Month: February 2019

The trail leading to the bungled drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple at their home in Houston on Monday began with a January 8 phone call from an anonymous woman who claimed to be standing outside the house and looking through a window. The woman told police “her daughter was in the house, and there were guns and heroin,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a press conference yesterday.

Two patrol officers dispatched to the house could not find the caller, but they reported that they heard another woman who was walking down the street say “the police are at the dope house” while talking on a cellphone. The officers called the woman who made the complaint. “She stated she did not want to give any information because they were drug dealers and they would kill her,” Acevedo said. “She wanted the officers to go into the house and get her daughter.”

The officers explained that they had no authority to do that, but they shared the information with the Houston Police Department’s Narcotics Division, which began an investigation on January 11. The investgation included a “controlled buy” by a confidential informant who reported seeing a 9mm semi-automatic pistol and “a large quantity of plastic baggies” containing black-tar heroin at the house on Sunday.

Police found neither of those things when they searched the house the next day after breaking down the door and setting off a shootout in which Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas were killed and five officers were injured. Acevedo said there was no heroin, just “small amounts” of cocaine and marijuana. And contrary to the anonymous complainant’s description of Tuttle and Nicholas as scary, bloodthirsty drug dealers, neither had any criminal record to speak of, and both were described by neighbors as “wonderful people” who “never bothered anybody.” Police did not know any of that before the raid, despite an investigation that supposedly spanned two weeks. They did not even know the suspects’ names before they charged into the house, where Tuttle and Nicholas had lived for more than two decades.

Acevedo had no explanation for why police did not find the drug that was the justification for the search, even though the house supposedly was under surveillance by narcotics officers between the controlled buy and the raid. As for the disappearing pistol, Acevedo implausibly speculated that the C.I. might not have been familiar enough with firearms to know the difference between a 9mm semi-automatic and a .357 Magnum revolver, the only handgun police found.

Despite his repeated promises of “transparency” and “accountability,” Acevedo was also hazy on the crucial point of whether Tuttle knew that the armed men breaking into his house, whose first action after entering was to kill his dog with a shotgun, were police officers. Narcotics officers executing search warrants “don’t show up in uniform,” Acevedo said, “but they do show up with plenty of gear that identifies them as police officers, including patrol officers that are out in front of the house.”

Patrol officers outside the house do not give people inside the house notice that the men breaching their door and killing their dog are cops, and it’s not clear what other “gear” Acevedo had in mind. But since the plainclothes officers who burst into the house did so without warning, “announcing” themselves at the same moment they were breaking down the door, it would not be surprising if Tuttle missed that announcement and any other clues to their identity.

Body camera video of the raid might have helped clarify this issue, but there is none. “Body-worn cameras are still a pretty new technology,” Acevedo said. “Over the last two or three years, we’ve been deploying them. Our priority was to get body-worn cameras into the hands of the people that are most prone and most likely to be involved in a use-of-force or a response-to-resistance incident or a complaint….The majority of the incidents involve patrol, so that’s been our priority.”

Acevedo suggested that if the department does eventually find the money to equip narcotics officers with body cameras, “the likelihood that we won’t land on ‘we’re going to have body-worn cameras’ is pretty slim for search warrants…because most of the times we’re going to be doing the right things and we want to capture that.” That sentence is a bit hard to parse, but the gist is that Acevedo thinks recording police when they serve drug warrants in people’s homes makes sense as a way of showing they did everything properly—or not, as the case may be. It’s just that the Houston Police Department has not gotten around to it yet.

Without a video record, we can only go by the official police account of what happened inside the house. But even based on that account, it is plausible that Tuttle reasonably thought he was acting in self-defense when he shot the man who had just broken into his house and killed his dog. Likewise when police fatally shot his wife as she was trying to disarm the wounded gunman, at which point Tuttle returned fire with his revolver. Whatever announcement the officers made as they were entering could easily have been lost amid the noise, confusion, and shotgun blasts.

“Officers, when they execute search warrants,…are making split-second decisions in many cases,” Acevedo said, “and then we spend weeks, if not months, if not years, scrutinizing every piece of that.” What about the split-second decisions that a homeowner has to make when people break into his house, kill his dog, and shoot his wife? Tuttle, unlike the officers who killed him, was not a trained police professional. Perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt, especially since he is not around to defend himself.

On Monday night, when a reporter asked if any of the officers had been hit by “friendly fire,” Acevedo was indignant. “We don’t suspect anybody of being struck by friendly fire,” he said. “I don’t expect [it], because our people are really well-trained, even though in these very dynamic situations that certainly can happen. But if an officer was shot by friendly fire, the only people responsible under the law and morally are the people inside that residence who decided to take shots at police officers executing a lawful search warrant.” That analysis, of course, assumes that Tuttle knew the men confronting him were “police officers executing a lawful search warrant,” and it’s not at all clear he did.

To his credit, Acevedo rebuked Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, for his “over-the-top” remarks on Monday night, when he nonsensically blamed “the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy” for the injuries suffered by his fellow officers. “Joe Gamaldi’s emotions got the best of him,” Acevedo said. “I came this close to yanking him off there because it took us all by surprise. It was over the top….This [incident] had nothing to do with any of the stuff that he was talking about.”

The Houston Police Department and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office are continuing to investigate the drug raid, and they will ultimately decide whether the officers acted legally and properly. Acevedo said he had promised Tuttle’s brother “to seek the truth…regardless of what that truth is.” One truth already seems clear: This violence was pointless and readily avoidable.

Sen. Cory Booker’s (D–N.J.) announcement today that he’ll seek the 2020 Democratic nomination for president prompted various political analysts to publish pieces pondering what his chances are. As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this morning, Booker’s strengths include his strong support for criminal justice reform. Plus, he’s already called for weed legalization nationwide.

But Booker’s chances will no doubt be hurt by his penchant for grandstanding and embellishing the truth for rhetorical purposes. Take, for instance, his many references to “T-Bone,” a drug dealer who Booker claimed to have been friends with. Various critics have questioned whether T-Bone is actually a real person, and Booker has never really provided a definitive response.

Booker was talking about T-Bone at least as far back as 2000, when he gave an interview to Stanford Magazine. (Booker is a Stanford graduate.) “I still remember my first month on the street,” Booker said, referring to the time in 1995 when he moved to a dangerous neighborhood in Newark. “I walked up to this charismatic black guy my age called T-Bone, who was one of the drug lords. I just said, ‘Yo, man, wha’s up?’ And he leaped in front of me, looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Who the blank do you think you are? If you ever so much as look at me again, I’m going to put a cap in your ass.'”

T-Bone then became a regular in Booker’s anecdotes. “I said hello to this guy and I’ll never forget he leaped off the steps where he was standing and looked at me and threatened my life,” Booker said during a speech at The New School in New York in 2007, not long after he was elected mayor of Newark, according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “I later got to know this guy and his name was T-Bone and I’m a vegetarian so that was a particularly vicious threat.”

You get the point. In fact, Booker has admitted to talking about T-Bone a “million” times, the Star-Ledger reported in 2013. Booker told The New School in 2007 that his friendship with T-Bone eventually ended after the drug dealer said there were warrants out for his arrest. “That rift between me and T-Bone was inches, we sat there, but I felt so alienated that there was a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon between us, and I could not reach out to save this young man, and we drove back to Brick Towers, and I’ve never seen him again since that day,” Booker said, according to National Review.

The validity of Booker’s T-Bone story was questioned in 2013, when he ran for Senate. That’s because no one had ever heard of a drug dealer in Newark who went by that name. In August of that year, National Review spoke to Clement Price, a history professor and friend of Booker who claimed the then-Senate candidate admitted to him in 2008 that T-Bone was not real. Rather, he was a “composite” of various people Booker knew in Newark. “Cory realized that he had erred,” Price added to the Star-Ledger. “He told me that my criticism of his invention of T-Bone made perfect sense to him and he had made a mistake.”

