Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment general freedom

Big Brother Rides Along

Hertz has begun installing cameras in their rental cars as part of a system called NeverLost. But don’t worry, they’ve got no plans (they say) to use them (yet).

“The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so,” Hertz spokesman Evelin Imperatrice assures us. I guess Hertz is with St. Augustine about how all that exists time-​wise is a vanishingly small present moment, inasmuch as the past is already gone, the future not yet here. Ergo, nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless, customers are worried.

“I even felt weird about singing in the car by myself,” says one.

“The system can’t be turned off from what I could tell,” reports another. “[And] the camera can see the entire inside of the car. I know rental car companies have been tracking the speed and movements of their vehicles for years but putting a camera inside the cabin of the vehicle is taking their need for information a little too far.”

I’m all in favor of extensive monitoring of police and others with government-​conferred power over us, in a position to easily abuse that power. I’m not in favor of indiscriminate spying by everybody on everybody. Or of any gearing up to do that.

What to do? A little bit of tape over the lens, that’s one option. Another: boycott Hertz until they rip the cameras out. Or at least make them easy to turn off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people too much government

At Least We’re Not Turkey

Merve Büyüksaraç

Whenever I feel discouraged by the steady drumbeat of domestic assaults on liberty — from Obamacare to parents being accused of “child neglect” for letting their kids return from a playground by themselves — I try to remind myself:

Things Could Be Worse.

World history provides plenty of support for this dictum, but so does a glance at the newspaper. Like the story of how a single satiric Instagram post “could end up sending a former Miss Turkey to jail.”

An Istanbul prosecutor has been threatening to imprison Merve Büyüksaraç for up to two years for the heinous deed of insulting an official. Last summer she excerpted a satirical piece called “The Master’s Poem” that originally appeared in the magazine Uykusuz. Uykusuz has a habit of mocking Turkish politicians, including President Erdoğan.

“I shared it because it was funny to me,” she says. “I did not intend to insult Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.” Regardless of her motive, her post should not have put her at legal risk.

Buyuksarac is popular on social media — 15,000 followers on Instagram, double that on Twitter — a presence that makes her a target. The Turkish government doesn’t care whether she is an ardent dissident. They obviously just want to intimidate others with a readership who are inclined to ruffle the feathers of the powerful even a little.

So yes, things could be worse. Lots worse. They could also be a lot better. That’s what we have to fight for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling folly Second Amendment rights

Pop Gun Tart

Pop Tart Criminal

America is often said to be a land of second chances.

Just not for 7‑year-​olds. At least, not when they’re in the public school system.

Back in 2013, a boy then in second grade in Anne Arundel, Maryland, was suspended for two days for what was deemed a “gun-​related” offense.

It was also a Pop Tart-​related offense.

No, he didn’t shoot a Pop Tart; he bit his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. There’s a dispute as to whether he then pointed the high-​calorie weapon at the ceiling or at other students. Either way, unless the strawberry filing was piping hot (it wasn’t), there wasn’t really anything to fear.

Still, school officials pretty much freaked out.

Of course, the incident did occur just months after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, when six- and seven-​year-​olds were feeling the full weight of adult hysteria about guns, pastries, pointed fingers, etc.

Fast-​forward to the present: the Maryland lad’s parents are still fighting to clear this gun-​related black mark from his permanent record, fearful it could damage him even decades from now.

I don’t blame them.

Unfortunately, last week the Maryland State Board of Education upheld the suspension. A spokesperson for the local schools claimed it was warranted because of the lad’s “long history of disciplinary issues,” adding that the school “has gone to every conceivable length to assist that student.”

The attorney for the family says they will appeal.

My kids have been homeschooled, but next year my youngest will attend a public high school. I just hope we can find a good, inexpensive attorney to go with her.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly general freedom nannyism too much government

America’s Twilight Zones

On Friday I lamented the picking up, by local police, of two children, 10 and 6, for walking home from a local park …

and the subsequent two-​month Montgomery County (Maryland) Child Protective Services investigation, which found the parents “responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect.”

Left unanswered? Whether parents “may” let their kids walk somewhere without supervision.

There’s no law, of course, against children walking in public without parents. But the “swarms of Officers” employed “to harass our people” aren’t limited by trifling things like laws.

This Kafkaesque episode reminds me of my experiences with campaign finance agencies.

In both cases, agencies rely upon meritless complaints to investigate, intimidate and impoverish people without any law being broken. All that’s required? An unelected bureaucrat’s arbitrary decision.

Take Lois Lerner. She ran the IRS division targeting conservative groups. Remember her allegedly lost emails? Irretrievable! Until someone actually looked for them.

Before violating people’s rights at the IRS, Lerner did so heading the Enforcement Division of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). A recent George Will column detailed her threats and very public and politically damaging harassment of Al Salvi, the Illinois Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Sure, he was fully acquitted in federal court … after his defeat.

Using a spurious complaint by former Rep. Mike Synar (D‑Okla.), Lerner launched a political persecution against U.S. Term Limits, costing us nearly $100,000 in legal fees and much more in dislocated time and manpower.

Finding no evidence — there was none to find — the FEC finally closed the matter. But agency officials still issued a news release proclaiming that they believed we had violated the law.

An Oklahoma newspaper headline read, roughly, “National Term Limits Group Broke Law, Says FEC.”

Talk about “unsubstantiated.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly judiciary

Contemptible Court

Judge Tim Grendell

Judge Tim Grendell missed his calling. Given his dictatorial impulses, he should have been a Soviet commissar or ancient Egyptian vizier. O, but for time, and place, and the mismatches of metempsychosis!

Grendell has lashed out punitively at Nancy McArthur, chairman of the Geauga County (Ohio) Republican Party, for seeking to undermine his authority with “vile” criticism. What happened? Did she interrupt courtroom proceedings with her aspersion-​casting? Shout obloquy as he sought to instruct a jury?

Nothing like that. McArthur was never in Grendell’s court.

She did badmouth the judge, however … in private conversation.

The person McArthur was talking to is involved in a case presided over by Grendell, and, in a private email, reported on McArthur’s comments. Grendell, somehow, got hold of that email. 

His response? Slap a subpoena on McArthur, demanding that she show cause why she should not “be held in Contempt of Court for making vile, contemptuous, slanderous, and insulting language directed at the Judge which reflects negatively on the integrity of the Court and impedes the Court in the administration of justice.…”

Yikes. McArthur was actually threatened with incarceration for speaking of this judge as if he were the type to do the sort of thing he did. Fortunately, his attempt to hold her in contempt has been blocked by an appellate court.

This isn’t the first time Grendell’s judicial reach has exceeded his ethical and constitutional grasp. Guilty of outrageous malpractice, he deserves a boot — to his rear, ejecting him from the bench.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Herd Immunity to Violence

I praised Juan Williams the other day. Let me balance that out.

On Tuesday’s The Five, a Fox news opinion chat show, in the wake of the Mall of America terrorist threat, Greg Gutfeld decried “gun-​free zones” advancing the “more guns, less crime” argument that economist John Lott has more famously made.

Mr. Williams expressed incredulity. “I don’t think that makes sense, that everybody in the mall has a gun. Let the police protect us.”

Gutfeld laughed. There was banter. Some accusatory explanation. Oh, you lefties! But then Gutfeld regrouped.

“This is not an either/​or — like everybody’s armed [or] everybody’s not. The concealed [carry] permit creates a level of uncertainty on the people that are choosing an attack.”

Other things being equal, the secretly (or discreetly) gun totin’ are safer than the rest of society. The more folks who secretly carry means that those prone to violence face higher risks. 

There may be more than one reason why gun violence has plummeted over the past two decades. But one must be this: as Americans have accumulated more guns per capita than ever before, as more households possess guns than ever, the “celerity of punishment” (that old Benthamite term for swiftness of bad repercussions) has increased, nudging the marginally criminal to choose to commit fewer violent crimes.

Making society safer. 

Since Williams seemed to have some difficulty with this, let’s translate it for him: compare gun violence and peaceful gun ownership to viral infection and vaccination.

It’s herd immunity, only to violence. Just as the more vaccinated make us all safer, the more peaceful people discreetly carrying guns make us all safer. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.