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Award-winning actor Rob Reiner has always been known for his political activism so much so that he was even parodied in an episode of South Park titled Butt Out.

Reiners waded into those waters again, taking to Twitter to weigh in with provocative statements over Kyle Rittenhouses visit to Mar-a-Lago to visit former President Donald Trump.

His name began to trend on Twitter on Wednesday, alongside the Meathead nickname from his character in All in the Family the classic 70s TV sitcom where he first made his name before evolving into a well-known director.

An underaged kid illegally takes an assault rifle across state lines, kills two people, injures another, then is welcomed with open arms at Mar-a-Lago by the leader of the Republican Party, a mentally ill Racist, Reiner opined in a tweet.

This is where we are, finishing with a declarative, God help US.

Rittenhouse, of course, is the teen protagonist of a recent high-profile court case, in which he was acquitted of charges stemming from an August 2020 shooting at a protest event in Kenosha, Wis.

Reiner isnt the first celebrity to tackle the topic of Rittenhouse on Twitter, of course. Author Stephen King notable compared Rittenhouse to a shooter from the Columbine High School massacre the morning he was acquitted.

But Reiners tweet brought in dialogue from those who disagreed with his position, including former Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman actor Dean Cain, who asked Reiner to at least be factual with your tweets.

Immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken went as far as to note, Imputing a person committed a crime is defamation per se, cheekily adding, You should probably consult a lawyer, Rob.

However, many flocked to Twitter to agree with Reiner as well. The Tweet, which garnered nearly 12,000 retweets and over 52,000 likes in its first 14 hours on the platform, sparked discussion.

One user suggested googling Zimmerman now referring to George Zimmerman, the subject of the 2012 trial for the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida to see what life would look like for Rittenhouse in the future.

Another user compared the meeting to the cult-classic Dumb & Dumber comedy films.

Another user shared an incisive quote from Trevor Noah about the case.

What do you think about Rob Reiners statements on the matter? Sound off in the comments.

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Rob Reiner Stirs Online Controversy With Take on Kyle Rittenhouse - We Got This Covered

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.

Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation's traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies - especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.

Not so much anymore.

For the first time in memory, conservatives now connect the FBI hierarchy with bureaucratic bloat, political bias, and even illegality.

In the last five years, the FBI was mostly in the news for the checkered careers of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Add in the criminality of convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

The colossal FBI-driven "Russian collusion" hoax was marked by the leaking of confidential FBI memos, forged documents, improper surveillance, and serial disinformation.

Prior heads of the CIA and FBI, as well as the director of national intelligence, have at times either not told the truth under oath or claimed amnesia, without legal repercussions.

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility - much less resigned - for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged "white supremacists," without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media. But they grudgingly admitted that many liberal journalists of the last century were mostly professionals. News divisions mostly reported the news rather than simply made it up.

Not so now with Big Tech and 21stt-century "woke" journalism. Few reporters have yet offered apologies for helping hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that paralyzed the country for three years.

Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team's prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.

Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the "hands-up-don't shoot" Ferguson distortions. Journalists promulgated misinformation about the "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.

They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant - but now utterly disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo - as well as the "Russian disinformation" yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.

Most recently, reporters spread serial untruths surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

For much of 2020 to even suggest that the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played a role in the birth and spread of the COVID-19 earned media derision.

Few reporters suggested that federal health agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases might be disseminating contradictory or even inaccurate information about the pandemic. To believe this was happening instead earned condemnation in the media as if one were some conspiracy theorist or nut.

Rarely have communication industries - veritable utilities in the public domain - so asymmetrically censored speech and applied such one-sided standards of suppressing free expression.

Conservatives used to oppose regulating larger corporations. Now, ironically, most are calling for regulating and breaking up multibillion-dollar social media monopolies and conglomerates that suppress as much as transmit private communications.

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis - have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation's military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

(C)2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Excerpt from:
Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization - RealClearPolitics

Although I participated in the countercultural "revolutions," antiwar protestsand racial conflicts of the 1960s, it wasn't until August2016 that Ihad my first truly unnerving intimations of a full-blown American civil war: Then-presidential candidate Donald Trumptold a rallythat if Hillary Clinton "gets to pick her judges, judicial appointments, nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people maybe there is. I don't know."

By June 1, 2020, Trump's seeming afterthought about "Second Amendment people"hadmetastasizedinto something truly scary. He and combat-fatigues-clad Gen.Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,along with Attorney General William Barr, strode from the White House to Lafayette Park, where a peaceful demonstration had been dispersed brutally by National Guard troops.

Trump's insistenceonlydays earlier that the U.S. Army itselfshouldbe sent against the protesters a demandechoed by Arkansas Sen.Tom Cottonin a now-infamous New York Times op-ed reminded me of Julius Caesarleading Roman legions illegally across the river Rubicon from Gaul into Italy in 49 B.C. to subdue Rome's own citizens and, with them, their republic.

Kenosha, Wisconsin's closest approximation to the Rubicon is the tiny Pike River, which flows from Petrifying Springs into Lake Michigan. Its closest approximation to a military crackdown was the police mobilization againstviolent protests aftera police officer shotand paralyzedan unarmed young Black man in August of last year. Those police failed to challenge Kyle Rittenhouse, the illegally armed, 17-year-old "Second Amendmentperson" who shot three men, killing two of them.

And when a Kenosha County jury failed to convict Rittenhouse on even a misdemeanor, sendingwhat the parents of Anthony Huber one of the men Rittenhousekilled characterized as"the unacceptable messagethat armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street," I couldn't help but wonder what, if anything, will stop armed "Second Amendment people" from showing up near polling places a year from now, as a Republican National Ballot Security Task Force" has done intermittently since 1981, although without brandishing guns.

More unnervingly and urgently, I wonder why a jury of ordinary citizens, along withthousands of others who approved and even celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict are walking themselves across a Rubicon to deliver the message I've just cited, even though they haven't been "demagogued" into doing it by a Caesar or driven to do it by a military force.

New York Times columnistCharles Blow has notedthat Rittenhousewas the same age asTrayvon Martin, the unarmed Black youth shot dead in Florida by George Zimmerman, who consideredhimself a "protector" of his neighborhood and who was acquitted of murder. Blow notes that although Trayvon Martin "was thugified" by Zimmerman and the judicial process, Rittenhouse was "infantilized" by the defenseargument that a 17-year-old may be excused for misjudging dangers that hehimselfhas provokedillegally. It's hard to imagine a similar jury acceptingsimilarexcuses for a young Blackman with an assault rifle,even if he never fired it.

I've contendedfor yearsthatswift, dark undercurrents are degrading and stupefying Americans in waysthatmost of us trynot to acknowledge. Moreof usthan ever before arenormalizing ouradaptations todailyvariants of force and fraud in the commercial groping and goosing of our private lives and public spaces; in nihilisticentertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment; in the "gladiatorialization: and corruptionofsports; in home-security precautions against the prospect of armed invasion; in casino-like financing of unproductive economic activities, such as the predatory lending that tricksmillions out of their homes; and in a huge, ever-expanding prison industry created to deter or punish the broken, violent victims of all these come-ons, even as schools in the"nicest,""safest," neighborhoods operate in fear of gunmenwho, from Columbine to Sandy Hook and beyond, havebeen students orresidents there themselves.

Stressed by this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes,home-security systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Edward Gibbon, the historian of ancient Rome, called "a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire" until Roman citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army."

Is it really so surprising that some of the stressed and dispossessed, too ill to bear their sicknesses or their cures, demand to be lied to instead, withsimple but compelling fantasies that direct them toward saviors and scapegoats into cries for strongmen to cross a Rubicon or two and for "Second Amendment people" to take our streets?

Originally posted here:
The Rittenhouse syndrome: Has America crossed the Rubicon? - Salon

Sometimes making change means playing the long game. And Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of the Florida advocacy organization Equal Ground, knows this well.

As a young girl, Burney-Clark grew up in Orlando, in a congressional district so gerrymandered that it jigsawed unevenly across Central Florida and was represented by one of the few women of color in Congress. As a young leader, she founded Equal Ground in 2019 to ramp up the political voice of underrepresented communities of color.

