New York City Cops

It sounds to me like any other guild, like lawyers or doctors or judges or academics or priests or whatever. Whether or not they tolerate hanky-panky, they NEVER tolerate accountability to outsiders.

Of course, outsiders insist that guild members are accountable, imposing the rule of law on them. And rule of law, ultimately, refers to the state’s legitimate monopoly of violence. Which we’ve vested in the cops. Uhhhhh

Contempt for the law is most worrying in a profession that exists to uphold the law. This point is so obvious, you must have made a special effort not to see it.

This is one more illustration of a larger issue in our culture – law is seen as something that punishes bad people as opposed to bad acts. It is the antithesis of due process of law.

Kidneystones@1: “If contempt for the law really is the issue, why not talk about drug-use and abuse among students and educators?”

Tell you what. How about we talk about drug use and abuse among cops? Implement a rigorous randomized testing protocol, not only for marijuana and cocaine but specifically for anabolic steroids among the NYPD and I’ll happily engage you in your (idiotic) argument about how nefarious reefer-addicted professors are polluting our precious bodily fluids.

Help me out here Substance, I’m feeling a bit thick and failing to get the reference/joke.

I think anyone who calls themselves “kidneystones” is probably someone whose goal in writing is to be an irritant: a troll, in other words. But his post sparked a thought I’d like to expand further.

Respect for the law has to start with the people at the top, or there will be no respect for the law. It has to start with the people who enforce the law. So law has to be well-made, and it has to apply to the great as well as the small.

And it is not and does not.

Law breaking by the police should be punished more strictly than law breaking by the general public, and should be subject to more scrutiny by the general public. I’m not saying that all police are bad, neither is the OP, nor any commenter above. The officers who obstructed public scrutiny should be disciplined in such a way as to indicate zero tolerance for this kind of conduct.

Thanks Substance.

I’ll be shocked if that ever happens CharleyCarp, shocked, more than pleasantly surprised, and wondering about the temperature in Hades.

The debate about the difference between your lawn, bob, and the courthouse is in the other thread.

From the same NYT story Henry links to:
“Jose R. Ramos, an officer in the 40th Precinct whose suspicious behavior spawned the protracted investigation, was accused of two dozen crimes, including attempted robbery, attempted grand larceny, transporting what he thought was heroin for drug dealers and revealing the identity of a confidential informant.
The case, troubling to many New Yorkers because of its implication that the police officers believed they deserved special treatment, is expected to have long tentacles.”
…
“Federal agents earlier in the week arrested eight current and former officers on accusations that they had brought illegal firearms, slot machines and black-market cigarettes into New York City. Recently, other officers have been charged in federal court with making false arrests, and there was testimony in a trial in Brooklyn that narcotics detectives planted drugs on innocent civilians.
Of the 16 officers arraigned on Friday, ranking as high as lieutenant, 11 were charged with crimes related to fixing tickets. All of them pleaded not guilty, and all but two were released without bail. Officer Ramos was held in $500,000 cash bail. Jennara Cobb, a lieutenant in the Internal Affairs Bureau, was released after posting a $20,000 bail bond. She was accused of leaking information about the investigation to other officers.”
…
“Particularly disturbing, the official said, was a news report that said some officers chanted “E.B.T.” at people lined up at a benefits center across the street, referring to electronic benefit transfer, the method by which welfare checks are distributed. The people had apparently chanted “Fix our tickets” to the officers. ”
…
“Prosecutors said the bulk of the vanished tickets were arranged by officials of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union. All the officers charged with fixing tickets are either current or past union delegates or trustees.
As the investigation unfurled, the union played down its significance and consistently referred to ticket-fixing as “professional courtesy” inscribed in the police culture.”
…
“The Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said the tickets fixed had robbed the city of $1 million to $2 million.”

It seems to me there’s a great deal to this story that needs to be taken into account. From this NYT report, everything about this demonstration (assuming the NYT story is accurate) stinks, as does the ticket-fixing itself. (And notice that this “perq” seems to be reserved for PBA officials, not even most officers.)
Law enforcement officers perhaps more than anyone else need to obey the law (unless they want to engage in civil disobedience, quite a different matter), especially in a city that prides itself on having those officers enforce “no tolerance” policies on the public (well, certain segments of the public).

Now, you may very well think that a rank-and-file cop who recieves an order that is both illegal and morally repugnant should defy that order, and having failed to do so and been caught, they deserve treatment as common criminals. Any you may well have a point there. But it isn’t necessarily the case that those who don’t see it your way have failed to think through the ramifications of what they are saying.

Well, no, the other option – the only other option – is that that they prefer to operate in a fascist, authoritarian mode. With themselves in positions of authority, of course, and not subject to it.

These people have got to be trolling. Nobody, not even the law and order types, can seriously be defending cops breaking the law.

Salient, I’ve been trying to imagine how to support these officers, and I await hearing from them/their spokesmen. Especially since one NYT article (well, I’ve read a bit more, but probably from the same sources as this article) can’t be relied on for all the needed information.
One way I’ve imagined: they resent being lumped in (implicitly) with a Ramos. That I could understand. But I’ve yet to hear that this is their motive. The PBA’s role in this (and maybe even someone in Internal Affairs!) is bothering me.
I’ve read that OWS folks haven’t gotten positive response from (at least most) cops when they’ve suggested to cops that OWS is acting on behalf of cops, too. I hope the PBA isn’t making us remember how unions (think Hoffa and the Teamsters) undermined their own agenda (before we even get into all the larger problems the left can have with “trade unionism,” and all that).

I’ll be citing Stanley Fish any moment now.

The “Law” only exists as a social discourse creating itself in the actual practice of individuals and groups.

Aw hell, to be honest, you transcendentalists bore me.

