After giving it a little more thought, however, I realized that the way the Academy defines “good acting” offered a better explanation.

To be clear, Margot Robbie is great in the movie. Barbie is an inhuman character who is the abstract embodiment of girls struggling to find their role in the world (or something like that), yet Robbie finds a way to make her relatable and charming. Given that she’s in almost every scene in the movie, she did an incredible amount of work.

But it’s just not the kind of role that wins Oscars. Robbie was playing a literal child’s doll. In the movie, she describes herself as “Stereotypical Barbie.” This is a character that doesn’t look, behave, or think like a normal human. The Academy wants characters who feel strong emotions, characters who suffer tragedy and feel pain.

If Robbie wanted an Oscar nomination, Barbie would need a rewrite. The Academy has no room for Barbie-with-thoughts. But there could be a nomination for Barbie-with-cancer. Or Barbie as a single mom. Barbie with a heroin addiction. Unemployed Barbie. Disabled Barbie. Rape Victim Barbie. The Academy loves suffering.

I mean, just take a look at the characters played by this year’s Best Actress nominees (spoilers ahead):

• Annet Benning in Nyad, where her character overcomes a history of child sexual abuse to complete a grueling swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage at the age of 64.
• Lily Gladstone, in Killers of the Flower Moon, where she plays an Osage women whose husband tries to murder her entire family in order to gain control of the oil rights under Osage tribal land.
• Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall, where she plays a German bisexual novelist with a blind son who is accused of murdering her husband.
• Carey Mulligan in Maestro, where her character is married to philandering bisexual substance abusing musician until she dies of breast cancer.
• Emma Stone in Poor Things, where she commits suicide and is resurrected by a mad scientist after which she runs off and ends up in a brothel before returning to an abusive ex-husband.

Margo Robbie’s Barbie can’t lay a hand on that level of misery and torment.

You can see the same principle at work in the Oscar history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think it’s fair to say that the character of Barbie is written at about the same level of realism as many of the superhero and supervillain characters in the MCU, many of whom are played by people just as talented as Margo Robbie. Yet despite their box office success and cultural influence, the thirty-three films of the MCU have given us only a single acting nomination, which went to Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. You may remember that she played T’Challa’s mother, Ramonda. In other words, she played a widowed mother who was mourning her dead son.

I think the Academy’s notion of quality acting is at least as good an explanation for Robbie’s Oscar snub as sexism.

Or so I thought…until I found out the Academy gave Ryan Gosling a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role in Barbie. He played Ken. You know, Barbie’s boyfriend, who has no life of his own. He’s basically the character equivalent of a lukewarm glass of tap water.

Never mind. I got nothing.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Margo Robbie Wasn’t Nominated

As should be clear from the trailers, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is not a traditional sequel to the original Ghostbusters movie. It’s not the same kind of story told the same way. If Ghostbusters was the first Star Wars movie, then Afterlife is Rogue One. It’s a different story in the same world.

This story begins with a mother and her two kids inheriting an old farmhouse just outside the small town of Summerville. Exploring the farm, the kids and their friends stumble across a bunch of mysterious objects left behind by the previous owner. Those of us who were fans of the original movie (i.e. pretty much everyone who sees this movie) will recognize these mysterious objects as tools of the ghostbusting trade. Discovering how and why these ghostbusting tools got to be there is the subject of the rest of the movie.

That’s not an easy task for the protagonists. It’s been more than three decades since the setting of the original Ghostbusters movie, and the ghostly events in Manhattan are just distant history as far as the film’s youthful cast is concerned, so they have to get clues by talking to their school science teacher and watching YouTube clips of the news coverage — taken straight from the original Ghostbusters movie. (Wisely, the filmmakers seem to have excised Ghostbusters II from history.)

With its small-town setting, young protagonists, and easy-going pace, the best parts of Ghostbusters: Afterlife play like an extended bonus episode of Stranger Things set against the Ghostbusters mythos, and who wouldn’t want to see that? (It doesn’t hurt that Finn Wolfhard from ST plays one of the kids.)

And there’s something really great about seeing all that ghostbusting equipment again. The props have been gently re-imagined, and watching the kids discover them…the way they’re filmed…they all feel so real. Even a wacky prop like the P.K.E. meter, with it’s silly pop-out antennas, somehow feels like a functioning piece of technology. The proton packs look like heavily-used but lovingly-maintained industrial tools, and they still make that same great sound.

The movie includes a fair amount of fan service, so it should come as no surprise that several original Ghostbusters cast members make brief appearances. Unfortunately, they bring along some of the irreverent spirit of the first movie, which kind of clashes with the more heart-felt tone of this one. Afterlife is by no means a “gritty reboot,” but it does take the characters and their emotions seriously enough that you would care if something bad happened to one of them. It feels like they’re in danger, and you never felt that way about Bill Murray in the first movie.

The ending also feels rushed. The early parts of the movie meandered past some interesting ideas and introduced a few subplots, but when the main conflict is resolved, the movie just ends, with little in the way of epilogue to show us how anything else turned out.

Nevertheless, the story was pretty coherent, the effects have all been updated without being unrecognizable, and it was fun to watch.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ghostbusters: Afterlife — Review

I still don’t care about House Atreides and House Harkonnen. I’m tired of hearing about the Bene Gesserit and the Kwisatz Haderach, the Padishah Emperor and his Imperial Sardaukar troops, and Paul’s mysterious connection to the Fremen (He knows how to wear a stillsuit correctly, oh my!). The whole wheels-within-wheels, schemes-within-schemes, secret-societies-within-secret-societies thing just doesn’t intrigue me as much as Frank Herbert wants it to.

In fact, the whole Dune universe just doesn’t work for me. It’s set something like 20,000 years in the future and has giant spaceships, but it’s filled with a superstitious medieval culture that fights with knives. I realize there are in-universe explanations for why things are the way they are, such as how shields make knives more effective than guns, but that doesn’t make it stop feeling silly.

And the whole Arrakis plot doesn’t make sense. If you’re prepared to invade a planet to destroy House Atreide, why don’t the Harkonnens and the Emperor just combine forces and attack them on Caladan? Instead, the Emperor gets the Harkonnens to abandon Arrakis, which they already control, only to return and try to take it back by force with help from the Emperor. That seems like an awful lot of trouble.

(Although actually, the initial invasion is super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Somehow the Harkonnens are able to enter the solar system, land ships on Arrakis, and get troops all the way to the door of the palace before anyone notices. And they are helped with this because the Atreides’ personal doctor, who holds no military command, is somehow able to disable the shields and let them in.)

I’ve now seen both movies (and the miniseries) and tried to read the book several times, but it just doesn’t draw me in. I realize that some of the things that bother me have explanations in the book, but that doesn’t help me enjoy it any more.

Dune is widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, but for whatever reason, I can’t get into it. I find much of it unlikeable.

Having said all that, if you’re still interested in my review…

This is certainly my favorite version of the story. It’s beautiful to watch, some of the characters are amusing, and the story (as much of it as we get in this first half) is told with some clarity. Also, one of Dune‘s silliest ideas — ornithopters — actually works visually, as these ornithopters traverse the desert like ferocious insects, angry and powerful.

I hope this Dune does well enough to get its sequel, because fans of the story deserve something this beautiful.

But I won’t get very excited about it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Dune – Review

https://twitter.com/evanrachelwood/status/1147213677247860737

(Because I don’t trust Twitter embeds, she wrote: “You should never date a guy like the cop from #strangerthings Extreme jealousy and violent rages are not flattering or sexy like TV would have you believe. That is all.”)

Some of her critics have been tediously pointing out that Sheriff Jim Hopper is a fictional character, as if we don’t discuss the ethics of of fictional characters all the time. (Also, as I’ll explain in a minute, part of Wood’s point is that real people aren’t like Hopper.)

Many other critics make a somewhat better point, which is that Hopper never hits Joyce Byers or any of the kids. He may be filled with rage, but he doesn’t actually hurt anyone — except the show’s bad guys, of course. That’s not a completely satisfying response, however, because angry men don’t have to actually hit women to scare the crap out of them, and scaring the crap out of someone is certainly abusive.

All of which brings me to the point that I think Wood was trying to make with her tweet: Fictional people like Hopper and real people like Hopper are not the same thing.

Fictional Sheriff Hopper is a guy with issues. He gets angry a lot. However, no matter how pissed-off he gets, Hopper would never actually hit Joyce or any of the children. We know this, because we recognize him as a well-known fictional archetype: The Violent Male Who Only Hurts Bad People.

That guy is everywhere in our fiction, from James Bond to Dominic Toretto to John Wick. Many comic superheros fit the mold — Batman, Wolverine, Deadpool, the Punisher, the Hulk, Hellboy — as do many of the love interests in romance novels. Actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Dwayne Johnson have spent half their careers playing some variation of that character. When we see this guy, we all know him, and we all know he’s not going to hurt the innocent people in his life.

The objection that abusive men don’t have to hit women to abuse them doesn’t really apply either because, by the rules of the genre, the fictional women and fictional children in his fictional life are quite aware that he won’t hurt them. In Stranger Things, Joyce Byers is startled and confused by Hopper’s rage at times, but she never reacts like she’s really afraid of him.

(I didn’t re-watch the entire show, but I can’t remember any real fear of him. If I got that wrong, I’ll have to walk this back.)

Another example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Kindergarden Cop. He’s a tough police detective who goes undercover as a school teacher. Much of the humor in the movie comes from the fact that no one is afraid of him — not the women teachers, not the lady principle, and not any of the children.

In the real world, violent people don’t follow genre rules. People with impulse control problems aren’t always able to draw the lines so carefully. They don’t just get violent with criminals and terrorists. They hurt people who are close to them, either because they can’t tell the difference, or because they just don’t care. In real life, guys who act like Hopper can be dangerous to have in your life.

We put up with a lot in fictional characters that we shouldn’t in real life. Fictional TV cops like Walt Longmire or Steve McGarrett beat the crap out of suspects, and we’re more or less okay with it, because Cop Who Breaks All The Rules For Justice is another well-known archetype. This cop may break the rules, but he always only does it to keep really bad people from getting away. This is unlike real-life rule-breaking cops, who are more likely to beat the crap out of 15-year-old turnstile jumpers who mouth off.

Another example is the character of Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS. As a fictional character, he comes across as a stern teacher and charmingly gruff boss. But a real-life boss who bullies his employees, sometimes even hitting them, is an HR nightmare who drags down everyone on his team. 

Or, getting back to Stranger Things, let’s think about the character of Eleven for a minute. This is a child who was isolated and emotionally abused all her life, and who was subjected to unethical science experiments. And at every moment she is carrying a weapon — her dangerous psychic ability — with which she has already killed at least a dozen people. Knowing all this about her, would you really let her anywhere near your children?

It’s the nature of our relationship to fiction that we empathize with the protagonists of a story, even when they are objectively bad people. The movie Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 is a notorious example that made a couple of murderous bank robbers into romantic protagonists. More recently, the writers on Breaking Bad used this effect with Walter White, intentionally making him into a self-absorbed violent jerk…who we still wanted to see win.

The effect doesn’t always work, however, because sometimes viewers have trouble getting past real life. I liked the Major Crimes police procedural stories, but every now and then I found myself yelling at the screen because they did something I had read about in one of Radley Balko’s gut-punching stories of police misconduct. I also had trouble enjoying the 1991 comedy Nothing But Trouble, about a bunch of big-city travelers who get in trouble in a small town ruled by a sadistic judge who likes to use a special machine called “Mr. Bonestripper” to execute people without a proper trial. It’s supposed to be a dark comedy, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that there are real places in the world where sadistic rulers find amusing ways to kill people who anger them.

For Evan Rachel Wood watching Stranger Things, it was Hopper’s out-of-control anger that was too close to reality. She knows a thing or two about sexual assault and domestic violence, and Hopper set off some warnings. He’s an entertaining character, but she wouldn’t want the real-world version of him in her life.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Is Chief Hopper a Perpetrator of Domestic Violence?

For one thing, I’m wondering if all the death-related magic is connected in some way. Everybody makes a big deal about the Night King and his army of White Walkers because they can raise the dead, but there’s a lot of that going around. The Red Woman, Melisandre, raised Jon Snow from the dead at Castle Black. And Thoros of Myr claimed to have raised his friend Beric Dondarrion from the dead six times, and we saw him do it once.

Then there’s whatever Cersei’s disgraced former maester, Qyburn, did to The Mountain after his near-fatal injuries from his fight with Oberyn. I don’t know what’s going on under that helmet, but I can make out tinges of blue that make him look a bit like one of the Night King’s risen dead. I can’t help but wonder if the Night King will have some influence over him, which could come as a nasty surprise for Cersei.

Finally, Arya Stark is an acolyte to the Many-Faced God of Death, who has clearly granted her some gifts. That seems like it should figure into all this somehow, doesn’t it?

And yet George R. R. Martin has been maddeningly annoying about making things like this pay off. I mean, we saw our first White Walker in the first episode of the show, and then we met Daenerys and learned of her family history not long after. So it was obvious that Westeros was eventually going to be caught between the icy White Walkers from the north and Daenerys’s fiery forces from across the sea. And yet…Daenerys didn’t set foot in Westeros until the beginning of the seventh season. And the Night King’s army of the dead, which has been marching south all this time, still wouldn’t reach the wall until the end of the season.

Moreover, with the exception of the White Walkers and the dragons, many of the fantasy elements in GRRM’s stories don’t ever really seem to land. The Lord of Light seems to communicate entirely in visions that we never see, and they don’t seem to be very useful to the people who receive them. And those flaming swords look really cool, but it’s not clear from anything we’ve seen in the show that a flaming sword gives any advantage to the wielder in a fight.

And even the magic that works doesn’t seem to be used properly. I mean, if you’ve got people like Melisandre and Thoros who can raise the dead, shouldn’t you hold them in reserve as an important resource instead of allowing them to wander the countryside?

Furthermore, while Daeneyrs knows how to use her fire-breathing dragons as weapons of war, no one seems to have thought to use them to gather battlefield intelligence. The Unsullied wouldn’t have been surprised at Casterly Rock — nor House Tyrell at Highgarden — if Daeneyrs had periodically overflown the territory to spot enemy troop movements.

As for the big question of who will take the Iron Throne, Daeneyrs seemed to have the strongest claim until we learned Jon Snow’s true heritage, but would he even want the throne? He seems quite likely to yield his claim to Daeneyrs. Or I suppose they could marry and rule Westeros together. They may be closely related — she’s his aunt — but incest is kind of a thing for the Targaryens, to keep from diluting their dragon-wrangling genes.

There are a variety of other with claims. Robert Baratheon’s conquest arguably moots the Targaryen claim and establishes a Baratheon royal line, so his bastard son Gendry arguably has a claim. Then again, the Lannisters and the Baratheons intermarried at some point, so Jaime might be able to claim the throne as the oldest living male with Baratheon blood. If he refuses, the throne would fall to Tyrion. Alternatively, there have been hints that Tyrion is not really Tywin’s son — that his wife had an affair with the last Targaryen king — which would give him an even better claim than Jon Snow.

Then of course there’s Cersei. Her claim by marriage into the Baratheon line is weak, but she’s the only one actually sitting on the throne. But can she hold it? Cersei is not good at holding people’s loyalty. Even Jaime has left her, and will her armies obey her without his steady hand to guide them?

I guess I can imagine four endings I’d find interesting:

• Daeneyrs and Jon take the throne together and everyone lives happily ever after…which doesn’t sound like a George R. R. Martin ending.
• Daeneyrs or Jon dies fighting the army of the dead. The other one takes the throne.
• Cersei takes the Iron Throne, but having alienated everyone, she has no power, no friends, and no family. She is queen of nothing. This is the ending I’d like to see.
• Cersei has a change of heart, everyone fights the army of the dead together, all is forgiven, and Cersei is proclaimed Queen of Westeros. She returns to King’s Landing to reign from the Iron Throne, with Sansa Stark as her Hand of the Queen. In the final scene, Cersei peels her face off to reveal Arya Stark. This is the ending I’d really like to see.

Of course, I would be remiss as a libertarian blogger if I didn’t say that I find this whole Iron Throne business offensive. It doesn’t matter who has the best claim to the Iron Throne because there is no such thing as a legitimate king. I kind of want some previously unknown distant wealthy liberal republic to fill the Blackwater with a fleet of steam-powered warships which promptly reduce the Red Keep to rubble with naval gunfire. And I daresay a few hundred Gatling guns could probably make short work of the army of the dead. Or, if it came down to it, the Unsullied, the Dothraki cavalry, and a couple of dragons as well.

Because Death to Tyrants, one and all.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Getting a Few Things Off My Chest: Game of Thrones Edition

I managed to catch one of the sneak preview showings of Shazam! last week, and I thought it lived up to the promise of the trailer. Without a lot the sturm and drang that has afflicted so many DC-Comics-based movies lately, it was just two hours of enjoyable comic escapism.

I grew up reading these comics, and back in the 1970s when young Billy Batson said the magic word “Shazam!” he turned into a superhero named “Captain Marvel.” That name would be confusing to modern audiences — and it would probably anger the lawyers at Marvel, which has a completely different Captain Marvel in theaters right now — so nowadays the character is known simply as “Shazam.” Nevertheless, although I have nothing against the fine work of Carol Danvers, Billy Batson’s alter ego who will always be the true Captain Marvel to me.

(The original Captain Marvel stories published by Fawcett in the early 1940s were incredibly popular, outselling even rival National’s Superman comics, on which the Captain Marvel character was loosely based. The sad story of the comic’s subsequent downfall involves rather a lot of intellectual property lawyers.)

The new Shazam! movie is clearly based on the 2012 incarnation of the character from the New 52 reboot by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. The biggest change from the comics I read is that Silver Age Captain Marvel was an adult superhero with an adult personality completely separate from Billy’s, but in this incarnation, the big guy with super-powers is still young Billy Batson on the inside. He’s a 15-year-old with superpowers, and that makes for some hilarious moments. And no, you haven’t already seen all of them in the trailer.

Although Billy’s exploration of his new superpowers makes up a substantial portion of the movie, as it does in the trailers, the main plot of the movie involves a confrontation with one of Captain Marvel’s traditional foes, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, played with steely menace by Mark Strong. Sivana has come into his own magical superpowers through darker means than Billy, and he wishes to use them for darker ends.

But this is not a dark movie. Shazam! never loses touch with its origins in a superhero comic series that had a lot of zany fun. Perhaps more importantly, Shazam! avoids the recent DC misstep of having the bad guys kill tens of thousands of people and then trying to call whatever happens next a happy ending. The bad guy in Shazam! is certainly bad, but without all that unnecessary tragedy porn.

Speaking of those other movies, although Superman and Batman are name-dropped as actually existing in the world of Shazam!, this movie does not appear to take place in the same DC Extended Universe as movies like like Justice League. That’s probably a good thing.

Finally, at the risk of a small spoiler, I’d like to head off some disappointment for fans who may have heard enticing rumors: Sorry, but Tawny does not appear as a character in this film. And in case you’re wondering, there are two closing credits scenes. The first is foreshadowing of a future villain, and the second is just a bit of fun.

Shazam! opens widely in theaters on Friday.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Shazam! – Review

The problem started with the final episode of Season 6, when Negan finally appears. The show had been building up to this for several episodes, as Rick’s group had a series of run-ins with Negan’s minions. In this episode, several of Rick’s group were captured by Negan’s much larger force and hauled into a clearing where they were forced to kneel as Negan gave one of his long-winded speeches.

Negan blathered on about how Rick and his group thought they were on top, but they were about to learn that they weren’t, and that he was going to punish them by beating one of them to death. He went on to taunt them with what was coming, and how much it must suck for them not knowing who would die. Then, as promised, he beat one of them to death with his baseball bat.

That’s where I got pissed off.

It’s not the killing itself that bothered me. Like every Walking Dead fan, I was well aware of the show’s willingness to kill off major characters. This was one of the things that made Walking Dead so intense: When bad things happened, no one was safe.

Obviously, Walking Dead is scripted television, so we know that the characters die because the writers decide to kill them. But until this moment, it always felt like a natural part of the story. People died because of decisions they made, or because of things they didn’t know, or because other people made decisions for which that they paid the price, or because they lost a fight with one of the show’s villains. The illusion of the fiction was working.

But Negan’s scene ruined that. In his speech, he made it clear he was calculating how to kill one of Rick’s group with the intent of causing them emotional pain, and that was weird to me, because I realized the Walking Dead writers had also been calculating how to kill one of Rick’s group to cause some strong emotions in the show’s audience. Negan was basically acting out the writers’ subtext right in front of us. The only way the authorial intrusion could have been more obvious is if series creators Robert Kirkman and Scott Gimple had come out and simply fired one of the actors.

(This was made ten times worse by having the episode end just as Negan started beating his victim, without showing the viewers who it was. We had to wait for the opening episode of the next season to find out. This cheap trick only served to emphasize how blatantly the writers were trying to manipulate us.)

Nevertheless, I continued to watch the show through two dismal years of the conflict with Negan, hoping that it would get good again. This season, under new showrunner Angela Kang, was really starting to show some promise. At least until last Sunday’s episode, which did pretty much the same damned thing the season 6 finale did.

(Spoilers ahead.)

In this episode, the Whisperers capture some of the good guys out on a patrol. Instead of killing them, the Whisperers give them a portentous warning and tell them to stay out of Whisperer territory, which would now have a special border marker. As the captives leave, they come upon a row of stakes, with a head mounted on each one. These are revealed to be the heads of various cast members, conveniently arranged in order of importance and shock value.

Since the Whisperers just grabbed a more-or-less random selection of people from the Kingdom, this feels just like Negan’s random choice of who to kill. But of course, neither of these killings were at random: The writers were doing it. I can imagine them sitting down to calculate how many minor characters they could kill without it seeming like a cop-out, and which major characters they could kill without hurting their ratings, and which ones they had to keep around for plot purposes…until they had just the right combination of dead characters to shock the viewers without driving too many of them away.

The big shock might still have worked if we had seen the action, if we had seen them captured, seen how they fought, and seen how they died. But all of that happened off screen (except for a hackneyed flashback narrated by one of the survivors). All we got to see was the proof that they were dead. This is only slightly better than if they’d ended with a white-on-black text epilogue that said “While you were watching this, the writers have decided to kill the following characters…”

Things like this make the whole show less enjoyable. Instead of being enthralled by the ups and downs of the story, I just feel silly for ever having cared.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Walking Authorial Intrusion

I’m part way through the first book, On Basilisk Station, and it seems to be fairly well written and plotted, but…parts of it are just painful. When Captain Harrington arrives in the Basilisk system, her command assumes responsibility for customs enforcement, including making sure everybody is paying the tariffs on the goods they are shipping. They do this by stopping and searching every ship that passes through — without a warrant from a judge or articulable probable cause (or the sci-fi equivalent) — and if they find something, they seize it without any apparent judicial proceeding. In parallel with one of the worst feature of American civil forfeiture, the ship’s crew are rewarded a fraction of the value of the seized merchandise, which in real life creates terrible incentives.

I’m pretty sure they will eventually stumble upon some enemy activity and get into some cool space battles, but this part where the supposed hero of the series is stealing from hard-working merchants to finance the Queen’s government is hurting my libertarian soul.

And now it looks like they are also going to be doing drug interdiction. Sigh.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Libertarian Meets the Honorverse

At the end, they flash a couple of corporate logos. I naturally had to step through them. The first one is a new logo for Weyland-Yutani, which is the name of the fictional corporation (usually referred to as “The Corporation”) that has been running through all the films. The second logo, however, says “Intelligence powered by AMD.”

AMD is a real-world semiconductor manufacturer, and I gotta say, as product placements go, that’s pretty cool. (Not Mattel-hoverboard-in-Back-to-the-Future cool, but still pretty cool.)

It says something about my life that I immediately turned to my wife and commented on the absence of Hyperdyne Systems. Then we shared a brief moment of confusion between Hyperdyne Systems and Cyberdyne Systems — one is from the Alien series, the other from Terminator — before reassuring ourselves that, yes, Hyperdyne was the maker of the synthetics in the Alien series.

This is why we’re married.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at An Alien Product Placement

In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t dress up. There wasn’t any single character I wanted to be. My personality was pretty much Brad, but my body type ran more to Eddie. And when you come right down to it, I kind of admired Riff Raff — he was a faithful handyman, and throughout it all he kept his cool and stayed on mission. (Unlike many of my friends, I actually knew the film had a plot.) In the face of that indecision, making a costume just seemed like too much work.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that somebody should do a remake, if only to give it some modern production values. I know it’s supposed to be cheesy, but dear God those special effects are awful. I was pretty interested when I heard that Fox was planning a new made-for-TV version of Rocky Horror, but I stayed away from reading much about it because I knew it would be controversial among the fans, and I just don’t want to read endless complaints and bickering about every choice from casting to choreography. So maybe it will be fun, or maybe it will suck, or (worst of all) maybe it will just be mediocre, but I’m still looking forward to seeing it when it airs this Thursday night.

I did however stumble across a preview clip of the title sequence from the new version, and they’ve brought back Trixie from the play. She’s a movie theater usherette who sings the opening number, “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” to set up the frame that the rest of the play is supposed to be imagined as a cheesy low-budget B-movie. Richard O’Brien wanted to keep Trixie in the film, but it would have been too expensive, and since Rocky Horror was an actual low-budget B-grade movie, the frame wasn’t as important, so they saved a lot of money by just filming the now-iconic floating lips. Although this version of Rocky Horror is based on the film, not the play, I guess they decided to put Trixie back in because that’s how it was originally intended to be.

(Also, it’s rumored that much of the cost of the original opening was obtaining the rights to images from all the films that it references, and nowadays, even though they’re all science fiction classics, Rocky Horror is probably more famous than most of them.)

And it’s a good thing Trixie’s back, because Ivy Levan’s performance is stunning:

https://youtu.be/RiNEYHP9TWI

[Updated with new Fox-approved version of the video.]

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White?

Let’s do the math.

When looking at racial statistics in the United States, it’s important to remember that black people really are a minority. I’ve seen complaints of the form “It’s outrageous that only 10% of <whatever> are black!”, but that’s actually not too bad. According to recent census estimates, approximately 12.6% of Americans are black, so 10% isn’t too far off. Depending what we’re talking about, the 2.6% difference could easily be explained by benign cultural and environmental differences.

Given that 12.6% of Americans are black, and assuming for purposes of the calculation that academy award voters are not racially biased in any way, what are the chances that not a single acting nominee is black? Could it just be random chance?

If there was only one nominee, then there would be a 12.6% chance of picking a black actor, which is the same as saying that there would be a 100% – 12.6% = 87.4% chance of picking a non-black actor. Expand the selection to two nominees, and there’s an 87.4% chance that the first one will be non-black, and then another 87.4% chance that the second one will also be non-black. So the chance of both of them being non-black is 87.4% * 87.4% = 76.4%. More generally, every time we add another person to the sample, that’s another 87.4% chance to keep the non-black streak going. So if we choose a group of N people at random, the chance of all of them being non-black is given by

[latex](0.874)^N[/latex]

From this, we can get the odds of all five nominees for Best Actor being non-black,

[latex](0.874)^5 = 0.510[/latex]

So we’d expect the Best Actor category to shut out black actors about half the time, even if the nomination process is completely colorblind. Add in Best Actress — raising the size of the sample to 10 nominees — and that works out to about 1-in-4 chance of a black shut-out:

[latex](0.874)^{10} = 0.260[/latex]

Two years in a row makes it 20 people, and the odds get worse:

[latex](0.874)^{20} = 0.068[/latex]

In other words, pure random chance will deliver an a slate of Best Actor and Best Actress nominees with no black nominees about 7% of the time.

I was just about to conclude that it’s not unreasonable that completely colorblind Academy could give black actors a two-year shutout entirely by chance, but then I noticed that Spike Lee says “For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White.” At first I thought Lee made a mistake — I counted 20 Best Actor and Best Actress nominees over both years, i.e. two consecutive years of 10 nominees, not 20 — but then I realized Lee is also including the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories, which also haven’t had any black people for two years. That’s a 40-person-long streak of non-black nominees. The odds of that are pretty low:

[latex](0.874)^{40} = 0.00458[/latex]

That’s less than a 1-in-200 chance that this could have happened entirely by random selection. That’s not impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely. By comparison, in the social sciences, any result that has a less than 1-in-20 chance of arising under random chance is considered significant enough to publish. The lack of black acting nominees is very unlikely to be random chance. Something is going on here.

These simple statistics alone, however, cannot tell us what that something is. All we’re doing is comparing the racial composition of the population of acting nominees to the racial composition of the entire population of the United States. There’s a lot of room between those two populations to explain the differences, which could be caused by a number of factors other than racist voters in the Academy. For example, just making stuff up off the top of my head,

• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less likely to think of acting as a legitimate career choice, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools makes it 10% less likely that blacks will get in, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools cause blacks to receive 10% less effective educations in acting, and
• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less able to devote time and energy to their acting careers (e.g. because of a greater need for a paying day job), and
• Perhaps racially biased casting directors are 10% less likely to cast black actors in the bit parts that will give them experience and exposure, and
• Perhaps racially biased screen writers are 10% less likely to write major parts for black characters, and
• Perhaps racially biased studio heads devote 10% less promotional effort to movies with black leads (possibly in response to racially biased audiences spending less on those movies), and finally
• Perhaps racially biased Acedemy voters are 10% less likely to vote for black actors and actresses.

Combine all of those elements, and the calculation looks something like this:

[latex]\left(1-\text{0.126} (1-0.10)^8\right)^{40} = 0.108[/latex]

So if there’s a 10% drag on blacks at eight different places along the way, then the odds of a two-year shutout for the acting categories is about 1 in 9. That means this explanation is statistically plausible.

I should emphasize, however, that I totally made up those explanations and the numbers to go with them, merely as an illustration of the kinds of things that might influence the acting nominations. These are the kinds of things we might want to look for if we are serious about figuring out what’s happening. It could turn out that all of the bias is indeed at the Academy voting stage, in which case a boycott might be a sensible response. Or it could just be that there is just an accumulated drag on black actors which builds up enough over their careers to keep them out of the nominations. I have no idea.

But I can do the math. And at 1-in-200 odds…something is going on.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Little Oscar Math

I enjoy police procedural mysteries — the crime scene, the forensics, the autopsy, interrogations, politics, history, secrets — but all these years of blogging about libertarian issues and the criminal justice system have made it hard to maintain the willing suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy fiction.

Most procedurals are set in major urban police departments, but the Kate Burkholder series by Linda Castillo is set in the supposedly quiet town of Painter’s Mill, Ohio, in the middle of Amish country. In Gone Missing, Burkholder is asked to assist the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation with a search for some missing Amish teenagers, one of whom has turned up dead.

That part is a pretty good story, but I kept getting distracted by one of the subplots. Over the course of the book, Burkholder has a series of fruitless arguments with the town mayor, who’s upset because her department has arrested his son for drug possession. Sheriff Burkholder may be a fictional character, but like most law enforcement officers, she’s part of the War on Drugs, and that makes it hard to think of her as one of the good guys. I mean, what’s next? Rousting homosexuals from bathhouses? Chasing blacks out of town before the sun goes down?

I have similar problems with the way other fictional portrayals of criminal justice clash with my beliefs and values. On a recent episode of Major Crimes they were trying to find a missing child, and when they interviewed a suspect they told him that because there were exigent circumstances he had no right to remain silent and no right to a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think that’s how it works. There might be some special rules about the admissibility of statements made to the police when questioned about certain things, but I’m pretty sure you can always shut up and lawyer up. They were lying to him about his rights.

They lie a lot on that show, often tricking suspects into doing or saying things that give them away. That seems legitimate enough, but the Major Crimes detectives also lie about how much evidence they have against suspects in order to trick them into confessing. That’s pretty cool on television, where the rules of series drama pretty much guarantee they’ve got the real bad guy. But in real life, unfortunately, sometimes when the cops convince a suspect that they’re sending him to jail, he ends up telling them whatever they want to hear in the hope of getting some leniency, even if it means admitting to a crime he didn’t commit. This is how false confessions are made.

Even worse, Major Crimes‘s Captain Sharon Raydor doesn’t just want suspects to leave the interrogation room under arrest, she wants them to leave having accepted a plea deal, so there’s no change they’ll escape justice by winning at trial.

It doesn’t help that police brutality has become increasingly acceptable in police fiction. When Harry Callahan tortured the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry to get him to reveal the location of a kidnapped child, at least we could understand why he felt he had to do it. Since then, however, the cop who “plays by his own rules” has become a staple of police dramas, from Jethro Gibbs on NCSI to Julio Sanchez on Major Crimes to Sheriff Walt Longmire. These fictional cops get tough on criminals because they care so much about the victims and will do whatever it takes to protect the innocent and bring the guilty to justice. (Except Steve McGarrett on the new Hawaii 5-0 who seems to torture suspects just to annoy Danno.)

But in the real world, brutal cops don’t get started by torturing serial killers into revealing the locations of their kidnap victims or by executing crime kingpins who are too smooth to get caught. In the real world they start by beating down street kids who mouth off. They start by tasering belligerent motorists and shooting people’s dogs. In real life, we get guys like Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, who was involved in torturing 200 criminal suspects, some of whom appear to have been innocent.

I’m currently reading a murder mystery in which the victim is a prostitute who the investigating officer had busted and then turned into an informant. The story is full of talk about the dangers facing police informants without once considering that the victim became an informant only because the officer coerced her into it by threatening to jail her for a victimless crime. In the real world, I don’t have much respect for cops who arrest someone for a victimless crime and threaten them into doing dangerous work as an informant.

I didn’t have much respect for Hank Schrader in Breaking Bad either. He wasn’t a murderer like Walter, Gus, and all the rest, but he was a DEA agent who had presumably ruined a lot of lives. He didn’t deserve to go out like that, but live by the sword, die by the sword.

Even in nonsense like Terra Nova — about a family that travels back in time to the Cretaceous period as part of an expedition to save humanity from ecological disaster — it bothered me that the father was a former narcotics officer. I kept expecting him to import his poisonous ideology into the colony.

In Gone Missing, Sheriff Kate Burkholder eventually figures out what has been happening to the children. (Spoiler alert, although I won’t give away the killer’s identity.) The Amish are expected to live their lives according to the ordnung, an informal but rather strict moral code, and much of the story involves Amish children struggling with its requirements. It eventually turns out that all of the abducted Amish children had broken the rules — by having sex, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, or wearing makeup — and the villain is a crazed Amish man who’s trying to save the children from their sinful ways by kidnapping them and keeping them locked up in dismal cells for months or years. The villain was willing to subject the teenagers to great suffering because, to paraphrase Shaw, he has mistaken the customs of his tribe for the laws of the universe.

This is, of course, the exact same thing that Sheriff Burkholder is doing to the mayor’s son: She’s willing to lock him in a dismal cell for months or years in order to “straighten him out” for breaking rules that are just as arbitrary and essentially religious in nature as the ordnung. And even when the mayor pleads for his son’s freedom, Burkholder is a merciless enforcer of her society’s moral customs.

For a while, I held out hope that author Linda Castillo saw the same parallels I did, and I half expected to see a scene at the end where Burkholder saw the horrors brought by overzealous enforcement of conformity to authority and decided to cut the mayor’s kid some slack. But it didn’t happen. Either Linda Castillo or the character she created just doesn’t see the world my way.

Which is a shame, because the Kate Burkholder stories are actually a pretty decent mystery series. I still enjoy them, but I feel funny about it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Kate Burkholder Is an Authoritarian Bitch

Citing similarities between the show’s finale and today’s tragic shooting at a Virginia TV station, USA Network says it will postpone tonight’s finale of Mr. Robot.

“The previously filmed season finale of Mr. Robot contains a graphic scene similar in nature to today’s tragic events in Virginia,” the network said in a statement. “Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers, we are postponing tonight’s episode.”

The episode will now air on Sept. 2. The network didn’t elaborate on how the scene from the finale is similar to the events today, in which a person shot and killed a cameraman and reporter during a live televised interview.

I don’t understand how this is about respect for the victims. No matter what happens on Mr. Robot, it’s not about the victims and has nothing to do with them.

I can sort of understand the desire to respect the feelings of the victims’ families and friends, but I have trouble believing that tonight’s episode of Mr. Robot makes any difference to them. Given that someone they love has just died, I don’t think they care what’s on television.

I admit that when my mother and father died a few months apart (from natural causes), I couldn’t watch new episodes of House for a few months. Unsurprisingly, watching people suffer from major health problems in hospital settings had lost its entertainment value for me.

But it didn’t bother me that House was on the air or that other people were watching it, and I don’t believe that today’s victims’ families and friends would be bothered by Mr Robot being on either. The most that might be needed from USA Network is a warning notice before the show so people who might be upset could avoid or postpone watching that episode.

Speaking of my dead parents, why didn’t House postpone any episodes when they died, out of respect for my feelings? For that matter, people are murdered pretty much every day in this country, so why don’t networks postpone shows all the time? Surely the family and friends of those victims would be just as upset by similar violence on television as the family and friends of the people shot in Virginia today. Why doesn’t USA Network postpone episodes for them?

Of course the big difference between today’s shooting and all those other murders (or my parents’ natural deaths) is the vast amount of news coverage. Everybody has heard about the Virginia shooting. What this tells me is that postponing tonight’s episode of Mr. Robot isn’t really about the victims or their families or their friends. It’s about all of us.

My initial thought was that USA Network was concerned the episode’s similarity to today’s tragic real-life events would make it harder for us viewers to enjoy the show, which is bad for the USA Network, because they need us viewers to make money. Even just putting up a warning notice could reduce viewership, although I suspect most fans would catch the episode later.

On the other hand, speaking as a fan, not only was there a depressing event in the news today, but now it turns out I won’t get to see a show I’ve been looking forward to all day. USA Network isn’t really helping me out here, and I’m guessing most other fans feel the same way. (Or maybe these coincidences just don’t bother me as much.)

That leads me to believe that postponing the episode is mostly about the desire by USA Network executives to avoid the appearance of insensitivity. They’re concerned that if they show the episode, someone or some group with an agenda will get outraged and make a big stink about USA Network’s neglect of victims’ feelings and “glorification” of violence.

But saying that in the press release would have been insensitive. So instead they say it’s about respect for the victims and their families and friends. That’s not to say that the people at USA Network aren’t genuinely sympathetic toward the victims and their families and friends. I just don’t think that’s why they’re postponing Mr. Robot.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Postponing Mr. Robot

The original Borderlands was kind of a half-assed project build around a neat system of randomly generated weapons and power-ups. It was fun to play, but a little rough around the edges and not well focused. For example, every character gets a special action skill, but in a game dominated by guns, two of the characters had abilities — Brick’s hand-to-hand Berserker rage and Lilith’s secretive Siren phase walk — that discouraged them from shooting anything. And the ending of the main campaign plot was infamously disappointing.

Still, Borderlands was a surprise success, and when Borderlands 2 came out, it was Borderlands done right. It introduced four new characters who were pretty much one-for-one replacements for the characters from the first game, but with better and more varied skills. The Berserker became a Gunzerker and the new Siren’s ability made shooting more effective rather than discouraging it. The plot was unified around fighting a tyrant named Handsome Jack, and the ending paid off.

In terms of hours played, Borderlands 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, but only in co-op play with someone else. Personally, I find the single-player mode less interesting. That’s because I don’t really like open-world games very much. Figuring out where to go and what to do next, and what the right order is for the side missions, and what items I’ll want to get before the next mission…that just isn’t fun for me. I spend my whole work day solving complicated problems, so when I want to escape in a video game, I want something simple and linear. Kill the bad guys, get the loot, move on to the next battle.

My sometimes co-blogger Ken likes all that complexity, so when I play Borderlands 2 with him, I let him lead the way, and I just follow along and shoot anything that bothers us. He gets the complex mission-oriented, open world style game he wants, and I get a linear first-person shooter I don’t have to think too hard about.

We’re about halfway through Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and I’m enjoying it. As every reviewer has tiresomely pointed out, it’s not quite the amazing game that Borderlands 2 was, but that’s praising it with faint damnation. In some ways, it’s not much more than a really big content expansion pack for Borderlands 2, but that’s not exactly a bad thing. The Borderlands 2 DLC’s were a lot of fun.

The main difference is that B1 and B2 both took place on the planet Pandora, but Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes place on Pandora’s moon, Elpis, which has lower gravity and no air. So you can execute giant floating leaps all over the place, and then suddenly plunge downward to stomp on your enemies. You do have to watch your oxygen supply whenever you’re outside or you’ll run out, but you don’t die right away, and there’s oxygen everywhere, so it’s not too annoying.

There are also different types of weapons, different equipment you can carry to buff your skills, different vehicles, and lots of different bad guys. But basically, it’s just Borderlands in Space. The game designers are well aware of this, even relabeling the ubiquitous “Guns” vending machines “Guns In Space.”

And I’m okay with that.

This plot takes place between Borderlands and Borderlands 2, and we’re working for Handsome Jack, who’s acting like he’s a good guy. But I’ve played Borderlands 2, so I know how he turns out. This is all going to end in tears. And bullets.

(And fire, electrical arcs, and explosions. Also some acid.)

Now excuse me, but I’ve got to exterminate some alien bad guys. We’ve got a moon to save.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Back to the Borderlands

Besides, they’ve got the wrong person playing the Terminator. It’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger created the role, but he doesn’t own it. In my mind, the role belongs to the one person who’s played a Terminator for much more screen time than Arnold ever did:

Summer Glau played Cameron the Terminator for 33 episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which took place after the events of the second movie and which did more intelligent things with the world of John Connor and Skynet than than either of the last two movies. Or probably the next one.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Wrong Terminator

Sometime afterward, I decided to check YouTube to see if there was an official video for the song. I found it here, but along the way I also found something far more entertaining in this fan mash-up from someone who realized that the song is a good fit for Batman’s story:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Step Back From the Line of Fire, Batman

I still don’t have as much to say as I did about Radley’s book (which will probably come as a relief to readers) because United States of Paranoia doesn’t really tell a single unified story that I can talk about. Stories have arcs and plots, but one of the guiding premises of the book is that when it comes to conspiracy theories and paranoia, not much has changed. So USoP is more like a collection of short stories tied together by a common theme.

Of course, when I say “stories” I’m not talking about fiction. These are true stories. Well…they’re sort of true stories. I mean, many of the conspiracy theories are wild nonsense and paranoia, with little or no truth to them, but they are conspiracy theories that people really, truly believed in. United States of Paranoia is filled with true stories about untrue stories.

Jesse Walker seems to have been inspired to write this book at least in part by Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which Hofstadter discusses political paranoia and conspiracy theories in fringe political movements. Walker has argued at least since his 2009 article “The Paranoid Center” in Reason magazine, that paranoia and conspiracy theories are often found in the mainstream.

In 2006, a nationwide Scripps Howard survey indicated that 36 percent of the people polled—a minority but hardly a modest one—believed it “very” or “somewhat” likely that U.S. leaders had either allowed 9/ 11 to happen or actively plotted the attacks. Theories about JFK’s assassination aren’t a minority taste at all: Forty years after John F. Kennedy was shot, an ABC News poll showed 70 percent of the country believing a conspiracy was behind the president’s death. (In 1983, the number of believers was an even higher 80 percent.) A 1996 Gallup Poll had 71 percent of the country thinking that the government is hiding something about UFOs.

In the worst case, these mainstream conspiracy theories become political causes and influence legislation and public policy. Probably the most infamous recent conspiracy theory to take hold is the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic that spread through law enforcement agencies in the 1980s, when police investigators and prosecutors (and unfortunately judges and juries) seemed willing to believe any stories told by the child victims, no matter how incoherent or imaginative.

One child […] began by saying she had no secrets to share, then eventually declared that she had been raped. After more days of questioning, she said “she was forced to drink [a teacher’s] urine and to consume his feces covered with chocolate sauce.” With time the girl “was talking about animals being slaughtered at the school and about how she was taken to a ‘mansion’ to be molested,” about adults “forcing her to take drugs, about fellating animals, about trips to a church and ‘devil land,’ and about being made to touch dead people.”

More recently, sex work activists like Maggie McNeill have been chronicling the conspiracy-theory-like thinking engaged in by so many people who are worried about human trafficking.

Although Walker didn’t write United States of Paranoia as a guide to recognizing and analyzing conspiracy theories, that’s certainly something you will be better equipped to do after you read the first of its two major sections, “Primal Myths,” which discusses some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated in the United States since before it was a country. This is an effective way to illustrate the structures of conspiracy theories, because the myths are no longer in our common consciousness, they concern matters no longer of direct importance, so we don’t get caught up in them as we think about them. However, it’s not hard to see the similarity of the old conspiracy theories to modern ones, which helps us to recognize and think about them.

Walker attempts to organizes the conspiracy theories into taxonomic categories roughly according to the identity of the bad guys: The Enemy Outside, the Enemy Within, the Enemy Above, the Enemy Below. (Walker also identifies a fifth category — the Benevolent Conspiracy — which posits a secret society working behind the scenes to help us and protect us from greater evils.)

In the early days of what eventually became the United States, the local Indian tribes were a prime candidate for conspiracy theories about the Enemy Outside. The mostly Christian immigrants were suspicious of the non-Christian Native American religions, often suspecting the Indians of being in league with Satan. On the other hand, most of the immigrants were Protestants, leading some of them to suspect that the Indians were in league with the Catholics. Making matters worse for the conspiracy-minded (and for the Indians), the colonists were unreasonably concerned that the tribes were on the brink of uniting under some imaginary “superchief” or Indian “King.”

Like most conspiracy theories, these fears were not completely made of whole cloth. Some tribes were a real source of danger for the settlers, but they were also likely to go to war with each other, or to join the colonists in attacking another tribe. In fact, tribes would sometimes spread rumors that other tribes were planning to attack the Europeans, hoping to encourage the colonists to bring their powerful military forces to bear against a rival tribe.

(We see similar patterns in our modern Enemy Outside, when we imagine that all the world’s Muslim terrorists are arrayed against us, an alliance of evil masterminds hiding in caves. It’s not that there aren’t Muslim terrorists, but they aren’t by any means unified, and some of the various Islamic groups have tried to manipulate us into fighting their enemies.)

Walker illustrates the Enemy Within through the witchcraft hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts. It started with accusations against an Indian slave, an obvious Enemy Outside, but soon the fear spread that almost anyone might be a witch — prostitutes, businessmen, ministers, even the governor’s wife. Many of the accusations followed preexisting animosities — business rivalries, cultural conflicts, religious differences — because if you’re going to suspect someone in your life of being a witch, it’s probably going to be someone you already have reason to dislike. And besides, an accusation of witchcraft was a good way to cause trouble for your enemies.

There was also, as the sociologist Richard Weisman has pointed out, a change in the role of the government. The typical New England witchcraft accusation involved townspeople blaming their neighbors for various mundane misfortunes. If you look past the fact that the charges involved the use of magical powers, you’ll find that the conflicts weren’t so different from the disputes that modern people have over rat-attracting junk piles, dogs that dig up gardens, or tree branches that extend into an adjoining yard. Even by the legal standards of the time, the use of malevolent magic was difficult to prove, so the New England courts were ordinarily reluctant to take on such cases.

But now the state was throwing itself into the conflict, creating a situation closer in spirit to Europe’s persecutions than to traditional tiffs between neighbors. An ordinary citizen of Salem might worry that the witches next door were poisoning his cow or making his children sick. The authorities had a grander fear: in Weisman’s words, that “an organized plot to subvert the Puritan mission had successfully infiltrated the core of the church.” Tales of vast conspiracies began to appear in the confessions.

Those confessions were easy to get, since accused witches could avoid execution by revealing the names of other witches, and the confessions led to an ever-expanding list of suspects, which raised the chilling prospect that the Enemy Within was actively recruiting conspirators, and that they might use their mysterious powers to induct your friends or even your children. These sorts of accusations have been routinely leveled against minority religious groups such as Shakers, Catholics, and Mormons.

(We can see similar Enemies Within in the anti-cult panic that followed the Jonestown massacre, or the rhetoric used to stir up oppression of fascists, communists, and homosexuals.)

The Enemy Within was also suspected to be capable of using almost every new medium to recruit. In modern times, comic books, television, video games, and the internet have all been sources of concern. Fear of manipulation through some form of mass media leads to perhaps the ultimate expression of the Enemy Within: The belief that most of the people around you are an easily manipulated mob, “sheeple,” deluded into “false consciousness,” and that only you — and a few especially intelligent people who share your views — can see the real truth.

The fear of mass culture had an authoritarian side too. It was shot through with distrust of ordinary people, who were often described in terms that suggested they weren’t fully human. Erich Fromm’s influential Escape from Freedom (1941) argued that while some of us had achieved a “genuine individuality,” monopoly capitalism had created a “compulsive conforming” in which “the individual becomes an automaton, loses his self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives of himself as free and subject only to himself.” Not every critic of mass culture would go that far, but they all contrasted the individual man with the amorphous mass.

Such ideas don’t have to lead to authoritarian conclusions. But if you see the average voter as an automaton, it’s obviously easier to support laws that might otherwise seem like restrictions on his freedom. And if you think he’s being manipulated by occult forces—advertisers, broadcasters, comic book publishers— it’s easier to rationalize those restrictions as an act of liberation.

Whereas the Enemy Within could be your neighbor, your priest, or the people teaching your children, the Enemy Below was identifiable as a particular social class. In the American colonies and the early United States, the most identifiable Enemy Below was the African slave population, who were frequently suspected of plotting an uprising to kill their white owners.

Slave escapes and revolts were real, of course, and the successful rebellion in Haiti set the slave-owning regions on high alert for signs of trouble. Rebellious slaves had often resorted to starting fires to destroy property and distract the authorities, so as far as the white population was concerned, every building that caught on fire was potentially a portent of a slave uprising. There was also concern that various shady people in rough neighborhoods were fomenting slave rebellions for dastardly reasons of their own, and during wars the slaves were often said to be working with the enemy.

(I think we can see echoes of the Enemy Below in the 1992 riots that erupted in black communities in Los Angeles. Fifty three people died and thousands were injured before military forces quieted the city. Just as slave owners couldn’t believe that slaves would spontaneously rise up, right-wing conspiracy nuts couldn’t believe that the riots were the result of poor police handling of genuine widespread outrage at the acquittal of white police officers accused of beating a black man. Rumors began to circulate that black and Hispanic street gangs had been planning the whole thing for weeks in advance so they could loot, burn, and kill.)

The opposite of the Enemy Below was the Enemy Above, the rich and powerful people who were supposedly keeping everyone else down. In the early days, predictably, the lead suspects were a cabal within the British government, intending to extinguish all liberty, starting with the colonies:

If the colonies could be subdued, one pamphleteer warned, the plotters “might open their batteries with safety against British Liberty; and Britons be made to feel the same oppressive hand of despotic Power.” The alarm was sounded: “a PLAN has been systematically laid, and persued by the British ministry . . . for enslaving America; as the STIRRUP by which they design to mount the RED HORSE of TYRANNY and DESPOTISM at home.”

(Apparently, even back then, ALL CAPS was a bit of a warning sign.)

The secret plan, John Adams explained, was to “establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches.” When the Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on printed paper , Joseph Warren of Massachusetts announced that the law had been “designed . . . to force the colonies into a rebellion, and from thence to take occasion to treat them with severity, and, by military power, to reduce them to servitude.” The Boston Massacre of 1770, the Tea Act of 1773, the Intolerable Acts of 1774: All were evidence of the dark design. One isolated act of oppression “may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day,” Thomas Jefferson acknowledged, but America was undergoing “a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers.” And that meant it faced “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

If you were to poll the founding fathers, you would hear slightly different accounts of who was a part of this conspiracy and what exactly the conspirators were up to. But when it came to where the enemy was taking them, they agreed with Jefferson. George Washington wrote that “a regular Systematick Plan ” threatened to reduce the colonists to “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” Alexander Hamilton concurred: A “system of slavery,” he said, was being “fabricated against America.” When the revolutionaries formed a Continental Congress, the body denounced the “ministerial plan for enslaving us” and issued a warning to the people of Great Britain: “May not a ministry, with the same armies, enslave you?” When the colonies declared independence, the plot against America was detailed in the new country’s founding document. The Declaration of Independence did not merely describe “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It argued that those abuses added up to “a design” to bring the colonists “under absolute Despotism.”

Again, as is often the case, the conspiracy theory was not entirely based on fiction. The British did, after all, rule over the colonies. But perhaps their ultimate goal was something less than total enslavement. (The British and their American loyalists suspected a mysterious cabal was behind the rebellion in the colonies. And that the French might be behind it .)

Other Enemies Above included the Masons, the Illuminati (but of course!), and bankers. Leading up to the Civil War, northern Republicans saw the hand of the Slave Power behind behind every setback. After the war, the KKK loomed larger than life in the nightmares of freed blacks. In more modern times, some people blame all political opposition on either George Soros or the Koch brothers.

Throughout the historical section of the book, certain themes seem to emerge:

• Conspiracy theories often have a basis in reality: Indians really did attack the colonies, rich people really do have undue influence in the government, slaves really did rise up against their masters.
• The conspiracies tend to imagine a much greater degree of coordination than is actually evident: That the Indians have a secret king, that all those fires can’t just be random accidents, and that people seeking political change must be serving a hidden master.
• The conspiracies tend to imagine very ambitious goals: The European royals don’t just want to rule the colonies, they intend to destroy all freedom, and the witches aren’t just hexing people they don’t like, they’re destroying the foundations of the church.
• The conspiracy tends to deny the agency or legitimacy of the enemy: The slaves aren’t unhappy, they’re being goaded into rebellion by outside forces, and the workers demanding unions are just following the commands of their communist paymasters.
• The conspiracy theorists often imagine that an entire religious group or immigrant community could live among us for years or decades for purposes of enacting a secret agenda when the right moment arises.
• The conspiracy is often declared to simultaneously be (a) vast and far-reaching and yet (b) hidden so well that we can only surmise its existence indirectly, unless we coerce people into confessing their complicity and naming co-conspirators.
• The enemy — whether above or below, inside or outside — always, always wants our women.

Having laid the historic foundation, the rest of the book explores some modern conspiracy movements. It’s a longer section, but if you’ve been around a while, the conspiracies are mostly pretty familiar: Super-secret government programs, the CIA, MK Ultra and COINTELPRO, the Illuminati and the Rothschilds, the Weavers and the McMartins and the whole Satanic Ritual Abuse panic. There’s also the whole extremely weird discordian movement, which deservedly gets a chapter of its own.

(The militia movement alone has a fascinating history. Vaguely organized around a opposition to  federal power, globalization, and/or the militarized police state, the movement included racists opposed to government equal rights policies, but the militia movement also included blacks and Jews, which often brought condemnation from white supremacists. Various militia groups have opposed the Rodney King beating, they’ve reported attempts to bomb gay bars and abortion clinics, and they’ve infiltrated police groups to expose racist behavior. That didn’t stop militia opponents from manufacturing their own conspiracy theories about what the militias were really all about, and it didn’t stop people from smearing their opponents with accusations of ideological affiliations with militias. The resemblance to witch hunts, Red Scares, and, well, a lot of modern politics, is not coincidental.)

By the end of the book, Walker has caught up to the present day, and the internet has put every conspiracy theory just one Google search away from anyone who’s curious, and which has led to a confusing mishmash of conspiracies — crop circles one day, CIA brainwashing the next, followed by the latest news on the Zionist conspiracy. And so now we have black nationalists who’ve adopted sovereign citizen theories that originated with the white power patriot movement.

The events of 9/11 were, of course, the result of a genuine conspiracy, but they also added fuel to the fire and touched off paranoid conspiracy theories about Muslim fifth columnists. As with the witch trials, these theories affected the government, leading to conspiracy-driven policies about how much liquid we can carry on planes and official paranoia about photography at a time when everyone in the country was about to start carrying small digital cameras.

Somewhere along the way, historians started to collect conspiracy theories and trace their origins. Soon people started collecting conspiracy theories and trading them like baseball cards, mixing the historic with the modern and the made-up-just-for-fun.

Which is, I guess, where Jesse Walker comes in.

One final note: While United States of Paranoia is a book about conspiracy theories, it’s also very much a book about telling stories that grab people’s imaginations. If you’re a novelist or screenwriter working on a series of stories, and you need to construct a compelling enemy, one that is at once secretive and powerful, then United States of Paranoia is an excellent guide. As H. P. Lovecraft says in the epigram that opens the eighth chapter, “No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The United States of Paranoia – Review

Jon Snow

Jon Snow is a skilled warrior with a sense of justice and compassion, yet as the bastard son of Lord Eddard Stark, he’s got plenty of motivation to prove himself, and he’s headed for a confrontation with the supernatural White Walkers and their army of the undead. In every way, he’s a classic fantasy hero. In the first season, he succeeded in reaching the Night’s Watch fort at the Wall and completing his training. In the second season, he gets separated from his patrol company and wanders around in the frozen wasteland. In the third season he wanders around in the frozen wasteland some more until he is badly wounded by his girlfriend, after which he returns to the fortress he was at in the first season. Now in this fourth season, I predict the action will continue apace, and we will get to watch as Jon Snow slowly recovers from his wounds until — during the traditional 9th-episode action climax — he visits the Castle Black kitchen and makes himself a sandwich.

Tyrion Lannister

Tyrion was introduced as one of the most amusing characters in the series — a bawdy, profane, and care-free party animal with a rapier wit. His world gets more serious and less fun every season, and the beginning of season four finds him separated from his love Shae, saddled with a wife who does not love him, and still a member of the dreadful Lannister family. I predict the death of fun will continue.

Brienne of Tarth

Brienne is a highly skilled warrior with strong principles and unbending loyalty. She can be trusted to keep her promises, no matter how difficult that turns out to be. She’s one of the most admirable characters on the show. Her fate is clear. In fact, I’m amazed she’s lasted this long. It’s probably because they didn’t introduce her until the second season. I assume she’s already dead in the books.

Daenerys Targaryen

I predict that Daenerys will continue her struggle to build an army to re-conquor Westeros in the name of the Targaryen line. By the end of the season, she will have taken important steps towards that goal and her dragons will have grown, just like in season three. And season two. And season one.

Arya Stark

Like Daenerys, this is a character whose destiny was clear from the beginning — from the moment her eyes lit up when Jon Snow gave her that sword. And like Daenerys, she will take a few more steps on that journey, in the 8% or so of screen time allotted to her story.

Sansa Stark

Will continue to have a very, very bad time, although I think she’s about out of family members for the Lannisters to kill.

Joffrey

Will remain an insufferable prick.

Hodor

Hodor.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Game of Thrones – Season 4

Discovering Toni Dwiggins‘s Forensic Geology series was like that. It’s not that I like geology in particular — I know very little about it — but I do like science, and Dwiggins’s stories all come with a heavy serving of geological science. It feels like real science too, without a lot of gee-whiz speculation. Dwiggins is exploring Michael Crichton territory, but she’s doing it with a far more accurate map.

Badwater introduces us to the forensic geology team of Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws as they are brought in to help figure out what happened to a stolen cask of ion-exchange resin beads used to clean radionuclides from the cooling water in a nuclear power plant. Yeah, you read that right. Radioactive beads. There’s no threat that someone will turn this stuff into a bomb, and it won’t melt your face off like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. What it will do is give you a fatal dose of invisible radiation that you won’t even notice until it’s far too late. That will happen quickly if you run into a large amount of the stuff, but if you spend too much time around even a small amount, you could be just as dead. I think it’s very cool that Dwiggins didn’t try to jazz up the story by making the radioactive waste into some sort of super-secret super-special radioactive stuff, but instead chose to build her thriller around a realistic depiction of the hazards of radioactive materials.

Volcano Watch takes us to Cassie and Walter’s home town of Mammoth Lakes, where the mayor has just been murdered and the local volcano has been rumbling ominously. Actually, it’s not just a volcano, but a whole volcano system, and the mayor had apparently learned something alarming about it, but nobody knows what. It’s not the usual disaster cliché — there’s no young volcano expert trying desperately to warn the town about the impending eruption while feckless politicians try to suppress the truth because they don’t want to lose tourism dollars. Instead, Dwiggins builds her story around evacuation planning until the volcano erupts (it’s not really a spoiler) and then it switches to a story of survival. The eruption of the volcano is described in extensive detail, and the volcanology feels accurate and not sensationalized.

Quicksilver is the third and most recent installment in the series, although it is technically a prequel. It’s also a novella rather than a full-length novel, so it tells a smaller, tighter story. All of the books in the series feature a significant amount of exploration and outdoor adventure, but Quicksilver focuses on a single expedition, as Cassie and Walter get caught up in a family’s obsessive search for a legendary vein of California gold. It turns out that some gold mining operations use a mercury amalgamation process to extract the gold from the earth, and before it was outlawed, a great deal of mercury was lost into the environment. Mercury is an amazing substance — a metal that’s liquid at normal temperatures — but under the wrong conditions it becomes a deadly cumulative neurotoxin. This fact turns out to be pretty important in Quicksilver.

If the Forensic Geology series sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to read, you might as well read through them in order, starting with Badwater, as I did. If you’re not so sure, I recommended reading Quicksilver first. It’s short and tightly written and it’s a good example of the kind of story that Dwiggins likes to tell. It’s also currently available for download at the low, low introductory price of free. Or you could go all-in and just download the whole set for $3.99.

(I interviewed Toni Dwiggins briefly about the self-publishing business for a post I wrote a couple of months ago.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Forensic Geology Series – Review

I loved the Andromeda Strain, both the book and the movie, and so I’m always willing to give a good plague story a try, which is why I really wanted to like Helix, the new series on SyFy, about a CDC team sent to investigate a mysterious situation at a biological research complex somewhere in the Arctic.

Unfortunately, Helix has turned out to be one of those shows that I only keep watching because I hope it will eventually get better. Mostly it just irritates me, and I feel like ranting about all the ways it kinda sucks:

• Helix starts so promisingly, with Doctor Alan Farragut (played by Billy Campbell) at the Centers for Disease Control holding up a pump handle and talking about Dr. John Snow’s famous investigation of the Soho cholera outbreak in 1854. That’s a terrific real-life story about solving a public health crisis with science and ingenuity. Too bad the plot of Helix is nothing like that.
• Helix is a zombie show that doesn’t want to admit it’s a zombie show. People infected with the mysterious virus become deranged and go wandering around the complex attacking other people, who then become infected themselves. They may be a little smarter and faster than the walkers on Walking Dead, but call them whatever you like (Helix uses the epidemiological term “vectors”), they’re still zombies.
• Ducts. A great deal of the plot depends on the fact that the zombies can move around the entire high-security complex in spacious, well-lit ventilation ducts that have no internal supports or grates or anything else to get in their way. This is such a hackneyed plot device that I’m surprised anyone would still use it seriously outside of video games.
• They killed off my favorite character, Doctor Doreen Boyle (played by Catherine Lemieux), a veterinary pathologist, who was the only person on the show with any detectable personality. She seemed like she’d be fun to talk to at a party, and she brought some badly-needed levity to the situation. And so the writers killer her.
• Every other character seems earnestly serious and deadly dull. Except when the plot needs them to be stupid.
• One of the key story elements is that the complex is completely cut off from the outside world because of an unstable satellite connection that stops working altogether when someone blows up the big dish outside the complex. This makes no sense in a world where Iridium satellite phones are small enough to fit in a jacket pocket and work all over the planet. Also, has nobody at Arctic Biosystems (or the writers’ room) heard of shortwave radio, which ships at sea and Arctic explorers have been using for years? Wouldn’t you think a CDC team would want to have good communications?
• Thin depth-of-field. That’s where the image on the screen is focused tightly at something a certain distance from the camera and everything in front or behind thrown out of focus. With modern cameras and lighting, there’s no reason for the depth of focus to be as thin as it is in Helix, except as an artistic choice because it looks dramatic. And the drama wears thin when you do it in every single scene.
• Speaking of annoying artistic choices, I realize the bland elevator music on the soundtrack is supposed to create some kind of ironic contrast with the story, but that trick gets old fast.
• The exterior of the Arctic complex is monumentally boring and unimpressive. I don’t know how much CGI goes into creating it, but the lack of detail or any sense of scale always makes it look like a cheap model. (The artificially thin depth of field contributes to this, since a thin depth of field is an optical cue for something close to your eye.)
• The interior of the research complex is no better, looking alternately like an office building or the basement of an office building. There’s no sense of how the parts of the complex are related physically to each other — which rooms are adjacent, and which are far apart — and there’s no sense of where any of these locations are in relation to the exterior shots.
• At one point, Dr. Farragut needs to break into another part of the complex and he mixes up a batch of thermite which he uses to burn through a grated floor. Thermite could certainly burn through a metal floor, but it’s a powder, so most of it would fall through the grate, and it’s hard to see how the combustion reaction could spread between the little piles that remain on the grate. Also thermite has a really high ignition point and there’s no way he could ignite it with an ordinary flame. There’s a whole science to igniting thermite. It’s a small thing, but it makes me think the biology and medical science are probably just as bad.
• There is already a B-movie subgenre of we’re-all-trapped-in-an-underground-facility-with-monsters-and-scientists-and-military-types-who-all-have-secret-agendas. It’s a popular story with straight-to-cable releases because you can film the entire thing in an abandoned factory and all the conspiracy dialogue (a) makes for easy-to-write plot twists and (b) kills time between the more expensive action shots. Helix differs only in style.
• Despite being set in the Arctic, the show never gives me that sense of oppressive, dangerous cold. I don’t know why that is.
• The writers have decided to build the story around an ever-deepening layer of conspiracies. Every character seems to have at least one secret agenda. The base director, Doctor Hiroshi Hatake (played by Hiroyuki Sanada), is very secretive about the base’s mission and he also seems to have an equally mysterious personal agenda. Then we meet his superior, Constance Sutton of Ilaria Corporation (played by Jeri Ryan), and she seems to have an even more mysterious mission. (And even though she’s clearly evil, she’s also the only other interesting character, which is probably why the writers killed her too.) And then there’s a reference to her even more mysterious “masters” who have a mission so mysterious that…well, it’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma stuffed into a vague promise that it will all make sense someday. Which brings me to my next bullet point…
• There was no Cylon plan. Ronald Moore is one of the chief creators of this show. At the beginning of his Battlestar Galactica reboot series, every episode started with an intro sequence that explained the premise: “The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.” Do any of you fans remember what that plan was? Anyone? No. Of course not. Because there was no Cylon plan. The writers were a bunch of lying liars who had no idea what the Cylons were up to, so they just made stuff up as they went along and never pulled it into a complete story. It’s probably wishful thinking to assume we’ll get anything better from Helix.
• Doctor Alan Farragut is on the CDC team because his brother Peter works in the Arctic Biosystems complex and is one of the infected patients. He’s also brought along his colleague Dr. Julia Walker (Kyra Zagorsky) who happens to be his ex-wife, who once had an affair with Peter. And to square the triangle, Farragut is assisted by young Doctor Sarah Jordan (Jordan Hayes), who is secretly in love with him. I can only assume the show’s writers added a relationship drama because they thought that deadly viruses, maniacal zombies, corporate psychopaths, military conspiracies, and Arctic adventure might not provide enough story to hold our attention.

Oh well. Maybe episode #9 will be better…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Helix Kinda Sucks

Chicago PD does have that character in the form of Sergeant Hank Voight, who robs and beats a guy in the opening scene and tortures him to get information about someone who’s selling a bad batch of drugs that’s killed a few people. I gather that Voight’s character was established in the Chicago Fire series as the worst kind of cop: Brutal, corrupt, and well-connected downtown, all of which might explain how, despite his crimes, he’s now in charge of a police intelligence unit working out of the 21st District station.

(Real-life Chicago has 22 police districts, numbered 1 through 25, skipping the 13th, 21st, and 23rd districts.)

In some ways, putting a corrupt thuggish cop in an intelligence unit is a great story idea. Intelligence units don’t do normal police work, so their activities aren’t easily tracked by CompStat (or whatever management tools the department uses), and they often work in secret, all of which means they have little oversight. (The LAPD Organized Crime Intelligence Division famously crashed and burned when Detective Mike Rothmiller wrote a book exposing mismanagement and shady activities.) Chicago cops are always complaining about connected guys who get away with all kinds of crap — often in special teams that are hard to monitor — so a connected douchebag in charge of an intelligence unit seems like a plausible villain.

Except I’m pretty sure the show’s producers don’t want us to think of him as a villain. I think he’s supposed to be “complicated.” He’s a tough guy doing a tough job the only way it can be done. He may torture a guy for information to save lives, but he’s a solid cop who will always have the back of the cops in his unit.

In real life, assholes like this aren’t that selective. They tend to be assholes to everybody. They are nightmares to work for because they know they control your paycheck and career, so they can treat you like crap. If Voight is beating drug informants for information now, then he was probably beating 15-year-old black kids for mouthing off when he was working patrol. (Also, Voight torturing informants has a certain sick resonance here in Chicago where Detective Jon Burge used to torture people in custody.) They only time guys like this are nice to people is when they need something, at which point they become your best friend in the world. That’s how guys like Voight get connections downtown.

The fictional version of this character usually isn’t as terrible as the real thing, and that tends to work well dramatically. Andy Sipowicz was one of the most beloved characters on television despite his rage, and it gets easier as the shows get less realistic: Bullies like Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS come across as stern teachers, torturers like Jack Bauer on 24 are heroes because they’re doing it for God and country, and a pair of efficient assassins like Nikita Mears and Michael Bishop on Nikita evoke admiration and even sympathy. And wouldn’t you like to have a murderous vigilante billionaire like Oliver Queen from Arrow as your friend?

Anyway…

Once I get past the Voight character, Chicago PD is an OK show. Some of the clichés are a little thick — Voight turns out to have a softer side, his boss is a black guy who’s angry at him, a cop takes off his badge and gun before challenging a jerk to a fight, and there’s a car chase at the end — but it’s also full of action and a few surprises.

It’s also nice to see a bit of Chicago on the screen. They don’t show much of the famous stuff, but the houses look like Chicago houses and the alleys look like Chicago alleys — you wouldn’t think you could tell, but it feels a lot different than it would if they shot in Vancouver.

I’ll give it another shot.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Chicago PD, “Stepping Stone” — Not Loving Voight

Here’s my list:

1. The Mote In God’s Eye. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
2. Protector. Larry Niven.
3. Ringworld. Larry Niven.
4. Iceworld. Hal Clement.
5. Salem’s Lot. Stephen King.
6. The Forever War. Joe Haldeman.
7. All My Sins Remembered. Joe Haldeman.
8. Stand On Zanzibar/The Jagged Orbit. John Brunner.
9. In the Ocean of Night/Across the Sea of Suns. Gregory Benford.
10. Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion/Endymion/The Rise of Endymion. Dan Simmons.
11. Arc Light. Eric L. Harry.
12. Revelation Space. Alastair Reynolds.
13. A Fire Upon the Deep. Vernor Vinge.
14. Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained. Peter F. Hamilton.

That’s a lot more than 10, but I’d have had to “think too hard” to cut it down to just 10.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 10 Books, More Or Less

Bad cops are the product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops. The good ones will never enter the field in the first place, or they will become frustrated and leave police work, or they’ll simply turn bad. At best, they’ll have unrewarding, unfulfilling jobs.

— Radley Balko. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces

I’ve been doing a close reading of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, and I’m trying to unweave the major narrative threads. In Part 1, I summarized Radley’s history of policing, in Part 2 I followed the threads that showed how the War On Drugs provided justification for raids, and the erosion of the Castle Doctrine provided permission, in Part 3, I discussed perverse federal funding incentives, and in Part 4 I discussed the resulting police violence. In this fifth and final post, I’m going to discuss what we can do about it.

Radley’s ninth chapter is titled “Reform,” and it is…inevitably disappointing. As I said at the beginning, Rise of the Warrior Cop is a horror story, so after reading five solid chapters about increasing police militarization, I really wanted the story to have a happy ending. Unfortunately, Radley can’t deliver a happy ending, because this is a true story, and it’s not over. But there are some signs of hope.

The chapter begins with the the story of a raid on Cheye Calvo’s home by the reliably awful police of Prince George’s County, Maryland, including the seemingly inevitable shooting of the family dog. As it happenes, Calvo was quite politically active — he was the elected mayor of Berwyn Heights, the town where the raid took place — and he responded by researching the issue of police raids and then leading a reform effort in Maryland that led to the passage of a modest transparency law requiring law enforcement agencies to report data on SWAT deployments. So now, at least in Maryland, we’ll know how often these raids happen.

Radley then lays out some of his own ideas for reform, beginning with the least likely to actually happen:

• Scale back the War on Drugs, including cutting back on federal support for local anti-drug efforts.
• Halt the mission creep in the way SWAT teams are used.
• Transparency, such as Cheye Calvo’s reporting law in Maryland, and better tracking of how warrants are handled, and how effective they are at turning up evidence. Radley also suggests getting police to use body cameras to record these raids.
• Increased community policing.
• Changing police culture to discourage violent behavior, by discouraging cops from thinking of police work as combat, and encouraging police to seek peaceful solutions to routine problems.
• Make police accountable. The folks who hold us to the law should not themselves be above it.

Occasionally throughout the book, Radley talks about police departments that have taken a different path. I think these are important, because we need to have good answers when people ask, “How can we run a police department without a SWAT team?”

Fortunately, there are good answers. Police departments did alright before it became common to use SWAT teams to serve warrants, and police departments continue to rediscover the possibility of a less violent way. When Nixon first pushed his tough-on-crime approach in federally-controlled Washington, D.C., Police Chief Jerry Wilson pushed back. Instead of following Nixon’s plan, he built up connections between police and the community, on the theory that it would make the police far more effective at fighting crime. He avoided activities that would antagonize citizens — roadblocks, stop-and-frisks, and especially the new no-knock raids. And his approach seemed to work:

Wilson’s tenure as MPD chief ran nearly concurrently with Nixon’s tenure as president… Under Jerry Wilson, violent crime in DC dropped 25 percent and property crime dropped 28 percent. Under Nixon, violent crime in the country as a whole went up 40 percent and property crime rose 24 percent.

In Colorado, in 1995, Pitkin County sheriff Robert Braudis spoke out against no-knock raids after a series of deaths:

“They are the closest thing I can think of to a military action in a democratic society.” Braudis explained that it was far safer to conduct surveillance, to learn a suspect’s routine, and to then do “a quick, quiet arrest when a suspect is in the open.” As for possible destruction of evidence, he said that his department would have the water shut off before serving a warrant (by knocking at the door and waiting for an answer). In some cases, they had arranged for a plumber to set up a “catch net” to capture anything flushed after police arrived to serve the warrant. But Braudis said that his concern went beyond the SWAT tactics. “The ‘war on drugs’ is an abysmal failure,” he said. “Even the term creates a dangerous war mentality.”

In 1998, Albuquerque, New Mexico had a wake-up call of its own after a SWAT team killed a mentally disturbed man.

The city brought in Sam Walker, a well-regarded criminologist at the University of Nebraska, to evaluate the police department’s use of lethal force. Walker was astonished by what he found. “The rate of police killings was just off the charts,” Walker told the Times. The city’s SWAT team, he said, “had an organizational structure that led them to escalate situations upward rather than de-escalating.” The city then brought in Toledo, Ohio, police chief Jerry Galvin to take over its police department. Galvin immediately disbanded the SWAT team, toned down the militarism, and implemented community policing policies. He told the Times, “If cops have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it will happen.”

One of the most prominent reformers is former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who is also one of the saddest figures in Warrior Cop. I’ve read his biography, and he seems to have gone through life repeatedly coming to the realization that he’s been doing it all wrong. Stamper was responsible for the crackdown on the protests against the World Trade Organization’s meetings in Seattle, for which he was widely criticized:

Norm Stamper took responsibility for the disaster and resigned as Seattle police chief. Though he defended the decision to tear-gas peaceful protesters in his 2005 book, he now says he was wrong. In fact, he says, it was the worst mistake of his career.

[…]

In spite of the fact that there were few injuries and no fatalities, the images that emerged from Seattle depicted a city that had lost control. Going forward, “control” would be the prevailing objectives for police handling protests. In the years to come, the Darth Vader look would become the standard police presence at large protests. Cities and police officials would commit mass violations of civil and constitutional rights and deal with the consequences later. There would be violent, preemptive SWAT raids, mass arrests, and sweeping use of police powers that ensnared violent protesters, peaceful protesters, and people who had nothing to do with the protest at all.

That’s why Stamper calls his decisions in Seattle “the worst mistake” of his career. He’s seen how the police response to protest has changed since 1999. “We gassed fellow Americans engaging in civil disobedience,” Stamper says. “We set a number of precedents, most of them bad. And police departments across the country learned all the wrong lessons from us. That’s disheartening. So disheartening. I mean, you look at what happened to those Occupy protesters at UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he’s watering a bed of flowers, and I think that we played a part in making that sort of thing so common— so easy to do now. It’s beyond cringe-worthy. I wish to hell my career had ended on a happier note.”

Since I started writing this series of posts, Radley has gone on to interview Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank, who managed the 2011 Occupy protests in his city in a remarkably peaceful way:

Burbank showed up at the camp and talked to the protesters, in some cases one on one. He explained that they’d need to start leaving the park at night, although they could come back during the day. He said that when the time came for them leave, they could do so peacefully, or they could choose to be arrested. He even asked them how they’d like their arrests to take place, in case they wanted the TV and newspaper cameras to photograph them giving themselves up for their cause.

[…]

When it came time to evict the Occupy protesters in Pioneer Park, then, Burbank and his officers wore their standard, everyday uniforms, not riot gear, as police units in other cities had. Burbank also made sure he was first on the scene — that the first person the protesters saw was the one with whom they had already had a conversation.

Most of the 200 protesters left voluntarily. Some took advantage of Burbank’s offer to have his officers help with their belongings. Nineteen chose to be arrested. There was no violence, no rioting and little anger.[…]

Burbank also looks for non-violent solutions to other police problems:

“I spent eight years on the SWAT team. I’ve served hundreds of no-knock warrants. I know firsthand how it all operates,” he says. “I also know firsthand that there are better alternatives. Too often we start with the highest level of force. We should always start at the lowest level. If the police show up and the situation deteriorates, then that’s our fault. We haven’t done our job right. I think we get too caught up in the whole officer safety thing. The danger you expose everyone to in these raids is significant.”

[…]As for the service of drug warrants, Burbank rejects the conventional wisdom held by so many police departments around the country that aggressive raids make the process safer for everyone. He says the goal in drug investigations should be about improving quality of life and making neighborhoods safe, not necessarily making arrests and racking up convictions.

When I caught Radley’s book tour here in Chicago, the other panelists were a somewhat liberal collection of activists, and presumably the audience was similarly composed, and Radley emphasized that police militarization is not just a concern for the liberal civil rights organizations that look out for minority communities. There are people on the right — or at least the libertarian right — who share their concerns. Likewise, it’s important for us libertarian types to remember that the liberal left has been fighting police abuse for decades on behalf of various minorities. We’ll get more done if we team up and hit them from both sides.

Conversely, one barrier to reform is the presence of partisan hacks who can be remarkably blind to police violence against their political opponents:

In the 1990s, it had been the right wing— particularly the far right —that was up in arms over police militarization. Recall the outrage on the right over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the raid to seize Elián González. The left had largely either remained silent or even defended the government’s tactics in those cases. But the right-wing diatribes against jackbooted thugs and federal storm-troopers all died down once the Clinton administration left office, and they were virtually nonexistent after September 11, 2001. By the time cops started cracking heads at the Occupy protests, some conservatives were downright gleeful. The militarization of federal law enforcement certainly didn’t stop, but the 9/ 11 attacks and a friendly administration seemed to quell the conservatives’ concerns. So long as law enforcement was targeting hippie protesters, undocumented immigrants, suspected drug offenders, and alleged terrorist sympathizers, they were back to being heroes.

The left has been no better:

In one lengthy segment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aired old footage from Waco and Ruby Ridge while making some tenuous connections between gun rights politicians and activists and Weaver, McVeigh, and Koresh. She referred to a “conspiracy-driven corner of the gun world’s paranoia about federal agents,” without paying much heed to the fact that the ATF was inflicting the same sort of abuse on suspected gun offenders that Maddow herself has decried when used against suspected undocumented immigrants or Occupy protesters. More tellingly, Maddow added that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to give more power to the ATF based only on the politics of the people opposed to doing so. “Sometimes the character of the opposition defines why something ought to be the most politically viable thing in the world,” she said.

Radley’s article about Chief Burbank was just one of a six-part-series on police reform in Utah, which gives some good examples of people with a variety of political backgrounds following a variety of strategies to change police behavior.

Another point Radley has made repeatedly is the importance of so many people being able to capture video of police misbehavior. It was the official video of the Columbia SWAT raid that helped attract enough attention to this issue that Radley could publish his book, and it was citizen video of police responses to the Occupy protests that brought so much attention to how police abuse peaceful protesters.

The ubiquity of smart phones and the viral capacity of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and blogs were already bringing unprecedented accountability to police misconduct and government oppression, be it a Baltimore cop screaming obscenities at a kid on a skateboard, a transit cop in Oakland shooting a man who lay handcuffed on his stomach, or government paramilitaries in Iran gunning down a young woman in cold blood during Arab Spring democracy protests. But the Occupiers, who tended to be young, white, and middle- to upper-middle-class, knew social media like few other demographics. They knew how to live-stream video directly to the Internet. They all had smart phones, so police couldn’t suppress incriminating video by confiscating one or two or ten phones— someone was bound to have video of not only the original incident but also of police trying to confiscate phones to cover it up.

(One hint I’d add is that if you catch cops breaking the law, don’t go public with the video right away. Give them a day or two to nail down their story in their reports — or better yet, in sworn documents submitted to a court under penalty of perjury — before you reveal your video of what really happened. They may be able to explain away what they did, but they’ll have a harder time explaining a coverup.)

I have to admit that when I first read Warrior Cop, the second half of it was almost unbearable. Chapter after chapter, decade after decade, things just kept getting worse, with no hope in sight (or crushed hope, if we made the mistake of believing in any Presidential candidates). Radley’s detailed accounts of police raids were particularly brutal. It was a long, depressing triumph of violence against American citizens.

After I calmed down, however, I realized that the time scale is a reason for hope. This is a huge problem, involving billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people. But this isn’t some catastrophe that overtook us in a moment. It took time for things to get this bad. And maybe that means that with enough time and effort we can turn things around.

The thing is, those of us who care about this issue can’t do it by ourselves.

The most difficult change is the one that’s probably necessary to make any of these others happen. The public needs to start caring about these issues. The proliferation of “cop watch” sites, citizen-shot video of police misconduct, and coverage of police abuse incidents by a bevy of online media is encouraging. Another good sign is the fact that this growing skepticism of police has been accompanied by a decline in violence against police officers themselves. Activists are fighting police abuse with technology and information, not with threats and violence. But while exposing individual incidents of misconduct is important, particularly to the victim of the misconduct, it’s more important to expose the policies that allow misconduct to flourish. Bad systems will continue to turn out bad results. And bad systems will never be reformed until and unless policymakers and politicians (a) are convinced there is a problem, and (b) pay a political price for not addressing it. Yes, trends that develop over years or decades can gradually normalize things that we might not have tolerated had they been imposed on us all at once. But it’s still rather remarkable that domestic police officers are driving tanks and armored personnel carriers on American streets, breaking into homes and killing dogs over pot. They’re subjecting homes and businesses to commando raids for white-collar and even regulatory offenses, and there’s been barely any opposition or concern from anyone in Congress, any governor, or any mayor of a sizable city. That, more than anything, is what needs to change.

Radley’s book has brought a lot of attention to the problem, and I hope it’s one good step down the long road to change, but the rest of us need to step up and keep pressing the issue.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 5 of 5: Reform

I’m not alone in facing this decision. The big-budget movie is based on the much beloved science fiction book of the same name, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. However, a lot of people are reluctant to see it because its author, Orson Scott Card, has in later years turned out to be something of a deranged anti-gay bigot. There’s even an organized boycott of the movie, to which Card has responded with a somewhat tone-deaf call for “tolerance.”

Personally, though, Card’s despicable politics aren’t the problem for me. I don’t pay much attention to the politics of the artists whose work I enjoy because it seems like a silly place to draw the line. I mean, I give business to my dry cleaner without a clue about how she feels about gay marriage, and I couldn’t begin to guess how my auto mechanic feels about immigration. And that waitress I tipped a few days ago — for all I know, she donated the money to Stormfront. As a libertarian, I’m sure most of the people I pay money to every day are supporters of political ideas I oppose, but I see no point in obsessing over it or allocating my spending according to any criteria other than what I want to buy. And I see no reason why I should start making an exception for art.

Other people feel differently, of course, and many of them face a real dilemma: They loved the book, and they expect the movie to be equally amazing and wonderful, but they don’t want to support an anti-gay bigot like Card, not even symbolically.

My reluctance to see the movie is due to something completely different. You see, I have a confession to make: Unlike all those loved-the-book-but-hate-the-author folks, I didn’t like the book. I didn’t hate it either. I barely even remember it. Something about a child who is raised to be a commander in a war against some aliens, right? And “the enemy’s gate is down” is supposed to mean something…?

Whatever.

I generally like science fiction, and I might enjoy the story more as a movie than a book. So I might go see it. Or my wife and I might just spend the weekend reading some good books.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ender’s Game…Meh

It’s a no-knock raid,
Don’t be afraid
We’ll shoot your dogs,
In front of your kids

Cuz we’re the SWAT
We’re here for your pot,
And all the cash that you got,
We are adrenalin junkies taking orders from the top,

— Lindy, “No Knock Raid” 2011

(The song is depressing enough, but I should warn you that the link is to the video, which includes graphic footage from real police raids. I find the song haunting, but I’m never going to watch the video again.)

I’ve been doing a close reading of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, and I’m trying to unweave the major narrative threads that explain how things got so bad. In Part 1, I summarized Radley’s history of policing, Part 2 discussed how the War On Drugs provides justification for raids permitted by the erosion of the Castle Doctrine, and Part 3 described the perverse federal funding incentives that fueled the rise of the warrior cop.

This fourth part discusses how the warrior cops evolved.

The Changing Role of SWAT

Daryl Gates created the SWAT concept for the LAPD in the 1970’s, with the goal of giving the department a way to handle very dangerous incidents. Although most police officers carried guns, they had little experience with gunfights — many officers went their whole career without drawing their gun in the line of duty, let alone firing it at someone. However, after a number of violent incidents for which the police had been ill-prepared, Gates got the LAPD to accept his idea for an elite team of officers who would respond to such incidents with effective force. When the bad guys started a violent encounter, SWAT could end it.

Other major cities soon copied the SWAT concept, but many of these departments faced pressure to deploy their teams in more situations in order to justify the cost. Using them for drug raids was an obvious solution. SWAT teams end up going on a lot of drug raids — raids on homes, raids on bars, raids on raves, even raids on schools. A 1997 survey found that 20 percent of departments used SWAT teams for patrols in bad neighborhoods. Sometimes they pretty much just raided whole neighborhoods, with frightening fervor but largely unimpressive results. And they weren’t always looking for drugs:

By the end of the [2010’s], state and local SWAT teams were regularly being used not only for raids on poker games and gambling operations but also for immigration raids (on both businesses and private homes) and raids on massage parlors, cat houses, and unlicensed strip clubs. Today the sorts of offenses that can subject a citizen to the SWAT treatment defy caricature. If the government wants to make an example of you by pounding you with a wholly disproportionate use of force, it can. It’s rare that courts or politicians even object, much less impose consequences.

The courts have ruled often and in some detail on the rules for issuing search warrants or entering homes without them, but other than the pretense of a knock/no-knock distinction, there have been very few rulings on the tactics police can use to serve those warrants — it could be a friendly officer knocking at the door, or it could be a SWAT team battering down the door.

Because of federal incentives (see Part 3), many small departments have formed SWAT teams over the past few decades. That leads to problems:

Stephen Downing, who worked in the same LAPD patrol bureau as Daryl Gates while Gates was developing his SWAT idea, explains how the move to smaller police departments makes already dangerous SWAT raids even more perilous. “You’d have this ‘I want one too’ phenomenon,” Downing says. “And so the SWAT teams get bigger, and they start to spread. And standards would start to drop. You have to be very careful about who you put on the SWAT team. The guys who want it most are the last ones who should be given a spot. At LAPD, you were choosing from a force of nine thousand strong. You’re getting elite, disciplined officers, and the pool is big enough that you can screen them. For fitness and marksmanship and all the usual stuff. But also for attitude and psychology.”

Choosiness isn’t a luxury at smaller police agencies. “Right now, I’m preparing to testify in a lawsuit stemming from a wrongheaded raid by a SWAT team in a twenty-eight-man police department,” Downing says. “How do you even begin to select from twenty-eight people?” […] “And how do they find time to train? At LAPD, the SWAT team will spend at least half their on-duty time in training. In these smaller towns, the SWAT team is something these guys do on the side. They’re patrol officers. And so what happens is that they train by practicing on the people.”

There is very little tracking of SWAT deployments and even less civilian oversight.

Dynamic Entry

Radley has often pointed out that as originally conceived, SWAT teams were intended to confront criminal violence, but nowadays most SWAT-style drug raids actually create violent confrontations where none existed before.

I would go further and argue that most of these raids aren’t actually conducted by real SWAT teams at all. Police departments may call them “SWAT” teams, and they may superficially resemble SWAT teams, but that aren’t SWAT teams in the original sense. They’re something more specialized and limited that I’m going to call dynamic entry teams. (If you know a better term for these units, tell me.)

Sometimes the distinction is explicit. I’ve heard that New York City narcotics officers don’t like to use the Emergency Services Unit (NYPD’s world-class SWAT team) for search warrants because they are too deliberate. They clear buildings methodically and with a lot of attention to safety, but for serving drug warrants their approach would give occupants too much time to destroy evidence, so drug cops prefer to use specialized dynamic entry teams that hit the target fast and hard.

Smaller cities and towns can’t afford to operate two different types of SWAT teams. They don’t have as many officers to choose from, and they don’t have the budget for the kinds of extensive training it takes to build a traditional SWAT team. So they build the kind of team that’s less expensive to operate, the kind of team that trains on the job doing dynamic entries, and perhaps most importantly, the kind of team that pays for itself by doing drug raids.

Although police leaders usually justify SWAT teams to the public by invoking the specters of terrorism and school shootings, Radley correctly points out that school shootings are incredibly rare, and terrorist incidents are all but non-existent. Statistically speaking, the average school can expect an on-campus shooting of a student once every few thousand years, and excluding 9/11 (which no SWAT team could have stopped), terrorists only kill about 3 people per year in the United States. So most SWAT teams will never be deployed in either of these situations.

I suspect it’s even worse than that, though, because given the small choice of personnel, the lack of training, and the focus on only one operation — dynamic entry warrant service — I doubt many of these teams are up to the task of handling the kinds of incidents used to justify them. The school shooting at Columbine was used for years afterwards to justify SWAT teams everywhere, but  SWAT was not a decisive factor at Columbine:

Though there were eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams on the Columbine campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous.

Fortunately, the shooters apparently got bored with killing students and committed suicide.

(To be fair, most active shooting incidents are over in a few minutes, and Columbine was no exception. By the time most of the police got there, the shooting had already stopped. However, at least one person is known to have bled to death while waiting for rescue that didn’t come for hours.)

I’m no expert on SWAT tactics, but it seems to me that dynamic entry teams must gain a big advantage from controlling the initiative: They get to choose their target, they have time to gather intelligence, and they control when the assault begins. If they arrive on scene and the situation is different from what they expected, they can postpone the operation so they can do more planning and assemble a larger team, or they can just leave and go raid some other drug dealer.

In an active shooter incident, the SWAT team has no control over when and where they deploy, they have little to no intelligence, and they can only use team members who happen to be available at the time. If the shooters are terrorists or well-prepared individuals, they can equip and train themselves to fight, they can fortify the location, and they can take hostages, so they’ll be ready when SWAT arrives. I don’t believe a dynamic entry team’s experiences serving warrants will prepare them for this level of conflict.

Furthermore, if dynamic entry teams are training on the job by doing drug raids, it means they are only getting practice dealing with the most common scenarios. So when something unusual happens, they will find themselves in a situation they are unprepared for. We can see some evidence of this, for example, in the Atlanta police raid on the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. She apparently thought they were intruders and pulled a gun, getting off only a single shot before the raid team shot her. The raid team, however, was so unprepared for even this meager opposition that three officers were wounded by gunfire from other officers.

Police Culture

Given the economic incentives for police militarization, I’m skeptical about sociocultural explanations, but Radley makes a case for several cultural factors. For one thing, those economic incentives start to feed back into police attitudes: Once police start conducting heavily armed raids and patrols in certain neighborhoods, they begin to think of the residents as the kinds of people who deserve heavily armed raids and patrols. And it extends up and down the chain of command.

The commission reviewed radio transmissions of LAPD officers referring to a drug roundup in a black neighborhood as “monkey slapping time” or fantasizing about driving down one particular street with a flamethrower—“ We would have a barbecue.”

The comments themselves would have been bad enough. Even worse was the fact that a culture existed within the department in which officers felt free to make them over police radio. The LAPD’s focus on reacting to crime instead of preventing it, the commission found, had isolated officers from the communities they patrolled. Cops were rewarded for putting up impressive arrest statistics and for being “hard-nosed.” The report found that drug and gang sweeps of the late 1980s had alienated LAPD cops from the community, creating reciprocal hostility and resentment.

In addition, police departments need to justify all those fancy weapons and vehicles they like to buy, and claiming that they’re outgunned by the bad guys is a common ploy. However, studies of gun violence have been finding that only a small fraction of the murders in this country (including murders of police officers) are committed with assault weapons.

But playing up the risks and dangers of the job, even in spite of overwhelming evidence that things are getting better, almost certainly has an impact on the mindset of the average cop. If you approach the job as if every day could be your last, you’re going to approach every citizen encounter as if it could be your last. That makes everyone a potential enemy. The job becomes about survival, not public service. Hence, the unofficial motto of the job you often hear from cops, or see posted on police discussion boards: “Whatever I need to do to get home safe at the end of the day.”

Another cultural factor that Radley identifies is simply that dynamic entry raids are an exciting way to do police work:

The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.”

The adrenaline high of doing dynamic entry raids probably discourages police from trying alternatives, such as traffic stops or surrounding the place and calling people out.

These sorts of police activities make for exciting popular entertainment, and police officers are as susceptible as anyone to the influences of pop culture. For example, in the 1970’s television programs were a lot less gritty than they are today, and almost everyone looked good, meaning male actors wore suits all the time, including those playing plainclothes police detectives on shows like Kojak, Hawii Five-O, Cannon, and McMillan & Wife. I remember hearing that some real-world detectives had adopted this behavior, and could be seen trudging around muddy outdoor crime scenes in expensive suits and shoes, much to the amusement of the patrol cops.

In his chronicle of the 1970s How We Got Here, conservative pundit David Frum argues that the decade’s parade of renegade cops who skirt the law but still abide by a familiar moral code (think Dirty Harry ) reflected the prevailing opinion at the time that bad court decisions and criminal-coddling procedures were preventing well-meaning cops from getting the bad guys. Ed Burns, the former narcotics cop and co-creator of HBO’s The Wire, thinks the influence might have been the other way around. In a 2008 interview, Burns said that the Gene Hackman movie The French Connection had a big influence on the culture of drug cops. “In The French Connection, [detective] Popeye Doyle had this very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mind-set that took over of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.”

Modern-day reality shows spread the same message:

A&E broke in first with Dallas SWAT, which sent a camera crew with the city’s elite paramilitary police unit to document drug raids and standoffs. The show’s success spawned Detroit SWAT and Kansas City SWAT. Court TV then jumped in with Texas SWAT and SWAT U.S.A. Testosterone-infused Spike TV joined the mix in 2008 with DEA.

When police are depicted in popular culture as badass warriors against the savage streets, police forces begin to attract applicants who want that kind of high-power adventure: People who enjoy kicking ass and taking names. And the process feeds back on itself as police recruiting materials are targeted at those kinds of people.

Browse the dozens of police recruitment videos on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that many of them feature images of cops tackling suspects, rappelling out of helicopters, shooting guns, kicking down doors, and siccing dogs on people. The images are often set to blaring guitars or heavy metal music. These are the videos that police departments send to high schools and colleges to attract new recruits. At the very first step in the process of staffing their departments, then, these agencies are deliberately appealing to people who are likely to be lured by the thrill-seeking, adrenaline-producing, butt-kicking aspects of law enforcement. Build an entire police force of people who fit that description and you have a force of cops who seek confrontation instead of avoiding it and who look to escalate volatile situations instead of resolving them peacefully.

Violence

Radley makes a sensible and surprising point about the way dynamic entry teams use flash-bang grenades to stun the occupants of a room before entering.

Clay Conrad, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, has argued that flash-bang grenades are unconstitutional because, by design, they’re intended to inflict injury on people who have yet to even be charged with a crime, much less convicted of one . “It’s just an assault,” Conrad told me in a 2010 interview. “These things are designed to blind and deafen. They produce a shock wave of 136 decibels or more. You’re intentionally injuring people.”

A cop throwing a flash-bang grenade might as well be whacking everyone over the head with his nightstick. Actually, that might be preferable, since the cop could still use some judgement about who might resist, whereas cops who “bang the room” before entering know nothing about the people they are assaulting. Flash-bang grenades are indiscriminate assault and battery against people who are not known to present any threat.

What surprises me most is that I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I thought only of what could go wrong — grenades starting fires, grenades shattering glass objects into shrapnel, grenades lobbed through windows into baby’s cribs — without realizing that even if everything worked perfectly, the police were still hurting American citizens.

What Warrior Cop makes clear, over and over, is that police are increasingly using violence on the American people without cause. Drug raids routinely involve breaking down doors, pointing guns at people who aren’t presenting a threat, shoving people to the ground, and restraining them while the place is searched. Any one of us would be arrested if we committed such violence, yet many of these raids are evidence-gathering missions, meaning that the people being assaulted are not known to have committed any crimes, even as the police come barging in with grenades and guns.

Shouldn’t that be shocking? Shouldn’t we object to the widespread violence against the American people? Yet we seem to have become numb to it, and we treat it as normal. Armed invasions of people’s homes by police don’t make the news. Even when police kill someone, it doesn’t stay in the news for very long.

Protests

Although the U.S. military has historically been used to put down riots and rebellions (as mentioned in Part 1), it hasn’t done so very much in recent times, but now that our police forces are armed with military weapons, trained with military tactics, and often think of their mission as military in nature, they have begun using a militaristic approach to put down protests.

It all started with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, when riot police attacked protesters with tear gas after they refused to disperse. The scene erupted into chaos, and confrontations between rioters and cops continued throughout the meeting. Although there was considerable property damage, the Seattle WTO protests had no major violence and only a few minor injuries. Nevertheless, it changed the way police departments all over the country responded to protests, including the recent Occupy-whatever protests.

This is how the country that gave the world the First Amendment now handles protest. There’s a disquieting ease now with which authorities are willing to crush dissent— and at the very sorts of events where the right to dissent is the entire purpose of protecting free speech— that is, events where influential policymakers meet to make high-level decisions with far-reaching consequences. In fact, the more important the policymakers and the more consequential the decisions they’ll be making, the more likely it is that police will use more force to keep protesters as far away as possible.

So what are we to do? I’ll discuss that in Part 5.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 4 of 5: Violence

Although I’m a software engineer, I thought that criminal hacking would be kind of boring — and less likely to bring him into contact with the organized crime figures I wanted in the story — so I decided instead to make him a chemist, and have him make drugs.

That’s right. I had the idea for Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad.

Okay, I was going to have him make designer drugs instead of of crystal meth. And he was going to have conflicted feelings about what he had become. And it wasn’t anywhere near as complex as Breaking Bad. And I didn’t have any other real characters. And my version wasn’t really very original. And of course I never did any of the hard work of actually writing the damned thing…which is why real professional writers make fun of people like me who “have an idea” and think that gets us somewhere.

Naturally, when I first saw ads for Breaking Bad, I knew I had to watch it. The first few episodes were kind of frustrating, because I kept filling in the blanks with pieces from my own concept, which didn’t work at all, but once I settled into the actual story that Breaking Bad was telling, it became one of my favorite shows.

I’m sorry to see it end, but I understand the dramatic reasons why it has to. Creator Vince Gilligan has made good on his original premise, and the story has to end. Walter White has transformed from Mr. Chips to Scarface. Actually, he was only Mr. Chips for maybe half of the first episode, after which he cooks meth and kills a guy. That seemed like a pretty quick transition to me, but little did I know. He would go on to do so many worse things.

And yet, with the final episode of the series just around the corner…I still want Walter White to win.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Walt’s a good guy. He’s a terrible human being whose hubris and sense of entitlement have led him to do terrible things. I wouldn’t want him to succeed in real life. But dramatically, in a television series, I’ll feel very let down if he doesn’t somehow come out a winner on his own terms.

It’s a truism of good storytelling that the audience always identifies with the protagonist, no matter how terrible he or she turns out to be. I imagine it’s related to psychological transference — when you spend enough time with the character, the protagonist’s friends start to feel like your friends, his family starts to feel like your family, his enemies start to feel like your enemies. So even knowing the protagonist is a terrible person, we find our mood rising and falling with his fortunes. Tony Soprano was a good example of this — a violent, petty, lying thug. But when we saw the world through his eyes for an hour, we could feel his pain.

(Shows like Game of Thrones depend on this idea. The show plays out on such a large scale and supports so many story lines that it actually has several protagonists, which makes it all the more involving when they try to kill each other, and all the more painful when they succeed.)

I’m not even sure what it would mean for Walt to win.

(Spoiler alert for potentially every episode before the last one.)

Living happily ever after isn’t possible. None of Walt’s tricks can cure cancer. His time is running out. Of course, since survival is off the table, he’s got nothing to lose, which only makes him more dangerous. But whatever he aims to do, it can’t just be dying. He’s going to want to see his victory before he goes. But what does victory look like?

From the very beginning, Walt has always been motivated by the desire to make sure his family is well taken care of after he’s gone. Other than his Chrysler 300C SRT8, Walter hasn’t spent his money on anything extravagant for himself. (The only other luxury I can think of is a tankless water heater, and that was really for the house.) But leaving something for his family, that’s his obsession. His single-minded pursuit of this goal has actually cost him his family, but he can’t see that. His ego still tells him he’s doing something good for Skyler and Walt Jr…if only they’d see it his way.

However, it hasn’t worked out well, even by Walt’s standards. With his secret out and the feds after him, he has no way of getting any money to his family. It sounds like the feds have seized the car wash, and his wife Skyler has taken a taxi dispatch job to make ends meet. She’s also facing federal indictments for her involvement in Walt’s crimes.

If Walt thought about things like this like a normal person, he’d follow his lawyer’s advice and make a deal. Here’s what he has to offer: He knows what happened to DEA agents Schrader and Gomez. He can lead the feds to their bodies, and he can name the people who killed them (although he’ll die of cancer before he can testify). Depending on what Walt knows, and what the feds can discover from there, he might also be able to lead them to the Aryan Brotherhood’s meth operation and to the $70 million in cash they stole from him, which the feds will be eager to seize. In the process, they will discover a captive Jesse Pinkman, an actual eyewitness to the murders, ready and willing to testify against the bastards who have made his life a living hell.

Best of all, Walt is asking so very little in return. He’s dying anyway, so he doesn’t need anything for himself. He could plead guilty to all his crimes. All he’d want is a promise that they’d leave his family alone. I’m no expert (and those of you who are can correct me), but that sounds like a pretty good deal for the government.

Walt won’t do any of that, of course. We’ve already seen the flash-forwards to Walt driving around with an M60 machine gun in the trunk, and we saw him recover his ricin poison. He’s going to do something terrible. The most common suggestion I’ve heard is that he’s going to use the M60 to kill the Nazi gang, and then he’s going to use the ricin to kill himself.

I don’t buy it. Neither of those things sounds likely.

First of all, ricin poisoning is not a good way to go. It’s not quick and painless. And depending on how it enters the body, it could take hours or days to kill him. Since Walt was smart enough to make the ricin, he’s probably smart enough to know that. So, I assume, are the show’s writers.

Second, an M60 machine gun is a formidable weapon, but it’s not an “I win” button. No matter how badass Walt is in Heisenberg mode, even with the M60, he’s still just one man. The M60 weighs over 20 pounds (not counting ammunition) and it’s intended to be crew-served, so for Walt to use one effectively by himself, he’d have to be Rambo. And he is so not Rambo, especially now that he’s sick. The Aryan Brotherhood guys have fully automatic weapons too, don’t forget, and unlike Walt, they know how to use them. (Alright, they don’t know how to use them very well, judging by the shootout at To’hajiilee, but they’re probably still better than Walt.)

I suppose he could be planning to hose down the entire compound with the M60 from a distance, killing everyone with a rain of bullets, but an M60 really doesn’t really have the sustained fire capability for that. It would jam up within a few hundred rounds. He might be able to pull it off if he used a minigun, but even that thing can’t kill someone hiding behind good cover, such as a mound of dirt or that pit where they cook the meth.

Actually, I think I’ve just talked myself into this one. Although killing all the Nazis with the M60 wouldn’t work in real life, it might work in TV, where machine guns can fire thousands of rounds without jamming, so maybe that’s the plan after all. It would fit in well with the other thing I think is going to happen, which is that Jesse is going to kill Walt.

They’ve certainly given Jesse plenty of motivation. Walt told Jesse he let Jane die, he turned Jesse over to the Aryan Brotherhood to be tortured and enslaved, and that led to the murder of Andrea.

Now if Walt comes looking for his money and shoots up the place, Jesse should survive it down there in the pit. Since Walt’s secrets are out, Jesse going to the cops is no longer a threat, so Walt might be feeling warm and fuzzy about him again and decide to free him. And that’s when Jesse can kill him. Heck, maybe getting Jesse to kill him is part of Walt’s plan. He’d probably prefer it to dying alone in the cabin.

But then I have no idea what Walt’s going to do with the ricin. To kill someone with ricin, you have to get close to them. They have to trust you. And who’s left that trusts Walt? The only people who might meet up with him are the Aryan Brotherhood. Ricin may not be fast, but it’s lethal in small doses, so he’s got more than enough doses to kill all of those guys if he can get them to ingest or inhale it somehow.

Or…while writing this, I just watched “Granite State” again. At the end, Walt is sitting in that bar in New Hampshire when he catches his old friends Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz being interviewed on television. They downplay his involvement in founding the the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical manufacturer Gray Matter Technologies, and then in response to a question about whether Walter White is still out there, Gretchen says that the friendly, happy Walter White they knew has been gone for a long time. Right after that, Walt decides not to wait for the police. He’s clearly setting off to do whatever he’s going to do with the M60 and the ricin.

I’ve been assuming that Walt was angry at Elliott and Gretchen for downplaying his involvement in the firm, or even for talking about how nice he used to be, when clearly Walt hates his old self. I thought maybe they would be the targets of his anger. But in re-watching that segment, I realized that Gretchen was answering a question in which the interviewer mentioned that Heisenberg’s trademark blue meth was still showing up all over the southwest and even in eastern Europe.

Since Walt has lost pretty much everything else in the world, maybe his meth is all he’s got left. He’s insanely proud of his meth cooking skill. So maybe it really pisses him off that someone else is now trying to pass off their inferior product as his own chemical  masterpiece. Maybe he’s going to make sure that no one else ever sells blue meth again.

Which makes me think that maybe he’s going to try to get the ricin into the next batch of meth to ship out of the Aryan Brotherhood camp, or maybe he’ll slip it into a shipment as it passes through Lydia’s hands. Inhaled, as a meth user might receive it, a lethal dose of ricin is pretty small (and meth addicts are pretty fragile), so if Walt can get the dosage right, he could kill hundreds of meth users. Once the authorities figure out the meth was poisoned, no one else would ever be able to sell blue meth again.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe Walt is about to become one of the worst mass murderers in history.

Or maybe he’ll just do what a lot of narcissistic assholes do when they realize they’re going to lose everything: Kill his family and then himself.

Sigh.

Okay, for the record, here’s my prediction. Walt will

• Visit Gretchen (and maybe Elliott) Schwartz, scare the crap out of her, and then extract a promise that she and Elliott will take care of his family.
• Use the M60 to kill the Aryan Brotherhood guys.
• Get into their meth lab and poison the meth, and then somehow get it shipped out.
• Die by Jesse’s hand.

Crap. Sunday night can’t come soon enough.

Update: My score: 50%

(Spoilers for the final episode.)

I got the Gretchen and Elliott thing right, and (as everyone did) the M60 v.s. Nazis. I was wrong about the ricin and about Jesse killing Walt, although Walt went there.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at I Still Want Walter White to Win

I have been following with great anticipation your three-part series of excited announcements this week. Your Linux-based operating system, cleverly called SteamOS, sure sounds fascinating, although I personally don’t want to “bring the Steam experience…into the living-room” because my wife is watching TV in there. For the same reason, I also have little interest in your new series of hardware to play games on, nor am I personally excited about your new game controller.

To be honest, when you hinted that you had three big announcements coming up, I was expecting something a little different. I mean, I have to admire the scope of your vision, but

Half-Life 3 Motherfucker!
Do you have it?

I mean, Jesus Christ! We’ve been waiting almost six fucking years since the last Half-Life game! You said the next one would be out in 2008, but you gave us nothing. Every time E3 rolls around, we hope for a hint, a morsel, some fucking clue that you still care about your oldest and longest-running fanbase. And yet you disappoint us year after year after year. After year after year after year.

If you sadistic lazy fucks aren’t going to release the next Half-Life game, just let us know so we can get on with our lives! Is that so fucking hard?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Brief Message to Valve Software

Radley’s presentation is pretty interesting, although not of course as in-depth as the book itself. He starts with a clip from the Columbia SWAT raid that brought so much national attention to the issue, and illustrates the rest of his presentation with a series of slides, some of which will be familiar to his regular readers (Sheriff Leon Lott makes an appearance, and we had a rousing game of Cop Or Soldier). If Radley comes to your area, it’s worth your time.

This was followed by an hour-long panel discussion which included representatives from several of the local organizations that sponsored his visit. The subject was broader than just police militarization — straying into police brutality, the general occupation of minority communities by police, what to do about it politically, and as any discussion of policing in Chicago must, the crimes of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.

Panel members, from left to right:

• Radley Balko, Huffington Post Senior Writer and Investigative Reporter
• Marco Roc, Illinois Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
• Crista Noel, Women’s All Points Bulletin
• Gregory Malandrucco, Chicago Alliance against Racist & Political Repression
• Joey Mogul, People’s Law Office

The event was also sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union Illinois, the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice & Transformation (Roosevelt University), the National Lawyers Guild (Chicago), Project NIA, and TruthOut.

I’ve been following Radley since shortly after I started blogging. (I met him once before in 2008.) During those early years, he was only a couple of rungs above me in the blogosphere — just another one of the libertarian voices on the web. Of course, even then he was much more of a professional than I was: He actually got out and reported stories. So seeing Radley now as a professional national journalist on his own book tour makes me proud as hell for him. I didn’t have anything to do with it, of course, but it’s like one of the guys from my old neighborhood got out and done good. The kid made a name for himself.

When I congratulated him on his success, Radley mentioned that he wished the book was selling a little better. Isn’t that always the way? Here he’s gone from being a solo blogger to a full-time professional journalist (at time when news outlets are doing massive layoffs), the L.A. Press Club named him Journalist of the Year in 2011, his work has been cited by the Supreme Court, he’s got his book out (ranked #2239 at Amazon today), he’s doing television appearances, he’s got another gig where musicians do live performances from his couch, and still…eh, book sales are a little soft…

Anyway, Radley was doing book signings, but I had already purchased Rise of the Warrior Cop as an eBook, and I wasn’t about to buy a hardcover copy just so he could sign it. So this was the best I could come up with:

If you haven’t done so already, get out there and buy your own copy of Rise of the Warrior Cop. Make Radley feel more successful!

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Rise of the Warrior Cop – Book Tour

I’ve been writing a series of posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) that outline some of the themes that Radley Balko explores in Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. The book itself is far more detailed, with discussions of the political forces that created some of these policies, and lots of descriptions of how they went so very wrong, including plenty of accounts of police raids (complete with puppycides) that will make your blood boil.

This is great material to have at hand if you find yourself arguing with other people about these issues. Also, Radley’s background as a policy analyst is showing, because the book is lavishly footnoted, making it easier to learn more about events that interest you.

So if you like what I’m writing in these posts, then buy Radley’s book, dammit!

(And I’m not just saying that because I’ll be attending Radley’s appearance in Chicago today and I don’t want him to be mad at me for stealing borrowing so heavily from his book to write these posts…)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Rise of the Warrior Cop – Interlude

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked 1935.

I’ve been doing a close reading of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, and I’m trying to unweave the major narrative threads that explain how it got so bad. In Part 1, I summarized Radley’s history of policing, and in Part 2 I followed the threads that showed how the War On Drugs provided justification for raids, and the erosion of the Castle Doctrine provided permission. In this third part, I’m going to review the perverse incentives created by federal anti-drug funding and changes in police organization that I believe are the main driving force behind the rise of the warrior cop.

Federal Funding

1988 saw the creation of the infamous Byrne grants, which essentially replaced the Nixon-era LEAA program, and which would go on to give billions of dollars to local police agencies throughout the country. Then in 1994, President Bill Clinton pushed the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which he had claimed would put another 100,000 officers on the street. COPS money was supposed to be used for “community policing” — a return to having cops on the beat who learn the neighborhoods. But as it turns out, a lot of this money paid for drug sweeps, anti-gang enforcement, and SWAT raids.

With federal funding hanging in the balance, policing became a numbers game. The departments that did best in the grant process were those that could show a lot of anti-drug activity: Arrests, warrants, seizures. So by stepping up drug enforcement, departments could obtain funding for activities (or levels of activities) that had not been approved by their local elected officials. Crimes that did not receive funding — sexual assaults, burglaries, auto theft, domestic violence — were increasingly treated as low priority.

After 9/11, federal funding shifted to support the War On Terror, and police departments promptly began applying for grants to fight terrorism. As it turns out, there wasn’t any more domestic terrorism after 9/11 than there was before, so a lot of that anti-terror money ended up fueling the War On Drugs anyway. It seems that many law enforcement agencies suddenly became deeply dedicated to fighting something called “narco-terrorism,” which almost nobody had been talking about before there were billions of anti-terrorism dollars up for grabs.

(I used to see a lot of that kind of opportunism when I worked in government contracting. If the government is buying anti-terror programs, everybody tries to find anti-terror applications for whatever it is they do, even if it’s just storing road salt.)

Civil Forfeiture

At the same time police departments began scrambling for federal funding, they also learned to take advantage of changes in civil forfeiture rules pushed by the Reagan administration. Real estate was no longer exempt, the standard of proof was reduced to less than probable cause, and seizures could go forward without even an indictment. The law also allowed seizure of assets even when it couldn’t be proven that a particular asset had been purchased with drug money.

Many state governments had been concerned that forfeiture could be abused, and they were careful not to give their law enforcement agencies broad forfeiture powers. However, a federal policy called equitable sharing gutted those protections by allowing federal agencies to share seized assets with any local local law enforcement agencies that had assisted in the seizure. In practice, this meant that local police could bypass state laws by bringing seizure opportunities to federal agencies, which would take over the seizure on paper. In reality, local law enforcement would continue to do all the work and receive most of the resulting money, with the federal agency providing token support and skimming a little cash off the top.

Nobody seemed to realize (or care) that this would have the effect of giving local law enforcement agencies a source of funding that was completely outside the control of local governments.  And unlike direct federal grants, this was a funding source that local police departments could directly influence: The more drug busts they did, the more they got to seize, the more money they got back from the feds.

In theory the victims of forfeiture could fight it in court, but prosecutors would often threaten criminal charges, which they would deal away if the property owners agreed to not fight the seizure. As Radley points out, this demonstrates the lie:

Those sorts of offers exposed just how fraudulent the government’s justification for its terror tactics really were. Allegedly, these pot growers were the dregs of humanity, greedily poisoning America’s children with their sinister harvest. They were dangerous enough that the government had to send virtual armies to occupy entire towns, buzz homes and chase children with helicopters, set up roadblocks to search cars at gunpoint, and strip suspects and innocents alike of their Fourth Amendment rights. These growers were that dangerous. However, if they were willing to hand over their land, the government was more than happy to let them go free.

Now instead of trying to find major drug dealers with large drug stashes, cops began looking for people who owned valuable property that they could link to drugs somehow. A guy dealing dope in a school yard might be moderately interesting, but a kid growing three pot plants in his parents’ $250,000 home was a higher priority, and business properties such as bars and hotels were potential goldmines because of their high value and because there was always a good chance that some customers had drugs on them, which would form the pretext for the seizure.

Forfeiture had turned police departments into thieves and money launderers.

Military Support and Equipment

The third change in police funding was a series of federal programs created to provide police departments with military-style equipment. This had been allowed since 1968, but in 1987 Congress stepped-up the effort.

[T]he 1987 law was more proactive. It established an office in the Pentagon specifically to facilitate transfers of war gear to civilian law enforcement. Congress even set up an 800 number that sheriffs and police chiefs could call to see what was available, and it ordered the General Services Administration to work with the Pentagon to produce a catalog from which police agencies could make their wish lists.

The Clinton era saw the creation of the “1033” program, which made it even easier for military hardware to flow down to civilian law enforcement agencies. By 2011 the Law Enforcement Support Office was reporting annual transfer of half a billion dollars worth of military gear to civilian cops.

Those grants were small, however, compared to the billions of dollars of post-9/11 equipment grants through the Department of Homeland Security. Police departments just love armored vehicles, and DHS helped buy a bunch of them all over the country. One of the more infamous was a $300,000 Lenco Bearcat (check out the macho bullshit promotional video) for the town of Keene, New Hampshire, population 23,000.

It’s arguable that armored personnel carriers are usable as rescue vehicles — although in that case it might make more sense if they were assigned to the fire department as aid vehicles — but some law enforcement agencies actually equip them with .50-cal machine guns. I’ve written about Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County, South Carolina, and Radley names several more.

(Honesty compels me to admit that I can think of a legitimate law enforcement use for a .50-cal rifle…but what are the chances we’ll ever see another Killdozer?)

Radley does tell my favorite militarization story:

And in Montgomery County, Texas, “the sheriff’s department owns a $ 300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.” A couple months before the CIR report, the sheriff in Montgomery County had broached the possibility of arming his drone with rubber bullets, or possibly teargas. “No matter what we do in law enforcement , somebody’s going to question it, but we’re going to do the right thing, and I can assure you of that,” he said. Five months later, the department made headlines when its DHS-funded drone accidentally crashed into its DHS-funded Bearcat.

Makes me chuckle every time.

Task Forces

The changes in funding were bad enough, allowing departments to fund their anti-drug activities independent of the approval of the communities they were policing, but the loss of control was made complete with the development of special-purpose anti-drug task forces.

Made up of personnel drawn from several different law enforcement agencies, control of these task forces is dispersed so widely that local civilian authorities have difficulty exerting control or even monitoring their operations. Police departments have joined task forces only to discover that they’ve given cops from other jurisdictions permission to operate in their territory without oversight. I’ve heard stories of task force officers from as far away as Arizona working here in Illinois.

In addition to being federally funded, task forces can also use civil forfeiture to fund themselves by seizing cash and property from anyone they deem a suspected drug smuggler or dealer — i.e. anyone with cash or property. Throw in the lack of the accountability, and they become like sharks in the water, forever hunting for their next meal:

As a result, we have roving squads of drug cops, loaded with SWAT gear, who get more money if they conduct more raids, make more arrests, and seize more property, and they are virtually immune to accountability if they get out of line. In 2009 the Justice Department attempted a cost-benefit analysis of these task forces but couldn’t even get to the point of crunching the numbers. The task forces weren’t producing any numbers to crunch. “Not only were data insufficient to estimate what task forces accomplished,” the report read, “data were inadequate to even tell what the task forces did for routine work.”

If you follow a blog like Pete Guither’s Drug WarRant or Radley’s The Agitator, it seems like every other horror story involves some kind of task force.

Farming Drug Dealers

Police forces have responded to these funding incentives in ways that are truly perverse, often leading them to act like criminals themselves. Worse, agencies and task forces that earn a profit from crime will become dependent on the very crime they’re supposedly trying to stop. As I wrote in another context, “When a city is spending a million dollars a year running a batch of red-light cameras, the last thing they want is for everyone to drive safely.”

The same argument applies to the drug war. Cops begin permitting the very crimes they’re ostensibly supposed to be fighting:

Most perversely of all, the promise of a financial reward actually provided drug cops with an incentive to wait until drugs had already been sold to move in with searches and arrests. A suspect flush with pot or cocaine didn’t offer much forfeiture potential. If they waited to bust him until he’d sold most or all of his supply, the police department got to keep the cash. Subsequent media and academic investigations would bear this out, finding examples of police waiting to bust stash houses until most of their supply had been sold, or of being far more likely to pull over suspected drug-running vehicles in the lanes leading out from large metropolitan areas (when they were likely to be full of cash) than the lanes leading in (when they were more likely to be filled with drugs).

Essentially, the cops are skimming money off the drug trade, just like any drug kingpins. Drug enforcement teams facing such incentives become focused on busts that will make them money, to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes even to the exclusion of guilt. In 1999 a task force used tips from an unreliable informant to launch a series of raids Tulia, Texas, which resulted in the arrests of fully 10 percent of the town’s black population. Something similar happened in Hearne the following year.

Radley finds some especially interesting evidence when discussing the police response to a recent cut in Byrne funding:

In March 2008, Byrne-funded task forces across the country staged a series of coordinated drug raids dubbed Operation Byrne Blitz. The intent was to make a series of large drug seizures to demonstrate how important the Byrne grants were to fighting the drug war. war. In Kentucky alone, for example, task forces uncovered 23 methamphetamine labs, seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana, and arrested 565 people for illegal drug use.

Radley draws this conclusion:

Of course, if police in a single state could simply go out and find 23 meth labs and 2,400 pounds of marijuana in twenty-four hours just to make a political point about drug war funding, that was probably a good indication that twenty years of Byrne grants and four decades of drug warring hadn’t really accomplished much.

I think I disagree. It sounds like police are accomplishing exactly what they want with the War on Drugs. Because of federal grants and civil forfeiture, police are dependent on drug busts to keep the money flowing, and the ability to make drug busts depends on a steady supply of drug dealers. No wonder the drug war is showing no signs of success: If the drug warriors ever managed to put a significant dent in drug trafficking, they’d lose their funding and then their jobs. So it’s to their advantage to leave plenty of dealers in operation. That’s why when Operation Byrne Blitz came along, they had no trouble finding people to bust.

In other words, drug warriors aren’t trying to eliminate drug dealers; on the contrary, drug warriors are farming drug dealers.

In Part 4, I’ll talk about some of the effects of all this on police behavior.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 3 of 5: Perverse Incentives