Morning Ed: Law & Order {2018.07.09.M}
[LO1] One of the things that always makes me uncomfortable with notions that we need to be able to predict who is going to be the next school shooter is false positives.
[LO2] If you’re going to die too young, is it better or worse to die ironically.
[LO3] WhatsApp and mob justice in India.
[LO4] Adeshina Emmanuel and (former Timesperson) Shawn Gude take aim at police unions.
[LO5] Police in Miami had to give a prostitute nearly $20,000 back.
[LO6] Helicopter escape! This seems like a plot I would have come up with in junior high and then thought stupid by high school, but it apparently used to be a regular nonoccurence.
[LO7] A mass shooters disproportionately white? Maybe not. Off the cuff, I would guess that the more narrow the definition of “mass shooting” the whiter the pool of culprits.
[LO8] Scalawag looks at attempts to organize a prisoners’ union in North Carolina.
[LO9] Fish yeah!
LO4: Many of the same things that are said police unions are also said of teachers unions: that the unions protect abusive and incompetent teachers. Sure, shooting innocent people is much worse, but an organisation that is dedicated to justice as a whole rather than representing one faction should be sufficiently self aware about its own practices. But, I suppose this is progress.Report
[LO5] Article says she was a stripper…?Report
I’ve said before, I’ll say again: If all Police Unions did was argue for more pay, more vacation, and more sick leave for its members, only nutbar libertarians would oppose them.
Heck, if all they did was argue for those things and were indifferent to whether the officers getting these benefits had recently been acquitted for some awful stuff, it’d probably be okay. “Hey, we are advocates for the Police and we fight for more pay, more vacation, and more sick leave”, they could say. “We don’t have an opinion on the tragic Eric Garner incident.”
That said, they don’t. And it’s reached the point where the leftier of the lefty publications have noticed that police unions are, seriously, protecting some serious bad apples. Like, barrel-spoilers. I’m interested in seeing how this evolves.
Who will have solidarity with whom?
(Edit: Oh… the articles are from 2015 and 2016. I’m not sure they’re evidence of irons being as hot as I thought they might be.)Report
Also, protect members’ rights on disability issues. Some agencies routinely screw over their own personnel, given the chance. We get at my work a steady stream of referrals from the police and fire unions. There sometimes are technicalities specific to the contract such that it isn’t necessarily a routine workers comp case, so they need a lawyer who has figured out the specific procedures.Report
Sure. Fine. That sort of thing would get only the wackos screaming about Police Unions leaving normal people to say stuff like “wow, I wish *I* had a union.”
It’s when the police unions argue against, for example, the admissibility of video showing them eating marijuana edibles in the dispensary they’re in the process of raiding, that I’m stuck noticing that we’re a long way from worker’s comp.
(And that’s one of the funny and lighthearted examples. There are depressing as hell ones if you google “police union defends officer”.)Report
The Heritage Foundation “voter fraud database” is making the rounds again, so here’s an article by Jason Bauman on why their analysis of it is bad and should feel bad.
Also if there’s a way to download the database in an actually useful format (Excel, CSV, et c.) I don’t see it. You can’t even sort the damn outputs by columns. Maybe that’s because they don’t want you to notice that their ~1100 or so instances of fraud go back to 1948.Report
I recall having three observations after spending part of an afternoon thumbing through their data (I haven’t looked at the Bauman article to see if these overlap): (1) many of the cases should be tagged “election fraud”, not “voter fraud”, as no voters did anything wrong; (2) small town/county elections in the South made up a disproportionate share; and (3) a surprising number of the cases would be eliminated if sheriff were not an elective office.Report
My morning is turning out to be annoying enough that I may console myself by scraping their site and actually picking their data to pieces.Report
Even if all 1132 were all voter fraud in one year, the percentage would be so vanishingly small as to be essentially zero. As it stands, the earliest date of disposition is 1979 – 39 years ago. So, 39 years of zero.Report
LO1: Honestly, when I was a teenager, had a school official asked me if those scissors could be made into a weapon, I would have answered the same way, just because the school official is being extra special dumb.
