Open season

Please note: This post concerns a sexual assault, and discusses it in some detail.

I'm opposed to the existence of sex offender registration lists, such as those created by what's commonly called "Megan's Law" legislation. They do an end run around due process by allowing governments to decree onerous new penalties  at will for crimes someone has already been convicted and sentenced for. They devastate the lives of people who have harmed no one or committed some extremely petty crime like public urination. They have far more to do with appeasing public hysteria by showing that the government is Doing Something then with actually protecting the public.There are very good reasons to be against these laws.

I'm not opposed to them because I think holding elementary school children down against their will and shoving your dick in their faces is harmless schoolyard tomfoolery.

A few days ago, there were a number of postings at various places online about 2 14-year-old boys in New Jersey who, after a decision by a New Jersey appellate court, had been permanently placed on the state's registered sex offender list due to a conviction for criminal sexual contact. The predominant response, including some from people I generally think quite well of, seems to be that it is not merely wrong that the boys would be put on a lifetime registry of sex offenders for this but silly or outrageous (scroll down a bit to the comments) that it is even being treated as a serious criminal matter at all, much less “criminal sexual contact.” The action for which the boys were convicted of a crime was, we're told again and again, something trivial, just a "prank" or "horseplay" or- in some cases- the sort of youthful character-building experience that, like vitamins and minerals and fresh air, is something a growing boy needs so that he doesn't grow up to be a complete pussy. The dominant view seems to be that's its the sort of thing that warrants a stern talking-to from dad, or at most some very minor legal slap on the wrist, not something that should be regarded as a genuine crime against the victims.

One of the things conspicuously absent from most reporting and commentary on the case is a thorough description of what actually happened. So, imagine this scenario. (The actual written decision by the court, which describes the complete incident, can be read here.)

You're in front of a local store when someone significantly bigger than you, who you have  never met, shoves you against a wall. He and his three friends then pick you up, forcibly carry you across the street, and threaten to beat you up. You attempt to flee but aren't fast enough, and they quickly catch you again. They pin you to the ground and hold you down while one of them beats and head-butts you. Finally, while you're still held immobile and helpless, one of them removes his pants and, nude below the waist, rubs his bare buttocks against your face while his penis presses against your lips.

That's the “horseplay” in question, except that in the real version it was done to two sixth-grade boys instead of an adult.

I agree that children today are frequently overprotected, though I think it would be more precise  to say that children  are overly “protected” from relatively uncommon or outright imaginary perils so that adults can feel good about how much they care without bothering with the more burdensome task of addressing actual or likely sources of harm. I also agree that there is a bias against boys in the educational system and much of the culture that treats perfectly healthy, harmless behavior and traits common among boys as if they were immoral, dangerous, destructive, or pathological. (Though, as we see here, the conservative Real Men contingent and I tend to differ somewhat on which category “elite group based on superior charisma, physical strength, social status, aggression, and adherence to gender norms intimidates, humiliates, and physically and psychologically abuses lower-status boys with the tacit or explicit approval of adults” goes under.) And I'm opposed to "Megan's Law" registration, for the reasons described above. So I'm sympathetic to some of the concerns raised by many of the people I'm talking about here.

But it was dismaying to see so many people on the same side as myself on the issue of sex offender registries make their case against offender registry laws by trivializing the violent degradation of a child.

And that is what this was. The fact that so many people are shocked at the idea of even making this a legal matter, much less a serious one, is a testament to just how normalized some types of violence are. Replace the 12-year old boy in the story with someone from a more protected group and this becomes immediately obvious to virtually everyone.  If 14-year old boys had done this to a sixth-grade girl- or to a grown woman, for all the hot air blown about protecting kids- that they had run into in front of a local store, virtually no one would have any trouble recognizing that such an act was an actual crime, and not a trivial one. I sure as hell don't think Radley Balko would be saying that the prosecutor should be fired for charging the perpetrators in the first place.

(Some people would object to charging the perpetrators as adults, arguing that they were too young and immature to understand the seriousness of such an act, but that's very different from the notion that there is nothing serious here to understand.)

The online tough guys in various comment sections bitching about how actually prosecuting this is a dismaying example of “political correctness”or the wimpiness of the modern age would be baying for blood louder than just about anyone. Cackling about the sort of “horseplay” the perpetrators might encounter in the American prison system would abound.

Opponents of registration like myself would still disapprove of it as a matter of principle in such a case, but I certainly don't think many of us would be holding such a case up as an obviously absurd and outrageous miscarriage of justice in the same category as branding a 16-year old boy as a lifelong "sex offender" for having consensual sex with someone a few months younger or prosecuting him for producing “child pornography” by photographing himself nude.

Now, part of that would be for strategic reasons- if you're trying to convince people on the other side of the issue to reconsider their position, "Registration laws can severely interfere with the lives of teenage boys who get their kicks by forcing their anuses and genitalia into the faces of frightened, struggling elementary school girls" is just about the least compelling argument imaginable. But it would also be sheer moral repugnance- the idea of a teenage boy chasing down a fleeing sixth-grade girl, pinning her to the ground, beating her, and shoving his privates in her face while she struggles is so clearly and repulsively not analogous to the sort of victimless crimes usually cited as examples of sex offense laws run amok that virtually everyone would recoil from the comparison.

None of this is surprising; violence against males in general simply don't bother most people the way  harms suffered by females do, and this is doubly the case if someone's genitalia is somehow involved. But in this case, a crime against adolescent boys isn't just taken less seriously then the same crime would be against girls or women; it's taken less seriously then the same crime almost certainly would be if it had been committed against a mature man. If a band of teenage boys had somehow seized men in their 30s or 40s off of the street and forcibly did to them what was done in this case, that would be considered- in the probably-unlikely event the victims reported it-  shocking, predatory behavior. The men they targeted would  probably receive more ridicule and contempt than sympathy, but no one would be suggesting that this was a case of normal, basically harmless boyhood hijinks gone a bit too far.

My guess- or at least my hope- is that a lot of this response is a knee-jerk reaction from people who didn't research beyond the initial news articles, which didn't describe the actual offense in detail and were laden with the sort of minimizing language common in media coverage of events like these. However, even the bowdlerized account in most of the media describes an incident that nearly everyone would have considered seriously criminal- and yes, sexual- if the victim had been anything other than a young boy.

(Yes, it's almost certainly true that the motive for the attack was not sexual gratification. The same can be said for many sexual crimes much more extreme than this one.)

If it had been, I'd like to think most of my fellow registration opponents would be able to make a cogent argument for why Megan's Law is not the solution by talking about issues such as due process, unexpected consequences, disproportionate punishment, the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders, or the dangers of public panic in the face of relatively uncommon but highly mediagenic crimes, instead of focusing on waxing indignant about how outrageous it is for people to claim that these poor, victimized fellows committed a sex offense when all they did was chase down, beat, and forcibly restrain a young girl so that they could drop their pants and rub their privates on her face.

This sort of thing has particular relevance to me as a libertarian, for reasons- which I might get to some other time- above and beyond the fact that it's a form of aggression that would be quickly recognized as criminal in other circumstances but is instead accepted or ignored. Popular attitudes concerning violence against men and boys are also, as people who've been reading this blog for a while know, a recurring focus of mine. But putting all that aside, the notion that a 12-year-old boy should have as much legal protection against being seized in the street, beaten, and forced into contact with his assailant's sexual and excretory organs as other people should not be an idea that one must be some sort of radical in order to accept.

