Tag: police

Dereliction of Duty

Must governments act to protect you when you or your property are attacked — for example, by rioters who vandalize and burn your store?

Is the government liable if it willfully lets it happen?

Protection of life and property is the moral obligation of governments constituted for this purpose. But whether officials who ignore the obligation can be held to account is another question.

A Madison Avenue shop, Domus Design Center, is suing the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York State. In late May and early June, hundreds of businesses were damaged by rioters while Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo refused to act to oppose them.

“Where are our tax dollars going?” asks the Center’s attorney, Sal Strazzullo. “Not protecting commercial properties is negligence of duty. Paying taxes that help pay the salary of the NYPD, we expect protection in return. Government is responsible to protect its citizens and businesses against criminals who want to do bad.”

Yes.

But Strazzullo’s client faces the precedents of rulings in cases like Warren v. District of Columbia, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, and a lawsuit by Parkland, Florida students against the local sheriff’s office. In these cases, plaintiffs argued that law enforcers had a positive duty to protect the plaintiffs when they were being clearly threatened.

The courts disagreed.

We must hope that there are limits to the willingness and ability of judges to avert their gaze. Otherwise, we are paying everyone in the system to look the other way when trouble comes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Georgia National Guard

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

Police Incentives Matter

criminal justice reform, incentives, law, police, money,

“For every bullet the German police fired on duty in 2016, American police killed 10 people,” writes Jason Brennan for MarketWatch. “Even overwhelmingly white states like Wyoming and Montana imprison citizens at higher rates than authoritarian Cuba.”

What is going on here?

And by here I mean “these United States of America.”

Well, Brennan, who is the Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has an answer.

“What matters even more than black and white is green,” he writes, referencing the current protests and riots sparked by coverage of the George Floyd killing by Minneapolis police. “Fixing our criminal justice system means fixing the incentives.”

Professor Brennan points the finger at a number of federal programs:

The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act “authorized and incentivized the U.S. armed forces to train police in military tactics” while the 1990 National Defense Authorization Act established a pipeline from the military industrial complex to local police forces.
The drug war set up police theft of private property via civil asset forfeiture, and encouraged federal drug warriors to share the loot with local police departments.
In many localities, direct election of prosecutors leads to campaign boasts about prosecution stats and long sentences, even when these policies make us less safe.

There’s a lot here to mull over, and you may not agree with everything Brennan argues, but the basic point is quite clear: “Even if we magically erased all racism overnight, the U.S. would still be harsh and violent” — and that because our politics has skewed incentives all wrong.

Getting rid of programs and laws that disincentivize good policing is a must.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly

Qualified Backlash

Extreme forms of protest — that is, rioting, looting, and street violence, as well as chanting about killing people, carrying torches, and the like — don’t help the cause of those who engage in it.

You know it; I know it — but is it common knowledge?

So, as a contribution to the common wisdom of Homo (hopefully) sapiens politicus, let us stress the truth, which we can now back up with a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Eric W. Dolan, writing on PsyPost, explains that six experiments involving 3, 399 participants “assessed how different types of protest behaviors influenced support for a variety of progressive and conservative social causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-abortion movement. They found that more extreme behaviors — such as the use of inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and vandalism — consistently resulted in reduced support for social movements.”

While “extreme protest behaviors” garner media attention, they turn away more people than they bring in.

“We found extreme anti-Trump protest actions actually led people to not only dislike the movement and support the cause less, but to be willing to support Trump more,” the researcher who talked to Dolan, said. “It was almost like a backlash.”

Almost?

Protest organizers have to understand that their enemies also know this backlash effect, and have incentives to corrupt peaceful protests by sparking extremism. Infiltrators from governments as well as opposing groups have been known to incite riots or cause destruction simply to discredit protests.

While destruction and mayhem by some do not negate the crying, dying need for criminal justice reform,* the tragedy remains: violence does spoil good will.

And calling in federal troops, as the president threatens, discredits almost everything. What a mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Much better than the turn to violence? Protest morphing into specific legislative and administrative reform. Ending “qualified immunity” for public officials, mentioned here Friday, and proposed by Representative Justin Amash (L‑Mich.), would be a great start.

