Tuesday 23 November 2010

Bent American Police & Federal Agents: How to Report Them

The first thing to say, is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of US Citizens who feel hemmed in and trapped between criminal gangs and corrupt or indolent police who will offer no legal relief or redress. They go searching for some way to report the fact that their local police, or someone if their local FBI field office, is in the pocket of the criminals who are persecuting them. They search the Internet.

Now, the official advice, which they desperately need to find, is remarkably dull, boring, unobtrusive and, having been last updated ten years ago, easily missed by most popular search engines. Try this link and see! The procedure outlined here is pretty involved, and requires sending a complaint and supporting documents by post. It is possible to discern from this page that there is a procedure, but also that it hasn't been given any love by those in power since the month before George W. Bush was elected president. That being said, it's the official way, and if you follow the official procedure and nothing happens, you do at least have grounds for complaint or legal action.

America is the land of Free Enterprise (so we're told, but not in the same way as Hong Kong or Dubai) and an entrepreneur has realized that desperate American citizens, their lives threatened by gangsters and corrupt policemen, even corrupt FBI and DEA agents, are looking for much more than a ten year old webpage telling them to write a letter. He has duly created something that looks just like the desperate people are hoping to find, see this link here!

Glossy, friendly, helpful, professional -and completely and utterly bogus. This is the welcoming portal of what amounts to an advance fee fraud at best, and blackmail and stalking at worst. For the would-be complainants, it is the equivalent of those businesses that offer to get your screenplay adopted by a major production company for £25,000 "development seed capital" or those "agencies" that will kickstart your pretty daughter's modeling career by compiling and distributing a "portfolio" for an advance fee somewhere between £250 and £800.

For any corrupt policeman or Federal Agent that the site's owner manages to identify from the complaint, this is the portal to help or hell, depending on how vulnerable they prove to be. If they are in a strong position and backed by frightening people, they will be tipped off about the complaint, and given all the complainant's personal details, gratis or for a very modest fee. If the corrupt officer or agent happens to be out on a limb, though, they will be blackmailed for everything they have, to the point where they might even wish they'd been brought to justice and put in jail.

This link is to a site set up to collate and air the woes of those would-be complainants, who have had their legitimate cases against corrupt law enforcement officials hijacked, their remaining wealth leached away, their phones bugged, their computers hacked -and everything they said about the corrupt officials -and all their private details- communicated directly to those they were trying to complain about. The site at http://policeabuse.com/ is utterly bogus, a mantrap, designed to bleed the victim white and to take perverse revenge against them by betraying them to their persecutors. It has been made possible by the fact that Federal officials and politicians have completely sidelined the issue of police and FBI corruption for a decade, till all the official avenues of redress are choked with dust and a whole new field of criminal endeavour has sprung up exploiting this.

For the record, policeabuse.com connects to the "Police Complaints Centre" website, which is not an official organization, and, though all its addresses and phone numbers give the impression of it being in Washington DC, the phones are answered (eventually), mail opened and cheques cashed, in Florida, by an unlicensed private investigator. The only honest way to describe a private investigator who cannot get licensed, even in Florida, is a conman.

So, what should people do about corrupt police in America?

Well, if you're a victim, steer clear of the policeabuse.com site, and anything else like it. The real thing is dismal and boring, the con sites are glossy, inviting, and just what you are desperately hoping to see. Look at the official DoJ webpage again, and try your best with the procedure there. You cannot complain about the procedure not working if you don't try, and if you do try and nothing is done immediately, at least your complaint will still be in the system when public pressure forces the politicians to shake the dust off it and make it work again. Also, see below, for another way to put American organised crime under pressure.

If you are not a victim, it's your public duty to bend the ear of your elected representatives on behalf of your fellow citizens who are victims of police corruption and misconduct. Until they either take effective action or their ears bleed, poor things. Make your Congressman and Senator look at the official page for reporting corruption and at the conpage for fleecing anyone who is trying to be a good citizen and report corruption. Make them ashamed that this is happening!

Meanwhile, there is another way.
Very little organised crime in America completely lacks an international dimension, and no matter how much corruption and indolence are choking America's response, any intelligence on large-scale criminal dealings and connections will be read with interest if communicated to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Pretty much regardless of what country is involved, because most of the world's money-laundering crosses one British jurisdiction or another at some point in its journey. If you've got something to say about drugs, arms, money or trafficked persons being moved around, say it there.

It is also worth knowing the following:
Any item of criminal intelligence placed on the UK's police national computer, the computers of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or even MI5, has to be accompanied by a risk statement, which helps determine who can be allowed to see that intelligence and who cannot. Therefore, when reporting anything, even if you're doing it anonymously, and you know about a risk involved, say what the risk is. (This rectifies a major failing of most American criminal intelligence, and indeed, military intelligence, handling.) If you report criminal X, and you know that policeman Y is in his pocket, say that there is a risk if policeman Y knows that criminal X has been reported. And so on. Just list the risks. You're making it easier for the officer who reads your information to put that information on the system in the proper way.

And the HMRC page does allow you to leave information via the internet, on a secure server, that is outside all American jurisdiction and untouchable by corrupt American officials, whether they are in the Baldwin County Sheriff's Department, or the White House. It's not appropriate for everything, but it'll be interested in a lot of stuff and it's a start.

Update:
The official, but very long unmaintained, DOJ page on reporting police corruption, on the link above, has recently had all its content removed, although the link isn't totally dead.
This is probably a good thing, because it looks as if it were hacked several years ago, to include links to the bogus confidence trickster's site. A serious criminal offence was committed by whoever did that, although the DOJ was negligent in that it doesn't appear to have checked its own page between the last month of the Clinton Administration and the publication of this post, a decade later. It is unknown how many people have been conned in the meantime, or precisely when the DoJ page was hacked to include official-looking links to an entirely bogus site. Probably, some time after it became obvious to the conmen that nobody in the DoJ was maintaining the page.

However, the number "three hundred" tends to crop up in other cases involving pathological liars who are keeping a number of victims on a string, and it may be that this is the maximum number they can keep track of and string along at any one time. Scams with larger numbers of victims are done on a "fire and forget" basis.