In many other posts, I have credited BLM for bringing attention to police accountability issues but have criticized them for not doing the hard local work to start fixing things ("defund the police" and looting Apple stores both being, to my mind, equally ineffectual approaches).
My son made me familiar with Campaign Zero, which does seem to be doing the hard local work to change laws and union contracts. They have state by state and city by city progress lists at passing key pieces of their reform agenda, model legislation, etc. I also like the fact that while they acknowledge racism as part of the problem, they frame the issue more broadly as a general issue of police violence and accountability. I don't agree with 100% of their program but as a libertarian I long ago got comfortable making common cause at less than 100% levels of agreement.
Their solutions page is really very impressive, and head and shoulders above most of the popular discourse I see on this topic. here for example are subpoints under "End For Profit Policing", just one of their 10 action planks. I love the links to actual model legislation where it exists. This is how change will happen on this issue.
Police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people.
POLICY SOLUTIONS
End police department quotas for tickets and arrests
Ban police departments from using ticket or arrest quotas to evaluate the performance of police officers
ban issuing fines or arrest warrants for civilians who fail to appear in court for a traffic citation (Ex: Ferguson Policy)
ban generating more than 10% of total municipal revenue from fines and fees (Ex: Missouri law)
allow judges discretion to waive fines and fees for low-income people or initiate payment plans (Ex: Pennsylvania law)
prohibit courts from ordering individuals on parole or probation to pay supervision fees and other correctional fees
Prevent police from taking the money or property of innocent people
Prohibit police from:
seizing property of civilians (i.e. civil forfeiture) unless they are convicted of a crime and the state establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the property is subject to forfeiture
keeping any property that has legally been forfeited (instead, this property should go to a general fund)
participating in the federal Equitable Sharing program that allows police to engage in civil asset forfeiture
As I observe it currently, the three strategies currently being taken by Progressives to increase police accountability are
Demonizing all police officers, good and bad
Making large cuts to police budgets and/or salaries
Looting Apple stores
I have lamented before that none of these approaches are likely to succeed at reforming police accountability or more broadly at helping black Americans. Remember that while black Americans disproportionately come in contact with police and the justice system, they also are disproportionately victims of crime. All the current approaches listed above are unlikely to improve the police and justice system but may make crime worse.
One of the seldom discussed differences between Progressives and libertarians in this country is their skill set for change. Progressives are very good at creating a "moment" where everyone in the country is forced to look at an issue and potentially agree that change is needed. Progressives can grab both the streets and the headlines. But they often suck at the hard work making real change happen in a Democratic system. They don't seem to have an interest in the drawn out 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense needed to make reforms city by city. Libertarians are just the opposite. We suck at building mass desire for change -- we write 5000 word think pieces with lots of graphs but you don't see us in the streets. But we can be good at actually getting change to happen -- I think of ALEC (which is really more Conservative than libertarian, but work with me here) and how it works. Let's say we decide it would be a good thing to have legal authority and process to build private toll roads. ALEC goes out there city by city and starts working the local government process. It finds a location, no matter how small, where it makes progress and gets laws changed. It then bundles this work into case studies and model legislation and takes it to other communities.
This is exactly the hard ground work that is needed to take the goodwill BLM has built up with the public and convert it to real change. And, correct me if I am wrong, I have seen exactly zero interest out of anyone in BLM to do this -- it's all street protest and, among the richer folks, high-profile virtue signaling.
Walter Olson had a link on Twitter to an article my Mailee Smith that really gives one an idea how hard the local work is going to be:
These efforts could prove meaningless, though, in states like Illinois that give public-employee union contracts greater power than state law. Buried deep in the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act, which gives collective bargaining power to police unions, is Section 15, entitled “Act Takes Precedence.” Section 15 explicitly provides that when a government-union contract conflicts with any other law or regulation, the contract prevails.
It would be unthinkable, in any other context, to permit an agreement negotiated by unelected third parties to trump state law—but that’s exactly what Section 15 demands. Illinois could enact the best police reforms in the nation, but those reforms won’t matter if they run contrary to a police-union contract.
Good God, this is awful.
Postscript: There are a couple of added barriers, I think, beyond just skills and interest that keep Progressives from digging down into these issues
Public employees unions have always been a keep political bulwark of the Left, and I think folks on the Left struggle to challenge a public employee union
A cynical interpretation is that hard-core Progressives want to chuck democracy altogether, and thus see no reason to do the hard work of making change happen in a democratic system
Update: One idea that has been raised by Progressive of late is unbundling the police force, taking social work or civil enforcement tasks from them into other groups. These seem like approaches worth considering -- I always have wondered why traffic or parking enforcement have to be police functions. However, this would not have addressed recent high-profile shootings that are driving a lot of the anger
Category: Police and Prosecutorial Abuse |
Comments Off on The Hard Work That Must Be Done to Improve Police Accountability
How long will taxpayers put up with threats to stop doing their job every time police forces are asked to make even the smallest change or sacrifice? It’s childish stuff and before long it’s likely to create a backlash that does the police no good.
Long time readers know at this point I am fed up with everyone in the debate on police. I have been frustrated for years, long before the advent of BLM, at the structural and cultural barriers to holding police accountable for violence against citizens. But I am equally frustrated at BLM and the Left for frittering away the moment, focusing on violence and looting Apple stores rather than the hard, city by city work of real reform.
Drum is right that the police and their unions tend to oppose even the smallest reforms. But I do think he is unfair in that he is leaving out the background that the Left is demonizing their entire profession and threatening to cut budgets and salaries -- a lot of folks would get snippy if the world were suddenly demonizing their profession.
But it is an interesting exercise to take the two sentences I quote from Drum and substitute "teachers", another group of government employees currently refusing to fully do their jobs, for "police".
Postscript: It is interesting to note in this comparison that no one has suggested that police stay home and get paid because of COVID threats, even though their risk is certainly far greater than that of teachers. I can't believe it, but after years of being a critic of abuses of police and prosecutorial power, the Left is this close to having me leap to the defense of police. Incredible.
A good many of my conservative friends are in shock at the reaction to the killing of George Floyd. "We saw the video. We agree its awful. No one we know is defending this."
Yes, that is likely true. The video was pretty damning. But you see, these things seldom happen on video. And when they don't, Conservatives are generally in a "believe all cops" mode that is just as ignorant of due process and nuance as the me-too brigades were with Julie Swetnick's crazy accusations about Judge Kavanaugh.
I understand that a great many police officers are good, even laudable people. But not all are. And because there are bad apples, we need careful accountability systems for police particularly because we give them powers and responsibilities that go beyond those of ordinary citizens.
The problem with this accountability is that Conservatives tend to go past respecting and supporting police, to fetishizing them. I get it -- police are really at the core of beliefs for many Conservatives, whose views turn around the fight between civilization and barbarism. It's hard not to think of this with barbarism in the streets over the last 24 hours. No matter how much we respect them and need them to be there, we still also have to impose accountability on them. You Conservatives frequently stand athwart of this accountability (you Progressives too, but I will get to that in the next post).
I am not going to lecture serious Progressives on the arson and looting in the streets today -- if you don't understand that stealing iPhones is not an appropriate reaction to police brutality, then the rest of this is going to be lost on you. But you guys basically represent my side in this thing and frankly you are doing a terrible job. I will focus on BLM and it could apply equally well to the entire Progressive response.
There is a real problem with police accountability and police violence in this country, one I have been writing about since long before the BLM movement was even created.
The harm of these police accountability issues falls disproportionately, but not solely, on blacks and other minority ethnic groups
For any number of reasons, fixing racism is not the immediate answer. Most obviously, because racism is super-hard to eradicate and has persisted (though improved, IMO) despite a lot of attention over many decades. It is hard to point to any time and place in human history when some folks have not been seduced by in-group-out-group thinking. The other reason is that the primary issue is accountability, not racism. We give police special powers to use force that the rest of us do not have, but impose less accountability on them for the use of force than the rest of us face. No matter how good most police officers are, this accountability problem is going to allow bad eggs to repeatedly abuse their power.
There are real, identifiable steps that can actually increase police accountability and transparency and reduce the types of police violence incidents BLM was formed to oppose. Early on, BLM actually identified a pretty good list.
BLM did a fabulous job of raising awareness and putting these issues near the center of political discussion.
Having done so, BLM now has gone completely off the rails. It appears to be entirely focused on virtue-signalling and disruption and support of progressive issues completely tangential to its initial focus. It has no coherent action plan. Colin Kapernick torpedoed his own football career to bring attention to BLM, but once he did so and had microphones thrust in his face from every direction, neither he nor any of his supporters had anything specific to advocate for, other than outrage and telegraphing their victim status.
Things are even worse today. A middle and upper class white populace who was sympathetic two days ago may be turning against you. If you display barbarism in the streets, barbarism that only the police can head off, then you increase sympathy for the police rather than support your narrative of accountability
Progress can be made on these issues, but what it will take is a hard city by city slog to change the rules that govern police discipline and transparency. As I wrote before, BLM "could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places."
Republicans often oppose police accountability steps -- they don't just support the police, they fetishize them. But the cities that most cry out for new accountability rules -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles -- are have Democratic super-majorities and governments whose officials almost to a one have come out publicly in support of BLM. So why no progress? One big barrier is the Democratic Party's unwavering support for public employee unions, and it is police unions that are the biggest barrier to implementing the steps BLM should be demanding. If you are not diving in and challenging police union contracts on their next renewal, then you aren't doing anything useful on this issue.
