Project Safe Neighborhoods

[Pathfinder]

I've been seeing some really annoying ads on The History Channel about Mommies losing their "babies" to gun crimes, showing a bunch of kids disappearing as a police car-led hearse procession rolls by. I finally got annoyed enough to look this up. I was appalled, especially by this link's info that the NRA was involved and the role of unintended consequences.

It looks to me like another nail in our coffin that as already been driven and is waiting for us. It takes only an activist prosecutor, judge, governor, or president, to make us all gun criminals. Remember Pastor Niebuhr's statement - First they came for the criminals, and since I was not a criminal, I said nothing. . .

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/more_injustice.htm

FTA:
June 11, 2002
Abolishing America (contd.): Bush’s Project Safe Neighborhoods Undermines Rule Of Law

By Paul Craig Roberts

In 1999 Edward Tenner published “Why Things Bite Back,” a provocative book about the unintended consequences of technology. Someone should write a similar book about law, because the unintended consequences are even more far reaching.

Gene Healy, a Cato Institute scholar, recently provided a thorough exploration of the unintended consequences of one law, the new Bush-Ashcroft plan to federalize gun crimes known as the Project Safe Neighborhoods program. The unintended consequences of this law are frightening.

The law originated in a strategy by the National Rifle Association and the Bush administration to forestall further anti-gun legislation by emphasizing tougher enforcement of existing gun laws. To this end, the legislation funds 113 new assistant U.S. attorneys and 600 new state and local prosecutors whose only beat is to prosecute gun crimes. And there lies the unintended consequences.

As Gene Healy rightly notes, one consequence is the overenforcement of gun laws and a “proliferation of ‘garbage’ gun charges--technical violations of firearms statutes on which no sensible prosecutor would expend his energy.”

Conviction rates are the key indicator in judging the performance of U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. Unlike other prosecutors whose bailiwicks cover all criminal offenses, the 713 Safe Neighborhood prosecutors are limited to one offense. Once they run out of serious gun crimes, they push on with technical and meritless indictments.

<end of snippet>

[DDMac]

Pathfinder, that project has been in operation in NC for about 6 years now, and all three U.S. Attorneys publish every prosecution in the local paper, the News & Observer. I have kept an eye on this from the git go and I have seen no hint of prosecutions of anybody not a felon, previously convicted, who needed the treatment. First you read about the crime, then about 4 mos later, the prosecution in Federal Court.

Maybe there are problems elsewhere in the country, politics being politics after all, but not here. Bon Voyage to the bangers. The professor may be generalizing assumptions and in fact, he sounds like someone who tried to be an Asst US Attorney but didn't get hired. Each office is divided into specialties due to the specific and complicated law relating to various violations. Nobody can know it all. They have drug prosecutors, white collar crime, environmental stuff, terrorism and so on. Having gun prosecutors, in a righteous function of government, should work the way the NRA intended. If not, the NRA is capable AND responsible to go back to Congress about this. I have heard and read nothing from them.

That project is big in Wilmington as well and maybe Twyacht has heard bad things about who gets drug into the waterfront Federal courthouse before judge Fox? You don't want to be guilty in his court.
Mac.

[twyacht]

That project is big in Wilmington as well and maybe Twyacht has heard bad things about who gets drug into the waterfront Federal courthouse before judge Fox? You don't want to be guilty in his court.
Mac.

You are 100% correct DDMack, The local paper "Red Star News & Observer" oops just the Star, The power given to the "Special Prosecutor", Rex Gore is one, but there are two more, covers three counties New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender.

They "quietly" without much state fanfare, go after the criminals, repeat offenders, dealers, and slam them. Here in coastal NC there is still a Southern Good ol' Boy mentality that leaves us law abiding gun owners alone, But if your a BG, or convicted felon with a gun, your going down. Can that lead to problems and abuses down the road? Absolutely!

Its not perfect by any means, Hell, Brunswick County Sheriff Ron Hewitt just received 6 years for all kinds of tampering with evidence,intimidating witnesses, using inmates to work on his personal property, election issues, etc,... and he was the Sheriff.

But Judge Fox, if he were alive in the 1800's, he would be another "Hangin Judge"