Thoughts on the email/Clinton scandal

I have generally been meh in reaction to this as a scandal. In so far as I agree it is a scandal, there is that. But it also does not present much useful information for me. There were a number of reasons I was not very moved for or against Clinton.

It was always to my mind extremely unlikely she would be prosecuted or charged with a crime. High government officials are rarely held legally accountable for their behavior. David Petraeus essentially did the same thing. He in fact deliberately leaked information, something which would be hard to prove in Clinton's case, and only got probation and a fine. There were numerous scandals and public officials under investigation during the Reagan administration. Very few of them went to jail; one was a cabinet official convicted of bribery involving public housing projects and building contractors. Agnew was convicted of tax evasion, but Nixon was pardoned for Watergate. Albert Fall was the first cabinet official ever convicted of a crime while in office and that took until the Harding administration and Teapot Dome. And so on. This makes no statement of whether the legal system should be more involved in the accountability of public officials in the executive branch. It's a statement that they usually aren't charged and convicted when something sketchy legally occurs, and that any expectation that would happen here should be tempered by the knowledge that it hasn't happened very often. As to why it does not happen more often.
a) It can be really hard to prove an actual crime was committed deliberately. Bribery for example has to usually show there was some significant political favor purchased with the bribes. It isn't as simple as showing that money moved from point A to point B. These are rarely cases involving direct physical evidence like a murder or robbery that can be examined separate from the case itself.
b) Justice department officials and public executive officials, like local police and prosecutors, more or less have to work with each other and have strong incentives not to rock the boat too much where it concerns a high official who if they screw up the prosecution and gets off, then is likely to still be The Boss. And probably will not be very happy with whomever tried to grind an axe and failed.

Without a legal charge, there was little probability that it would have a major impact on the campaign. As a scandal it largely fit the processing of how many people already saw the Clintons (both Bill and Hillary). This is more a statement about us than it is about her. If people already saw her as hypocritical or duplicitous, then behavior which appears hypocritical or duplicitous simply reinforces the existing narrative. Many people already held this view of the Clintons and of Hillary in particular. This was not changed or altered in some fundamental way such that it actually matters in campaign horse race terms. I generally see coverage to the contrary as media attempting to get attention for something rather than reporting on something new and interesting. Such as any policy shifts she has made, and proposed to make, and whether those will be good for the country/world or not.

As a statement about her judgment it says very little. A more concerning feature of judgment is her assessments of waging war in Libya. Without a probable long-term campaign to re-stabilize the country after deposing a ruler, or risking any long-term diplomatic strategy for getting China and Russia on board if a more significant foreign government/dictator actually needed to be deposed, like, say, Assad in Syria. The Benghazi "scandal" has largely ignored this question during investigation, most likely because many elite Republicans favored intervention in Libya, much as they favored intervention in Iraq (as she did too). The email scandal meanwhile has occasionally been linked into questions over her support for NSA metadata collection, opposition to publicly available encryption, continued processing of far too many government documents as classified or other attempts to keep them from public view, and so on.

These to me are the far more important questions of her judgment being in error as these potentially negatively impact the civil liberties of millions of American citizens and residents, something a President has enormous power and sway to do. Likewise pushing for an ill-advised bombing campaign for the purpose of regime change in an unstable area without likely stability in the form of new leadership (which is judged in some way morally superior), seems like a poor judgment. The bigger picture seems more important than whether or not some sensitive documents were hacked because they were improperly handled. That's more or less par for the course right now, in my estimation, because that's kind of how the internet works right now. Documents will be hacked if someone wants to hack them. Or leaked if someone wants to leak them.

Another annoyance

There's a story floating around about a police shooting that supposedly went ignored because the victim was white and that this implicates the "alllivesmatter" movement.

First of all. It wasn't ignored. It crossed my news feed in at least three different sources that typically cover police shootings and violence/oppressive police strategies. Police misconduct might be an unusual beat relative to mainstream coverage, but it doesn't focus only on minorities being killed or wrongfully treated. The reason it appears that way might be because minorities are more commonly assaulted or killed (or at least disproportionately so).

But ultimately this framing is sort of like "why don't Muslims/atheists/etc disavow some action". When they almost always already have, and that this was ignored in order to complain that somehow, someway, white people are being discriminated against.

Meanwhile various shootings (both by police or by ordinary citizens) that did occur did go ignored in the general public. Possibly because the victims were not white.

A second and perhaps more important point. "alllivesmatter" isn't a movement. It is a bullshit twitter response to an actual movement (blacklivesmatter) and actual problem specifically targeted by an original movement because we would rather pretend we are not still a racist society populated by largely racist people and thus who are demanding a fairly racist policing strategy. Indeed, some of the criticism of the lack of response by this "movement" focuses explicitly on the silly assumptions people have been using about the nature of policing in the country that it is in some way fair and useful when it oppresses people for particular things (like making drug arrests as in this case).

The problem of police reforms has often focused specifically on particular forms of oppressive policing used primarily on minorities (and in particular African-Americans, or in some parts of the countries, Latinos). That movement didn't use the alllives nomenclature for a very good reason. It was targeting a specific set of policy problems related to race and police and the way in which shootings and deaths, to say nothing of wrongful arrests or harassment and general abuse, are washed away as procedure or appropriate protocol and training. There are more systemic problems related to race and policing that do not apply in the same ways to everyone else (stop and frisk, racial profiling, etc). They apply in some intersecting issues, such as through poverty or the enforcement of drug laws, but these are often tangential effects rather than intentional policy or arbitrary use of force. This is distinguished from the manner in which police are armed, trained, instructed, or otherwise prepared on the appropriate use of force and the methods available to avoid it. It is a more general problem in the way it allows for the arbitrary and casual enforcement and interference by police of whole communities beyond the application of lethal violence, it's most devastating and visible effect. Ferguson didn't erupt into demonstrations and violence because a young black man was shot under what were deemed suspect circumstances. It erupted because the police as a whole had been undertaking oppressive strategies of policing and policy enforcement and where young man was killed, and the manner the police undertook to respond to both that death and the resulting demonstrations, this was seen as a natural extension of those oppressive policies. This was a last straw and the only one which became visible. Even today the broad and condemning DoJ reports on the conduct and policies of Ferguson and other related communities is typically ignored in the way these issues are discussed in the popular imagination.

The case of violence against anyone in particular is certainly equally offensive in all cases where it is not justified, but the frivolity of legal arbitrary penalties and procedures falls in a very unequal and distinctive way. That this then results in a distinctive pattern of death or abuse at the hands of police should hardly be surprising either, but it has as its roots differences in cause. It is true in the blandest sense that police violence, brutality, or the arbitrary nature of many authoritarian policies could impact anyone and many of the victims of these assaults are what we might optimistically think of as ordinary people. But these aggressive escalation tactics used commonly by police are a means of policing much more likely to be tolerated and even endorsed when they are applied to "other people", people not like ourselves (immigrants/Latinos, as in Maricopa county, blacks in NYC or Chicago or really anywhere, and likewise people who are mentally ill, or generally people who sell or possess illegal drugs). We see that this is so when one examines where, on a map, aggressive SWAT raids are deployed to drug interdiction missions and related activities, or where stop and frisk was typically used in NYC, and so on. It is helpful as a philosophical exercise that some people imagine the problem could be roughly equal and impact themselves too in as far as it influences the support for overall police reforms that are badly needed to correct for systematic injustice inflicted by police and criminal justice, but it won't or doesn't actually apply in the same way and for the same reasons.

Consider the petty nature of the initial infractions that led to these deaths (legally open carrying an airsoft gun, busted taillight, not using a turn signal, selling loose cigarettes, running away, no front license plate) versus this one (someone shot in the middle of a drug bust under admittedly highly suspicious circumstances). None of these cases should be cause for violence of police to enforce these, and none seems to be a case where said violence was justified from popular description, but the rapid escalation of violence for minor and trivial crimes is far more likely in the former set of cases and poses a different form of disturbance in how we must think of our society and what it seeks to enforce by applying the force of law. The solutions that reduce the problem of the former issues, the general problem of police aggression and abuses (to say nothing of prosecutorial discretion or the rubber stamping of search warrants and deference to police by judges), where the problems could in theory impact everyone, are different from solutions to the problems of implicit and explicit bias on the part of police and popular support for police policies and how we could limit or provide outlets for dealing with this. It is natural that there should need to be different causes and distinct movements for dealing with them and that these causes and movements would have distinct concerns that they focus their attention upon. The ACLU is going to respond very differently than people involved in the blacklivesmatter protest group.

I've written about this in various forms. So it should not be surprising that this annoys me that it persists as a thing.

Is it the T word?

While there's been quite a lot of air time wasted on Faux News attributing an obviously racially motivated attack to hammer into a narrative about otherwise non-existent violence against Christians in the US, there's a side debate of more interest going on. Whether the killings in Charleston were an act of terrorism. I've noticed several features to this debate

1) People who "refuse to call it terrorism" must be willfully blind/racist, largely because they're liable to identify some similar (or even some ineffectual act) when done by a Muslim, say, as terrorism. I myself am pretty slow to call much of anything "terrorism", when done by any persons of any racial or religious basis, for reasons that I'll examine in a moment. Meanwhile our broader culture, media culture, political culture and largely within mostly white segments of the population, throws this word around frequently to identify actions by groups of people they don't like (while excusing the actions of individuals similar to them as deranged lunatics or bigots rather than part of some common cause event). This dichotomy I find curious in its own way. Clearly I am using a very stringent definition of "terrorism" or others have lost all sensible purpose for the word.

2) There's some interest in identifying the action as racist or a hate crime. Which seems obvious and correct from the motivations expressed publicly by the killer and his victims. This is not necessarily the same thing as "terrorism". But it isn't mutually exclusive with it either.

What I think these two components mean is that after 9-11, our culture tended to take any activity less seriously unless it was in some way broadly related to an action like 9-11. Namely, that it was what we typically associate as "terrorism" (mass targeted killings of civilians for political, religious, or other ideological reasons, designed to inspire fear in a designated group of people, a country, race, religion, political movement, etc). If something could be described as "terrorism", it evoked for many people these images of destroyed skyscrapers and the violent deaths of hundreds or even thousands of people. Actions which aren't in this category could nevertheless be associated as more serious concerns for millions of Americans to consider as problems worthy of their time and attention.

Fear is a powerful motivator to get people to go along with whatever you can then claim must be useful for keeping people safe. And so the idea that there must be all kinds of terrorists and terrorism just around the corner from which we must be protected has proliferated. I think this is a lazy and overused political trick. As a result, I am very slow to identify much of any action as the actions of a terrorist, the cause and actions worthy of the political and legal penalties associated with that terminology. I've seen this phrase used to describe: fairly ordinary murders committed at least in part for unsavory reasons (bigotry, religious intolerance), organised campaigns to intimidate people involved in abortion clinics, pretty much any activity by a Muslim, the distribution and production of various narcotics, attempted plots to attack some target of people more or less set up by the FBI (rather than detected and foiled by them), attempted plots not detected by police and FBI which are carried out and kill or injury a large number of people, and so on. And of these, many are attempted, or succeed in publicly tying themselves to: atheists, Muslims, Christians, right-wing political movements, left-wing political movements, libertarians, individualists, mental-illness, weapons that aren't used in the commission of these actions of violence (or commonplace acts of violence like murder or assault).

And this brings me to the social problem with the legal and cultural definitions of terrorism. They're constrained by political considerations or the dominant/prevailing culture of a society rather than some empirical definition of what constitutes an attack which qualifies. They are inherently likely to spawn arguments about what is and what is not an act of terror, or who is and who is not a terrorist, and inherently likely to be wrong about what actions and what types of people end up on either side of those lines. And much of this will ignore what the appropriate responses for a society to take should be because we will be confusing one thing for another, or ignoring causes and agents that can be dealt with separately or distinctly, and so on.

There's a similar debate like this concerning "genocide" in international relations. Actions like the those of the Ottoman government against Armenians or USSR against rather a lot of people rather than a handful as we are discussing now, are often referred to variously as either acts of genocide or not acts of genocide. Rather than talking about what actually happened, who was killed, forcibly moved, or otherwise harmed and attacked by the actions of nation-states and the societies they nominally oversee, there's a lot of argument about whether it qualifies as some arbitrary definition. These are actions involving several hundreds of thousands of deaths at a minimum. In the USSR case, there's probably several million such deaths caused deliberately in the 1930-1950 period alone. These we would think would not lend toward ambiguity in a way that killing a dozen people, or trying to kill a couple of very specific people doesn't obviously seem like it must or must not be an act of "terrorism". And yet much of time when these subjects come up, it's in the context and contest over whether it is or is not some sort of international crime against humanity rather than stacking up what happened, or telling the story of the people(s) who were being slaughtered and annihilated.

When something awful happens, and some number of people are killed or maimed by heinous actions. I'm not very interested in what we call this action. I'm not even that interested in who does it. Because it rarely seems to be a repeatable set of circumstances that led to some violent being acting upon other human beings with malicious intentions toward a dozen or more people in some way that it could be very easily prevented without a lot of taxing effort on social or culture change. But I am interested in who was killed. And maybe why that happened is of notice and attention. Maybe, how they lived might be more interesting though. I wish we would cover this more often. Deaths caused by murder and mayhem are the ending of what are usually interesting lives to the people who loved and knew this person. They're full of mystery, intrigue, achievement, failure, familiar stories to all of us. One of the successful points to the Fruitvale Station film was that it didn't depict Oscar Grant as some sort of angel to be avenged. He was depicted as a human being, a screwed up person just like the rest of us. And his death was both unnecessary and tragic in spite of this supposed flaw of being a kind of problem child, as most of us are wont to do. When we are deprived of this fuller story that someone's life and lived experiences can tell us, that is a story we should seek out. The ending of that story isn't liable to be as interesting without pausing to see what came before it.

I would point out a few things at this point

1) I am quite certain the motivations of the Charleston killings were racial in nature. The attack coming as it does in a church seems quite incidental. If anything, the selection of a church depicts a level of familiarity with the culture the killer sought to attack, but it does not depict some level of hostility with religion.  Black churches were for a long time banned and burned to the ground throughout the antebellum South. This wasn't because racists and white supremacists of that time hated church. Church bombings in the 1960s occurred because that's where the human targets of hatred and oppression bound up in racist motives were most easily found clustered together and thus killed. So it is now.

2) "Guns in church" is a humorous Carlin bit, but it has little to do with the safety of pastors and worshipers. George had two words for you all who think it might: "Disgruntled worshiper". Pissed off and determined people with guns can cause all kinds of problems even if someone manages to shoot them down during or after the fact.

2a) Neither would most of the more popular proposed forms of gun controls be that helpful here. (Some might have helped, but not most).

3) I'm not sure there's anything wrong with referring to something like this, a racially motivated attack killing or attacking a large number of people, as an act of terrorism. Go ahead if it makes you happy. I don't actually disagree on this point. To me, the biggest question mark isn't what we call it. It's how we respond. Given that I feel how we've responded to terrorism is generally awful and horribly unproductive as a society up until now to establish a poor track record, I'd rather we call it something else just to avoid this clumsy overbearing response that isn't likely to produce a fruitful result. Racism for instance. We respond poorly and unproductively to that also, but it is a subject that is apt to produce slightly more thoughtful effort than people running and scurrying around in fear and in this instance, with the motives of the killer exposed for examination and publicly declared, and the actions so horrifying, there will be relatively few people prepared to declare that this was not a racist acting out the hateful and terrible conclusions to their beliefs. People aren't going to be able to successfully argue this comes into some grey territory.

4) South Carolina is liable to pursue (and get) the death penalty, to demonstrate they take the murders of some number of its citizens "very seriously", without reference to "hate crime legislation" or "terrorism" statutes. This is fairly easy to do because ordinary murders don't take the lives of a sitting state Representative or some number of church pastors, or even just a large number of people all at once. In truth, of late South Carolina has actually been a beacon of "racial progress" in so far as it has dealt swiftly and somewhat harshly with police brutality and violence toward its citizens on this basis of race based bias and violence (yes, that South Carolina).

A number of shootings in the state by police have had the officers fired or dismissed from the force, nearly immediately, and charged with various degrees of murder or assault (in the occasion that the unfortunate victims of these shootings did not die of their wounds). This is to be applauded relative to, say, Ohio and its local governance. Which all but ignored the John Crawford killing, which occurred a few miles from my home. And has done little to nothing with Tamir Rice's killer. It sends a pretty powerful symbol to the community that indiscriminate and inappropriate violence by anyone, even those charged with enforcing the law, is not to be tolerated when the state seeks to punish police officers for inappropriate and indiscriminate violence that takes the lives of its citizens, and an equally powerful symbol when that violence by police is ignored or papered over. Racism isn't border limited to former Confederate or slave owning states. It isn't even border limited to "the USA", for that matter.

4a) South Carolina can remind us of that fact in both directions. Take down that fucking flag. You lost the war that you started on extremely morally suspect grounds (to defend the ability to oppress large numbers of human beings by declaring them property, devoid of agency and ability that is not provided for them to do). Stop trying to pretend you're still fighting for this cause. Apparently some number of your citizens are convinced enough to take up arms, and a larger number are convinced enough that they think they're being oppressed. The latter somewhat reasonably.

Charity to rivals

Some nice things to say about people I will tend to disagree with.

1) Conservatives
 - Abortion- Many ardent pro-life persons actually do seem motivated by a genuine belief and desire to protect the lives of the unborn as a basis for argument, rather than some innate hatred of women. Indeed I don't begrudge those few who seem willing to state that they oppose exemptions even for rape and incest, simply because their priority is on the as yet unborn life in a consistent moral argument. While those making carve-outs are effectively ceding the battleground on which they are fighting to the "I don't like your reasons for an abortion, while mine are perfectly fine" position on which most people are contending with this issue.

My disagreement is whether these prospective lives of the unborn tend to justify the variety of policies put in place to police the activities of women and doctors, whether these are from a moral or ethical standard actual lives or not (in many cases, I would argue not, at least in the legal sense that we could design any practical policy to enforce and protect them that would not also punish or provide investigatory powers for common natural events like miscarriages). And then in many cases, either the tactics or laws pursued are either trivially annoying and ineffective or outright counterproductive to their purported goals. I don't not believe their motives as real in many cases (some perhaps are opportunistic or patriarchal) despite the inability to match up policies they would support with actual results.

- Drug Warriors - Are in fact motivated to combat a potential social problem, drug addiction (or general irresponsible drug use as a secondary issue). They have chosen the worst possible methods I can imagine (police and force instead of doctors and social work). But there is at least the existence of a problem they are choosing to fight using the social tools available to them.

- Police more broadly - I'm sympathetic to the problem of having to enforce a myriad of laws and social mores and directives, with a changing set of political agendas hovering over all of this. I feel the easier solution is less to provide more tools and weapons and aggression for the command of authority to rule the day but for fewer things to be resolved by police and laws, and to allow police to do things on which they are more suited to enforce and investigate (eg, not worrying about vice laws or drug crimes, and more of a focus on preventing murder or theft). Police are not social workers in the broad sense on which we have often deployed them to deal with parenting questions, mental ailments and issues, endemic poverty, race relations and so on. To expect all of that to go swimmingly by using force through the police is to expect something that isn't possible.

- Religious conservatives generally - While I have all manner of theological and atomistic reasons to think religion (any religion) is silly, a great many people seem to extract a sensible set of value from participating in their religious traditions. Tradition in and of itself isn't interesting to me, but it often can contain kernels of wise council about our actions. A broader sense of community isn't interesting to me, but for many people provides purpose and a camaraderie that they enjoy. Metaphysics generally isn't interesting to me at all, but for many people, answering "life's big questions" with a set of prepared answers (whether or not those answers make any sense) is a satisfying practice. Occasionally religious entities even do useful and good things; helping the poor or indigent or providing aid and shelter after a disaster.

There are downsides to the "community" aspects of religion, namely the in-group/out-group dynamics are extremely strong (perhaps rivaled only by nationalist fervor in the modern context), such that outsiders can easily be viewed with suspicion or hatred. And bothering people who don't have much interest in being part of these communities gets really annoying.

- Neoconservatives - Do at least seem to be trying to pay attention to the international community by observing the rise and fall of potential threats. They've often overblown how dramatic the threats are, or have no idea what methods would best resolve the threat before it becomes a real danger. But it's a starting point relative to many who utterly ignore the affairs of other countries, governments, and the people and associations they form, complete with their own interests and goals, in other lands.

This bleeds into security state defenders (strong/invasive NSA policies), where I would agree these are people generally motivated by an interest in protecting people from harm, but who have crafted policies that either fail to do so, fail to do so at the cost, or which are more harmful than beneficial (because others have less noble ends in mind, such as prosecuting the drug war).

- Nationalism - Does form originally from ardent patriotism in most cases. Which would be productive. I don't have anything else good to say about it though so I should probably stop talking. (this is probably one of the worst modern "sins" I can conceive of people having endorsed is to place nationalism ahead of patriotism, or humanism, or their faith, or basically any value set whatsoever would be superior).

2) Libertarians

- Ayn Rand fans - I appreciate that these are people who are starting to grapple with a wide set of public policy questions and issues. The lens used for examination is problematic, but it's a start and people need to start somewhere. Most people rarely study public policy questions with any degree of seriousness, with no eye for coherent ideologies or practical effects. Political philosophy is probably an even rarer source of investigation for most people. Her's isn't much of a philosophy as it is a guideline, but again, baby steps.

- Ron Paul fans - paleo-conservativism has its uses in moderating many of neoconservatism's worst impulses (IR aggression or the security state as examples). I still question the motivations pushing for much of any anti-globalism or anti-trade or anti-immigration notions that sometimes arise in these far fields of political conservatism. But tamping down the worst excesses of another political structure's intentions by offering an alternative interpretation (even if often straying way out into paranoia), is a vital enterprise for public policy.

- Gold bugs/end the Fed types - The average person spends almost zero time observing monetary policy, seeing it as opaque and insignificant. These are people who seem to focus on almost nothing else. I'd hope for a more happy medium from both the public and government officials in the amount of attention and less fussing over precious metals as though that would somehow resolve our financial position ("strong" currencies, of the type usually favored by gold specie demands are meaningless because they can be potentially damaging or self-correcting to economic prospects and provide no additional stability that isn't created by moderately competent central banking).

3) Liberals/Progressives

- Economic views - Seem to be largely concerned about concentrations of wealth or the condition of the poor. I'm ambivalent about the first being a huge problem in and of itself, but the latter certainly is a powerful and concerning issue. Often don't seem to grasp effective solutions and causes very easily. This isn't a critique of progressives or liberals specifically however as most people do not (conservatives are often just as bad on economic policies that they want to put forward).

- Environmentalism - Most people seem to accept a genuine concern for the natural world as a sensible motivation. Activities or positions taken on some issues (nuclear power or fracking for example) are alarmist and counterproductive. There's a real danger in environmentalist positions and movements of the same variety of closed-minded-closed ranks behavior that conservatives have tended toward, where adherence to a set of positions on issues supersedes evidence of actual risks involved in those issues, or adherence to rigid policy outcomes while disregarding any path to them (that isn't an absolute drop/change).

A way to summarize most of these disagreements would be as follows:
"I believe you are well-motivated and have identified what you feel is a problem. But your actual positions and motions to do something about it are misguided, ineffective, or totally symbolic rather than meaningful and productive. Stop being symbolic and do some real work to think carefully about what you want to achieve and whether what you are asking can be done, or can be done in this way."

Random sex scandal stories mentally intersected

Probably shouldn't be, but I don't know enough about either story on its own to fully address either.

The Duggar scandal. - I tend to break these kinds of stories (and there are lots of them) into a couple standard elements

The presumption that "godly" or "god-fearing" or otherwise ardently religious people are good, decent people and thus incapable of heinous abusive actions clouds the reaction with a lot of "but he seemed like such a kind, decent person" reflexes. My operating assumption isn't just that ardently religious people are assholes, but that most people are. Even, or perhaps sometimes especially, the "kind, decent" people that I barely know. I don't assume they're incapable of anything unless there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. Most of us do not know this family and its various members, just as we do not know many other 15 minute TV celebrities or politicians and so on. So the inflection of these characters with special decency, or special hatred (as is often the case) is bizarre. As I said back during Tiger Woods' story some years back, we don't know them just because we watch them play golf and let them sell us Buicks on TV commercials. So the idea that we should just assume they are all wholesome goodness is absurd. This is particularly rich for someone like me when it is suffused with a lot of religion as in this case (as though this automatically removes the prospect of guilt and destructive actions against fellow human beings), but the argument holds across virtually any sector.

I think that interacts with the Cosby rape allegations over the last many years in a disturbing way. Namely that we are slower to see it when we have established this person as a social role model. We should be able to separate out the social role model, the character that a person has crafted and presented to the world, from the actions of the human being and hold them accountable. Many of America's founding political philosophers/lawyers owned slaves. This does not automatically invalidate their political views. It means they are flawed in a nearly fatal to the country way which was partly resolved some decades after their deaths. But the arguments are no less sound simply because they were not at the time applied to all men (much less all women). If we have to do the same now with a musical performer, or a comedian, or a TV star, maybe people can do that and still enjoy their art (or whatever it is that reality TV shows are portraying). But if someone is actually a slime ball of a human being who has abused and assaulted women, that can matter to our calculations of how we appreciate and enjoy their art, and it certainly should mean that we will still want to find them accountable for any actions they've done.

Huckabee has taken a somewhat forgiving stance in his public statements so far. I'm not sure I begrudge this if it existed on its own as it's probably an outgrowth of his general religious faith. But there are problems with it. First, that he wastes little time blaming and socially insulting or assaulting people whose cultural views he does not agree with for their actions (eg, liberals), but then also wastes little time forgiving his cultural allies. That's convenient selectivity for his purported desire for forgiving people (if he's going to waste as much time as he does attacking Beyonce for basically being a good capitalist, it doesn't make much sense to defend this guy in other words. But then, I didn't quite understand where he was going with the Beyonce stuff in the first place). Second, that the problem with the story isn't that he did something awful and could or should not be forgiven for it (some people won't be able to, but some would), but that he did something awful and nobody did anything about it, so far as can be shown, and then is to be forgiven for it now with nothing having been actually adjudicated so far as anyone can tell, either in a court or a psychologist's office or whatever. It seems like he went and did some yard work and it was otherwise swept under the rug for quite some time even before that occurred. This is not the way one deals with a problem like child molestation. It is somewhat understandable that a family might be slow to pull the trigger to turn in a family member for conducting horrifying indignities upon young women, but this all seems like nobody ever took it that seriously. Including Huckabee in his public statements about it after the fact. That should be worrisome both for Christians in how it portrays a continued lack of concern for the well-being of women and in general that we seem to be comfortable according a certain lack of concern for both the victims and the perpetrators of sexual violence (when underage like this story implies, it suggests they may also have been victims too of course, which is a further problem).

At the same time, I've been vaguely following the Columbia mattress art project story. And I can't really make heads or tails of it. I suspect that's why the university didn't do anything either, despite a lower standard of guilt required than a court of law. What that tells me isn't that we don't take women seriously when they make accusations of sexual assaults, though that might be true in many respects, but that we don't always have a very clear means of adjudicating those complaints in a manner that clears it up for all parties in a decisive and satisfying way. Applied to the Duggar case, it isn't obviously clear what we should have preferred we do. Register him as a sex offender for life? We have lots of problems with how that system allows people to re-integrate into society, or seek any necessary treatment and atonement for what they did, in a manner that is disproportionate even in a society that makes such reintegration difficult. Prosecute him for sexual assault? That can be difficult if the victims do not want to cooperate with police and prosecutors, as it may be likely in the case of family members (for example). Nor does a conviction mean that the victims of such assaults like molestation are automatically healed and may go forth without incident or harm to their development as people. There are intermediate steps here to resolve these cases most likely that we could have chosen that may not satisfy every gawking audience but may have worked fine for victims in this or other cases.

But I suspect one of the problems is that we don't do very much as a culture to give people a way to communicate about sex in general, and sexual abuse in particular (and this includes, perhaps especially, evangelical Christians like the Duggars). We do not have a very clear grasp of sexual consent and the language both physical and spoken involved, and that means it is difficult to teach children about it as something they could defend themselves against, or might wish to complain to an adult or parent about if it were to happen (not that we spend much time doing so). It becomes more difficult to navigate and adjudicate complaints between possible couples or one-night stands in a college dorm in a way that feels like justice. And it becomes easier to dismiss dozens of complaints against famous celebrities by generally ignoring the story because we previously enjoyed the celebrity and their performances being held at fault more than we wish to provide a means of justice and resolution for these harms and injustices committed upon them.

Maybe this is because some of us don't really think these are harms or injustices deserving of serious attention, as might be the case with many devoted fans of the Duggars or Bill Cosby, or just some random student at Columbia who we maybe aren't sure did anything that should be considered illegal or not (and so far as the university was concerned, didn't). Maybe this is because some of us think these are people incapable of being improved, for lack of a better term, and by extension reducing the incidence of these types of sexual criminal acts by giving such people (mostly men in these examples and cases) a manner of relating to women as individuals and human beings rather than just objects of sexual desire. Or in the case of child sex abuses, there are treatments and therapies available for that as well. Maybe this is because we just don't like talking about sex, gender politics, sexual communication, and sexual abuse, and we'd prefer someone else handle all of that (if anyone as again evangelicals seem especially prone to ignoring the valence of these as subjects demanding conversation).

Passing the buck isn't really an option here. In part because it doesn't seem like there is a clear expert on which we should trust an opinion on all matters of sexual confusion, much less disturbing sexual abuses. We have to take some responsibility for not wanting to discuss these things with our children, or our friends, or our families. Not all of it needs to be aired out in public for all the world to see, or even our close friends who we might talk about all manner of things instead, but there needs to be somewhere to start. But in large measure this is because these are some of the most intimate forms of abuse one can construct. They often involve very trusted friends or family members or family friends (or other trusted authority figures, like celebrities can often be). Without some architecture for understanding what is even happening, without some method of reporting what has happened, it will go on. And without some one stepping in and saying, "no, that's not appropriate", or even "no, that is wrong", it will go on. In order to do any of that, we will need to be able to talk a little more about what we are not sure about.

Sex is basically a form of physical communication for human beings. Even if it is inappropriate or unwanted it is still a communication. It is at that point saying "I can do whatever I want to your person" and also at some level "your body is what I want, so I will do whatever I want to it", which is a terrifying or horrifying message to want to communicate. It is inherently dehumanizing and stripping another person of agency, desire, and the capacity of communication of anything in response, physically or spoken. One response to this would be to tell people to want to communicate less horrifying, "better" messages instead using their bodies (and by extension communicated with other people's bodies). At some level that shouldn't have to be a message we have to explain to other people but we may have to start at this basic level and build up. It doesn't appear we're making a lot of headway by compiling "yes means yes" policies and trying to explain things like obtaining affirmative consent (using words) or by establishing draconian penalties for sexual abuse and wrapping in a lot of inappropriate nudity (streaking or peeing in public for example or mixed age teenage sexuality, or teens just sending nude photos to one another), or by generally ignoring complaints of sexual abuse and misconduct for years at a time. Start at the beginning and move forward from there.

A further and perhaps more important point might be what should we do about the victims in the meantime. It isn't clear the Duggars did anything (as little as they did with the molester among them, this isn't that surprising). Cosby's various accusers haven't gotten a day in court that I can tell and there doesn't seem to be any hurry to provide one. Columbia let one form a complicated performance art stunt to complain. That may be an option even if all it really tells us is someone is maybe an asshole.

Addendum: TLC or any other network could pull a reality TV show off the air for pretty much any reason and I would not complain. But this seems like a fairly reasonable response is to kick off the air a family that has a lot of offscreen moral and legal trouble going on right now, even if the response wasn't designed as a penalty (it undoubtedly is, but still). For the main reason that it portrays the network (and the family it is airing a TV show about) with a certain aura of hypocrisy for proclaiming some sort of "family values" notions when at least one member of that family has a now admitted history of abusing other members of it. But also because this sort of attention isn't something that needs to come to focus for his victims (if they don't wish to be a part of it). People do not always want to be defined as victims of a sexual crime and that would be difficult to avoid with a TV show in the public forum. They may prefer to be known for other things. I'm inclined for their sake to let them try to do so.

Continuing to talk about unspeakable things

Torture edition

I think this view actually confuses the utilitarian argument. Or at least the consequentialist argument against torture and for a general prohibition on its use by the state (and in a related matter, the NSA dragnet). That argument goes like this:

1) Obtaining accurate information is a valuable intelligence goal in preventing heinous acts of violence.

This isn't a dispute in either the torture or the NSA dragnet debates. The problem is that it is unclear that torture or the NSA dragnet have provided this information, and that valuable intelligence was often obtained in other ways.

2) We should use those methods that quickly and verifiably provide that intelligence.

It is not disputed that torture or the NSA dragnet could provide verifiable and useful intelligence (there's some dispute on whether it has, particularly in the latter case). The big question mark is if it is the most efficient means of investigation and interrogation of sources out of the litany of options available to detect and parry aside possible threats of terrorism. Which it doesn't appear to be.

The argument is often made that KSM lied to provide information the interrogators wanted to hear rather than actual useful intelligence because of torture. This is somehow defensible in the minds of torture proponents because he or others lied under normal interrogation methods too. That is undoubtedly the case that they did but this has little persuasive use in pointing it out. If other methods allow for easier verification, or prevent interrogators from entering with an agenda of scaring out a particular story of guilt (and thus obtaining false and unverifiable "information"), those methods are superior even if they also obtain false information as they may be less prone to these systematic errors (over time). The key is whether we are  obtaining truthful and accurate intelligence, and it is far from demonstrated that torture was a reliable method on this merit. The NSA dragnet seems even less clear and a more demonstratable failure (even by their own admission, it appears its main use was to expensively and invasively demonstrate that there weren't that many people worth following as potential threats to acts of terrorism; that the threat for which it existed in the first place doesn't actually exist).

3) We should also use those methods that do so with minimal cost upon the interrogators, detainees themselves, and where these are international norms being involved upon a state of moral standing obtained by being a "good country" which conforms to, or even helped set (as in this case of torture prohibitions), those norms.

A utilitarian logic would conform to a cost-benefit analysis at some point. If there are substantial costs to doing something, then it would be reasonable to look for something that provides a similar benefit without the higher costs. In the case of torture, to our general security by agitating many people by violating norms of international human rights, or to the moral qualms of the people engaged in the acts of malicious cruelty themselves.



One plausible argument and serious problem with the terrorism mantras is that we are often confusing single (or a handful of) villainous individuals and their ideological causes and potential defeats with a defeat of the threat of danger. This is too linear and perhaps not even expansive enough (eg, "terrorism" is only terrorism if it happens because X did it, and if we can stop people like X, we win). Terrorism however is a process and tactical strategy of using asymmetric warfare and it has a multivariate set of causes. Rather than being a single cartoon villain defeated in the space of a Hollywood plot, it is inherently a long-lasting system with a variety of agents attempting to use it throughout human history (many more than just "islamo-fascists", whatever that's supposed to mean). Attempting to suppress it likewise has a number of effects. Including the possibility of creating lasting animus that inspires further attacks, such as by abusing captive prisoners with violence or physical and mental trauma in violation of our normal standards of human rights (which we ourselves as a nation have been long-time promoters and advocates). Americans haven't typically demonstrated great skill in asymmetric warfare. At least not for generations (maybe against some native tribal peoples in the 19th century and prior to that, and then of course, we have our history of violence against racial minorities). So it's not something I'd advise we undertake casually, without attempting a fuller appreciation of consequences to our preferences in actions and strategies to suppress violence and terrorism undertaken against Americans.

We are a long, long, long way away from the "ticking time bomb"/24 style scenarios that our government attempted to assure us were to be the norm for regimes of torture, even for those subjects about whom there is less sympathy for their plight (KSM for example). We are instead looking at a systematic method of abusing captives with a secondary purpose of possibly obtaining information being a norm, with an episode like Abu Ghraib being not an outlier but a standard of operation. When we have reasonable alternatives to imposing violence and cruelty upon captive human beings, about whom we may have uncertain at best standards of their guilt or complicity in any plots of violence against Americans or really anybody at all, it is reasonable to continue to use them instead.

On this topic in particular I go back principally to the high value our society places upon punishment and its confusion with severity of punishment as a method of deterrence rather than as a means of satisfaction. That appears to be the ideological preference of those favoring torture regimes or systems of un-adjudicated detention for our purported enemies and threats to national security. In so far as some methods of penalty, detention, and general safety or security are favored and needed for a prosperous society to continue to flourish in the face of dangers of crime and mayhem, I don't think this is a disputed point. In so far as the extremes being demanded and insisting that these are necessary and helpful steps (in the utilitarian sense of "it works"), this is far less clear. The "ends justify the means" logic really only works if the ends were the only way to obtain the means and then it helps if they actually obtained the means. Which is in this case, less clear.

We are seeing a similar debate (finally) cropping up surrounding the death penalty and mass incarceration policies for our more commonplace domestic criminal activities. One should expect that would be far more controversial as it pertains to millions of lives, both of criminals and victims of crime and yet there are broadly shaped ideological coalitions pushing against the systems of policing and incarceration or punishment strategies being used for their cost being excessive, both in human and fiscal terms. The cost in the form of torture is rarely discussed when placed against the purported benefits (both sides ignore the existence of the other). Which suggests that people wishing to use some variety of consequentialist logic to justify their preferred actions aren't bothering to actually try to do so.

Thoughts of the day

1) As before with the gay marriage cases before SCOTUS, I'm not interested in displaying a changed photo status on social media. I don't go in much for symbolism for one, and secondly, I think the case will be basically about the final score (whether it is 6-3 or 5-4) and not the outcome. I don't think any marginal lobbying on twitter or facebook is going to make a difference to the score. Where my (our) focus would need to be is on people who don't think this is an okay change, or at least think it happened too fast, and not on the justices, and finding ways to connect to these people and change their minds or at least understand their objections and help them find ways to live with it now as a disfavored minority. Gay marriage being equal is all but a done deal, if not now by court ruling then very soon by public mandate as demographics shift away from older conservative Christians to younger more progressive Christians (at least on this topic). Now supporters and opponents have to live together and deal with this new reality. This has become a more vital project as court rulings have greatly and rapidly expanded the equal recognition of homosexual couples at a more rapid pace than I would have thought likely. I regard that as a good thing that it has, and that it likely will continue. But the fact remains there is still bitter intolerance and hatred present among a subset of the population, and considerably larger population that is uncertain or uneasy about these changes and what they will mean either from prejudices or ignorance of the issues at hand, and all of that will continue to need to be moderated even with these changes in legal status as applied to marriage and marriage contract benefits coming swiftly.

The gay rights cause seems to be winning something in my lifetime and bully for that as it is a much needed change in social tolerance and respect for individuals and their liberties. I've written or spoken generally in support of such a change for years (with a detour into the fantastical realm of the government not recognizing marriages at all and letting people make private contracts as they see fit, but still not proclaiming that any government or government official should ignore or refuse those contracts when made between same-sex couples). It's also impacting a much smaller number of people ultimately than some other issues that often dominate my attention, so I don't have as much to say on it now that progress is being made. Like whether we as Americans are being policed or occupied in our own communities. A topic where progress is much more diffident and uncertain.

2) Baltimore.

On the one hand, I'm not a big fan of riots. They're generally destructive to the city involved, rarely raise the value of the underlying issues causing people to generate mayhem or to demonstrate angrily (but peacefully), and don't seem to change people's minds regarding the strangeness of seeing APCs and police decked out like they're invading Iraq wandering through American cities. Very little good comes of it. They are a point of protesting when people feel they are rendered voiceless and a means of relieving their need for aggression against this frustration. But that's not generally what people hear and it often drowns out the message as a result. Typically people not involved but necessary to act oversimplify the basis for protests and riots down to single, isolated, circumstantial incidents (bad apples) rather than the systematic problems which put thousands of people in a position to demonstrate angrily.

So. On the other hand. I regard the need for police reforms on militarization of equipment, aggression toward the public in the form of escalation and authoritarianism rather than de-escalation and public service, violence and brutality viewed as unacceptable and unfortunate outcomes rather than excused as "by the book" , methods of dismissal or penalty for brutality and mayhem by police, penalties for violations of civil rights and unwarranted arrests (for example, "resisting arrest" should be abolished as a possible charge), and so on as very high on my list of "things I want to see changed positively in my lifetime".

One of the major problems during previous riots in Missouri (Ferguson), was that there was a perception among many Americans that this was all stemming from a single incident of violence or brutality by police (in that case, Michael Brown being shot and killed, also Eric Garner being strangled to death by a chokehold in NYC). Such shootings or killings of citizens by police are fairly common, distressingly so in fact. There's a fairly reliable crowdsourcing effort putting the number over 1200 per year of people killed by police. Official government statistics, which have accountability and reporting/self-reporting problems, have been recently revised upward from around 400 to around 800. But even if it were only at 400, this should be regarded as a serious problem worthy of scrutiny and reform in our methods of policing, if not a serious failure of how we police and enforce laws more broadly or an indictment of our cultural preferences for violence. That's at least 1 person per day killed by a police officer somewhere in the country, and probably closer to 3 people per day.

Most other developed nations do not kill that many people in a year via their police forces. We do so every day. Even if that were the sole impetus behind the protests and riots, it should be a cause in which we should be concerned that this is the result of our choices and policies for police.

But it wasn't just about cops shooting or killing people and a perception that they will always get away with it. Baltimore is a large city, with thousands of police officers. Ferguson is a modest suburb, with a few dozen officers. Both however have been investigated by the Department of Justice. And both find similarly disturbing behavior on the part of police officers in their treatment of residents, particularly on racial divisions. Violence and brutality are far more common than should be tolerated as necessary. Police are often seen much more as an occupying army in many parts of these communities than a helpful and reliable ally in a fight against crime, with their purpose being to rack up fines in Ferguson, and to roust and harass residents for petty, seemingly arbitrary, infractions in both cities.

This is not just the fault of police. The public has demanded it as well. The public, certainly among the well-to-do middle class white Americans, believes crime is much higher than it actually is as a risk and danger, and often sees police responses as capable and justified. Their interactions with police are often limited to polite but unpleasant traffic tickets and fines, not flashbang grenades in the window and family dogs being shot, and your person detained and questioned without probable cause on a weekly basis (if not more often). So there's an understandable division in how the police are interpreted. There are communities where violence and crime are serious problems requiring a firm police intervention, but these are not resembling the types of criminal actions we commonly are seeing resulting in violent actions by police. Walter Scott was shot because he faced possible arrest for not paying child support payments and fled from police (shooting someone who merely runs away is, of course, not considered kosher under the law, and the officer involved is facing a murder charge, thanks mostly to a citizen cell phone recording the incident). Freddie Gray was killed in part because of a series of low-level arrests for drug enforcement laws and because he ran after looking at a cop (he was arrested, it seems, because he supposedly had a knife which he was not wielding aggressively at anyone at the time or likely visible at all to the public). Michael Brown as an incident seems to have started because he was walking in the street. Eric Garner was killed while being arrested for selling loose (untaxed) cigarettes. At best, none of these cases represents enormous threat to safety of other people and yet all apparently allowed us to deploy violence to enforce these laws.

A better, more torturous example of how this indicts the public though is available. Tamir Rice and John Crawford were killed basically for holding air guns in an unwise manner. What seems to have aggravated these last two was the public response to seeing a young black male holding what appeared to be a fire arm and doing so in what seemed like a strange way. Rice was pointing it at passerbys in the park he was in, but the only reported call suggests that they knew or suspected it was a prank and a toy gun. Crawford sounded like the caller greatly exaggerated the threat as there doesn't appear to be much evidence he was threatening or menacing anyone and in any case, police fired upon him while he was talking on a cell phone and not threatening anyone. In both cases, police response was aggressive, moderated for what we might think appropriate for a terrorist incident or a potential hostage crisis. This is typical training for aggressive uses of forces and the escalation of violence rather than the de-escalation allowing everyone to at least be arrested peacefully. Militarized high-risk raids on homes are typically undertaken rather than detaining someone by knocking on the door or at or coming to or from work, as a more widespread example of this type of thinking. These are the most adverse risks and consequences of what is demanded of police to enforce and against whom (mostly poorer minorities).

The most common risks however are just as poisonous in their effects upon a community. A person who is arrested risks losing a job that sustains them and risks difficulty obtaining a new one. They generate costs for themselves in the case should it proceed to court (many do not), and additional costs  in time and money if it should go to trial (most convictions are arbitrated without a jury). Most people who are being detained, arrested, and charged in Baltimore and Ferguson and hundreds of other cities cannot afford either the time or the money for their infractions, which makes it more difficult for them to properly defend themselves or moderate and navigate the penalties to something appropriate for their crime. If they go to jail or prison for any extended period of time, they then have a criminal record, which further makes it difficult to re-integrate into society. Many jobs now require occupational licenses or at least background checks, which frown upon criminal records. All of this makes it difficult to maintain a respectable job. If someone is being arrested for armed robbery, that's rather understandable that it should be punished with an inconvenience like this. But many arrests are trivial, for example drug possession charges or "disorderly conduct" or "resisting arrest" or easily chalked up to bias and misunderstanding and essentially are arbitrary crimes (most people in prison, less so). The cost of this is not inconsequential in the economic disruption it causes a community in the form of fines, bail money, loans, and lost time and productivity. In many communities, such penalties begin racking up with teenagers (if not earlier, Tamir Rice was not even that old), costing gains from education as well, or leading kids to abandon education entirely as too adversarial rather than beneficial. Crime imposes such costs as well, but fighting it should not.

