Category: law enforcement

The insanity defense: is it sane? Thoughts from the Leopold and Loeb case.

August 17, 2020 • 10:30 am

I’m reading the book below, which I found in a free book box, about the famous Leopold and Loeb murders of 1924.  The murders took place in Hyde Park/Kenwood, just a few blocks from where I sit. Nathan Leopold (left on the cover below) and Richard Loeb, once University of Chicago students, 19 and 18 respectively, decided to commit the perfect crime—a murder. There was no obvious reason for it except for for their hubris, especially Leopold’s, for he was a fan of Nietzsche and thought he was exempt from ordinary moral strictures. That gave rise to the book’s title. (Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site, and I do recommend the book as a historical page-turner.) They planned the murder for six months, confident that they could kill someone (they planned to abduct a random child from a nearby school) and never get caught.

In May of that year, the pair abducted and brutally murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks, Leopold’s second cousin. They drove his body to Indiana and sequestered it in a railroad culvert. The pair then sent a ransom note to Franks’s family, though the child was already dead.  They probably would have pulled off the crime, too, except that Leopold dropped his glasses near the body, and they had a special frame that had been sold to only three people in Chicago. The cops quickly traced the glasses and zeroed in on the pair, who promptly confessed everything in great detail. And they confessed without ever having talked to a lawyer, which of course is a serious mistake.

Leopold and Loeb’s families were wealthy, and engaged three lawyers to defend them, including Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America. (The next year he was the major defense attorney in the Scopes “Monkey Trial”.) Darrow, who also lived near me in Hyde Park, is a hero of mine: dedicated to fighting for the underdog, fiercely smart and eloquent, and an outspoken determinist and atheist.

Left to right: Loeb, Darrow, and Leopold. Source.

The boys changed their plea from “not guilty” to “guilty”, therefore giving up a jury trial as well as the possibility of a verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity”. The only courtroom proceedings, then, were the lawyers’ arguments before the judge to determine what sentence the boys got (hanging, life without parole, or 14 years or more in prison).

Even Darrow admitted that the boys should be in jail until they died, but argued fiercely before the judge that the boys had no choice but to commit the crime—they were conditioned by their genes and environment to murder Bobby Franks. Darrow considered this mitigation, and was arguing for a prison sentence rather than hanging. Much of the book is devoted to the testimony of neurologists and psychologists who argued whether or not the boys were mentally ill, even though they couldn’t plead insanity. Darrow argued that both had mental disorders, and these played a major role in the crime.

In his summation and plea that the judge impose prison rather than the noose, Darrow made a famous twelve-hour argument, some of which you can read here. It was heavily deterministic, to wit:

This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.

. . . Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. Mr. Savage, with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?

Darrow won. To everyone’s surprise, the judge gave them both life sentences. In 1936, Loeb was murdered in prison with a razor by a fellow inmate who claimed that Loeb made homosexual advances (Leopold and Loeb had a homosexual relationship). Leopold was actually paroled in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.

I’ve digressed, but the story is a fascinating one, seen at the time as the crime of the century, with worldwide interest and publicity. Thousands of onlookers tried to rush the Chicago courtroom to hear Darrow’s summation, and finally had to be beaten back by the police.

When reading the book, I discovered that the standard for “insanity” at the time, which if proven by the defense would get you a “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict (and likely a shortish stint in an asylum) was that the defendant did not understand that his conduct was criminal. That is, he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong (in the law).

That is in fact still the law in Illinois: here’s from the criminal code of our state in 2012:

Darrow argued that although Leopold and Loeb were not “insane” by these standards (he knew that such a plea wouldn’t fly), they were nevertheless suffering from mental illness, and it is on this issue that his speech centered.

While thinking it over, I realized, as I’ve said here before, that understanding that your crime was against the law is a lousy criterion for “insanity” mitigation in these cases. That’s because, as a determinist, I think that to some extent everyone who commits a crime is “insane” in the sense that they could not help themselves. As for Illinois’s insanity defense,  there may be those, including some serial killers, who know that their deeds are criminal and illegal, but are under such delusions or compulsions that they cannot help themselves, even though they know about conventional and legal morality.

Is “a knowledge of criminality”, then, to be the line that divides a gentler, more rehabilitative punishment from one that throws you into jail with other criminals, a dreadful fate if you’ve committed a capital offense? I can’t see why.  Why is “mental illness that blinds you to criminality” so different from “mental illness that compels you to do murder, even though you know it’s wrong?”  In fact, as a determinist, I don’t think that the criminal, at the moment of the crime (and oftentimes before, as with Leopold and Loeb) could have chosen to behave differently. Regardless of your views on punishment, if you agree with me—and I think all science-minded people must)—then you have to take determinism into account when weighing punishments.

My own view, which I’ve expounded here over and over again, is that even “hard” determinism mandates punishment for three reasons: to keep a dangerous person out of society (sequestration), to rehabilitate them if possible (so that sequestration can end), and to deter others (deterrence). But none of this justifies any punishment, like the prosecutor in the Leopold/Loeb case argued repeatedly, based on the fact that the criminal made the wrong choice. (The State’s Attorney repeatedly argued for the death penalty because Leopold and Loeb, not being insane, could have realized the criminality of their act and refrained from it.)

