Problems with 911
Michael Crowley, senior editor at The New Republic, recounts some nightmare episodes with the 911 Emergency Response System in the current issue of Reader’s Digest. Here’s an excerpt:
If there’s one thing we think we can count on, it’s that a frantic call to 911 will bring a swift and effective response. Government’s first priority, after all, is protecting its citizens. But a spate of recent cases reveal shocking flaws in our national emergency response system–at a cost measured in lives.
One of those cases involved a young college student at the University of Wisconsin. She dialed 911 and then hung up without saying anything. Before the line was disconnected, however, there were screams and sounds of a struggle caught on tape. The operator claims she could hear no noise–so she did not dispatch the police or try to call back. Later that day, the college student, Brittany Zimmerman, was found beaten to death in her apartment. An audio recording of some of the 911 nightmares can be found here.
Michael Crowley stresses the need for better trained operators and perhaps penalties for the people who tie up the lines with frivolous calls. That’s all well and good, but more importantly, we must all acknowledge the limits of the 911 system and take responsibility for our own safety. As the libertarian sheriff, Bill Masters, points out “If you rely on the government for protection, you are going to be at least disappointed and at worst injured or killed.”
For related Cato work, go here.
Update: New Jersey State Police are reviewing how a recent 911 call was handled. A Catholic priest called 911 as he came under criminal attack in his church.
Drug War Insanity Goes Up in Smoke
As my colleague David Rittgers notes below, the announcement by the Department of Justice that it will no longer seek to arrest medical marijuana users is a breakthrough for common sense in federal drug policy.
It is bizarre that it takes a major policy announcement to spell out what a waste of police and court time it is to investigate the ill people who use medical marijuana. Historians will surely look back on this period and ponder how our government could have seriously embraced the opposite policy, in the same way we look back at the strange days of alcohol prohibition.
The Obama administration should be taking much bolder steps to stop the criminalization of drug use more generally. More and more people have come to recognize that the drug war has been given a fair chance to work, but it has proved to be a grand failure.
Do We Need a Law against Texting While Driving?
Radley Balko exposes the politicians who play the game of enacting laws for symbolic purposes. In this game, whether the proposed law has any actual impact on the supposed problem seems entirely beside the point. Excerpt:
Maryland just passed a texting ban, but state officials are flummoxed over how to enforce it. The law bans texting while driving but allows for reading texts, for precisely the reasons just mentioned. But how can a police officer positioned at the side of a highway tell if the driver of the car that just flew by was actually pushing buttons on his cellphone and not merely reading the display screen? Unless a motorist is blatantly typing away at eye level, a car would need to be moving slowly enough for an officer to see inside, focus on the phone, and observe the driver manipulating the buttons. Which is to say the car would probably need to be stopped—at which point it ceases to be a safety hazard.
Read the whole thing. Until this feel-good-gesture-legislation game is broken up, the number of laws will continue to multiply. And that means the sphere of government expands while the sphere of liberty recedes.
Cheye Calvo Reflects on SWAT Shooting
Cheye Calvo is the DC-area small-town mayor who had his two pet dogs shot and killed by a botched drug raid about a year ago. In an article to be published in this Sunday’s Washington Post, Calvo reflects upon his experience — not just the raid itself, but on the actions of the police department afterward. Excerpt:
I remain captured by the broader implications of the incident. Namely, that my initial take was wrong: It was no accident but rather business as usual that brought the police to — and through — our front door.
In the words of Prince George’s County Sheriff Michael Jackson, whose deputies carried out the assault, “the guys did what they were supposed to do” — acknowledging, almost as an afterthought, that terrorizing innocent citizens in Prince George’s [County] is standard fare. The only difference this time seems to be that the victim was a clean-cut white mayor with community support, resources, and a story to tell the media.
What confounds me is the unmitigated refusal of county leaders to challenge law enforcement and to demand better — as if civil rights are somehow rendered secondary by the war on drugs.
Mr. Calvo has been a super advocate for reform — he has given up countless hours of his spare time to study and speak on this subject so that fewer people will be victimized the same way his family was. He spoke at a Cato Hill Briefing over the summer.
Calvo told his story at Cato last year.
For related Cato research, go here and here.
Pervasive Illiteracy in the Afghan National Army
Matt Yglesias has a lot of smart things to say about the pervasive illiteracy plaguing the Afghan National Army. Upwards of 75 to 90 percent (according to varying estimates) of the ANA is illiterate.