Many states (and juries and public opinion) likewise frown upon someone who has a prior criminal record by perceiving violence against such people by police more likely justified, or should they be arrested again perceive that as justification for additional and much more severe penalties in any new infraction, or perceive it as more likely they are guilty of whatever they are accused of owing to their prior recklessness. All of this makes it more likely that people may repeat offenses, or end up back in prison, or out of work and willing to do shady or outright hazardous things to generate a living. If a community sees police as an enemy, not an ally, and yet demands a response to its problems with crime, that is the fault of the police and the communities that fund such forces and provide them with missions and arms through the force of law.

I propose to resolve this issue we should consider the following:
a) Whether all of the laws we want enforced are justifiable if they should result in the death or injury of fellow citizens who may be suspected of violating them by police. If they are not, we should reconsider whether the force of law is the appropriate vehicle for amending or coercing bad behavior as this is a risk of having laws on the books. Many things which are laws in my opinion should not be written into legal code for this reason. For example, there is evidence that a charge like "resisting arrest" is essentially code for "I beat someone up" when used by police as it is typically used by a very small cohort of police, and that that cohort in turn shows a higher likelihood of being accused of brutality or excessive force (in these or other cases).

b) Whether or when enforcing the law should permit violence in defence of a community as a minimum necessity of use of force rather than aggressive tactics and maximum force. Self-defence is typically regarded as an acceptable moral landscape, as is the defence of others against violence. A large number of these controversial cases appear to be based more around compliance to authority rather than aggression. Pepper spray or other non-lethal weapons (tasers especially) get used pretty casually under the logic that a use of force that doesn't kill someone is justified to get them to obey commands or to punish non-compliance. It sounds likely Gray's death may have been related to rough car rides in the back of a police van as a "disciplinary" practice, under a similar vein. Defending other people is an acceptable use of violence under the law. Meting out extra-judicial penalties for someone being an asshole or having a bad attitude toward a cop is not.

c) What level of armament is appropriate or necessary for police to carry out a minimum necessity of violence. This includes uses of "non-lethal" force. A baton or even a fist can still kill someone. So can a taser or a flashbang grenade or even pepper spray. A gun isn't necessary to kill a suspected criminal. This means we should think very carefully about use of force protocols as a society for the people we empower to enforce laws, but also think very carefully about what weapons they are given to do so, and how they will be used or trained for. An APC or submachine guns seem to serve very little purpose in this process. There's little evidence they're even that useful for riot control (the best available practices there should be to aim to prevent the riot from starting in the first place).

Crime pays

For many of my gripes with Kleiman, he wrote a book on this topic a few years ago (When Brute Force Fails). Some of the same conclusions are involved. Example. For minor infractions like parole or probation violations instead of sending people to prison to serve out a lengthy term, they might go to jail immediately for some smaller period of time (a few days to a month), and then are released.

A crucial element that wasn't mentioned in the piece is that one of the major aspects of "successful" punishment is that it usually is not the length or severity that matters for people to get the point that they did something wrong and deter others from doing the same. Rather it is having available swift and sure possibilities for penalties to occur in the first place. In many cases prison sentences are increased because we don't have very sure or swift penalties for the criminal acts involved and it is assumed that the only way to provide deterrence is a stiffer penalty. People can commit these kinds of crimes with relative impunity. As a result we might also want to look at which crimes we could better deter with different police patrol patterns, more community involvement, a better focus on the use of our investigative resources to solve these crimes doing the most damage, etc.

People don't tend to randomly kidnap children in the US versus other many countries because it's extremely hard to pull off without getting caught (or at least this is the belief among many criminals, it's also pretty low on the totem pole of prison hierarchies to do pretty much anything to kids, which adds another wrinkle). It's almost always a family member in this country for that reason that abducts a child. Someone who probably doesn't care if they get caught because they're not rational involving their own children. This attitude of deterrence through the surety of penalties could be applied to any number of criminal acts (murder, robbery, fraud, etc) and should provide much more deterrent value than longer sentences. There will still be murders, but they'd be more and more acts of "passion"; sudden events that escalate to violence and less and less random acts of violence committed against strangers.

I think there's also a large sum of currently designated criminal behavior that isn't described or studied here that doesn't cost as much in the form of social damage (drug use/possession and distribution being one source), or where there is damage, using the prison system to deal with it probably isn't appropriate and is wasteful and costly versus the alternatives. This would also apply to many mental health problems. It sounds like this was a study or set of them that looked too linearly at the costs of prison itself rather than also including the costs of policing or the costs of basic health care, and the benefits of same, and so on. I find that many of our policy approaches are not "3-D", taking into account alternatives from outside the context of a narrow policy view. For instance, drug addiction (actual drug or alcohol addiction, not mere use of drugs that we find are socially disapproved) or mental health disorders could be treated as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. The narrow focus on the costs of these in criminal activity often precludes people from assessing how they might be dealt with more efficiently elsewhere. It is useful to know that X criminal act potentially costs us this much in social damage, and imprisoning a person for doing so costs Y dollars, but it is useful to know that because we can then evaluate it against other alternatives and also see if we will come away with fewer of X criminal acts in the first place using those alternatives, or if those alternatives have other positive benefits (better mental health for instance allows people to hold down regular employment easier, narrow policing focus allows police to push criminal activity into smaller and smaller spaces, thus making any remaining criminal activity less likely).

Garner

Honestly at this point I don't care if half the country gets burned to the ground and we have to start over. Nobody seems inclined to take seriously suggestions of how we get from here to there, where there is somewhere a decent people should want to go.

The Brown-Wilson case was mishandled at crucial points but there's little chance that would have gone to a conviction. The end result would have been the same; Wilson resigning. That entire case basically turns on what witnesses you believe or don't believe concerning what happened after Brown had moved away from the car and those last several shots being justified or not. All of which is enough for reasonable doubt in a court room. Of course, whether police usually receive reasonable doubt from juries when normal citizens often do not could be discussed at that point. How all of it was handled from there was an outrage, but that's a different sort of outrage than the actual death itself (leaving the body in the street for hours, running over memorials to the deceased, mistreatment of protesters and media in the aftermath, total lack of communication between protesters and security forces, deployment of military equipment for which police were not trained for use against a non-military grade threat to officer safety, PR battles which often had limited value, calling anyone who opposed police action "thugs" or furthering a "pro-thug" agenda, with all the attending racial-loaded implications of that language in the modern era, etc).

This case.... there was all kinds of evidence involved however. Police procedures were not followed. The arrest had no such import as a prospective assault/robbery suspect (however unjustified killing such a suspect was, the criminal acts for which the deceased were being accosted were miles apart in the importance of effecting arrests). The man clearly had medical issues induced from police action, and still they persisted. Heads should have rolled. Excuses piled up instead and nothing happens. The Crawford case was in the same boat, and one expects that the Rice case in Cleveland will fall under the same hand at this point.

This has to stop, but it won't.

The only way that happens, the only way we can begin to examine this corpse of our society and its presentation of justice and what may ultimately destroy us, is if we start to acknowledge we have a police problem. We have an institutional problem with the way we police, and how we look the other way when violence is meted out to those we deem unworthy of basic decent legal and moral protection. And the main reason we have such people upon which to permit, if not demand, such institutional violence is we have a race problem. Still.

It isn't just a race problem. Poverty, the drug war, media coverage of crime and criminal justice, military-grade hardware distributed like candy to police forces large and small, and the expansion of police powers and broad and vague legal codes all contribute. And it isn't just a police problem; a media climate of fear is perpetuating the feeling of a society under attack from what are largely mythical criminal acts and as a result the general public carries many of the same biases and prejudices in private and public encounters with people who do not look like us. Many of these situations would not have happened at all if someone with suspicion formed (primarily) on the basis of skin colour did not call the authorities to alert them of something that could have been handled with a simple question or conversation at the scene. The animus doesn't require the police. The fault is not in any stars. It is from ourselves.

When we put these problems together though, the explosives are made more deadly and more corrosive to the nature required of us in forming a functional and prosperous society. Where all people feel reasonably safe in their homes and neighbourhoods not just from criminals, but from the authorities as well. Where all people feel that the provision of law is not a means or tool for oppression of basic dignity, but rather a weapon for preventing that oppression of dignity. These should be our aspirations in crafting the laws, and the methods of enforcing and arbitrating violations of laws. We may never perfect the methods and means of obtaining these lofty goals. But we should at least act like we care that these are our preferences. Or we should admit that they are not our aspirations at all.

