Category: reason

Michael K. Williams’ Death Sparks Charges Against Drug Dealers


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In September, actor Michael K. Williams, best known for his nuanced portrayals of gangsters in T.V. dramas like The Wire and The Night Of, passed away. His death was determined to be the result of an overdose of heroin which had been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent. Earlier this week, federal prosecutors in New York charged four men with selling Williams the fatal mix. The man who actually made the exchange, Irvin “Green Eyes” Cartagena, was additionally charged with causing Williams’ death. But while Williams’ death was tragic, throwing the book at his dealers will not have the effect that prosecutors intend.

On Wednesday, the same day news outlets reported the arrests, The Daily Beast published a lengthy account of the investigation which led to the four arrests. The article draws heavily from interviews with police, who relay the actor’s movements during his final hours in granular detail. Deputy Chief John Chell recalled that he advised the investigating precincts, “Treat this case as if Michael K. Williams was hit by a bullet. Make believe he got shot.”

Upon determining where and from whom Williams bought the drugs, the officers made a consequential decision:

To make a state case against the crew for death by dealer, the detectives would have needed to prove that the crew was aware that the particular dose sold to Williams would likely be fatal. Federal law, on the other hand, requires only proof that the user died as a result of what the dealer provided. So the detectives went to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which had successfully prosecuted a number of such cases.

Armed with this lower standard of proof, as well as a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison for “selling narcotics that result in a death,” police successfully carried out the arrests. The article quotes Detective Ramon Rodriguez, one of the investigators, bemoaning that when he had arrested Cartagena for dealing a month before Williams’ death, it was dispiriting “[t]o see him go through the system and come right out.”

But it is far from clear whether this arrest will have the intended effect of disincentivizing future drug dealers. Historically, when the penalties for dealing in illicit narcotics increase, operators within black markets do not pull back; they simply pass those costs on to the consumer. In fact, higher penalties can even encourage riskier behavior: In places like Indonesia, where the penalty for trafficking can include death, traffickers trick or coerce innocent people into acting as mules on their behalf. In a risk-reward calculus where the risk includes death, and the reward includes huge profits, extortion is just another cost of doing business.

It is also frequently the case that laws intended to crack down on dealers and traffickers are applied to addicts and users. In 2019, a woman was sentenced to 21 years in prison for distributing heroin that killed someone, despite the fact that the two of them were using that heroin together. (The conviction was thrown out, but only after two years and with the prospect of a retrial.) Increasingly, prosecutors are applying these statutes to drug users when another user dies, regardless of if the survivor being prosecuted knew that the drugs were tainted.

Then there is the irony of the federal government pursuing charges over fentanyl-laced heroin when one of the primary reasons that this more potent mixture has proliferated over the years is that same government’s War on Drugs. Crackdowns on painkillers led patients to seek remedies elsewhere, and bans on substances incentivize dealers to traffic in substances of higher potency. And of course, when the entire enterprise is forced to take place underground, there is no way for a user to ensure that what he is buying will be safe to consume. Like Prohibition before it, the War on Drugs is actively harmful to the people it purports to protect.

Ironically, one person who understood this backward dichotomy was Williams himself. In 2016, Williams penned an op-ed for CNN in which he characterized the War on Drugs as “a war on people,” with “devastating…effects” especially on “black and brown Americans.” Williams wrote that while he had struggled with addiction throughout his life, he considered himself “lucky,” as he was “able to get the help and treatment I needed.” He acknowledged that “I realize that no one’s life, least of all mine, would have been safer, better or more productive if I had been jailed for my addiction issues.”

Williams’ death was a tragic loss: a truly talented performer who was open about his struggles yet ultimately succumbed to them. It is entirely possible that if, as alleged, the dealers in question knew Williams’ mix was tainted when they sold it to him, then some sort of charges of criminal negligence could be appropriate. But by dangling a decades-long federal sentence, police are not only failing to address the very real issues which cause these tragedies to occur, they are actively creating the conditions which make them worse.

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Biden Defends the Military’s ‘Preparation and Precision’ in a Counterterrorism Operation That Killed Syrian Kids


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President Joe Biden announced today that a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria killed top Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Al-Qurayshi became the leader of the Islamic State after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in a similar 2019 raid led by U.S. Special Operations forces.

“Last night at my direction, U.S. military forces in northwest Syria successfully undertook a counterterrorism operation to protect the American people and our Allies, and make the world a safer place,” Biden said in a statement. In Thursday morning remarks on the raid, he praised the “signature preparation and precision” U.S. troops employed in carrying out the attack, and noted that he “directed the Department of Defense to take every precaution possible to minimize civilian casualties.”

Lost in that framing, however, is the civilian death toll. Syrian defense group the White Helmets reported that at least 13 people were killed during the operation, including six children and four women. “In the planning process, the U.S. military was very concerned about the family living on the first floor,” reported CBS News. “Before the operation started, troops called out for civilians to leave the building.”