Scott Johnson of Powerline has been following the trial of a Minneapolis police officer accused to shooting and killing a totally innocent woman (in fact, the woman who called the police) seemingly without the least provocation. Johnson has reported for months on all the frustrating barriers to bringing this police officer to justice -- the refusal to pin the officers to a story immediately before they had time to coordinate a story, the internal affairs investigators who acted more like cover-up artists, the complete unwillingness of the police force to do a quality investigation, and the incredible difficulty the DA had in pursuing this case or getting any cooperation with supposed law enforcement officers. As he writes:
Prosecution of the Noor case by his office has been a tremendous strain on Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. He is in treatment for alcohol abuse. He deserves credit for assigning the case to Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy and sticking with it as it roiled relations with Minneapolis police. As it turned out, Sweasy had to convene a grand jury and issue subpoenas to secure the testimony of police officers involved in the case.
These are the kinds of issues I and many others have raised for years about problems with police accountability. I believe bad police officers are a small minority of the force but this lack of accountability has been incredibly obvious for years, and has poisoned the view of police officers in certain communities that interact with them the most. Black Lives Matter started with a police accountability agenda before the movement went off the rails. So I am happy to see a prominent writer give it attention.
Sort of. Because it is not clear to me that Johnson really sees the general police accountability issue. For most of the last 10 years, Powerline bloggers including Johnson have been pretty skeptical of those who have critiqued police shootings. I would describe their default position as "the police are right, their critics all have agendas." I refuse to claim to see into people's hearts, and really am reluctant to get pulled into intersectional finger-pointing, but it is impossible to ignore that the one case that seems to have woken him up is the killing of a pretty blonde white lady by a person of color.
Don't get me wrong, I think the jury was correct in convicting the officer, and respect their bravery as very, very few juries will ever convict police officers. The prosecutor had to have done a heroic job in getting this conviction. But I fear that Johnson and perhaps other Conservatives are reading the wrong causes into the difficult prosecution. He writes that "Something is rotten in the city of Minneapolis," and my interpretation of this (from this series as well as other things he has written) is that he attributes the difficulty in prosecution not to systematic problems in holding police accountable but in the fact that the officer was ethnically Somali and that the city of Minneapolis is somehow reluctant to challenge the Somali community. I guess after horrific stories like the non-prosecution of rapists in Rotherham, one has to consider this possibility -- I know Minneapolis has a large Somali community but know nothing of its dynamics. But frankly after studying 100 candles that are burning through the oxidation of petrochemicals, I am skeptical the 101st will turn out to be phlogiston.
Former Broward County sheriff's deputy Scot Peterson has been widely vilified for failing to intervene in the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But did Peterson's failure amount to a crime? Although that is what local prosecutors argue, it seems like a stretch.
The arrest warrant approved by Circuit Court Judge Andrew Siegel this week charges Peterson with seven counts of child neglect, a felony, and three misdemeanor counts of culpable negligence as well as one misdemeanor count of perjury for allegedly lying to investigators about how many shots he heard while taking cover 75 feet away from the building where a gunman was murdering students and teachers. Only the perjury charge seems like a straightforward application of the relevant statute, while the other charges are novel applications of laws that are generally invoked in very different contexts.
To my mind, this represents another example of the escalation of stakes in modern partisan politics. Conservatives invested a lot in the "it's all Scot Peterson's fault" narrative about Parkland, presumably as a foil to the gun control lobby. I think this is similar to some of the flimsy charges levelled at Trump associates in an attempt to show that some kinda-sorta-maybe Russian collusion was going on. If it were not Florida I would say that there can't be any way the charging authority thinks this can make it through trial, but it is Florida after all.
Prostitution is a person selling sexual services of their own free will. Trafficking is a form of kidnapping and slavery, when someone is forced to provide sexual services by someone with power over them.
All or even most prostitution is not trafficking, but many in the media and political sphere use these two a synonyms. I have seen it all week surround the Robert Kraft bust for seeking a private happy ending even before his team played in the Superbowl. I see this as a victory of traditionally anti-prostitution folks on the Right who have found a way to take advantage of a division on the Left, and specifically a division within feminism, to rebrand prostitution and bring some folks on the Left over to their side.
I am not an expert on feminist politics, but what I do know is the prostitution has created a divide among feminists. You remember the old abortion chant that feminists wanted the government to keep its laws off their body? That what a woman did with her body was an eminently private affair and should not be subject to government regulations? Well, feminists who followed up on this thought in a consistent manner generally supported legalization of prostitution. Bans on prostitution were seen by these folks as just another example of the male-dominated system limiting women's choices and ability to make money the way they choose.
On the other side more modern feminists see everything through the prism of male power over women. This is the "all sex is rape" group and for them prostitution has nothing to do with women's free will and everything to do with yet another channel through which men objectify and dehumanize women. From here it's only a small step to thinking that all prostitution is slavery. And thus by attempting to rebrand prostitution as trafficking, the Right found new allies on the Left in their campaign against sex work.
Those who read me a lot know I come down on the side of women being able to exercise choice, and I think the only real dehumanizing going on is the denial by modern feminists of any agency among most women.
But real abusive trafficking certainly exists. How much of prostitution fits this category is impossible to really know as a layman because the media and activists do so much to blur the line in their reporting. But I will say this: To the extent trafficking exists, it is not enabled by society somehow being soft on prostitution, in fact it is enabled by the opposite. By making prostitution illegal, we give unscrupulous people leverage to abuse those in sex work. Women being abused by men at, say, Wal-Mart have many legal outlets to air their grievances and seek change or compensation -- no one talks about trafficking in Wal-Mart greeters. But abused sex workers cannot go to the legal system for redress of abuse because they themselves are treated as criminals in the system. Contributing to this is our restrictionism on immigration. This is why many real trafficking cases revolve around the abuse of immigrant women, because abusers know these victims have not one but two impediments to seeking legal help.
For a short time 5-10 years ago I thought we might be near a breakthrough in softening the penalties on women voluntarily seeking to make a living through sex work. Now, my optimism has dimmed. The success the Right has had in enlisting parts of the Left in rebranding all prostitution as slavery has polluted discourse on this issue and means a lot of women will still be left outside the law.
This actually got me thinking about policing and race. When I was growing up in the South, having white skin could confer similar privileges, though less reliably (I still managed to flirt with losing my license on a couple of occasions). The tiny village where my high school was located (Houston at the time had a number of small villages inside its boundaries) actually hired one of the Houston Police officers who was fired for killing Joe Campos Torres as its police chief. Today, I would hope things are much better than they were in the 1970's South but blacks today are still arrested for marijuana use way more often than whites despite similar usage patterns.
I have never thought that bad police officers were anything but a small minority of police forces, but unfortunately lack of accountability, a general unwillingness to punish bad officers, and even protection provided to bad officers by good ones all combine to let these bad officers do a lot of damage.
Lawrence Faulkenberry has been awarded $1.3 million for the police brutality he suffered. But in the decades before inexpensive personal video recording, he would have instead been rotting in jail.
The video, posted below, shows Fauklenberry standing outside his home when three deputies walk up with guns drawn, responding to a false report from his mentally ill son after a spat over homework, who had accused his father of being drunk and carrying a gun.
Not only does Faulkenberry not own a gun, he was not drunk.
“The video plainly shows that at no point during the entire incident did the plaintiff offer any resistance or assault any of the deputies.
...
Not only did Faulkenberry not assault deputies, the video shows Caldwell County Sergeant Dustin M. Yost using a judo-type leg sweep on Faulkenberry, causing him to fall down, even though he appeared to be fully cooperating.
Then all three deputies can be seen piling on top of him with one deputy punching him in the eye and another pushing him down with his knee.
The video also revealed at no point in the video did Faulkenberry assault deputy Michael Taylor and deputy Houseton, which they claimed as justification for their use of force.
Faulkenberry was arrested for felony assault on a public servant, resisting arrest and aggravated assault with a firearm.
One wonders how many innocent people went to jail, and still go to jail, because police know that they can make any story stick -- at least until video evidence started to appear, and even then it is hart to convict police of obvious crimes.
Postscript: I would add that this case illustrates one of my issues with the BLM approach to police violence -- it is not just an issue of racism. This is a white victim. And since it is really hard to fix racism anyway (thought there are police training programs that can help), the solution has to also involve a lot of hard work changing rules and union contracts to increase police accountability, hard work that pretty much is not happening or even being discussed anywhere -- instead we are arguing about NFL millionaires taking a knee during the national anthem.
Like many of the people who are protesting today in St. Louis the acquittal of Jason Stockley (please, let's hope it stays peaceful) I am angry about the lack of accountability for this behavior:
Smith tried to flee from Stockley on Dec. 20, 2011, following an alleged drug deal, authorities said. During the pursuit, Stockley could be heard saying on an internal police car video he was going to kill Smith, prosecutors said.
Stockley, riding in the passenger seat of a patrol vehicle with his personal AK-47 in one hand and department-issued weapon in the other, shot at Smith’s car, according to St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Susan Ryan and charging documents.
At Stockley’s direction, the driver of the police car slammed into Smith’s vehicle and they came to a stop, court documents said. Stockley then approached Smith’s car and shot him five times with his service weapon.
Stockley’s lawyers said he fired in self-defense because he believed Smith was reaching for a gun but prosecutors said the only gun recovered from the scene had only Stockley’s DNA on it.
Stockley was acquitted of all charges today. Just read the above and remember that Smith was not some terrorist about to detonate a nuclear weapon, he was involved in a drug sale. And here is this police officer chasing him in gunzerker dual-wield mode, crashing his car into him and shooting him after stating his intention to do so over the radio.
But I am also pissed off at BLM. Why? Well, I suppose if they encourage folks to violence today I will be mad at them for that. But I am really mad at the total failure they have become as a change organization. For years many lone voices have tried to point out issues with police violence and the lack of accountability for it. BLM did a great job of substantially raising awareness of these issues through protests and disruptions. But protest and disruption (and collecting donations) is all they seem to be able to do. The time is long past that they need to be leading the hard work of renegotiating police union contracts and changing local laws. BLM should have been ready for a day like today with a list of model legislation they can be waving in front of cameras saying this is the list of things we need to be doing in every city to prevent a repeat of this travesty. Instead, all we will watch is more protests and violence.
Why do I single out BLM? Why is it their responsibility? Because they have sucked all the oxygen out of the room. They wanted to be -- and are -- the de facto leaders on this issue. They get all the funding. They get all the celebrity support. And they are not doing jack except perhaps alienating people they will need to work with to make progress. They actually had a good plan in the beginning that they have since abandoned in favor of posturing and virtue signalling. In contrast look at the ACLU, the IJ, and ALEC and how they spend their resources. It reminds me of exactly how the Trump Administration operates, as so ably described by Megan McArdle today. Lots of posturing, no ability to do the hard, detailed work to make change.
If you want to convince me of the need for restrictions on any substances, such as narcotics, you have to convince me of three things:
That incarcerating users is somehow better for them than their addiction
That ethically abusers of the substance are more worthy of our attention and intervention than legitimate users who benefit from the substance and whose access will likely be restricted
That the negative social costs of the substance's use are higher than the inevitable social costs of the criminal black market (including the freedom-reducing policing laws implemented in response) that will emerge when its use or purchase is banned
Not only have I not been convinced on any of these dimensions on any of the substances we currently call illegal drugs, I have yet to see anyone seriously even attempt to address these trade-offs or acknowledge they exist.
I was at a function the other day when I was challenged to take a position on the stupid 'black lives matter vs. all lives matter' false dichotomy. I was fortunate to be in a group that actually let me answer with more nuance. Here is essentially what I said:
There is a real problem with police accountability and police violence in this country, one I have been writing about since long before the BLM movement was even created.
The harm of these police accountability issues falls disproportionately, but not solely, on blacks and other minority ethnic groups
For any number of reasons, fixing racism is not the immediate answer. Most obviously, because racism is super-hard to eradicate and has persisted (though improved, IMO) despite a lot of attention over many decades. It is hard to point to any time and place in human history when some folks have not been seduced by in-group-out-group thinking. The other reason is that the primary issue is accountability, not racism. We give police special powers to use force that the rest of us do not have, but impose less accountability on them for the use of force than the rest of us face. No matter how good most police officers are, this accountability problem is going to allow bad eggs to repeatedly abuse their power.
There are real, identifiable steps that can actually increase police accountability and transparency and reduce the types of police violence incidents BLM was formed to oppose. Early on, BLM actually identified a pretty good list.
BLM did a fabulous job of raising awareness and putting these issues near the center of political discussion.
Having done so, BLM now has gone completely off the rails. It appears to be entirely focused on virtue-signalling and disruption and support of progressive issues completely tangential to its initial focus. It has no coherent action plan. Colin Kapernick torpedoed his own football career to bring attention to BLM, but once he did so and had microphones thrust in his face from every direction, neither he nor any of his supporters had anything specific to advocate for, other than outrage and telegraphing their victim status.
Progress can be made on these issues, but what it will take is a hard city by city slog to change the rules that govern police discipline and transparency. As I wrote before, BLM "could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places."
Republicans often oppose police accountability steps -- they don't just support the police, they fetishize them. But the cities that most cry out for new accountability rules -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles -- are have Democratic super-majorities and governments whose officials almost to a one have come out publicly in support of BLM. So why no progress? One big barrier is the Democratic Party's unwavering support for public employee unions, and it is police unions that are the biggest barrier to implementing the steps BLM should be demanding. This is another side of this issue discussed earlier in the week.
The other day, in writing about how I think Black Lives Matter has lost its way, I said that I supported their goal of increasing accountability of police forces but that goal was going to take a lot of hard, nuts-and-bolts legislative and policy steps that BLM seems uninterested in pursuing. This article from Reuters (via link from Overlawyered) gives one an idea of some of the issues that exist:
The episode is a telling snapshot of the power police unions flex across the United States, using political might to cement contracts that often provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse.
From city to city, union contracts have become just as crucial in governing departments as police manuals and city charters. Yet those contracts are coming under scrutiny amid civil rights protests over alleged police abuses, including shootings of unarmed black subjects.
Reuters, examining the fine print of 82 police union contracts in large cities across the country, found a pattern of protections afforded the men and women in blue:
• A majority of the contracts call for departments to erase disciplinary records, some after just six months, making it difficult to fire officers with a history of abuses. In 18 cities, suspensions are erased in three years or less. In Anchorage, Alaska, suspensions, demotions and disciplinary transfers are removed after two years.
• Nearly half of the contracts allow officers accused of misconduct to access the entire investigative file – including witness statements, GPS readouts, photos, videos and notes from the internal investigation – before being interrogated.
• Twenty cities, including San Antonio, allow officers accused of misconduct to forfeit sick leave or holiday and vacation time rather than serve suspensions.
• Eighteen cities require an officer’s written consent before the department publicly releases documents involving prior discipline or internal investigations.
• Contracts in 17 cities set time limits for citizens to file complaints about police officers – some as short as 30 days. Nine cities restrict anonymous complaints from being investigated.
Police and their supporters will say that Police have a particularly dangerous job and need such extra process protections. In fact, while there are dangers, it is certainly not among the most dangerous jobs (trash collectors are twice as likely to die on the job than police). I would argue that we give the police unique powers -- to use violence and to take away a persons liberty -- not possessed by any other citizens and thus we should expect more rather than fewer accountability provisions to go with these special powers.
I will say that I am not particularly optimistic about progress in this area. The Right tends to fetishize police and are tend to oppose any restrictions on police. The Left is the natural home for police reform, but most on the Left are loath to take on public employee unions, probably their strongest base of political power, and most of these changes (as seen above) require challenging the police unions. Black Lives Matter brought a lot of focus to these issues, but they simply can't seem to get past disruption and into policy changes and legislation, and besides the group appears to have been hijacked by the Left to be a vehicle for generic protests of Progressive causes like climate change legislation.
BLM has created a very hot brand, and at least for certain segments of the population, it has a lot of accumulated virtue credits. Now, everyone on the progressive Left wants to use that brand and those virtue credits, and are trying to shove their particular issues under the BLM tent. BLM is thus in the process of being hijacked. I give the movement about 60 days to get its messaging in order before its power to actually affect its original issue (police and proprietorial abuse) is at an end. That doesn't mean that BLM will go away -- if successfully jacked it may be around for decades, but it will be just another progressive shell organization. This will make its leaders more prominent and even perhaps a lot richer (think gigs at MSNBC), but it will make the goal of getting more accountability applied to police forces a dead letter.
Well, it appears that Black Lives Matters has moved on to climate activism, or whatever, but has mostly fallen off message on police accountability. Protests in the vague hope of ending racism by closing busy highways and airports and kneeling during the National Anthem are going to get nothing done -- the solution to the problems that sparked the BLM movement are to be found in legislative efforts to create better police accountability measures and to roll back a number of egregious protections from accountability that exist in many union contracts. The solution is not to throw blanket hate on police officers, many or most of whom are doing a good job, but to recognize that when we give officers unique powers to use force, they need extra accountability to go with those powers. Today, most police have less accountability for their use of force than you and I do.
Unfortunately, doing that is hard. It is a tough legislative slog that has to go local city by local city, with few national-level shortcuts available. It faces opposition from Conservatives who tend to fetishize police, and from Liberals who are reluctant to challenge a public employees union. And it requires that BLM translate their energy from disruption and attention-grabbing (which they are very good at) to policy and legislation, which they have shown no facility for. They need to be working on model legislation and pushing that down to the local level. This original plan actually looked pretty good, but apparently it has been rejected and gets little or no attention.
As a result, BLM seems to be stuck in a pointless do-loop of disruption and virtue-signalling. I just want to scream at them, "OK, you have our attention -- and many of us are sympathetic -- what in the hell do you want done?" Unfortunately, their current lists of goals have almost nothing to do with police accountability and appear to be a laundry list of progressive talking points. It appears to be another radical organization that has been jacked by the Democratic establishment to push mainstream Democratic talking points.
Here is a good example, for a number of reasons. In the past, the officer likely would have been believed and the woman might have been convicted of something. I think this happens to people across the racial spectrum, but African-Americans have had a particularly hard time -- given both racist perceptions and lack of good counsel -- in these he-said-she-said cases with police. Not to mention that African-Americans -- for a variety of reasons including racial profiling in things like New York's stop and frisk program to the tendency of poor black municipalities to fine the crap out of their citizens to generate revenue -- come in contact with police disproportionately more often.
Legalize drugs. This would reduce the rents that attract the poor into dealing, would keep people out of jail, and reduce a lot of violent crime associated with narcotics traffic that kills investment and business creation in black neighborhoods. It would also reduce the main excuse for petty harassment by police that falls disproportionately on young black men. No it's not a good thing to have people addicted to strong narcotics but it is worse to be putting them in jail and having them shooting at each other.
Bring real accountability to police forces. When I see stories of folks absurdly abused by police forces, I can almost always guess the race of the victim in advance. I used to be a law-and-order Conservative that blindly trusted police statements about every encounter. The advent of cell-phone video has proven this to be supremely naive. No matter how trusted, you can't give any group a pass on accountability.
Eliminate the minimum wage (compromise: eliminate the minimum wage before 25). Originally passed for racist reasons, it still (if unintentionally) keeps young blacks from entering the work force. Dropping out of high school does not hurt employment because kids learn job skills in high school (they don't); it hurts because finishing high school is a marker of responsibility and other desirable job traits. Kids who drop out can overcome this, but only if they get a job where they can demonstrate these traits. No one is going to take that chance at $10 or $15 an hour
Voucherize education. It's not the middle class that is primarily the victim of awful public schools, it is poor blacks. Middle and upper class parents have the political pull to get accountability. It is no coincidence the best public schools are generally in middle and upper class neighborhoods. Programs such as the one in DC that used to allow urban poor to escape failing schools need to be promoted.
Both BLM and the campus rape culture movement have a starting point in real problems.
On campus, and even in a few police precincts, women complaining about sexual assault would get patted on the head and sent on their way, their charges going largely investigated. In part, oddly enough, I think the problem stems from the war on drugs -- for literally decades, campus police have helped to shelter their students from drug investigations and harassment from their local community police force. I know they did so at Princeton when I was there. So campus police forces really had a mission to keep their students out of jail and out of trouble. This is A-OK with me on drugs, but it obviously leads to terrible results when we get to sexual assault. So something needed to be done to have police forces, particularly ones on campus, take sexual assault charges seriously.
With police, officers have been sheltered from any real accountability for years. We give the police the ability to use force and other powers that ordinary citizens don't possess, but instead of giving them more scrutiny and accountability to offset these powers, we give them less. This has really been a bipartisan problem -- Conservatives tend to fetishize the police and want to assume by default that all police actions are justified. The Left is more willing to be skeptical of police behavior, but they refuse to take on any public sector union and police unions have generally locked in their contracts any number of accountability-avoidance mechanisms. So something needed to be done to bring accountability to police forces.
And with these quite justifiable and reasonable goals around which many of us could have coalesced into some sort of consensus, both protest efforts immediately overreached into crazy zones.
On campus, the reasonable demand for serious action in response to a sexual assault charge was abandoned in favor of the demand for immediate conviction without due process based on any sexual assault charge. Oddly mirroring the conservative attitude towards police, activists said that alleged victims had to always believed, and demanded that universities punish anyone accused of sexual transgressions. The result has become a toxic mess, and in some ways is a setback for justice, as activists have made it easier to get a rapist thrown out of school but perhaps harder to actually get thrown in jail.
With police, activists immediately eschewed the reasonable need for more police accountability and jumped to the contention that all police officers are racist and systematically abuse black citizens. Their focus seems to be on police shootings, though I find the pattern of petty police harassment (through the war on drugs and programs like New York's stop and frisk) to be more problematic. Just as in the campus rape debate, a reasonable need for more accountability and investigation of police shootings has morphed into a demand that police officers be treated as guilty by default in all shootings.
Each of these movements have made the problems more visible while simultaneously making these problems less likely to be solved.
I will add that I stick by my evaluation of BLM I wrote a while back. I actually sort of liked a lot of their proposed plan, but I wrote (see particularly part in bold):
There is much that progressive and conservative groups could learn from each other. Conservative groups (outside of anti-abortion folks) are loath to pursue the public demonstration and disruption tactics that can sometimes be helpful in getting one's issues on the public agenda. The flip side is that public disruption seems to be all BLM knows how to do. It can't seem to get beyond disruption, including the unfathomable recent threat to disrupt an upcoming marathon in the Twin Cities. It could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places. Many of the steps in BLM's plan cry out of model legislation and successful pilots/examples.
It's not that I think that all police officers are somehow evil and out to kill black people, or whatever. The issue is that we give police special and unique powers, and those special and unique powers should require special and unique accountability. Unfortunately, we tend to do exactly the opposite -- give police less accountability than the average citizen for his or her actions (this lack of accountability can be blamed both on the Left and Right -- the Right tends to fetishize and hero-worship police, seeing them as the last bastion against creeping barbarism, and the Left refuses to take on the powerful public unions that represent police).
This is a great example of exactly why I get angry. It causes us to wonder how many of those police stories from the past were just as full of sh*t as this officer's, but we lacked the ability through modern video to find out. The police officer's actions in trying to cover up his misconduct (e.g. by screwing with the timeline in his dispatcher calls) turns out not to be unique (the most common variation of this is the now-ubiquitous officer yelling drop the gun about five seconds after he has already shot the citizen). In fact, it seems to happen so often that one wonders if there is not an informal grapevine among police that train new officers in these cover-up techniques.
People often ask me in the comments why I don't respect officers for the job they do. Sure I do -- policing is one of the few clear-cut government roles all but the most extreme anarcho-capitalist libertarians support. But I am angry that my and others' respect for officers has been used historically against the public as a tool for evading accountability.
Update: Making this proposed legislation in AZ to outlaw recording of police in public a really bad idea.
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
I will remind folks that civil asset forfeiture is by definition taken from innocent people, ie those not convicted of a crime.
Update: It would be interesting to see the racial/ethnic mix of those whose stuff is seized. Somehow, I don't imagine the victims of theft-by-cop are a bunch of rich white people.
Chicago police's use of a warehouse at Honan Square to detain suspects for secret interrogations just gets worse and worse.
Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal....
According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.
But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian.
“Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”
For whatever reason, the story does not seem to be able to generate much national heat, as partially evidenced by the fact that it takes a UK newspapers to show any initiative on the story. The Right fetishizes law enforcement, the Left refuses to take on a powerful public union, and the city is run by a mayor with powerful connections to both the President and Hillary Clinton, so essentially no one is interested.
By the way, most of these folks are being held for hours or days due to drug possession arrests (5386 of the 7000+), yet another indicator of why the war on drugs has become so stupid and counter-productive.
In discussing the plan, Kevin Drum fails to address the elephant in the room for the Left in making progress on this, and that is the enormous reluctance of Democrats to challenge a public employee union. And you can bet that police unions will likely be the biggest barrier to getting a lot of this done, even perhaps ahead of Conservative law-and-order groups (you can see the token sop thrown to unions in point 10 of the plan, but it ain't going to be enough).
By the way, there is much that progressive and conservative groups could learn from each other. Conservative groups (outside of anti-abortion folks) are loath to pursue the public demonstration and disruption tactics that can sometimes be helpful in getting one's issues on the public agenda. The flip side is that public disruption seems to be all BLM knows how to do. It can't seem to get beyond disruption, including the unfathomable recent threat to disrupt an upcoming marathon in the Twin Cities. It could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places. Many of the steps in BLM's plan cry out of model legislation and successful pilots/examples.
I am hoping this is fake given the joke name of the author. If not, I would point out that we (reluctantly) give TSA employees power to search our luggage solely for seeking out items that might endanger the aircraft or other passengers. We do not give this arguably extra-Constitutional power to TSA employees so they can write titillating articles on the web exposing our private stuff.
In operating campgrounds, I could create a blog with posts every day showing the goofy things that campers bring with them or try to do, or mistakes they make as novice campers. I do not, though, because hosting folks is a kind of trust. I would expect folks empowered to ransack my luggage to show even more discretion.
If I were a Mexican in Phoenix, I would do a full walk-around checking my vehicle before every trip. A visiting friend once asked me if the fact that Hispanics all seem to drive so slow was a cultural thing and I said that more likely, they know they will get busted for going even a hair over the speed limit.
When Kris Kobach says "In four different sections, the law [SB1070] reiterates that a law-enforcement official 'may not consider race, color, or national origin' in making any stops or determining an alien's immigration status," he is ignoring reality. The law asks police to make a determination (e.g. probable cause that one is an illegal immigrant) that is impossible for actual human beings to make without such profiling. It's like passing a law that says "police must drive their cars 30 miles a day but can't drive their cars to do so." The reality on the ground here in Arizona is that, illegal or not, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been using racial profiling to make arrest sweeps for years, and his officers have become masters at finding some pretext to pull over a Mexican they want to check out (e.g. the broken tail light). Words in this law about racial profiling are not going to change anything.
Update: I forgot this story from 2008, which is a great example of what I am talking about here
Arrest records from crime sweeps conducted by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office add substantial weight to claims that deputies usedracial profiling to pull Latino motorists over to search for illegal immigrants....
even when the patrols were held in mostly White areas such as Fountain Hills and Cave Creek, deputies arrested more Latinos than non-Latinos, the records show. In fact, deputies arrested among the highest percentage of Latinos when patrols were conducted in mostly White areas.
On the arrest records, deputies frequently cited minor traffic violations such as cracked windshields and non-working taillights as the reason to stop drivers.
"These are penny-ante offenses that (police) almost always ignore. This is telling you this is being used to get at something else, and I think that something else is immigration enforcement against Hispanic people," Harris said....
