Abolish Jaywalking Laws

Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian:

Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, made headlines this week when they violently detained two teenage African American boys, and arrested one, for walking down a quiet street that didn’t have a sidewalk. When one of the teenagers asked what they had done wrong, he was told: “You were jaywalking; you broke the law.”

But why is jaywalking even against the law? There is no such offence in much of Europe, including in the UK – although Ken Livingstone apparently proposed making jaywalking illegal while he was mayor of London. In the US, however, you can get a hefty fine and even go to jail for it.  . . .

Jaywalking laws are not evenly applied: enforcement disproportionally targets people of colour. In 2019, for example, 90% of illegal-walking tickets issued by New York police were to black and Hispanic people. 

I've always hated jaywalking laws, and at this point anything we can do to reduce friction between the police and minority Americans seems like a good idea to me. I mean, I don't think the British have any more trouble with people blocking traffic while they amble across the street than we do.

Police vs. Prisons

Alex Tabarrok has been arguing for decades now that the US spends far too much on prisons and not enough on police. Many Americans have the sense that our police forces are bloated and over-militarized, but we spend less per capita on the police than most wealthy nations. Compared to the average wealthy country, we have three times as many people in prison, but 35% fewer police officers (per capita).

There is some data that suggests this is absolutely the wrong approach, and that moving our spending from keeping people in prison to putting more officers on the street would make us safer. We don't do this because, I think, we are savagely vindictive in our urge to punish, and because we have an essentialist view of evil: we think that bad people are just bad and once they have gone definitively bad (if not from birth) there is nothing to be done for them but to make sure they don't trouble us any more.

I am sure Tabarrok posted about this now because of the talk about "defunding the police" and so on, but it is good to remember that our police violence problem does not stem from our having too many officers.

Closing the Olaf Palme Case

In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was assassinated, shot in the back as he walked down a quiet street in Stockholm. The inability of the police to find the killer spawned myriad conspiracy theories, many of them connected to the Cold War. Palme was a socialist who regularly criticized US foreign policy, so some people thought the CIA got him. But he also criticized the Soviets, so others thought the KGB did it because Palme showed that a much more humane socialism was possible. Palme especially liked to criticize South Africa, so some people thought that either the South African government  killed him, or the gold barons, or just some cranky Boers. Palme also had many domestic enemies.

The police have just announced that they think they know who did it: a Swede named Stig Engstrom, who killed himself in 2000. Engstrom was an unhappy loner and a bit of a right-wing nut, and he had previously been figured as the likely killer by an investigative reporter a few years ago. The police say they did not rely on the reporter's work, so this looks like independent investigations arriving at the same end point.

It's a disappointment to conspiracy buffs, but the police did allow that they can't rule out a conspiracy behind Engstrom; after all if there were other conspirators they had years to cover their tracks. But the police say they did not find any evidence that Engstrom had accomplices.

I still find it weird that in 1986 the Prime Minister of Sweden had no security. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get back to that sort of world?

Patrick Skinner on the Police and the Protests

I wrote two years ago about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and Afghanistan who came home and became a beat cop in Savannah, where he grew up. When the latest crisis boiled over Ezra Klein had the great idea to call Skinner and get his take. I recommend the whole interview, but here is the last bit:

Ezra Klein
You said earlier you’re not optimistic a task force will change any of this. So how does it change? What needs to happen?

Patrick Skinner
People need to imagine the end of a war. That’s what they need to accept. Our training is spot on: We’re in a war on crime, and it’s us versus them, and our neighbors are sheep we need to protect. You hear the term civilians. I thought we were all civilians! Our training fits the mindset.

The question we need to ask is: What’s the point? What do we want to see happen? It’s about what we expect the police to do. If I was commissioner of all police on the planet, I’d say there’s a ceasefire in the war on crime. We’re going to work for the 99 percent of people instead of against the 1 percent. Most 911 calls I go to are not crimes. They may become crimes, but our job is to stop it. We’re taught that it’s a war. It’s not. But it’s becoming a war.

We are the action arm for a fucked-up national mindset. This doesn’t exist in isolation. America has the police force that it votes for, that it funds. This system is what we set up. We spent a lot of money and a lot of time over hundreds of years to have this police force. We are trained for what we’re hired for, and what we’re hired for is war.

Eight Can't Wait

"Eight Can't Wait" is a menu of concrete police reforms that has been widely proposed, at least on Twitter. The reforms are aimed, not at the law, but at internal police department guidelines on the use of force. This means that they could be quickly adopted in many cities. This graphic has been making the rounds:

Most of these are self-explanatory, Matt Yglesias offers this description of the rest:

A comprehensive reporting requirement means that officers need to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against a civilian. A duty to intervene rule requires bystander officers to step in if a fellow officer is using excessive force and formally requires police officers to break the blue wall of silence and report such incidents to supervisors. The use of force continuum is a specific set of requirements governing what kinds of weapons can be used versus what levels of resistance. And a deescalation requirement mandates that officers try to secure their personal safety through distance and communication before resorting to force.

As to the evidence that these measures reduce police violence, well, there is some. But it is not iron-clad and it is all subject to a big confounder: maybe these measures are all meaningless in themselves but seem to work because they represent a leadership push to reduce violence somehow. So if they were adopted in the middle of a crisis to calm the situation, without any real commitment from city and police leaders to enforce them, they might not matter at all. Still, a leadership commitment has to be expressed in some concrete rule changes, and these are certainly worth looking at.

Meanwhile in Camden, NJ

Alex Taborrok:

One of the few bright spots over the past week was Camden, NJ where instead of beating protesters the police joined them.

A decade ago Camden had a terrible crime rate and a notoriously ineffective police force; among other things, in 2012 the city payed out more than $3.5 million to settle 88 lawsuits for police misconduct. But in 2013 the whole city-run force was disbanded, which abrogated the union contract, and replaced by a new county-run force.

Since then the crime rate has fallen by much more than the national average and the reputation of the police has soared. The chief, J. Scott Thompson, credits a switch to community policing:

That meant focusing on rebuilding trust between the community and their officers.

“For us to make the neighborhood look and feel the way everyone wanted it to, it wasn’t going to be achieved by having a police officer with a helmet and a shotgun standing on a corner,” Thomson said. Now, he wants his officers “to identify more with being in the Peace Corps than being in the Special Forces.”

A conversation with Thomson about community policing is likely to involve many such catchy maxims. “Destabilized communities,” he told me, “need guardians, not warriors.” He explained the “Back to the Future Paradox”—use technology wisely, but pair it with regular-old “Bobbies on the street.” And he stressed the idea that public safety is about access to social services, economic rejuvenation, and good schools, not just cops: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

It’s policing turned poetry, and his officers, too, have internalized it in their training. “The old police mantra was make it home safely,” Camden police officer Tyrell Bagby told the New York Times in April. “Now we’re being taught not only should we make it home safely, but so should the victim and the suspect.”

Part of the approach is to settle most traffic stops with a warning rather than a ticket:

“Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year” — around the per capita income in the city — “can be life altering,” Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver’s license. “Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger.”

This long NY Times piece from 2017 is fascinating in what it shows about the on-the-ground effects of a serious leadership commitment to reducing violence. All officers receive training in de-escalation, with that mantra that the suspect should go home alive, too. You can see this in practice in a remarkable video of officers carefully cordoning off a deranged-looking man with a knife and talking to him until he surrenders it.

One of the chief's standing orders is that if officers do shoot somebody, they should transport him to the hospital in their cruisers rather than waiting for an ambulance. It strikes me that this might not always be the best medical advice, but as a symbol of treating everyone as a human life it might still be a good idea.

The broken relationships between American cities and their police forces is an old problem with deep roots, and fixing it won't be easy, but Camden shows that a lot of progress can be made with the right leadership.

More Americans are Blaming the Police for Violent Clashes

New poll from Morning Consult, via Kevin Drum

Don't Escalate

Maggie Koerth and Jamiles Lartey at 538:

Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Cars and buildings have burned. Store windows have been smashed. Protesters and police have been hurt. When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening?

Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?

“There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey.

“That’s the primal response,” he said. “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.”

There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate “abrasive policing tactics” and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police.

Of course it's not a simple problem and there are cases where one police response gets great results on one block and leads to an explosion of violence on the next block. But I think it's hard to watch what has happened over the past few days and think that tough policing is generally the way to go.

New Trump Administration Guidelines on Campus Sexual Assault

One of the issues I have been following closely over the past decade has to do with how universities respond to allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Until the Obama administration, universities had policies that varied dramatically, from formal hearings with lawyers to informal interventions by friendly Deans. In 2011 the Education Department issued a "Dear Colleague" letter that tried to impose some uniformity. In particular, it required that universities have written policies regarding sexual harassment and assault, which include formal investigation by some designated official, and that they stick to those policies.

This led to a big legal mess in which more than two hundred colleges and universities were sued for how they handled these cases. These suits came from both parties, the accused and the accusers, who all felt that they were not given a fair hearing. I wrote about this in detail here.

One of the first things Betsy Devos did after becoming Secretary of Education was to institute a review of this policy. New guidelines were issued in draft form in 2018 but they attracted more than 124,000 public comments so it took until now for those to be worked through and the final guidelines issued.

First, this will not solve the problem; acquaintance rape is a devil's problem that will always defy a clean solution, and since we as a society do not agree on what sexual conduct is acceptable we can hardly count on universities to sort that out. Second, it will cost even more money and take up even more time. For example, universities used to be able to assign a single official to investigate a case and give a verdict, but now the verdict will have to be given by a second official or, better, a committee. There must also be a right of appeal if either party thinks the case was mishandled, which means there must be some third person or group to serve in that role. If you compare the official summary of the new policy to the Dear Colleague letter, the new version is at least three times as bureaucratic and technical. I would complain but this just seems to be the way of our world. When confronted by conflict, we respond by enlarging the bureaucracy.

The main changes are as follows:

1. Institutions must presume that those accused of sexual misconduct are innocent at the start of the investigation, which means that accused people cannot be asked to leave campus while the case is being investigated. So accusers who want to avoid the people they have accused have to leave campus themselves, which was one of the major complaints victims' rights groups had about the situation before 2011. (Remember that the whole point of Title IX is to provide women equal access to education.)
2. Colleges can decide whether to use the "preponderance of evidence" standard, as is normal for civil actions, or the "clear and convincing" standard, which is normal for criminal actions. I don't understand this mingling of standards, and I bet this will be litigated in court.
3. First Amendment free speech rights are specifically called out as immune from Title IX complaint. So if you advocate for a return to the patriarchy as a political policy, that speech cannot be construed as sexual harassment.
4. Universities should use the narrowest of the government's several definitions of sexual harassment, which is that to be considered harassment behavior must be "such than an objective person would find it severe, pervasive, and offensive." Since there are no objective people when it comes to these matters, I find this one unhelpful, but the "pervasive" clause does make it very hard to file a complaint for a single utterance. 
5. Universities cannot carry forward investigations based on second-hand referrals if the victim does not want to proceed. Many institutions (including my company, as they remind us all the time) require that anyone who becomes aware of harassment or abuse must report it, and universities have been accused of expelling people for conduct that the alleged victim did not find problematic.
6. No testimony can be entered in the record unless the witness gives it in a "live hearing" and a representative of the other party is present to cross-examine. This has long been one of the flash points of the debate, and the new rules come down squarely on the side of cross-examination. 
7. Schools may offer the parties informal adjudication rather than a formal hearing if both parties agree. (This point, which is standard in civil proceedings, is important because some universities thought the Dear Colleague letter forbade it, although that was never actually clear.)

The general effect of the new standards is to move these matters from a civil complaint about the educational environment to something much more like a criminal trial of the accused. This is what the ACLU and men's rights groups have been fighting for, on the grounds that being expelled from college for rape is a serious matter and ought to be treated that way. Opponents say that now vulnerable young people can't complain about harassment without being willing to face cross-examination by the accused's lawyer, which just adds more pain to what they are already suffering.

Notice how much this requires of the universities: they must have investigators, judges, and what amounts to court rooms, including the option for the parties to be in adjacent spaces connected by video, and they must provide advocates for those who don't bring their own lawyers, etc. One of the complaints made by some universities is that the new rules seem to require them to hire more staff for their Title IX offices by August 14 even though they are 1) closed and 2) in a financially perilous situation. The use of the narrow standard for sexual harassment has also drawn opposition from educators who think universities have a right to impose a higher standard of conduct than would be expected on say an oil rig.

I find myself skeptical of the whole business. If the point is to protect the accused from false conviction, well, consider how often our actual criminal justice system fails at that task. As Aristotle remarked a long time ago, writing the laws is useless if somebody else controls the judges.

We don't know how to respond to problems without layering procedures on top of procedures, rules on top of rules, oversight on top of oversight. We do not trust anyone to be wise or fair. Maybe we just can't, but it makes me sad to think about that.

The Timebomb of the Theranos Patents Goes Off

Theranos, the blood testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, was a fraud. It never built anything that really worked. Along the way toward its inevitable and much deserved collapse, however, it accumulated hundreds of patents. As far as I am concerned, this points to the problem with our patent system, which awards patents for the ideas of things to people who have no idea how to actually create that thing. For example, Richard Feynman held a patent on nuclear-powered aircraft simply by offering the idea that it ought to be possible.

When Theranos went bankrupt its patents were bought up by Fortress Investment Group, which is a major patent troll. People warned at the time that this might lead to trouble down the road, since some of the Theranos patents are broad enough to cover all sorts of medical testing.

Now that fear has been realized, as Mike Masnick explains:

Honestly, I wasn't sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you'll ever see. They are representing "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you'll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos -- the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle. . . .

So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, "Labrador Diagnostics," which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests. The company they're suing, BioFire, recently launched three Covid-19 tests built off of the company's FilmArray technology. And that's what "Labrador" (read: SoftBank) is now suing over. . . .

The lawyers filing this lawsuit on behalf of "Labrador" should remember what they've done -- filing a bullshit patent trolling lawsuit, on behalf of a shell company for a notorious giant patent troll, using patents from a sham company, and using them to try to block the use of Covid-19 diagnostic tests in the middle of a pandemic. I wonder how they sleep at night.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Peter Robb, "Midnight in Sicily"

Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily, published in 1996, is half about the experience of living in southern Italy and half about the mafia corruption trials that brought an end to the First Italian Republic. I found it a weird book because I thought the two parts did not go together well. I did, however, very much like certain scenes from each half. There is some great material about the restaurants and hotels of Palermo, the rituals of Italian coffee, and especially the impact of heroin on street culture of Naples. There is also some great material on the mafia and the pervasiveness of corruption in Italy.

The basic story of modern Italy is this: After World War II, Italy was the only country in the West that had a really strong Communist party, which regularly got 20% or even 30% of the vote and was sometimes the biggest party in Parliament. (Partly because the Communists were the only ones who actually fought against the Fascists.) In the late 1940s the US brought all the anti-communist Italians together and told them, your job is to make sure the communists never get power. So from then down to 1994 all Italian governments were coalitions, usually including both the main right-wing party (the Christian Democrats or DC) and the main center-left party (the Socialists). Some of the work that went into organizing all those coalitions was done in a secret Masonic Lodge called P-2, an old institution relaunched by Italian gangsters at the behest of the CIA that included half the Italian leadership among its members.

(If you search for P-2 online you will find all sorts of crazy stuff about secret meetings of men with red robes and masked faces and an inner clique called the "Wolf Pack" who were all sworn to kill to protect the Lodge and so on, and you may end up thinking that this has to be made up. Maybe half of it is, but the P-2 Lodge was real, counting five Italian Prime Ministers and 200 generals of the armed forces and police among its members. And by the time you're done reading about what really happened in Italian politics, you may start believing in the red robes and the Wolf Pack, too.)

The DC had some strength across Italy but it was based in the south, and its continued presence in every Italian government depended on always winning the vote in Sicily. The DC always won in Sicily because they had a deal with the mafia; the mafia delivered the Sicilian vote, and the DC ignored the mafia, in fact denied the existence of the mafia even though every single person in Sicily knew this was a lie.

The depth and breadth of corruption that sprang from this deal would be impossible to believe if it weren't so copiously documented. Giulio Andreotti, three times Prime Minister, was accused by prosecutors of being a Made Man in la Cosa Nostra, and several mafia witnesses testified that he ordered the assassinations of communist labor leaders. Everything was sold or traded for favors: permissions to build new buildings or tear down historic ones, fishing licenses, construction contracts, jobs in museums and tourist bureaus, everything over which the state had any control. Especially egregious was the way money voted for earthquake relief was spent on hotels owned by mafiosi or roads to their estates or just flat-out stolen while homeless people lived for years in WW II surplus quonset huts.

What finally brought this perfect system down was a war within the Sicilian mafia. In the late 1970s a faction from Corleone, led by the monstrous Toto Riina, launched a violent takeover of the whole organization, murdering hundreds of rivals. Seeing that there was no more honor among the mafiosi, several leading members turned state's witness. Their testimony was made public in the 1986 "Maxitrial," which led to the jailing of hundreds of mafiosi. In the course of this investigation the magistrates turned up evidence that many, many government officials colluded with the mafia, including the leadership of the DC. It was a two steps forward, one step back operation, with many mafia convictions overturned on appeal by DC judges, apparently at the behest of DC politicians. But some Italians struggled on, determined to learn the truth.

In 1992 the two magistrates most involved in fighting the mafia, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were assassinated on the orders of Riina. This caused a profound reaction even among the cynical people of Sicily, and a wave of anti-mafia feeling led to first Riina and then his two successors being betrayed to the police. Riina was convicted in 1995 and died in prison. A committed group of investigators and judges followed the trail all the way to the top, and in 1994 they indicted Prime Minister Andreotti himself.

Andreotti was convicted twice but both convictions were overturned on appeal, and he died a free man in 2013. But the Christian Democrat party evaporated, paving the way for the TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi (former member of the P-2 Lodge) to become Prime Minister. Some outsiders marveled that Italians voted for the clown Berlusconi or some of the weirder parties who came into Parliament in the 2000s, but consider that the entire Italian establishment had been shown to be corrupt and allied with the mafia; you would probably have voted for crazy people over them, too.

It's dizzying, really. While reading about this stuff I always think, this doesn't happen in America. Or does it? Am I naive? After all millions of Americans believe that the Clintons have ordered many assassinations. I don't believe that, but I have to wonder what about the world is hidden from me. Is the Sinaloa Cartel really in a war with the Mexican government? Where did the Covid-19 virus really come from?

Who is lying to us, and how would we know?

Bail

Orem Nimni reviews Alec Karakatsanis’ new book, Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System:

Karakatsanis opens his book with a scene in a New Orleans courtroom, where a man is accused of a crime and ordered held on a $20,000 bail. Because he can’t pay $20,000, the man will stay in jail until trial. That he can’t afford $20,000 is no surprise: about 40 percent of American families can’t come up with even $400 in an emergency, much less $20,000. Most of the criminal punishment system operates to the heavy disadvantage of poor people. If you only have money for silly things like food and shelter you likely won’t be able to pay off a ticket (and the resulting unpaid debt can get you put in prison), let alone your bail. Hundreds of thousands of people are held in cages simply because they can’t “make bail.” That means they are held pre-trial, convicted of nothing, just because they can’t pay the state the amount set by the court.

This wealth-determinate caging system also has harsh downstream consequences beyond the fact of being in jail itself. If you’re imprisoned because you couldn’t make bail, you’re likely to lose your job because you don’t show up, and you’re likely to lose your house because you can’t pay rent. You may lose custody of your kids since you can’t care for them effectively behind bars. Pre-trial detention also results in consequences for the criminal case itself. Those locked up pre-trial are more likely to accept a plea agreement (even a bad one) just to get out of jail, and statistics demonstrate that those held pre-trial, as opposed to those who are released, are more likely to be convicted. It should be troubling to anyone that cares about justice that wealth (and race) is a major determinant of a person’s outcomes in the criminal system.

I’ve actually found discussions of bail to be a good entry point for talking about the cruelty of the criminal punishment system. It’s just so intuitively unjust. “That’s crazy!” most people say upon learning that you can be held for ransom by the state, potentially for years, before having a trial. “That must be illegal!” Most lawyers would scoff at this last statement, because bail is just so central to the criminal system and its existence seems like an immutable fact of nature.

Of course the reason bail was invented was that accused criminals have a habit of not showing up for trial, and I'm not sure what Nimni and Karakatsanis propose to do about that. But I agree that the bail system as it exists is awful.

Tokyo Drone Wars

The latest from Japan:

Reportedly, in Tokyo, local gangs have started using drones to transport drugs across the city. In response, the police are using net-carrying drones to try to capture these packets mid-air. The gangs are counter-attacking with their own net-drones to try and drop police drones. A police spokesman said they "Haven't had this much fun in years"

Parenthood and Crime

Mothers

Fathers

Graphs showing that both mothers and fathers commit many fewer crimes in the three years after a birth than in the three years before. At first I was amazed that women 8 months pregnant commit crime at a detectable rate, but then I read the fine print and saw that the numbers include drug crimes and DUIs. The effect is larger than the estimated effect of a 20-year prison sentence.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Fear of Accelerationism

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp goes all in on fear of the white nationalist doctrine of "Accelerationism."

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

The October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. It was followed in April by another attack on an American synagogue (this time in Poway, California), and an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart that was one of the most brutal attacks targeting Hispanics in US history. . . .

These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.

Two things about this alarmism. First, as Beauchamp, admits, violence has become more attractive to white nationalist extremists because they have realized they have no hope in democratic politics. Donald Trump seems to be the farthest American politics can go in that direction, and his departure in 2020 or 2024 is likely to bring in a major rebound.

Second, none of this is new. Beauchamp does a weird bit of signaling when he calls these tactics "heightening contradictions." That is what Lenin called it, drawing on a tradition of revolutionary thought going back to the mid 1800s. So Beauchamp lets sophisticates like me know that he knows these ideas are all 150 years old. Yet that doesn't keep him from going on as if this were some new and terrifying threat. He never says, oh, by the way, 19th-century anarchists said the same thing, and somehow civilization survived.

I think knowing that "accelerationism" is just the contemporary version of 150-year-old rhetoric is important for understanding what is happening. Modern civilization has had a radical fringe for as long as it has existed. The fringe has taken different forms, from the Anarchists to the Red Brigades to the Monkey Wrench Gang, but it has never gone away. It is a problem, yes, but the risk that any of us will die from it is tiny. The police killed ten times as many Americans last year as terrorists and school shooters combined, and opiate overdose killed fifty times more than that.

Which is not to say that terrorism is not a concern. We should take it seriously. Maybe the FBI was slow to take white supremacists seriously as a threat, but it seems clear that they do now, and based on past experience we can predict that given time the FBI and other police forces will roll up any violent networks that form. They eventually got the anarchists and the Weathermen, after all. There is a price to be paid in terms of privacy and civil liberties, but most Americans seem to think the protection provided is worth it. I can't see any way that a few hundred or a few thousands violent right wingers are our threat to our way of life.

Of all the things to worry about in our world, I think neo-Nazi terrorism is far down the list.

Boeing Crashes and the Human Factor

The NTSB investigators looking into the two deadly crashes of Boeing's 737 Max say the company failed to account for "the human factor":

The agency said Boeing had underestimated the effect that a failure of new automated software in the aircraft could have on the environment in the cockpit. When activated, the system, known as MCAS, automatically moves the Max’s tail and pushes its nose down. The system contributed to two crashes in less than five months that killed 346 people and caused regulators around the world to ground the plane. Boeing did not fully inform pilots about how MCAS functioned until after the first accident. . . .

In conversations with airlines and aviation unions following the crashes, Boeing executives said that the accidents could have been avoided if pilots had simply run a standard emergency procedure. But officials with the safety board suggested that Boeing was too confident the average pilot could easily recover the plane in that situation, because the company had not considered the chaos that ensued inside the cockpit.

“They completely discounted the human factor component, the startle effect, the tsunami of alerts in a system that we had no knowledge of that was powerful, relentless and terrifying in the end,” Dennis Tajer, the spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union, said of Boeing. . . .

When Boeing developed the Max, it assumed that if MCAS activated erroneously, pilots would immediately react by performing a standard emergency procedure. But the company had tested the possibility of an MCAS failure only in isolation, failing to account for just how chaotic the cockpit would become when the activation caused other malfunctions.

On the doomed Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights, a faulty sensor triggered MCAS, which produced a cascading number of warnings that may have overwhelmed the pilots.

“They did not look at all the potential flight deck alerts and indications the pilots might face,” said Dana Schulze, the director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the safety board. “Multiple alerts and indications have been shown through years of research to have potentially an impact where pilots will not respond as perhaps you might have intended.”

This sounds to me like the essence of bad design, followed by bad testing and bad training for pilots. If the NTSB is right and the pilots in the fatal crashes faced not just one warning but a whole series, then the failure of Boeing to plan for that and prepare pilots to face it looks murderous to me.

Data on Police Shootings

The high-profile police shootings of 2014 focused attention on the problem of police violence in America. Researchers quickly discovered, though, that the data needed to seriously study the problem did not exist. The Obama administration got the FBI to begin a nationwide effort to track police use of deadly force, and that effort is now up and running and should provide better data going forward. Meanwhile several private groups have started their own efforts, including The Washington Post, which right now probably has the most comprehensive database.

These efforts have revealed that US police kill about 1,100 citizens a year, which is twice what the FBI counted under its old system. With this expanded dataset it is possible to explore many sorts of variation. One thing that jumps out is regional and local variation; the rate of police killings in Arizona is four times what it is in Illinois.

This chart shows variation by race, but counted in a weird way, by lifetime chance of being killed; since the rate of violence in America varies so much from decade to decade I would much prefer a chart with annual death rates. Anyway this shows that a black man in America has about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by the police, 2.5 times the rate for white Americans. (Of course that means a majority of victims of police shootings are white, since there are 5 times as many white Americans as black.)

One thing experts are fighting about right now is the exact mechanism of the disparity. I mean,  racism is surely behind this at some level, but how? There is some evidence that black Americans are several times more likely to be stopped by the police than whites, so it may be that the chance any given encounter will lead to violence might be no more, or even less, for blacks, and the rate of killings is just higher because there are more encounters. But since the data on who the police stop and question is very poor, it's hard to say. Those local disparities also come into play; more blacks may live in the sort of high crime, high violence neighborhoods where the police are on hair-trigger alert. Because while some cops are just brutal and violent, most shootings happen because the officers are scared. Maybe they are more scared than they should be, and quicker to reach for their guns than they should be, but more than 50 cops are shot and killed each year, so the risk to them is real.

The root cause, I believe, is a breakdown in trust between the police and the people they are supposed to be protecting, and since that is a reflection of a general breakdown in how much Americans trust each other, it is going to be a hard problem to solve.

On the other hand there is some evidence, presented here, that the sheer number of guns in the US is a big factor; maybe the police are more scared because the people they deal with are just more likely to be carrying a gun.

"Reasonable" to "Necessary"

California has passed a new law intended to reduce police shootings by tightening the legal standards under which deadly force can be used:

The bill aims to “affirmatively proscribe” — as in, explicitly limit — the instances when police officers can use deadly force, changing the standard from one based on a “reasonable belief” that the officer or another person is in imminent danger to one that requires police officers to use deadly force only when necessary. . . .

As Peter Bibring, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, wrote in April 2018, “Officers are rarely held accountable [in California] because the law allows police to use deadly force whenever an ‘objectively reasonable’ officer would have done so under the same circumstances, and courts have said that police don’t have to use the least amount of force possible for their conduct to be ‘reasonable.’” . . .

Advocates behind AB 392, including the ACLU, think that the compromises it struck with law enforcement groups to get the bill to the governor’s desk will make a real difference. It’s the shift from a “reasonable” to a “necessary” standard that most matters in the eyes of the bill’s supporters.

That sounds like a positive step to me, but of course the real question is whether jurors can be made to care about police shootings, or whether they remain so frightened of crime and disorder that they reflexively take the police side.

Transition House

Long, interesting article in the New Yorker by Louise MacFarquar about Transition House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the nation's first shelters for battered women. The shelter still exists but it has changed in many ways since its beginning. The article is interesting not just about this particular issue but as a look at radical political action of any kind.

MacFarquar covers how the theories the activists worked under changed over the years and how that influenced what the shelter did, and I found this fascinating. For example, in the beginning everyone saw battering as a form of patriarchal dominance that would end only when the patriarchy was broken; they refused to involve psychologists because they saw their mission as political. But then women began showing up who had been beaten by their female partners, and eventually they had to rethink and adopt new theories about what was going on. In general I found this essay one of the clearest statements I have read about the role of theory in political action. Another interesting element looks at how the shelter was organized. From the beginning they had allowed everyone to participate in decision making, and they tried to erase any distinction between women being helped and women helping. Everything had to be done by consensus, which meant that some things were never done. Now they have a formal board and an executive director with a corner office, and the transition happened after intellectuals within the movement began to criticize consensus meetings on a theoretical plane, pointing out that some voices were always louder and more powerful than others, and that bullies could use the very lack of structure to wear others down and get their way.

Another theme is how on-the-ground feminism has always been entangled with the fight against racism. About the early days in the 1970s:

Many volunteers had been activists in the civil-rights and antiwar movements but had got sick of being ignored and making coffee. Gail Sullivan had just come back from a stint at the Wounded Knee defense committee, in South Dakota. “The movement was dominated by men who were actively hostile to feminism, which they termed ‘white feminism,’ ” Sullivan says. “Most were very invested in traditional gender roles, which they defended as Native American traditions. This stuff was very common, men using racial oppression as an excuse to oppress women.”

But then later on, when they tried to involve more black and Latina volunteers, they ended up having to question their attitudes toward involving the police in domestic disputes. Feminists had fought hard to make spouse abuse a crime and to force the police to respond, but many non-white women disagreed:

By the late eighties, several states had passed laws requiring police to make an arrest when a domestic assault appeared to have taken place, but this change brought its own problems. For one thing, a lot of women genuinely did not want their husbands to be arrested—they just wanted the beating to stop—so the laws took away their option of calling the police altogether. Fairly often, the police, unable to determine which partner was to blame for the violence, arrested both. And, while the mostly white feminists at Transition House welcomed the imprisonment of batterers, to women of color at Casa Myrna the issue felt more complicated. “The feminist movement never really dealt with what it meant that black men were also oppressed by white men,” Curdina Hill, Casa Myrna’s first executive director, says. “It never dealt with women who were being abused but who still wanted to support their men on a political level. It wasn’t that they were not aware of it—they didn’t deal with it.”

If you have any interest in radical politics and how that part of the world has changed since the 1970s, I highly recommend MacFarquar's piece.

Partisan Politics at the Supreme Court

The conservative-majority court has not been the disaster Democrats feared. There have been a bunch of different coalitions, sometimes involving conservative and liberal justices on the same side. Sometimes, it seems, the personal philosophies of the justices do matter. Chief Justice John Roberts, it seems to me, has done a decent job of keeping things focused on the legal matters at hand and not letting partisan ideology take over.

EXCEPT when it comes to issues that bear directly on which party holds power in Congress or the White House. When it's Bush vs. Gore or the recent case on gerrymandering, all of the justices reliably vote the interests of their own party. When a decision would throw the White House or either house of Congress to the other party, everything else goes out the window.