The American Conservative

Yesterday, two journalists were arrested for taking pictures and filming a public meeting of the D.C. Taxi Commission. One of those journalists was Jim Epstein of Reason Magazine, and you can read his account here or watch his video of the event:

This is downright Soviet. If people don’t have the right to record public meetings of government officials, we are in danger of losing one of the bedrocks of republican government, which isn’t terribly healthy as it is. Radley Balko, who knows a thing or two about recording public servants, wryly notes that the cab drivers, who are mostly immigrants “from east Africa and the Middle East,” are outraged and therefore “seem to have a far better grasp of free expression and the need for transparency in government than the federal and city employees working in America’s capital city.”

Government transparency is not a sufficient condition for a corruption-free government, but it’s sure as hell a necessary one. And although this may seem to be a minor incident, government at the federal level has grown dramatically more opaque with, for instance, an explosion in the number of classified documents after 9/11. President Obama pledged to reverse this trend, but that promise has not yielded impressive results. We should not be surprised when local bureaucracies follow the lead of their federal overlords and do everything within their power to shield themselves from public scrutiny.

Has progressive activism reached a new low? A George Washington University law professor is threatening to sue Catholic University over its recent decision to return to single-sex dorms.

The professor, John Banzhaf, claims that Catholic’s decision is in violation of a D.C. anti-discrimination law that prohibits discrimination based upon sex.

GW prof John Banzhaf argues that the plan to gender-segregate all of the school’s dorms constitutes illegal sex discrimination under the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act.

Banzhaf has won more than 100 legal actions under the statute, he said in a statement, adding that the District’s anti-discrimination law “prohibits any discrimination based directly or indirectly upon sex unless it is strictly necessary for the entity to remain in business.”

And since for more than 25 years Catholic University has grown considerably without gender-segregated dorms, “it is very unlikely that this newly-unveiled plan would qualify” as a business necessity, Banzhaf added.

Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon announced that “we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.” It has not gone well. Illicit drugs are easily available and continue to be used by tens of millions of Americans. For this complete lack of results, we have wasted over a trillion dollars, imprisoned more people per capita than any nation on Earth, and fed wars and rebellions across the world that have done nothing but destroy people and property while further tarnishing our reputation. No wonder then that former Maryland State Police Officer Neil Franklin recently referred to the drug war as the  “worst piece of public policy since slavery.”

The good news is that people finally seem to be realizing that drug prohibition is no more workable than alcohol prohibition. At the beginning of the month, I discussed a new report calling for an end to the drug war that has continued to spur discussion, but it appears that the report’s luminary authors are far from alone in their assessment. Over at Hit and Run, Jacob Sullum has helpfully rounded up a wide selection of the commentary on this unhappy anniversary, and from Time to The Washington Post to The Chicago Tribune everyone seems to think that it might be time to start developing an exit strategy from this unwinnable quagmire. While visiting CBS’s News for a completely unrelated story, I stumbled upon this relatively critical piece on a policy that was unquestionable fifteen years ago.

And there’s good reason to think that this shift in opinion among pundits will (eventually) change policy. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan reports here on research that supports the idea that “intellectuals change their minds first, and activists, the rank-and-file, and politicians gradually get into line.” That process appears to take a decade or so–or at least it did in the early to mid twentieth century–but still it offers hope that we can change tragically bad policies…even after forty years of senseless repetition.

Throughout the day, people sent me a story about a SWAT team in Stockton, California raiding a man’s house because his estranged wife defaulted on her student loans. According to the Department of Education, the raid was not executed over bad student loans, but it was part of an unspecified “ongoing criminal investigation.” That’s troubling but relatively routine in today’s America. What’s shocking is that the DoE did not use the local SWAT team for this, instead deploying their own team of jackboots:

U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton confirmed for News10 Wednesday morning federal agents with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), not local S.W.A.T., served the search warrant…

OIG is a semi-independent branch of the education department that executes warrants for criminal offenses such as student aid fraud, embezzlement of federal aid and bribery, according to Hamilton. The agency serves 30 to 35 search warrants a year…

[Stockton] Police officers did not participate in breaking Wright’s door, handcuffing him, or searching his home.

Seriously? The Department of Education has a police force? And it executes paramilitary raids? Words fail.

Update: A summer intern at the Department of Education emailed me to pass along this fact sheet about the Department’s Office of Inspector General and the raid in question. I doubt this is how this intern imagined his first few weeks on the job playing out.

A report released yesterday by the Global Commission on Drug Policy calling for the legalization or decriminalization of many drugs is generating quite a buzz (at least judging by the wide variety of people in my social network I have seen post it).  The findings of the report are not terribly noteworthy–people have been making similar arguments for decades–but the list of political heavyweights on the commission is. The BBC reports:

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson…

The 19-member commission includes Mexico’s former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, as well as the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou.

The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, a former US secretary of state.

It’s revealing that only one of the many political figures on the commission is currently in office. I think most high level politicians know the drug war is a failure. How could they not? However, they fear that voicing such a heresy will instantly brand them as “soft on crime” or “pro-drug” and potentially cost them their office. Better to wait until after retirement to speak the truth on such an emotional issue. It’s becoming more acceptable to question prohibitionist policies in Latin America, which has borne the worst of the fighting, but in the states, supporting the drug war is still the electorally safe route.

In The Republic, Plato famously advanced the idea of “the noble lie,” a myth that political leaders consciously propagate to keep social order. That’s a disturbing thought, but the noble lie seems to be mercifully rare. Unfortunately, the ignoble lie–a myth propagated by a politician for no greater good save his constant reelection–is common as the cold. Politicians’ ignoble lies are hardly limited to drug policy, of course. They employ it whenever the public would rather not hear the truth, so it surfaces frequently in conversations about health care and entitlements among other issues where unpleasant tradeoffs must be accepted.

But the idea of a drug free America is the king of ignoble lies. Every politician knows it’s a fantasy, but if one of them dares to even acknowledge this fact, his opposition will turn him into Tony Montana. This will not change until the public becomes willing to accept uncomfortable truths, or politicians are willing to accept the negative consequences of speaking them. I am not optimistic on either front.

 

Whenever I start to think that I’m overly cynical and paranoid about the government, I read something like this and realize that, if anything, my paranoia is completely insufficient for the off the wall schemes our government concocts.  In fact, the only thing that appears to keep government officials from engaging in Parallax View style conspiracies is their laughable incompetence. Nothing has demonstrated that more in recent years than domestic terrorism investigations. Time and again, law enforcement has proven that if given a long enough leash, they would rather pursue the make -believe terrorists they see hiding behind every protest placard than tackle the much more difficult–and real–problem of tracking people with an actual desire to harm others.

We’ve seen this type of thing before, but this farce of an investigation from Seattle really takes the cake. The Seattle Police Department in conjunction with the FBI sent an undercover agent, Bryan Van Brunt, to surveil a local after hours party hot-spot and its participants for the better part of two years. The police believed they could use the party scene to infiltrate the eco-terrorist group Earth Liberation Front, expose corrupt local politicians, and bust high level drug traffickers. Through sheer dumb luck, investigators managed to pop a few Honduran cocaine dealers, but they never get any crooked pols, let alone terrorists. But because they need to pin some scalps to the wall, the SPD arrest a few amateur poker players and the unfortunate Rick Wilson on unrelated gun charges. The article is long and well worth the read, but if you refuse to devote the time to this tragi-comic story, here is a key excerpt: Read More…

And the drugs have won. Take a look at this news report from Tennessee on how law enforcement agencies are using civil asset forfeiture to “fight” drugs:

This report doesn’t explain much about how civil asset forfeiture works, so here’s a crash course. Under federal law, if police believe property was involved in a crime, they can seize it, sell it, and keep up to 80% of the proceeds while kicking the rest up to the feds under an arrangement known as equitable sharing. They do not need to convict or even charge anyone with a crime to complete the forfeiture because the government is literally accusing the property of a crime. This is why forfeiture cases have names like State v. $500 in cash or State v. 1974 Cadillac Eldorado. Conveniently, property does not have the same kind of pesky due process rights as a person, so, for instance, the government does not need to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt but merely through a preponderance of the evidence.

That’s all very distressing to anyone concerned about preserving our civil and property rights, but it’s old hat by now. What’s striking about this video is that the police no longer appear interested in seizing drugs, just drug money. That’s a completely predictable result given their incentives. The police can’t sell the drugs themselves and keep the money–at least not legally–but they can tacitly allow drug dealers to do the work and then take the cash. Civil asset forfeiture laws were originally pitched as a tool to help cops end the drug trade, but instead, they have made law enforcement just another group competing for their cut of the profits.

If you’d like to learn more about asset forfeiture, you should watch this short video by the Institute for Justice or listen to this presentation by yours truly on how the practice is used and abused in Missouri.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg belies his elitist image, boldly demonstrating his contempt for due process will not be overawed by wealth and status:

“I think it is humiliating, but if you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.”

And if you expect the mayor to prove your presumed crimes, consider staying out of New York. Perhaps it’s an optical illusion, but when I take a step back this “elitist” becomes a petty provincial. Mike Bloomberg in the role of redneck sheriff–and killing it! Lord, I’m ready.

“You don’t have to fake DNA — you issue a press release”.
–Spartan, David Mamet

Some of the French are angry about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “perp walk”:

Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry denounced “degrading images” and said France was lucky to have a law on the presumption of innocence that bars media from showing defendants in handcuffs before they are convicted.

When you’re right, you’re right. It’s time for the walk to go the way of the stocks. The practice degrades the accused (even prisoners of war are protected from this) and unfairly incriminates him in the eyes of the public–poisoning the well of his peers from which his jury is drawn. Yet we encourage it, because it’s used on high-profile suspects and for high-profile crimes. Also, human nature being what it is, we tend to presume fire where there is smoke. Legal protections for the accused are there to clear the smoke so that we can verify the fire with our own eyes. The perp walk is a fog machine, smoking up the concert stage.

And staged it is. While it gives police and prosecutors a weapon of intimidation against the accused–play ball or we’ll publicly humiliate and ruin you–this can’t explain their enthusiasm. They do it, of course, to further their careers (it doesn’t help that prosecutors and judges are elected in New York). DSK thus required the supervision of four high-ranking officers for his parading; apparently the logistics of marching a suspect some 50 feet are that great (must be the confusion of so much flash photography). In a photo I saw one appeared to be straining to maintain his tough-cop expression (adapted from television and film, no doubt) and stay in the frame at the same time.

Here they had the ultimate Great White Defendant, handcuffed behind his back (readers of Bonfire of the Vanities will recall the debate between lawyers and cops before perp-walking Sherman McCoy–did he warrant the extra humiliation of cuffing behind-the-back?), and standing in for all those never-to-be-convicted criminal bankers, for the whole of our decadent and incompetent elite. But he’s being thrown into the volcano of popular scorn by that same elite. We should throw him back.

Wry Dan McCarthy asks below:

Won’t it be a wonderful victory for civil liberties when the problem of intimate searches is solved and we can all go back to being X-rayed whenever we fly?

Alas, long before we manage to un-encumber ourselves of such as the TSA, x-ray technology will have become our grand-children’s steampunk. From Danger Room, a developing nanotechnology combines bee venom with nano-fiber to sniff bombs at the molecular level. Nanotechnology has inspired its own “runaway replicator” theory and is carbon-based, like us. But then some worried the first atomic explosion, if hot enough, would ignite the atmosphere and flambe Earth (now we know it isn’t possible); fortunately sterner souls prevailed and we now have nuclear weaponry.

The technology could do away with invasive searches (“beats having your junk touched” says Danger Room; “not necessarily”, says my creepy Uncle Del). I don’t know; all I see is Quantum Realm (where nanotech operates) + Bees (the Wermacht of the insect world) + State Surveillance. This is how it ends. Someday we’ll smile, if we’re still capable in our new status, recalling our childhood fears of mechanical robots gaining autonomy and making us their slaves…