Posts Tagged ‘police’

Lawsuit against dog dismissed

Randall Kevin Jones was injured by police canine Draco when apprehended, and proceeded to sue the animal itself, among others, under Georgia law for negligence. The Eleventh Circuit ordered the claim against the dog dismissed, noting “that the practical problems with suing a dog are virtually endless.” [Jordan Fowler, Washington Legal Foundation] To quote the opinion in Jones v. Fransen:

…under the express terms of Georgia law, only a person may be held liable for breaching a legal duty. … Not surprisingly, O.C.G.A. § 50-21-22(4), which we use to determine the meaning of words used in Georgia’s tort statutes, does not define the word “person” to include dogs.

In a 2001 case called Dye v. Wargo, the Seventh Circuit likewise dismissed an attempt to sue a police dog.

P.S. “I have here a stack of affidavits declaring the defendant a good boy.” — @jhimmibhob on Twitter.

“Back the Blue Act”

“The Back the Blue Act would make any assault on an officer a federal crime with a mandatory minimum sentence. But here’s the thing: assaulting a police officer is already a crime in every state and already carries strict penalties set by local legislatures.” The placing of persons under arrest inevitably generates some ambiguous or factually uncertain instances of the closely related offenses of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, and the concept of assault itself is independent of any infliction of actual injury. Pulling broad swaths of this law, and then subjecting the whole thing to mandatory minimums, is unlikely to improve matters. (The bill has other provisions too.) [Neill Franklin, The Hill] More: Scott Shackford.

April 26 roundup

  • FDA’s costly menu labeling rules set to begin enforcement May 5. Any hope of blocking them? [Baylen Linnekin, earlier]
  • “Justice Department Disability Demands Raise Serious Free Speech Issues” [Hans Bader, CEI, earlier on the Berkeley online course takedown]
  • Government shouldn’t be entitled to shut down recording of its officers in public places when it doesn’t interfere with law enforcement [Ilya Shapiro and Devin Watkins on Cato Institute brief in 9th Circuit case of Jacobson v. Department of Homeland Security]
  • I knew the late Leo Rosten a bit in 1990s NYC. Now Dan Klein has a fun paper on The Joys of Yiddish as an economics text [SSRN via David Henderson]
  • Many libertarians diagnose “crony capitalism” as a leading source of American ills. How good are their examples? [Arnold Kling]
  • Signs in India proclaiming who owns a given plot of land point to a vulnerability of legal system [Alex Tabarrok] “The Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People” [Tabarrok on this 2009 Open Magazine piece]

Baltimore police consent decree, cont’d

There’s much that needs reforming about the Baltimore police department, but the collusive sweetheart agreement between two lame duck administrations, transferring power over department practices to outside activists and the usual monitor setup, has a great deal wrong with it. George Liebmann of the Calvert Institute, who has been critical of the settlement, wrote up his objections in a lengthy communication to the court, excerpted at Free State Notes.

More from Tim Lynch at Cato on the DoJ’s changing posture:

…Sessions is making a grave mistake if he thinks previous DOJ investigations did not uncover severe problems in American policing. The problems are there. The real question is how to address them. In the education area, teacher unions are the main obstacles to reform. Police unions are the major obstacle to sensible accountability measures for police organizations. But over the long run, local mayors and city councils must make a sustained commitment to proper oversight of police. It is unrealistic to expect the Attorney General or a federal monitor to do their jobs.

March 29 roundup

  • “SEAT Act: Top Senators Sponsoring Bill to Outlaw Low Cost Carriers, Raise Airfares” [Gary Leff, View from the Wing]
  • “Trump’s Safe and Sane ‘Regulatory Reform’ Idea” [Cass Sunstein/Bloomberg, earlier Sunstein on Trump regulatory initiatives]
  • Changing law and economics shape street protest [Tyler Cowen] Arizona’s bad idea on protestors involves racketeering charges, forfeiture, and more [Coyote]
  • “Rights And Reality: Georgia Cop Jails Ex-Wife For Facebook Gripe” [Ken White, Popehat]
  • “Opponents of same-sex marriage cynically…manufacture[d] a baseless controversy in the Texas Supreme Court” to attack City of Houston’s spousal benefits, but as the Hon. Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit had already stated in persuasive guidance, Obergefell “is the law of the land.” [Mark Pulliam, Law and Liberty; a second view from Josh Blackman]
  • Idea making some headway: adapting use of class action and similar aggregate litigation procedures to administrative adjudication [Sergio Campos, Jotwell]

Kentucky joins Louisiana in adding police to hate-crime protected group list

A police union’s national campaign continues to bear fruit as Gov. Matt Bevin signed a bill making Kentucky the second state, after Louisiana, to include police as a protected group in hate crime law. For principled conservative opponents of hate crime laws as a category, now would be a good time to speak up, wouldn’t it? [Beth Reinhard, WSJ] Such “Blue Lives Matter” bills continue to be introduced elsewhere around the country at both state and municipal levels [Julia Craven/Huffington Post, Tim Cushing/TechDirt]

