Cops Behaving Badly - Australian Edition

Take a 13-year-old autistic boy with an in IQ of 71, and a fixation on ISIS, add one covert operative to feed him info and stoke the fires of his fixation, and wait. Then arrest him. How Australian undercover police ‘fed’ an autistic 13-year-old’s fixation with Islamic State

It is as bad as it sounds.

The boy, given the pseudonym Thomas Carrick, was later charged with terror offences after an undercover officer “fed his fixation” and “doomed” the rehabilitation efforts Thomas and his parents had engaged in, a Victorian children’s court magistrate found.

The parents went to the authorities to get help. The help did include some "therapeutic" activities, but also included that covert operative to undermine those activities. Why? Because they can, and they have to create problems so they can solve problems, and "shut up and don't question our authority," that's why.

It is a long article, but the bottom line is that the police went into it with the intent to arrest the 13-year-old kid. Well, they waited to arrest him until he was 14, because that made their lives easier, and his more difficult. The problem of the cognitive impairment was probably the only thing that tripped them up.

“The rehabilitation of TC was doomed once the [operator] connected online…befriended TC and fed his fixation, providing him with a new terminology, new boundaries and an outlet for him to express, what was in part, his fantasy world.” [The judge in the case said that.]

Why did they do this? Because the Joint Counter Terrorism Team, which ran most of this, doesn't get funding if they can't show they are stopping terrorists. And it is easy to stop terrorists that you've created, even if it wastes everyone's time and money. It isn't their money after all, and if the don't prove they are doing anything, they might get disbanded. And they don't want that; they have a cool-sounding job. Didn't you watch 24, staring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer?