Month: September 2018

Violent crime in the U.S. decreased slightly in 2017 following two years of dramatic spikes in murders in many major cities, according to new data from the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report.

Nationally, the violent crime rate in 2017 fell by 0.9 percent over 2016, and the murder rate decreased 1.4 percent. Property crime continued a more than 20-year decline. Aggravated assault and rape rates both increased, by 2.2 and .3 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, a study released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice looked at crime in 30 major U.S. cities for the first half of the year; it too found the numbers coming down. The new figures suggest that violent crime has at least plateaued and may be on its way back down.

In 2015 and 2016, violent crime in the U.S., driven by scores of murders in cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and D.C., began to rise after more than two decades of decline. It was the first time since 2005 and 2006 that the U.S. experienced a consecutive year-to-year rise in violent crime.

The sudden reversal led to fierce debate. On one side, advocates of tougher policing and harsher sentencing laws, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump, warned that rising crime threatened to wipe out those hard-won gains in safety. On the other side, criminal justice reformers said the rise may merely be a blip in a long-term downward trend and that it shouldn’t discourage ongoing efforts to reduce mass incarceration.

In speech today to law enforcement in Alabama, Sessions credited his Justice Department’s increased prosecutions for helping to bring the crime rate down:

Our good friends at the Brennan Center project that the murder rate in our 30 biggest cities will decline by 7.6 percent this year—bringing the murder rate back down to 2015 levels in those cities.

And I am announcing today the FBI will release its annual Uniform Crime Report, which will show that violent crime and murder have stopped rising and actually declined in 2017. That is something that we all should celebrate.

Those are the kind of results you get when you support law enforcement. Those are the kind of results we get when we work together.

Sessions has been a vocal critic of Obama-era investigations of unconstitutional policing, and in a speech last week he explicitly blamed consent decrees put in place to reform police departments in Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore for the precipitous rise in violence in those cities.

“There’s a clear lesson here: If you want more shootings and more death, then listen to the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, or antifa,” Sessions said. “If you want public safety, then listen to the police professionals who have been studying this for 35 years.”

In other words, any rise in crime is a result of policies Sessions opposes, and any decreases are a result of those he favors, even if, as The Baltimore Sun reported, he misstated rape statistics and erroneously attributed the consent decree restricting unconstitutional policing in Baltimore to the ACLU. (It was, in fact, finalized by the Justice Department.)

Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, tells Reason it was “galling to see” Sessions cite national crime data to support his position on policing.

“Ascribing credit of any crime increase or decrease to a single year and a half of federal policy is just beyond belief, but here we are,” Grawert says.

Grawert notes that, according to the FBI data, murder decreased in cities with more than 1 million people by 8 percent in terms of raw numbers.

“If you pull back from the academic debate about what’s causing crime to rise and fall and focus instead on the political debate over what causes violence in America, one would take this as rebuke to the ‘American carnage’ theory that cities are out of control and only Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump can save them,” he says.

There are more concerning trends buried in the numbers, as Fordham Law School professor John Pfaff has noted on Twitter. Outside of cities with more than 1 million people, the murder decline was largely driven by non-urban areas; murder in the aggregate went up in urban areas.

Conservative criminal justice reform groups also applauded the new crime numbers and said it reinforced their position that recent sentencing overhauls in red states have been largely successful in reducing crime.

“Criminal justice reform skeptics will undoubtedly attribute this good news to being ‘tough on crime,’ but don’t be fooled—there is scant evidence to support this theory,” says Mark Holden, the Koch network’s point man on criminal justice reform, in a statement on today’s report. “The reality is, data-driven prison and sentencing reforms, like those that have passed in places like Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina, reduce crime while giving people opportunities to transform their lives.”

Bonus: Look at this painfully bad graphic the FBI included for its data on clearance rates for crime.

The Dallas Police Department has fired Amber Guyger, the off-duty officer who shot and killed Botham Jean after apparently mistaking his apartment for her own. But questions still remain about both the timing and the reasoning behind the firing.

Guyger, who lived in the unit directly below Jean’s, returned to her apartment complex after work earlier this month. She says she attempted to enter the wrong unit, encountered Jean, and eventually shot him. Jean died at a local hospital. Guyger was then placed on administrative leave and charged with manslaughter.

Today the Dallas police announced that Chief U. Reneé Hall has terminated Guyger. The reason, according to a department statement: An Internal Affairs investigation revealed Guyger “engaged in adverse conduct when she was arrested for Manslaughter.”

It’s not clear what “adverse conduct” the department means. Reached for comment by Reason, the police declined to elaborate.

What is clear is that Guyger turned herself in to the authorities nearly three days after she killed Jean. (Hall has said the arrest was delayed because the Texas Rangers, who took charge of the investigation, wanted more time.) She was booked and charged, then released within two hours after posting the $300,000 bond. She may end up spending much longer behind bars, as it’s up to a grand jury to decide what charges she’ll ultimately face.

