Tag: crime

Passive murder

The Guardian has an article today about the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service to put an end to attempts by the London Metropolitan Police to punish women who participated in a vigil for Sarah Everard, the woman raped and murdered by a serving police officer.

Everard was abducted by Wayne Couzens as she walked home in south London, with the police officer pretending to be enforcing Covid rules to get her into his car. Couzens – now serving a whole-life sentence – drove the 33-year-old out of London, where she was raped and murdered.

Beyond the outrage of the police force using Covid rules to punish its critics, after one of their own used those rules to carry out a brutal rape and murder, there is the shocking fact that some of the women were “previously convicted behind closed doors under the Single Justice Procedure (SJP)”, a process usually used for traffic violations and failure to pay television fees.

A very informative article, and generally sympathetic to the women targeted by the Met. But I am particularly struck by the Guardian’s choice of wording to describe the original crime. Couzens abducted the woman, raped her, and murdered her. Was it squeamishness or something else that led the Guardian journalist to say only that Couzens “[got] her into his car” and “was raped and murdered” — passive voice. One could imagine, if this report were all we knew of the story, that Met officer Couzens was as shocked as anyone else when the poor woman who “got into his car” ended up dead, at the hands of some unknown malefactor.

Out-of-the-box approaches to the school shooting problem in the US

Now that the proverbial “good guys with a gun” — 19 of them, in fact — have singularly failed to prevent the mass slaughter of children in Uvalde, Texas, the American Right is resorting to ever more absurd proposals to deal with the terror that Americans feel over the threat of children being shot to death in school. Some are proposing that Guns don’t kill people, doors that let gunmen in kill people. Others argue that we stop sending our children to school altogether.

Eventually I expect they’ll hit on an old Cold War-era solution. Back in the early 1980s Ronald Reagan expressed dismay, in one of his State of the Union addresses, about a survey that found like a majority of US children said they feared there might soon be a nuclear war. Cartoonist Mark Stamaty, in his series Washingtoon, showed a group of leading generals listening to the speech and exclaiming, “American children suffering in fear of a nuclear war. That is unacceptable!” And they task the Pentagon with solving the problem… by commissioning a television series starring “Willie the Warhead” that will teach children to welcome rather than to fear nuclear war.

I foresee a similar solution eventually arising from the Christian Soldier circles. Our children should not live in fear of being murdered by a nut with a gun in their schools. In the television series Straight to the Top, they’ll learn to see school shootings as a shortcut to the delights of heaven. Each week another group of blameless godfearing youth get dispatched by a leering antifa Democrat, and then get to eat ice cream and play video games in the divine presence, and enjoy watching the leftist killer being tormented in Hell. A recurring gun-grabber character will be the comic relief, until it turns out that he’s actually the one training the killers, in order to further his plot to carry out a Marxist revolution in a disarmed America.

“Unfair to other rich people”

The UK government is making a big show of considering, though they ultimately probably won’t follow through, scrapping the so-called “golden visa” programme, which allows wealthy people to bypass immigration constraints to move to the UK, in exchange for investing at least £2 million. This scheme is generally considered to have grossly abetted the growth of London as a world centre for money laundering.

Now, The Guardian reports, “London lawyers who help the global super-rich apply for “golden visas” to enter the UK have called on the government to reconsider its decision to abolish the Tier 1 investor visa scheme, warning that it would be “enormously damaging” to the economy.”

Kyra Motley, a partner at the law firm Boodle Hatfield, said the UK was jeopardising billions of pounds in overseas investment “because of a popular myth that foreign money is dirty money”…

Chetal Patel, a partner at law firm Bates Wells, said scrapping the investor visa because of increased tensions over Russia’s threat to Ukraine would be “unfair” to other rich people wishing to come to the UK.

“Since the introduction of golden visas in 2008, the UK has benefited from billions of pounds of investment. It would be enormously damaging to the UK economy if this was to be cut off.”

