“Situations like the ones we’ve seen in Lewisville, West Ocean City, and countless other places highlight how bankrupt our current approach to “helping human trafficking victims” is. If these women really are in trouble, there has got to be a better way to get them services than making them jack off a cop (sometimes several times) first. And if they’re neither victims nor perpetuating harm against anyone, then leave them alone.”
“Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.”
“Video footage of Phoenix police officers beating and tasing a deaf black man with cerebral palsy has led to an internal investigation and widespread media coverage—and it couldn’t come at a worse time for the city. This summer the Justice Department (DOJ) released a scathing report accusing the police department of systemically violating the civil rights of vulnerable residents.
Local TV news outlet ABC15 first published footage last week showing the violent arrest on August 19 of Tyron McAlpin, who is now facing felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest charges as a result of the incident.”
“On its face, there’s nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to “helping” trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.”
“The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.”
…
“While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that anti-drug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.”
“On May 22, 2022, Michael Jennings, a pastor at a church in Childersburg, Alabama, was watering his out-of-town neighbor’s flowers when another neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious person. Two police officers, Christopher Smith and Justin Gable, soon arrived and began questioning Jennings.
Body camera footage of the incident shows that Jennings told the officers that his name was “Pastor Jennings” but refused to hand over his I.D. card, saying “I’m not gonna give you no I.D., I ain’t did nothing wrong….I used to be a police officer.”
“Come on man, don’t do this to me. There’s a suspicious person in the yard, and if you’re not gonna identify yourself—” said one of the officers, before Jennings interjected, “I don’t have to identify myself.”
The officers arrested Jennings, and he was booked at the Childersburg City Jail on obstruction of government operation charges. The charges were dropped just days later, and he then sued, claiming that the officers wrongfully arrested him and violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure.
Last December a judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the officers had qualified immunity, protecting them from civil liability. (Qualified immunity is the doctrine that shields officials from federal civil rights claims unless their alleged actions violated “clearly established” law, with “clearly established” defined extremely narrowly.) But Jennings appealed, and last Friday a three-judge panel for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision.”
…
“Even if the officers had a right to demand Jennings identify himself, Jennings still complied with the state’s ID requirements. He told the officers who he was, that he lived across the street, and why he was in his neighbor’s yard.
“While it is always advisable to cooperate with law enforcement officers,” the opinion reads, “Jennings was under no legal obligation to provide his ID. Therefore, officers lacked probable cause for Jennings’ arrest for obstructing government operations because Jennings did not commit an independent unlawful act by refusing to give ID.”
With the court’s decision, Jennings can continue suing the officers who wrongfully arrested him. But it shouldn’t have taken this intervention for Jennings to be able to lodge his lawsuit in the first place. Stringent qualified immunity protections made police officers—and other government actors—virtually unaccountable for violating citizen’s rights. The fact that Jennings’ clear-cut case was dismissed in the first place reveals the deep flaws in that system.”
“The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a history of protecting bystanders by shooting them. This March, when Brooklyn man Nathan Scott tried to shoot a mugger who had his wallet, the NYPD killed Scott and wounded an auto mechanic across the street. In 2013, after a man in a road rage incident made finger guns and reached for his pocket, the NYPD tased the man and shot two women nearby. In 2012, after a disgruntled ex-employee murdered his coworker outside the Empire State Building, the NYPD shot the murderer along with nine bystanders.”
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“After chef Derrell Mickles allegedly snuck into a subway station without paying his fare on Sunday, the NYPD tried to arrest him. They claim that Mickles muttered “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop following me” and drew a knife. (Mickles’ mother says the knife was from his job.)
After failing to subdue Mickles with a taser, the officers shot him, two bystanders, and one of their own in the crowded station.”
…
“Mickles was within seven feet of the officers when they shot him, the NYPD says. Police are traditionally taught the “21-foot rule,” which says that a suspect holding a knife within 21 feet is close enough to pose an immediate threat. But the 21-foot rule is not a license to start shooting anyone within that distance”
“Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.”
“Over the past five years, Chicago taxpayers have forked over nearly $400 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from officer misconduct, according to a new analysis of city data. While around 1,300 police officers were named in the lawsuits, just 200 were responsible for more than 40 percent of the total cost.”
“Spanish police believe they have smashed a gang that was planning to make up to 1,000 Kamikaze drones and sell them to the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
It comes following raids in Barcelona and Badalona, to the north of the city, in which a total of three people were arrested. Another suspect was also detained in Germany.”