Bad Policing: Even “Qualified Immunity” Can’t Defend This One

“Fuck that shit, ’cause I ain’t the one
for a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun”

Fine, let’s talk about that CBP raid in Chicago.

TLDR: it was bad; very, very bad.

Set aside for the moment the whole military cosplay aspect of it. That was ludicrous enough, but it’s not really the main point here; a bunch of cops wanting to play at being soldiers is stupid, but not actually illegal.

And set aside the glaringly obvious racist background to it too. That’s also not the point; much of that was actually illegal, but this blog does not support laws that consider motivations.

The organizers and participants in that raid should still all be arrested immediately.

The raid was conducted in several ways that blatantly violate not just many well-established civil rights laws, but also any rational moral basis for State actions:

They acted without a warrant.
They acted on generalized suspicion, not particularized information.
They targeted a group (people living in a particular building), not individuals.
They processed people by category (race), not as individuals.
They unnecessarily damaged and destroyed property.

Frankly, the treatment of children in the raid is, by itself, grounds to arrest every person involved.

But every one of the points listed there violates the 4th Amendment, in ways that are both blatantly obvious and well established.

Now, I would argue that even under the Supreme Court’s foolish and unsupportable “qualified immunity” standard all of these actions break laws that are so established that no officer could possibly be unaware that this was all massively illegal.

So the Chicago and Illinois police should be pursuing every single person involved in planning or carrying out that raid.

And, since the current controllers of the federal government are unlikely to hand over a list of names, they should be barricading every federal facility in the city and state until the perpetrators are identified and arrested.

This would absolutely not be “insurrection”.