Ain’t no “Law’ There are only people.

Maybe there’s a [4] and etc I’m missing.

Selective application. They probably feel that everything is corrupt anyway, everyone breaks the law 50 times every day (this is NYC, after all, with all those Wall Street billionaires), and they’ve been singled out and picked on for political or some other reasons.

Oh, if you want to say these police exercised bad judgement, I am ok fine with that.

Interesting comments. Henry, Patrick, and company can find succor in the fact that they have an eager ally in Glenn Reynolds.

The drug use I’m referring to is not restricted to illegal marijuana or crack use (and sale) in schools and universities, but includes the entire gamut of drug-related illegal activity that is tacitly or overtly condoned by people charged with teaching and protecting the young. We might agree that police people have a special responsibility to “uphold” the law. If this is the case – that police do have a special responsibility, then we can reasonably assume that teachers and educators, who also occupy positions of trust and responsibility, should also be held to a similar, higher standard. That’s clearly not the case, at least when it comes to keeping the educational community free of illegal drug taking behaviors.

As I mentioned in my original comment, traffic-ticket fixing seems to me to be an extremely strange place for either camp to take a stand given the widespread lawlessness we see in most societies. The police unions very much believe that their members require/deserve the full protections of the law and it isn’t clear to me that standing between the press and cameras violates any laws. I’d offered evidence in the form of a snarky reference to OD’s.

Winston Smith might want to go back and re-read his own post. Cops routinely ignore violations of the law. Exercising that discretionary authority, in itself, violates the statute. Few people want to live in a world where laws are enforced any time a law is broken. Cops understand this. The fact that some cops are engaged in illegal activity should come as a surprise and shock to nobody.

Rather than drug test kids, I’d much prefer to see educators, parents, and school staff tested. My own experiences among children confirm that kids understand right from wrong rather better than adults. The “if I break the law, it’s ok” defense of illegal behaviors we see here in several posts wouldn’t survive a second in any lunch room or playground.

Who’s the transcendentalist here?

Doesn’t ticket-fixing and its equivalent usually exist in a wider culture of perks and favors by those with access to the machinery of the legal system? In other words, where (some) police are fixing tickets, (some) prosecutors, legislators, and judges know about it, and are getting their tickets fixed, and are doling out their own, often more valuable units of currency. For one part of that world (the prosecutors) to turn on its foot soldiers (the cops), to *expose them to public condemnation as if they were the only wrongdoers and in collusion with violent criminals*, means either that a white knight reformer is at work, or some violent intramural conflict has occurred behind the scenes. Or the prosecutor has just made the risky decision to treat the cops like other low-level offenders, and use them to climb the ladder to the real bad guys, then let them off lightly. In any of these cases, it’s a profound breach of custom in a pressure-filled environment. Some bewildered outrage seem unsurprising (even if bad p.r.).

I’d like to focus in on one thing from the OP here: in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward

This is assault and battery. If I did it to a cameraman, I might very well expect a short jail sentence, or at the very least a fine and probation. If I did the same thing to a cop, and was not summarily executed (which I wouldn’t be, since I’m not a young black man), I wouldn’t be surprised if I received a year in jail. The reason that most people despise the police (even those who pretend not to in order to shore up their corrupt ideologies) is that the cops want it both ways. They simultaneously expect to be above the law in their own actions toward others, while others’ actions towards them are dealt with in the harshest possible manner. Analogize that one, schmibertarian cop-lovers.

See, by the way,

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-rage-of-a-privileged-class/247560/

Also from the NYT article:
“”It is hard to see an upside in the way the anger was expressed, especially in Bronx County, where you already have a hard row to hoe in terms of building rapport with the community,’ said Eugene J. O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. ‘The Police Department is a very angry work force, and that is something that should concern people, because it translates into hostile interactions with people.’”
“‘A very angry work force….'” Something’s up here, but we don’t yet have enough information to know what, yet. (Probably a number of important things. Interesting that nothing but NYC’s supposed law enforcement successes have been discussed in recent years in MSM. The lid’s been kept too long on — on what? ) Like you, Salient, I’m only trying to stay fair. Adult is certainly right that “authoritarianism is a form of culture,” a form that police (like the military) are inevitably prone to. And we’ve put them in that spot and owe it to them to be watchers of the (our) watchmen, without expecting the watchmen to be angels.
All standard, as adult says, but I think there’s more to this story than just cops’ usual flaws and challenges. Why so much anger, now? (I’m thinking those white shirts at the Brooklyn Bridge, too. Where is this intense, and organized, anger coming from? What is it about?)

What the fuck is all this drivel about transcendentalism McManus? If you want to take the passive-authoritarian route, go ahead, but don’t pretend it’s a matter of jurisprudential metaphysics.

This is not matter of some tough judgement call, it’s a systematic – bureaucratic – approach to the routine perversion of the course of justice, driven by overt nepotism and having of course a financial dimension. That’s the driving offences anyway (all deemed worth ticketing by the officer at the scene, of course – you did get that bit, did you?). One or two other bits of the iceberg were also in view though of course – a little sample of the drugs and guns and favours for gangsters side of things, wasn’t it? None of this is surprising, of course, if that’s relevant in some way.

I’d agree with HV that there’s an explanation #4 not a million miles from meeting his description, though the defendants are being ‘singled out’ only in a rather Israeli kind of sense, that is they’re taking a defensive brand of umbrage at people complaining when they could surely find something else to complain about if they tried. Cops are used to impunity and mistake it for some kind of entitlement, hallowed as it is by custom and emboldened as they are by unanimity, solidarity, sheer weight of numbers (Serpicos, as everyone knows, need not apply).

