Policing for Me but Not for Thee

by · Jun 9, 2020 2:16 pm

Remembering my father’s admonition to me to “thank God for your enemies,” I bring you this beauty from liberal and forward-looking Los Angeles, where our opponents campaigning to “defund the police” are in full voice:

LOS ANGELES – While LA City Council President Nury Martinez was filing a motion last week seeking to cut $150 million from the LAPD budget, she had an LAPD unit standing watch outside her home providing her family with a private security detail since April. Continue reading . . .

What Disbanding The Police Looks Like

by · Jun 9, 2020 10:58 am

As Chicago was besieged with another weekend of protests against police with the accompanying fires and looting, 110 people were shot, 25 fatally.  Tom Schuba, Sam Charles and Matthew Hendrickson of the Chicago Sun Times report that most of the shooting victims last weekend were black as are most of the suspects.  Reverend Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence in Chicago told reporters, “I heard people saying all over, `Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.'”  The city reported 65,000 calls to 911 over the weekend, as law-abiding store owners and residents sought police responses to an “unprecedented level of activity,” according to a PD spokesman.  The protests in Chicago over the death of George Floyd included attacks on officers and demands that police departments be shut down or defunded,  and provided a “teachable moment” on how cities will look if those demands are met.

Continue reading . . .

Why Is Baltimore Overrun with Crime?

by · Jun 8, 2020 5:09 pm

The answer to that question is multifaceted, but I thought the essence of the problem was beautifully captured in this headline:

Ex-Baltimore mayor, once convicted of embezzlement, now favorite to fill seat of mayor convicted of fraud

The story, for those with the stomach for it, is here.

The Dastardly Origins of Qualified Immunity

by · Jun 8, 2020 2:20 pm

Hard core libertarian groups are on a tear these days about the possibility that the Supreme Court might abolish or at least limit the doctrine of qualified immunity, which they view as a grossly unacceptable impediment to holding vicious police officers accountable for their behavior.  But the doctrine has its beginnings in a source not known for bending over backwards with sympathy for the police. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Affirms That “Jailhouse Lawyer” Law Means Just What It Says

by · Jun 8, 2020 8:13 am

Today in Lomax v. Ortiz-Marquez, No. 18-8369, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided that a statute means exactly what it clearly says. One might well wonder why it is necessary to have the Supreme Court weigh in on such an obvious question, but two courts of appeals had decided it the other way. Justice Kagan’s opinion for the Court states the issue:

To help staunch a “flood of nonmeritorious” prisoner litigation, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) established what has become known as the three-strikes rule…. That rule generally prevents a prisoner from bringing suit in forma pauperis (IFP)—that is, without first paying the filing fee—if he has had three or more prior suits “dismissed on the grounds that [they were] frivolous, malicious, or fail[ed] to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.” … Today we address whether a suit dismissed for failure to state a claim counts as a strike when the dismissal was without prejudice.

Continue reading . . .

Life Without the Police

by · Jun 7, 2020 10:03 pm

The Minneapolis City Council has announced plans to disband the city police department.  What will life be like without the cops?  We have some evidence about that from the 1969 Montreal police strike.  Harvard Professor Steven Pinker recalls:

“As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).”

Our Underincarceration Problem, Part Eight Zillion

by · Jun 7, 2020 1:37 pm

My friend Paul Mirengoff writes today about two criminals we caught and convicted, then fecklessly released, only very predictably to see them commit more crime, in one case a murder.  This sort of thing should be a scandal.  Instead, it barely sees the light of day in the mainstream media, because the MSM is dedicated to its ideology that criminals are victims and the rest of us are Puritanical,  bourgeois dolts (at best).  We are lectured ceaselessly about the costs of incarceration, but our opponents are just too dishonest and too dug in to tell us about the costs of decarceration.

Paul writes: Continue reading . . .

Giving Irony a Bad Name

by · Jun 6, 2020 4:18 pm

We have been relentlessly lectured of late that, even if “peaceful protesters” sometimes become rioters and hooligans, we need to remember that their initial motivation was to demand respect and justice for black people.  Too often, it’s said, those demanding “law and order” just ignore the sacrifices black people have made to achieve even the measure of equality America gives them.

Yes, well, that’s the lecture.  Continue reading . . .

L.A. Mayor Wants Less Police

by · Jun 5, 2020 10:02 am

After more than a week of rioting, looting, vandalism and violence, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced yesterday that he intends to defund the city’s police department.  Apparently taking a cue from “Black Lives Matter” leaders who have said publicly that police should be abolished, Eric Garcetti suggested cutting LAPD funding by $100 to $150 million in order to “end racism in our city.”   Hans Bader in Liberty Unyielding notes that Hillary Clinton’s former national press secretary, Brian Fallon has also called for cutting police budgets across the country.   Bader then explains why such calls make zero sense.  “Cutting police funding will leave the police without the manpower needed to investigate and arrest many criminals. When that happens, it is disproportionately minorities themselves who will suffer.”