To avoid infiltration, MC's require prospects to commit felonies in the presence of members. So the claim that the U/C broke no laws himself is laughable. Secondly, how many schemes were cooked up by the U/C? There is no way to know. Certainly, his advice to the crew would be to go out and commit more crimes to buff up his own stats. He would never be a voice saying, "no, robbing a gas station is a bad idea." Instead, he would say, "why are we wasting our time on small potatoes? We gotta rob a bank instead."
Informers manufacture crime where there otherwise would be little or none.
These problems have been around for centuries and are nothing new:
{the informers} were...the scourge of the people...Their careless or criminal violation of truth and justice was covered by the consecrated mask of zeal; and they might securely aim their poisoned arrows at the breast either of the guilty or the innocent...A faithful subject...was exposed to the danger of being dragged in chains to the court to defend his life and fortune against the malicious charge of these privileged informers.
I Gibbon,Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire548, 49 {Modern Library ed.}
There are actually a ton of examples now that I'm thinking about it. Canadian entrapment laws are much more lax and it happens pretty frequently up there as well
>To avoid infiltration, MC's require prospects to commit felonies in the presence of members. So the claim that the U/C broke no laws himself is laughable.
Sounds like many entities, politics, business, masons, military, police, nhs.
Its the same thing over and over again, break a rule/law, say you didnt see something and watch the promotion's occur.
As long as humans and money exist you will always have corruption but some happen to be on the right side of the law and others not.
There are ways to appear to commit a felony without actually doing it. For example, he could sell a large amount of drugs to another informant or he could rob a fake business set up by the fbi.
Do you seriously think these guys are like, "pick a crime and target, anything really so long as it's a legit felony...we'll give you a week to get creative, then when you're ready, we can all sing kumbaya while you demonstrate your loyalty to the group"?
There’s a case in Geelong Australia where a stabbing was caught on grainy cctv, people knew who the perpetrator was, but there was no hard evidence.
The undercover police set up a fake gang that recruited the suspect, and performed fake burglaries on prepared targets as part of their attempt to get him to confess, including the tv show staple of the undercover police officer cell mate, none of which worked he never confessed to the crime to his fellow ‘gang members’
It was said to be the states most expensive unsuccessful undercover operation, after the operation was shut down a million dollar reward was offered. I believe it was evidence that was then provided that lead to a conviction
Yesterday I read a bit about the European Convention on Human Rights, where Article 2 – Right to life [0] left me thinking for a while.
2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary:
a. in defence of any person from unlawful violence;
b. in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained;
c. in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.
It's a bit loose, isn't it? You can shoot someone if it's the only way to prevent them ruffling your hair, escaping from an arrest for shoplifting, or inciting a political protest.
But the ECHR is meant to be a lowest common denominator: states are encouraged to have their own stricter prohibitions on human rights abuses.
This post seems to be suggesting that the main cause of Pagan related violence is informers.
> where there otherwise would e little or none
This is really not believable.
There is definitely a problem with informers manufacturing crime, but that should not be used to distract from what the Pagan MC really is, or prevent law enforcement from trying to protect the rest of us from their predations.
Did you copy and paste one of the comments from the linked story?
edit while trying to figure this out their profile says the post was from yesterday but thie comments section says from an hour ago. Which makes me find it more likely the same person posted it both places.
"So the claim that the U/C broke no laws himself is laughable."
Even if he wasn't performing the actions, he would still be committing crimes. That's how they charge a lot of people. Whether it's a conspiracy charge for having knowledge of (or help plan, or benefit from) the crimes before they happen, or if you're committing some lessor crime and one of your co-criminals kills someone so you're all charged with murder, etc.
If I'm a cop, and I suggest to you that we should go rob a bank tomorrow, and you actually show up at Main and Third to do it, that's not entrapment. That's just you being a bank robber.
