The New York Times has an article today on the plight of Central Falls, Rhode Island, a 19,000-population industrial city that may declare bankruptcy under the fiscal weight of $80 million in pension obligations for police and fire officers. Unlike some coverage of municipal fiscal woes, this one does not dance around the way some of the problem originates in misguided labor policy:

The city, just north of Providence, is small and poor, but over the years it has promised police officers and firefighters retirement benefits like those offered in big, rich states like California and New York. These uniformed workers can retire after just 20 years of service, receive free health care in retirement, and qualify for full disability pensions when only partly disabled.

“Promised” is a word of art here, because the city wasn’t really making all of these concessions on a voluntary basis, as its negotiator explains:

state law called for binding arbitration, which for many years was a clubby process that emphasized comparable benefits all across the state more than any city’s ability to pay.

“Binding” arbitration, just to be clear, does not mean that the city agreed beforehand to settle disputes with the unions by way of arbitration; it means that state law imposed an arbitrator’s edict whether city managers ever signed up for the arbitration route or not. It thus differs from the contractually specified arbitration upheld lately in consumer contexts by the U.S. Supreme Court in AT&T v. Concepcion, a decision assailed by many of the same politicos who see no problem with genuine mandatory arbitration in the labor context.

The crisis in municipal finance wrought by binding public-sector arbitration and related laws comes as no surprise to readers who remember Cato’s excellent 2009 study “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Representative Government” by Don Bellante, David Denholm, and Ivan Osorio. (The California city of Vallejo declared bankruptcy in 2008 following the failure of negotiations with police and fire unions over unsustainable compensation.)

One point the otherwise thorough Times article omitted: many politicians in Washington have worked for years to impose a Central-Falls-like legal climate on states and localities lucky or farsighted enough to have avoided one in the past. During last fall’s lame duck session, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to push through the truly appalling Public Safety Employer–Employee Cooperation Act, which not only would have forced police and fire unionization on reluctant states and localities but also provided that in case of impasse (quoting Heritage) “States would have to provide a dispute resolution mechanism, such as binding arbitration.” And the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a priority of President Obama during his first years in office, would have imposed binding arbitration on the private sector. Central Falls may now be hurtling toward the waterfall, but how many other communities are just one political shove away from plunging into the same fiscal rapids?

As Central Falls Falls is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week, after I responded to Akhil Amar’s op-ed that defended, in an uncharacteristically unthoughtful and ad hominem way, the constitutionality of the individual mandate, a reader suggested that Amar’s argument — particularly that “breathing is an action” that Congress can regulate — reminded him of that Police classic, “Every Breath You Take.”  What’s ironic about this suggestion, perhaps inadvertently, is not only the invocation of “breathing” but that the whole Obamacare battle boils down to competing views of federal power:  Does the government have a general “police” power or is its authority limited to that finite set of powers listed in the Constitution?

And so, without further ado, here’s how the song would look updated for 2011′s favorite constitutional debate (with apologies to Gordon Sumner aka Sting):

Every breath you take
Every move you make, or
Decide not to take
Even when you flake
We’re mandating you

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Even if you stay
We’re coercing you

O don’t you fuss
You belong to us
How we regulate every step you take

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
We’re mandating you

The Constitution’s lost without a trace
Since ’37 we go every place
Limits on government you can’t replace
Got rid of those so we’re always in your face
We’re commanding you, no saying please

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
We’re mandating you

The Federal Government’s Police Power is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A Seattle police officer was caught on tape kicking a man who was lying face down on a sidewalk with his hands already handcuffed behind his back.   Whether the off-duty cop was drunk and badgering some women, as some witnesses claim, would make the incident even worse–because the handcuffed “suspect” may well have believed he was coming to the woman’s defense from some creepy guy.  In any event, kicking handcuffed persons who are not doing anything is unprofessional and illegal.

Cato held a forum on filming the police and that event can be viewed here.

Seattle Cop Caught on Tape is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Post has an interesting report about the huge amount of money that Fairfax County spends to go after gambling. The story cites critics who ask “why law enforcement spends valuable time and money on combating sports gambling. The answer is obvious — and explicit in the story: “…police in Virginia are allowed to keep 100 percent of the assets they seize in state gambling cases.” In other words, harassing the gambling business is a profit-making endeavor for police. And it also can be deadly since cops killed an optometrist during a SWAT arrest. The Institute for Justice has a powerful video on the dangers of “policing for profit,” and Fairfax County is just one bad example of how this lures cops into misallocating resources to fight behaviors that shouldn’t even be illegal.

