| Title | This American Life: ATF Agents - "Sloppy and Stupid", "Ineffective and Dangerous" | |
| Date | Saturday November 29 2014, @09:00AM | |
| Author | LaminatorX | |
| Topic | ||
| from the Branch-Ira-Glass-iand dept. | ||
So, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sets up a fake storefront in Milwaukee as a honeypot to buy stolen goods. They don't put a burglar alarm on the the place—or even proper locks, apparently—and the contents get stolen by the truckload. Their expensive, ineffective operation is exposed by reporters when the Feds destroy the landlord's property and won't pay damages or even rent.
Repeat for similar stories in Wichita, Portland, Oregon, Pensacola, Albuquerque, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
Great stuff from TechDirt's coverage:
When [the Milwaukee landlord] tried to collect, they didn't pay up. In fact, an ATF lawyer warned him that if he kept asking for the money, it could be seen as harassing federal agents.
The other thing that becomes clear in all of this is that these "undercover" ATF agents aren't just sloppy and stupid, they seem to go out of their way to be ineffective and dangerous.
[...]The whole effort has resulted in some attempts to actually disband the entire ATF, which might not be such a bad idea. While we hadn't been following the agency that closely (and hadn't been aware of all of these fake storefronts and the crazy stories behind them), in the past we've reported on how the ATF made up an entire robbery plot in order to entrap a group of poor young men in a "crime" that wouldn't have existed, but for the ATF's fantasy.
It would be nice to trust law enforcement officials, but they keep giving us reasons not to trust them at all.
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printed from SoylentNews, This American Life: ATF Agents - "Sloppy and Stupid", "Ineffective and Dangerous" on 2024-04-23 15:54:17