Tag: news

Most Americans do not trust cops much, according to new poll results that put public confidence in the police at a record low level. From 2019 to 2020, Gallup reports, “confidence in the police fell five points to 48%, marking the first time in the 27-year trend that this reading is below the majority level.”

Since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, the share of American adults who said they had “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in the police has ranged from 52 percent to 64 percent. In the latest poll, which was conducted in late June and early July, that number fell to 48 percent. Meanwhile, 33 percent of respondents said they had “some” confidence in the police, while 17 percent said “very little” and 2 percent said “none.”

The decline in confidence, which follows nationwide protests triggered by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, is especially striking when compared to the trends for other institutions. From 2019 to 2020, confidence in the medical system and the public schools rose by 15 and 12 points, respectively. Confidence in small businesses and organized religion also rose substantially (by seven and six points, respectively), and even Congress rated slightly better this year than last (rising from 11 percent to 13 percent confidence).

As in prior years, there are stark partisan and racial gaps in attitudes toward the police. “Confidence in the police rose seven points among Republicans to 82% and dropped six points among Democrats to 28%,” Gallup notes. And while 56 percent of white adults had “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in police, only 19 percent of black adults did.

The latter result may seem surprising in light of another Gallup finding: More than four-fifths of black respondents said they did not want police to spend less time in their neighborhoods. Sixty-one percent said the current police presence should be maintained, while 20 percent said it should be increased. As my colleague Nick Gillespie suggests, those findings cast doubt on the popularity of calls to “defund” or abolish police departments. But there is nothing inconsistent in wanting police to do their jobs without abusing the citizens they are supposed to serve.

Among adults generally, confidence in the police stood at 52 percent in 1993 and peaked at 64 percent in 2004. There is little reason to think police abuse has gotten worse since then, but publicity about it certainly has increased. The ubiquity of cameras in the pockets of cellphone owners, on storefronts, on the dashboards of squad cars, and on the bodies of police officers has a lot to do with that. The public understanding of controversial police encounters, which once depended on conflicting accounts from cops and people who claimed to have been victimized by them (sometimes coupled with possibly unreliable bystander testimony), is nowadays routinely informed by compelling video footage.

Floyd’s death never would have gotten the attention it did without cellphone video that clearly showed Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed, prone arrestee whose resistance at the time was limited to complaining that he could not breathe and begging for his life. And in the aftermath of that horrifying incident, when police officers across the country seemed intent on validating public suspicion by using excessive force against peaceful demonstrators protesting such abuse, video evidence was again crucial in documenting their misconduct.

This week, for example, two Indianapolis officers were charged with assaulting two women at a protest on May 31. A protester alleged that the officers, Jonathan Horlock and Nathaniel Schauwecker, attacked her with batons and pepper balls without provocation. Her companion, a photographer, said one of the officers shoved her to the pavement when she objected to the protester’s treatment. While the officers claimed they used appropriate force while arresting the women for violating a local curfew, video of the incident told a different story. Now Horlock and Schauwecker both face battery charges, while Horlock is also charged with perjury and obstruction of justice because he lied about the encounter, falsely claiming that the protester had hit a police sergeant in the chest.

The response from the local police union was notably muted. “We look forward to a full, fair and public airing of all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the events in question,” the Indianapolis Fraternal Order of Police said yesterday. “While officers prefer to avoid any use of force, we fully recognize the requirement to safely and swiftly effectuate the lawful arrest of individuals when called upon to do so, especially during tense and rapidly evolving events. Therefore, we welcome a robust review of these allegations and have confidence in the process.”

The restrained tone of that statement contrasts sharply with the strident, diehard defenses that we frequently hear from police unions. That reflex, which elevates the personal interests of particular cops about the broader interests of the profession, is one of the things that will have to change if police want to rehabilitate their reputation and restore public confidence in their work.

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A new article of mine in Newsweek, responding to Prof. John Eastman’s contrary view, and building on my blog post on the subject.

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“The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” declared the stark New York Times headline in November 2018. The article focused on a 2017 German study that said the mid-summer levels of “flying insect biomass” in 63 nature preserves had declined by 76 percent over 27 years. In a 2019 study in Biological Conservation, researchers warned that we might see “the extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades.”

Big if true.

Now a new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution offers some happier news: In the United States at least, the abundance and insect biodiversity trends are “generally indistinguishable from zero.” In other words, there is no detectable insect armageddon here. “This lack of overall increase or decline was consistent across arthropod feeding groups and was similar for heavily disturbed versus relatively natural sites,” note the researchers. “The apparent robustness of US arthropod populations is reassuring.”

The researchers came to their conclusions by parsing the data collected through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s network of Long-Term Ecological Research sites. This network, established in 1980, comprises 25 monitoring locations across each of the country’s major ecoregions.

The press release accompanying the study notes that the team looked into several factors that might have had a noticeable effect on insect population levels, including insecticides, light pollution, and built environments.

“No matter what factor we looked at, nothing could explain the trends in a satisfactory way,” said University of Georgia entomologist Michael Crossley. “We just took all the data and, when you look, there are as many things going up as going down. Even when we broke it out in functional groups there wasn’t really a clear story like predators are decreasing or herbivores are increasing.”

In an April 2020 commentary in Science, two British researchers urged their colleagues against crisis-mongering through overinterpreting tentative results from very preliminary insect abundance studies.

“The temptation to draw overly simple and sensational conclusions is understandable, because it captures the attention of the public and can potentially catalyze much needed action in policy development and research arenas,” they warned. “However, fear-based messages often backfire. This strategy has the grave risk of undermining trust in science and can lead to denialism, fatigue, and apathy. Embracing nuance allows us to balance accurate reporting of worrying losses with hopeful examples of wins. Hope is a more powerful engine of change than fear.”

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Vice President Mike Pence took to Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox News earlier this week to gripe that Democrats were attempting to include legislation related to marijuana and banking in the latest coronavirus relief bill.

“I heard the other day the bill mentions marijuana more than it mentions jobs,” Pence said to Dobbs. “The American people don’t want some pork-barrel bill coming out of the Congress when we’ve got real needs for working-class families.”

Maybe he’s trying to remind everybody that Joe Biden isn’t the only vice president who’s still resisting marijuana legalization?

There are two ironies here. First, the bill Pence is complaining about makes it possible for cannabis businesses to safely engage in banking in states where cannabis is legal, which helps those “working-class families” who rely on the cannabis industry. Second, the bill he’s referring to will actually save taxpayers money, unlike much of the rest of this relief legislation.

The “Secure and Fair Enforcement Act of 2019,” a.k.a. the “SAFE Banking Act,” would allow legally operating cannabis businesses to have the same legal access to banks, loans, and deposit protections as other legal businesses. Because the sale and possession of marijuana are still forbidden by federal law, banks are reluctant to have any dealings with dispensaries and growers, even when they’re legally operating within their home states.

This is not a pork-barrel bill. While the marijuana industry would love to have access to federal coronavirus relief, the SAFE Banking Act would allow them only to use banking services the way other businesses do. According to the Congressional Budget Office, passing the bill would actually reduce the federal deficit by $2-3 million dollars a year. This is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things (the federal deficit for 2020 stands so far at $2.8 trillion), but as Reason Foundation Policy Analyst Jacob James Rich observes, legal banking creates a framework for the expansion of the cannabis industry and also improves bookkeeping and revenue and income reporting. Both of those actions ultimately lead to more commerce and more revenue for the government:

Issues of underreported marijuana income are endemic across all municipalities and states that have regulated cannabis. This should come as no surprise since cash-based businesses tend to underreport their incomes by 50% in general, which might be even larger in the marijuana industry as suppliers transition from illegal to regulated markets. Additionally, employees of cash-based businesses tend to report less than 20% of their incomes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The best way to address these issues would be to allow marijuana businesses access to banking services, which provide much better records for accounting purposes.

The country is in a recession and experienced an unprecedented 32.9% drop in gross domestic product (GDP) for the second quarter of 2020—due largely to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic lockdowns many state and local governments implemented. While seeking to grapple with the pandemic, recession—and eventually needing to confront the nation’s unsustainable spending, both conservative and liberal policymakers in Congress should consider provisions, like marijuana banking law reforms, that could help the economy, state and local governments, small businesses, and be a net positive to the federal budget.

Pence and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) are using the SAFE Banking Act as a cudgel to accuse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) of including “non-germane” content in coronavirus relief legislation. Back in May, when the House previously attempted to add the SAFE Banking Act to coronavirus legislation, McConnell took the same approach as Pence is taking now, mocking the bill for referencing “cannabis” more than it references “jobs,” which is a cheap and lazy way to score points. The number of times a bill uses a particular word is not a good indicator of what the bill does.

The SAFE Banking Act passed the House last September, 321-103. Only one Democrat (Terri Sewell of Alabama) voted against it, while 90 Republicans supported it. Thanks to McConnell, it hasn’t been taken up by the Senate, despite having the support of fellow Republican and Kentuckian Sen. Rand Paul, who tweeted in support of it just yesterday.

While there are myriad issues with the federal government’s coronavirus relief efforts, allowing state-legal cannabis businesses to use banking services is not one of them.

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