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Thread: Armed Citizens Take Over Public Safety

  1. #1

    Armed Citizens Take Over Public Safety

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...-guts-sheriff/

    When budget woes reduced the sheriff's department in one rural Oregon county to a bare-bones force, residents decided to take matters into their own hands -- creating armed patrol groups in defiance of local officials.

    Their decision has raised safety concerns with the county government, which would prefer residents instead hike their own taxes to fund the hiring of trained deputies. But despite the risks, the move stands as a unique, some would say innovative, response to one of the country's most severe local budget crunches.

    The government in Josephine County, where nearly 70 percent of the land is owned by the U.S. government, had long relied on federal timber subsidies to pay the bills. When the feds terminated the funds, county officials scrambled to pass a May 2012 tax levy to make up a nearly $7.5 million budget shortfall.

    However, the county's residents voted against the levy, and as a result the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office was gutted. The major crimes unit closed, dozens of prisoners were released from the county jail and the department reduced operations to Monday-Friday, eight hours a day.

    The Sheriff’s Office then issued a press release announcing their deputies would only be responding to what they deemed “life-threatening situations.”

    Ken Selig -- who was the longest-serving law enforcement officer in all three local agencies when he was forced to retire from the department due to cuts -- told FoxNews.com he found the sheriff’s declaration unacceptable. And he felt compelled to guard his community’s vulnerable members.

    “Who else is going to protect you when your government can't?” Selig said.

    Selig and his friend Pete Scaglione formed the North Valley Community Watch, a county-wide organization dedicated to helping citizens in non-life-threatening situations, primarily property crimes. It is one of a handful of community groups that have formed since the cuts. Without a robust Sheriff's Office, their mission is broader than the typical neighborhood watch group.

    Not only did the Sheriff's Office narrow its scope to "life-threatening" situations, but it even encouraged people who felt unsafe to relocate. “... the Sheriff's Office regretfully advises that, if you know you are in a potentially volatile situation (for example, you are a protected person in a restraining order that you believe the respondent may violate), you may want to consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services,” the original release stated.

    Selig's community watch group, looking to fill in the law enforcement cracks, now meets once a month to discuss crime and teach its approximately 100 members about personal safety. The group also has a trained “response team,” which consists of 12 people who will respond to the scene of a reported non-life-threatening situation if called.

    Though the “response team” members do carry legal firearms, Selig said the team’s main goal is to provide a deterrent presence, and that none of them have ever fired a shot. He said those involved in his group believe there is no substitute for well-trained law enforcement, but they feel they have no other choice but to protect their community.

    “We believe responsible citizens doing responsible things make it hard for criminals to do irresponsible things,” he said.

    Selig believes politics are behind the county government’s decision to not funnel what funds they do have toward law enforcement. He says the county government seems to be pressuring the citizens to pass an additional tax hike they cannot afford.

    “The key is to get the funding somewhere where the local people can get the services they need,” Selig said.

    However, Josephine County Commissioner Keith Heck said residents of the county that opposed the tax levy need to realize there is no fat to cut.

    Heck said the county has tried to live within the bounds of its fiscal realities, but citizens need to realize the options for paying for law enforcement are limited. "The county coffers are at the bottom of the barrel," he said.

    Heck said though he supports neighborhood watch groups and citizens being vigilant in their community, the rise of increasingly “aggressive” community watch groups make him worried the situation could escalate to violence. Watch groups have been under increasing scrutiny nationally ever since the George Zimmerman case in Florida.

    “These things seem good on the PR side but fail a little in the reality side,” Heck said.

    Heck said the only real solution is for the county citizens to approve more funds.

    “There is this little shimmer out there of some giant Santa that is going to come and drop all this money on us because we are well-meaning folks,” he said. “The sleigh is broken, the deer are dead, it’s not going to happen. We have to figure out how we are going to solve this problem.”
    Last edited by AFPVet; 12-26-2013 at 09:11 PM.
    Indianensis Universitatis Alumnus



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  3. #2
    Their decision has raised safety concerns with the county government
    Safety concerns for who?
    "The Patriarch"

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    Safety concerns for who?
    Why, the gummint honchos, of course. Specifically, they are concerned about the safety of their bottom-lines and their ability to dominate local residents.

    "Their decision has raised safety concerns with the county government, which would prefer residents instead hike their own taxes to fund the hiring of trained deputies."
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    Why, the gummint honchos, of course. Specifically, they are concerned about the safety of their bottom-lines and their ability to dominate local residents.

    "Their decision has raised safety concerns with the county government, which would prefer residents instead hike their own taxes to fund the hiring of trained deputies."
    Which would of course be so much more efficient.
    "The Patriarch"

  6. #5
    Good
    Out of every one hundred men they send us, ten should not even be here. Eighty will do nothing but serve as targets for the enemy. Nine are real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, upon them depends our success in battle. But one, ah the one, he is a real warrior, and he will bring the others back from battle alive.

    Duty is the most sublime word in the English language. Do your duty in all things. You can not do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less than your duty.

  7. #6
    Another lesson to be learned here is what happens when community gov't become reliant on federal subsidies. Good on the people to take up the slack rather than, oh, riot or something.
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
    T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

    "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

    We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me

    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  8. #7
    Wow, 100 local citizens. Considering how dangerous a job law-enforcement is their ranks must already be decimated to a half dozen or so.

  9. #8
    Statist as $#@!. "Nothing replaces well trained LE" "who will protect us when our government can't."
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous



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  11. #9
    Maybe this will be an awakening moment for those people.

  12. #10
    Some background.

    2011- Sheriff makes waves in DC by questioning the authority of Forestry police in his county.
    http://www.newswithviews.com/NWV-News/news287.htm

    May 2012- Not surprisingly, the Feds cut off timber revenues that county government had grown reliant upon.
    http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index...ns_disman.html

    April 2013- Reason point out how wonderful citizen patrols are.
    http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/04/2...-law-enforceme

    May 2013- While ThinkProgess says that the rednecks have allowed rapists and murders to run amok.
    http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...-to-send-help/

    July 2013- Even the NYTimes notices that where citizens patrols are in the county, crime has dropped.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/us...p-Patrols.html

    XNN
    "They sell us the president the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars. They sell us every thing from youth to religion the same time they sell us our wars. I want to know who the men in the shadows are. I want to hear somebody asking them why. They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are but theyre never the ones to fight or to die." - Jackson Browne Lives In The Balance



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