daytime. The men were wearing street clothes and baseball caps. One was wearing sunglasses.
One of the men asked King for identification. He said he didnt have any on him. The men then moved toward him, trapping him against the SUV. One reached for and removed his wallet. Thinking he was being mugged, King tried to run. The men grabbed him and threw him to the ground. King cried out for help, asking anyone nearby to call the police. One of the men then put him in a chokehold until he fell unconscious. When King came to, he panicked and bit the mans arm in an attempt to escape. The men then furiously beat him. One would later say he punched King in the head, "as hard as I could, as fast as I could, and as many times as I could.
Some passersby did call the police. Others filmed the beating and aftermath. One woman later said she thought she was watching a murder. But when uniformed officers arrived, they discovered that the men who had beaten King were law enforcement. Detective Todd Allen works for the Grand Rapids Police Department. Special agent Douglas Brownback works for the FBI. The uniformed police then asked witnesses if they had filmed the encounter and, if they did, ordered them to delete the videos. Several witnesses said they had no idea the assailants were police until well into the beating.
The two men who attacked King detective Allen and agent Brownback were part of a local-federal task force overseen by the FBI. They had mistaken King for a wanted man.

The police had the gall to try and charge him w/ three felonies after this, which were quickly decided against by the jury.
Article then goes on to talk about how these "state-federal task forces" allow cops to avoid accountability.

The governments use of joint task forces has created an accountability shell game, says Kings attorney, Patrick Jaicomo from the Institute for Justice. Federal officers police state law, state officers police federal law, and both can select the state or federal laws and immunities that best suit their purposes. Thanks to the proliferation of task forces, that shell game is now being played in all 50 states.
Conceived during the Nixon administration, the first multi-jurisdictional forces were assembled in the early 1970s to fight the war on drugs, and they were staffed with a combination of state, federal and local police, the latter often coming from multiple local police agencies. As journalist Dan Baum documents in his 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors, Nixon wanted strike forces that could kick down doors and put the fear of God into drug offenders without burdensome hurdles like the Fourth Amendment or the separation of powers. Many state officials wanted no part of such aggressive tactics. But by sending federal drug warriors (and money) to work with local cops, these task forces could pick whichever laws state or federal afforded them the most power and the least accountability.

In 2009, the Obama Justice Department tried to conduct a cost-benefit study of these task forces. But the study had to be stopped, because the task forces kept little to no records. The authors concluded, Not only were data insufficient to estimate what task forces accomplished, data were inadequate to even tell what the task forces did as routine work.
A 2015 study by a marijuana legalization group in Missouri found that states task forces routinely used their federal jurisdiction to escape state open-records laws, but then claimed they were state agencies when subjected to a records request under federal law.
They take a similar approach to civil asset forfeiture. In states that have put restrictions on when law enforcement agencies can seize property without a conviction, task forces will claim theyre governed by federal law. In states that give police more power to seize property, theyll claim state law.

Some excerpts from the article. Radley Balko has been one of the best journalists in this country for a long time, writing on civil rights.

https://imgur.com/gallery/1y8mK39

Apparently no one even clicks on topics about news stories unless there are RANDOM caps and the POSTER asks if the subject is HOT

I read it. Just have nothing insightful to add to it

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