On DUIs and Selective Enforcement

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday - a time of fun, friends, camaraderie and, if you listen to law enforcement, drunk driving.  Of course, law enforcement’s favorite tool for managing drunk driving during special events like the Super Bowl, Christmas, Labor Day, Independence Day, Boxer Day, Veteran’s Day, Arbor Day, Executive Professionals Day, days that end with the letter ‘y’, and so on is the ubiquitous DUI checkpoint.  The concept is pretty simple and straightfoward - if we pull everybody over and have them breathe into a breathalyzer, we’ll catch drunk drivers before they have a chance to hurt somebody.  Sure, we take a hit to our civil liberties by allowing law enforcement to pull us over without any suspicion, reasonable or otherwise, of possible wrongdoing, but, as the proponents of such measures love to point out, it’s a small price to pay for the sake of safer roadways.  Unfortunately, like many ideas that sound good on paper, there are a couple of drawbacks in the implementation, notably:

1. Efficacy:  How well do DUI checkpoints really work?
2. Location:  It’s ultimately up to local law enforcement to select a “random” location to enact these DUI checkpoints.  Needless to say, they’re rarely carried out at the entrances to well-heeled gated communities.

So, how did last night’s DUI checkpoint in Reno do?  Let’s find out…

1. Efficacy: The police stopped 995 cars.  Of those, fewer than 1 % were charged with driving under the influence.  Fortunately, we proud taxpayers may take solace in the fact that, though the DUI checkpoint inconvenienced nearly a thousand drivers to stop the reckless actions of eight, at least our police correctly cited twenty-two people for using excessive tinting on their windows.  Truly justice was served last night!
2. Location: Since the point of the DUI checkpoints is to help ensure that drunken frivolity and merriment stays in the bars and isn’t extended into the roadways, we can expect that the DUI checkpoints would be near sports bars, where fans of the Super Bowl would presumably be intoxicating themselves before engaging in some alcohol-fueled road-related shenanigans.  With that in mind, we can safely expect a plethora of sports bars to be located near each DUI checkpoint.  Allow me to demonstrate:

   
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   That’s right - the DUI checkpoint was placed about as far away from every sports bar in Washoe County that you could place a DUI checkpoint and still have people drive through it.  That El Rancho just happens to be one of the major thoroughfares to Sun Valley, one of the more economically depressed neighborhoods in our area, is, of course, purely a coincidence.

So, just to make sure I understand what was accomplished last night, let’s recap:

A DUI checkpoint implemented to keep people from killing each other after a night of football-related drunken debauchery was put as far away from the drunken debauchery as humanly possible and violated the civil rights of nearly a thousand drivers, of which less than one percent were engaging in the very act that “necessitated” the DUI checkpoint in the first place.

This is why I prefer a limited government.

On Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves

While listening to Colin Cowherd on my way to work this morning, he began to discuss this time that he was mugged in Fresno.  One of the listeners that called to comment about this story was a “criminal justice major”, who proceeded to launch into a “There are three kinds of people” monologue.

For those of you unfamiliar with the “three kinds of people”, the basic gist is that there are “sheep”, “sheepdogs”, and “wolves”.  Wolves are the bad guys - they want to eat the sheep.  Sheepdogs, meanwhile, protect the sheep from the wolves.  Trouble is, sheepdogs look a lot, and behave a lot, like wolves - they’re both dogs, they’re both aggressive, and, to a sheep, they’re both scary.  The result is that sheepdogs are never really appreciated by sheep - in fact, more often than not, the sheep will try to control the sheepdogs by putting limits on them to make them less scary.  Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of making it more difficult for the sheepdogs to protect the sheep from the wolves.  Following this analogy, the “wolves” are criminals, terrorists, and the like; “sheepdogs” are cops, the military, and others that put their lives on the line for us; “sheep”, meanwhile, is everybody else.

This analogy is one that I have seen and heard numerous times, usually uttered by Internet tough guys and mall ninjas.  There is some truth to it, of course - there are many people that really can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.  People experiencing such confusion will say things like “insulting the mothers and sisters of prisoners is torture“, or that, if we just send all of our troops home and adopt an isolationist foreign policy, nobody will ever want to bother us again, despite years of evidence to the contrary.  Meanwhile, like most things in life, if we look too deeply at the methods involved to protect us, many people will take offense.  In much the same way that letting food grow in cow dung is surprisingly healthy but a little gross if you think about it long enough, killing bad guys is a surprisingly effective, if morally “questionable”, way of dealing with people that would just as soon kill you.

Even so, the troubles with this metaphor are numerous and manifold, most of which being directly related with the conclusions that people that throw this metaphor around try to draw from it.  By and large, someone coming up with this metaphor wants you to believe the following:

1. Being a “sheep”, “sheepdog”, or “wolf” is innate and not something that can be conditioned.
2. “Sheep” should listen to “sheepdogs” and let them do whatever they feel they need to do to protect the “flock” from the “wolves”.

The first conclusion is absolutely ridiculous.  A person’s response to crisis is largely determined by their experience and training regarding that crisis.  If somebody points a gun at me, for example, since I have no training or experience in such manners, it’s absolutely true that I will undoubtedly behave very “sheeplike”.  Conversely, if somebody points a gun at, say, a Marine, they will respond differently.  Those that overuse this metaphor will claim that’s because the Marine is a “sheepdog”.  What they don’t realize is that the entire reason the Marine could behave like a “sheepdog” in the first place is because the Marine was trained in how to respond to the situation.  The Marine actually has some familiarity and experience with having weapons pointed at him, whereas I do not.  Conversely, if a Marine was faceed with a crisis that I actually have training and experience with (say, a broken server), the Marine may behave very “sheeplike”, whereas I’ll be able to calmly and cooly deal with the situation.  Why?  Because, unlike the Marine, I actually have training and experience with this situation.

Ah - now, I know what you’re thinking.  A broken server is nothing compared to the risks that much of our military and our police forces (i.e. our “sheepdogs”) deal with on a daily basis.  This is absolutely correct, so let’s try another unfamiliar situation for our Marine - we’ll make him a fighter pilot.  If we take a Marine, one that is trained in ground combat and has received no pilot training, and throw him into, say, an F/A-18 or something similar and say, “Okay, defend our skies from the wolves!”, what is the Marine going to do?  Chances are, our hypothetical Marine will behave very “sheeplike”, as well he should - he has no training or familiarity with the situation.  If he’s able to start the plane - much less actually get it off the ground - before the enemy blows him up, it will be a small but pyrrhic victory.  Conversely, if we take a fighter pilot and throw him into, say, a serious firefight on the ground, he probably won’t exhibit much “sheepdog-like” bravery himself, which is probably for the best.  Frankly, if he tries to be “brave”, he’ll probably just end up putting himself and his unit in serious jeopardy since he lacks the training and experience necessary to know which risks are acceptable and which ones aren’t.  Keep in mind that neither the fighter pilot nor the Marine are shying away from putting their lives on the line - they’re just going to be more willing to do so in situations that they have training and experience in because, in those situations, they’ll have enough familiarity to work past the initial panicky flight-or-fight emotions that any of us would experience in their place.

The second conclusion, however, is the most dangerous one.  Another way of saying it is, “The ends justify the means,” which is one of the most dangerous philosophies to ever haunt man.  “The ends justify the means” is how we ended up with the PATRIOT Act, the Drug War, and countless other assaults against our civil liberties, all because somebody said that they were a “sheepdog” and, if we just listened to them and gave them just a little bit of our freedom, they’d protect us from the big, bad “wolves”.  Communism was an attempt by a group of so-called “sheepdogs” to protect the worker-”sheep” from the bourgeois “wolves” - all they had to do was simply do whatever the “sheepdogs” told them to do.  That worked well for everyone involved, now didn’t it?

With appropriate training and familiarity, people can and will act with bravery, decency and competency.  We do not need some self-appointed “sheepdog” on an ego trip telling us what to do, nor should we suffer fools who believe otherwise.

A Libertarian Quandary

I haven’t been paying too close to the story behind John Travolta’s kid, but this post at American Atheists got me thinking - where does the line between a parent’s right to raise a child as they see fit collide with a child’s rights?  An excerpt:

I often get asked where religious liberty should end, and I often respond with “there’s a gray line”.

But the death of children is clearly over that line.

[...]

ANY parent responsible for killing their own kid due to idiotic teachings cannot blame the teachings — they must take the responsibility for believing the idiocy and pay the price. Religious liberty ends BEFORE the kids’ well-being is endangered.

This is one of those subjects where I have reservations.  In many respects, my thoughts on when a child’s rights are being overrun parallels the Supreme Court’s take on indecent literature - I’ll know it when I see it.  For example, you’re not going to catch me declaring that a parent’s right is so paramount that they should be allowed to, say, beat a child with a wrought iron poker, sexually molest their children, or set up binding arranged marriages without the child’s consent.  Conversely, I’m also not going to agree with somebody that declares that, for the good of children and society, all children must attend public schooling at the exclusion of all other educational methods, or that we should forbid parents from feeding children junk food.  However, things start to get a little fuzzy when I begin to work my way into the margins.

Take education, for example.  I believe that parents should have the right to choose how their child is educated, at least to a point.  That point, at least for me, ends when they’re educating their kid in a way that makes them absolutely useless, if not blatantly malicious, once they become adults.  For example, if you’re sending your child to a school whose primary purpose is to spread intolerance and hate (I’m thinking of some of the more extreme Pakistani madrassas as a particularly good example), I don’t care what rights you think you have as a parent - that right stops when you train your kid to kill mine.  Another example would be really poor home schooling; yes, I know that home-schooled children do pretty well overall, but I’m sure there’s some parent out there that thinks that the right to home school  means they have the right to pretend that Chick Publications should be used as some sort of base curriculum.  Sorry, but if you’re “educating” your child to become an ignoramus that believes that dinosaurs walked with men 6,000 years ago (no, seriously - I’m not making this up) and refuse to give your child a chance to experience a post-Medieval education because it violates “the word of God”, I have a problem.  Sorry, but the kind of thinking that says that everything in the King James Bible is true and that every advancement in science, philosophy and art that’s come out in the past millenia or so was a mistake is also the kind of thinking that far too often says that, in an ideal world, I shouldn’t be allowed to disagree with you and should be burned at the stake.  I have a big problem with being burned at the stake.  Seriously - it hurts. Past that, though, where should the line be drawn?  For that matter, how should the line be enforced?  Who should enforce it?  This is where things start to get rather murky in a hurry.

Medicine gets even more convoluted.  Every cure, every palliative, every medical procedure, every medical product has some benefit and at least a little risk involved.  When it comes to children, parents become understandably risk-averse - this is why stories about vaccinations causing autism still carry traction.  Sure, it’s probably not true, but what if it is?  If parental risk assessment was even remotely rational, our parks wouldn’t be anywhere near as boring as they are today, and parents actually understand park rides.  How well do you think many parents hold up when dealing with a complex subject that requires over a decade of intense schooling and continuing education to even wrap your mind around a small subset of it?  Consequently, though I instinctively believe that failing to provide medical services for your child when you have the capabilities to do so is morally wrong and probably some sort of child abuse, I can definitely understand how there’s some real gray area here.  If you believe that it’s less risky to rely on God than it is to rely on modern medicine, I’d strongly disagree with you and use everything in my power to convince you otherwise, but it’s a little hard for me to force you to incur risk to your child, even if it happens to statistically be much less risk than the path that you’re choosing.  The one area where I’m less willing to bend on this, however, is vaccinations - unfortunately, when you choose to take a risk and not get vaccinated, you’re putting everyone else at risk, too, thanks to the double-edged sword that is herd immunity.  If you, your child, and I get vaccinated, there’s no way my infant is going to get sick.  On the other hand, if you decide to not vaccinate your child and he or she gets sick, the chance that my child might get sick goes up rather fast, which, from where I’m sitting, passes the “your freedom to move your fist ends at my face” test.

What does everybody else think?  Seriously, I’m open to suggestion here - how do we figure this out?

It’s Always About The Children, Isn’t It?

There are two stories that came to my attention that prompted today’s post:

1. Via Instapundit, Perry de Havilland finds an interview of a UK official, who discusses his interest in creating a “child-safe” Internet in conjunction with the Obama administration.
2. Scientists discuss the effects of “third-hand smoke” on children and how it may lead to universal indoor smoking bans, even in private residences.

Emotional manipulation is a powerful thing.  If you want somebody to do something for you or give you something they might not ordinarily be inclined to give you, one of the easiest ways to facilitate that is to prey on their emotions.  It usually starts with fear (”There’s a market for pictures… pictures of your children…naked!“).  You overblow it, make it seem like a common occurence (”This market is everywhere. Your neighbor could be trying to find these pictures!”).  After letting the fear sit just long enough to make the target uncomfortable, the next step begins - offering the solution.  You’ve reminded your intended victim that fear is unpleasant. You’ve shown them that what they fear could be just around the corner.  Now you give them an out.  You comfort them.  You let them know that you - and only you - can make that fear disappear.  Then you tell them how.  By getting them to fixate on that fear, they become consumed by it, or at least consumed by it just enough to not question the solution.  Stunted child development?  Toxins?  We have to make them stop! Never mind that we’re effectively talking about criminalizing one more common recreational drug, something which will invariably hurt far more children far more directly than third-hand smoke.  You think light contact to carcinogenic toxins is harmful to children?  How about watching family members end up in jail?  How about foster care?  The important thing is that you consider the cure in an empty vaccuum, one in which there’s no such thing as an unintended consequence, where the phrase, “The cure is worse than the disease” is never uttered.

Whenever somebody mentions children, you can almost universally guarantee that somebody wants you to do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do.  Children are the easiest way to get adults to experience fear.  We don’t have a financial offender registry - if you embezzle money from work, you’re not put into an online-accessible database, nor are you forbidden from living within 1,000 yards of a bank.  We do, however, have a sex offender database, Megan’s Law, Amber Alerts, laws that restrict where sexual offenders can live, and so much more.  Why?  The answer is simple:  fear.  We fear that our children will be harmed and we will do just about anything to make sure that feeling goes away, no matter how many people we hurt in the process.  Politicians know this and happily use this both against ourselves and against each other - after all, if you’re running against a politician, do you want to be the sane one talking about preserving freedom of speech and balancing the need to protect our children with the need for a free and open communication medium, or do you want to be tough on crime?  Do you want to talk about balancing the need to prevent exposure to harmful chemicals versus the damage that would be caused to children by inflicting the legal system against their families, or do you want to be tough on toxins and big tobacco corporations?  As Frank Herbert once put it, “fear is the mind-killer”.  He wasn’t kidding.

UPDATE: It’s a bad day to be a sex offender, that’s for sure.  From Slashdot:

“Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well.”

From the news article:

State Sen. Cecil Staton, who wrote the bill, said the measure is designed to keep the Internet safe for children. Authorities could use the passwords and other information to make sure offenders aren’t stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics.

Staton said although the measure may violate the privacy of sex offenders, the need to protect children “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.“

There it is, folks.  The need to protect children is more important than the Bill of Rights and due process.  The need to keep the Internet “safe for children”, even though it isn’t, never was, and never will be justifies any abuse we choose to heap on those who were committed as sexual offenders.

I want to be clear about something here:  I don’t have any pity for sexual offenders.  What they did is incredibly heinous.  That said, we are setting an extremely poor precedent here.  If we don’t believe they can be trusted to conform to society’s legal norms of sexual behavior, why are we letting them out of prison?  If it’s due to some sort of mental illness, why aren’t we putting them in asylums?  Either they’re in or they’re out.  Otherwise, we’re setting ourselves up for all kinds of circumnavigations of the Bill of Rights.  How long will it be until we come up with another class of crimes that, even after their sentencing is completed, will lead to lifelong probation with severely reduced rights?  After all, if smoking is harmful to children, couldn’t we just as easily justify tracking all credit card purchases of smokers to “protect the children”?  Cigarettes are addictive, after all - we can’t be too careful.  They might relapse at any moment.

Strawmen aside, we need to make a decision:  If we believe that somebody shouldn’t be trusted in public around children and shouldn’t be trusted online, they shouldn’t be put in a position where they could be around children or online. That means increasing the terms of incarceration or possibly labeling them “criminally insane” and locking them up in a psychiatric ward somewhere.  It does not mean we pretend that our Constitution doesn’t apply to them - the instant we start doing that is the instant we decide it’s okay to do that to others, and that’s not a precedent I can get behind.

Fourth Amendment and No-Knock Raids

There’s an article from the AP about Georgia reconsidering its no-knock raid policies. To quote a paragraph from the story:

The measure was prompted by the Nov. 21 shootout between Kathryn Johnston and three police officers during a no-knock search of her Atlanta home. When the officers entered without warning, police say that Johnston, 92, fired a handgun at them and that the officers returned fire, killing her. An autopsy concluded she was shot five or six times.

This reflexively calls out the Fourth Amendment, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So, the question is, what qualifies as an unreasonable search and seizure? The answer to that lies in finding out what would cause someone to require a no-knock raid in the first place - what kind of actions are being performed that would tell the police that they need to use overwhelming paramilitary force to resolve the situation? At the risk of repeating myself, there are two reasons:

1. Evidence might be flushed away or otherwise removed during the standard course of serving a warrant.
2. There might be armed individuals that are either a threat to police or a threat to others in the area (hostage situation, for example, or a well-armed gang holdout).

As far as I’m concerned, the first reason is not good enough for a no-knock raid - it’s too broad. If that alone is all that’s required for a no-knock raid, just about any warrant search can be served with a SWAT team since, during the course of a warrant search, there is almost always evidence that can be quickly removed. Endangering American citizens and removing their rights because we’re fortunate enough to have indoor plumbing and ready access to household cleansers is not acceptable. With regards to #2, it should go without saying that having a bunch of well-armed, screaming, gun-toting police officers swarm your house with flash grenades and tear gas is almost certainly not going to encourage you to become less of a threat to yourself, those around you, or the police officers. On the contrary, it’s almost guaranteed to elicit a fear response, which will cause you to respond with as much force as you can muster against the source of that fear. People in fear are not rational and are far more prone to hurt themselves and anything around them. This also makes the job of the police officer more difficult since, by using a no-knock raid in the first place, you’re implicitly communicating to them that they have something to be afraid of - if they didn’t, why wouldn’t they just knock on the front door? Consequently, you’ve gone from one possibly well-armed and fearful group to one definitely well-armed and slightly less fearful group (the police) against one possibly well-armed and definitely fearful group. How is that an improvement, exactly?

I think there are very, very few good excuses for no-knock raids (hostage situations, maybe). I also think that no-knock raids are the police equivalent of the fire department choosing to quell a house fire by burning down every surrounding building so it doesn’t spread. They just makes a bad problem much, much worse.

I am against no-knock raids. I am against policies and laws that restrict constitutionally-enshrined rights and freedoms. I know I’m not breaking new political ground here with this, but I’m not willing to throw our rights down the toilet because we’re afraid of a few drug dealers.