Category: reason

A county prosecutor says a Utah cop was not justified in shooting a woman wielding a screwdriver. But an area use of force board disagrees, and the officer, who remains employed, has simply been placed on paid “administrative leave.”

The shooting incident occurred in June after Enoch City Police Cpl. Jeremy Dunn responded to an alleged truck stop burglary in Parowan, Utah. Body camera footage shows Dunn arriving at the scene to join Parowan City Police Sgt. Mike Berg, who was already holding two suspects at gunpoint—an unarmed man and a woman with a screwdriver.

Both officers tried to get the woman, identified as Ivonne Casimiro, to drop the screwdriver, but she refuses. At one point in the video, Casimiro tells the officers to “go ahead and blow.” Dunn, meanwhile, tells her: “You come at me with that knife, I guarantee I’ll smoke ya.”

At one point, Dunn references a 2012 incident, also involving Berg, in which he shot a man with a knife who was approaching both officers. “I can take her out like last time. Do you want me to take her out like last time?” Dunn asks Berg.

Later, Dunn attempts to tase Casimiro but fails. After Casimiro appears to take a step toward him, he fires three shots with his gun, hitting her in the leg twice.

Dunn clearly overreacted, says County Attorney Scott F. Garrett. “While the suspect was armed with a screwdriver and had been non-compliant by failing to follow officer’s commands, including multiple commands to drop the screwdriver, it cannot be objectively stated that the officers or anyone else were in danger of death or serious bodily injury at the exact moment that lethal force was used,” he wrote in a letter to the Enoch Police Department. “From the video and Sergeant Berg’s testimony, it appears that the situation was manageable at the time Corporal Dunn arrived and it would have seemed reasonable for officers to continue de-escalation tactics until the situation could be more fully contained. Corporal Dunn was only on scene for three minutes before firing shots.”

But Garrett declined to press criminal charges, noting that “the State would not be able to prove the requisite criminal intent.”

The Enoch City Use of Force Review Board came to an entirely different conclusion. In a report released yesterday, the board claimed “Dunn’s actions were within department policy” and that he used “reasonable force” to deal with an “immediate and severe threat.”

In the board’s view, “After resisting Sergeant Berg’s attempt to detain her, and being subjected to two ineffective TASER deployments, and after the female raised the screwdriver in her right hand across her body appearing to load for an attempt to strike, taking a step forward with her left leg while her arm was cocked, Corporal Dunn chose to incapacitate the female suspect using lethal force in a non-lethal manner.”

According to the city board, the only thing Dunn did wrong was to aim for Casimiro’s legs instead of her extremities. But he was cleared of wrongdoing there as well, as the board accepted his argument that he was trying to incapacitate her with non-lethal force.

Dunn “is currently on administrative leave until a determination can be made in compliance with and by all relevant agencies,” the city board says. His short-term fate isn’t particularly surprising, given that getting paid not to work is a pretty common “consequence” for officers involved in controversial shootings.

Casimiro was taken to the hospital and later booked on multiple charges, including vehicle burglary and assault of a police officer.

Even as it tightens its controls on the things people in the U.S. can say on its platform, Facebook has dealt Movimiento Brasil Libre—the Free Brazil Movement—a serious blow shortly before the country’s October elections. The social media giant deactivated 196 pages and 87 accounts belonging to the classical liberal organization, calling the pages “a coordinated network that hid behind fake Facebook accounts and misled people about the nature and origin of its content, all for the purpose of sowing division and spreading misinformation.”

Free Brazil Movement spokesperson Kim Kataguiri tells Reason that the group was unaware of the scope of Facebook’s actions until its members read a Reuters article about it. (Facebook has not deactivated the group’s main page.)

This is the first time the group has ever faced a crackdown of this sort. Previously, Kataguiri says, Facebook chose instead to diminish the reach of the group’s posts. He compares that to “a disease that doesn’t kill you in the first moment but makes you suffer over time.

