Liberty 'Gator

Williamson Evers offers an extensive reading list about police reform.

Federal agents have arrested people for no good reason in Portland.

Radley Balko, one of the most important writers on abusive policing, participated in a great interview with Nick Gillespie on criminal justice reform. Balko has embraced the idea (as have I) that there really is such a thing as systemic racism particularly in the policing and criminal justice systems. Balko pushes back on the idea that capitalism is the root problem; to him (as to me) capitalism means voluntary exchange where at root you control (“own”) your own body and property. In that sense, he says, slavery is the opposite of capitalism.

San Francisco: “District Attorney Boudin Announces New Policy Directive Not to Charge Cases That Rely on Officers with Serious Prior Misconduct.”

Samuel Sinyangwe reports, “DC Council has now passed legislation to remove all limits on police discipline that were imposed by their police union contract. This is one of the first cities to do this, a major shift to limit the power of police unions.”

Prosecutors need to hold police officers to the same standards as everyone else. I was pleased to see, then, that a South Jersey police officer who pepper-sprayed a teen for no good reason was “charged with two counts of simple assault.”

Patrick Sharkey has some insightful things to say about policing and violence. He notes that violence is devastating to a community, that more policing can reduce violence, but that alternatives to traditional policing also can reduce violence. He writes, “Every shooting in a neighborhood affects children’s sleep and their ability to focus and learn. When a neighborhood becomes violent, it begins to fall apart. . . . One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.” Yet: “Decades of criminological theory and growing evidence demonstrate that residents and local organizations can indeed ‘police’ their own neighborhoods and control violence — in a way that builds stronger communities.” He’s not talking about vigilantism, but things like after-school programs, summer jobs programs, and community gardens. He envisions government funding community groups to hire “conflict mediators, violence interrupters, youth outreach teams, case workers, mental health counselors, crisis response teams, maintenance and beautification crews, data analysts, liaisons to public agencies.”

Jacob Sullum has a nuanced discussion of the police killing of Rayshard Brooks. “Officers are trained that they have the right to escalate their use of force if they believe someone is threatening to incapacitate them,” notes the New York Times (as Sullum quotes).

This to me is the saddest line: “Brooks suggests that the officers allow him to lock up his car and walk to his sister’s house, which is nearby. ‘I can just go home,’ he says.” But do we want police officers to enforce drunk-driving laws, or not? If we do, that means police have to arrest drunk drivers.

This to me is the crux of the issue: Another “opportunity for de-escalation came when Brooks ran away from the cops. Instead of giving chase, [Kalfani] Turè suggests, [the officers] could have tracked him down later based on his car registration, or they could have called for more officers to help subdue him without using deadly force.”

My take: The officers involved certainly should not be criminally charged. But officers certainly should be trained on how and when to deescalate.

June 18 Update: From what I can tell, the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks was charged not for shooting Brooks, but for failing to administer timely medical attention (and various other alleged offenses).

Eugene Volokh summarizes, “He views the doctrine as likely not authorized by the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, or the legal principles that it may have implicitly absorbed; instead, he argues, it was created it just ‘because of a “balancing of competing values” about litigation costs and efficiency.'”

The Institute for Justice is disappointed: “Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Cases Challenging Qualified Immunity.”

Jay Schweikert’s take: “The Supreme Court’s Dereliction of Duty on Qualified Immunity.”

Yesterday I watched the documentary The Vanishing Trial, about America’s abusive plea bargain and sentencing system. Today a panel interested in reform further discussed the relevant issues. See also the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawers document, “The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right to Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How to Save It.” The University of California Press collects a variety of articles on the subject. Here is the essential problem: By threatening people with absurd and unconstitutional overpunishment if they go to trial and lose, prosecutors often coerce plea deals, even for people who are innocent.

This sounds great to me: “San Francisco police officers will be replaced with trained, unarmed professionals to respond to calls for help on noncriminal matters involving mental health, the homeless, school discipline and neighbor disputes.”

Wesley Lowery writes a powerful piece on policing in America. He describes the scene shortly after the death of George Floyd: “Parts of many American cities were on fire and police officers in dozens of places were committing indiscriminate acts of violence—unleashing tear gas, rubber bullets, and worse—against the citizenry they had sworn an oath to serve and protect.”

Here is the key issue: “For years, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to demand a wholesale reimagining of the criminal-justice system.” He anticipates, “for the first time in our nation’s history, a reality in which black people aren’t routinely robbed of their livelihoods and lives by armed government agents.” So far, he’s not saying anything that any of my libertarian friends wouldn’t say. I have long thought that America’s criminal justice system is in many ways horrifically unjust.

Lowery asks, “What if the activists are right, and the solution is to dismantle American criminal justice and build something better? What might that look like?” He writes about “defunding and dismantling police departments, and ultimately abolishing American policing as it is currently constructed.” It’s entirely unclear to me what this actually means. It sounds like empty utopianism. Nor is it consistent with the meaningful reforms we know are needed: end qualified immunity, end police union contracts that protect bad cops, reform the plea bargain system and the sentencing system, end the death penalty, and so on.

Lowery writes (nominally attributing the view to others) that “the entire American experiment was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” Andrew Sullivan addresses this, as I discuss.

Christine Gardiner writes (2017), “About one third (30.2 percent) of police officers in the United States have a four-year college degree. A little more than half (51.8 percent) have a two-year degree, while 5.4 percent have a graduate degree.”

I think Bryan Caplan is probably right that much of higher education is about signalling, not actual learning, but I suspect it’s the case that the sort of person who can complete a four-year degree also tends to be a better cop. So I suspect that education level correlates with quality of policing. At a common-sense level, the sort of person with the foresight and patience to jump through four years’ worth of hoops probably also has the demeanor to be a good cop.

But probably better than requiring a four-year degree would simply be to psychologically profile prospective cops. Does this person have patience, emotional control, common sense, and empathy? If the answer is no, the person almost certainly will not make a good cop. We should bear in mind that it’s a good idea to get good cops who grew up under difficult conditions that may have made a college education harder.

Let’s not forget this crazy 2000 story: “A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.” That’s absurd on its face.