Democrats' Tough Road Ahead To Diminish Police Violence

Trump provides a convenient scapegoat for a lot of sins on the national scene, but it's significant that George Floyd was killed by a blue city police force in a blue state. (Both Minnesota senators are Democrats, and Minnesotans have not sent a Republican to the Senate since Rod Graham retired in 2001. Tim Pawlenty, the last Republican governor, ended his term in 2011. The office has been held by Democrats ever since, including the current governor, Tim Walz. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is likewise a Democrat, albeit as a member of the uniquely Minnesotan Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party.) There's a number of reasons for that, and why these killings keep happening in such places. In some cases, Democrats are in a particularly bad position to implement needed changes:

1. Ending qualified immunity. Among these, this is the least likely to result in division. Justin Amash has lately announced a bill to end the disastrous judge-made doctrine of "qualified immunity". This makes it difficult to pursue civil rights cases against police unless someone else has shown there was a pattern of such abuses. Because of the Catch-22 of qualified immunity, it is almost certain such cases will never proceed. Recently, the Supreme Court refused to hear one egregious case, which means legislative action is necessary. Justin Amash recently drafted a bill on the subject, and has lately found a Democratic co-sponsor in the House, Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass).
2. Ending 1033 transfers and demilitarizing the police. There is substantial evidence that giving military-grade hardware to police increases civilian casualties. New efforts to dramatically reduce these transfers have lately started from Rand Paul (R-KY) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), but the problems there are the usual ones of politicians not wanting to look soft on crime, and lobbying efforts by the powerful Fraternal Order of Police (which, see below). In fact, it's never been safer to be a cop, and this military hardware is counterproductive to actual policing.
3. Ending the War On Drugs. A study that came out last year purported to show that, once you controlled for violent situations, the number of black people shot was on a par with the overall population rates. Yet this contains a significant, circular flaw. Drug prohibition has chased procurement and distribution of some drugs underground. Accordingly, contract disputes become deadly. The mass of drug enforcement takes place selectively in predominantly black neighborhoods.
   
   Ending this will not be easy. Joe Biden, the Democrats' standard-bearer going into November, shows why: he has been one of his party's most enthusiastic drug warriors. While the terrain has changed since the Reagan administration, the appetite for meaningful reform has mostly been piecemeal and incremental.
4. Reducing the scope of the law. The more laws there are, the more to enforce, and the more need for police interactions with the public. This can have fatal consequences — and there are no better examples of this than Eric Garner, whose cigarette sales evaded New York's insanely high taxes. Those taxes, since raised yet again, are a strong Tell that the technocratic Democratic Party is of no mind to dial back such laws, and indeed still thinks mankind is perfectible by way of the legislature.
5. Ending police unions. This is the biggest nut, and the one the Democrats will have the most trouble with. Democrats' historic affinity for unions, and public employee unions particularly, will make a showdown with the Fraternal Order of Police all but impossible. The squabble a few years back over private prisons shows how this is likely to unfold: on the one hand, yay that organizations like CoreCivic have had fewer prisoners sent their way, with the recognition that private entities shouldn't create incentives to jail people; yet there is no analogous understanding that public employee prison guard unions spend vastly larger sums on lobbying to the same effect.
   
   As noted above, police unions oppose not only demilitarization, but also ending asset forfeiture, body cameras, and in California, a public records law that would provide much more transparency to police activity. For all these reasons, Peter Suderman at Reason has called for an end to police unions, on some very solid grounds:

   Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria's economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining produces somewhat higher compensation for police officers. It does not correlate with a reduction in total crime—but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities.

Not even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, alleged scourge of public employee unions, had the guts to apply public employee union restrictions to police and fire unions. Democrats are in even worse shape, with stronger headwinds. The median Hillary voter is a greater danger to black people than even the Klan, nowadays.

