Tuesday, April 11th, 2006,
by Fred (,
police, St. Louis
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Activists Press for Police Review Board
From 1998 to 2003, the Internal Affairs Division examined 409 complaints that officers had verbally or physically abused someone. Of those, it “sustained” just one, meaning one was sent to the Police Board for discipline.The rest? Some were withdrawn, some proved false. Investigators exonerated a handful of officers, finding that their actions were reasonable given the circumstances.
But in about 80 percent of abuse complaints, Internal Affairs investigators found insufficient evidence to prove it true or false. The department has not released more recent statistics.
The activists claim that this proves the need for an independent civilian police review board, given that Internal Affairs virtually never sustains an allegation of abuse. But neither does IA side with the officer. In most cases, it does not have enough evidence to reach a determination. This is hardly surprising, as there are unlikely to be witnesses to such altercations, and in a he said/he said argument, finding insufficient evidence to decide is the most just result. If IA was really interested in sweeping abuse under the rug, they would find for the officers more often.
And in allegations other than abuse, where eyewitnesses other than the complainant are more likely, IA does in fact find against the officers. The Post article notes that Internal Affairs sustained 42% of allegations of “conduct unbecoming/uncivil treatment” and 79% of of allegations of “improper handling of assignment.”
So is a civilian review board necessary? The St. Louis police are already subject to civilian review. The department is not run directly by the city but instead is operated by a five-member St. Louis City Board of Police Commissioners, composed of the mayor and four appointees of the governor. Mayor Slay’s compromise proposal would establish a civilian panel reporting to the Police Board.
Slay’s proposal would establish a panel of seven members nominated by the Board of Aldermen, selected by him and confirmed by the Police Board. Its members would receive police misconduct complaints from the public that are now made to Internal Affairs. It would be able to investigate after Internal Affairs investigators finish their own inquiries and forward findings to the chief of police.
The police would thus be subject to two levels of civilian review, albeit by boards composed of political appointees. If the city police are to continue to be operated by the Police Board rather than the city, this seems a reasonable approach. It is not the civilian review panel activists want, but if the Slay proposal doesn’t produce results, the city can revisit the issue.
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Thursday, April 6th, 2006,
by Fred (,
Cynthia McKinney, police, politics
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What does it take to get Cynthia McKinney to apologize? A Grand Jury.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., expressed “sincere regret” Thursday for her altercation with a Capitol police officer, and offered an apology to the House.”There should not have been any physical contact in this incident,” McKinney said in brief remarks on the House floor. “I am sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all and I regret its escalation and I apologize.”
Oh, so now it’s a “misunderstanding”? I thought she was the victim of pervasive Capitol Police profiling. The AP piece points out that the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been noticably silent on McKinney, sometimes takes the other side:
Rep. Mel Watt, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, has had no statement on the incident. The caucus’ silence stands in stark contrast to its investigations of past scuffles between the U.S. Capitol Police and members.
One such probe occurred in 1990, when the caucus investigated whether Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla. poked a black female Capitol Police officer and shouted curses at her, after she had denied entrance to an Edwards staffer who did not have House identification card with her.
McKinney could have avoided the whole incident by either wearing the pin designed to identify her as a member of Congress or by obeying any of the officer’s three requests that she stop. But she couldn’t do that and pass up a chance to accuse The Man of racism.
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Thursday, April 6th, 2006,
by Fred (,
nanny state, police, security, terrorism
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I’m not sure which is scarier, this Daily Mail story about a man arrested for playing the wrong music:
Harraj Mann, 24, played the punk anthem London Calling and classic rock track Immigrant Song in a taxi before a flight to London.The lyrics to both tracks made the driver fear his passenger was a terrorist.
The words of the Clash track begin: “London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down.” And Led Zep’s Immigrant Song goes: “The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!”Mr Mann, of Hartlepool, Teesside, had boarded the plane at Durham Tees Valley Airport when the flight to Heathrow was stopped and he was arrested by police.
He said he was told he was being questioned under the Terrorism Act and his choice of music had aroused suspicions.
Or the people defending the actions of the police. From the Daily Mail reader comments:
Fair enough! Only those who don’t know the lyrics can think otherwise!
- Lana Edwards, Zurich, Switzerland
The taxi driver was suspicious and tried to do the right thing, in notifying authorities. Lives have been lost with all these bombings.
- Marijane, Lady Lake, FL
Or these comments at the Wizbang post about this story:
I guess I am conservative enough that I would rather be safe than sorry. Maybe this incident is just the tip of the iceberg, maybe it is the isolated case that stands out. I know that our planes flying into buildings is a sign of a broken system. A guy spending several hours under questioning may make sense or not, I would need more facts to be sure.
But as I said before, if both the taxi driver and the police twitched on this guy and didn’t follow through before he did a terrorist act, that would be the real tragedy.
First, I give the taxi driver his due for being able to understand the lyrics. That is pretty impressive in itself.
Second, I do not think he is a jerk at all, much less deserving of eternal damnation for being suspicious of someone I presume is Arabic, listening to disturbing lyrics about waging war. Was he also in Muslim garb? The article doesn’t say. In today’s context the driver did exactly the right thing. Virtually no one except a Muslim terrorist is likely to take those lyrics literally, but they are alarming in light of recent events. For all the cab driver knew, the guy may have been on his way to wage Jihad. Better safe than sorry. Apparently the authorities agreed.
The man was questioned for three hours and probably had a background search. Boo hoo. Cry me a river.
Give me a break. Detaining someone for several hours because they listen to a 36 year old rock song? Defending the police that do such a thing because “better safe than sorry”? It’s wild goose chases like these that keep the authorities from catching actual Bad Guys. But at least that taxi driver can feel better because he made the police arrest a dirty muslim Led Zeppelin fan.
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Monday, April 3rd, 2006,
by Fred (,
crime, drugs, methamphetamine, police
,
Score another one for the War on Cold Medicine, this time in Arizona
Under the new laws, all those medications must be kept behind the counter, available for purchase only after customers sign a special logbook. Every month, the logbook would be faxed to police.And, as Phoenix Police Sgt. Don Sherrard explains it, even though the pages now make a stack eight feet high, they didn’t just end up in the trash . . . or even in a file cabinet somewhere. The cops actually read them.
And that led them to Anthem.
As the officers pored over the logbook, Sherrard says, they kept noticing the same name, over and over, and the same Anthem address.
So they went out to investigate.
Now, it might be funny if Anthem, a cookie-cutter enclave northwest of the city, harbored a coven of tweakers, systematically “cooking” cold medicine into an illegal drug. It’s not hard to imagine cops busting the place, sending dozens of skinny soccer moms to jail.
But that isn’t what happened when the police officers made their trek up I-17.
Instead, they found a big family that had been racked by the flu.
The members of this family weren’t stocking up on pseudoephedrine. They were buying cold medicine.
“The way the log reads, the amount purchased can be deceiving,” Sherrard says. “All we see is that the mother’s name appeared four or five times — what it doesn’t tell you is that she’s buying Children’s Tylenol.”
(And if mom had wanted to make meth, five boxes of Children’s Tylenol was hardly going to do the trick.)
Needless to say, Sherrard says dryly, “we closed that case.”
Sherrard says he thinks the city restrictions were worth doing: “If we can stop just one meth lab, it’s worth it.”
This is just stupid. Does anyone really believe that the meth market is controlled by a bunch of people who buy cold medicine over the counter in pharmacies? No, of course not. Because most meth is made by drug cartels that get their precursor chemicals in bulk, such as the 100 million extra tons of pseudoephedrine that enter Mexico each year. Even the DEA recognizes this, notes Jacob Sullum:
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some 80 percent of the illicit meth consumed in the United States comes from large-scale Mexican traffickers, who buy their pseudoephedrine in bulk rather than a couple of boxes at a time from CVS. Restricting retail access to pseudoephedrine may shift production from small local labs and toward the big-time meth makers who already account for most of the supply, but it’s unlikely to affect consumption noticeably.
Nor do you need pseudoephedrine to make methamphetamine. Other methods use precursors such as ephedrine, methylamine, phenylalanine and phenyl-2-propanone (which can be synthesized various ways). So even if the government somehow managed to cut off all access to pseudoephedrine — which making you line up at the pharmacy for cold medicine assuredly will not — the black market would adjust.
That family in Anthem, AZ? The Childrern’s Tylenol cold formulas contain 15 mg of pseudoephedrine per 5 ml dose. That wouldn’t have made much meth in a home lab. So you have a pointless law that will have almost no impact on the meth trade. The Arizona cops that raided a sick family looking for tweakers admit that the pharmacy logs haven’t produced a single legitimate lead. The only effect it does have is to make sick people suffer more and to force manufacturers to substitute inferior replacements for pseudoephedrine - tried the new NyQuil lately?
Worth it if they stop one meth lab? No it isn’t. You could stop all traffic fatalities by banning cars, too, but that wouldn’t be worth it either. It makes as much sense as Missouri requiring home sellers to disclose whether meth was ever produced on the premises:
In the event that any parcel of real property to be sold, exchanged or transferred is or was used as a site for methamphetamine production, the seller or transferor shall disclose in writing to the buyer or transferee the fact that methamphetamine was produced on the premises, provided that the seller or transferor had knowledge of such prior methamphetamine production. The seller or transferor shall disclose any prior knowledge of methamphetamine production, regardless of whether the persons involved in the production were convicted for such production.
[via SayUncle]
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Thursday, February 16th, 2006,
by Fred (,
NAACP, Nathaniel Cole, police, pursuit, St. Louis
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Want to know about how long you’ll wait at the airport to clear security? Check the TSA’s Wait Times page. Here’s the page for Lambert International on Monday mornings.
[Via the Post-Dispatch Aero and Defense Beat]
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Thursday, February 16th, 2006,
by Fred (,
Edmon Burns, NAACP, Nathaniel Cole, police, pursuit, St. Louis
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Tuesday’s Talk of the Day question in the Post-Dispatch asked what’s your favorite “school reformâ€?
Most of the responses centered on school uniforms and discipline. Which, as it turns out, is where the Superintendent is headed:
The reforms scheduled for the 2006-07 academic year include mandatory school uniforms for students system-wide, ninth-grade academies for students attending the city’s three largest high schools, year-round school for ninth-graders, gender-specific academies and the introduction of more “small school” learning academies throughout the district.
Pundits describe the reforms as “ambitious.” And it will be, if ambitious means “expensive.” $57 million in the first year, which probably doesn’t capture all the costs of the new gender-specific academies and ninth-grade academies at the three largest high schools. Why limit year-round school to the summer after eighth grade? Is there reason to believe that the extra three months will turn underachieving students around? How will the school environment change? How will teachers produce results that they are not producing now?
And by ninth grade, some of the damage has already been done. According to the city’s 2004-05 School Accountability Report Card, 36% of third-graders scored Advanced or Proficient on the math portion of the MAP exam. The seventh graders were at 8.1%. These students clearly need academic intervention and higher expectations before a summer of extra school after eighth grade.
And are smaller academies the answer? St. Louis city has a student to classroom teacher ratio of 19:1, which is average for Missouri districts. Suburban Rockwood has a ratio of 18:1.
These reforms seem destined to fail like previous efforts. Year-round schooling will be controversial, and the district already has a shortfall, without adding an additional $57 million. What about expecting students and teachers to succeed, and holding back or removing those that don’t? Superintendent Williams hints at this:
Students who fail to attain the credits necessary to finish ninth grade will continue in school for a second consecutive summer. “From now on, if you go into the 10th grade of the St. Louis Public Schools you will be a true 10th-grader,” Williams said.
Shouldn’t that be the expectation for all students in all grades? And maybe, just maybe, we’re asking the wrong questions, as “elliott” points out in his comment:
What is the purpose of a public school system?
Who should it serve?
What should it look like?
How big should the system, and the schools, be?
Should there even be a public school system?
If not, what would replace it?
I don’t feel that these questions are being looked at systematically and publicly, and therefore, I think the reform efforts that have gone forward are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Reminiscent of Reason’s discussion of school reform from December 2005.
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