"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 25, 2010

The Guilty Always Glow

So, leave it to bonny Britain to pioneer some new policestatist nastiness:

"...That gadget was a SelectaDNA Spray -- a canister loaded with a harmless solution containing synthetic DNA. If a criminal attempts to burgle a premises fitted with the device, an employee can hit a panic button that alerts police to a crime in progress and simultaneously shoots out a fine mist covering everyone in the room, including the robber. And as each batch of the spray -- which glows blue under ultraviolet light -- has a unique DNA signature, police can connect the robber to the scene of the crime. 

Criminally minded readers might now be thinking, "Well, if I robbed a shop, I'd just scrub myself clean when I got home." But as Andrew Knights, managing director of SelectaDNA, explains, the solution isn't so easy to remove. "It will come off within a number of hand washes," he told AOL News. "But if you run through a spray it'll accumulate on the inside of your nostrils and ears and under the fingernails; areas that are difficult to get off." And, he notes, if a criminal doesn't have an ultraviolet light, he won't know where the liquid is lurking."

Provided by a private security firm, through the police, to businesses.

But, worry not, you civil libertarian gadflies. No government will abuse this. Because, if you've nothing to hide, you won't glow with guilt.

When you, for example, pass through the airport. Or just have a run in with the cops:

"...Knights says the sprays can reduce crime levels, but he admits the unique DNA evidence they offer has yet to be used in a prosecution.

That's not a sign of failure, though. If a suspect is scanned with a UV light at a police station (almost everyone arrested in the U.K now undergoes this procedure, no matter what crime the person is suspected of) and starts to glow, he says, "They'll generally plead guilty. The criminal knows it's better to make a plea bargain, rather than annoy the police even further by forcing them to go through the DNA testing."

That's exactly what happened when an 18-year-old burglar from the town of Rawtenstall -- some 20 miles east of Preston in northwestern England -- was hauled in for questioning last month. When he walked under a UV light at the station, his arms started to shine, explains Police Constable Phil Buck, a crime-prevention coordinator in the northern English county of Lancashire. The young offender picked up the glow when he broke into a garden center whose roof had been smeared in another crime-fighting substance: SelectaDNA Gel. "He held up his brightly glowing hands and confessed," says Buck, adding that the teen admitted breaking into the gardening store three times..."


So, get this. Only the guilty suffer determent. Only the guilty go to hell. Only the guilty glow like they belong there.

One could simply not conceive of a situation where the police start buying this shit up - say in lawn order obsessed "Middle America," or along the Mexican border, or wherever middle class white Christians especially fear their employees - and spraying crowds of people who gather to make the sort of trouble crowds make.

You know, to haul them in later and shine the Guilt Detector on them, up their noses, around their eyes, and in their ears.

Wouldn't happen here. Couldn't happen here.*


* - rule does not apply to black men; rule never applies to black men...

...if some professional liberal or managerial moderate insists that an abuse could not occur, what what, cuzza the rulahlaw, or good government, I immediately begin to operate on the assumption that someone has already begun using it against black men; if some militia nazoid insists that the vasty vast liberal conspiracy to impose capitalist socialism on all the godsfolk in the hills of Montana, or the swamps of Mississippi, is right this moment planning to do some evil, nasty thing to those saidsame godsfolk - count on them (a) wishing they could do it to black people and (b) already possessing a history of doing it to black people.

5 comments:

Ethan said...

Wow. Better to plead guilty than annoy the cops.

I saw this article and I have to say my mind didn't go where yours did, but it sure has now! So, thanks for those nightmares.

Despite that, I'm glad to see you back.

Jack Crow said...

Thanks, Ethan.

I settled on that phrase "annoyed" too. Thought about centering commentary around it, but it stands out all on its own.

Anonymous said...

"If ye ain't criminal, y'ain't gots a worry."

I love when people use that sort of excuse to justify greater losses of freedom.

Ofcr Porcine: "Sir, I'm giving you a citation for Driving While Black. It's well known that in America, you have to Whiten Up first before getting behind the wheel. Follow the role modeling of the noblest President since Washington: BHObama!"

Ethan said...

it stands out all on its own.

Christ, sure does.

Peter Ward said...

"Lawn order obsessed 'Middle America'"? You should check out the NYPD something. (It's true in middle America police are more equal-opportunity--here in NYC they prefer harass minorities and folk presumed to be aliens. I've experienced both.)