From the amount of money spent each year in the United States on law enforcement, one might assume crime continues to be a growing problem.
But that’s not the case at all.
Crime rates today are at their lowest levels in 30 years and the rate of violent crime has dipped to a 39-year low. Yet the number of arrests between 2009 and 2010 declined only slightly, according to the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), which noted in its new report that police spending increased 445% between 1982 and 2007 and federal funding for police burgeoned by 729%.
Meanwhile, local, state and federal governments spend more than $100 billion each year on public safety and to maintain police ranks that exceed 710,000 nationwide.
Between 1993 and 2007 arrests for violent crimes dropped 27% and property crime arrests 22%. With fewer violent and property crimes being committed, the burgeoning ranks of police departments have concentrated on other offenses, particularly those related to the illegal drug trade. During the same period, drug-related arrests climbed 45%. The report notes that “Although Blacks make up 13 percent of the population, they make up 31 percent of arrests for drug offenses.”
“These arrests, often for possession of very small amounts of drugs, carry tremendous costs both to society and to the people involved, who must then face the rest of their life with the collateral consequences of a criminal record,” the JPI wrote.
The think tank suggested politicians redirect funding more toward “true community-based and collaborative policing efforts” as well as alternative programs and initiatives that “promote healthy safe communities.”
It suggested that law enforcement concentrate on serious offenses and, for low-level offenses, issue citations rather than pursue arrests.
This case could have been a slam dunk for the NYPD, had it not been for one thing: the video showing police claims of disorderly conduct during an OWS protest to be completely untrue.
Hundreds have been arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests, but photographer Alexander Arbuckle’s case was the first to go to trial – and after just two days, the Manhattan Criminal Court found him not guilty.
Supporters of the OWS protest movement have already hailed the ruling as a major legal victory.
Arbuckle was arrested on New Year’s Day for allegedly blocking traffic during a protest march. He was charged with disorderly conduct, and his arresting officer testified under oath that he, along with the protesters, was standing in the street, despite frequent requests from the police to move to the sidewalk.
Pool’s footage clearly shows Arbuckle, along with all the other protesters, standing on the sidewalk. In fact, the only people blocking traffic were the police officers themselves
His lawyers said the video proving that testimony false is what swayed the judge, and the verdict a clear indication that the NYPD was over-policing the protests.
The irony of the case, however, is that Arbuckle was not a protester, or even a supporter of the Occupy movement. He was there to document the cops’ side of the story.
A political science and photography major at NYU, Arbuckle felt the police were not being fairly represented in the media.
“All the focus was on the conflict and the worst instances of brutality and aggression, where most of the police I met down there were really professional and restrained,” the student said.
However, his good intentions only landed him in trouble. As with all the other detained protesters, the police offered Arbuckle an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal (ACD), which basically means he would be let off the hook if he agreed not to fight the charges. But to Arbuckle, that meant an admission of guilt, and he decided to take the case to trial.
In our drones report, we discuss the coming onslaught of domestic drones and the weak state of the privacy laws that should protect us, and we outline our recommendations for protections that Congress and local governments should put in place.
But if nothing is done, how might things go? Let’s take a look at how police drone use could unfold:
The FAA’s new rules go into effect. Acting under orders from Congress, the FAA in coming months and years will significantly loosen the regulations that have been holding back broader deployment of drones. Starting later this year, for example, the FAA must allow any “government public safety agency” to operate any small drone (under 4.4 pounds) as long as certain conditions are met.
More and more police departments begin using them. The FAA’s new rules allow for the release of pent-up demand among police departments for cheap aerial surveillance. Ownership of drones quickly becomes common among departments large and small. Organizations are formed by police drone operators, who exchange tips and advice. We also begin to hear about their deployment by federal agencies, other than on the border.
We start to hear stories about how they’re being used. Most departments and agencies are relatively careful at first, and we begin to hear stories about drones being put to use in specific, mostly unobjectionable police operations such as raids, chases, and searches supported by warrants.