In public, Booker has admitted T-Bone was not completely real. Sort of. Per a 2008 interview with Esquire:

T-Bone’s actual earthly existence has been fodder for public debate, leading Booker to admit that although T-Bone’s corporeal being is “1,000 percent real,” he’s an “archetype” of an aspect of Newark’s woe whose actual nom de crack may not actually be T-Bone.

That’s not a clear answer, of course. Reason reached out to Booker’s Senate office for clarification on the matter, but did not receive a response in time for publication. (We will update this post if we do.)

So why does T-Bone matter all these years later? Because embellishing stories and creating composites is penalized in politics. Pres. Obama used a composite in Dreams of My Father, and the media obsessed over it. Even if it’s a more effective way to humanize a problem (as in Booker’s case) or to protect the identity of someone (in Obama’s case), it rings of untruthfulness. In many of Booker’s stories, T-Bone is a foil. He’s more useful to Booker’s self-mythologizing than Booker ever was to him (or them, as it may be).

The story is also a reminder that Booker loves to be the center of attention. Why else tell people that a person he ostensibly felt sorry for had threatened to kill him?

As previously noted, Booker has been an excellent advocate for criminal justice reform. He pushed for passage of the FIRST STEP Act, wants to legalize pot, and has spoken out against the war on drugs and mass incarceration. He’s also shown a willingness to cross partisan lines, partnering with Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in 2014 to reform the way the justice system deals with juveniles and low-level offenders.

But his desperate need to be the center of every event and the hero of every story might cause him problems. See, for example, his dramatic performance at last year’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh. Likening himself to “Spartacus,” Booker said he was risking Senate expulsion by releasing confidential emails sent by Kavanaugh during his time as a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. It turned out the emails were not confidential. In fact, they’d been already been released. Booker, though, still made headlines.

Since the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed in 1988, every presidential administration has been required by law to publish a document each year outlining its plans for addressing illicit drug use.

After spending the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency in limbo, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has released its first congressionally mandated report since the Obama era.

Not counting the cover page, the table of contents, or the opening letter from Drug Czar James W. Carroll, the 2019 National Drug Control Strategy is 20 pages long. For comparison’s sake, the 1992 National Drug Control Strategy ran 182 pages, not counting the introduction or index. (And no, the 2019 report does not contain an index.) The 2016 National Drug Control Strategy was 87 pages.

The 2019 National Drug Control Strategy is like a book report from a student who may or may not have read the book, and who may or may not have wrote his report on the bus ride to school.

That said, it does contain some food for thought.

What’s new for 2019? Broadly speaking, not much.

As was the case under Barack Obama, Trump’s 2019 report focuses on reducing demand by informing the public about the dangers of illicit drug use, micromanaging prescribers in order to reduce opioid availability, increasing the availability of drug treatment options, and cracking down on the illicit drug trade. And by “focuses,” I mean the report mentions these things.

What’s specifically different from years prior? Marijuana and kingpins.

Previous National Drug Control Strategies generally contained lengthy sections on marijuana. But in keeping with the recent trend toward state-level legalization, Trump’s 2019 report focuses only on reducing underage cannabis consumption (via grants to state and local organizations), interdiction of marijuana trafficked from overseas and Latin America, and cracking down on marijuana cultivation on public lands.

In total, the word “marijuana” appears only four times in the 2019 strategy, while the word “opioid” appears 53 times. There is no suggestion in this report that the Trump administration plans to undermine state-level legalization efforts. This is a good thing!