It must be said that civilians died at the hands of al-Qurayshi, who detonated a bomb at the beginning of the operation. Biden notes that al-Qurayshi “had chosen to surround himself with families, including children.” There is no getting around the fact that he and his group stand for, and have done, terrible things.

But the Pentagon has called this operation “successful,” and Biden, though he spent ample time chastising al-Qurayshi for his role in the civilian deaths, did not express regret for them himself.

Since the beginning of the year, the U.S. has shown questionable regard for civilians and children in its military operations in the Middle East. U.S. forces launched airstrikes against a prison holding Islamic State fighters in late January, despite nearly 700 children being detained there. “It is unclear how many of the detained boys had been fighters and how many were in detention simply because they were deemed too old to be in camps for ISIS families,” reported The New York Times. Teenage inmates were among the nearly 500 people ultimately killed as Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. forces fought to regain control of the prison.

January also saw numerous reports of past attacks that are now receiving increased scrutiny. During previous campaigns against the Islamic State, the U.S. military placed the ISIS-controlled Tabqa Dam, the largest dam in Syria, on a no-strike list. A U.S. Special Operations unit bombed it in 2017 anyway—despite a military report that warned against an attack, saying the ensuing flood could “kill tens of thousands of civilians.” Conduct in Afghanistan came under fire in January as well. The New York Times published footage of an August 29 U.S. military strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians (including seven children), clearly showing that children were in the vicinity prior to the attack.

One day after the Times released footage from Kabul, congressional Democrats sent a letter to Biden condemning “repeated civilian casualties arising from secretive and unaccountable lethal operations.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a directive just one week later, calling on the military to “improve upon efforts to protect civilians.”

Indeed, Biden alluded to this rising concern as he discussed Thursday’s attack. “We made this choice to minimize civilian casualties,” Biden said of the decision to carry out a raid rather than an airstrike. That may be true, but inflicting civilian casualties and nonetheless praising the precision of the attack is simply callous.

There is still a question mark lingering over U.S. military engagement in Syria and how much longer our operations will be necessary—an issue that Biden did not address in his remarks. Former President Barack Obama said back in 2014 that the campaign against ISIS would “be a long-term campaign. There are not quick fixes involved.” But given the current state of the fight, it is unclear why we remain involved eight years later.

Even in the group’s early years, ISIS did not pose an existential threat to the U.S.; it certainly doesn’t now. The group was effectively defeated years ago and has not held territory in Iraq or Syria since 2019. Still, roughly 900 U.S. troops are currently stationed in Syria and are tasked with fighting ISIS. The Biden administration says it’s unlikely to withdraw them anytime soon (despite there being no congressional authorization for this presence). For as long as they’re stationed there, they’ll face attacks from militias that want them to leave.

America’s involvement in Syria carries dangers to civilians and U.S. troops alike, and our military departure is long overdue. An ISIS leader was killed today, but U.S. officials should not minimize the civilian casualties that accompanied his death. Unless they concede that we can and should do more to reduce harm, civilians will continue to suffer.

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Now That Pot-Averse Conservatives Are Openly Defying the Federal Marijuana Ban, What Excuse Does Congress Have for Maintaining It?


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In 2020, Mississippi became the 35th state, and the second in the Deep South, to approve medical use of marijuana. But Initiative 65, which was favored by three-quarters of voters, never took effect, thanks to a legal requirement for ballot measure signatures that was impossible to satisfy. After the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the initiative, the state legislature responded by independently approving a medical marijuana bill, which Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law yesterday.

The broad, bipartisan support for medical marijuana in a deep-red state shows how far the rejection of pot prohibition has spread since California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. That reality seems to have sunk in almost everywhere except on Capitol Hill.

Mississippi’s medical marijuana law, S.B. 2095, passed by an 8-to-1 margin in the state House and a 9-to-1 margin in the state Senate. A total of 37 states now allow patients to use cannabis for symptom relief, including conservative bastions such as South Dakota, where 70 percent of voters approved a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2020, and Alabama, where legislators passed a law similar to Mississippi’s by a 2-to-1 margin last year.

Even Reeves, a conservative Republican who worried that medical marijuana could become a cover for recreational use and threatened to veto S.B. 2095 if his objections were not addressed, eventually felt compelled to respect the will of the voters who overwhelmingly approved Initiative 65. “The ‘medical marijuana bill’ has consumed an enormous amount of space on the front pages of the legacy media outlets across Mississippi over the last 3+ years,” the governor complains in a statement he issued when he signed the bill. “There is no doubt that there are individuals in our state who could do significantly better if they had access to medically prescribed doses of cannabis. There are also those who really want a recreational marijuana program that could lead to more people smoking and less people working, with all the societal and family ills that that brings.”