And although both Darrow and I are determinists, he went even further than I, arguing that prisons were superfluous. But perhaps we do agree on this: “prison” shouldn’t be an exercise in horror, but a removal from society (which is punishment itself and a deterrent), combined with whatever therapy necessary to ensure that the criminal can be returned to society. If there is no such therapy, then sequestration for life is mandated. In Norway, you’re examined for rehabilitation every five years, and if you’re judged un-rehabilitated, you stay in jail for another five years. But Norwegian prisons are far less brutal than American ones.

In other words, I don’t like the insanity defense, which offers true rehabilitation only to those deemed “insane”.  My view of criminal trials is that there should be two phases:

A. Was the criminal “responsible” for the deed? That is, did he do the act, period? That can be decided by a jury.

B. What is the best way to treat a convicted criminal in light of the three rationales for punishment given above? What sequestration is an appropriate deterrent? (That is something that can be decided empirically.) Is there a form or rehabilitation that will allow the criminal to return to society and pose no more danger than that of an ordinary citizen? If there is, that therapy should be given. The sentence, then, should be imposed not by judges or juries, but by a panel of experts, legal, medical and psychiatric.

I know that this mandates an extensive reform of the American penal system, and will be costly and will involve trial and error for a long time to come. And many people who are libertarian free-willers, and who think that criminals could have decided otherwise, will oppose reforms that take determinism into account.  But I can’t see any good argument for keeping the present system, which is cruel, retributive, and yields a high rate of recidivism.

_________

CODA:

Here are Leopold and Loeb’s mugshots taken when they entered prison (Leopold is at the top

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Once again: is the higher per capita rate of black deaths at the hands of police due to racism?

June 21, 2020 • 12:30 pm

In the past couple of weeks I’ve written about the views of the African-American English and Comparative Literature Professor John McWhorter (e.g., here and here) on whether the higher per capita rate of deaths of black people at the hands of police implicates racism.  His view was “not necessarily,” and he posed an alternative hypothesis. His hypothesis is based simply on the fact that arrests for violent crime in America is higher for blacks than for whites; the article below, from the Boston Globe, says 3.6 times as often.

Now if presuppose that there is no racism as the null hypothesis, and then posit that there is a probability x, identical for blacks and whites, that an encounter with the police will lead to police murder of the suspect. If this is the case, and blacks encounter police more often, then one can still get a higher per capita death rate of African-Americans than of whites even with identical “x”s.  So the higher per capita rate does not in itself implicate racism (n.b., McWhorter does highlight that there are data, like those from traffic stops, that do indicate racism on the part of police).

As I pointed out at the time, nobody seems to have adduced the right data needed to settle the situation:

Of course these are just parallels and don’t answer the question we want to know: are black people more likely to be murdered by cops on a per capita basis, in a given set of encounters, with controls from white suspects in similar situations, with all other things roughly equal? If that’s the case, then racism is implicated. Anecdotes like those above won’t answer that question.

The same point is made by Aubrey Clayton, a mathematician and author, in this Globe article (click on the screenshot below).  I think he makes the point unnecessarily complicated because he uses math and many American are innumerate, but the point is pretty much the same as mine:

Here’s Clayton’s analysis, which is further complicated because he doesn’t use equal number of incidents for whites and blacks, so you have to multiply up:

Could the reaction to high-profile killings like those of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd be a matter of confirmation bias? Could the narrative of police racism be disproved with a tweet-sized calculation?

No.

These statistics are consistent with excessive use of deadly force against Black people, due to a mathematical phenomenon called Simpson’s Paradox.

The key point is that not all encounters with police are equally deadly. In any given kind of encounter with the police, a Black person can be likelier to be killed than a white person even if the overall rate of deaths per encounter appears lower for Black people. This would happen because Black people have many more interactions with police in non-deadly situations — a dynamic exacerbated by racism. And all those extra encounters dilute the rate.

Consider two extremes of police encounters: traffic stops and active shooter scenarios. Suppose, hypothetically, that a white suspect is killed by police in one out of 100,000 traffic stops and nine out of 10 shootings. And imagine that Black suspects are killed by police after 20 out of 1,000,000 traffic stops and in 10 out of 10 active shooter incidents. In each kind of incident, Black suspects are killed more often than white suspects. In aggregate, though, the percentage is higher for white people: 10 out of 100,010 white people are killed vs. 30 out of 1,000,010 Black people, because the white people tend to encounter the police in more grave situations.

He could have given the per capita death rate here, which is 0.01% for whites and 0.003% for blacks, despite the higher per capita death rate of black suspects in both traffic stops and shootings. This depends on the particular figures chosen, of course, but the upshot is that if encounters with the police have different death rates for different races, and those encounters have substantially different frequencies among races, then one is not justified in imputing different death rates as a statistical result of number of police encounters. In other words, higher crime rates of blacks than whites doesn’t take racism off the table as a cause of higher per capita death rates of black suspects. In fairness to McWhorter, I don’t think he makes that argument, but broaches it as a possibility that needs to be considered, and I agree.

(Note, though, that the 3.6-fold difference cited by Clayton is “arrests for violent crimes”, not traffic stops.)