As Ted Galen Carpenter and I argue in our recent Cato white paper Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan, this lack of basic education prevents many officers from filling out arrest reports, equipment and supply requests, and arguing before a judge or prosecutor. And as Marine 1st Lt. Justin Greico argues, “Paperwork, evidence, processing—they don’t know how to do it…You can’t get a policeman to take a statement if he can’t read and write.”
Yglesias notes:
This strikes me as an object lesson in the importance of realistic goal-setting. The Afghan National Army is largely illiterate because Afghanistan is largely illiterate…we just need an ANA that’s not likely to be overrun by its adversaries. But if we have the more ambitious goal of created [sic] an effectively administered centralized state, then the lack of literacy becomes a huge problem. And a problem without an obvious solution on a realistic time frame [emphasis mine].
Such high levels of illiteracy serves to highlight the absurd idea that the United States has the resources (and the legitimacy) to “change entire societies,” in the words of retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl. Eight years ago, Max Boot, fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, likened the Afghan mission to British colonial rule:
Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets…This was supposed to be ‘for the good of the natives,’ a phrase that once made progressives snort in derision, but may be taken more seriously after the left’s conversion (or, rather, reversion) in the 1990s to the cause of ‘humanitarian’ interventions. [emphasis mine]
But as I highlighted yesterday at the Cato event “Should the United States Withdraw from Afghanistan?” (which you can view in its entirety here), policymakers must start narrowing their objectives in Afghanistan, a point Yglesias stresses above. Heck, as I argued yesterday, rational people in the United States are having difficulty convincing delusional types here in America that Barack Obama is their legitimate president. I am baffled by people who think that we have the power to increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government. It’s also ironic that many conservatives (possibly brainwashed by neo-con ideology) who oppose government intervention at home believe the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide. These self-identified “conservatives” essentially have a faith in government planning.
Yet these conservatives share a view common among the political and military elite, which is that if America pours enough time and resources—possibly hundreds of thousands of troops for another 12 to 14 years—Washington could really turn Afghanistan around.
However, there is a reason why the war in Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking issues important to the American public, and why most Americans who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). It’s because Americans understand intuitively that the question about Afghanistan is not about whether it is winnable, but whether it constitutes a vital national security interest. An essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan has yet take place. America still does not have a clearly articulated goal. This is why the conventional wisdom surrounding the war—about whether we can build key institutions and create a legitimate political system—is not so much misguided as it is misplaced.
The issue is not about whether we can rebuild Afghanistan but whether we should. On both accounts the mission looks troubling, but this distinction is often times overlooked.
More Anti-Drug Aid to Mexico?
The Washington Post reports that despite reports of widespread violence and human rights abuses since Mexico increased its fight against the drug trade, the U.S. government is considering pumping more money to their failing efforts:
The Obama administration has concluded that Mexico is working hard to protect human rights while its army and police battle the drug cartels, paving the way for the release of millions of dollars in additional federal aid.
The Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.4 billion assistance program passed by Congress to help Mexico fight drug trafficking, requires the State Department to state that the country is taking steps to protect human rights and to punish police officers and soldiers who violate civil guarantees. Congress may withhold 15 percent of the annual funds — about $100 million so far — until the Obama administration offers its seal of approval for Mexico’s reform efforts.
…In recent weeks, after detailed allegations in the media of human rights abuses, the Mexican military said that it has received 1,508 complaints of human rights abuses in 2008 and 2009. It did not say how the cases were resolved, but said that the most serious cases involved forced disappearances, murder, rape, robbery, illegal searches and arbitrary arrests. Human rights groups contend that only a few cases have been successfully prosecuted.
Sending additional anti-drug aid to Mexico is a case of pouring more money into a hopelessly flawed strategy. President Felipe Calderon’s decision to make the military the lead agency in the drug war–a decision the United States backed enthusiastically–has backfired. Not only has that strategy led to a dramatic increase in violence, but contrary to the State Department report, the Mexican military has committed serious human rights abuses. Even worse, the military is now playing a much larger role in the country’s affairs. Until now, Mexico was one of the few nations in Latin America that did not have to worry about the military posing a threat to civilian rule. That can no longer be an automatic assumption.
Washington needs to stop pressuring its neighbor to do the impossible. As long as the United States and other countries foolishly continue the prohibition model with regard to marijuana, cocaine, and other currently illegal drugs, a vast black market premium will exist, and the Mexican drug cartels will grow in power. At a minimum, the United States should encourage Calderon to abandon his disastrous confrontational strategy toward the cartels. Better yet, the United States should take the lead in de-funding the cartels by legalizing drugs and eliminating the multi-billion-dollar black market premium.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Hate Crimes Bill Becomes an Amendment
Unsure about prospects on passing the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act as a stand-alone bill, proponents intend to attach it as an amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization bill. As I have said previously, this bill is an affront to federalism and counterproductive hater-aid.
Federal Criminal Law Power Grab
This legislation awards grants to jurisdictions for the purpose of combating hate crimes. It also creates a substantive federal crime of violent acts motivated by the “actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person.”
This is a federalization of a huge number of intrastate crimes. It is hard to imagine a rape case where the sex of the victim is not an issue. The same goes for robbery – why grab a wallet from someone who can fight back on equal terms when you can pick a victim who is smaller and weaker than you are?
This would be different if this were a tweak to sentencing factors.
If this were a sentence enhancement on crimes motivated by racial animus – a practice sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Wisconsin v. Mitchell – then it would be less objectionable if there were independent federal jurisdiction.
Thing is, the federal government has already done this, with the exception of gender identity, with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (scroll to page 334 at the link):
If the finder of fact at trial or, in the case of a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, the court at sentencing determines beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally selected any victim or any property as the object of the offense of conviction because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person, increase by 3 levels.
The contrast between a sentence enhancement and a substantive crime gives us an honest assessment of what Congress is doing – federalizing intrastate acts of violence.
If Congress were to pass a law prohibiting the use of a firearm or any object that has passed in interstate commerce to commit a violent crime, it would clearly be an unconstitutional abuse of the Commerce Clause.
Minus the hate crime window dressing, that is exactly what this law purports to do.
Iraq’s Future Is Up to Iraqis
The U.S. is not yet out of Iraq, but American forces have pulled back from Iraqi cities. Iraq’s future increasingly is in the hands of Iraqis. And most Iraqis appear to be celebrating.
This is no longer America’s war.
Iraqis danced in the streets and set off fireworks Monday in impromptu celebrations of a pivotal moment in their nation’s troubled history: Six years and three months after the March 2003 invasion, the United States on Tuesday is withdrawing its remaining combat troops from Iraq’s cities and turning over security to Iraqi police and soldiers.
While more than 130,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, patrols by heavily armed soldiers in hulking vehicles as of Wednesday will largely disappear from Baghdad, Mosul and Iraq’s other urban centers.
“The Army of the U.S. is out of my country,” said Ibrahim Algurabi, 34, a dual U.S.-Iraqi citizen now living in Arizona who attended a concert of celebration in Baghdad’s Zawra Park. “People are ready for this change. There are a lot of opportunities to rebuild our country, to forget the past and think about the future.”
On Monday, as the withdrawal deadline loomed, four U.S. troops were killed in the Iraqi capital, the military announced Tuesday. No details about the deaths were provided. Another soldier was killed Sunday in a separate attack.
The Bush administration never should have invaded Iraq. The costs have been high: more than 4,000 dead American military personnel. Tens of thousands more have been injured, many maimed for life. Hundreds more military contractors and coalition soldiers have died. And tens of thousands of Iraqis — certainly more than 100,000, though estimates above that diverge wildly.
The U.S. has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and the ultimate cost is likely to run $2 trillion or more, as the government cares for seriously injured veterans for the rest of their lives. America’s fine fighting men and women have been stretched thin and America’s adversaries, most notably Iran, have been strengthened. Yet another cause has been added to the recruiting pitch of hateful extremists seeking to do Americans and others harm.
Nevertheless, let us hope that Iraqis take advantage of the opportunity they now enjoy. It will take enormous statesmanship and restraint to accommodate those of different faiths and ethnicities, forgive past crimes committed by Sunni and Shia forces, eschew violence for retaliation and revenge, resolve even bitter disagreements peacefully, and accept political defeat without resort to arms.
Other peoples who have suffered less have failed to surmount similar difficulties. But it is no one’s interest, and especially that of the Iraqis, to lapse back into sectarian conflict and political tyranny. Let us hope — and dare I suggest, pray? — that they prove up to the challenge.
‘The Police Became a Mob’
Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook recounts the horrific police attack on Frank Jude in a ruling this month from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
By way of background, Jude tagged along with some young ladies to a house party late one evening. The party was mostly off-duty cops who immediately made Jude feel unwelcome. Jude left after just 5 minutes, but several men followed him out to the street and accused him of stealing someone’s police badge. Then the beating began:
Men punched Jude’s face and torso; when he fell to the ground, they kicked his head and thighs. The partygoers behaved as a mob. Not a single person in the house tried to stop the attack or even to call for aid. Jon Clausing, who had slashed Harris’s face, explained his conduct as “just kind of going along with everybody.” That is the way of the mob. Society has police forces to pose a counterweight to mobs, yet here the police became a mob.
Schabel and Martinez were on duty and had not been drinking, so they should have put a stop to the violence. Instead Schabel joined it, while Martinez watched. On being told that Jude had stolen Spengler’s badge, Schabel called Jude a “motherfucker” and stomped on his face until others could hear bones breaking. After telling Martinez “I’m really sorry you have to see this,” Daniel Masarik picked Jude off the ground and kicked him in the crotch so hard that his body left the ground. Jon Bartlett then took one of Schabel’s pens and pressed it into each of Jude’s ear canals, causing severe injury and excruciating pain. The men also broke two of Jude’s fingers by bending them back until they snapped. Spengler put a gun to Jude’s head and said: “I’m the fucking police. I can do whatever I want to do. I could kill you.” Bartlett used a knife to cut off Jude’s jacket and pants, leaving him naked on the street in a pool of his own blood.
The attack was so violent that it couldn’t be ignored. Several officers were prosecuted, but the blue wall of silence kicked in and several officers committed perjury to shield their criminal acts. Judge Easterbrook writes, “The distance between civilization and barbarity, and the time needed to pass from one state to the other, is depressingly short.”
Read the whole thing (pdf). Previous coverage here.
HT: Sentencing Law and Policy.
No Wrongdoing in the Calvo Raid?
Last year the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department SWAT Team raided the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo. Police officers on the case knew that dealers were sending packages to random addresses so that accomplices in delivery companies could pick them up. The officers didn’t take the drugs out of circulation at the warehouse when they intercepted them. They simply sent them to the bogus address and raided it. The investigating officers did this without checking with local law enforcement officials, who probably would have told them that the mayor wasn’t a drug dealer and that they were barking up the wrong tree. The SWAT team shot and killed Mayor Calvo’s two dogs and caused significant property damage to his home before they got around to figuring out his (nonexistent) role in narcotics trafficking.
The Sheriff’s Office just cleared its deputies of any wrongdoing.
Radley Balko has a post up at Reason. His Cato study, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, shows that this is not an isolated incident. Check out the raidmap for more detail.
Mayor Calvo spoke at a Cato event in the wake of the raid, “Should No-Knock Police Raids be Rare-or Routine?” He tells his story below:
Cops Gone Wild
Terrific editorial over at the Washington Times.
Excerpt:
The bad behavior of these police officers exposes a double standard. As one Nationals fan, who is a lawyer, told us: “There’s no way those cops could pass a street sobriety test right now. Just imagine how we’d get treated if they pulled us over having consumed half of what they’ve drunk tonight – and they’re packing heat.”
We don’t begrudge police officers having a little fun, but they need to abide by the same laws they enforce on the rest of us. When they go out for a few beers, they might want to leave their uniforms and guns at home.
The idea of a National Peace Officers Memorial Week is a fine idea but it is regrettable that the memorial and event is in Washington, D.C. Just reinforces the wrongheaded notion that the federal government must be involved in everything.
Gun Free School Zone Follies
As I have noted before, “gun free” zones are an exercise in fantasy. To some, a place without guns sounds like a great place to live. Unfortunately, others think they sound like a great place to plunder.
Some recent developments highlight the ability of armed citizens to defend themselves and how localized gun bans near schools or on universities make victims of law-abiding citizens.
A group of Georgia college students at a birthday party owe their lives to the fact that one of them had a gun. (H/T Of Arms & the Law) Two gunmen burst in to the apartment and separated males and females into different rooms. The gunmen began discussing whether they had enough bullets to kill everyone at the party. One of the students pulled a gun from his backpack and shot at the home invader holding the men, chasing the gunman out of the apartment. The armed student went to the next room, where the other gunman was preparing to rape his girlfriend. The student shot the second gunman, killing him.
If the birthday party had been in a dorm, the student probably would have left his gun at home because of the Georgia statute that bans guns on campus. The students would likely be dead as a result.
A second story comes from Wisconsin, one of the two states with no provision allowing for concealed carry. A man on a bicycle was hit and thrown to the ground by four young men. The bicyclist was carrying a handgun openly, a practice approved by the Wisconsin Attorney General. The bicyclist drew his revolver, pointed it in the air and yelled, “gun!” The four assailants fled. The bicyclist flagged down a police officer to report the incident.
