I haven't really been following the trial of the four cops who shot an unarmed Sean Bell outside the strip club where he'd just had a bachelor party. However, a few things seem worth mentioning.

First of all, the fact that the cops fired 50 shots is vivid and horrific, but I don't think it says much about the cops who did the shooting.

Cops used to be taught to draw and fire a shot when threatened, but there have been incidents where the offender shot back and a cop got killed because his shot missed or he didn't hit the offender in a vital area. Nowadays, in the interest of protecting the lives of police officers, they often shoot until the offender goes down.

When the threatening person is seated in a car, as Bell was, he's already as down as he's going to get, so the cops just keep on shooting. It's not that the cops are too stupid to realize the target is seated, but a gunfight is so incredibly stressful that it suppresses conscious thought. A few years ago there was a shooting incident involving a man in a wheelchair---the cops in that case fired a lot of rounds into him as well.

Second, this situation started when Bell and his friend got into his car and the cops rolled up to stop him from leaving. Bell tried to drive away and rammed the police cars in the process, so the cops opened fire.

Bell's defenders point out that these were plainclothes cops in unmarked cars, so Bell didn't know they were cops and probably thought he was about to be killed. Defenders of the cops responded that the cops identified themselves by yelling "Police!" as they approached.

With all due respect to the cops, who were probably just following procedure, that's really not true in any normal sense of the word identify.

To identify themselves, the cops would have had to pull out their badge and department identification and show it to Bell, or at least they would have had to arrive in a marked police car and wear a police uniform, or maybe even just have a marked car put in an appearance.

These cops did not identify themselves as police. What they did was drive up and jump out with their guns and claim to be police. Which is something anyone can do.

I can't know what was going through Bell's mind as the cars pulled up to block him in, and the armed men jumped out, but I have no trouble believing he freaked out and went into full fight-or-flight mode. He may have noticed that the attacking men were yelling, but he was probably too flooded with adrenaline to recognize the words, let alone to think rationally about what the words meant.

There's something wrong about a system in which police can start a violent action---a takedown or a raid on a drug house---and simply by yelling "Police!" can shift the entire burden of safe and reasonable behavior onto everyone else.

Third, defenders of the police in these incidents usually claim that the situation was confusing, frightening, and volatile, and the cops had to make split-second decisions for which they should not be held criminally accountable.

Fair enough. But shouldn't the exact same reasoning apply to the other people involved in the incident? In fact, given that the cops were the ones who started the incident, shouldn't the other guys get even more benefit of the doubt?

Yet if the situation was reversed, if Sean Bell had succeeded in driving away from the scene but run over and killed a cop in the process, does anybody think he'd have been as successful claiming confusion at his trial?

Fourth, one of the smartest things I've read about this incident is from Jim Leitzel at Vice Squad:

Sean Bell is dead, and there is no criminal responsibility for the police. It isn't hard to understand the latter part. Police have to make split-second decisions in highly uncertain and stressful situations. Lethal force, which can be applied at a distance, is widely available. A police officer who guesses that a suspect is holding a cell phone could easily be killed, if that guess is wrong and the object turns out to be a gun. (The first police officer to shoot in the Bell case believed from overheard conversations inside the club that a gun might be present.) I think that this is one of the main reasons that courts are extremely reluctant to convict police after the shooting of an unarmed citizen.

But what is the lesson? Well, it is a general point in public policy: the less effective are after-the-fact sanctions, the stronger the case for imposing before-the-fact controls.
It is very difficult, and perhaps even undesirable in most circumstances, to hold police accountable for errors in judgment that result in the death of innocent (or even guilty!) civilians. Therefore, one should only initiate police/citizen encounters when the stakes are high. The police who killed Sean Bell were at the strip club as part of an anti-prostitution sting operation.

The criminalisation of prostitution puts prostitutes, clients, and police at great risk. The toll in the US is small relative to the deaths brought on by the criminalisation of drugs, but it is significant nonetheless. The criminalisation of prostitution isn't necessary -- many places get by just fine with legal, regulated prostitution. Even if prostitution policing were perfect and costless, and even if prostitutes were not put at great risk from clients in a prohibition regime, I would not favor the criminalisation of prostitution. But the violence suffered -- by prostitutes, johns, and police -- as a result of criminalisation makes a strong case for a legal, regulated adult sex market. One of the enduring mysteries of vice policy is why this steady violence has had so little impact on improving public policy towards prostitution.

In other words, the cops were basically wasting their time and the taxpayers' money to investigate a victimless crime, and in the process they killed a guy. 

There's no way this could possibly go wrong:

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who's using an open wireless connection--and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.

CNET is a tech news site, so they spotted the first thing I thought of:

There's no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn't tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message.

If that's true, then the FBI has no proof of why someone followed the link or what they thought it would get them. Anybody could have found one of those links and posted it to another web site with a misleading message such as "click here to see playful kittens."

Or imagine you're reading a forum or some blog comments, and you read a message that says "Oh my god, does this look like child porn to anyone?  Should we tell someone?" Can you be sure you wouldn't reflexively click the link before thinking about it? Have you ever clicked a link by accident when you selected a window?

Anyone who followed one of those links could get raided by the FBI. That's a scary thought.

To be fair, in the case described in the CNET article, the posts by the FBI were very explicit about what was supposedly at the other end of the link, and the FBI servers recorded 5 clicks to 3 different files over a six hour period from the same IP address. That's more than just one reflexive click or a mousing error.

Nevertheless, this seems like a dangerous direction to take law enforcement.

(Hat tip: Crime & Federalism)

As is often the case, a lot of women are getting hurt by the Spitzer scandal.

My wife feels particularly bad for Spitzer's wife Silda. Aside from cheating on her, Eliot Spitzer also seems to be dragging her to all his humiliating press conferences. As Maggie Gallagher puts it:

No animal would plan for its mate as exquisite a humiliation as Eliot Spitzer inflicted on his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, Monday afternoon in broad daylight, in front of us all.

I don't have a lot of hope for the public morality. I don't suspect this is the last time a man entrusted with high office will descend into a sex scandal, or even break the law (as Eliot Spitzer did) to get what he wants...

But can we at least end this barbaric practice of dragging your wife before the cameras while you confess your shameful guilt? If she wasn't there in the hotel room when you did your crime, don't ask her to do your time.

The practice began relatively innocently as something an accused man might do when he denied the allegations . A man's wife at his side showed that she, at least, believed the guy when he said he did not do it.

It was former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey, I believe, who began the modern practice...of parading the little wife before the cameras to hold your hand as you confess your guilt. The goal is to get the shell-shocked wife to demonstrate to the public that the offense is forgiveable. If his wife forgives him, how mad can you be?

But the practice requires a man to turn the best instinct of his wife---to unite behind the family in crisis---into an instrument of her own public humiliation.

My own sympathy for Silda Spitzer is somewhat diluted by my dislike of her husband. The man is a self-aggrandizing jerk who enjoys hurting other people to further his career. If that's the kind of guy she wanted to marry, it makes her a bit difficult to feel sorry for. On the other hand, she probably didn't see this coming.

I feel sorry for the ladies at the Emperor's Club. They thought they were going to make some money doing a disreputable job but eventually get out clean. Now, however, they'll probably all be dragged through the papers.

Spitzer's girl in Washington, "Kristen," has now been identified as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, and journalists are scouring the earth for more information about her. If you want to see what she looks like, the Smoking Gun has pictures. Apparently, she's an aspiring musician. Or at least she was. From now on, however, she'll be known as governor Spitzer's hooker.

Then again, I could be completely wrong. Maybe this isn't a devastating personal setback. Our standards of propriety for celebrities have changed. She could make a lot of money posing in Penthouse or Hustler right now, and there's probably a book deal in her future. Heck, there's probably a reality television show with Paris Hilton on Spike TV in her future if she wants it.

Her MySpace page is still up, and her song has been played by 3 million people, which is more than most musicians get. The comments she gets from her friends are almost all heartwarmingly supportive, and maybe even a little bit envious.

The mess Ashley Dupré finds herself in is the result of the choices she made, but like Mrs. Spitzer, she probably didn't see this coming.

There are three other women who didn't see this coming, Spitzer's three daughters, but unlike Silda and Ashley, they had no choice in the matter. No choice at all.

Poor girls.

There have been some rumors that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is trying to bargain with the feds over his involvement with a prostitution ring. Apparently, he's offering to resign the governorship in return for a walk on the charges.

