ATF Resorts to Dubious Tactics to Secure Arrests
·
Raven Clabough
New American
December 10, 2013
New American
December 10, 2013
An exposé by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports
that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (still
known as ATF) engaged in rogue tactics to go after guns on the street,
including exploiting the mentally ill, purchasing weapons at extremely
high costs, and allowing minors to smoke marijuana and drink.
The exposé follows one that the Journal Sentinel ran earlier
this year that focused on the Milwaukee arm of the ATF. According to
that article, the undercover ATF agents opened a storefront sting
operation that was said to have focused on breaking up criminal
operations in Milwaukee by purchasing illegal guns and drugs from
felons.
Unfortunately, the operation was a fiasco. The newspaper noted,
But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down a gang.
Instead,
it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures, including an ATF
military-style machine gun landing on the streets of Milwaukee and the
agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.
When
the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents and
Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out the
store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names, vehicles
and phone numbers of undercover agents.
And
the agency remains locked in a battle with the building’s owner, who
says he is owed about $15,000 because of utility bills, holes in the
walls, broken doors and damage from an overflowing toilet.
Officials claimed that the blunders committed by the Milwaukee ATF were limited to that specific office, but the most recent exposé reveals
that there is a clear “pattern of questionable decisions that were
employed by six ATF operations, including Milwaukee, nationwide,” Fox
News writes.
Saturday’s report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says
that a review of thousands of pages of court records, police records,
and other important documents reveals that the ATF often resorts to
rogue tactics such as those seen in the Milwaukee sting.
Fox News reports,
Similar
to the Milwaukee operation, agents in other cities set up a gun buyback
program that turned into a cash cow for sellers. The ATF offered
sky-high prices, so people would just buy guns at other shops and turn
them over to undercover agents for a quick profit, according to the
report.
The
undercover ATF agents running Squid’s Smoke Shop in Portland, Oregon,
convinced a mentally disabled young man to get a tattoo on his neck of a
squid smoking marijuana to help promote their business, and even paid
him $150 to convince him to do so. Months later, he would learn that the
shop was part of a setup.
Careful review of the documents revealed a number of disquieting findings.
ATF
agents used mentally disabled people to help promote their businesses,
and then arrested them for their participation in at least four cities,
in addition to Milwaukee.
Likewise,
agents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, gave a brain-damaged drug addict a
“tutorial” on machine guns, despite his meager knowledge of weapons.
In
several other cities, agents opened undercover gun and drug operations
in safe zones near churches and schools and permitted juveniles to smoke
marijuana and drink. In Portland, attorneys for three teens who were
charged stated that one of the female agents had dressed provocatively,
flirted with the boys, and encouraged them to bring drugs and weapons to
the store for sale.
Other sting operations involved agents running fake pawnshops and selling stolen merchandise.
In Atlanta, for example, ATF agents bought guns that had been stolen, in some cases, from police cars.
ATF
agents also inflicted damage on buildings that they rented for their
operations by tearing down walls and rewiring electricity, and they left
landlords with the repair bills. One property owner in Portland claims
that agents removed a parking lot spotlight, damaged a new $30,000 roof,
resulting in leaks, and then disappeared without leaving a means to be
contacted.
Agents
permitted suspects to leave their stores with guns. Agents in Wichita
for example suggested that a felon take a shotgun to shoot and then
return, and even provided the felon with instructions on how to do so.
Those agents then charged the man with a serious crime.
ATF agents hired a felon in Pensacola to run a pawnshop. The Journal Sentinel explains,
“The move widened the pool of potential targets, boosting arrest
numbers. Even those trying to sell guns legally could be charged if they
knowingly sold to a felon.”
Later,
the felon was convicted of pointing a loaded gun at someone, but rather
than receiving the sentence typical of someone who has committed such a
crime, he got six months in jail.
Given
all that was revealed in the report, skeptics are finding it difficult
to believe that these actions are exceptions to the rule, and not
indicative of the normal methodologies of the ATF.
“To
say this is just a few people, a few bad apples, I don’t buy it,”
asserted David Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh
School of Law and an expert on law-enforcement tactics and regulation.
“If your agency is in good shape with policy, training, supervision and
accountability, the bad apples will not be able to take things to this
level.”
Of
course, there was already abundant evidence that the ATF had been
mishandling its operations — most notably, Project Gunrunner.
As reported by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com,
[Gunrunner]
was a project of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fireworks [sic]. In
late 2009, the ATF was alerted to suspicious buys at seven gun shops in
the Phoenix area. Suspicious because the buyers paid cash, sometimes
brought in paper bags. And they purchased classic “weapons of choice”
used by Mexican drug traffickers — semi-automatic versions of military
type rifles and pistols. According to news reports several gun shops
wanted to stop the questionable sales, but the Bureau encouraged them to
continue.
It
is now known that ATF weapons — which U.S. officials involved in the
project allowed to be purchased by suspicious individuals in the United
States and then be “walked” to and distributed in Mexico — have been
turning up in Arizona drug crimes.
No comments:
Post a Comment