Update 2020-06-10: Scott Greenfield, from a couple days ago:

Tepid. How about requiring FBI to record interrogations, banning anal & vaginal digital searches, requiring overt act for fed drug conspiracies, ending stash house prosecutions, cutting sentencing guidelines, removing marijuana from Schedule 1, ending QI, to name a few others? https://t.co/TdlDB1yzme

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) June 8, 2020

Also, more from Jacob Sullum in Reason: banning chokeholds, use-of-force restrictions, making it easier to fire bad cops, increasing police transparency, and abolishing qualified immunity.

The Wrong Jailers

Last Thursday, the Department of Justice announced it would cease using private prisons, an advance for those of us who think private incentives to imprison people have no place in a free society. Of course, this doesn't end them everywhere; the ACLU has a petition to terminate private prisons for captured illegal immigrants, a contract let by the Department of Homeland Security. And then of course there are the various states using them (the ACLU cites Texas and Louisiana as two that do), though such prisoners are a minority of the overall population.

But private prisons are by no means the only entities pushing to imprison people, as this 2015 Reason essay makes clear. In a review of a Washington Post story reporting that private prison companies CCA and GEO "have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts", Ed Krayewski writes "there's a far larger lobbies [sic] invested in large prison populations—corrections officers and their associated unions":

The California prison guards union, for example, poured millions of dollars to influence policy in California alone—it spent $22 million on campaign donations since 1989, more than CCA and GEO have combined, and continues to push for prison expansions. The National Fraternal Order of Police, meanwhile, spent $5 million on lobbying efforts since 1989, more than GEO did. That's not to mention the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which includes a "Corrections Union" and lobbies on behalf of all kinds of policies that seek to turn citizens into revenue sources for public employees. They've spent $187 million on campaign donations since 1989, making a far stronger case to be labeled the biggest lobby nobody's talking about than private prisons.

The AFSCME corrections union represents Federal prison guards, and a quick visit to their page makes clear their opposition to private prisons.  If, per the AFSCME, private prisoners represent 22,600 individuals, 12% of the overall population, we can assert a similar sized increase in the ranks of unionized jailers. Which is to say, the union itself has an interest in keeping people imprisoned, and has spent large sums doing so. The jobs it represents involve keeping people in cages, yet we hear nothing from the ACLU about ending public employee unions and their pernicious effects. Just as police unions remain the most strident foe of policing reform, prison guard unions make an awkward bedfellow when ending the War On Drugs is on the table. The modern left cannot see past its historical romanticizing of unions, and so this will not happen.

But let us return to the recent DOJ announcement. All those prisoners will be transferred to Federal jails, with union jailers. If convicts are serving time in whole or in part because of unnecessarily harsh laws and practices advocated by CCA et al. lobbying efforts, in what world is it just that the AFSCME should benefit from that? Isn't that so much tainted fruit? This vital question remains unexplored by the ACLU, who appear mainly concerned the Feds not employ the wrong jailers.

Update: A prescient blog post from Mimesis Law about the ACLU:

How different things are now, when the ACLU is at the head of the movement to restrict our rights. When a public university expels college students for saying something racist, the ACLU applauds. And when the federal government proposes a law to criminalize revenge porn, it’s down to party.

According to the civil rights advocates of today, one little tweak – a mens rea component – is all that’s needed to make the law constitutionally kosher. Never mind that revenge porn is speech. Never mind that it doesn’t fall into a category of exempt speech and is therefore constitutionally protected. Revenge porn is bad, and the ACLU opposes bad things, especially trendy bad things that intersect with feminism.

A lot more there, but the ACLU's complicity with rights suppression is of a piece with their increasingly liberal — not in the older sense — political outlook. I stopped giving to them years ago for this very reason.

Alton Sterling Meets The Murder Factory

A lot of generalized, not particularly well-thought-out points about the Alton Sterling shooting:

1. Presuming Louisiana subscribes to the same grand jury system as the rest of the US, expect to see a stacked-deck grand jury presentment of the sort engineered to get the cop exonerated (Darren Wilson, there) in the Michael Brown case. This is tolerated because grand juries are tools of prosecutors and almost never fail to convict indict, unless the subject is a law enforcement officer.
2. Even if the case were to get to trial, the prosecution would have a rough go of it, because of the presumption of truth baked into the system. That is, the system presumes cops never lie; their accounts of events, even in the face of video, are rarely questioned.
3. That is further exacerbated by the fact that Louisiana is one of many states whose statutes feature a "police bill of rights" that gives cops extra protections civilians simply do not have. This gives them time to corroborate stories, delay investigations, and other things no other accused murderer could do. "Louisiana’s law allows officers to wait up to 30 days before being interviewed as part of an investigation."
4. Finally, the "living Constitution" is frequently translated in terms favorable to police, in the form of tests that include the world "reasonable", e.g. Graham v. Connor. Cops get off with a lot of stuff civilians can't because of it.

Update: Scott Greenfield has more to say on "reasonable":

The reasonable person. The reasonable cop. The reasonable whoever. These are the sorts of rules that courts love to embrace when confronted with hard, maybe even insurmountable, problems and they can’t develop a principled test that would actually inform people what they can do without getting prosecuted.

And you love these rules. Well, not so much lawyers, but the rest of you. Because “reasonable” sounds so, well, reasonable. And as Seth Godin asks, who isn’t reasonable?

Also worth reading: "The First Rule of Policing And Alton Sterling".

Update 2: Well, then (N.b. I do not endorse "pigs"):

Now let's see how these pigs defend this. RIP #AltonSerling #BLACKLIVESMATTER pic.twitter.com/35SIWwTruJ

— R. Blanco (@illygirlBreA) July 6, 2016

Update 3: Why are ex-military given priority for civilian police jobs? Is this begging for factory-installed undiagnosed PTSD? (Not saying this was a factor in this or the I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-so-damn-soon-after-but-yeah-it-is Philando Castile shooting.)

Tamir Rice's Preordained "No True Bill"

With the Christmas season upon us, I missed a few things, but it was no surprise when I learned yesterday that Tamir Rice's killer in a blue uniform had a "no true bill" delivered (i.e. insufficient evidence to prosecute on murder charges) against Timothy Loehmann. Scott Greenfield had already predicted this outcome back on December 16, when the presentment was sent to the grand jury:

McGinty doesn’t want an indictment. McGinty is too much of a coward to take the responsibility of his office to say so, and instead is engaging in a grand jury charade to soothe the public’s anger about the murder of Tamir Rice while assuring the desired outcome.  And as this description of what happened in the grand jury shows, the prosecution is making damn sure that there will be no indictment.

This shouldn’t happen. Prosecutors do not attack, ridicule, smirk at and mock their own witnesses, except when they are doing everything possible to guarantee the result of no true bill.  And they are doing this solely to pretend, after the grand jury refuses to indict, that they’ve been fabulously fair. It’s a lie.  The difference this time is that we know of the lie before the outcome.  We’ve got the details in hand.

Which is to say, it was exactly the same sort of dog-and-pony show the district attorneys in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases trotted out as a legal Potemkin village substituting for real adversarial proceedings. There were signs Timothy Loehmann was incompetent to begin with: he had effectively been fired (he quit, in fact, but circumstances suggest he was pushed out) from the Independence, Ohio police force:

After five months on the job, Loehmann quit the police force of the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio, in December 2012, days after a deputy police chief recommended his dismissal. The deputy police chief based his recommendation on a firearms instructor’s report, obtained by NBC News, that Loehmann was experiencing an “emotional meltdown” that made his facility with a handgun “dismal.”

“They put a police officer in this situation who had a history of mental health problems,” said Michael Benza, a criminal law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “It may not have been ‘reasonable’ for him to shoot given his mental issues.”

Or it may not have been reasonable that the Cleveland PD should have ever hired him.  Claims of menace backed up his preordained exoneration, eagerly accepted by juries grand and petit, not to mention police:

In one experiment, a group of 60 police officers from a large urban police force were asked to assess the age of white, black and Latino children based on photographs. The officers were randomly assigned to be told that the children in the photographs were accused of either a misdemeanor or felony charge. The officers overestimate the age of black felony-suspected children by close to five years, but they actually underestimated the age of white felony-suspected children by nearly a year.

California lately has signed into law a bill forbidding the use of grand juries in police shooting cases, SB 227.  It could be a step in the right direction, depending on how it's implemented; state attorneys at least wouldn't have a grand jury to hide behind, anyway.

The Dumb Rejoinder To Ahmed Mohamed's Arrest: Common Sense Clocks Out

So in case you've been living in a cave the last couple of weeks, an Irving, Texas boy, Ahmed Muhamed, claimed to bring a clock of his own manufacture to school. In his English class, he plugged it in to a wall socket, whereupon it made some noise that the teacher decided was suspicious. Someone at the school declared the device a "hoax bomb", i.e. not a real bomb, whereupon police arrested and handcuffed Ahmed while they waited for his parents to take custody of him. As one Facebook poster observed, it is entirely clear neither the school officials nor the police believed he had a bomb; the observation of the "bomb", and his arrest and detention all took place within the school; the bomb squad was never called, and the "bomb" was never isolated.

More recently, poster Jeremy at Artvoice wrote a long-form piece about the incident that makes a compelling case against at least Muhamed's title claim, i.e. that he made the clock, a sentiment also endorsed by Richard Dawkins (who cited that piece). I won't go into that, because his photographs provide sufficient evidence that it's highly likely Muhamed merely stripped the cover off an old Radio Shack digital clock and threw it in a pencil case to make it look homebrew. But Jeremy then drifts into speculation and sophistry when he endorses subsequent police and administration behavior:

If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

Well, yes, it was a ridiculous overreaction. Arresting a kid for having a clock? For what crime? Handcuffing him? If the charge is that the kid lied about its manufacture, in what universe is that a colorable crime? And if the point was it might have been a hoax bomb (when the kid consistently declared otherwise, per the Dallas Morning News report), who made that determination? Subsequent investigation prompted Irving police chief Larry Boyd to say "there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm". In other words, the only people stirring up trouble were the paranoid panicky teachers, administrators, and police at the high school. (Wait, police at a suburban high school?) I get his point that "none of us were there", but if we take media reports seriously (i.e. based on evidence presented), this is a zero-tolerance nightmare. To dismiss criticism of the actions of the officials on the scene as specious ("we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts") is equally misguided. The Muhumad case joins a long list of official freakouts over very little, and if anything, should open a dialogue about the wisdom of using police to perfect society.

Monday Links

• Biology has a role in constructing gender? That's crazy talk! Leading off, a flawed but generally good essay on the social construction of sex at Pacific Standard by Alice Dreger. Excerpt:
  

  It makes me crazy that some of my feminist friends try so hard to stop their kids from being gender-typical. I have one such friend who has a fairy-princess daughter, and my friend keeps trying to keep her daughter butch, as if she owes this to Susan B. Anthony. I asked my friend, “If your son wanted to wear a pretty pink dress, would you let him?” She turned red and said, “Yes.” I answered, “Then why isn’t it gender-based oppression to deny your daughter a pretty pink dress?”
  
  ... People who think gender identities, gender roles, and sexual orientations are all socially constructed are the most naive biological determinists I’ve ever seen. They think all human brains are completely without structure when it comes to these things; we all have empty slates in our skulls at birth. No, we don’t! Really!