Right now, even as the immediate battle for representation plays out with the states Republican-controlled Legislature convening to redraw the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts, she is keeping her focus on the future.

The result? A brand-new Redistricting Fellowship program that engages Black college students and young professionals about the crucial redistricting process that is taking place this year. Funded in part by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the program is giving a new generation the tools to monitor the redistricting process, and to fight back against a system that, if history is any guide, is skewed against communities of color.

As the founder of Equal Ground, this work is tied deeply and closely to how I was raised in a gerrymandered district the majority of my life, Burney-Clark said. That defined my political existence. I saw from a young age how it kept my community from having a proper voice. And I saw that affected everything. It meant a lack of opportunity for housing, for community development, for education. It meant more often than not that Black people were laborers in the places they occupied, rather than leaders. It meant that had to change.

To learn how to direct such opportunities to communities who need them, seven fellows from the northern, central and southern areas of Florida are meeting virtually now through November with advocacy leaders, legislators, local and state policymakers and others. They are undergraduate and graduate students from historically Black colleges and universities, and some are young professionals. They have each demonstrated leadership on various levels, and they come seeking equal representation with a level of energy that inspires.

One of the fellows is Jaliyah Cummings, 22, who learned early on how much your neighborhood can determine your future. The daughter of two police officers, she grew up in a middle-class suburb of Orlando, attending fine public schools that she said were well-resourced and gave her every opportunity to succeed.

But her cousins grew up in a more urban area not far away, and she watched with pain and dismay as their friends dropped out of poorly performing schools and ended up in prison. In 2013, when she was 14, she watched in disbelief as George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

As a younger child I can say that I was kind of sheltered, in a sense, but being able to be that age and watch that trial and to see the verdict, it was just so wrong, Cummings said. I realized I wanted to be an attorney. That is where I need to be. That is my purpose.

Now a senior at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, Cummings is completing her coursework for a degree in criminal justice and plans to attend law school next fall. She said the fellowship with Equal Ground has given her the tools to understand just how critical securing real representation is for minority communities.

We are not angry, we are exhausted, Cummings said. There is so much that hinders people from reaching their full potential. And what we are learning is that so much of it starts with who is out there representing us.

Dierre Johnson, 22, another Equal Ground fellow, is a recent graduate in human resources studies at the University of West Florida. Now pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree, she has learned through the fellowship that redistricting is basically foundational.

My parents always told me not to be a spectator but to be a participator, Johnson said. How can your vote be your voice, how can you be a true participant when its muzzled or diluted from the effects of gerrymandering? That is what flipped the switch for me, when I actually learned what redistricting is and how it has been used to silence Black communities.

All members of Congress and state legislators are elected from political divisions called districts. Redistrictingis the process of enacting newcongressionalandstate legislativedistrict boundaries. The states redraw these district lines every 10 years following completion of the U.S. Census, which tracks population shifts. The federal government requires these districts to have nearly equal populations and not to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.

However, some politicians have used gerrymandering the process of drawing district lines to favor one political party, individual, constituency or race over another in order to advance their political objectives.

Redistricting is just one of the issues Equal Ground has taken on. Along with other, more established organizations throughout the state, it works to protect voting rights across the board. It also educates voters, particularly in the Central Florida communities where the organization got its start, on registering to vote, casting ballots and getting involved in their communities at all levels.

Equal Ground represents what a new social justice movement needs to look like to really effect change, said Nancy Abudu, interim strategic litigation director for the SPLC. Yes, there are bigger, more established groups like the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, but its often the smaller grassroots organizations that are nimble enough to reach voters in an even more impactful way. And in the case of Equal Ground, you have a Black-led organization making sure that Black people are politically engaged to change the system.

For its grassroots work to empower voters, Equal Ground received a grant of $200,000 from the Vote Your Voice campaign earlier this year. The campaign is investing up to $30 million from the SPLCs endowment to engage voters and increase voter registration, education and participation.

The SPLCs Voting Rights Practice Group has made redistricting a priority.

The process will determine the allocation of political power and representation at every level of government across the country for the next 10 years. Equal Ground and other organizations like it want to ensure that redistricting is not used to exclude communities of color from attaining political power.

