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The Baltimore city council
held a hearing with the police commissioner, Anthony Batts, and
several other high-ranking officials. Council members probed how
police officers actually made stops and police brass insisted they
expected constitutional policing. The police commanders also said
they wanted more cops to handcuff people while stopping them, for
safety. Asked about the same people being stopped multiple times by
cops, one deputy commissioner called it a “delicate situation,”
saying he and the other commissioners didn’t want cops “to
terrorize the citizens.”

The meeting came after a Baltimore Sun investigation
into the number of lawsuits against police claiming excessive
force. Residents also complained about a 30 day rule cops use to
keep the property of people they put in jail. Property taken by
cops has to be claimed within 30 days or it’s forfeited, even if
the property owner is being kept in jail or otherwise away from hi
things for longer than that. Duane Davis, who was arrested for
putting a toilet in front of the local courthouse and regularly
films cops, said he’s had his cameras taken away that way.

One council member, Warren Branch, relayed in one instance
seeing cops enter a man’s home and search his refrigerator after
detained him, and in another a cop poking a handcuffed man later
released. The police brass there said they’d never heard of it. At
the time, Branch said he reported both incidents to commanders,
including one lieutenant colonel, Dan Lioi, was promoted with two
other commanders in 2013 to get the murder rate down, but, as the

Baltimore City Paper reports:

Since then, two of the three have left the department and have
been charged with crimes. Lioi currently faces assault charges in
Harford County related to a dispute with his wife. When Harford
County deputies seized five guns from Lioi’s residence, they found
that one had previously been held by Baltimore City police as
evidence. There has been no public explanation of how the gun got
to Lioi’s house or how the Baltimore Police evidence control
section lost it. The incident is allegedly under
investigation. 

Last week [Clifton] McWhite was charged with theft because he
allegedly claimed academic credentials he had not earned, which got
him a pay bump. He had resigned abruptly in April after 19 years on
the job. His lawyer told the Sun that he is a victim, as he did not
realize his credentials came from a diploma mill.

The Department of Justice says it will investigate the alleged
pattern of excessive force used by the Baltimore Police Department,
but residents hope other issues are addressed to. Talking about his
experiences having his property seized, Davis told the city
council: “The Justice Department is coming now and you’ll have to
turn the records over to the Justice Department.” We’ll see.

“Should Libertarians Vote for Republicans in 2014?,” our
interview with Republican National Committee press secretary
Kirsten Kukowski on the midterm elections, is the latest from
Reason TV. Watch above or click the link below for full text,
links, downloadable versions, and more. 

View this article.

Intrigued? From my latest
Daily Beast column:

I started receiving People magazine recently,
and as I was leafing through its ho-hum 40th anniversary issue, I
stumbled across this 1974 cover featuring Telly Savalas, the man
who mainstreamed baldness into everyday life (screw you,
Yul Brynner!) and portrayed Kojak, one of the most memorable
small-screen detectives up to that point in TV history. This cover,
I submit, is as sharp a rebuke to the “progress is over!” crowd as
Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking hissy fit was to Bishop
Berkeley….

The middle class can’t afford nothing no more, Amazon’s
warehouse workers are “today’s coal miners,” and even bomb-crazy
and jihad-suffering Middle Easternersare more optimistic about
the future than Americans and Europeans. The Experts (with a
capital E!) have spoken: We’ve reached The
End of Progress….

bear with me here. Cue up Telly’s
incomparable semi-parlando rendering of If. Get
lost in the Aegean-deep pools of Telly’s eyes and marvel at his
gold-chain-and-bracelet set. As you contemplate a naked celebrity
torso apparently unfamiliar with any form of exercise, let’s count
the ways in which the world has not just gotten a little bit better
but a whole fucking lot better since Kojak was on the case.

Read the while thing, baby.

NPR and ProPublica have published a
detailed account of the Red Cross’ poor performance after
Hurricane Isaac and Superstorm Sandy. The story reads like a
primer in the problems of centralization, with national
headquarters regularly substituting its own judgement for that of
the people on the ground. At one point after Sandy hit, for
example,

headquarters issued an edict
that the New York operation needed to start producing more
meals.

That wasn’t the problem, [Richard] Rieckenberg told his superiors.
He was in charge of tracking food and, at the time, the Red Cross
was already wasting three out of every 10 meals being prepared, he
estimates. The real issue was that the Red Cross was failing to
gather information about where hungry victims were located.

Officials at the Red Cross’ national headquarters stood firm over
Rieckenberg’s objections. They directed a catering company to
increase its output dramatically, from 20,000 to 220,000 meals per
day. And it had to start with breakfast for 100,000 the next
morning.

In the ensuing chaos, the caterer was only able to deliver 70,000
Danishes the following day, Rieckenberg says. The cost to the Red
Cross: about $7 apiece, much more than normal. Top Red Cross
officials had assured Rieckenberg that someone would get him the
locations where staffers could deliver the meals. The list was
never supplied. About half of the pastries were
wasted.

Worse still, the leadership sometimes diverted resources from
genuine relief to public relations. In Mississippi after Issac hit,

An official gave the order to send out 80 trucks and
emergency response vehicles—normally full of meals or supplies like
diapers, bleach and paper towels—entirely empty or carrying a few
snacks.

The volunteers “were told to drive around and look like you’re
giving disaster relief,” Rieckenberg says. The official was
anticipating a visit by Red Cross brass and wanted to impress them
with the level of activity, he says.

After Sandy, a much-needed emergency response vehicle was
instead “dispatched to an early December photo-op with supermodel
Heidi Klum to tour affected areas with Red Cross supplies.” The
reporters quote one official’s response to the PR stunt: “Did you
know it takes a Victoria’s Secret model five hours to unload one
box off a truck? I was so mad.”

The article alludes a couple of
times to the more decentralized and volunteer-driven groups that
surfaced after the storms. A man from the Rockaways mentions that
Mormon and Amish volunteers “appeared at my doorstep offering
much-needed help” three days after Sandy, a response he contrasts
with the two weeks it took before “the only Red Cross truck my
neighbors or I saw” showed up. Later there is a reference to

Occupy Sandy, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot whose horizontally
organized relief work drew a lot of praise after the storm hit. (At
one point, Occupy Sandy had four times as many volunteers in the
field than the Red Cross did.)

It makes sense to expect such networks to be more flexible, more
capable of adjusting to conditions on the ground, and—when the
groups are themselves locally based—more receptive to local
knowledge. This is understood even within the halls of the
Department of Homeland Security, which commissioned a
report last year that highlighted Occupy Sandy’s successes.
Occupy, the paper concluded, not just complemented the official
effort but “in some cases filled critical gaps.” (One interesting
observation from the DHS report: “In circumstances of rising public
distrust of hierarchical institutions, as is the case in many
communities within the United States today, it would not be unusual
for horizontal grassroots disaster relief networks with strong
affiliations within certain communities to be chosen over
professional response organizations that might try to assert
control over a complex operating environment in a disaster.”)

The Red Cross, in comparison, is a lumbering beast. It is
essentially a public/private hybrid—the organization is
chartered
by Congress to fulfill specific mandates, including relief work
coordinated by FEMA, but it is formally independent of the
government and largely raises its own funds. It devotes
far more of its budget to its (very valuable) blood and plasma
services than to disaster response, but it uses disasters as a
fundraising opportunity. It is clearly better suited for some sorts
of recovery work, such as operating shelters, than others, such as
the areas where the Mormons and Occupiers outperformed it. And to
judge from the NPR/ProPublica report, it suffers from a severe
surplus of bureaucracy. To read the rest of the exposé, go
here.