Reason Magazine - Topics > Crime

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

A Better Way to Fight Crime

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In June 2006, a minor brawl erupted at Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, England. In the aftermath, police arrested Mark Dixie, a chef at the pub, who surprised them by breaking into tears.

He had good reason. As a standard practice in arrests, a DNA swab was taken from him. What the authorities didn't suspect, but he did, is that his DNA would match that of the man who raped and murdered an 18-year-old woman nine months earlier. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

This is just one of many cases that have vindicated the use of DNA in cracking crimes. Britain, which now has the world's biggest collection of such profiles, has found it abundantly useful as a law enforcement tool. In a typical month, police get 3,500 matches between samples recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles in the database.

Now the U.S. government is set to expand its own database to include anyone arrested by federal agents, as well as many foreigners who are detained for one reason or another. It will add more than 1 million samples each year, greatly increasing the chances of getting "cold hits" from crime scenes.

But the expansion alarms some civil liberties advocates, who think it is dangerous to include people who may be innocent. They would prefer to see the files limited to those who have already been convicted of crimes. By that logic, we would throw out the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested but never prosecuted. In reality, we don't. Why? Not because we impute guilt to anyone who is arrested, but because a bigger database is more helpful in solving crimes than a smaller one. And because the only people who stand to be implicated by such information are those who are guilty of later crimes.

We could "protect" innocent arrestees by discarding such helpful identifying information. But we have reached the conclusion that the potential value of preserving it outweighs any burden it places on those who were wrongly arrested.

In some instances, the database can be a boon to the innocent. In 2004, when Chester Turner was implicated in a string of Los Angeles murders through DNA analysis, a man wrongly convicted for three of them was freed from prison.

Opponents of the new system fear that information from the federal bank may someday be used for purposes other than law enforcement—say, screening insurance applicants for certain diseases. But this is a weak excuse for rejecting the administration's proposal.

In the first place, the potential uses of the DNA information kept in databases have been greatly exaggerated. "The profile's not useful for anything much other than identification," says David Kaye, a law and life sciences professor at Arizona State University. "The 'medical' information is, and is likely to remain, no more significant than, say, a blood type."

The actual DNA swabs tell far more. But those are not what goes into the database. The privacy concern is an argument for getting rid of the original samples—not for getting rid of the identifying markers they yield.
Besides, the obvious way to address potential abuses of useful information is by enforcing appropriate rules.

The government might do something alarming with the existing fingerprint files—such as require employers to cross-check prints from all private-sector job applicants. But you don't need to throw out the fingerprints of anyone not convicted to prevent such misuse, as we have found. You can prevent it by not allowing it.

In the case of the DNA database, the looming imposition on the guiltless is minimal. Under the proposed policy, when someone is arrested or detained, his DNA will be taken and a profile included in the federal collection. If he is not convicted, though, that profile will be expunged on his request.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks the removal should occur automatically. But if keeping the profile is of no concern to the innocent person in question, it's hard to see why it should be of concern to the rest of us. Those who consider it an intolerable invasion of privacy, after all, will avoid it. Those who couldn't care less won't.

DNA analysis is one of the most valuable instruments ever devised for snaring the guilty and exonerating the innocent. This expansion will make it even more potent.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Grand Theft Smasheroo

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:16:00 EDT

The latest installment of the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto will bust up sales records like Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) driving home from Capitol Hill, say industry analysts:

The launch of "Grand Theft Auto 4" is expected to be the biggest entertainment event of the year, with first-week sales forecast to be up to $400 million, beating those of last year's "Halo 3" from Microsoft Corp.

More here.

As sales mount for the game, now set in New York-like "Liberty City" and (hopefully featuring a whore-banging, money-laundering, hypocritical pol a la Eliot* Spitzer), expect the protests to mount against the game, which has somehow helped add to generally lower crime rates in the United States.

[*]: Spelling corrected due to input from reader Adam Scavone.

Openly Armed = Frequently Hassled

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:31:00 EDT

In Ohio, where the state constitution declares that "the people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security," supporters of that right waged a long battle to overturn an 1859 ban on carrying concealed firearms. A constitutional challenge was successful at the trial and appeals court levels but rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court. The state legislature finally enacted a nondiscretionary carry permit law in 2004. Since then anyone 21 or older with a clean record who passes a safety course has been eligible for a permit. A recent story in The Columbus Dispatch notes a fact that was widely overlooked during the debate over concealed carry in Ohio: Openly carrying a gun was never illegal in Ohio, and it does not require a permit, although people who tote rifles or strap pistols to their belts in public can expect "some unwanted attention from police officers":

Philip Turner, 30, discovered that in July when he walked from his Hilliard apartment to his parked truck wearing a gun on his belt. At the time, Turner worked protecting banks' ATMs as they were serviced and delivering diamonds to jewelry stores.
An undercover agent with the Ohio Investigative Unitthe police agency that enforces the state's alcohol, tobacco and food-stamp laws -- saw the gun and quickly ordered him against his truck with his hands on his head.
"He came up and treated me like a felon for absolutely no reason at all," Turner said. "There wasn't even a suspicious action on my part to warrant him taking this action against me. Had I been out waving a gun around the parking lot, (then) yeah."
After being detained for about 30 minutes, and after Hilliard police arrived at the agent's request, Turner was released without charges. An internal investigation that concluded this week found that neither Agent Timothy Gales, who had stopped Turner, nor his partner, Betty Ford, did anything wrong.
However, it also revealed that Gales did not know it was legal for Turner to carry a gun openly, said Lindsay Komlanc, spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety. As a result, more than 100 agents in the unit are to attend a mandatory refresher course on Ohio's gun laws over the next couple of months, she said.

In addition to avoiding hassles from police officers who are ignorant of the law, concealed carry offers the advantages of not alarming passers-by and of keeping criminals uncertain about who is packing. The latter feature means that even the unarmed can benefit from the potential deterrent effect. Whether that effect has had a measurable impact on crime remains controversial in Ohio as elsewhere. The violent crime rate in Ohio, which had been declining pretty steadily since the early 1990s, continued the downward trend in 2004, the year concealed carry permits were first issued, went up slightly in 2005, then down slightly in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has data.

[Thanks to Dan Gifford for the tip.]

You Can't Always Believe Your Eyes

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Editor's Note: Steve Chapman is on vacation. The following column was originally published in February 2005.

In September 1985, Dennis Brown heard the words that sent him to prison for rape. The victim took the stand and had no doubt who had attacked her. "I had his face this close for at least 20 minutes," she said, holding her hand inches from her face, "and he's the man." Brown was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to life without parole.

But in October 2004, the 36-year-old Brown walked out of the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, having been exonerated by DNA evidence. Prosecutors dropped the charges. After being locked up for 19 years, more than half his life, an innocent man was free.

Like many people in his ill-starred position, Brown was snared by a mistaken identification. The victim picked him out of a police lineup, and her testimony provided the bulk of the evidence against him.

His case illustrates the dangers of relying on what used to be seen as the best kind of evidence—a person who was present at the scene of the crime who can attest, "I saw him do it." Time and again, thanks to DNA evidence, we've seen that a victim can be absolutely sure in identifying her attacker—and be absolutely wrong. Amy Klobuchar, prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, says faulty identifications are "the single most common error" generating bad convictions. [Ed—Klobuchar vacated this position in 2006 when she was elected to the U.S. Senate.]

What is most disturbing is that the mistakes we know about represent only a tiny share of the total. Most of the exonerations involve rapes—where DNA can definitively establish the perpetrator. But police rarely find bodily fluids in robberies, muggings, burglaries and other far more common crimes. So if someone tabs an innocent person, the innocent person probably won't ever be cleared.

Many of the mistakes occur during police lineups, where witnesses try to pick out the perpetrator from a group of people or pictures. Experiments have shown that when confronted with several possible suspects at once (a "simultaneous" lineup), the witness is prone to choose whoever most resembles the actual criminal - even if the actual criminal is absent. Presenting the choices one at a time (a "sequential" lineup) is more likely to yield a correct identification.

In 2001, the New Jersey attorney general required all police departments to change the way they handle lineups to prevent errors. The change that got the most attention was the adoption of sequential lineups. But Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has been the chief pioneer in studying eyewitness identification, says that was not the most important reform. Even more critical was the use of "double-blind" testing—where the police officer conducting the lineup doesn't know which of the people is thought to be the guilty party.

Why does it matter? Because an officer can consciously or unconsciously steer a witness. In 2005, Wells, speaking at a Minneapolis conference on wrongful convictions, said that when a witness chooses the "wrong" suspect, the lineup administrator may say, "Are you sure?" or "Take another look at No. 3." But when the witness chooses the right suspect, the response may be, "Tell me about him."

Sometimes the police buttress the witness's memory by saying something like, "You got the right one." In an armed robbery in Iowa, Wells recalls, the victim was asked in the trial how detectives responded when she chose the defendant's photo. "They clapped," she said.

Normally, the cops aren't trying to manipulate the witness; they're just being human. But occasionally, the tilt is intentional. In 2002, the city of Chicago was ordered to pay $15 million to James Newsome because two detectives had rigged the lineup in which he was identified, leading to his mistaken conviction for murder. One witness said he was repeatedly told to look at Newsome. Newsome said he saw one detective point him out to another witness.

Problems like these can be avoided—by turning the lineup over to someone who knows nothing about the case, or by presenting the photos so the administrator can't see them, perhaps on a computer. Such changes have worked well in New Jersey, where 91 percent of respondents to a statewide survey of law enforcement agencies said the new methods created no major problems.

Eyewitness testimony can be extremely useful in catching criminals, but it needs safeguards to make sure it doesn't nab the innocent. After all the wrongful convictions in recent years, no one should have trouble seeing that.

Honey, Remember Our First-Time Offense?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:55:00 EDT

This 20/20 story aired a couple weeks ago, but I missed it: John Stossel tells the tale of a Texas man condemned to a life of stigmatization as a "sex offender," lumped in with child molesters and serial rapists, because he had consensual sex with his not-quite-16-year-old girlfriend when he was a 19-year-old high school senior. A state legislator defends the registration requirement for a man whose "victim" is now his wife, saying the law is the law, we're a nation of laws, and too many people in America expect a second chance when they do something wrong.

More on sex offender registration requirements and residence restrictons here, here, and here.

[Thanks to Veronique de Rugy for the tip.]

'Police Are Like Vampires'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:11:00 EDT

As they wait to hear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will rule that the District of Columbia's firearm restrictions are unconstitutional, D.C. police are grabbing guns while they can. Under a program scheduled to begin in a couple weeks in the Washington Highlands neighborhood, police will go door to door, asking for permission to search. Any guns they discover will be confiscated and destroyed, unless they are linked to a crime. The police are promising "amnesty" for violations of the city's gun ban and for any other crimes they happen to find evidence of during the searches. This is hard to believe on its face: If they find a few kilos of heroin, piles of cash, or a severed head, they're not going to ask any questions? Even if they make no immediate arrests, what guarantee is there that they won't be back later, with a warrant ostensibly based on an independent source of information? Not surprisingly, residents are suspicious:

"Bad idea," said D.C. School Board member William Lockridge. "I think the people should not open your doors under any circumstances, don't even crack your door, unless someone has a warrant for your arrest."
Ron Hampton, of the Black Police Officers Association, said he doesn't expect many in the community to comply.
"This is one of those communities where the police even have problems getting information about crimes that are going on in the community, so to suggest, now, that the police have enough community capital in their hand that the community is going to cooperate with them, I'm not so sure that's a good idea," Hampton said.

In Boston, meanwhile, police have scaled back plans for a similar gun hunt in "four troubled neighborhoods" after unexpected resistance from the community. They promise to search only the rooms of minors, with permission from their parents or guardians, and "keep the discovery [of a gun] confidential under most circumstances." An ACLU attorney notes that public housing residents could be evicted for having guns, to which a local advocate of the searches responds by suggesting that police "would support any family that cooperated with the police and oppose their eviction." The Boston Globe says critics complain that "police will not guarantee that residents would face no criminal charges if guns or drugs were found":

"Police are like vampires. They shouldn't be invited into your homes," said Jamarhl Crawford, chairman of the New Black Panther Party in Roxbury, who moderated the meeting [of 100 residents at the Roxbury Family YMCA].
"Vampires are polite; they're smooth," he said in an interview the following day. "But once they get in, the door closes. Havoc ensues."

If you are wondering why anyone would consent to a search of his home when there's evidence of a crime there, there are two main explanations: 1) The person who consents may not know about, say, the bag of marijuana in the dresser drawer, and 2) people are intimidated by the police and may feel constrained to say yes even when they know it will get them into trouble. They may think that police will find a pretext to do the search anyway, in which case they will be angrier, more destructive, and possibly violent. In neighborhoods where residents tend to view police as an occupying force rather than peace officers there to assist them, that reaction may be especially likely.

[Thanks to John Kluge and Brett Wallis for the tip.]

Gratuitous D.B. Cooper Citing

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:03:00 EDT

He wasn't quite Patty Hearst or Bigfoot, but missing skyjacker D.B. Cooper, last seen jumping out of a big old jet airliner somewhere over Oregon with $200,000 in extorted cash, was one of the weird figures who made the 1970s such as a bizarre decade.

Now his parachute might have been found. Not that means the case is solved:

If it is Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery - where he apparently landed - but it will raise another, Carr said.
In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.
"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window."

More here.

The FBI has been wasting its time and your tax dollars on this very cold case very recently.

That's Why You Have to Put Chips in Their Heads

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:32:00 EDT

In the Hartford Advocate, Hit & Run regular Jennifer Abel dissects a law proposed by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that would make anyone convicted of a crime against a child subject to "continued supervision, either in person or through remote monitoring, of the person's ingoing and outgoing e-mail and other Internet-based communication"; examination of "the person's history of [W]eb sites visited"; and "periodic unannounced inspections of the contents of the person's computer or any other device with Internet access." Abel notes that such supervision is easily accomplished but also easily evaded:

What's this guy going to do if he wants to go online without police oversight? For starters, he can go to a public library. Or an Internet café. With a few hundred in cash, he can even buy a cheap, untraceable laptop and bring it to a coffeehouse or restaurant with open wireless Internet access, or drive through town looking for a wireless hot spot. (Depending on where he lives, he could access several of his neighbors' unsecured wireless connections from his own apartment. And so long as he doesn't download movies or other data-heavy files, chances are his neighbors will never know he's there.)
Yes, it'll be easy for him to get online without supervision. And once he's there, he can open an unlimited number of free and anonymous Web e-mail accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo, and register to join chat forums where kids hang out. The law won't prevent him from contacting your kids; at most, it will make such contact slightly more inconvenient.

The Blumenthal-backed bill also would require that ISPs provide Connecticut subscribers with parental control options. As Abel notes, the courts may view this mandate as unconstitutional interference with interstate commerce. In any case, the need for it is debatable:

We couldn't find a comprehensive list of every single ISP selling Web access somewhere in Connecticut, but a quick poll of our officemates yielded 13 companies, mostly familiar names like Comcast, AT&T, Optimum and Juno. All 13 offer parental controls as part of their packages. By contrast, we couldn't find a single ISP without this option.

Last month I noted a study that debunks the stereotypical view of Internet-related sex crimes, which overwhelmingly involve teenagers who knowingly and voluntarily meet adults for sex, as opposed to prepubescent children tricked and coerced by molesters.

[Thanks to NoStar for the tip.]

Are Guns on Campus Uniquely Dangerous?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:11:00 EST

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a group that formed in the wake of last year's Virginia Tech massacre, has attracted new support following last month's shootings at Northern Illinois University, which once again revealed the limitations of campus security measures. On Wednesday The New York Times reported on the debate over an Arizona bill that would allow concealed carry on campus. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, at least 12 other states are considering similar legislation. Utah is the only state that already allows guns on campus.

As I said after the Virginia Tech murders, I am sympathetic to the idea that students and faculty members who are licensed to carry guns should be allowed to carry them on campus. "Gun-free zones" clearly do not protect people from gun-wielding maniacs (or ordinary criminals or scary ex-boyfriends) and may well attract them to places where they know their victims will be unarmed. Guns in the right hands can deter attacks or at least cut them short.

The downside of letting people carry weapons on campus is the same as the downside of letting them carry weapons anywhere else: Everyday arguments might escalate into deadly violence, accidents might happen, police (assuming they ever arrived in time) might mistake a law-abiding gun owner for an attacker, drunken gun owners could start whooping it up by wildly firing shots into the air, etc. These are the same arguments that gun controllers deployed in opposing the liberalization of concealed carry laws across the country, and the nightmare scenarios never materialized, even though 39 states now have nondiscretionary permit policies. On the whole, permit holders turned out to be remarkably well-behaved, committing crimes at a lower rate than the general population and rarely doing anything bad enough to lose their permits.

Instead of an increase in violence, adoption of Florida-style concealed carry policies has been followed by a decline in violence. The extent to which that decline can be attributed to more guns in the hands of law-abiding people in public places remains a matter of much controversy. But one thing seems pretty clear: The fears stoked by opponents of concealed carry liberalization were unjustified. Are there good reasons to think their dark predictions about guns on campus will be any more accurate?

[Thanks to KD Sim for the Inquirer link.]

Oakland Police Try to Corner the Market in Guns

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:10:00 EST

Speaking of lame gun control schemes, the Independent Institute's Alex Tabarrok takes aim at gun buy-back programs in The Oakland Tribune and blows them to kingdom come:

In an authoritative study, the National Academy of Sciences reported that "the theory underlying gun buy-back programs is badly flawed and the empirical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these programs."...
Imagine that instead of guns, the Oakland police decided, for whatever strange reason, to buy back sneakers. The idea of a gun buyback is to reduce the supply of guns in Oakland. Do you think that a sneaker buyback program would reduce the number of people wearing sneakers in Oakland? Of course not.
All that would happen is that people would reach into the back of their closet and sell the police a bunch of old, tired, stinky sneakers.
Gun buybacks won't reduce the number of guns in Oakland. In fact, buybacks may increase the number of guns in Oakland.
Imagine that gun dealers offered a guarantee with every gun: Whenever this gun gets old and wears down, the dealer will buy back the gun for $250.
The dealer's guarantee makes guns more valuable, so people will buy more guns.
But the story is exactly the same when it's the police offering the guarantee.

At $250 per gun, the Oakland program cost $250,000, most of which was not even budgeted. Tabarrok notes that "the first two people in line at one of the three buyback locations were gun dealers with 60 firearms packed in the trunk of their car." He wonders why police don't cut out the middlemen and buy guns directly from manufacturers.

[Thanks to Don Boudreaux for the tip.]

Gun Control Non Sequiturs

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:07:00 EST

While researching my column for this week (about Barack Obama's position on gun control), I came across this lame response from Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, to the recent shootings at Northern Illinois University (NIU):

Do we give up and say we can't do anything about these tragedies? Or do we take common-sense steps today to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons?...
Over the years, the Brady Campaign has proposed numerous common-sense measures to reduce and prevent gun violence. It may be difficult to stop "suicide shooters" like the Northern Illinois University killer, but there are steps we can take as a nation.
We can require background checks for every gun transaction in America. Current Federal law requires that only Federally licensed gun dealers do a computer check on the criminal backgrounds of purchasers who buy guns from them. Yet there is no such restriction on unlicensed sellers who sell guns at gun shows, from the trunk of their cars or at their kitchen tables. If we want to make it harder to dangerous people to get dangerous weapons, we must close this loophole, and require that all gun buyers undergo a background check.
We can limit bulk purchases of handguns to cut down on the illegal gun trade. Gun buyers currently have no Federal limits on the number of guns they can buy at one time. Gun traffickers take advantage of the unlimited number of guns they can purchase at a time in order to sell guns to criminals and gangs....
We can also ban the sale of military-style assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines. One thing the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shooters had in common was that they both used high capacity ammunition magazines that would have been prohibited under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004.

The NIU murderer, Steven Kazmierczak, legally purchased the shotgun and three handguns he used, which did not qualify as "assault weapons," from a licensed dealer on three trips over seven months, and there does not seem to have been anything about his background that disqualified him from owning firearms. So the only possibly relevant suggestion offered by Helmke is to reimpose a 10-round federal limit on the size of magazines. But considering that Kazmierczak fired the shotgun six times and the handguns 48 times; that it takes just a few seconds to switch magazines; and that police arrived about six minutes after the attack started, by which time Kazmierczak already had killed himself, it is doubtful that the death toll was any higher than it would have been had he been carrying 10-round magazines. In fact, I cannot recall reading an account of a mass murder in the U.S. where "high capacity" magazines made a demonstrable difference.

The rest of Helmke's "common-sense steps" could not possibly have stopped this attack. So why trot them out and pretend otherwise? Because that's what gun controllers routinely do, as I noted in a 1994 article for reason. Their lobbying, publicity, and fundraising imperatives prevent them from admitting the truth: With something like 200 million guns in circulation and no reliable way of predicting which quiet graduate student will go on a rampage one day, this sort of thing is bound to happen occasionally. No policy short of wholesale firearm confiscation can prevent such incidents, although (as I've argued) allowing law-abiding people to carry concealed weapons in heretofore "gun-free zones" might help reduce the number of injuries and deaths after an attack starts.

Also, They Can't Reach Through the Screen and Grab Your Child, à la Freddy Krueger

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:20:00 EST

Based on surveys of young Internet users and interviews with government investigators, University of New Hampshire researchers have concluded that the risk from online pedophiles is not trumpeted often or loudly enough. Just kidding. In the latest issue of American Psychologist, they debunk the following misconceptions, as summarized by McClatchy Newspapers:

Myth: Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.
Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. "The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours," [sociologist Janis] Wolak said.
Myth: Internet predators are pedophiles.
Finding: Internet predators don't hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak's team determined from interviews with investigators.
Myth: Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.
Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.
Myth: Internet predators trick or abduct their victims.
Finding: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.
Myth: Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.
Finding: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.
Myth: Online interactions with strangers are risky.
Finding: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don't know. What's risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.
Myth: Internet predators go after any child.
Finding: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.

Here (PDF) is a press release about the study, produced by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, and here (PDF) is the full text.

Aguirre: The Wrath of Allah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:39:00 EST

Remember that story about people who run around in costumes claiming to be superheroes? I have another follow-up:

Fernando Aguirre, locally known as Osama Bin Laden, patrols a slum in Bogota. Aguirre, who claims to be the son of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, patrols the most dangerous slums of Bogota and lives from the contributions received from those seeking his protection. Aguirre informs police on petty crimes being committed and is allowed by authorities to brandish his fake rifle.

The costumed crusader in action:

Jason Vorhees, Crime Fighter

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:45:00 EST

Opponents of efforts to regulate or censor violent entertainment sometimes argue that, rather than encouraging imitation, it reduces real-life violence by providing a release for aggressive impulses. Here's a new twist on that argument: A paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which was held over the weekend, suggests that violent movies reduce violent crime not by providing catharsis but by keeping young men with violent tendencies occupied:

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.
"You're taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters," said one of the authors of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. "In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you're going to increase violent crime."

Looking at crime rates and movie audience data, Dahl and his co-author, U.C.-Berkeley economist Stefano DellaVigna, found that "on days with a high audience for violent movies, violent crime is lower." They estimate that the difference amounts to about 1,000 fewer assaults per weekend.

The New York Times notes that Dahl, a Mormon who does not let his children watch violent films, "recently purchased a DVD player that strips out brutal or sexual images" and "eschews violent films himself, professing discomfort even with 'Schindler's List,' the epic portrayal of the Holocaust." It also quotes a psychologist who claims "there are hundreds of studies done by numerous research groups around the world that show that media violence exposure increases aggressive behavior."

In a 20000 column, I explained why such statements are misleading. Jib Fowles analyzed "the bum rap against TV violence" and the motivations behind it in the March 2001 issue of reason

Lest You Think Southerners Are Comfortable With Incest

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:51:00 EST

Here's a weird wrinkle in Georgia's sex offender law that I discovered while researching this week's column: In addition to people who engaged in oral sex ("sodomy") as teenagers, the list of offenders who are required to register includes people who commit "incest" as teenagers or adults. Section 16-6-22 of the Georgia code defines incest this way (emphasis added):

A person commits the offense of incest when the person engages in sexual intercourse with a person to whom he or she knows he or she is related either by blood or by marriage as follows:
(1) Father and daughter or stepdaughter;
(2) Mother and son or stepson;
(3) Brother and sister of the whole blood or of the half blood;
(4) Grandparent and grandchild;
(5) Aunt and nephew; or
(6) Uncle and niece.

This definition covers not only parents' sexual abuse of their children but consensual sex between relatives. One of the plaintiffs in the federal suit challenging Georgia's sex offender restrictions, for example, was accused of having sex with his sister when he was 13. Such behavior is certainly troubling, but it does not indicate that he's a child molester. In fact, the incest definition extends to sex between grown siblings as well as sex between people who are not even related by blood, such as a woman and her aunt's husband. Yet the minimum punishment is 10 years in prison, followed by registration as a sex offender, with all the restrictions that entails, for at least 10 years more.

Georgia Supreme Court Rejects Banishment of Sex Offenders

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:01:00 EST

Last week the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously overturned that state's draconian restrictions on where sex offenders may live after they're released from prison. Georgia's law prohibited sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and other places where children may gather, including the state's 150,000 or so school bus stops. The upshot was that entire counties, except for a few spots here and there (where there might not have been any actual housing), were off limits. Worse, the opening of a playground or day care center, or the designation of a new bus stop, could render previously legal locations illegal, forcing sex offenders to move repeatedly. "Under the terms of that statute," the state Supreme Court noted, "it is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected." The court ruled that the law violated the Fifth Amendment's ban on uncompensated takings of property.

A PDF of the decision is available here. