Category: reason

Australia’s war on drugs has led to the repulsive but perhaps inevitable spectacle of cops leering at the bodies of girls as young as 12.

Data released last week about police tactics in New South Wales, provided in response to a records request by the Redfern Legal Centre, show that law enforcement’s obsession with stamping out drug use at outdoor festivals has produced a twentyfold increase in strip searches over the course of a decade. They have increased by nearly 50 percent in the last four years. And most of the time, the cops are finding nothing.

According to the date, nearly two-thirds of the 5,400 strip searches performed by New South Wales police from 2017 to 2018 found absolutely nothing. In the past three years, more than 600 people under 18 were subjected to police strip searches. Three of them were 12 years old. Seven were 13.

More than 90 percent of these strip searches stemmed from suspicion of illegal drug possession. The New York Times and The Guardian both report that festivals in New South Wales are now thick with police and their dogs sniffing around for drugs—and, apparently, for reasons to look inside young people’s underwear.

The Guardian details the story of one 19-year-old man’s strip search. It’ll sound familiar to anybody who has experienced or read about America’s sorry handling of people who police suspect of getting high‚and about our overdependence on the flawed noses of drug-sniffing dogs:

“I knew I didn’t have anything on me, no drugs or anything, so it was no problem,” [Camille Elies] says.

“But then the dog started sniffing around the car and she started saying ‘you look a bit nervous mate, you look nervous, if you have drugs on you then you might as well tell me now or I’ll take you to the strip-search tent and we’ll find them that way.'”

Elies says the officer started recording him using her body-worn camera. While he continued to deny he had any drugs, she continued to press him on why he looked “nervous”.

“I said, ‘because you are interrogating me and you have the dog there.’ She was being so rude about it as if I had done something wrong already,” he says.

Elies was eventually strip searched in a makeshift tent. Two male officers instructed him to lift his shirt, drop his pants and hold on to his genitals while they “walked around” him.

“I was a bit shook up,” he says. “I don’t know. I just, yeah, I was shook up by it to be honest.”

These intrusive searches are supposed to be justified by a recent increase in deaths by festival attendees who had taken MDMA. New South Wales has seen six such deaths in the past year, as opposed to 12 in the entire prior decade. But there are other, better methods of dealing with overdose deaths. New South Wales’ deputy coroner, Harriet Grahame, argues that the police presence actually increases, not decreases, the likelihood that somebody will get hurt. She’d rather introduce pill testing at these outdoor festivals so that people can check to make sure their MDMA is safe. After all, overdose deaths frequently happen not because people have taken too many pills, but because they aren’t aware that the pills have been adulterated, often with fentanyl, or because the drugs are much more powerful than they realize. Drug-testing stations would help users make sure they’re not taking something that will kill them.

Unfortunately, many public officials are standing fast. Here’s how New South Wales’s police minister, David Elliott, defends the police practice of leering at teens’ naked bodies:

I’ve got young children, and if I thought that the police felt that they were at risk of doing something wrong, I’d want them strip-searched.

One wonders what his children think about that.

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Donald Trump Jr. spoke at the University of California, Los Angeles, yesterday to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

An ideological group of hateful silencers did indeed interrupt the proceedings, forcing Trump to cut short the Q&A period. But these were not intolerant, triggered leftists. They were far-right activists.

This is a reality that a more mainstream conservatism must take seriously. While criticism of the campus left is often justified—I’ve penned two articles on the subject just today—for too long the right has treated alt-right-adjacent trolling as trivial or insignificant when compared with progressive activism.

The irony of Trump Jr. promoting a book about leftist shutdown culture and instead finding himself interrupted by the right was not lost on the media outlets who covered the incident. Trump Jr. even challenged his audience to “name a time when conservatives have disrupted even the furthest leftist on a college campus.

“It doesn’t happen that way,” he insisted. “We’re willing to listen.”

Well, it depends who the “we” is. Indeed, a number of conservative campus events in recent days have been targeted by supporters of Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old YouTuber and far-right gadfly. Fuentes describes his views as nationalist and “America First,” though he has a long history of making racist and anti-Semitic statements. His movement has recently hijacked events featuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R–Tex.) and folks in the Daily Wire orbit over their support for Israel and their refusal to avow that the U.S. should remain a culturally “European”—i.e., white—nation. Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro recently inveighed against this movement in his remarks at Stanford University, and was right to do so.

