Public Sector Unions Undermine Accountability

Research on schools, policing, and government spending is clear: public sector bargaining forces taxpayers to finance the erosion of their rights.

By Jason Sorens of AIER. 

"This November, Vermont will vote on Proposal 3, a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to entrench collective bargaining rights in the state’s constitution. If it passes, the Vermont legislature would be barred from adopting any law that “interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to collectively bargain with respect to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety.” 

The most immediate impacts of Proposal 3, if it passes, would be to authorize unionization for farmworkers and supervisors, the two categories of employees currently exempt from collective bargaining under state and federal law, and to effectively end the ability of the legislature to limit the scope and terms of public sector collective bargaining. The latter change is an especially big problem, because a growing body of evidence demonstrates that public sector collective bargaining undermines accountability to taxpayers and users of public services.

Take public education. Teachers unions exist to promote the interests of teachers, not students, and their activities have damaged school performance and raised costs for taxpayers. Sophisticated empirical studies have repeatedly confirmed these findings.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby used state “duty-to-bargain” laws as an instrument to predict the timing and geographic scope of collective bargaining in K-12 education. She found that collective bargaining increased per-student spending but also increased the high school dropout rate, especially in places where there is less competition among public schools.

Political scientist Terry Moe examined “restrictive” collective bargaining contracts in California and found sharply negative effects on student test scores in larger districts. The negative effects on performance were most pronounced for minority students. “Restrictive” contracts are ones that provide due-process protections against firing bad teachers, limit the role of merit rather than seniority in determining assignments, promotions, and layoffs, and cap work and training hours.

A recent national study of the effects of duty-to-bargain laws in the prestigious American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found that the laws had long-term harmful effects on the labor-market success of men who were students at the time that these policies were enacted, with total negative effects on earnings of more than $200 billion every year.

It’s important to acknowledge that one of the authors of that study previously found null effects of union certification elections in Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota on per-student spending and dropout rates. It could be that effects differ across states or in the long run versus the short run. That’s the reason why social scientists say “read literatures, not papers.” The overall evidence on public sector unionization is firmly negative.

In general, unionization in public schools seems to reduce accountability to parents. School district unionization rates predicted longer school closures during the COVID pandemic, resulting in massive and possibly irreversible learning loss. More unionized schools were less likely to require teachers to teach in person during the pandemic. Stronger unions are associated with fewer effective literacy programs — though this relationship is a rough correlation, not a sophisticated study.

Public safety is another area where collective bargaining has proven harmful. Union contracts frequently shield police from legitimate accountability. Collective bargaining contracts include “delay privileges” that require investigators to wait a certain period before interviewing a police officer who engaged in the use of force. These delay privileges obstruct investigations, reduce the odds that officers face internal discipline, and normalize the excessive use of force.

According to a survey by law professor Stephen Rushin, a whopping 88 percent of police union contracts contain at least one provision that could thwart legitimate disciplinary action, such as mandatory destruction of disciplinary records, bans on civilian oversight, prohibitions on anonymous civilian complaints, and time limits on internal investigations.

Collective bargaining rights increase police misconduct. That’s the conclusion of an empirical study that leveraged a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision expanding collective bargaining to sheriffs’ deputies. After the change, there was a substantial increase in reports of “violent misconduct” by sheriffs’ offices relative to police departments.

The negative consequences of collective bargaining for the taxpayer are also evident in police and firefighter contracts, according to a causally identified study in the ILR Review. Collective bargaining substantially increases firefighter pay and more modestly increases police pay and reduces their workweek. A well-designed synthetic control analysis published by the Heritage Foundation found that collective bargaining increases the cost of government on average across the US by about $600 to $750 per person per year.

Why are public sector unions so harmful? The biggest reason is that unions are often on both sides of the negotiating table. They fund politicians’ campaigns and lobby them for favorable legislation. In low-turnout local elections, they can be the dominant force. So it’s no surprise that local elected officials give the unions exactly what they want.

The science is clear: public sector unions are bad for taxpayers and the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting. Abolishing public sector collective bargaining is necessary to make government a servant of the people, rather than its master."

The Shaky Evidence That Flock Cameras Reduce Crime Rates

Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect.

By Autumn Billings of Reason. 

"Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates. 

Flock Safety has been promoting a working paper that examines whether the company's controversial and hotly debated cameras improve outcomes for motor vehicle theft. To test the effects of Flock's surveillance network, the study uses data from 216 agencies that began using Flock in the period from 2017 to 2023, and 3,108 agencies that did not. The authors then evaluated the cameras' effects on monthly motor vehicle thefts, arrest rates for motor vehicle theft, and the recovery time of stolen cars following ALPR deployment.

The study's findings include an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft, a 15.9 percent increase in motor vehicle theft arrests, and a reduction of 0.28 days in the median recovery time for some stolen cars. The authors concluded that "fixed ALPR deployment is associated with lower theft and higher [arrests], alongside a modest reduction in recovery lag among recorded recoveries."

But the data aren't actually that clear, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm and home of the Plate Privacy Project. 

IJ Senior Researcher Analyst Matthew West found that motor vehicle thefts and arrest rates in those jurisdictions were already trending in the favored direction months before Flock's cameras were ever in use. Unsurprisingly, many of the places that chose to deploy ALPR systems did so when experiencing high levels of vehicle theft, and engaged in crime-fighting initiatives beyond partnering with Flock. Because the study doesn't compare places on similar trajectories, it is unclear how much credit the cameras, as opposed to those other initiatives, deserve for causing motor vehicle thefts to fall and arrests to rise. 

"Because there were already differences in arrests and thefts trends before ALPR deployment, we don't know if the differences in ALPR deployment were caused by ALPR deployment," West explained in a statement. 

West goes on to point out that the authors were able to obtain an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft only "when the data are weighted in favor of agencies that had a bigger problem to begin with." By contrast, if "the data are instead averaged across all agencies (or weighted by population), the study finds no statistically significant change" in the number of thefts.

The study's data have other complications that the authors did not fully account for. One is the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which impacted both the level of crime and the number of people driving across the country. Another is the viral "Kia Challenge" on social media, which led to increased Kia and Hyundai thefts. Such "events may have contributed to motor vehicle theft rising and falling at different times in different places," writes West, further complicating whether ALPR cameras did, in fact, cause favorable changes in the data. 

hese criticisms don't necessarily mean the study's results are wrong, but they do show that the full picture hasn't been explored.

Flock has been using the working paper's results to defend its cameras against an ongoing national backlash. But as much as the company may wish otherwise, the scrutiny of ALPR surveillance technology is far from over."

How Progressive Government Set the Stage for the L.A. Riots

The city’s failed policies on crime, economics and schools hurt immigrants more than anyone else

By Allysia Finley. Excerpts:

"The Los Angeles Police Department has about 1,300 fewer officers than a decade ago—and about half as many per capita and nearly 90% fewer per square mile than New York City."

"he mayor this spring proposed eliminating another 400 police positions to close the city’s $800 million budget hole, caused by ballooning pension costs and lawsuit payouts. The LAPD has also struggled with low morale and recruitment owing to lax enforcement policies that let lawbreakers run free. Crimes such as shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly conduct and trespassing are rarely prosecuted."

"Los Angeles County has lost some 1.4 million people due to domestic out-migration since 2010, which has been offset in part by an influx of 530,000 immigrants."

"many of those immigrants lack the qualifications . . . to serve in the city’s police force."

"high minimum wages are pricing unskilled workers out of jobs, to the detriment of immigrants, young people and public safety."

"The minimum wage in L.A. is $17.28, and the state requires fast-food restaurants to pay $20 an hour. The Employment Policies Institute’s Michael Saltsman calculates that California’s unemployment rate for teens was 21.2% in April—about double the nationwide figure—and 9.7% for adults 20 to 24, vs. 7.2% on average in the rest of the country."

"Only 21% of the city’s eighth-graders scored proficient or higher in reading last year on the Nation’s Report Card, and 19% in math." 

George Floyd’s Death Almost Consumed America in Revolution

As the streets exploded, nearly every institution celebrated a ‘reckoning.’ Then people fought back.

By Mike Gonzalez. He is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Excerpts:

"During the civil unrest between May and July, more than 2,000 officers were injured in the line of duty, according to an analysis by the Major City Chiefs Association, an organization of police executives. Of 8,700 protests across major U.S. cities that summer, 3,692 involved some level of illegal activity, and 574 included outright violence, including attacks on police as well as destruction of local businesses and other private property.

The report found 2,385 looting incidents, 624 arson incidents, and 97 police vehicles burned. In Minneapolis and St. Paul combined, about 1,500 properties sustained severe damage, with nearly 80 completely destroyed. Reporting from Axios found that the destruction resulted in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims."

"The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported in September 2020 that at least 86% of riots for which the identification of the participants was known were explicitly linked to Black Lives Matter activism."

"After all, the founders of BLM, particularly Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, were trained by Marxist ideologues: Ms. Cullors in radical-left activist Eric Mann’s Labor/Community Strategy Center, and Ms. Garza in Gramscian scholar Harmony Goldberg’s School of Unity and Liberation.

The goal of these BLM leaders was clear. In 2019 Ms. Garza had told a group in Maine, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country. . . . I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”"

Democrats Owe the Nation’s Police an Apology

Their embrace of the criminal-justice reform movement has sabotaged a core government function

By Edward Conlon. He is a former NYPD detective and communications director. His most recent book is “The Policewomen’s Bureau.” Excerpts:

"The prevailing attitude among the academic elite was that whatever harm offenders inflicted on others was outweighed by harms inflicted on them by society. No one should go to prison aside from murderers and rapists, and their terms of incarceration should be as brief as possible. Talking heads routinely made the false claim that modern American policing derived from slave-hunting patrols in the antebellum South, and has more-or-less stuck to the same mission."

"Discovery reform obliged prosecutors to produce massive amounts of irrelevant documentation in every case, on the strictest of timetables. The dismissal rate soared. Prosecutors now drop 62% of cases, compared with 41% before the reform, mostly because the paperwork burden can’t be managed. Juvenile justice reform led to a dramatic rise in adolescent recidivism."

"Across the country, veteran cops retired in droves. New academy classes couldn’t be filled. Response times went up, and clearance rates went down. In 2014 there were some 14,000 homicides in this country. By 2021 there were nearly 23,000—roughly 30,000 excess murders across seven years. Traffic fatalities followed a similar pattern, from 32,000 in 2014 to 43,000 in 2021, for a cumulative total of 34,000 additional deaths."

"the two record-breaking murder spikes—2014-16 and 2020-21—correlated precisely with the crests of the Black Lives Matter movement"

"Consistent majorities of black voters tell pollsters they want more police in their neighborhoods"

A former DEA agent is convicted of protecting drug traffickers

By CAROLYN THOMPSON of AP. Excerpts:

"A former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Buffalo, New York, was convicted of corruption Thursday following a second trial on charges he used his position to protect drug traffickers he believed were associated with organized crime.

Jurors found Joseph Bongiovanni, 60, guilty on seven of the 11 counts he faced.

Prosecutors said Bongiovanni, for at least a decade, shielded childhood friends who became drug dealers and other suspects with ties to organized crime, tipping them off to investigations and falsifying DEA reports. He was accused of taking at least $250,000 in bribes that prosecutors said he used for necessities, as well as trips and other luxuries.

“This jury determined he was a corrupt federal agent,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi said at a news conference after the verdict, “and he violated his oath and duties to protect those that he should have been investigating and arresting.” 

The case cast a harsh light on the DEA’s supervision of agents amid a string of corruption scandals at the agency. Bongiovanni is among at least 16 DEA agents brought up on federal charges since 2015. Many of the cases resulted in prison terms, including two former DEA supervisors sentenced in a Miami bribery scandal involving intelligence leaks to defense attorneys."  

Bongiovanni was convicted of four counts of obstruction of justice, as well as single counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and making false statements to law enforcement."

"The case is part of a sex-trafficking prosecution involving the Pharoah’s Gentlemen’s Club outside Buffalo. Bongiovanni was childhood friends with the strip club’s owner, Peter Gerace Jr., who authorities say has close ties to both the Buffalo Mafia and the violent Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Gerace is awaiting trial on numerous charges, including that he bribed Bongiovanni. He has pleaded not guilty."

Mob Targets Synagogue As LAPD Stands By

Anti-Israel protesters obstructed, beat and bear-sprayed Jews who were simply trying to enter

By Alexandra Orbuch. 

"A friend texted on Sunday afternoon: “Just checking in to make sure your family is okay after everything in LA today.” I hadn’t been online and had no clue what he was talking about. It could have been anything—an earthquake or a wildfire—but something told me it was antisemitism. Unfortunately, I was right.

Protesters waving Palestinian flags and shouting anti-Israel slogans gathered outside Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles’s Pico-Robertson neighborhood on Sunday. They tried to block the entrance and were soon met by counterprotesters waving Israeli flags. The groups clashed. Adas Torah officials said the anti-Israel demonstrators maced and bear-sprayed Jews trying to enter the synagogue, which was holding an Israeli real-estate fair. Talia Regev, 43, said she was sprayed and saw violent altercations between the two groups.

“There was nowhere to turn where you could be safe,” said Naftoli Sherman, 25, who had planned to attend the synagogue’s fair. He was attacked and ended up in the hospital. “There was a whole gang of protesters on top of me. They broke my nose and kicked me in the head a couple of times.”

Israeli-born journalist Daniel Greenfield reported that an anti-Israel protester had threatened, “Billions of us will come and kill you.”

President Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom took to social media to condemn Sunday’s act of hate. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised that the police would “provide additional patrols in the Pico-Robertson community as well as outside of houses of worship throughout the city.” It’s good they spoke up, but tweeting isn’t enough.

Nor is standing by and watching. Members of the Los Angeles Police Department observed the melee unfold rather than protecting those targeted by the mob. It took volunteers from nonprofit Jewish security organizations, including LA Shmira Public Safety and Magen Am, to break up the scuffles. “Without them, it would have been a lot worse,” Mr. Sherman said.

“If not for Magen Am, I don’t know what would have happened,” said David Kramer, 37. “People were running, screaming, a little bit delirious,” and begging uniformed officers to intercede. Despite many pleas, he said, “they were slow to move, and it appeared to me like they had orders to stand down.”

As the fighting moved east of Adas Torah toward other synagogues in the Jewish neighborhood, the police remained about a quarter-block away from the action, Ms. Regev said. She urged officers to get involved. “I said, ‘You need to stop this,’ and they essentially said, ‘We can’t do anything without a higher authority.’ ” Mr. Greenfield said the police “did little to interfere with the terrorist supporters.” By failing to disperse the protesters, they made it difficult for Jews to enter their own synagogue. The LAPD declined to comment.

Ms. Bass and the LAPD should be better prepared to handle violent incidents, especially given the surge in antisemitic activity in the Los Angeles area since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. A month after Oct. 7, Paul Kessler, 69, died of a head injury in Thousand Oaks following an altercation with an anti-Israel protester. Weeks later, Raphael Nissel, 75, needed staples to close a wound in his forehead after being assaulted by a man wielding a belt buckle in Beverly Hills. Mr. Nissel was on his way to synagogue. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said the attack took place amid a “disturbing trend of antisemitic hate crimes” in the area.

Would the police have been as passive as they were on Sunday if those being targeted had been any minority other than Jews? Would they have stood by and let protesters block the entrance to a church or mosque? This blatant double standard is precisely why the first place my mind went when my friend reached out was antisemitism. I long for the day when an earthquake is more plausible.

Ms. Orbuch is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal."

Why In-N-Out Burger Is Out of Oakland

The city cuts back on police to pay for public-worker pensions. Result: surging crime

WSJ editorial. 

"California’s famous In-N-Out Burger chain announced Sunday that it is closing its restaurant in Oakland, blaming rising crime. You might also say it is the victim of a progressive backlash to law enforcement and soaring government-worker pension costs that have squeezed spending on public safety.

In-N-Out’s store by the Oakland airport drew hordes of travelers, but its packed parking lot and long drive-through line were frequently targeted by thieves. “This location remains a busy and profitable one for the company, but our top priority must be the safety and well-being of our Customers and Associates,” said chief operating officer Denny Warnick.

He added: “Despite taking repeated steps to create safer conditions, our Customers and Associates are regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft, and armed robberies.” This is what happens when cities cut back on policing.

Oakland’s progressive City Council in 2021 bowed to antipolice activists by limiting the number of police academies for training new officers and freezing 911 surge units, all while boosting funding for putative violence prevention “alternatives.” Meantime, as federal pandemic largesse shrank, spending on government-worker benefits ballooned.

Between 2019 and 2023, Oakland’s spending on public-worker retirement benefits rose 42% ($73 million) and 34% ($49 million) for fringe benefits. Last year Oakland spent more on government worker benefits than it collected in property and sales tax. To close a $360 million budget deficit, the city cut back on law enforcement even more.

The unsurprising result: Surging crime. Robberies last year were up 22% over the three-year average. Auto burglaries (23%), carjackings (15%) and motor vehicle theft (29%) also spiked. Roughly one of every 30 Oakland residents had a car stolen last year. Many In-N-Out patrons and workers found their car windows smashed, if they were lucky enough to avoid being held up at gun-point.

Businesses in California pay exorbitant taxes, which are supposed to provide for public safety and other essential government services. But increasingly businesses are finding they are on their own as cities slash law enforcement. Is it any wonder In-N-Out is now intent on growing outside of California in states such as Texas and Tennessee?"

Get Out of Jail Cards, 2

From Alex Tabarrok.

"“Courtesy cards,” are cards given out by the NYC police union (and presumably elsewhere) to friends and family who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. I was stunned when I first wrote about these cards in 2018. I thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and flailing states. The cards even come in levels, gold, silver and bronze!

A retired police officer on Quora explains how the privilege is enforced:

The officer who is presented with one of these cards will normally tell the violator to be more careful, give the card back, and send them on their way.

…The other option is potentially more perilous. The enforcement officer can issue the ticket or make the arrest in spite of the courtesy card. This is called “writing over the card.” There is a chance that the officer who issued the card will understand why the enforcement officer did what he did, and nothing will come of it. However, it is equally possible that the enforcement officer’s zeal will not be appreciated, and the enforcement officer will come to work one day to find his locker has been moved to the parking lot and filled with dog excrement.

A NYTimes article discusses the case of Mathew Bianchi, a traffic cop who got sick of letting dangerous speeders go when they presented their cards.

By the time he pulled over the Mazda in November 2018, drivers were handing Bianchi these cards six or seven times a day. (!!!, AT)

…[He gives the ticket]…The month after he stopped the Mazda, a high-ranking police union official, Albert Acierno, got in touch. He told Bianchi that the cards were inviolable. He then delivered what Bianchi came to think of as the “brother speech,” saying that cops are brothers and must help each other out. That the cards were symbols of the bonds between the police and their extended family and friends.

Bianchi was starting to view the cards as a different kind of symbol: of the impunity that came with knowing someone on the force, as if New York’s rules didn’t apply to those with connections. Over the next four years, he learned about the unwritten rules that have come to hold sway in the Police Department.

Bianchi is reassigned, given shit jobs, isn’t promoted etc. Mayor Adams and police chief Chief Maddrey protect this utterly corrupt system."

Minneapolis destroyed itself for BLM — was it worth it?

By Zachary Faria. 

"More than three years after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, it is clear that Minneapolis allowed the Black Lives Matter movement to destroy it. Was it all really worth it?

Minneapolis’s police staffing shortage has now reached an all-time low, with just 585 officers on the job. For reference, the city had 888 officers in 2019 and 638 officers in early 2021. The city is now relying heavily on other police departments, and has an officer-to-resident ratio that is nearly half the national average. The decline isn’t slowing either, as the city has already lost 45 officers this year.

Unsurprisingly, crime still has not returned to pre-pandemic (before Floyd’s death) numbers. Violent crime is still up 11% compared to the five-year average before 2020, and the city’s 260 gunshot victims through the first eight months of the year is higher than any recorded number before 2020.

And all of this stems from the city being the launching point for Black Lives Matter’s resurgence. City leaders stood idly by as rioters burned down buildings and looted stores. They joined activists and some Democratic politicians in calling for the abolition of the city’s police department, going as far as to put it to a vote (which voters rejected). They made it clear that police officers in Minneapolis had no defenders among city leadership at the same time celebrities and Democratic politicians helped bail out rioters so they could continue to destroy the city.

All of this for a case of police misconduct that would have been prosecuted anyway. The officers who killed Floyd would have been fired, prosecuted, and convicted just the same as they have been. Minneapolis was sacrificed at the altar of the national Black Lives Matter movement, and as a result, crime has remained above normal levels and the police staffing shortage only grows worse.

Minneapolis residents and their leaders were used and discarded for a political movement just as Ferguson, Missouri, was before them. Activists and media crews rolled in, created havoc, left behind an unsustainable situation, and never thought twice about it. Minneapolis still hasn’t been able to recover three years later. So, again, was it all really worth it?"

The Oakland branch of the NAACP rejects "defund the police"

See ‘How to Serve White Victims’: Oakland, Calif., is plagued by crime—and by a district attorney, Pamela Price, determined to divide people by race by Heather Mac Donald. Excerpts:

"The district attorney has drawn criticism from unexpected quarters. On July 27, the Oakland branch of the NAACP called on elected leaders to declare a state of emergency in Oakland. “Failed leadership,” including the “movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals,” NAACP president Cynthia Adams and Bishop Bob Jackson wrote in their appeal. NAACP member Darren White told Yahoo News that young people on the street boast: “We can do A, B, or C because we’re not going to get charged.”"

"Three veteran county prosecutors have resigned. One of them, Charly Weissenbach, complained that Ms. Price cares more about “criminal defendants and how she can undo what she believes are historical injustices” than about the victims of crime. Danielle Hilton wrote in her resignation letter: “I encourage you to look at crime scene and autopsy photos, meet the victims of the robberies, sexual assaults, home burglaries and other crimes from within the county. It is their voices you were elected to empower.”"

"When Ms. Weissenbach resigned, she faulted the way her boss deals with victims of crime: “How Price approaches the families is always very much that the family needs to be more sympathetic to the person accused of the crime.”"

In New York Prisons, Guards Who Brutalize Prisoners Rarely Get Fired

Records obtained by The Marshall Project reveal a state discipline system that fails to hold many guards accountable

By Alysia Santo, Joseph Neff and Tom Meagher of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Shattered teeth. Punctured lungs. Broken bones. Over a dozen years, New York State officials have documented the results of attacks by hundreds of prison guards on the people in their custody."

"when the state corrections department has tried to use this evidence to fire guards, it has failed 90% of the time"

"more than 290 cases in which the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision tried to fire officers or supervisors it said physically abused prisoners or covered up mistreatment that ranged from group beatings to withholding food. The agency considered these employees a threat to the safety and security of prisons.

Yet officers were ousted in just 28 cases. The state tried to fire one guard for using excessive force in three separate incidents within three years — and failed each time."

"An officer who broke his baton hitting a prisoner 35 times, even after the man was handcuffed, was not fired. Neither were the guards who beat a prisoner at Attica Correctional Facility so badly that he needed 13 staples to close gashes in his scalp. Nor were the officers who battered a man with mental illness, injuring him from face to groin. The man hanged himself the next day.

In dozens of documented cases involving severe injuries of prisoners, including three deaths, the agency did not even try to discipline officers"

"For decades, the workings of the prison discipline system had been hidden from public view under a secrecy law adopted at the urging of the state’s powerful law enforcement unions."

"The records probably reflect only a fraction of the violence guards have inflicted in New York’s corrections system, experts said. Many prisoners do not file complaints because they fear retaliation or not being believed."

"the contract the state signed in 1972 with the union. The agreement requires any effort to fire an officer to go through binding arbitration, using an outside arbitrator hired by the union and the state"

"Only a court can overturn arbitration decisions.

In abuse cases, the arbitrators ruled in favor of officers three-quarters of the time"

"verall, the corrections department has tried to oust staff members almost 4,000 times since 2010, for such infractions as chronic tardiness and drug use. It succeeded in just 7% of the cases."

"In 2016, The New York Times reported that state officials vowed to beef up investigations into brutality after an arbitrator reinstated an officer with back pay even though the guard had been caught on video repeatedly punching a prisoner lying on the floor. A jury acquitted the guard of assault, however, and attacks on prisoners continued.

Two years later, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed legislation to give the corrections commissioner the power to dismiss officers, but the plan withered under opposition from the Assembly and Senate."

"A powerful union can undermine safety in prisons by gumming up the disciplinary process, said Steve J. Martin, who has worked as a consultant for corrections facilities across the country and is now the court-ordered monitor for the New York City jails on Rikers Island.

Officers “know they can beat the system more often than not,” Martin said. “That’s how you develop these cultures where you have frequent instances of excessive force.”"

"The Marshall Project identified more than 160 excessive-force lawsuits that the state lost or settled, paying $18.5 million in damages. The corrections department’s records show that officials attempted to discipline an officer in just 20 of those cases."

"The attack that prompted Nick Magalios to file his lawsuit began when officers at Fishkill Correctional Facility, in New York’s Hudson Valley, yelled at him for hugging and kissing his wife hello during a visit, which prison rules allowed.

Afterward, Officer Mathew Peralta, who had reprimanded Magalios, knocked him to the floor and kicked and punched him as another guard held him down and a third officer watched, according to testimony in the civil trial."

"The Marshall Project found only two excessive force lawsuits in which officers had to contribute some of their own money; taxpayers were on the hook for the rest."

Crime and Consequences in Seattle

The new City Attorney gets results by pursuing repeat offenders

WSJ editorial.

"Policy news flash: Fighting crime reduces crime. The latest evidence comes from Seattle, of all places, where City Attorney Ann Davison’s efforts are showing results.

Ms. Davison took office in January 2022 after voters elected her on a law-and-order mandate. She has focused on the 168 troublemakers responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime—nearly 3,500 misdemeanors in Seattle over a five-year period, by her office’s estimates.

These miscreants had an average of 6.3 misdemeanor criminal incidents referred for prosecution in Seattle in a year. Their most common crimes were theft to buy fentanyl or meth, which often led to more serious charges, such as assaults and “robbery if someone attempts to stop them,” the Seattle City Attorney’s office says in a new report.

But new numbers show that on Ms. Davison’s watch the number of annual misdemeanor referrals by this group has dropped to 2.7. What changed?

Well, start with arrests and punishment. In the past year 142 of Seattle’s 168 top recidivists were behind bars at some point. King County jails had limited bookings for most misdemeanors. But last spring Ms. Davison brokered an agreement to make an exception for Seattle’s most prolific misdemeanor criminals.

She also pushed through a reform that excludes from Seattle’s notoriously lenient Community Court anyone who had 12 or more charges referred to the city attorney for prosecution over the past five years, including one in the past eight months. Their cases are now handled by the Municipal Court, where they can face bail requirements and jail time.

Ms. Davison has persevered despite criticism from Seattle progressives, but the facts vindicate her approach. Imagine: Crime falls when you arrest and punish criminals."

The Year in Exaggeration

Correcting the record on democracy’s death, nasty railroads, killer hurricanes, etc.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.. Excerpts:

"Reverse hysteria helped to obscure another important story. Police killings of blacks, while gaining saturation coverage, actually are a smaller share of all black homicides than for other racial groups. That share likely got even smaller in 2022 for a horrifying reason: an increase in black homicides overall. One study found that while gun homicides of white males remained flat at roughly 3 per 100,000, they jumped an astonishing 60% for black males in the previous two years, to 56 per 100,000.

This phenomenon, apparently related to a crisis in black-police relations after the George Floyd murder, goes unmentioned by many for whom putatively “black lives matter.”

Joe Biden intervened in 2022 to prevent as disastrous rail strike not because railroads insist on denying their workers sick days. As USA Today almost alone pointed out, railroads actually were leaders in a national “trend toward giving employees a bank of paid days off, that can be used for any purpose,” so workers don’t have to “lie about or prove illness to take a sick day.”

Perhaps the most misleading moment was a front-page Washington Post story about a rail worker who cancelled a doctor’s appointment for an unspecified symptom and died of a heart attack an unspecified number of weeks later.

The Post didn’t explain whether the symptom was related to the heart attack, how many weeks had elapsed, whether the worker had a known condition, why he didn’t reschedule the appointment, why he didn’t use any of his contractual days off or replenishable “points” under a company system that allowed him to reject a work assignment on short notice for any reason."

"In a tweet thread, Patrick Brown, an atmospheric scientist at the climate-action-supporting Breakthrough Institute, wondered why, apart from increased rainfall, the news media “insist on a framing that misleads its audience into thinking we have experienced a dramatic change in hurricane frequency/intensity?”

Ollie Wing, a University of Bristol hydrologist, wondered in a tweet why the media publishes exaggerated flood maps to suggest centimeters of sea-level rise will result in meter-deep floods. The maps are based on so-called bare earth digital overlays that ignore natural and artificial flood barriers, including trees and other vegetation, which in any climate act to limit flooding.

Mr. Wing’s own recently published study indicates that expected increases in U.S. flooding losses in the next 30 years will be primarily due to increased development, not climate change.

The year that ended saw the expressions “existential” and “climate crisis” become conjoined twins in the press. Yet a reader searched in vain for any mention that a long-awaited report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reduced its estimated path of future emissions and also judged the climate to be less prone to worst-case warming than previously thought."

A Pension Fix to Help Fund Police Departments

In California, police officers can retire at age 50

Letter to WSJ.

"In California, police officers can retire at age 50. The average cop retires with 22 years of service and collects a pension of almost 70% of final pay with annual cost-of-living adjustments. Because of a flood of retirements, cities are forced to ramp up wages to attract recruits and pay bonuses to steal officers from other agencies (“Cities Dangle Bonuses to Fill Police Ranks,” U.S. News, Oct. 1).

California has more cops retired than working, and pension costs are sinking city budgets. Congress should allow states to modify defined-benefit pension formulas for current public workers, similar to what is allowed in the private sector. Requiring police officers to work five years longer will cut pension costs substantially, retain experienced officers, reduce our backlog of unfinished investigations and reduce lateral-transfer upheaval.

Marcia Fritz

California Fdn. for Fiscal Responsibility

Sacramento, Calif."

 

‘Criminal (In)Justice’ Review: In Defense of Policing

A crime-policy expert’s data-backed report on what works on the street. The upshot? ‘More policing means less crime.’

By Elliot Kaufman. He reviews the book Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most by Rafael Mangual. Excerpts:

"When it got ugly—in the streets, the parks and the subways—and New Yorkers had nowhere left to turn, they elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He turned to the Manhattan Institute, whose “broken windows” policing philosophy would prove crucial to the city’s restoration in the 1990s."

"The average person arrested for a shooting in Chicago in two recent years had nearly 12 prior arrests. Yet it remains an article of faith that the U.S. justice system is too punitive, locking up too many for too long. To hear some tell it, every second guy in prison is there merely for smoking a joint. But it isn’t true, Mr. Mangual explains. Around 90% of U.S. prisoners are state prisoners, only 4% of them are locked up for drug possession, and many of those have pled down from other offenses. “The vast majority of American prisoners,” writes Mr. Mangual, “are violent, chronic offenders” who “have received more than one ‘second chance.’”

Just 40% of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence, and the median violent offender serves less than two and a half years. America has far more prisoners per capita than Western Europe not because our justice system is uniquely cruel, he argues, but because we have far more violent crime."

"Turning to police shootings, Mr. Mangual treats readers to a master class in the rhetoric of reaction: The problem is exaggerated, most solutions won’t work and the ones that do would jeopardize more important objectives. Force, he shows, is used in only a tiny percentage of arrests, and deadly force even less so. In 2020 the NYPD responded to 74,378 calls involving weapons yet shot only 12 subjects. That’s way down from 145 in 1972—before most of the “militarization” that is now often blamed for police shootings. Defunding the police could stop some shootings, but it would facilitate many others. “One of the most consistent and robust findings in the criminological literature,” writes Mr. Mangual, is that “more policing means less crime.”"

"From 1993 to 1999, during Mr. Giuliani’s policing revolution, the gun-related homicide victimization rate for black New Yorkers fell from under 40 per 100,000 to about 10, a stunning improvement. “The people who benefited most,” Mr. Mangual observes, “are precisely the people we’re told are singled out by the system for unfair treatment.”"

"Blacks are more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but shouldn’t it matter whether this is due to invidious discrimination or differences in violent crime rates? Mr. Mangual produces “a mountain of evidence,” as he puts it, that police attention and enforcement are allocated so unevenly because serious crime is allocated the same way. Around 4% of a city’s street segments will tend to see around half the city’s crime.

In the hands of activists, racial disparities in drug arrests, despite similar rates of use, are proof of racism. Mr. Mangual has a subtler explanation: Since criminals tend not to specialize, police use drug enforcement as “a pretextual attack on violent crime.” Given limited resources, focusing enforcement on dangerous areas is a way to catch gang members and other violent criminals more likely to harm others.

“A truly racist cop,” a black police officer once told Mr. Mangual, “isn’t the guy constantly getting out of his car, frisking people, and clearing corners to try and prevent s— from happening. A truly racist cop is the guy that says, ‘F— ’em. Let ’em kill each other.’ But the haters [of police] want us to act more like the racist and less like the go-getter. So, what does that say about them?”"

De-prosecution and death: A synthetic control analysis of the impact of de-prosecution on homicides

By Thomas P. Hogan in Criminology & Public Policy.

I am unable to copy any text but the article concludes that de-prosecution led to an additional 74.79 murders per year in Philadelphia.

George Soros Gets Criminal Justice All Wrong

‘No Crime and No Punishment’ was a pleasant daydream, but the results speak for themselves

Letters to WSJ.

"Mr. Soros hasn’t been financially supporting moderate prosecutors who are engaged in carefully adjusting and reforming the subtle mechanisms of the criminal-justice system. He has been providing outsize funding to inexperienced politicians who have engaged in wholesale de-prosecution of both felonies and misdemeanors. This isn’t reform. It is a speculative deconstruction of criminal justice.

Mr. Soros argues for replacing police responders with mental-health professionals, ignoring that police are almost always first on the scene to a mental-health emergency, which are often dangerous. He claims that research shows his prosecutors aren’t linked to increases in crime. (The authors of that study concede that it is “imprecisely estimated” and lacks statistical significance.) More recent research links the de-prosecution policies to large increases in homicides.

After decades of declining crime based on hard work by prosecutors and police, Mr. Soros and his supporters convinced the voting public that crime had been defeated and even violent criminals could be ignored. The result has been violence and disorder. Urban voters are now reacting by removing radical prosecutors like Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, demanding that prosecutors balance treatment and diversion programs with holding violent criminals accountable.

The utopian myth of “No Crime and No Punishment” funded by Mr. Soros is a pleasant daydream, but it doesn’t reflect the hard reality of violent crime in America.

Thomas Hogan

Malvern, Pa.

Mr. Hogan, a former federal prosecutor and district attorney, is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Mr. Soros writes, “We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy.” But reducing the black incarceration rate to the white rate would require releasing vast numbers of dangerous criminals, most of whom preyed on other black people. Innocent black people would be harmed the most.

Hans Bader [former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute]

Arlington, Va."

Three New Books Challenge Preconceived Notions of Race

Far-left activists, scholars and journalists dominate the debate with views most black Americans reject.

By Jason L. Riley of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"A majority of blacks tell pollsters that they support school choice and voter ID requirements and that they oppose racial preferences."

"One of today’s most prominent activist organizations, Black Lives Matter, has advocated defunding the police, while polling has shown that upward of 80% of blacks want the level of policing in their communities to remain the same or to increase."

"“Black leaders have turned to group identity rather than individual identity and American principles of assimilation. The result has been cultural stagnation for some black communities.”"

"Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury challenges the left’s notion that racism mainly explains this cultural underdevelopment. “The ‘structural racism’ argument seldom goes into cause and effect,” he writes. “We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called ‘structural racism,’ abetted by an environment of ‘white supremacy’ that purportedly characterizes our society. Any racial disparity, then, can be totally explained by the imputation of ‘structural racism.’ ”"

"In “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the path out of poverty is not more government wealth redistribution but more focus on family structure and the so-called success sequence: graduate from high school, find a job, get married and then have kids, in that order."

"Rafael Mangual has just authored “Criminal (In)justice,”"

"The book’s discussion of the popular belief that poverty is a “root cause” of crime is instructive. Mr. Mangual reports that New York City homicides fell from more than 2,220 to fewer than 300 between 1990 and 2018, a period during which the city’s poverty rate increased slightly. Even during the 2007-09 Great Recession, which hit New York especially hard, crime continued to decline. Between 2006 and 2009, the jobless rate for black men, who are most of the city’s murder victims and perpetrators, nearly doubled, yet homicides and other violent crimes fell significantly."

Black deaths at the hands of police are statistically rare, and those involving unarmed suspects are rarer still

Was a Judicial Nominee Prejudiced in Her ‘Role as an Advocate’? Nusrat Choudhury claimed police kill unarmed black men in America ‘every day.’ That’s nowhere near true. by Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"There is no evidence that police officers kill unarmed black men daily. Black deaths at the hands of police are statistically rare, and those involving unarmed suspects are rarer still. Arrests in the U.S. number more than 10 million in a typical year. According to a database maintained by the Washington Post, police shot 1,054 people in 2021, including 234 whites and 139 blacks. Thirty-three of those shooting victims were unarmed, including eight whites and six blacks.

Meanwhile, black homicides not involving police numbered more than 7,700 in 2019 and more than 9,900 in 2020 and are expected to surpass 10,000 when the 2021 figures are released. These civilian shooting deaths are the real scourge of low-income black communities, but highlighting them doesn’t advance the left’s political agenda. So such activists as Ms. Choudhury choose to keep the focus on law enforcement, even if it means distorting the truth and smearing police.

To make matters worse, mainstream media outlets go out of their way to spread the ignorance that these activists spew. Last week the New York Times ran a story about the rise in shootings in New York City and the impact on children, 40 of whom have been shot this year. Nowhere in the story are we told that the shooters and shooting victims in these tragedies are almost always black or Hispanic. Aside from a reference near the end to a candlelight vigil attended by “mostly young Black children between 12 and 14 years old,” race isn’t mentioned."