It’s football season, and for millions of Americans that means betting season. …It’s a crime that Fairfax County police take seriously. So seriously that in one recent gambling investigation, they spent — and lost — more than $300,000 in cash to take down a Las Vegas-based online bookie and his group of Fairfax-based associates. …Police critics have long wondered why law enforcement spends valuable time and money on combating sports gambling. …Unlike drug cases, police in Virginia are allowed to keep 100 percent of the assets they seize in state gambling cases, so other agencies or divisions receive no benefit. And the vast majority of those arrested are placed on probation. “What a waste,” said Nicholas Beltrante, founder of the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability, a group formed earlier this year in part to combat unnecessary police spending. “The police should be utilizing their resources for more serious crimes.” Fairfax’s most notorious gambling investigation ended in disaster. In 2006, an undercover detective lost more than $5,000 while betting on NFL games with optometrist Salvatore J. Culosi — and when the detective called in a SWAT team to make the arrest, an officer shot Culosi once in the heart and killed him. …Since 2004, the squad has seized about $1 million in cash and assets annually, but some of those cases landed in federal court, where money is divided among various agencies, Schaible said. …One case from 2006, that of admitted bookmaker Kyle Peters, resulted in police seizing and keeping $566,940 from his bank accounts.

Giving Cops Bad Incentives to Harass Victimless Behavior is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The USA Today editorial board is criticizing the use of state wiretapping laws to prosecute citizens who tape on-duty police officers. I have written on this extensively: here, here, here and here. The editorial joins the Washington Examiner and Washington Post in this critique.

USA Today’s opposing view (presented by two AFL-CIO police union officials) provides this comment:

In today’s environment, police officers have to assume that every action they take is captured on tape, somewhere. They must be comfortable that everything they say or do in the course of their duties may be shown on the 5 o’clock news.

Our problem is not so much with the videotaping as it is with the inability of those with no understanding of police work to clearly and objectively interpret what they see. Videotapes frequently do not show what occurred before or after the camera was on, and the viewer has no idea what may have triggered the incident or what transpired afterwards.

This is often true. The recordings that prompt public outcry are sometimes “gotcha” moments where the camera only captures the use of force with no context.

Here is an example from Maryland that shows officers arresting a woman during the Preakness Stakes. At the end of the video, an officer says to the person recording the arrest: “Do me a favor and turn that off. It’s illegal to videotape anybody’s voice or anything else, against the law in the state of Maryland.”

As the USA Today editorial notes, this is a misreading of Maryland law that is kept alive by the prosecution of Anthony Graber and others who record the police. My commentary on the issue is here. As Carlos Miller points out, Maryland prosecutors come to different conclusions about the scope of the state’s wiretap law.

The real problem (besides the fact that the officer is misstating the law to prevent public accountability) is that the officer felt it necessary to stop the filming in the first place. This arrest was justified. The woman bleeding on the floor assaulted another patron, and when two officers responded to the incident, she assaulted them as well. This was a justified and necessary arrest. Whether the level of force was justified is another question, and one that is harder to assess because there is no recording of it.

Here is the solution – officers recording the incidents:

A handful of police departments already have their officers wearing video and audio recording devices. While I said a while ago that gun-mounted cameras are a good tool for police transparency and accountability, this head-mounted camera is a better option. It captures the prelude to the use of force, and doesn’t provide an incentive for the officer to draw his or her weapon sooner to get the event on film.

This is the future of American law enforcement. Departments will embrace this technology because it is a defensive measure against public outcry over the next “gotcha” video filmed with a cell phone and potential lawsuits. Law enforcement agencies will release their own footage of high-publicity events to show that their officers were complying with department guidelines on the use of force. The presence of a camera in an interaction between a cop and a citizen may also serve to keep behavior more civil since both parties know that the world is watching.

In 10 or 15 years, this technology will be ubiquitous just as police cruiser dashboard cameras are now, and law enforcement officers and the public will be better off for it.

