Coyote Blog

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.

There is much to criticize in how the BLM movement operates, but I can get behind much of the plan they introduced last month.  I don't agree with all of it, but I seldom agree with all of any plan I see proposed from any side of the aisle.

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.

It seems that one of those cycles the US always castigates itself about is a perception that the Europeans have a better rail system than we do and that we should somehow emulate their system.  Which is why we still have federal subsidies of a half-assed Amtrak system and high-speed rail proposals are circulated breathlessly from time to time. 

By the way, I have been a consultant to French railroad SNCF and I gaurantee we do not want to emulate the European rail system.  First and foremost, the railroads are huge employment boondoggles.  I remember that the SNCF when I was there had something like 100,000 freight cars but 125,000 freight car maintenance people.  I suggested the railroad could assign one individual full time to his own car and still lay off 20% of the work force. 

The main reason we don't have inter-city passenger rail is a simple one that anyone spending 5 minutes with the numbers can understand -- there are distance break points where air travel is more economic than rail, and most US inter-city transit falls into the larger distance ranges.

Anyway, the anti-planner shares a bit of information that is seldom mentioned in the rail discussion that makes the US rail system look a lot more desireable:

Europe has decided to run its rail system primarily for passengers,
while America's system is run mainly for freight. Europe's rail system
has about 6 percent of the passenger travel market, while autos have
about 78 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of European freight goes by
highway. Here in the U.S., highway's share of freight travel is only 29
percent, while the auto's share of passenger travel is about 82
percent. So trains get 4 percent of potential auto users in Europe out
of their cars, but leave almost three times as much freight on the
highway.

In fact, the freight rail system is so efficient that to some extent we've obviated the need for the Panama Canal.  Many Asian container ships bound for Europe actually make port in Seattle or Vancouver, offload their containers onto trains which shoot across the country to New York or another eastern port where they are reloaded on ships for the trip to Europe.

By the way, in the same article, don't miss the hilarious proposal in Minnesota to spend taxpayer money for a high speed rail line from the Twin Cities to ... Duluth.  Yeah, that's the ticket.  New York to Boston barely makes it financially, but St. Paul to Duluth is going to be a winner.

NFL running back Onterrio Smith was apparently detained at the Twin Cities airport for possessing a device used to beat drug tests:

A search of a bag Smith was carrying April 21 turned up several
vials of dried urine and a device called "The Original
Whizzinator," which includes a fake penis, bladder and athletic
supporter.

Lets be clear on this - the device, is as far as I know completely legal.  Mr. Smith is not even in violation of NFL rules for possessing one in an airport - only actually strapping this bad boy on in an actual drug test would violate rules.  Apparently the police mistook the vials of dried urine for cocaine (I can already picture a future Will Farrell movie with a scene based on such a mix up).

Here is what scares me - why do we know about this?  Once it was determined that Mr. Smith did not possess any illegal devices or substances, he should have been left to go on his way.  Why are the airport police handing this story to the press?  Why were Mr. Smith's employers in the NFL notified?  Why isn't Mr. Smith and the contents of his luggage owed privacy?  What's next, stories about famous women found with vibrators in their luggage?