The next generation of SWATting
Tucker Carlson promotes reporting you to child welfare authorities. For masking your kids during a pandemic.
A mystery for the ages: was Tucker Carlson always a total wingnut, even when he successfully masqueraded as a relatively mainstream conservative pundit, or did something snap within the last couple of years?
And does he really believe what he’s going on about these days, or is it all a show for the rubes?
And which would be worse?
Almost every day, the man seems to hit rock bottom, and here was yesterday’s example:
“SWATting,” a “prank” involving people calling the police on whomever they felt like harassing that day, came into vogue a few years ago. People have gotten killed as a result.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before the world’s worst people figured out that you can make someone’s life absolutely miserable by reporting them to child protection authorities. I’ve seen it before - any online discussion of transgender children inevitably descends into calls for the parents to be reported, and I even remember some members of the very online left saying Sarah Palin should be investigated for somehow endangering her kids - but this is the first time I’ve seen a major media commentator promote the practice.
And for children wearing masks? During a worldwide pandemic?
In my legal practice, I represent many parents whose children have been taken into foster care by the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services. You don’t know true anguish until you’ve seen it on the faces of people caught in the living Hell that is having their kids removed from their homes.
And that’s in the cases where removal may have been justified. I’ve also lost count of how many of my family law clients have had their exes make dubious referrals to the child welfare authorities. Even when the investigation is relatively quick and the allegations found to be unsubstantiated, it’s still an emotional wringer I wouldn’t wish any parent to go through.
I didn’t understand it myself until I had kids, but I’d risk a hundred confrontations with trigger-happy SWAT teams over a single investigation that presented even the slightest risk that I could lose them.
It’s not the sort of thing you should ever take lightly, and it’s especially bad when someone with a major platform calls for it. And it’s worse still when the guy is only doing it to suck up to the absolute worst corners of the right-wing base.
Tucker Carlson has been a notable media figure for many years, but he now has fame and TV ratings like never before. I hope giving up his soul was a fair trade for him.
In the wake of the tragic - but legally justified - police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, the increasingly zombified ACLU apparently decided to go all-in on calling for police abolition.
If you’re saying the criminal Justice system cannot be reformed, you are saying the police should be abolished. Simple as that.
Back here in the real world, Newark, New Jersey, is showing that policing can indeed be reformed. In a city long synonymous with violent crime, police officers didn’t fire their weapons once in 2020.
Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.
At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.
“This is significant,” says Aqeela Sherills, head of the Newark Community Street Team, a group of mostly former offenders who work to defuse violence in the city’s most violent wards. “It speaks to how reform has really taken hold in the city.”
[…]
This is a remarkable success story, all done at a time when serious crime in Newark has dropped by 40 percent in the last five years. Both Harvey and Fishman say the key to that success is that Mayor Ras Baraka and Police Director Anthony Ambrose took the mission to heart.
They hired more Black and brown officers, began training programs based on best-practices, required any officer who uses force in any way to report it in detail, and for the supervisor to review it. The bad cops were suddenly outed.
Former Gov. Christie Whitman fought like a wildcat to keep the DOJ away from the State Police during the racial-profiling scandal, a defensive reaction that is more commonplace. But the DOJ came anyway, and it succeeded.
Baraka welcomed this intervention. He himself was a leading campaigner against police brutality before he became mayor. And Ambrose, who looks like a stereotypical old Italian beat cop, turned out to be a progressive at heart, a guy who took a knee during local demonstrations over the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.
This streak sadly ended on New Year’s Day - the story doesn’t give enough details to say if the shooting was justified under the circumstances - so it’s sadly still a work in progress. But compared to the blatantly corrupt, trigger-happy and racist police force patrolling Newark not too long ago, it’s a massive step forward.
Questionable police shootings will not end overnight. As I write this, a city in North Carolina is bracing for the release of body camera footage from an incident The victim’s family calls an “execution” by police officers. Reform is a slow and agonizing process, and the conviction of Derek Chauvin is just one small step, but it is moving in the right direction.
As for the ACLU, it is an organization whose very reason for being has traditionally been to advocate for reform through the courts and the legislative process. If they don’t believe that anymore, they should disband themselves, liquidate all their assets, and use the money to buy weapons for violent revolution.
On second thought, I don’t want to give them any ideas.
“Your Honour, in my client’s defence, the boys were thirsty in Atlanta and there was beer in Texarkana.”
“Case dismissed!”