cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1059590

A spinoff of the company "Protector" — an Uber-style rentier app that lets users temporarily hire an armed bodyguard — Patrol offers property owners the chance to rent out "off-duty police officers to help protect their homes."

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/29826178

The Senate has passed a bill making Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the U.S.'s largest interior law enforcement agency with funding for Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agenda higher than most of the world's militaries, including Israel's.

Pending its passage in the House of Representatives, Trump's bill could mean a massive increase in ICE funding as part of an immigration enforcement agenda worth $150 billion over four years.

This figure is more than the annual military budget of Italy, which at $30.8 billion, is the world's 16th highest defense spender for this year according to tracker Global Fire Power.

It is also higher than military spending for Israel, ($30 billion), the Netherlands ($27 billion) and Brazil ($26.1 billion).

Held for 16 days in a “dry cell”—a solitary room with no running water or flushing toilet—Adams was kept under lighted observation by sight and security camera, with no privacy whatsoever for the entire duration. She had been segregated on suspicion of hiding drugs in her vagina at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, Nova Scotia.

Mike German, an ex-FBI agent, said immigration agents hiding their identities ‘highlights the illegitimacy of actions’

Some wear balaclavas. Some wear neck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.

Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing up prominent Democratic critics.

It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.

Mike German, a former FBI agent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedented in US law enforcement and a sign of a rapidly eroding democracy. “Masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls,” he said.

Having acknowledged the intimate bonds and episodic convergence of abolition and communism, it behoves us to inquire into what might be learned from their points of dissension. Are there ways in which abolitionism and communism might still operate, to cite Du Bois, as ‘separating ideologies’? I think the most fruitful approach, in view of an eventual ‘drawing together’, is to contend in tandem with abolitionist critiques of communism and communist critiques of abolition. My wager, to paraphrase an old philosopher from the Baltics, is that communism without abolition is empty, abolition without communism blind.

For those of us who have experienced isolation in prison, it's a trauma that never leaves.

We talked to detainees and prison guards to unearth the violent and inhumane conditions at private prisons. "In these places, human rights don't exist. You don't even exist as a human," one former detainee told us. Meanwhile, the CEO of private prison company CoreCivic is worth $20 million.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45477118

It's like RoboCop, except the robots are villains helping human villains villain more comprehensively.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22730020

archived (Wayback Machine)

A reminder folks: people engage in this kind of radical protest because it works:

Results of two online experiments conducted with diverse samples (N = 2,772), including a study of the animal rights movement and a preregistered study of the climate movement, show that the presence of a radical flank increases support for a moderate faction within the same movement. Further, it is the use of radical tactics, such as property destruction or violence, rather than a radical agenda, that drives this effect. Results indicate the effect owes to a contrast effect: Use of radical tactics by one flank led the more moderate faction to appear less radical, even though all characteristics of the moderate faction were held constant. This perception led participants to identify more with and, in turn, express greater support for the more moderate faction. These results suggest that activist groups that employ unpopular tactics can increase support for other groups within the same movement, pointing to a hidden way in which movement factions are complementary, despite pursuing divergent approaches to social change.