Quick hits (part I)

1) This from Radley Balko is two years old, but super on-point, “What if we treated violent crime the way we treat Ebola?”

And why hasn’t crime dropped in Chicago the way it has in, say, New York?

One interesting difference between the two cities is that New York doesn’t have anywhere near the gang violence that Chicago does. About a decade ago, a study by the Justice Policy Institute offered a reason for that. The interventionist, public-health-based approach adopted by New York in the 1970s and 1980s was simply more effective than the heavy-handed suppression approach in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. “The evidence that punitive responses to youth crime do not effectively increase public safety mounts,” the authors concluded. They recommended “implementation of evidence-based practices to treat young people who are in conflict with the law” and urged that “funding for such programs should be routed through the health and human services system, where they have been proven to be more effective than in the criminal justice system.”

The good news is that funding such programs tends to be cheaper than funding anti-gang task forces and other aggressive law enforcement approaches. The bad news is that it’s often hard to convince people that such programs really are effective…

Let’s say every large city adopted the Cure Violence model. What would policing look in those cities? 

What we say is that we need to treat violence as a health issue, and what we advocate for is the effective prevention of violent behavior through highly specific public health methods. 

All other epidemics are managed by public health. They’re managed from the inside out, with health officials guiding and training healthcare workers, collecting and using data, and ensuring results. By managing violence as a health issue, we’re able to detect potential violence before it happens, to mediate conflicts before they turn violent. These interventions are done by credible, highly trained workers. (They get over 100 hours of training before the start, then ongoing on the job.) They know how to talk to people in these communities, and they’re known throughout the community as a resource in violence prevention. Our workers identify those most likely to be violent, then intervene to reduce the risk.  They also work to change norms in the community so that violence is discouraged. This is very similar to how health workers help people in [cases of] Ebola, cholera and other epidemics. You change behavior to prevent the disease from spreading. 

2) I had part of this quoted in another link the other day, but it’s really, really important, “De-escalation Keeps Protesters And Police Safer. Departments Respond With Force Anyway.”

Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Cars and buildings have burned. Store windows have been smashed. Protesters and police have been hurt. When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening?

Three federal commissions concluded that when police escalate force those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent.

Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?

“There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey.

“That’s the primal response,” he said. “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.”

3) Chris Rock on “bad apples” is wonderfully captures what’s wrong with this.  It’s not okay to have a few bad apples when those apples are given the power of the state to take life and liberty.  Also, they spoil the damn barrel!

4) Something I recently re-tweeted really captured the dynamic we’re seeing.  Just video after video after video after police behavior (and, yes, I do think police should be held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens in a protest), NYT, “A Crisis That Began With an Image of Police Violence Keeps Providing More”

5) Does David Hopkins ever write a bad post? “Trump, the Floyd Protests, and the End of Confident Conservatism”

Conservative confidence in the nation’s long-term direction became notably scarce in the Obama years, as widespread pessimism and fear replaced Reagan’s cheerful assuredness. The popular backlash on the right against the “change” that Obama himself claimed to personify was stronger than it had been against Clinton, taking aim at the traditional leadership of the Republican Party as well as the Democrats. Rather than selecting yet another member of the Bush family to succeed Obama, Republican primary voters opted to nominate Donald Trump, an outsider candidate who had built his campaign around passionate contempt for Obama and the state of the nation under his watch.

But whatever expressive purpose the decision to elect him may have served, the current president is ill-equipped to usher in a new conservative age. Trump is not a friendly face with the charisma to increase conservatism’s mass appeal, like Reagan was. He is not a man with a 40-year plan, like Rove was. And any hopes that his glowering demeanor and vengeful preoccupations would either intimidate liberals into silence or halt the progression of larger social changes have clearly not been realized. In part because Trump has inspired a backlash of his own, conservatives do not seem much more comfortable with the direction of America today than they were four years ago.

The waning confidence of the American right in its own popular standing has produced other manifestations as well. Its imprint can be seen in conservative opposition to measures designed to increase the ease of voting, in negative portrayals of “millennials” and college students in the conservative media, and in an increased emphasis on the unelected federal judicial branch, rather than the congressional legislative process, as an avenue for conservative policy-making. Perhaps most dramatically, it is expressed by the more frequent displays of firearms at conservative protest events—a clear suggestion that the use or threat of physical force might be necessary to compensate for losses in the court of public opinion.

The current crisis in the streets of America has roots that stretch in many different directions, but it has surely been exacerbated by the current administration’s propensity for confrontation with the many perceived enemies that surround it. It’s not especially important that Trump apparently moved briefly to the bunker under the White House last week in the face of protests outside the building—a subject of liberal mockery in recent days—but it’s crucial that the administration’s governing approach from its inception has reflected a bunker mentality. The protestors gathering daily outside the White House and in cities and towns all around the country since the George Floyd killing have come to embody the threat of cultural besiegement that many conservatives, including those in law enforcement professions, have been feeling since 2008.