Cops and Cameras: The Future of Policing is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An off-duty Baltimore police officer and a former Marine had a disagreement about the Marine’s advances toward the officer’s girlfriend. The officer ended it with thirteen rounds fired from his service pistol, six hitting the Marine and killing him. Baltimore police have confirmed that the Marine was unarmed. The officer refused a breathalyzer at the scene. (HT Instapundit)

It gets better. The officer was involved in another shooting five years ago, which was determined to have been justified, but the officer was disciplined… for being intoxicated.

I suspect that if your average citizen had defended his significant other’s honor with a dozen or so bullets, he would be in jail. Not so for the officer, who remains on administrative leave.

Of course, anyone recording the exchange that led to the shooting could be prosecuted for a felony under Maryland’s wiretapping law. Just ask Anthony Graber.

Baltimore Police Officer Fires 13 Shots, Kills Unarmed Man is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Police in New York City conducted 575,000 “stops” in 2009.  The actual number could be higher–depending on the number of stops the police decided not to record on paper.  The ‘stop and search’ is a legally dubious tactic that persists largely because white, middle-class people are mostly unaffected by it.  It is bad enough when the officers are in uniform, but gets worse when the police are in plain clothes and approach people rapidly.  The police “target” may have only seconds to determine whether he/she is facing a mugging or a police stop.  More here.

Stopping and Searching is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Businessweek has a story quoting a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Michael Wildes, speculating that Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, made so many mistakes (leaving his house keys in the car, not knowing about the vehicle identification number, making calls from his cellphone, getting filmed, buying the car himself) that he may be the “dumbest terrorist in the world.” But Wildes can’t accept the idea that an al Qaeda type terrorist would be so incompetent and suggests that Shahzad was “purposefully hapless” to generate intelligence about the police reaction for the edification of his buddies back in Pakistan.

Give me a break. This incompetence is hardly unprecedented. Three years ago Bruce Schneier wrote an article titled “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot,” describing the incompetence of several would-be al Qaeda plots in the United States and castigating commentators for clinging to image of these guys as Bond-style villains that rarely err.  It’s been six or seven years since people, including me, started pointing out that al Qaeda was wildly overrated. Back then, most people used to say that the reason al Qaeda hadn’t managed a major attack here since September 11 was because they were biding their time and wouldn’t settle for conventional bombings after that success. We are always explaining away our enemies’ failure.

The point here is not that all terrorists are incompetent — no one would call Mohammed Atta that — or that we have nothing to worry about. Even if all terrorists were amateurs like Shahzad, vulnerability to terrorism is inescapable. There are too many propane tanks, cars, and would-be terrorists to be perfectly safe from this sort of attack. The same goes for Fort Hood.

The point is that we are fortunate to have such weak enemies. We are told to expect nuclear weapons attacks, but we get faulty car bombs. We should acknowledge that our enemies, while vicious, are scattered and weak. If we paint them as the globe-trotting super-villains that they dream of being, we give them power to terrorize us that they otherwise lack. As I must have said a thousand times now, they are called terrorists for a reason.  They kill as a means to frighten us into giving them something.

The guys in Waziristan who trained Shahzad are probably embarrassed to have failed in the eyes of the world and would be relieved if we concluded that they did so intentionally. Likewise, it must have heartened the al Qaeda group in Yemen when the failed underwear bomber that they sent west set off the frenzied reaction that he did.  Remember that in March, al Qaeda’s American-born spokesperson/groupie Adam Gadahn said this:

Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy.

As our enemies realize, the bulk of harm from terrorism comes from our reaction to it.  Whatever role its remnants or fellow-travelers had in this attempt, al Qaeda (or whatever we want to call the loosely affiliated movement of internationally-oriented jihadists) is failing. They have a shrinking foothold in western Pakistan, maybe one in Yemen, and little more. Elsewhere they are hidden and hunted. Their popularity is waning worldwide. Their capability is limited. The predictions made after September 11 of waves of similar or worse attacks were wrong. This threat is persistent but not existential.

This attempt should also remind us of another old point: our best counterterrorism tools are not air strikes or army brigades but intelligence agents, FBI agents, and big city police.  It’s true that because nothing but bomber error stopped this attack, we cannot draw strong conclusions from it about what preventive measures work best. But the aftermath suggests that what is most likely to prevent the next attack is a criminal investigation conducted under normal laws and the intelligence leads it generates. Domestic counterterrorism is largely coincident with ordinary policing. The most important step in catching the would-be bomber here appears to have been getting the vehicle identification number off the engine and rapidly interviewing the person who sold it. Now we are seemingly gathering significant intelligence about bad actors in Pakistan under standard interrogation practices.