If I threaten you into doing it, that's entrapment. If I don't threaten you, and we talk about doing it, but you don't actually take any meaningful steps towards doing it, you're in the clear. If we talk about doing it, and you go out to buy a gun, and a ski mask, and find a driver for the getaway car, it's also not entrapment. Because you're taking meaningful steps towards carrying out a conspiracy.
Even if I'm the one selling you the gun. And the ski mask.
It's still 100% total bullshit. For law enforcement to make any attempt at convincing someone to commit a crime so that they could then come in and make the arrest to solve the crime is absolutley something that should not be allowed.
If I hire a hitman to do a deed, I go to jail more than the hitman. When a LEO convinces someone to do a crime, they need to go to jail too.
I think that it depend on the circumstances; there are different kind of entrapment, that do different things. In some cases, the police should be arrested for such a thing, but whoever they tried to convince to do, can be freed due to a technicality. In some cases, both the police and whoever they told to do, should both be arrested for such a thing. In some cases, nobody need to be arrested. Sometimes, the police should be fired for such a thing but should not be arrested.
Selling you a gun and ski mask does not necessarily mean that you will rob a bank. That isn't entrapment. In that case, if you do rob a bank then you can be arrested for it; whoever sold the gun and ski mask didn't make them rob a bank so they aren't the criminal. (Although, there might be a separate issue if purchasing a gun requires safety training (which it probably should, if it is a business transaction), and they don't have any; but, that is a separate issue.)
But, if the police lie to you to make you to rob a bank instead, to try to make you to do so, then that is different; then the police is the one who is criminal.
People that commit these crimes "suggested" by undercover typically aren't the sharpest tool in the box. For LEOs to take advantage of that is reprehensible.
One of LEOs responsibilities shouldn't be to see how many crimes they can get others to commit on their behest. It should be to catch those that commit crimes. We don't need more crime because LEO encourages it. That's just bassakwards logic.
> One of LEOs responsibilities shouldn't be to see how many crimes they can get others to commit on their behest. It should be to catch those that commit crimes. We don't need more crime because LEO encourages it. That's just bassakwards logic.
This is I agree. If someone else commit the crime then the police can arrest them. Police should not make other people to commit a crime, and the police should not commit their own crimes either. Even if they are the police, they should not be mean to everyone else, but too often there is too much police meanness.
Jerry Drake Varnell needed the assistance of 3 FBI agents: one to seduce him online, another to pose as a bomb expert, and a third to teach him to drive a car.
“ An affirmative defense in which a defendant alleges that police officers acquired the evidence necessary to commence a criminal prosecution of the defendant by inducing the defendant to engage in a criminal act which the defendant would not otherwise have committed.”
Of course, the debate is “not otherwise committed” but hypotheticals are not a basis for “beyond reasonable doubt.”
> MC's require prospects to commit felonies in the presence of members.
> Informers manufacture crime where there otherwise would be little or none.
These points are contradictory - crime is a required part of the initiation, but they also would not have done any crimes without the undercover agent tricking them?
> He would never be a voice saying, "no, robbing a gas station is a bad idea."
Why should he have to be? Do you think it would have helped? Maybe they should be sending in "undercover moms" instead to deradicalise gangs.
There's a small part of the book that crosses over with the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests and the interpretation of events that transpired couldn't be further apart. It feels like that era of American literature is long past now.
It has been some time but I think it's from "Hells Angels' I learned Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, participated in MKUltra while working as a student at Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital and the character Chief was inspired by his own hallucinations.
Hunter S. Thompson partied with the Hells Angels at Ken Kesey's house with the Merry Pranksters. There's a lot to unpack there.
This article doesn't say how many people they entrapp... arrested from this special agent's work. And it sounds like it took a thousand undercover assignments to catch them selling drugs?
As long as the undercover cop isn't the one leading the gang and threatening violence towards anyone that doesn't help commit crimes, it's likely not entrapment. Entrapment almost always falls under a crime that you otherwise never would have done if a cop didn't somehow coerce you to do it. I'm sure there are some grey areas like a cop offering a homeless person some drugs to sell or telling a lower ranking gang member to commit a crime when knowing that they may be harmed if they refuse. But simply participating in illegal activities that would be taking place regardless of the undercover's presence is not entrapment.