Getting the right data, however, involves more than just calculating homicides in traffic stops versus active shootings. If someone stopped in traffic has a gun, or refuses to obey police orders to show their hands, those factors may differ among groups and also lead to differential death rates in very similar kinds of arrests. Getting the right “controls” here may, I’m starting to realize, may be impossible, as each encounter has its unique aspects. Clayton realizes this:

There are, of course, more than two types of police encounters in reality, and whether any of them involves deadly force will depend on many factors, such as whether the suspect is armed and making threats, how many officers are on the scene, and so on. The actual data is far more complex than in this simplified example, and there isn’t consensus over whether clear evidence of encounter-specific racial bias exists. There are just too many variables for the data to be definitive on its own.

That’s why one study, frequently cited as evidence that Black people are killed just as often (or less often) as others in similar situations, has been critiqued by other researchers who noted that “its approach is mathematically incapable of supporting its central claims.”

So give credit to Clayton as well for saying that we just don’t know the role racism plays overall in the disparity between death rates between whites and blacks in police encounters. And perhaps we can’t settle that with data (remember that the race of the police officers must be considered as well, assuming that blacks can’t be racist against blacks nor whites against whites).

And here’s Clayton’s conclusion, which seems reasonable. It’s not really a conclusion but a caveat:

The inflated number of non-lethal encounters Black people experience due to racial profiling could be what shifts the balance, perversely using one kind of discrimination, over-policing, to mask another: the greater use of deadly force against Black suspects. Simpson’s Paradox predicts these counterintuitive results whenever data is averaged over inconsistent group sizes. Here, the inconsistency lies in the types of interactions Black and white people have with police. Since these are distributed differently, the pooled numbers can get the story backwards.

. . . as they do in Clayton’s example above.  The lesson for us: while in certain cases racism is clearly involved in the murder of black suspects (police remarks on the scene, differential deaths due to racial profiling in traffic stops, which is a fact, and so on), we cannot say, as so many are doing now, that the disproportionate number of deaths of blacks at the hands of police is prima facie evidence of structural racism in the police. We need controlled data to say that. We may not get that data, but at least we can do things to try to eliminate anything that smacks of racism in police departments, like getting information on traffic stops and other stops for nonviolent crimes like drugs.

h/t: Scott

McWhorter on police violence

June 14, 2020 • 11:30 am

Although John McWhorter, a professor of English and linguistics at Columbia University, is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, his new essay on police violence was not published there. Rather, it’s in Quillette. Given that in length, style, and quality (it’s very well written and makes cogent points) it would be suitable for The Atlantic, I’m guessing that he didn’t even try to publish it there. That’s because it makes an argument that is politically uncongenial to The Atlantic and to much of the Left:  that perhaps the claim that black men get shot by police at a rate higher than their frequency in the population  is not a function of police racism, but of a greater frequency of interactions between blacks and police due to a higher crime rate in black communities.

This idea is heterodox, contrarian, and is suitable for Quillette. But no mainstream Leftist media would ever touch it, even though it might contain some truth. It’s not ideologically acceptable to say that while there are some racist cops, the difference in the relative frequency of blacks versus whites killed by cops could be due to a higher crime rate among black males and in the black community, perhaps itself a function of poverty that breeds crime. This is a valid hypothesis, but it taboo for most of us to discuss. As black men, however people like McWhorter and Glenn Lourycan say this without fear of being deemed “racists”.

Read for yourself (click on screenshot).

First, the disproportionality:

. . . .it remains true that black people are killed at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Does this decisively demonstrate racial bias or murderous animus on the part of American law enforcement? Blacks represent about 13 percent of the US population but about a quarter of victims in cop killings. Whites constitute about 62 percent of the population but only half of those killed by the police. With slight fluctuations, these trends have been broadly consistent.

But you can’t say that this itself is prima facie evidence that cops are racist, and that they murder men like George Floyd because they’re black. As McWhorter notes:

However, these figures are not necessarily evidence of police racism. According to the Washington Post‘s database, over 95 percent of the people fatally shot by police officers in 2019 were male, and no serious-minded person argues that this is evidence of systemic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the disproportionate representation of black men among those killed by cops?

McWhorter gives lots of examples of both black men and white men killed by cops in nearly identical circumstances, but the deaths of whites gets much less attention because it doesn’t play into a narrative of police racism. One is Tony Pimpa, a 32-year-old white man who suffocated in 2016 when a cop put a knee on his back for 13 minutes. Timpa’s crime was calling the cops himself for help because he feared he might be a danger to himself when he was drunk. That’s just the first example, and McWhorter gives others:

Timpa was, of course, just one case and might be dismissed as an anomaly. On the other hand, we are told that what happened to George Floyd is what happens to black people “all the time.” But because the killing of black suspects by white police officers receives more media attention and elicits more outrage, such instances leave us vulnerable to the availability heuristic—a cognitive bias that leads us to form judgements about the prevalence of phenomena based on the readiness with which we can recall examples. Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too. And just as the Timpa case tragically parallels the Floyd one, there are countless episodes paralleling those we hear about involving black people.

In 2014, John Crawford, black, was shot dead by police while waving a BB gun. In 2016, Daniel Shaver, white, was waving a pellet gun out of motel window and suffered the same fate. In 2015, officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, black, in the back and killed him as he was running to evade a traffic ticket; the following year, Andrew Thomas, white, was shot in the neck by a police officer and killed as he climbed out of the SUV he had crashed trying to evade arrest. In 2015, Sam DuBose, black, was shot dead as he tried to escape a traffic summons in his car; the same year, Michael Parker, white, was shot dead in the same way while trying escape a ticket for a moving violation. In 2016, Philando Castile, black, was shot dead in his car by a cop as he reached under his waistband for his license and registration during a traffic stop; the same year, Dylan Noble, white, was shot dead under almost identical circumstances. Also in 2016, Alton Sterling, black, was shot dead in front of a convenience store as he was being detained for unruly conduct; the same year, Brandon Stanley, white, was shot dead in a convenience store for trying to avoid a warrant.

Of course these are just parallels and don’t answer the question we want to know: are black people more likely to be murdered by cops on a per capita basis, in a given set of encounters, with controls from white suspects in similar situations, with all other things roughly equal? If that’s the case, then racism is implicated. Anecdotes like those above won’t answer that question.

But the point McWhorter is making is that there are other causes for higher per capita rates of blacks being shot by police, and we have to work out why this is the case. He mentions some alternatives (I’ve bolded the crux of his thesis).

The socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor. Police are called to poor neighborhoods more often, so poverty makes someone more likely to encounter law enforcement. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many conservatives argued that too many black people were on welfare. Liberals and progressives replied that, firstly, more white people were on welfare and that, secondly and more importantly, a greater proportion of the black population is on welfare because a greater proportion of black people are mired in poverty. In this context, former Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery observed that black people are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cops than their representation in the population would predict. Today, the percentage of black people living in poverty is about two-and-a-half times that of whites (22 percent and nine percent, respectively, in 2018).

This disparity in poverty rates means black people are also disproportionately represented in rates of violent crime. Poverty can lead to dangerous survival choices that include lucrative criminal activity. Furthermore, outstanding warrants can cause suspects to flee law enforcement when stopped for other trivial infractions. This disparity cannot explain every fatal police shooting, including some of the most notorious examples, such as the shootings of Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. Nevertheless, the tragedy remains: Higher aggregate crime rates lead to more encounters with police officers overall which increases the likelihood that a proportion of those encounters will get out of hand. Entrenched socioeconomic disparities should concern us all, and are as intolerable as cop murders. But the idea that the police murder out of racist animus is much less clear than we are often led to suppose.

This is not to say that McWhorter thinks that no cops are racists, or that there isn’t a systematic form of racism among some police departments. He notes, for example, that blacks are disproportionately pulled over by cops for drug searches, and that must be due to race since the disparity with whites disappears after dusk when race is harder to identify. Further, blacks are more likely than whites to be handcuffed, put up against a wall, or confronted with drawn weapons.  If one can indeed show that the same disparity holds for murder with the appropriate controls, then, Houston (and Atlanta and Minneapolis), we have a problem.

Here’s McWhorter’s ending:

Police officers are too often overarmed, undertrained, and low on empathy. Some police officers are surely racist and act like it. But it does not follow that white cops routinely kill black people in tense situations out of racist animus. This scenario may seem plausible—I believed it until only a few years ago. But there are times when facts are counterintuitive, and it is important to get the facts right and to analyze them with clear eyes and a clear mind (the enlightening work of criminologist and ex-cop Peter Moskos is helpful in this regard). Rhetoric has a way of straying from reality, and to get where we all want to go, it is reality that we must address.

 McWhorter’s message is that we shouldn’t rush to judgment about racist killer cops. It may be too late: the claim is largely taken for granted by many. But McWhorter can get away with saying this only because he’s black, and thus can’t be called a racist (I suspect he’s already suffered that, though). That only African-American can argue this way without opprobrium is, as they, problematic.  To paraphrase Dr. King, the validity of an argument should not depend on the pigmentation of the person who makes it.

 

Calls to literally abolish the police

June 13, 2020 • 11:00 am

There’s been some discussion about what the demand for “defunding the police” really means. To some it means cutting police budgets in ways to minimize their brutality, and the example often used is their acquisition of discarded equipment from the U.S. military, or more training in social work by cops. To others it means deeply slashing police budgets, although where the cuts are to go isn’t often specified. Often the slashed funds are to be diverted to social programs whose existence, they claim, will severely reduce crime.

And to others in the “disband the police” camp, it means, as adherent Mariame Kaba says in the New York Times op-ed below, the literal abolition of police departments. And that’s what she argues (click screenshot to read). There was a lot of criticism about what Tom Cotton said in his NYT editorial, because his call for putting the military in U.S. cities to police demonstrations was just dumb. Well, Mariame Kaba’s op-ed seems just as dumb to me, but it meets with no criticism because it’s woke.

Kaba is a writer, organizer, and activist advocating for abolition of the police and the prison-industrial complex.  Here are her arguments for disbanding the police:

1.) Most cops don’t spend their time going after bad guys, but writing traffic tickets, fielding noise complaints, ad other issues. She quotes someone saying “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”  This, of course, overlooks the deterrent effect of simply having a police presence. If there weren’t cops on the street, people would be running red lights and stop signs willy-nilly, and traffic accidents would increase. Likewise with crime in general, as the Montreal police strike of 1969 showed.

2.) The tendency of cops to “keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence, and death” does not create a safer society. To the extent that this is true (and tomorrow we’ll see a dissent by John McWhorter), this needs to be stopped. Police should not be treating people differently based on their race. But before we make this assertion, we need evidence that it’s the case. I suspect it is for many interactions between police and citizens, but it’s not so clear for things like cops killing people.  The solution is not to abolish the police, but to train them better, and to ruthlessly weed out the bad apples. Bodycams must be turned on at all times, and so on.

