Tag: safety

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Rethinking What Safety Means

crime, safety, law, police, Washington D.C.

Joe Scarborough threw kindling onto the fire. 

In the context of President Trump calling up the National Guard to help police the streets of Washington, D.C. — “you’ll have more police and you’ll be so happy, ’cause you’d be safe” said Trump — Scarborough prompted Symone Sanders, a Democratic strategist, fellow MSNBC host, and wife of a former night mayor of the city, with cedar soaked in kerosene: “You don’t think more police makes streets safer?”

“No, Joe,” she said, helping Morning Joe viewers decipher her racial identity: “I’m a black woman in America.

“I do not always think that more police makes streets safer.” 

Before you have time to wonder whether she’s advancing the law of diminishing returns in criminology, she quickly goes on: “When you walk down the streets of Georgetown” — a predominantly wealthy and white D.C. neighborhood — “you don’t see a police officer on every corner but you don’t feel unsafe. So what is it about talking about places like South D.C., right, Ward Eight (if you will), that people say ‘we need more officers to make us safe’?

“I think we have to rethink what safety means in America.”

While adding more police officers to a peaceful society won’t likely decrease crime much, a violent community is another story. People in these communities need greater safety to live their lives. Without becoming a statistic. Law enforcement that is visible on the street can surely help.

But rethinking the meaning of “safety” won’t. 

So what’s burning?

Democratic hopes, maybe. We’ll see how Trump’s move to clean up the capital goes.

Yet, if he tries to use the National Guard in other cities without constitutional warrant, that’d go beyond mere policing, into police-​state territory. 

Just don’t consult Democratic strategists for a “rethink” of such distinctions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Noncriminal Advice Not a Crime

I have now learned, or relearned, that doing legal things may well be illegal.

A recent example of the legal-​is-​illegal syndrome is the apparent criminalization, ex post facto, of helping your clients legally promote their legally vendible wares.

According to an April 2024 Wall Street Journal report, the consulting firm McKinsey is in trouble with the Justice Department for advising Purdue on how to sell more of its drug OxyContin, which is legal to sell. The Department has criminally opened a criminal investigation into McKinsey’s “role in advising” opioid manufacturers like Purdue “on how to boost sales.”

McKinsey consultants suggested pitching more to doctors who prescribe OxyContin the most, pitching less to docs who don’t prescribe it.

Which part of this shockingly standard advice is the criminal activity?

As economists David Henderson and Charles Hooper note, there is “nothing mysterious or nefarious” about going where the sales are. It’s “economically rational. To do otherwise would be inefficient and wasteful.”

But there’s an Opioid Crisis. 

And whenever there’s a Crisis, lawmakers and launchers of criminal investigations hurtle to ignore subtle distinctions about legal, illegal, etc.

I’m not quite sure what we do in light of this information, that all the legal-​to-​do things are now subject to senseless investigations by Justice Department hacks, bored or maniacal.

I guess the safest thing would be to stop doing things. All the things. Well, you can’t really live by pursuing safety — or a mirage of safety — at all costs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation too much government

SAD Regulators

nanny state, regulations, food, safety, health

Americans are getting sicker and fatter on government-​approved, corporate-​made foodstuffs, yet government continues to crack down on the sale of natural and home-​made foods.

The classic case is raw, whole milk. I’ve talked about this before. The most recent case is from Amish country, where the State of Pennsylvania raided a farm “on suspicion of selling ‘illegal milk,’ among other products,” explains The Epoch Times, and the farm “is being sued by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.” 

The Amish farm “has been ordered to halt all sales of its dairy products, inspiring widespread anger over what critics have called a blatant example of government overreach.”

At issue is government interference in farmers and customers freely choosing to skip the major grocery outlets multinational companies and dealing with each other on a local, free-​market basis. “Capitalist acts between consenting adults,” as Robert Nozick put it.

But it’s especially galling when placed in the wider context of the FDA’s and USDA’s obvious failure to produce a healthier populace. Though the state’s attorney general insists that “we cannot ignore the illnesses and further potential harm posed by [the] distribution of these unregulated products,” the illnesses caused by what many call the Standard America Diet (SAD) go unnoticed and unregistered as such. 

One standard for “the market,” another for the regulators.

Meanwhile, the State of Wisconsin is pushing a new bill to impose a $20,000 annual sales cap on participants in the state’s cottage food industry, “one of the most restrictive in the nation,” explains Suranjan Sen, an attorney at the Institute for Justice — a legal aid outfit often mentioned in these pages.

The very point of the law is to protect brick-​and-​mortar grocery and baked-​goods stores — not the health of consumers. It has the backing of powerful lobbyists.

Looking for healthier foods and healthier economies? Don’t look to government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom

Starbucks Gets Out

Starbucks, coffee, violence, crime, safety

Though not a fan of Starbucks’s often obtrusive lefty politics, I sure like its beverages, such as the glorious Flat White. I’ll take a venti.

