Piper: How to Live Under an Unqualified President

….to differentiate between things like marijuana and real crimes of violence, I’d think. It also strikes me that—having looked up a little about what community policing is (think beat policing but with events to get to know the community)—that a community can get a degree of community policing without the chief of police doing anything if people simply take the steps to get to know officers there. Invite them to block parties, etc.. Now certainly there are cultural, crime, and historic reasons why this is difficult, say, on the South Side of Chicago, but I don’t think the CPD and mayors Daley and Emanuel get full blame for what’s gone on. (especially since the city is basically bankrupt)

Really, the ancient practice of bakeries giving donuts and coffee to officers is an example of this, no? Yes, it goes a lot further, but sometimes your community starts at home, no?

Note back on the original topic; I wish and pray the best for Trump, but he seemed to be making some promises that…let’s just say I’ll have to be persuaded he can fulfill them.

[Bert Perry]

GregH wrote:

So Bert, if you want to blame Obama for Chicago’s increase in murder over one year, are you also going to give him the credit for the overall decrease in violent crimes in this country over the past 8 years? https://mises.org/blog/fbi-us-homicide-rate-51-year-low

​My guess is no…

Here are the data that cover the Obama administration. Murders of blacks are up fairly significantly since BLM got going, and are up overall since 2009. Murders of non-blacks are somewhat down, though up since Michael Brown’s death, and you’ll see that there was also something that increased black murder rates from 2004-2008. Overall the trend is flat to slightly down, which is to say I can at least give Obama (and states, communities, and ordinary citizens) credit for not totally screwing things up.

Bill Clinton ends up looking pretty good in part because various factors reduced the crack trade—among them the harsh sentences Joel is talking about. I’m not totally in favor of them, but there is that correlation.

The thing I have against Obama regarding BLM is that it’s not sufficient to say “blue lives matter”. He needed to say, forcefully and in black areas, that imperfect as they are, the police are doing the black community a lot more good than harm by putting criminals in jail. Moreover, one thing he did that was clearly harmful was to use “disparate impact” theory to impose sanctions on communities and school districts. More or less, if the % of people arrested/put in detention at school exceeded the percentage of blacks/minorities, the DOJ initiated legal action, completely ignoring the question of whether more problems were from those groups.

In other words, the DOJ was actively undermining community policing efforts under Obama, with the result that hundreds have died.

Remarkable… Why segment the data when I sent you the simple total of homicides? Fact: homicides are down significantly over the past 8 years. Will you give Obama credit for that? No, you have to find some less important stat (black homicides or Chicago or whatever) that went up so you can use it to beat down Obama.

Now, I will be the first to say that I don’t give Obama credit for that decrease in homicides either. It is part of a bigger trend than Obama. Homicides in fact have been cut in half in the past 20 years. However, if you are going to beat him up over Chicago and your other cherry picked stats, it is inconsistent to not give him credit for the stat that is actually more important.

Your data ended in 1914, before the BLM data were taken, Greg. Look closely. Unfortunately, when the BLM effect is included, they’re about even overall and up significantly among blacks.

[Bert Perry]

Your data ended in 1914, before the BLM data were taken, Greg. Look closely. Unfortunately, when the BLM effect is included, they’re about even overall and up significantly among blacks.

Wow, a century out of date!!

No wonder these arguments are all over the place.

[Don Johnson]

Bert Perry wrote:

Your data ended in 1914, before the BLM data were taken, Greg. Look closely. Unfortunately, when the BLM effect is included, they’re about even overall and up significantly among blacks.

Wow, a century out of date!!

No wonder these arguments are all over the place.

I think he meant 2014 rather than 1914. Because the data is through 2014.

But I find myself in a strange place after several years working in the prison system and now in a drug clinic with mostly all clients court-stipulated. Daily they come from state or county prison. In Philly they are now called “returning citizens” rather than ex-cons to avoid the stigma. No one would excuse me of being soft on crime. However, there are those who have received sentences disproportionate to their crimes. Anyone who doesn’t think money talks (and the other stuff walks) in the legal system where the inability to hire high-priced defense lawyers is the difference between probation with community service or prison lives in a world I don’t recognize. I know. “Do the crime. Do the time.” Yet there are times when sentences should be commuted and pardons offered.

I spent two years working for the prison system, and I had weekly opportunities to review files for newly incarcerated prisoners. More than a few I read absolutely were victims of our ‘tough on crime’ and ‘three-strikes’ policies that stipulated anywhere upwards to ten to even thirty year mandatory sentences for drug-related crimes. Here’s a quick example, taken from Wikipedia:

Defendant William James Rummel had, prior to the offense in question, twice pleaded guilty to felony charges involving property:

In 1964, Rummel pleaded guilty to fraudulent use of a credit card to obtain $80.00 worth of goods or services. As the amount in question exceeded $50, under Texas law the offense was classified as a felony punishable by 2–10 years in the (then called the) Texas Department of Corrections (TDC). Rummel was sentenced to three years.

In 1969, Rummel pleaded guilty to passing a forged check in the amount of $28.36. The offense was classified as a felony by 2–5 years in the TDC. Rummel was sentenced to four years.

The third offense, in 1973, involved Rummel refusing to return $120.75 received as payment for repairs of an air conditioning unit that, depending on the source cited, were either performed unsatisfactorily or not at all. By itself, the crime was designated as “felony theft” and punishable by 2–10 years in the TDC. However, the prosecution sought to enhance the sentence under Texas’ three strikes law, citing the 1964 and 1969 convictions as proof of Rummel being a repeat offender; the law required a mandatory sentence of life with the possibility of parole if the enhancement allegation were found to be true.

A jury found Rummel guilty of felony theft and also found as true the allegation that Rummel had been convicted of two prior felonies; the trial court imposed the mandatory sentence in accordance with the law.

Rummel received a lifetime sentence for a total of around $225 in theft.

A lifetime sentence.

For $225.

Let that sink in.

How is that ‘just’? Is it ‘righteous’ to take even three years of a person’s life for $225?

And then, once the man is out of prison either because his sentence is up or he received parole…what exactly is he supposed to do then? How is he supposed to support himself? Where do you go when you have no friends on the outside, and your kids are now adults with their own kids and issues? How do you build a life when half of it is gone for something done more than a decade prior?

Les Miserables is a terrific musical, but Jean Valjean’s story plays out every day in towns and cities across our nation.

As someone who worked in the system, there is no doubt in my mind that it is fundamentally broken. But very, very few people are willing to take the risk of helping rebuild lives. Be that person.

These posts illustrate that, even with a supernaturally powerful gospel, helping those involved in drugs and prison is difficult. Now, take away the gospel from a person’s resources and you have the inability and frustration of a secular counseling and prison system to help people.

[GregH]

Don Johnson wrote:

Bert Perry wrote:

Your data ended in 1914, before the BLM data were taken, Greg. Look closely. Unfortunately, when the BLM effect is included, they’re about even overall and up significantly among blacks.

Wow, a century out of date!!

No wonder these arguments are all over the place.

I think he meant 2014 rather than 1914. Because the data is through 2014.

yes, I know, Greg. I was making a joke. Smile. It won’t hurt.

The IRS Scandal went back to one female IRS Management employee who probably had her own agenda. Nothing was found that tied to Obama and she was career federal employee not appointed.

I’m not going to get sucked into a back and forth on this issue, but even if all that you said is true…then why didn’t she get disciplined by her supervisors? Particularly with all the media coverage this got?

I think you know.

Smiles on my mistake….oops. And this NY Times story indicates Rummel is (was?) white. But that said, I remember a guy in California who was sentenced to 25 years or something like that because his third crime was stealing a piece of pizza from a kid—the major bit of violence being, apparently, intimidation. I don’t think the kid was as much as punched—timeline was sometime around 1995, and I was living in LA at the time, or had recently. Pretty sure he was black.

To build on what I was discussing earlier, there are a few reasons that I think the reversal in homicide rates starting in 2015 (or 1915 I guess) is significant. For starters, it’s a reversal, and to continue, it appears to be centered in cities with recent accusations of police misconduct and/or significant BLM action (more or less the same cities with a few exceptions), and it’s worst among black communities, as the data I presented showed. For example, from 2014 to 2016, murder in Chicago nearly doubled—from 390 to 762, I believe.

(note; as much as I like the idea of community policing, it turns out that the murder rates really started to rise not when it was defunded in the early 2000s by Mayor Daley, but rather in 2014/2015 with the death of Michael Brown and other events. We can debate whether this was just the end of residual good will from community policing, or that the approach they were using actually worked, or whatever, but those are the numbers)

And the full extent–hundreds of homicides in 2015 and 2016 over what the trend since 2004 indicated—is not all Obama’s fault, to be sure, but he is responsible for what the DOJ did after Michael Brown’s death. Specifically, they would come in to cities with disparate impact statistics that compared arrest rates (and even student discipline rates) with overall population percentages instead of the portion of actual crime committed by each demographic group. In other words, they ignored the possibility that group A was more likely to commit crime B than other groups, which is exactly what one would think if one….looked at populations in jail and the like.

The result is that statistics that may simply reflect group A’s behavior are seen as a reason to….distrust the police, which will further worsen the disparities in crime rates by demographic group. Really, Obama’s mentality was more or less the same mentality that correlated with the doubling (plus some) of murder rates from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. Correlation isn’t causation, to be sure, but we ought not ignore the numbers.

Joe, the lawyers representing victims of the IRS auditing scandal note that they’ve got people signing off on the demands for information from offices all over the country, and not all of them as much as reported to Lois Lerner. Moreover, not all victims have anything to do with Bill Gothard—not that this would excuse the actions. You might as well say that Unitarians will need to provide more information or something. I can assume that religious group A is total scum, but not concede that the IRS is the proper agency to deal with them—they may simply be scum in a non-taxable way, or even if the scumminess is in a taxable way, you’ve got to have probable cause. Calling yourself “Tea Party” doesn’t qualify.

I have zero interest in Rummel’s ethnicity and have no idea why it is even being discussed.

The point remains that because Rummel stole approx. $225, the state government locked him up for the rest of his life. That is not just. Period.

There is a reason for the saying “Justice is blind”. It should remain so.

Finally, Rummel is just one example of dozens/hundreds/thousands more in very similar situations. He is hardly the one exception.

The point remains that because Rummel stole approx. $225, the state government locked him up for the rest of his life.

Just to be clear, he was not locked up for the rest of his life because he stole $225.

It may be unjust to lock him up for the rest of his life, but let’s be honest about the reason.

OK, so he stole a grand total of approx. $225 on three occasions.

No deception was intended.

Let’s keep in mind that “three strikes” was developed in an era when people were in more or less a “revolving door” justice system, and people were coming in with dozens of convictions indicating a clear disregard for their neighbors (to put it mildly) and then got….a month of three hots and a cot. So we should be a little bit gracious as we understand where the previous generation was coming from. I would agree it needs some tweaking today, and it will need some tweaking in the future, as there seems to be something of a “pendulum” between over and under punishment. The original “three strikes” laws were a reaction to underpunishment; arguably today we may have the opposite.

(and if you look at murder rates from the 1970s to the 1990s, you’ll understand WHY we reacted to underpunishment—it was brutalizing minority populations…some of the biggest advocates of higher penalties for crack were inner city politicians who saw the carnage….I think we overreacted, but let’s remember our history)

Might be best to get rid of them, though, since there is an “ex post facto” issue where if I have two convictions, then they pass a 3 strikes law, and then I get a third, I am in effect being punished for crimes I committed before, not my actual crimes since the law. Finding a happy middle seems to be elusive, though.