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The lieutenant in charge when he and three other plainclothes New York City cops stopped to intimidate and arrest a postal worker who yelled at them for almost hitting his truck has had his badge and gun taken from him and place on “modified duty,” according to the New York Daily News.

Lt. Luis Machado and three other cops were speeding through Brooklyn when they almost hit a postal truck. The driver, Glen Grays, shouted at the cops, who backed their car up to confront him after he yelled at them.

Video of the incident went viral, embarrassing the department, so the NYPD launched an internal affairs investigation:

The postal truck was left in the middle of the road.

Lt. Machado was placed on “modified duty,” meaning he continues to be paid while stripped of his gun and badge and unable to do pretty much any police work.

The incident illustrates how important police reform is and why merely focusing on individual cops won’t do much to deal with systemic police violence.

Law enforcement officials talk a lot about their “professionalism.” The NYPD and police departments around the country ought to have “zero tolerance” for behavior that could indicate bigger problems, to get disturbed officers off the force before they kill. Cops who display an inability to control their emotions, a propensity to abuse their power, or a lack of situational awareness about the way their actions create risk (from unnecessary confrontations to leaving unnecessary hazards like a postal truck in the road), ought to lose their jobs.

Police unions and the contracts they have been able to negotiate with local governments thanks to privileges granted on the state and federal level make dealing with police violence in a proactive and effective way far more difficult. Police unions, by nature, produce rules that will help bad cops. Black Lives Matters’ Campaign Zero identified “fair police union contracts” as one policy reform that could reduce police violence, and targeted particularly egregious provisions in police contracts with a separate website and data collection project, Checkthepolice.org.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announces the latest in cutting-edge military technology in this promotional video released exclusively through Reason TV.

The new Cranial Response Online Weapons Network will allow instant executive branch-level command of U.S. military resources, without the need for congressional authority, debate, or national unity.

Approximately 1:55 minutes.

View this article.

The election boiled down to a single @MorningJoe chart. http://pic.twitter.com/BKqN8IiTHR

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) April 1, 2016

New York Times staffer and author of The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas Anand Giridharadas posted the above to Twitter this morning.

You never want to ascribe too much meaning to a single point, especially one made on Morning Joe, but the implications here are not only pretty clear, but pretty striking, particularly on the Republican side. Of course conservatives think things were better 50 years (or 100 years ago, or 25 years ago, depending on the personality and age of the person in question). That’s pretty much the definition of conservatism, isn’t it? That it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” or at least begging, Slow Down.

So it’s not surprising that supporters of the two candidates who inveigh against political correctness, want to make the country more homogenous by kicking out (mostly Mexican) illegals and stop immigration more broadly, and invoke American Greatness like they’re being paid by the mention are fonder of the past than the present.

More interesting to me are the barely optimistic responses by supporters of Sanders and Clinton. Even they cannot muster much fun feelings about the present. Are they too young to remember 50 years ago or too senile not to remember? Either way, there is simply no reason to believe that life was better in 1966, despite an absolutely killer year in music (more on this in a moment).

To be fair, the presumption that those good old days were a) much better than today and b) gone for good is such a feature of the American psyche that it predates the founding of the country. The settlers in New England were convinced that things were going to shit about 15 minutes after docking at Plymouth Rock. By the late 1600s, pastors were already proposing “half-way covenants” to second-generation puritans who were drifting into secularism and a generation before the American Revolution we were already “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

Throughout the 1990s—those glorious, go-go years when even those of us who didn’t become tech gazillionaires saw our wallets fatten up and our life possibilities expand geometrically!—Reason published a never-ending stream of rebuttals (like this and that) to people proclaiming the death of the American Dream and invoking that old, horseshit-covered chestnut that “this next generation may be the first to have a lower standard of living than its parents…”

So to me, what’s most striking to the chart above isn’t the spread between Trumpists and Clintonistas (though it is stunning, to be sure), it’s that only a bare majority of the latter feel things are better now than they were 50 years ago.

In such a tepid response to the present, you see the failure not of America to deliver on the promise of a better, richer, freer life for those of us lucky enough to wash up on these shores before they are barricaded against foreign people and foreign goods (all the remaining Dem and GOP candidates are to varying degrees protectionist against both), but the failure of politics and the two major parties.

I don’t mean to scant the authenticity of respondents and their feeling of despair, but c’mon already and get a grip. By orders of magnitude, we are all richer, smarter, and better off. We are more educated, we live longer, we smell better, we DIE LESS. In terms of lifestyle and speech, we are freer to express ourselves; we are objectively less racist, homophobic, sexist, and generally uptight. There are many serious problems in today’s world and this country: We document those several times an hour at Reason.com, in fact, and offer ways to remedy many of them.

As Matt Welch and I argued in The Declaration of Independents, in most aspects of our lives—our personal lives, cultural lives, work lives—things are in fact improving. It’s in the areas of our lives governed by politics that things are stagnant, declining, or barely improving. The only large parts of our lives that haven’t gotten obviously better over the past 50 years include areas like K-12 education (where we spend about 2.5 times as much money to achieve exactly the same results), government spending (the government spends vastly more money per person and is succeeding mostly only in bankrupting future generations via old-age entitlements and dampened economic growth), and foreign policy (in 1966, we were in Vietnam; in 2016, we’re everywhere but Vietnam).

You leave the hothouse sphere of politics—harder and harder to do, for all sorts of reasons—and most people suffer not from too few choices and opportunities but too many. That’s where our lives should be lived, far away from the madding crowd filled Team Blue and Team Red tribalists who vote on what kind of food we can eat, dope we can smoke, sex we can have. Party identification is “at or near historic lows” not because America has failed but because politics and politicians and partisanship have failed. Once we fully understand, accept, and act on this and create a government that is smaller, more effective, and less intrusive, who knows? We might actually start realizing that the present beats the past but pales in comparison to our future.

• It’s April Fools’ Day! Be careful out there today, folks. 
• Reddit’s annual transparency report does not contains its usual section stating that the company hasn’t received a secret order for information from U.S. intelligence agencies. The report last year stated that “if we ever receive such a request”—which of course the company would not be able to explicitly mention—”we would seek to let the public know it existed.” 
• A sex worker was sentenced to a year in state prison after a busybody with a drone filmed her meeting with a client and turned it over to police. 
• Breitbart personality Milo Yiannopoulos “does not exist,” sources tell Buzzfeed. “It is a collective consciousness of various different people who come and go.” [Might be important to keep bullet point one in mind here?]
• Around a fifth of the world’s population of obese adults live in the United States, the U.K., Australia, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. 
• In fatal shootings by police officers, one fifth of officers’ names go undisclosed. 
• For the first time since it went public, Walmart’s annual revenues have dropped. 
• A federal judge Thursday struck down Mississippi’s ban on adoption by same-sex couples.
• Watch Matt Welch discuss the “libertarian moment” withThe Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, and the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. 

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don‘t forget to sign up for Reason‘s daily updates for more content.

Students at another university are furious about a spate of chalk scribblings that appeared on campus this week. “Trump 2016,” “Build the Wall,” and “Stop Islam” were among the messages that made some members of University of Michigan community feel unsafe enough to actually call the police.

UM is a public university, unlike Emory University and Scripps College, and its students enjoy broader free speech protections under the First Amendment. The chalkings, which appeared on the Diag—a public square frequently inhabited by activists of various causes—seem even less out of place here than at Emory. As a graduate of UM, I can testify to the fact that the campus is highly politically active and frequently inhabited by demonstrators, littered with flyers, and yes, even covered in chalk.

And yet you would think—based on this story in The Michigan Daily—that UM students are so sheltered they have never encountered an opinion that offends them. How else can anyone explain why a group of student-activists were so spooked by obvious political speech that they overcame their natural aversion to the police and actually called for help?

“I’ve been getting bounced around from one person to another, and I understand it’s after hours, but there should be some kind of emergency number besides the police because a lot of students of color don’t feel comfortable calling the police,” one irate student, Banen Al-Sheemary, told The Daily. “They’re our only resource and that I think is ridiculous.”

What’s ridiculous is that the students wasted the authorities’ time at all. The chalkings weren’t an emergency: they were protected expression, and neither the police nor the university is under any obligation to remove them.

Chalk messages are easily erased, of course, and the students were able to cleans the Diag easily enough with a few buckets of water. Al-Sheemary described this as “a really difficult process” and lamented that the administration’s inaction “perpetuates these really racist and hateful stereotypes that turn into violence and turn into students of color feeling unsafe on campus.”

UM did release a statement. “Attacks directed toward any member or group within the University of Michigan community, based on a belief or characteristic, are inconsistent with our values of respect, civility and equality,” said UM spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald, referencing the “Stop Islam” message.

I understand the sentiment being expressed here, but is it really the case that “attacks”—if that is indeed what these messages are—directed toward adherents of certain religions are off limits? Islam is an ideology, not a race. It seems like a university is fine place to speak out against systems of belief that one thinks are harmful, including various religions.

Imagine if right-leaning students had taken offense at a message that read “Stop Conservatives” or “Stop Republicans.” Should the cops do something about pro-Bernie Sanders students if they chalk “Stop Hillary”?

Criticism is not an act of violence, no matter how fervently the campus left insists that it is.