Trump has started to echo Nixon’s famous invocation of a supportive “silent majority.” But he is the only president in the history of public opinion polling who has never had a majority of Americans on his side, even on his first day in office, and he has never shown much interest in courting skeptics rather than attacking them. Winning a second term will likely require him to eke out a narrow margin in the electoral college, very possibly without a popular-vote plurality once again. The current governing regime seeks to retain political power from behind barricades that are primarily psychological, separated in spirit more than in physical distance from a growing population of fellow Americans whom it no longer trusts to be on its side. When you see your own domestic political opponents as an irredeemably hostile force trying to destroy the country as you know it, perhaps it’s only natural to fantasize about calling in the troops.

6) Jamelle Bouie on the violence from police:

If we’re going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren’t destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many police are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets.

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

None of this quells disorder. Everything, from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves, does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence, we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

7) Because, of course…”Top U.S. scientists left out of White House selection of COVID-19 vaccine short list”

8) Yglesias on the “8 can’t wait” policies for police reform:

The essence of the campaign is eight procedural rules that Campaign Zero claims “data proves” can conjointly decrease police violence by 72 percent.

…

These ideas all cut against officers’ typical demands for maximum autonomy and minimal accountability while also remaining comfortably within the technocratic, meliorist domain rather than amounting to a radical transformation of policing.

Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist with Campaign Zero, tells me that’s no coincidence. The point of the list, he says, was to assemble “policies that can make a big difference and that can be implemented most quickly by cities across the country.”

Implementing new training regimes at scale across the country would take time. Creating a new corps of unarmed mediators and mental health professionals who could serve as crisis responders would likely take longer. 8 Can’t Wait is about policy changes that could be made in a very rapid time frame. But do they work? …

The 8 Can’t Wait agenda is extremely well-constructed for speed — it’s right in the name — in a way that is deeper than branding. Since any given recommendation on the list is in effect in at least some American cities, all a place needs to do to become an eight-for-eight city is copy some stuff out of other cities’ police regulations. The process moves quickly, and the logical relationship between these measures and reduced violence is clear and obvious.

Will universal adoption of all eight really generate the kind of massive fall in police violence this study indicates? There’s plenty of reason for skepticism. But the ideas are genuinely promising, they are based on some evidence, and they fit the political needs of the moment very well. Mayors and governors looking to show a good-faith desire to tackle the problem of excessive police violence without lapsing into radicalism could do a lot worse than to pick up this message.

9) Ta-Nahesi Coates is actually optimistic (and so am I):

Ezra Klein

What do you see right now, as you look out at the country?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment.

I had an interesting call on Saturday with my dad, who was born in 1946, grew up dirt poor in Philadelphia, lived in a truck, went off to Vietnam, came back, joined the Panther Party, and was in Baltimore for the 1968 riots. Would’ve been about 22 at that time.

I asked him if he could compare what he saw in 1968 to what he was seeing now. And what he said to me was there was no comparison — that this is much more sophisticated. And I say, well, what do you mean? He said it would have been like if somebody from the turn of the 20th century could see the March on Washington.

The idea that black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods would resonate with white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London — that was unfathomable to him in ‘68, when it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.

I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black, that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is. I think that’s different.

10) I met ACLU lawyer Somil Trivedi on my criminal justice reform trip to DC last Fall with the NCSU Park Scholars.  Definitely one of the most impressive– smart, thoughtful, warm– people I met on the trip.  He co-authors this excellent piece on why it’s so hard for prosecutors to hold police accountable:

As we argued recently in the Boston University Law Review, police exert significant control over prosecutors in both formal and informal ways. For example, in sociological research examining police and prosecutorial practice in Chicago, prosecutors relied on police testimony to win trials, and those trial wins were essential to earning promotions within the office. Prosecutors described an overt pressure to comply with a police culture of “silence and violence” that all but dictated that prosecutors operate with “blinders” on. This meant that questioning an officer’s version of events, whether there was a dead suspect or just a missing bag of drugs, was seen as a sign of “disrespect” to the officer. Conscientious prosecutors who questioned the legitimacy of a police report or the word of an officer could end up with tarnished reputations amongst law enforcement, resistance from officers, and marginalization in the office…

This perverse incentive structure normalized police perjury and created the conditions upon which police misconduct could thrive in small and big ways. These practices stacked the deck in favor of the state in run-of-the-mill prosecutions and often violated the law—both state and constitutional. But, in the most extreme cases, where a suspect was shot or killed, they helped ensure that there was no justice for the victim or community, no accountability for the police, and the officer involved was allowed to continue walking their beat.

11) OMG– I assume you have read about the 57 police officers in Buffalo.  “Just following orders.”  Some people need more history.    Adam Serwer

After an elderly protester in Buffalo, New York, was pushed to the ground by police officers and left to lie there as blood pooled beneath his head, the head of the local police union, John Evans, said his colleagues were disgusted.

Disgusted, that is, that two of the officers seen in the video were suspended without pay.

“Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” Evans told the Buffalo NBC affiliate WGRZ, offering a classic Nuremberg defense. The officers remain employed; they have simply resigned from the riot team that was deployed to clear the city’s Niagara Square of residents protesting police abuse…

Initially, the Buffalo police insisted that the man “tripped and fell” during “a skirmish involving protesters,” a description implying that the officers had been physically threatened by the elderly protester and had acted to protect themselves. In the absence of a video proving that story false, it seems likely they would have stuck to that story. The willingness of officers to behave this way on camera and then lie about it raises discomfiting questions about what such officers are willing to do, or mislead the public about, when no one is recording.

Some of the recent protests across the United States have been marred by looting, rioting, and violence, but the video from Buffalo was just the latest example of police officers responding to anti-police-brutality protests with violence against individuals who pose no apparent threat. Since the nationwide demonstrations began, videos showing police beating unarmed protesters, driving police cars into crowds, firing at journalists, and teargassing peaceful protesters with no provocation have spread across social media. Elected officials and police spokespeople have insisted that the catalyzing event for the protests, the release of a nine-minute video showing the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin digging his knee into the back of George Floyd’s neck, was an isolated incident. But the response of many police departments across the country vindicates the protesters’ complaints: In many cases, protesters against excessive force have themselves become the targets of excessive force…

This is not a system that can be overcome by good intentions. Still, the data suggest that officers might act differently if the system were not so effective at protecting cops who cross the line. But it also indicates that until police officers can be held accountable for violating the rights of the people they are paid to protect, and police officers themselves are rewarded rather than punished for identifying colleagues who abuse their authority, the problem cannot be resolved.

The fact that 57 officers were willing to take a stand to defend misconduct rather than to oppose it shows how far we are from a system that does that.

12) Adam Gopnik (don’t know how I missed this last year) is so good.  And this is so relevant, “How the South won the Civil War.”

13) The data behind this tweet make me very happy (and optimistic):

2014:
43% of Americans said that the killings in Ferguson and NYC were "signs of a broader problem" and 51% said they were "isolated incidents" in a Post-ABC poll

Today:
74% say George Floyd's killing was a sign of a broader problem in a ABC-Ipsos pollhttps://t.co/zsoaNVqCrG

— Emily Guskin (@EmGusk) June 5, 2020

14) And while we’re at it with encouraging tweets:

Net approval, Day 1233

GHW Bush -11.9
TRUMP -12.0
Carter -13.5 https://t.co/wrUKm1l7pa

— Jonathan Bernstein (@jbview) June 5, 2020

15) Okay.  One more tweet.  This graph is so important.  We’ve got to contain the virus!  Only then does the economy really come back.

This is probably one of the most interesting charts. Almost no difference in spending activity between lockdown states and non-lockdown ones pic.twitter.com/TcSFuRU2j1

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 5, 2020

16) Linda Greenhouse is not happy about the horrible Kavanaugh dissent on religious service in California:

The concept of discrimination, properly understood, simply doesn’t fit this case. California is not subjecting things that are alike to treatment that’s different. Churches are not like the retail stores or “cannabis dispensaries” in Justice Kavanaugh’s list of “comparable secular businesses.” Sitting in communal worship for an hour or more is not like picking up a prescription, or a pizza, or an ounce of marijuana. You don’t need a degree in either law or public health to figure that out. If anything, California is giving churches preferential treatment, since other places where people gather in large numbers like lecture halls and theaters are still off limits.

So what was the dissenters’ problem? Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion offers a clue. The Christian observance of Pentecost was last Sunday, and the clock was ticking as the justices considered the South Bay United Pentecostal Church’s request. “The church would suffer irreparable harm from not being able to hold services on Pentecost Sunday in a way that comparable secular businesses and persons can conduct their activities,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. What does that sentence even mean? What’s the secular comparator when it comes to observing Pentecost? A Sunday afternoon softball game?

I’m baffled by why a particular liturgical observance should have even a walk-on role in this opinion. Last weekend was also Shavuot, a major Jewish holiday. But it’s the Christian calendar about which recently appointed federal judges seem exclusively concerned. In April, Judge Justin Walker of the Federal District Court in Louisville, Ky., blocked that city from enforcing a ban on drive-in church services. “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter,” his overheated opinion began. (Judge Walker is Senator Mitch McConnell’s young protégé who, barring a miracle or a pair of righteous Republican senators, is on the verge of confirmation to the powerful federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.).

In any event, no one was stopping the church from observing Pentecost. As its own brief points out, the church conducts as many as five services on a typical Sunday, each attracting 200 to 300 worshipers. As the state points out, it could schedule more services…

But then came the California church case. Justice Kavanaugh might have chosen to observe the norm, casting his vote without issuing an opinion that served only to raise the political temperature. Instead of that unspoken gesture toward collegiality, he gave us more proof that the polarization roiling the country has the Supreme Court in its grip. The court can’t save us; that much is clear. It can’t even save itself.

17) I’m going to be watching this with a lot of cautious optimism.  I really think this may be our pre-vaccine ticket out of this mess, “First human trial of potential antibody treatment for Covid-19 begins”

Scientists at AbCellera and the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases selected those they thought would be most potent and Lilly scientists engineered the treatment, known as a monoclonal antibody therapy. This approach has worked to treat other illnesses; there are monoclonal antibody therapies that treat HIV, asthma, lupus, Ebola and some forms of cancer…

If the treatment appears to be safe, the company would move to the next phase of testing in a matter of weeks. The second phase of the trial will involve a larger number of patients, including patients who are not hospitalized, and will test whether the therapy is effective.

The company also plans to study the drug as prevention. The treatment could be used for vulnerable patient populations for whom vaccines might not be a great option, such as the elderly or people who have chronic disease or compromised immune systems.

Eli Lilly has already begun manufacturing the antibody therapy in large quantities so it could be tested and potentially for use in patients beyond the trial. Under non-pandemic circumstances, the companies would usually wait to find out if it worked first before it started making it.

“If it does work, we don’t want to waste a single day, we want to have as much medicine as possible available to help as many people quickly,” Skovronsky said.

In trials over the next several months, Lilly says it will test different mixtures of a few of the other antibodies scientists think might provide protection. The optimal scenario, though, Skovronsky said, is if they only need one antibody at a relatively low dose.

18) Peter Suderman, “It’s Time To Bust Police Unions: Over and over again, unions have defended bad policing and bad police. It’s time for them to go.”

This is what police unions do: defend the narrow interests of police at the expense of public safety. They exist to demand that taxpayers pay for dangerous, and even deadly, negligence. And although they are not the only pathology that affects American policing, they are a key internal influence on police culture, a locus of resistance to improvements designed to reduce police violence. To stop bad cops and police abuse, we must tackle police unions.

In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement. In 2014, for example, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. As a result of Pantaleo’s chokehold, Garner died. Garner’s last words were, “I can’t breathe.”

The incident, caught on video, helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, but five years after Garner’s death, he was fired from the force following a police administrative judge’s ruling that the chokehold was, indeed, a violation of department policy.

Pantaleo had violated his police department’s policy in a way that resulted in the death of a man who was committing the most minor of offenses. Yet when he was finally fired, Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, Pantaleo’s union, criticized the city for giving in to “anti-police extremists” and warned that such decisions threatened the ability of city police to do their jobs. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” Lynch said.

In essence, the police union’s position was: Officers of the law should not be punished for using prohibited techniques in ways that result in the deaths of nonviolent offenders, because to do so would unduly inhibit police work. A deadly violation of department policy is just police “doing their job.” 

19) I’ve always enjoyed the fact that my blood type is A+.  I feel like that’s on-brand for me :-).  But, alas, solid evidence that it’s not good if I get Covid.

Why do some people infected with the coronavirus suffer only mild symptoms, while others become deathly ill?

Geneticists have been scouring our DNA for clues. Now, a study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

Variations at two spots in the human genome are associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19, the researchers found. One of these spots includes the gene that determines blood types.

Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study…

The findings suggest that relatively unexplored factors may be playing a large role who develops life-threatening Covid-19. “There are new kids on the block now,” said Andre Franke, a molecular geneticist at the University of Kiel in Germany and a co-author of the new study, which is currently going through peer review.

Scientists have already determined that factors like age and underlying disease put people at extra risk of developing a severe case of Covid-19. But geneticists are hoping that a DNA test might help identify patients who will need aggressive treatment.

Figuring out the reason that certain genes may raise the odds of severe disease could also lead to new targets for drug designers.

20) Also, not a link.  But damn I cannot wait to teach Criminal Justice Policy in Spring 2021 (it’s almost tempting to think about adding it right now to the Fall semester).  Saving so many great articles that I can already here the complaints of my students about the reading load. And definitely send me thoughtful, policy-oriented takes that I might have missed and that would be good for my future students.