Reeves says the changes he demanded (not all of which he got) were aimed at balancing the benefits of medical marijuana against the risk that it might, God forbid, allow some people to smoke pot for fun. “I have made it clear that the bill on my desk is not the one that I would have written,” he writes. But he adds that “significant improvements” to the bill—including a reduction in the monthly purchase limit, an in-person visit requirement for cannabis prescriptions, and a ban on marijuana dispensaries within 1,000 feet of churches or schools—made the legislation something he could stomach. He thanks legislators for their responsiveness but ends on a churlish note: “Now, hopefully, we can put this issue behind us and move on to other pressing matters facing our state.”

Given his anti-pot prejudices, Reeves’ grudging support for medical marijuana speaks volumes about the current politics of prohibition. Under S.B. 2095, marijuana dispensaries are supposed to receive state licenses within six months or so, which means they could start serving patients by the end of the year. When that happens, they will be operating with state approval but in flagrant violation of federal law, which still recognizes no legitimate use for marijuana. Reeves, despite his reservations and his distaste for people who relax with a joint rather than a cocktail, is cool with that.

Eighteen of the 37 states that allow medical use of marijuana, accounting for more than two-fifths of the U.S. population, also allow recreational use, which is clearly a bridge too far for Reeves. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another conservative Republican, has a similar attitude. When voters in her state approved medical marijuana in 2020, they also approved a broader measure, Amendment A, that would have created a state-licensed recreational market. Noem, who opposed both measures, acquiesced on medical marijuana but backed a successful legal challenge to Amendment A, which the South Dakota Supreme Court nixed last November after concluding that it violated the “single subject” rule for constitutional amendments.

As abstruse as the legal arguments about Amendment A were, the issue that defeated Mississippi’s Initiative 65 was even more perplexing. A state law required that no more than a fifth of the signatures for the ballot initiative come from a single congressional district. That made sense when Mississippi had five congressional districts, but by 2020 it had only four, which made it impossible to meet this requirement. Madison, Mississippi, Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler nevertheless persuaded the Mississippi Supreme Court that the law had to be applied as written.

Unlike Mississippi legislators, who have replaced the invalidated initiative with their own law, South Dakota legislators so far have not produced a bill that would accomplish what Amendment A aimed to do. While prominent Republicans in the state legislature have suggested they would like to do that, Noem has threatened to veto any such bill. Amendment A’s backers are therefore working on a 2022 legalization initiative that complies with the South Dakota Supreme Court’s interpretation of the “single subject” rule.

Congress, meanwhile, has done nothing to address the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws, except for an annually renewed spending rider that bars the Justice Department from interfering with state medical marijuana programs. Notwithstanding that rider, the department is helping California and Kansas cops use civil forfeiture to steal money earned by state-legal medical marijuana suppliers.

President Joe Biden, who says states should be free to go their own way on this issue, nevertheless opposes repealing the federal ban on marijuana. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), who says he wants to legalize cannabis, recently torpedoed a bill that would have removed federal barriers to banking services for state-licensed marijuana businesses.

According to the latest Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal. When even pot-averse Republicans like Tate Reeves are responding to public opinion by openly defying the federal ban, what excuse do Biden and Congress have for maintaining it?

The post Now That Pot-Averse Conservatives Are Openly Defying the Federal Marijuana Ban, What Excuse Does Congress Have for Maintaining It? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Now That Pot-Averse Conservatives Are Openly Defying the Federal Marijuana Ban, What Excuse Does Congress Have for Maintaining It?


Tate-Reeves-9-28-20-Newscom

In 2020, Mississippi became the 35th state, and the second in the Deep South, to approve medical use of marijuana. But Initiative 65, which was favored by three-quarters of voters, never took effect, thanks to a legal requirement for ballot measure signatures that was impossible to satisfy. After the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the initiative, the state legislature responded by independently approving a medical marijuana bill, which Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law yesterday.

The broad, bipartisan support for medical marijuana in a deep-red state shows how far the rejection of pot prohibition has spread since California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. That reality seems to have sunk in almost everywhere except on Capitol Hill.

Mississippi’s medical marijuana law, S.B. 2095, passed by an 8-to-1 margin in the state House and a 9-to-1 margin in the state Senate. A total of 37 states now allow patients to use cannabis for symptom relief, including conservative bastions such as South Dakota, where 70 percent of voters approved a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2020, and Alabama, where legislators passed a law similar to Mississippi’s by a 2-to-1 margin last year.

Even Reeves, a conservative Republican who worried that medical marijuana could become a cover for recreational use and threatened to veto S.B. 2095 if his objections were not addressed, eventually felt compelled to respect the will of the voters who overwhelmingly approved Initiative 65. “The ‘medical marijuana bill’ has consumed an enormous amount of space on the front pages of the legacy media outlets across Mississippi over the last 3+ years,” the governor complains in a statement he issued when he signed the bill. “There is no doubt that there are individuals in our state who could do significantly better if they had access to medically prescribed doses of cannabis. There are also those who really want a recreational marijuana program that could lead to more people smoking and less people working, with all the societal and family ills that that brings.”