Trump’s talk was sponsored the young conservative group Turning Point USA, which has raised the Fuentes gang’s ire for being too moderate on social issues. At a recent TUPUSA event at Ohio State University, a Fuentes activist asked Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Rob Smith, “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” The only point of this bizarre non sequitir was to shame Kirk for featuring Smith—a gay, black conservative—in his campus tour. Kirk and Smith justly mocked the questioner.

It’s great to see conservatives denouncing this racist, anti-gay, white identitarian nonsense. When the right inveighs against progressive censorship and intolerance, it really needs to stress that this is a serious problem on its radical flank as well. Far-Right Trolls Sabotage Event might not generate as many clicks in the conservative media environment as Triggered Left Wants to Silence You, but it is no less important to say.

For more on this subject, check out my book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.

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Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) will pay freelance photographer Avi Adelman $345,000 to settle the lawsuit he filed after he was illegally arrested in 2016 for taking pictures at a train station. The settlement follows a federal appeals court’s September 20 ruling rejecting a qualified immunity claim by Stephanie Branch, the DART police officer who arrested Adelman for trespassing and then repeatedly lied about the incident.

Adelman had been photographing paramedics as they treated a man who had overdosed on a synthetic marijuana substitute. He spent a day in jail, but the charge against him was dropped a week later. An internal investigation found that Branch had arrested Adelman without probable cause and in violation of DART’s photography policy. The report also said Branch had made 23 “false or inaccurate statements” about the circumstances of Adelman’s arrest, including her claim that he was standing too close to the paramedics, who supposedly wanted him to step back. She was suspended for three days as a result of the investigation.

A federal judge ruled that Branch was entitled to qualified immunity against Adelman’s claim that she had violated his First Amendment rights, because case law in the 5th Circuit had not clearly established the right to take photographs of first responders in public places at the time of his arrest. But the court allowed Adelman to proceed with a claim that his unlawful arrest violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable seizures. Branch asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to reverse that decision.

The appeals court ruled that Branch was not entitled to qualified immunity against Adelman’s Fourth Amendment claim. “No reasonable officer under these circumstances would conclude that she had authority to eject a person complying with DART policies from public property—and then arrest that person for criminal trespass when he failed to depart,” the court said.

A DART policy established in June 2014 allowed people to take pictures at its stations as long as they do not “interfere with transportation or public safety activity.” The 5th Circuit pointedly rejected Branch’s excuse that she was not familiar with that policy, which was adopted while she was on sick leave. “Branch’s mistake was not reasonable,” the court said in a footnote. “She didn’t misinterpret an unclear policy or law; she simply failed to learn about DART’s updated policy. And ‘an officer can gain no Fourth Amendment advantage through a sloppy study of the laws [s]he is duty-bound to enforce.'”

A DART audio recording of the incident that led to Adelman’s arrest showed that everyone else at the scene recognized that Branch was out of line. “He was just taking pictures, right?” one paramedic said. “Why is she going crazy?” Elmar Lee Cannon, one of Branch’s fellow DART officers, replied: “I don’t know. That’s going to be on her. He can take all the pictures he wants. That’s why I’m not getting involved in that.” Another paramedic concurred, saying, “I don’t know where that idea [that Ademan had committed a crime] came from…because there is freedom of the press.”

Adelman, a longtime defender of the right to record public events, created an educational program on the subject for police officers. In settling the lawsuit, DART rejected his request that it post its photography policy on its website. “Many transit agencies around the country post their photography in public policies on their websites,” Adelman notes in a press release, including systems in Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Houston, and San Francisco. He says he will donate $2,500 from his settlement to the National Press Photographers Association for legal advocacy and another $2,500 to the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

“I was arrested—and spent a day in jail—on a bogus ‘throw-down’ charge of criminal trespass for one reason only: to stop me from taking photographs of paramedics treating a patient in public view on public property, which is a lawful activity,” Adelman says. “The subjective personal opinions of [law enforcement] personnel should never be allowed to interfere with lawful and protected First Amendment activities. I will work with, and support, First Amendment advocacy groups to make sure arrests like this never happen again, and to defend the photographer vigorously when it does happen.”

I called DART’s media relations department to ask about the source of the funds for its $345,000 settlement payment. I will update this post if and when I get a response, but I suspect the money will come either from DART’s budget or from a liability insurance policy. Either way, Branch herself is not on the hook, which illustrates a point made by UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz. Schwartz investigated the practices of 81 law enforcement agencies and found that “police officers are virtually always indemnified” in civil rights cases. During the period she studied, “governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement.”

That practice weakens the deterrent effect of lawsuits like this one, even if they overcome the obstacles created by the misbegotten qualified immunity doctrine. At the same time, the routine indemnification of police officers who violate people’s constitutional rights refutes a claim often made by the doctrine’s defenders, who worry that the threat of personal liability will have a chilling effect on legitimate policing.

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Harvard’s student government, the Undergraduate Council, has voted to support Act on a Dream, an activist student group calling for a boycott of The Harvard Crimson.

The council’s statement does not specifically endorse the boycott. But it does express solidarity with Act on a Dream, whose members want the student newspaper to apologize for seeking comment from representatives of U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement in articles.

As I noted in my previous coverage of this kerfuffle, seeking comment from relevant parties is standard journalistic practice and ought to be commended. Instead, the activists have somehow convinced themselves that when The Crimson talks to ICE, it makes the campus less safe for undocumented immigrants.

“In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping [ICE] off, regardless of how they are contacted,” the activist group’s leaders wrote in their petition.

This concern is silly, and none of the activists have offered any evidence it is legitimate.

And yet yesterday the council voted 15–13–4 to pass a statement in support of this unfounded fear.

“It is necessary for the Undergraduate Council to acknowledge the concerns raised by numerous groups and students on campus over the past few weeks and to recognize the validity of their expressed fear and feelings of unsafety,” the statement said.

The Crimson‘s own coverage of the vote points out that several campus groups, including both Act on a Dream and Harvard’s chapter of the College Democrats, are refusing to speak to the paper until it bows to the demands. Time and time again ,sources of institutional authority at Harvard have not simply failed to rebuke unreasonable demands from the campus’s progressive sect but have actively sided with them.

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Lagrua v. Ward, 136 Misc. 655 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1987) involved a New York police officer who, to benefit from an affirmative action program, sought to change his ethnic classification with the police department from white to Hispanic. To substantiate his claim of Hispanic identity, Lagrua claimed that his mother was born in Gibraltar and that his maternal grandparents were of Hispanic origin. He also claimed that he had joined the Police Department’s Hispanic Organization. The officer in charge of such things could not substantiate that Lagrua had ever been a member of the Hispanic Society. Moreover, though originally part of Spain, “Gibraltar is and has been under British rule since 1718; the culture there is mixed, the official language is English and the law is based on English Common law. Although Spanish is widely spoken the Gibraltarian way of life is predominantly British.” The department therefore determined that Lagrua was not Hispanic, a conclusion accepted by the police department’s equal opportunity office. On appeal to the New York State Supreme Court, the court concluded that this decision was not erroneous, and therefore ruled that Lagrua would remain classified as white.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—Several thousand activists gathered Saturday on the National Mall to voice their opposition to a federal ban on flavored nicotine vaping products. The ban, they say, will be lethal for the vaping industry, and for millions of ex-smokers who have relied on these products to quit cigarettes.

The crowd was blanketed by a heavy fog of fragrant-smelling vape clouds, but the message was crystal clear: If President Donald Trump continues with his plans for a flavor ban, he risks alienating a large, motivated bloc of single-issue voters who might otherwise be in his camp.

“We have an audience, in the short term, of one,” says Greg Conley, executive director of the United Vapers Alliance, which organized the rally. “Thousands of consumers and small business owners [have] made it very loud and clear that if [Trump] allowed this to go through, it could cost him reelection in 2020.”