Drone use broadens. Fairly quickly, however, we begin to hear about a few departments deploying drones for broader, more general uses: drug surveillance, marches and rallies, and generalized monitoring of troubled neighborhoods.
Private use is banned. A terrorist like the pilot who crashed his plane into an IRS building in Texas uses an explosives-laden drone to try to attack a public facility. In response, the government clamps down on private use of the technology. The net result is that the government can use it for surveillance but individuals cannot use it to watch the government.
Drones become able to mutually coordinate. Multiple drones deployed over neighborhoods can be linked together, and communicate and coordinate with each other (see this video for an early taste of what that could look like). This allows a swarm of craft to form a single, distributed wide-area surveillance system such as that envisioned by the “Gorgon Stare” program.
The analytics gets better. At the same time, drones and the computers behind them become more intelligent and capable of analyzing the video feeds they are generating. They gain the ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around a city or town, with different drones handing off the tracking to each other just as a mobile phone network passes a signal from one cell to another as a user rides down the highway.
Flight durations grow. Technology improvements (involving blimps, perhaps, or solar-power innovations) allow for drones to stay aloft for longer periods more cheaply, which becomes key in permitting their use for persistent surveillance.
The cycle accelerates. The advancing technology incentivizes agencies to buy even more drones, which in turn spurs more technology development, and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating.
Laws are further loosened. As drones get smarter and more reliable and very good at sensing and avoiding other aircraft, FAA restrictions are further loosened, permitting even autonomous flight.
Pervasive tracking becomes common. Despite opposition, a few police departments begin deploying drones 24/7 over certain areas. The media covers the controversy but Congress takes no action, and eventually it becomes old news, and the practice spreads until many or most American towns and cities are subject to the practice.
Technologies are combined. Drone video cameras and tracking analytics are combined or synched up with other technologies such as face recognition, gait recognition, license-plate scanners, and cell phone location data.
The data is mined. With individuals’ comings and goings routinely monitored, databases are able build up records of where people live, work, and play—what friends they visit, bars they drink at, doctors they visit, what houses of worship, or political events, or sexually oriented establishments they go to—and who else is at those places at the same time. Computers comb through this data looking for “suspicious patterns,” and when the algorithms kick up an alarm, the person involved becomes the subject of much more extensive surveillance.
Ultimately, such surveillance leads to an oppressive atmosphere where people learn to think twice about everything they do, knowing that it will be recorded, charted, scrutinized by increasingly intelligent computers, and possibly used to target them.
I’m not sure how realistic this scenario is. Perhaps it is far-fetched (I hope so). But the questions to ask are: which of the above steps is unlikely to take place, and why? And if we don’t end up in the situation described, how close will we get?
Police in the US state of Georgia have handcuffed a six-year-old black school girl with her arms behind her back because the girl threw a tantrum.
Salecia Johnson was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing books and toys in an outburst at the principal’s office at Creekside Elementary, police said. According to the police, she also threw a small shelf that struck the principal in the leg, and jumped on a paper shredder and tried to break a glass frame.
She “was restrained by placing her hands behind her back and handcuffed,” police said, defending the action as a safety measure.
Salecia was transported to the Milledgeville Police Department where her handcuffs were removed and she was placed in a patrol briefing room.
A juvenile complaint has been filed against Salecia, accusing the girl of simple assault and damage to property.
The girl’s family demanded Tuesday that their city in central Georgia change policy so that other children won’t receive the same treatment.
“We would not like to see this happen to another child, because it’s horrifying. It’s devastating”, the girl’s aunt, Candace Ruff, said, adding that the girl was terrified by the ordeal.
The girl’s family is also furious that law enforcement officials got involved in a situation viewed as a school disciplinary issue.
“What is the purpose of counselors and other aides in the school system when they just call law enforcement to calm a child when they act out?” her aunt said.
Her mother, Constance Ruff, said the girl has been suspended and can’t return to school until August.
I don’t know Temple University photojournalism major Ian Van Kuyk, despite his enrollment in Temple’s Journalism Department, where I teach.