3.) “Police officers break rules all the time.” Kaba mentions slashing tires, shoving people unnecessarily, arresting journalists, and so on. Again, the solution is to instill police officers with a respect for the rules, which includes the threat of firing and, if they break the law, of arrest.

Kaba’s error here is to propose complete abolition of police departments in a naive faith that people who aren’t policed will act well, eliminating the need for cops. But if you live on planet Earth, this is palpably ridiculous. Alternatives to cops, she says, are more social work, health care, better housing, and so on. And yes, these are things we must do to eliminate the inequalities created by history, and surely will help eliminate crime, a lot of which stems from poverty. But not all of it!  We will still have crimes not motivated by poverty (this is assuming we can get rid of it, which is a long way off): murders, rapes, white-collar crime, terrorism, and so on. And of course many of these crimes have nothing to do with social inequality.

But here: read what Kaba wants:

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What, no sequestration of dangerous people, sequestration that not only keeps the baddies out of society, but could also act as a deterrent and, in an ideal world (not the U.S.!) help reform people?  Restorative justice, in which offenders meet with those they’ve harmed and work out resolutions, can work in some cases of nonviolent crimes, but will it work with armed robbers, rapists, or people like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or other sociopaths? What would Kaba do with a serial killer, or someone who murders a bank clerk while committing a robbery? And even with restorative justice, how do you catch the offender in the first place without police? Are they just going to come forward and confess?

And what about rape or sexual assault, crimes not clearly connected with poverty? Kaba’s solution to this seems heartless; she simply claims “but cops rape, too, and, anyway, most rapists are never caught.”:

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct.  In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

Got it? Because there’s still rape, police are useless against the crime.  True, it’s hard to catch and successfully prosecute rape, but, according to the Department of Justice, “About 234,000 convicted sex offenders are under the care, custody, or control of corrections agencies on an average day.” 5% of the U.S. prison population consists of sexual offenders. What would Kaba do about this? She has no solution.

Instead, she counts on people’s goodwill to ensure that a world without cops would largely be a world without crime. I think she’s sorely mistaken. And her palaver about “restorative justice”, and the feel-good sentiments below, don’t make a good case for abolishing the police. By all means reform police departments, and by all means ensure that more money flows to the root causes of crime, including inequality, poverty, and lack of opportunity. But seriously, abolish the police? Who would you call if you were raped, or if someone is trying to break into your house? A social worker?

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

Holy Kropotkin, Batman! A vision entirely without police? Does any country in the world lack police? I don’t think so—even the most progressive ones, and even countries far more racially homogeneous than the U.S. Until I see a convincing case for why a country without police would be better than one with police, and some concrete plans for how we replace the cops but ensure people’s safety, I’m not signing on.

By the way, this is also happening at the University of Chicago (and other schools as well), where some faculty and many students want the large University of Chicago police department to be disbanded. There was in fact a demonstration for this yesterday, and you can read their “demands” on the Facebook page below (click on screenshot).

This won’t work either, especially because they explicitly say that they’re not trying to replace the University of Chicago police with the City of Chicago’s police. No, they just want no cops on or around the campus (the U of C police patrol an area much larger than the campus, and although some of them have harassed black students, by and large they’re a potent force keeping our campus safe. Without them, we’d suffer an attrition of faculty, staff, and students, who depend on campus police to help keep the area safe.  Sometimes I wonder if people who make demands like this are thinking clearly. No, let me be a bit stronger: I think people who make demands like this are not thinking clearly, or perhaps are involved in some kind of performative virtue-flaunting. I will have no truck with them.

But no worries: our University is not stupid enough to get rid of its police department.

Dismantling (or defunding) police departments

June 8, 2020 • 10:15 am

One of the misguided goals of the recent protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd are the calls not just for “defunding” police departments, but to abolish them entirely. Now it’s often not clear what “defunding” means, but sometimes protestors conceive of it as diverting money from the police force to social programs.

In the disturbing video below, Jacob Frey, the impossibly young mayor of Minneapolis (he’s 38), is asked by a protest leader if he’ll commit to defunding/dismantling the city’s police department. When he says he can’t commit to that, he was booed and driven away (this despite his promises to make “deep structural reforms” in the police department and admission that the city’s police culture was imbued with systemic racism). This is what happens when you try to compromise with wokeness. There is no compromise, and perhaps a mayor can’t commit to stuff like that with a simple “yes” or “no” answer, as they demanded.

 

And indeed, Minneapolis is a city where the city council, weighing in with a veto-proof majority, has sworn to eliminate the police department entirely, replacing it with, well, it’s not clear. Here’s the NYT article on the issue:

The call here is not for reform, but for abolition:

Nine members of the Minneapolis City Council — a veto-proof majority — pledged on Sunday to dismantle the Police Department, promising to create a new system of public safety in a city where law enforcement has long been accused of racism.

Saying that the city’s policing system could not be reformed, the council members stood before hundreds of people gathered late in the day on a grassy hill and promised to begin the process of taking apart the Police Department as it now exists.

For activists who have been pushing for years for drastic changes to policing, the move represented a turning point that they hope will lead to a transformation of public safety in the city.

