Reason Magazine - Topics > Crime

Yay USA: We've Only Got One of the Planet's Five "Murder Capitals"

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:11:00 EDT

Foreign Policy lists five of the planet's most notably murderous metropoli, with murder rates per 100,000 population ranging from Moscow's 9.6 to Caracas's 130.

Our own New Orleans comes in with FBI stats of 95. (They list Moscow because it's so bad in comparison with most European capitals--but for 2007, our own capital of D.C. had a murder rate of 30.)

On the bright side, the overall U.S. murder rate has fallen since 1991 from 9.8 to 5.6.

Maybe Next Time He'll Think Twice Before Recycling

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:25:00 EDT

Tony Richard, a 17-year-old senior at Blaine High School in Blaine, Minnesota, works 20 hours a week at a local grocery store, where he uses a retractable razor blade to break down boxes for recycling. One day after work, he tossed the box cutter into his car, which he later drove to school. Anyone familiar with "zero tolerance" insanity can already guess where this story is heading: Richard was suspended from school, and may be expelled, for bringing a "weapon" onto campus. School officials say their hands were tied:

The policy flatly says any student found in violation will be immediately suspended, and expulsion proceedings will be launched automatically.
Tony has spent his entire high school career at Blaine, and the sum total of his behavioral mishaps until now were three marks for being tardy. That had no bearing on the school's decision to banish him.
The staff at Blaine High, Schwartz explained, has no leeway in such matters once a weapon is found on school property. These cases are referred directly to the school board regardless of circumstances.

[Thanks to Mark Lambert for the tip.]

Still No Good News for the West Memphis Three

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:52:00 EDT

The long, sad case of the West Memphis Three took yet another turn last week as Crittendon County Circuit Judge David Burnett rejected death row inmate Damien Echols' motion for a new trial based on new DNA evidence. Echols, who was 18 at the time, was convicted in 1994 of the brutal murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Two other teens, 17-year-old Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and 16-year-old Jason Baldwin, were also convicted, though only Echols was sentenced to death. Misskelley and Baldwin's motions were denied last week as well.

It's a shocking and thoroughly depressing story from start to finish. Local officials maintained that the murders were "Satanic" in nature and then used the three teens' fondness for black clothes and heavy metal music as evidence against them. There was no physical evidence linking the three teens in any way to the crime, only the factually impossible "confession" of Jessie Misskelley, a special education dropout with an IQ of 72. To appreciate just how ugly the whole sham was, consider that Misskelley's statement was wrong about virtually every significant aspect of the crime, from the nature of the victims' injuries, to the manner in which they were restrained, to the timeframe where the killings occurred. He gave vague and contradictory information, most of which was preceded by prompts from the police. As Mara Leveritt notes in Devil's Knot, her excellent book on the case, "Every detective in the room knew, even if Jessie did not, that the statement was absurd."

More here. My review of Leveritt's book here.

If You Pass This Bill, More Presidents Will Die

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Congress is considering a bill that would remove several burdensome restrictions on gun possession that the District of Columbia retained even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its handgun ban and firearm storage requirements violated the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment Enforcement Act, introduced by Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.) and supported by dozens of Democrats in the House, would repeal D.C.'s onerous gun registration rules, lift the requirement that guns be kept unloaded and locked except in the face of an "immediate" threat, and narrow the legal definition of prohibited "machine guns" so that it no longer covers magazine-loaded semiautomatics, the most popular self-defense weapons.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) argues that the bill would allow people to carry "loaded AK-47s or .50-caliber sniper assault weapons openly in cars or in person," which would pose a "palpable risk...to the public safety of our residents" and create a challenge for "federal law enforcement and security officials in this city, where two presidents have been killed with handguns." D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier warns, "In attempted and successful assassinations around the world, the first step in attacking a motorcade is frequently to take out the security detail with semiautomatic and automatic firearms."

I'm not sure where to begin. The only provision of the bill that deals with carrying weapons applies in the gun owner's "dwelling house or place of business or on other land possessed by that person." There's nothing about carrying loaded guns in public. AK-47s and all other "automatic firearms" would remain prohibited in any case. The two assassinated presidents to whom Norton refers are Abraham Lincoln, who was killed with a single-shot derringer, and James Garfield, who was killed with a revolver. (John Hinckley also used a revolver when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan.) Both are types of weapons that would remain legal in Washington no matter what Congress does.