I do know that dynamics embedded in the recent arrest of Van Kuyk by Philadelphia police–an arrest now generating news coverage nationwide–provide yet another snapshot of the systemic abuses I’ve reported and researched during three decades spent documenting the lawlessness endemic among law enforcers.
Philadelphia police roughed-up and arrested Van Kuyk for his photographing a police traffic stop taking place in front of his apartment. The arrest of Van Kuyk violated Philadelphia Police Department directives permitting such photographing as well as court rulings and constitutional rights.
Police harassing citizens lawfully documenting police activities taking place in public is a “widespread and continuing” problem according to the ACLU.
“The right of citizens to record the police is a critical check and balance,” an ACLU analyst noted during a September 2011 speech where he referenced six incidents in five cities of police arresting citizen photographers during just the spring of last year.
Yes, police attacking civilians for lawfully photographing public spaces, police routinely employing unlawful excessive force and prosecutors too frequently turning a blind eye to such police misconduct are all nationwide problems.
Systemic abuses by police and the prosecutors that condone such misconduct corrode public confidence in the justice system and cost taxpayers millions of dollars spent on settling lawsuits alleging illegalities by police.
Historically, abuses by police and particularly those by prosecutors receive short-shrift from most elected officials.
Just a few days before the alleged March 14, 2012 abuse of Van Kuyk, an artist filed a federal lawsuit against a Philadelphia policeman for roughing her up when arresting her less than two miles from the Van Kuyk incident. When arrested that artist was lawfully creating an outdoor artwork.
In January 2012, the City of Philadelphia settled another lawsuit filed against the same artist-arresting policeman, with the City agreeing to pay a woman $30,000. She alleged that the officer had “violently manhandled” her – breaking her nose and spraining her wrist during a sidewalk encounter.
Abundant evidence now implicates a police-prosecutor abuse angle in the Florida fatal shooting of teen Trayvon Martin by 28-year-old George Zimmerman.
The evidence is clear that Sanford, FL police officials acted in incomprehensible variance with established procedures in their handling of that fatal incident, seemingly proceeding in ways calculated to support Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.
And evidence indicates those police officials plus prosecutors rejected a Sanford Police detective’s request to arrest Zimmerman for manslaughter – a management decision that appears to demonstrate less concern for victim Martin than for shooter Zimmerman, whom the evidence shows ignored police orders to not confront Martin, only to have him then claim he shot Martin in self-defense.
The incident producing the arrest of Van Kuyk and outrage from the general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) about gross violations of this young photojournalist’s First Amendment rights occurred in a section of South Philadelphia.
Of course there are two sides: in this case the account advanced by arresting officers and accounts from Van Kuyk, his girlfriend (also arrested that night) and a few of their neighbors who witnessed the events.
The only points of agreement between the two versions are that police were questioning one of Van Kuyk’s neighbors outside the South Philadelphia apartment where Van Kuyk lived, and that the budding photojournalist began photographing that encounter.
Philadelphia police are now re-investigating the incident in the wake of criticism and critical news coverage.
According to Van Kuyk, Philly police, after demanding that he stop photographing them, and after their dismissing his First Amendment protests, snatched Van Kuyk up, slammed him to the ground, swept him off to a police station for a nearly 24-hour detention, and eventually slapped him with a slew of charges, including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstruction of justice.
How was Van Kuyk ‘obstructing justice’ if, as an NPPA letter to Philadelphia police contends, Van Kuyk “never came closer than ten feet” to the police? That letter notes that Van Kuyk “voluntarily backed up” when ordered by police before a policeman “approached [him] in an aggressive manner demanding that he stop taking pictures.”
Police also arrested Van Kuyk’s girlfriend, detaining her for 19-hours, also slamming her with trumped-up charges. Her arrest arose from her trying to retrieve Van Kuyk’s school-issued camera.
At the core of this incident we see some Philadelphia police failing to follow clearly stated department policy. A Philadelphia Police Department directive issued in September 2011 bars officers from arresting people for “photographing, videotaping or audibly recording police personnel [conducting] official business… in any public space.”
