No Disintegrations: DHS Is Feeling A Tad Insecure

*“Bounty hunters. We don’t need that scum.”*

Many sources are reporting that DHS is looking to spend around $180 million on a bounty hunter program.

Which is just so many kinds of wrong.

Even the existence of bounty hunters in a modern State is an admission of defeat by the legal system: we can’t do our job, so let’s let just anyone give it a go; we’ll even pay them.

Which isn’t desirable, but might be kinda OK for some things, I guess? If your job is picking up trash around town and the city council won’t give you the budget to hire enough trash-picker-uppers then fine; ask the public to help.

After all, the public are responsible for electing the city council and are also the ones harmed by having a filthy city.

I mean, it’s embarrassing to have to do it and it’s not right and shouldn’t really be allowed, but no one’s actually hurt by it.

But law enforcement is just not in the same category.

Like the military and the intelligence services (who have also gone whole hog on a frenzy of subcontracting their jobs to mercenaries and corporate spies lately), police are supposed to operate under a set of fairly exacting rules and restrictions on what they can get up to and how.

Rules and restrictions that tend to be ignored when passing off tasks to subcontractors.

(For more than enough on that, you can just glance briefly at the private prison industry. Or anything to do with the “War on Terror”. Or the 4th Amendment, if you can find it anywhere.)