Category: Politics

Technological Sunlight

Another benefit of the proliferation of technology. We’ve had cell phone video capturing an array of violence for years (I recall rulings from the 90’s about your right to record police activity, although the smartphone-everywhere phenomenon is more recent), but “what’s different this time” may be the availability of publishing platforms — document repositories, web platforms, mass communication. Not just phone video capturing an array of violence, a public spreadsheet aggregating information for all to view. Visualizations based on the data. Sunlight, as it were. And, possibly, national news organizations tired enough of being branded an ‘enemy of the state’ that they’re airing these egregious acts. This will force Americans, hopefully a large majority, to experience how others experience police interactions.

While I academically knew people got brutalized for nothing or for crimes where violence lacks proportional response (tase an armed guy who just shot three people at the park, reasonable. tase a guy who jaywalked, WTF?!). But it was academic knowledge. The most startling thing about the videos I’ve seen since Memorial day is how common it is to have a grown man kneeling on the neck of a suspect. The number of people choking out that they cannot breathe. The absolute lack of provocation that leads to violent police response. The fact these videos are broadcast on the national news.

Otherwise how does a significant portion of upper/middle class White Americans experience police interactions otherwise? There’s the traffic violation no one enjoys (fine, increased insurance rates) but more of a ‘hate the messenger’ scenario than a legitimately unpleasant *police* experience. There’s TV where shows generally cast police in a very positive light. Even when you watch a show where police run someone down, you’re not seeing someone innocently taking their kid to the park get run down and tased because someone in a blue shirt kited a check at the bodega last week. You get the cop’s point of view about why the person is obviously guilty (side note — Cops got cancelled). Other than that? Not much experience. I live in a small town, and the cops will cruise by the park when I have my daughter there. Just making sure I’m safe. If they do more than wave, it’s “stop by and chat” or “hey, want to check out the lights and siren”. The Chief eats lunch with the kids, and we see officers at community events.

Among friends, my experience with police is on the bad side of the spectrum. And it’s never been *bad*. I used to get lightly harassed by the police. I drove a small, flashy, convertible sports car. And had a friend who lived in “the bad part of town”. My friend was in her 90’s. Her family had the land grant signed by Andrew Jackson on three 100-acre parcels. Her family had lived on the property for almost 200 years, and she wasn’t moving just because “the bad part of town” happened to have moved in. I’d get stopped driving down to visit her — certainly, I was there to buy recreational drugs. It surprised me that police seemed to expect people to waive their rights — I know the plain view doctrine, but you want to check in the boot of my car? Get a warrant! The occasional officer would take me up on the offer, and we’d all wait around. A K9 unit would stop by, and we’d chat while the dog smelled absolutely nothing interesting around my car. Eventually they’d get a warrant because, evidently, young white chick with a bit of money driving around the SW side of town is cause (a line of through I never bothered to pursue because there was no fruit on that tree, poisoned or not). And then they’d find the “car box” (air pump, paper towels, handful of crescent wrenches, a driver and socket set, and a few screw drivers), spare tire, shop manual, and heap-o air that I kept in the boot. Total waste of time, but I wasn’t in danger.

Ignoring Distal Factors

I’m glad to see that all of the officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death last week have been charged, but there are proximal and distal factors prompting the protests. While this might address the proximal factor, what does it do for the distal ones? How many instances of police brutality have still been ignored? How much police brutality have we seen during the protests? There was a clip on the ABC news a few nights ago where two cops were arresting someone. The one cop threw his leg over the individual and dropped a knee on his neck. Now the other cop quickly shoved the first cop’s leg away, but how in the world could a cop think “hey, knee on the neck is a good idea”?

In the mid-90’s, I worked on a project to bring local law enforcement data together and use rudimentary AI to identify offenders who spanned jurisdictions. Why wouldn’t we demand a similar database for police offenses? Identify behavioral patterns that might be addressed through training, identify practices that frequently endanger civilian lives, avoid a violent officer moving around to maintain employment, and incorporate individual’s information in performance reviews.

I’ve been wondering about changes to the internal affairs processes — intentionally including people from civil rights organizations and community groups in a review board. Police tase some guy that was running at them brandishing a knife? IA clears it as justified. Tase some dude who wanted to hand off his baby before getting on his knees with his hands behind her head? There are disciplinary actions and possible criminal charges.
Also having IA boards from larger areas provide review for jurisdictions that are so small that “immediate supervisor” serves as a review board. I live in a small town with a handful of officers. They have an agreement with a neighboring town to roll their phone number to that station after-hours. Why couldn’t the larger town provide review services too? I mean, I get not wanting someone else second-guessing your actions, but my tax money is paying to keep the community safe. And if taxpayers consider having some non-partisan external entity review use of force to be an essential part of “keep the community safe” … it is.
I also get that a non-trivial portion of the country doesn’t see top-level legislation as the answer to, well, anything beyond military spending. But I don’t see any way to enact this kind of reform from the bottom up. I could probably talk my community into an external review board instead of using the Chief of Police, but use of force is quite rare here (thus my change is basically feel-good theater). Could the Cleveland City Council force such a change? It seems like a state law or some federal requirement where funding is withheld for non-compliance (think the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act — we cannot tell you to make your drinking age 21, but we can withhold federal highway funding if it’s not 21) would be needed to effect change.
ETA — I love Bernie Sanders:

Monolithic Extremism

From The Nation:

‘The report did warn that individuals from a far-right social media group had “called for far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents, use automatic weapons against protesters.” (The Nation is withholding the name of the group in order to not disrupt any potential law enforcement investigations.) ‘
 
The report basically says they’ve not found any evidence that Antifa is involved in the rioting. I guess we have the monolithic communism theory applied to extremist organizations. Monolithic extremism? Other non-entities are equally not involved — alt-right is a loosely defined association of a bunch of different groups to … it itself probably doesn’t have coordinated involvement in anything.
While they cannot link Antifa to the riots, the FBI did find a far-right group promoting violence. That is a logical extension of ‘Bernie Bros” — it’s not like a protest verifies the identity and online history of every participant to ensure they’re legitimately concerned about racial equality and/or police practices. But someone within a couple blocks of your protest loots Macy’s & you’ve become Antifa rioters to the MAGA crowd.

Non-shared Experience

Arnold Schwarzenegger published an article in The Atlantic today that includes the following passage that vividly demonstrates the different experience people have in America:

    “My friend Erroll Southers, who has spent his career in law enforcement and served in my administration’s homeland-security department, wrote today: “I still get nervous when I receive the unexpected phone call at an odd hour, hoping my son, brother or relative has not become the next hashtag.”
    Think about that. Erroll Southers is a professor at USC, a former FBI agent, an upstanding man in every sense of the word, and because of the color of his skin, when his phone rings in the middle of the night, his first thought is that his son or brother might be the reason for the next march.
    I can’t even fathom that experience. If my kids FaceTime me late at night, it brings me joy, or maybe if they’ve been at a party, a laugh. It is completely unjust that for much of our population, those family calls bring anxiety.”

Even if a late night call brings anxiety, it’s not the same thing. My family had a “don’t call after 9PM unless it is an emergency” policy, but my thoughts when the phone rings at 10PM run toward natural causes, accidents … years ago, there was the possibly of a friend picked up on drunk and disorderly needing bail.

One giant leap for profiteering

I cannot help but see NASA’s use of private companies for space travel as a giant leap for profiteering. I’ve never thought government should be run like a business — businesses are, quite often, run quite terribly and the entire point is to make money. Government should be run like a non-profit. Farming out government functionality to non-profits makes a modicum of sense, but for-profit prisons?! For-profit health insurance!? For-profit military equipment/manpower?! Any of these seem to ensure some powerful lobby wants to expand demand — more people in prison, more sick people (don’t cure something, develop a drug that costs a couple hundred bucks a month), and INVADE!!! Reusable first stage rockets are a great advance in space travel — but there’s no reason NASA couldn’t have designed one. The only “progress” we made today is that some private company can profit from my tax dollars going toward space travel and research.