The “Purpose” listed on that policy, Memorandum (11-01), was to “remove any confusion as to duties and responsibilities” when police find themselves subjected to recording devices.
That National Press Photographers Association letter to Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner, raising the First Amendment, stated “It is truly abhorrent that not only did your officers abrogate that right [they] chose to add insult to injury by overcharging Mr. Van Kuyk with offenses he did not commit.”
Given that red-line PPD policy directive, police supervisors and prosecutors should have immediately pulled the plug on the charges against Van Kuyk and his girlfriend, but they didn’t.
Prosecutors pressed the flawed-arrest-related charges against Van Kuyk’s girlfriend, extracting their pound of flesh by forcing her into a program requiring 12-hours of community service and paying a $200 fine in exchange for their dismissing those flawed charges.
Van Kuyk is awaiting his preliminary hearing and possible trial.
The prosecution of Van Kuyk’s girlfriend and his pending charges are a stain on both the ethical duty of prosecutors to seek justice and Professional Conduct rules for prosecutors restricting prosecutions “not supported by probable cause.”
Someone somewhere in Philly’s prosecutor’s office should have questioned the questionable if not totally bogus charges arising from arrests prompted by police violating their department policy.
Philadelphia police spokesmen proclaim that the arresting officers knew about that directive protecting First Amendment activity, but contend that “other things happened… that caused the officers to make an arrest,” according to widely reported media accounts.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s record of abusive misconduct, however, casts a dark shadow on the department’s contention that “other things happened,” as do eyewitness accounts.
This incident involving Van Kuyk is hauntingly similar to an August 1972 incident that occurred just ten blocks from Van Kuyk’s apartment. In that 1972 incident, a minister questioning police for pummeling a man outside his house triggered a home-invasion, with police ransacking the minister’s home and arresting him, his wife, his daughter and a house guest from Germany.
As with the Van Kuyk case, the assaulting police hit Rev. Joseph Kirkland, his family and house guest with a slew of charges, including disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer.
Philly prosecutors pressed those charges, which police had concocted to cover-up their criminal assault on Kirkland’s house, but a judge quickly dismissed them.
Philly’s then top prosecutor, Arlen Specter, later a US Senator and top Senate Judicial Committee member, rejected widespread demands to prosecute those offending police officers for their criminal conduct against Rev. Kirkland and his family.
Specter recently released a book criticizing the dysfunction in contemporary partisan politics – an ironic argument coming from someone who once shirked his ethical and professional duties by ignoring outrageous misconduct and abusive behavior by police and prosecutors.
Months after that August 1972 incident, a federal judge in Philadelphia issued a ruling in a class-action police brutality lawsuit in which he criticized arrests without probable cause.
That judge noted that those most likely to be targeted for police abuse are individuals who had the audacity (but legal right) to challenge their initial police contact.
I guess certain abusive practices are just embedded in Philadelphia Police Department culture.
So are a 1972 incident and 1973 court ruling ancient history?
Well, that ’72 incident and ’73 court ruling implicated issues animating the Van Kuyk incident.
Meanwhile, a Maryland man in 2010 avoided a possible 16-year prison term for posting a video on YouTube showing a plainclothes state trooper brandishing a pistol when he stops that man for an alleged speeding violation.
A Maryland judge dismissed the criminal charges filed against that motorcyclist wearing a helmet cam in a ruling reminding police and prosecutors that public officials are “ultimately accountable to the public” and public servants should not expect their action to be “shielded from public observation.”
Philadelphia prosecutors need to drop the charges against Van Kuyk and reverse the proceeding against his girlfriend.
Further, authorities nationwide need to crack down on misconduct by police and prosecutors.
Professor James Petras, 89, world-renowned sociologist, public intellectual, and scholar of Latin American politics and global economics, died peacefully on January 17, 2026, in Seattle, WA, surrounded by family.
A prolific scholar and activist, he devoted his life to challenging power, imperialism, and inequality. … continue
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Police in the US state of Georgia have handcuffed a six-year-old black school girl with her arms behind her back because the girl threw a tantrum.
02.13.2026 
Aletho News
Aletho News 