Reeves says the changes he demanded (not all of which he got) were aimed at balancing the benefits of medical marijuana against the risk that it might, God forbid, allow some people to smoke pot for fun. “I have made it clear that the bill on my desk is not the one that I would have written,” he writes. But he adds that “significant improvements” to the bill—including a reduction in the monthly purchase limit, an in-person visit requirement for cannabis prescriptions, and a ban on marijuana dispensaries within 1,000 feet of churches or schools—made the legislation something he could stomach. He thanks legislators for their responsiveness but ends on a churlish note: “Now, hopefully, we can put this issue behind us and move on to other pressing matters facing our state.”

Given his anti-pot prejudices, Reeves’ grudging support for medical marijuana speaks volumes about the current politics of prohibition. Under S.B. 2095, marijuana dispensaries are supposed to receive state licenses within six months or so, which means they could start serving patients by the end of the year. When that happens, they will be operating with state approval but in flagrant violation of federal law, which still recognizes no legitimate use for marijuana. Reeves, despite his reservations and his distaste for people who relax with a joint rather than a cocktail, is cool with that.

Eighteen of the 37 states that allow medical use of marijuana, accounting for more than two-fifths of the U.S. population, also allow recreational use, which is clearly a bridge too far for Reeves. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another conservative Republican, has a similar attitude. When voters in her state approved medical marijuana in 2020, they also approved a broader measure, Amendment A, that would have created a state-licensed recreational market. Noem, who opposed both measures, acquiesced on medical marijuana but backed a successful legal challenge to Amendment A, which the South Dakota Supreme Court nixed last November after concluding that it violated the “single subject” rule for constitutional amendments.

As abstruse as the legal arguments about Amendment A were, the issue that defeated Mississippi’s Initiative 65 was even more perplexing. A state law required that no more than a fifth of the signatures for the ballot initiative come from a single congressional district. That made sense when Mississippi had five congressional districts, but by 2020 it had only four, which made it impossible to meet this requirement. Madison, Mississippi, Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler nevertheless persuaded the Mississippi Supreme Court that the law had to be applied as written.

Unlike Mississippi legislators, who have replaced the invalidated initiative with their own law, South Dakota legislators so far have not produced a bill that would accomplish what Amendment A aimed to do. While prominent Republicans in the state legislature have suggested they would like to do that, Noem has threatened to veto any such bill. Amendment A’s backers are therefore working on a 2022 legalization initiative that complies with the South Dakota Supreme Court’s interpretation of the “single subject” rule.

Congress, meanwhile, has done nothing to address the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws, except for an annually renewed spending rider that bars the Justice Department from interfering with state medical marijuana programs. Notwithstanding that rider, the department is helping California and Kansas cops use civil forfeiture to steal money earned by state-legal medical marijuana suppliers.

President Joe Biden, who says states should be free to go their own way on this issue, nevertheless opposes repealing the federal ban on marijuana. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), who says he wants to legalize cannabis, recently torpedoed a bill that would have removed federal barriers to banking services for state-licensed marijuana businesses.

According to the latest Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal. When even pot-averse Republicans like Tate Reeves are responding to public opinion by openly defying the federal ban, what excuse do Biden and Congress have for maintaining it?

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L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti Says His Mask Mandate Violation Was OK Because He Held His Breath


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L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is the latest California politician to hammer home the point that the state’s pandemic rules are just for the little people. What Gov. Gavin Newsom started, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed continued, Garcetti has perfected. He even developed the ideal face-saving line: When a photo surfaced Wednesday of Garcetti, maskless, with Lakers legend Magic Johnson at a Rams game, the mayor reassured concerned citizens that he held his breath to take the photo. (Los Angeles County has a mask mandate in place both indoors and at crowded outdoor events. SoFi Stadium also requires event attendees to wear masks when not actively imbibing.)

Garcetti’s comically absurd response betrays either a misunderstanding of how COVID is spread or the extent to which the rules he’s imposed, but doesn’t feel the need to follow, are largely hygiene theater.

Just as plexiglass barriers between diners are performative measures that don’t make sense given what we know about this airborne respiratory virus, holding your breath during a photo op won’t prevent you from spreading or contracting COVID.

What Garcetti might’ve said is that photo ops are brief encounters, and that COVID spreads much more successfully in longer encounters when a greater viral load can be transmitted. In the same way that we don’t really need to mask up just to walk from a hostess stand to a table in a restaurant, it probably won’t be a single brief photo op that leaves someone COVID positive. At this point in the pandemic, Garcetti should understand that. If his behavior suggests that he already understands that, he should acknowledge reality and adjust his policies accordingly.

But there’s obviously more at play than a rudimentary misunderstanding of the science. Garcetti is committed to COVID safety measures as a tribal talisman. It is a symbol to his fellow liberals that he’s taking the virus seriously. Claiming that he held his breath is meant to protect his place atop a polarized political constituency that views masking as patriotic and sacrosanct; it is not science-based advice for determining when a person can or should forego a mask.

