Policing expert: Stop Lying About the Cops
Heather Mac Donald has some advice for the next president: Focus on rhetoric, not policy. “Washington’s role in crime-fighting is negligible,” she writes at Real Clear Policy. Instead, the president should stop pushing the false narrative “that officers are routinely shooting blacks out of ‘implicit bias.’ Research shows just the opposite.” And the hostile atmosphere confronting police means “many cops have cut back on discretionary, proactive policing. Pedestrian stops dropped 82 percent in Chicago through September 2016, for example. Officers are simply driving by large crowds of youth hanging out on corners and fighting, having been told by the Obama Justice Department that it is racially oppressive to disperse such unruly groups.”
From the left: America’s Newest War
Twice the past week, writes Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe, American missiles have been fired into Yemen at Houthi rebels believed to have targeted US ships, making US participation in another Mideast war unambiguous. And yet you might have missed it, because, he notes, “The United States no longer enters wars as we did in earlier eras. Our president does not announce that we have taken up a new cause in a distant land. Congress does not declare war, which is its constitutional responsibility. Instead, a few buttons are pressed and, with only a brief and quickly forgotten spurt of news stories that obscure more than they reveal, we are at war.” What’s more, he writes, in Yemen, “our strategic objectives are unclear, and our exit strategy is unclear.”
From the campaign trail: The Great Badger State Hope
It’s looking like control of the Senate could come down to Wisconsin, writes George Will in The Washington Post, and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson: “Ten months ago he trailed [Democratic opponent Russ] Feingold by double digits. He is attempting to become the first Wisconsin Republican since 1980 to win a Senate election in a presidential year.” And yet, despite those headwinds, he’s clawed his way back by doing “something eccentric: He has run television ads that make people smile rather than wince. One concerns his support for a faith-based program teaching unemployed inner-city residents the modalities of job-seeking (interviews, etc.); the other highlights Johnson helping a Wisconsin couple bring their adopted child home from Congo.” In a year of angry battles, Johnson’s the happy warrior.
From the right: The Future of Cyber Attacks
Friday’s massive denial-of-service attack on the major Internet-server host Dyn is likely just a preview of what’s to come, says Jazz Shaw at Hot Air. The attack, affecting sites like Netflix, Twitter and Spotify, shows the vulnerabilities of the rapidly expanding “Internet of Things.” He explains: “we have a whole new layer of the web which is used exclusively by devices speaking to other devices independent of direct human control. These include everything from your DVR and cable box to newer models of refrigerators, toasters, cameras, wireless routers and even your car.” And “this collection of tens of millions of comparatively stupid devices hooked to the web were likely enslaved by hackers to act like an army of internet zombies attacking Dyn’s DNS servers. And they could do it again.”
Sociologist: A Mental-Health Fix for NYC
The outrage at the fatal NYPD shooting of Deborah Danner misses a larger point, says Alex Vitale at the Gotham Gazette: “The fact that police had to even be dispatched in the first place is a sign that something went wrong.” Vitale explains: “Health officials knew about this woman’s condition. Neighbors reported that they had recently seen her taken away in a [strait] jacket. Why was she returned to her apartment without adequate ongoing supervision or care?” Thousands of mentally ill people in New York go without intervention until a crisis brews and police respond. Vitale says there’s a solution — if the city’s willing to use it: “A coalition of service providers, advocates and family members has spent years calling on the city to create ‘crisis intervention teams’ made up of medical professionals who could respond to calls for help.”
Compiled by Seth Mandel