The stakes are high. State legislatures have an obligation to ensure fair and equal representation for all people, upholding the 14th Amendments guarantee of equal protection under the law and complying with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But historically they have often done the opposite.

The last time Floridas Republicans were tasked with redrawing the states political districts, in 2012, a judge concluded they turned it into a mockery by secretly and illegally working to enhance their command of the state. After years of litigation, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Legislatures map and set the states current congressional boundaries.

This year, an even more powerful GOP-led Legislature is again preparing to begin the recasting of state House, Senate and congressional district lines. That means it can dictate not only who runs for public office and who is elected, but also how financial resources are allocated for schools, hospitals, roads and more.

And the representatives who are elected have the power to make decisions that greatly impact the communities they represent, from ensuring safe schools to adopting inclusive immigration policies. The people who live in a district can then influence whether elected officials feel obligated to respond to a particular communitys needs.

To make matters still more fraught, Floridas population has grown, so the state will be allocated one more seat in Congress. Whether that seat will be held by a Republican or a Democrat and whether the district will fairly represent the people who live in it depends largely on how the Legislature draws district boundaries.

Against that backdrop, Equal Ground is working with other organizations around the state to train Black and Brown communities on how to reach their elected officials, how to vote for officials who will better represent them, and how to hold legislators responsible for conducting a fair redistricting process.

The more were able to educate folks, the more powerful they become, said Jamara Wilson, redistricting program manager for Equal Ground. We understand that this process right now is in the hands of the Legislature, but they need to understand that they are being watched carefully.

Read more stories from theBattle for Representation: The Ongoing Struggle for Voting Rightsserieshere.

Photo at top, from left to right: Kristin Fulwylie,Jasmine Burney-Clark andJamara Wilson.

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Redrawing the Map: Grassroots organization trains Black college students and young professionals on the importance of redistricting - Southern Poverty...

Amazons cover-your-ass gesture, while certainly laudable, has had very little impact thus far on the bigger picture. Along with the smaller companies like Rank One, Cognitec, and NEC, which continue to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, other strains of similar technology are further expanding the surveillance state and perpetuating a culture of fear and racism in America. A year after the George Floyd protests, we remain at an inflection point for law enforcement, but instead of pausing more potentially dangerous surveillance systems until the government sorts out regulation, the vast majority of tech companies and lawmakers have chosen instead to continue full speed ahead. Together, theyre applying a move-fast-and-break-things mentality to things that, if broken, cannot be fixednamely privacy, freedom, and human lives.

If demand is running high for security solutions recently, its because violent crime has risen as well. Just last week, between July 17 and July 23, at least 430 people were killed in 915 shootings across the country, according to Gun Violence Archives collaboration with ABCs This Week. Only halfway through the year, 2021 is already on pace to top 2020 in gun-related deathswhile 2020 was already the deadliest year for shootings in two decades.

Prominent Republicans and the National Fraternal Order of Police have tied the crime-spike to the Defund the Police rallying cry that emerged from last years protests, despite the fact that little defunding has actually taken place yet, and the fact that violent crime is also up in cities that maintained or increased funding for police. The panic around the surge also seems to somehow disregard the anomaly factor of a once-in-a-century pandemic, prior to which violent crime had plunged precipitously since the early 1990s. But panic has never historically been confused with rational, analytical thinking; so instead of looking into Americas surplus of guns and lack of a social safety net, the powers that be are instead beefing up surveillance systems.

A lot of people have an innate fear of being monitored and tracked. They put pieces of tape over their laptop camera lens, like a Band-Aid that might heal any vulnerability to being seen involuntarily. They avoid smart home gadgets, such as Amazon Echo, for fear that everything they say will be recorded and archived. However, eventually, everyone must go outside and enter the public sphere, at which point they find themselves in constant risk of being surveilled in one way or another.

Smileyoure on candid panopticon.

What lawmakers and law enforcers both seem to want, in theory, is the digital equivalent of magic: the omniscient ability to catch criminals in the act, find them anywhere they may attempt to flee, and even predict their crimes before they happen. In practice, however, the equipment that tech companies have produced to meet these ends ranges from spotty to catastrophic.

Lets take a look at some of whats taking a look at us.