“Our Facebook pages were crucial during the past 3 years,” he adds. “When our movement, the Free Brazil Movement, had its greatest moment of growth, we reached a range of 40 million people weekly. The social media today has a brutal role in the political game, is how most people get informed and follow politics. That’s why we’re so concerned about it, because there’s a huge part of the public debate happening there.”

The movement now plans to spread its message using “Minds, Telegram, Youtube, [LinkedIn], and even sending a newsletter through e-mail,” Kataguiri says.

In 2015, the Free Brazil Movement organized a protest of more than a million people to call for the impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff was forced to step down in May 2016 after she was charged with trying to manipulate the federal budget and mask economic problems by secretly borrowing money from state-owned banks. The young activists were widely credited with Rousseff’s removal.

The group was the subject of a Reason profile in November 2016. There, Free Brazil Movement activist Renan Santos called Facebook an important tool: “Without Facebook, we would still have Dilma.” In an accompanying video, Santos told Reason that the group used the site to create “a sort of parallel media.” The open nature of Facebook allowed the group to gain exposure often denied them by the traditional media outlets that received money from the Brazilian government.

One Free Brazil Movement activist, Thomaz Barbosa, says that Facebook took a payment from him just before removing his account. According to Barbosa, he paid 400,000 Real—equivalent to about $100—to use a Facebook feature that would expand a post’s reach. Despite Facebook’s decision to deactivate Barbosa’s account, Barbosa says the money was not returned. Reason reached out ot Facebook for comment on this, but did not receive an immediate response.

An Ohio police department’s policy on Taser has come into the spotlight after an officer tased an 11-year-old girl.

According to the Cincinnati Police Department, an unidentified officer was working an “outside employment detail” at a Kroger grocery store in Spring Grove Village. The officer was assigned there to investigate a group of girls accused of shoplifting. While on duty, the officer issued “several commands” telling an 11-year-old to stop walking away from him. (Though the department’s press release does not explain what led to the confrontation, the Columbia Dispatch reports that the girl was allegedly seen stealing food and putting it into her backpack.) The officer then deployed his Taser on the girl’s back.

The girl was taken into custody on charges of theft and obstruction of official business. She was then transferred to a children’s hospital and eventually released into parental custody. She is set to appear at the Hamilton County Juvenile Court at a later date.

Following the incident, police Chief Elliot K. Isaac said that he was “highly concerned” with the use of a Taser on such a young child. Isaac announced an investigation and said the officer involved would be placed on “restricted duty” pending the outcome. He also promised to evaluate footage from the incident, but police later revealed that the officer’s body camera was not turned on during the confrontation.

City policy, as reported by The Cincinnati Enquirer, lists age requirements for Taser use: “Officers should avoid using the Taser on obviously pregnant females and those individuals under the age of 7 or over the age of 70 due to the potential for these individuals to fall when incapacitated by a taser, unless the encounter rises to the level of a deadly force situation.”

“There needs to be a complete investigation,” Vice Mayor Christopher Smitherman tells the Enquirer. “It’s hard to understand why an 11-year-old would be tased. I expect answers in 24 hours.”

The latest casualties from President Donald Trump’s trade war are 126 jobs at a plant where televisions are built.

Element Electronics announced Monday that it would close its facility in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Layoffs will begin in October, the company told the state’s Department of Employment and Workforce in a letter. (The letter was obtained by The State, a newspaper based in Colombia, South Carolina.)

“The layoff and closure is a result of the new tariffs that were recently and unexpectedly imposed on many goods imported from China, including the key television components used in our assembly operations in Winnsboro,” said the letter.

The jobs lost in Winnsboro are unlikely to be replaced quickly. Even before the tariffs hit, Fairfield County (where Winnsboro is located) was struggling: It recently lost a textile mill that employed more than 200 people, and the planned construction of a nuclear power plant was canceled. In May, the most recent month for which data is available, Fairfield County had the highest unemployment rate in South Carolina.

Trump’s tariffs, which are really just taxes on imported goods, are likely to cause the most pain in places like Fairfield County. Large, successful businesses are not immune to the consequences of trade barriers, but they have more ways to deal with suddenly higher production costs than small companies that were already struggling to stay afloat.

And the president is not done with his assault on South Carolina’s manufacturing sector. If Trump follows through with a threat to impose tariffs on automobiles and the parts used to build them, it could wreck havoc on the state’s economy. In comments submitted last month to the U.S. Commerce Department, which is studying the possibility of placing tariffs on cars and car parts, Germany-based BMW said those import taxes could force it to reduce production and cut jobs at its Spartanburg, South Carolina, plant. That facility employs about 10,000 workers and is BMW’s largest manufacturing facility in the world. The trickle-down effects of tariffs could jeopardize another 35,000 jobs at American companies that supply parts for that plant, BMW warned.

Just the threat of those auto tariffs is hurting the state. The Swedish automaker Volvo has paused plans to hire 4,000 additional workers at its production facility near Charleston, citing uncertainty over American trade policy.

South Carolina is quickly becoming a microcosm for the national debate over tariffs. It’s a state that Trump won by more than 14 points in 2016, but it’s also a place where agriculture and industry—the two sectors of the economy most likely to take a hit from the trade war—are vitally important. Unlike most other East Coast states, South Carolina lacks major cities that serve as hubs for major financial services or tech firms. It’s a state that has benefited tremendously from international automobile manufacturers’ production facilities, but it’s also a state where the loss of a television manufacturing plant can derail a small town.

Trump has said his trade war of choice would be “good and easy to win.” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has shrugged off tariff-caused job losses as mere “hiccups” along the road to making America great again. In places like Winnsboro, South Carolina, those comments probably ring especially hollow.

The drive to keep Alex Jones off the major online platforms may have had some unintended consequences—at least temporarily.

Jones, a noted conspiracy theorist, has seen his professional pages and podcast unpublished and/or removed from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. The four companies stated that Jones’ disparaging comments about Muslims, immigrants, members of the LGBT community, and several other groups of people violate the hate speech clauses in their respective terms-of-service agreements. But Jones’ Infowars app remained available for download via Apple.

A day after the move, people downloaded the remaining Infowars iPhone app enough times that it became the fourth most popular news app on the store, beating out the Google News and CNN apps, reports CNBC.

As CNBC notes, the Infowars app violates the same guidelines that prompted Apple to remove its podcast counterpart, so it seems unlikely that it will remain available from Apple for long. But for now, the push against him may have gotten more people interested in hearing what he has to say.

Jones reacted to the news by tweeting a picture of himself holding a glass of champagne next to his app. A caption said, “When they try to ban you, but you keep on winning.”

Twitter troubles and tribulations. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pushed back Tuesday against those condemning the site for not jumping on the ban-Infowars bandwagon. Facebook, Apple, and YouTube have all exiled Infowars, run by the infamous cross-aisle conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, from their respective platforms.

“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday,” Dorsey tweeted. “We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does.” For now, said Dorsey, “We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories.”

“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction,” he continued. “That’s not us.”

While Jones may be known for sensationalism and “unsubstantiated rumors,” tweeted Dorsey, it’s the job of journalists to “document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.”

Incredibly reasonable, right? Of course, nearly everyone was upset.

Some suggested it was ridiculous to demand journalists do the work of separating truth from fact when we could leave it up to tech companies, social-media mobs, regulators, or the random employees tasked with judging reported tweets and posts.

Conservatives complained that even if they didn’t want Jones banned, the internet still isn’t fair because Twitter had suspended or banned right-leaning voices in the past for what folks suspect are political reasons. Liberals complained because they did want Jones banned, and thought it wrong that he got to stay while left-leaning accounts had previously been suspended or banned over less.

