John Oliver takes a cheeky look at civil (asset) forfeiture. You may be surprised by some of the things he mentions.
Something pretty cool in New York
October 5, 2014If you read all the posts about cops here, you might come away with the idea that they’re mostly cruel people who enjoy abusing their power. They’re not, of course; my own interactions with police have been positive by and large. And I think that police officers show the same mix of good and bad folks that’s in the general population.
So for a little balance, here’s a story about a cop and a young child that’s good news. Congratulations to Sergeant Hildenbrand for helping to save this boy’s life.
Police officer drives car and does CPR at same time on toddler
RED HOOK, N.Y. (WABC) —
A Red Hook police sergeant thought he was just pulling over a speeder; instead it turned out to be a frantic dad trying to get help for his son.The 22-month-old was having a medical emergency and the officer took quick action that saved the little boy’s life. […]
On Monday, Morgan’s 22-month-old boy, also named Matthew, suffered a seizure and collapsed. The 19-year-old grabbed the small lifeless body and jumped into his car. Speeding through the Dutchess County Village of Red Hook, Morgan and Police Sergeant Patrick Hildenbrand spotted each other at just about the same time.
“I was going and then he hit his lights and then as soon as I seen that I stopped and I ran to his car. You get through traffic a lot faster,” Morgan said.
“He has a young boy in his hands and he’s running at me, yelling at me, his son is not breathing. ‘I think my son is dead, my son is not breathing,'” Hildenbrand said.
What happened next is extraordinary. Morgan, now in the back seat of a police SUV held his son close to the partition and watched as the 35-year-old policeman drove to the hospital and performed CPR on the boy at the same time.
“I reached my hand back here as I’m driving, moved my body over and started doing all the compressions and feeling for a pulse while I could still operate the vehicle,” Hildenbrand said. […]
“I really don’t think this child would be here today if it wasn’t for those efforts. I think the key is when you can start rescue CPR out in the community it certainly, the earlier you start it the better outcomes you have,” said Dr. John Sabia, of Northern Dutchess Hospital.
Something rotten in Maryland
October 1, 2014This is the opening of a recent editorial in The Washington Post. If you read the whole thing, it makes this case really smell fishy.
A judge wrongly throws out an officer’s assault verdict in Prince George’s County
IN PRINCE George’s County, it is now clear that the police, without provocation, can beat an unarmed young student senseless — with impunity. They can blatantly lie about it — with impunity. They can stonewall and cover it up for months — with impunity. They can express no remorse and offer no apology — with impunity.
The agent of this travesty of justice, and this impunity, is Judge Beverly J. Woodard of the Prince George’s County Circuit Court. Judge Woodard has presided in the case involving John J. McKenna, a young University of Maryland student who was savagely beaten by two baton-wielding Prince George’s cops in March 2010, following a men’s basketball game on the College Park campus.
The beating of Mr. McKenna was videotaped; had it not been, the police, who filed no report and then falsely claimed that he instigated the incident and attacked them, may never have been investigated or charged. Yet despite the fact that a jury convicted one of the police officers, James Harrison Jr., of assault nearly two years ago, Judge Woodard has now thrown the verdict out and closed the case.
Via Radley Balko
Another one bites the dust
September 27, 2014Paul sends a link to this article at Vice about a utopian settlement project called Galt’s Gulch Chile. Has any utopian settlement ever lasted for more than a couple of decades?
Based on this article, it sounds as though this project didn’t fall apart so much as it never got started.
ATLAS MUGGED: HOW A LIBERTARIAN PARADISE IN CHILE FELL APART
It was a good idea, in theory anyway. The plan was to form a sustainable community made up of people who believed in capitalism, limited government, and self-reliance. The site was already picked out: 11,000 acres of fertile land nestled in the valleys of the Chilean Andes, just an hour’s drive away from the capital of Santiago, to the east, and the Pacific Ocean, to the west. Residents could make money growing and exporting organic produce while enjoying Chile’s low taxes and temperate climate. This was no crackpot scheme to establish a micronation on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean (a common libertarian dream)—this was a serious attempt to build a refuge where free marketers and anarcho-capitalists could hole up and wait for the world’s fiat currencies to collapse. They called it “Galt’s Gulch Chile” (GGC), naming it for the fictional place where the world’s competent capitalists flee to in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
The project was conceived in 2012 by four men: John Cobin, an American expat living in Chile who once ran unsuccessfully for Congress in South Carolina; Jeff Berwick, the globe-trotting founder of the Dollar Vigilante, a financial newsletter that preaches the coming end of the current monetary system; Cobin’s Chilean partner; and Ken Johnson, a roving entrepreneur whose previous investment projects included real estate, wind turbines, and “water ionizers,” pseudoscientific gizmos that are advertised as being able to slow aging.
That initial group quickly fell apart, though today the principals disagree on why. Now, two years after its founding, the would-be paradise is ensnared in a set of personal conflicts, mainly centered on Johnson. Instead of living in a picturesque valley selling Galt’s Gulch–branded juice, the libertarian founders are accusing one another of being drunks, liars, and sociopaths. GGC’s would-be inhabitants have called Johnson a “weirdo,” a “pathological liar,” “insane,” a “scammer,” and other, similar things. Some shareholders are pursuing legal action in an effort to remove him from the project, a drastic measure for antigovernment types to take. Johnson, who remains the manager of the trust that controls the land, claims all the allegations against him are false. So what happened?
What he said (5)
September 24, 2014A good essay about what science is and what it’s not. (The author’s emphasis below.)
How our botched understanding of ‘science’ ruins everything
Here’s one certain sign that something is very wrong with our collective mind: Everybody uses a word, but no one is clear on what the word actually means.
One of those words is “science.”
Everybody uses it. Science says this, science says that. You must vote for me because science. You must buy this because science. You must hate the folks over there because science.
Look, science is really important. And yet, who among us can easily provide a clear definition of the word “science” that matches the way people employ the term in everyday life?
So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.
To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.
In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say “science”, what they really mean is magic or truth.
H.T. Jeff
When humans lose control
September 23, 2014This is a pretty interesting article about government bureaucracies – and their incentives – at The Atlantic by Philip Howard. RTWT.
When Humans Lose Control of Government
The Veterans Affairs scandal of falsified waiting lists is the latest of a never-ending stream of government ineptitude. Every season brings a new headline of failures: the botched roll-out of Obamacare involved 55 uncoordinated IT vendors; a White House report in February found that barely 3 percent of the $800 billion stimulus plan went to rebuild transportation infrastructure; and a March Washington Post report describes how federal pensions are processed by hand in a deep cave in Pennsylvania.
The reflexive reaction is to demand detailed laws and rules to make sure things don’t go wrong again. But shackling public choices with ironclad rules, ironically, is a main cause of the problems. Dictating correctness in advance supplants the one factor that is indispensable to all successful endeavors—human responsibility. “Nothing that’s good works by itself,” as Thomas Edison put it. “You’ve got to make the damn thing work.”
Three cheers for Kahler Nygard
September 23, 2014The TSA wanted to screen Kahler Nygard after his flight from Minneapolis to Denver. (I don’t know if the flight continued past Denver.)
So he called their bluff about getting the local police involved and he walked – bless his heart. This nonsense won’t stop until we put a stop to it.
If you don’t defend your rights, you don’t have any.
Eugene
September 20, 2014An old friend sent me a link to Greg Brown’s Eugene.
Sometimes you gotta not look too hard – just let the dog find you.
Live free or die.
An official protection racket
September 13, 2014Matt Ridley gives us a lesson in the history of governments – think of it as Civics 101 – while he writes about the militarization of police in the United States.
Government begins as a monopoly on violence
It’s an official protection racketMy Times column last week was on the historical roots of government: […]
The deal implicit in being governed is at root a simple one: we allow the people who govern us to have an exclusive right to commit violence, so long as they direct it at other countries and at criminals. In almost every nation, if you go back far enough, government began as a group of thugs who, as Pope Gregory VII put it in 1081, “raised themselves up above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder — in short by every kind of crime”.
Was Canute, or William the Conqueror, or Oliver Cromwell really much different from the Islamic State? They got to the top by violence and then violently dealt with anybody who rebelled. The American writer Albert Jay Nock in 1939 observed: “The idea that the state originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation — that is to say, in crime . . . No state known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose.” […]
One of the great peculiarities of the United States is that it never quite managed to impose a state monopoly on powerful weaponry. The right to bear arms was a reaction to the presence of redcoats as an occupying army before 1783. The government got to own the tanks and aircraft carriers, but never pointed them at its own people, who were allowed to own guns much more freely than in other countries.
This is what makes the kit that the police displayed in Ferguson, Missouri, this month so alarming. With their camouflage uniforms, armoured vehicles and heavy-calibre machine guns, “law enforcement” cops looked less like a constabulary and more like an occupying army. In recent years, largely by exploiting the “war” on terror and the “war” on drugs, the American police have indeed been radically militarised. […]
Like watching your sister’s kids go to pot
September 10, 2014The more news I read from Venezuela, the more anti-socialist (or anti-statist, to be clearer) object lessons I see.
To set the scene, Venezuela is a member of OPEC – that’s the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. And Venezuela used to export a fair amount of oil. But here’s a graph of its production for the last 50 years — which is down by about 1/3 in the last 15 — so now Venezuela’s ready to start importing oil.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ll recall that el señor Chávez was first elected in 1999.
(Graph from EnergyInsights.net.)
The management acumen of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro continues to amaze. Reuters:
Algeria is in talks to export crude oil to fellow OPEC member Venezuela, Algerian Energy Minister Youcef Yousfi said on Tuesday, confirming a Reuters report. […]
“Yes, we are in talks,” Yousfi told Reuters when asked whether Algeria was planning to export crude oil to Venezuela. He declined to provide details.
More details come care of the Miami Herald:
It turns out that Venezuela’s own production of light crudes has plummeted since the late President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, and the country desperately needs light crudes to blend with its Orinoco Basin extra heavy crude oils. Without such a blend, the Orinoco Basin’s extra heavy crude is too dense to be transported through pipelines to Venezuelan ports and exported abroad.
Venezuela’s oil production, which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s export earnings, should be used in world classrooms as a textbook case of what happens when a populist government starts distributing a country’s wealth in cash subsidies, without investing in maintenance and innovation. Much like happened with Cuba’s once flourishing sugar industry, Venezuela’s Chávez-inspired populism has destroyed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
In 1999, when Chávez took office, PDVSA had 51,000 employees and produced 63 barrels of crude a day per employee. Fifteen years later, PDVSA had 140,000 employees, and produced 20 barrels of crude a day per employee, according to an Aug. 14 report by the France Press news agency. […]
There was a popular riddle bandied about the Soviet Union back in communist days that went something like this: Question: if the Soviet Union conquered the Sahara, what would happen? Answer: nothing for 50 years, then a shortage of sand.
Present-day highwaymen is what I’d call them
September 10, 2014The Institute for Justice has been running a campaign to end civil forfeiture — a topic I mentioned recently with the video about the ‘forfeiture machine’ in Philadelphia.
The IJ contributed to a three-part series in The Washington Post titled Stop and seize. The first installment is a long article but the thing that jumped out at me was this bit (fairly early on).
A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.
“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.
Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”
Evidently we’re all fair game now, according to Deputy Hain.
As I often say, RTWT.
And when you have time, pay a visit to the IJ’s EndForfeiture site.
Update (9/22/14):
Here’s an editorial by John Yoder and Brad Cates (both former directors of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office) that appeared in The Washington Post on September 18th. My emphasis below.
Government self-interest corrupted a crime-fighting tool into an evil
Last week, The Post published a series of in-depth articles about the abuses spawned by the law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture. As two people who were heavily involved in the creation of the asset forfeiture initiative at the Justice Department in the 1980s, we find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.
Asset forfeiture was conceived as a way to cut into the profit motive that fueled rampant drug trafficking by cartels and other criminal enterprises, in order to fight the social evils of drug dealing and abuse. Over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.
The mark of a master
September 6, 2014Paul sends a link to this interesting story about Richard Feynman and fuzzy black holes: Why “Hawking Radiation” Was Almost “Feynman Radiation”.
What he said (4)
August 24, 2014Jeff sends a link to this post by Kevin Williamson at NR’s The Corner. (It’s the whole post, since it’s not easily excerpted.)
In the Wrong Business, Part 247
The school board of Centinela Valley Union High School District in Los Angeles County is firing its superintendent, Jose Fernandez.
He was paid $750,000 a year.
That’s three-quarters of a million dollars a year — not to manage some sprawling big-city school system (which would be questionable enough) but to oversee five schools and an independent-study program in the suburbs.
But not to worry: He was previously paid only about a half-million a year. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “Fernandez’s unusually high compensation was in part the result of a one-time payout of $230,000 he used to increase his pension credits, which would give him a higher annual pension upon his retirement.”
So they were paying him an outrageous sum of money today in order to pay him an even more outrageous sum in the future.
These thieves are why we’re broke.
Amen, brother.
Policing the police (2)
August 19, 2014Here’s some follow-up on a post from last December about equipping police officers with body cameras.
Gee, what a surprise!</sarcasm>
What Happens When Police Officers Wear Body Cameras
Use of force by police officers declined 60% in first year since introduction of cameras in Rialto, Calif.
With all eyes on Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the death of Michael Brown, a renewed focus is being put on police transparency. Is the solution body-mounted cameras for police officers?
Sometimes, like the moments leading up to when a police officer decides to shoot someone, transparency is an unalloyed good. And especially lately, technology has progressed to a point that it makes this kind of transparency not just possible, but routine.
So it is in Rialto, Calif., where an entire police force is wearing so-called body-mounted cameras, no bigger than pagers, that record everything that transpires between officers and citizens. In the first year after the cameras’ introduction, the use of force by officers declined 60%, and citizen complaints against police fell 88%.
It isn’t known how many police departments are making regular use of cameras, though it is being considered as a way of perhaps altering the course of events in places such as Ferguson, Mo., where an officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.
What happens when police wear cameras isn’t simply that tamper-proof recording devices provide an objective record of an encounter—though some of the reduction in complaints is apparently because of citizens declining to contest video evidence of their behavior—but a modification of the psychology of everyone involved.
Cops into Robbers
August 12, 2014Today the Institute for Justice will announce a major federal lawsuit on behalf of a group of Philadelphians seeking to end the city’s particularly shocking system of seizing nearly $6 million in property from thousands of its citizens each year.
"Settle" for half the market value indeed. What a racket!
Thank Heaven for IJ; there are No Rights without Property Rights.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way
August 10, 2014Here’s some interesting news from Bath (in southwest England).
Rolling in money: Man makes toll road to get around roadworks
A grandfather sick of roadworks near his home defied his council and built his own toll road allowing people to circumvent the disrupted section.
Opened on Friday, it’s the first private toll road built since cars became a familiar sight on British roads 100 years ago. Motorists pay £2 [$3.30 USD] to travel each way and bypass the 14 miles diversion.
Mike Watts, 62, hired a crew of workmen and ploughed £150,000 [~$250,000 USD] of his own cash into building a 365m [0.23 mi.] long bypass road in a field next to the closed A431. He reckons it will cost another £150,000 in upkeep costs and to pay for two 24 hour a day toll booth operators.
Speaking from the road in Kelston, Somerset, Mike said: “Too many people are displaced by the road closure, their daily lives have been so disrupted by this.”
The A431 between Bristol and Bath was closed in February after a landslip caused huge cracks to appear in the road.
Quickly businesses in the area began to suffer – including the cafe and party supplies shop Mike runs with wife Wendy Rice, 52, in Bath.
Naturally, the local bureaucracy wasn’t pleased.
But a spokesman for the council said it was not happy about the bold build.
“It is not just the planning, it’s the legal aspect of drivers using the road, and also safety – the area around the road where the landslip occurred has only just stopped moving, which is why work has only just been able to begin.”
Update 10/13/14:
Here’s a video about Mr. Watts’ toll road; he backed the cost of construction with his house.
What happens when your tax rate is too high?
August 8, 2014For one thing, you get nonsense-on-stilts like this:
The United States Needs Corporate ‘Loyalty Oaths’
Big corporations are fleeing for lower tax rates abroad. With reform legislation going nowhere, it’s time to think creatively and institute newfangled ‘non-desertion agreements.’
Do none of these people ever think…
– about the incentives companies are reacting to?
– that corporations are just groups of people; like school boards or the local Lions Club (except with better financial savvy)?
– that the idea of taxing corporations is sort of nonsense to begin with?
Corporate taxes are paid by customers (people), or by reduced earnings to shareholders (people), or by reduced salaries and benefits to employees (people), or by reduced reinvestment — causing job and opportunity losses (to people).
Help a sister out
July 29, 2014This post has been updated twice; see below.
Shaneen Allen has a funding campaign for her legal defense.
Despite the fact that Shaneen Allen possesses a License to Carry Firearms issued by the City of Philadelphia…
Despite the fact that Allen has been trained in firearm safety and passed an NRA handgun safety course…
Despite the fact that Allen voluntarily presented her carry license to the police in conjunction with a routine traffic stop, as per her training…
New Jersey is doing its best to turn Shaneen Allen into a convicted felon facing a State Prison term of a minimum-mandatory 3-5 years with no chance of parole.
What heinous offense did Shaneen Allen — a hard-working single mother of two, with no prior criminal record — do to deserve such a fate? Last October, she travelled with her Pennsylvania licensed handgun loaded with lawfully purchased, low penetration self defense ammunition, into New Jersey.
That is all.
From what I’ve read, she sounds like the victim of an overzealous (or maybe just thoughtless) prosecutor.
Radley Balko wrote about Ms Allen last week:
Shaneen Allen, race and gun control
Last October, Shaneen Allen, 27, was pulled over in Atlantic County, N.J. The officer who pulled her over says she made an unsafe lane change. During the stop, Allen informed the officer that she was a resident of Pennsylvania and had a conceal carry permit in her home state. She also had a handgun in her car. Had she been in Pennsylvania, having the gun in the car would have been perfectly legal. But Allen was pulled over in New Jersey, home to some of the strictest gun control laws in the United States.
Allen is a black single mother. She has two kids. She has no prior criminal record. Before her arrest, she worked as a phlebobotomist. After she was robbed two times in the span of about a year, she purchased the gun to protect herself and her family. There is zero evidence that Allen intended to use the gun for any other purpose. Yet Allen was arrested. She spent 40 days in jail before she was released on bail. She’s now facing a felony charge that, if convicted, would bring a three-year mandatory minimum prison term. […]
And this part comes from a recent National Review editorial (with my emphasis):
A single mother of two young children, Allen works more than one job and as a result leaves her home at odd times of the day. After two robberies made her aware of her vulnerability, she became convinced that she should be prepared to defend herself and her family, and resolved to do something about it. Which is to say that Allen bought her firearm, and obtained her concealed-carry permit, not to commit crimes but to prevent them. This has failed to move the prosecutor, Jim McClain, an overzealous man who has routinely declined to use the considerable latitude with which he has been entrusted by the state.
Under New Jersey’s rules, McClain could have declined to press any charges against Allen, recognizing that she was guilty of little more than an innocent mistake. He could have treated it as merely a misdemeanor and sent her to municipal court. He could have permitted her to enroll in one of the diversionary programs that New Jersey has established for peaceful first-time offenders, thereby sparing her both the prison time that will take her away from her children and the felony conviction that will almost certainly destroy her career in medical work. Instead, he has sought punishment to the fullest extent of the law: in this instance, a three-year mandatory minimum jail sentence for illegal possession of a firearm, and an extra year or more for possession of illegal ammunition. This is a travesty of justice.
Update:
Radley Balko has another column about Ms Allen’s case.
Prosecution of Shaneen Allen moves forward
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Shaneen Allen, a single mother from Philadelphia who was arrested for driving through New Jersey with a handgun. Allen had a permit for her gun in Pennsylvania, but New Jersey doesn’t recognize Pennsylvania gun permits. […]
Now, New Jersey Judge Michael Donio has denied Allen’s request to have the charge dismissed.
The words common sense were mentioned quite a bit during Shaneen Allen’s hearing yesterday in Atlantic County Superior Court.
Allen, 27, cried for a moment in the hallway with her son Naiare and his father after a judge denied her motion to dismiss weapons charges filed against her in October and refused to overturn a prosecutor’s decision to deny her entry into a first-time-offender diversion program.
So Allen walked back into court, turned down a plea deal that would have given her a 3 1/2-year sentence and decided to go to trial in October, hoping a jury would use some common sense and not send a working mother of two to prison for not knowing New Jersey’s gun laws.
Let’s hope Ms Allen gets a jury that uses its common sense.
Update 2:
She avoids a trial and possible jail time (via Hit & Run).
Shaneen Allen to be admitted into pretrial intervention
A Philadelphia mother facing prison time for bringing her legally registered gun into New Jersey will be allowed into a diversion program, after the attorney general clarified a directive that had expanded New Jersey’s gun law.
Shaneen Allen was arrested last year after a motor vehicle stop on the Atlantic City Expressway in Hamilton Township. She told the state trooper that she had her loaded gun and a concealed carry permit with her.The single mother of two said she didn’t realize that the permit did not cross state lines. New Jersey does not allow the average citizen to have concealed weapons, even if they are legally registered.
Atlantic County Prosecutor Jim McClain originally denied Allen pretrial intervention because he said a 2008 directive that expanded the state’s Graves Act did not allow for an exception.
But the attorney general released a clarification to the state’s county prosecutors Wednesday with respect to out-of-state visitors from states where their gun possession would be legal.
“In most of these cases, imprisonment is neither necessary nor appropriate to serve the interests of justice and protect public safety,” acting Attorney General John Hoffman wrote.
Rand Paul’s FAIR Act
July 26, 2014It’s legislation like this that impresses me with Rand Paul. As Matt Welch (with Reason) once said, "You have to remind yourself that Senator Paul’s a Republican."
What a guy. Go get ’em, Tiger.
Sen. Paul Introduces the FAIR Act
Jul 24, 2014WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sen. Rand Paul yesterday introduced S. 2644, the FAIR (Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration) Act, which would protect the rights of citizens and restore the Fifth Amendment’s role in seizing property without due process of law. Under current law, law enforcement agencies may take property suspected of involvement in crime without ever charging, let alone convicting, the property owner. In addition, state agencies routinely use federal asset forfeiture laws; ignoring state regulations to confiscate and receive financial proceeds from forfeited property.
The FAIR Act would change federal law and protect the rights of property owners by requiring that the government prove its case with clear and convincing evidence before forfeiting seized property. State law enforcement agencies will have to abide by state law when forfeiting seized property. Finally, the legislation would remove the profit incentive for forfeiture by redirecting forfeitures assets from the Attorney General’s Asset Forfeiture Fund to the Treasury’s General Fund.
“The federal government has made it far too easy for government agencies to take and profit from the property of those who have not been convicted of a crime. The FAIR Act will ensure that government agencies no longer profit from taking the property of U.S. citizens without due process, while maintaining the ability of courts to order the surrender of proceeds of crime,” Sen. Paul said
Click HERE for the FAIR Act legislation text.
Let’s show them how that would work
June 28, 2014Radley Balko points out something interesting in an ACLU report:
Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws
As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.
As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In 2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about $4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. (See page 36 of linked PDF.) That LEC has about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene investigators and computer crime specialists.
Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.
How clever of them, eh? I think we should let their claim stand and then start working out the consequences of that claim. Here’s a start:
1. SWAT companies give up all public funding and have to sell their "services" in an open market. No more police payroll and pensions. As my friend Paul said, we could hire the Keystone SWAT company.
2. SWAT companies give up their qualified immunity and become financially responsible for violating victims’ rights, destroying property and blowing holes in 2-year-olds.
In short, they’d have to provide commercial liability insurance to protect their clients (i.e., governments that hired them). Why not? Any other contracting company does.
Here’s a short video by the ACLU about using SWAT teams on drug raids.
Here’s the ACLU page on militarization: War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.
Weren’t unreasonable searches and seizures part of the reason we rebelled against British rule? Just sayin’.
No Truce With Kings 