ShotSpotter is, for lack of a better way to put it, Shazam for crime noise. Its a tool that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, and then puts out an alert for participating police officers. Currently in use in more than 100 cities, the technology generates, in Chicago alone, an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The company claims it is 97% accurate.

Not only does the device inform officers about potential active crime scenes, its website also promises to help build courtroom-ready cases. Unfortunately, as Motherboard reported earlier this week, those cases are often built with altered evidence.

According to the report, ShotSpotters analysts have the ability to manually override its algorithms and reclassify a sound as a gunshot, or change other factors like the location of the sound, or the time it took place, according to the needs of the case. These analysts have frequently modified alerts at the request of police departments.

The danger doesnt end there, either. The law enforcement tendency to use ShotSpotter exclusively in predominantly Black and Latino communities is poised to further the already disproportionate rate of police brutality in those communities. It was a ShotSpotter alert this past March, for instance, that sent police to a street in Chicago where they ended up shooting and killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

Atlanta-based Flock Safety made headlines recently for its $150 million Series D round of funding, and pledge to reduce crime by 25% in the next three years. Operating on motion sensors, the device pairs solar-powered license-plate readers with cloud-based software. Police have used license-plate readers for at least a decade, but the ones made by Flock Safety are said to be more powerful than their predecessors. They automatically take down the make, model, color, and distinguishing marks of any vehicle that passes by, and record the date and time as well. Flock Safety also issues an alert whenever it spots a known stolen vehicle, or one thats fled a crime scene. The product is already set up in 1,200 communities in 40 states, and used by over 700 law enforcement agencies.

Just like gunshot detection systems, however, license plate readers can be used for unsavory ends.

Beyond merely solving crimes like stolen cars, some of Flock Safetys competitors have been adopted by ICE agents to track down undocumented immigrants. These types of devices are not immune to error either. In 2018, for instance, another license-plate reader in the Bay Area led police to pull over a vehicle and point guns at the driver and his passenger, all over a rental car incorrectly identified as stolen.

Acquired by Amazon in 2018, Ring is a doorbell-security camera hybrid that records and sends video to users phones, and to Amazons cloud, based on motion sensors. It has famously captured some funny neighborhood moments, cementing it in some peoples imaginations as a quirky facet of modern living, but it also carries much more sinister connotations. Mainly, it turns the prospect of anyone ever coming near ones door into an alarming event, providing law enforcement with a flood of false alertsand an abundance of questionable opportunities.

Rings promise to consumers is Protection at every corner, and it fulfills that promise by deputizing Ring owners in the war on crime. Citizens report suspicious people, who may only be suspicious in their own minds, and either sic the cops on themthe so-called Karen problemor possibly take matters into their own hands, like George Zimmerman. Police, meanwhile, know that many doors with a Ring on it contain footage that might help them either solve a case, or perhaps indulge a wild hunch.

Up until recently, Ring let police privately ask users to share video footage their cameras have captured. Thanks to vocal criticism from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, though, police now have to publicly make requests through Rings Neighbors app, a sort of digital bulletin board where people can post alerts for their community. Amazon also recently set limits on what footage police can ask for, and how much of it, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation found police officers attempting to use Ring footage to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. (Exactly the kind of hypocrisy Amazon got called out for with its gesture supporting Black Lives Matter last June.)

Rings collaboration with law enforcement runs deep, with the company even drafting press statements and social media posts for police to promote its cameras with, and officers seeming to relish the technology in turn. As Gizmodo reported in 2019, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, apparently raffled off Rings to members of certain communities, and were specifically instructed by superiors to verify that the users knew how to receive police requests for Ring footage.

Similar to Rings Neighbors, Citizen is another highly localized crime notification app. Its original name was Vigilante when it launched in 2016, which says pretty much everything about the companys intentions, even before the part where it encouraged users to approach the crime problem as a group and see what they could do about it. (Vigilante here is not to be confused with Vigilant Solutions, a facial recognition software company employed by many police officers.) Vigilante was swiftly banned, until it rebranded as Citizen, with a reduced emphasis on personal intervention. It now has more than 7 million users across 30 cities.

Even with the new name, the app still indulges fantasies of vigilantism, and helps mold more Kyle Rittenhouseswith unreliable information, to boot. The apps alerts are based on uncorroborated 911 calls, which sometimes get details wrong. Back in May, for instance, Motherboard reported that Citizen CEO Andrew Frame put out a $30,000 bounty for info leading to the arrest of a suspected arsonist, imploring his staff to FIND THIS FUCK, only to later discover that the man whose head hed put a price on was innocent.

Even more recently, the app has gone beyond deputizing civilians in the war on crime to quietly hiring teams of amateur field reporters to scour cities like New York and Los Angeles for crime scenes to livestream. Anyone interested in making $200 for an 8-hour shift (in New York) or $250 for a 10-hour shift (in Los Angeles) can become, essentially, Jake Gyllenhaals creepy character from the film Nightcrawler. If simple phone notifications isnt enough to get people looking over both shoulders all the time, perhaps a series of snuff films will do the trick.

Finally, theres Palantir: the supposed ultimate tool for surveillance.

Named after the Seeing Stones in Lord of the Rings, Palantir is designed to take in reams of data collected by any number of organizations, everything from license plates and fingerprints to identities of confidential informants and email records, and enable users to spot hidden connections between them. It was forged with the help of Peter Thiel, and fueled by the same omniscient ambition as the Pentagons former data-mining program, Total Information Network. Although it has worked with just about every alphabet soup acronym in government, BuzzFeed News last year described it as the most secretive company in law enforcement.

Almost 5,000 police officers in Los Angeles have access to the all-seeing eye of Palantir. They can use one of many available non-Amazon facial recognition tools to take a photo of anyone they deem suspicious, instantly uncover their identity, and then plug it into Palantir to find out untold gobs of info about them, warrant-free. Like magic. In fact, Palantir also helps with whats known as predictive policing, current technologys answer to the precogs from Minority Report. Its an idea premised on the belief that algorithmic data can determine where future crimes may take place and when.

According to research from the Brennan Center, the Los Angeles Police Department first began to explore the possibility of predictive policing back in 2008. Since then, the LAPD has implemented a variety of predictive policing programs, including LASER, which identifies areas where gun violence is thought likely to occur, and PredPol, which calculates so-called hot spots with a high likelihood of crimes. But there is a massive difference between deploying speed traps on highways where speeding has historically been prevalent, and sending police to neighborhoodsor near specific peoplebased solely on previous patterns, to stop crime before it happens. Especially when, as The Next Web points out, the data the predictive policing has collected may be based on various forms of unlawful and biased police practices.

Ultimately, any algorithm used to predict or prevent crime is only as reliable as the human operating it is fallible.

Why are todays police increasingly becoming equipped with tools one might use to track down terrorists? Especially when they cant even seem to keep body cameras working properly.

At the beginning of last summer, during the peak of the George Floyd protests, when Amazon put a pause on its facial recognition software (it has since extended the pause indefinitely), it seemed as though America might have a serious moment of introspection over which communities were bearing the brunt of over-policing and why; but that moment has evaporated. Just as the country started to collectively question the polices power in shaping narrative, the narrative of crime is rising in cities where police were defunded quickly took over. At this point, the idea of actually defunding the police and beefing up social services in any meaningful way has curdled into a cynical talking point that Democrats may use in the 2022 election.

If all this enhanced surveillance tech was already ramping up while crime was falling over the last few decades, I shudder to think of how much more of it well get as crime rises as it has recently. The more that average citizens feel panicked, the more Silicon Valley will crank out new and inevitably flaw-prone systems to exploit the situation. Police departments will continue working with those companies, which not only give them the opportunity to cut corners or act on biases in some cases, but ironically also make them look progressive and future-forward while doing it.

At a certain point, this continued dependence on expensive, unreliable equipment begins to look like a feature and not a bug. The use of machines to reduce the possibility of human error in police work as much as possible might just be a way to avoid ever truly dealing with the kinds of deeper issues about the role of police in society that reached a boiling point last summer.

Its as futile as putting a Band-Aid over a bullet woundor putting a piece of tape over your laptop camera and thinking that means no one can find out what youre up to.

[Correction: a previous version of this article incorrectly linked Flock Safety specifically to ICE.]

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Violent crime is up. Expanding the surveillance state is not the solution - Fast Company