Questions also remain regarding the timing of Guyger’s dismissal. Hall said at a town hall on Tuesday that she couldn’t fire Guyger due to “local, state, and federal laws” preventing her “from taking action.” In a written statement on Thursday, Hall explained she didn’t want to “compromise the criminal investigation” into the shooting. “As an employer, DPD can compel Officer Guyger to provide a statement during a DPD administrative investigation and those statements given to DPD could potentially compromise the criminal investigation,” Hall said.

But Hall seems to have cast aside this reasoning, opting to fire Guyger while the criminal investigation is still ongoing.

It’s difficult to determine why Hall changed her tune, but one thing is certain: questions over her department’s handling of the incident aren’t going away. From the decision to search Jean’s home for “narcotics” after the shooting to the fact that they waited nearly three days to arrest Guyger, the department has much to answer for.

We still arrest absurd numbers of Americans just for possessing marijuana, even as legalization trends march on. For proof, look at the FBI’s data on national crime trends for 2017, which the bureau released today.

Most of the media attention will be on whether violent crime is up or down (it’s down). But there’s another important story in those numbers: The number one reason that people get arrested is drugs. In 2,017 there were 1.6 million arrests for “drug abuse violations.” That’s more than were arrested for violent crimes (518,000) or property crimes (1.25 million).

Drill down even further into the FBI stats and we see how absurdly lopsided drug-war enforcement is in the United States. Of those drug arrests, only 15 percent included charges of manufacturing and sales. Fully 85 percent of drug arrests were about simply having and/or using them.

And even as the march to decriminalize and legalize marijuana marches forward, in 2017 it was still the number one drug for getting arrested. Nationwide, 36.7 percent of drug arrests were for marijuana possession. That works out to 587,000 people arrested in a single year, just for pot.

Tom Angell notes in Forbes that the number of actual arrests have increased over 2016. This increase is due to more people being arrested for possession, not manufacturing or sales—for those crimes, there was an 8 percent drop.

This could mean, as marijuana law expert Douglas Berman notes, that the ability to legally grow marijuana in several states is changing enforcement. According to the FBI stats, marijuana arrests in western states (the main area of legalization) are about half the rate of other parts of the country. Unfortunately these same states more than make for it in arrests for possession of heroin, cocaine, and other types of drugs, so even in those states the vast majority of drug arrests are for possession, not manufacturing.

A new documentary series that just hit Netflix can help us see some of the more absurd contours of the drug war. First and Last is a six-part series that follows people’s first or last days in the custody of Gwinnett County Jail in Georgia. The people arrested and put in jail for weeks and even months are frequently there for drug possession and use without any sort of additional criminal activity. One young man in the show spends 30 days in lock-up for violating probation on a marijuana-possession crime with a second arrest for marijuana possession. That’s it.

It will be interesting to see what happens down the line to our crime stats when marijuana finally gets taken out of the equation. Yes, that’s a “when,” not an “if.” There will probably still be some marijuana-related arrests; some states and cities can’t keep from meddling in how citizens consume their weed. But if none of those marijuana arrests from 2017 had happened at all, that would have cut drug arrests by a third.

Timothy Diaz is accused of 10 counts of sexual exploitation of children, and so police in Arizona arrested Timothy Diaz. Unfortunately, the Timothy Diaz they arrested is 53 years old, stands 5-foot-5, and has black hair. His middle name is Ernie. The Timothy Diaz they were supposed to arrest is 26 years old, stands 5-foot-10, and has brown hair and hazel eyes. His middle name is Dean.

Timothy Ernie Diaz is now suing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and the Chandler Police Department after being “forced to endure the humiliation and shame of informing his family and his employer that he been accused of sexual exploitation of minors.”

The case of mistaken identity began in March 2014, when Jason Hunsaker, a Chandler police detective, found a computer suspected of facilitating child pornography in an online investigation. Hunsaker received a warrant to arrest the right Diaz and search his computer. The case was submitted to the County Attorney’s Office a month later, and it was submitted to a grand jury in August 2017. It was there that Deputy County Attorney Elisa Ramunno mistakenly identified the wrong Diaz, which then mistakenly indicted him. Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him in September 2017, despite his protestations that they had the wrong man. He was booked, photographed, and fingerprinted.

The wrong Diaz’s son soon noticed that the middle name on the Chandler police records was different from his dad’s. He passed the information on to his father’s public defender, who then called for a public hearing to call attention to the error.

Diaz’s lawsuit says that the mistake took a toll on his livelihood, as the indictment showed up on background checks. He was also forced to pay 10 percent of a $100,000 bond and court fees for a crime he did not commit.

It is unclear whether the wrong Diaz’s record will be cleared and if the right Diaz has been indicted.

This isn’t the first case of its kind. A Colorado mother was arrested and jailed for sharing the same name as a suspected robber. A 19-year-old was jailed in Florida after authorities confused “Dakota” with “D’Coda.” And a young man in Georgia spent nearly a month in jail for a similar mistake.

A new bill that borrows language from the PATRIOT Act promises to nab human traffickers using the same surveillance techniques that law introduced to catch terrorists and their associates. We all know how that went: The PATRIOT Act’s spying provisions—and other “War on Terror”–era crime measures—proved attractive to law enforcement far beyond their intended scope. Now, legislators like Rep. Ann Wagner (D–Mo.) hope we won’t notice if they feed us the same liberty-poisoning bologna with a new excuse.

It’s “a disguised effort to expand the #PatriotAct,” tweeted Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) on Saturday. “GOP leaders put ‘Fight Human Trafficking’ in the title to conceal the bill’s true purpose: to give the government more power to unconstitutionally spy on law-abiding Americans without a warrant.”

Wagner’s bill (H.R. 6729)—the deceptively named the “Empowering Financial Institutions to Fight Human Trafficking Act” of 2018—is the latest in a long line of assaults on civil liberties disguised as attacks on the biggest crime panic of the decade, sex trafficking. Wagner alone brought us the SAVE Act in 2015 and FOSTA in 2018, both of which take aim at online anonymity, web publishing, social media, sex workers, and free speech under the guise of saving children from “modern slavery.”

Specifically, H.R. 6729 would allow financial institutions, federal regulatory bodies, nonprofit organizations, and law enforcement to share customer bank records between them without running afoul of rules regarding consumer privacy and without opening themselves up to lawsuits. Ostensibly, this would be done “in order to better identify and report potential human trafficking or money laundering activities.”

But these entities need not demonstrate that the “sharing was made on a good faith basis,” according to the current text of the bill.

Cops working specific cases or pursing specific suspects can already obtain their financial records by going through court channels and using the subpoena process. What they want here is access to wide swaths of (subsequently shareable) financial data on customers accused of no crimes and facing no charges. And they want this data to be served up proactively by bank staffers, who are supposed to somehow pick bad actors out from the rest of us based on their financial transactions, and by nonprofits, who would be empowered to share information gleaned through the provision of social services.

Wagner’s bill would cover “matters specifically related to those benefiting directly or indirectly from human trafficking, the means by which human traffickers transfer funds within the United States and around the world, and the extent to which financial institutions, including depository institutions, asset managers, and insurers in the United States, are unwittingly involved in such matters or transfers and the extent to which such entities are at risk as a result.” It would also cover information related to “means of facilitating the identification of accounts and transactions involving human traffickers and facilitating the exchange of information concerning such accounts and transactions between nonprofit organizations, financial institutions, regulatory authorities, and law enforcement agencies.”

The language echoes Section 314 of the PATRIOT Act, which covers “matters specifically related to the finances of terrorist groups, the means by which terrorist groups transfer funds around the world and within the United States, including through the use of charitable organizations, nonprofit organizations, and nongovernmental organizations, and the extent to which financial institutions in the United States are unwittingly involved in such finances and the extent to which such institutions are at risk as a result.” Section 314 also covers information on “means of facilitating the identification of accounts and transactions involving terrorist groups and facilitating the exchange of information concerning such accounts and transactions between financial institutions and law enforcement organizations.”

Like other PATRIOT Act provisions—most notably, Section 215, which the Department of Justice interpreted to allow metadata collection on millions of innocent Americans—Section 314 turned out worse in effect than in theory. The provision was pushed as a way to let financial institutions legally share information with each other and authorities but was used by authorities to demand all sorts of information from banks. It also led banks to start dropping people with Middle Eastern surnames.

“While other parts of the PATRIOT Act initially drew fire, Section 314 glided by, largely overlooked by everyone except the bankers,” Jeff A. Taylor wrote here at Reason in 2004. But Section 314 turned out to be a “ticking time-bomb for anyone a buttoned-down banker might consider suspicious.” (For more on the perils and pointlessness of Section 314, see “Show Us Your Money: The USA PATRIOT Act lets the feds spy on your finances. But does it help catch terrorists?,” from Reason‘s November 2003 issue.)

It would go on to be used “to hunt down ‘terrorists’ at Vegas strip clubs,” and generally serve as an all-purpose way for the feds to surveill random consumer financial transactions.

A 2016 bill to directly expand Section 314 of the Patriot Act was narrowly defeated in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Introduced on September 6, Wagner’s new bill has already received a first vote by the House Committee on Financial Services (44 for, five against) and five co-sponsors, including two Democrats (Reps. Carolyn Maloney of New York of Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) and three Republicans (Reps. Mia Love of Utah, Mimi Walters of California, and Claudia Tenney of New York).

A full House vote is scheduled for Wednesday.

Wagner has been instrumental in spreading false narratives about the website Backpage.com and its founders, who currently face federal money laundering charges. Despite more than half a decade of investigation, authorities have been unable to find evidence that Backpage knowingly condoned or facilitated forced or underage prostitution. They are still trying to gather evidence for their money laundering case against Backpage’s executives, who were arrested in April but (at the government’s insistence) must wait until 2020 for a trial.

Allowing—or demanding—information sharing between banks, cops, and nonprofits that work with sex workers could go a long way toward not just shuttering individual sex worker bank accounts but facilitating money-laundering charges against any website that allows “escort” ads or otherwise enables communication that connects sex workers and clients.

Does defensive gun use stop crime? Would more gun control save lives? Those were the topics of a public debate recently hosted by the Soho Forum, featuring Gary Kleck, a criminologist from Florida State University, and Paul Helmke, the former president and CEO of the Brady Center/Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as well as the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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