I assume Holmes and Lanier are not suggesting would-be assassins are deterred by laws against carrying loaded weapons. Their concern seems to be that if Childers' bill passes the streets will be filled with law-abiding citizens openly carrying loaded rifles and shotguns, making the assassins harder to identify. Leaving aside the rather important point that the bill does not change the rules for carrying guns in public, here's a good way to tell who the assassins are: They're the ones who aren't openly carrying loaded weapons.

In July I noted D.C.'s determination to continue flouting the Second Amendment.

'Political Correctness Has Ruined Country Humor'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:34:00 EDT

At a Harlan, Kentucky, grocery store last week, perennial gubernatorial candidate Otis "Bullman" Hensley encountered a woman with her two nieces, ages 11 and 13. He offered to trade a "fattening hog" for the girls, a variation on an old Appalachian joke meant as a compliment. The woman evidently didn't get it. A.P. reports that "the family obtained a warrant for Hensley's arrest from the local prosecutor, claiming the comment was intended to entice the children into illegal sexual activity." Hensley—who earned his nickname by traveling the state with "a giant Fiberglas bull on which he attached a sign proclaiming that, if elected, he would 'chase the bull out of Frankfort'"—spent three days in jail before the girls' father decided he was willing to accept an apology in lieu of a 10-year prison sentence.

"He absolutely meant no harm," the prosecutor says. "It was a joke to him." Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones complains that "political correctness has ruined country humor."

If the hog-for-girl swap is representative, I won't mourn the loss of country humor too much. I'm more worried about the way sex crime hysteria has perverted the law. "In Kentucky," A.P. explains, "citizens can obtain arrest warrants simply by filing a complaint with local prosecutors," and "no investigation is necessary for police to make an arrest when the charge involves an alleged sexual offense."

[via The Freedom Files]

If No One Ran From the Room Crying, He Wouldn't Be Doing His Job

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:50:00 EDT

Cheyenne, Wyoming, Police Officer John Gay travels from school to school, warning students about the sexual predators lurking on the Internet. During a recent visit to Windsor High School in Windsor, Colorado, he got a little carried away, haranguing 16-year-old Shaylah Nordic over her allegedly provocative MySpace page in front of an assembly of her fellow students:

"He basically just said I was asking to be raped," said Shaylah Nordic, a Windsor sophomore.
A photo from Nordic's MySpace.com page, depicting her in a T-shirt and shorts, bending over and pointing at a new pair of shoes, was displayed on a screen in front of two separate student assemblies.
"He was saying that the posture of her rear end could be appealing to a sexual predator," said Ty Nordic, Shaylah's father.
"He did this in a mocking way," Ty said. "He took a pretty innocent picture and made it look sleazy."
Ty says Gay told the students that older men would be masturbating to her picture.
"She was belittled, embarrassed and humiliated," Ty said.

After Shaylah burst into tears and ran from the auditorium, Gay realized he had gone too far, so he apologized. Just kidding. He called her on her cell phone and asked her to return, thereby proving his point that creepy men could get her contact information from her MySpace page.

There is some disagreement between Gay and the Nordic family (as well as other students who witnessed his presentation) about exactly what he said—whether, for example, he claimed to have shown Shaylah's photograph to an imprisoned sex offender, who said he would use it as a masturbatory aid and added that if he ever met Shaylah he would "tear her up." But Gay does not dispute the general thrust of his comments, which amounted to a warning that Shaylah had in effect posted a "Rape Me" sign.

Shaylah, who has taken down her MySpace page, told Windsor Now the experience was especially upsetting because "my whole life I've really prided myself on being a Christian girl and having this pure image." Now teachers and fellow students look at her differently. "He just completely ruined that reputation that I worked for," she said. "He basically called me a slut."

Although no teacher or administrator intervened during Gay's presentation to save Shaylah from his harassment (which several of her fellow students vocally protested at the assembly), Principal Rick Porter apologized afterward:

I have some apologies to make. I don't want to apologize for the message that I'm trying to send because I am trying to educate kids in some of the dangers of the world that they work with every day. Some of the ways that [Gay] approached it offended, embarrassed and are hurting some of our kids.