The whining, cringing, cowards and misfits who are pointing their pudgy pampered little fingers and shrieking so shrilly just don’t understand what it’s like to have the job of being a lard-assed bully-boy. Especially since cops suffer such terrible deprivation when it comes to deference, mythologising, adulation, groupies, opportunities to posture etc. To be fair, it does seem a bit arbitrary to pick on just these few guys, and such relatively minor felonies. You can also see why their colleagues might be concerned about where it’s all going to end if not nipped in the bud.

Meanwhile the cast is supplemented by kidneystones in that staple comic role – the one who needs no encouragement to hold forth on the utterly unrelated topic of his/her deranged obsession, in this case students! smoking weed! er, on campus!

Then there’s Salient (sorry, S!) doing the handwringing thing – not wanting to jump to any observations. This is ending over backwards to a degree only previously achieved (allegedly) by Yvonne Fletcher.

What might really top things off might be to get that NYPD guest poster back – brandon, wasn’t it?

Tim Wilkinson bursts a blood vessel or three. Take a deep breath. The issue is traffic-ticket fixing. I suspected we’d see rather more generalizations about the shortcomings of the people who suit up to protect the rest of us. If we’re cutting to the chase, I’d say Cannoneo has it about right, as far as the specific case is concerned. Why we’re talking about angry cops is another question. I wouldn’t say that Henry is posting to encourage a two-minute hate, even if that is the result in several cases. No, I’d say the reason the NYT crafted this piece in the manner they did is to create a particular frame around the topic of anger, one that identifies anger with the police, the favorite whipping boys and girls of the self-proclaimed liberal left. I noted in my second comment that Henry, Patrick, and now Tim find their strongest supporters among the Glenn Reynolds crowd, which should give anyone reason to pause and reflect.

I’ll add a couple of more points that will probably be even more difficult for Tim to connect. As noted, the NYT makes the cops the angry players of the week. This serves to deflect attention from the really angry people in the news this weekend: the rioters of Occupy Denver, for example, who scream that they want jobs and aren’t about to vote Democrat. That’s absolutely a discussion of angry people that some would prefer not to have.

The angriest people in this particular comment thread seem to be Tim and company. Why they are angry is their own business. But I suspect part of stems from having to defend an administration that is currently assassinating US citizens for what they write and say.

There are multiple strands connecting drug abuse, illegal behavior, and the behavior of authority figures. The drug laws in Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and other Asian countries probably strike some here as draconian in the extreme. They are born, however, of experience. I can’t see that they are any worse than the laws in the US. I’d much rather my own children take thirty strokes of a cane across the back in purely punitive Singapore, than spend thirty days in even the best juvenile reform facility in New York or Boston. As noted, white wealthy folks are extremely unlikely to see the inside of a jail for offenses that might well win a person of color a year or two in jail. If you think the police are the reason that’s the case, then you really don’t understand the dynamics and power of liberal elites. See Andrew Sullivan and his case as an illuminating example of this practice.

Should Herman Cain win the Republican nomination liberals are going to see much more conservatism from members of the African-American community who very clearly see a connection between the breakdown of authority, drug abuse, and illegal behaviors in nation’s schools. Conservative African-American parents, many of whom are anti-gay marriage and anti-decriminalization, currently vote Dem. That’s very likely to change if this constituency is presented with the opportunity of supporting a candidate who asks members of society to respect the police, respect teachers, respect themselves, and obey the law. The fact that this sounds so much like fascism to a vocal minority here simply confirms that Tim and company simply don’t know what fascism is.

Traffic-ticket fixing is a nothing issue and the behavior of all the cops in question is little different from the actions of most self-interested constituency. The posturing is slightly interesting, but pretty much matches the nothing-burger story in the NYT. Better than talking about angry protesters and attacks on police, however.

@Tim, #47

“This is not matter of some tough judgement call, it’s a systematic – bureaucratic – approach to the routine perversion of the course of justice, driven by overt nepotism and having of course a financial dimension. ”

Indeed it is. Some minor tinkering and that formula applies to Iraq, Fisa, Gitmo, waterboarding, and a host of other practices that have come to form a pervasive disregard for justice and simple decency.

But what the hell. Move on, I say. Look forward.

Kidneystones, those who enforce the law must respect it far more then those whom they enforce it over. A policeman derives his authority not from his gun or his badge, but from the uniform and the respect it commands. When the police are seen doing illegal acts, it detracts from that respect, and ultimately places the police officer as the blue gang with the radios.

Hi Henry. I take Patrick’s point. As I don’t view anyone’s writing or opinions or sewage, generally speaking, I’ll respectfully suggest that I’m better informed regarding the dubious assertions of Pr. Reynolds and company than most here. I’ve had a number of email exchanges with him over the years, btw, and he takes criticism with much greater equanimity than most. Your own commendable good humor is the stuff of legend as you know. At the risk of ruining your morning, I can attest to the fact that Reynolds has been ranting and raving about the excessive zeal of the police for many years. It’s an essential feature of his libertarian Ayn Rand kick: howling about the corrupt behavior of those with a state monopoly on violence. You and Patrick are very much playing among Reynolds’ cow pies, if we can employ your own aromatic terminology.

As for the “incident”. This particular case seems to be an extremely minor infraction of abuse by any reasonable standard. I can think of countless much more serious incidents. Double standards are the staple of life. I see no reason to become upset over this particular example.

The assertion that we should expect a higher standard of behavior from those in positions of social trust, however, is one that I support. I realize that you may not wish to address the specific points I raise – that pervasive drug abuse in the educational community and the blind eye educators show to such abuse is much more damaging to the public good than police officers grabbing cameras or bumping into the press. That remains my position, however.

