Discretion

Thursday 5 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

When your discretion dictates that you need a SWAT team that is half the size of a small mining town in rural Alaska in order to check for supposed water violations, you’re doing it wrong.

Miners from the Chicken area — a gold mining town of just 17 full-time residents and dozens of seasonal miners off the Taylor Highway, between Tok and the Canadian border — said that during the third week of August they were surprised by groups of four to eight armed officers, who swarmed onto their mining claims with little or no warning.

The officers were armed and wearing body armor. They were part of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and were there to check for violations of section 404 of the Clean Water Act, according to several miners who were contacted by the group. Section 404 governs water discharges into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans.

The use of SWAT teams to perform regulatory checks (and virtually everything else they do) needs to be stopped.

2013-09-05  »  madlibertarianguy