POLICING FOR PROFIT: My colleague Penny White and I have a piece over at the Wall Street Journal based on our forthcoming law review artice on this subject.

Excerpt:

Everyone knows the speed trap: a sudden speed-limit drop, often poorly marked, with police waiting to pounce and local courts ready to assess fines for the local treasury. This has now gone mainstream, as communities large and small across the U.S. adopt policies that make citizens targets to be squeezed, not constituents to be protected.

This destructive exploitation is due in part to state and federal laws that allow jurisdictions—and sometimes law-enforcement agencies themselves—to keep the proceeds from fines, forfeitures and court costs. Fortunately, there is a simple fix.

In some places, police prey on citizens. In Brookside, Ala., as Birmingham News columnist John Archibald recently reported, from 2018 to 2020 “revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent and now make up half the city’s total income.”

So many tickets are issued that police have to direct traffic around the courthouse. Forfeitures—in which property is seized by police on suspicion of a crime, requiring the owner to prove his innocence in court to regain his property—are out of control. In 2020, taking advantage of its 1½ miles of Interstate 22, the town of about 1,250 residents had more misdemeanor arrests than residents. That year it collected $487 in traffic fine and forfeiture revenue for each resident, quite an achievement for a town with no traffic lights. Total town income more than doubled on proceeds from fines and forfeitures. Brookside’s police chief recently resigned under pressure from state lawmakers and the public. . . .

It is easy to see the appeal for government officials. Voters may punish politicians at the polls when taxes are raised to fund government, but when those same expenditures are funded by fines, forfeitures and court costs paid by those who “violate” the law, politicians face less risk. Some targets may be out-of-towners, but too often those targeted are poor and minority citizens who may be less likely to vote.

What is at risk, however, is the legitimacy of law enforcement. Policing for profit produces a predatory relationship between officers and citizens. Policing is no longer about protecting people, but about extracting money from them. This also promotes hostile interactions between police and citizens, which increases the likelihood of violence. The entire system winds up being corrupted. Can an accused person expect fair treatment when everyone in the system knows that its well-being depends on revenue from convictions?

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Tumey v. Ohio (1927) that when judicial officials profit directly from fines, defendants are denied due process. It also held, in Ward v. Village of Monroeville (1972), that if those administering the fines benefit indirectly from boosting municipal budgets, then due process is violated.

Two 2019 decisions from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Cain v. White and Caliste v. Cantrell, applied the due-process requirement that judges be entirely disinterested in the outcome. Noting that money from fines and fees went into a slush fund that covered judicial personnel and travel, the court held that judges’ knowledge that their day-to-day comfort depended on revenue from convictions was enough to bias them unacceptably, denying defendants the neutral decision makers to which they were entitled.

We agree. As municipalities’ and law enforcement’s reliance on revenue from fines, fees and forfeitures grows, the chance that defendants will get a fair shake falls. Judges are supposed to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and relying on people targeted by law enforcement as a revenue source makes the entire process appear improper.

What to do? One would hope for greater judicial scrutiny, but the judiciary is part of the problem. Appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court should provide more supervision. So should state legislatures and Congress.

The solution is to send the money from fines, fees and forfeitures elsewhere. If that money went to a state’s general fund, municipalities would have no incentive to target people for extra revenue and could focus simply on public safety. Even if the state returned the money to municipalities based on a neutral formula, the incentive to engage in financially motivated law enforcement would vanish.

Instead of “defunding the police,” which is such a dumb idea even the Democrats are now pretending they never favored it, it’s more helpful to look at how the police are funded. Incentives matter.

21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: Once-taboo ketamine booms for US at-home mental care.

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Report: Israel Prepares For Biden’s ‘Spectacularly Bad’ Iran Deal Next Week. “Iran will not be required to destroy its advanced centrifuges under the revived agreement.”

Ben Rhodes smiles.

VIDEO: School Board Fireworks as Fearless Mom Shows Maskless Photos of Chairwoman and Almost Gets Arrested.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Most supplements touted for menopause aren’t effective, experts say.

NOT THE BEE: Kamala’s trip to Ukraine to prevent WW3 went about exactly as you’d expect.

MATT LABASH: P.J. O’Rourke, 1947-2022.

It’s a sad fact of American letters that “humorists” – a word I’m almost positive P.J. detested – often get consigned to the children’s table.  As though laughing at life keeps one from extracting the marrow from it – a sentiment P.J.  regarded as ass-backwards.  After all, he was a God guy  – and God himself clearly has a bent sense of humor. As P.J. once wrote me: “We acknowledge the Bible as the word of God.  And — the one attribute that we absolutely share with our Creator — we have a sense of humor.  Right off the bat there’s Genesis 1:27: ‘God created man in his own image.’ And then I look in the mirror.”

But how good a writer was P.J. O’Rourke? Well that’s a hard thing to quantify if you’ve never read him. And I could sit here and play you his greatest hits reel, which would be a daunting challenge, since there are so many  hits to choose from. He was a one-man Bartlett’s, if Bartlett’s did funny. P.J. tended to leave at least one chocolate on the pillow in every paragraph. So in showing you how good he is– sorry, was (he’s still so alive to me, I keep forgetting) –  I have decided to simplify, and conduct an experiment. As I write this, I have five of his 20 or so books stacked near my keyboard. I am now going to open each one randomly, and relay to you whatever passage I see first.

From 1983’s Modern Manners: 

This brings us to a more drastic method of getting an audience: be one. Listen patiently while other people tell you about themselves. Maybe they’ll return the favor. This is risky, however. By the time they get done talking about themselves and are ready to reciprocate, you may be dead from old age. Another danger is that that if you listen long enough you may start attending to what’s being said. You may start thinking about other people, even sympathizing with them. You may develop a true empathy for others, and this will turn you into such a human oddity that you will become a social outcast.

From 1989’s Holidays in Hell:

There were some odd ducks in the audience. They were all milkmaid types with too much hair spray. The men were dark and greasy with Cadillac-fin lapels on their suits and tie knots as big as their ears. “What kind of people go to nightclubs in Poland?” I asked Zofia. “Whores and Arabs,” she said. “What do Poles really do for fun?” “Drink,” said Zofia.

From 1991’s Parliament of Whores:

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it, between Democrats who wanted to tax us to death and Republicans who preferred to have us die in a foreign war. The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.

From 1994’s All the Trouble In the World:

Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm which will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that politicians can wield the baton. Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded (though only metaphorically – politicians don’t like real wars, too much merit is involved). The idea is that people will drop everything for a WWIII. Remember the War on Poverty? And how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with “the moral equivalent of war”? (What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station attendant to death?)

From 1995’s Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut:

We were on the Big Island, Hawaii proper, the place where migrating Polynesians originally landed more than 1,500 years ago and where Captain Cook died in 1779. Cook was the first haole (a Hawaiian word meaning “person whose luggage is still at the Los Angeles airport”) to visit Hawaii. His crew spread venereal disease through the islands, the Hawaiians beat Captain Cook to death with clubs, and the tourist trade has continued with only minor alterations to the present day.

Again, these aren’t necessarily the Greatest Hits. These are just roll-of-the-dice random passages. Yet I embarked on this experiment fully confident that my eyes wouldn’t land on some weakly-written or boring graf. For one simple reason:  P.J. was incapable of writing those. Try the same with any other writer, and see how quickly the experiment fails.

Read the whole thing.

THE LEFT’S DEMAND FOR RACIAL HATRED IN AMERICA FAR EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Another fake hate crime in California.

We’ve seen enough of these stories over the past several years to make them hardly worth mentioning, but the response to this incident by both the media and the Sacramento school district where it took place merits a closer look. The “hate crime” in question took place at C.K. McClatchy High School on February 11th. Someone spray-painted the words “colored” and “white” above a pair of drinking fountains at the school, suggesting racial segregation during the Jim Crow era. An investigation was immediately launched to determine who could have perpetrated such an outrageous, racist desecration of the school. Unfortunately for the perpetrator, the vandalism was caught on camera. And unfortunately for those who were loudly pointing to it as yet another example of racial intolerance in America, the graffiti had been applied by a female, Black teenage student who is not being named because she is a minor.

The first curious aspect of the story involves the fact that it took so long for a public announcement to be made. The school obviously had access to that video almost immediately and if it had been some white kid wearing a face mask who they couldn’t immediately identify, the calls would have been going out the same day seeking help in identifying the racist perpetrator. But they sat on the story for more than a week before finally admitting what had happened. (Assuming they actually did admit it, which we’ll get to in a moment.)

If it had been some random white boy, you don’t need me to tell you what the response from the school district and the media would have been. But since it was done by a Black teenage girl, district officials are simply describing it as “a prank that went sideways.”

Why are our public schools so racist?

MICHAEL WALSH: From Behind the Unreasoning Mask.

So now the mask slips and the truth is revealed: it was never about masks, or Covid, or “the science” at all. It was always—and always will be—about power. The Long March through the Institutions, the hallmark of the Frankfurt School‘s assault on the Western democracies, has now claimed its latest and thus far biggest prize.