I don’t want my own children around teachers or parents who condone or ignore illegal drug use. I do not believe that children as young as 10 should be compelled to decide whether or not to take drugs and engage in illegal activities. I support, quite seriously, a broad range of draconian measures to protect children from drugs. I can also assure that a great many people in my part of the world hold similar views.

Hope the morning goes well. Thoroughly enjoyed your recent stuff on the EU.

bob, freedom is not served by anarchy. Banditry can destroy freedom just as much as the state, and since the state is in theory accountable to the people, it is preferable.

@bob mcmanus:

I think your mistake is in the placement of the authority in the context of the term “authoritarian”. Were the authoritarian mindset about the authority of social institutions such as the rule of law, than violating them would indeed be a violation of authoritarianism.

However, as the term is usually used, it refers to the notion that a set of people are in power, and that their personal authority is the force in question, whether or not they break the law or violate social norms. So deference to a cop qua cop, whether or not his actions conform to the rule of law, is an authoritarian act within the meaning of the word.

In that context, yes, “cops who break the law and violate social norms are authoritarians”; they are relying on their authority as police officers to justify their actions.

(As for your second part? “lovers of freedom” is such a bucket term as to be essentially meaningless. But I’d suggest that those of us who consider the rule of law, rather than particular people, to be one of the building blocks of a free society have more right to that term than authoritarians.)

58:For me at least, the weird liberal reaction to the NYC cops connects directly to the liberal reactions to OWS:”Where are the leaders, the demands, the goals? Who the hell is making the rules in the park? It’s it’s it’s impossible, a crime against nature.”

Liberals have become so authoritarian that obedience is freedom.

special authority figures who get to wield discretion in opposition to (nominally) democratic laws is a distinctively authoritarian view.

The hell it is. If the enforcers are serving Qadaffi maybe, but not if they are acting as a small group.

Only if the law-breaking is an obedience, a submission to a different authority. And I am not even sure about that.

I was not creating a general rule or a new authority when I was smoking pot. I was anti-authoritarian.

Criminals as authoritarians is really weird.

Barry, do you really mean to say that we can’t take it for granted that someone advocating the mandatory drug-testing of college professors on a CT thread about police corruption is arguing in good faith?

Jim, Why yes, I guess I really do mean that. And I think I’ve rarely seen Henry as vexed as when he stepped back into to spank the offender above. (Then again I’m just starting again to read CT threads after a number of years away, now I’m beginning to see why I left).

And just a reminder that even sticking to just the ‘ticket-fixing’, this means a bunch of people who feel free to drive around drunk, at high speed, dangerously, etc because they are related to cops – actual cops of course never even getting the ticket in the first place.

@Tim Wilkinson

Of course, dude. Police officers should just be getting high, fixing tickets, and participating in illegal gun rackets all the time, cuz breakin’ the law is what freedom is all about.

Then there’s Salient (sorry, S!) doing the handwringing thing – not wanting to jump to any observations. This is bending over backwards to a degree only previously achieved (allegedly) by Yvonne Fletcher.

Oh no, I’ve definitely come to conclusions. Coordinated disruption is a legitimate tactic when it is used to combat injustice. I see no breach of justice protested here: all I see is a gang of a hundred mobsters who control of part of the city, engaging in coordinated intimidation of due process, acting in solidarity with other mobsters. The fact that the mobsters happen to be agents authorized by the state to make arrests and such only makes it much worse.

If the NYPD (or at least those who participated in the protest) would like to retain its legitimacy in the eyes of people like me, they would do well to clarify what injustice they are protesting. As of right now, in the absence of a statement, I feel completely comfortable calling for the police department to formally censure and penalize every police officer who was known to attend the protest, with penalties up to and perhaps including termination of employment. About the only clarification I would accept is that the officers gathered to protest the prosecution of low-level offenders, to encourage the Bureau of Internal Affairs to investigate their own commanding officers, and to express their willingness to testify on the record against their commanding officers. That’s what “Just Following Orders” would have to mean in order to confer legitimacy. If this wasn’t an attempt to call for higher-level investigation, then there’s not a single officer in that crowd that deserves any respect or deference from any of us, and if the coordinated disruption continues, it’s time to start calling for their resignations, as well as more thorough corruption investigations.

Have you seen Serpico? Do you really think this kind of pack-mentality privileged bully-boy antics and the hippy-punching good ole boy type of attitude that underlies them – an attitude continuous with those of the proverbial nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches – are individualist and freedom loving rather than authoritarian and oppressive?

That you should buy into the Dirty Harry myth that expecting these armed thugs to make some concessions to the rule of law is in some way oppressive is quite frankly fucking staggering. Next you’ll be telling us about the shameful way the constuitutional rights of arms companies are flouted and all the rest of that pseudo-libertarian macho posturing.

It’s a bit early for the Godwin option, but the idea that having a police force that functions like a mob is in some way romantic really has had its chance and failed to deliver freedom. The Golding option, perhaps, for some kind of less heavyhanded hint as to how this stuff pans out.

…in fact, I just noticed wikipedia saying: “Lumet felt guilty about the two-dimensional way he had treated cops in the 1973 film Serpico and said that Prince of the City was his way to rectify this depiction”.

I think I agree with all that, as with your previous comments here – I don’t think I’ve said anything to suggest otherwise.

(Well, I dunno about the Gates business – I didn’t follow the episode with any great interest and was primarily concerned with some of the cop’s other comments about saving face and keeping ‘order’.)

“The NYPD can stand with their own class, or they can stand against it.”

Problem is, they’re being completely opaque about which choice they’re making. There’s nothing inherently wrong with executing a highly public coordinated disruption without a specific message to assert, of course. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with showing up purely as a gesture of solidarity to a fellow member of a group–I’d probably go stand with a crowd and support and applaud in much the same way for a fellow Occupant.

