Archive for November, 2006

MORE ON POLICE MILITARIZATION, in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today. Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq. The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.

Read the whole thing — the link should work for a week.

UPDATE: Reader Gary Cameron emails:

I think it’s important to separate issues that involve the safety of individual cops from the so-called “police militarization” controversy.

Joseph McNamara, as a former cop speaking out against the recent NYPD shooting in the WSJ piece, is the police equivalent of those former Bush officials turned media darlings who turn on the administration after they leave office. His credibility with the MSM media stems solely from the fact that he once worked as a cop, as well as his willingness to speak out against pretty much anything rank and file police officers believe in, which he has done ever since his very short and controversial term as San Jose police chief. This is not to say that the opinions of most police officers (or the NYPD shooting, for that matter) are necessarily ‘right’, just that McNamara has no more credibility or insight on these issues than anyone else.

I think the following quote from his piece is very telling:

>>Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances.<< Back in 1985, while a street cop in Vancouver, BC, I ended up firing all six of my .38 rounds at point blank range into the 10-ring of a mentally-disturbed gentleman. He had stabbed me in the side after stabbing a young man in the stomach, just missing the baby he was carrying. Nothing happened. He didn't stop trying to kill me until another member also shot him. Police officers carry "high-caliber" semi-automatics nowadays because they should have access to the best tools possible when they are really needed. Trust me on this: even the most routine call is an "extraordinary circumstance" to a cop in trouble.

I have no objection to high-capacity handguns. I do think, though, that McNamara is right about the psychological change that’s gone on. (Kind of like the change in Hill Street Blues, where the catchphrase went from “Let’s be careful out there,” to “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.”) I think that’s a bad psychology for police.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sven Swenson emails:

Col. Jeff Cooper long maintained that most police officers do not have the training and discipline to be trusted with more firepower than is provided by a 6-shot revolver. He reasoned from long observation that high capacity handguns, assault rifles & such encourage “spraying & praying”, which endangers bystanders. It’s a psychological thing. The man with a singleshot is going to make his one shot count. Under stress, the guy with a belt-full of 20-round mags is likely going to fill the air with lead to little effect.

The recent shooting in Queens is a case in point: The officers fired 50 or so rounds and only hit *the car* 21 times, much less its occupants. That’s spraying and praying, and ought to be considered reckless endangerment, no matter how evil the guys they’re trying to take down.(Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame the police, I blame the people who issue them such high firepower weapons but *never* give them enough money and time for training.)

Pax your correspondent who relates putting 6 .38s “into the 10-ring”, it might be worthwhile to remember that it takes about 12 seconds for a person to lose consciousness once their blood pressure drops to zero. His heart may be completely gone, he’s effectively dead, he just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure that’s a very looong 12 seconds when someone is stabbing you, but 6 .45 acp hydrashocks to the heart might not have done any better.

That and the possibility that your target is wearing a ballistic vest or totally wakked on drugs led the Colonel to advocate the “Mozambique” even with a .45: One or two shots center mass immediately followed by a shot to the head. If you shoot the guy between the eyes and he keeps coming, then you can complain to me about your ineffective .38.

Sounds like a zombie. They’re everywhere these days! As I recall, by Hollywood convention only shotguns work against zombies and other evil powers.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization–never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty–we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking–won at such a great personal cost–to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today’s Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats–and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in “liberal” Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge–although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.

And we need not only speak of threats to free speech, but also the tangible rewards from a terrified West to the agents of such repression.

Read the whole thing.

I guess it’s more of that Gramscian damage that Eric S. Raymond was talking about.

PATTERICO ACCUSES ME OF FAIR-WEATHER FEDERALISM for supporting Congressional legislation to rein in no-knock drug raids.