I agree completely with both parts of the second half of your post, and I think the parent commenter above yours does as well.
The first half, however, is neither kind, nor thoughtful. It's a direct attack on someone, rather than engaging in mutual learning on the subject at hand.
I agree, except it was meant to be a tounge-in-cheek response rather than a blatant FU. I was hoping the specific phrasing would be identifiable as such. Clearly I fell victim to the assuming part.
However, phrases like left cost lib are pretty much equally an attack on someone as well. Not saying tit-for-tat is the level of discourse, but I was hoping to make it laughable with the retort rather than escalate. Mission NOT accomplished. Got it.
For example, my son and I just started riding motorcycles and "cager" is sorta stupid YouTuber biker slang for people in cars. You know, it's the sort of thing said to make motorcycle riders feel more superior (because we are, of course, you filthy cager). In the article, the term is pointed out as a sign of how sinister the Pagans were. I don't doubt that they were and are, but that example was silly enough to make me question some of the other bits in the article, honestly.
The bit about riding at 100mph two abreast in a line of 100 riders on a round trip NY to Ohio drug run sounds completely shit-in-my-pants terrifying. But the cager thing is stupid.
Sounds a lot like Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang:
"In 1998, William Queen was a veteran law enforcement agent with a lifelong love of motorcycles and a lack of patience with paperwork. When a “confidential informant” made contact with his boss at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, offering to take an agent inside the San Fernando chapter of the Mongols (the scourge of Southern California, and one of the most dangerous gangs in America), Queen jumped at the chance, not realizing that he was kicking-starting the most extensive undercover operation inside an outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement.
Nor did Queen suspect that he would penetrate the gang so successfully that he would become a fully “patched-in” member, eventually rising through their ranks to the office of treasurer, where he had unprecedented access to evidence of their criminal activity. After Queen spent twenty-eight months as “Billy St. John,” the bearded, beer-swilling, Harley-riding gang-banger, the truth of his identity became blurry, even to himself.
During his initial “prospecting” phase, Queen was at the mercy of crank-fueled criminal psychopaths who sought to have him test his mettle and prove his fealty by any means necessary, from selling (and doing) drugs, to arms trafficking, stealing motorcycles, driving getaway cars, and, in one shocking instance, stitching up the face of a Mongol “ol’ lady” after a particularly brutal beating at the hands of her boyfriend.
Yet despite the constant criminality of the gang, for whom planning cop killings and gang rapes were business as usual, Queen also came to see the genuine camaraderie they shared. When his lengthy undercover work totally isolated Queen from family, his friends, and ATF colleagues, the Mongols felt like the only family he had left. “I had no doubt these guys genuinely loved Billy St. John and would have laid down their lives for him. But they wouldn’t hesitate to murder Billy Queen.”
From Queen’s first sleight of hand with a line of methamphetamine in front of him and a knife at his throat, to the fearsome face-off with their decades-old enemy, the Hell’s Angels (a brawl that left three bikers dead), to the heartbreaking scene of a father ostracized at Parents’ Night because his deranged-outlaw appearance precluded any interaction with regular citizens, Under and Alone is a breathless, adrenaline-charged read that puts you on the street with some of the most dangerous men in America and with the law enforcement agents who risk everything to bring them in."
Informers manufacture crime where there otherwise would be little or none.
These problems have been around for centuries and are nothing new:
{the informers} were...the scourge of the people...Their careless or criminal violation of truth and justice was covered by the consecrated mask of zeal; and they might securely aim their poisoned arrows at the breast either of the guilty or the innocent...A faithful subject...was exposed to the danger of being dragged in chains to the court to defend his life and fortune against the malicious charge of these privileged informers.
I Gibbon,Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire548, 49 {Modern Library ed.}
See, "How to Spot the Informant at your Local Mosque": https://casetext.com/analysis/how-to-spot-the-informant-at-y...