But when the group in question is, by their own admission, police officers who break various minor laws in an intentional and systematic way and would like to keep doing so, there’s really no reason to support them or condone their civil disobedience (when and where it does occur). There are plenty among the 99% who are willful and enthusiastic agents of the 1%. When you say “They are surely not happy about this” I wonder, what evidence of that do we currently have?

For those of you who still don’t get it – these are not crimes on the order of someone running a red light or driving drunk. They are an abuse of the public’s trust.

Think about it this way: how would you feel about an incompetent engineer who builds a bridge that fails under the designed load vs an engineer who deliberately builds a bridge to fail within the the specified design tolerances? How would you feel about a doctor who misdiagnoses a patient through incompetence as opposed to a doctor who deliberately infects his patients with malarial parasites?

Now, how would you feel about one hundred doctors showing up and trying to intimidate the press and the jury during the trial of one of their own for deliberately infecting their patients?

I feel bad about doctors taking bribes and kickbacks from pharma companies. But I suspect almost all of them do, one way or another. And engineers probably make similar deals with their suppliers. Money makes the world go round.

A couple of thoughts on this very curious thread. Ticket-fixing, like driving drunk, may not in itself be a big deal. At least, driving drunk isn’t a big deal — until you get into an accident and kill or maim somebody (maybe yourself). And a ticket fixed here or there — who would claim the whole justice system is collapsing because of that? But systematic or routine ticket-fixing (which can eventually result from the ticket fixed here or there) is perhaps more like the drunk who does get into the lethal accident, in that the results of that systematic/routine fixing undermine the fundamental principle that we are all equally subject to the law (the laws we have made). By that principle, the police remain “one of us” as well as “for us.” They are subject to the same laws we all are. (I know I’m idealizing here. I still think in terms of aiming high and then getting to work. Misreadings of Stanley Fish notwithstanding.)
Judges accord credibility to police testimony almost by definition. I hear about this all the time from my daughter, who is in the process of becoming a defense attorney in NYC (alert: a huge percentage of “crimes” involve low level drug-dealing, including dealing in marijuana, and charges are brought almost entirely against people of color. A problem here! — maybe not of police making, but it speaks to some other comments). If police are to deserve that credibility from judges (and jurors), they’d better stop fixing tickets, for starters.
If the NYT article is accurate (and who knows? I agree with an earlier commenter that the grey lady has become a journalistic embarrassment), PBA types got this particular perk, not all officers, and PBA types were demonstrating. This may be an important point. That union leadership and union rank-and-file might be out of sync — well, that would be nothing new.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent?act=2

I agree. Stop and frisk is a much bigger deal. People get sent to jail for three days awaiting arraignment and then lose their jobs for a phony charge, typically trespassing.

Could it be that this is a way of going after the union? Not that I condone ticket fixing, far from it.

dk writes: citation needed. I’ll give it a quick look. The fact that you are unfamiliar with Reynolds’s position on the state’s monopoly on violence says rather a lot about what you know and don’t know about 21 st century libertarians. Isn’t there an index in those “How the Koch Brothers Are Planning To Destroy Democracy” bibles so popular these days? Reason, Matt Welch, et al are all in favor of decriminalizing drugs and curtailing the excesses of the police. I can easily recall a Reynolds post circa Abu Ghuraib when he observed that conditions in many US prisons suggest a long history of cruel and unusual punishment practices that garnered very little outcry. You really don’t know how these folks roll, do you? You should.

If I have the time, I may help you do the search in the IP archives. Or you could simply email Glenn and ask for the info. He publishes frequently in law reviews and may have something formal you can use.

Here you go, dk. Part of a week from the IP archives: 8/11/2001. I suggest you devote a moment to at least familiarize yourself with Reynolds’ positions. I’ve included just the first few entries. Enjoy!

WHO DIED AND MADE YOU GOD? That’s the question many are asking bioethicists these days, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a good question. It’s not like God was especially good as a source of answers for moral questions (the Inquisition comes to mind as an example of this approach’s flaws) but nowadays bioethicists are increasingly asked to take the place of religion. And they’re not God, or godlike. They’re just officious people with graduate degrees. They’ve become part of an overarching ethics establishment with no particular claim to legitimacy and with substantial evidence of feathering its own nest at the expense of the interests it’s supposed to protect. This problem isn’t unique to bioethicists, but they suffer from it as much as any others.

Posted 8/11/2001 11:51:07 PM by Glenn Reynolds

MORE ON THE CONTROVERSIAL LEON KASS: Ronald Bailey joins Virginia Postrel’s concerns about the appointment of the highly partisan Leon Kass to head George W. Bush’s bioethics commission. As mentioned below, I agree. This is like putting Neal Horsley in charge of a commission on the ethics of abortion. Will the press focus on Kass’s precommitments on this issue?

Posted 8/11/2001 02:03:37 PM by Glenn Reynolds

TERRIFIC column by Dorothy Rabinowitz on the continuing madness of the Amirault witch-hunt in Massachussetts. Now that their case has been discredited by evidence that the children “victims” were coached and browbeaten into saying exactly what the prosecution wanted to hear (chilling excerpts provided) the prosecutors have brought these victims back for a press conference. Now they’re reporting entirely new, and even more fantastic, episodes of abuse — episodes never mentioned earlier in depositions or at trial. Sadly, these former kids (they’re practically grownups now, over a decade later) probably sincerely believe that this stuff happened. They’re victims all right — victims of prosecutorial brainwashing. If child abuse is horrible because of the lifelong anguish it can inflict on its victims, then isn’t virtual child abuse — in which the lifelong anguish is inflicted without the actual abuse — nearly as bad? Not much chance that the prosecutors will be held accountable, though. Historians will look back on the Amirault case and the other episodes like it the same way they look back on the Salem witch trials. (Hey, that was in Massachussetts too…). The WSJ and Dorothy Rabinowitz deserve medals for bravery in an era when anyone who decries such horrors is at risk of being deemed a pedophile-lover. When will the federal Department of Justice investigate this case? And when are state bars’ ethics commissions going to start disciplining prosecutors for offering obviously manufactured testimony, and for refusing to back down when they’re caught? If a plaintiffs’ lawyer did this sort of thing in a tort suit, he or she would be disbarred. Why should prosecutors, who can take people’s lives and liberty, not just their money, be held to a lesser standard?