When we have one law for those who enforce and craft laws, and another set of laws for others, we cannot present a place for basic dignity. We enable those who would hide behind their position to inflict injustice where they should be in the service of justice. We can have room in our society for difficult decisions, for actions taken in self-defence or in defence of others, and we have legal codes which allow for this. Nor should we want police officers to fear for their safety anymore than we should ourselves live in fear. But this impunity before the law must end.

Fallout. New Tactics.

So. That was fun. A few buildings burned. A couple of cop cars. And not much was resolved or changed.

Here's what I think we know in the Brown-Wilson case.

There was some form of altercation. This resulted in Brown's death (eventually).
Wilson's story has some corroboration here there there was a form of disturbance.

Stuff that remains undetermined:
I think the causes of that disturbance are less clear. It's possible Wilson's account is accurate. I remain dubious largely because Wilson's account relies heavily on his subjective interpretations rather than other witnesses. Some of the details are not as clearly corroborated or seem outright wrong (for instance, how and why Brown turned around, the "reaching for his waistband", and the distances involved from Wilson's car). Some of those are fishy narratives that are often used by police in describing a violent episode involving deadly force. Whether they actually happened in all cases they are used to me is an unfounded assumption. To me this narrative is mostly superfluous. The crucial question isn't so much whether there was a scuffle and a shot or two fired at Brown, possibly hitting him. But whether Wilson's second batch of shots at Brown was justified after Brown retreated. Wilson uses a rather dehumanizing and scary account of dealing with an impending assault and firing at an onrushing attacker, and it is certainly possible that many elements of that account are true to the best of his knowledge. There appeared to be more conflicting accounts however over that set of details. I think it very likely that such conflicting accounts would make it virtually impossible for him to be convicted of anything. But I do think that there may be some open questions over the justification for those shots, in particular the fatal shots to the head. Or to the training involved that lead to it if nothing else.

Things that don't make sense in his narrative:

The tie-ins to the robbery suspect story feel like they were tacked in to make a revision to his story and add some form of justification. But. If an officer felt he was approaching or saw someone who might be a suspect in a robbery/assault, it seems strange that he might merely ask such a person to get out of the street and walk on the sidewalk. That entire set of facts he presented centering around a package of cigarillos feels tacked on as a result. That there was some kind of disturbance and scuffle ought to be enough that there might be a justification for force. If Brown's assaulting someone (and an officer of the law at that), that should be plenty without adding in anything else (like "this man was a wanted criminal, for basically petty theft, maybe assault). And indeed, whether or not he was involved in such an incident still does not justify being shot at by police. The justification for that turns on whether or not the scuffle provoked a considerable fear.

Things that also happened as a result of the grand jury.

Lots of people (mostly white people) complain about rioting. I agree it does not help the cause of justice here, or reform. I agree it isn't justified. I don't see why it was a surprise. Most people expected both the lack of an indictment and the possibility of riots as a result. Police spent most of the time leading up to the result talking up the level of preparations. And then didn't seem all that prepared when violence broke out, like they were surprised in particular where violence broke out (nearby where Brown was shot and where there was some violence before during the summer) rather than where people and many police were assembled (near the courthouse and police station).

Prosecutor spends a lot of his air time complaining about the media and social media narratives. I'd say that given that a lot of both of their use of narratives haven't done much to establish something about this particular case, and have done a great deal (but not nearly as much as they could have) to show the lack of merits in militarized police forces putting down protests with disproportionate force to the level of threat, or to cover the methods of police oppression used on a daily basis in communities like and including Ferguson, Missouri (largely through the collection of petty fines and warrants, asset forfeiture seizures, occasional violence against citizens, etc), that complaining about those things would be perhaps something he feels compelled to do, but has little ground on which to stand. As it is his office that helps run through the system of abuse through fines and criminal justice which isn't properly adjudicated (eg, with appropriate defense counsel), and is likely deliberate.

Complaining about media narratives framing and prejudging the case, perhaps is a more sensible complaint. I paid much less attention to details about the actual shooting because I was aware that was more like a matchstick than the kindling on which things might burn and that details would be scarce. Also it was pretty clear from the prosecutor's demeanor, history, and close ties to the police that there would be any prosecution anyway, and what leaks of information came out ahead of time only suggested it would remain unlikely and would almost certainly fail to provide a guilty verdict even if the case proceeded to trial.

The crucial elements were that there are deep-seated reasons why these communities do not trust the authorities to handle cases of police shootings fairly, believe those shootings to be unjustified, or otherwise are more skeptical than are the people observing from the safe confines of American suburbia (where encounters with police are rare outside of speeding tickets for teens and college students, or the occasional break-in being investigated). Policing is experienced very differently based on skin colour alone, much less the cultural and socio-economic gaps between poorer communities and upper middle class neighbourhoods. This is evident when looking at polling suggesting many are seeing these events as isolated and the apparent mystery experienced by the general public in associating why there might still be riots or protests months later. When the problems are systemic to the way the community is policed and how both police and the community see one another.

Police seem to have made a hobby of developing excuses for deaths that do not require them to examine their training and use of force methods. This is one of the reasons these kinds of stories continue to persist. Some police forces have dealt with very questionable shootings by officers by dismissing officers, or pressing charges (in one bizarre case in Connecticut, officers wanted to press charges against another officer for a beating in a "resisting arrest" case, but the DA refused. The officer was at least fired).

There was a lot of attention paid to whether there were drugs in Brown's blood stream. (Well after the John Crawford shooting in Ohio, this also came up there). Marijuana on its own from observing people who use it does not strike me as heavily correlated with erratic and aggressive behavior of the sort police or 911 callers, etc, are claiming in these cases. Maybe poor judgment. But it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that this was drug addled crazy behavior when the drug in question doesn't tend to cause such behavior. If they were claiming these men were stone cold drunk, yes. I could see that. Stoned, not so much.

So where do we try to go from here. I would propose several things

1) For the St Louis area in particular (and there are other metropolitan areas with similar problems, Atlanta, Detroit, or even San Francisco/Oakland would be examples), we may want to look at consolidating some of the tiny legal jurisdictions that have cropped up as city populations have expanded and sprawled outward. These are often carved out deliberately for race related reasons and result in a lack of a sustainable tax base to support the level of civic government required (because too many people are poor and jobs are scarce). Instead, the town's government will levy considerable fines and minor legal fees upon an impoverished community. It may even account for planned increases in those fines in year-to-year budgeting. Suggesting that the fines are arbitrary rather than necessary quality of life and safety legal structures. We may not be able to abolish this variety of policing entirely, but avoiding the problem of unsustainable local governance by eliminating or at least reducing the level of civic separations in an area may be of use.

2) Continue to work to abolish the war on drugs. At this point the number one thing that can be done to improve civic relations between minorities and the police is to reduce the amount of contact and the amount of invasive police tactics that are being used. A huge portion of that comes back to the penalties (arrests, felony convictions, loss of economic and legal rights making re-integration difficult) and incentives for police (asset seizures, frequent arrests for stat games) involved in the war on drugs. The flow of militarized equipment into local police departments, of the sort used in putting down demonstrations, is also closely tied to this ridiculous project of trying to use the law and police to deal with medical problems (for some, addiction or overdose) or to avoid dealing with medical problems for others (mental health ailments being self-medicated with drugs or alcohol in a non-addictive way). A violent crime, such as assault or murder or arson or rape, should attract a significant bulk of our police attention and resources. Followed by varieties of property crime (theft, fraud, etc). We are expending inordinate amounts of attention and resources for policing what are effectively consensual acts (vice crimes, like the trade and use of narcotics). If people are getting high and going off to commit acts of violence, that is still worthy of our time and attention. But far more people are getting drunk and doing so. We do not or should not say that this is not worth our time and attention simply because the drug of choice was legally sanctioned.

3) Continue to reduce or reform the penalties for many non-violent crimes. If we can't get rid of the laws, we should at least reduce the amount of harm that punishment for a petty crime does.

4) Try to channel public anger in these directions. Talk about the harm that is done when police become an oppositional and occupational force in a community, and try to have more communities actually deploy community policing, where cops walk beats (getting out of the squad car), know the communities in which they work and are known in them, talk with leaders and representatives, and respond to complaints rather than feel like an invading army. With the appropriate funding for that rather than the funding for "community policing", where police departments have gathered large amounts of military hardware (without much training but plenty of intent to use it) and have strong incentives to make arrests rather than investigate crimes. There are communities and police departments that behave in this way. Even in areas with violence, poverty, or minority populations. The outcome of friction between police and the community should not simply be angry and violent demonstrations or police deploying in SWAT gear and firing off tear gas or pepper spraying peaceful demonstrators. Both sides have reasonable demands (both want crime to go down in a community for example and by association, their lives to be easier and safer). What we're mostly arguing over is what works to actually accommodate those demands. It is not, generally speaking, what police are doing.

To take a separate example. In Utah over the past half-decade the largest cause of homicide is the police. They're technically in a rough tie with a domestic dispute leading to death, but the ordinary things driving crime elsewhere like gangs are almost non-existent as a cause of violence by comparison. There are two ways to approach that fact of life. One might be that this might mean that the public is quite safe and there are few murders, which may indicate the police are doing an effective job helping do so. In the entire state there were just over 300 in a 5 year period. There were at least that many every year in Chicago alone in that same time frame. But another way to look at is that the public could be even more safe if the police weren't busy killing some of them. Police shooting of citizens caused 45 of those deaths. There's a middle point in there somewhere where there are perhaps some cases where police have to kill someone to protect the community, but that the use of force is a last resort and rarely if ever used and rarely if ever needed versus other methods of policing (de-escalation for instance).

Missouri

I have consumed a large quantity of analysis and footage and news concerning the protests, riots, looting, shooting(s), and on and on down the litany of civil libertarian woe. My main reaction, which is typical to me, is to summon my cynicism. Not much appears likely to change. The police don't appear ready to dial down their rhetoric, equipment, or tactics. Even or perhaps especially in front of media. The public appears broadly indifferent outside of groups that were already closely following these kinds of issues (police militarization, racial profiling, police brutality/aggressiveness) with what does not appear to be a major shift beyond the slow drift away from paranoia that dominated the previous three decades.

Some thoughts.

1) It is not relevant empirically that the police killed this person instead of some other person (or some other person who was killed by police elsewhere). People should be outraged and demand transparent methods of evaluating the actions where ever police are involved in the death of a "civilian". We, the public, should view that as a failure. Even if, and I wish this were more obvious than it appears to be, the person killed was accused of or witnessed committing a crime. It's possible that the death may be later justified in self-defence, but it should always be transparently investigated. Preferably by a third party agency rather than the police itself. I would also press for this in cases of non-lethal violence (assaults, tasings, deployment of tear gas or pepper spray). Police generally are poorly trained in marksmanship, use of non-lethal weapons and tactics, and in the de-escalation of force from the evidence of these cases of death and injury, and one reason for this is the lack of a proper and transparent accountability to the public that is served by policing.

2) People complaining about these actions in Ferguson and elsewhere are not being "anti-cop" or "anti-police". Most people making such complaints, even the civil libertarian wing who has monitored the growth of militarized police forces and the expansive use of procedures like no-knock raids, asset forfeiture, and stop and frisk searches, mostly upon disfavored minorities, would acknowledge a role for police to serve the community in the pursuit of justice and law and order. The complaint is that the tactics, strategies, training, and activities of police are often inappropriate, possibly unconstitutional and certainly not respective and protective of individual civilian rights regardless of whether they are violating those rights, often well beyond the minimum level of force required to carry out their duties, and have developed legal structures and protections that make them both individually and as a whole unaccountable to the communities involved. And all the while the victims of these actions have limited voice to make a strong defense of their innocence, or the disproportionate nature of such activities.

The major change that makes this issue apparent, one hopes, isn't that our police have become more violent and hazardous to communities, but that our communities have more tools to realize and become aware that police are trying to avoid accountability and transparency (camera phones, video surveillance, body cameras on the cops themselves or in their squad cars, etc). The worry is that the problem is more endemic to the recruiting and training of police procedures, and that brutality and violence are as a result a preferred means of affecting law enforcement for some, if not many police officers. Removing such officers from the force will be increasingly difficult the more widespread the problem is. If it is cultural rather than "bad apples".

3) We do not have currently good transparent data to evaluate whether it is cultural or bad apples. Police do not generally disclose their use of aggressive search warrant tactics, the discharging of firearms, even the deaths or assaults of citizens or civilians caused by police actions (whether justified or not) are not well documented. No one keeps track of this data. Very few states require the collection and documentation of it and federal data collection is voluntary and relies upon self-reporting. Worse still, it is often difficult to document or track the "bad apples", if that is the problem, as they can shift between departments, or between districts and jurisdictions of large urban areas, without being disciplined, charged, or otherwise interfered with in the problems they are causing.

In Ferguson several years ago, there was a severe beating of an innocent man in police custody (arrested because his first and last name matched a warrant, but with a different middle name and social security number), evidence of a purported assault on an officer for which this beating supposedly occurred was destroyed or conveniently missing, and the police attempted to have him charged with "destruction of property" for bleeding on uniforms. A charge which they later retracted that had even occurred. No one was disciplined, and without there having been a legal deposition (during which they may have admitted to having offered false testimony to gain the charge in the first place), there would be no official record of who these officers were.

One possible option would be to start to use Yelp! style public reputation models for rating police interactions, such that "bad apples" who have a poor reputation in the community, whether from violence or other inappropriate actions, would be at least moderately easy to identify. I have myself mostly encountered police during traffic stops. And some of these were polite and efficient, if otherwise unpleasant, and others were unpleasant and borderline abusive. I would emphasize nothing as yet untoward has occurred to me (other than perhaps getting a ticket or two when I might have gotten off with a warning from a different cop). But there was a clear difference in the interactions that some were coming from a more authoritarian world than should be the case for police to seek to maintain while others recognized their duties to enforce the law with a minimum of disruption. If such a system were widely available, I would rate those second variety more highly and positively, and rate the former negatively.

4) One of the largest problems with policing isn't the heavy duty toys provided by the Pentagon. It is that the system of accountability makes it difficult to first recognize "bad apples" and second to properly or appropriately discipline them. The Pepper Spray cop, Lt John Pike, was found to be cleared of wrongful actions by the police's own investigation, which took months (during which time he was still being paid). Independent investigation documented insubordination (disobeying orders not to deploy with riot gear), lack of training on equipment selected for use (said riot gear, in particular the pepper spray, was not adequately trained with), escalation (showing up to a peaceful protest in riot gear), and brutal force (the actual spraying of pepper spray, incorrectly and indiscriminately), in much less time. He was only fired over the objections of the police investigation. Without the independent investigation and worldwide distribution of video documenting part of his activities, it is very likely he would still be an officer of the law today. Various other officers have committed similar actions, often on video, and remain employed and patrolling the streets of some city or town today. The FBI's internal investigations have found zero unjustified shootings out of the last 150, demonstrating that the problem of accountability may not be simply a local force and lower professional standards as causes.

These problems are not limited to use of force. Wrongful arrests, such as for people taking video or photographs of police activity, are a violation of basic civil rights. Such events typically can cost a city thousands of dollars in lawsuits and settlements. But most of the time nothing happens to the officers who actually created these violations.

5) Police militarization has occurred in large part through the war on drugs and war on terror formulations, whereupon large quantities of military hardware were gifted to police forces, large and small, urban and rural. The logic behind this is typically to proclaim a need for high value intervention forces, like SWAT teams. Most of the towns and cities which are receiving this, a) haven't had assaults, much less murders of police officers in decades if ever, and b) haven't even had many murders and shootings of "ordinary citizens" in decades. Violent crime rates have been falling, in some places fast, and in others barely, for over 20 years. You would not know this to hear it from police officers who speak of "war zones", and general danger and fear of the communities they police and work in. To be sure, they have a risky job which involves occasionally a very high danger to their personal safety. But the actual danger to police, the risk of death or injury, from assault or gunfire from suspected criminals, is extremely low. As is the actual danger in most instances of terrorism, or for mass shooting events and hostage scenarios. And almost none of these individual events requires that we arm police with sniper rifles, automatic machine guns, and armored personnel carriers. Very little of this equipment has been well trained with, or the personnel selected for advanced training rather than simply being a part of a small rural or suburban assault team.

6) The main use for these tactics and equipment is to conduct no-knock drug raids upon non-violent, mostly poor, mostly minority residents and property owners. The reason is fairly simple; in many cases the police can make seizures of a variety of assets during a drug bust, assuming the drug bust is of the correct home and finds drug paraphernalia. The incentives for doing what we would regard as ordinary police work are skewed by the "investigation" of vice crimes like drug distribution.

Taken altogether, as with many of my observations of the society around me I wonder something strange, one could wonder why there aren't people in the streets fighting with police more often in protest and/or riot formats. None of these are positive trends, and there is limited impetus to shift policy on virtually any of these designs (with the possible exception of legalizing marijuana).

One main reason: mostly these forms of mobile oppression are mostly imposed upon the poor and lower status minorities or immigrant communities. Middle class white people are then left mostly alone and see very little of these activities as commonplace. Further, they support these tactics even more when told who they are being used against. A large portion of the injustice of anti-terrorism surveillance is the singling out of Arab-American and Muslim-American communities and individuals. With little or nothing to show for it and at great expense to the taxpayer. People not only don't mind this, but prefer it. Ditto for criminal enforcement of African-American communities or their imprisonment, no matter how petty the legal infringements. Inconveniences of oppression are imagined to be much less inconvenient when they are imposed upon people "we" want oppressed anyway. Finally, most middle class white Americans do not know anyone who is of some minority, even to the extent of knowing few non-Christians. Which limits the knowledge and perspective such people might offer on the subject.

All of that means
1) Most Americans do not see a reason to be upset enough to demonstrate.
2) Most Americans see demonstrations as unusual and in need of repression rather than legitimate airing of grievances.
3) Which in turn means there's a social custom against demonstration, on this subject in particular.

It would be nice if there were more mainstream protests and movements to reform the conduct and supervision of police, or the legal incentives available to persecute, investigate, or detain and harass people for non-violent and especially consensual criminal acts like those involved in vice crime. But we're not there yet. I have been following these issues for several years with an increasing degree of annoyance. Posting about it feels at this point like a flat and useless "I told you so", but it seems no less important to keep talking about in the hope that there will be people listening.