Probably Not The Jacking He Was Originally Asking For

A woman who met a man at a sex club had her car taken from her by him at gunpoint.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – A woman had her car stolen at gunpoint in San Francisco early Friday morning by a man she met at a sex club in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, police said.

The carjacking was reported about 4 a.m. near the intersection of Seventh and Howard streets.

The 38-year-old victim met the suspect, a man in his 20s, at the Power Exchange [NSFW], a sex club located at 220 Jones St.

I include the url of the Power Exchange for information purposes only. Besides the police are looking for clues. If you study the pages you might find one. Or perhaps something else.

From the Power Exchange Rules Page.

Club also STRONGLY ENCOURAGES that all patrons secure their valuables. Leave them @ home, the room, in the car, in a locker or utilize the coat check! Power Exchange is not responsible for misplaced or lost items.

Evidently the lady forgot to take her most valuable item into consideration. Herself.

Personally I'm not into one night stands. They are so unsatisfying. Unless she begs for it. I did sorta have a one night stand once with a lady I knew. I wound up marrying her. We are still together 37 years on. So be careful out there. You can get more than sex from a one night stand. In my case it turned out well. That is not always the case.

And just in case you are curious here are some reviews [NSFW] of the club. None of them (that I have read) are flattering. Here is a classic review by some one who didn't have to pay to get in:

I paid nothing and felt ripped off.

You have to wonder what a woman driving a BMW (the jacked woman's car) was doing at a place like that without friends? Slumming? She probably got her fill. For a while.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Rockford Made The List

Of the ten most dangerous cities in America with populations above 100,000, Rockford, Illinois came in at number 9.

Rockford has unusually high violent crime rates for a city of its size. Most notably, the city has the fourth highest rate of aggravated assault in the country, with 10.5 cases for every 1,000 citizens in 2010. During the same period, 20 murders occurred, almost double the number in 2000. Quoted by the Rockford Register Star in 2007, Winnebago County Sheriff Dick Meyers said that he believed the city’s “location worked against [it,]” as Rockford receives traffic from the drug markets in Madison, Chicago, and Milwaukee, resulting in heightened rates of violence.

Well back in the days of Alcohol Prohibition Rockford was known for alcohol manufacturing and as a hide out for Chicago criminals. Some things never change.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Public Or Private

Heh.

They Don't Have Politics

I know Eric at Classical Values is covering the Arizona shooter well. But I just had to have my say. And I'll make it short and sweet:

Paranoid Schizophrenics don't have politics. They have voices.

But if you want to do politics at least one of his acquaintances has said he was a lefty.

And if you are looking to condemn, how about a system that knew he was troubled and did nothing for him. We don't treat our mentally ill worse than dogs in Bedlams any more. We are better than that. We are indifferent to them.

Let me say this: for all its fiscal stupidity Illinois has a decent program for those with mental afflictions. Once they get in trouble with the law (the shooter had run ins in Arizona) there are special courts for them. Not only that, Rockford, Illinois has special police trained to deal with the mentally ill.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Personal Preference vs. Economic Activity

John Derbyshire in a critique of the Glenn Beck Million Christian March (Well really Restoring Honor Rally - but...) mentions a few things about "conservatives" he doesn't like (I agree with his list - mostly). This is one of my biggest pet peeves:

the infantile narcissism of believing that all life’s ills have a remedy in law

Ya know Derb? I have this problem with "conservatives" all the time. They have as much faith in the power of the state as the socialists do. They just want to use it for different purposes. You know how it goes with them "well surely the state can't create economic utopia, but it can cure vice."

Except vice is when you do something bad to yourself. Well assign a policeman to every house, street, and place of business. And they need not be regular police - secret police will do. Or as we prefer in the US - undercover cops and informants. That will stamp out vice. Unless the informants and undercover cops are on the take. Which they are in any well established system.

There are some things about human nature that can't be fixed at the point of a gun. Economic activity and personal preferences are the big two. The best that can be hoped for is reasonable regulation (which is to say regulations that >99% will follow with no enforcement). Generally these days in America we have a Personal Preferences Party and an Economic Activity Party. Each side does its ratcheting against the other side and very little deratcheting is going on.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Radical Conservative

I was discussing the Drug War with a conservative friend and had a few things to say.

Drug crime is rather unusual.

In what we normally think of as crime there is a perpetrator and a victim. The perp tries to make the victim do something against his will.

With drug crime the victim is the perpetrator and there is no conflict of wills. Just a business transaction. And you know the first rule re: government when it comes to business.

When governments controls what is bought and sold the first thing bought and sold is government.

"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."- William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995

It worked the same way in China.

The Opium Trade

"If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us."
-- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

Boodle Boys

There are always "useful idiots" to use Stalin's clever turn of phrase. Which is to say: what ever you think you are doing, objectively you are supporting the cartels. We didn't get rid of the American alcohol cartels by intensifying alcohol prohibition. But at least in some respects people were smarter back then.

It falls into the same category as the useful idiots who promote socialism to help the poor. And the error in thinking is the same: if we put enough guns and power in the hands of the state we can fix this.

What tickles me is that the progressives say - we can fix the economic order with enough government power. While our erstwhile "conservatives" say - we can fix the social order with state power. What can the state do reasonably well? Kill people and break things.

Did you know that the reporting of all transactions of over $10,000 was a drug war measure? Money laundering don't you know. Well our current Congress has lowered the threshold to $600. Swell. Just swell.

Let me paraphrase Franklin:

Those who give up essential liberty for safety will get neither liberty nor safety.

I believe the man was on to something.

=====

What ever power you give the State will eventually be used against you and your interests. And you know this in every context except for the drug war exception. But to think there is a drug war exception is magical thinking.

Suppose for some odd reason the state takes an interest in you and the interest is not benign. What is the easiest way to violate your liberties with little or no recourse? Accuse you of a drug crime. Then the search and seizure rules go out the door. Especially if they bring some drugs with them to make sure you are guilty. There is no reliable way to protect yourself from a status crime. Because possession is 100% of the law in those cases. Of course as a suspected dope fiend the government will take away your children. To protect them from the dope. And even if you eventually get it all resolved in your favor you will have months and possibly years of family trauma to deal with. Why it is enough to drive a person to drugs.

Well. It can't happen here. Except for the fact that we have a very vocal minority (probably a majority for now) cheering them on. And it has happened more than once (see Rampart scandal Los Angeles for one example). But for now it will be confined to "those people" until you are used to it. And then it will expand. In just the way $10,000 became $600.

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Geo. Washington

Thanks my "conservative" friend for putting such powerful tools in the hands of our Masters.

My advice to the rest of the population: watch out for those who say we must reduce state power "except for". Our rules give advantages to criminals. We do that to protect the liberties of those not criminals from a state with unlimited power. I do not believe in a Drug War exception to that principle.

Tariffs

Commenter simentt at my post Got An Old Hard Drive? tells me about a campaign going on in Norway to reduce the costs of goods imported to Norway.

Do you eBay?

There is a small campaign (Organized by the libertarian magazine 'Farmann', apparently on Facebook) going on to have people eBay all kinds of stuff for 30USD with a 'buy now' option enabled. The reason for this, is that the Norwegian customs service collects VAT for all imports above 200NOK (~33USD), and that this tax is waived for lower amounts.

Thus the above campaign to get a as large as possible market for 'no-tax' imports.

This USB-adapter would thus be tax-free from Amazon, while a device costing 40USD would be taxed (the tax is 25%, and in addition a 'handling fee' of another ~20USD would be applied).

The intent of the campaign is to have people offer up goods from WallMart and other low-price vendors at less than 33USD (depending on exchange-rates) on eBay and similar so that we Norwegians can benefit from low US prices, and US citizens can make a few bucks pr item on reselling them to Norwegians.

Which just goes to show the problem of "no feedback" accounting when it comes to government taxes and tariffs. Citizens will do as much as they can to thwart the efforts of government to steal their money.

If only those passing the laws took to heart the old libertarian slogan:

Taxation Is Theft

we might get some legislators who tried to increase tax revenue by growing the economy rather than just trying to increase the extortion rate.

In general the smartest people go into the sciences and mathematics. Then come the engineers. Followed by businessmen. And who goes into politics and crime? (what's the difference?) The dimmest bulbs on the block.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Victim Status

Criminals are losing their victim status. No. Really.

it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

I guess that claiming they are depraved because they are deprived isn't going to work as well as it used to.

H/T Instapundit

The Status Of Crime

Camden, New Jersey has a problem.

For nine months last year, Ron Mills was locked in the Camden County Jail.

For nine months he held firm to his story that the drugs he was charged with possessing didn't exist.

Last month Mills' story was validated when a former Camden police officer admitted in federal court that for more than two years he and four other officers arrested suspects with planted drugs, carried out illegal searches and wrote false arrest reports.

Mills' story, which was detailed by former Patrolman Kevin Parry in court, is now being laid out in one of a growing number of lawsuits planned against the city.

That is the trouble with status crimes. Only a police officer is needed to give evidence. If you are going to falsely accuse some one of robbery you generally need a civilian accomplice who will testify "I wuz robbed". Somewhat more difficult than just planting evidence and making up stories. A tactic often referred to by police as Testilying.

But haven't we heard that story before?

The Rampart scandal refers to widespread corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (or CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Rampart Division in the late 1990s. More than 70 police officers in the CRASH unit were implicated in misconduct, making it one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in United States history. The convicted offenses include unprovoked shootings, unprovoked beatings, planting of evidence, framing of suspects, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, perjury, and covering up evidence of these activities.

Those Rampart boys sound a bit excessive. Even for out of control police.

But back to Camden.

In announcing the case dismissals for the first time last month, Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk described their extent as "unprecedented in the state of New Jersey."

Cherry Hill attorney Michael Pinsky said in his 46 years as an attorney he has "never seen mass dismissals like this."

But the corruption in Camden isn't completely unique, as rogue officers from Philadelphia to Los Angeles have caused thousands of cases to be dismissed.

In the mid-1990s, a police scandal in Philadelphia's 39th District led to at least eight officers pleading guilty to corruption charges. Hundreds of criminal cases were thrown out by judges and lawsuits against the city tallied at least $4 million in settlements, according to media reports.

Say didn't they have problems like these during alcohol prohibition? Yes they did.

Prohibition also fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement among large segments of the population. Harry Daughtery, attorney general under Warren Harding, accepted bribes from bootleggers. George Remus, a Cincinnati bootlegger, had a thousand salesmen on his payroll, many of them police officers. He estimated that half his receipts went as bribes. Al Capone's Chicago organization reportedly took in $60 million in 1927 and had half the city's police on its payroll.

One of the reasons I think police have a need for prohibition to continue for as much longer as is possible is that there are a lot of ugly things that are going to be uncovered when this rock is lifted.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sometimes The Science Is A Crime

An interesting report on bad science in crime labs.

Let us consider something we used to teach our sophomores - lead smelting and refining. Almost all lead occurs as sulfide ores that contain lesser amounts of other metals. Smelting removes the sulfur and refining removes most of minor elements, notably gold, silver and copper. The composition of the refined lead may be easily and inexpensively determined by, for example, spectrographic analysis.

Someone at the FBI decided that if the compositions of two bullets “matched” well enough the two were from the same box of ammunition. Then if the box of ammunition was tied to the defendant, so was the subject bullet.

My reaction to the claim is “HUH?” One crucible of refined lead could make millions of bullets, and the molten lead is not necessarily of uniform composition. A composition match does not prove a darned thing.

This erstwhile expert was clearly working far above his pay grade, but sold the idea to superiors who really should have known better. For the next two decades, thousands of innocent people were convicted on the basis of totally hokum bullet matching. The FBI was the only lab in the country that was using the technique, which should have been a warning that something was wrong.

Finally someone in a high position got the National Academy of Science to address the lead-matching issue. They turned thumbs down and the FBI stopped matching bullets to a particular box.

Recently the Academy performed an extensive study of the nation’s crime labs. Law enforcement agencies resented the intervention of mainstream science in the courts and an arm of the Justice Department tried to block the study. It failed and the resulting report decried the lack of science and the use of shoddy practice.

One thing the labs are really good at is producing convictions because you know - it's science. Good for mystifying the rubes. And you wonder why lawyers don't like engineers and scientists on juries.

Just round up the usual suspects.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

We See Nothing

The Atlantic has an interesting article on how moving people out of crime ridden neighborhoods has moved the crime with them as well. In the whole piece, not one single commentator mentioned the rhinoceros in the room. Drug prohibition. The American price support system for criminals. Oh it gets mentioned in passing. The usual "drug addicts are bad" kind of stuff is in there. No policy prescriptions however.

The answer the policy people prescribe is more police. That is the ticket. Subsidies for the gangs on one hand. More police to fight them on the other.

I guess things have not gotten bad enough in the good neighborhoods for the policy elites to notice. Give it time.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Bad Law

The Volokh Conspiracy is discussing whether juries should be informed of the sentences that accompany a crime. Here is what I think:

I think introducing some common law standards back into our judicial system through jury nullification is a good thing.

Will the results always be good? Well no. But neither is our current system where only the facts are judged - not the law as well.

Remember Peter Zenger. Guilty as charged. Jury nullified. Free speech upheld.

The jury is supposed to protect us from bad people and bad law. Jury nullification helped repeal alcohol prohibition. One way to get bad law repealed is to make it unenforceable.

Not to mention runaway prosecutors. There seems to be a lot of those these days.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Hate Crime

The Petrelis Files thinks Nancy Pelosi is not working hard enough to enact legislation making gays a favored class when it come to "hate" crimes. It got me thinking.

A lot of people hate spinach. What did spinach ever do to merit that?

Some people hate meat eaters. Others hate vegetarians. Why isn't Pelosi speaking up?

And how about rats? Don't they deserve protection? Are cockroaches and flies any less deserving? Are they not all nature's creatures?

BTW what is Pelosi doing for those into S&M or boob fetishists? Why is she only looking out for gays?

Plus what about hating Bush? Or Clinton? Don't Presidents deserve protection from hate?

So here is what we can do for now. We treat all crimes as hate crimes if there is any malice involved what so ever. Like if you steal from the rich because you hate rich people - extra punishment. I think those who hate stupid people deserve extra special punishment. All that would have to be established would be that the victim of the crime was behaving in a stupid manner. A simple statement should do - "Judge, I'm stupid. Punish the perpetrator accordingly."

Kind of an instant IQ test. In public.

We have to get over the idea that the stupid will be punished. Or the spinach.

H/T Instapundit

Where Is Rev. Al?

What About Our Daughters has a series of posts on a truly horrific story.

"The City of West Palm Beach, Florida is still stuck on stupid almost 4 months after a 35 year-old woman was brutally gang raped by ten African American teens and forced to perform a sex act on her own child at gunpoint. At the time, we all were asking..How on earth did something like this happen? How could her neighbors listen to this woman and her child scream for three hours and not call 911. How could one of this woman's neighbors say "So what a lady got raped...crime happens here all the time." Well folks we are seeing irrefutable proof that there is something in the water in Florida. The Mayor, Lois Frankel isn't the only one whose performance in this matter is way past poor.

Following the international spotlight landing on their city for this heinous crime, the city commissioners moved into "action" and set up a private security patrol in a place the residents called "hell on earth." Now the money is running out and folks are fighting over funding more security. Now mind you these folks can't even install light bulbs in the street lamps of Dunbar Village, the residents live in Florida without air conditioning despite air conditioners being donated and the Police Chief, Delsa Bush has said that a $1,000 reward is sufficient to induce people into providing information on the remaining six gang rapists that are running around West Palm Beach, four months later.

Why isn't this story getting any traction?

It doesn't fit The Narrative

Larry Craig

Maybe it is time for gays to learn the Morse code.

That would be some fancy foot tapping indeed.

Roughly Justice

There is a discussion going on in the comments at Durham in Wonderland about the quality of our justice system and the acceptable error rate. The ever ubiquitous anon. at 9:12AM had this to say:

As for rough justice? When most violent criminals are just that, violent criminals with long arrest and conviction records, records of commiting violent crimes and pleading down to lesser charges, WHO CARES???? I don't. I don't think rough justice can work for the crimnal underclass. But if it does, if it brings more pain to the families of those who bring pain to others, bring it on. I applaud it.

What does he mean by rough justice? Using the criminal justice system to harass the usual suspects.

My answer (revised and extended) was:

Rough justice is normally done by rounding up the usual suspects. The people no one cares about if a mistake is made per 9:12AM.

However, when it becomes a habit and the race and class boundaries are breeched there is hell to pay.

Here is what Graham Greene has to say about who can be given rough justice and torture in his novel of the cold war Our Man In Havana:

"The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal."

The Biggest Cover Up Of All

Rough justice is not real justice. It is a short cut. Short cuts have consequences.

When rough justice is the norm the innocent get no break.

The purpose of justice is to prevent the rise of a vendetta culture. It is bad for business.

Rough justice erases the line between guilt and innocence. It is an unwise policy.

Remember back to the movie Casablanca where the police chief says round up the usual suspects even though none of them were guilty. The good guy goes free. Some bad guys got punished, and yet we know in our heart of hearts justice was twisted.

So what level of error am I willing to tolerate?

I'm an aerospace kind of guy. We build the stuff so that it is safer to fly than to drive. We have a system for getting this done and correcting errors in a very timely fashion. Why not have a justice system held to similar standards?

An error is an error even if it takes a bad guy out. The quality of justice counts just as much as the quality of our airplanes. Either can take your life.

And yeah. It is going to cost more money to do things right.

The money is there. All we have to do is give up on drug prohibition and give the drug problem to those best qualified to handle it. Doctors.

We ended prohibition once. We can do it again.

===

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It won't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

Franklin P. Adams, 1931

===

Isn't it time that our justice system met the quality level of our air travel system? In terms of getting you to your destination alive? I will say it would be nice if your luggage arrived with you a bit more often.

Consider that the baggage system that goes with air travel makes about the same level of error as our justice system - in the range of 1% to 3%, and we are deeeply unhappy with that level of performance.

We ought to apply the same standards to justice as we do to baggage delivery.

So what is the rate of error in our justice system? In death penalty cases in Illinois there were 167 men on death row when George Ryan left office. There had been 13 exonerations. That would then be 13 / (167 + 13) = about 7%. That is for death penalty cases. Would the results be better or worse given the lesser quality control on less serious charges? One of the posters on the thread thought the error rate was under 1%. If you use the lost baggage standard it would have to be very significantly below 1% to make the customers happy.

One wag on the thread thought a miscarraige of justice was more likely in high profile cases due to community pressure. In other words the more community pressure the more corrupt the process. Not a comforting thought at all.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Crime Reporting

How do colleges and universities report crime? We have a small part of the answer due to the Guilford College case.

GREENSBORO — If students involved in the recent fight at Guilford College had not gone to the magistrate's office to file charges, chances are good that word of the event might never have left campus.

That's not uncommon.

Colleges frequently don't involve city police in on-campus incidents, law enforcement officials say.

But that isn't necessarily a problem. Not everything that technically could be a crime is best handled through the legal system, officials say.

Which is a good thing. It helps keep civil society civil. The occasional break in civility is usually not worth a civil war.

In the recent incident, Palestinian students said they were beaten by football players who used racial slurs. The father of one player has said the Palestinian students started the fight.

Bowers said that if the charges hadn't been filed, the incident would not have seen the light of day. "They probably would have kept the fight a secret," she said.

Law enforcement officials say they know all incidents that might be crimes are not reported. The key, though, is how serious those crimes are and whether decisions about what to report are consistent.

Which for the Palestinians would have been a better way to handle it. Their story is not holding up well. Now instead of it being a campus issue, it has become a world wide issue. Nice going Omar, Feris.

Police Lt. Brian James said not all incidents necessarily need to be reported to police, but those involving serious injuries or serious allegations do.

When that doesn't happen, that can cause problems, he said. It's harder to go back and investigate an incident after the fact, he said.

In the recent Guilford incident, police have said that their role in the investigation has been affected because they weren't immediately called to investigate.

Colleges aren't alone in not always involving law enforcement. The same thing happens at businesses and public schools and other places as well, Neumann said.

In fact, if everyone reported everything, "we'd be swamped," he said.

I think that points out one of the great difficulties in letting people bring charges before a magistrate. The chances of a complete investigation are slim. A trial then becomes a matter of trading accusations instead of evidence. I'll bet that is what the Palestinians were hoping for.

Those Palestinian boys are real smart. Possibly too smart by half.

Cross Posted at Classical Values