This is wrong for two reasons:

First, it's not much of a punishment. Thousands of men arrested as prostitution patrons and money launderers are already not a state governor. If the feds give Spitzer a walk, shouldn't all those other guys get a walk too?

Second, as Mike at Crime & Federalism points out, it's none of the federal government's business. Eliot Spitzer was put in the governor's office by the people of New York, and it's not up to the U.S. Justice Department to change that. Using the threat of prosecution to force him out of office is little more than blackmail and extortion. I hope the feds are better than that.

Update: Spitzer just resigned. Never mind.

I'm still riding high on the Elliot Spitzer hooker scandal. What a tool.

Note that I didn't call it a sex scandal. That the governor of New York was having sex with these women is not the problem. (Mrs. Spitzer might have a different opinion.) No, the problem is that he was hiring hookers. To be more specific, he was hiring them in violation of the law. He even owed them money.

As a libertarian, I think that if consenting adults want to trade sex acts for money, no legitimate government purpose is served by stopping them. However, just because I'm in favor of legal prostitution doesn't mean I approve of its illegal forms.

The folks who run illegal prostitution rings are probably not doing it because of their strong libertarian sensibilities. They're doing it because they want to make money, and they're willing to break the law to do so. In fact, the whole operation ends up taking place outside the law, which places everyone involved outside the protection of the law. And if New York is anything like Chicago, that means this prostitution ring is under the control of organized crime.

That's a huge problem for a government official, especially one who has had law enforcement duties, such as Elliot Spitzer in his former position as New York State Attorney General. Once he had had a few dates with the ladies of the Emperor's Club, they owned him. They could threaten to blow up his career at any time by going public.

(That might expose a few of the ladies to prosecution, and maybe even a couple of people running the ring, but it wouldn't touch anybody higher up.)

It's possible that a high-class escort service that has clients able to pay $1000 per hour wouldn't ever engage in blackmail. Their reputation for discretion might be so valuable that it's not worth risking. Why resort to extortion when clients pay them millions of dollars per year of their own free will?

Still, think about what it means that the top prosecutor in the state of New York owed money to the mob and regularly did business with them.

As a Manhatten ADA, he went after a Gambino labor-racketeering operation in 1992. But then he went into private practice for a few years before taking the New York Attorney General's office in 1998. In that role, he focussed on consumer issues and business fraud. None of the notable cases on Spitzer's Wikipedia page involved organized crime. Why not?

As Attoney General, he would have been in position to decide which cases are worth further investigation...and which ones would be shut down. If I worked in the New York AG's office right now, I'd be asking everyone there if Spitzer shut down any cases that were still good.

Interestingly, during his term as Attorney General, he did actually prosecute cases against two prostitution rings. Why those two? Could he have been eliminating the competition as a favor to someone?

Really, I have no idea what was going on in the New York AG's office, or whether any mob figures ever had a friendly conversation with Spitzer about his entertainment expenses. This is all just speculation. As far as I know, the FBI court documents only cover his time in the Governor's office, so it's possible he was clean while he was the Attorney General. But I doubt it.

I don't really care if a politician has sex outside his marriage (that's between him and his wife), and I don't care that he paid women for sex (that's between him and them), but I do care if he's doing favors for the mob.

Scott at Simple Justice is always a source of fascinating issues, and recently he wrote about the Pew report on incarceration:

The Pew report has been the subject of intense interest around the blawgosphere.  This is the report that tells us that we finally reached a 1 in 100 incarceration rate (and far higher for minorities) and the cost is blowing the doors off of budgets...

That's a higher rate of incarceration than any other democracy in the world. It's also a higher rate of incarceration than any totalitarian dictatorship in the world. And we put young black men in jail at a higher rate than South Africa at the height of apartheid.

(Depending what you're trying to prove, it can be unfair to compare U.S. incarceration rates to those of unfree countries. In places like North Korea and Myanmar, the incarceration rate is arguably 100% since the entire country functions as a work camp. Put another way, would you prefer a 99% chance of living outside of prison in the U.S., or a 99.25% chance of living outside of prison in Cuba?)

Scott's post is in response to a New York Times piece by Adam Liptak:

In juxtaposition to the report, Liptak brings in Paul Cassell, Utah lawprof, former federal judge and victim's rights advocate (though Liptak doesn't mention this last piece).

“We aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration,” said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director. 

But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the “very tangible benefits: lower crime rates.” 

Scott goes on to argue that we don't really have good proof of the relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates. I'm sure he's right that the relationship is weak, but I'm also pretty sure that some relationship exists.

What Cassell points out is that the Pew report only discusses the costs of operating prisons. The numbers may well be accurate, but they only tell part of the story. Cassell wants to discuss the benefits of high incarceration rates as well. In doing so, he's trying to change the argument in two important ways.

First, he's changing the subject of the argument from state budgets to social welfare. This makes a lot of sense. Governments supposedly exist to serve the people, so when we want to analyze a policy, the proper subject of any cost-benefit analysis is the effect on the people as a whole.

Second, Cassell wants to count non-financial costs and benefits. To do that, he would have to find a way to compare the various non-financial costs and benefits with the financial costs and benefits. In effect, he wants to assign a dollar cost for every crime committed, and then see how much is saved by reducing the number of crimes.

This sounds impossible at first, but certain kinds of economists spend their whole careers figuring out ways to do things like this. For example, you could do a factor analysis of home sales all over the country to try to tease out the effects of local crime rates on local real estate prices. This would give you an idea of how much people are willing to spend to reduce their chances of being crime victims. A similar analysis could be done on wages and on-the-job crime to figure out how much of a pay cut people are willing to take to work at a safer job.

So the question that Cassell wants us to answer is whether the $50 billion dollar annual cost of operating our nation's prisons is more or less than the benefits we reap by reducing crime.

Scott Greenfield is essentially arguing that when analyzing our policy towards imprisonment we should only count the reduction in crime that is attributable to increased imprisonment. He's right, but he's missing a couple of other big gaps in Cassell's argument.

For one thing, many victimless crimes have no net social costs. Since all the participants have consented to the "crime." it's a pretty safe assumption that all participants are receiving benefits that are worth the costs. So we as a society are enduring the costs of imprisoning people for victimless crimes without reaping any compensating benefits.

It gets even worse for Cassell. He argues that the Pew report is omitting the benefits to society of incarceration, but he himself is making the exact opposite mistake by omitting a major cost. It may even be the biggest cost. Cassell is omitting the cost of imprisonment to the prisoners themselves.

It may seen counter-intuitive to count the cost to prisoners, but if you're going to make a cost-benefit argument for a social policy, you have to include all the costs and benefits to all the people involved. History is filled with horrible ideas that look good if we treat some people as less important than others. Everyone counts, and everyone counts equally.

It may seem hard to assign a cost to imprisonment, but it's no harder than assigning a cost to being a crime victim, and Cassell is insisting we do that.

The annual cost of prison to a prisoner is the same as the amount of money he would want to be paid in order to voluntarily spend a year in prison. That's a tricky number to estimate, but here's one quick calculation: The average wage for high school dropouts in 2007 was $11.40 per hour, which means that it would cost $23,712 per year to hire one for 40 hours a week for a full year. Surely he would demand no less to spend the same year in prison. Multiply by the 2.3 million prisoners in the Pew report and you have a lower limit of $55 billion dollars.

That brings the total cost to $105 billion dollars per year. This seems intuitively in the ballpark: Imprisoning 1% of the people who produce a $10 trillion economy costs about 1% of $10 trillion.

(If you think I'm arguing that our policy for imprisoning rapists and murderers should take into account how unpleasant it is for them, you're exactly right. Of course, we should also take into account the benefits to society of imprisoning rapists and murderers. I have no doubt that imprisoning rapists and murderers has more benefits than costs.)

Keep in mind, the real question is not whether we're better off paying the $100 billion dollar cost of incarceration. Of course we are. Without our system of law and justice, we'd descend into violent anarchy---think Somalia around 1990.

No, the real question is what our policy should be on the margins: Which way should we be moving? If we make a policy change that increases our prison population by 20,000 at an annual social cost of a billion dollars, will that lead to a reduction in crime that saves us a billion dollars every year? Or if we decide to follow a policy that reduces our prison population by 50,000, will the resulting increase in crime wipe out the $2.3 billion we save?

The answers to these questions obviously depend on the specifics of what types of crimes and criminals we're talking about. Releasing thousands of murderers is probably a bad idea. On the other hand, releasing the perpetrators of victimless crimes is an obvious win.