Posted 8/11/2001 11:53:02 AM by Glenn Reynolds

THE BULLMOOSE is joining Josh Marshall in attacking President Bush’s stem cell decision. Well, not really. Marshall says (wrongly, I think — see below) that Bush’s speech was terrible. Bullmoose thinks that it’s the tepid response of the pro-lifers that’s terrible. Bush has betrayed them, says the moose, but they don’t care so long as they maintain access. I think that’s unfair. In truth, despite all the posturing, the stem-cell issue is peripheral. It is to the abortion debate what Quemoy and Matsu were to the Cold War: something you can argue about precisely because it is peripheral. Bush isn’t going to concede much, if any, ground on the abortion front where it really matters — he won’t be vetoing any partial-birth abortion bans, for example. (I think he should veto such a bill, because regulating abortion isn’t a legitimate part of the commerce power but that’s neither here nor there.) In truth, there’s a lot of consensus on the middle ground in the abortion area: most people know you can’t really outlaw it, and don’t really want that anyway, but they don’t really like abortion and don’t mind if it’s moderately hard to get one. This situation is deeply unsatisfying for people who like nice, clean ideological divisions. But most voters, and most politicians, aren’t those sorts of people.

Posted 8/11/2001 10:36:06 AM by Glenn Reynolds

EVEN MORE PROBLEMS FOR THE FBI: According to this story, FBI agents and prosecutors allowed informants to plot and commit serious crimes, including murder. A similar scandal has been unfolding in Boston. Now, I understand that when you have informants in criminal gangs, by definition they’re going to be committing crimes. But at the same time, “informant” status has been used, apparently not uncommonly, as a “get out of jail free” card. At some point it looks less like assisting an investigation on the part of the informant, and more like complicity on the part the government. The ability to, er, overlook crimes is an inevitable part of law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. It’s also one that is enormously susceptible to corruption, abuse, and bad judgment. Once again, it appears that the FBI isn’t up to the job.

Posted 8/11/2001 10:15:21 AM by Glenn Reynolds

“Of the 16 officers arraigned on Friday, ranking as high as lieutenant, 11 were charged with crimes related to fixing tickets. So, yes, these are crimes pretty much on the order of someone running a red light or driving drunk.”

There is no petty crime when it comes to subverting criminal justice. These are all serious crimes – very serious crimes. Cops get charged with traffic violations ALL THE TIME and you don’t get hundreds of other cops protesting the “unfairness” of it all. The NYPD is up in arms here b/c these cops are in SERIOUS, SERIOUS TROUBLE.

I can’t understand for a second this tendency to downplay what these cops did. I don’t understand why anyone would analogize selling justice to “running a red light” or a student smoking pot. Those are citations, or minor misdemeanors at best.

what a sad, sad thread.

what a sad, sad thread.

Yup.

Oh, I am a Direct Action (so to speak) Leftist who thinks the groveling obeisance to the Rule of Law displayed in this thread simply means that the necessary next steps (so to speak) after OWS has failed will be unavailable. You do know that General Strikes are very illegal (horrors), not to speak of most of Gene Sharp’s tools.

The Right does not have your fastidiousness and they will bury us.

Wait are we confusing mcmanus with a right-winger?

and by the time that you have disappeared so far up anarcho-syndicalism’s ass that you are writing apologia for the police, it’s time to turn in your copy of Rocker’s Theory and Practice and call it a day.

“I don’t want my own children around teachers or parents who condone or ignore illegal drug use. I do not believe that children as young as 10 should be compelled to decide whether or not to take drugs and engage in illegal activities. I support, quite seriously, a broad range of draconian measures to protect children from drugs. I can also assure that a great many people in my part of the world hold similar views.”

Hate to tell you this kidneystone but if your kids are older than 12 I bet they have been around people smoking pot or drinking under age. Don’t worry though, they will get through it just fine. Most of us do.
/You must be a lot of fun at parties.

DKW, did you get the memo that ‘teh’ was on the tired list? It hasn’t been ‘hawt’ for a couple of years now.

DKW’s fingers were broken by policemen so you could be a little more sensitive.

Yes, McManus: the point of the rule of law is not ‘people being told what to do’, it’s ‘people, even if they are being told what (not) to do, at least not just being ordered about arbitrarily by unconstrained dictators’. Constraining authority is not authoritarian; discretion first engine of tyranny; or see previous comments; ah forget it.

Of the 16 officers arraigned on Friday, ranking as high as lieutenant, 11 were charged with crimes related to fixing tickets. So, yes, these are crimes pretty much on the order of someone running a red light or driving drunk. Running a red light or driving drunk is trivial as long as it remains only a theoretical risk, and has no realized consequences. Fixing a ticket, similarly, typically has no immediate consequence—a bridge doesn’t fall down and no one develops malaria. Try to keep some perspective, here.

So then my hypothetical doctor hasn’t committed a serious crime if the patient he’s infected with a potentially deadly disease successfully fights it off? If a wife hires what she thinks is a contract killer to off her husband isn’t really a contract killer and turns her into the police she hasn’t really committed a serious crime (hey, no one was even marginally hurt, let alone seriously injured, let alone killed!)