Weirdly, despite the fact that this is a purely economic argument the only people quoted are lawyers, not economists. I wonder whether The Guardian would be equally open to splashing on their home page claims by a group of economists that a new tax law would damage the integrity of the UK legal code? Particularly if those economists admitted — indeed, if their sole claim for expertise in this matter — was their personal pecuniary interest in having the law changed.

Honestly, is there any reason to think that the UK is suffering a shortage of foreign investment — as opposed to, say, a shortage of farm workers, which is well documented, and has been driven by intentional government action to exclude foreigners. And this despite the fact that — “popular myth” or no — the incidence of criminality among billionaires (domestic or foreign) is clearly higher than among farm workers.

Statistics, politics, and causal theories

A new headline from the Trump era:

Fewer Immigrants Are Reporting Domestic Abuse. Police Blame Fear of Deportation.

Compare it to this headline from a few months ago:

Arrests along Mexico border drop sharply under Trump, new statistics show

This latter article goes on to comment

The figures show a sharp drop in apprehensions immediately after President Trump’s election win, possibly reflecting the deterrent effect of his rhetoric on would-be border crossers.

It must be noted that these two interpretations of declining enforcement are diametrically opposed: In the first case, declining reports to police are taken as evidence of nothing other than declining reports, whereas the latter analysis eschews such a naive interpretation, suggesting that the decline in apprehensions is actually evidence of a decline in the number of offenses (in this case, illegal border crossings).

I don’t mean to criticise the conventional wisdom, which seems to me eminently sensible. I just think it’s interesting how little the statistical “facts” are able to speak for themselves. The same facts could mean that the election of Trump was associated with a decline in domestic violence in immigrant communities, and also with a reduction in border patrol effectiveness. It’s hard to come up with a causal argument for either of these — Did immigrant men look at Trump with revulsion and decide, abusing women is for the gringos? Did ICE get so caught up with the fun of splitting up families in midwestern towns and harassing Spanish speakers in Montana, that they stopped paying attention to the southern border? — so we default to the opposite conclusion.

Less than zero: A new reckoning

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about capitalism and the nature of wealth I learned from Donald Trump. And now I discover that I was entirely misled, at least as regards Trump’s particular role.

As I discussed in a post a couple of years ago, back in the 1990s I read a newspaper article about Donald Trump’s most recent bankruptcy, and was struck by the fact that, despite having vastly more liabilities than possessions, Trump was still treated as a wealthy man, and not worse than a pauper. And his creditors were willing to come to an arrangement that allowed him to live a rich-man lifestyle, if somewhat less opulent than before. I understood that to mean that modern capitalism makes debt almost as valuable as property, that the person with a billion in debt and the person with a billion in property are considered to be much more similar to each other than either is to the one who has neither debts nor wealth.

Now, having read several books on Trump, including most recently Seth Hettena’s Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, I see that this beautifully esoteric interpretation must yield — at least in the case of Trump — to a simpler and crasser interpretation: At various stages of his career Trump has been propped up by criminals who found the Trump Organisation, and its self-absorbed empty-headed chief, too useful as a cover for moneylending — first for the New York mob, then on a larger scale for Russian oligarchs and criminals from the former Soviet Union — to let it fail. In some sense, this is the value of debt: When there are large numbers in play, it’s easy to hide smaller numbers, just as long as you can come to an agreement to keep the flow going. And it does take a special kind of person to have managed to accumulate that amount of debt in the first place, making Trump’s debt truly a rare and valuable commodity.

I’m perfectly willing to accept a certain claim of innocence, that Trump believed all along that the fact that he kept managing to steer around failure demonstrated nothing but his unique genius. It reminds me of Hitler’s famous comment “Ich gehe mit traumwandlerischer Sicherheit den Weg, den mich die Vorsehung gehen heißt”: I follow, with the certainty of a sleepwalker, the path that Providence has laid out for me.

That narcissistic naïveté probably was, and remains, his most useful quality. First time tragedy, second farce.

Your shadow genetic profile

So, the “Golden Gate killer” has been caught, after forty years. Good news, to be sure, and it’s exciting to hear of the police using modern data systems creatively:

Investigators used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online genealogy database. One such service, GEDmatch, said in a statement on Friday that law enforcement officials had used its database to crack the case. Officers found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to his front door.

And yet… This is just another example of how all traditional notions of privacy are crumbling in the face of the twin assaults from information technology and networks. We see this in the way Facebook generates shadow profiles with information provided by your friends and acquaintances, even if you’ve never had a Facebook account. It doesn’t matter how cautious you are about protecting your own data: As long as you are connected to other people, quite a lot can be inferred about you from your network connections, or assembled from bits that you share with people to whom you are connected.

Nowhere is this more true than with genetic data. When DNA identification started being used by police, civil-liberties and privacy activists in many countries forced stringent restrictions on whose DNA could be collected, and under what circumstances it could be kept and catalogued. But now, effectively, everyone’s genome is public. It was noticed a few years back that it was possible to identify (or de-anonymize) participants in the Personal Genome Project, by drawing on patterns of information in their phenotypes. Here’s a more recent discussion of the issue. But those people had knowingly allowed their genotypes to be recorded and made publicly available. In the Golden Gate Killer case we see that random samples of genetic material can be attributed to individuals purely based on their biological links to other people who volunteered to be genotyped.

The next step will be, presumably, “shadow genetic profiles”: A company like GEDmatch — or the FBI — could generate imputed genetic profiles for anyone in the population, based solely on knowledge of their relationships to other people in their database, whether voluntarily (for the private company) or compulsorily (FBI).

Jared Kushner thinks ahead on prison reform

One of the oddest trends of the latter half of the odd 1970s in the US was the transformation of law-and-order conservatives like Charles Colson and even G. Gordon Liddy into prison-reform advocates, after they had spent some time themselves in federal prison for their role in the Watergate scandal. The President’s son in law isn’t waiting. Congress is considering a package of reform measures to improve federal prison training programmes, and increase the possibilities for early release for good behaviour. Reports are that Kushner has taken time out of his busy schedule making peace in the Middle East and solving the opioid crisis to lobby for the bill. JK is, of course, famously well behaved. What good is advocating prison reform if it comes too late for you to take advantage of it?

The magical zero marginal

There’s no knowledge like secret knowledge… Prominent in today’s news is Labour’s contention that

leaked Home Office documents suggesting government cuts are linked to the rise in violent crime, and demanded the home secretary explain herself to parliament.

It’s a bizarre accusation, not because it is implausible, but because it could not be otherwise, and the suggestion that this has been “revealed” by a secret report is part of implicitly accepting an inane pattern of government — and not just government — obfuscation that I am choosing to call the magical zero marginal. The way it works is, the government (let us say) feels an urge to reduce expenditures on (let us say) policing. It’s a problem, because the voters rather like police, by and large, and feel that they derive benefit. Not to worry, says the government press release (possibly produced by a dedicated key on the Whitehall keyboard), there will be no reduction in service. The costs will be made up with efficiency gains. The claim is that there is a significant portion of the current budget that is bringing zero marginal benefit, and whose elimination will therefore cause no harm. Perhaps this portion doesn’t exist as a budget line item now, but will after a “reorganisation” — but then the implicit claim is that the costs of the reorganisation as well will be covered by the savings. Continue reading “The magical zero marginal”

The World’s Greatest University(TM) has a bad PR day

Pity the poor flack in Harvard’s press office that needs to deal with two remarkable instances of cravenness in a single day: Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government bowed to criticism from the CIA to revoke its invitation to military whistleblower and transgender activist Chelsea Manning to come for a short stay as a “visiting fellow”. And Michelle Jones who rehabilitated herself in prison after a gruesome childhood that culminated in the neglect, abuse, and possibly murder of her own child, to emerge 20 years later as a noted historian of the local prison system, to be admitted to multiple graduate programmes in history, but had her acceptance at Harvard overruled by the university administration. Continue reading “The World’s Greatest University(TM) has a bad PR day”