The News: The
mudia reported today that the U.S. Marshall's Office had "rounded up" 35,000 "fugitives" in this year's
Operation Falcon. One was thus led to surmise that our Homeland Security Teams were vigilantly hard at work making us ever safer.
The Note: However the numbers did not add up. Without so much as a blanch, ABC News reported that the total included 433 persons wanted for murder and 900 gang members. And....? Well ABC didn't provide details as to the 33, 667 "others".
So, we googled on over to the U.S. Marshall's page on Operation Falcon where we
found out that the number also included 2356 persons wanted for sex crimes and 10, 525 drug offenders and 1, 677 weapon's offenders. As usual it turns out that ABC was not so much reporting as regurgitating from a Govmint Press release.
But that still left 19,118 person unaccounted for. Were our valiant and vigilant Homeland Security guards sweeping the country coast to coast dragnetting petty thieves and such social threats as felony failure to pay parking tickets?
It was unclear. The Marshall's press release also informed that 47,000 warrants had been cleared. Assuming this referred to arrest warrants, these are cleared when the person to be arrested is found and locked up
or when it turns out that the person arrested already did his time and was no longer really wanted except that no one bothered to update the database. So, it seemed likely that
the 35,000 "fugitives" included a sizeable number of poor dumb fucks that were rousted up in the wee morning hours, hauled off to jail only to be released several days later when things got "cleared up."
It also appears that the 35K figure most probably included a pot-pouri of miscreants guilty of things like theft, joyriding and felony failure to pay a parking ticket.
So, the good news is that, no, the U.S. did not add another 35,000 to our bulging 2 million (sic) prison population. It added only about 15,000 of which 4,33 were murders and no more than 2,300 were serious sex offenders as opposed to gropers, streakers and sex offenders who failed to register on release.
The bad news is that the government is trying to razzle dazzle us with the idea that we are safer the more people we "round up".
Wow!! Look at them figgers, Marge. Way ta' go. I hope our marshalls can beat the record next year. The more the safer, is what I say.
When we start thinking this way, we will have managed to lock ourselves up in a continental prison
Not that we aren't already well on the way. To put things in perspective. The total population of Stalin's Gulag on a yearly basis varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953).
[
gulag] The total annual population of Nazi Germany's camp and prison population from 1933 to 1939 hovered around 35,000. So the mudia's headlines could have read:
U.S. Marshals Round Up in One Month the Total Prison Population of Nazi Germany.
Still in the bad news department is the latent fact that virtually all of these 11,000 so-called drug and gang arrests were dragnets in Black and to some extent Hispanic neighborhoods. What Operation Falcon is really protecting us from is small time black, street corner drug dealers. The figures betray the game. The U.S. Marshall's FAQ sheet, proudly announces that this years sweep netted, $ 320,000 in money and other forfeited assets.
Do the math. That's $3.20 for each and every "drug offender" -- not including the occasional $50,000 SUV. Not only that, but the Marshall's web page proudly shows Our Team, valiantly storming Fortress Shack.
Ah yes! The word's of William Pitt come to mind. "It's roof may leak, it walls may shake, but all the Kings Horse dare not breach the threshold of the poorest cottage in the land."
Ah well. Not in
America's Sicherheitstaat. No... in the 22nd Century, the
Govmint bulldozes through slums and minority neighborhoods, scooping up petty drug offenders and then turns around and tells all the rest of us how safe it is making our lives.
©Barfo, 2009