And school officials should understand how autism works, and not hold that against kids.Report
A relative of mine was, as part of the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, sent home from school due to wearing a black shirt, just like the Columbine guy. The stupidity burns!Report
There seems to be a sort of learned cluelessness and lack of common sense that operates in school officials.Report
According to my girls, Local High School Football team decided to pick on a kid by branding/naming him the next school shooter.Report
Teenage life must have changed a lot in the past few decades. When I was younger, having the football team think that I was deranged would have been social gold.Report
Makes me wonder if the process here was simply weaponized.
The school needs to show it’s doing “something”, which implies “stopping someone”.
Shooters are rare enough that not every school has one to stop… so how do they show the process is working if they don’t pick someone out and showcase him?Report
There’s no theater like security theater!Report
the juvenile version of SWATting. Ugh. I could TOTALLY see kids at my school having done something like that, if school shooting/”if you see something say something” was a thing when I was a schoolkid.
I could even see some of the mean girls doing it to ME.Report
What struck me as deficient, though, was that the process/protocols for dealing with see-something/say-something (at least as related by this particular article) were entirely disconnected and insufficient.
Step 1: Hearsay reported.
Step 2: Interview person who overheard others.
Step 3: Interview others.Report
LO5 reminds me of this:
In the car, I was listening to a call-in show that gave financial advice. A young woman called to say that was a stripper and had accumulated five figures worth of tips that she hadn’t declared as income. She wanted to know a safe way to deposit them into a bank account without drawing the attention of the IRS. The host mansplained that of course she should put the money in the bank, because then it would earn interest.Report
L01: Lessons and questions:
(1) Beware psychiatrist selling book;
(2) People being asked to anticipate future school shootings are concerned about what will happen to them if they fail to predict the future;
(3) Who exactly made the initial evaluation of whether he was a risk to himself or others and then recommended bringing in the police? It sounds like something a therapist would evaluate, but therapists typically have confidentiality obligations preventing such actions unless they reasonably believe there is a risk of injury. Seems like two possibilities here: one is that the parents are selectively reading materials to the reporter and there was an issue, and the other is that the evaluation is not being conducted by a qualified mental health professional.
(4) How can the kid’s privacy be protected by using only his middle name given all of the other information about his school in the story?Report
Lo5: What jumped out at me on this story was, first, that they actually got the cash back. Progress! But second, this:
Not that they had evidence it was drug money or could show it was drug money, but that they simply “believed” it was drug money. People can believe all sorts of shit when it suits their interests.Report
If she exchanged all of the ones for $100, what percentage of those $100 bills would test positive for cocaine?
Trick question! 90% of them would.
Q.E.D.Report
Cocaine’s pretty bad, but there can be dangerous amounts of fentanyl on flyers that test negative for fentanyl!
Report
Cops are just congenitally paranoid. I guess a certain level of heightened suspicion is sort of a job requirement but really…Report
They could have shot her because they believed she posed a threat, so …Report
She does appear to be black, or Latina, so obviously she’s a deadly threat.
Honestly, the real story here is that, despite the presence of guns, no citizen was shot.Report
False positives are a relatively minor risk when compared to how much they’re improving India.Report
…improving India?
EDIT: Ohhhh now I get it.Report
Yeah, that was a bit darker than usual.Report
LO3:
The article was written in that weird passive voice, where it sounds like a bit of software is apparently running around killing people.
As if there is no underlying social pathology to mob violence and witch hunts, which could explain the seemingly random pattern.
Because as we saw here in America, these things are never random, and always conform to the larger class and caste dynamics of society.Report
It’s Brett Kavanaugh for the Supremes. Pretty much a conservative out of central casting and I was right that it would be a Harvard or Yale grad.Report
Post on Kavanaugh is up if you want to opine…and I know you all want to opine.Report