Category: Public Order

Walz Dithered While Minneapolis Burned

VP Harris’s choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has prompted examinations of his role in the Minneapolis riot of May 2020. Heather MacDonald has this op-ed in the WSJ, with the above title.

The protests included widespread looting and arson. Rioters then attacked the firefighters as they responded to the fires, further aggravating the damage. The police and their station house were also attacked.

Despite repeated requests from the mayor, Gov. Walz sent only a small contingent of the National Guard on the evening of the second day of rioting–too little, too late. Not until the fourth day did the Guard arrive in force. Continue reading . . .

USCA9 Vacates SF Camping Injunction

In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against San Francisco, preventing the city from enforcing its ordinance against camping on public property based on its precedents in Martin v. City of Boise and Johnson v. City of Grants Pass. The decision was 2-1, with Judge Bumatay dissenting, noting that “there’s nothing in the text, history, and tradition of the [Cruel and Unusual Punishment] Clause that comes close to prohibiting enforcement of commonplace anti-vagrancy laws, like laws against sleeping on sidewalks and in parks.”

Last week the Supreme Court reversed in Grants Pass, taking the same view of the Eighth Amendment as Judge Bumatay. See this post.

Today, the Ninth withdrew its published opinion and replaced it with a brief “memorandum,” i.e., an unpublished opinion. Continue reading . . .

Prop. 47 Damage Control Initiative on Cal. Ballot as Prop. 36

The Homelessness, Drug Addiction & Theft Reduction Act, a California ballot initiative to limit the damage from 2014’s disastrous, Soros-funded, Proposition 47, among other things, will be on the November ballot as Proposition 36. The Cal. Secretary of State released the ballot measure number list yesterday.

The initiative’s provisions are summarized in Section 2: Continue reading . . .

Major Win on Homeless Encampments

Homelessness is a major problem, and it is a complex one. People become homeless for different reasons, and they have different obstacles to returning to the ability of obtaining their own shelter. Two of the most common are mental illness and addiction. These two problems are particularly difficult, as the conditions themselves may block the person’s willingness to accept and participate in the treatment needed to fix the problem. Sometimes an arrest is exactly what a person needs to provide the needed motivation. Fifty-six years ago, Justice Thurgood Marshall recognized similar considerations when he wrote the plurality opinion in Powell v. Texas. That opinion rejected the notion that the Eighth Amendment prohibited punishing an alcoholic for being drunk in public because the conduct was an involuntary result of his status. Such a constitutional mandate was too simplistic a way of dealing with a complex and difficult social problem.

Even so, the Ninth Circuit took the step that the Powell plurality rejected with regard to laws penalizing camping on public property as applied to the homeless. Today, the Supreme Court reversed that decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion of the Court. Three Justices dissented. CJLF filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the city.

A key legal issue in the case involved the status and reach of an even earlier case, Robinson v. California. In that case, the Court declared a California statute unconstitutional because it made criminal the status of being addicted to drugs as opposed to the act of possessing or using an illegal drug. Oddly, the Court invoked the Eighth Amendment for this proposition, an argument only briefly mentioned by Robinson, rather than the Due Process Clause, which was Robinson’s main argument. Continue reading . . .

The Indirect Consequences of Crime

Efforts to measure the costs of crime generally focus on direct effects. They try to place a monetary value on the loss to victims and tally the cost to governments of dealing with crime. Yet looking only to direct effects and ignoring indirect effects is a major source of error in public policy. The indirect effects of crime are large and important. Brian Patrick Eha has a two-part essay in the City Journal titled The Element of Crime, exploring these issues. Part one is here. His focus is on New York, the place he knows best, but the theme is universal.

To live in New York today is to experience, on a regular basis, visibly and abrasively, the element of crime. By this, I mean more than run-ins with the “criminal element,” that is, serious offenders, though such encounters are more frequent. I mean not only, for instance, the 25 times that someone was pushed onto subway tracks in 2022—four more times than in 2021—but also the countless small infractions, spit in the eye of the body politic, the casual disrespect for law and common decency: the picnic table covered in food waste and Kool-Aid pouches when a trash can is two feet away; the pharmacy with locked cabinets for such valuables as fruit juice and deodorant; the requirement, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Van Gogh exhibit, to empty your water bottle before entering the gallery, for fear that some vandal might smuggle in a substance with which to desecrate the art, as has happened at more than a dozen museums over the past year.  I mean, in short, all the demoralizing effects of which pervasive crime is the cause, the impact that lawlessness and an inescapable awareness of it—to say nothing of official resignation or indifference—has on society and the psyche. Continue reading . . .

More Delay on Grants Pass

See earlier posts here, here and here. This case involves a challenge to a Ninth Circuit decision that severely inhibits cities’ ability to do anything about people camping on its streets and in its parks. The petition to review the case is supported by two dozen amici curiae from across the political spectrum.

Today the Court granted the plaintiffs an extension to December 6 to file their opposition, despite their initial waiver of the right to file at all. That means that the conference of January 5, 2024, is the first realistic date for the Court to consider whether to take up the case.

Cases granted in January can still be heard and decided in the same term, but a few “relistings” of the case may put it off to next term. Continue reading . . .

Major Effort to Overturn 9th Circuit Ruling Allowing Homeless Camps

The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has joined the city of Grants Pass, Oregon to seek a Supreme Court review of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ extension of its 2019 ruling in Martin v. City of Boise. That decision announced, in effect, that the homeless had an Eighth Amendment right to camp on public property in any city where the number of homeless exceeded the number of beds in shelters. The ruling covers the nine western states in the Ninth Circuit which includes Alaska, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, California, Arizona and Hawaii. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined a petition by the City of Boise, supported by a brief by CJLF, to review and overturn that ruling.

Continue reading . . .