Porter deserves some credit for apologizing. But when he booked Gay he had seen him in action and knew his technique involved using information from students' MySpace and Facebook pages to publicly put them on the spot. The fact that he asked Gay to visit his school anyway, not to mention the fact that Gay feels justified in using his Scared Modest approach to begin with, can be understood only in the context of the general panic about online sex offenders. Porter and Gay both seem to think they're dealing with an emergency in which harsh measures are required to prevent girls from being abducted, raped, and/or murdered, a danger Gay repeatedly invoked.

Yet such outcomes are rare even among Internet-related sex crimes, the vast majority of which involve consensual encounters between teenagers and adults. As investigators at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center have shown (PDF), the typical "online predator" (who targets teenagers, not prepubescent children) does not conceal his age or his sexual interest and does not use force or the threat of violence to get his way. Something like 95 percent of sex crimes that involve the Internet also involve the knowing cooperation of the victim. So while authority figures like Porter and Gay are warning teenagers to look out for violent perverts who may use their online information to kidnap and assault them, the real danger is both more subtle and more obvious. The University of New Hampshire researchers found that the teenagers most at risk of sexual overtures from adults were those who "interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors," such as "having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online." In other words, it's not simply a matter of posting personal information (which by itself was not associated with an increased risk of come-ons) or putting up a picture that might titillate a rapist (or a cop).

[via The Freedom Files]

Use an Aesthetically Pleasing Tactic to Keep Taggers Temporarily at Bay, Go to Jail

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:59:00 EDT

Los Angeles is almost as lousy with graffiti as Washington D.C. is lousy with rats. Worse, when you confront a tagger defacing your home or business, he will shoot you.

What's a shop-owner to do? Law enforcement is obviously out of the question (it's akin to reporting your camera stolen in Rome). But you can apparently hire some local mural painters (L.A.'s got some seriously awesome street murals) who are respected by taggers enough so that they leave the various Virgin Marys and flag-carrying eagles alone. But − unlike awful graffiti, for example! − having nice-looking paint on the side of your liquor store requires any number of permits from the city.

"ORDER TO COMPLY," said the letter from the Building and Safety Department, which required the Antonios to remove "excessive signage" under threat of a $1,000 fine "and/or six (6) months imprisonment" for each of four alleged violations.

The Antonios called the office of Councilman Ed Reyes for help, but to little avail. One day the city sent out a work crew and just like that, the Antonios' $3,000 investment was gone, covered over with dull beige paint.

You know, of course, what happened next. Whitewashing that wall was like sending ants an invitation to a picnic. The taggers have been back almost daily, treating the wall like a fresh canvas.

Whole story here.

Suicide Solution?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:29:00 EDT

The wave of post-Sept. 11 anthrax attacks, as Jeff Taylor wrote in this space a month ago, is one of the murkiest and most unsatisfying criminal cases in recent U.S. history. Today comes news that teases satisfaction, while deepening the murk:

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.
Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Whole thing here. Color me skeptical of anyone who becomes a public* suspect only after their death, particularly in a case that has already produced a $5.82 million settlement for the last government scientist who was accused of the crime.

* I added the word "public" there, because it was silent in the original.

This Polygamist Thing of Ours

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:53:00 EDT

At a Senate hearing yesterday, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) described polygamous sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) as a "form of organized crime," saying they have created a "web of criminal conduct that includes welfare fraud, tax evasion, massive corruption and strong-arm tactics." Reid, who has introduced a bill that would establish a Justice Department task force on polygamy and "assist victims of crimes committed by polygamist groups," added: "I am not saying that they are the same thing as the crime syndicates that used to run Las Vegas. But they engage in an ongoing pattern of serious crimes that we ignore at our peril."

This is the same sort of indiscriminate accusation that led to wholesale removal of children from the FLDS' Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, last April. It may well be that some members of the church married and/or had sex with underage girls. This week a Texas grand jury indicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs (already in prison for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin) and four followers on sexual assault charges. A sixth FLDS member was indicted for failing to report child abuse. But as the Texas Supreme Court concluded, evidence of some underage marriages does not mean every FLDS parent is guilty of child abuse. Likewise, the fact that some members of polygamous groups have committed welfare fraud or failed to pay taxes does not mean every member has, let alone that membership in such a group is enough to make one a criminal.