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general freedom

Freedom’s Front Lines

coronavirus, Covid, China, police, protest,

Last weekend, riot police broke up a candlelight vigil for Chow Tsz-lok, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology student, who died back in November. He had fallen a story from a parking garage as Hong Kong police were “clearing a group of anti-government protesters.”

“Police said they seized petrol bombs, bricks and other protest items from the car park where the memorial was held,” reports the South China Morning Post. “Officers then stopped rally-goers from leaving and checked their identity cards and bags, arresting more than 40 people for unlawful assembly.”

If the police can be believed.

They can’t.

As Tom Grundy, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Free Press, puts it: “[P]eople just don’t trust the Government.”

While people were violently arrested, it wasn’t for violence or weapons. It was for daring to use what we call “freedom of assembly.”

Now with the spread of the COVID-19 virus, protesters have been reluctant to call for mass gatherings. Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based regional director of Amnesty International, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “The authorities may be counting on the coronavirus epidemic to extinguish the unrest.”*

On Friday, authorities used the lull to charge three prominent pro-democracy leaders — Jimmy Lai, owner of media highly critical of China; Yeung Sum, the former Democratic Party chairman; and the Labour Party vice-chairman, Lee Cheuk-yan — for taking part in a protest march last year.

They join more than 7,000 demonstrators arrested since the protest movement began last June.

Young people — and some not-so-young — are risking their very lives for freedom, for the right to choose their leaders … knowing that without such basic mechanisms, they have no defense against the Butchers of Beijing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Amnesty International has called for an “independent investigation into police violence.”

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general freedom ideological culture

The Fundamental Complaint

revolution, protest, police, authoritarianism,

“Something is going on,” writes The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor. “From Baghdad to Hong Kong, Santiago to Barcelona, sites around the world have seen major protests over recent weeks.”

What is that something?

“Global protests share themes of economic anger and political hopelessness,” reads the headline to Taylor’s article.

He’s way off.

Hope, not hopelessness, drives people to demand change.

“Income inequality seems to have added an economic insecurity that helped lead to anger and protests,” Taylor informs … in keeping with a consistent Post narrative.

The millions who have marched in Hong Kong didn’t take to the streets over income equality. Their five clear and reasonable demands are about justice and basic democratic citizen control of government.

The protests and violence in Catalonia stem from the central Spanish government denying self-determination and trying to bully the people by imposing long prison terms on Catalonian officials who committed the crime of holding an “illegal” referendum for independence.

Even where economic concerns are far more prominent (or the main driver of demonstrations, such as in Chile) the frustration is much less about inequality than a lack of opportunity in a stagnant and corrupt system.

“They promise changes every time we protest, but it’s not a new law or a concession that we want,” Iraqi student Ali Saleh explains. “It’s our rights. It’s a fundamental change in how we’re governed.”

The current global explosion of political unrest isn’t about income inequality or even economic insecurity alone. It is about the desire for more fundamental freedoms — economic as well as political — in an unfree world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags authoritarianism, police, protest, revolution

crime and punishment property rights U.S. Constitution

Injustice Blocked

asset forfeiture, theft, police, corruption,

Civil asset forfeiture is one of those government practices that good people, when informed of it, often express, at first, incredulity. How can something like that exist in these United States?!?

Good question.

One reason seems to be that very incredulity. Normal Americans trust their government not to be evil. When shown that it regularly engages in actual highway robbery, then denial — ‘this cannot be happening.’

But it is.

Another reason it exists? It is so profitable.

For those in government, anyway. They get to fill their department coffers without having to ask for tax hikes. They — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘the police’ and government attorneys at state and local levels — just take the wealth.

Indeed, police routinely “keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized.”

In South Carolina, Shackford reports, police agencies “across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.”

Fortunately, there is good news. “Circuit Judge Steven H. John has ruled that the South Carolina’s civil asset forfeiture regulations violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the citizens.”

Unfortunately, the fight against this evil practice is far from over.

But maybe the judge’s ruling will inspire citizens to petition their government and place politicians’ greed into check.

And might not this judge inspire other judges around the country?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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