Similarly, we should contemplate the costs and benefits of creating new crimes or increasing the punishments for existing ones. Prison time is expensive, so we should try to avoid buying too much of it.

A few months ago, I was a juror on a criminal case where a guy was accused of attacking a cop. The cop was the only witness to the attack, and the defendant said he didn't do it. We the jury thought the defendant's story had too many problems, so we disregarded it and then convicted him based on the cop's more-credible testimony.

I bring this up again because Scott at Simple Justice points us to a situation that's making me wonder if we rushed to convict, just because we had the credible statement of the victim. Maybe we should have insisted on video.

Here's what we know from the media reports: A woman accused a Shreveport cop of beating her while she was under arrest for alleged drunk driving. He says he didn't do it.

The twist is that there's video: We see the cop and the woman are in a room of some kind. She's being annoying, so the cop cuffs her hands behind her back and pushes her against the wall and then down to the floor. A little later, she's screaming and resisting as he tries to hold her in a chair, so he stands her up and swings her around and out of the frame where we hear a thump.  Then we see her sitting in the chair again as the cop steps in front of the camera to turn it off.

When the camera's turned back on, the woman is lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She had two black eyes, cuts to the face, and two broken teeth.

The cop has been fired, but he hasn't been charged with any crime because, police say, the video doesn't show what happened.

So, to review, we the jury actually convicted a guy of aggravated battery based on even less evidence than this, but no one in Shreveport even thinks it's worth bringing charges?

I'll tell you what. If anybody from the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office in Louisiana wants some advice, just get in touch with me, and I can give you the name of a Cook County ASA who knows how to win those tricky cases that don't have complete video evidence of the crime.

Long before I got fascinated by legal blogs, I was fascinated by legal novels. Neither is a substitute for receiving actual instruction in the law, but both are cheaper. I've learned a few things.

Reading Scott Greenfield's rant about informants reminded me of A Cinderella Affidavit by Michael Fredrickson. I'm not going to go into the details of the plot---they're not that important and I can't really remember them anyway---but the concept of a Cinderella Affidavit has stuck with me.

I don't know if "Cinderella Affidavit" is common legal jargon or just a catch phrase Fredrickson made up for his book. In any case, here's how it works: Say you're a cop working narcotics, and you want to arrest a guy you're sure is dealing drugs out of a house, but you don't have any proof. In order to get the probable cause you need for a warrant, you're going to have to investigate the case, gather evidence, find informants, and try to make a controlled buy. But that's a lot of hard work, and you might not succeed.

If you aren't too concerned about lying to a judge (also known as perjury), there's an easier way: You make it all up. Just start writing out your affidavit and say a confidential informant told you there were drugs. (This also works if you got some information in a way you're not supposed to, like the Herc and Carver on The Wire attributing all the information from their illegal audio bug to a phantom informant named "Fuzzy" Dunlop). The judge grants the warrant, and you bust into the drug dealer's place of business and find what you were looking for: The drug dealer and his drugs.

Case closed, pretty much. No one will ever expect to meet the phantom informant. For one thing, most cases never make it to trial, and if there's no need for a trial, there's no need for his testimony. If the case does go to trial, the cops can argue that revealing his identity will ruin his value as an informant. If worst comes to worst and somebody insists, the cops can just say they can't find their informant (which has the advantage of being true). The prosecutor doesn't really need the informant anyway because he's got a big pile of drugs he can show off.

On the other hand, if the cops didn't find any drugs during the raid then the informant isn't needed because there's no criminal case. Either way, like Cinderella at the ball, the informant just vanishes from the scene.

Unless something goes wrong.

In A Cinderella Affidavit, a cop gets killed during the drug raid. This brings down a whole lot of attention on just why the cops raided the location and what the informant saw when he was there. It takes a novel for it all to play out.

Knowing what a Cinderella affidavit is turns out to be helpful in understanding a number of real-life stories. For example, when Atlanta cops killed a 92-year old grandmother during a drug raid, a lot of people wanted to know why the cops thought there would be drugs in her house. The resulting federal investigation alleged that although the informant was real, he made his statement after the cops framed him with planted drugs. The cops also allegedly lied about there being security cameras at the house to justify a no-knock warrant. If all had gone according to plan, the problems with the affidavit would probably never have come to light.

Then there's the drug raid in Cheseapeake, Virginia on the 17th of this month, in which officer Jarrod Shivers was shot and killed, allegedly by the occupant of the house, Ryan Frederick. On their warrant application, police said they had a confidential informant who had seen a marijuana grow operation in the garage. Almost a week after the raid, police finally announced they had found some marijuana in the home, but they wouldn't say how much. Meanwhile, Frederick says that no one was in his home around the time specified in the affidavit, but there were signs of a break-in. Did the cops raid this guy's house on the word of a burglar? Did they mention that in the affidavit? Or was that something else that would vanish when the party was over?

I've been reading about botched drug raids for a while, and it seems that a non-trivial percentage of them turn out to have problems with the facts asserted by the officers applying for the warrant. Do you think that's a characteristic of botched drug raids? Or do you think we'd find the same kinds of problems in all the successful drug raids if we ever bothered to look?

In 1982, Andrew Wilson confessed to his lawyers, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, that he had robbed a McDonald's on Chicago's south side and killed security guard Lloyd Wycliffe with a shotgun. Bound by the confidentiality of attorney-client communications, the lawyers were unable to tell anyone about Wilson's confession.

They remained silent even as another man, 54-year old Alton Logan, was arrested for the murder. He was tried, convicted, and sent to jail for life.

Although attorney-client privilege prevented the lawyers from revealing their client's confession, they did manage to get Wilson's permission to reveal the truth after his death.

He finally died this last November, and on January 11, Kunz and Coventry got a judges's ruling that they could go public with his confession. After 25 years in jail, Alton Logan may be getting a new trial.

(The full story is told in a terrific piece of news writing by Tribune reporter Maurice Possley. It's a more complicated and more interesting story than my short summary.)

I first heard about this in a post by Chicago's own Second City Cop entitled "Kill All the Lawyers." He has this to say:

What is truly amazing to us is it seems these two scumbag lawyers look like they want to be praised for keeping an innocent man behind bars for 26 years because they wrote a notarized affidavit in 1982 and kept it in a locked box since then.

We'll say this - Doctor/Client privilege can be pierced in extreme circumstances. Under certain conditions, the doctor is obliged by law to report certain things. Husband/Wife privilege can be broken, most times voluntarily by one party or the other. You can't tell us that Lawyer/Client privilege is the only thing impregnable in all circumstances? The law needs to be reformed if so.

He's certainly got it right that this was an awful situation, but it's hard to see a way around this without gutting attorney-client privilege. Every accused person needs counsel. As one of SCC's commenters points out, "I can tell you have never had a case put on you by [Internal Affairs Division]."

SCC goes on to ask,

So who does Alton Logan sue now? Kunz and Coventry? Wilson's "estate"? Illinois?

It wasn't Kunz and Coventry who put Alton Logan in jail for two and a half decades. It was the Chicago Police who caught the wrong man and the Cook County State's Attorney who prosecuted him.

Wilson's lawyers did what the ethics of their profession requires of them. The assigned role of criminal defense lawyers is to represent their client's liberty interest at all costs. As ugly as the situation was, they were doing their job.

In yet another odd twist to this story, Andrew Wilson and his brother were arrested for murdering two police officers, and they later accused Police Commander Jon Burge of torturing them during questioning. Burge was investigated for this and other allegations of torture, and he was eventually fired.

However, too much time had passed since the alleged incidents of torture for Burge to be charged. The scandal remains controversial to this day and has arisen as an issue in the current race for Cook County State's Attorney.

Wilson had received some accolades for his role in bringing the Burge scandal to light, but now we know that through it all he was keeping a secret that was ruining Alton Logan's life one day at a time.

Update: I just noticed that Capital Defense Weekly has linked to this article. I guess that would be the worst case scenario. A life sentence is only second-worst case.

The Revolution Is Coming! The Revolution Is Coming!

Well, I can hope, can't I?

In February, rookie Cincinnati Police Officer Elizabeth Phillips responded to a pair of car crashes but didn't ticket anyone. That omission annoyed her boss, so Phillips wrote a pair of tickets. The drivers were long gone, however, so she decided to forge their signatures on the ticket and throw away their copies.

This made it appear that both drivers had signed a promise to appear in court when in fact they didn't even know they'd been cited for traffic violations. When neither one showed up on the assigned court date, the judge issued warrants for their arrest.

To the credit of the Cincinnati police, when one of the drivers complained, the department investigated and figured out what happened. Phillips was arrested for the forgery and fired from the police department.

All may not be as it seems, however. Although Phillips was arrested, the grand jury refused to indict her. That's amazing, considering that grand juries are usually accused of being so under the prosecutor's thumb that they'll indict a ham sandwich. But apparently not a lying cop. Almost makes you wonder how hard the prosecutor was trying.

Phillips had another good piece of "luck."  Even though she was arrested in May, her disciplinary hearing wasn't until September, and she wasn't fired until October. Conveniently for her, that was 2 weeks after her probationary period ended, which means she was covered by the police union contract. The union has brought the matter to arbitration.

I suppose it's possible Phillips the rookie cop didn't realize the consequences of her act. Like any bureacracy, the police department probably has a lot of red tape, and maybe she thought this was just another case of fudging some useless bit of paperwork.

Then again, given how the department seems to be covering for her after the fact, maybe Cincinnati cops do this sort of thing all the time, and she just made the mistake of doing it to someone in a position to make a fuss about it.

While we're trying to figure that out, consider this astounding quote from the Cincinnati Enquirer story:

“I can’t think of anybody who was fired for (non-criminal) reasons whose job we haven’t gotten back,” said Kathy Harrell, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 69, the Cincinnati police union.

Do you think Harrell realizes what she just said? Apparently, once you're a Cincinnati police officer, the only way your job performance could be bad enough to get you fired is if you are convicted of a crime. If you just suck at being a cop, you have nothing to worry about.

Chicago cops complain a lot about the way they're treated in the local media, which seems to give voice to every complaint about the police. If a neighborhood has a high crime rate, the newspapers publish stories about inadequate policing. When an officer shoots someone, the media is full of family members' allegations that the shooting was unnecessary or racially motivated. On the police blogs, officers are full of outrage at what they see as unfair treatment.

But that's not to say there aren't real problems within the department:

[Chicago Police Officer Jerome] Finnigan, 44, already at the center of a widening probe of corruption, kidnapping and robbery in the Police Department's Special Operations Section, was charged Wednesday with plotting the murder-for-hire of a former police officer.

...

In telephone recordings made last week, Finnigan and the officer discussed whether they should hire a member of a Hispanic street gang or a "professional hit man" to kill the officer, referring to the planned hit as a "paint job," authorities said.

The recordings also captured the officers talking about the possibility of killing an additional officer, who they believed was also cooperating with authorities, according to the charges.

Authorities said Finnigan and the other officer discussed killing up to four fellow cops.

Fortunately for everyone except Finnigan, according to the story, the officer he was talking to was wearing a wire for the FBI.

Bad stories like this one have been coming out of the Special Operations Section for the last year. The excellant Chicago Tribune article by David Heinzmann and Todd Lighty gives a recap of some of the ugliness.

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By answering that Craigslist ad, Arin Greenwood started down a path that led her and 80 other people to waste several months of their lives on scam jobs for a company called Global Speculator that never really existed. You can read the whole story here.

I doubt her conclusion about what the con artist was trying to do. Or rather, I doubt he was trying to do just one thing. This kind of con is all about stirring up a lot of activity and then taking advantage of any opportunities that come along. He probably tried to find investors, and he may have tried to find vendors that would sell him things on credit.

On the other hand, some people are excoriating her in the comments for being stupid enough to fall for this. That's a bit unfair. First of all, we're reading a condensed version of it all at once. It probably wasn't obvious how crazy this was when it played out slowly over several months.

Second, it's easy to delude yourself when there are many other people involved. It makes the business seem more legitimate, especially if the other people are enthusiastic sales types who are natural company boosters. That's one reason for involving so many people in the con.

Third, it's a lot harder to spot a fake when you've never seen the real thing. Have you ever taken a job with someone who had great goals, but after you've been there a while you realize they have no plan for making those goals a reality? That's the same thing, except the problem is incompetence rather than fraud. It's like getting into relationships with people who turn out to have a lot of problems. When you get older, you learn to spot them sooner.

Finally, a new job is always a test. You want to look good, and no matter what goes wrong, you want to be the kind of employee who gets the job done. It's a case of can-do attitude overriding good judgement.

Hat tip: Mike at C&F.