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Last year, the city of Camden
decided to can its unionized police force in favor  of
unionized county cops who
hit the streets this April. The decision came about because the
police union would not budge on the
highly lucrative contract they had, even by police standards.
Camden cops, for example, got a 4 percent bonus for working the day
shift, and a 10 percent bonus for starting at 9:30am. On any given
day, 30 percent of the force was absent because of the liberal sick
policies. The city has been run exclusively by Democrats for
several generations, and some local leaders openly worried that
Camden, which already had the highest crime rate per capita last
year, would get worse.
But it hasn’t. In fact, crime’s gone down, as Fox News Latino

reports: 

The reorganization increased the amount of police on
the streets and incorporated cutting edge technology such as
ShotSpotter rooftop monitors. The initiative has already gotten
results, according to city leaders.

Over the summer months this year, the murder rate fell by 22
percent and crime overall was down 15 percent, according to data
provided by Camden County officials.

Cities like Detroit, which is now in bankruptcy court in part
thanks to onerous union obligations and whose police department
does not know how many
employees it exactly has or what they do, ought to take
note.

Two
years ago, in Commonwealth v. Cruz, the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts ruled
that the odor of burning marijuana is not sufficient reason for a
police officer to order a motorist out of his car. The court noted
that under Question 2, an initiative that Massachusetts voters
approved by a large margin in 2008, possessing up to an ounce of
marijuana is a citable offense rather than a misdemeanor. “To order
a passenger in a stopped vehicle to exit based merely on suspicion
of an offense,” the court ruled, “that offense must be criminal.”
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley nevertheless is asking the
court to uphold a car search triggered by the smell of marijuana.
Among other things, he argues that such an odor counts as probable
cause because possessing small amounts of cannabis remains a crime
under federal law. In an
amicus brief filed last Friday, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws urges the court to
reject that argument (citations omitted):

The appellant asks this Court to reverse its holdings in
Cruz and its progeny by empowering state law
enforcement to ignore the state decriminalization law and
enforce instead federal prohibition law. The appellant
would enable federal law to justify police
searches otherwise illegal under state law….

Enforcing federal prohibition—against the will of
a compelling majority of state’s voter rejection of
that policy in adopting decriminalization by
initiative—violates fundamental principles of federalism and
the state constitution’s separation of powers….

State law enforcement derives its authority from state law,
its constitution and statutes; the power of local police to
detain and arrest, within the outer limits of
federal Constitutional civil rights law, is derived from
and determined by state law. 

Local police cannot evade state law constraints in state
court prosecutions by wishing they were federal deputies and
pretending their arrestees can be brought to federal
courthouses. Allowing state law enforcement to disregard state
law, by preferring federal policies rejected by popular
initiative and this Court, eviscerates the sovereignty of the
people and federalism’s protection of state
sovereignty. 

The case involves a motorist, Anthony Craan, who was pulled over
in June 2010 by state police at a sobriety checkpoint. Trooper
Scott Irish claimed to smell “the strong odor of fresh, unburned
marijuana coming from the passenger compartment.” After Irish
mentioned this, Craan revealed that he had a plastic bag of pot in
his glove compartment, which led to car search that revealed
additional marijuana, MDMA pills, and a four loose rounds of
ammunition. But at the point when Irish decided to search the car,
all he knew was that Craan possessed less than an ounce of
marijuana, which in itself is not a crime under Massachusetts
law.

In addition to seeking refuge in federal law, the prosecutors
argue that Irish had probable cause to charge Craan, who admitted
that he and his passenger had recently smoked marijuana, with
driving under the influence, in which case going through the car
would have been justified as a search incident to an arrest. The
government also argues that the presence of a little marijuana
raises the possibility of more—perhaps enough to count as a
misdemeanor under state law. That last argument, like the one based
on the federal Controlled Substances Act, would justify a car
search whenever a cop smells (or claims to smell) pot, even though
possessing up to an ounce has been decriminalized in Massachusetts.
He would not even need a
dog.

[via
Boston magazine]

Despite government agencies, such as the Los Angeles Homeless
Services Authority, spending $82 million per year to help the
city’s homeless, Los Angeles has the second-highest homeless
population in the country at 53,800
individuals.

So
to help mitigate the problem, organizations like the Greater West Hollywood Food
Coalition serve nightly hot meals to long lines of hungry
residents in mobile food trucks parked at various parts of the
city. The GWHFC, which has been operating for 27 years staffed by
volunteers, prides itself on providing up to 200 meals per night,
as well as offering emotional support and “specific, practical
help” to its patrons when possible. Their motto is “I Am My
Brother’s Keeper.”

Not everyone is pleased with the charity’s presence though.

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council
recently proposed an
ordinance that would ban private charities and individuals from
feeding homeless people in public. The politicians behind the
legislation, Tom LaBonge and Mitch O’Farrell (both Democrats), have
said they are responding to concerns from residents who are
uncomfortable with the homeless spending lots of time around their
homes. 

One such resident, Alexander Polinsky, an actor who lives two
blocks from the popular bread line,
told the New York Times: 

If you give out free food on the street with no other services
to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people
beginning to squat. They are living in my bushes and they are
living in my next door neighbor’s crawl spaces. We have a
neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward.

Essentially, Councilman LaBonge
argued, the charitable food line is creating a public nuisance.
“[It] has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood,” he told
the Times. “When dinner is served, everybody comes and
it’s kind of a free-for-all.”

Opponents of the ban have expressed their frustration at what
they consider heartless, overreaching legislation. 

“This is an attempt to make difficult problems disappear,” Jerry
Jones, the executive director of the National Coalition for the
Homeless told the Times, adding, “It’s both
callous and ineffective.”

Debra Morris, a patron of the Greater West Hollywood Food
Coalition, said that the organization is “helping human beings,” as
she was seated in a wheelchair enjoying the evening’s offering of
pasta with tomato sauce. “I can barely pay my own rent.”

If Los Angeles enacts the ordinance, the Times
reports, it will join more than 30 other cities “that have
adopted or debated some form of legislation intended to restrict
the public feeding of the homeless.” Last year for instance,

Mayor Bloomberg banned food donations to the homeless in
New York City on the grounds that the city couldn’t assess the
food’s salt, fat, and fiber content. In Orlando, Florida, police
have
arrested volunteers feeding homeless people in parks
for violating a city ordinance. The National Coalition for the
Homeless calls the trend the “criminalization
of homelessness in U.S. cities.”

In the Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger
writes:

These laws…look like attempts to push the homeless out of
public view. If a city can’t get rid of these people, in other
words, maybe it can get rid of the activities that so visibly
attract them.

If the purpose of the legislation is to reduce the presence of
homeless people in public though, then why don’t cities ban
homelessness outright? It turns out that politicians actually tried
just that in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s. The city passed an
ordinance that made it illegal to sleep on the street. However, a
judge eventually
overturned it as unconstitutional.