The truth, of course, is that many people—left, right, libertarian, apolitical, and adhering to many other ideologies—have had their Twitter accounts suspended or revoked unfairly. This is what happens when people on all sides weaponize offense (or faux-offense) to get those they don’t like banned, and when we’re asking for judgement calls on millions of mini-missives based on vague and subjective criteria.

Yes, there have been many, many instances of accounts getting suspended for sarcasm, for jokes, for hyperbole, for having “a four-hundred-year-old, painted tit” in a profile pic, etc. No, Twitter has not always gotten it right in the past and will surely make some bad calls again.

Just yesterday, the absurdist account Sweet Meteor of Death was temporarily suspended for sharing what was clearly a joke about killing “everything that’s alive Except for deep-sea sulfur-oxidizing bacteria.”

But the solution so many are suggesting—more intense scrutiny of everyone’s tweets and a stricter suspension and banning policy—is silly, counterproductive, and sure to make no one actually happy. We all, including Twitter monitors, have wildly varying sensibilities and abilities to comprehend humor and sarcasm. Stricter monitoring and enforcement isn’t going to lead to a perfect digital sphere where no one gets unfairly suspended, and certainly not the to world partisans on both sides seem to imagine, where only the types of rhetoric the other side uses will be found guilty. Rather, any sort of enhanced enforcement will end with all sides up in arms and further limited in speech.

So does that mean nothing can be done about “fake news” and “hate speech” on the internet? Of course not. As Dorsey mentioned, journalists and other watchdogs can take a more active role. More importantly, we already have civil and criminal ways to deal with spreading serious lies, defamation, or threats. In The New York Times today, David French suggests that social platforms stop dealing in vague terms like “hate” and “harassing” and instead work to prohibit things with actual legal meanings, like libel and slander.

“Private corporations can ban whoever they like,” writes French. “But if companies like Facebook are eager to navigate speech controversies in good faith, they would do well to learn from the centuries of legal developments in American law. When creating a true marketplace of ideas, why not let the First Amendment be your guide?”

Several Antiwar.com writers also had their accounts suspended or banned yesterday. Antiwar.com said they were reported by author Jonathan Katz after criticizing him, though Katz disputed this. Antiwar.com editor Scott Horton and Ron Paul Institute chief Daniel. L. McAdams were temporarily suspended, while author Peter Van Buren had his Twitter account permanently banned.

“This followed exchanges with several mainstream journalists over their support for America’s wars and unwillingness to challenge the lies of government,” wrote Van Buren on Antiwar.com. “After two days of silence, Twitter sent me an auto-response saying what I wrote ‘harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice.’ I don’t think I did any of that, and I wish you didn’t have to accept my word on it….But Twitter won’t allow that. Twitter says you cannot read and make up your own mind. They have in fact eliminated all the things I have ever written there over seven years.”

FREE MINDS

Debate over “white people” tweets continues. At Slate, Yascha Mounk suggests that his fellow liberals are right that The New York Times should stand by new hire Sarah Jeong after old tweets of her disparaging white people and “old white men” resurfaced. But they don’t need to defend her speech, writes Mounk:

[T]he content of her tweets is, from a liberal perspective, much worse than her defenders want to admit and…detrimental to the prospect of building a just society….Many of Jeong’s worst tweets were supposed to be funny, but what was supposed to make them funny was the fantasy of inflicting indiscriminate cruelty on a whole group of people—something to which, as liberals and leftists, we have good reason to object.

That’s the moral case, he writes. Another is strategic: “A lot of very loathsome figures are deeply convinced that publicizing uses of the defensive inversion of bigotry will serve their cause,” and “they aren’t wrong.” And while “there is dignity in refusing to let what one says, writes, or tweets be shaped by its likely consequences,” there is “a third reason to steer clear of the defensive inversion of bigotry: neither moral nor strategic, this final reason might perhaps best be called aspirational….If the left imitates the inflammatory rhetoric of the right, the best possible future is one in which today’s minority groups take over the reins of power but our social divisions grow even more poisonous.”

Read the whole thing here.

FREE MARKETS

Bad news on compulsory union dues.

Missouri’s right-to-work law is going down in flames pic.twitter.com/DigLQagRCG

— Will Rahn (@willrahn) August 8, 2018

More here.

QUICK HITS

• Former would-be Libertarian Party presidential nominee Austin Peterson lost his bid to become the Republican challenger for Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s seat.
• Michigan cops made an 80-year-old woman spend a night in jail over an expired medical marijuana card.
• The Missouri prosecutor who handled the investigation into Ferguson teen Michael Brown’s death has lost his bid for reelection.

Did you miss the #SESTA #FOSTA workshop with the attorneys working on the litigation? Watch it here! Live Streamed Workshops – Woodhull’s Sexual Freedom Summit https://t.co/6v8v88RBW3

— Kate (@KateDAdamo) August 7, 2018

• Actress Alyssa Milano is on to the Russian plot to see the Green Party rise in Ohio, or something.
• The Summer of Snitches continues…

the governor of texas is tweeting out fake winston churchill quotes about antifa pic.twitter.com/rtZ4ymAqo2

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) August 7, 2018

• A Virginia newspaper and one of its former reporters are going to court over who owns the rights to a Twitter account.
• “A federal judge in California has ruled that a confidential messaging app must release the identity of a user who is accused of helping plan violence at a white nationalist rally last year in Charlottesville,” NPR reports.

My appeal has now been fully rejected. I made a video discussing what I am able to make public.

It’s not quite over yet, but I explain more about that in the video.https://t.co/vdz0IAtm8V

— Count Dankula

In a recent editorial demanding censorship of legal, unclassified information about firearms, The Washington Post mentioned freedom of speech in passing but immediately dismissed its relevance.

That’s par for the course among gun controllers terrified by the thought of Americans using 3D printers or computerized milling machines to make firearms with the help of software provided by Defense Distributed. People who are convinced that the Austin, Texas, company’s computer code will “put carnage a click away” (as the Post put it) tend to overlook the fact that they have moved from regulating guns to regulating speech, Jacob Sullum says.

View this article

Chinese officials have blocked the release of Disney’s Christopher Robin in that country. No reason was given for the move. But the movie depicts a grown up Christopher Robin getting a visit from his childhood friend Winnie the Pooh, and Chinese censors have cracked down on references to Winnie ever since critics of President Xi Jinping have mocked his resemblance to the character.

The St. Louis County prosecutor who oversaw the investigation of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri lost his bid for reelection Tuesday night.

In his first contested primary since the 2014 shooting that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch became another incumbent prosecutor to be ousted by a progressive candidate. Wesley Bell, a Ferguson City Council member with experience as a municipal judge, unseated McCulloch in the Democratic primary for the position.

The Appeal reported earlier this week:

Bell rose to prominence in a wave of Black leaders who were elected after the Ferguson protests highlighted a glaring lack of diversity in local government. He has since helped establish new police accountability and court reforms in Ferguson, efforts he now hopes to replicate through countywide office.

“People realize the need for change, they realize the need for criminal justice reform,” Bell, 43, said. “When we talk about reforming the cash bail system or ending mass incarceration, I wouldn’t call those radical. I would call those policies that work and help people.”

Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, hailed Bell’s victory as “a milestone for the movement to hold prosecutors accountable for fueling mass incarceration.”

“It is yet another example that the politics of mass incarceration are changing,” he continued. “Voters are hungry for candidates who support criminal justice reform. They are rejecting tough-on-crime politics, and embracing policies such as bail reform and ending mandatory minimums. Smart justice is winning. And the elections in November will further prove this point.”

Media investigations in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting revealed that St. Louis County and towns like Ferguson used petty fines to squeeze revenue from poor and minority residents, and jailed them when they couldn’t afford it. In fact, Bell was a municipal judge in a small town that was one of several in St. Louis County sued for its predatory bail practices.

In the years since Ferguson, reform-minded district attorney candidates, funded by deep-pocketed donors and riding a wave of increased public attention, have beat incumbents in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Houston.

McCulloch, though, didn’t appear to be going anywhere. He ran unopposed in 2014, and Bell was a heavy underdog going into tonight’s election. As The Appeal noted, McCulloch outraised Bell 6-1.

But the fallout from his numerous controversial decisions during the investigation of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown, finally caught up with him.

McCulloch had deep family ties to law enforcement, leading to calls for him to appoint a special prosecutor, which he refused to do.

When a grand jury did not return an indictment against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson officer who shot Brown, McCulloch announced the news in, as Reason‘s Anthony Fischer described it, “a bizarre, rambling, at times overtly hostile press conference.”

During the unrest that followed the grand jury’s decision, McCulloch lambasted Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D-Mo.) for relieving the Ferguson Police Department of duty.

His long tenure was marked by similar previous episodes. At one point, McCulloch wanted to prosecute Axl Rose for a riot at a Guns’n’Roses show in Riverport.

McCulloch inadvertently helped spark a national movement. On Tuesday night his political career came to an end because of it.

Two years ago, Austin Petersen, a former cable news producer at the then-tender age of 35, came in second place behind Gary Johnson in the race to secure the Libertarian Party presidential nomination—one that would end up being three times more successful than any of its predecessors, however otherwise frustrating.

Last July, Petersen announced that he was leaving the L.P., without rancor, for the opportunity to confront one of the Democratic Party’s most vulnerable senators, Claire McCaskill. He would be reinforcement for the lonely libertarianish likes of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), talking Constitution and debt and free trade at a time when those once-bedrock conservative values are in open retreat. The only catch? He would have to beat a crowded Republican field for a coveted seat.

Tonight, emphatically, that did not happen.

At the denouement of a campaign in which he was known mostly as the candidate who auctioned off machine guns and periodically got banned from social media platforms, Petersen finished on the business end of an old-fashioned rout. Ninety minutes after polls closed, establishment frontrunner and state Attorney General Josh Hawley was declared the victor, with well over 50 percent vote in an 11-candidate primary field. With 1,687 of 3,228 precincts reporting as of 10:45 p.m. ET, Petersen was struggling near the bottom of a three-way race for a distant second, with 8.1 percent of the vote, compared to Air Force veteran Tony Moretti’s 9.1 percent and 2016 senatorial challenger Kristi Nichols’s 8.1.

Petersen, the onetime producer of Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano, had run on being “Pro-Life. Pro-Liberty. Pro-Constitution.” His campaign in recent weeks had emphasized the demerits of President Donald Trump’s pro-tariffs agenda, as well as continuing to stress his own Second Amendment bonafides.

Hawley, who had been criticized for running a lackluster campaign (“GOP golden boy mails it in,” ran one Politco headline), nevertheless drew endorsements from Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and just about every other major donor or supporter you could name.

Though Petersen lagged in the GOP endorsement race, he did all right with key figures in his former home at the Libertarian Party. New York gubernatorial candidate Larry Sharpe issued a late-campaign testimonial, and newly elected L.P. Vice Chair Alex Merced tweeted that “if things don’t go your way tonight there is a home for you and your supporters to continue the fight in the LP with @yefeth into the general election.”

So is there a future for A.P. in the L.P.? On last night’s episode of Fox Business Network’s Kennedy, Petersen was asked point blank whether he was “going back to the Libertarian Party.” His answer? “I’m going to stick with the Republican Party, because my people asked me to, and because I believe it’s the party of abolitionism and the party of freedom, and I will work to make America free again.”

“So,” Kennedy nevertheless persisted, “you will not run for president on the Libertarian ticket in 2020?”

Petersen’s response: “No, I will leave that to my betters.”

Reason has interviewed Petersen several times over the years, including Nick Gillespie’s podcast when the candidate first announced 13 months ago:

Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr.