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Monday, June 19, 2023

This is a Very Troubling Report

Multiple news organizations have reported the murder of four people apparently by a neighbor in Kellogg, Idaho.  All except this one are careful to report that the nature of the relationship between victims and alleged murder will be revealed in charging documents.

This 6/18/23 Idaho Tribune report claims the son in the murdered family had exposed himself to the alleged murderers' 11-year-old daughter and had a history of masturbation in class.  The claim is that neither school nor Kellogg Police took serious action on these reports.

Part of why we have a criminal justice system is to prevent vigilantism: to make sure we have the right criminal.  When that system breaks down, vigilantism and just outright mass murder is inevitable.

A couple weeks back, I linked to an Idaho Tribune article about a mental health professional who wanted to shoot at a range as he told the range master to prepare to "execute transphobes."

According to the article, Couer d'Alene police talked to him and he admitted the threat but did not take him into custody because he was not an imminent threat to public safety.  The guy had an criminal record.

It is beginning to seem as though the criminal justice system is breaking down.  In a place like Idaho, this is worrisome.  In a big city, it will lead to widespread killing.  Our society is dying?

6/18/23 Newsbreak is telling the same story.  Police took a report of the exposure but it was only a misdemeanor and he was not charged:
Although no arrests were made for the initial call, prosecutors were recommended to charge Smith with indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, although no record of Smith being charged was filed as of Tuesday, meaning either Smith wasn’t served papers before his death, or the case wasn’t made public for a different reason.

I always thought this was a serious crime.

5 comments:

  1. Some people need killing. If the government won't do it... well there ya go.

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  2. As is so often mentioned in other fora, the police don't exist to protect us from criminals; they exist to protect criminals from us. Remove that protection and the criminals are going to face mob justice, vigilantism, and vedetta--exactly how it's been all through human history before the invention of the police force c. 1829. Given the coddling of criminals by so many American LE agencies and courts in recent decades, I am kind of OK with the idea of reversion to the norm.

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  3. People will look at the social contract as not powers to enforce law residing in the government and not the people, but something more like the original social compact, in which the people as agents delegate power to the state and thence to the people employed by the state. Sworn officers. As the current method works less and less to keep people safe, people will begin to look at their agents as incompetent and take the power back to themselves.
    The State actors will not want to relinquish this power and will not recognize the nature of the social compact that led to the founding of western society.
    This civilization is dying and the war of All against All is closer than we think.

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  4. The target appears to have a long history of borderline behavior. Many bad actors learn to exploit the borders. It's costly and frustrating for law enforcement to prosecute formally in such cases: the bad acts are hard to prove and are often only misdemeanors.

    There are others who learn to exploit "protected" status, as in the cases in Rotherham in Britain, where police ignored acts of Moslems because "racism". That particular issue is not present here, apparently, but there may have been another similar issue.

    What is also troubling about this is the apparent enabling of the target by his family. His bad behavior was known and presumably brought to their attention, but continued. That may explain why the attacker killed all of them.

    Also, what is the history of the attacker? It may also be troubled. I have the strong impression that some kinds of communal intimidation were historically "delegated" to the local "toughs", while the "respectable" people kept their hands clean.

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  5. When the government fails to act to protect the law abiding against the depraved, what options are available to end the abuses of the degenerates? We have seen what has happened in NYC, Chicago, DC. Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, and Philly.

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