While I'm not very fond of cops they will be providing a service to Oakland California residents

[Union Label]

A new program that should start in July of this year will hopefully take guns off of the streets.

OAKLAND _ A six-month pilot program where Oakland police officers would knock on doors and ask permission to search homes for guns got the green light from the City Council's public safety committee Tuesday night.
It goes to the full council Tuesday, when the council will meet at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The consent-to-search program, as it is called, is based closely on a similar effort launched in St. Louis in 1994 and on ongoing programs in Boston and Washington, D.C. The idea is simple: To ask parents for permission to search their homes for weapons their children may be hiding.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_8868701

[Ikonoklast]

1. And if they find a serial number on a weapon that was used in a crime

Will every adult in that house be charged and arrested, and just let the courts sort it out?

[jody]

2. And of course the primary effort will be in low-income, minority areas. n/t

[bluestateguy]

3. Fraught with problems

Will the police only search "bad" (read, minority) neighborhoods?

And what if I as a resident say to the police "No, you may not search my home"? Will they become suspicious and then come back three days later with some trumped up search warrant?

Gun control is racist. All the rich white politicians supporting it live far away from high crime neighborhoods and they all have private armed security to keep the "undesirables" out of their neighborhoods.

[notesdev]

5. Of course

The original purpose of gun control was to protect the KKK from their victims.

[hvn_nbr_2]

18. ???????

[notesdev]

21. taking guns out of the hands of black people

makes it a lot easier for groups like the KKK to do their dirty deeds.

It's a lot safer to be a noose-toting, cross-burning thug (or any other sort of criminal) when you can be confident that your victims don't possess the capacity to defend themselves.

[Union Label]

7. Maybe its me but I can't see any of that in a Voluntary program

If you read the article it states that this program is being used in some areas in the east and the ACLU will be keeping an eye on it, so I'm keeping an open mind that this just might work to get guns off the street here.

[bluestateguy]

12. I'm just wondering how voluntary it really is

I don't see the cops going out of their way to tell people that they have a right to NOT consent to a search of their house. And with so many poor and uneducated people in Oakland, I doubt that many of them are up to date on the finer points of constitutional law.

[izquierdista]

20. Still suspicious

Police in America are little better than the Gestapo. Until they are retrained and reprogrammed out of their us versus the public mentality, they should not be wandering around doing "voluntary" searches and seizures.

I suppose the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, but this isn't a good first step.

[niyad]

4. this is a service? what in the HELL happens when a person says NO

which is what I would do (and I hate guns, would never have them, but that doesn't mean the cops can come in and look for them.

who in the HELL thought this was a good idea?

[coriolis]

6. What a great idea! While they're in there, let's have them search for

drugs, unpaid traffic tickets, porn (printed and computer stored), and anything that somebody might consider seditious.

[provis99]

8. of course, they do this in black-inhabited Oakland

Lets see those Bay-area cops go into Palo Alto and search rich white people's houses for guns, too. You'll find a hell of a lot more guns there than in neighborhoods too damn poor to buy guns. Idiots.

[Ikonoklast]

17. You silly goose!

White people never have coke, or unregistered guns, or any other illegal substances in their houses!

I know that because I watch TV.

It's always brown people doing the shooting, and dope dealing. We must control them at all costs.






I sincerely hope I don't have to add the :sarcasm: tag.

[Demobrat]

23. If little white kids in Palo Alto were being mowed down by stray bullets

while they practiced the piano, you can damn well bet something would be done, and right away.

[izquierdista]

9. Just what part

of "The Fourth Amendment" don't you understand? :silly:

[Union Label]

10. Just what part of 'Volentary" don't you understand?

Guns are a big problem here.

[Wizard777]

16. The problen could be that Reagan declared war on Americans and they are shooting back.

I can understand Republicans not understanding how war works. Are you sure you're a Democrat? When you declare war on people. believe it or not they don't bring you flowers and hold parades. They tend to shoot at you and want to kill you in general. It's just one of the idiosyncracies of war.

[Union Label]

19. Just where did I declare war on anyone?

I just want to stop the killing on the streets here and guns are what are being used.

[Wizard777]

25. I never said you did. But war began long before the invention of the gun.

If the actual cause of the problem is comming from the paramilitary civil war on drug users. Taking guns won't end the killing. Just change the weapon people are killed with. It's like Archie Bunker said to Gloria after her gun control rant. Would it make you feel better if those people were pushed out of windows instead?

[notesdev]

27. Look to the UK and Australia

Following gun bans in both places, violent crime skyrocketed.

Now, throwing more liberty after bad policy, the UK has gone down the road of trying to ban knives. Before long you'll need a government waiver there to cook dinner.

[coriolis]

13. There is, however, a precedent for warrantless searching for weapons

of mass destruction.
:grr:

[Demobrat]

11. I work in Oakland. People here are desperate for relief from the gun violence.

This program is worth trying. If it doesn't work it will not be continued. But something has to be done. Parents are afraid to let their kids play outside because of the constant gunplay. I doubt if you'll hear them complaining on the internet or anyplace else about any kind of effort to stop the killing.

[notesdev]

22. The #1 component to a real solution

End the drug war.

That's where the money comes from to fuel the violence.

Just ask the mafia. Their heyday was over the moment Prohibition was repealed.

[Demobrat]

24. And meanwhile?

?

[notesdev]

26. And meanwhile what?

If the city is serious about solving the problem it needs to root it out at the core, and forbid federal drug enforcement in its jurisdiction, and order its own police to stop enforcing those laws.

Turning the place into a police state where you can either submit to having your house searched by the government or automatically be suspected of being a criminal is not an answer.

