Mostly Cloudy / 76° F
Columbus police to receive $15k of free equipment
Published 6:07pm Tuesday, August 21, 2012The Columbus Police Department will soon be equipped with $15,200 worth of new equipment at no cost to the town.
Columbus Town Council met Thursday, Aug. 16 and approved a resolution to accept funding for a new light tower and generator, an equipment trailer, a set of checkpoint signs, 20 traffic cones, 10 traffic vests and five flashlights.
The state funding is from the town’s participation with the N.C. Governor’s Highway Safety program.
The town conducts activities to gain points, mainly through vehicle checkpoints and assisting other checkpoints. The more points are gained throughout the year for the program, the more funding is possible in order to purchase equipment to increase enforcement.
The town is not required to contribute a match to the funding.
Columbus will send its resolution to the state for final approval. Columbus police officers said the state will likely give the final approval in October, with the new equipment arriving in December.
We’re getting free stuff for our town–that sounds wonderful!
But wait, the article says this particular batch of free stuff will specifically be used *against* law-abiding people who just want to drive around their own town in peace? We should expect more “checkpoints” (i.e., searches without any cause whatsoever) where officers will be busy shining lights into our car windows in order to gain “points” (plus maybe some revenue too) so they can get even more free stuff for even more of this type of “enforcement” in the future? What an Orwellian joke.
If I were paying for police protection services on the free market (i.e., if there were no geographical monopoly on this sort of thing), I would instantly change security providers over this type of racket. Expropriating “protectors”–who would pull people over for no reason or send us a bill for a burned out headlight–would go out of business in the blink of an eye. No one really wants to be “protected” like that, do they?
But of course this is not the voluntary sector at work, this is sector of force. Democratic processes notwithstanding, we see clearly the fact that “we” are not the government at all. Even at a local level, our government will do countless things “for” us and to us without our consent.