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Let's clear the decks of a few recent non-election related items that merit Grits readers' attention:
CCA: End justifies means at traffic stops
Reported the Courthouse News Service, "Police can make illegal traffic stops if the driver or passengers have outstanding warrants, the divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled." Read Liberty and Justice for Y'all's take on this ignominious opinion, "Attenuating the Taint."
Congress may prohibit employers requiring social media passwords
Legislation has been filed in Congress to prevent employers from requiring employees to give up their social networking username and password, reports The Back Gate. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice allegedly had done just that, the website reported earlier.
Adios, Injustice Everywhere
The CATO Institute has taken over the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project after a brief hiatus following its founder's retirement, and has resumed the site's original mission publishing daily summaries of police-misconduct related news stories found online. The site, previously called "Injustice Everywhere," has migrated to a new URL, policemisconduct.net. Congrats to David Packman for successfully passing off the project.
'Why We Lie'
The Wall Street Journal excerpted a forthcoming book which argues, "We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. ... But that is not how dishonesty works. Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little." Most people cheat right up until they think it makes them look bad, says the author. "Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society."
Stop and frisk on trial
A federal judge granted class-action certification in a civil rights lawsuit to plaintiffs alleging mass constitutional violations under New York City's famed "stop and frisk" policy. Those interested can read the judge's blistering opinion (pdf). Unless an appellate court says otherwise, the suit will put the "stop and frisk" policy itself on trial.
Could most gunfire incidents really go unreported?
Something doesn't add up here.The New York Times has a story on cities which have adopted "ShotSpotter" technology which allows them to triangulate the source of gunfire by sound. The company charges cities a yearly fee of $40-60,000 per square mile as a subscription package. Predictably, concerns have been raised about recording conversations in one incident (the system isn't supposed to). More surprising, though: the technology has "made it clear how much unreported gunfire takes place on city streets. ... In the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood of San Francisco, for example, where one square mile is covered by ShotSpotter sensors, only 10 percent of the verified incidents of gunfire detected by the system were accompanied by 911 calls, Commander Ali said. In Oakland, Sergeant Bolton said, only 22 percent of the verified gunfire the system detected over a three-month period was also reported by residents." Those are eye-popping numbers: One wonders if that much "verified" gunfire truly goes unreported or if the technology is generating false positives?
Reviewing new Florida regs on confidential informants
At the Snitching Blog, Alexandra Natapoff points to a retrospective on the death of Rachel Hoffman, a Florida drug informant whose death spawned a new state statute regulating confidential informant use. (See prior Grits coverage.) Natapoff also mentioned an interesting looking law-review article about the Florida statute that "focuses on an important provision in Rachel's Law that was eliminated [during the legislative process], that would have required police to provide potential informants with counsel."
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