by Patrick Henningsen

Created on: July 06, 2007

Past experience shows us that spending another $2 Billion per year on law enforcement in the US will have no effect on reducing crime levels. History shows that there is no real correlation between throwing large sums of money at a problem and reducing that problem(the fact that we cannot even afford it is beside the point). Take a look at the very grand, very expensive "War on Drugs" which was launched by the Bush Sr Administration in the late 80's. Despite the Billions allocated in this campaign- the problem increased... and is still increasing today. But let's keep our eyes on what's really at play here. Currently in the US, there is a disturbing trend taking place under our noses, one which every American get to grips and take notice of, if they haven't already. That trend is not rising crime levels, rather it's the rocketing increase in the amount of law enforcement and security personnel we are fast surrounding ourselves with.

Back in 1990, Law Enforcement personnel employed throughout the US numbered around 300,000 and by contrast today in 2007, the ranks have swelled to nearly 2,000,000- an increase of five-fold in only a decade and a half! During this time we have similarly seen an alarming growth in the US prison population, with approximately 2,000,000 incarcerated at any one time. Thats a ratio of one Law Enforcement Employee per prison inmate. You can also add to this the hundreds of thousands of new private security personnel employed throughout the country, and on the administrative side- the new (and largest) department in the Federal Government... Homeland Security. This is a department which has come at an unprecedented cost to the American people. Normally, these kind of scary trends and frightening ratios could describe the emergence of a real 'Police State', but it's much worse than that. These levels in US actually surpass number in Eastern Europe during the Communist years, these are Soviet-level numbers we are talking about.

So is crime no longer the big issue? Well that depends on what sort of crime we're talking about- petty, street, cyber, theft, blue collar, drugs... even white collar? No, let's ask a better question altogether. How do we protect ourselves when our government violates our First Amendment Rights, or suspends the US Constitution to suit a political agenda? By putting current events and trends into the perspective of the "War on Terror", with a US Gov't who has argued for Wire-Tapping its own population, domestic spying,

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