“It shouldn’t have taken so much death to get us here,” Kandace Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said from the stage at the rally. “We’re safer without armed, unaccountable patrols supported by the state hunting black people.”

The pledge in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died 13 days ago after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee, reflected calls across America to rethink what policing looks like. Protesters have taken to the streets with demands to shrink or abolish police departments, and “defund the police” has become a frequent rallying cry.

Officials in other cities, including New York, have begun to talk of diverting some money and responsibilities from police forces to social services agencies, but no other major city has gone as far in reaction to the protests as the Minneapolis officials have promised to do.

Council members said in interviews on Sunday that they did not yet have specific plans to announce for what a new public safety system for the city would look like. They promised to develop plans by working with the community, and said they would draw on past studies, consent decrees and reforms to policing across the nation and the world.

It seems to me that before you abolish the police department, you have to have a plan for what will replace it. The fact that these people don’t have a plan suggests that theirs is a knee-jerk reaction, not a thoughtful response (there have been thoughtful responses by others, though; see below).  It’s telling that although the council members don’t have a replacement plan, the New York Times tried to put words into their mouths—and into the mouths of others. Here’s one example where editorializing creeps into the Times’s news coverage:

Protesters’ cries to defund or abolish the police are often not meant literally. Rather, they are demands to rethink a law enforcement system from the ground up and to grapple with deeply ingrained issues, including employing officers who do not live in the city they police — as is done in Minneapolis — and sending armed officers to respond to situations that turn out not to be crimes, as when a mentally ill person is in distress.

Oh really? How does the New York Times know what the protestors mean? How do they know that the city council doesn’t want to abolish the Minneapolis police department? Answer: they don’t; the paper is trying to alter what the protestors are saying to make it more palatable to the paper’s liberal audience.

As for defunding, well, there are some reforms suggested by more thoughtful people in the body of the piece, suggestions like asking whether a 911 caller needs medical, mental-health, fire, or police assistance before dispatching help (don’t they do that already?), self-policing of communities, and so on (there really aren’t many alternatives mentioned).  What seems more sensible is a bottom-up and top-down reform of problematic police departments.

I have no idea whether there’s a lot of fat in police budgets, but unless you have an effective alternative to the current “style” (and I don’t mean brutal or racist style) of policing, it would be unwise to willy-nilly cut millions of dollars from police budgets without some heavy scrutiny.

The idea to completely replace conventional police with community policing or some unspecified alternative seems to me very unwise. I remember the Montreal Police Strike on October 7, 1969 (also known as the “Murray-Hill riot“), when the police, fed up with low pay and poor working conditions, went on strike for just one day. With no police on call, things went to hell. Wikipedia reports:

As the police were on strike, a crowd of disgruntled taxi drivers belonging to the Mouvement de Libération du Taxi appeared outside of the City Hall at about 6 p.m. supporting the police strike, carrying banners denouncing the Mayor, Jean Drapeau, as being corrupt. After the rally, the taxi drivers formed a convoy that were escorted by the Popeyes Motorcycle Club, the most violent of all Montreal’s many outlaw biker clubs. Joining the convoy were journalists and members of the FLQ carrying banners demanding independence for Quebec. On the street, the convoy encountered a Murray-Hill limousine that was forced to stop. The passengers and driver were allowed to leave, and then the car was smashed to pieces by the taxi drivers and the Popeyes.

The taxi drivers, Popeyes and FLQ congregated around the Murray-Hill garage in Griffintown, protesting against Murray-Hill’s monopoly at the Dorval International Airport. Attempts by the Sûreté du Québec to stop the procession towards the garage were stopped by striking Montreal policemen. Many of the taxi drivers were armed with Molotov cocktails as they were intent upon burning down the Murray-Hill company’s garage. At the Murray-Hill headquarters, various young people began to throw rocks and bricks through the windows, followed by Molotov cocktails. A sniper opened fire, leading one demonstrator to return fire. The fire came from the Murray-Hill security guards armed with 12-gauge shotguns, whose blasts left several people seriously injured. One young man managed to take over a Murray-Hill cab and drove it into a row of five limousines and three buses. The eight officers from the Sûreté du Québec attempting ineffectually to stop the riot were surrounded by the taxi drivers and as a journalist from La Presse wrote: “were shouted down, roughed up, had their caps thrown into the air, and their badges ripped off”.  During the melée, Sûreté corporal Robert Dumas was killed by shots fired from the roof by security guards and the owner’s son Buses were overturned and burned. As the situation at the Murray-Hill garage escalated, the bulk of the Sûreté du Québec officers in the city were ordered to go there, leaving the rest of the city exposed.

Crowds began to smash windows and loot stores. In particular, the crowds targeted a high-end restaurant owned by Drapeau, La Vaisseau d’Or, which was thoroughly trashed and looted. Also targeted were pick-up points owned by the Murray-Hill company, McGill university and the Montreal offices of IBM. Gangs of masked men armed with guns began to systematically rob the banks, through most bankers had made certain the day before that there was only a minimal amount of cash on-hand, limiting their losses. One branch of the Banque d’Épargne that failed do so lost some $28,845 dollars that day as three masked men smashed their way in.

