Thugs, Race-Baiting and the Police State

The recent events in Ferguson Missouri are displaying all of the hallmarks of the race-baiting grievance industry. For background (and in case this is being read well after the fact), an unarmed (black) teenager was shot by a (white) cop. These are the bald facts and the races of the involved are in parentheses because I personally don't think they were the driving force of events. Details are trickling out, the most recent (autopsy) that all shots to the victim were in the front, the wound pattern contradicting the "eye-witness" account of Mr. Brown's friend who was with him at the time.

There is pervasive racism in the USA, like there is everywhere else. Naturally, given the afore-mentioned racism grievance industry, any shooting involving an unarmed black man by anyone other than another black man, the vultures will descend. What follows is what I think the facts will eventually bear out in this case.

Michael Brown may have been 18 years old, but he was a hulking 18-yr-old who was captured on video only minutes before the shooting roughing up a shopkeeper and stealing a box of cigarillos. Petty theft and standard assault so far; definitely not capital crimes. Problem is, the cop who shot him didn't even know about this at the time; the initial stop was apparently for walking in the middle of the road blocking traffic.

Last I checked that type of behavior constitutes Probable Cause for a police stop, being at least a misdemeanor. What happened next is speculative, but based on the limited sample of Brown's (anti-social) behavior available it is probable that he threatened the cop in some fashion, and at 6'4" & 290lbs and not alone, that is a clear and present danger to anyone. The friend (accomplice) claimed that the officer shot Brown in the back and that Brown's hands were up and he was running away, which is disproved by the autopsy results. What is consistent with the physical evidence is that Brown was charging at the officer.

At this point however, most of the damage has been done. Days of rioting and looting have resulted in the National Guard being called out and a curfew imposed. In the process leading up to this there have been many discussions of militarized police forces which is also a problem, albeit not the one which precipitated the violence.

The problem is thugs, specifically black ones. Treyvon Martin was a teenager too, but again a big one with an aggressive attitude. Big guys who are "unarmed" are still capable of deadly or crippling physical violence and I have no doubt that if Zimmerman hadn't shot him Zimmerman would be dead or brain-damaged today.  Big thugs of any other complexion are of course just as dangerous, only no-one would riot if Brown were white, even if a black cop shot him.

It comes down in situations like this to "Better tried by 12 than carried by 6", optics be damned. I will yell as loud as anyone about police abusing their power, and there is a lot of that, just not in this specific situation as far as I can tell. Cops in assaulter gear shooting dogs, SWAT teams hitting the wrong houses, reporters and the public being intimidated and arrested for filming police in public areas; these are real problems requiring a vigorous public response. Said response should constitute political action, possibly civil disobedience, but smashing burning and looting is merely opportunistic crime.

This will be investigated, and is being so already. As long as the Attorney General can be kept from interfering (it's happening again) something as close as we can get to the truth will eventually come out.

The Flyswatter Doctrine

This article is on the same wavelength with my thoughts on the level of threat from non-state-sponsored terrorist outfits, Hezbollah being a different beast entirely.  Key excerpt:

A third technique is to exaggerate the importance and effectiveness of the “affiliated groups” linked to al-Qaeda central. In particular, alarmists point to the al-Qaeda affiliate in chaotic Yemen, proclaiming it to be the “deadliest” and the “most aggressive” of these and a “major threat.”

Insofar as it threatens the United States, the Yemen group has been elevated by two efforts at international terrorism, both of which failed abysmally.

It apparently supplied the 2009 underwear bomber with an explosive that he was unable to detonate, one that, a test by the BBC suggests, might not have downed his plane even if it had gone off.

The other failure is the foiled effort to set off bombs contained within laser printers on planes bound for the United States in 2010. The organization explained that one of their packages contained a copy of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations to express its optimism about the operation’s success even as the group promised more such attacks. The optimism, and thus far the promise, have gone unfulfilled.

With that track record, the group may pose a problem or concern to the United States. But it scarcely presents a “major threat.” [emphasis mine]

It's taken a long time, but people seem to be grasping that this "nation-building" thing is a no-go, which should trigger a re-assessment of strategy and tactics used to deal with jihadi idiots the world over.

"Should" is of course the operative word but there are bureaucratic and other empires built on over-reacting to minimal threats.  This means that any changes will have economic and/or political causes.  We are seeing a manifestation of that with "the Obama Doctrine" of frequent little taps of the big stick which is the American armed forces.