Reid, a Mormon, should understand why it's a bad idea for the federal government to start picking on unconventional religious groups. Instead he seems eager to persecute heretics.

New Orleans D.A. Fights Murder by Sending Pot Smokers to Prison

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:59:00 EDT

New Orleans City Business reports that Orleans Parish District Attorney Keva Landrum-Johnson has instituted a new policy of charging minor marijuana offenders with felonies if they have prior convictions. Under state law, possessing a small amount of marijuana is a misdemeanor that can result in a jail sentence of up to six months but is typically punished by a small fine. Subsequent offenses can be treated as felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison for a second offense and up to 20 years for a third offense. But Landrum-Johnson's predecessors routinely exercised their discretion to treat such offenses as misdemeanors. The new D.A. has reversed that policy so she can rack up felony prosecutions and demonstrate her tough-on-crime credentials:

Shortly after Keva Landrum-Johnson took over as district attorney...hundreds of new felony cases flooded the public defenders office, overwhelming the 29 defense attorneys.
After New Orleans regained its title as the nation's murder capital, the public demanded its city leaders crack down on violent crime. By filing hundreds of new felony cases each month, it appeared as if the new DA heeded their call.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the case, said Steve Singer, chief of trials for the Orleans Public Defenders Office.
The flood of new felony charges didn't target murderers, rapists or armed robbers— they targeted small-time marijuana users, sometimes caught with less than a gram of pot, and threatened them with lengthy prison sentences.
The resulting impact has clogged the courts with non-violent, petty offenses, drained the resources of the criminal justice system and damaged low-income African-American communities, Singer said.

Nearly all of the people facing felony charges for smoking pot are black and poor, because, as everyone knows, virtually no middle-class white people smoke pot. One defendant cited by the paper is a man who was "arrested once before as a teenager 20 years ago" and since then "has married, raised a family and kept out of trouble." Now he may have to spend the money he saved for his son's college tuition on legal expenses. Take that, crime!

In May I marveled at New York City's little-noticed crackdown on pot smokers, which has a similar racial skew, unjustly converts citable offenses to misdemeanors, but looks enlightened compared to Landrum-Johnson's crusade.

[via Paul Armentano at NORML]

Where's the (Criminal) Justice?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

After 15 years of decline, the violent crime rate in America has in the past two years inched upward again, driven by spikes in midsized cities such as Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Minneapolis. This is occurring even as the U.S. continues to set new records in incarceration rates: One in 100 Americans is now behind bars or on parole. In recent years, DNA testing has shown that our criminal justice system is troublingly fallible. Some 218 people have been exonerated in recent years, and we’re discovering a new case of wrongful conviction every couple of weeks. The U.S. attorney scandal, the war on drugs and problems with how federal agents use confidential informants have all been in the news of late.

Yet criminal justice policy has thus far been conspicuously absent from the presidential campaign.

Read the rest of this article at The Politico.

Headline of the Morning (Hippie Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:04:00 EDT

From the AP:

Hippie town's homeless attack portends trend

In Bushitler's America, even the hippies are mad as hell!

Comply, or We Will Erase your Memory

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:50:00 EDT

Need still more reason to dislike Tennessee law enforcement officials? How about having your memory wiped? From Channel 4 in Nashville:

For almost two years, [Nashville] Metro police have had the option of calling for a needle loaded with a strong sedative to control the most unruly people they encounter on the street....
The drug is called Midazolam, which is better known as Versed. People who have had a colonoscopy have probably had a shot of the drug for the procedure.
"The drug has an amnesia effect, and we use that therapeutically because one of the nice ways to take care of the discomfort is to make people forget that they've had it," said biomedical ethics and law enforcement expert Dr. Steven Miles....
"It's something that in the medical community and in the EMS medical community is very common. It's a given. When I surveyed the major metropolitan areas around the country, I think only two cities were not actively using it," said [Dr. Corey Slovis, Nashville’s emergency medical director].

Read the whole thing here.