Why not rally the community for a community-based solution? Social pressure can be very effective. If the community wants to be rid of gangsta behavior, one thing it can do is to make it clear that the gangsta culture is unwelcome.

[Demobrat]

29. You sound like somebody for whom it's all theoretical.

Ironic that only the posters who actually live and work here think it's a good idea. Do you sleep in the bathtub at night because the walls are too thin to stop the bullets? Just curious.

[notesdev]

31. Not theoretical for me

I lived in NYC under David Dinkins. During those years we set a couple of records for number of murders in one year in a single city, which I'm pretty sure still haven't been eclipsed. It was pretty ugly.

I live just outside of DC now, have good friends in Baltimore. Some pretty nasty crime rates - suffice it to say that I've got some experience in surviving in crime-ridden cities.

What will happen with this program is very very easy to predict. Guns will be taken out of the hands of mostly law-abiding people; the searches will result in the arrest of a lot of other people for completely unrelated (and harmless) crimes. The actual criminals? They either won't consent to a search, or they'll have their weapons stashed away in a safe place that won't be searched.

There's also that pesky 4th Amendment you might want to review. Door-to-door searches are un-American.

[dysfunctional press]

14. while i can understand what they CLAIM to hope to accomplish...

there are just too many red flags to consider this a good move.

any parent that would suspect their kid enough to consent- why wouldn't the parents just do the searching themselves?

more parents need to take more responsibility for more of their kids' lives.

[EFerrari]

15. The potential for abuse is huge. This is a terrible idea. n/t

[Toasterlad]

28. I Have Absolutely Nothing to Hide, And I STILL Wouldn't Let the Cops Search Without a Warrant.

Get a homophobic asshole cop who takes offense to my erotic fridge magnets, and off I go to jail on a trumped up charge.

:scared:

[DCKit]

30. How about this scenario:

The government continues the program and, even though most people refuse entrance (because they still have an option), claims great success in the seizure of guns, other weapons and large quantities of drugs.

Bolstered by this success and with the MSM firmly in their camp and touting new seizures and arrests every hour of every day, the Republic decides to make the searches mandatory - at first only for public housing, then the "dangerous" neighborhoods, then for everyone - just so it's "fair". In no time, it's discovered that, in nearly half of all households, there resides at least one gun-running, drug dealing pimp - Who also happens to be a registered, voting Democrat. But nobody cares, because they're keeping us safe.

Even if they only concentrated on poor, minority neighborhoods, the potential for voter disenfranchisement is a Republigasm of hysteric proportions. That it's also against everything the U.S. stands for is almost an afterthought, at this point.

If I wanted to live under that kind of repression, I'd move to an Islamic theocracy and wear a star of David wherever I went. But I don't, so I won't. To those of you who do, "Bon Voyage", "Happy Trails" and all that shit, but that's not MY America.

[hvn_nbr_2]

32. Republigasm of hysteric proportions

That's quite a turn of phrase. I'm kind of hoping that "histeric" was deliberate and not just a typo for "historic."

[DCKit]

34. I've been a fan of Freudian slips and other verbal gaffes since 1969...

when my four year old sister got angry, stamped her foot and yelled "I resemble that remark."

[mulsh]

33. I'm an Oakland native, the cops certianly won't be allowed to

search my house. Since I live in the solidly middle class Glenview district and I'm a middle aged white guy I'm pretty sure it won't be an issue. Now my friends in West and East Oakland, they'll probably get cops trying to search their houses. If I still had my studio down on 7th & Wood ( deep in west Oakland near the projects) I'm pretty sure they'd be trying to search it.

what happens if someone allows one of these "consent-to-search" and the cops turn up some hot merchandise or drugs? How many of you actually know any Oakland cops? some are wonderful and some are scary, some are just trigger happy.

one other thing, isn't this the kind of action that inspired those guys down at Merritt College to start the Black Panthers? As I recall those guys were organized primarily to observe police actions in their neighborhood. Of course that's back when solid Republican politicians like the Knowlands ran things around here. I think we've been down this road before.

I think they should do a test program down in San Jose.

[piesRsquare]

35. I would suggest instead...

...a program/campaign/whatever that would encourage parents to "search their homes for weapons their children may be hiding" and turn said weapons over to law enforcement. Parents could call a specified number to arrange for an officer to come by and pick it up. Perhaps anonymity and/or some type of immunity could be guaranteed?

Is there any type of anonymous law enforcement hotline already in place for kids, along the lines of "See a kid with a gun (where inappropriate, obviously)? Find a gun? Report it/have it picked up at 800-000-000"? If not, perhaps setting something like that up would help?

I don't know how the logistics of this would work; it's just an idea. My main point with this idea is: How about encouraging--and supporting--parents to take control of their own home environments, rather than having law enforcement take over?

I believe that, rather than law enforcement making its way into homes, schools, rec centers, etc, programs/campaigns designed by police and teachers, community leaders, citizenry, etc. that are geared towards *support* would be more effective. If parents, teachers, school staff, etc felt assured that they had the full *support* of law enforcement when it comes to dealing with gang, gun, etc issues, they (we) would be more inclined to involve the police where appropriate.

*Support* includes the sense/knowledge on part of parents and teachers that contacting law enforcement will help things, and not make a situation worse. I think what happens all too frequently is people believe that involving law enforcement would make a bad situation worse (and messy), and calls to the cops aren't made when they really should be.

We're all supposed to be on the same team, here...perhaps if people felt more like law enforcement is there to help and not punish, then efforts to get a handle on gun violence would be more successful.

Just my thoughts...