That’s silly. Congress clearly has the power to pass laws, under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, to prevent states depriving citizens of life, liberty or property without due process of law. When cops bust down your door and shoot you without — very — good reason for being there, that’s a deprivation of liberty and property, and often life, without due process, the very kind of thing Congress was empowered to address. So unless Patterico thinks that the 14th Amendment is itself an improper impediment to federalism, I don’t see the problem here. What’s more, the no-knock problem stems from federal policies — the “war on drugs” and the free distribution of military equipment to local SWAT teams — and thus further justifies a federal corrective. Under federalism, one role of the federal government is to protect citizens’ rights against unconstitutional encroachment by the states. That’s what the 14th Amendment is about. And the doctrines of official immunity that make lawsuits difficult in such cases are found nowhere in the Constitution, but are the creation of activist judges, reading their policy preferences into the law. They are worthy of no particular deference.

UPDATE: I see that Patterico has updated to say that he doesn’t think the immunity-stripping violates federalism, which makes me wonder what our disagreement really is. At any rate, Ilya Somin has some further thoughts on how this problem was mostly federal in creation anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In a later update, Patterico says that I’m inconsistent on federalism in light of my Schiavo comments here:

After talking about small government and the rule of law, Republicans overwhelmingly supported a piece of legislation intended to influence a single case, that of Terri Schiavo. As former Solicitor General Charles Fried observes:

” In their intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter, Republicans in Congress and President Bush have, in a few brief legislative clauses, embraced the kind of free-floating judicial activism, disregard for orderly procedure and contempt for the integrity of state processes that they quite rightly have denounced and sought to discipline for decades.”

I think he’s right. As with Bill Hobbs, quoted below, I don’t have an opinion on what should happen to Terry Schiavo — though given the rather large numbers of judges who have looked at this case over the years I’d be especially reluctant to interfere. Can they all be deranged advocates of a “culture of death?” But regardless of the merits, Congress’s involvement in this case seems quite “unconservative” to me, at least if one believes in rules of general application. Florida has a general law, and it’s been followed. That people don’t like the result isn’t a reason for unprecedented Congressional action, unless results are all that matter.

Reading that entire post, it seems to me that my predictions of Republican problems ahead have certainly been borne out in spades, but it wasn’t really a federalism argument as such. (In fact, in an earlier post — scroll down from that link above — I noted that the bill wasn’t necessarily unconstitutional, just a bad idea.) Nonetheless, I think that the kind of legislation I’ve suggested — stripping officers of official immunity in no-knock cases, where we’ve seen that there’s a pattern of misconduct and that state remedies have proven inadequate — is at the very core of Congress’s 14th Amendment powers. On the other hand, the Schiavo intervention seems much farther from that mold.

At any rate, doesn’t this go both ways? That is, isn’t Patterico inconsistent to have supported the Schiavo legislation while regarding Congressional legislation over no-knock raids as posing troubling federalism problems?

It seems however, that the actual remedy that I’ve proposed raises no problems in his mind, so this entire disagreement is fairly abstract. I have great respect for his abilities as a blogger, but I remain convinced that no-knock raids should be limited to very narrow circumstances, and that officers — and government agencies, for that matter — who engage in them should not be able to hide behind doctrines of official immunity that themselves have little warrant in the Constitution.

LOOKS LIKE BILL FRIST WON’T BE RUNNING in 2008. I agree with A.C. Kleinheider that it’s a good move: “Frist is not over politically — not by any means. But to trudge through this campaign just because it had been planned for so long would have been idiocy. Frist is smart. He read the tea leaves and saw that the presidency wasn’t in the cards. Now, he will have the time to regroup and retool his image.”

CHESTER ON IRAQ: “Go native.”

AUSTIN BAY AND REUTERS LOOK AT NATO IN AFGHANISTAN:

Since early last summer, the Taliban and its remaining Al Qaeda allies have been testing the NATO force. The Taliban wanted to inflict at least one casualty-heavy defeat on a NATO ally, and then magnify that in the media. The Talibs goal: a “Spanish-style” withdrawal from Afghanistan by a NATO nation.

The Taliban has failed –and failed miserably.

Good.

CALL ME CRAZY, but I don’t see why the federal government should be spending tax money to tell grownups not to have sex:

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it’s a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

“They’ve stepped over the line of common sense,” said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. “To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It’s an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health.”

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.

The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.

I should certainly hope so.

A LOOK AT MOB RULE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES: This is only a problem in a few, mostly elitist, institutions, but it is a problem.

A LOOK AT MOB RULE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES: This is only a problem in a few, mostly elitist, institutions, but it is a problem.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett reports on an oil-for-food investigation done right:

For starters, the Cole inquiry has set a standard of clarity and transparency that the U.N. itself has yet to adopt — and shows no signs of doing so. The Cole commission conducted public hearings, and appears to have posted the vital underlying documents in full on the web. The interviews of the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, chaired by Paul Volcker, were all done in secret, with snippets released at the sole discretion of Volcker and his team. And although Volcker’s $35 million inquiry — the only investigation with full access to the U.N. itself — went to the trouble of amassing an archive of some 12 million pages, much of that digitally searchable, Volcker never released many of the vital underlying documents. He now appears poised to hand the trove back at the end of next month to the same U.N. where Annan’s former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, spent months shredding executive office papers potentially relevant to the investigation.

The Cole report exemplifies why Volcker’s archives need to be delivered into the public domain — or at the very least, entrusted to authorities with a less glaring conflict of interest in handling any potentially damning information not yet disclosed. Cole’s findings, which in the AWB case go well beyond the Volcker report, are presented in a style so clear and direct that one might infer the investigators genuinely wish to communicate to the public the full extent of their discoveries. That’s quite a contrast with the reports released last year by Volcker’s committee.

Indeed. Plus there’s this: “Lest this seem a problem solely of the past, it bears noting that U.N. secrecy goes well beyond Oil-for-Food. Even now, the U.N. keeps secret many of the germane terms of its global business in procurement contracts, through which it spends billions of taxpayer dollars every year on everything from printer paper to peacekeeper rations. This secrecy paved the way for another U.N. scandal, the bribery saga still unfolding in the U.N. procurement division — in which one U.N. staffer pleaded guilty in 2005, in U.S. federal court, and two more have since been indicted (both have pleaded not guilty).”

AN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR? More thoughts on Orson Scott Card’s Empire, in my TCS Daily column this week.

THE EXAMINER EDITORIALIZES:

President Bush was right to declare yesterday in Latvia that he will not withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq until the “mission is complete” because “we can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.” It appears Bush’s characteristic Texas stubbornness is the only thing standing between victory and the U.S. defeat that has all but been proclaimed by Washington’s foreign policy establishment and its friends in the mainstream media like “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan. She insisted in her weekend interview with Gen. John Abizaid that “managing the defeat” is America’s only option.

It is to be hoped that Bush’s main target with yesterday’s declaration was his father’s former Secretary of State, James Baker, head of the soon-to-be-sainted Iraq Study Group. The ISG is widely reported to be preparing a recommendation that Bush seek the aid of Iran and Syria in resolving the war in Iraq. Iran and Syria may be U.S. opponents, but they have a common interest with us in establishing a stable regime in Baghdad, we are told by the Foggy Bottom Realpolitikers and the media experts for whom NBC’s decision to call it a civil war represents a “Cronkite Moment.”

Such advice is worse than wrong-headed, it is a denial of reality. Iran and Syria have one primary interest — U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and ultimately out of the entire Middle East.

Read the whole thing. And note this observation, too: “There is another crucially important denial of reality akin to the ‘managing defeat’ syndrome. Evidence is rapidly accumulating that major Western media organizations are being had on a daily basis by the propaganda efforts of the Jihadist insurgency.” What’s worse is that they don’t seem to mind.

UPDATE: “The Iraq War: ‘Proxy,’ not ‘Civil.'” Yes, and they’re the proxies of Iran and Syria. These people are not our friends.

SWAT TEAM OVERKILL: The folks at Popular Mechanics have posted my column on the subject early.

Plus, here’s more on that Atlanta shooting.

HEH: “Glenn might know how to produce these podcasts. But I know how to sell ‘em.”

KIND OF DUMB, yet also kind of cool: A TV wristwatch.