It is as wrong as his government’s insistence that physical building plans—as in, pieces of paper—be quarantined before a government employee will examine them:

Politicians could just admit they’re just like the rest of us—exhausted by the pandemic and its political wars of attrition on both sides, vaccinated and at low risk of bad COVID outcomes, who go to sporting events and take maskless pictures and see other people in close quarters because that’s what people are supposed to do at sporting events. They could remove mask mandates, citing the CDC’s admission that cloth masks don’t do all that much, and which they themselves flout anyway.

But, y’know, don’t hold your breath.

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Americans Want Police Reform, Not Abolition. So Did This Slain NYPD Officer.


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“My perspective on police and the way they police really bothered me,” wrote Jason Rivera, then a probationary officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), in November 2020. “As time went on, I saw the NYPD pushing hard on changing the relationship between the police and the community. This was when I realized I wanted to be a part of the men in blue” in order to “better the relationship between the community and the police.”

A year into his job, Rivera, who grew up in Manhattan, was shot and killed on January 21 while responding to a domestic disturbance call at a Harlem apartment. His colleague, Officer Wilbert Mora, was also shot and ultimately pronounced dead last week after spending several days in critical condition.

According to Rivera’s note, his desire to change the NYPD by joining it came from watching his community deal with the department’s stop, question, and frisk program, which allows police officers to detain people and search for weapons based on reasonable suspicion. “Has this program been successful in removing guns off our streets? NO!!” wrote then–State Sen. Eric Adams in 2011, who had previously served as a captain with the NYPD and who has made waves with his early tough-on-crime approach as the newly-minted mayor of New York City. “Police are illegally going through their pockets…Our young people are being arrested for disorderly conduct for questioning these stops…Our young people will have police records that will impact their future.” In 2009, Adams noted, 0.13 percent of stops resulted in a seized weapon. Future iterations of the program, he said, needed to be more constrained to better target crime.

Rivera’s start at the police academy in November 2020 happened to coincide with a record-low approval rating for police nationwide: That same year, about 48 percent of the public held a favorable view of law enforcement, the lowest that has ever been recorded and the first time it’s ever fallen below a majority since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.

Like Adams, Rivera appears to have understood at least one reason for the low marks: Police officers often are unaccountable to the communities they are supposed to serve. He also seemed to understand that one of the solutions to that problem is to build trust.

It’s an obvious answer to public discontent with law enforcement, and yet it seldom appears in public debate, possibly because you can’t legislate trust. Instead of talking about how to encourage more idealistic young people to follow Rivera’s lead, discussions of police reform in major media and on Capitol Hill are dominated by the most extreme ideas: back the blue (no matter what they do), or defund the police.

The vast majority of the American public fits into neither one of those camps. Only 15 percent of people surveyed by the Pew Research Center want the police “defunded” in some way, while the bulk of that cohort—9 out of that 15 percent—only wants to decrease funding by “a little.” A mere 6 percent of people favor “abolishing” the police, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

But the public does want better policing. In the summer of 2020, after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, a Gallup survey found that 96 percent of Americans support punishing bad officers and 98 percent back barring those with multiple misconduct complaints from continuing to serve.

The desire for police officers who truly serve the public while being held to high standards of conduct cuts across racial lines. An overwhelming share—81 percent—of black Americans want police presence either maintained or increased, according to a Gallup poll taken in August 2020. Perhaps more interesting: When given a choice of issues and asked what the most pressing one was in their community, 87 percent of black Detroit residents responded with public safety, according to a survey conducted by USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. (Contrast that with the mere six percent of white residents who gave the same answer.) In dead last for black residents: police reform.

And yet, those data exist alongside another racial gap in polling: Just 27 percent of black Americans trust the police, compared with 56 percent of white folks, according to a 2021 Gallup poll.

In other words, black communities don’t want more Derek Chauvins. They want more Jason Riveras. Instead of arguing whether cops should be legally untouchable or not even exist, we should be thinking about what programs and policies will help officers like Rivera build the bridges that are necessary for solving violent crimes and helping victims while curbing the negative impacts of policing on low-income and minority communities.

We know what the problems are. In addition to the harassment that police inflict on minorities and the poor, the police clearance rate for murder in the U.S. hovered around 54 percent in 2020, which means about half of murders went unsolved. In the final quarter of 2020, New York City’s clearance rate was 46 percent.

Put more plainly, police departments aren’t always adept at solving crime. But that’s different from preventing crime, a distinction sometimes lost on progressive advocates. And the data on the latter are fairly clear: More police officers lead to higher crime deterrence, with people less likely to brazenly commit crimes amid a heightened police presence. Perhaps that explains, at least partially, why some communities want to see that presence increased, or are wary of reducing it.

