Mayor Bloomberg: "Looters Will Be Put In Internment Camps"

From M.o.1 -- I just want to state right off the bat that when this article was posted on Forbes....it was promptly removed as it was whistleblowing the whole "internment camps don't exist" story that the government has been spreading for years. As it stands, the only place you can find this article online now are from unrealiable sourcs such as weeklyworldnews and stuff like that. However, through the use of "googlecache", I was able to find the original source and it will be posted here for all to see.

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Crime in the Wake of Hurricane Irene

By E.D. Kain | Forbes – Sun, Aug 28, 2011

Crime in the Wake of Hurricane Irene

A resident walks through floodwater on Coney Island after Hurricane Irene hit, in New York, August 28, 2011.





In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg chose not to evacuate the criminals in Rikers Island, according to Mother Jones. The mayor has also warned that any looters caught during or in the wake of the storm will be placed in internment camps. This raises questions about the role of law enforcement and order during a natural disaster. It also raises questions about the psychology of looting and rioting which occur after most natural disasters.

On one level, it's understandable that people attempt to avoid evacuation orders in the face of an oncoming hurricane or other natural disaster. After all, leaving entire neighborhoods empty leaves them open to looters and other criminal opportunists.

In the fires in Arizona last summer some neighborhoods in northern Arizona had to be evacuated for a day or two and even in that short period of time there was some looting. In much more populated areas with higher rates of crime, this is going to be much more widespread.

Besides, many people are conditioned to think that all news reports are little more than media hype. Why leave home when the storm might just blow over?

The real damage, of course, will be caused by the storm itself and by flooding, which New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, estimates will be in the billions or tens of billions for his state alone. But the crime, the looting, and the other betrayals of societal trust are what often sting the worst, or at least leave the most bitter taste in peoples mouths.

Sometimes looting can actually be little more than people attempting to get supplies like clean water and food. Other times it's sheer criminality.

Social psychologists distinguish between different types of looting:
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• Looting of goods needed for survival
  
  
• Opportunistic theft of good such as TV sets
  
  
• Collective action, conditioned by the political environment
  

According to James Glass, a political science at the University of Maryland, the first category is justifiable:

Community perceptions of police abuse, poverty, and other factors can lead to looting and riots and provide cover for true criminality. This is what we saw in London.

The police can have a difficult time differentiating between criminality, mob violence, and the first category of looting for actual need, which can in turn lead to police abuse and even the killing of innocent people, as in the case of Henry Glover. Looting can also be heavily dependent on culture. There was no reported looting in the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for instance.

Even in America, it really is remarkable how little looting actually takes place. There's something about major disasters that often brings people together. Perhaps also the opportunity to safely commit crimes is diminished by the disaster itself. Potential looters don't want to get stuck in the middle of a hurricane either. Still, there is more opportunity in an empty Newark street to loot and rob than there was in the streets of London during recent riots there and yet we see nothing even close to that in New Jersey in the wake of Irene, though obviously more will come to light as damage is assessed and the storm moves further north.

All of this lends some credence, I think, to the notion that even in a stateless society, perhaps people would not resort to the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish" behavior that Hobbes described. Perhaps it is in our collective coercion of others that the worst in society emerges. The third category of looting stems almost entirely from perceptions of the state. Most people are not criminals. Most will not loot or cause harm in the wake of a natural disaster. Most of us will, somehow, attempt to help one another - with or without a government.

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