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No Federal Charges for Police Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice

tamirrice_1161x653

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it’s closing its investigation of the fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice. The agency will not recommend any charges against the officers involved.

Rice was shot and killed in 2014 at the age of 12 by then-Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann. Loehmann and a fellow officer responded to a 911 call reporting a “guy with a pistol” in a public park who was occasionally pointing his gun at people. The person who called 911 told the dispatcher they believed the gun was fake, but that information was not passed along to the officers.

When the police car rolled up to the scene, Loehmann exited the car while it was still moving, and within two seconds, opened fire on Rice, shooting the boy in the abdomen. Rice died. Loehmann said that he gave Rice multiple orders to show his hands (even though he shot him almost immediately upon exiting his car) and said that he thought Rice was reaching for the gun. The weapon ultimately turned out to be a toy airsoft gun.

Rice’s death was one of many recent unnecessary killings by police. His death led to protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and demands for reforms in how officers approach suspects, particularly black men and adolescents. After Rice’s killing, the Justice Department opened an investigation to determine whether either Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback, should face federal charges for violating Rice’s civil rights.

Tuesday, the Justice Department reported that, due to the poor quality of the video evidence and disagreement among experts about whether Loehmann’s use of force was appropriate, it did not believe it could make a case against the officers.

The decision may reopen old wounds, but the reality was that the federal government’s loose standards for police use of deadly force pretty much guaranteed this outcome. The announcement from the Justice Department notes, “[C]aselaw establishes that an officer is permitted to use deadly force where he reasonably believes that the suspect posed an imminent threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others. … It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment.”

It is not relevant to the DOJ’s determination that the police officers were not actually facing serious physical harm and that any perceived threat was a result of the officers abruptly careening onto the scene to confront Rice (Garmback actually lost control of the police car driving and skidded 40 feet). What matters to the DOJ is that Loehmann said he believed he was about to be shot by Rice and that this belief was reasonable given the circumstances at that moment.

The tragic and absurd killing of Rice has prompted activists to demand law enforcement agencies and lawmakers rethink the rules for deadly use of force by police. Rather than permitting police to open fire just because they believe they’re in danger, reformers instead want to instead establish that police may only use deadly force if it’s the only way to stop a suspect from immediately causing injury to others.

California passed such a law in 2019 in response to Sacramento police chasing and fatally shooting Stephon Clark after mistaking his cellphone for a gun in a nighttime backyard confrontation. Body camera footage of the incident showed that the officers were not pinned in or in a vulnerable situation when they mistakenly thought Clark was going to shoot at them. But because California law on the police use of force allowed the officers to claim they had a “reasonable fear” of danger, the Sacramento County district attorney declined to press charges against the officers.

Loehmann may not have been prosecuted, but the City of Cleveland did agree to pay Rice’s family $6 million in a settlement. As for Loehmann, though he wasn’t charged with a crime, he was fired. It turned out he had concealed from the Cleveland Police that he had previously quit from another police department to avoid being fired for his poor performance there. Amazingly, another police department in Bellaire, Ohio, attempted to hire Loehmann onto their force in 2018, but public outrage prompted him to withdraw his application.

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No Federal Charges for Police Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice

tamirrice_1161x653

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it’s closing its investigation of the fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice. The agency will not recommend any charges against the officers involved.

Rice was shot and killed in 2014 at the age of 12 by then-Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann. Loehmann and a fellow officer responded to a 911 call reporting a “guy with a pistol” in a public park who was occasionally pointing his gun at people. The person who called 911 told the dispatcher they believed the gun was fake, but that information was not passed along to the officers.

When the police car rolled up to the scene, Loehmann exited the car while it was still moving, and within two seconds, opened fire on Rice, shooting the boy in the abdomen. Rice died. Loehmann said that he gave Rice multiple orders to show his hands (even though he shot him almost immediately upon exiting his car) and said that he thought Rice was reaching for the gun. The weapon ultimately turned out to be a toy airsoft gun.

Rice’s death was one of many recent unnecessary killings by police. His death led to protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and demands for reforms in how officers approach suspects, particularly black men and adolescents. After Rice’s killing, the Justice Department opened an investigation to determine whether either Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback, should face federal charges for violating Rice’s civil rights.

Tuesday, the Justice Department reported that, due to the poor quality of the video evidence and disagreement among experts about whether Loehmann’s use of force was appropriate, it did not believe it could make a case against the officers.