And no, this is not an alternative to being Tasered. Channel 4 reporter Demetria Kalodimos interviewed Dameon Beasley, who said that officers injected him with the drug only after failing to shock him into submission.

Editor Brian Doherty wrote here about police abuses during the 2007 immigration riots. Editor Radley Balko blogged here about police Tasering a man in his own home.

First, Group Showers--Now, No Cornbread?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:27:00 EDT

Polk County, Fla., needs to save a little money, so it's putting the inmates of the Polk County jail—many of whom are behind bars for making, selling, or possessing crystal meth—on a diet:

Cornbread to crackers - Instead of serving cornbread 3 times per week, inmates are now served 3 packs of crackers per week. This represents a cost savings of $33,304 per year.

Tea and juice to water - All tea and juice products have been eliminated. Inmates are instead served water. This represents a cost savings of $56,630 per year.

Two slices of bread to one - Instead of serving each inmate 2 slices of bread for breakfast each day, he or she receives 1 slice of bread for breakfast each day. This represents a cost savings of $25,116 per year.

Fresh eggs to egg patties - Instead of serving 2 fresh eggs to each inmate per week, inmates are served with one egg patty per week. This represents a cost savings of $24,545 per year.

PBJ to meat - Instead of serving peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, inmates are served meat sandwiches. This represents a cost savings of $11,076 per year.
Carton milk to Non-fat dry milk - By switching from cartons of fresh milk to non-fat dry powdered milk, PCSO will save $10,545 per year.

The Polk County Sheriff's Office's list of "Inmate Rights and Responsibilities" includes "nutritious meals" as a right, but Polk County Sheriff (and Head Good Ole' Boy) Grady Judd says that if inmates want to eat food that is nutritious and tasty, "They need to behave, quit violating the law, and stay out of the county jail."

Polk County isn't the only place cutting back. Call it the Shawshank effect (empathizing with prisoners), but I think that as long as we continue to incarcerate people for committing victimless crimes, we should feed them well—Leona Helmsley's dog has it better, for christ's sake.

Editor Jacob Sullum argued for incarcerating fewer people here.

"It Is Unclear Why He Did That"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:38:00 EDT

A tidy example of how government can corrupt business, rather than the far more frequently chronicled reverse case:

In my idyllic suburban hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, the police shut down a brothel a few days ago. According to the Wellesley Townsman, one of those arrested for running the business was a man named William Eastwick.

The paper also notes that six months ago the Wellesley police shut down a similar operation nearby. That police action was based on a tip from the same William Eastwick. Oddly, when referring to the Eastwick tip, the town paper says "it is unclear why he did that."

The temptation to shut down your competitors using the heavy hand of the state is ever-present. This little example of dueling rats is basically the same thing as, say, protective tariffs on steel or corn subsidies. Because the businesses in question happen to be illegal, the instruments are even blunter than usual.

Via Greg Mankiw

Medicare Fraud: Big League Faking It

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:53:00 EDT

How much more common would this problem be under a universal healthcare system?

Rita Campos Ramirez orchestrated what prosecutors call the largest health-care fraud by one person. Over nearly four years, she electronically submitted more than 140,000 Medicare claims for unnecessary equipment and services. She used the proceeds to finance big-ticket purchases, including two condominiums and a Mercedes-Benz....
Employees review fewer than 5 percent of the nearly 1 billion claims filed each year. The vast majority of claims shuttle through computer systems that are tweaked when authorities notice fraud patterns.

And how do the Medicare and Medicaid authorities respond to these crooks?

This year, [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] is working to finalize a rule that would prevent convicted felons from obtaining Medicare billing numbers.

Looks like even a universal program would leave a few people high and dry.

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum with more Medicare madness. Senior Editor Radley Balko on Medicaid Fraud and the 4th Amendment.