So how do you bolster police forces without bolstering abuse? Often missing in this debate are the laws that police are charged with enforcing. It should be plainly obvious that not all cops are bad. All cops are, however, made to enforce bad laws, which naturally increases trust-violating interactions between law enforcement and the public. If a law isn’t worth having an armed agent of the state enforce it, then maybe it’s not a good law.

Consider drug laws: Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses, despite white people using and selling illicit substances at comparable rates. Police unions have long opposed legalizing or decriminalizing even marijuana, as the drug war is a major source of their funding for initiatives like drug task forces. But if the above abysmal clearance rates are any indication, perhaps it’s time police diverted their limited time and resources to fighting the violent crimes that make communities unsafe.

Getting more out of our police requires holding them accountable. At the heart of that debate is qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows certain government actors to infringe on people’s rights without having to face federal lawsuits if the way in which they allegedly violated the Constitution has not yet been outlined concretely somewhere in a prior court precedent. In practice, that means an officer can violate his own training and still be shielded from civil court if no preexisting ruling delves into the precise circumstances surrounding the misconduct in question. Around two-thirds of Americans say the doctrine should be reformed.

“As long as we make that [civil suit] payment transparent so we don’t have nondisclosure agreements, then we can act, and we also collect data on it,” Rachel Harmon, a University of Virginia law professor whose research focuses on police reform, told Tyler Cowen in June 2020. “Then a community could actually say, ‘Hey, I don’t want my taxes to go up because you idiots won’t train and prepare officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this.'”

As Harmon notes, such suits may serve as a signal to both police departments and the community that something is awry with certain employees. That’s especially true when considering that municipalities can be hesitant to hold rogue officers to account: “The City Council has failed to demand accountability from the NYPD,” wrote Adams in the aforementioned presentation.

Violent crime is up nationwide. In New York City, where Rivera worked, murders have increased 68 percent from 289 in 2018—a record low—to 485 in 2021. And while context is certainly always important, I’m not particularly swayed by the constant refrain that “crime isn’t as bad as it was in the 1990s.” While that’s objectively true, I can’t think of many times when “it’s been worse before” was lauded as an especially powerful argument. Those stakes are raised when considering the subject matter, and that the 68 percent increase in homicides isn’t a meaningless statistic. Those were real, human lives lost.

Yet cops can’t do their jobs in a vacuum—they need the trust of their communities. In order to improve those numbers, law enforcement undoubtedly has to have the trust of the people, who want to see them as accountable to the public they protect and serve.

Part of that trust will come with accepting that police officers are also human beings—imperfect as they might be—something that can get lost in the fray of our hyperpolarized media environment. Also sometimes lost in that noise is that the American populace wants policing: quality, accountable policing. May Mora’s and Rivera’s deaths not be in vain.

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L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti Says His Mask Mandate Violation Was OK Because He Held His Breath


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L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is the latest California politician to hammer home the point that the state’s pandemic rules are just for the little people. What Gov. Gavin Newsom started, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed continued, Garcetti has perfected. He even developed the ideal face-saving line: When a photo surfaced Wednesday of Garcetti, maskless, with Lakers legend Magic Johnson at a Rams game, the mayor reassured concerned citizens that he held his breath to take the photo. (Los Angeles County has a mask mandate in place both indoors and at crowded outdoor events. SoFi Stadium also requires event attendees to wear masks when not actively imbibing.)

Garcetti’s comically absurd response betrays either a misunderstanding of how COVID is spread or the extent to which the rules he’s imposed, but doesn’t feel the need to follow, are largely hygiene theater.

Just as plexiglass barriers between diners are performative measures that don’t make sense given what we know about this airborne respiratory virus, holding your breath during a photo op won’t prevent you from spreading or contracting COVID.

What Garcetti might’ve said is that photo ops are brief encounters, and that COVID spreads much more successfully in longer encounters when a greater viral load can be transmitted. In the same way that we don’t really need to mask up just to walk from a hostess stand to a table in a restaurant, it probably won’t be a single brief photo op that leaves someone COVID positive. At this point in the pandemic, Garcetti should understand that. If his behavior suggests that he already understands that, he should acknowledge reality and adjust his policies accordingly.

But there’s obviously more at play than a rudimentary misunderstanding of the science. Garcetti is committed to COVID safety measures as a tribal talisman. It is a symbol to his fellow liberals that he’s taking the virus seriously. Claiming that he held his breath is meant to protect his place atop a polarized political constituency that views masking as patriotic and sacrosanct; it is not science-based advice for determining when a person can or should forego a mask.

It is as wrong as his government’s insistence that physical building plans—as in, pieces of paper—be quarantined before a government employee will examine them:

Politicians could just admit they’re just like the rest of us—exhausted by the pandemic and its political wars of attrition on both sides, vaccinated and at low risk of bad COVID outcomes, who go to sporting events and take maskless pictures and see other people in close quarters because that’s what people are supposed to do at sporting events. They could remove mask mandates, citing the CDC’s admission that cloth masks don’t do all that much, and which they themselves flout anyway.

But, y’know, don’t hold your breath.

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Academic Freedom Alliance Letter to SUNY Fredonia

The Academic Freedom Alliance released a public letter to SUNY Fredonia calling on the university to reaffirm the academic freedom of philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar.

Kershnar works on applied ethics and writes on a wide range of controversial topics, including “adult-child sex.” His research includes a scholarly monograph dedicated to that subject published by an academic press. He recently discussed his work on a YouTube channel dedicated to philosophy topics, and that is when the trouble began. His comments on adult-child sex were picked up by what is becoming a common set of right-leaning media and campus watchdog groups, including Campus Reform, the Libs of Tiktok Twitter account, the Post Millennial, and the New York Post.

SUNY Fredonia issued a denunciation via tweet which concluded that “the matter is being reviewed.”

From the AFA letter:

I write on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance to emphasize that Professor Kershnar’s scholarly research and teaching on these topics is fully protected by principles of academic freedom and his public discussion of his ideas on these issues is protected by principles of freedom of speech. There is, quite simply, nothing for the university to review under these circumstances. The university’s obligation in the face of this controversy is to provide a forum in which ideas, however extreme or misguided they may be or seem to be, can be articulated, criticized, and fairly debated. A member of your faculty under such public scrutiny is likely to be targeted for abuse and threats, and the university’s responsibility is to shelter the faculty member from that harassment and not add to it.

Read the whole thing here.

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Americans Want Police Reform, Not Abolition. So Did This Slain NYPD Officer.


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“My perspective on police and the way they police really bothered me,” wrote Jason Rivera, then a probationary officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), in November 2020. “As time went on, I saw the NYPD pushing hard on changing the relationship between the police and the community. This was when I realized I wanted to be a part of the men in blue” in order to “better the relationship between the community and the police.”

A year into his job, Rivera, who grew up in Manhattan, was shot and killed on January 21 while responding to a domestic disturbance call at a Harlem apartment. His colleague, Officer Wilbert Mora, was also shot and ultimately pronounced dead last week after spending several days in critical condition.

According to Rivera’s note, his desire to change the NYPD by joining it came from watching his community deal with the department’s stop, question, and frisk program, which allows police officers to detain people and search for weapons based on reasonable suspicion. “Has this program been successful in removing guns off our streets? NO!!” wrote then–State Sen. Eric Adams in 2011, who had previously served as a captain with the NYPD and who has made waves with his early tough-on-crime approach as the newly-minted mayor of New York City. “Police are illegally going through their pockets…Our young people are being arrested for disorderly conduct for questioning these stops…Our young people will have police records that will impact their future.” In 2009, Adams noted, 0.13 percent of stops resulted in a seized weapon. Future iterations of the program, he said, needed to be more constrained to better target crime.

Rivera’s start at the police academy in November 2020 happened to coincide with a record-low approval rating for police nationwide: That same year, about 48 percent of the public held a favorable view of law enforcement, the lowest that has ever been recorded and the first time it’s ever fallen below a majority since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.

Like Adams, Rivera appears to have understood at least one reason for the low marks: Police officers often are unaccountable to the communities they are supposed to serve. He also seemed to understand that one of the solutions to that problem is to build trust.

It’s an obvious answer to public discontent with law enforcement, and yet it seldom appears in public debate, possibly because you can’t legislate trust. Instead of talking about how to encourage more idealistic young people to follow Rivera’s lead, discussions of police reform in major media and on Capitol Hill are dominated by the most extreme ideas: back the blue (no matter what they do), or defund the police.

The vast majority of the American public fits into neither one of those camps. Only 15 percent of people surveyed by the Pew Research Center want the police “defunded” in some way, while the bulk of that cohort—9 out of that 15 percent—only wants to decrease funding by “a little.” A mere 6 percent of people favor “abolishing” the police, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

But the public does want better policing. In the summer of 2020, after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, a Gallup survey found that 96 percent of Americans support punishing bad officers and 98 percent back barring those with multiple misconduct complaints from continuing to serve.

The desire for police officers who truly serve the public while being held to high standards of conduct cuts across racial lines. An overwhelming share—81 percent—of black Americans want police presence either maintained or increased, according to a Gallup poll taken in August 2020. Perhaps more interesting: When given a choice of issues and asked what the most pressing one was in their community, 87 percent of black Detroit residents responded with public safety, according to a survey conducted by USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. (Contrast that with the mere six percent of white residents who gave the same answer.) In dead last for black residents: police reform.

And yet, those data exist alongside another racial gap in polling: Just 27 percent of black Americans trust the police, compared with 56 percent of white folks, according to a 2021 Gallup poll.

In other words, black communities don’t want more Derek Chauvins. They want more Jason Riveras. Instead of arguing whether cops should be legally untouchable or not even exist, we should be thinking about what programs and policies will help officers like Rivera build the bridges that are necessary for solving violent crimes and helping victims while constraining the negative impacts of policing on low-income and minority communities.

