Category: reason

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is still trying to lure unsuspecting residents into committing petty theft so it can lock them up.

Operation Lucky Bag began in 2006, supposedly as a way for police to put away people with existing rap sheets. Undercover officers would plant a bag, usually with money or other valuables inside, in a public place. They’d wait for someone to “steal” the planted property then make an arrest.

In other words, they were creating crimes out of thin air. If, indeed, they were crimes at all. Under state law, people who find property worth more than $20 have 10 days to either return it to the owner or give it up to police.

Unsurprisingly, the practice drew controversy. In 2013, several people adversely affected by Operation Lucky Bag filed a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD. The following September, the two sides reached a settlement. The police clarified that “a person picking up property that they find cannot be charged with larceny simply because they fail to return property to a police officer who is located near the site at the time the property was found,” according to a January 2015 operations order provided to Reason by an NYPD spokesperson. Arrests can only be made if there is “a separation of any valuables from the rest of the property” (i.e., if a person takes cash out of a planted bag and discards the bag), if “a larceny by trespassory taking has occurred” (i.e., if someone grabs a bag hanging from a stroller), or if “an individual has taken property but denies seeing or possessing the property when approached by” police.

But police are still able to fabricate crimes—crimes that hurt no one—just so they can lock people up. Two recent cases illustrate the absurdity of this tactic.

On December 14, police planted a backpack outside a Macy’s department store in Manhattan. The bag’s contents included a laptop, an iPad, and a wallet with $40 in it, according to the New York Daily News. A pedestrian, Tamarit Orquidea, noticed the bag and picked it up. “I would have taken it to the precinct down the street from my house,” she told the Manhattan Times last month. Instead, she got arrested.

Police claim that Orquidea walked by a uniformed traffic cop while carrying the bag and that she put the $40 in her pocket. Whatever Orquidea’s true intentions were, she was not hurting anyone. Police had no way of knowing what she was going to do with what she found, and arresting her did nothing to help keep the streets safe.

The same can be said of Cinque Brown, who police entrapped using the same bag roughly 30 minutes earlier. Brown picked the bag up and failed to give it to a nearby traffic cop. He apparently decided not to and was arrested as a result. Neither Orquidea nor Brown represented a menace to society, but both were still charged, Orquidea with petty larceny and Brown with petty larceny and possession of stolen property.

“I just don’t understand why this is still going on in this city—I really don’t,” Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Melissa Crane said during Brown’s December 15 arraignment hearing.

Two nonprofit legal defense organizations—New York County Defender Services (NYCDS) and the Legal Aid Society—tell the Daily News they’ve represented at least nine people entrapped by Operation Lucky Bag in recent days.

I don’t have the relevant data for the latest wave of arrests, but of the first 220 people arrested after the program’s implementation in February 2006, more than half did not have a prior criminal record. The alleged point of Operation Lucky Bag, you may recall, was to catch repeat offenders.

A Houston Police Department spokesman said the narcotics officers who broke into a middle-aged couple’s house last week and killed them in the ensuing shootout were wearing “tactical gear clearly labeled ‘police'” on the front as well as the back. That detail is important because it helps illuminate the question of whether Dennis Tuttle, who fired at an officer who had just broken into his house and killed his dog with a shotgun, knew the intruder was a police officer.

Last week Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said narcotics officers executing search warrants “don’t show up in uniform, but they do show up with plenty of gear that identifies them as police officers.” But since he said that “gear” included “patrol officers that are out in front of the house,” who would not necessarily be visible to people inside the house, it was not clear whether the men knocking down Tuttle’s door were marked as police officers.

Kese Smith, an HPD public information officer, said they were. Depending on exactly what gear they were wearing (compare the vest front on the left, for instance, with the vest front shown in the photo above), Tuttle might still have overlooked the word police in the heat of the moment. According to Acevedo, the officers announced themselves while “simultaneously breaching the front door,” which was immediately followed by shotgun “rounds” that killed the dog. Tuttle responded by shooting the shotgun-wielding officer with a revolver. When the officer slumped onto a sofa, Rhogena Nicholas, Tuttle’s wife, reportedly tried to disarm him, at which point one or more of the other cops shot and killed her. Tuttle returned fire with his revolver and was killed as well.

Smith did not know what color clothing the officers were wearing or whether their faces were covered. He said he would check on those details and get back to me. But whatever the officers’ appearance, the no-knock “dynamic” entry was reckless, especially in light of Houston’s recent experience with armed robberies committed by criminals disguised as cops. There have been several such incidents in recent years, including at least three home invasions in late 2013; two shootings, one of them fatal, on the same evening in 2016; a 2017 attack in which “four men wearing tactical gear ordered people on the ground, attacked them, and then ransacked the house”; and motel-room robberies last year.

Somewhat less alarmingly, four men were arrested in Houston last year for pulling over motorists while pretending to be police officers as part of a YouTube prank. They were equipped with “flashing lights” and a “police badge.” It’s fair to say that a Houston resident would have ample reason to doubt that armed men forcibly entering his house, killing his dog, and shooting his wife were police officers even if he heard them say so or noticed the word police on their vests.

This sort of operation is designed to catch suspects off guard, partly to prevent them from disposing of evidence. But notwithstanding the advantage of surprise, the cops found none of the heroin they claimed Tuttle and Nicholson were selling. Bursting into the home without warning is also supposed to create alarm and confusion, making suspects easier to subdue. But that alarm and confusion also can have deadly consequences, as this case illustrates.

Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor—Phillip Adamo, who also serves as head of the honors program—after he used the n-word in class.

The incident took place in October. Adamo had assigned The Fire Next Time, a book by the black, gay author James Baldwin. In the book, Baldwin writes, “You can really only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n*gger.” A student quoted this line, which prompted shock from other members of the class. Adamo attempted to foster a discussion about Baldwin’s use of the word, and in doing so, also used it. Madness ensued.

Several students who were not enrolled in Adamo’s class evidently caught wind of what had happened, and showed up for his next session. They went so far as to ask Adamo to leave his own class while they discussed his behavior; eager to placate them, Adamo exited. When he returned, students continued to scrutinize his decision to use the word, and secretly recorded his responses.

The recording is audio-only, so it’s impossible to tell how many students are expressing dissatisfaction with the professor—or even how many students are in the class. Throughout the exchange, Adamo barely defends himself, mostly deferring to the students’ insistence that he had wronged them. The students assert that they are holding him accountable for making marginalized students feel unsafe.

“You have a right to always feel safe and feel like you are wanted here and that you can speak in the class,” says one student. “Especially if you are a first generation student of color, you should never feel outed by that.”

Mortified that he made the students so upset, Adamo asks what he should do next. A student suggests he cancel class, and the professor agrees.

Afterward, he emailed the students, according to Inside Higher Ed:

After class, Adamo informed his provost what had happened. She suggested that he write a note to the students in the honors program, he said. That letter says, in part, that the classroom “is a place where any and every topic can be explored, even those topics considered to be taboo. This is how I understand academic freedom, which is a precious thing to me and other professors. It is the currency that allows us to speak truth to power.”

Yet, Adamo continued, “I also understand that this point of view is available to me because of my privileged position. I am now struggling to understand how it may be better not to explore some taboo topics, and to weigh the consequences of absolute academic freedom versus outcomes that lead to hurt, racial trauma, and loss of trust.”

Adamo wrote a separate email to the honors student leaders. Praising them for their defense of the program’s values, he also noted his concern about their “methods,” including showing up to class unannounced and filming him without permission.

Some students filed bias incident reports against Adamo, and the provost eventually suspended Adamo. He did not teach the rest of the semester, and he is still on leave this semester. His duties as head of the honors program have come to an end. He is accused of bad behavior in the following categories: respect for students, bias and discrimination, teaching competence and program leadership.

Adamo received the Minnesota Professor of the Year award from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in 2015. Between the award and his exceedingly polite, deferential behavior during the audio recording, it is hard to imagine that he is a disrespectful, biased, or incompetent teacher. There is, obviously, a huge difference between using the n-word as a slur and quoting it from a text. It’s crazy to treat this as a punishable offense.

Augsburg is a private institution, and is thus free to give unreasonable students such powers to restrict classroom conversation. But this is the wrong approach, and it is likely to end the discussion before it even takes place.

Neither Adamo nor Augbsurg University’s administration responded to a request for comment.

Legislative attempts to restrict access to tobacco usually come with some overheated rhetoric. But nothing comes close to the language in a Hawaii bill that would raise the state’s smoking age to 100, effectively banning the sale of cigarettes.

“The cigarette is considered the deadliest artifact in human history,” declares HB 1509. The product, it continues, has “killed one hundred million people in the twentieth century and is likely to kill one billion people in the twenty-first century,” giving the tobacco industry roughly the same body count as global communism.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Richard Creagan (D–South Kona/Ka’u), aims to halt this menace by raising the legal age for buying cigarettes to 30 in 2020, rising from there to 60 in 2023 and 100 in 2024. Retailers who sell cigarettes to underage Medicare recipients would be subject to fines of $500 per violation.

Cigars and e-cigarettes would be spared from these age restrictions. The bill would not prohibit those over the age of 21, the state’s current smoking age, from merely possessing cigarettes.

You might think this sounds like a draconian restriction on consumer choice. But Creagan claims that that any free will smokers might believe they have is just an illusion.

“Banning the sales of cigarettes should be viewed as a good faith effort to free smokers from the enslavement of this powerful addiction and not an infringement on individual liberties,” reads the bill. Creagan reiterated his belief that smokers are “enslaved” in an interview with the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

Indeed, Creagan thinks lawmakers who fail to liberate these smokers could have blood on their hands. Reads the bill: “Although the deaths caused by cigarettes may not legally constitute murders, the legislature believes that the State’s lack of action to prevent these deaths by banning the sale of cigarettes could, and perhaps should, be considered the moral equivalent to murder, or at the very least, of being an accessory to murder.”

Most people would distinguish the violent taking of life from a gradual, self-imposed shortening of one’s own lifespan. Indeed, people engage in all sorts of activities that could shorten their lifespan, from drinking to consuming sugar to tanning. If you look only at the negative consequences of those actions, and if you assume away individuals’ ability to control their impulses or change their habits, then cigarettes are hardly the only worthy targets of government prohibition.

But people engage in risky behaviors for a reason—they derive pleasure or satiety from doing so. Treating harmful habits as a struggle between enslavement and emancipation, as opposed to a trade-off between indulgence and self-discipline, leaves little room for individual choice.

And then, of course, there are the practical downsides of Creagan’s proposed prohibition. Banning or severely restricting something that people really want to consume is rarely an effective policy. U.S. states that adopt higher rates of taxation to deter smoking have experienced an increase in the rate of cigarette smuggling, according to a 2015 study by the Tax Foundation. More than half the cigarettes sold in New York state—which has some the highest tobacco taxes in country—were smuggled in from other states.

The Himalayan nation of Bhutan banned the sale of cigarettes in 2004. A 2011 study in the Journal of International Drug Policy found that the policy was largely a failure. “Arguments that stringent anti-tobacco tax and regulatory approaches including a sales prohibition will induce tobacco consumption to cease or nearly cease has not occurred,” it said. The author added that “illegal tobacco smuggling including black market sales due to the sales ban in Bhutan remains robust.”

Why any Hawaii lawmaker would think he’ll be able to escape these effects of prohibition is a mystery.

Creagan’s bill was introduced in late January. No hearings have been held on it yet.

Government agencies and laws have devolved into weapons to be wielded against political opponents in this country, so why wouldn’t taxes follow? Too many Americans now promote taxes as a means of hurting people they dislike, putting the raising of revenue as a secondary consideration or dropping it entirely.

Given the destructive nature of taxation, it’s a potentially effective strategy—at least for a while—writes J.D. Tuccille. It may also totally delegitimize the tax system in the eyes of the people who are supposed to pay the bills.

View this article.

Just when you thought U.S. politics can’t get any weirder, the website Big League Politics published a picture Friday from the medical school yearbook of Gov. Ralph Northam (D–Va.), who is is trained as a pediatric neurologist.

Big League Politics has obtained photos from Northam’s time at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, from which he graduated in 1984.

Northam and a friend were photographed together—one in blackface, one in Klan robes.

Northam’s quote: “There are more old drunks than old doctors in this world so I think I’ll have another beer.”

Northam immediately apologized for the image, although he didn’t indicate whether he was the guy in blackface or the guy wearing the KKK robes. On Saturday, Northam said at a press conference that he wasn’t actually in the picture at all and he wasn’t sure how the image ended up on his page.

“I believe now and then that I am not either of the people in this photo,” Northam said, denying that he had ever worn a KKK robe and hood or been drunk enough to forget a moment like this. “This was not me in that picture. That was not Ralph Northam.”

But Northam did admit that he had donned blackface while participating in a “dance contest where he dressed as [Michael] Jackson, the legendary pop icon.”

“I had the shoes, I had a glove, and I used just a little bit of shoe polish to put under my—or on my—cheeks,” he said. “And the reason I used a very little bit is because, I don’t know if anybody’s ever tried that, but you cannot get shoe polish off.”

He added: “I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that.”

At the press conference, he was asked whether he could still “Moonwalk” a la the Prince of Pop and he looked like he might be ready to bust a move until his wife stopped him.

Many high-ranking Democrats, including recent governors of Virginia and several national figures, have called on Northam to resign. So far, he is saying he will stay in office.

Early last week, Northam appeared on a radio show and endorsed legislation that would have relaxed restrictions on late-term abortions. Sources at Big League Politics, speaking anonymously to The Washington Post, claimed that the “revelations about Ralph Northam’s racist past were absolutely driven by his medical school classmate’s anger over his recent very public support for infanticide.”

Republicans were quick to jump on the story, although with mixed results, given the recent comments in defense of “white nationalism” made by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):

Shot. Chaser. pic.twitter.com/rBf8GndZoa

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) February 4, 2019

Where this story goes to die is anybody’s guess.

More research on how social media were used to spread disinformation in 2016 finds that the scope and reach of so-called “fake news” were greatly exaggerated. Looking at a large sample of Twitter users, a team of researchers from Harvard, Northeastern University, and SUNY–Buffalo have found that “fake news accounted for nearly 6% of all news consumption, but it was heavily concentrated.” Just 1 percent of Twitter users saw 80 percent of the misleading or false content, and only 0.1 percent of users shared some 80 percent it.

“A cluster of fake news sources shared overlapping audiences on the extreme right, but for people across the political spectrum, most political news exposure still came from mainstream media outlets,” they write in Science.

Information from mainstream media outlets is not without its own problems, of course. And arguably the biggest concern when it comes to misinformation on social media comes from users—including mainstream journalists—either spreading viral content that is wrong or framing factually accurate content in a misleading and volatile way. Neither this study nor similar recent research on Facebook looks at these phenomenon.

Instead, they concentrated on the spread of outright fake stories from sites that deliberately dish out false content, as well from fringe political sites (such as Infowars) that Snopes has flagged for frequently trafficking in dubious reporting. The authors define “fake news” as editorial content that has “the trappings of legitimately produced news” but not the “norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information.”

We can still glean some good insights from this study. Most importantly, it suggests that paranoia about outright disinformation dominating election discourse was unwarranted. More subtly biased journalism should worry democracy-doomsayers more than blatant hoaxes or those dreaded Russian bots.

Excluding “supersharers” and “superconsumers” of fake news—who accounted for 80 percent of the fake news spread and seen—the researchers found that Twitter users had, on aveage, “about 10 exposures…to fake news sources during” the month leading up to the 2016 election. “The average proportion of fake news sources (among political URLs) in an individual’s feed” was 1.18 percent.

The researchers note that “people who had 5% or more of their political exposures from fake news sources constituted 2.5% of individuals on the left and 16.3% of the right.” As in the similar Facebook study, this may reflect a greater portion of blatantly fake news sites being devoted to conservative or pro-Trump content during the campaign.

“Other factors such as age and low ratio of followers to followees were also positively associated with sharing fake news sources, but effect sizes were small,” the researchers note. Men, whites, and swing-state voters were also slightly more likely to be affected.

FREE MINDS

Zadie Smith won’t let you pigeonhole her. And she doesn’t think such pigeonholing fair for other writers, either. At an recent event in Colombia, the British novelist and essayist called out those who would advise writers to stay in their ethnic, racial, or gender lane when creating characters.

“If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans,” said Smith.

She continued with a comment about her debut book, White Teeth, and its diverse range of characters: “It had all sorts of mistakes I’m sure but if I didn’t take a chance I’d only ever be able to write novels about mixed-race girls growing up in Willesden.” More here.

FREE MARKETS

Budweiser versus Big Corn!

To be clear, Bud Light is not brewed with corn syrup, and Miller Lite and Coors Light are. pic.twitter.com/x6tWqdSRXN

— Bud Light (@budlight) February 3, 2019

.@BudLight America’s corn farmers are disappointed in you. Our office is right down the road! We would love to discuss with you the many benefits of corn! Thanks @MillerLight and @CoorsLite for supporting our industry. https://t.co/6fIWtRdeeM

— National Corn (NCGA) (@NationalCorn) February 4, 2019

I am sort of curious who at Budweiser thought that the Bud Light demographic was so corn syrup averse that they should center their big Super Bowl ad on this point.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) February 4, 2019

QUICK HITS

• Some 3,750 U.S. troops are being deployed into the president’s political theater on our southern border.

• A Transportation Security Administration agent committed suicide in a Florida airport over the weekend, prompting pandemonium.

• Eugene Volokh’s very sensible take on the Gov Northam controvery.

• A Brooklyn-based jail went for days without electricity, prompting protests and concern for the well-being of those stuck inside. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which run the facility, initially tried to reject extra generators and blankets.

• Maine is cracking down on CBD products. Will other states follow?

• “Basically, #MeToo has become a risk-management issue for men.”

• “Fights have broken out over donated fans or hot plates—with residents claiming they’ve lost out because of racial prejudices. There are two washing machines for over 400 people. Bed bugs are a constant problem. Theft is common.” Huck magazine explores life inside a Greek refugee squat.

• Right? Right…?

When we put those eight people in prison for selling a product that made countless people’s lives worth living the opioid epidemic will go away. https://t.co/NhSAHC3V7N

— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) February 4, 2019

• Immigration agents are going after 21 Savage, who has claimed to be from Atlanta, saying that the Grammy-nominated rapper is actually from the U.K. and has overstayed his visa.

Important new info on #21Savage arrest: am told it was NOT part of a #SuperBowl -related ICE operation, that he was in car with another hip hop artist who was subject of a local police bust @wsbtv https://t.co/oXms9qyWjo

— Mark Winne (@MarkWinneWSB) February 3, 2019

• The Twilight Zone is back!

Every policy proposal is, in a direct sense, an attempt to solve a problem. Poverty, ignorance, hunger, sickness, danger, pollution—in the realm of politics, to name a problem is to call for a solution, to demand that action be taken by someone or something, which always turns out to be the government.

In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, offers a slew of policy proposals, from loosening environmental regulations to reshaping collective bargaining to overhauling the process by which the federal government funds state-based poverty programs to creating new wage subsidies for low-income workers. Each of these ideas is an attempt to address a little problem, all of which add up to a much bigger problem.

Cass starts from what he has dubbed the “Working Hypothesis”—that “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.” His primary target is “economic piety”—the prevailing notion that the organizing aspiration of politics and policy should be to promote economic growth above all. He describes his book as an attempt to reorient American politics around promoting work and the interests of workers, especially less educated workers in manufacturing jobs.

But Cass’ description understates his own ambitions, writes Peter Suderman.

View this article.

Members of the Oakland, Calif., city council have agreed to pay $295,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Charles Vose, a former deputy city attorney. Vose, who is white, claimed he was passed over for promotions in favor of minorities with less experience. City Attorney Barbara Parker denied any discrimination against Vose, saying “mere competency and years of experience” aren’t enough to qualify someone for a supervisory position and other candidates had more of the qualities she was seeking than Vose did. She also noted half the supervisors she appointed were white.

Super Bowl Sunday is sometimes called an “unofficial national holiday,” but the federal government plays a larger—and more expensive—role than it probably should, for what is still very much a private event.

As Juliette Kayyem, chair of the Homeland Security Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, points out in The Washington Post, the Super Bowl is designated as a SEAR (Special Events Assessment Rating) Level I event—that’s Department of Homeland Security speak for “a really juicy target for potential terrorists”—and gets the same sort of security treatment as, for example, the State of the Union address (another SEAR Level 1 event).

Practically, that means almost every federal law enforcement agency is part of Super Bowl security, and every police officer in Atlanta will be on-duty Sunday, according to CNN. Together, they will handle security checkpoints around the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta, as well as emergency response and cybersecurity operations. There’s even a no-fly zone around the stadium that starts at 3 p.m. on Sunday and extends until midnight, with Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) aircraft patrolling the skies during that time. In all, more than 1,500 personnel are involved in securing the Super Bowl. And then there are the more questionable uses of federal resources, like sex trafficking stings that mostly nab consenting adults and the weird CBP-led operation that seized $24 million in counterfeit Super Bowl merchandise.

All of that is paid for by taxpayers—either at the federal or local level.

When the NFL’s contract with Minneapolis to host last year’s Super Bowl was made public, we got a glimpse at how little the NFL actually contributes to paying for its own championship game. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, that contract contained almost 200 instances of the phrase “at no cost to the NFL,” including a clause making clear that security issues are left to the host city to fund.

“It makes sense that federal law enforcement, with all its capabilities, has a central role in efforts to make the Super Bowl as safe an experience as possible for fans and its host community,” writes Kayyem in the Post. But, she argues, it’s time for the NFL to “start shouldering more of the security the costs for its own premier event.”

Indeed it should. That’s even more true when the federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits, and when the threat of more shutdowns continue to loom over federal workers. If the Super Bowl had taken place two weeks ago, some of those federal law enforcement employees securing the game would have been working without pay. Perhaps that would have put more attention on how ridiculous it is that the NFL does not cover at least some of the cost of securing its own event.

President Donald Trump, who often expresses an interest in negotiating better deals for American taxpayers and has openly stoked criticism of the NFL, should take the opportunity to demand that the league defray those costs in future years. There is already a playbook to follow. In 2015, the NFL willingly gave up its tax-exempt status after members of Congress and the media draw attention to the nonsensical loophole that saved the league about $10 million annually.

Because the NFL is concerned about public perception, this is a perfect opportunity for Trump to use his bully pulpit to benefit taxpayers, whack his old rivals in the NFL, and stand up for American law enforcement personnel. It seems like a win-win for the president, but don’t hold your breath for anything to change.