thatgeekinit

The FBI is a general federal law enforcement organization with an extra Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism mandate.

They don't need to catch any particular class of criminal to justify their existence. Counterintelligence doesn't really have to catch spies that often because the public isn't going to be told most of the time anyway.

The DEA and the ATF have certain crimes in their mandate and if those crimes are either not common or seen by the public as unimportant, they can't justify their budgets.

How many bombings have we had in the US in recent decades? How much arm smuggling in a country with lax firearms laws and deliberately sabotaged enforcement. How many bootleggers? The ATF shouldn't exist as a LEO agency. It should be a little office in DC that processes gun and explosives licenses.

Same with the DEA. 90%+ of drug arrests are for cannabis, then legalization dooms the DEA to being the cocaine/heroin squad of the border patrol. They can't let that happen so they spent decades trying to tie cannabis to violent criminals.

Iirc, NY courts have interpreted a state privacy law concerning civil service personnel records in a way that makes it nearly impossible for police accountability to be effective.

In a lot of ways, the NYPD like a lot of police agencies wants to have full disciplinary control internally like the military but then wants a ton of union and civil service protections thrown in. It can't work that way. The reason the US military can effectively police its own misconduct is because command power is nearly absolute up to the point where the military courts martial gets appealed to civilian federal court.

The NYPD system stacks the deck towards officers so heavily you could literally have a serial killer in the department and it would be nearly impossible to fire him. They have certainly had multiple serial rapists.

I actually think A-J overall is a net positive because while clearly state supported media, it’s far more independent of direct state censorship than basically all other Arab television media except ironically i24 Arabic in Israel.

I think their editorial stance towards Israel is obviously biased but their audience and potential audience has had 80 years of overtly antisemitic propaganda from state media outlets so it’s not like some balanced discussion of the I/P conflict is going to attract viewers.

The GOP says the same thing about the NFL kneeling protests. It's the most absurd argument. Its as ridiculous as me saying the GOP should only run ads for their candidates after the elections.

Obviously the inappropriate time to draw attention to an issue you care about is when 10M people are watching you on TV. /s

Translation: I don't want the truth about Roy Moore molesting teenagers to get attention so I want you to stfu until no one is paying attention anymore.

Australian religious conservatives sound just like our American ones. Then again the same guy owns their employers.