I have to say that shooting fireworks at people or rven just buildings is not in the same vein as spraying graffiti on walls by any means though. Those are explosives. There's a reason hospital staff hate all fireworksy holidays.
Yeah, fireworks can be very dangerous, I just found the "mortar-style" an amusing moniker to attach. Like an attempt to make it sound more militaristic.
I was probably being a little too flippant initially - my point wasn't that there was no real violence, more that CBP was lumping in a bunch of minor stuff with a few significant events in an effort to make it sound like "under siege for 47 days straight."
Doesn't CBP file official arrest reports? I mean, if they don't it doesn't really matter if the agency gives a sweeping reason like "oh these people assaulted us first", it's still basically disappearing people.
In at least some of the cases being reported on, people are being "detained" without any report ever being filed. One of those semi-technicalities to try and get around legal requirements.
Yes, "disappearing", like the ones who got released and told about it on twitter or whatever. Clearly we're dealing with the KGB or Gestapo.
What's happening now is basically a stop and search for people that committed crimes while in largely anonymous crowds with their identities concealed (and everyone else covering for them, cause "fuck the police"). It seems a pretty decent method of getting justice when dealing with violent individuals among a large anonymous crowd of people who refuse to cooperate.
Setting aside some of the broader trends of local or state police detaining nonviolent (often non-white) people without even filing proper charges and the like, what's going in here is federal enforcement officials taking the broadest possible interpretation of their legal rights/abilities in terms of policing.
The federal government does not have general policing power. Yes there's the FBI, but they are limited to the realm of federal crimes, which are a pretty limited subset of criminal law. Most criminal law, and general policing power, is within the realm of state authority and enforced by state police.
Under normal circumstances federal "police" (not sure this CBP is technically police) patrolling the streets would raise huge red flags among conservatives as a federal invasion of state rights, but these are the days we're in.
(All that said, you are correct that I was being at least somewhat excessive calling it gestapo. Not to say there haven't been plenty of incidents of both state and federal police murdering people, but there hasn't been true 'disappearing' yet here.)