before and after mission statements of the FBI:
Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities.John Hudson/ForeignPolicy 05.Jan.14
[...]
"Violent crime, property crime and white-collar crime: All those things had reductions in the number of people available to investigate them," former FBI agent Brad Garrett told Foreign Policy. "Are there cases they missed? Probably."
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Despite the history-of-things television has been giving us for lots of many years, the FBI started out as a babycakes next-gen federal version of the private sector Pinkertons, themselves a kind of hybrid aboveground version of the age-old indeed ancient tradition of the rich and powerful defending themselves through the proxy of thugs-on-a-leash.
The Pinkertons came out of the Chicago-ish wet dreams of heavy capitalist-splooge-tycoons enabled by the meat slaughtering biz and the smokestacks of 19th. commercial resource forges, plus railroads plus banks plus whadelsyagot?
They weren't about solving crime originally, they were about protecting highly successful criminals who'd made it through the membrane threshold of legal/illegal into legal all the way, because rich.
It became about solving crime only because that's what they called it when anyone tried to take away what the tycoons had amassed through chicanery and rigging whatever they could.
We'll just ignore the crimes that got you that there pile, Mr. Stack, sir. And see that these evildoers are apprehended, even if we have to blow the arms off their moms with phosphor bombs.
The confusion is well, property crimes, those are committed against the plutocrats, right?
Well, on TV yeahsure, but the pound for pound of American property crime, white-collar crime, is committed from above, on those below. In the sense that the loss is measurably of greater, far greater impact - read hurt - on the unders.
So, it isn't really a jump away from mission direction for the Hooveroids to ease up from crime-preventioning to (national - hmmf!) security, it's a return to origin for thugs-on-a-leash. They came into being as yard-dogs for the rich, stands to reason they'd return to that.
Back to their roots and all.