We know what the problems are. In addition to the harassment that police inflict on minorities and the poor, the police clearance rate for murder in the U.S. hovered around 54 percent in 2020, which means about half of murders went unsolved. In the final quarter of 2020, New York City’s clearance rate was 46 percent.

Put more plainly, police departments aren’t always adept at solving crime. But that’s different from preventing crime, a distinction sometimes lost on progressive advocates. And the data on the latter are fairly clear: More police officers lead to higher crime deterrence, with people less likely to brazenly commit crimes amid a heightened police presence. Perhaps that explains, at least partially, why some communities want to see that presence increased, or are wary of reducing it.

So how do you bolster police forces without bolstering abuse? Often missing in this debate are the laws that police are charged with enforcing. It should be plainly obvious that not all cops are bad. All cops are, however, made to enforce bad laws, which naturally increases trust-violating interactions between law enforcement and the public. If a law isn’t worth having an armed agent of the state enforce it, then maybe it’s not a good law.

Consider drug laws: Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses, despite white people using and selling illicit substances at comparable rates. Police unions have long opposed legalizing or decriminalizing even marijuana, as the drug war is a major source of their funding for initiatives like drug task forces. But if the above abysmal clearance rates are any indication, perhaps it’s time police diverted their limited time and resources to fighting the violent crimes that make communities unsafe.

Getting more out of our police requires holding them accountable. At the heart of that debate is qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows certain government actors to infringe on people’s rights without having to face federal lawsuits if the way in which they allegedly violated the Constitution has not yet been outlined concretely somewhere in a prior court precedent. In practice, that means an officer can violate his own training and still be shielded from civil court if no preexisting ruling delves into the precise circumstances surrounding the misconduct in question. Around two-thirds of Americans say the doctrine should be reformed.

“As long as we make that [civil suit] payment transparent so we don’t have nondisclosure agreements, then we can act, and we also collect data on it,” Rachel Harmon, a University of Virginia law professor whose research focuses on police reform, told Tyler Cowen in June 2020. “Then a community could actually say, ‘Hey, I don’t want my taxes to go up because you idiots won’t train and prepare officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this.'”

As Harmon notes, such suits may serve as a signal to both police departments and the community that something is awry with certain employees. That’s especially true when considering that municipalities can be hesitant to hold rogue officers to account: “The City Council has failed to demand accountability from the NYPD,” wrote Adams in the aforementioned presentation.

Violent crime is up nationwide. In New York City, where Rivera worked, murders have increased 68 percent from 289 in 2018—a record low—to 485 in 2021. And while context is certainly always important, I’m not particularly swayed by the constant refrain that “crime isn’t as bad as it was in the 1990s.” While that’s objectively true, I can’t think of many times when “it’s been worse before” was lauded as an especially powerful argument. Those stakes are raised when considering the subject matter, and that the 68 percent increase in homicides isn’t a meaningless statistic. Those were real, human lives lost.

Yet cops can’t do their jobs in a vacuum—they need the trust of their communities. In order to improve those numbers, law enforcement undoubtedly has to have the trust of the people, who want to see them as accountable to the public they protect and serve.

Part of that trust will come with accepting that police officers are also human beings—imperfect as they might be—something that can get lost in the fray of our hyperpolarized media environment. Also sometimes lost in that noise is that the American populace wants policing: quality, accountable policing. May Mora’s and Rivera’s deaths not be in vain.

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Academic Freedom Alliance Letter to SUNY Fredonia

The Academic Freedom Alliance released a public letter to SUNY Fredonia calling on the university to reaffirm the academic freedom of philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar.

Kershnar works on applied ethics and writes on a wide range of controversial topics, including “adult-child sex.” His research includes a scholarly monograph dedicated to that subject published by an academic press. He recently discussed his work on a YouTube channel dedicated to philosophy topics, and that is when the trouble began. His comments on adult-child sex were picked up by what is becoming a common set of right-leaning media and campus watchdog groups, including Campus Reform, the Libs of Tiktok Twitter account, the Post Millennial, and the New York Post.

SUNY Fredonia issued a denunciation via tweet which concluded that “the matter is being reviewed.”

From the AFA letter:

I write on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance to emphasize that Professor Kershnar’s scholarly research and teaching on these topics is fully protected by principles of academic freedom and his public discussion of his ideas on these issues is protected by principles of freedom of speech. There is, quite simply, nothing for the university to review under these circumstances. The university’s obligation in the face of this controversy is to provide a forum in which ideas, however extreme or misguided they may be or seem to be, can be articulated, criticized, and fairly debated. A member of your faculty under such public scrutiny is likely to be targeted for abuse and threats, and the university’s responsibility is to shelter the faculty member from that harassment and not add to it.

Read the whole thing here.

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