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You had one job America. . .
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Marilyn Mosley is frustrated. This State’s Attorney in Baltimore, Maryland, angrily dropped charges against the remaining three police officers not already acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray, who died from injuries sustained while in police custody.
Clearly, Mosley lacked the evidence to convict these officers of murder, manslaughter, false arrest, etc. Were the charges politically motivated, as police allege? Or did police impede her investigation, as she charges?
I don’t know. But here’s what we do know:
Upon sighting police April 12th of last year, Gray ran but was apprehended. Police confiscated a knife, which was perfectly legal to carry. Then police called for a van, and video captured police dragging 25-year-old Freddie Gray, screaming in agony, to that van.
Police transported him on a very circuitous route “downtown” that ended up at the hospital, after police discovered during a stop that he wasn’t breathing. A week later Freddie died.
The cause of death was a spinal injury.
The video suggests impairment before the travel therapy administered by police, though the injury could have been worsened in transit. Gray wasn’t wearing a safety belt. In fact, the medical examiner ruled it a homicide based on his not being belted in.
Whether the spinal injury was a freak accident, caused by police misconduct or, as alleged, Gray was trying to injury himself to seek damages, the medical evidence shows no serious bruises or broken bones — just the spinal injury.
We don’t know what happened.
What we do know is that a man was taken into police custody without any legitimate charge, not treated or attended to as he should have been, and he’s dead.
There’s no victory or vindication here for police.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
AND ANOTHER THING: To what degree is Freddie Gray a casualty of the war of drugs? Back in June, defense attorneys for the police released an email that Prosecutor Mosley’s office had sent to police asking for an “enhanced” police presence to combat drug dealing in the area Freddie Gray was arrested. That was three weeks prior to his arrest.
Yesterday, we discovered that modern America asks police to do “too much.” Which prompts the next question: What should police stop doing?
Here are two immediate reforms where police can do less, while protecting the public more:
(1) End the War on Drugs. Preventing violence and fraud is the rightful role of police. Not preventing people from engaging in activities that are peaceful, however misguided or self-harming. The criminalization of marijuana means more than 150 million Americans are criminals, warranting police involvement.
Now, Mr. Obama has released some convicts serving long drug-related sentences, but we need a president who will go much farther in changing law enforcement priorities.
(2) Stop Using Civil Asset Forfeiture, whereby police steal people’s stuff without charging and convicting those people of any crime. Not only do federal agencies from Justice to the IRS take our property in violation of our rights, but the Feds encourage state and local police to join them in this bad behavior through their “equitable sharing” program.
While Obama has spoken against seizing assets without a criminal conviction, he hasn’t stopped it. And he could at the federal level, with a stroke of his pen — as I have advocated at Townhall. Ending civil asset forfeiture is an executive order actually within his constitutional power.
Would these two steps end all racism or violence or crime? No, no, no.
They would be, however, two steps forward toward a more principled, lawful and respectful style of policing that would better serve to unite rather than divide citizens and police.
It’s a different two-step than reformers have been witnessing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo Credit: Tomasz Iwaniec
When President Obama said, “[W]e ask the police to do too much,” at the memorial service for the five slain Dallas policemen, he was echoing an idea previously expressed.
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters a day earlier. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve,” he added, noting such problems as a lack of mental healthcare, rampant drug abuse, substandard schools and even roaming dogs.
So, what should police stop doing?
Plenty. But I’ll save that answer for tomorrow. Today, let’s pose another: Why so much crime, poverty, and violence in these communities?
Mr. Obama fingered not taxing-and-spending enough on benefits for the poor, including for “decent schools,” “gainful employment,” and “mental health programs.” Yet, after decades of expensive wars on poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, etc., things have only gotten worse.
“We flood communities with so many guns,” the president intoned, “that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock, than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
He’s playing fast and furious with the truth. Books are free at the library. Glocks cost money.
And who is this “we” he keeps bringing up?
Chief Brown mentioned a critical problem Obama did not: “Seventy percent of the African American community is being raised by single women.”
Police cannot solve all our problems, sure, but they especially cannot fix problems exacerbated by the welfare state and the educational system. Big government is no substitute for Mom and Dad.
