Month: April 2022

Police and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents in Pharr, Texas, thought they had intercepted a massive meth smuggling operation this February. Juan Carlos Toscano Guzman, a Mexican national, spent nearly six weeks in jail accused of transporting roughly 700 gallons of liquid methamphetamine. But it turned out not to be illicit drugs at all, just the result of unreliable drug field tests that have led to hundreds of other wrongful arrests.

The case, first reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, started when a Pharr police officer noticed three men transferring liquid out of large barrels next to a tanker truck. The officer noticed strange crystallization around the barrels and called in backup.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Guzman in federal court, Pharr police officers, firemen, and DEA special agents all tested the liquid in the barrels using drug field tests, and they came back presumptive positive for methamphetamines. The DEA estimated the total haul was 700 gallons of liquid meth with a street value of more than $10 million. The seizure made headlines across the state.

“This massive drug seizure impacts way beyond our region where it was headed,” Pharr Chief of Police Andy Harvey said in a Facebook post. “This stemmed from a patrol officer’s attention to detail when he observed something out of the ordinary and he used our resources to further investigate. This is great policing!”

But a DEA crime lab would later invalidate those field test results, leading prosecutors to drop their case against Guzman in late March. Guzman’s lawyer told the Star-Telegram he was transporting a mix of diesel and oil.

As Reason reported last year, such drug field test kits are manufactured by several different companies and are used by police departments and prison systems across the country. The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. And although the tests are fairly simple to use, they’re still prone to user error and misinterpretation. 

Because of this, they are generally not admissible as evidence in court, but police still use them to establish probable cause to arrest and jail people. This has led to hundreds of known instances of wrongful arrests and even guilty pleas from defendants facing charges for test results that crime labs would later invalidate.

For example, Atlanta resident Ju’zema Goldring spent nearly six months in the Fulton County jail in 2015 after police said sand from a stress ball in her purse tested presumptive positive for cocaine. She was left in jail for four months after a crime lab concluded that the mysterious powder was sand, not cocaine. A federal jury in Goldring’s civil rights lawsuit awarded her $1.5 million earlier this year.

In 2019 in Georgia, a college football quarterback was arrested after bird poop on his car tested positive for cocaine. A Florida man was wrongfully jailed in 2017 after a field test confused his donut glaze with meth.

In 2016, sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County, Georgia, arrested Macon resident Dasha Fincher after they found a plastic baggie of blue crystals in her car. A NARK II field test of the substance returned a presumptive positive for methamphetamines, and Fincher was charged with trafficking and possession of meth with intent to distribute. Fincher sat in jail for three months until a state crime lab determined that the substance was blue cotton candy. 

A follow-up investigation by a Georgia news station found that the NARK II test kit produced 145 false positives in Georgia in 2017.

Last year, more than a dozen Massachusetts attorneys said they were falsely accused of sending drugs to their incarcerated clients, who were then put in solitary confinement for receiving legitimate legal mail. (One way that synthetic opioids are smuggled into prison is by soaking papers in the drug.) A class-action lawsuit followed, challenging the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ use of NARK II field tests to detect contraband and punish incarcerated people.

Until police and prisons acknowledge the limitations of these tests, cases like these will keep popping up, and innocent people like Guzman will be deprived of their liberty for doing nothing wrong.

The post Faulty Police Field Tests Said This Trucker Was Carrying 700 Gallons of Meth. It Was Diesel. appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Liberal government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is proposing a ban on foreigners purchasing homes in the country in an effort to combat high housing prices. If the small number of existing foreign homebuyers and other countries’ experience are anything to go on, it won’t do much good.

“We will prevent foreign buyers from parking their money in Canada by buying up homes. We will make sure that houses are being used as homes, rather than as commodities to be traded,” said Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister, in a forward to the government’s proposed 2022 budget.

The plan would ban foreign commercial enterprises and people who are neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents from purchasing “nonrecreational, residential property” for a period of two years.

Running foreign buyers out of the housing market might strike some as xenophobic. But even in welcoming Canada, it’s a political winner.

During last year’s elections, both Trudeau and Erin O’Toole, leader of the rival Conservative Party, proposed a ban on foreign buyers, reports Bloomberg. The left-wing New Democratic Party proposed a 20 percent tax on homes bought by non-Canadians.

There’s a certain logic to a ban on foreign home purchases. Reducing demand should, in the short run, reduces prices. Those benefits would all go to the remaining Canadian homebuyers.

The problem is that foreign buyers are a small percentage of overall buyers in the housing market. Excluding them does little to dampen demand. Soon enough, it’s overwhelmed by rising demand from native Canadians.

The record of policies aimed at reducing foreign buyers in housing markets shows fleeting effects on affordability.

Starting in 2016, the British Columbia provincial government levied an additional 15 percent property transfer tax on homes bought by foreigners in the Vancouver Metro area. In 2018, that tax was raised to 20 percent and expanded to other areas of the province. Provincial property transfer data does show a pretty steep decline in foreign-involved purchases after the implementation of the tax, from about 10 percent of all property transfers to between 1 and 2 percent.

The effect on housing affordability was minimal, however. One study on the tax found that it reduced house price growth by 1 percent, with that benefit fading away after just 7 months. Foreign home purchases continue to be about 1 percent of total home purchases in British Columbia. And it’s still the most expensive province in the country to buy a home.

In 2018, New Zealand also largely banned foreign nationals from purchasing homes—estimated to be about 3 to 4 percent of home sales. Since, home prices increased by 12 percent in 2019, 18 percent in 2020, and 23 percent this past year.

Getting rid of restrictions on supply would do much more to reduce housing costs than marginally reducing demand in the short run.

Canada has many of the same price-increasing restrictions on new housing that U.S. cities and states do. Its local and provincial governments restrict new dense housing within the urban core and suburban development on city fringes. Several cities have rent control, which discourages investment even more.

“Rather than chasing villains, we should seek solutions,” writes Steve Lafleur of the Fraser Institute, a free market Canadian think tank. “If policymakers want to increase housing affordability for young people, families, and newcomers, they should reduce barriers to housing construction.”

Not only would reducing home construction barriers improve affordability, but it would probably make scapegoating foreigners for Canada’s domestically sourced high housing costs less politically profitable.

The post Justin Trudeau's Plan To Ban Foreigners From Buying Canadian Homes Won't Make Housing Affordable appeared first on Reason.com.

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In what should serve as a major blow to the credibility of federal law enforcement agents, a district court jury acquitted two men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The jury deadlocked on the charges against two other defendants, and it’s not clear whether prosecutors will seek to retry them, according to The New York Times.

Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris were acquitted on all charges they faced. Adam Fox and Barry Croft will be eligible for retrial.

This is an embarrassing outcome for both the FBI—which had relied on a vast network of informants that were extensively involved in planning and even encouraging the plot—as well as Whitmer herself, who treated the plot with utter seriousness and connected it to former President Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric.

In reality, Whitmer was never in actual danger; “Big Dan,” the ringleader of the alleged plot, contacted law enforcement early on, and the FBI paid him $54,000 to conduct six months of surveillance on a loose network of militia members who were upset with Whitmer’s aggressive COVID-19 lockdown policies. When the group staked out Whitmer’s house, it was Big Dan leading the effort—with the FBI’s foreknowledge and encouragement.

At the same time, Big Dan’s FBI handler, a man named Jayson Chambers, was attempting to start a side business as a security consultant; he thus had every incentive to construct a major domestic terrorism bust that he could take credit for foiling. As The Times reported:

No attack ever took place and no final date for an abduction was set, testimony showed, and the details of the alleged plan sometimes differed from witness to witness. The F.B.I. informant, Dan Chappel, said he believed the group planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had infuriated the men. Ty Garbin, the man who earlier pleaded guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Another man who pleaded guilty, Kaleb Franks, said he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor’s security detail.

“There was no plan to kidnap the governor, and there was no agreement between these four men,” Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, said in closing arguments. He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and undercover agents, and that “without a plan, the snitches needed to make it look like” there was movement toward a plan.

The FBI, of course, has a long history of engaging in entrapment: i.e., inducing people to plan crimes that they had no intention of carrying out. The victims of these prosecutions have often been Muslims, though right-wing groups are also a common target of overzealous law enforcement. It appears that the jury possessed reasonable and well-justified doubt that the there was ever any actual plot to kidnap Whitmer, despite the FBI’s attempts to manufacture one.

The post Jury Acquits 2 Men Accused of Plotting To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on Reason.com.

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In Shanghai, which is three times the size of New York City, residents have been under strict pandemic lockdown since March 27 in some parts, and since March 31 in others, with no end in sight.

Having detected a huge surge in cases, with more than 20,000 new cases being found daily, Chinese authorities locked the city of 25 million down, forcing residents into situations of extraordinary deprivation and subjecting them to brutal containment and control measures. With residents unable to leave their houses, food supplies are dwindling, and government workers attempting to deliver supplies to homes and apartments, frequently failing to do so in a timely or consistent manner. People are running out of the medicines they need to stay healthy or alive. Some people experiencing medical emergencies, CNN reports, have died after being turned away; they were unable to access care without negative COVID tests. “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures,” read a viral post on social media site Weibo.

Due to strict containment and isolation measures in place for COVID-positive people, some mothers report being forcibly separated from their COVID-infected children by authorities. Health authorities allege parents will be able to appeal this and seek permission (!) to accompany their COVID-positive children to hospitals and isolation wards. It is unclear how this will actually apply in practice and whether this will end the brutal measure of separating parents from their young, sick children.

“In this country it’s not the virus that scares us, but the chaotic anti-Covid measures that have caused risks to the well-being of the elderly, the children and companion animals,” Shanghai resident Lily Chen told Bloomberg. “I now realize we can only rely on ourselves—not the government—to protect our own families.”

A video that has gone viral in China shows one family in Shanghai being taken off to COVID quarantine as their pet corgi chased the van in pursuit of its people. They had ostensibly released the dog into the city, assuming possible survival, instead of letting it stay in the family home during the quarantine period (where it would die without care). The dog was promptly killed by a COVID prevention worker wielding a spade. (This is not the first time Chinese authorities have come under fire for brutal treatment of pets in pursuit of COVID containment.)

The great leap forward, from the discomfort of your own home. Hunger drives people crazy, how can this continue? https://t.co/i1wnRiwcg2

— Alex Turnbull (@alexbhturnbull) April 5, 2022

Those who do violate or attempt to violate state-mandated quarantine or lockdown are subjected to punishment, though it is difficult to know the full extent due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggressive censorship. In other cities like Shandong, which was also recently forced under lockdown, videos of harsh punishments have circulated:

Disturbing video of COVID volunteers forcibly shaving someone who stepped outside of the house in Heze, Shandong (山东省菏泽市鄄城县凤凰镇) pic.twitter.com/TI49QzRnqa

— Alexander Boyd (@alexludoboyd) April 5, 2022

(Some on social media site Weibo suggest that the above could be a parody, while others elsewhere note that “forcibly shaving only the left side” is a callback to “an insulting practice widely used during the Cultural Revolution.”)

All such measures are part of the CCP’s “COVID Zero” strategy, which aims to entirely eliminate COVID spread within China’s borders, often through imposition of aggressive regional lockdowns like the one seen in Shanghai, as well as strict border control and frequent testing. Only about half of China’s above-80 population is fully vaccinated, with Chinese vaccines proving less effective than their Western counterparts. It’s unclear what the death toll looks like as this COVID outbreak takes it course, and CCP-sourced numbers are notoriously unreliable.

What is clear is the degree to which residents of Shanghai are disturbed by the state of deprivation they’ve been forced to endure; an unusually high amount of government criticism has emanated from Weibo and other platforms, which are typically heavily censored. “We don’t want to starve to death,” chanted residents of one suburb.

“Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” one drone told them as it aerially broadcasted COVID control policies throughout the city, emblematic of how seriously CCP authorities take citizens’ concerns.

The post Under COVID Lockdown, Shanghai's People Are Running Out of Food and Meds While Pets Get Killed in the Streets appeared first on Reason.com.

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