Who had the collapse of Canada as a functioning democracy on his bingo card? It was disheartening enough when Australia (with a “conservative” prime minister) fell, and that disarmed and benighted nation quickly transformed from the land of Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee back into the British penal colony it always was.

* * * * * * * *

Amazingly, and to its credit, so did the editorial board of the New York Times, meekly defending the right of peaceful protest, something Trudeau, Jr., had once claimed to champion:

We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support. Governments have a responsibility to prevent violence by protesters, but they must be willing to accept some degree of disruption by those seeking to be heard. The challenge for public officials — the same one faced by Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 during the protests after the murder of George Floyd — is to maintain a balance between public health and safety and a functioning society, with the right to free expression. Entertaining the use of force to disperse or contain legal protests is wrong. As Mr. Trudeau said in November 2020, in expressing his support of a yearlong protest by farmers in India that blocked major highways to New Delhi, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.”

One of the obstacles to understanding the malign intentions of the Davoisie and its fellow travelers in this mésalliance of corporate leaders and government officials—one of the textbook characteristics of Fascism, along with the employment of private militias to subvert the democratic process—is the highly successful campaign the international Left has waged since the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact under exigent circumstances in 1941, mostly via the media, to convince you that National Socialist Germany and the international Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were somehow antithetical, when in fact they were two sides of the same hellish coin. The contraction “Nazi” (almost never used by the members of the NSDAP themselves) derives from the first syllable of the German words for “national” and “socialist,” and was used to distinguish National Socialists from “Sozis” in common parlance.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS FROM THE DUMPSTER FIRE THAT IS GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL: Georgetown Law Faculty And Students Debate Ilya Shapiro’s Fate.

A larger question is, if higher education has become an incubator of totalitarianism — and you can make a good argument that it has — why should society be funding it? There are other, cheaper, quite possibly better ways to educate people without producing the toxic social externalities that higher education increasingly seems to produce.

MATT MARGOLIS: Did You Get On Trump’s Truth Social Platform Yet? I Did… Sort of… “I spent roughly an hour attempting to get through the account creation process Sunday evening, finally giving up shortly after midnight. I tried again in the morning and successfully created my account, although I’m not able to use it yet.”

I signed up this morning with little trouble, but was put on a wait list — #167,933 — to get access to my account.

If you’re interested, the app is only available on iPhone (Android is coming soonish) and signing up on the web doesn’t yet work, so for now it’s the iPhone app or nothing.

HIS WORST FAILURE, SO FAR. If Joe Biden Doesn’t Change Course, This Will Be His Worst Failure.

CHRIS BARRON: The End of the Pandemic.

In early January, my friend and Fox News superstar Greg Gutfeld announced that the COVID-19 pandemic would end on February 1st of this year. Not because Anthony Fauci or Joe Biden or the CDC would announce an end to the pandemic, but because average Americans all across the country would make it clear they were simply done with the pandemic.

Greg was wrong on the exact date – but not by much. It’s now mid-February and it is clear that Americans everywhere are declaring independence from the tyrannical and draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine passports. This isn’t a red team vs blue team issue either, even blue State Governors are rolling back restrictions.

These rollbacks are happening not because of guidance from the tin pot despots over at the CDC but indeed IN SPITE of the guidance of the CDC.

To be fair, the CDC has proven itself worse than useless.

HMM: GOP Congresswoman Has an Answer to Trudeau’s Trucker Tyranny. “I am introducing legislation that would temporarily grant asylum to innocent Canadian protesters who are being persecuted by their own government. We cannot be silent as our neighbors to the north are treated so badly.”

USEFUL BOOK: Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life: A Former CIA Officer Reveals Safety and Survival Techniques to Keep You and Your Family Protected. #CommissionEarned

BLUE CITY BLUES: Denver’s Worst-in-the-Nation Car-Theft Problem and Where Stats Are Highest.

WHEN YOU’RE A DEM WHO’S LOST THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS…: ‘Looks Like Jimmy Carter:’ ABC Panel Torches Biden Over Inflation, Economy.

TODAY’S HIGHER EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT IN A NUTSHELL: Purdue professor worries campus mask-optional policy will give people ‘more freedom.’

If you want people to be less “combative” about “individual freedom,” stop trying to take it away from them.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Minnesota college cancels no-whites-allowed luncheon after College Fix report.

MICHAEL BARONE: Must government be a ‘big, waddling, sluggish beast?’

Itinerant policy journalist Ezra Klein, now with the New York Times, has highlighted something interesting about the Biden Democrats’ now-defunct Build Back Better legislation — something beyond its huge price tag (in the trillions) and its failure in a Democratic Congress, much like the recent failure of California’s single-payer healthcare bill.