You might want to rethink this one, and why speeding and drunk driving are considered crimes in the first place. You might also want to think what would happen if instead of paying the fine for speeding you flat-out refused to do so and claimed that you really shouldn’t even be called to account for a minor infraction where – Hey! – no one got hurt. Just see what the police think about that sort of reasoning when it’s you and not them using it.

And going back to my original point, I’m not really talking about the police who are being tried for various crimes right now; I’m talking about the off-duty “protesters” whose position is apparently that the police shouldn’t have to stand trial for any of these charges. Like the original poster, PNH was saying.

“Hi MPA, I hate to break the news to you, but I can guarantee our kids haven’t been around pot, cocaine, E, or lsd.”

Hi kidneystones, how can you guarantee this? All you can guarantee is that you haven’t CAUGHT your children around these substances. That proves nothing. Kids are very good at hiding things from their parents.

“As for the drugs and kids question, my wife and I don’t consider alcohol and tobacco to be “drugs” in the same way that pot, coke, and lsd are.”

Just because you do not consider them to be drugs doesn’t mean that they are not drugs.

“We simply don’t want our kids to have to decide whether to engage in illegal drug-taking activities while they are children. Folks in our community believe that’s a decision no child should be forced to make.”

Unless you live on a compound somewhere in Utah it is likely that your children have already made these kind of decisions. Probably multiple times. Also it is likely that at least some of your neighbours regularly use some sort of illegal drug.

/Also I apologise for the party crack. It was uncalled for.

I first came onto the blogosphere about the time Bush started torturing and the liberals were telling me the Law would protect the vulnerable from the powerful. How’s Iraq? How’s John Yoo doing?

Damn right I have contempt for the Law.

I still respect politics, the shout in the street.

Great! So when do cops have to follow the law, and when can they ignore the law, and are you willing to put it in writing?

If I were Dragon-King, cops would have to follow teh law ALL THE TIME. They can ignore the law or bend the rules in order to catch teh bad guys exactly NEVER. NOT EVER. NEVER NEVER NEVER.

What is the principled difference between OWS defying an evacuation order and a cop fixing a parking ticket? What is the difference between cops at City Hall and OWS supporters protesting and arraignment?

Teh protesting/ticket fixing cops get to go back to carrying guns and enforcing law. I fully support teh right of police to protest or engage in civil disobedience. I also fully support Society’s right to have standards about whom they choose to trust with powers of arrest and detention. That teh people in the role of Police can be held to a higher standard of behaviour – teh Uncle Ben Principle about Power and Responsibility being directly related (not inversely as it seems to have become) – I am okay with that.

Also too, WTF? Ticket-fixing vs. denying an order to abandon your political protest? Uh, yeah I would have to say there are principled differences between teh two.

DKW, did you get the memo that ‘teh’ was on the tired list? It hasn’t been ‘hawt’ for a couple of years now.

Yep. Even when the competition gets very stiff, like on this one, Dragon-King’s tehs and moars remain the single-most irritating feature of CT comment threads. It’s like if you’re an interesting conversation except that one person in the group keeps reaching out and pulling on your nose. Partly you wonder why he’s doing that, but mostly you just really want to not talk with him.

kidneystones@120

Okay, I give up. Could you please reveal, if not the township and county, at least the general area where you live, and in which your children have never been exposed to any (illegal) drugs?

I always had the sort of general impression that one of the roles of a parent was to help one’s children acquire a value system that would make them able to resist illegal drugs, regardless of geographic location. Because you never know where your children might end up living …

On another note: this thread is now so far OT (er, what was the topic?) that it seems (to me, anyway) BLR.

Bruce W @ driving drunk is trivial as long as it remains only a theoretical risk, and has no realized consequences. Fixing a ticket, similarly, typically has no immediate consequence

Well, not really. Driving drunk is culpably reckless regradless of whether the downside risk actuallly eventuates. ‘But’, you reply, ‘the ticket will not be fixed if someone has been killed’. Quite possibly not, but that’s not reaqlly the point. The problem about this kind of impunity for a certain class of drunk drivers is that it is anticipated.

The expectation of impunity encourages (removes the deterrent from) drunk driving. It’s irrelevant if when someone finally does goes killed the ‘ticket’ doesn’t then get ‘fixed’. In the individual case it is too late, and in general these cases don’t have much deterrent effect – drunk drivers are – of course – reckless about the prospect of actually crashing. (And incidentally, there should be a lot less moral luck involved in sentencing for these crimes – no-one really expects to crash, so the motivational impact of penalties for doing so being piled on top of the other grim consequences is pretty feeble.)

Similar consids also apply to other forms of dangerous driving – which is what these traffic offences mostly concern (and again note that ticket fixing applies only to tickets which a cop on the ground decided merited a ticket).

Motorists like to think that traffic offences are only on the books as just some kind of arbitrary persecution (massive metal things hurtling around at high speed – what could possibly go wrong?). Back here in reality the idea that legislators are happy to piss off the motoring lobby is on a par with the bullshit talked about evidentiary ‘technicalities’ as if judges and legislators are all criminal lovers who get off on enforcing perverse rules, or morons who really should be listening to the famously brainy boys in blue.

Even parking prohibitions are often there for safety reasons, though admittedly it’s generally primarily the safety of mere pedestrians.

It is not speed that causes accidents but poor driver training that may be the case, though just out of interest it certainly doesn’t follow that there is motivation other than safety for speed limits.

I can’t (certainly won’t) attempt to address that particular issue – but I would guess that a fair proportion of speeding drivers, at least, are at least rather under-justified in their beliefs about the low correlation of speed and casualty rate/seriousness.

