Tag: hit&run

I am happy to
announce that the journalistic organization you are consuming has
been nominated for
13 Southern California Journalism Awards, as administered by
the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Covering work produced from San
Diego to Santa Barbara (Reason is headquartered in Los
Angeles) during the 2013 calendar year, the SCJAs recognized our
efforts in the following categories:

* Best Website, News Organization: Reason.com.

* Best Feature Documentary: Paul Feine and Alex
Manning, for America’s
Longest War.

*
Best Cause/Advocacy Journalism: Zach Weissmueller,
for “Anarchy
In Detroit.”

* Best Television Feature: Amanda Winkler, for
“Riverside
Cop Tricks Autistic Teen Into Buying Pot.”

* Best Television Investigative: Paul Detrick,
for “L.A.
County Sheriffs Hassle Photographer, Trample Constitution, Get
Lauded By Bosses,” and Tracy Oppenheimer, for “Cop
Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket And Arrest
Quotas.”

* Best Magazine Feature/Commentary (under 1,000
words): Jacob Sullum, for “When
Policing Becomes Harassment.”

* Best Magazine
Entertainment/Review/Criticism/Column: Matt Welch, for
“When
Jackie Robinson Fought Back: A New Movie Elevates The
Trailblazing Ballplayer’s Nonviolence Over His
Furious Competitive Spirit.”

* Best Online Political Column/Commentary:
Scott Shackford, for “3
Reasons The ‘Nothing To Hide’ Crowd Should Be Worried About
Government Surveillance,” and J.D. Tucille, for “Why
I’m Teaching My Son To Break The Law.”

* Best Online
Non-Political Column/Commentary: Baylen Linnekin, for
“California
Regulators Attempt To Kill Sriracha.”

* Best Online Entertainment Commentary/Review:
Nick Gillespie and Jim Epstein, for “3
Reasons All Kids Should Be FORCED To Watch South Park!“

* Best Online Sports News/Feature/Commentary:
Matt Welch, for “The
Inglory Of Jackie Robinson’s Times.”

Reason’s 2013 journalism was also
nominated for 12 awards earlier this year by the Western
Publishing Association, which covers magazines in the western part
of the United States. Those nominations yielded two first-place
Maggie Awards, for:

* Best Regularly Featured Web, eNewsletter or Digital
Edition Column: Nick Gillespie and Reason TV, for
“3
Reasons Not To Go To War With Syria” and “3
Reasons All Kids Should Be FORCED To Watch South Park!“

* Best Use of Social Media (you can sample such
usage at Twitter and
Facebook).

Reason was nominated for 11 Southern California Journalism
Awards last year,
winning two.

Such recognition is due directly to your support of the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)3
nonprofit that publishes all of our journalism here, for which we
offer our thanks. Donate even more
money at this link! You can also subscribe to the print
magazine, for less than $15 a year, and/or subscribe to just
about any e-version of the mag you can imagine.

Spontaneous protests over a depiction of the
prophet Mohammed which led to attacks against multiple embassies
weren’t actually spontaneous and its organizers were intent on
escalating the situation and introducing violence according to the
former spokesperson of a working group of imams who coordinated the
response to a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons of Mohammed in
2005.
Freedom House reports:

[As Ahmed Akkari] explains in his book [My Farewell to
Islamism] and a number of interviews he has given since last
summer, the protests and mayhem were not spontaneous reactions from
the Muslim community. Instead they were produced by a calculated
conspiracy between a group of Danish imams and ambassadors from
various Muslim countries, who decided not only to appeal to
influential Muslim states and clerics in order to put pressure on
Denmark, but also to call on brute force from terrorist
organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter alliance
probably led directly to the destruction of the embassies in Beirut
and Damascus…

What is most surprising—and chilling—in Akkari’s book is how
willing the Danish Islamists were to escalate the situation, with
no qualms about the possibility that it could result in violence.
They deliberately played a double game with the Danish and
international community, pretending to work for peace and
reconciliation while covertly taking actions that could only lead
to more confrontations. For the imams, a “clash of civilizations”
was something to be cherished, not avoided, even if the violence
became far more extreme than they had expected.

Our own Matt Welch wrote the Los Angeles Times
editorial on the cartoon controversy, something he discussed
on
this blog in 2010, when outrage over the depiction of
Mohammed—something prohibited in certain hadiths, or
sayings of Mohammed, but not in the Quran, Islam’s holy book,
itself—came to the U.S. over the animated TV show South
Park’s attempt to depict Mohammed in a parody. Reason
hosted Everybody
Draw Mohammed Day after the cartoonist who first proposed it
backed down because of threats of violence. Check out the winners
here. As Nick Gillespie noted
at the time, some of the foulest images of Mohammed used to
stir up outrage in the Middle East over the Danish cartoons were
actually created by the imams themselves.

With the
heat of summer quickly approaching, New Yorkers might want to
quench their thirst with some “Phrosties,” alcoholic slushie
beverages sold by an eponymous delivery service. Too bad, because
New York Sen. Charles Schumer (D) may have just scared the
underground drink maker out of existence.

At a press conference on Monday he
said it’s time for a crackdown on Phrosties because “a
12-year-old can probably buy these ‘sloshies’ online, get it and
enjoy it because it’s filled with fruit juice and fruit punch and
all the things that taste sweet and nice.” 

According to the New York Post, Phrosties is “already
are under investigation by the State Liquor Authority because they
are unregulated and unlicensed.”

Vice‘s Grace Wyler says that’s all it took to put the
delivery service “out of business, or at least driven them deeper
underground.” She reports
on Phrosties’ quick fade into obscurity:

By Tuesday, the Phrostie Instagram account had been
scrubbed clean, its delivery contact details replaced by the
warning “WE DO NOT DELIVER.” After that, my texts to the previously
listed phone numbers went unanswered, until Wednesday night, when I
got a reply from the Brooklyn delivery service saying that if I
wanted any more Phrosties, I would have to order “ASAP.”

Twenty minutes later, a delivery guy showed up and handed me a
black grocery bag full of slushies. “That’s it for the Phrosties,”
he sighed. The service, he explained, was selling the last of its
inventory and closing up shop, thanks to “Schumer and the
regulations, I guess.”

“It’s all just political propaganda bullshit,” he added, with a
wave that was both a farewell and a summary dismissal of the
crushing regulatory burden of the nanny state.

Were
these $10 drinks really so dangerous? Even at the food blog
Grub Street where Alexis Swerdloff worried
over the fact that Phrosties are unregulated, she bought some
anyway and lived to tell the tasty tale. The same goes for
International Business Times‘ Eric Brown who
thinks Schumer “has a point” about Phrosties but slurped them
down until his face went numb.

For those keeping score, Schumer is also leading the charge
against powdered alcohol and in 2010 threw a fit about caffeinated
malt liquor drink Four Loko because of its appeal to young
people. 

President
Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel are the latest to
express concern that the American appetite for managing foreign
conflicts is waning. In his West Point speech Wednesday, Obama said
the military is the “backbone” of American leadership, even as he
claimed that force is not the first answer to every problem. And
Hagel recently told some foreign-policy wonks in Chicago that it
would be “a mistake to view our global responsibilities as a burden
or charity.” But, Sheldon Richman notes, America’s interventionist
attitude has our put our country in more danger than any sort of
claims of “isolationism.”

View this article.

“There’s nothing like a riot to bring out the amateur
psychologist in all of us,” Michael Bond
writes in Aeon. He’s referring to the idea that people
lose their reason, even their individual identities, in a crowd—a
notion that thrives in punditry and pop culture even as
sociologists and psychologists keep giving us reasons to believe it
isn’t true. Reviewing the research, Bond makes the case “not only
that mindless irrationality is rare within crowds, but also that
co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at
stake.”

At one point, Bond goes further than Reason‘s
oft-made
point that crowds during
disasters generally stay
calm and
do not panic, arguing that crowds can be too calm:

When the hijacked planes hit the World Trade
Center towers in New York on 11 September 2001, most of those
inside procrastinated rather than heading for the nearest exit.
Even those who managed to escape waited an average of six minutes
before moving to the stairs. Some hung around for half an hour,
awaiting more information, collecting things to take with them,
going to the bathroom, finishing emails, or making phone
calls.

Likewise, say researchers, passengers have died in accidents
because they just didn’t try to get out. Take the aircraft fire at
Manchester airport in the UK on 22 August 1985, when 55 people died
because they stayed in their seats amid the flames. John Leach, who
studies disaster psychology at the University of Oslo, says a
shared state of bewilderment might be to blame. Contrary to popular
belief that crowds always panic in emergencies, large groups mill
around longer than small groups since it takes them more time to
come up with a plan.

And in a piece of good news, some officials—not all, alas—are
starting to take this social science into account when they try to
police crowds:

[Clifford] Stott and his
collaborators presented their research to the Portuguese Public
Security Police (PSP) before the European football championships,
scheduled for Portugal for the first time in 2004. They advised the
PSP to drop the riot-squad tactics used at most previous
tournaments in favour of a lower-profile, firm-but-friendly
approach. The Portuguese were receptive. They developed a training
programme to ensure that all PSP officers understood the theory and
how to translate it into non-confrontational policing. The result
was an almost complete absence of disorder at England games during
Euro 2004.

Today, the social identity model of crowd behaviour is the
framework by which all Union of European Football Associations
(UEFA) matches in Europe are policed—though in Russia and in
eastern Europe it is still only sporadically applied.

Read the rest
here.

Bonus link: This isn’t
the first time we’ve noted Bond’s writing on this subject.

Three years ago,
in Glik
v. Cunniffe, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st
Circuit upheld a
man’s First Amendment right to record an arrest on Boston
Common. Last week, in Gericke
v. Weare, the court upheld a woman’s First
Amendment right to record a traffic stop in Weare, New Hampshire.
The combination of these two decisions is a powerful rebuke to cops
who continue to harass
people with bogus wiretapping charges when they dare to capture
images or sound of police encounters on their cellphones.

In the 2011 case, Simon Glik was charged with violating
Massachusetts’ broad wiretap law, which makes it a crime to
“willfully commit[] an interception…of any wire or
oral communication,” after he
recorded an arrest in which he believed police
were using excessive force. The 1st Circuit ruled that “a citizen’s
right to film government officials, including law enforcement
officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a
basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First
Amendment.” Hence “Glik was
exercising clearly established First Amendment rights in filming
the officers in a public space.”

In the case decided last week, Carla Gericke took out her
cellphone after police pulled over her friend, whose car she was
following to his house, and announced that she was recording the
stop. The 1st Circuit ruled that the First Amendment right
recognized in Glik also applies to traffic stops, although
it may be reasonably restricted in that context to protect the
safety of officers and the public. In this case, Gericke says
police never asked her to stop recording or to leave the scene;
they just arrested her afterward. “Based on Gericke’s version of
the facts,” the court said, “she was exercising a
clearly established First Amendment right when
she attempted to film the traffic stop in
the absence of a police order to stop filming or
leave the area.” 

New Hampshire’s wiretap statute, unlike the Massachusetts
law, applies only to situations in which the people who are
recorded have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The 1st Circuit
noted that police officers performing their duties in public have
no such expectation, especially when the person recording them
announces her intention to do so. Furthermore, because of a
technical glitch, Gericke did not actually capture any video of her
friend’s detention. These facts help explain why local prosecutors
ended up dropping the charges against Gericke. The cops who
arrested her were so keen to punish her perceived disrespect that
they not only violated her constitutional rights; they misapplied
the statute.

What’s especially significant about both of these cases is that
they allowed lawsuits against the police officers themselves to
proceed. The court decided that the officers did not qualify for
immunity because the rights they violated were clearly established
at the time of the arrests. Cops who continue to
mistakenly believe they have a right not to be recorded while on
duty should understand that they cannot hide behind their real or
professed ignorance of what the Constitution requires.

In a case that J.D. Tuccille
noted a couple of weeks ago, police in Chicopee, Massachusetts,
charged Karen Dziewit with wiretapping after she recorded her
own arrest for disorderly conduct and possessing an open container
of alcohol. Unlike Glik and Gericke, who openly recorded the cops,
Dziewit did so surreptitiously, but that detail should not affect
the constitutional analysis. The 1st Circuit recognized a First
Amendment right to “film government officials, including law
enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public
space.” That description clearly applies to the officers who
arrested Dziewit. The fact that they did not realize she was
recording them does not matter. Officers should take it granted
that people may be recording them whenever they are performing
their duties in public, and if they did it probably would
improve their behavior. 

[via
Ars Technica]

Did you know that the government can rifle through your opened
emails without a warrant if they happen to be at least 180 days
old? I had somehow forgotten that unhappy fact until yesterday,
when Rep.
Jared Polis (D-Colo.) came on
The Independents to talk about his Email
Privacy Act. Watch
below:

A treasure trove of past Reason writing on the issue can be
found here.

In the wake of the successful campaigns to
prevent the commencement addresses of three high-profile
speakers—Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University,
Ayaan Hirsi-Ali at Brandeis University and Christine Lagarde at
Smith College—many censorship-weary spectators of higher education
fretted that “disinvitation season” seemed worse than ever this
year.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) now has
data to back up those fears. Since 2000, an increasing number of
campus speakers faced both informal and formal muzzling at the
hands of students, faculty and administrators eager to disrupt the
presentation of viewpoints they don’t like, according
to FIRE’s latest report.

“Disinvitation efforts are not new, but our research indicates
that they are dramatically increasing,” the report found.

FIRE noted that some prospective campus speakers voluntarily
canceled their speeches after students and faculty protested their
inclusion. Others were formally disinvited by university
administrators. In some instances, speakers attempted to deliver
their remarks but were silenced by hecklers. While this third kind
of intolerance—the abject kind—was rarest, it occurred more
frequently over the last few years.

While a speaker’s conservative views on gay marriage, abortion
and the War on Terror were most likely to yield a disinvitation,
left-of-center speakers such as former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and activist Bill Ayers have
also endured repeated silencing.

A key finding: Public and private universities disinvited
speakers at nearly equal rates. As the report explains:

Disinvitation incidents occurred in remarkably even numbers
among public colleges and universities (68), private secular
institutions (59), and private religious institutions (65). The
split between the types of institutions is surprisingly close,
revealing a systemic problem—some students and faculty at colleges
and universities of all types appear increasingly unwilling to
allow those with whom they disagree to speak and advocate for their
position on campus.

Private universities are well within their rights to cater to
political correctness and rescind speaking invitations, of course.
And students at private and public institutions have the right to
protest speakers with whom they disagree.

Even so, colleges that cultivate an aura of knee-jerk hostility
toward different ways of thinking are depriving students of one of
the cardinal benefits of campus life: the opportunity to interact
with unfamiliar perspectives and engage new ideas. They are also

subtly teaching students to fear controversy and abhor
dissent.

Given such an unfriendly environment for free expression, it’s
not surprising that some students now believe the syllabi for their
English classes
should come with warning labels that the works of Shakespeare
and Homer may cause emotional distress.

The state of Minnesota has
actually struck down more than 1,000 old, obsolete laws. Imagine
that!
From the Pioneer Press:

It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an
illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are
gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can
figure out how to do it.

Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and
incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature
repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession”
initiative. His goal was to make state government work better,
faster and smarter.

“I think we’re off to a very good start,” Dayton said Tuesday at
a Capitol news conference.

There’s actually more than getting rid of those silly laws that
make up occasional “listicles” of “24 Things You Didn’t Know Were
Illegal.” A new law is supposed to streamline the state
environmental permitting process for businesses, and the state is
also cutting the amount of time businesses are required to maintain
employment records. The Press says these efforts were a
result of a bipartisan push. And there’s also this:

Legislators launched an initiative that got rid of more than 30
advisory boards, councils and task forces that had outlived their
usefulness.

It’s possible to get rid of these? I didn’t even know that.
Knowing state government, though, that’s probably less than 1
percent of the advisory boards, councils and task forces that have
actually outlived their usefulness (or never actually had a real
use to begin with).

The last of New Orleans’
government-run schools (five of them) closed this week, and when
the school year starts in September, every student in the public
education system will be attending one of the 58 charter schools in
the city. 510 out of the school district’s 600 employees will
 be gone by the end of the week. The public education system
in New Orleans has been run by the state’s “Recovery School
District” since Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005. At that
time, the state took over 102 of 117 schools in the city, the
“worst performers.” Those with skin in the public school game
aren’t pleased,
as the Washington Post reports:

“They [charter school providers] don’t answer to anyone,” said
Sean Johnson, the dean of students at Banneker [Elementary, one of
the public schools that has just closed], whose father attended the
school while growing up in the Black Pearl neighborhood. “The
charters have money and want to make more money. They have their
own boards, make their own rules, accept who they want and put out
who they want to put out.”

According to the Post, before the Recovery School
District took over in New Orleans, the elected Orleans Parish
School District was bankrupt and $71 million in federal money had
gone missing. The high school graduation rate was just 54.4 percent
before the state took over; by 2013 it was 77.6 percent. And while
those numbers compare the pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans
population, data limited to the post-Katrina  population is
improving too. In 2007 for example, only 23 percent of students
were at grade level for math. That’s up to 57 percent. In the
meantime, while the Recovery School District is about to have just
90 employees, the failing Orleans Parish School District had more
than 7,000 before the state took over. It may be more difficult now
to use the public education system for personal enrichment as a
jobs program, but the system should also be working a lot better
for actual students as it’s supposed to.