Police roundup

  • Investigation of problems with no-knock “dynamic entry” police raids [Kevin Sack, New York Times; cf. Radley Balko’s work] But her living room furniture was just sitting there! Why shouldn’t we take it? [C.J. Ciaramella on Mississippi case]
  • Minnesota judge approves (which doesn’t mean Google will go along with) police demand for all search records on a certain name from any and all users in town of Edina [Mike Mullen, City Pages]
  • “The L.A. County sheriff wants to release names of 300 deputies with histories of misconduct. He can’t.” [Jessica Pishko, Slate; Tim Cushing, TechDirt (list is of cops considered highly impeachable in court testimony)]
  • Just catching up with this still-relevant Joshua Muravchik critique of Black Lives Matter [Commentary]
  • Feds indict seven members of elite Baltimore police gun trace task force on racketeering charges; underlying predicates include robbery, swearing out false search warrants, false overtime claims (“one hour can be eight hours.”) [U.S. Department of Justice, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post]
  • “New Orleans Police Chief Says He Needs to Hire and Fire Commanders at Will to Protect Reforms” [Ed Krayewski]

More federalization of crime? No thanks

On “Blue Lives Matter” sentence enhancement, floated as a national idea in one of President Donald Trump’s three executive orders last week on crime, the feds really have no business meddling when local legal systems are appropriately vigorous in prosecuting and punishing a category of offense, as is ordinarily true of injuries to police [Jonathan Blanks, Cato] More views on the executive orders: Tim Lynch/Cato, Harvey Silverglate via Anthony Fisher.

P.S. Some reasons conservatives who favor enhanced penalties for attacks on first responders should oppose using “hate crime” dodge to do so [John Bicknell/Washington Examiner, thanks for quote]

Baltimore, DOJ sign police consent decree

Yesterday the city of Baltimore signed a 227-page consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice putting the city’s police department under wide-ranging federal control for the indefinite future (earlier).

The decree (document; summary of high points) mingles some terms that rise to genuine constitutional significance with others that no court would have ordered, and yet others that appear not to be requirements of the law at all, but at most best practices. Many are virtually or entirely unenforceable (“professional and courteous” interaction with citizens). Whether or not the decree results in the less frequent violation of citizens’ rights, it is certain to result in large amounts of new spending and in the extension of the powers of lawyers working for various parties.

In November David Meyer Lindenberg of Fault Lines, the criminal justice website, wrote this opinion piece about the failure of DoJ police reform consent decrees to live up to the high claims often made for them (more: Scott Shackford, Reason). Our consent decrees tag traces the problems with these devices in a variety of public agencies such as those handling children’s and mental health services, as well as the budgetary rigidity they often impose.

Since Congress passed enabling legislation in 1994 in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, the Washington Post and Frontline reported in a 2015 investigation, “Twenty-six [police] investigations — a little more than half of them since President Obama took office — have led to the most rigorous outcome: binding agreements tracked by monitors. More than half were consent decrees, meaning they were approved and managed in federal court.” As of that point only Ohio, at 4 agreements, had had more than Maryland, at 3.

This 2008 report from the Alabama Policy Institute by Michael DeBow, Gary Palmer, and John J. Park, Jr. takes a critical view of the decrees’ use in institutional reform litigation (not specifically police), and comes with a foreword by Sen. Jeff Sessions, now the nominee to replace Loretta Lynch as Attorney General of the U.S. Speaking of which, there’s something so weird about some liberals’ eagerness to hand the keys to big-city police departments over to Mr. Sessions. It’s as if they think once Main Justice is calling the shots it won’t think of using that leverage on issues like, say, sanctuary cities.

Police and community roundup

  • Fraternal Order of Police asks Amazon to stop allowing sales of Black Lives Matter shirts after Walmart.com yields to similar request [Ben Rosen, Christian Science Monitor] FOP boss Chuck Canterbury, defending civil asset forfeiture: hey we could use the money [Scott Shackford] FOP chief vows to override Pennsylvania governor’s veto of bill that would shield names of involved police officers for 30 days after killings of civilians [CBS Philadelphia]
  • Technology panel from Cato policing conference included law professors Tracey Meares of Yale and Elizabeth Joh of UC Davis, City of San Jose independent police auditor Walter Katz, and Maj. Max Geron of the Dallas PD, moderated by Cato’s Jonathan Blanks [video or podcast] “Police Spy Tools Evolve Faster Than Lawmakers Can Keep Up: Baltimore’s aerial surveillance continues unchecked” [Monte Reel, Bloomberg BusinessWeek]
  • One effect of ban on smoking in New York City public housing: new excuse for cops to bust in [Scott Greenfield]
  • WSJ investigation: Of 3,458 US police officers charged with crimes, 332 (10%) kept their badges” [@johngramlich]
  • “San Francisco has become a predatory government,” says its elected treasurer [José Cisneros, San Francisco Chronicle]
  • Don’t let quest to increase police accountability worsen problem of intrusive surveillance [Matthew Feeney on Jake Laperruque presentation at Cato’s recent surveillance conference]