continued
FYI, AN ONGOING ACTION BY EL SALVADOR’S NEW PRESIDENT:
President Nayib Bukele has declared a state of emergency and constructed a huge new mega-prison, the largest in the Americas, as the centerpiece. The prison will eventually house up to 40,000 inmates. Tens of thousands of gang members have been rounded up and the first group of 2,000 have been moved to the prison. President Bukele tweeted “This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, unable to do any further harm to the population.”
Dramatic photos online of “President Nayib Bukele’s gang prison” show hundreds of inmates in tight formations completely helpless and compliant. This is a prison where the inmates are neither running the show nor conducting gang operations from inside. Interesting
SOME CONCLUSIONS:
Ø All of this is sad news, bad news, getting worse rapidly, and a true threat to our safety and security.
Ø As usual, we are trying to solve a serious problem with a massive federal bureaucracy, and by throwing billions of dollars at the problem repeatedly and getting the same failed annual results; the true definition of insanity.
Ø Our most senior leaders in the executive and congressional branches have, are currently, and will in the near term fail to lead.
Ø No society can survive without law and order at the local level; that must therefore be the point of execution. At the local level investigate, find the gang members, arrest them, try them, and send them to prison. All the planning and funding must focus on that formula.
Ø We should probably begin to build more prisons.
Ø A lack of law and order is consistently destroying our cities and their economies.
Ø Arresting criminals with long rap sheets of 10, 20 sometimes more prior arrests flies in the face of the simple philosophy that if the criminals are off the streets and in jail, crime will go down.
The U.S. may have to consider using force in Mexico to take down the cartels. I absolutely believe it can be done. See the concept of operations at:
THE U.S. IS UNDER ATTACK
www.WeThePeopleSpeaking.com Sep 4, 2023
HOW TO MOVE FORWARD.
The current problem is our president: First, he will not admit he has a problem that exists in his administration. If forced to address a crisis he will do so with the blame game. Most of the time it begins with, “My predecessor…..” as he did 13 times during his recent State of the Union address. Cardinal rule, “Blame” is the first fallback position of a failed leader. Then he will let the issue die out of focus and hope the left media comes to his rescue by dropping it from public view.
BOTTOM LINE: this cannot be allowed to endure.
PART 2, LET’S CLEAN UP THIS MESS
We should recognize that the alphabet-soup government agencies have proven they are, collectively, incapable of solving this problem with their current agenda. Every year, within the local, state, and federal governments we probably produce thousands of studies, have countless meetings spend billions of dollars, and watch the problem get progressively worse every year because NO ONE is in charge. There is no specificity and no focus associated with the day-to-day efforts. There are no identifiable positive results. No best practices are being shared from community to community.
Here is what we need to do:
PHASE ONE, 2024:
Elect a president who can lead, who can plan, who can act, and will kick ass and take names.
PHASE TWO, 20 January, 2025. About 4 pm:
Begin the process of focusing We-the-People on criminal gangs. Begin the process of changing the culture of law enforcement in America. Criminals, once arrested, should not be intentionally and immediately put back on the streets to commit another crime.
The new president’s first Executive Order should specify his or her intent and look something like this:
1) The level of lawlessness and drug abuse in this country is unacceptable and a growing threat to our national security. Therefore, I intend to rid our country of criminal gangs, cartel operatives, and drug dealers by focusing our efforts on identifying every one of them, arresting them, giving them a speedy trial, and, if convicted, putting them in jail, thereby dramatically reducing crimes of all types at all levels and simultaneously reducing the import, distribution, and sale of illegal drugs.
2) To accomplish this, I am hereby declaring a narrowly focused national state of emergency to curb rampant lawlessness across the country. It will NOT infringe on your day-to-day rights and privileges. It will NOT restrict your actions and activities. It will NOT raise your taxes. But it will require you to be a willing participant and to respect and support all of our first responders, law enforcement officers, and those prosecutors and judges administering the judicial system.
3) This will be a focused effort with all actions from families, leaders, and administrators at the local level to the Office of the President, seeking to take down criminal gangs, Mexican Cartel operatives, and anyone associated with the transport, warehousing, production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs.
4) Upon publication of this Executive Order, every gang member is hereby designated a criminal guilty of a felony offense simply by being a gang member.
5) What is a “gang”?
· A group whose members share an identity, typically linked to a name, and often some other symbols.
· Members view themselves as a gang, and they are recognized by others as a gang.
· The group has some permanence and a degree of organization and leadership.
· The group is involved in some level of criminal activity.
· This becomes the national definition. No ambiguity, no soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities.
6) The law: it is illegal to be a member of an organization, whatever size, that is engaged in criminal activity. One does not have to physically engage in committing a crime (for example, selling illegal drugs), simply being a member of a gang that does it is, in and of itself, a crime. Being a gang member is a felony offense. If convicted, jail time is hereby a mandatory sentence. We have to get specific about the law and its consistency among all the states.
7) Family involvement: Across this country, tonight every family, particularly those with teenage youngsters, should have this conversation: Jimmy/Susan, if you are a member of a gang, as of today you are a criminal committing a federal felony offense and you are subject to being arrested, tried and sentenced to prison. The point is that at the dinner table within a few hours of signing this Executive Order there is focused initiative in tens of millions of homes across the entire nation and the 33,000 gang structures are under siege.
8) Human intelligence, Humint, will be the center of gravity for this campaign. Definition: The center of Gravity can be a person, thing, circumstance, or situation that is central to the success of an operation or can cause it to fail. There are an estimated 33,000 gangs in the U.S. In order to take them down law enforcement must know who the members are, where they live, and with what criminal activities they are involved. Certainly, there can and will be some surveillance involved in fact-gathering. But the bulk of the information will come from within the community. People know who the gang members are, and will be encouraged to share their knowledge. But the bulk of the Humint will come from the members themselves.
9) Amnesty: Every community will immediately set up and announce a short-term (weeks not months) amnesty program in which every gang member, cartel operative, and drug dealer is offered the opportunity to make an appointment with law enforcement officials and in a confidentially recorded conversation denounce their membership, disclose the who/what/when/where facts about their organization and in exchange be offered amnesty from prosecution relative to past crimes in which they participated, except for murder. The main objective of the interview is to gather all possible information about the gang’s leaders. Acting on that information, the police should then arrest the leaders which will prompt the remaining members to apply for amnesty and effectively shut down the gang within days of activating this campaign.
10) At the end of the amnesty period, across the country, the mass roundup of active gang members, cartel operatives, and drug dealers will begin.
11) Prosecutors and judges serve at the will of We-the-People they swore to protect. They will use their power to the full extent of the law and if they choose to function outside the intent of this Executive Order, they should be removed and replaced.
12) Outside the bounds of this Executive Order, but still key to reestablishing law and order across the nation are two additional directives:
First, a too-often occurrence today when arresting an alleged criminal is to discover they have a ridiculously lengthy “rap sheet” with a dozen or even dozens of prior arrests. Therefore, it is hereby directed that a third misdemeanor arrest will automatically be recorded and prosecuted as a felony crime.
The second point has to do with minimum sentencing. If a gang member has been convicted of committing a crime and is sentenced, the minimum sentence will be two years in jail without parole just for being a gang member. A gang member arrested with a gun will receive a minimum sentence of 4 years in jail without parole.
As the numbers of gangs and gang members diminish, there will be an impact on illegal drug distribution. The FBI and DEA must go with the flow, and adjust plans and actions to take advantage of reduced foot soldiers to defeat drug importation, distribution, and sale.
Sanctuary states and cities are not excluded from any of the above directives.
The objective of publishing this Executive Order is to dramatically and simultaneously launch the law-and-order campaign in millions of homes and every community today. Tomorrow, actions should begin and will continue until the 33,000 gangs are gone from our communities.
Repeating the previously stated current statistics, the estimated 1.4 million American gang members are responsible for:
48.9% of violent crimes,
42.9% of property crimes,
39.9% of drug sales, and
13% of all homicides.
If we can get perhaps a million of them to accept amnesty in the next few weeks, the crime rates may be reduced to the point that our diminished police forces can effectively handle the remaining crime load.
The overall intent of this campaign is to create an enduring overarching culture of deterrence when it is time for teens to choose between law and order or a criminal street gang, they will think hard about the possibility of landing in jail for two years.
This must become the law of the land. No separate versions for the soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities are authorized.
Logically, the Attorney General and Department of Justice should take the lead for the following reasons: First of all, he/she is the existing senior cop in the country; no reason to create a new organization to do this. Additionally, two of the critical subordinate action organizations are already direct-reports to the Attorney General; they are, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
I request that every newspaper and news magazine publish this entire Executive Order at their earliest convenience. I want a couple hundred million Americans to have access to their own personal copy.
If this Executive Order, for any reason, becomes a partisan issue, we will be doing the American public a terrible disservice.
End of Executive Order.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.
If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato