Friday, May 4, 2007

Bill Piper: A New Bottom Line for the War on Drugs. Now that two of the Atlanta police officers responsible for killing 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston have pled guilty to manslaughter, planting evidence and a cover-up, it is time for policymakers to change the policies that led to her death. Obvious reforms are requiring substantial evidence before a warrant to raid someone's home is issued and severely limiting the use of "no knock" raids. Less obvious is the need to change the underlying incentive structure under which law enforcement agencies operate. Drug war tragedies happen, in part, because law enforcement agencies are graded on such Vietnam-like "body count" statistics as the amount of drugs seized and the number of people arrested. Yet arrests and seizures have little if any impact on drug availability or the problems associated with substance abuse. Furthermore, measuring success by these statistics alone can breed corruption and impropriety. Because the amount of funding narcotics taskforces receive is often based on how many people they arrest and the amount of drugs they seize, individual officers can advance their careers significantly by making a large number of arrests, even if they are just drug users. This incentive structure has led to fabricating informants, raiding homes on false evidence, lying to judges, and planting evidence. Anything to increase the "body count." Federal prosecutor David Nahmias recently told The New York Times: "The [Atlanta] officers...were not corrupt in the sense that we have seen before. They are not accused of seeking payoffs or trying to rob drug dealers or trying to protect gang members. Their goal was to arrest drug dealers and seize illegal drugs, and that's what we want our police officers to do for our community. But these officers pursued that goal by corrupting the justice system, because when it was hard to do their job the way the Constitution requires, they let the ends justify their means." Corrupting the justice system is what happens when policymakers tie budgets, promotions, and salaries to statistics like arrests and seizures. As the plea agreement makes clear, the Atlanta officers cut corners in order to ''be considered productive officers and to meet [the agency's] performance targets." Atlanta's police union has complained that narcotics officers are under pressure to meet quotas for arrests and warrants. This is a common story one hears in state after state. Even when police officers play by the book, grading them by arrests and seizures is a recipe for failure. The easiest way to boost their numbers is to arrest low-level offenders - from people smoking marijuana on the street corner to drug mules and the homeless. These arrests do much to pad the official reports, but do nothing to stop major traffickers or reduce the problems associated with substance abuse. It is time for a new bottom line. Drug law enforcement agencies should be graded on their ability to break-up crime networks and apprehend violent offenders. Arrests and seizures should be strategies for achieving these goals, not measurement criteria to judge success or failure. A recent book by the American Enterprise Institute explains: "Retail-level drug enforcement should focus on what it can accomplish (reducing the negative side effects of illicit markets) and not on what it can't achieve (substantially raising drug prices). Thus, instead of aiming to arrest drug dealers and seize drugs - the mechanisms by which enforcement seeks to raise prices - retail drug enforcement should target individual dealers and organizations that engage in flagrant dealing, violence, and the recruitment of juveniles. Arrests and seizures should not be operational goals, but rather tools employed, with restraint, in the service of public safety." (from the February 2005 AEI book, An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy) This pragmatic approach is taking root in Texas, where a series of scandals has spurred massive change. State narcotics officers are now judged less by arrests and more on how well they disrupt and dismantle dangerous crime organizations. Gathering intelligence and building connections takes precedent over arresting low-level offenders. Drug arrests have fallen by more than 40 percent in the last year, but drug seizures have more than doubled. The state is moving closer to its goal of taking down the top Texas "gatekeepers" to the major drug cartels. Georgia officials have an opportunity to do something similar. Mrs. Johnston's death is about more than bad apples in the Atlanta police department. It's about the corrupting incentives of a failed drug policy. Changing the criteria by which drug enforcement agencies are evaluated will not bring her back, but it will ensure that her death was not in vain. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 9:07:13 AM    comment []

Gerald Bracey: A Test Everyone Will Fail. The world of education is a world of tests these days. But why should tests be only for students? Here's one for policy makers, politicians and adults in general. Bet you don't pass. The National Assessment Governing Board defined the "proficient" level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as the level that "all students should reach" (the other levels are "basic" and "advanced;" the proficient and advanced levels are often reported together as "proficient or better"). Given that and given that Sweden was the top-ranked nation among 35 in the most recent international reading study, answer the following questions. 1. If Swedish 4th graders sat for our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test, what proportion of them would be labeled "proficient or better?" 2. If Singaporean 8th graders sat for our NAEP science test, what proportion of them would be labeled "proficient or better?" 3. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1995, where did American fourth graders rank in science among the 26 participating nations? 4. What percent of American fourth graders were labeled as "proficient or better" in the NAEP 1996 science assessment? 5. What indicators of achievement have been rejected by the Government Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education and the Center for Research in Evaluation Student Standards and Testing? 6. What are the first words in set-off text that one encounters in the recently released Center for American Progress/Chamber of Commerce report, Leaders and Laggards? THE ANSWERS 1. 33% 2. 51% 3. Third 4. 29% 5. The National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement levels--basic, proficient, and advanced. 6. "The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most fourth- and eighth-graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics." By comparing the results of foreign students and American students on tests administered in both nations, and then examining the American students' scores on the U. S. NAEP, it is possible to reliably estimate how well foreign students would perform on the NAEP. And it turns out that only one third of those high-flying Swedish kids would be considered proficient readers. The actual figure for American 4th graders who did take NAEP was 29%. The great majority of the remaining countries would have fewer proficient students than the United States. Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers. Using the NAEP standard, Singapore is the only nation in the world to have a majority of its students proficient in science, and that by a scant one percent. Only a handful of countries would have a majority of students proficient in mathematics. All of those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent--kids can't answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions that they shouldn't be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called "unreasonable" results including the fact that third-ranked America had only 29% of its 4th graders considered proficient or better by NAEP. Other evidence is easily come by. In 2000, 2.7% of American seniors scored a 3 or better on Advanced Placement Calculus (3 is the score at which colleges begin to grant college credit for the course). Almost 8% of all seniors scored above 600 on the SAT (24% of SAT test takers scored over 600). Yet NAEP said only 1.5% reached the advanced level. So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The CAP/Chamber illustrates why--these numbers are useful as scare techniques and bludgeons. If you can batter people into believing that the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future and you can control them. In the 1980s the schools-suck-bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year-long recession-stagnation was going to take away all of our markets; today India and China play the role of economic ogres. Recently in the Post, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that the constant reference to a "war on terror" "stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue." Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, putting up $60 million hoping to "wake up the American public." If the fear mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase "failing schools" in the last five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would never allow had they not frightened you into submission. This was originally published in the Washington Post. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 8:18:04 AM    comment []

Jeff Dorchen: First They Came for the Latinos. Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the panda who uses its thumb to hitch a ride to the beach. I know it's poor etiquette to compare today's human rights abuses to those of the Nazis. The quaint practices of the National Socialists in Germany so many decades ago were far more regimented than those in operation today. The willy-nilly explosions and machete choppings and spastic "crowd control" during demonstrations, along with proudly displayed videos and photos of beheadings, sexually-oriented tortures, and hangings, make the Nazis seem a little priggish with their rigorous record-keeping and formality. But every once in a while something happens that is so evocative to a Jewish imagination such as mine that the prohibition against remarking on the resemblance to the archetypal bad guys of the previous century is an artistic straitjacket no rhetorical Houdini could resist escaping. And if you doubt I am a rhetorical Houdini, look again please at the way I untangled myself from the previous sentence just before drowning. About a mile or so west and a little south of my house on the south side of Chicago, there's a mall called the Discount Mall in Little Village. The mall is not just a place of business, but a gathering place for street vendors and meandering shoppers at the busy block between Albany and Kedzie on 26th Street. My wife used to teach at Madero Middle School on Kedzie and 28th Street, so I passed through that thronged thoroughfare many times on my way to pick her up from work. Nearly everyone who patronizes the mall is of Latino heritage. I guess that makes it a good place to look for illegal immigrants. You would also find a lot of legal ones, and many just plain U.S. citizens. However, you could just as easily find the same percentage of illegal immigrants to legal immigrants to just plain U.S. citizens at lunchtime in what residents of Chicago call The Loop, the downtown business district. So, let's say you threw a Gestapo-style cordon of Federal Agents carrying high-powered rifles and wearing bullet-proof armor around a block of lunch places and storefront businesses on Wabash between Madison and Monroe and didn't let anybody in or out of that cordoned area while you checked everyone's "papers." If you wanted to round up illegal immigrants, or even, say, a ring of people making fake IDs, that would be a great idea, right? What? Why not? Oh, I see -- because totalitarian police state-style behavior tends to upset people who work for banks, law firms, city, county and state offices, foreign consulates, and stylish department stores. And let us not forget patrons of the arts, art students, and self-employed professionals. Yes, I see your point. Yes. It's a little out of place in an open society, a democratic republic such as the United States of America, to cordon off a section of the public thoroughfare as if it were a block of apartments in the Warsaw Ghetto. And you certainly don't want people watching the news to see a white travel agent or a black psychotherapist or a secretary at the Indian consulate or an Asian museum curator complaining that U.S. Federal agents with high-powered rifles and bullet-proof vests held them hostage while they stood their, helpless and terrorized, wondering what would happen next. Anyway, you wouldn't have to do that -- you could just cordon off all the kitchens of those lunch places, and a couple of photocopy shops. That's where the Latinos are, and those are the illegals you're looking for, right? But you might be accused of racial profiling, if you only harassed the Latinos in an area you'd cordoned off. Much better just to cordon off an area where everyone's Latino. Take the Little Village Discount Mall, for example. You can't be accused of harassing only the Latinos in the mall, you'd be harassing everyone -- it just so happens that everyone's Latino. And even better: if you do it during business hours, you can be pretty sure that almost no one you harass will be some easily-ruffled art patron, paralegal, or clerk of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. No, almost everyone is low-income, and unconnected with anyone more powerful than the manager of a grocery store. All right, if you're really unlucky you might harass the relative of an alderman. But the alderman of Little Village is going to be Latino, too. See, all you really want to do is make sure anyone who's going to complain is Latino. That way, anyone from the rest of the population watching TV who sees people complaining about Gestapo tactics will see only people who look like brown immigrants. And they'll say to themselves, "There go all those brown immigrants who come to take our jobs, complaining about America again. If they don't like it, why don't they go back where they came from? You know, to that other, not as good America." The Nazis tried to avoid dramatic scenes where regular Germans could see them harassing Jews right in their midst, at least early on -- they didn't throw cordons around high-society balls just because a couple of Jews were attending. It always worked out better for the Nazis when they harassed Jews in the Jewish neighborhoods. That's why they put them in ghettos, silly! Even European anti-Semites could be annoyed by being cordoned off in a block of cafes at tea time, even if it was in the name of ferreting out the dirty Jew, and don't get me started with your dozen or so less-than-rabidly-anti-Semitic Germans -- they had no stomach for that stuff whatsoever. On the other hand, it is nice to know that the quaint custom of treating immigrant populations as animals to be corralled hasn't completely died out in the West. You think Sarkozy's doing so well in France because voters think he's going to shorten the work week? Let alone make everyone equal under French law? Egalite? I don't think so. Maybe Fraternite, as long as mon frere is a frere by blood. Liberte? Well, the West always has that. It's the West! The West invented la Liberte. Anti-immigrant Nationalism has never really gone out of style in the West -- or anywhere. It's just that with the leader of the Free World pushing discourse so far to the right -- if you can call monarchy "right" -- all right, pushing discourse so many centuries back into the pre-republic past, back to the days before Italian Humanism, back before Machiavelli saw a market for his ideas -- it's made scared, angry majorities nostalgic for the days when you could just round up the troublemaking outsiders and massacre them. It's like when white people in the USA start singing songs about watching the darkies picking cotton, or when a group of Germans start singing "Deutschland Uber Alles" or the "Horst Wessel" song, they get all misty-eyed and long for the good old days. Now I don't want to single out W. Bush as the guy who first started singing the old nostalgic tunes -- Ronald Reagan started demonizing poor people in the 1980s, turning them back into subhumans whom one might be justified in enslaving, if only for their own good. But he was too busy attacking Latinos in their own countries to create a focused campaign of anti-immigrant propaganda at home. And he didn't have the terrorism excuse for harassing foreigners. The most he could do with it was bomb Libya. But he did have the War on Drugs. His clandestine employees in the War against Central American Sovereignty, with their ready access to coca processing, funded themselves by selling crack to domestic black people in Los Angeles -- whereupon the War on Drugs would be the pretext to sweep the ghettos and transfer black men from the street to the more easily controlled environment of prison. The War on South of the Border Communism/War on Drugs synergy was the closest thing to a recycling policy the Reagan Administration ever pursued. But the rhetoric against non-wealthy Latino immigrants was barely in its infancy back in the 1980s. Look how far we've come. Now you former colonies, don't get all smug -- you Sudans and Rwandas and Gujurats and Israels and Turkeys and Syrias and Indonesias and Chinas -- you haven't been setting a very good example for your former mentors, the West. It's like all that time the West spent civilizing you has gone right down the toilet. When a government can't rule competently, it has to rule by fear, or risk being thrown out by the people. So, in all fairness to everyone on Earth, the internal enemy is the best friend an incompetent government can have. And since humanity has never been plagued by an epidemic of competent government, we should hardly be surprised to find so many enemies in our midst. I guess citizens of the USA are spoiled. They should stop deluding themselves that their Constitution can somehow prevent their government from abusing human rights. How is the USA supposed to compete in the new competitive global marketplace if they're hamstrung by government regulations that protect their citizens from unreasonable search and seizure? China doesn't have to follow due process -- that's how they got to be such an economic powerhouse. And how is Dick Cheney supposed to win the war against terrorism if he can't terrorize anyone? You have to fight fire with fire! That's why firemen always spray fire on buildings that are on fire. If you know a better way to fight fire, I'd like to hear it! Now it turns out, or rather the Feds would have us believe, that a couple of dozen people in that mall I mentioned, the Little Village Discount Mall, were making and selling fake Social Security cards. With a Social Security card you can get a United States passport, a driver's license, all the things an illegal alien looking for a job needs. And terrorists need them, too, so they can drive legally to pick up their bombs. All those Latino terrorists -- like that Jose Padilla. Not "pa-DEE-ya." He rhymes it with "killa." He can't even pronounce his own last name right, he's a failure as a terrorist AND a Latino. Anyway, the long and the short of it is: on Tuesday, April 24, 2007, Federal Immigration agents took my advice. They didn't throw a big Gestapo-style cordon around Orchestra Hall or a Club Med or a party at the Governor's Mansion. They went to a poor Latino neighborhood and threw their Nazi-style cordon around a mall. And they locked the gates of the mall -- good thing the mall had gates! Talk about convenience! Usually you have to go to a wealthy community to find gates capable of quarantining an entire population when shut. They locked the mall down -- it was pretty exciting! Guarded by helmeted agents with high-powered rifles, bullet-proof vests, no one allowed in or out, a couple hundred or so terrified people, corralled in a huge pen, not knowing what was going on, wondered anxiously if their aunt or uncle or brother or they themselves would be thrown into a van and taken away. Finally, the officers in charge of the operation addressed the crowd. All of those who had been herded together -- men, women, children, and the elderly -- were told to remove their clothes, to strip down completely. Then they were to proceed into the showers to be disinfected. No, I'm sorry. That last part referred to something entirely different. Something that could never happen in my neighborhood. This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day! [You can read past Moments of Truth in the Moment of Truth Archives. Jeff delivers his commentary on "This Is Hell," a unique progressive radio show hosted by bitter, blind, gap-toothed Chuck Mertz, broadcast live from the campus of Northwestern University on the web at http://www.wnur.org/ every Saturday morning beginning 10am Eastern Time. The show is podcast, and its archives and the excellent website for the show are at http://www.thisishell.net/]. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 8:15:23 AM    comment []

Florida Acts to Eliminate Touch-Screen Voting System. Florida legislators voted on Thursday to replace touch-screen voting machines - installed in 15 counties after the troubled 2000 presidential election - with a system of optical scan voting. The new system is scheduled to be running in time for the 2008 presidential election. [t r u t h o u t] 8:09:51 AM    comment []

Rights: US ‘Moral Authority’ Rests on Big Stick. UNITED NATIONS - When the 192-member U.N. General Assembly meets in mid-May to elect 14 new members to the 47-nation Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), the United States will be conspicuous by its absence and missing from the ballot. Justifying its decision, Washington says it will skip the elections because the HRC has lost its “credibility” [...] [CommonDreams.org] 7:05:30 AM    comment []

Steve Young: Tune In BillO Today. Should Be *%$#* Fun. And Rosa Brooks Helps.. Thank God the study is in. Who knew Bill O'Reilly was a name-caller? The Indiana University study saying that Bill name-calls at least once every 6.8 seconds. Mu watch doesn't have a tenth of a second hand so I don't know if it's true. Still, the study is analogous to those government studies that prove the Sun is hot, or Bush Administration studies that say it isn't. We know the results before the first researcher puts on his white lab coat. No matter 6.8 or 7.3, this one is gonna be fun. Yesterday Bill already threw in the George Soros gave money to IU canard. 'Nuff said. But that won't stop Bill from saying it again and you can bet your Soros stipend that Bill will be saying it all day today. And Rosa Brooks will be right in Bill's crosshairs with IU. The secular-progressive, far-left moonbat, L.A. Times oped columnist, who probably receives beau coup bucks from Soros, highlighted the story in her LA Times her "Sweet Jesus I love Bill O'Reilly!" column today. Yesterday Bill said the story never hit the papers. Well, today that's old news. And for that, I ask America's far-left loons to circle the wagons around Brooks. She's gonna need it. It might pay to get the hundredth of a second hand ready. Of course, if Bill were smart, and he wanted to really get our goat, he would neither touch the story nor Brooks. Nothing bothers an instigator than not getting credit for instigation. Like I said, "if Bill were smart..." Can't wait to listen to him berate IU and Brooks. Steve Young is author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" (www.greatfailure.com)and his "All The News That's Fit To Spoof" appears in L.A. Daily News opeds every Sunday (www.dailynews.com/steveyoung), right next to Bill's...really. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 7:04:36 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.