The Montreal Gazette reported on 8 October 1969:

“Fires, explosions, assaults and a full-pitched gun-battle kept Montrealers huddled indoors as the reign of terror brought the city to the edge of chaos and resulted in the call for the Army help… Hundreds of looters swept through downtown Montreal last night as the city suffered one of the worst outbreaks of lawlessness in its history. Hotels, banks, stores and restaurants around the Ste-Catherine-Peel Street axis had their windows smashed by rock-tossing youths. Thousands of spectators looked on as looters casually picked goods out of store-front windows.”

Many of the young French-Canadians who looted the stores claimed to be striking against the economic domination of Montreal’s Anglo minority, leading them to chant separatist slogans. Despite this claim, the looters did not distinguish between stores owned by French-Canadians and English-Canadians. By the end of the day, over half a million dollars worth of goods had been looted from various stores while a hundred people were arrested.

There are some contested data showing that when New York Police decided to stop enforcing less serious crimes in 2014 and 2015, the crime rate actually dropped. But the causation is here is unclear. Nevertheless, that is not what these protestors are talking about.

If you’re going to deep-six police departments, you’ll have to replace them with something that has enough deterrent power to prevent stuff like this from happening. I hope people are thinking about that.

 

ACLU continues defending the right of medically untreated men who claim they’re women to compete in women’s sports

February 13, 2020 • 11:15 am

I used to admire the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); I used to donate to the ACLU and was a member of the ACLU; the ACLU took my case when I was drafted illegally, and got me (and several thousand COs) out of our alternative service when the courts ruled unequivocally that the government had violated its own rules. Over history, the ACLU has been a fantastic organization for preserving the civil liberties of everyone, particularly those who are oppressed.

But now they’re going woke, and thereby going downhill. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, they have decided to get into the social-justice arena—which would be okay except that they are taking positions that are neither reasonable nor supportable. In this case, they’re trying to argue that it’s discriminatory to prohibit biological men who claim that they’re women—”transgender” athletes who have undergone neither surgical nor hormone therapy—from competing in women’s sports.  The ACLU has been arguing this for some time (see here), and the motivation behind this are recent instances when men who identify as women, but haven’t undergone hormone treatment or surgery, are beating the pants off women in track events. See this description of a Connecticut race in which two transgender women took first and second place, at least one of which—and probably both—hadn’t begun physical or hormonal transition (see also here).

In this 2019 article on the ACLU website (click on screenshot), two employees of the organization argue against banning “trans girls” from school sports. The problem is the definition of what a “trans girl” is. If it includes males who have decided they’re women but have done nothing to modify their bodies, then their argument loses force.  And Medley and Sherwin apparently abide by that definition.

I’ve written several times about the difficult ethical and physiological issues at play when deciding how to deal with both transgender athletes and those who have an intermediate sexuality (see some of the articles at this link). The problem is what kind of definition you use to assign someone as “men” and “women” in contests like the Olympics.

But I don’t think anyone would disagree that if you’re born as a biological man, and you decide you’re a woman but do nothing about it medically except make the claim, you should not be allowed to compete with women. It’s unfair to the women, for there are pronounced physical and strength differences between men and women that give men an inherent advantage in many sports. In fact, this is the very reason why men’s and women’s sports are segregated—to prevent unfairness.

In fact, even if you begin a medical transition to a woman after puberty, the muscle mass and bone strength you’ve acquired already may give you an advantage in sports that lasts for a lifetime. That is a more difficult problem, and one that I’ll leave aside (see my discussion here).

However, in many states, including Connecticut, biological men need not undergo any medical transitioning to claim that they’re women, and thus to compete with women in sports. As the Washington Times notes, (my emphasis below):

Connecticut is one of 17 states that allow transgender high school athletes to compete without restrictions, according to Transathlete.com, which tracks state policies in high school sports across the country. Seven states have restrictions that make it difficult for transgender athletes to compete while in school, like requiring athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate, or allowing them to participate only after going through sex-reassignment procedures or hormone therapies.

The other states either have no policy or handle the issue on a case-by-case basis.

“Without restrictions” means that the simple claim that you’re a woman qualifies a biological male to compete in women’s sports. Such claims were apparently made by the two winners of the Connecticut track championships. In fact, according to the Associated Press, the families of three of the women athletes who lost in these competitions are suing the state for its criteria (they also seek to ban all transgender athletes from participating in girl’s sports, which isn’t as cut-and-dried as prohibiting just males who haven’t begun transitioning).

In its self-righteous article, the ACLU uses the Connecticut case an an example of discrimination against transgender people. Here’s a quote (the reference to the Connecticut case isn’t here:  it’s at the beginning of the piece.)

There is a long legacy of sex discrimination in athletics. Myths, such as the idea that physical exertion would harm women’s reproductive systems or that women were inherently inferior athletes, were historically used to “protect” women out of participation in entire fields, including marathon racing and contact sports, despite ample evidence that girls can compete and win against boys. The enactment of Title IX, the federal statute banning sex discrimination in school programs and activities receiving federal funds, was intended to end such discrimination, and it has indeed resulted in a dramatic increase in girls’ participation in sports. But girls — and particularly girls of color — still face stark inequalities in opportunities, funding, and resources.