Watchers of the drug war in Latin America may also be surprised to learn that the report contains some subtle criticism of what’s called the “kingpin strategy,” which, for two decades now, has seen U.S. and Latin American law enforcement agencies focused on identifying and arresting the leaders of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). Critics of this approach have shown for years that taking out cartel leaders causes DTOs to fracture, factionalize, and fight for territory and control, which leads to more violence and political destabilization and corruption. The 2019 Drug Control Strategy is the first report I’ve seen that sorta-kinda acknowledges this consequence:

Our conventional focus on targeting high-level individuals within the hierarchy of well-organized and sophisticated DTOs must evolve toward identifying and targeting vulnerable critical components of more fluid and dynamic organizations such as financial facilitators, corrupt officials, and key transporters, to affect a significant disruption of DTO activities, targeting key nodes to attack the entire network through its enablers.

Degrading and defeating criminal networks that have become more resilient because they are decentralized, redundant in capabilities and capacities, and compartmentalized, requires identifying the key nodes enabling DTO operations and simultaneously targeting them for maximum effectiveness over time. Agile interagency and international coordination will allow for better detection of changes in the trafficking supply chain, which will support intelligence-driven operations against identified vulnerabilities, from drug production to delivery to the end user.

Unfortunately, the 2019 report does not tell us what the administration thinks the U.S. should be doing instead. We know the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to operate in Latin America, but it is not clear from this report that the ONDCP or the White House is overseeing or coordinating those activities.

What are the goals of the 2019 Drug Control Strategy?

In short: “Do everything we’ve always done, only better!”

Here are the actual “measures of effectiveness”:

• The number of Americans dying from a drug overdose is significantly reduced within five years
• Nationwide opioid prescription fills are reduced by one-third within three years, and within five years all healthcare providers have adopted best practices for opioid prescribing
• Evidence-based addiction treatment, particularly Medication-Assisted Treatment for opioid addiction, is more accessible Nationwide for those who need it
• The production of plant-based and synthetic drugs outside the United States has been significantly reduced, illicit drugs are less available in the United States as reflected in increased price and decreased purity, and drug seizures at all U.S. ports of entry increase each year over five years

The phrases “significantly reduced” and “more accessible” are pretty sly! We should expect the administration to take credit for any decrease in overdose deaths, even if there’s no way to prove a causal effect. This is the prerogative of every president, of course.

The continued emphasis on controlling prescriber behavior remains troubling. (See Jacob Sullum on the disastrous consequences of punishing doctors for helping people.)

I should add that striving for “increased price and decreased purity” is essentially how we arrived at the fentanyl crisis. Federal regulations made prescription pills harder to come by, so consumers turned to street drugs, which are notoriously impure. Countries that have seen street drug shortages, meanwhile, saw consumers turn to other street drugs or to even more impure formulations of the newly scarce drug. The report is at least right that reducing supply drives up costs and decreases purity, but this is not a good thing.

With the exception of a relaxed attitude toward domestic marijuana production, the federal drug war appears to be the same as it ever was.

People who remain skeptical about global warming have been citing as contrary evidence the brutally cold polar vortex now assaulting the midwestern and northeastern U.S. So here’s a baseline for discussion: The planet is getting warmer, and the United States is experiencing fewer, not more, cold waves.

First, the cold waves. The 2017 Fourth National Climate Assessment notes that the annual average temperature in the contiguous United States increased by 1.8°F (1.0°C) from 1901 to 2016. Therefore it not surprising that heat waves have become more frequent in this country since the 1960s, while extreme cold temperatures and cold waves are less frequent. The assessment notes that “the number of record daily high temperatures has been about double the number of record daily low temperatures in the 2000s, and much of the United States has experienced decreases of 5%–20% per decade in cold wave frequency.”

Now let’s briefly consider the trend in global average temperature. Satellite measurements of the lower troposphere (that is, the atmosphere from the surface to about 5 miles up) According to researchers at both the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), 2018 was the sixth warmest year since 1979. Surface temperature analysts at Berkeley Earth and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service say that 2018 is the fourth warmest year since 1850. The Copernicus researchers report that “the average temperature of the last 5 years was 1.1°C higher than the pre-industrial average.” U.S. climate researchers have not yet reported their calculations for 2018, due to delays occasioned by the federal government shutdown.

The UAH researchers calculate that the planet has been warming at an average rate of +0.13 °C (0.23 °F) per decade. RSS reports a faster increase—an average rate of about +0.18 degrees C (0.32 degrees F) per decade. Berkeley Earth reports that since 1980, average surface temperatures have been increasing at a rate of +0.19 °C (+0.34 °F) per decade. NASA’s Earth Observatory reports that since 1975, the surface has been warming at a rate of roughly +0.15-0.20 °C (0.27-0.36 °F) per decade. Cold though it may be in Chicago, it has been getting warmer overall.

Given that we’re talking about a polar vortex, the trends in the Arctic seem relevant. Researchers find that temperatures in that region are rising considerably faster than the global average. Berkeley Earth reports that 2017 was the second warmest year in the Arctic since 1900 and that the region’s average temperatures had increased in the past 40 years by about +3.0 °C (5.4 °F). It also calculates that the average increase for the planet over the same period was just shy of +1.0 °C (1.8 °F). Basically, the Arctic is warming three times faster than the whole planet.

So does Arctic warming have anything to do with cold weather in mid-latitude areas like the Midwest? Many climate researchers are intrigued by this question. The Rutgers climatologist Jennifer Francis and her colleagues published a study in Geophysical Research Letters last September that hypothesized that rapid Arctic warming favors an “increased persistence of regional weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere. Persistent conditions can lead to drought, heat waves, prolonged cold spells, and storminess.”

The rough idea is the jet stream—a westerly blowing river of air, high in the atmosphere, that generally confines Arctic air masses to the far north—becomes wavier and more unstable as the polar region warms and the extent of sea ice declines. The deeper jet stream waves periodically stall, allowing the frigid air to flow southward and freeze folks in the Midwest. The same process is also thought to be responsible for long-duration cooling events during winters in Siberia.

In a statement reporting the study results, Francis observed, “While we cannot say for sure that Arctic warming is the cause, we found that large-scale patterns with Arctic warming are becoming more frequent, and the frequency of long-duration weather conditions increases most for those patterns.” Long-duration weather events like the current polar vortex.

On the other hand, there’s an analysis of especially cold U.S. winter months during the past half-century, published last June by researchers associated with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. It also finds links between reduced sea ice the warming Arctic and recent cold snaps in the U.S., but it also points out that similar events have frequently occurred without that association. The researchers conclude that it will be difficult to untangle the effects of natural variations from those associated with increased warming.

In a nice summary of current research on how a warming Arctic may affect our weather, Francis observes, “Exactly how the northern meltdown will ‘play ball’ with other changes and natural fluctuations in the system presents many questions that will keep scientists busy for years to come, but it’s becoming ice-crystal-clear that change in the far north will increasingly affect us all.”

The bottom line: The U.S. is experiencing fewer cold waves, even as recent research suggests that a warming Arctic may bolster the cold waves that do occur by making it easier for frigid air to spill southward and hang around longer.

Hip, wisecracking and restlessly bored, Nadia slips out of the bathroom at her 36th birthday party for a booty call. Wham! She’s hit by a taxi and the vision in her lifeless eyes fades to black—and then pops back into focus at that same bathroom mirror. Wow. What was in that joint? Better head home for bed, this time alone. Wham! She gets knocked into a river and drowns, only to show up at the mirror again. What the hell? An even swifter exit that ends in a neck-breaking fall down the stairs. Wham! And… .

Well, you get it. We’re in a Groundhog Day-style time loop. Nadia is going to keep falling down sewers, getting smashed to pieces in car crashes, and freezing to death in homeless campsites until … well, until what? That’s not at all clear. “The universe is trying to fuck with me,” deduces Nadia. “And I refuse to engage.” Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a closer look.

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