John Robins, head of England's West Yorkshire Police, said police departments should be able to practice "positive discrimination" in favor of black and Asian applicants in order to increase the number of nonwhite officers in their ranks. Robins insists this would not result in lower standards for officers. Such discrimination is illegal in England and Wales. "I think the time has now come that legislation should change so that we should [use] positive discrimination," he said.
The post Brickbat: A Thumb on the Scale appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Norway has long required publicly listed companies to have women make up 40 percent of their board members. Now, the government is set to expand those quotas to private companies. Under a proposed law, any private company with at least 30 employees and annual revenue of at least 50 million kroner ($4.66 million) would have to have women account for at least 40 percent of its board members. The law would affect around 20,000 firms.
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]]>President-elect Joe Biden has indicated that he will use his executive authority to reverse many of President Donald Trump's immigration policies. Biden likely will move quickly to scrap the ban on travel from 13 countries, most predominantly Muslim, and to reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that granted temporary legal status and protection from deportation to residents brought to the United States without authorization as minors.
Another issue that deserves Biden's urgent attention is stalled legislation in Congress that would expedite green cards for Indian and Chinese professionals, the former facing waits of well beyond their lifetimes. The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act overwhelmingly passed the House in fall 2019. But a companion Senate bill that then–Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) co-sponsored was derailed partly because of resistance from fellow Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. Biden can demonstrate his good faith on immigration by telling Durbin to get on board.
Current law caps the number of employment-based green cards that can be granted each year at 40,000. That is far fewer than the demand for green cards in that category. Making matters worse, nationals from any one country can be granted only 7 percent of the total.
As a result of that rule, a very small share of high-skilled professionals from India and China are able to land green cards even when their petitions have been approved. These two countries send America the bulk of our imported high-skilled talent, typically on H-1B visas. Meanwhile, the green card quotas for countries that don't send much high-skilled talent to the U.S. go unfilled.
The upshot is that an estimated 800,000 immigrants who are working legally in the United States are waiting for green cards, an unprecedented backlog in employment-based immigration. The vast majority are Indians; Chinese are the next biggest category.
An Indian national who applies for a green card now might wait 50 years (or more) to get one. Under current policy, the Cato Institute's David Bier estimates, 200,000 Indians will die of old age while waiting for green cards. The children of such workers qualify for dependent visas until they turn 21, at which point they become "legal Dreamers"—people who have grown up in this country but can't qualify for permanent residence.
The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act would ameliorate this situation in two ways. In the first phase, it would eliminate the 7 percent per-nation cap, letting Indians and Chinese receive 85 percent of green cards in the first and second years, then 90 percent in the third year. The bill also stipulates that no national whose green card petition had been approved would face any delays. After three years, the bill would eliminate the nation-specific cap and award green cards on a first-come, first-served basis.
The legislation would address an unfair policy that lets an I.T. professional from, say, Sweden get a green card within a year while making a similarly situated Indian wait decades. Because of the annual cap on green cards, however, this fix will initially force some people from other countries to wait longer than they do now. A solution to that problem would be to raise the green card cap—or, better, eliminate it right away.
That's where Durbin comes in. An alternative bill proposed by the Illinois senator, the Resolving Extended Limbo for Immigrant Employees and Families (RELIEF) Act, would raise the annual green card cap to a level large enough to clear the existing backlog. That idea was anathema to restrictionist Republicans. In addition to introducing his own bill, Durbin added red tape to the Fairness Act aimed at preventing alleged H-1B abuse by employers, which raised concerns in the business community.
While the RELIEF Act is a superior bill, passing something like the Fairness Act would not preclude coming back and doing better legislation later. At this stage, giving relief to folks who are playing by the rules should be a priority. Biden should impress that upon Durbin and other Democrats who are placing obstacles in the way of incremental reform.
The post It's Time To Fix Green Card Quotas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new lawsuit is challenging a California law that requires corporations to elect a minimum number of women to their boards of directors.
On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state official in charge of administering SB 826. That law, passed in 2018, requires that, by 2020, all publicly traded companies headquartered or incorporated in California have at least one woman on their board of directors.
Come 2022, companies with five-member boards will need to have at least two female directors. Firms with six or more directors will need at least three women on their board.
Failing to fulfill the law's gender quota or to properly report the composition of their boards to the state can net companies fines of $100,000 for the first violation, and $300,000 for each subsequent violation. Each board position required to be occupied by a woman, but isn't, counts as a separate violation.
The purpose of the law, according to its sponsor, state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), is to make the top of the corporate ladder more equal and to improve corporate decision making.
"The time has come for California to bring gender diversity to our corporate boards," Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in September 2018. "With women comprising over half the population and making over 70% of purchasing decisions, their insight is critical to discussions and decisions that affect corporate culture, actions, and profitability."
Whatever the intentions behind the law, its means are both unconstitutional and counter-productive, says Anastasia Boden, an attorney with the PLF.
"Equality is meant to allow people to be more than their immutable traits," Boden tells Reason. "This law reduces women to their immutable traits."
Boden and PLF are suing on behalf of their client, Creighton Meland, Jr., a shareholder of California-headquartered OSI Systems, Inc., a defense contractor that currently has an all-male board.
