You Be the Judge: The Case of the Glass Eye
A man is on trial for puncturing another man’s eye with a key during a fight outside a Philadelphia bar. The victim is on the stand, testifying, when his prosthetic eye suddenly pops out and falls into his hand. (What the judge decided) For links to CJA posts as soon … Continue reading →
How Many Gun-Related Deaths Has the United States Seen in the Eight Weeks Following the Newtown, Connecticut Shootings?
The answer For links to CJA posts as soon as they go online, as well as Facebook-only content, please “like” us (using the button on the upper right-hand portion of this page). This article, and all articles on this site, are © 2013 by Bill Bickel unless otherwise noted.
Teacher Fired For Calling Her Students ”Future Criminals” on Facebook
Jennifer O’Brien, a New Jersey first grade teacher, has been fired for writing on her Facebook page “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals,” and that her students should take part in a “scared straight” program. She’d intended the posts to be read only by her … Continue reading →
Colorado 7-Year-Old Suspended For Throwing an Imaginary Hand Grenade
“I think that when a child is trying to save the world, I don’t think he should be punished for it” -Mandy Watkins, mother of Colorado second-grader Alex Evans During recess, Alex threw an imaginary hand grenade into a box full of “pretend evil forces.” You’d think school officials would … Continue reading →
“How Police Are Using Technology to Predict Crimes” ==> “404 Not Found”
Hmph. Other appropriate errors would have been “Payment Required 402″, “Not Implemented 501″, and “Not Modified 304″.
Weird. It still works for me. But there’s an alternate URL that leads to the same article, so I plugged that one in.
“Technology” to predict crimes?
It’s just statistics, with number crunching. Why wasn’t this done, say, 20 years ago?
I am no expert in the car rental industry but is a rental company responsible for knowing the complete history of every car they use? I have to think some are used when they get them and who knows what has or hasn’t been done.
And the racial profiling claim from the ACLU is a poor argument. Racial profiling exists regardless of the law. Unless we start saying police can not take any action until they see a crime taking place, there will be profiling. I can’t imagine anyone wanting that.
CRIMINAL profiling is just fine. RACIAL profiling is not. Because, um, being of a particular race is not a crime. Rather than thinking of it as “OK, well, that guy turned out to be a nice, normal, law-abiding citizen who was not at all up to no good, but better safe than sorry”/”Sure, people who are a particular shade of skin tone get hassled a little more often, but not THAT much more often”… think of it as “while the cops were checking out THAT guy because of the race he happens to belong to, an actual criminal got away with it because the cops were wasting their time with the wrong guy.” instead.
Of course, note that the people who say “it’s not that big a deal” tend to be in the subset of citizens the cops are less likely to examine under racial profiling. In a similar vein, consider the Arizona immigration law that was recently struck down by the Supreme Court… sure, it SAYS right in it that racial profiling is forbidden, but I don’t think any of its supporters assumed the cops would be detaining white guys to check their immigration status. This is, after all, the state that REPEALED photo radar because it was too intrusive on their freedom.
I never said racial profiling was fine, just that the stop and frisk law does not cause it. Of course I would be less fond of the Arizona immigration law if I was Hispanic. That doesn’t make it a bad law. Make sensitivity training for police officers mandatory if you want. But accept the fact that any time we give police more freedom to do their job, some will be targeted more than others. Doesn’t mean we have to tie their hands so they can’t do anything until a crime has been committed.
You’re setting up a false dichotomy. Saying that you think the NYPD has too low of a standard for suspicion for stopping and frisking people isn’t the same as saying that the police can’t do anything until a crime has been committed. There’s a pretty wide range of possible police standards between the two extremes. Everyone agrees that police can stop someone based on reasonable suspicion. The disagreements are over whether the standards the police are following are in fact reasonable.
Similarly, it’s not reasonable to dismiss the racial profiling argument on the grounds that racial profiling always exists. To the degree that police have to give clear, objective grounds for a stop, explainable to a magistrate, there will be less racial profiling, because the stops will be based more on objective standards. To the degree that you trust the police to give weaker, more subjective reasons, the more racial profiling there will be, because this allows more police biases, conscious or unconscious, to enter into the process. It’s a tradeoff, because with the decreased standards for the stop, you get more racial profiling, and more innocent people getting their privacy violated by the police, but you can also get more crimes stopped. I have no opinion on whether the NYPD has gone too far one way or the other. But it’s not reasonable to act as if the issue is over whether the police should be able to do helpless to do anything, or to say racial profiling is irrelevant because it will always exist.
“Is a rental company responsible for knowing the complete history of every car they use?”
I would think that the law only goes to the model; if the 2005 model of the Ford Focus were recalled (for instance), then rental companies wouldn’t be allowed to offer a 2005 Ford Focus as an option.
“If a recall notice has been issued for a rented car, that car should be taken off the road until it’s fixed – it’s that simple,” said Rep. Lois Capps, D.-California, one of the sponsors of the bill.
That makes it sound to me like they could still offer that 2005 Ford Focus if the issue involved with the recall notice was fixed. And really, if we made it so that any model that has had a recall notice was prohibited for rental, I have to think that limit availability considerably.
Especially since the large chains buy huge numbers of the same model, and have cross-marketing agreements that limit their ability to buy other brands. A “you can’t EVER use that model again” law potentially pushes a rental car company into bankruptcy… legally they can’t use the cars they got now, and contractually they can’t switch to a different car.
The problem is that fixing a recall notice takes a car out of productive service. When it’s one car, you get it in to be fixed and get a friend or family member to give you a lift on the day when it’s in the shop being fixed… a minor inconvenience. If you have 50 of the things, you probably can’t get them all fixed the same day, and, since you have to wait to get some of them fixed, why not let them continue to earn their keep while they wait their turn at the shop (if the thing they’re being recalled for is unlikely to occur.) That’s rational business decision-making. From there, though, you get a reluctance to take the cars out of service at all, because a car in the shop isn’t earning any money. And hey, even if the problem the cars are being recalled for happens, the cost of paying off a lawsuit is probably less than the lost earnings of the fleet of cars subject to recall from grounding them until they’re fixed. Cases like that, where the measurement of things purely in terms of dollars, without taking other things into consideration, is why we need government regulation of business.
There’s another way than stop and frisk that can be pretty darn effective and is just good policing. Somebody suspicious is spotted and the officer strikes up a conversation. A good one would be along the lines of “hey, aren’t you John/Jane Doe from over on Eighth St? No? Wow, you two could be twins. I’m Officer Friendly, what’s your name. Well, be seeing you around.” If they were up to something, unless they are complete idiots, they will have serious second thoughts on whatever was planned. If they weren’t, hey, Officer Friendly has made a personal contact with a citizen and that’s not a bad thing either.