Private Prisons

I wonder how much privatization of prisons has contributed to police violence. The American health care system optimizes profit by creating take-two-a-day-forever pills to manage symptoms rather than curing people. Many years ago, Scott’s annual check-up revealed high cholesterol. Lipitor, the doctor said, would fix that right up. And it’s cheap — especially if insurance covers it — so why not try it? The doctor went on to tell him that lifestyle changes might produce a slight reduction, but the drug would work miracles. Give it a month or two, you’ll see. Instead of taking the medication, we spent some time researching which lifestyle components would most significantly increase his cholesterol. Identified one and changed it. I’m certain the drug would have worked faster, but his cholesterol level at the next annual checkup was in the healthy range. No medication required.

Creating a profit motive for increasing prison populations could encourage a criminal justice response — respond to mental health issues with incarceration, respond to poverty with incarceration. In fairness, though, there’s a long history of incarceration-instead-of-social-changes — Jean Valjean. It’s an easy solution — just like popping Lipitor would have been an easy solution. And people (individuals, businesses, governments) like easy solutions. But there seems to be a logical correlation between for-profit prison systems, campaign finance, and high levels of incarceration. Just like we’re seeing stories about drug companies encouraging doctors to write prescriptions for their medication. Not just their as opposed to another brand (especially since there are a decent number of drugs without competitors), but writing prescriptions for *medication* at the slightest provocation.

That didn’t take long

Today, Trump managed to run up against the ramifications of his EO that I predicted yesterday. He quoted some police chief who was on the wrong side of the race riots back in the late 60’s. While his message was first just locked so others couldn’t interact with it (censorship, but not censoring him), my understanding is that the thing is now hidden. Which is censorship. Censorship that is more or less required if the Section 230 exception doesn’t apply to Twitter.

Twitter isn’t responsible for the content users post on their site. The social media business model becomes untenable if they’ve got to employ people and technology to police content sufficiently to minimize legal risk. If they are responsible for content posted on their site, then, yeah, they need to hide/delete posts inciting violence, libelous information, and a whole lot of other data they’ve been allowing to fly. Content that makes up a good bit of Trump’s Twitter usage.

On Censorship

Trump finally issued his Executive Order retaliation against Twitter “censoring” his free speech online. Now I know people who use “talk to the lawyer” as a threat — a lot of people don’t have a decent understanding of the law, and many more people don’t have the time and/or money to deal with litigation. The times I’ve been threatened with “the lawyer”, the person had no legal case against me. I was, I expect, not meant to realize they had no case and cave immediately because lawyer = scary? Trump’s EO seems like the same kind of “empty threat”. Why? The implication of the order harms Trump. He’s a huge abuser of Twitter’s ability to ignore content based on Section 230. A great deal of his campaign strategy hinges on continuing to use Twitter as a platform to spread misinformation and hatred.

I’m not sure he can start regulating Twitter – he can try, and it will move through the courts. A publisher has control over their content — when the Hinckley Record includes letters to the editor on its website or print magazine, someone read through them and decided to include the letter in the publication. All of the comments on my blog are held in a moderation queue. This is sustainable because I get a few hundred visitors a day and a few comments per month. Is it feasible for the Hinckley Record to moderate all comments before they are posted? For a small paper, maybe. Is it feasible for Slate to moderate each comment before it is visible on the site? Is it feasible for Facebook to have someone read every single post before it goes live?! Even if courts decide he can remove Section 230 protections for social media companies … can he regulate the social media platforms that he dislikes while not regulating those who give him more leeway? Twitter loses the protection because they inform us that mail-voting isn’t rife with fraud, but Facebook removes all sorts of content too.

The legal basis for suspending Section 230 protection aside … Twitter hasn’t censored him. Slapping a label on free speech indicating said speech is factually inaccurate isn’t censoring. It could be considered editorializing. Or it could be considered fair warning. And I’m certain there’s a party-line divide on opinions there.