By forcing Meland and other shareholders to consider gender when they vote for board members, reads their lawsuit, California's law "imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination." This, they argue, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The potential constitutional flaws of SB 826 are not news to anyone. Even supporters of the bill have acknowledged that it might not withstand legal challenge.
"There have been numerous objections to this bill, and serious legal concerns have been raised," wrote then-Gov. Jerry Brown in a statement after signing the bill into law. "I don't minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation."
In addition to the PLF's federal lawsuit, there is also a state-level challenge to the law.
That lawsuit was filed by three California taxpayers with the assistance of conservative group Judicial Watch. It argues that the appropriations necessary to enforce the law violate the state constitution by expending money on an explicit gender quota.
The post California Sued Over Law Requiring Corporations To Adopt Woman Quotas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ridgetop Police Chief Bryan Morris submitted his resignation on Friday. The Tennessee city is now without a police force and it's all due to a disagreement over illegal ticket quotas.
In January, FOX 17 released explosive reports that implicated Ridgetop Mayor Tony Reasoner and Vice Mayor McCaw Johnson in a scheme to generate revenue for the city of just over 2,000 by directing the police department as a whole to write a minimum of 210 tickets each month. The officers pushed back and finally took it upon themselves to secretly record Reasoner and Johnson. The recordings were then handed over to FOX 17.
In the recordings, Reasoner and Johnson talk about repayments to the city after the police payroll was $54,000 higher than the revenue from citations. The pair hoped that if the police wrote more tickets, it would generate new revenue that would fund the entire police payroll.
Section 39-16-516 of the Tennessee criminal code bars politicians and state agencies from disciplining a police officer solely based on the officer's ability to meet a ticket quota. The Ridgetop officers have argued that Reasoner and Johnson violated this law by demanding to see bi-weekly ticket reports from each officer. In one of the recordings, Johnson even attempted to leverage a raise for two officers and the rehire of another to encourage officers to meet the quota.
"Law enforcement is not about tickets. It's about trying to cut down on crime. That is a local government taking advantage of its people. That's not what we are here for," Officer Shawn Taylor, who captured the secret recordings on Chief Morris' behalf, declared at the time.
When asked by FOX 17 if he knew that ticket quotas were illegal, Reasoner replied, "Yes, we do. We know." McCaw, after denying that he demanded the quota, added that he was merely interested in "revenue stream."
The fight between the city officials and the police came to a head in June when officials voted to disband the department. After Robertson County Judge Bill Goodman blocked the city's decision, the police department was scaled down from five officers to one—Morris.
Morris submitted his resignation on Friday afternoon, effectively leaving the city without a police department.
The city will now search for a replacement police chief. In the meantime, the Robertson County Sheriff's Department will take over law enforcement operations in the city.
The post A Tennessee Police Department's Last Officer Resigns Over Ticket Quotas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The University of Louisville recently posted a job listing for a tenure-track position in the Department of Physics and Astronomy that specified the position would be filled only with an "African-American, Hispanic American or a Native American Indian." The ad was removed after someone complained it didn't include those with disabilities.
The post No Irishmen Need Apply appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason TV's Nick Gillespie, Riley praises the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s even as he takes aim at affirmative action in higher education, which he says keeps black graduation rates low even as it increases diversity among freshman classes at various univesities. He also argues that the drug war doesn't explain black-on-black violence and ending it won't transform urban America in the way libertarians insist. His book lays out the case against the minimum wage in a chapter called "Mandating Unemployment" and he argues that especially among African Americans, an intact family unit is the best anti-poverty program available.
About 20 minutes.
Produced by Anthony L. Fisher, camera by Meredith Bragg and Fisher, with assistance from Brett Crudgington.
Music: "Applicant" by The Matt Kurz One
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notification when new material goes live.
In 2008, Reason TV talked with Riley about his book about immigrants, Let Them In, and his case for open borders. Watch that here.
Below is a rush transcript of the interview with Jason Riley. Check all quotes for accuracy against video.
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
0:32—Black Experience and Characterizations
reason: At the start of the book, you write that "the sober truth is that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won 4 decades before the Obama presidency. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society. Blacks have become their own worst enemy." And liberal leaders, you go on to say, are essentially abetting that. What is the typical black experience and is there this fixation on the black underclass that no longer exists, or is representative, or what does it mean?
Jason Riley: Well, I don't know that there is a typical black experience, which is progress in and of itself. You have a big black middle class now, most blacks are not poor in this country. But the problems of the black underclass continue to dominate the discussion and rightly so, and they do continue to be representative of blackness writ large, so to speak. We need to talk about these problems and what I'm talking about is culture. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I think there is a hesitancy, particularly among those on the left, to discuss black culture. And I don't know how we're going to address those problems if we're afraid to talk about them.
1:45—Achievements of Civil Rights
reason: And I want to get to this, you say, "Much more disturbing is that half a century after the civil rights battles were fought and won, liberalism remains much more interested in making excuses for blacks than in reevaluating efforts to help them." And you talk about the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 as "liberalism at its best." Civil rights activism set the stage for those victories, what did they achieve?
Jason Riley: Well, the 1964 Act gets at legal discrimination in the country. The 1965 voting rights act makes voter registration possible and actual voting possible. They made this country a more just society and I think with Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, and the Freedom Riders and those folks, what they were fighting for was worth fighting for.
reason: Absolutely necessary?
Jason Riley: Absolutely necessary, and all Americans can be happy that they made this country more just. Then you get Lyndon Johnson coming in and saying, "that's not enough. Equal opportunity is not enough. We need equal results." And I question whether that is a legitimate or a reasonable goal, since you don't see equal results among groups historically in America or anywhere else in the world. Maybe the best you can hope for from government is equal opportunity. Then it's up to those groups to take advantage of those opportunities.
reason: There is no question that the black experience, with the possible exception of the Native Americans, is infinitely more punishing and oppressive of an experience. So it's not completely out of bounds that you would say, you know what, equal opportunity is not enough. I mean, it may be wrong, but you can understand the impulse.
Jason Riley: What have the results been of trying to go beyond that? That's what I look at in this book. Have these efforts helped or harmed black Americans?
3:32—Government Programs Intended to Help Blacks
reason: As you point out in the book, the black unemployment rate is essentially double the white or national average. What were the programs put into place supposedly to help blacks?
Jason Riley: Well, these were anti-poverty programs. And also, wage floors. And I'm talking about minimum wage laws. Davis-Bacon, and so forth. And if you look at black employment prior to the implementation of these policies—you saw much better outcomes. In the 1940s, well into the 1950s you saw black labor participation rates higher than what we have today.
reason: And just to put a button on that, it's insane that in an America that was manifestly more discriminatory and prejudiced, you had blacks participating more…
Jason Riley: Well, that's the point. For all the legacies of slavery, for all the legacies of Jim Crow, they couldn't keep black employment from being essentially parallel with white employment within the same environment.
reason: Young blacks without skills, like all young workers who have relatively low skills, are they priced out of the labor market and then they just can't get work? Or are you saying that it's anti poverty programs that allow them to get by…
Jason Riley: Well it's a number of factors. One is, yes, pricing people out of the labor force. When you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer people get hired. And you are particularly hurting less skilled, less experience workers by raising the cost of hiring them. Now the left sells this as an anti-poverty program, but most poor households are in that category because they have no workers, not because they have workers that are paid too little. You can't confuse poor households with households with minimum wage workers. And a lot of that confusion results in trying to use the minimum wage as an anti-poverty measure.
reason: And the left, or liberals, tend to look at the person who keeps a job and goes from making $4 an hour to $6 an hour…
Jason Riley: …if they keep the job.
reason: …but they ignore the people who never get hired, and they assume those people will keep their job and work at the same number of hours. Let's look at poverty. Between 1940 and 1960, black poverty in America fell by 40 percentage points in 20 years. That's before the civil rights act, before voting rights act, before Brown v. Board of Education…now it continued to fall through the 70s and 80s but at a much slower rate. You had a much stronger black family coming out of slavery, throughout reconstruction, into Jim Crow, two parent households were much more likely among blacks than what you have today. And in some years, according to the census, the rate of two parent households among blacks exceeded that among whites. And the difference today, and I would argue largely as a result of these efforts to help blacks, you have seen the disintegration of the black family. And until blacks repair that damage, and there is significant damage there, I don't see how these other outcomes are going to improve.
6:44—Single Parent Households/Intrusive Policy Programs
reason: What can the government do? If, in fact, single parent households are the problem, what happens?
Jason Riley: Again, to the title of the book, it's not about what I want the government to do, it's what I want the government to stop doing. Stop raising the minimum wage and pricing blacks out of the labor force, stop mismatching kids with schools in the form of affirmative action and setting them up to fail, stop trying to replace a father in the home with a government check.
reason: You opened the book with a discussion of the last time you saw your father. Your parents were divorced, ideally one assumes fathering is in the household with the kids, but you can be a parent and a father while not living in the same household.
Jason Riley: These kids need a father's presence in their lives, and we know all the bad outcomes associated with not having a father present. We have people calling out there for slavery reparations, or another wealth distribution scheme in America to help solve black poverty. Here's a back poverty program: married couples in this country who are black, they have a poverty rate in the single digits, and have for 20 years. There is your anti-poverty program: get married before you have kids. My beef with the black left is that they want to keep the focus on what government or Washington or politicians or whites in general can do for blacks or should be doing for blacks, instead of what blacks can be doing for themselves. This is the polar opposite of what you got in, say, Martin Luther King's generation, who made black self-development a priority. And he was in a long line of civil rights leaders who did that. I quote from Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, both men born slaves, who said 'all we can really ask for from government is equal opportunity.' Then it's up to us to take advantage of these opportunities. Now today you have civil rights leaders saying, 'until racism has been vanquished from America, blacks cannot be held responsible for the criminality, for the attitudes towards education, for the work habits, and so forth.' Again, the complete opposite of the previous civil rights movement…and the reason behind that, is because the civil rights movement has become the civil rights industry. They have a vested interest in keeping a certain narrative out there, to maintain their own relevance. If it really is about black culture, if it really is about a racial conversation that black people need to have among one another, then what the NAACP is out there trying to do, what Jesse Jackson is trying to do, what Al Sharpton is trying to do, is less and less relevant. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book is because there is an audience for what I'm saying, a receptive audience, that agrees with me on these cultural issues, even though the supposed black leaders don't want to talk about it because it's not in their vested interest to do so.
9:35—Younger Generation of Black Leaders
reason: Who are the young generation of black leaders do you think that are sending the right message.
Jason Riley: There are people like Artur Davis, former congressman. Another former congressman Harold Ford Junior has been saying these things…
reason: and Harold Ford Jr. a Democrat from Tennessee.
Jason Riley: I don't think it's necessarily generational. I think you have many ministers in the black community, many black parents who get what I'm saying in this book and want to talk about these issues. Again, they may not self-identify as conservatives, but I think there are a lot of them out there that share the same values.
10:11—Affirmative Action
reason: So, your broad thesis is that a lot of programs that were put in, whatever their intentions, are having negative effects because they allow the perpetuation of a dependency culture, or a culture that gives rise to a lot of social problems. How does affirmative action fit into all that?
Jason Riley: Again, affirmative action is another well-intentioned policy intended to increase the ranks of the black middle class, increase the number of black college graduates. I talk about it in the book mostly in the education sector and what it's done at the higher education level in particular. And what you have is a mismatch problem, and we saw that when California ended its ban on racial preferences back in 1996. What happened after that ban took place is that black graduation rates increased by more than 50%, not only overall, but in some of the more difficult disciplines, like math, science, and engineering, again by more than 50%. So a policy that intended to help increase the number of black graduates was resulting in fewer doctors, lawyers, engineers than we otherwise would have had.
reason: Explain how that happened?
Jason Riley: Well, what happened was that these schools were funneling blacks into environments where they didn't match the educational credentials of the average student at the school, and so they were outmatched. Many of them dropped out or switched to easier majors. After the ban took place, kids were being better matched with schools where they could do the work, and therefore you had better graduation rates. But the way the whole affirmative action debate has evolved: graduation rates aren't the priority! Diversity is the priority! The campus has to look like America, the college catalogue has to be color-coded. Whether kids are actually graduating is a secondary concern at best. The freshman class is what matters. A good example of this in a nutshell, is a study some years ago done at MIT, black kids at MIT. Black kids at MIT scored in the top 10% of the math section of the SAT, of all the kids in the country, of any color. But they were in the bottom 10% of scores in the math section of the SAT, at MIT. So you have these very smart black kids who would be hitting it out of the park at a less selective school, but they're struggling at MIT. But MIT could care less, because their campus looks like America.
12:40—School Choice/Charters
reason: That leads to one of the places where government policy, in the context here, is going in the right direction and it's really getting out of the way of people creating their own culture—which is school choice. You write a lot about K-12 school choice and this is the fascinating issue because it tends to unite libertarian, conservatives, as well as inner-city blacks in particular. Talk a little bit about the value of school choice and why it's a good thing that it seems to be on the rise.
Jason Riley: Well, it works, that's the value of it. And the problem is that this whole debate we have about school choice is not really about whether school choice works, it's about whether public education should be primarily a jobs program for adults. That's the real debate that's going on out there.
reason: What do you mean by that?
Jason Riley: What I mean by that is first of all, it's hugely popular among the very people who want it and need it the most, low income, inner city, black and hispanic people. For decades it is polled off the charts. And I use this as another example of a disconnect between the black rank and file and the black leadership, your Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons, NAACPs, who tend to oppose school choice because they're siding with the unions, who do not like it not because it doesn't work, but because many of these charter schools, and many of these schools where these vouchers would be used aren't organized, and their primary concern are the adults within the system, not the kids. So you see them fighting for laws which have no educational justification. Last In First Out hiring policies? There is no educational justification for that. Hiring teachers after two years in the classroom, giving them a job for life, making them impossible to fire…there is no educational justification for that. Those are job protections. And yet you see the unions fighting for them even to the detriment to the children they claim to represent. And then you see these organizations like the NAACP who take money from the unions, siding with the unions over the kids and the parents of the kids who they claim to represent.
reason: There were no charter schools in 1996, the first one in the country opened its doors in Minnesota in 1997, now there are tens of thousands. What has to happen for it to become the new normal?
Jason Riley: One of the arguments that opponents of charter schools and vouchers make is that they can't be scaled up to replace our public school system. That's a red herring. They don't need to be scaled up. We don't need a KIPP in every neighborhood in America. I live in suburban NYC, we don't need a KIPP up there, the public schools are just fine. We know where we need these schools, we need them in our inner cities, in our most difficult neighborhoods, with the kids facing the most challenges. And that's where these schools want to be located, and that's what we need. We don't need them everywhere, so this argument that 'oh, we can't voucherize the whole system or charterize the whole system, so we can't do anything' is a dodge and should be dismissed out of hand. But where these schools are located—they are getting results. But you do have a leadership out there, from the president on down, who talks one game but his actions do something different. So he talks a lot about school choice, but his administration is trying to shut down a voucher program in Louisiana. He talks a lot about school choice, but he's been trying to shut down the voucher program in DC since the day he entered the oval office. The president of the United States has never found a public school good enough for his own children, either before he was president or since. He tells us, 'be patient, I'll fix those public schools' while his kids attend private schools. And again, he has a whole other agenda, which is to continue his support from labor, from the teacher's unions, from others who have a vested interest in the status quo, no matter what. No matter that that status quo is harming our most vulnerable kids. I think it's appalling.
16:42—Post Racial Society?
reason: Speaking of Obama, when he was elected, many people on both the right and the left—you start your book with the discussion that this is a pretty great moment, that America has moved past a certain stage in race relations. Do you think discussions of race have gotten better or worse? Or at least are we having more now since Obama has become president? And should we look forward to a period—and how would we get there—where race is no longer an open wound that it seems to be in American political and cultural discourse.
Jason Riley: We're not post racial. But I'd argue that the left has no interest in being post racial. They claim they want to be post racial, but they really don't. They want to keep race front and center in our national conversations, because it serves their agenda, that racism is the all-purpose explanation for what ails black America. There are a lot of people making a lot of money on that narrative and they want to keep it out there. There are political parties who gain and keep political power with that narrative out there, and they want to keep talking about it.
17:58—Black Outreach
reason: By the same token, I'm not a partisan one way or another—I don't know that you are, but what is the Republican party doing to send a message to black America? What did Mitt Romney get? What should they be doing and how responsible are they for the fact that they're lucky if they get 5% of the black vote? And there was a time when the Republican party actually was the black party.
Jason Riley: Oh yeah, these things change over time. Loyalties to parties change over time, that's certainly true. There is some black outreach among the GOP. Today you have people like Paul Ryan making an effort. Chris Christie in his reelection bid in NJ, went into Camden, introduced himself—did pretty well among blacks. In the past you've had people like Jack Kemp, known for his work in the inner cities. You had Richard Riordan out in LA, you had Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis, but those still tend to be exceptions. By and large, serious black outreach does not occur among Republican candidates. And I don't ascribe that to racial animosity, I think they're being very pragmatic. They feel they don't need this vote to win, and they feel that time spent courting this constituency that they're not likely to get a big return on is time not spent courting someone else. And I don't think that's really going to change until the Republican party feels they need the black vote to win. You were speaking about immigration earlier. Right now there is a huge debate in the GOP about the Latino vote and whether they can continue to win elections going forward without more of this voting bloc. There is no such discussion about blacks among the GOP right now. I don't think you're going to get one until they feel they need this group to win elections. I wish they would do more black outreach, and the black outreach that they do is pretty much laughable. Going to the NAACP every four years to give a speech is not black outreach. Those folks are probably lost to the GOP. I like what Rand Paul is doing, going to black colleges and trying to get at that younger generation, but that's what you need to do, you need to go into the barbershops, you need to go into the community centers, the churches, introduce yourself. The habit among Republican candidates these days is really to just concede that vote. Make symbolic statements, 'I support school choice,' and maybe that will win me a few votes. You have to do more than that.
The post Black Americans Failed by Good Intentions: Q/A with Jason Riley appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hanners brought his case to court, saying he was fired for speaking out about the quotas. On Monday, U.S. District Judge W. Harold Albritton dismissed his case. Judge Albritton ruled that Hanners did not provide adequate evidence to back up his termination claims, and that the defendants [City of Auburn, Alabama; Thomas Dawson; and Charles Duggan] had grounds for firing Hanners.
The Defendants have reiterated numerous times that the Plaintiff was terminated primarily because he recorded conversations without disclosing the recordings and because he violated a direct order by discussing an internal affairs investigation.
These recorded conversations were the pivotal point that informed the public about Auburn's "numerical goal for contacts" as former Police Chief Tommy Dawson called it. Dawson believed "the officers were misconstruing a numerical goal for contacts as a quota for citations," according to Judge Albritton's summary. Side note: after retiring as police chief, Dawson recently ran unopposed for city council and will be taking his seat in November.
Hanners had argued that his actions were justified by the First Amendment and are entitled to whistleblower protection. The judge responded:
Plaintiff Hanners was a municipal, not a state, employee and, therefore, is not covered by the State Employees Protection Act (Count One). As to his Section 1983 claim (Count Two) alleging a violation of his constitutional right to freedom of speech, he has failed to present to the court sufficient evidence of a genuine issue of material fact, from which any reasonable juror could find that his speaking out in opposition to what he perceived to be a quota system requirement in traffic enforcement was a substantial motivating factor in any adverse employment action taken against him.
At this point, it is unlikely that Hanners' case will ever be heard by a jury. Yet he says he will be releasing all related documents, so that the public can decide for themselves.
"I'm working on making
digital copies and I'll start putting all the documents out there on social media," says Hanners. His Facebook support page can be found here.
This has been huge blow to Hanners, who has already dedicated the vast majority of his time and money towards fighting for reform.
"During all this we've lost our home to foreclosure and had to move in with family, what retirement funds I had invested have been spent trying to pay bills, we are barely getting by and keeping our two daughters fed," says Hanners. "The city [has] also attacked my character and integrity which hurts my chances for future employment. All this to cover up their dirty little secret I recorded and released to the public."
Read Judge Albritton's summary here, and watch "Cop Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket and Arrest Quotas" for the full story.
The post Former Auburn Cop's Ticket and Arrest Quotas Case Dismissed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On the heels of reporting the trend of New York City Taxi and Limousine Officials improperly seizing cars under extremely dubious claims that they are illegal cabs (when they were actually transporting friends or family members of the driver), DNAInfo New York spoke with several inspectors who lay the blame on quotas:
[Alan] Kaeckmeister, and three other TLC enforcement sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while inspectors are tasked with policing yellow cabs and livery cabs, seizing cars suspected of being illegal taxis has become the main focus.
They said the reason is money.
While illegal cab seizures may be a gold mine for a city — those found guilty must pay a fine of at least $600 — the push is also leading to innocent drivers losing their cars, Kaeckmeister and the other sources said.
"They're stopping cars without legal justification all the time," said Kaeckmeister, who in the past year has gone to two tribunal hearings to testify before a judge that his superiors forced him to seize a car when he didn't have the evidence to do so.
DNAInfo described one case where a driver actually thought a taxi commission chief was trying to carjack him. They tussled, and the driver was arrested, but subsequently cleared of allegations by a tribunal.
A commission spokesperson has responded to DNAInfo's reporting by saying all the terrible incidents that have happened took place under the previous leadership. With the Bill de Blasio administration comes a new commissioner, Meera Joshi. She has mandated "refresher training" of the protocol for seizing vehicles and has ordered additional dashboard cameras.
But the whole problem with calling more training is the silly assumption that these officials don't know exactly what they're doing. DNAInfo was told by anonymous sources that underperforming officers are threatened with bad shifts and other forms of retribution. Kaeckmeister said an assistant commissioner once told inspectors that he would not lobby for them to receive pay raises because they weren't snagging enough cars. DNAInfo concludes its latest report:
As for Kaeckmeister, he has given up on a career in law enforcement and is now pursuing a master's degree in divinity and hopes to become a chaplain.
In a 12-page statement he submitted to the DOI last year, he summed up his frustration with the TLC.
"I wanted an entry-level law enforcement position and to help people," he wrote. "However, within a few weeks of starting actually working with the TLC, I can see that the TLC doesn't offer any real value to the public and the enforcement section of it is more or less just a corrupt money-making scam for the city."
In other transportation news from the Big Apple, Lyft will start offering its ride-sharing services there today, after agreeing to submit to the taxi commission's various regulations.
The post N.Y. City Taxi Inspectors Say They've Been Pressured to Seize Cars for the Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>SACRAMENTO—Republican legislators had often been criticized for being divisive when they held up the passage of state budgets to exact concessions—something that has subsided after the 2010 passage of Proposition 25, which requires a simple majority to pass budget bills.
Yet the fading of Republican power has not led to an era of Kumbaya. In fact, the state Capitol recently has been plagued by some of the ugliest and most divisive political battles in years as Democrats fight one another over ethnic-related issues. A new bill that recently passed a Senate committee is likely to keep the hostilities boiling.
The flashpoint was in March, after Asian-American legislators backed away from their previous support of SCA 5, a constitutional amendment that would have asked voters to repeal Proposition 209. That was the 1996 statewide initiative that banned racial and ethnic quotas in the state university systems and other public facilities.
Asian-American voters feared that their kids would face discrimination in university admissions if the new measure passed—and they put pressure on their legislators to back off. But some of SCA 5's supporters, who remain intent on reviving the issue, were livid at how it all played out.
The Sacramento Bee reported on "racially tinged reprisals," including allegations that an unrelated bill by an Asian-American assemblyman was killed by Latino and African-American legislators purely as retribution. Several Latino and African-American legislators withdrew their support for state Sen. Ted Lieu's congressional bid given that Lieu signed a letter asking the Assembly speaker to shelve the bill.
A cooling-off period seems in order, yet some of the same legislators who backed SCA 5 also are backing a bill that could lead to the reinstatement of another controversial ethnic-related policy: bilingual education.
In 1998, voters approved Proposition 227 mandating that public schools teach immigrant students with instruction that would be overwhelmingly in English. Sponsored by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, the measure basically ended public bilingual education programs that were said to have delayed English fluency because they taught kids heavily in their native language. It won with 61 percent of the vote.
The measure wasn't only about methods of English instruction. Supporters of Prop. 227 argued that bilingual education was an impediment to assimilation, so it got caught up in the immigration debates even though Unz had opposed Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that restricted public services to unauthorized immigrants.
Yet the death of bilingual education has remained a sore point for many Latino legislators. Last week, a Senate committee voted 7-0 to approve SB 1174 by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Huntington Park/Long Beach. It would ask voters in November 2016 to "amend" Prop. 227 by deleting the English-immersion requirement and leaving it up to local education officials. The bill is a clear effort to reinstate bilingual-education programs.
Indeed, Lara's statement on the vote laments the reduction of such programs. Given the evidence that immersion is a quicker way to teach immigrants English, bilingual-ed's backers now champion the method as a way to help kids maintain their Spanish-language heritage.
Unz thinks that current legislators don't really remember the old debate, but ultimately will be forced to back down in a fashion similar to what happened after parents learned about SCA 5.
"For most of a full generation, almost all young immigrant students in California have been taught English as soon as they started school and generally learned it perfectly well within a few months," Unz told me on Friday. "If the California politicians and school administrators were crazy and stupid enough to try to switch back to Spanish-almost-only instruction, they'd encounter such a gigantic grassroots revolt they'd be politically annihilated in very short order."