These are among the points explored in the volume Chris Preble, Jim Harper and I edited: Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It — now hot off the presses. Contributors include Audrey Kurth Cronin, Paul Pillar, John Mueller, Mia Bloom, and a bunch of other smart people.

We’re discussing the book and counterterrorism policy at Cato on May 24th,  at 4 PM. Register to attend or watch online here.

‘The Dumbest Terrorist In the World’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday I wrote about the University of Maryland student beaten by police and falsely charged with assault during a post-game celebration. I concluded with a warning that a law barring citizens from taking photos or videos of law enforcement officers (such as those in force in Great Britain) would have prevented the false charges and beating from coming to light.

I did not know that Maryland was already heading that direction. Video:

Anthony Graber was riding his motorcycle on I-95 in Maryland, speeding and popping wheelies and recording the experience with a helmet cam. An unmarked car cuts him off as he slows for traffic, and a man in a hoodie and jeans jumps out with a gun in his hand. Five seconds after the armed man has exited his vehicle and approached Graber, he identifies himself as a Maryland State Trooper. Graber accepts a speeding ticket and posts video of the experience on YouTube. (HT Armed Liberal)

If that were the end of it – a law enforcement officer recklessly creates a situation that could prompt a firefight by provoking a law-abiding citizen with a concealed carry permit (because the officer’s outward appearance suggested a criminal attack was underway) – I wouldn’t be writing this. But the Maryland State’s Attorneys are now charging Graber with unlawfully recording the incident. Police have seized his computer and he faces felony charges.

Maryland is working hard to justify its status as least-free state in the union. Find your state’s ranking here.

Felony Charges for Recording a Plainclothes Officer is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Following the home basketball victory against Duke, University of Maryland students took to the streets to celebrate. Prince George’s County Police, along with mounted officers from the Maryland-National Capital Park Police, responded to disperse an unruly crowd. One student skipped for joy toward police in riot gear, then stopped as he neared two mounted officers. Prince George’s officers rushed the student, beating him with clubs until he fell to the ground, and then continuing to deliver blows as he lay on the pavement. Video of the incident:

The student, John McKenna, was charged with felonies on suspicion of assaulting officers on horseback and their mounts. The charges against McKenna were dropped yesterday without comment, and now the officers responsible for the beating are under scrutiny. One of the three officers who beat McKenna has been suspended, and as soon as the other two are identified they face parallel sanction. Prince George’s prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation as well.

While this story is moving in the right direction, the video contradicting the charges against McKenna and putting police brutality on record made all the difference. Good reason to be wary of laws prohibiting photography or video of police officers.

University of Maryland Beating Prompts Investigations is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday Cato hosted the premiere screening of the new film, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police, produced by our friends at Flex Your Rights. The Washington Post has a nice piece about the film and event here. And the Washington Examiner covered the event here.

10 Rules is a gold mine of useful information (both legal and practical) for handling police encounters.  Legal books are too often impenetrable and just too time-consuming for laypersons. 10 Rules is a media-savvy vehicle that can alleviate the problem of constitutional illiteracy in America.

In less than 45 minutes, you acquire the information you need to know.  Get the dvds and encourage others to show them at high schools, colleges, and other venues.

Catch the trailer below:

Dealing with Police is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard the story—and seen the video.  During the weekend’s Snowpocalypse™ in DC, a gaggle of young urbanites, using Twitter and other social media, announced a big group snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U Streets.  For a while, it was all good fun, with the participants periodically stopping the skirmish to help dislodge a motorist for a snowdrift, amid collective cheers. But an off-duty plainclothes cop whose Hummer had been hit by a few snowballs lost his cool—and advanced on the crowd to berate them with his gun drawn. You’d think an angry, out-of-uniform guy brandishing a gun might set off a dangerous stampede in the snow, but true to form, the DC crowd responded with chanting: “You don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight!”

Initially, the Metropolitan Police Department “reviewed the evidence” and concluded that the officer had only been holding a cell phone after all—folks who’d said it was a gun must have just imagined it, what with all that snow. But it turns out there were a whole lot of video cameras and phonecams there, and still shots and recordings began to circulate on the Internet, making it impossible to deny what had happened.  By Monday, the chief of police had issued a statement calling the officer’s behavior “totally inappropriate” and announcing that he’d be relegated to desk duty pending further inquiry.

