As I understand it, any government agency that investigates felony criminal actions, will have an armed group within the agency. They make up a tiny minority of the overall work force.
My ex-wife worked at the Department of Labor as an investigator. On occasion she would deal in criminal cases and would possibly have a Sheriffs officer accompany her on serving a subpoena. But she wasn’t armed ever.
Her friend transferred from that office to the criminal investigation branch (I forget the exact name) and she was armed.
So like, with the IRS, if you’re just some guy who screwed up his taxes, you would get a normal investigator. If you’re Al Capone who is doing some shady criminal shit, the investigator will be armed.
The problem of their being first goes deeper than a few idiots. As many have pointed out, a lily-white agricultural state that leans conservative across both parties is not really a good political bellwether anymore and hasn’t been for a long time. Worse, its caucus system is problematic in a number of ways.
The good news is, the DNC has finally removed the state from its first-in-the-nation status in the primaries. They and New Hampshire will still go ahead according to their state laws, but according to the rules they’ll both be sanctioned by the DNC by having half of their delegates cut from the 2024 convention. However things shake out, I hope this will see the end of Dem presidential candidates pandering to Iowans by taking toward the right and by promising to keep those sweet corn subsidies flowing.
“Brad Stone. CEO of struggling tech company. Employees report that their 401Ks are missing payments. Accounting shows some very suspicious moving of funds. And then we have this.”
(surveillance photos of him getting out and fueling a new Corvette with a 60 day tag)
“Son of a b!itch.”
“How does a CEO of a struggling tech company afford a brand new Corvette? One that people are paying twice the sticker price for, they are so hard to get?”
“You don’t. Unless…”
“Unless he’s pocketing benefits pay.”
“Call Labor SWAT. I want a chopper in the air and eyes on his location in thirty minutes. We got this scum bag!”
I’m not so sure it’s a battleground state anymore. It’s very rural and very evangelical. There are progressives there, just like there are in all red states. But I’m not sure enough of what constitutes the middle in Iowa is persuadable anymore, even though it’s only two elections since it went blue.
Not sure the middle anywhere is easily persuadable. Not even sure what the middle is. We have balkanized so much that whatever middle there is gets pounded by all sides and has no real options to begin with.
In the US, yes. Other countries, not so much. How do they do it, you ask?
They ask a couple of cops to tag along - if and when they think it’s necessary. And even then the cops usually just end up carrying boxes of seized evidence.
Totally. I get this from my dad all the time, who doesn’t watch Fox but is deep down the right wing Facebook rabbit hole. In the middle of an otherwise normal conversation he’ll blurt out some nonsensical thing about “Trudeau making oil illegal next year” or whatever and I realize he’s been reading memes about that thing for weeks and thought it was real. Sigh. It’s always a record-scratch moment in the conversation because he drops it casually as though this is a fact we all know, rather than the insane conspiracy theory it is.
Yeah, like I said above, my ex has had Sheriff escort for a handful of things like subpoenas.
I honestly don’t know how large the various armed branches are or how much they are really needed. And I think they sometimes work with local or federal LE as well.
I can imaging some of the postal inspectors that deal with things like drug smuggling might run into violent people sometimes. I know my ex has dealt with some people who were VERY hostile to the governmetn investigating them, but not idea how many would have ever been violent.
Yep. He’s since passed away (RIP) but it sticks in my memory that one of the last conversations I had with my dad a couple years ago was us chatting friendly for an hour or so, and when we said goodbye, I said, “Merry Christmas!” (because it was December) and he said, “oh ho! You aren’t saying “happy holidays?!?” I thought that was the thing on ‘your side’.”
It came out of left field. We’d always celebrated Christmas, so it was weird to even bring it up, and out of nowhere like that. And he’d never even asked about my stance on anything political, just assumed.
Like he was just spoiling for a fight. It had literally never come up before.
It remains a disappointing memory of how brainwashed he’d become.