The Democrats’ major problem, Klein argues, is that they’re too unambitious, proposing only “a grab-bag of longstanding Democratic proposals” that mostly seek to close the “gaps” between the “social insurance options” of “any Western European nation.”

* * * * * * * *

Gen. Leslie Groves and James Webb were not politically correct choices to head the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, respectively, but they got their seemingly impossible jobs done. Sometimes, that took scrambling and ignoring ordinary procedures. Reading Dan McLaughlin’s account in National Review of how Operation Warp Speed officials got an air handling unit delivered from the Midwest to a Massachusetts Moderna factory by arranging a law enforcement escort brought to mind Steve Vogel’s account in The Pentagon of how Gen. Brehon Somervell, told that a steel shipment would be weeks late, ordered a truck convoy to ship the stuff from Pittsburgh to Washington overnight.

To achieve anything like Ezra Klein’s ambitious goals, you need clear goals, you need to sweep aside bureaucratic roadblocks, and you need, most of all, to choose the right people to get things done. That’s what Trump did on Operation Warp Speed, and it’s what Roosevelt did on defense production and the Manhattan Project. Absent those things, Big Government remains, as I wrote a dozen years ago , “a big, waddling, sluggish beast, ever ready to boss you around, but not able to perform useful functions at anything but a plodding pace.”

Winning WWII and the COVID vaccines aside, I’m usually pretty happy with a government that moves at a plodding pace, considering some of the “socialists-in-a-hurry” alternatives Ezra has debated in the past.

I RARELY GET SICK BUT FIGURED IT MUST HAVE BEEN ALL THE VITAMINS: SCIENCE! More Attractive People Have Stronger Immune Systems.

HIGHER EDUCATION AS POLICE STATE: GWU admits that it tracked student, employee locations on campus without consent.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, LITERALLY: NIH Sent The Intercept 292 Fully Redacted Pages Related to Virus Research in Wuhan.

With the global death toll from Covid-19 approaching 6 million, the need to understand the origins of the pandemic is both pressing and grave. But the National Institutes of Health continues to withhold critical documents that could shed light on this question. This week, in response to ongoing litigation over public records related to coronavirus research funded by the federal agency, the NIH sent The Intercept 292 fully redacted pages rather than substantive material that could help us understand how the virus first came to infect humans.

At this point, no one can say for sure how SARS-CoV-2 set off the pandemic. It may have emerged naturally, jumping from a host animal to people, as many other deadly pathogens have. Or the coronavirus could have first spread to humans as the result of a research mishap — through bat capture and collection, risky experiments, or a host of other more mundane lab activities. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed both theories as possible. But knowing exactly what led to the worst disease outbreak in recent history requires more information.

It’s pretty obvious that the NIH is trying to hide something they did that was stupid, criminal, or both.

TRUST THE SCIENCE! ALSO, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE THE SCIENCE, BECAUSE SCIENCE. The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects: The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.

When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.

The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. . . . The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made public.

Plus: “Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said. . . . Concern about the misinterpretation of hospitalization data broken down by vaccination status is not unique to the C.D.C. On Thursday, public health officials in Scotland said they would stop releasing data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status because of similar fears that the figures would be misrepresented by anti-vaccine groups.”

OH, CANADA: Requiem for a Nation.

Justin Trudeau’s ineffable Justice Minister David Lametti is on record threatening those who hold the wrong political views that they are liable to have their bank accounts seized. “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing,” he said, “then you ought to be worried.” The assumption that Trump has something to do with Canadian trucker donations seems particularly unhinged.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who sits on the board of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum—an obvious conflict of interest—has moved to freeze the bank accounts and other financial instruments of the “protesters” and private citizens who have donated to the trucker fund. Hacked documents revealed the names of these offenders, some of whom have been “interviewed” by news media like the CBC and The Washington Post. Others have been doxed and menaced.

No less distressing, a substantial majority of the Canadian public have approved of the government’s jackbooted and manifestly illegal handling of the situation, taken in by the prime minister’s bought-and-paid-for media’s slanted and mendacious coverage. They are, to adapt a phrase from Daniel Goldhagen, Canada’s willing executioners, a compliant and unthinking populace presiding over the extinction of a once-democratic country. It couldn’t get any worse—though it probably will, with the assistance of the people’s sodden parliamentary representatives and a morally bankrupt media fifth column.

Read the whole thing.

To repeat: The silence coming from the other Western capitals is deafening. They must be watching Canada as a test case for just how hard they can push their own people.