Autobahns/motorways are highly specialised driving environments, too, and results from them can’t be applied to the rest of the road system.

But if you are right, and motorists know this and are thus justified in ignoring speed limits, even though legislators for some reason are unresponsive to the facts, then consider mention of speeding in the above to have been retracted.

kidneystones,
It was sincerely interesting to read about your experience raising children as a foreigner in Japan. As I feel we are getting a bit off topic I will leave the conversation here.
Thank you for your response.

Having lived in both Japan and China (where drug laws are more draconian and the social stigma attached to drug use even greater than Japan) I am stunningly impressed with kidneystones’ ability to live in a dream world. That’s not a case of rose colored glasses, he’s wearing a blindfold… also, pumping Glenn Reynolds. Dear, God!

Back to NYC: another angle:

http://gothamist.com/2011/10/31/drunks_criminals_told_by_nypd_to_oc.php

charming, kidneystones. Do you always leaven your opinions of the world with such an enormous dose of judgmental bile? Why do you assume that because I met a couple of high people at a nightclub I am one of them? Or is it the mere act of going to a nightclub that offends you so?

You also obviously don’t wish me and Atticus well; you think we’re junkies and a bad influence on your children, and want us locked up, and admire the Japanese system of doing just that. Why bother with the passive-aggression?

Oh, and please do share with me what you told your children about me and my friends. It’s surely enlightening for them and me both.

Ah, kidneystones exegesis.

“…kidneystones has produced a subtle yet highly entertaining satirical allegory, coolly vivisecting the ethos and praxis of the NYPD to reveal an ugly reality all the more shocking for the understated metaphory. By an inspired abduction of the narrative across oceans to an environment differently, more quietly, dysfunctional in its hypermasculinity, new trenchancy is enlisted to the service of this determinedly oblique denunciation of kiss up kick down authoritarianism; of uniform and uniformity; of status privileges conferring rights of open-ended command and control and of the total subordination concomitant with them; and, of course, of the squirming, teeming hive of corruption and hypocrisy that is the War in Drugs. Overlaid on the invocation of that all-too-corporeal – corporal – milieu, the lightest harmonic overtone of allusion to the hikikomori, the drug-free dropouts unable or unwilling to submerge themselves in the pack…[cont p.93]”

I sat on an empty seat opposite two young middle-school boys. One attempted to slyly drop a tissue on the floor behind his bag. One of the adults immediately fixed him with a glance and instructed him to think more clearly about his actions. The contrite lad picked up the tissue and we all returned to our activities.

This is unimprovable.

The hideously unambitious transgression: ‘One attempted to slyly drop a tissue on the floor behind his bag’.

The stifling vigilance of the adult who ‘immediately fixed him with a glance’. Not even a glare; a mere glance is skewer enough, any more prolonged eye contact excessive, decadent.

The rebuke grimly chilling in its bland pallidity, as psychically disruptive as any flash grenade in its gnomic, elusive obscurity: ‘instructed him to think more clearly about his actions’.

And finally, the robotic joylessness encapsulated in ‘we all returned to our activities’. Returned to our activities satisfied, after having abruptly broken off from these activities, all heads turning as one, like Midwich Cuckoos or drinkers in a stranger-silenced saloon, to observe the inevitable, silently delegated correction of this affront.

Clearly the conversation has deteriorated. sg can’t seem to understand whether he met a couple of people high or an entire segment of Tokyo. The pro-legalization community are so outages to discover that they share common ground with Reynolds both on the question of criminalization and police excesses that at least one reader believes I agree with Reynolds when I explicitely stated I do not. I was genuinely surprised that dk could be so profoundly ignorant of 21st libertarian thinking, loopy as it is.
I don’t know if sg and Atticus are junkies and I certainly wouldn’t think any less of them if they were. In our short time together, sg has confirmed that we’re unlikely to find much common ground on most topics that I could name. I realize that it’s probably expecting too much to ask sg to discover any space, even in the almost infinity of the internet for a largely pro firma “I wish you well.” But you have it.

To follow up Tim Wilkinson’s cute critique of kidneystones’ presentation of a Japanese train … I should add that public confrontation is absolutely not the way that Japan maintains good manners and public etiquette – it’s the opposite of how Japan works. Japanese are all about “let’s enjoy being environmentally friendly together!” and “how about we use the toilet neatly!” and the like. In fact, even quite horrifying breaches of social etiquette will be smoothly ignored by those surrounding the offender.

I’ve never seen anyone publicly rebuked on a train in Japan. My partner was once, for using her phone in the “omoiyari” (kindness) zone, but I’ve never seen that happen to anyone else and I think it was an overt (by Japanese standards) expression of racism. People follow rules here for many reasons, but fear of being “instructed […] to think more clearly about [one’s] actions” is not one of them.

In fact, in the queue for that very same nightclub, I intervened when a foreign guy (why are they always foreigners?) started feeling up the girls behind me. They certainly weren’t going to raise a fuss, and no one else was going to. And I did it by getting his attention and standing in the way, rather than confronting him. It’s just not how things are done around here.

Tim Wilkinson @144 wins the thread. Does anyone remember how this mess started?

@150:

Indeed, a good thread for Wilkinson, who neatly disposed of mcmanus in 76:

That you should buy into the Dirty Harry myth that expecting these armed thugs to make some concessions to the rule of law is in some way oppressive is quite frankly fucking staggering. Next you’ll be telling us about the shameful way the constuitutional rights of arms companies are flouted and all the rest of that pseudo-libertarian macho posturing.

It’s a bit early for the Godwin option, but the idea that having a police force that functions like a mob is in some way romantic really has had its chance and failed to deliver freedom. The Golding option, perhaps, for some kind of less heavyhanded hint as to how this stuff pans out.