Demilitarization of the Police Requires Demilitarization of Civilians

The recent clashes between demonstrators and police forces in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police forces has many calling into question the slow, steady rate at which police forces in the United States have become militarized. If we want to stop and potentially reverse this trend, we need to understand its underlying cause–the simultaneous militarization of the civilian population.

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Clemency for Drug Offenders?

US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that the Obama administration plans to implement new rules that would reduce sentences for thousands of nonviolent drug offenders currently in federal prisons. This new policy, combined with the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, would allow the administration to commute the mandatory minimum sentences many prisoners received under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The new approach may feature hundreds of presidential pardons. In the meantime, congress has been considering new legislation (the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2014, still pending) that would cut the remaining minimum sentences in half. This is good policy, but it does not go far enough. Here’s why.

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The Internet is like a Road

There’s a lot of disagreement about the extent to which the state is entitled to take metadata on whom people communicate with on the internet and over the phone. I’d like to make a broad argument, one that I think ought to hold no matter what kind of state you live in, whether you’re in the US or Europe or China or what have you. This argument relies on our conception of the “public network”. What do we understand to be a public network, and what can the state do with public networks? Once we have determined what a public network is, we can apply the same moral and legal principles to every public network. I think that roads, rails, phone lines, power lines, pipes, the internet, and mobile phones are all in an important sense public networks, and that the laws and principles governing surveillance of any one of these networks should apply to all of them.

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Crime Rates: Our Mass Delusion

As unusually highly attentive readers might be aware, I am now a grad student at the University of Chicago. By reputation, Chicago is often thought a comparatively dangerous, unsafe place, and this was the impression most are under upon arrival there. If, however, we actually look at crime statistics, we find that the extent to which people in this area fear crime and perceive it to be an endemic threat is unjustifiable. In this piece, I will establish that claim, and then consider how it has come to pass that the average citizen overestimates the amount of danger he is in so thoroughly and consistently.

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Zimmerman Trial Hysteria

Remember a little while back when George Zimmerman killed Travyon Martin (either in self defense or out of racism, depending on who you talk to)? Of course you do. You almost certainly also know that Zimmerman was recently acquitted. This is not the only trial you probably know something about. You might also know something about the Amanda Knox trial, the Drew Peterson trial, the Casey Anthony trial, the Ariel Castro trial, the OJ Simpson trial, the Michael Jackson trial, all of the various mass shooters and their trials, any number of criminal trials in recent years that the media has attached itself to and reported the proceedings of on a day to day basis. My contention today is that you shouldn’t know about these trials. None of us should. Because they don’t matter.

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