Thankfully, it appears that trendy politics has limits. Despite the company’s support for a Marxist organization that riots and rampages in the name of racial justice (I won’t name names, but the initials are BLM), CEO Howard Schultz is reluctant to tolerate crime that makes it unsafe to sell lattes.

In leaked video of an internal meeting, Schultz says he’s shocked “that one of the primary concerns that our retail partners [employees] have is their own personal safety.”

One way Starbucks will cope is by giving managers authority to do things like limit seating and close bathrooms. Employees will also be trained in conflict de-​escalation and dealing with “active shooter scenarios.”

And Starbucks will close “not unprofitable” shops in areas where risks to employees and customers are most severe. This means closing 16 stores in which people feel unsafe because of crime and open drug use. The closures are taking place in such bastions of crime nurturing as Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.

More shutdowns are to come, Schultz said, adding that “governments across the country and leaders, mayors and governors, city councils have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime.”

Starbucks has — all companies have — every right to escape the resulting lawless conditions. 

Were they also to abstain from doing anything to promote such conditions, that would be whipped cream on top.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

Safety … or Not?

safety, Covid, OSHA

The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a formal aim: to make workplaces safer. And, during this part of the pandemic, it has sought to encourage workers to get vaccinated with one of the several mRNA treatments that have been given the green light by the federal government, though not having gone through the many hurdles of the Food and Drug Administration’s normal trials.

Now, safety isn’t just one simple thing. In May, OSHA declared that companies requiring employees to get vaccinated will be held liable for injury and illness caused by those vaccines. Seems reasonable. If your employer requires you to get “the jab,” and you get sick — and all vaccines have secondary effects, making them dangerous for some people — then your employer should be held responsible.

Along with that divvying up of responsibility, OSHA has since May mandated reporting on negative effects of the vaccines on workers in those workplaces that require the inoculations.

But not anymore.

According to The Epoch Times, “to encourage American workers to get vaccines,” OSHA has just “suspended the legal requirement for employers to report work-​related injuries resulting from vaccinations aimed at combating the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.”

Why? Well, the OSHA website now states that the administration “does not want to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving” the jab, and is also worried about appearing to “disincentivize” employers.

Yet the basic responsibility remains.

Liberty Counsel, a Christian ministry, speculates that the change in reporting was “politically motivated” and came from the Biden Administration.

A specific treatment is being promoted ostensibly for health reasons, but the agency promoting safety and health now downplays the importance of keeping track of any negative results.

That’s discouraging for safety, health and truth.

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.

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Robots in Amber

In 2010, Newark, New Jersey, collected more than $3 million in fines based on the watchful (and programmed) work of red-​light/​amber-​light intersection cameras. The next year there were even more violations.

Politicians love these Orwellian devices, while citizens remain extremely suspicious.

New Jersey recently suspended ticketing based on the results from 63 of the state’s 85 intersection cameras. It seems that these specific cameras (including all those in Newark) had not been properly configured according to the specifications set by the enabling legislation.Big Brother Is Watching You

A Star-​Ledger report neatly explains the calibration method, which requires intersection speed studies to set the proper duration of the amber lights. Figuring caution-​light duration based on actual intersection speeds, not on posted speed limits — that is, the average actual speed of 85 percent of drivers — would seem to have something to do with safety. The 85 percent rule is an old highway safety engineering standard, and safety is allegedly why governments are involved in this at all.

A problem, though: This compliance procedure is great for setting speed limits, but in this case, wouldn’t it punish slower, legal drivers on streets where people tend to drive faster than the limit? Were the overwhelming majority of folks to speed through intersections, that would correspondingly lower the duration of the amber lights. Consequence? The folks most likely to receive tickets would be those who drove slowly through the intersections.

Hardly a good idea. As one driver commented, “Virtually from green it turns into red.”

More telling against the cameras is the increase in infractions, suggesting that the robotic cameras do not have a net instructional effect.

That is, they don’t make intersections safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall nannyism too much government

Greenlighting Red Light Cameras?

Politicians seem to love what are called “red light cameras” — cameras that take pictures of cars that run red lights. And then ticket the registered owners.

Citizens? Not so much. I’ve reported how Tim Eyman — an activist who usually sets his sights on tax increases — orchestrated a citizen initiative petition campaign to get rid of the red light cameras in his town. There are many other such movements. 

But those who habitually side with government don’t get it. They see the issue as the Washington Post editors see it, as “common sense. Police can’t be everywhere, and officers should not be diverted from high-​crime areas to police every high-​risk intersection.”

A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety backs up this “common sense” with, uh, science. Sort of. The study’s method has been attacked pretty thoroughly.

More importantly, as Radley Balko notes, there are better alternate policies — more effective in saving lives at intersections, and far less creepy.

Like what? you ask. Well, bear with me. It’s hard to understand: Longer yellow lights.

Yes. Longer yellow lights save lives. What a shock. And yet it turns out that when politicians have red light cameras installed, they tend to decrease the time of the yellows — the very opposite policy.

For our safety?

No.

For their revenue.

People who “go into politics” show their true colors when they prefer to pump up surveillance state powers instead of enacting simple, decent reforms. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.