Still illegal in Idaho

 Here's a map from The Hill of places where marijuana will be legal to various degrees by the end of this year. Grey states are where marijuana is still entirely illegal.  Despite the best attempts of the previous presidential administration to make America grey again, Idaho is one of only three states that remain grey: they are surrounded by states in which cannabis is legal in some form, and most of Idaho's neighbors have legalized marijuana (even) for recreational purposes (bright green on the map).

But Idaho is holding the line, which seems to be politically popular there.

The NYT has the story:

A Legal Pot Pioneer Was Busted in Idaho With 56 Pounds. He Has a Plan.  By Corey Kilgannon

"In retrospect, the Idaho shortcut might have been a bad idea.

...

"Idaho is surrounded mostly by pot friendly states and is strict about people driving through with the stuff. The authorities are especially vigilant in “corridor counties” along Interstate 84, of which Gooding County — where Mr. Beal encountered the state police — is one.

"Under state law, carrying more than 25 pounds of marijuana is a felony with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years; the maximum is 15 years, with a maximum fine of $50,000.

“It’s one of the worst places in the country to possess marijuana, definitely,” Michelle Agee, Mr. Beal’s court-appointed lawyer, said. “Idaho is stuck in the 1950s as far as marijuana goes. It’s definitely the wrong place, wrong time for a person to be accused of having marijuana.”

...

"Reached for comment, Idaho’s attorney general, Raúl R. Labrador, a former Republican congressman who helped found the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said that legalization in neighboring states had done nothing to deter the strict enforcement of the laws in Idaho.

“We’ve watched how those decisions to legalize drugs have ruined other states, and Idaho demands just a bit better for our citizens and communities,” he said. “If you are trying to transport marijuana across state lines through Idaho, take the long way instead. It’ll save us money on your incarceration.”

The black market in looted antiquities

 The market for ancient art has a dark underside, that involves not just the usual shady characters we expect to encounter in black markets.

The Atlantic has the story, focusing on the law enforcement work of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office::

THE TOMB RAIDERS OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE. Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. By Ariel Sabar

"When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a looted mummy coffin whose corpse had been dumped in the Nile, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with few of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.

...

"Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s extraction of wealth from poor countries and people of color. The fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities to their homelands, on the grounds that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances of money and power. Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last surviving ancient-art dealers, told me that he has lost sales of well-provenanced objects, in part, he suspects, because sensational news stories have soured collectors on the entire sector. The push to make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do with the law than with an anti-European cultural politics.

"Particularly galling to Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades. Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone relief of a spear-toting Persian soldier, valued at $3 million. In 2017 Bogdanos removed it from an art fair at the Park Avenue Armory, as its enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since the 1950s. Spurred by a tip from a scholar, Bogdanos’s team used archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the relief had been filched in the 1930s from an excavation in Iran. The British dealer and a colleague agreed to surrender the relief without admitting guilt, and in 2018, a New York judge ordered its repatriation."

Police assignments by seniority in Chicago

 Here's a recent NBER working paper reporting a study of the assignment of police officers in Chicago, where some officers can choose to transfer to newly vacant positions, with priority determined by seniority. The resulting allocation reveals that more senior officers move to assignments with lower levels of violent crime.

Police Officer Assignment and Neighborhood Crime  by Bocar Ba, Patrick Bayer, Nayoung Rim, Roman Rivera & Modibo Sidibé  WORKING PAPER 29243, DOI 10.3386/w29243,  September 2021

Abstract: We develop an empirical model of the mechanism used to assign police officers to Chicago districts and examine the efficiency and equity of alternative allocations. We document that the current bidding process, which grants priority based on seniority, results in the assignment of more experienced officers to less violent and high-income neighborhoods. Our empirical model combines estimates of heterogeneous officer preferences underlying the bidding process with causal estimates of the effects of officer experience on neighborhood crime. Equalizing officer seniority across districts would reduce violent crime rate by 4.6 percent and significantly decrease inequality in crime, discretionary arrests, and officer use of force across neighborhoods. Moreover, this assignment can be achieved in a revenue-neutral way while resulting in small welfare gains for police officers, implying that it is more equitable and efficient.

Policing in our decentralized American democracy

The current dismal news about how American minorities are often more endangered than protected by American police forces raises a market design problem.  How can police departments be reformed, in a vast, diverse democracy, where the responsibility for policing falls largely on the smallest government units, namely towns and cities and counties?

While many responsibilities are local, government at the state and federal level (and the courts) have a role in regulating police work and in providing collective resources such as training that can't be provided effectively at the municipal level.

Here's the May 2015 (Obama era) report published by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS):

 Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Washington, DC: Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services. May 2015.

The overall thrust of the report is that policing is a community activity (the word "community appears 318 times), and should have a "guardian" rather than a "warrior" culture. The report has many chillingly timely recommendations. E.g.:

"2.7 RECOMMENDATION: Law enforcement agencies should create policies and procedures for policing mass demonstrations that employ a continuum of managed tactical resources that are designed to minimize the appearance of a military operation and avoid using provocative tactics and equipment that undermine civilian trust."

"6.1.3 Action Item: The Federal Government should support the continuing research into the efficacy of an annual mental health check for officers, as well as fitness, resilience, and nutrition."

"6.4 RECOMMENDATION: Every law enforcement officer should be provided with individual tactical first aid kits and training as well as anti-ballistic vests."
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The 2016 presidential elections intervened, and this report was shelved.  Many of the authors have retreated into a private sector consulting organization named after the report on 21st Century Policing:

"21CP is an outgrowth of many of its consultant’s experiences on the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. That Task Force produced a pioneering report on contemporary policing, creating a common-sense law enforcement agenda based on input from criminal justice experts, community leaders, law enforcement, and civil liberties advocates. The recommendations have been endorsed by the Major Cities Chief Association, embraced by the National League of Cities, and heralded by community organizations and civil rights activists.

"21CP Solution’s trusted police leaders and experts work on the ground in police departments across the country – leading large departments and assisting smaller agencies. Public safety in partnership with the community is not a theoretical enterprise for 21CP."

One imagines that some of these individuals could be recruited to government service if a different administration takes office in Washington in 2021.

One of the principals in 21CP, who was the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services  at the time the above report was issued, is Ronald L. Davis, who came to COPS from East Palo Alto (where I lived briefly in 1978 while visiting Stanford, and near where I now live), where he was chief of police.  Here's an excerpt from the announcement of his appointment to COPS in 2013:

"Attorney General Eric Holder today announced Ronald L. Davis as the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).  Davis comes to COPS from the East Palo Alto Police Department, where he served as Chief of Police since 2005.
...
"In East Palo Alto, Davis led an organizational reform and community-policing effort that increased public trust and confidence and achieved dramatic crime and violence reductions in a city once dubbed the murder capital of the United States.  Davis also partnered with the  Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to implement a pilot parole-reentry program that provided programming and enforcement services and a job program with the California Department of Transportation.  The East Palo Alto Police Department was the first police agency in the state to operate a state-funded reentry program.  Return-to-custody rates dropped from more than 60 percent to less than 20 percent during this program."
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Under the current administration in Washington, the Federal government has stepped back from police reform in a number of ways.  Here's a story that ran yesterday in the Guardian:

Trump's scrapping of Obama-era reforms hinders police reform
Trump’s justice department has dropped the use of consent decrees to bring federal oversight of troubled police departments  by Ed Pilkington.

"Under Donald Trump, the US justice department has allowed federal mechanisms designed to impose change on racist police agencies to wither on the vine. As a result, law enforcement agencies that practice racial profiling, use excessive force and other forms of unconstitutional policing are now free from federal oversight.

"The most important of those tools, known as consent decrees, were deployed extensively by the Barack Obama administration in the wake of previous high-profile police killings of unarmed black men. They included the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, that same year; and the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Under Obama, 14 consent decrees were enforced upon troubled and discriminatory police agencies. By contrast, none have been issued in the more than three years of the Trump administration.
...
"Consent decrees fall under the 1994 Law Enforcement Misconduct Act that was passed by Congress in the wake of the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police three years earlier. The statute allows the US government to sue local police agencies that engage in “patterns and practices” of unconstitutional policing and fail to comply with essential reforms."
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For the record, here is the Law Enforcement Misconduct Statute, 42 U.S.C. § 14141, which is part of U.S. civil rights legislation:

§ 14141. Cause of action (re-codified at 34 U.S.C. 12601)

(a) Unlawful conduct

 It shall be unlawful for any governmental authority, or any agent thereof, or any person acting on behalf of a governmental authority, to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers or by officials or employees of any governmental agency with responsibility for the administration of juvenile justice or the incarceration of juveniles that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.

(b) Civil action by Attorney General

Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that a violation of paragraph (1) has occurred, the Attorney General, for or in the name of the United States, may in a civil action obtain appropriate equitable and declaratory relief to eliminate the pattern or practice.

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Two stories in the Washington Post together frame the current political moment:

Here's the first:
‘Defund the police’ gains traction as cities seek to respond to demands for a major law enforcement shift  By Derek Hawkins, Katie Mettler and Perry Stein   June 7, 2020

"Though long a concept floated among left-leaning activists and academics, officials from Washington to Los Angeles are now seriously considering ways to scale back their police departments and redirect funding to social programs. The moves would be a strong show of solidarity with protesters, who are clamoring for social justice and to strike back at what they see as an oppressive force across the country."

And here's the second:
Protesters hope this is a moment of reckoning for American policing. Experts say not so fast.  By
Kimberly Kindy and Michael Brice-Saddler   June 7, 2020

"Charles H. Ramsey, a former chief in the District and Philadelphia and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said perhaps the biggest obstacle to nationwide change is the unwieldy way in which police departments are organized. With every city, town, state and county fielding its own force, he said, it’s hard to standardize training and policies.

“Regionalizing them would be a solid first step,” Ramsey said. “But then you get into the politics. Every county and every mayor; they want their own police force, they want their own chief.”

"For that reason, a coalition of nearly 400 disparate organizations is focusing on securing federal reforms. Last week, the group — including the NAACP, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the American Music Therapy Association — sent a joint letter to congressional leaders calling for legislation to combat police violence.

“With so many police departments, it is important that there is federal action,” said Vanita Gupta, a former head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

"Although past efforts at policing reforms stalled in Congress, Booker expressed optimism, noting that civil rights legislation has always traveled a bumpy road. "