In my last article here on this writing platform, I made it no secret that I am no major fan of Thom Hartmann. Nonetheless, I must give this man credit where credit is due.
Recently Mr. Hartmann invited a former cop named Christopher Armitage onto the Thom Hartmann Program that can be found on YouTube. Mr. Armitage is now a journalist. He recently had a very scary experience with a mob of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement ("ICE") agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Below is a video in which he describes this ordeal in his interview with Mr. Hartmann.
I.C.E. Agents Ganged Up On A Former Cop In An Intimidating Manner With Threats
If Mr. Armitage had still been a police officer, would these I.C.E. agents have treated him as disgracefully as they did? Who can really say? If these same I.C.E. agents had ganged up on a police officer in uniform and had threatened to arrest him, among other things, that police officer certainly would have learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of a group of mentally unhinged law-enforcement officials with guns and badges closing in on him as Mr. Armitage described in the video above.
What these events bring to mind is all of the online sex-sting operations that Chris Hansen conducted so many years ago alongside the ones that you see on YouTube and on similar social-media platforms today in which a mob of police officers swarm at a suspect as he leaves a sting house and throw him down to the ground as though he is some kind of violent, dangerous terrorist or the likes. They even have these suspects in tears. He feels helpless against them as they pin him down to the ground.
Now, to all of you police officers who have been involved in arresting suspects who have gotten caught in online sex-sting operations, whether you work on one of the Internet Crimes Against Children ("I.C.A.C.") task forces or you simply happened to receive a call to carry out an arrest of someone who got caught in an online sex-sting operation, I'm going to make this one request to you herein. Sit back and imagine yourself in Mr. Armitage's shoes when the I.C.E. agents closed in on him.
It's not a very pleasant thought, is it? If it could happen to a former cop, it could happen to any cop. If you're a police officer who has engaged in this same kind of outrageous behavior, don't you think that the suspects who have gotten caught in online sex-sting operations and that you have tackled to the ground have needlessly suffered the same kind of fear and trauma that Mr. Armitage did?
As an officer of the law, all you have to do whenever you arrest these suspects is handcuff them and read them their rights rather than manhandle them. They are not dangerous terrorists. They are usually men who have attempted to do something that would be perfectly legal for a high-school boy under the age of eighteen to do.
Let's also not forget that many European nations have a statutory age of consent that is no higher than 14 years old. Therefore, these online sex-sting operations here in the United States make no sense in the first place.
Germany and Austria are among the European nations where the statutory age of consent is only 14 years old. Take a look at the two German-speaking teenage girls in the video below.
Two German-Speaking High School Girls Have Well-Built Figures That Even Adult Men Will Likely Notice
Do these two girls in the video above still play with Barbie Dolls? I hardly think so. Do they still watch cartoons on television? Probably not. Instead, they likely go out on dates to do what most German and Austrian girls their age would find to be fun.
If they both were to go to a local discotheque or the likes to go dancing and a college man in his early twenties were to walk up to one of them to ask her to dance, do you think she would be willing to do so? If he were handsome, she probably would.
Also, no police officer would ever grab that young college man and throw him to the ground, because nothing he would be doing would be illegal no matter what they suspected it was so long as it didn't involve force or coercion inasmuch as the young girl would be legally over the statutory age of consent. Germany and Austria don't have dumb sex laws as the United States has.
Let's stop pretending that teenage girls are toddlers. Law-enforcement officials need to stop misusing the sex laws pertaining to teenage minors in our nation to throw their weight around. It's as simple as that.
Mr. Armitage had a close call with I.C.E. agents. They could have really done some major bodily harm to him. At the same time, hopefully, police officers across the United States will see this incident on the Internet that Mr. Armitage was involved in and think twice about acting needlessly violent with anyone they arrest.
If a father were to find out that his 15-year-old daughter was pregnant and he confronted her 16-year-old boyfriend about it, would the law be okay with the father throwing that boy onto the ground and terrorizing him? Of course, it wouldn't. So then why should the law be okay with law-enforcement officials taking a suspect who got caught in an online sex-sting operation and manhandling him? It shouldn't be.
There have been other incidents here in our nation of police officers storming into the residences of people on the sex-offender registry without search warrants and tearing up their property. I could go on and on regarding the number of rights that these rogue cops violate in similar scenarios.
One of the things that Mr. Armitage complained about was the decadence of the United States Constitution, and Norman Michael Achin has made comments about that same problem in many of his videos on his YouTube channel named I.C.A.C. Unpacked. The United States definitely has a constitutional crisis and it will only get worse, unless each and every U.S. citizen stands up to the system and attempts to reforms it any way possible.
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