Tag: news

Former Broward County sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson has been widely vilified for failing to intervene in the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But did Peterson’s failure amount to a crime? Although that is what local prosecutors argue, it seems like a stretch.

The arrest warrant approved by Circuit Court Judge Andrew Siegel this week charges Peterson with seven counts of child neglect, a felony, and three misdemeanor counts of culpable negligence as well as one misdemeanor count of perjury for allegedly lying to investigators about how many shots he heard while taking cover 75 feet away from the building where a gunman was murdering students and teachers. Only the perjury charge seems like a straightforward application of the relevant statute, while the other charges are novel applications of laws that are generally applied to very different contexts.

As relevant here, Florida defines “neglect of a child” as “a caregiver’s failure to make a reasonable effort to protect a child from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.” A “caregiver” is defined as “a parent, adult household member, or other person responsible for a child’s welfare.” Did Peterson, as the resource officer assigned to the high school, qualify as a caregiver, and did he therefore have a legal obligation to risk his life by running into the school? Not surprisingly, Peterson’s lawyer, Joseph DiRuzzo, argues that he did not. But other legal experts are also skeptical.

“This is a unique prosecution, pushing the bounds of criminal liability,” Miami defense attorney David Markus, who is not involved in the case, told the Associated Press. “While elected prosecutors many times bow to the court of public opinion, our justice system demands that a case like this be tested in a court of law. Legally, this is a tough one for the prosecution.” Michael Grieco, another defense attorney who is also a Florida legislator, agreed that “the decision to criminally charge Mr. Peterson, although popular in the court of public opinion, will likely not hold water once formally challenged.”

The culpable negligence charges seem closer to the mark than the child neglect charges but will still be hard to prove. The Florida Supreme Court has defined culpable negligence as conduct “evincing reckless disregard of human life or of the safety of persons exposed to its dangerous effects; or that entire want of care which would raise the presumption of indifference to consequences; or such wantonness or recklessness or grossly careless disregard of the safety and welfare of the public, or that reckless indifference to the rights of others, which is equivalent to an intentional violation of them.”

Peterson is charged not with doing something that recklessly endangered others but with failing to do something (enter the school and confront the gunman) that might have prevented harm to others. The arrest warrant argues that Peterson could have prevented several murders if he had done what he was supposed to do. DiRuzzo argues that Peterson “was not criminally negligent in his actions, as no police officer has ever been prosecuted for his or her actions in responding to an active shooter incident.” The fact that the prosecution is unprecedented does not necessarily mean it is unwinnable, but it does suggest that the statute is not an easy fit (although you could also argue that Peterson’s failure was uniquely egregious).

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh notes that even when people (such as parents) have a special duty of care, they are not legally obligated to intervene if it exposes them to a risk of death or serious injury. “My quick research has revealed precedents supporting this in Alabama, California, Michigan, Montana, and North Carolina, and no precedents imposing a more categorical protect-even-at-risk-of-death duty,” he writes. “Likewise, the few states that purport to impose a more general duty to help even strangers generally limit that duty to safe rescues.” The question is whether Peterson, as a police officer trained to deal with active shooters, had a legal duty that went beyond what would be required of a mother who is afraid to get between her violent husband and the child he is beating.

Matthew Mayer, an expert on school violence at Rutgers University, notes that the charges against Peterson assume that if he had entered the school he would have been able to interrupt the attack. The case “rests on him being in the correct place at the right time and getting there and successfully firing shots,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “That is 100 percent speculation.”

Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, takes a similar view. “Criminalizing someone for not acting in the middle of a mass murder is built on the preposterous notion that police officers are Navy SEALs in disguise that can spring into action,” O’Donnell told the Sun-Sentinel. “You never know what you’re going to do when the bullets start flying.”

While O’Donnell said he could see why a police officer might be fired in a case like this (Peterson resigned), but criminal charges are another matter. “This is headhunting,” he said. “This is trying to make someone pay for a tragic series of events.”

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who headed the state commission that investigated the Parkland shooting, takes a different view. “Scott Peterson is a coward,” Gualtieri said. “He’s a failure. And he’s a criminal. No doubt because he didn’t act people were hurt and people were killed.”

But H. Scott Fingerhut, a law professor at Florida International University, emphasizes the distinction between moral and legal responsibility. “We don’t know what his lack of action legally caused,” Fingerhut told the Sun-Sentinel. “What we think morally is one thing. But our criminal justice systems are based on legal liability or guilt, meaning what can be proved.”

These dueling views can also be heard from people directly affected by the Parkland shooting.

Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, was one of the students who died that day, welcomed Peterson’s prosecution. “It’s about accountability, and there’s to be more in Broward County,” he told The New York Times. “We knew all along that this guy did something very terrible. He let my daughter die, and a lot of other victims in the school—teachers and children—and he didn’t do his job.”

By contrast, Daniel Bishop, who was a sophomore at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when it was attacked and subsequently joined fellow students in campaigning for stricter gun control, questions the charges against Peterson. “It wasn’t his fault,” he told the Times. “Who am I to place blame on anyone besides the one person who should be held accountable?”

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Mtj9fc
via IFTTT

New tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico are supposed to start on Monday—but even if they don’t end up happening, some damage has already been done.

In a tweet last week, President Donald Trump abruptly announced plans to slap 5 percent tariffs on all Mexican imports starting on June 10. The White House followed up with a plan to hike those tariffs monthly, up to a maximum of 25 percent, if Mexico fails to adopt the immigration policies Trump would prefer. Even at the lowest level, those tariffs would amount to an $87 billion tax increase on Americans and could cost thousands of jobs. At the highest level, they would be one of the largest tax increases in decades and would jeopardize more than $600 billion in cross-border trade, with agriculture and manufacturing sectors hit particularly hard.

There are reasons to be skeptical that the tariffs with actually materialize. Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top trade advisors, said Wednesday that the new taxes may not be necessary “because we have the Mexicans’ attention.” Even if the White House does push ahead with the trade barriers, Trump may lack the legal authority to impose them as part of a national security declaration. If he tries, Congress could act to block them.

More practically, there is still no formal guidance from the Trump administration telling U.S. customs officials to collect those tariffs. After decades of mostly tariff-free trade between the U.S. and Mexico, there are good questions about whether border checkpoints have the logistical capabilities to start collecting tariffs in a matter of days. A presidential tweet can’t magically create the vast bureaucracy necessary to collect taxes on $1 billion in daily imports from Mexico.

“So, if the tariffs are applied on Monday, expect a mess,” tweets John Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If the tariffs don’t happen—for any of these reasons, or simply because Trump changes his mind—that might seem like a victory for free trade. Certainly, it’s better than the alternative. But Trump’s threats have already done damage in ways that might not be immediately obvious.

“The overall problem here is one of U.S. credibility going forward,” says Clark Packard, trade policy counsel at the R Street Institute, a free market think tank. “Why would other countries want to negotiate with us after the president pulls this stunt right as his administration is pressing Congress and Canada and Mexico to move forward with [the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement]? Totally self-defeating.”

Indeed, it’s impossible to separate the new tariff threats against Mexico from the Trump administration’s claim that it has been using tariffs to negotiate better trade deals for the United States. The first of those new trade deals to emerge is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which has yet to pass Congress.

“He’s already injected the idea that he could move to slap them on at any time, never mind USMCA, and for any reason,” tweets Politico and CNBC correspondent Ben White on Wednesday. “That has its own impact on confidence and decision making.”

You can add all that to the list of unseen costs of the Trump trade war. As I detailed in a Reason feature earlier this week, we may never know the trade war’s true cost in terms of lost opportunities and unmade investments.

If Trump is going to sign a trade deal with Mexico and then immediately threaten to hit Mexican imports with tariffs over completely unrelated issues, what incentive does China or Europe have to reach a deal with him? The president still has time to avoid the economic damage that would be caused by these new Mexican tariffs, but who knows how much political damage he’s already done?

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2HXMlXm
via IFTTT

As the FBI amasses hundreds of millions of photos for its facial recognition program (with little in the way of safeguards), is it also going to force us to bare our faces for cameras as we move through an increasingly surveilled country? It’s a timely question as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that even modest privacy and accuracy recommendations have been ignored by U.S. law enforcement and, in the UK, police create a precedent by penalizing passers-by who cover their faces to avoid being scanned.

“Lawmakers were left momentarily and uncharacteristically speechless Tuesday as an auditor at Homeland Security detailed the FBI’s database of 640 million faces, a number that is twice the population of the United States,” according to Courthouse News.

That’s a lot of faces for computers to scan for matches, though not as many identities, since the pictures come from overlapping state and federal databases. About 30 million of the images are derived from criminal justice records through the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System. The rest “primarily contain civil photos from state and federal government databases, such as visa applicant photos and selected states’ driver’s license photos,” according to a GAO report published June 4, the same day director Gretta Goodwin detailed her agency’s concerns to Congress.

A map included in the report shows that some states have prohibited the use of facial recognition technology or opted out of sharing photos with the FBI. But others have surrendered almost everything to the feds. A good many, including my own Arizona, have apparently withheld mugshots of accused and convicted criminals while turning over the images of anybody with a driver’s license.

 

That’s potentially a big problem, since the FBI has done little to ensure the reliability and respectability of its efforts. “While the FBI has conducted audits to oversee the use of its face recognition capabilities, it still hasn’t taken steps to determine whether state database searches are accurate enough to support law enforcement investigations,” the GAO cautions.

Overall, in the years leading up to the report, “GAO made three recommendations related to privacy, one of which has been implemented. GAO also made three recommendations related to accuracy that the FBI is still working to address.”

“There have been no findings of civil liberties violations or evidence of system misuse,” responds Kimberly J. Del Greco, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “To date, the FBI has conducted nine audits—there have been no findings of non-compliance, and no observations of unauthorized requests.” Del Greco also claims better than 99 percent accuracy for the Bureau’s facial recognition algorithm.

So, the FBI would have me believe that it absolutely will not be abusing its ability to track me through public places based on its unerring interpretation of the scowling snapshot the Arizona Department of Transportation turned over without a fight.

Or maybe it will abuse its power. That there have (allegedly) been no internal findings of civil liberties violations yet is a less-convincing predictor of future behavior than the FBI’s own record of sketchy conduct; the 1976 Church Report found that “the FBI…has placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than on organized crime” in just one effort to expose a litany of violations.

And, if history repeats itself, FBI efforts to track me could end up landing you in hot water.

“One potential source of injustice is the prospect of an inaccurate identification match being triggered, resulting in unwarranted action against individuals,” acknowledges a London Policing Ethics Panel report on facial recognition released last month.

Field implementation of facial recognition technology has been a tad less accurate than official claims would have you believe. Britain, that test bed of the modern democratic police state, has been experimenting with facial recognition technology on its streets with unimpressive results.

“Using a series of Freedom of Information requests Big Brother Watch” found that “Metropolitan Police’s facial recognition matches were 98% inaccurate, misidentifying 95 people at last year’s Notting Hill Carnival as criminals,” the civil liberties organization reports. “South Wales Police’s matches were 91% inaccurate.”

In London, a series of eight trials between 2016 and 2018 yielded a 96 percent false positive rate. That’s “where software wrongly alerts police that a person passing through the scanning area matches a photo on the database,” according to The Independent, which notes that “a 14-year-old black schoolboy was fingerprinted after being misidentified.”

It’s a creepy police state as administered by Barney Fife. That’s pretty damned funny—unless you’re arrested based on a bad match.

But improving the accuracy would make its implementation potentially more threatening, not less.

“Currently, protesters enjoy a sense of safety in numbers. This would be lost in an era of total surveillance,” the London Policing Ethics Panel report concedes. “While many people believe the British state to be generally benign … political history teaches us that we cannot be complacent and assume this will always be so.”

As for that benign state…

“Several people were stopped after covering their faces or pulling up hoods” to avoid being scanned during a test deployment of facial recognition technology in Romford, London, according to The Independent. This, despite assurances from the police that “anyone who declines to be scanned during the deployment will not be viewed as suspicious by police officers.” One man was fined 90 pounds after loudly protesting when police stopped him for covering his face.

The FBI has its own track record of abuses and missteps, dating well before the focus on dissent documented in the Church Report and continuing through the debate over its role in the 2016 presidential election and modern partisan politics. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, at the center of current Bureau controversies, was once called before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to explain bogus surveillance warrants.  Given that history, it’s hardly reassuring when officials insist that “the FBI has developed practices and procedures when it uses facial recognition technologies that constitute the state of the art in protecting privacy and civil liberties” and that any other protections are unnecessary.

Until the feds come up with something a little more solid in the way of assuring both the accuracy of facial recognition techniques and a respect for personal liberty when implementing the technology, you might want to consider buying yourself a nice hat—something that can be pulled down over your mug. And you’ll just have to hope that you’ll be allowed to wear your headgear in places where the government is scanning for suspects—or anybody who might slightly resemble them.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IrxgN3
via IFTTT

Residents of New York City will take 35 million elevator rides today. That works out to an astronomical 12.77 billion elevator rides per year. An average of 2.75 of those rides end in a fatal accident. That’s 404 times less likely than an ocean swimmer getting attacked by a shark.

Is that a problem that demands government action? Some lawmakers seem to think so. The State of New York is considering a bill to require licenses for elevator mechanics. Some recent elevator accidents, the legislation’s authors argue, were caused by insufficiently trained mechanics.

In fact, there’s good reason to doubt that New York has less safe elevators than the rest of the country or that requiring licenses would make them safer. The chief effect of those licenses would be to make it harder for New Yorkers to find jobs in that field.

Thirty-five states require licenses for workers in elevator repair or installation. There’s not much empirical research comparing elevator safety on a state-by-state basis, but it’s illuminating to compare elevator safety in license-free New York City to elevator safety across the country.

Nationally, there are 325 million elevator rides per day, or 118.625 billion rides per year—and there are roughly 27 elevator-related deaths a year, according to ConsumerWatch.com. That comes to .00000000023 deaths per elevator ride across the United States. 

In New York City, there are 35 million elevator rides per day, or 12.775 billion rides per year. According to The Real Deal, which covers New York real estate, the city has seen 22 confirmed deaths in elevator-related accidents since 2010, or an average of 2.75 elevator deaths per year. That comes to .000000000215 deaths per elevator ride in the Big Apple.

In other words, the death rate per elevator ride is actually a little lower in New York City than in the rest of the country. 

Meanwhile, stairs cause 1,600 deaths a year in the United States. By LiveScience.com’s calculations, that makes them significantly more dangerous than taking the elevator.

Can government licensing make New York’s elevators marginally safer? It’s hard to tell for sure when you’re working with numbers this tiny.

But this certainly seems like another instance where occupational licensing laws are being justified on flimsy public safety or consumer welfare grounds, even though many analyses of specific licenses have shown little connection between the existence or stringency of the license and public health, safety, or service quality.

Instead, licensing laws tend to enrich license holders, by protecting them from competition, at the expense of consumers, who pay higher prices, and at the expense of potential new workers, who face higher barriers to entry.

The most likely result of this bill, if it is passed, is to create new barriers to entry for workers looking to find a new job. They would have to pay a fee (licensing fees average $279 in New York), and they would have to either complete a certification program from an industry group, hold an out-of-state elevator mechanic license, or have four full years of experience in elevator maintenance, construction, or repair. Elevator mechanics make well above the average wage, and are a growing field; new fees and certification requirements will reduce the availability of a good middle-class job.

Occupational licensing laws currently on the books already place a significant burden on New York’s economy. According to an analysis from the University of Minnesota economist Morris Kleiner, excessive licensing laws cost the state over 100,000 full-time jobs and almost $13.1 billion in economic growth. Instead of stacking on another licensing requirement, New York lawmakers should consider rolling back some of those existing regulations.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2wGIxn7
via IFTTT