Even freedom merely offers the opportunity to fix our own problems.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Making up petty rules and enforcing them is one thing governments do well.
On Monday I warned about the dangers of asking too much from government. I think, today, I’ll make the opposite warning: of not asking enough.
Mandatory seatbelt laws were enacted (sometimes by citizens initiative and referendum) to save people’s lives. But the reason many police and local jurisdictions like these laws is that it gives them a chance to engage in shakedowns, entrapping citizens into non-compliance, and then socking them with fines.
In Regina, Saskatchewan, a man pulled up to an intersection and saw a down-and-outer with a sign. He felt sorry for him, so, as he pulled up, he unbuckled his seat belt and pulled three bucks in change out of his pocket. And dropped the three dollars on the curb.
A few moments later, police stopped him, and handed him a ticket. The “homeless guy” with the sign turned out to have been an undercover cop, and the few moments without a seat belt was enough to charge our philanthropist $175 Canadian.
Though an obviously preposterous misuse of police time and attention, and an abuse of the citizenry, Regina’s police force remains adamantine, claiming that “this is nothing new. It’s part of a project that has police watching for traffic violations at intersections.”
Because this sort of thing only hits people almost at random, but the benefits are concentrated on police coffers, it’s hard to organize against such nonsense. Which is precisely why such nonsense goes on.
Still, we must prevent such abuse at the local level, if we’re ever to control the federal leviathan.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It’s commonly said that government is here to protect us. Well, that’s one theory.
In the wake of the horrible massacre at the Pulse in Orlando, Florida, I’ve been hearing a lot of murmuring. People are wondering why a man who had been interviewed by the FBI several times in relation to possible terrorist activities could have legally purchased firearms without flagging greater attention.
Others complain that it took the police three long hours to gather themselves and enter the Pulse, to rescue the living, and kill (as they ended up doing) the shooter, Omar Mateen.
Where’s the protection? Where’s the security?
Governments don’t seem to be much good at that.
And why should we expect them to be?
It’s hard to collate information well — though the government had everything it needed, what it lacked was the sense and the willpower to do it. Why? Because novel, dispersed information is hard to deal with.
And let’s not second-guess the Orlando police. It’s a tough job dealing with a killer who wants to kill as many people as he can before he is, himself, killed.
If we wanted real security, real protection, we’d be more armed ourselves (the Pulse had security personnel, but the night club was a gun-free zone, so that’s not much protection), and we’d hire, by contract, security professionals to protect us.
Government police aren’t here to protect us. We have them to clean up after something terrible has happened. Re-establish order. Seek justice against the perpetrators. And, thus, provide “security theater,” more than security itself.
Governments are good at some things.
Just don’t expect more than they can deliver.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: Elvert Barnes on Flickr
The fight against government theft of private property, through “civil forfeiture,” just got a little harder.
There’s a new technology available: ERAD card scanners.
And the Oklahoma City Police Department’s joint interdiction team has them, and can use the scanners to take money from you without your consent.
What money, in particular? The money you have stored in pre-paid debit cards.
ERAD stands for Electronic Recovery and Access to Data, and the ERAD Group, Inc., stands to make a lot of cash from the technology. Police around the country want to be able to take the funds secured in debit cards. It’s the latest thing in the war against the war against the War on Drugs.
Drug traffickers, we’re told, hide dozens of such cards in vehicles transporting drugs.
It’s not enough that police can, in the course of investigating a crime — without conviction, mind you; indeed, without charges being filed — confiscate the cards themselves.
The police also want to be able to siphon the money out of those cards.
Which leads to corruption. Which is already rife in civil forfeiture usage, as a recent Oklahoma state audit found — missing money, misused funds, that sort of thing.
The cavalier way in which government officials defend expropriation by ERAD scanners is chilling. In an Oklahoma Watch article, reporter Clifford Adcock relates the official explanation: “These cards are cash, not bank accounts. . . . Individuals do not have privacy rights with magnetic stripe cards.” Why not? Because the information on the strip “literally has no purpose other than to be provided to others to read.”
That’s so open to logical criticism you could drive a confiscated truck fleet through it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Last week, the crooks in Washington proved themselves nice enough to let us know that their rip-off machine is back in action. The Obama Justice Department announced the resumption of the “equitable sharing” program, whereby the Feds sing Kumbaya with state and local police while sharing the loot they snatch from innocent folks through “civil asset forfeiture.”