One Place Where Crime Isn't Getting Any Better

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:28:00 EDT

The FBI's most recent report says that violent crime rates are going down; everywhere but Liberty City, that is. Turns out Grand Theft Auto IV's cops suck at their jobs:

"I was shot 14 times on my way to work today, including twice by police," said one Algonquin-area resident. "That is unacceptable."
Many blame the LCPD directly for the increase in criminal activity, citing the department's lax procedure for arresting criminals, which involves taking 10 percent of the suspect's money, confiscating his weapons, and simply releasing him from custody later that day. Outraged citizens say this is not enough, especially in a city where assault rifles can be found on factory roofs and grenade caches are located under the globe at the old World's Fair site.
"The police just let them go, and 20 minutes later they're shooting at the very same criminals from helicopters," veteran crime reporter Mike Whiteley said. "That is not proper law enforcement. We may be seeing a return to the bad old days of 2002, when the police, the FIB, and even Army tank battalions would leave countless bodies on the streets while attempting to capture just one man on some sort of joyful mass-destruction spree."

In related news, it looks like DC police have picked up a lesson or two from Liberty City cops. And the LCPD aren't the only ones with itchy trigger fingers.

D.C.'s Crime Problem

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:59:00 EDT

When it comes to sacrificing civil liberties in the name of fighting crime, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and his administration are full of innovative ideas. Among them:

• Giving police officers bigger, badder guns.

• Sending officers door to door requesting to conduct "voluntary" gun and drug searches of citizens' homes.

• Cordoning off portions of the city with almost certainly unconstitutional checkpoints requiring citizens to tell the police where they came from, where they're going, and what their business is in that particular neighborhood. The Washington Post reports that motorists refusing to answer questions or to submit to requested searches of their cars risk arrest.

Ah, but there's one crime-fighting idea Fenty adamantly opposes: letting law-abiding D.C. residents own a gun for self-protection. Seems that only the government can be trusted to protect you from crime. Except, of course, when it doesn't.

It's interesting that crime-fighting ideas requiring the citizenry to give up some of its freedoms are "innovative," while proposals that would give some freedom back are "dangerous."

R. Kelly's Sex Tape Phantom

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:17:00 EDT

It seems the purported victim's family in the R. Kelly sex tape case is having difficulty doing what Jimi Hendrix and Meg White fans were able to do in only a few hours: determining whether or not they know the person in the sex video.

Lead attorney Edward Genson starts things off by calling a cousin, an aunt, and an uncle of the alleged victim, all of whom declare unequivocally that their relative is not Sex-Tape Girl. (All three also acknowledge that they hadn't seen the video until this week—a reminder of the many prosecution witnesses who, the defense has argued, were certain that the alleged victim was on the tape before ever having seen it.) Charlotte Edwards, the girl's aunt, says that the young woman in the video has much larger breasts than the alleged victim. Genson, perhaps rusty when it comes to questioning nonhostile witnesses, follows up by asking Charlotte if she'd ever seen her niece naked—the same question he used to undermine witnesses who claimed they were 100 percent sure they could identify the girl. Charlotte, unperturbed or unaware of Genson's mistake, responds straight-facedly that she had indeed seen her relative's nude torso, "when I used to change her diapers."
In contrast to Genson, state's attorney Shauna Boliker performs flawlessly. After a few perfunctory questions to the day's first witness, the alleged victim's cousin Shonna Edwards, she begins the show-and-tell portion of the cross-examination. On a giant screen 10 feet from the jury box, the state displays a screenshot from a video put out by the alleged victim's music group. Shonna identifies her cousin and band mate immediately. A few seconds later, we see a still from the 27-minute sex tape—if memory serves, it's taken from the very beginning, as Sex-Tape Girl is about to receive a handful of bills from Sex-Tape Man. Shonna says that she doesn't recognize that person. Boliker then has the photos displayed side by side. Both are profile shots, showing the left side of the alleged victim's face, her mullet, and a slightly puffy cheek. They look the same. "Is it possible that it could be the same individual?" Boliker asks. "Not at all," Shonna says. Boliker doesn't accuse her of lying or covering for her kin. She asks no further questions, eager to get the next witness on the stand—another opportunity to put the pair of poster-sized photos in front of the jury.

Granted, there's a lot at stake if one of the actors is indeed underage, but what's the hold-up in identification? Seems like the gist of the case—the accusation of child pornography—is getting lost in the maze that is Kelly's extensive list of associates.

For more on Kelly's history of doing things that everybody disapproves of, click here.