I, btw, approve of this as the way to deal with these threats: surgically, remorselessly and frequently.  Just because something is a minimal strategic threat doesn't mean that you ignore it, just use the tools appropriate to the job.

How much Bang is stopped for your Bucks?

Back to Slate again, but not to excoriate this time. It's pretty 'Progressive" but balanced enough or I wouldn't read it, and today's link ties into whatever it is that I've been on about here lately. The trend seems to be "efficiently fighting bad people" and here is the authors' explanation of "cost effectiveness":

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

Hearken back to my problems with the methods of the TSA in the last post, and we're all on the same page here. The enemy of cost effectiveness is bureaucratic empire building, and we come to where that begins in the context of American Homeland Security:

To evaluate the reduction in risk provided by security measures, we need to consider their effectiveness in foiling, deterring, disrupting, or protecting against a terrorist attack. In assessing risk reduction, it is important first to look at the effectiveness of homeland security measures that were in place before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission's report points to a number of failures, but it acknowledges as well that terrorism was already a high priority of the government before 9/11. More pointed is an observation of Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism: "The most important work in protecting our country since 9/11 has been accomplished with the capacity that was in place when the event happened, not with any of the new capability bought since 9/11. I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post-9/11 security."

There is another consideration. The tragic events of 9/11 massively heightened the awareness of the public to the threat of terrorism, resulting in extra vigilance that has often resulted in the arrest of terrorists or the foiling of terrorist attempts.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we come back to the fact (visited a couple of posts back) that history and terrorism didn't pop out of nowhere ten years ago. I will make the argument that 9/11 was Team bin Laden's peak (safe bet at this point) and only worked because they had element of strategic surprise about the suicide bombing thing. No one will ever again allow terrorists to take over an airplane, and you'll notice they have stopped trying and merely try to destroy them in air. A cost effective solution to hijacking: lock the cockpit door and give flight attendants tasers.

With that in mind, into the meat of Mueller and Stewart's excerpt:

Putting this all together, we find that, in order for the $75 billion in enhanced expenditures on homeland security to be deemed cost-effective under our approach—which substantially biases the consideration toward finding them effective—they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks of something like the one attempted in Times Square in 2010. In other words, we'd have to foil more than four major attacks every day to justify the spending.

I don't crunch numbers too much here, so I'll use theirs and take this at face value. Assuming there was this much terrorist activity in the USA (it's a big place, but seriously?) how much of it is there that wouldn't be picked off by routine law enforcement? Standard police work with some elementary triggers (chemical purchases, reports from concerned citizens, etc.) will sort most of this out, and indeed there were warnings about the 9/11 hijackers which could have been acted on.

Now the age-old question: how much is your life worth?

It is possible, of course, that any relaxation in these measures will increase the terrorism hazard, that the counterterrorism effort is the reason for the low-hazard terrorism currently present. However, in order for the terrorism risk to border on becoming "unacceptable" by established risk conventions, the number of fatalities from all forms of terrorism in the United States would have to increase 35-fold, equivalent to experiencing attacks as devastating as those on 9/11 at least once a year or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year. Even if all the (mostly embryonic and in many cases moronic) terrorist plots exposed since 9/11 in the United States had been successfully carried out, their likely consequences would have been much lower. Indeed, as noted earlier, the number of people killed by terrorists throughout the world outside (and sometimes within) war zones both before and after 2001 generally registers at far below that number.

At the end of the day it again comes down to leadership or the lack thereof. If rational decisions are made and explained by calm, rational people to the rest of us, we will (mostly) follow that example. secure in the knowledge that our concerns are taken seriously and are being acted on. However, the Zero-Defect mentality is enforced by the media, and it takes a very strong personality to stand their ground in face of the shit-storm should something slip through, as it inevitably will.

Even with the extra multi-billions spent on all of this, things still slip through to be stopped only by alert and motivated members of the public. All that money and a Dutch tourist sitting next to the would-be bomber had to do the job; your organization was not very cost effective, was it, Ms Napolitano? Good leadership is also shown by subordinates who know when to act, but huge expensive bureaucracies don't generate many of those, and promote even fewer. Good thing the Americans can afford all of this...

Profiles in Petty Tyranny

There are lots of (logical) arguments in favour of "profiling" in law enforcement and security, but this one is as good as they get:

... when a group of 2,000 elderly British cruise ship passengers docked at Los Angeles for a short stop-off during a five-star cruise around America it was, in the words of one of them, more like arriving at Guantanamo Bay.
Although they had already been given advance clearance for multiple entries to the country during their trip, all 2,000 passengers were made to go through full security checks in a process which took seven hours to complete.
The fingerprints of both hands were taken as well as retina scans and a detailed check of the passport as well as questioning as to their background.
Passengers claim that the extra checks were carried out in “revenge” for what had been a minor spat over allegedly overzealous security.

I totally believe this. I have a friend who was banned from entry to the USA for five years for getting in an argument with one of their border guards, and that was before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. I've said it before and I'll say it again; as long as visiting the USA is an ordeal, I won't subject myself to it.

A group of elderly Brits on a high-end cruise ship is about as unlikely a group of terrorists or illegal immigrants as you could ask for, and nothing about the situation justified what was done. So some old guy compared you to North Korean border guards (maybe not literally, but you know what I mean), does that mean you have to act like them? This is the result of too much power being given over completely banal situations, and petty functionaries the world over are prone to get drunk with such power.

Stories like this abound about "the land of the Free and the home of the Brave". Efforts to control everything to this degree are born of Fear, and they make people distinctly not Free. I know that the US is having problems, but is the place really so fragile that anything that a six-year-old or a group of elderly tourists could possibly do (saying nothing about what's probable or even likely) bring the whole rotten edifice down?

Fear drives most of security thinking, but fear should be used as a tool and not take over or be a means to further a plan which loses sight of the basic rights of the citizens and even of visitors who shouldn't be assumed (at least not all of them) to be terrorists. This requires intelligence and flexibility, not something you'll get from the sort of people who want to be TSA screeners.

"At the end of the day, the United States is down, for sure, but it is not out," ; this is from a statement about oil prices and investment from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, but I'm not so sure. The US can certainly come back from this, but it's increasingly difficult to see how. What hope I do see is in this general direction and comes from the grassroots; the government and the malignant bureaucracies it has spawned needs to be torn down and rebuilt. That I don't see happening, so I'll just stay away until they prove me wrong.

Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.

The Toronto/Huntsville G20/G8 summits are well behind us now, hopefully never to be repeated. I've been waiting a bit to see how this all settles out, but I certainly have opinions of my own and they're not particularly surprising.

I have already addressed the strategic mistakes made in holding these things in a major city ("If You Build It, Will They Come?", AotF 21 June 2010), so I'll move to the tactical execution of the $1B in security for it. In short, the ball was fumbled, dropped, then kicked out of bounds in that order.

The PR battle was in danger from the get-go due to cost, and not helped at all by the "5 metre" rule. It is not unreasonable to expect people approaching or entering a secure area to submit to being searched as a condition to proceed, and that is a standard warning on any military establishment in Canada already. Somehow this turned into a tempest in a civil-rights teapot, another failure of leadership and communications.

The "drop" came on the Saturday when the vandals went to town and the only police presence was the burning police cars. Not only did this this start with no useful police presence, it continued that way. If there was ever a time to send in the riot squad and crack some heads, that was the time, place and the proper recipients. "Epic fail" by the police; I also like the French word for this sort of muddle: echec!

Phase Three, "kick it out of bounds" was on Sunday when the police overcompensated for their passivity the day before and penned people like cattle in various blocks near the event. The final roundup was the real problem, as even 4-5 hours after all of the summit attendees had left the police held milling groups of protesters, passers-by and local residents in a compressing ring in a couple of blocks (can't remember exactly where) and wouldn't let anyone through. So, if you lived there or were just walking through minding your own business you were swept up and held there for no good reason that even I could see, and I was watching it live.

I saw a lot of bad behaviour by the cops, and have read reports of a lot more. This again is a failure of leadership. Leadership is not "covering your ass", it's accomplishing the mission and looking after your people. In this case, if you're organizing security for this, "your people" include the public and business owners.

Acting like a bully has nothing to do with protecting the event or property; it's depressingly close to the fuckers who like to go out and smash stuff up. You're using the event to get your kicks and/or you're being carried away by the group/mob mentality. The job of the police is to separate the chaff from the wheat, not to throw it all in the silo. That bad metaphor aside, I just hope that the right lessons from this are learned in the law enforcement community