  She gets into some schizophrenic moments — "The expectation that men will be strong, insensitive, and hornier than women could also be described as a social construction" is more descriptive than "expectation" — but overall a great deal clearer and rational than most of the horrible feminist bilge that contains the words "men are taught to...".
• Feminists askeered of Christine Hoff Sommers: Pretty much guaranteed that calls for a safe space would result when reform feminist Christine Hoff Sommers showed up at Georgetown to deliver a talk on the state of modern feminism, with ensuing "trigger warnings" and demands for a "safe space":
  
  
  
  Sommers attracts this sort of hysterical overreaction everywhere she goes, as for instance, her Oberlin appearance, which drew out this treacly and self-absorbed letter to the editor, titled (I am not making this up) "In Response to Sommers’ Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves". Sommers' crime mainly consists of walloping the 1-in-5 rape victims myth, which apparently qualifies as being a rape "denialist" or "apologist", depending on the moment, i.e. a heretic. But what I did not realize is that the specific language has a hidden function, whether or not intended by the original writers: that of censorship.
  

  If you don't know how the game is played, the new magic word is "unsafe," because if you claim someone is making you feel "unsafe," that sets in motion Title IX protections. That is, if you want to censor someone, just claim not that you disagree with them or find them disgusting, but that they make you feel "unsafe;" then administrators are under legal peril if they do not act swiftly to restore your sense of chill.

  Which of course makes total sense: the point of these insane, childish restrictions is to suppress dissenting views, and if possible, call them names.
• Becauze "zero tolerance" has worked so well elsewhere: Speaking of paranoia and overreach, Stanford will ban students found guilty of sexual assault as the default punishment. I can't possibly imagine how that would cause anyone problems.
• When the police are brutalizing neocons, we know things will change: A terrific piece at the National Review on the "John Doe" investigations in Wisconsin that were going on while Gov. Scott Walker worked to limit collective bargaining power (not even entirely!) for public employee unions.
  

  “I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”
  
  They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.
  
  The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”

  Individuals given this "dangerous, heavily armed drug kingpin" treatment — i.e. the sort of thing that happens every day in black neighborhoods — all were Republican supporters of Wisconsin's Act 10, the bill that eventually reigned in collective bargaining for employee benefits. "Don't call your lawyer. Don't tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends." Generally social conservatives are pleased to dismiss police abuse in places like Ferguson, MO or North Charleston, SC as either justifiable or atypical, when it is anything but. When the victims are conservatives, perhaps this will give impetus to restraints on police activity and law enforcement more generally from those corners.
  
• Republicans vote to axe the death penalty in Nebraska: Utterly astonishing, but a good sign.
• Women in STEM, Dueling Studies Dep't: Another great essay by Scott Alexander, talking about two utterly divergent studies on sexism and women in STEM. The takeaway seems to be that the two best-known recent studies on the subject, Williams & Ceci 2015 (PDF) and Moss-Racusin et al. 2012, which used similar methodologies but found utterly divergent results. Williams & Ceci have long been a proponent of the idea that sexism largely doesn't exist as a bias in academic STEM fields, as for example their New York Times essay last year, "Academic Science Isn’t Sexist". Neither strikes me as compelling to partisans of the other side (see, for instance, this piece at Slate attacking the W&C study).
• Progressive Policies + San Francisco Real Estate = Gentrification: I wrote a little bit about this here whilst taking a jab at Model View Culture's apparent ignorance about the consequences of renting, but Coyote Blog has a great post up about how progressive policies drive real estate prices to the moon in that city while making rental units all but impossible to find. This is basically a function of three simultaneous and converging thrusts:
  
  
  1. Vertical caps (building upward).
  2. Population density caps (a function of #1, in part).
  3. Rent caps (rent control). This now, lately, extends to Airbnb and other short-term rentals.
  
  Rent control appears to be only somewhat in force there, as it is in Los Angeles, because how else are older, more established tenants getting evicted as per Model View Culture? According to this page, it appears rent control only operates if the property was built before 1979. (Am I weird to wonder if some landlords might hope their units get knocked down in an earthquake?)