I'm always tempted, when the issue of violent bullying comes up, to ask people if they think bands of hooligans should be allowed to storm their workplace or just grab them off the street and smack them around for a while. Nothing lethal or disfiguring or crippling, no guns or clubs or blades, just a mild beat-down that probably won't even break any bones- and, in this case, a few more exotic elements  Doing that to you should be legal, or at most warrant a few hours of community service and some harsh words, right? Simple self-respect ought to make a grown man recoil at the prospect of hiding behind the legal system's skirts when faced with something he considers so trivial that he expects elementary school-age children to take it.

Cory Maye

I'm a few days behind the curve, as usual, but I'd just like to add my voice to those celebrating the news of the impending release of Cory Maye.  The end result can hardly be called justice- an innocent man spent nearly a decade in prison, and will spend the rest of his life with a criminal record, for the crime of defending his home and his daughter from violent, unidentified intruders because the intruders turned out to be government employees.

But, until very recently, he was serving a life sentence. Until 2006, he was on Death Row. Without Radley Balko's years of work, it is very likely that he would still be there awaiting death by lethal injection, or else dead already. Instead, he's going home.

I wish Mr. Maye all the best. Take care.

The worst people in the world, then and now

Because I'm nothing if not eager to brood resentfully about the past, I've been thinking back, recently, on the aftermath of the Jared Lee Loughner mass shooting in Arizona. (See my previous remarks here.) It's impressive how quickly that seems to have gone down the memory hole once the accumulation of actual information about Loughner and his motives meant that the  “anti-government nut driven to mass murder by those horrid people saying mean things about Democrats” fantasy so many media figures and rank-and-file progressives were luxuriating in was no longer tenable. So frustrating, when reality interrupts a good wet dream that way.

After I published this post last November, I had started to wonder if I'd been overly harsh when I'd referred to the mainstream Left's "fascistic true colors" and described its predominant attitude towards dissent as “berserk, hysterical rage and hatred.” That was then. Now I'm just wondering why I beat around the bush with that milquetoast "-ic" suffix. Many rank-and-file progressives no doubt mean well and would recoil from things they currently accept or support if they fully understood them- but, to paraphrase what I said in that post, a successful statist ideology needs to be good at making sure it isn't understood too well.

The response to the Jared Loughner shooting didn't show me anything that I didn't, at least in broad outlines,already know.  The frenzied, triumphant eruption of demonisation and hatred directed by so many liberal commentators, politicians, and everyday folks at anyone with an unkind word to say about Obama, Democrats, or the sacred federal government after the Loughner shooting, before anyone had gone through the formality of actually finding out what the shooter's motives were was the natural evolution of liberal/centrist discourse, and the message is what it always was: Shut up. It has been readily apparent for some time that mainline left-liberal opinion-makers and political figures consider any meaningful dissent to be utterly beyond the pale. If you're on board with the existing state and its continued expansion and want to suggest some tweaks while you're submitting, that's fine, and that's as far as legitimate, responsible “differences” can go. That's been the consistent pattern since Obama took office; at a (usually) less hysterical/gleeful level it's been an ongoing theme in American politics for at least half a century.

(All three of those links are to articles by Jesse Walker that I recommend very highly.)

When attempts to use the Jared Loughner shooting to demonize dissenters into silence were at fever pitch, some people rebutted that all this liberal caterwauling about “civility” and right-wing “hate” was grossly hypocritical in light of the sort of things many liberals were saying during the Bush years. That's true enough, but it wrongly implies the existence of some radical discontinuity between the Bush era and the years preceding it.

I came of political age in the Clinton years, and- unlike the significant percentage of the population that was apparently sent into some sort of amnesiac fugue state by the shock of 9/11- I remember them.  As much as the state of pro-war conservative rhetoric during the George W. Bush years repelled me, liberal complaints about being called “anti-American” or the like were always ridiculous to me. I certainly agree that the accusation was rarely if ever true, and that a large proportion of right-wing political speech after 9/11 consisted of shrill, hysterical insults based on nothing but the fact that you had the temerity to disagree about the war in Iraq or the PATRIOT Act or whatever. I was subjected to it myself on more than one occasion.

(There was the time I was accused of wanting "Islamo-Fascists" to conquer America, have women stoned to death, outlaw liquor, and send everyone to gas chambers, for instance.)

But to have taken liberal outrage over the likes of David Horowitz calling people “traitors” or “America-hating” seriously,  I'd have to have believed that relentlessly  accusing people of being cruel, heartless, greedy, selfish, hate-filled, fascist, racist, misogynistic, violent, or dangerous for daring to disagree with you is just fine, but that calling someone unpatriotic is somehow beyond the pale. I would have to forget the militia scare, when people with much louder megaphones than the likes of Ann Coulter were talking about the ominous, dangerous “extremism” of folks like me, who didn't like the vast power wielded by the national government or thought that things like the government-instigated bloodbath at Waco or the cold-blooded murder of Vicki Weaver were worth being mad about. I'd have to imagine that the shocked, hysterical whining of a spoiled bully outraged to discover that someone was actually willing and able to hit him back somehow deserved my respect.

I also think the extent to which the political Left got nastier during the Bush years is somewhat exaggerated- they were quite fierce, certainly, but the previous baseline was already quite high. There was a genuine increase in liberal acrimony, but the chief difference is that the most hated opponents of liberals during the Clinton years were a more diffuse target, and after a while liberal demonisation of them became the political equivalent of white noise from an air conditioner- loud, but so uniform that after a while you stop consciously noticing it unless you specifically decide to think about it. The Bush administration provided conspicuous specific personalities like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who drew much more concentrated and thus more attention-grabbing hostility. It's like replacing four 50-watt light bulbs lighting a room with two 50-watt light bulbs lighting a room and a 100-watt laser burning someone's face off- getting attention isn't just a matter of raw output.

More importantly, however,the Bush era is much less revealing than the state of liberal and centrist rhetoric after Bush, during the same period when critics of the Obama administration were supposedly being whipped into a murderous rage by antigovernment rhetoric and the ensorcerelled bullseyes on Sarah Palin's evil hypno-map. What has characterized the speech of the Left and the "vital center"? For fairness' sake, let's limit it to mainstream figures and publications.

Mindless, reflexive, sweeping condemnations of dissent as "racism." A litany of accusations that people who oppose a government takeover of healthcare are insurance industry shills and/or causing the deaths of hordes of fellow Americans out of sheer greed or callousness, . Blaming opponents of the new administration for inciting the "murder" of a government employee that, awkwardly, turned out to have never taken place. Comparisons of people at peaceful rallies to Stalin.  Description of the Tea Party movement as "small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht." An apparent Jack Chick-like inability to even conceive of someone who's heard their program and yet rejects it for reasons other than bigotry, greed, or sheer wickedness.

Declaring criticism of or opposition to liberal politicians, their polices, or the power of the federal government to be sedition- that is to say, criminal.

And, of course, a seemingly endless series of claims that widespread, significant opposition to Obama's policies represent some sort of rising tide of "fascism" or sinister "extremism" that threatens an imminent explosion of violence. Calling actual, significant expansions of government power instigated and controlled by people who actually hold power "fascism" is absurd, paranoid, extremist, and irresponsible, whereas calling peaceful political speech by private citizens opposed to such expansion of state power "fascism" or "terrorism"is perfectly reasonable.  This is probably where liberal hypocrisy about "civility" is most glaring- if anti-Obama groups ever managed to pull off something half as disruptive and noisy as the liberal response to Scott Walker's attempts to weaken government employee unions in Wisconsin,  they'd probably be screaming for the President to declare martial law.The overwrought hysteria and terror so many liberals in the media and government display at the prospect of non-liberals daring to actually organize and protest would be hilarious if it weren't so  ominous.