RIP, Emperor's Club VIP

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:19:00 EDT

With all the fuss over what to do with Eliot Spitzer, rubber-neckers almost forgot about the state's punitive plans for the folks who arranged the governor's good times:

The petite madam at the center of the prostitution ring that brought down Eliot Spitzer is expected to plead guilty as soon as this week and dish dirt in an ongoing federal probe centered on the former governor.
Cecil "Katie" Suwal, 23, agreed yesterday to come clean on her role in the million-dollar Emperor's Club VIP ring, according to a statement by her lawyer, Alberto Ebanks.
"Ms. Suwal agreed to come to terms with the government and will accept responsibility for her involvement in the operations of the Emperor's Club VIP," Ebanks said. "She is contrite and she is determined to right her wrongs in a manner that is just and fair."
A source said Suwal has agreed to testify for the feds in a grand-jury investigation that could lead to criminal charges against Spitzer.

Sewal's and others' testimonies are going to be used in the probe against Spitzer, but one can't help but wonder what will be left of these people and the callgirls they employed when the feds are finished with them. I bet Spitzer's hoping he can quietly sneak back to suburbia without facing any charges. If he makes it out of this without having to wear a state-issued onesy, will he have the balls/integrity to lobby on behalf of the people who are likely to get locked up for providing him with a remedy for his libido-less marriage?

For more reason coverage of Spitzer's downfall, see here, here, here, and here.

Membership Has Its Privileges

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:53:00 EDT

Chicago Alderman Dick Mell forgot to register his guns with the Chicago Police Department this year. He's required to do so under one of the toughest gun laws in the country, a law he helped pass.

Mell first sought to play the "do you know who I am" card, and bully Chicago PD's gun registration division into granting him an exception. They declined (good on them for that).

No problem. Mell has since introduced a new law that would give Chicagoans who forgot to register their guns last year a one-month grace period in which they can re-register without penalty.

Mell helpfully explains:

"It's not just for me. It's for other people with the same problem. It's giving people who legitimately registered their guns at one time only to let it slip by a chance to come back into compliance," Mell said. "Some people didn't realize that, every year, you have to re-register your guns."

By the way, if you move to or live in Chicago, you can forget about buying a handgun like one of those Mell owns. They've been banned since 1982. Mell was grandfathered in. Judge for yourself how well the ban has protected Chicagoans from gun violence. But hey, at least Mell feels safe.

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

A Better Way to Fight Crime

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In June 2006, a minor brawl erupted at Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, England. In the aftermath, police arrested Mark Dixie, a chef at the pub, who surprised them by breaking into tears.

He had good reason. As a standard practice in arrests, a DNA swab was taken from him. What the authorities didn't suspect, but he did, is that his DNA would match that of the man who raped and murdered an 18-year-old woman nine months earlier. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

This is just one of many cases that have vindicated the use of DNA in cracking crimes. Britain, which now has the world's biggest collection of such profiles, has found it abundantly useful as a law enforcement tool. In a typical month, police get 3,500 matches between samples recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles in the database.

Now the U.S. government is set to expand its own database to include anyone arrested by federal agents, as well as many foreigners who are detained for one reason or another. It will add more than 1 million samples each year, greatly increasing the chances of getting "cold hits" from crime scenes.

But the expansion alarms some civil liberties advocates, who think it is dangerous to include people who may be innocent. They would prefer to see the files limited to those who have already been convicted of crimes. By that logic, we would throw out the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested but never prosecuted. In reality, we don't. Why? Not because we impute guilt to anyone who is arrested, but because a bigger database is more helpful in solving crimes than a smaller one. And because the only people who stand to be implicated by such information are those who are guilty of later crimes.

We could "protect" innocent arrestees by discarding such helpful identifying information. But we have reached the conclusion that the potential value of preserving it outweighs any burden it places on those who were wrongly arrested.

In some instances, the database can be a boon to the innocent. In 2004, when Chester Turner was implicated in a string of Los Angeles murders through DNA analysis, a man wrongly convicted for three of them was freed from prison.

Opponents of the new system fear that information from the federal bank may someday be used for purposes other than law enforcement—say, screening insurance applicants for certain diseases. But this is a weak excuse for rejecting the administration's proposal.

In the first place, the potential uses of the DNA information kept in databases have been greatly exaggerated. "The profile's not useful for anything much other than identification," says David Kaye, a law and life sciences professor at Arizona State University. "The 'medical' information is, and is likely to remain, no more significant than, say, a blood type."

The actual DNA swabs tell far more. But those are not what goes into the database. The privacy concern is an argument for getting rid of the original samples—not for getting rid of the identifying markers they yield.
Besides, the obvious way to address potential abuses of useful information is by enforcing appropriate rules.

The government might do something alarming with the existing fingerprint files—such as require employers to cross-check prints from all private-sector job applicants. But you don't need to throw out the fingerprints of anyone not convicted to prevent such misuse, as we have found. You can prevent it by not allowing it.

In the case of the DNA database, the looming imposition on the guiltless is minimal. Under the proposed policy, when someone is arrested or detained, his DNA will be taken and a profile included in the federal collection. If he is not convicted, though, that profile will be expunged on his request.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks the removal should occur automatically. But if keeping the profile is of no concern to the innocent person in question, it's hard to see why it should be of concern to the rest of us. Those who consider it an intolerable invasion of privacy, after all, will avoid it. Those who couldn't care less won't.

DNA analysis is one of the most valuable instruments ever devised for snaring the guilty and exonerating the innocent. This expansion will make it even more potent.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Grand Theft Smasheroo

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:16:00 EDT

The latest installment of the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto will bust up sales records like Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) driving home from Capitol Hill, say industry analysts:

The launch of "Grand Theft Auto 4" is expected to be the biggest entertainment event of the year, with first-week sales forecast to be up to $400 million, beating those of last year's "Halo 3" from Microsoft Corp.

More here.

As sales mount for the game, now set in New York-like "Liberty City" and (hopefully featuring a whore-banging, money-laundering, hypocritical pol a la Eliot* Spitzer), expect the protests to mount against the game, which has somehow helped add to generally lower crime rates in the United States.

[*]: Spelling corrected due to input from reader Adam Scavone.

Openly Armed = Frequently Hassled

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:31:00 EDT

In Ohio, where the state constitution declares that "the people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security," supporters of that right waged a long battle to overturn an 1859 ban on carrying concealed firearms. A constitutional challenge was successful at the trial and appeals court levels but rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court. The state legislature finally enacted a nondiscretionary carry permit law in 2004. Since then anyone 21 or older with a clean record who passes a safety course has been eligible for a permit. A recent story in The Columbus Dispatch notes a fact that was widely overlooked during the debate over concealed carry in Ohio: Openly carrying a gun was never illegal in Ohio, and it does not require a permit, although people who tote rifles or strap pistols to their belts in public can expect "some unwanted attention from police officers":

Philip Turner, 30, discovered that in July when he walked from his Hilliard apartment to his parked truck wearing a gun on his belt. At the time, Turner worked protecting banks' ATMs as they were serviced and delivering diamonds to jewelry stores.
An undercover agent with the Ohio Investigative Unitthe police agency that enforces the state's alcohol, tobacco and food-stamp laws -- saw the gun and quickly ordered him against his truck with his hands on his head.
"He came up and treated me like a felon for absolutely no reason at all," Turner said. "There wasn't even a suspicious action on my part to warrant him taking this action against me. Had I been out waving a gun around the parking lot, (then) yeah."
After being detained for about 30 minutes, and after Hilliard police arrived at the agent's request, Turner was released without charges. An internal investigation that concluded this week found that neither Agent Timothy Gales, who had stopped Turner, nor his partner, Betty Ford, did anything wrong.
However, it also revealed that Gales did not know it was legal for Turner to carry a gun openly, said Lindsay Komlanc, spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety. As a result, more than 100 agents in the unit are to attend a mandatory refresher course on Ohio's gun laws over the next couple of months, she said.

In addition to avoiding hassles from police officers who are ignorant of the law, concealed carry offers the advantages of not alarming passers-by and of keeping criminals uncertain about who is packing. The latter feature means that even the unarmed can benefit from the potential deterrent effect. Whether that effect has had a measurable impact on crime remains controversial in Ohio as elsewhere. The violent crime rate in Ohio, which had been declining pretty steadily since the early 1990s, continued the downward trend in 2004, the year concealed carry permits were first issued, went up slightly in 2005, then down slightly in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has data.

[Thanks to Dan Gifford for the tip.]