Tag: Law and Disorder

Minneapolis Police Department Added Another to Its Body Count and People Became Upset

Yesterday morning saw another unarmed black man added to the Minneapolis Police Department’s (MPD) body count. In a surprisingly short period of time it was announced that four officers were fired from the department over the situation. However, that failed to assuage the masses who are all too familiar with the cycle of law enforcers being fired only to be reinstated after their union argues that the firing was unwarranted. During the evening the inevitable happened. Protesters made their feelings clear to the law enforcers.

The protest, which I followed courtesy of the live streamers at Unicorn Riot, was larger than previous protests against MPD’s brutality. Eventually the protesters made their way to the Third Precinct in Minneapolis and went to town. The protesters surrounded the Third Precinct, tagged it with graffiti, smashed many of its windows, and messed up a couple of law enforcer vehicles. The evening festivities culminated with MPD reinforcements arrived and clashing with protesters for quite some time.

Not surprisingly online viewers were arguing about whether or not the protesters’ were villains or heroes. I think that argument missed the most important point. The morality of the protesters’ actions depends on your personal views, but what happened last night was inevitable.

MPD has a sordid history with unarmed black men dying in its custody. The decision makers in the MPD, City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, State of Minnesota, and federal government have blocked any justice for the families of those killed by MPD. The officers involved seldom receive any meaningful punishment and are almost never charged with a crime. When they are charged, they are almost always found not guilty because the law give law enforcers, unlike the rest of us, tremendous leeway in the use of deadly force.

If you take away all forms of recourse that we like to consider civil, wronged individuals will eventually resort to violence. What happened in Minneapolis yesterday evening was the direct result of government personnel continuously protecting MPD officers from punishment for their wrongdoing. The fact that such a situation hadn’t happened earlier is rather miraculous. Likewise, the fact that the situation wasn’t far worse is also miraculous.

The truth is MPD was damn lucky. The protesters massively outnumbered the officers in the Third Precinct. They could have easily overrun the building and killed every officer inside. They didn’t, but if the status quo with MPD continues, the next incident will likely be worse and eventually a spark will light the powder keg that is the city and a lot of people will die. I hope that last night’s conflict puts enough fear into the decision makers to convince them that the status quo is no longer viable. Unfortunately, I doubt it did. It may take citywide rioting before the decision makers are finally scared enough to stop shielding MPD’s officers from justice.

Maintaining a Currency

I like the idea of cryptocurrencies for several reasons. With the exceptions of ones started by governments or their cronies, they exist outside the direct control of governments. If designed properly, they can also enable anonymous transactions, which hinders the efforts of governments to use transaction information to oppress individuals. However, there is a lot of criticism aimed at cryptocurrencies. Some of the criticism is valid, but much of the criticism is idiotic when considered in the context of currencies in general.

One of the most common criticisms I see regarding cryptocurrencies is their energy consumption. Consider Bitcoin. There is a website dedicated to tracking the estimated power usage of the Bitcoin blockchain. As of this writing the site estimates the blockchain’s energy consumption at 73.12 TWh, which it says is roughly equivalent to the power usage of all of Austria. Consuming the power usage of an entire country to maintain a blockchain appears horribly inefficient… until you compare it to the resources used by other currencies.

Consider the United States dollar. It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming the dollar is a comparatively efficient currency since pieces of paper with pictures of dead tyrants don’t consume electricity. But there’s so much more involved in manufacturing an maintaining dollars. To start with you have the obvious raw materials needed to manufacture dollars. Ink, paper, printing machinery, etc. are needed to make every dollar. Not only is printing machinery used to print dollars, it also requires routine maintenance. Once the dollars are printed they must be stored so you need warehouse facilities. But not any warehouse facility will do. Being a highly sought after good, dollars must be stored in a warehouse that is secure against thieves. These secure storage facilities require hardened materials, security devices, electricity, manpower, etc. Then you have the issue of transporting dollars between storage facilities, which must also be done in a secure manner (armored trucks aren’t exactly fuel efficient vehicles).

The resources needed for manufacturing, storing, and circulating dollars is only a small percentage of the overall resources needed to maintain dollars. A fiat currency quickly becomes worthless if nongovernmental counterfeiters are able to practice their trade unhindered. There are two majors steps to thwarting counterfeiters: hardening the currency itself to make counterfeiting more difficult and punishing counterfeiters once they’re captured.

A dollar can have a lot of built-in security measures. Each of these measures requires resources for both development and implementation. Research and development is needed first to come up with measures that make dollars harder to counterfeit, then manufacturing machinery capable of implementing those measures must be developed, purchased, powered, and maintained.

Then you have the task of punishing captured counterfeiters. The first step in this process is writing and passing legislation, which can be an incredibly inefficient process. The legislation itself is meaningless though, it merely authorizes the allocation of resources for law enforcers. Dollars are probably the most common target of currency counterfeiters, which means the amount of law enforcement effort needed to find and capture counterfeiters is significant, especially when you consider the fact that such efforts must be global in scale. Once captured the counterfeiters must then be tried and, if found guilty, imprisoned. The court system isn’t designed for efficiency and prisons, like the previously mentioned secure warehouses, require a lot of resources to build, operate, and maintain.

What I’ve presented is an incomplete summary of the resources needed to maintain a fiat currency. It’s easy to see that they’re not a resource efficient as many people suspect. Criticizing cryptocurrencies for being inefficient without comparing such inefficiency to their biggest competitors, fiat currencies, is disingenuous and meaingless.

A First

For the first time in the history of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) an officer has been found guilty of murder while operating in an official capacity:

Mohamed Noor became the first former Minnesota police officer found guilty of an on-duty murder Tuesday as a Hennepin County jury convicted him for the fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond in 2017.

Jurors reached their verdict after about 10 hours of sequestered deliberations in a case that was closely watched nationwide and in Damond’s native Australia. They convicted Noor of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter but acquitted him of the most serious count — second-degree murder.

I’ve been following this case through Lou Raguse’s Twitter account since he was one of the handful of journalists granted access to the trial. The main thing I took away from the trial was the extent to which MPD went to cover up the murder. From body cameras not being turned on at critical moments to Noor’s squad car being washed and returned to service the very next day it was pretty obvious that MPD went as far as it could to cover the up the evidence of this murder. However, the case was so blatant that those efforts ended up being in vain.

There is currently a pending civil case brought by the family of Justine Damond against the City of Minneapolis. The evidence revealed during Noor’s trial will likely provide a lot of legal ammunition for Justine’s family’s case. I hope the City of Minneapolis gets soaked for the entire $50 million being sought. It’s obvious that MPD and the government tasked with overseeing it are horribly corrupt and they deserve some swift and severe punishment.

Keeping the Slaves in Their Place

Not only is New Zealand punishing gun owners, it is also punishing slaves who expressed themselves improperly:

The United States is unusual in offering near-absolute protection for free speech under the First Amendment. Most other countries—even liberal democracies—have more extensive systems of online and offline censorship. That difference has been on display this week as New Zealand authorities have begun prosecuting people for sharing copies of last week’s white supremacist mass shooting in Christchurch and for posting hate speech in the wake of the attack.

[…]

Distributing objectionable materials online comes with stiff legal penalties. One man—the 44-year-old owner of an insulation company with alleged neo-Nazi sympathies—has been arrested and charged with two counts of distributing objectionable materials in violation of New Zealand’s Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act. He is being held without bail and could be sentenced to as much as 14 years in prison for each offense.

If you want to judge some of humanity and find them wanting, go to the comments section of that story and read all of the comments by the fascists who support this nonsense (or, just as bad in my opinion, believe the punishment is too severe but otherwise support the law).

I personally object to the ideas expressed by white supremacists and pretty much every other type of collectivist. I’ll even remove their garbage from my site. However, I object even more strongly against the idea that a government should be allowed to punish somebody for what they say, even if it’s the vilest thing imaginable. But I learned long ago that I’m a rather rare breed because I believe individual freedom trumps the demands of the unwashed masses (often referred to as democracy).

Nothing to See Here

The judge presiding over the Mohamed Noor case has announced that no audio or video recordings of the trial will be allowed:

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minnesota judge says there will be no audio or video recording allowed during the trial of a former Minneapolis officer who shot and killed an Australian woman.

Mohamed Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who was shot after she called police to report a possible sexual assault behind her home.

If I were in the judge’s position, I’d do the same thing. Noor really put the Minneapolis justice system in a bind. Most law enforcers have the decency of fabricating some kind of plausible (if you use your imagination) justification for their unnecessary use of force. Noor just flat out executed a woman. Letting him off is going to require jury instructions that no judge would look good giving and certainly no judge would want to be recorded giving. At least that’s the only explanation of which I can conceive that explains the recording prohibition.

Denial of Service Attack

An Oklahoma lawyer performed a successful denial of service attack against a courthouse:

The Rogers County Courthouse in Oklahoma closed early Monday due to bed bugs.

Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton said a lawyer came up to a third-floor courtroom with bugs falling out of his clothing.

Courthouse officials had a meeting and decided to close the courthouse until the bed bugs were gone.

This might be a good card to keep in your back pocket in case you’re ever in court and want an extra day or two to get your defense in order.

Grammar Matters

People are often surprised by what constituted a “classical” education. Education in ancient Rome was heavily focused on grammar. Why? Because the highest aspiration of an educated Roman was to make convincing arguments to get his (sorry ladies, the ancient Romans weren’t into gender equality) clients off the hook for whatever crimes they were accused of perpetrating (much like the decisions of the legal system here in the modern United States, the decisions of Rome’s legal system were more dependent on the ability of lawyers to spin a good yarn than what the evidence indicated).

A brief conversation with the average person will quickly prove that modern education isn’t terribly concerned with grammar. But I urge people to study grammar. While the highest aspiration of an educated person today may not be to impress a judge or jury with impeccable storytelling, the proper use of grammar can still pay dividends:

A pair of student drug dealers have been spared jail after a judge was impressed by the ‘spelling and grammar’ of the texts they sent advertising their product.

[…]

A court heard police examined their mobile phones to find text messages relating to their drug deals composed using perfect spelling and punctuation.

Judge David Hale said the ‘grammar and punctuation’ in the messages was of a much higher standard than normally seen from dealers and indicated a higher level of education.

The bar is set sufficiently low that the appropriate use of a single comma or period qualifies as a “much higher standard than normally seen.” But that’s good news for anybody who “don’t write so good.” They don’t have to study for long to become better than average.

If We Screw Up, It’s You Who Pays

What happens if you’re arrested by a law enforcer under suspicion of possessing drugs, forcefully subjected to a anal cavity search (after an x-ray turned up nothing), and then found innocent of all wrongdoing? You receive a $4,595.12 bill for having the inside of your asshole inspected:

They collaborated to sedate a suspect and thread an 8-inch flexible tube into his rectum in a search for illegal drugs. The suspect, who police said had taunted them that he’d hidden drugs there, refused consent for the procedure.

At least two doctors resisted the police request. An X-ray already had indicated no drugs. They saw no medical need to perform an invasive procedure on someone against his will.

[…]

When they were done, the hospital lawyer overruled its doctors. The lawyer told his doctors that a search warrant required the doctors to use “any means” to retrieve the drugs, records show.

So St. Joe’s medical staff knocked out the suspect and performed the sigmoidoscopy, in search of evidence of a misdemeanor or low-level felony charge, records show.

[…]

So, was it worth the risk? The X-ray was right. The scope found no drugs.

And when they were done, St. Joe’s sent the suspect a bill for $4,595.12.

Will you look at that? The radar shows a lawsuit coming in fast!

In a just world the law enforcers would be punished for trying to force doctors to perform a medical procedure that wasn’t necessary. The judge would be punished for issuing a warrant without any probably cause (a gut feeling and divine inspiration don’t qualify as probably cause). And the hospital’s lawyer would be punished for ordering the doctors to perform an invasive procedure even though an x-ray had already proven that the suspect had no drugs hiding inside of his ass (a hospital’s lawyer is supposed to keep the hospital out of legal trouble not embroil it in situations that will obviously result in a lawsuit).

However, this isn’t a just world. I suspect that the hospital will be punished but I’m all but certain that the law enforcers and the judge will get away scot-free.

Once Again Courts Find Law Enforcers Have No Duty to Protect You

One of the most common arguments made by gun rights advocates is that keeping and bearing arms is essential for self-defense. One of the most common counterarguments made by gun control advocates is that people should rely on professionals to protect them. Professionals in their case means law enforcers, which leaves a giant hole in their counterargument. Courts have consistently ruled that law enforcers have no duty to protect people. A new ruling clarifies that that lack of duty includes children:

A federal judge says Broward schools and the Sheriff’s Office had no legal duty to protect students during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a suit filed by 15 students who claimed they were traumatized by the crisis in February. The suit named six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina.

Bloom ruled that the two agencies had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody.

Whenever I’ve pointed this consistent ruling out to gun control advocates they’ve had to resort to the extremely weak counterargument that while law enforcers aren’t obligated to protect people, no decent law enforcer would shirk from doing so. Arguments based on what people should do can be immediately dismissed when discussing violence because people should refrain from initiating acts of violence. When the argument of self-defense arises, it is because what people should do has already been thrown out of the window. More specifically though the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School proved that there are law enforcers who will shirk from defending people.

As far as the courts are concerned, when somebody initiates violence against you, you’re on your own. If I were a student, I’d trust a teacher who likely has an emotional incentive to protect me far more than a random law enforcer who has no obligation whatsoever to protect me. Since I’d put more trust in a teacher, I’d prefer they have the option of being armed so they are better equipped to defend me if the need arises (as an added bonus, the need to defend me would be less likely to arise since the school would no longer be a tempting soft target).

A Plea Bargain Is Not Proven Guilt

Last week major media sources published stories claiming that a woman was guilty of being a spy for Russia. However, if you spent a few seconds reading the articles, you quickly learned that she wasn’t proven guilty by a jury. She signed a plea bargain:

A Russian woman accused in the US of acting as an agent for the Kremlin to infiltrate political groups has pleaded guilty in a deal with prosecutors.

The key part in that sentence is, “in a deal with prosecutors.”

Imagine you’re brought before a prosecutor. The first thing they show you is the long list of charges that they’re bringing against you. If you’re found guilty of even some of the charges, you’re looking at decades behind bars. However, the prosecutor is willing to cut you a deal. If you sign an admission of guilt, you will only face five years in prison. You know that you’re innocent by do you believe that you’ll be able to convince a jury of that? Even after the judge gives the jury instructions that will stack the odds against you? Even if the prosecutor has an unfair advantage because their transgressions against court procedure often go unpunished? Even though many of the laws you’re accused of violating are so vaguely written that it’s nearly impossible for anybody to argue their innocence against them? Wouldn’t it be better to take the five years in prison rather than the very likely decades you’ll face if this case goes to a rigged court?

These are the questions one must ask themselves when a prosecutor puts a deal in front of them. In my opinion it’s one of the most corrupt aspects of the American judicial system. At a minimum I wish news agencies would reflect this ridiculousness by clearly stating in both the headline and the article that the suspect wasn’t found guilty but merely signed a plea bargain.

None of this is to say that this woman isn’t guilty as Hell. She very well may be a Russian spy. But I don’t believe signing a piece of paper under duress is the same as proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.