In fact, in my experience liberal commentators have been far more vitriolic and eager to demonize opposition since Bush left office than while he was in it. Even if you don't share my assessment that it's actually gotten worse, it's still rather curious considering what it's in response to.

During the Bush administration, Bush and other Republicans (and many Democrats, like Obama's current Secretary of State) launched a pointless, costly, devastating and highly controversial war due to what was at best terrible judgment and at worst consciously perpetrated fraud, severely attacked civil liberties, and assumed office through an extremely controversial election victory that many liberals considered fraudulent or corrupt. Whatever  else I may say about liberal discourse during the Bush years, which rarely dared to question liberal statism and put too much emphasis on a few figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney while giving short shrift to the decades of accumulated precedents leading up to them, the sheer fury directed towards men like Bush made sense given the situation.

(If not always the reasons for it- in terms of the animosity it generated, Bush's failure to speak with a proper General American Walter Cronkite accent was probably worth at least a few tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.)

The targets of liberal ire during the Obama administration, on the other hand, have been rather less accomplished. Criticism of federal spending has become fiercer and more common than it was during the Bush years.  Republican congressmen- some of whom are apparently under the impression that winning the Presidential election only gives the winner the powers of a President and not a Roman dictator- wouldn't vote for Obamacare, causing it to be passed slightly later then would have otherwise been the case. There's a cable network with programming that often portrays President Obama and other Democrats in a hostile light, and many talk radio shows do likewise. Non-liberals have had the temerity to hold peaceful public rallies, lawfully exercise their right to bear arms in public, and even mouth off to their betters during what were supposed to be carefully managed propaganda events.

Even if you don't approve of these things, they still seem rather unimpressive compared to the reasons for liberals to be angry during the Bush years, and yet they produce at least as much rage and loathing as the outrages of the Bush administration. The sheer scale of it has certainly grown since the Bush years, from something directed predominantly at relatively prominent, influential figures such as politicians and media personalities to a more democratized sort of  demonisation of far larger groups of people.

The mere existence of significant, outspoken dissent against liberal domestic politics- dissent which was ultimately unsuccessful, since it didn't stop the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress at that time from passing the health care bill, or the bailout of the automobile industry and its associated unions, or hundreds of billions of dollars in “stimulus” spending- provokes at least as much rage and loathing as a pointless war that has killed hundreds of thousands of foreigners and thousands of Americans, the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars and much of America's international reputation, all sorts of outrageous attacks against civil liberties and due process, and a possibly stolen election.  During the Bush years- and still today,  occasionally- some liberals, usually those of a more radical sort, advocated prosecuting Bush as a war criminal for starting a war of aggression that killed thousands. Now we've got mainstream liberal figures and publications like The Nation talking about prosecuting people for criticizing politicians.

I used to find this counterintuitive. I no longer do.  For all the condemnation he received, George W. Bush was never a threat to liberalism/progressivism's core principles.

The near-total evaporation of the anti-war movement has been remarked upon many times, so I won't belabor it here. In addition to that, I would remind everybody that  President Bill Clinton's enforcement of UN sanctions against Iraq during his 8 years in office killed  hundreds of thousands of people.  Aside from libertarians, some paleoconservatives, and the sort of leftists who probably find Democratic Party fund-raising letters in their mail and think “I should see if my parakeet's cage needs to be cleaned,” most people didn't care much. Stacks of dead foreigners simply aren't that big an issue.

Bush's attacks on civil liberties and due process at home drew plenty of heat while he was in office. There are still outspoken people on the Left, such as Glenn Greenwald, who haven't let up on the issue.  As we've seen since Obama took office, however, most liberals treat those issues as at best a minor sideshow when a Democrat is in the White House. They don't necessarily like or advocate them- I'm sure many devoted liberals would, all else equal, prefer it if the government wasn't claiming the right to assassinate American citizens at will or groping children's pubic regions at airports- but things that Bush was excoriated for, or would have been if he had actually dared to do them, barely register now.

And of course, there's no shortage of  liberals who will actually defend these things. (Or, more cleverly, claim nominal disapproval and them and go on the attack against people who demonstrate actual disapproval, a la Mark Ames and Yasha Levine.) If there is an assault on people's freedom, privacy, or dignity so grotesque that large numbers of liberals won't rally to defend it, it has yet to be discovered.

The most conspicuously objectionable things Bush did simply aren't things most mainstream liberals actually oppose all that strongly, if at all.The lie that Bush was some sort of radical free-marketeer has become firmly established now,  but when he was in office Bush barely even pretended to have interests in that direction. He was a “compassionate conservative,” not one of those scary anti-government types; he had disputes with liberals about the precise implementation of the welfare and regulatory state, and about the specific areas and rate of its future expansion, but he didn't even pretend to take the anti-statist rhetoric of the Clinton era seriously.

And here we run into a striking difference between Bush and the sort of people that some of the folks at America's oldest and most venerable journal of left-of-center political opinion wants imprisoned for sedition. The tea party movement defines itself by its hostility to domestic statism, or at least economic statism. Many politicians who've associated themselves with it are no doubt just opportunists, and many rank-and-file supporters are no doubt not terribly consistent. Still, I think there clearly is a lot of genuine hostility to domestic statism in the movement, though I remain cautiously pessimistic about the prospects of any long-term effects.

(My default stance is to assume that any seemingly positive development is either a mistake, a trick, or unstoppably careening towards a catastrophic plunge over the side of an unseen cliff, so “cautiously pessimistic” is actually fairly high praise.)

In any case, their harshest detractors usually seem to consider them a genuine menace to the modern welfare/regulatory/cronyist state. Unlike George W. Bush, the Tea Party movement is avowedly hostile to liberal principles that, unlike privacy or not immolating foreigners for no good reason, are not negotiable:welfare statism, interventionism, ever-greater management of the economy and society by government technocrats. Tea Party rhetoric is anti-government, whereas he great bulk of what the loudest right-wingers during the Bush administration had to say was merely anti-Left- and the venom of liberalism's harshest critics during the Bush years was primarily targeted at things that have now been shown to be disposable appendages of American liberalism rather than vital principles. Here there is a strong parallel with establishment conservatism, which forgives virtually any amount of contempt for its supposed principles of free markets and “limited government” if you're sufficiently supportive of the warfare state and is indifferent to any amount of support for them if you're not.

Sincerely or not, consistently or not, the ideas being expressed by people like the Tea Partiers strike at the very heart of mainline American leftist/liberal and centrist values in a way George W. Bush never did. And so it's perfectly natural that peaceful people ineffectually protesting bailouts or health care mandates cause as much rage and horror as government-sanctioned torture, the destruction of habeas corpus, and hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths. Gotta keep your priorities in order.

You never know which casual saunter across somebody's lawn might be your last

You've probably heard by now of the police killing of Jose Guerena his own home during a SWAT team raid in Pima County, Arizona. If you don't have the back story, please see Radley Balko's article. (I just approvingly linked to something at the Huffington Post. Strange feeling.) See also here, here, here, and here for more.

I've never been impressed by the arguments of apologist for the police who claim, whenever police engage in some questionable use of force, that mere civilians should not pass judgment because they don't understand what it takes to do a job where you never know if you'll be returning home to your family alive and failing to respond to a potential threat quickly enough can be lethal.

Partly that's because police work isn't nearly as dangerous as many jobs that don't get this sort of privileged status- you're more than four times more likely to die in the line of duty as a logger than as a law enforcement official, and more than five times more likely as a commercial fisherman, and not once in my entire life have I ever heard anyone being upbraided for failing to appreciate the hazards they face so that the rest of us can have houses and books and seafood. (And violence isn't the primary cause of officer fatalities- traffic accidents are- so using police occupational fatality rates as a measure of how much danger the police face from violent attack is quite misleading in any case.)

Partly it's because the argument tends to be inconsistent- police are supposed to have a blank check because they heroically endanger themselves for the sake of civilians, even when  doing things that gravely endanger or sacrifice innocent civilians to minimize risks to the police themselves. And, partly, because it's frequently plainly incompatible with the facts of specific cases- quite often, the only way an officer who engaged in some dubious act of violence or coercion could have genuinely believed that his actions were a reasonable response to the amount of danger he perceived himself to be in is if he's either a coward or utterly unhinged from reality.

All the usual defenses and excuses for misconduct by law enforcement have been brought out for the killers of Jose Guerena. You can't read the comments on any news article at any site of significant size without stepping in them.

SWAT teams and paramilitary-style tactics are used in situations requiring rapid, coordinated, overwhelming force. Their work is extremely perilous, and the sort of methods often used for serving search warrants- violently terrorizing whoever happens to be in a targeted house at gunpoint, slaughtering harmless household pets, using tactics that often give the people inside the targeted house no way of knowing whether the armed intruders in their house are actually police or just private-sector thugs, shooting innocent people defending their homes from sudden violent invasion by armed intruders, beating, electrocuting, or killing what turns out to be unarmed, helpless, innocent people for the supposed sake of "officer safety"- are necessary and justified because of that peril.

They work in situations where instantly reacting to a possible threat can often mean the difference between life or death, and so actions that may seem unreasonable, overly hasty, or excessively violent to civilians are, in fact, entirely appropriate and ought to be accepted. Their personnel are very brave men and women who know that they are putting their lives on the line every time they go out, and consequently their willingness to gravely endanger or harm innocent citizens- sometimes fatally- for the sake of reducing potential risks to themselves is justified and should not be questioned or criticized by civilians, who owe police their deference.

And so on.There's been some video of the fatal raid released, showing the police outside the house before, during, and immediately after the shooting. Let's take a look.

By far the most striking thing to me is how laid-back the whole affair is. The officers just sort of cluster in the front yard, mostly in the general vicinity of the door. Some amble about a bit, apparently at random, which will continue until the actual shooting starts. Aside from the fact that they're holding guns, they look like a group of coworkers killing time in the alley behind the store during their smoke break.

When the door is forced open with a loud bang at about :34, there's no apparent urgency. Only one or two men- it's hard to tell because there's a bunch of other guys lollygagging around the door and adjacent areas of the yard- go in. Now, the point of having a bunch of men right by the door just before you bust it open is so they can rapidly file in and be in position to back each other up against whatever might be lurking on the other side as quickly as possible. Of course, it's only worth doing if you have reason to believe the situation might involve some sort of actual danger.

Two men remain just outside, looking through the front door. Which is precisely where you don't want to be when that door has just been loudly forced open and you're concern about the prospect of someone hostile and armed on the other side, since it means you're silhouetted exactly where the people on the other side of the door know an intruder will have to pass. Again, absurd behavior for anyone who actually thought the situation was even close to being dangerous enough to warrant a SWAT team smashing through somebody's front door with guns drawn.

The rest are just standing around, looking quite casual. One of them turns around, quite casually turning his back to the open door of a house where someone who is supposedly potentially dangerous enough to justify the presence of a SWAT team to serve a search warrant may lie in wait, and strolls back to the vehicle. Several of them are in the direct line of sight of a large picture window, with its blinds lowered and closed, in the front of the house- another place I would very much not want to be spending extended periods of time if I thought there might be an armed hooligan lurking within.

A lot of people who've commented on this video have described the officers as incompetent or poorly trained. Maybe, but based on their behavior and demeanour in the video there's a more parsimonious explanation: their behavior was grossly inappropriate for dealing with a supposedly dangerous situation because it didn't occur to them that they were in a dangerous situation.

And why would it? SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics are used so casually now that there's no reason to assume, just because they've been called out, that the situation is actually dangerous. They were ambushing a man in his sleep to search his house for drugs. (Though the official reason the police were there seems to has shifted over time, with the crime Guerena was supposedly suspected of committing escalating as new information made the police look worse and worse.) They had no reason to expect anything but immediate submission.

The SWAT raid was conducted the way it was in order to prevent police casualties? Please. They were practically going out of their way to make it easier for hostile gunmen to kill them, if any had actually been present.

They didn't, as the old cliche goes, know if they'd make it home that night?  Watching them in action, I'd be very surprised if the idea that they might actually be attacked, let alone killed, ever crossed their minds until they actually started firing. The shooting wasn't something done by men whose reflexes were on a hair-trigger because of the life-or-death situations they've faced.  It was the sort of panicked flailing typical of people who are accustomed to half-assing things when they unexpectedly encounter a situation where they're threatened with actual consequences for it.

The typical excuses made for this sort of police violence aren't convincing even when there isn't any sort of video record, and they're an utter joke this time. The Pima SWAT team's apologists may honestly believe that the police did what they did here- serving a search warrant by breaking down Guerena's front door after a "warning" so perfunctory and half-assed as to be indistinguishable from none at all, storming into his home with guns drawn to ambush him while he slept, blasting him to ribbons in a wildly undisciplined hail of over 70 bullets when they saw he possessed a weapon, and leaving him to bleed out on the floor while they stopped the paramedics from going to him for the next hour- because they were venturing into potentially lethal danger and did what they had to do to make it home alive.

But actions speak louder than words, and the police officers themselves don't seem to agree.

A Partial List of Things the Government of the State of Oklahoma Considers Preferable to the Peaceful Production of Concentrated Psychoactive Plant Resin

The State of Oklahoma recently passed a law increasing the sentence for producing hashish, a concentrated derivative of the cannabis plant, to a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of life imprisonment. On a first offense, no less.

The purpose of this legislation was to "send a message" about illegal drugs, according to the bill's original supporters in the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and Governor Mary Fallin and Oklahoma's legislature have certainly done that. This left me wondering: How are other crimes treated in Oklahoma? What messages are they the subject of?

More specifically, what crimes are punished less harshly- and, it can thus be reasonably inferred, are considered less objectionable?  After a bit of research into the minimum and maximum sentences allowed for various crimes under Oklahoma law, I've compiled an incomplete list of things that, while not smiled upon by Oklahoma's rulers, are more acceptable to them than the prospect of Oklahoma residents being able to smoke hashish. Maximum sentences for other crimes in Oklahoma include:

Using threats or violence to force a child into prostitution- 25 years

Forcible sodomy- 20 years

Assault or battery with a knife, firearm, or other deadly weapon- 10 years

Battery causing bone fracture, protracted and obvious disfigurement, protracted loss or impairment of the function of a body part, organ or mental faculty, or substantial risk of death- 5 years

Abandonment of a child under the age of 10 by his or her parent or legal guardian- 10 years

Culpable negligence resulting in the death of a human being- 4 years

Urinating, defecating, or ejaculating on a child for sexual gratification- 20 years

Forcible restraint of a woman in a house of prostitution- 20 years

Using letters or other printed materials to threaten someone with death or bodily harm- 1 year

Premeditated infliction of a disfiguring or disabling injury- 7 years

Procuring a child for the production of child pornography- 20 years

So, there you have it. Message read and received.

I don't endorse breaking the law, and needless to say the governor and legislature of Oklahoma don't either. But if you do, then for the sake of both the common weal and your own conscience at least restrain yourself to less heinous crimes that are less destructive to the rights and well-being of your fellow citizens. Sell a child into sexual slavery. Show your next-door neighbor that you don't appreciate his critical remarks about the state of your front lawn by shooting him in the face with a nail gun. Cut off the pinky finger of an annoying coworker with a meat cleaver and wear it on a necklace as a warning to the others. Mail your former spouse or significant other a series of packages containing recently killed and dismembered animals, each one larger than the last and accompanied by a crudely handwritten note that says THIS IS YOU.

But while you do so, for the love of God please don't sink so low as to make hash. The  government of Oklahoma will thank you.

Just like Club Med, but with more frequent shiv attacks

There's a blog post at This Ain't Livin' called The Myth of Cushy Prisons that is well-worth reading.  It focuses on the material conditions of the prisons themselves, but the way prisons are run is worth bringing up as well, because in that area the myth goes from being merely mistaken to downright nonsensical.

The popularity of the belief that prisons are some sort of swanky resort or the like- "country club" seems to be the most common term- involves some very weird doublethink, because the fact that prisoners are often subjected to horrendous violence and degradation while in prison is hardly some sort of secret. It's not even something people generally know but avoid talking about.

On the contrary, open acknowledgments of it are pervasive.  Prison rape is not an official part of the legal system, but it's so common and so tolerated that it might as well be. References to it, both serious and comedic, are ubiquitous in pop culture; referencing it is risque, but hardly shocking or taboo. Protagonists on prime time network cop shows threaten uncooperative men with it, and this is generally not considered shocking or unheroic because everyone understands- even if they do not say- that being raped in prison is a de facto component of many prison sentences.

Now, it's true that this sort of incoherence is not unique in political matters. As Roderick Long has pointed out, modern statism in general  depends on people's belief that the state is a peaceful, consensual institution and their knowledge that it actually isn't, existing side-by-side. But while the reality of the nature of the state is obscured by a veil of ideological obfuscations, that's not the case here. People may try to rationalize or justify or condone the prevalence of violence in prisons, but rarely if ever try to claim it's not violent, or isn't horrible for the victim.

It's also true that people trying to deny an intolerable reality can develop irrational, absurd, or blatantly and obviously self-contradictory beliefs to keep themselves going. But this isn't about denial- most people know about it and will acknowledge it if the subject comes up, and some outright revel in it. The subject is not taboo. People may not know the precise details of how prevalent it is, but it's widely understood that it is not a rare, unusual occurrence happening in a generally peaceful and safe environment.

If anything, there seems to be a positive correlation between openly acknowledging what prisons are like and the stated belief that prisons are "country clubs"; my own experience is that people who lament the overly luxurious conditions of the American prison system are more likely than average to openly chortle at the prospect of someone they dislike being raped in prison. Somehow, they're able to reconcile the two. Country clubs are less genteel than popular stereotypes have led me to believe, apparently.

Walking out your front door is a privilege, not a right

Among all the other reasons they're appalling, the Transportation Security Administration's new "enhanced pat-downs" and the willingness of many people to defend them are another example of how quickly a scenario that used to seem like an intentionally ridiculous reductio ad absurdum can become reality. If anyone in 2001 had suggested that in less than a decade the expansion of the national security apparatus would've brought us to the point where having one's privates manhandled by government agents would be a common, unexceptional procedure for getting on a plane, it would've been held up as proof of how silly, hysterical, and unreasonable civil libertarians were in their opposition to even the most reasonable, commonsensical, Serious People-approved measures to protect the American people in the post-9/11 world. If something like this appeared in a book or movie or TV show set in some dystopian future America, it would seem like bad writing- too implausible, too hamfisted in the way it pushes at people's sense of revulsion to make the bad guys seem like cartoon caricatures, too obviously a cheap attempt to manipulate the emotions of the audience rather than thoughtful speculation about what the future might hold. (Even the name of the company that makes the machines that scan through people's clothes, "Rapiscan Systems," sounds like something some especially lazy and unsubtle dimestore hack would come up with.)

And yet here we are, with precisely that happening and no shortage of people lining up to defend it. Many valuable lessons can be learned from all this- about the mainstream media's revolting combination of sycophancy towards the government and smug, sneering condescension towards any dissent among the peasantry, the tribalism and authoritarianism of so many liberals/progressives even on the civil liberties issues they're supposedly "good" on, the bigotry and intolerance of many of the same people who pride themselves on how accepting and live-and-let-live they supposedly are. What's most interesting to me, though, is just how implicitly totalitarian some of the more popular justifications are.

(This primarily applies to the honest defenders of the TSA's current methods.  The loathsome "As a liberal I nominally disapprove of degrading attacks on people's privacy and dignity, groping little kids, turning air travel into a potentially nightmarish ordeal for rape survivors, autistics, and anyone else who has issues with being manhandled by strangers, and leaving cancer sufferers humiliated and/or spattered with their own urine, but I disapprove of people who actually speak out against it or challenge it far more" subspecies is a separate case.)

Quite typical are arguments along the lines of, “You consented to this when you bought a ticket. No one is forcing you to fly.” The rather creepy similarity this argument shares with the sort of "You knew you what you were getting yourself into" abuse directed at victims of rape and sexual assault has been ably discussed by others, so I'll stick to the more general libertarian point about the abuse of the concept "consent." These procedures are mandated by the government. They are not the result of property owners freely choosing to set particular conditions to be allowed on their property. If you wish to engage in a consensual commercial exchange with an airline, you are forced to submit to the government's procedures. This is obvious, but when dealing with such elementary mistakes it's necessary to restate the obvious.

Yes, you can choose not to fly. If I assembled a gang of club-wielding hooligans, lined them up by the door of your local supermarket and forced shoppers to run the gauntlet as they entered, you're free to buy food somewhere else, or grow or hunt your own. If I announced that I would kill anyone who tried to go out with my sister, you are free to not date my sister. If you think the TSA rules are supposed to be more legitimate because they're from the government, fine; suppose that the duly elected legislature has decreed that supermarket shoppers must run the gauntlet or that dating my sister is a capital crime. (Yes, the latter is effectively a bill of attainder, but if we're already reducing the 4^th Amendment of the Constitution to a meaningless blot of ink I don't see a minor creative reinterpretation of Article 1 doing much harm.)

This sort of argument based on “consent” is among the most commonly used defenses of state power in general, of course-the state is legitimate and thus has the right to make you do/not do X because you supposedly consented to it by choosing to remain within the territory the state claims jurisdiction over rather than leave. (And the state has the right to claim jurisdiction over the territory and demand obedience within it because the state's power is legitimate. And that power is legitimate because, of course, you've consented to it. It's never a good sign when the justification for your political ideology resembles the episode of Futurama where the cast accidentally travels back in time and Fry discovers, to his horror, that he's his own grandfather.) But hearing this kind of reasoning used to justify and whitewash coercion in the course of an abstract discussion about the government's power to use force in general doesn't have the same visceral punch as seeing it used in a more concrete scenario, especially when that scenario is “If you enter a voluntary commercial transaction with a private business, you have no grounds to object when some third party gropes your genitals against your will.”

Similarly with the common and supposedly important point that flying is not a constitutionally guaranteed right, and that the government is therefore justified in setting onerous conditions, including waiving basic constitutionally guaranteed rights, on people who choose to fly. Or, as it is often put,"Flying isn't a right, it's a privilege." It's certainly true that the Constitution says nothing about a right to airplane travel. It also says nothing about any right to travel by any means, including your own legs. It says nothing about the right to buy food, or walk down the street, or go to a doctor, or to have a job, or to not have a job. There's no constitutionally enumerated legal right to perform basic biological functions like eating and drinking. I suppose a right to breathe is implicit in the right to freedom of speech, so at least we've got that going for us.

If the TSA search is voluntary, anything done to a person is voluntary provided that they are warned beforehand what will be done to them and under what circumstances it will be done. If subjecting unwilling flyers to degrading intrusions on their person and depriving them of their legal rights under the Fourth Amendment is excused because there's no constitutionally enumerated “right to fly,” then the government can legitimately place all sorts of onerous conditions on almost any activity imaginable.

Having accepted these premises, if some government agency decreed that anyone who entered a shopping mall could be required to submit to a police strip search at any time, or that anyone who traveled by car/taxi/train/boat/whatever had thereby waived their First Amendment rights, or that anyone who worked in the skilled trades was required to perform sexual favors for government licensing officials and their pals, what objection is possible? You could still criticize such requirements on the grounds that they're not effective for whatever their supposed purpose is, but you couldn't reasonably say that they were somehow oppressive or unjust. These things aren't rights, after all, and no one is forcing you to do any of them.

(It's especially amusing how often, now that Bush is out of office and many of his critics on the Left have dropped their pretense of caring about civil liberties, these argument are so often coming from the same quarters as arguments that consensual economic transactions are really coercion because of unequal bargaining power between the parties to the exchange or an insufficient number of available alternatives.)

A lot of people likely would regard this as a feature rather than a bug, to be sure. The standard pattern in American politics for any respectable political ideology is to regard almost every aspect of life as a legitimate area for technocratic government control, aside from a few exceptions set aside as more-or-less immune. Your right to talk/pray/copulate as much as you want is sacred; anything else you choose to do or not do in your life is a privilege, and you'd damn well better be grateful for it.

When soothing lies go wrong

Radley Balko has been writing quite a bit lately about incidents of people being harassed, arrested, or having their property confiscated by law enforcement for recording video or audio of their encounters with police in public places, frequently involving police who cite completely imaginary state laws against the practice. From Ohio- where videotaping police is quite legal- Balko brings this story. Melissa Greenfield and her boyfriend Colton Dorich had pulled into a truck stop after running out of gas. Dorich made a sign asking passing drivers for gas money, which apparently caused someone to call the police, resulting in the arrival of Sgt. Jonathon Burke of the Delaware County Sheriff's Department, who questioned the couple.

What I find especially worth noting about the story is that it provides a very vivid example of one of the dismaying aspects of modern law enforcement: The supposed justifications given for objectionable behavior by police are, if actually true, frequently just as damning as the criticism they're supposed to ward off.

From the article:

"I'm a 115-pound, 20-year-old girl wearing a cervical collar with nothing but a cell phone. I was not going to harm any officer," Greenfield said today. However, a sheriff's sergeant saw the situation differently after Greenfield announced she was recording video "for legal purposes and our own safety."

Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the "unknown" object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.

Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a "cell-phone gun." However, neither the sheriff's office nor the Columbus office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has ever come across one of the black-market devices that apparently are made in Eastern Europe...

The woman from Poway, Calif., pleaded no contest to obstructing official business. She was fined $20 and released with time served - three days in jail. The resisting-arrest charge was dropped. Greenfield said her plea was one of convenience to allow her to return home to receive treatment for her neck, which had been injured in a car wreck a few days earlier.

Greenfield said that, while driving her to the jail, Burke said that it was "unacceptable for me to be filming his activities."

Delaware County Sheriff Walter L. Davis III backed up Burke's actions. And, needless to say:

After Greenfield got her phone back, she said the video she took of the deputies at the Flying J truck stop at I-71 and Rt. 37 on July 9 had been deleted, along with a couple of vacation videos. Deputies did not delete any video, Davis said. A warrant would have been required to search the phone, and one was not obtained, he said.

Well, yes, but the fact that doing something would be corrupt and illegal is only a reason to think someone didn't do it if one is already assuming that their trustworthiness and integrity is unimpeachable, and going out of your way to prevent the creation of records of what you're doing on-duty while on the public payroll sort of works against that. The sad thing is that law enforcement enjoys enough reflexive deference among enough people for this to actually be a viable defense. (Think of how useful that would be in day-to-day life. "No, dear, of course I didn't lie about having a flat tire so that I could weasel out of my promise to see Cats with you for our anniversary and play Street Fighter IV on my friend's new HDTV instead. That would have been dishonest!")

People have been picking on Burke's bizarre "cell phone gun" claim, but that's not what makes his claims about his motives transparently ridiculous. It's his response to this supposed threat. If police officers genuinely believe that a person they are confronting may be pointing a gun at them, their response is not to repeatedly ask the possible gunman to put the suspected firearm back into their pocket. Neither "repeatedly ask" nor "back into their pocket" have any real-world referent in such a scenario. Even if police in this country were a lot more forbearing and restrained than I've come to expect, Burke's account would not be plausible, and in the "officer safety at any price" atmosphere that pervades so much of modern law enforcement it's utterly ludicrous.

(Also, cell phone guns do not function as electronic devices, since the original insides are removed to conceal the gun. If Burke knows how cell phone guns work and was willing to take enough time to repeatedly ask the woman to put her phone away, he could have easily confirmed that it was a real phone.)

But let's entertain his justification for a moment, and see what it implies. Suppose Burke is telling the truth, and he really did act the way he did because he was worried about a "cell phone gun."

There actually have been cases of people concealing firearms in cell phones. That, however, is merely a single example of the fact that weapons can be, and at some point or another probably have been, concealed in almost anything. Firearms have been hidden in flashlights, lipstick holders, beepers, pens, canes, and belt buckles. Virtually any bag, box, or container could contain explosives or incendiaries. The Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was murdered by a KGB assassin who stabbed him with a poison-injecting umbrella. A seemingly blind man with a white walking stick might actually be wielding a sword cane or a concealed single-shot gun. (And wearing darkened glasses that contain some sort of Predator-esque infrared targeting system, perhaps.) Any bulging pocket or billowing sleeve can contain a weapon. Any seemingly innocuous word or gesture could be a covert signal to a hidden accomplice or sniper or hit squad.

The point is this. Whenever you are among other humans, there are an innumerable number of possible means by which one of the people around you might injure or kill you, and there is always a chance, however small, that one of them possesses such a means and is about to attack you with it. Many of these are more likely than the the threat Burke was supposedly reacting to, often much more, and still not nearly likely enough to justify commanding or forcing people to preemptively "disarm" in the absence of any concrete reason to suspect a threat.

And here we see a phenomenon that is remarkably common when police are trying to explain or justify questionable behavior: The justification is as damning as the criticism it was meant to dispel. Greenfield accuses a police officer of abusing his authority, and the excuse given by the police is that what seemed like a police officer abusing his power to forcibly prevent a citizen from exercising her rights was actually just a police officer forcibly preventing a citizen from exercising her rights because he was lashing out at phantom threats while in the grip of some paranoid madness.

If I went around demanding that my fellow patrons at my local bar drink only from glasses if sitting in my vicinity (people are impuslve when they drink, and I could be shanked with a broken bottle), that anyone walking behind me on the sidewalk stay at least 15 feet back (might get thumped from behind), or that everyone turn out their pockets when I enter the room to show they contain no weapons, nobody would consider that reasonable behavior. My friends and family would fear that I had developed some terrible psychological or psychiatric problem. If I went beyond verbal demands and resorted to force, I'd be considered a menace to society.

And yet, the risks I'd be heading off are still more likely than the theoretically possible but wildly improbable risk Burke claims he feared. If Sergeant Burke really arrested Greenfield because he was worried about the possibility that a woman in a neck brace he had met while responding to a call about panhandling loiterers at a truck stop who said she was recording her encounter with him on a cell phone camera for legal reasons- which she had every right to do- was actually just pretending to record him so that she could murder him with a rare black market Eastern European gangland assassination weapon, then he is out of his mind.

If that's really true then Burke is a pitiable figure rather than a blameworthy one, but if anything the sheriff's department actually comes off looking worse. Even reasonable men can make tragic mistakes when watching for potential threats in stressful situations. Giving a gun and the task of enforcing the law to anyone as paranoid, fearful, and on-edge as Burke would need to be to truly think that his behavior was a reasonable response to danger is a disaster waiting to happen, and his superiors would be obscenely irresponsible to create such a risk. In turn, if Burke's superiors are being sincere when they back him up and say that his actions were a reasonable and proper response to a reasonable fear, that's even more ominous still, because that implies that the whole department is run by raving paranoiacs.

As I said above, I don't believe for a moment that Burke was actually motivated by fear of secret weapons, or that his own superiors really think he was. What troubles me more than the dishonesty is the fact that many people, I'm sure, will accept the excuses given by Burke and by Sheriff Davis. In other words, they will accept the idea that it's actually appropriate for the police to view all the rest of us with the sort of hysterical paranoia that Burke's "justification" implies, and treat us accordingly.

To serve, protect, and/or scare the hell out of

Birchibald T. Barlow: But suppose for a second that your house was ransacked by thugs, your family tied up in the basement with socks in their mouths, you try to open the door but there's too much blood on the knob-

Mayor Quimby: Ah, er, what is your question?

Barlow: My question is about the budget, sir.

The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob Roberts"

The government of Sacramento County, California (Hat tip to Hit and Run), like many government bodies in that state, needs to cut spending somewhere. When it was suggested, in light of the fact that Sacramento's murder rate is the lowest it's been in decades, that part of the cuts needed to make up the county's $180 million might come out of law enforcement spending, the sheriff's deputies union decided to skip any attempt at anything even vaguely resembling rational discourse and responded with an ad campaign that included, well, this:

The ad, put out by the Sacramento County Deputy Sheriff's Association, shows a terrified-looking young girl with a large, burly arm and hand wrapping around her and clamping over her mouth. Below the image in large text are the words "Your child's safety is at risk!", followed by a few sentences in smaller print about an ominous upcoming budget meeting.

While the image as a whole is about as subtle as a shotgun blast in the face, when looked at in parts it's also a model of the use of subtly reinforcing details that create an aura of fear, helplessness, despair, and corruption. The girl's panicked eyes are tilted so far back in her head that's she seems to be looking almost straight up, suggesting the towering size of her attacker. Her own hands are partially visible, pitifully small , pushing against the hand and arm of her attacker in a clearly futile attempt at resistance. His index finger is just below her nostrils, and his thumb is poised pincer-like just above them, moments away from stopping her breath.

The assailant's hand and arm is the only part of him visible on camera, and the dark material of his shirt sleeve against the dark background makes the hand look almost disembodied. His evil is intangible, sourceless, omnipresent, and literally faceless, seemingly striking from nowhere. At the same time, the hair on the back of his hand is dark and fairly dense, his veins and knuckles bulge, his skin is rough, and his fingernails are dirty-looking; he is crude, animalistic, and brutishly masculine, especially when juxtaposed with the girl's pristine fragility.

Even the letters of the ad's dire warning, white text on a black background, look gritty, damaged, stained, and besieged. The white is irregularly speckled with little black dots that get more common the closer you get to the letter's edge, and at the outer borders of some of the letters are larger black marks and splotches that seem to be in the opening stages of invading or consuming the words.

I'm quite accustomed to public employee unions treating their budget as some sort of inalienable patrimony that ought to exist independently of the community's actual needs, and of responding to the prospect of budget cuts with hysterical threats about the catastrophe that will ensue if they are no longer kept in the manner to which they are accustomed. Similarly, images of children in peril or vulnerable-looking females being sexually menaced is hardly unknown in political propaganda. Nevertheless, this is the first time I've seen an argument over personnel cuts reach the point of "Here's a photo of what it will look like when your daughter is kidnapped, raped, and probably murdered because you reduced our budget." The centrality of hysterical fear in politics is something I've become pretty inured to over the years, so it comes as a surprise to discover that I can still be surprised by this sort of thing.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

One of the things one becomes aware of as a libertarian is that most messages from politicians and government agencies are definitely not made with you in mind, because they are created to be appealing and persuasive to a public that, for the most part, is operating on ideological premises very different from your own. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that I'm so out of touch that I'm unusual in being creeped out by this:



No, that's not a parody. To give credit where it's due, the production values are far superior to anything the government puts out here in Illinois.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

Did anyone explain to these people that the whole “omnipresent government surveillance watching your every move through its pitiless electronic eyes” motif doesn't really work when you want to portray something as, y'know, not horrifying? The fact that the voice-over is done in a creepy, soulless computerized monotone that sounds like HAL 9000's little sister makes it even better. Short of having the announcer add "AND BY 'BACK TAXES,' TOM, WE MEAN YOUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM, WHICH WE WILL HARVEST TO CONTINUE OUR HORRIFYING EXPERIMENTS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS SO THAT WE MIGHT FURTHER EXPAND OUR GODLIKE TRANSHUMAN INTELLECTS," I'm hard-pressed to think of how this ad could be made even less likely to endear the government of Pennsylvania to me than it is already.

(An earlier draft of this post said "endear the government of Pennsylvania to anyone," but then I read the comments section of this article at Huffington Post.)

Here's what stuns me about this, even taking the frequent ineptitude of government into account: Mass media public relations material for an organization as large and bureaucratic as the government of a major U.S. state has to go past a lot of eyes before it ends up on TV. You'd think that at some point in the chain of people from the ad's creators to their superiors at the advertising agency to the people in the government who had to sign off on it that someone, somewhere, at some point would have suggested that an ad that looks like it comes from a dystopian future where mankind has been enslaved under the suffocating Orwellian rule of sinister, tax-hungry artificial intelligences might not play well.

It's just like the time I got confused and accidentally went on an interstate bank-robbing spree

You know, the frequent attempts I see to excuse flagrant police misbehavior as honest mistakes are seldom very convincing, but at least the excuse is usually applied to acts committed in the field. It's still usually a weak and often absurd excuse, and often applied to situations where the officer's claim that he sincerely thought he was doing something necessary for his own safety, if true, is damning proof that he's either a coward or mentally unstable, but at least it's applied to an environment where situations that require quick, potentially life-or-death decisions based on limited information can and do actually occur. The "you don't know what it's like not knowing if you'll make it home alive" excuse loses whatever plausibility it had when it's applied to paperwork.

At a Critical Mass event in New York in 2008, police officer Patrick Pogan shoved Chris Long as the latter rode past on his bicycle, knocking Long to the pavement. Pogan reported that he stopped Long because was weaving dangerously through traffic, forcing cars to stop or turn to avoid him, and that Long intentionally turned to ram him with his bike and knocked him down. Long was charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct.



The incident was caught on film, which exposed Pogan's entire report as a lie, as did subsequent eyewitness testimony, and stirred up public outrage when it appeared on Youtube. There was no moving car traffic, and Long was in no danger of colliding with Pogan. Pogan rushed Long without provocation, and shoved him down when Long tried to avoid a collision. Pogan remained solidly on his feet.

Last week, Pogan was acquitted of assault but convicted of filing a false police report, which has a potential sentence of up to four years. That Pogan was not convicted of anything for the attack itself is unfortunate- thought not at all surprising- and it's possible that the judge will give him a slap on the wrist during sentencing, but it's something. And all it took was hundreds of thousands of people seeing direct video proof that Pogan was lying.

I know that's a low standard. I live on the outskirts of Chicago, where a police officer getting caught (Note: Link goes to video footage showing severe violence) on video beating the shit out of a woman because she cut him off at the bar is only worth two years probation and some anger management classes. I grasp for whatever shreds of justice I can.

Pogan's defense attorney claimed that Pogan had been genuinely confused about events when he filed the false report. (Not that being genuinely confused or honestly mistaken makes a lick of difference when it's a police officer suffering harm at the hands of a civilian rather than dishing it out.) Patrolman's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch condemned the conviction, saying, "This will have a chilling effect on every new young officer when they realize mistakes now become crimes."

I can buy the possibility of someone body-checking someone into the pavement because of a reasonable but mistaken belief that they were under attack. That's plainly not what happened in this case, where the two men would never have come within ten feet of each other if Pogan hadn't dashed from his position to intercept Long, but it could happen. That's a mistake.

Whereas Officer Pogan's "mistake" was that, entirely innocently, he rushed a man and body-checked him into the pavement without provocation and then, by mistake, filed a police report that got every salient detail of the incident wrong and, in so doing, accidentally concealed the fact that he had rushed a man and body-checked him onto the pavement without provocation and framed the man he had attacked for a crime that never happened.

There's a scene from the early 90s action movie The Last Boy Scout that comes to mind with depressing frequency when I think about American law enforcement, and this is one of those times. Bruce Willis' character has discovered that his wife has been cheating on him. Her lover says that it "just happened," to which Willis sardonically replies:

Sure, sure, I know... it just happened. Coulda happened to anybody. It was an accident, right? You tripped, slipped on the floor, and accidentally stuck your dick in my wife.

Of course, when Willis comes up with that scenario it's supposed to sound transparently ridiculous.

The soft bigotry of low expectations

Perusing Hit and Run, I encountered this post about some police caught on video who, having stormed a house during a drug raid, decided to settle in and spent several hours playing a bowling game on the resident's Nintendo Wii.

My instinctive reaction to reading this news is an illustration of how my expectations have changed over the course of the 15-16 or so years I've been interested in politics. I can remember a time when reading this story would have left me appalled at the police's misuse of property and lack of professionalism. Circa 2009, I read the post and my immediate response was, "Well, at least they were kept out of any other mischief for a few hours..." It's a sad thing when something that once would have dismayed you now seems almost refreshing by comparison.

Race and police misconduct

I’ve been following the case of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates with some interest. (Here's a quick bit of background, in case you've spent the last few weeks living in a sensory deprivation tank or on some sort of eremitic desert religious retreat.) On the one hand, I’m glad to see a police abuse of power get some serious attention. On the other hand, it’s saddening (though not unexpected) to see how much attention is paid to a Harvard professor being wrongly arrested and briefly detained when cases like the cold-blooded murder of Kathryn Johnston by Atlanta police and their subsequent attempt at a cover-up barely seem to warrant mention at all.

It’s interesting and unfortunate how mainstream opinion on the issue has split into the following two camps:

1. The police officer who arrested Gates, James Crowley, was motivated by racism, and therefore the arrest was not justified.

2. The police officer who arrested Gates was not motivated by racism, and therefore the arrest was justified.

This conspicuously leaves out the possibility that the arrest of Gates was not motivated by racism, but was nevertheless unjustified. I don’t doubt that black men are more likely to suffer mistreatment from law enforcement, but there’s ample evidence that there are plenty of police willing to abuse anyone who irritates them on an equal-opportunity basis, and thus far there does not seem to be any evidence that the arrest was racially motivated.

So, why the focus on the supposed racial angle to the almost total exclusion of everything else? I think part of the answer actually ties partially into my recent post contrasting the far left with mainstream left-liberals. Remember, one of the defining traits of the mainstream Left is that government-related unpleasantness is never the product of systemic flaws in the nature of the government itself.

If this is your worldview, the idea that the police are racist is paradoxically comforting.
Suppose it were the case that the unjust arrest of Henry Louis Gates, as well as the more extreme and gruesome examples of police misconduct that ironically get much less attention, were all motivated by racism. That means that the problem can be fixed with just a modest tweak to the system: all you need to do is get rid of the racists in the police department and replace them with non-racists, and things will be fine. There are no deeper issues with the underlying system, just some individual bad apples. There is no need to worry about the possibility that there are problems with law enforcement that might be inextricably tied to other aspects of American statism, aspects that many people like.

(As an added bonus, this also redirects the blame to voluntary society. If the behavior of the police is not the product of something inherent in the system they work for or the position they hold in it, then presumably it must be the result of the society they came from- their families, communities, churches, popular entertainment, or just the culture in general. The more dysfunctional voluntary society is perceived to be, the more pressing the need for the government’s help will seem.)

For those who reflexively defend the police, focusing on race also has benefits. People frequently treat a refutation of the most commonly heard argument for a proposition as a conclusive disproof of the proposition itself. If the case of alleged misconduct against Gates (or anyone else) turns out to have no racist motivations, and racism is the only imaginable cause of police misconduct, then the police are vindicated.

This is not to say that racism is not a genuine factor in police misconduct; there are ample cases where it clearly is. However, I think the focus on it here actually serves to shield police misconduct rather than expose it. The public is presented with two possibilities, both of which absolve the system itself. This tendency is reinforced by the dominant ideology of journalists and other opinion-makers themselves. The good-government progressivism that dominates the mainstream media rules out the possibility that statism is inherently damaging or corrupting, whereas the idea that everyone outside a small clique of enlightened liberal thinkers is a bigoted neanderthal seems almost omnipresent.

Potential factors coming deriving from the nature of the government and laws themselves- an environment where so many peaceful and largely invisible acts are illegal that the police are encouraged to treat everyone like criminal suspects or hostile foreigners under military occupation, the invasiveness and brutality needed to effectively enforce such laws, attitudes among both police and the general public that turn law enforcement officials into an elite quasi-military class that is largely unaccountable to civilians, the sort of personality that is disproportionately likely to be drawn to a job with broad coercive authority- do not come up. This is an outcome congenial to both sides of the mainstream political spectrum, since neither side is eager for the public to seriously question the near-infinite reach of the modern state into daily life.