In September, prompted partly by a rise in teen vaping and partly by the spread of a fatal vaping-related lung disease, Trump announced that the federal government would ban most flavored nicotine vaping products and push forward the deadline for when vaping products are required to get FDA approval from 2022 to May 2020. Last Friday, the president also said that he would raise the age required to buy vaping products to 21.

But those laws are unlikely to stop the problems they are supposed to solve. A study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published last week, has given yet more support to the theory that the vaping-related lung disease is caused by a vitamin E acetate found in illicit THC vaping cartridges, not the flavored nicotine products that would be subject to Trump’s ban.

For many at Saturday’s rally, Trump’s prohibitionist impulse is a stab in the back from a president they were counting on to take a deregulatory approach to their industry.

“I voted for Trump on the promise that he going to go in and undo regulations [and] allow small businesses to flourish,” Matthew Kleizo, the owner of several Florida vape stores, told Reason. The president’s support for a flavor ban, he warned, “will come back to bite him.”

James Howard, who owns two stores with his wife in Colorado Springs, expressed a similar sentiment. “I’m a right-leaning independent. I support Trump. I 100 percent do not support this at all. This is not a conservative tactic,” he said Saturday.

On a sound stage, speakers talked of being disappointed and even betrayed by Trump and his flavor ban, which they considered arbitrary and “un-American.” In the crowd, store owners and others held signs that said, “We Vape, We Vote.” A flavor ban, they warned, would be fatal to an industry that The Washington Post as recently as September dubbed “a miraculous small-business success story.”

Analyzing data from the U.S. Department of Labor, the Post found that the number of tobacconists (a category that includes vape shops) had grown over 100 percent in the last decade, far faster than other retail. The number of people employed by these tobacconists had grown at a similar rate. Two-thirds of vape-shop workers are employed by businesses with fewer than 10 employees.

A study from the Vapor Technology Association (VTA), a trade association, found that the industry has created, either directly or indirectly, some 166,007 jobs.

For others, the issue of a flavor ban was more personal. Flavored nicotine vaping products had been essential in helping them quitting smoking. A ban, they said, might prevent others from doing the same, or even encourage some vapers go back to cigarettes.

Lots of attendees at the rally sported Mad Libs–style T-shirts on which they filled out their name, the number of years they smoked, and the flavor that helped them quit.

A group of thirtysomethings from North Carolina told Reason that they couldn’t have quit without flavors, listing candy cane, apple butter toast, and “Propaganda Illuminati” (apparently a fruity flavor) as the ones that helped them the most.

“This is not a lifestyle, it’s life or death,” said one speaker from the stage. She asked if anyone in the crowd had lost a loved one to a smoking-related illness. Almost everyone had.

The individual anecdotes are backed up by the data, says Sally Satel, an addiction psychiatrist at the American Enterprise Institute who attended Saturday’s rally.

“When flavors are threatened or aren’t available, they’ll return to smoking or they’ll go to a black market vape in that situation,” said Satel. “We’ve already seen what black market THC does. We’re setting ourselves up for the same situation.”

In January, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that found those who used nicotine vaping products to quit smoking cigarettes were twice as likely to be smoke-free a year later, compared to those who used other cessation devices, such as nicotine gum or patches.

In addition to Saturday’s rally, the VTA has run anti-flavor-ban digital ads around Trump campaign events and television ads on Fox News, all in an effort to reach the president.

“I think [Trump] is reachable. I think that once they sit down and really think through this, they’re going to realize a flavor ban is not the right way to go for public health, and certainly not the right way to go for the economy,” says Tony Abboud, executive director of the VTA.

Only time will tell how successful vapers’ activism will be in staving off the pending ban. Even if the administration were to put a freeze on a flavor ban, the requirement that all nicotine vaping products receive FDA approval—which can cost as much as $500,000—will still kill off much of the industry.

This morning, Trump announced via Twitter that he would be meeting with vaping industry representatives and public health officials.

Will be meeting with representatives of the Vaping industry, together with medical professionals and individual state representatives, to come up with an acceptable solution to the Vaping and E-cigarette dilemma. Children’s health & safety, together with jobs, will be a focus!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2019

At the very least, Saturday’s rally demonstrated that there is a whole industry and a whole community who want the government to leave them alone, and who are willing to travel to the capital from across the country to say so.

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