The positive outcome to this story is countered by the fact that the bicyclist was accosted within 1,000 feet of a school. His possession of a gun is criminalized by both Wisconsin and federal statutes.
Although the local district attorney said that the bicyclist will not be prosecuted, the Milwaukee police chief and other Wisconsin law enforcement officials have promised to focus additional scrutiny on persons who openly carry a firearm.
All of this highlights the folly of “gun free” school zones. Using the law to target citizens who will not be protected by the police is a perverse policy. It gives thugs every incentive to focus their criminal activities in the areas around the schools the legislation intends to protect.
Libertarian Wisdom
From Will Saletan at Slate:
the tricky thing about official intervention is that once the state gets its foot in the door, you don’t necessarily get to dictate what it can and can’t do.
He’s talking about how “For the usual incoherent combination of lefty reasons—not enough private discrimination in working conditions, too much private discrimination in family values–” he ”felt the urge to support regulation of the [surrogate motherhood] industry,” but then he read about Chinese police kicking in doors and forcing surrogate mothers to abort their babies, and realized that wasn’t “the kind of policing liberals have in mind when they call for tighter regulation of the fertility industry.”
But the lesson is broader, of course. It applies to health care, education, energy, faith-based organizations, and just about any enterprise you let the state take a role in.
What Is a “Fifth Column” Anyway?
@RadleyBalko points to a Washington Examiner column in which Jim Kouri, Vice President and Public Information Officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, says that Obama administration policy changes with regard to the “global war on terrorism” allow “suspected Fifth Column-type groups . . . to make symbolic demands on agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He says the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on the FBI to confirm or deny that a number of Long Island mosques are under law enforcement surveillance.
It’s hard to find the answer to the first question this raises: “So what?” Kouri does not make the case he implies: that something sinister lurks because this group, having a suspicion of something they see as wrongdoing, asks the agency in question whether it’s happening or not.
But the piece raised another question for me: “What’s a ‘Fifth Column,’ anyway?” The expression has been around forever, but what does it really mean?
Ahead of the Siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, a general under Francisco Franco claimed that he would take the city with the four columns of troops under his command and a “fifth column” of nationalist sympathizers inside the city.
The city never fell to the nationalists, but fear of this “fifth column” caused the Republican government under Francisco Caballero to abandon Madrid for Valencia and it led to a massacre of nationalist prisoners in Madrid during the ensuing battle.
So a “fifth column” is not so much an insidious group of spies or traitors as it is the threat of such a group which causes the incumbent power to miscalculate and overreact. That doesn’t clear up what Kouri is trying to get across, but it does have the air of unintended confession.
Put Surveillance Cameras on Police Guns, Not Street Corners
Mayor Daley of Chicago is planning to put a surveillance camera on every corner to aid first responders and deter terrorism. As I’ve said before, cameras don’t deter terrorism, but they do satisfy the need to “do something” without really improving security. Police officers prevent attacks with traditional investigation and intelligence gathering; cameras are only useful in picking up the pieces after the attack is done. My colleague Jim Harper is cited in this piece that addresses their utility in more detail. Cameras didn’t stop the 7/7 bombings in London, but they took lots of pictures of the attack (creepy Big Brother shots here). The London police doubled down on mass surveillance, but reported that the cameras have not reduced crime. Worse yet, the British have effectively outlawed taking photos of police officers, prompting photo protests.
Chicago isn’t the first major American city to take this route. New York did so, as did the District of Columbia. The cameras in D.C. have not prevented crime, and this piece makes the case that they are a waste of resources – no one can point to a prosecution that used the camera footage to obtain a conviction, and several murders have been committed within a block of a surveillance camera.
Surveillance cameras can and should play a prominent role in law enforcement – mounted on officers’ firearms. A company is now producing a camera that attaches to the tactical rail found on modern pistols and rifles. A New York county has invested in the technology for its officers, and their experience looks promising. Putting a camera on the guns of SWAT officers will keep them honest and prevent falsification of evidence after the fact to cover up a mistaken address or unlawful use of lethal force.
Mayor Cheye Calvo can attest to these horrors, as detailed in a recent Washington Post Sunday Magazine cover story, this Cato Policy Report, and this Cato Policy Forum, “Should No-Knock Police Raids be Rare-or Routine?” Click here for video – Mayor Calvo calmly captures the raw shock of having your life turn into a tactical problem for a SWAT team to solve, and he is now advocating for a Maryland state statute to mandate tracking the deployment of tactical law enforcement teams. As Radley Balko would tell you, this is long overdue.
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