“How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?” asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.
Fine sat down with ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it’s not just about collecting taxes.
“The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels,” says Fine, “already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers.”
August 22, 2012
Reason.tv: Can legal cannabis revolutionize the US economy?
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August 17, 2012
The police war on photographers and videographers: the Canadian front
Karen Selick in the National Post confirming that Canadian police are also under the impression that their work cannot legally be photographed:
What have cops got against cameras these days? Increasingly, people are getting arrested, charged or even assaulted by police officers, merely for attempting to take photos or videos of officers at work. Often, police simply command people to stop photographing. Scared into thinking they must be breaking some law, citizens comply.
When Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, police seized the now famous video made by witness Paul Pritchard, who had to hire a lawyer and threaten court proceedings to get it back.
[. . .]
There is no law in Canada that prohibits people from openly photographing police. Section 129 of the Criminal Code prohibits “wilfully obstructing” police in the execution of their duty, but it is hard to imagine how standing by peacefully and videotaping as police searched the premises and piled up items for seizure could be considered obstructing. After all, the police themselves were videotaping on Ms. Jones’ premises — but selectively. They probably didn’t capture themselves ordering her friend to refrain from taking the pictures she was legally entitled to take.
That same day, three other search warrants were executed at the homes of other individuals the CFIA suspects of conspiring with Ms. Jones to save her healthy sheep. At Michael Schmidt’s residence, all cell phones were immediately confiscated. When a visitor from outside arrived with his cell phone, Schmidt’s wife borrowed it and took photos of police inside her home. Officers seized the phone even though it was clearly outside the scope of the warrant. They returned it three hours later, with the photos erased. When the victim of this apparently illegal seizure objected, police responded, “We can do whatever we want.” But of course, that arrogant response was not permitted to be recorded.
[. . .]
Police must be made to understand that being on duty or executing a search warrant does not transform an officer into a petty dictator with carte blanche to issue arbitrary orders to everyone in sight. Police cannot do “whatever they want.” Citizens have the right to hold them accountable for their actions. Personal cameras are important tools in implementing that right. Bullying people out of using them must cease.
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August 10, 2012
Who’s more dangerous to a random American citizen, terrorists or police officers?
According to Jim Harper at the Cato@Liberty blog, you’re eight times more likely to be shot by the police than killed by a terrorist:
It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted, “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters.
In case it needs saying: Police officers are unlike terrorists in almost all respects. Crucially, the goal of the former, in their vastest majority, is to have a stable, peaceful, safe, law-abiding society, which is a goal we all share. The goal of the latter is … well, it’s complicated. I’ve cited my favorite expert on that, Audrey Kurth Cronin, here and here and here. Needless to say, the goal of terrorists is not that peaceful, safe, stable society.
I picked up the statistic from a blog post called: “Fear of Terror Makes People Stupid,” which in turn cites the National Safety Council for this and lots of other numbers reflecting likelihoods of dying from various causes. So dispute the number(s) with them, if you care to.
I take it as a given that your mileage may vary. If you dwell in the suburbs or a rural area, and especially if you’re wealthy, white, and well-spoken, your likelihood of death from these two sources probably converges somewhat (at very close to zero).
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July 27, 2012
If Boris wasn’t mayor of London
Lawsmith imagines what Boris Johnson would write about the London Olympics “major international sporting event” in a “certain major city in the UK” if he were not mayor:
I can imagine his perfect article in this alternative history in my dreams. Written in the Spectator and littered with self-deprecation, references to dead or fictitious Greeks, Liverpool and wiff-waff, Boris would have danced across the pages as he gleefully excoriated the Labour administration for the absurd idea of inviting a bunch of prima donna athletes and bureaucrats, most of them foreign, to compete in an outdoor stadium during the coldest, wettest summer in British history.
He might have pointed out that all this would take place in Newham, a place not altogether unlike Portsmouth and, in any case, one most Londoners consider more alien than Paris, with among the highest incidence of robbery and assault in the entire city. He might have joyfully foretold the pain and suffering of millions of income taxpayers on account of the shut-down of major roads and TfL advising know-nothing tourists to hop the tube at rush hour to make the 10 AM events, and seriously questioned the wisdom of erecting a steel wall around Hyde Park for an entire summer before fouling it up beyond recognition.
In our alternative history he would have savaged, rather than prodded, the implementation of widespread censorship undertaken by a hit squad of intellectual property ninjas; he would have lamented the fact that our police were arresting “marginal” (i.e., possibly innocent) suspects – living, breathing, thinking people – on terrorism charges which they might not be able to prove. If he had really driven it home, he would have pointed out that, under normal circumstances, those arrests would never have been made. He would also have asked why nobody seems to care.
By this point, his oeuvre would have been the most hilarious political essay ever written. He would flay alive in full public view the pathetic, uncritical, fawning news-media industry which crafts its Olympic stories with all the creative flavour of an oak plank, their proxy world to escape from our own inadequacies where professional athletes become “heroes” (seriously, find a different word), washed-up “heroes” become “legends,” and civil liberties violations and government largesse are completely ignored.
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July 25, 2012
Michael Bloomberg’s call for a national police strike
At the Simple Justice blog, Scott H. Greenfield explains why New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is so very, very wrong to call for a national police strike:
There are some virtues that come with having a billionaire mayor. He’s not easy to bribe, for example, so you know whatever comes out of his mouth does so honestly. And therein lies the downside when he says something like this:
“I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say, ‘We’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe,’” Bloomberg said on CNN Monday night.
Within this idiotic comment are two fallacious assumptions. The first is the “war on cops” tripe, that there is a trend against cops, putting them at increasing risk of harm from gun-toting criminals. Radley Balko has beaten that myth to death. Mike Riggs too. It’s a good myth to further a public agenda in favor of order at the expense of law, but it just doesn’t hold water.
The second, however, is the mayor’s encouragement to police to take the First Rule of Policing a step further than ever before, to use their singular authority to hold a nation hostage. This is perhaps the most dangerous idea Bloomberg could promote.
[. . .]
Ironically, the only means of staying this armed takeover, should the police ever come to recognize that they have the power if not the authority to seize control, would be guns in the hands of citizens. No rational person could want it to come to such a battle.
So while a billionaire mayor may be above the influences that drive mere mortals, they sometimes utter the most insanely foolish things that take us to a place we must never go. The day the police, as a whole, think they can use their posts to take our government hostage is the day every citizen will need to dust off his arms. The day a billionaire mayor suggests that the police should use their power to influence our government is a day he’s been in office too long.
Update: Walter Olson at the Cato@Liberty blog:
It’s enough to make you wonder whether Bloomberg is secretly a passionate admirer of the Second Amendment and keeps saying things this outrageous from a covert intent to sabotage the case for gun control.
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July 18, 2012
Toronto’s gun problem
No, not a problem with guns per se, but a problem with the image of guns. Jonathan Kay tries to do a quick psycho-analysis of Toronto’s issue here:
The primary tragedy of urban gun violence is, of course, that it kills people — including 14-year-old Shyanne Charles and 23-year-old Joshua Yasay, who were slain in Scarborough this week. A secondary ill effect is that it produces paralyzing anxiety in millions of otherwise unaffected people, largely thanks to sensationalistic media reporting that encourages the idea we are all inhabiting some kind of anything-goes “war zone.” As I’ve written before, gun violence in Toronto is largely confined to a small set of areas, and a small set of social and criminal contexts. For the average citizen, the chance of suicide or death-by-domestic-battery is much, much higher than the chance of becoming collateral damage in a gang killing.
But it’s not hard to figure out why scared housewives are canceling their zoo trips when the Toronto Star is blaring out headlines like “Mass shooting on Danzig puts the lie to Toronto’s ‘safe city’ mantra.”
Combine that headline with the lurid, disturbingly blood-fixated Rosie DiManno column that sits under those words, and a clear message emerges: Torontonians have been living in a dream world, going about their parenting and work lives in blissful ignorance of the warring gangs who are probably just around the corner, ready to march up the street, spraying the whole area with machine gun fire. Even the lemur isn’t safe: They’ll probably shoot him, too.
As I’ve noted, Chicago — a city with a population close to Toronto’s 2.6-million — witnesses about 10 times as many murders every year as Hogtown. And as Marni Soupcoff wrote earlier this week, tiny Detroit has had 184 murders this year, compared to Toronto’s 28. To repeat what’s been written: Among the American cities that witnessed more murders than Toronto in 2011 were Nashville (pop. 616,000), Tulsa, Okla (pop. 393,000), and Stockton, Cal. (292,000). In per-capita terms, Toronto has a substantially smaller homicide problem than Winnipeg and Edmonton.
And one must remember that Toronto has a unique view of itself and its role in the world:
Another factor is Toronto’s bizarrely inflated view of itself as a civic nirvana, to which the rest of the world is constantly gazing as a sort of Light Unto Cities. When anything bad happens, we naturally assume that the entire planet is gasping in horror and disappointment. In 2010, for instance, when a few dozen windows got broken at the G20 Summit here, Canadian journalists truly believed that the news would make banner headlines on other continents — and that we would have a “black eye” that would last for generations.
Regarding the shootings in Scarborough, this Reddit item is worth reading.
Update: Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail:
… In certain neighbourhoods, a war is on. It’s a war against peace and order waged by the forces of social disintegration. It’s the same war that killed Jane Creba in 2005, two people at the Eaton Centre last month and dozens of other victims who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The single most significant root cause is not guns or crummy housing or racism or inadequate policing or lenient sentencing or lack of jobs or insufficient social programs. It is family and community breakdown. Most especially, it’s absent fathers.
Social programs are essential. But all the social programs in the world can’t make up for family disintegration.
[. . .]
Family disintegration is not a racial problem. It is an underclass problem. The evidence is plain that children born to unmarried women – of whatever race – do much worse than children with two married parents. They’re less likely to succeed in school and more likely to turn to violence (boys) and promiscuity (girls). The easiest way for them to feel like someone is to grab a gun or have a baby.
So by all means, let’s redevelop public housing, strengthen our policing, hire more youth workers, launch more employment programs, start more basketball programs, help young mothers finish school and teach them how to read to their kids. It makes us feel good to focus on these things because they are things we can actually do something about, and maybe they will make a difference. But let’s not kid ourselves: They’re Band-Aid solutions.
We have a million euphemisms for what’s gone wrong in our so-called “priority” neighbourhoods, a splendidly euphemistic term that has replaced “at-risk,” “disadvantaged,” “underprivileged” and “poor.” By now, it should be obvious that material poverty is not the problem – not when every kid in a priority neighbourhood has a cellphone and a flat-screen TV. Their poverty is of a different, more corrosive kind: a poverty of expectations, role models, structure, consistency, discipline and support.
Even our euphemisms have euphemisms these days. They do nothing to solve the problem, but they allow the problem to be discussed at such a distance from reality that the lack of solution is generally hidden from view.
Until the next shooting.
July 9, 2012
Adrian Peterson on his arrest, sort of
The first word directly from Adrian Peterson after his arrest in Houston this weekend:
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
WC— Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) July 8, 2012
Thank you for waiting for the facts. Truth will surface.
— Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) July 8, 2012
H/T to Christopher Gates at the Daily Norseman.
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July 8, 2012
Apparently in Texas you can be arrested merely for “resisting arrest”
In what must be the worst kind of news for Minnesota Vikings fans, star running back Adrian Peterson was arrested early Saturday morning for … resisting arrest. ProFootballTalk has the report:
A source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that the incident culminating in Peterson’s arrest was captured by one or more surveillance cameras. Multiple persons also witnessed the event.
According to the source, Peterson, his girlfriend, and some family members were at a nightclub in Houston. At closing time, a group of police officers entered the club, and they began instructing the remaining patrons to leave.
Peterson wanted to get some water before he left, but an officer told Peterson that he needed to leave. Some words apparently were exchanged, but Peterson eventually walked to the exit with one of the club’s bouncers.
It’s believed that one of the officers then jumped on Peterson’s back from behind and tried to take him down. (Key word: “tried.”) Other officers then joined the fray and completed the arrest.
Peterson was charged with resisting arrest, which implies he was being arrested for something else. He is charged for now with no other crime.
I was under the vague impression that to be charged with “resisting arrest” you’d have to already be wanted by the police for doing something that warranted arrest. Based on the initial reports, it doesn’t sound like Peterson did anything before he was arrested to justify arresting him … unless it’s a case of a police officer deciding that he’d been disrespected. We’ll have to wait until more of the information becomes available.
Update: Contrasting with the initial report, Dan Zinski of The Viking Age says Peterson was “heavily intoxicated” at the time:
More on Adrian’s incident, and this isn’t flattering. The general manager of the club where Adrian Peterson was arrested after allegedly pushing an off-duty cop has told website TMZ that the running back was “heavily intoxicated” at the time of the incident. A police report says Peterson became belligerent after he and his companions were told the leave the bar, and ended up being subdued by three officers.
Live at Bayou Place general manager Daniel Maher says Peterson tried to order one last drink after being told to leave, and after being denied, tried to intimidate the bartender into giving him the drink anyway. It was at this point that Maher himself intervened, but Peterson refused to listen to him. The off-duty cop then broke in and was shoved by Peterson, leading to the Viking being hauled in for a misdemeanor A count of resisting arrest.
Update the second: At Viking Update, John Holler provides a bit of background (which may or may not be relevant to this particular case, but is interesting anyway):
The interesting aspect of the Peterson incident is that the only charge he was hit with was resisting arrest. He wasn’t charged with assaulting an officer. Had he actually shoved a policeman to the point that he “stumbled,” it would seem logical that charges of assaulting of an officer would also have been leveled. Therein lies the need to hear both sides of the story.
I come from a different perspective than most on this type of subject. I have been involved with “bouncer dust-ups” on the wrong side. Yet, three of my best friends are or were cops. I could accurately be accused of being “cop-friendly.” Of the numbers saved in my phone, a half-dozen of them are cops. When they’re “moonlighting,” it’s a night off for them. The odds of them getting shot as the result of a meth-addled domestic abuse call are out of the question. In those situations, they are truly “in charge.” And they like it that way.
When a bouncer (cop or otherwise) is working “his turf,” he can be aggressive. Very aggressive. As tenuous as life is in the NFL, the reality is that “hired muscle” at a nightclub can’t lose if he gets in a dust-up with a drunken patron. Whether an off-duty policeman, a local college football player or just a big guy who casts an imposing shadow, “security” at a big-time nightclub is expected to quell all problems — exceptions not allowed.
In order to do so, off-duty cops (trust me when I tell you that they’re never truly off-duty) aren’t going to take any guff from anyone. They have the experience. They have the sobriety advantage.
If the Peterson matter actually goes to court — the smart money would say that only a hard-core prosecutor would push the case — it will be destroyed by competent legal representation on Peterson’s behalf.
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July 6, 2012
June 27, 2012
Questions on the Elliot Lake rescue efforts
Whether it was just a badly phrased moment in a press conference or not, Toronto’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue team has not done itself any public relations favours in the aftermath to the partial collapse of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake:
The story of the collapsed mall in Elliot Lake, where the rescue mission is back on after being suspended on Monday because officials deemed the building too “unsafe,” has so far deviated from romantic tales of heroism and rescue, spiralling instead into talk of delays, strict mandates and “limited resources.”
A spokesman for Toronto’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue team, Bill Neadles, said on Tuesday the group was still in its “infancy” — that aside from winning some industry competitions and running mock rescues, HUSAR, as it is known, had only participated in one operation: a gas explosion in 2003. He said when he initially told residents on Monday the team had “reached the end of its mandate” he did not mean they were abandoning the operation, he “just didn’t want to lead anybody to believe I was going to come back with a silver claw and walk on water.”
[. . .]
In Elliot Lake, no one has been spirited away alive, at least not yet. One person is thought dead and a dozen are feared missing. At least one is believed to have made a noise amid the rubble on Monday morning.
“One of the things that gives rescue a sort of romance is the idea that you go in and you get the job done … and that’s one of the reasons this Northern Ontario mall story is so 21st century,” said Bob Thompson, a pop culture expert at New York’s Syracuse University. “Here we’ve got this potentially romantic rescue story, and what do we see? Good ol’ fashioned bureaucracy.”
When most Canadians think of rescue, they do not think of government inner-workings: a Ministry of Labour structural engineer suspending a search; provincial officials having to explicitly give the Toronto team the authority to go back in; a premier intervening to make that happen.
“If you had put 100 miners in there, they would have been out by Saturday,” said Greg Dillavough, a retired miner who once worked in mine rescue in the Northwest Territories and Ontario. “You don’t walk away from a site when someone’s alive.”
June 21, 2012
June 12, 2012
Stop worrying about the approaching police state: it’s already here
I saw Twitter updates about this, but I assumed it was an Onion story that someone didn’t recognize as being from a parody news site. I was wrong:
The police state is not only here — it is being welcomed with open arms.
Exhibit A: In Aurora, Colorado, police searching for suspected bank robbers locked down an entire intersection, dragooned 40 random motorists out of their cars at gunpoint, handcuffed them and “asked” for permission to search their vehicles. [. . .]
Naturally, no one refused permission.
The action itself is startling: 40 people, guilty of nothing more than proximity, of being in the same general area where a suspected criminal might also be, are literally pulled from their vehicles, shackled and detained for more than two hours — even after it was obvious they were guilty of no crime at all.
Even more startling, however, than these over-the-top tactics is the fact that (apparently) every one of these 40 innocent people complied without a peep of protest. Not one said: “I’m sorry officer, but unless I’ve committed a crime I’d like to be free to go about my business.” Not one said, “I do not consent to any searches.”
None put up a fuss when the cuffs came out.
One woman interviewed by ABC News clucked happily: “Yeah, we all got cuffed (laugh) until they figured out who did what.” No doubt this woman will not object when a gang of armed men kicks in her door, invades her home and holds her family at gunpoint until they figure out who did what. After all, there are criminals about. They could be anywhere. Which means, anything is justified.
In the words of one ABC News blogger, “Sounds like the police did their job — and did it exceptionally well!” And another: “I think the police did a great job in an unusual circumstance and protected the people of the city from a dangerous criminal. Those people should praise the police, not sue them!”
It’s amazing that none of these people who were the victims of an insane amount of police overreaction seem to feel that the police did anything wrong. There must not be a civil liberty equivalent of the ambulance-chasing lawyer.
June 7, 2012
“What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?”
Judge Andrew Napolitano on the lack of outrage over the use of military drones within the borders of the United States (and, in all probability, Canada):
When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes, and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. The folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.
Don’t believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the “recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function” in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel inside the United States and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them “to collect information about U.S. persons.”
It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. And, any “incidentally acquired information” can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?
The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama’s Secretary of the Air Force on April 23, 2012. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as “balancing…obtaining intelligence information…and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution…” Note the primacy of intelligence gathering over freedom protection, and note the peculiar use of the word “balancing.”
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May 25, 2012
Ottawa assault and robbery victim spent 75 days behind bars after 911 call
The Ottawa police have promised an investigation into this weird miscarriage of justice:
Ottawa police are investigating how an elderly victim of a vicious attack in his home ended up spending 75 days in jail after calling 911 for help.
Marian Andrzejewski, 74, called 911 after two men broke into his Ottawa apartment in October 2010, robbed him and punched him repeatedly.
But instead of getting help, Andrzejewski was scolded by the dispatcher when he struggled to communicate in broken English and ended up in handcuffs himself when police finally arrived.
H/T to Mike Brock for the link.
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“SWATting”
This is a rather disturbing development:
At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.
When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.
They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?
I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.
Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.
Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.
The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.
Because I could have been killed.
A “prank” phonecall that could easily have gotten the victim killed. Difficult to describe that as a mere “prank”. Bordering on terrorism, if not over the line.
It actually happened. The phenomenon is called “SWATting,” because it can bring a SWAT team to your front door. SWATting is a particularly dangerous hoax in which a caller, generally a computer hacker, calls a police department to report a shooting at the home of his enemy. The caller will place this call to the police department’s business line, using Skype or a similar service, and hiding behind Internet proxies to make the call impossible to trace. Anxious police, believing they are responding to the home of an armed and dangerous man, show up at the front door pointing guns and screaming orders.
That is exactly what happened to me. It is a very dangerous hoax that could get the target killed.
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