Yes, there again is that strange three-word, legalistic, police-pocketing term: civil asset forfeiture.
Free country? Not so long as local police and federal government agencies seize people’s stuff without ever charging or convicting those people of a crime. Simply by claiming suspicion . . . about their stuff.
To get their money or property back, the victims must hire an attorney and sue the government. Guilty until proven innocent. Only those raking in the ill-gotten gains are shameless enough to defend this completely un-American practice.
Which more than doubled in use during President Obama’s first five years in office, according to The Washington Post. Today, police and various government agents actually take more value from innocent Americans through civil asset forfeiture than do burglars through burglary.
“As President Obama counts down the days of his last year in office,” the Cato Institute’s Adam Bates wrote back in January, “one positive step he could take for his legacy would be to halt the federal government’s use of civil asset forfeiture and make the suspension of the equitable sharing program permanent.”
Yet, despite Mr. Obama’s talk about criminal justice reform, and despite his ability to bring justice with a stroke of his pen (and actually within his constitutional authority), last week the Feds instead went back to business as usual, ripping people off.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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There’s been a big push for criminal justice reform, with some recent progress on civil asset forfeiture.
This is the process through which police and government agencies grab a citizen’s money or property — even if the citizen is never charged with a crime, much less convicted. Then, to get one’s stuff back, a citizen must sue to prove the stuff was innocent of being involved in criminal activity.
Asset forfeiture without a criminal conviction turns our system of justice on its head, encouraging bad behavior by police — ahem, stealing — by rewarding departments and agencies that get to keep the loot.
Reform legislation passed through an Oklahoma House committee earlier this week and now goes to the full House. Television News 9 in Oklahoma City began its report by acknowledging that, “A watered down version of the civil asset forfeiture bill has crossed another hurdle in the state Legislature.”
That’s because a bill to end civil asset forfeiture outright had already failed in the Senate. The currently pending legislation requires that citizens who sue to recover their property and win be awarded their legal fees.
It’s progress . . . but still not justice enough.
Late last month, Wyoming’s Gov. Matt Mead signed reform legislation mandating that there be a probable cause hearing before the legal forfeiture process can begin. Good. But that was after Gov. Mead vetoed a better bill, which stopped all official, convictionless snatching of stuff.
Police taking people’s stuff without having to prove a crime must be ended altogether, abolished. That means we better stop waiting for politicians. Instead, petition this important principle directly to the people — use ballot initiatives in cities and states across the country.
No time like the present.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Common Sense Needs Your Help!
Also, please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money. Your help in spreading the message of common sense and liberty is very much appreciated!
While crime was plummeting throughout the country, last year New Orleans experienced a surge — rapes up 39 percent and armed robberies up 37 percent.
Having reduced its police force by 500 officers due to budget problems, the Big Easy called in Louisiana State Troopers to assist a force “historically mired in corruption.” Yet, there was scant progress in keeping citizens safe.
Then crooks broke into Sidney Torrez’s home and Torrez, known as the “trash king” because he made a fortune hauling trash out of the city after Hurricane Katrina, responded with a $100,000 television ad campaign. “The French Quarter is under siege by criminals,” his TV spot declared; it encouraged citizens to “hold the administration accountable.”
Mayor Mitch Landrieu wasn’t pleased, shooting back that, “If it’s so easy, maybe [Torrez] should just take some of that money and do it himself.”
So, Torrez did, teaming up with Bob Simms, a retired aerospace engineer.
In no time, they developed a downloadable app for smartphones, allowing folks to contact police much like we use Uber to contact a car ride. Torrez donated $500,000 and the Batman and Robin-esque duo hired off-duty policemen outfitted with Polaris golf carts to patrol the French Quarter, the city’s “golden goose.”
Other private donations arrived to support the effort. In just months, crime dropped 45 percent in the Quarter. Now the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau is paying the monthly cost.
Torrez notes that the effort allows “the community a way to self-police,” adding, “I think it can work anywhere.”
“It’s not rocket science,” says Bob Simms . . . the former rocket scientist.
It’s citizen-led government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