As anyone who follows the excellent work of my colleague Radley Balko will be well aware, things often play out quite differently—with departments circling the wagons, and no serious accountability for far more egregious abuses of authority. But video—increasingly ubiquitous and portable—can make a difference. And it strikes me that, in one sense, it helps remedy other kinds of social inequality.  Reviewing that video of the snowball scene, you might point out that the crowd is full of white 20-somethings, many of whom (given the city’s demographics) are almost certainly college-educated professionals, while police misconduct toward less privileged groups is far more likely to be ignored.

What is privilege, though? In cases like these, it consists largely in the ability to be seen and heard—to attract media attention, to articulate your story in a clear and compelling way, to be considered credible by press and the community. All of these, unfortunately, depend enormously on class, status, race, and education. Unless there’s video. And video is democratic these days. You’d have to poke around a bit to find even a bottom-of-the-line cheapo cell phone that didn’t come with at least a still camera, and likely video capture to boot. So while there’s been some attention paid to the potential of this kind of “Little Brother” surveillance to increase accountability—the to lessen disparity in power between citizen and cop—it’s also worth stressing the way it can lessen certain kinds of disparities between citizens.

That said, and just going by memory, it seems like most of the stories I encounter in this vein still involve white, middle-class, college-educated young people. One possibility is that this shows I’m wrong, and that other aspects of privilege still play into their videos circulating while others languish. Another, though, is just that they’re both accustomed to this kind of routine use of technology and sharing of data, and that they take their social power for granted. That is, it occurs more naturally to them that the right response to this kind of misbehavior is to record and circulate it. If it’s mostly the latter, we’re on an interesting precipice, where the main remaining precondition for the leveling effect to kick in is just awareness that the other preconditions are in place.  If that’s right, the next few years should be interesting.

Do Bring a Phonecam to a Snowball Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here are some interesting new items on the web:

• Cato Senior Fellow Nat Hentoff is interviewed by John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute.  Nat says “Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.”  And “Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had.”  Go here for the full interview.
• Cato adjunct scholar Harvey Silverglate is blogging this week over at the Volokh Conspiracy on his new book, Three Felonies a Day.
•  Cato Adjunct Scholar Marie Gryphon, who is also a Senior Fellow with the Manhattan Institute, has just put out a new paper, It’s a Crime: Flaws in Federal Statutes That Punish Regular Businesspeople.
• Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko takes a look at the pathetic machinations in the Chicago Police Department.  Reminds me of the proud boast from a patronage worker in the political machine: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!”

Good stuff here.  For more Cato scholarship, go here.

A Civil Liberties Roundup is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Our friends at Flex Your Rights have a new film that is about to be released.  It’s called 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. Trailer for the film here.  I have seen the entire film and it is an outstanding work–accurate and useful information, great screenplay, and great acting.

Believe it or not, the police can lie to you and can try to trick you into giving up your constitutional rights.  Happens every day.  In less than 45 minutes, this film teaches you what you need to know about police encounters.  Every citizen should take an interest in learning about constitutional rights.  And experienced lawyers will tell you that you can save thousands of bucks in legal fees by avoiding common mistakes.  But you need to know the traps.   If you have teenagers in the family, make them watch it.  Knowledge is power.  Spread the word.

10 Rules for Dealing With the Police is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Great news – for a change!  A Mississippi court has ordered a new trial for Cory Maye.

When Cato author Radley Balko was preparing his report on violent, no-knock, drug raids, he discovered the case of Cory Maye, who was then on death row for murdering a police officer.  On closer inspection, Radley thought the shooting looked like self-defense, not murder.  At Maye’s initial trial, he had lousy legal representation.  Thanks to Radley’s writings about the case, Maye secured top notch lawyers for his appeal.  With a new trial, Maye now stands a very good chance of getting out of prison altogether.  Congratulations to Radley Balko!

Previous coverage here.

New Trial For Cory Maye is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Problems with 911 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Drug War Insanity Goes Up in Smoke is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Do We Need a Law against Texting While Driving? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Cheye Calvo Reflects on SWAT Shooting is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Pervasive Illiteracy in the Afghan National Army is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog