March 30, 2010
March 29, 2010
Don’t talk back to the man, part XLVI
Ken at the Popehat blog has a beef with part of the message in “10 Rules for Dealing with Police” from Flex Your Rights:
See, if your goal is not to be abused, wrongfully arrested, falsely accused, searched without probable cause, or proned out on the pavement because you irritated someone with a gun and a badge, then “don’t be mouthy to a cop” is excellent practical advice. But dammit, we shouldn’t have to give that advice. The concept that you should expect to be abused if you aren’t meek (or, to be more realistic, subservient) in dealing with public servants ought to be abhorrent to a society of free people. Courtesy is admirable, and unnecessary rudeness is not, but rudeness ought not be seen as inviting government employees to break the law. But the reality is that our society largely issues apologias for, not denunciations of, police abuse. The prevailing belief is that claims of abuse are about lawyers or crooks trying to game the system, that people accused of crimes generally committed them, and that cops are heroes of the sort who deserve the benefit of the doubt when their account of a roadside encounter differs from that of a citizen. Our society, for the most part, indulges cops in their expectation that citizens will be subservient. As a result, “don’t talk back to a cop” remains tragically apt practical advice.
Moreover, the truth of it is that many cops will interpret an assertion of your constitutional rights, however politely delivered, as a rude challenge. They are supported in that view by four decades of “law and order” talk that classifies constitutional rights as mere instrumentalities of crime, not as the rules by which we have chosen to live.
Shame on us if we put up with that.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link, who also offers a graphic example of what can happen when you don’t follow the helpful advice in the video:
Last week, a panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that three Seattle police officers were justified in using a taser three times on a pregnant woman for resisting arrest. The woman had been pulled over for going 32 mph in a school zone. She insisted it was the car ahead of her that was speeding, and refused to sign the ticket. That’s when they tased her.
The problem is that under Washington law, (a) you aren’t required to sign a traffic ticket, (b) speeding isn’t an arrestable offense, and (c) you can’t be arrested for resisting an unlawful arrest.
So the woman was completely within her rights. Yet asserting those rights got her the business end of a stun gun. Three times. And two of the three federal appellate judges to hear the case see nothing wrong with that.
March 25, 2010
This is positive, but it’ll be more positive when it isn’t even news
The pursuit of equal opportunity for all has another minor milestone: the first black police officer to head Toronto’s homicide squad:
Inspector Mark Saunders became the first black head of Toronto’s Homicide Squad this week, replacing the division’s first female leader.
Staff Inspector Kathryn Martin was promoted after just one year as homicide’s top cop; she now heads the professional standards division, charged with integrity on the force and public confidence.
Insp. Saunders, a former homicide detective who most recently worked in professional standards, moved from that division back to homicide this week.
Police Chief Bill Blair has stressed the importance of diversity on the force and also promoting the best people. Since he became chief in 2005 year, he has named two black deputy chiefs, as well as women as heads of the sex crimes and fraud units.
This is a good sign that institutional racism and sexism is becoming less and less a factor (at least within the Toronto police force), although it’ll be a great day when this sort of announcement isn’t even remarkable. That would mean that the best candidate for a job is the one who’s offered the job, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Humanity being prey to frailties, it might never happen, but it’s still worth working towards.
Another tidbit on military reform in China
In an article briefly discussing the not-widely-reported unrest in ethnic Uighur regions, a mention of some progress in reducing corruption in China’s military hierarchy:
There’s a lot of corruption remaining in the military as well. For over a decade, the government has worked to eliminate the worst of the theft and moonlighting. The most outrageous examples of this have been curbed. Thus military officers no longer use cash from the defense budget to set up weapons factories they run and profit from. Big chunks of procurement cash no longer disappear into the offshore bank accounts of generals and admirals. But there’s still a lot of corruption. Much is still for sale, like promotions. Lower ranking officers and NCOs can still be found selling weapons and equipment that is reported “destroyed” or “mission.” Commanders who are not doing so well, can pay to have reports of their performance upgraded. Senior government officials still have doubts about how effective the military would be in another war. It was noted, usually by journalists, that the army response to several recent national disasters (which usually employ troops for disaster relief) had problems. This is not supposed to be reported, but the journalists discuss it among themselves, and some of this knowledge gets onto the Internet and outside the country. People love to gossip, especially in a police state like China.
In response to the corruption, and uncertainly about how the military reform (and modernization) program is going, this year’s defense budget only went up 7.5 percent. For over a decade, the annual increases were in the double digits. But another reason for the stall is the impact of the worldwide recession. While the Chinese economy continued to grow, the rate was less.
The usual caveats apply about any official statistics used in discussions about China: if you’ve somehow managed to avoid seeing ’em before, there’s a roundup here.
March 10, 2010
Police funding: Toronto increases budget, reduces staffing
Toronto’s police force is going to have to cut back on the number of officers on the beat, in spite of a $33 million budget increase since last year:
At an emergency meeting at police headquarters, the board voted to find temporary savings, which would bring spending down to the $888.1-million approved by the city in February, avoiding a clash over a $5.9-million disparity.
Police Chief Bill Blair said even temporary budget reductions would mean fewer officers on staff, and concerns about a reduction in the force’s effectiveness.
“At the end of the day, this is what you need to fund these service levels. The city doesn’t want to come back and say, ‘cut police officers,’ because politically, that is a difficult thing to suggest,” Chief Blair said. “But what they instead say is, ‘We won’t give you enough money to pay their salaries.’ So inevitably we have to cut the number of police officers.”
Last year’s budget was $854.8 million. So an increase to “only” $888.1 million means automatic cutbacks to staffing levels. That must make sense to someone, but it seems like only in the public sector can an increase in funding go hand-in-hand with a decrease in provided services.
March 2, 2010
Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?
Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:
I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.
Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:
It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.
To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.
When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.
Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.
Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.
To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.
Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:
Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.
What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”
It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.
It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.
It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.
SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing
Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:
. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.
Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.
Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.
It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.
Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.
Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.
The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.
February 24, 2010
Was there anyone in Dubai who wasn’t involved in the killing?
Dubai’s investigators announce another 15 suspects in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a military leader with Hamas:
Dubai has identified 15 new suspects in the assassination of a Hamas official at a Dubai luxury hotel, bringing the total number of people believed involved in the death to 26, the government said on Wednesday.
Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed last month in his hotel room in what Dubai police have said they are near certain was an Israeli hit. They said the killers travelled to the Gulf Arab emirate on European passports.
Of the new suspects, six carried British passports, three held Irish documents, three Australian, and three French, the Dubai government’s media office said in an emailed statement.
At this rate, they’ll be trying to arrest hundreds of people in connection to the assassination. Israel, of course, has not admitted any involvement (and you have to admit that previous Mossad activity didn’t appear to require a cast of this size).
January 19, 2010
A round-up of current “non-lethal” weaponry
Strategy Page looks at some new developments in the non-lethal weaponry category:
Israel has developed a new non-lethal weapon; the Thunder Cannon. Light enough to be mounted in a cart, it uses a new Pulse Detonation Technology that combines LPG (liquefied natural gas) with air to create a sonic boom in a cannon type barrel. Each burst moves forward at 2,000 meters per second and lasts 300 milliseconds. The cannon generates 60 to 100 bursts per second. One 27 pound (12kg) canister of LPG can create 5,000 bursts. A PDA size control unit does the mixing and detonation. The cannon is effective, at hitting people with these sonic bursts, at ranges of up to fifty meters (152 feet), and eventually double that. At ten meters or less, the burst can cause injury, or even be fatal. Anyone hit by the sonic bursts feels it, and hears it. It’s disorienting, and most people exposed to it flee the area. The technology was first developed to chase birds away from crops. It has been very effective at that. The military version can be mounted on vehicles, and fitted with a nozzle that can calibrate the shockwaves for special mission requirements. [. . .]
The problem is that, non-lethal weapons are not one hundred percent non-lethal, and not nearly as effective as proponents would like. But people love to call them non-lethal, because such devices are intended to deal with violent individuals by using less lethal force. A classic example of how this works is the Taser. A gun like device that fires two small barbs into an individual, and then zaps the victim with a non-lethal jolt of electricity, the Taser has been popular with police, who can more easily subdue violent, and often armed, individuals. Before Taser, the cops had a choice between dangerous (for everyone) hand-to-hand combat, or just using their firearms and killing the guy. While the Taser has been a major success for non-lethal weapons, for every thousand or so times you use it, the victim will die (either from a fall, another medical condition, use of drugs or whatever). This has been fodder for the media, and put Taser users, and non-lethal-weapons developers, on the defensive. Naturally, the manufacturers of these devices want zero deaths, and the users want a device that will bring down the target every time, at a price (for the device) they can afford to pay. There’s no way of satisfying all these demands, but it makes great press, insisting that someone should make it so.
Of course, the media also — rightly — points out cases where police officers use their Tasers like wands of domination . . . Tasering in situation where there’s no need for it or using the Taser like they’re playing paintball with the victim. There’s no need to blame the technology when it’s misused by “professionals”.
December 17, 2009
Judiciary to “fight back” against draconian Tory laws
It’s always nice when your secret opponents actually come out and say that they’re against you. Bob Tarantino shows how the Tories’ “draconian” penalties against criminals are opposed by the judiciary:
In the middle of an otherwise rote piece in a Toronto-area newspaper about how Stephen Harper is just too gosh-darn mean to criminals, there appeared this remarkable passage: “Judges are skilled at devising creative ways to fight back against laws they believe may skew the system. For example, Judge Cole said the elimination of two-for-one pre-trial credit has prompted judges to begin talking openly about forcing trials to be held more quickly. He said Canadian judges may also start compensating by intentionally lowering sentences: ‘That appears to have been the experience in other jurisdictions where Draconian sentencing policies have been forced upon the judiciary.’ ”
The passage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Neither Justice Cole nor the newspaper’s justice reporter, both of whom can be assumed to have at least a glancing familiarity with the role of judges in our constitutional democracy, saw anything striking in characterizing the proper task of the judiciary as “fighting back” against laws they don’t like.
Nor do they find anything striking about a judge viewing duly enacted legislation as something being “forced upon” the judiciary — as if it were the judges who were being sent to jail.
And judges won’t just be “fighting back” against Parliament — in order to make good on the threat of handing down “intentionally” lower sentences, they will need to ignore case-law precedent. Evidently, neither Parliament nor the previous decisions of judges themselves will be allowed to stand in the way of the determination of certain members of the judiciary to treat convicted criminals lightly.
It’s no surprise that certain members of the judiciary think of themselves as being better able to determine what “appropriate” punishment might be . . . after all, within the statute and case law, that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s the expansion of that notion that they know better and don’t feel they should be bound by the letter of the law. That’s several steps too far.
December 15, 2009
Nanny state now to come with pop-up warnings
Just in case you British internet users weren’t already aware, the government may start including pop-ups whenever you access an out-of-country social networking site. Nice of them to at least warn you that your internet usage will be monitored for quality and customer satisfaction (the customer in question is the government, BTW):
The ACPO document, obtained by The Register, suggests the government may “minimise or discourage or give ‘pop-up’ warnings as regards to communications services within the online environment where there is evidence, presented to a Circuit Judge or Secretary of State, that allowing the public access or use of specific communications services could make them vulnerable to fraud, the theft of personal information or other attack”.
ACPO does not explain the technical details of its plan, but points out that “measures already exist to minimise the availability of potentially illegal content”. However, it cites the Internet Watch Foundation’s blacklist of international URLs carrying indecent and abusive images of children, suggesting a parallel list of social networks, forums and real time messaging sites judged to be risky could be created.
The proposal was drawn up by ACPO’s Data Communications Group. The group is chaired by Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is responsible for policing paedophiles on the internet.
December 11, 2009
They don’t call it the original Nanny State for nothing
In case you think the constant stories from Britain of increasing state surveillance of the citizenry are just unrelated events, Shattered Paradigm has more unrelated events for you:
#1) The U.K. has more surveillance cameras per citizen than anywhere else in the world. In fact, according to one estimate, there are 4.8 million video cameras constantly watching every move citizens make.
#2) Government education inspectors in the U.K. have announced that the 40,000 parents who homeschool their own children must undergo criminal records checks.
#3) U.K. authorities are now admitting that every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens will be stored for one year and will be available for monitoring by government agencies.
#4) Officials in the U.K. have spent two years and massive amounts of money on a study they claim proves that 10-pin bowling is a health and safety hazard and should be banned.
#5) Parents at one school in the U.K. are being forced to undergo background checks to prove that they are not pedophiles before they are allowed to accompany their children to school Christmas carol events.
H/T to Radley Balko, who says that the title “‘Most oppressive Big Brother society on earth’ is a bit much.”
November 25, 2009
November 24, 2009
Friendly reminder to UK readers: you do not have a right to remain silent
A fascinating story about a case in Britain where the government’s shiny new powers under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) have been used to jail a schizophrenic man for refusing to divulge the passwords to access his files:
The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.
His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.
The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.
In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.
[. . .]
Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence — a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.
November 10, 2009
QotD: “It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent”
You know the scariest thing about this? It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response.
Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don’t understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let’s-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.
Ace, “FBI: Hassan’s Al Qaeda Emails Were Probably Just Some Research and Social Chatter and Stuff”, Ace of Spades, 2009-11-10
