Monthly Archive: August 2020

Still Want to Defund the Police?

by · Aug 10, 2020 12:19 pm

Left wing leadership in Chicago and Portland got more of what they’ve spent years asking for when violent mobs of hoodlums noticed this weekend that they have the green light for party time.  That is, they took advantage of the Conventional Progressive Wisdom that the police are the ones who need to be contained (by being stripped of funding, weapons, and legal protection, among all the other things we’ve heard so much about lately), while they  —  the thugs  —  are to be regarded as the newly entitled victims of Amerika’s callousness and cruelty.

As you might imagine, what happened then wasn’t pretty.

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Blacks Overwhelmingly Want the Police Presence They Have Now — or More.

by · Aug 5, 2020 3:35 pm

One of the narratives we hear constantly from the Left is that African Americans distrust the police and want their malign presence in black neighborhoods decreased if not eliminated.  Like so much else we hear from progressives  —  the people who ceaselessly wail that we need to pay more attention to “fact-based” this and “evidence-based” that  —  their claims are not merely fact-free but affirmatively false.  According to a Gallup poll released today, more blacks than whites want increased police patrolling in their neighborhoods.

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CA Law Enforcement Braces for Inmate Releases

by · Aug 5, 2020 2:29 pm

Last month California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he was authorizing the early release of another 8,000 prison inmates due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Quinn Wilson of the Bakersfield Californian reports that Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood is concerned about the type of offenders being released.  “You must be an overachiever at committing crimes to be in (a CDCR facility).  These are reoffenders and they’re going to go out and reoffend,” said the Sheriff.

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Go To Prison and Live Longer

by · Aug 4, 2020 1:56 pm

The conventional wisdom is that a stint in prison is, between one thing and another, going to reduce your lifespan.  But scholarly inquiry shows this is not true.  The opposite is true.  See this entry on Sentencing Law and Policy, the body of which I repeat verbatim below.  The research is from Ohio, but I know of no reason to think Ohio is not fairly representative of the nation.

This paper analyzes the effect of incarceration on mortality using administrative data from Ohio between 1992 and 2017. Using event study and difference-in-differences approaches, we compare mortality risk across incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals before and after pre-scheduled releases from prison. Mortality risk halves during the period of incarceration, with large declines in murders, overdoses, and medical causes of death. However, there is no detectable effect on post-release mortality risk, meaning that incarceration increases overall longevity. We estimate that incarceration averts nearly two thousand deaths annually in the US, comparable to the 2014 Medicaid expansion.

H/t to the estimable Doug Berman.

 

BLM Mob Converges on Home of Seattle Police Chief

by · Aug 3, 2020 4:10 pm

The Chief of Police in Seattle, a lady named Carmen Best, is a longtime member of the force.  I know very little about her.  I do know that she broadly shares the liberal perspectives of the leadership of that city, as one would expect of a chief of police.

Still, she has shown a spine, and an understanding that vandalism, rioting and arson are not acceptable.  This has not made everyone happy.  So they did what any “peaceful protesters” would do.  They showed up in force at her house.

Cross the mob and expect a visit.  If there’s a difference between this and how La Cosa Nostra operates, it’s too subtle for me.

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Defense Bar Discovers that Judicial Discretion Has Downsides

by · Aug 3, 2020 1:45 pm

I spent a good chunk of my career at the Justice Department and my life afterwards speaking up for a sentencing system that more nearly resembles law than the “anything-goes” regimen that existed when I started my career.  At that time, with limited exceptions, judges were free to sentence as they chose within any point in a very broad statutory range, pretty much with no questions asked.  This led to scandalously wide and irrational disparity.  In the Eighties, Congress noticed, and responded with one of its signal achievements, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.  The SRA established the Sentencing Commission and a system of mandatory sentencing guidelines, with departures allowed in exceptional cases, for good reason explained by the court on the record.

One of the main criticisms I encountered was that the SRA system was too rigid and took the human element out of sentencing.  We should “let judges be judges,” or so I was told.  I now see, however, that the adversaries of law-driven sentencing have had at least a modest change of heart.

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Murder Explodes in Cities Big and Small as Police Come Under Attack

by · Aug 3, 2020 9:18 am

The WSJ documents the surge in murder across the country.  The question is:  Why is this happening?  Let me ask that question another way:  When the police are hobbled by relentless and viciously slanted attacks on their basic decency, by movements to defund and disband them, and by other movements to have them do bake sales instead of street patrols, what did you think was going to happen?

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