Law allows Justin Trudeau to arrest people who have committed no crime

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Justin Trudeau Minority Report precrime

Law allows Justin Trudeau to arrest people who have committed no crime

A new piece of legislation that could have come straight out of the Sci-fi movie Minority Report allows Justin Trudeau to arrest Canadians before a crime has been committed.

Minority Report tells the story of a dystopian future where a special “Precrime” policing unit has been created in Washington D.C. to prevent crimes before they happen. Tapping into the psychic talents of “Precognitives” (Precogs) capable of predicting murders before they occurred, law enforcement used their predictions to arrest people before they committed their crimes.

Unfortunately for Canadian lovers of liberty, Justin Trudeau wants to make the movie a reality by arresting people before a crime is committed (via TheDeepDive.ca):

Canadian Justice Minister Arif Virani has outlined the provisions of a new online harms bill, which introduces a novel measure allowing for preemptive action against individuals feared to potentially commit hate crimes in the future.

Under this legislation, such individuals could be subjected to house arrest or mandated to wear an electronic monitoring device upon the attorney general’s request and a judge’s order.

Virani, who also happens to be the Attorney General, stressed the importance of a meticulously calibrated approach toward the implementation of peace bonds. If “there’s a genuine fear of an escalation,” Virani said, “then an individual or group could come forward and seek a peace bond against them and to prevent them from doing certain things.”

Conditions of the peace bond may include restrictions on proximity to places of worship and limitations on internet usage, aiming to counteract radicalization driven by online content.

Bill C-63, as the legislation is formally known, not only seeks to curb the spread of hate online but also introduces a new hate crime offense with a maximum life imprisonment penalty. (Emphasis mine)

Unlike Stephen Spielberg’s movie, however, the government will not be using psychics to determine future crimes. Instead, Justin Trudeau, judges, and politicians with tyrannical ambitions will be making the call.

It has become rather easy to point out Trudeau’s tyranny in the Great White North, but this new legislation bears a frightening resemblance to actions taken by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

During the 2016 primary season, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — yes, THAT Kevin McCarthy — responded to the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, FL by proposing the creation of a “precrime” unit within the Department of Homeland Security following the Orlando nightclub shooting. Known as the Homeland Safety and Security Act (HR-5611), this legislation was intended “to prevent terrorists from launching attacks and obtaining passports, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES” (Emphasis mine).

The phrase “for other purposes” was thrown in there to leave the door wide open as to how the law can be applied.

Though HR5611 failed to go anywhere in 2016, Republicans reintroduced it two years later following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in a bill I satirically called the Minority Report Act of 2018. The reintroduction of this legislation called for the creation of the Office for Partnerships to Prevent Terrorism — later known as the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.

Minority Report-inspired legislation has yet to be fully realized on the national level — just give it time — but pre-crime policing has been going on at the state level for some time now, complete with all of the liberty-killing consequences that come whenever government assumes the role of the provider of our rights instead of the protector.

One example of what this looks like comes to us in a March 2021 article by J.D. Tuccille at Reason.com where he shares the story of a lawsuit filed against the Pasco County sheriff’s department:

Predictive policing—a concept seemingly pulled straight from the 2002 popcorn flick Minority Report—has become increasingly hot with law enforcement agencies over the past decade. The field tempts budget-minded officeholders and cops alike with its science-y promise to forecast where crimes will occur in the future and who will commit them, targeting risk while minimizing wasted resources. But it also holds the potential to justify hassling people based on what a computer program and biases entered as data say they might someday do. That’s the basis of a recent lawsuit charging that a Florida sheriff’s department has used predictive policing to harass the innocent.

“Predictive policing is the use of analytical techniques to identify promising targets for police intervention with the goal of preventing crime, solving past crimes, and identifying potential offenders and victims,” according to a 2013 RAND Corporation report. Even in those early days of the field, though, the report acknowledged that “[t]he very act of labeling areas and people as worthy of further law enforcement attention inherently raises concerns about civil liberties and privacy rights.” (Emphasis mine)

In application, Pasco County precrime policing proved that concerns about liberty and privacy rights are quite valid:

“How does the Pasco County program live up to everybody’s worst fears of acting on predictions of what people haven’t done but might do?

“First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts,” the newspaper’s report noted. “Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.”

“Make their lives miserable until they move or sue,” is how a former deputy described the department’s tactics to reporters. (Emphasis mine)

The Institute for Justice sued the county on behalf of a group of county residents over the department’s conduct following years of harassing visits by cops who dropped by because the system identified residents as potential criminals. If residents resisted precrime policing, law enforcement would bombard them with the red tape of the endless regulatory state to “encourage” cooperation.

“Pasco [County] defended its program as a crime fighting tool,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Robert Johnson. “But in America, there is no such thing as ‘innocent until predicted guilty.’ The government cannot harass people at their homes just because it thinks they might commit some unspecified future crime.” (Emphasis mine)

Precrime policing and its evil twin, red flag laws, are bad news for gun rights along with many of our God-given, constitutionally protected rights. In addition to violating the Second Amendment, pre-crime policing violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of knowing who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence being brought against you, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due-process and equal-protection rights that protect you against the arbitrary or irrational actions of government.

Here’s one more thing to consider. The pre-crime bill being pushed by Justin Trudeau targets the free speech rights of internet users, and with Republicans and Democrats in bed together when it comes to destroying the First Amendment, how long do you think it will be before the Washington duopoly comes up with an American version of the Canadian law?

Pre-crime policing makes for a good story line in the Minority Report movie, but it’s a terrible idea in the real world because it will destroy liberty . . . and that’s a crime that doesn’t require a Precog to predict.

 

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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