The marginalization of trans student athletes is rooted in the same harmful history of gender discrimination and stereotyping that has impeded the achievement of gender equality in sports as a whole. Old stereotypes regarding athleticism, biology, and gender are being directed at transgender girls, who are frequently told outright that they are not girls (and conversely transgender boys are told they are not really boys). This policing of gender has been used to justify subjecting transgender student athletes to numerous additional barriers to participating in sports, from onerous medical requirements to segregation in locker rooms to outright bans on their participation.

The truth is, transgender women and girls have been competing in sports at all levels for years, and there is no research supporting the claim that they maintain a competitive advantage.

Much of this is okay, but it is also said to apply to what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “psychologically transitioned women.” And notice the link in the last sentence; it goes to an Everyday Feminism article that doesn’t talk about research at all! I’d bet a substantial amount of money that medically untreated men who compete in women’s sports will indeed “maintain a competitive advantage.”

The ACLU would have a better case if they argued that “transgender women” who have a right to participate in women’s sport were men who had begun hormone and other medical therapies to remove some of the inherent male advantage in size, bone structure, and strength—though even that might not be an ethical fix. But does the ACLU really want to die on the hill of arguing that men who haven’t done anything to their bodies should be able to compete in women’s sports? For surely that would be the end of women’s sport!

As I’ve always said, if someone born male wants us to address them as women, treat them like they’re women in everyday circumstances, use female pronouns, and assure them equal rights, that’s fine. But that equality isn’t automatic when it comes to sports—or other situations like rape counseling when victims want help from biological women. The mantra “trans women are women” is insupportable when those “trans women” rest their identities solely on a claim without any medical intervention—and then want to engage in women’s sports.

Is there any reader who supports the ACLU’s arguments—unless the transgender women who want to compete have begun medical transitioning?  Does anybody feel that an unaltered male should be able to compete with women solely on the basis of an identity claim? I doubt it. And yet that’s the law in 17 states.

The ACLU would have more credibility if it had more nuance (yes, I used that word) about what it was trying to defend. Of course we must come to grips with the athletic implications of transgender people, but we can start by asserting that some medical intervention is required before you can “switch teams.”

It’s very sad when the defining institutions of the old Left, like the ACLU, undergo mission creep of this kind, becoming so woke that they can no longer rationally deal with legal or moral issues.

UPDATE: I see from the ACLU’s website that they’ve been busy tweeting away about this. An example:

Really? Come at me, bro? What the bloody hell happened to this once admirable organization?

Recreational marijuana and cannabis products now legal in Illinois; Lieutenant Governor among the first to buy

January 2, 2020 • 10:00 am

With all the bad news stretching through the holidays, we have some good news in Illinois: as of January 1, recreational marijuana and its derivatives are legal to buy in our state. Last June, our new Democratic governor, J. B. Pritzker, signed a bill allowing those 21 and older to buy 30 grams of marijuana (a bit over an ounce), 5 grams of cannabis concentrates like oils, and “edibles” containing up to 500 mg of THC. If you’re an out-of-state resident, you can buy half that amount, but of course you aren’t allowed to transport it across state lines, or fly with it anywhere.

This makes 11 states total where recreational marijuana is legal, as well as Washington D.C.  Here’s a map from Business Insider of where both medical and recreational marijuana is legal (the green ones, along with Washington, D.C.):

Many stores were open yesterday, on New Year’s Day, and, according to the local news, the lines at the dispensaries in Chicago were long, with waits from 4-6 hours. You can see the CNN report by clicking on the screenshot below:

From the CNN report:

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton was among hundreds of early morning customers at Sunnyside Dispensary, a Chicago marijuana dispensary, on the first day of legal recreational sales in the state, according to a release from Cresco Labs, which owns the dispensary.

“For too long, IL residents, particularly those that are black & brown, have been targeted and criminalized for #cannabis possession,” Stratton wrote in a tweet following her visit. “It’s not just a new year, it’s a new day. Thank you, @GovPritzker, for ending prohibition and building a more equitable Illinois.”

Stratton bought a 100-milligram tin of Mindy’s Edibles Glazed Clementine Orange Gummies, according to a statement from Joe Caltabiano, Cresco Labs president and co-founder. Each gummy is 5 milligrams, a “very popular microdose for beginning edible consumers,” he said.

I want to know how she jumped the queue to get in first!

Here’s Stratton’s tweet:

And look at those lines!

According to the longer Chicago Tribune report (which gives a handy map of the dispensaries), the lines were accelerated by having people write their orders down on paper bags before entering the store. To wit:

Forty-three dispensaries have been approved as state weed-procurement sites, most of them around Chicago.

It’s only a matter of time, I think, before marijuana is legal in every state, though that might happen through decriminalization on the federal level rather than state by state, and that will still be some time away. So if you smoke weed anywhere that it’s legal, you remain in accord with state laws but in violation of federal laws.

In the meantime, as CBS News reports, the next states that may legalize recreational marijuana—and this is not by any means certain—include Florida, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and Minnesota. It’s simply baffling that alcohol, a far more dangerous drug than marijuana, is legal almost everywhere (there are a few dry counties and cities), but marijuana remains illegal in most places. This is presumably because of its reputation as the “devil’s weed”, coupled with weed’s reputation as a gateway drug to “harder” stuff. That’s true to a very limited extent, but so are alcohol and tobacco.

Further good news: on New Year’s Eve, governor Pritzker approved pardons for 11,000 low-level marijuana offenders, a smart move that will save the state considerable money.

“Happy” New Year!