That's a relief, but it still raises a disturbing question: Why are some California legislators so eager to revive these old ethnic debates that will lead to nothing but bitterness and division?
The post California Legislators Fight Divisive Ethnic Battle appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>SACRAMENTO — When my family moved from northwest Ohio to pricey Southern California, we could afford an entry level house but couldn't also spring for private-school tuition for the kids. So we scoured the test-score databases, looking for those neighborhoods where home values were reasonable and public schools were tops.
Given the focus on schools, it will surprise no one that we settled in a city with a majority Asian-American population. On the night the school held a meeting about Advanced Placement, there wasn't parking spot within a mile. Tales of so-called Tiger moms–Asian mothers who impose strict academic standards on their kids–are not fictional. There's a reason Asian-American and Pacific Islander students make up 14 percent of the state's high-school graduates but nearly half of freshmen at Berkeley.
Unfortunately, students from other ethnic groups haven't always had as much success getting into the state's top universities. So Democratic senators in January passed SCA 5, which would have restored racial and ethnic quotas that were stripped from California's public-university systems in 1996 following statewide passage of anti-quota Proposition 209. Their stated goal wasn't to reduce Asian attendance, but given that top-university admissions are a zero-sum game, that would have been an end result.
The new measure, a proposed constitutional amendment that needed a two-thirds legislative vote before putting it on a statewide ballot, was shelved after three Asian-American Democratic senators who had previously voted for the bill removed their support after many of their constituents got wind of the advancing proposal.
"As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children," said Sens. Ted Lieu, Carol Liu and Leland Yee, in a letter last week to Assembly Speaker John Perez. They called for a hold on the bill until its sponsor, Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) has an opportunity to "attempt to build a consensus." Don't expect a consensus soon.
"There was a real grassroots revolt against this effort and it really caught Asian-American Democratic legislators by surprise," said Lance Izumi, an education expert at the conservative Pacific Research Institute. One opponent called SCA 5 "the most racist bill" in the state's history in the Cal Alumni magazine. That's a stretch considering, say, the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment camps, but the article captured the anger that split the Democratic caucus.
"It was interesting to see the Chinese-American community enter the fight when they had not during the 209 fight," said Ward Connerly, who was chairman of the 1996 campaign. But he told me Asian-Americans now understand that their kids would lose out if admissions officials gain the right to discriminate.
Nevertheless, Hernandez has called Prop. 209 a "complete failure" because it led to a less diverse student body. San Diego Democratic Sen. Ben Hueso said in published reports that "Prop. 209 creates a barrier for people of color to access higher education."
Practically speaking, Prop. 209 has meant that admissions to California's elite public universities go to the individuals most qualified to attend them. It's not a barrier for people of color–but a barrier for all students who don't have the best grades and test scores. California has other universities and colleges that accept people whose academic records aren't quite as good.
"These kids can perform if they are given the right quality of education in the K-12 years," Izumi said. Quotas are an attempt to bail out the current, troubled system, he added. A new study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, for instance, found impressive academic gains for Latino students in impoverished Los Angeles neighborhoods who attended charter schools.
Our kids rose to the occasion when placed in a hard-charging academic environment. Their ethnicity wasn't an issue. Likewise, this quota debate misses a more important focus, which should be on helping Latino, African American and other students get the quality education they need to qualify for the best schools on their own.
The post Angry Parents Crush Race-Quota Revival appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this incident of cops caught on tape, an officer in Bethel Heights, Arkansas says he recorded his police chief pushing him to manufacture reasons to make traffic stops and get ticket numbers up. From the local NBC affiliate KNWA:
[Timothy] Brasuell, whose been with the BHPD since 2008, says in an effort to issue more tickets, [the police chief Don] McKinnon encouraged crooked cop behavior.
The voice goes on to say in the recording [sic], "If i seen a vehicle, I could always find some reason to stop them even if I made them do something stupid."
The voice, Brasuell says is McKinnon, goes on to describe his traffic stop method:
"I wanna stop that car load of dumb sh*** in the car, I wanna stop it, but they are not going to do anything wrong. Hell, I'll get behind or the other lane and I'd start crowding them. Kinda dirty pool but i got two or three arrests out of it."
The cop says he played the tape to the county prosecutor and the mayor, but the mayor would only say it was an "internal matter." Trying to defend revelations about quotas in the NYPD during a recent lawsuit, police commissioner Ray Kelly said they were just like performance benchmarks in other industries. Faced with the same kind of reasoning at the Auburn police department, former cop Justin Hanners, featured in a Reason TV doc last month, said: "Streets and fire hydrants don't have Constitutional rights. They don't pay taxes. They don't vote. We're supposed to protect and serve the citizens." Instead, in the last few weeks alone, we heard one Florida sheriff calling his department a "paramilitary organization" and saw cops in Georgia banging on a resident's door at 1:30 in the morning over a "civil fine".
Watch Reason TV on the Auburn cop who whistleblew about ticket quotas in his police department below:
h/t RJ
The post Cop Records Police Chief Pushing Ticket Quotas, Boasting About Always Finding a Reason to Stop Someone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The piece features Justin Hanners, a former member of the Auburn, Alabama police department who refused to keep quiet about "contact" quotas that began after the arrival of Chief Tommy Dawson in 2010 (neither Hanners nor Dawson currently work for the police department).
In response to the video, one viewer made a Facebook group in support of Hanners. The group already has 6,000 members. Another viewer set up a fund for donations to help with ongoing legal proceedings. Hanners' email account has been flooded with support and offers to send groceries and job-placement services. Media outlets are swarming him for interviews and he reports he is happy for the aid and attention.
The police department declined my requests to talk during the making of the documentary. And now the city has now made a statement that there is not a quota system in Auburn:
Chief Register, as well as former Chief Dawson, have made it clear that they do not require quotas in the Auburn Police Division. If any Auburn Police officer is unclear on the expectations of the Chief or his supervisor, Chief Register, Public Safety Director Bill James and I all have open door policies and will be happy to hear their concerns and make our expectations clear.
Hanners kept copies all of his correspondence throughout his grievance process, including a response from the Public Safety Director Bill James specifically addressing Hanners' discomfort with the quotas. James said:
To make 100 contacts, which include among others, traffic stops, issuing warrants, field interviews and arrests, requires about two contacts per shift hour. Making two contacts per hour is not unreasonable and still seems to leave a lot of time to perform other duties that are detailed in your job description. Your supervisors as well as I have an expectation that each employee needs to be productive during their time on shift.
James continues:
This production is measured using different matrix's, including numbers. This is not any different than quantifying miles of streets paved or number of fire hydrants painted.
I asked Hanners to respond to this claim.
"Streets and fire hydrants don't have Constitutional rights. They don't pay taxes. They don't vote. We're supposed to protect and serve the citizens," Hanners said, "They're not to be looked at as inanimate objects that we have to keep rank and file like our streets being neat and our fire hydrants being painted."
The city's statement also says that Hanners' claim that he was fired for violating a gag order is unsubstantiated. But they "cannot comment in detail on the specific basis for the termination." Hanners walked me through his grievance process and the internal affairs investigation:
"Well, the day my grievance was over, I get called into the Chief's office, and was told that some evidence I presented was from an internal affairs investigation and the gag order had been placed and I wasn't supposed to have it. So then the Chief, who is the suspect in my grievance, now starts an internal affairs investigation into me and my partner to see if we somehow compromised his own investigation into his own wrongdoing where he had found he had done nothing wrong. So in this investigation, they found that we had violated a gag order and that I had violated the city's reporting policy by reporting these people. And they ultimately fired me for it and suspended my partner who gave me a statement that said everything I was saying was true."
Auburn Assistant City Manager James Buston is also saying that Reason did not do our journalistic duty:
"They did not even offer us the opportunity to respond before they put it together. It's a pretty shoddy news organization, I would say."
Actually, I have an email response from the police department, with the public safety director copied, declining my interview request.
Here's the video, "Cop Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket and Arrest Quotas":
Update: Assistant City Manager Buston was unaware of my email exchange with the Auburn Police Department and graciously apologized for his statement upon learning about it.
The post Auburn Cop Fired for Resisting Quotas Gets Online Support; City Officials Deny Deny Deny appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"When I first heard about the quotas I was appalled," says former Auburn police officer Justin Hanners, who claims he and other cops were given directives to hassle, ticket, or arrest specific numbers of residents per shift. "I got into law enforcement to serve and protect, not be a bully."
Hanners blew the whistle on the department's tactics and was eventually fired for refusing to comply and keep quiet. He says that each officer was required to make 100 contacts each month, which included tickets, arrests, field interviews, and warnings. This equates to 72,000 contacts a year in a 50,000 person town. His claims are backed up by audio recordings of his superiors he made. The Auburn police department declined requests to be interviewed for this story.
"There are not that many speeders, there are not that many people running red lights to get those numbers, so what [the police] do is they lower their standards," says Hanners. That led to the department encouraging officers to arrest people that Hanners "didn't feel like had broken the law."
Former Reason staffer Radley Balko, now an investigative reporter for the Huffington Post and author of the new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, says that this isn't just a nuisance, it infringes on public safety.
"You have a policy that encourages police to create petty crimes and ignore serious crimes, and that's clearly the opposite of what we want our police to be doing," says Balko.
Hanners repeatedly voiced his concerns through his chain of command, and the department responded that these requirements are necessary for increasing productivity.
Yet Hanners firmly believes that the quotas are entirely revenue driven.
"I had no intention of dropping it," says Hanners, "This is a problem in more places than Auburn, and I think once the people know that they can hold their public officials accountable, it'll change."
The police chief singled out by Hanners retired this July, citing medical reasons.
About 7 minutes.
Written and produced by Tracy Oppenheimer. Camera by Alex Manning.
Music by The Jowe Head Band, "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.
The post Cop Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket and Arrest Quotas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Never mind that lifting the import quotas would benefit candy companies, it would also benefit consumers to the tune of nearly $3 billion per year. Congress has been propping up Big Sugar for decades. This needs to stop! Greed indeed.
The post In the Annals of Chutzpah Big Sugar Takes the Cake appeared first on Reason.com.
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