The decision may reopen old wounds, but the reality was that the federal government’s loose standards for police use of deadly force pretty much guaranteed this outcome. The announcement from the Justice Department notes, “[C]aselaw establishes that an officer is permitted to use deadly force where he reasonably believes that the suspect posed an imminent threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others. … It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment.”

It is not relevant to the DOJ’s determination that the police officers were not actually facing serious physical harm and that any perceived threat was a result of the officers abruptly careening onto the scene to confront Rice (Garmback actually lost control of the police car driving and skidded 40 feet). What matters to the DOJ is that Loehmann said he believed he was about to be shot by Rice and that this belief was reasonable given the circumstances at that moment.

The tragic and absurd killing of Rice has prompted activists to demand law enforcement agencies and lawmakers rethink the rules for deadly use of force by police. Rather than permitting police to open fire just because they believe they’re in danger, reformers instead want to instead establish that police may only use deadly force if it’s the only way to stop a suspect from immediately causing injury to others.

California passed such a law in 2019 in response to Sacramento police chasing and fatally shooting Stephon Clark after mistaking his cellphone for a gun in a nighttime backyard confrontation. Body camera footage of the incident showed that the officers were not pinned in or in a vulnerable situation when they mistakenly thought Clark was going to shoot at them. But because California law on the police use of force allowed the officers to claim they had a “reasonable fear” of danger, the Sacramento County district attorney declined to press charges against the officers.

Loehmann may not have been prosecuted, but the City of Cleveland did agree to pay Rice’s family $6 million in a settlement. As for Loehmann, though he wasn’t charged with a crime, he was fired. It turned out he had concealed from the Cleveland Police that he had previously quit from another police department to avoid being fired for his poor performance there. Amazingly, another police department in Bellaire, Ohio, attempted to hire Loehmann onto their force in 2018, but public outrage prompted him to withdraw his application.

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Trump’s Tariffs Made D.C. Swampier as Senators, Lobbyists Sought Special Favors for Connected Companies

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When a Missouri-based power tool manufacturer was facing the prospect of higher costs due to new tariffs on imported saw blades, it turned to friends in high places for help—including Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).

Hawley has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump’s destructive trade policies. In fact, he’s suggested that the president should have done more to dismantle the system of global trade. But Hawley was one of four members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to sign onto a letter sent in September 2019 asking the U.S. trade representative to grant a special exemption for SM Products, which is based in Kansas City.

“It would not be beneficial to impair a small American company that does not have the financial resources or alternative supply chain options,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was obtained and published this week by the Wall Street Journal. Because SM Products had contracts locked-in months in advance, it had no choice but to eat the cost of the tariffs, they wrote, warning that “this cost will likely prevent SM Products from reaching profitability, thereby jeopardizing its future viability.”

In short: China wasn’t paying for the tariffs.

The tariff costs facing SM Products were also hitting many other American manufacturers since much of American manufacturing is dependent on the ability to import low-cost inputs from China and elsewhere. But while some companies were able to find members of Congress willing to lobby on their behalf before the unelected board of trade officials who get to decide which tariff exemptions to grant and which requests to ignore, most other American businesses were less fortunate.

As I reported in May 2018 when the Trump administration was first considering imposing tariffs on thousands of Chinese-made products, the U.S. International Trade Commission hearing was a five-day parade of business owners literally begging the federal government not to do it. One after another, for five minutes at a time, hundreds of business owners told the commission much the same thing that Hawley and his colleagues wrote in that letter: Tariffs would hurt their profitability. Contracts were already locked in and couldn’t be altered at the drop of a hat. Alternative supply chains would take time and money to develop.

Once the tariffs were in place, the Trump administration set up a murky, confusing process for companies to request exemptions. It was, and is, a system that almost seems designed to be exploited by politically connected firms and individuals. Indeed, right from the start of the Trump trade wars, some major American steel manufacturers appeared to be exercising undue influence over the exemption process. Members of Congress have warned that the process lacks “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” After two years, the government’s own data suggest that’s exactly what has happened.

Hawley’s letter was hardly the only one. The Journal says it obtained more than 100 letters from members of Congress to the U.S. trade representative seeking special treatment for connected companies. “Some of these exclusions were granted, and many weren’t. It’s difficult to know if lobbying by Congress made a difference since the Trump Administration’s approval process is a black box,” the paper reports.

Under those circumstances, then, it should be no surprise that businesses that could afford to do so started hiring lobbyists to navigate the new tariff regime. The amount of money spent on lobbying work related to tariffs increased 900 percent as the trade war was getting started.

If you had the connections necessary to get a couple of members of Congress to write a letter to the U.S. trade representative on your behalf, as the owners of SM Products apparently did, you’d be foolish not to try that too. Most businesses, however, can’t afford to hire lobbyists and don’t have easy access to a sitting senator. They just have to pay the tariff bill.

These are all unintended but completely expected consequences of Trump’s trade war and his poorly thought-through plan to use higher tariffs as a cudgel against China. Not only did Trump’s trade policies run directly counter to his promises to “drain the swamp” by creating opaque bureaucracies that can decide the fates of small businesses all over the country, but they actually created incentives for the swamp to get even swampier.

In the warped reality the trade war helped to create, a company in Kansas City might not succeed or fail based on the quality of the power tools it is manufacturing, but on whether its owners know the right men in Washington.

As soon as he takes the oath of office, President-elect Joe Biden ought to scrap every last part of Trump’s tariffs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely. Maybe Republicans will finally start to care about undoing the bureaucracy of tariff exemptions once Democrats are running it.

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Trump’s Tariffs Made D.C. Swampier as Senators, Lobbyists Sought Special Favors for Connected Companies

upiphotostwo589602

When a Missouri-based power tool manufacturer was facing the prospect of higher costs due to new tariffs on imported saw blades, it turned to friends in high places for help—including Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).

Hawley has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump’s destructive trade policies. In fact, he’s suggested that the president should have done more to dismantle the system of global trade. But Hawley was one of four members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to sign onto a letter sent in September 2019 asking the U.S. trade representative to grant a special exemption for SM Products, which is based in Kansas City.

“It would not be beneficial to impair a small American company that does not have the financial resources or alternative supply chain options,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was obtained and published this week by the Wall Street Journal. Because SM Products had contracts locked-in months in advance, it had no choice but to eat the cost of the tariffs, they wrote, warning that “this cost will likely prevent SM Products from reaching profitability, thereby jeopardizing its future viability.”

In short: China wasn’t paying for the tariffs.

The tariff costs facing SM Products were also hitting many other American manufacturers since much of American manufacturing is dependent on the ability to import low-cost inputs from China and elsewhere. But while some companies were able to find members of Congress willing to lobby on their behalf before the unelected board of trade officials who get to decide which tariff exemptions to grant and which requests to ignore, most other American businesses were less fortunate.

As I reported in May 2018 when the Trump administration was first considering imposing tariffs on thousands of Chinese-made products, the U.S. International Trade Commission hearing was a five-day parade of business owners literally begging the federal government not to do it. One after another, for five minutes at a time, hundreds of business owners told the commission much the same thing that Hawley and his colleagues wrote in that letter: Tariffs would hurt their profitability. Contracts were already locked in and couldn’t be altered at the drop of a hat. Alternative supply chains would take time and money to develop.

Once the tariffs were in place, the Trump administration set up a murky, confusing process for companies to request exemptions. It was, and is, a system that almost seems designed to be exploited by politically connected firms and individuals. Indeed, right from the start of the Trump trade wars, some major American steel manufacturers appeared to be exercising undue influence over the exemption process. Members of Congress have warned that the process lacks “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” After two years, the government’s own data suggest that’s exactly what has happened.

Hawley’s letter was hardly the only one. The Journal says it obtained more than 100 letters from members of Congress to the U.S. trade representative seeking special treatment for connected companies. “Some of these exclusions were granted, and many weren’t. It’s difficult to know if lobbying by Congress made a difference since the Trump Administration’s approval process is a black box,” the paper reports.

Under those circumstances, then, it should be no surprise that businesses that could afford to do so started hiring lobbyists to navigate the new tariff regime. The amount of money spent on lobbying work related to tariffs increased 900 percent as the trade war was getting started.

If you had the connections necessary to get a couple of members of Congress to write a letter to the U.S. trade representative on your behalf, as the owners of SM Products apparently did, you’d be foolish not to try that too. Most businesses, however, can’t afford to hire lobbyists and don’t have easy access to a sitting senator. They just have to pay the tariff bill.

These are all unintended but completely expected consequences of Trump’s trade war and his poorly thought-through plan to use higher tariffs as a cudgel against China. Not only did Trump’s trade policies run directly counter to his promises to “drain the swamp” by creating opaque bureaucracies that can decide the fates of small businesses all over the country, but they actually created incentives for the swamp to get even swampier.

In the warped reality the trade war helped to create, a company in Kansas City might not succeed or fail based on the quality of the power tools it is manufacturing, but on whether its owners know the right men in Washington.

As soon as he takes the oath of office, President-elect Joe Biden ought to scrap every last part of Trump’s tariffs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely. Maybe Republicans will finally start to care about undoing the bureaucracy of tariff exemptions once Democrats are running it.

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Citizen vs. Government (Vol. 6)

vol6_v2

A citizen and the government have a friendly chat about being outdated, mandates, and peacekeeping.

Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton; starring Austin Bragg and Heaton; produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Watch the full series playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdsAqq875U&list=PLBuns9Evn1w9TMV8W9ejb8BPBdjSAGovs

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Citizen vs. Government (Vol. 6)

vol6_v2

A citizen and the government have a friendly chat about being outdated, mandates, and peacekeeping.

Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton; starring Austin Bragg and Heaton; produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Watch the full series playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdsAqq875U&list=PLBuns9Evn1w9TMV8W9ejb8BPBdjSAGovs

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The Government Isn’t About to Tell You to Stop Drinking Now

tpgrfphotos159599

This year, not even the government is going to try to tell you not to drink. Updated U.S. dietary guidelines go about like you would expect (eat your vegetables and fruits, stop eating so much processed meat and refined grains, etc.). But the guidelines—updated every five years—are surprising in one way: they don’t adopt a recommendation from experts to revise down alcohol limits for men.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Human and Health Services (HHS) have the final say on the guidelines. But they take recommendations from a panel of experts—who said in a summer report that men should not drink more than one alcoholic beverage per day. That’s down from saying two alcoholic beverages per day is OK for men, and on par with the drink limit recommended for women.

However, the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans do not include this recommended change.

Although “the preponderance of evidence supports limiting … alcoholic beverages to promote health and prevent disease, the evidence reviewed since the 2015-2020 edition does not substantiate quantitative changes at this time,” it says.

The whole thing is sort of silly, as the nutrition content and health effects of alcoholic beverages are highly dependent on what type of drink is being consumed, as well as how quickly, whether it’s with a meal (and what sort), and things like body size, metabolic status, and a host of other personal health factors.

But “sort of silly” is pretty much the mantra of the dietary guidelines, which have always been beholden to business and agricultural interests, nutritional fads, and a whole lot of dubious science, as well as painfully slow to change. “We have the situation where we just cannot reverse out of these policies that were originally based on really weak science,” Nina Teicholz—author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet—told Reason in 2018.

What the 2020 dietary guideline gurus wrote about alcohol isn’t terribly unreasonable, From their executive summary:

Binge drinking is consistently associated with increased risk compared to not binge drinking, and more frequent binge drinking is associated with increased risk compared to less binge drinking. Similarly, among those who drink, consuming higher average amounts of alcohol is associated with increased mortality risk compared to drinking lower average amounts. The Committee concurred with the recommendation of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans that those who do not drink should not begin to drink because they believe alcohol would make them healthier. Although alcohol can be consumed at low levels with relatively low risk, for those who choose to consume alcohol, evidence points to a general rule that drinking less is better for health than drinking more.

The committee adds that “there is evidence to tighten [recommendations] for men such that recommended limits for both men and women who drink would be 1 drink per day on days when alcohol is consumed.”

It also recommends that people cut added sugars (a.k.a. those that don’t naturally occur in food)—another update that was rejected.

FREE MINDS

Vaccine rollout efforts are off to a worryingly slow start. “The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330.7 million people get the shots by late June,” notes CNBC. “To meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get the shots each day, the math shows.” But in the past two weeks since the vaccines started going out, only about 2 million total (of the 11.5 million vaccine doses shipped so far) have been administered.

FREE MARKETS

President Donald Trump issues “Executive Order on Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School Choice.” But like so many of Trump’s executive orders, this one is basically all smoke and mirrors. While the “headline suggests it creates a federal school choice program for students whose schools have gone all-remote,” it actually “creates no program, and what it does do would require about a year of sustained bureaucracy-wrangling and lawsuit-fending-off effort by the White House and the HHS secretary before it would produce any real effect,” writes Greg Forster, a fellow with EdChoice. More here.

QUICK HITS

  • The new coronavirus variant which is more easily transmitted that’s running wild through the U.K. has hit the United States, with a Colorado man who says he has not recently traveled anywhere testing positive for it.
  • Two more officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor have been fired:

The Senate voted 38-29 to give millions of women access to legal terminations under a new law supported by President Alberto Fernández. The margin was expected to be much smaller. Massive crowds of abortion rights activists and anti-abortion campaigners gathered outside the Palace of the Argentine National Congress to await the results, which came in the early hours of the morning after an overnight debate.

  • “Mexico is set to become the world’s largest legal cannabis market,” reports the Wall Street Journal:

Mexico’s Senate passed a bill in late November legalizing recreational marijuana. Lawmakers in the lower house say they will approve a bill by February, though they want to raise the amount of pot consumers may possess in public beyond the Senate bill’s limit of 28 grams, or about an ounce. Currently in Mexico, one can possess up to five grams of marijuana without being arrested.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3rI5nWu
via IFTTT

The Government Isn’t About to Tell You to Stop Drinking Now

tpgrfphotos159599

This year, not even the government is going to try to tell you not to drink. Updated U.S. dietary guidelines go about like you would expect (eat your vegetables and fruits, stop eating so much processed meat and refined grains, etc.). But the guidelines—updated every five years—are surprising in one way: they don’t adopt a recommendation from experts to revise down alcohol limits for men.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Human and Health Services (HHS) have the final say on the guidelines. But they take recommendations from a panel of experts—who said in a summer report that men should not drink more than one alcoholic beverage per day. That’s down from saying two alcoholic beverages per day is OK for men, and on par with the drink limit recommended for women.

However, the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans do not include this recommended change.

Although “the preponderance of evidence supports limiting … alcoholic beverages to promote health and prevent disease, the evidence reviewed since the 2015-2020 edition does not substantiate quantitative changes at this time,” it says.

The whole thing is sort of silly, as the nutrition content and health effects of alcoholic beverages are highly dependent on what type of drink is being consumed, as well as how quickly, whether it’s with a meal (and what sort), and things like body size, metabolic status, and a host of other personal health factors.

But “sort of silly” is pretty much the mantra of the dietary guidelines, which have always been beholden to business and agricultural interests, nutritional fads, and a whole lot of dubious science, as well as painfully slow to change. “We have the situation where we just cannot reverse out of these policies that were originally based on really weak science,” Nina Teicholz—author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet—told Reason in 2018.

What the 2020 dietary guideline gurus wrote about alcohol isn’t terribly unreasonable, From their executive summary:

Binge drinking is consistently associated with increased risk compared to not binge drinking, and more frequent binge drinking is associated with increased risk compared to less binge drinking. Similarly, among those who drink, consuming higher average amounts of alcohol is associated with increased mortality risk compared to drinking lower average amounts. The Committee concurred with the recommendation of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans that those who do not drink should not begin to drink because they believe alcohol would make them healthier. Although alcohol can be consumed at low levels with relatively low risk, for those who choose to consume alcohol, evidence points to a general rule that drinking less is better for health than drinking more.

The committee adds that “there is evidence to tighten [recommendations] for men such that recommended limits for both men and women who drink would be 1 drink per day on days when alcohol is consumed.”

It also recommends that people cut added sugars (a.k.a. those that don’t naturally occur in food)—another update that was rejected.

FREE MINDS

Vaccine rollout efforts are off to a worryingly slow start. “The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330.7 million people get the shots by late June,” notes CNBC. “To meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get the shots each day, the math shows.” But in the past two weeks since the vaccines started going out, only about 2 million total (of the 11.5 million vaccine doses shipped so far) have been administered.

FREE MARKETS

President Donald Trump issues “Executive Order on Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School Choice.” But like so many of Trump’s executive orders, this one is basically all smoke and mirrors. While the “headline suggests it creates a federal school choice program for students whose schools have gone all-remote,” it actually “creates no program, and what it does do would require about a year of sustained bureaucracy-wrangling and lawsuit-fending-off effort by the White House and the HHS secretary before it would produce any real effect,” writes Greg Forster, a fellow with EdChoice. More here.

QUICK HITS

  • The new coronavirus variant which is more easily transmitted that’s running wild through the U.K. has hit the United States, with a Colorado man who says he has not recently traveled anywhere testing positive for it.
  • Two more officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor have been fired:

The Senate voted 38-29 to give millions of women access to legal terminations under a new law supported by President Alberto Fernández. The margin was expected to be much smaller. Massive crowds of abortion rights activists and anti-abortion campaigners gathered outside the Palace of the Argentine National Congress to await the results, which came in the early hours of the morning after an overnight debate.

  • “Mexico is set to become the world’s largest legal cannabis market,” reports the Wall Street Journal:

Mexico’s Senate passed a bill in late November legalizing recreational marijuana. Lawmakers in the lower house say they will approve a bill by February, though they want to raise the amount of pot consumers may possess in public beyond the Senate bill’s limit of 28 grams, or about an ounce. Currently in Mexico, one can possess up to five grams of marijuana without being arrested.

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via IFTTT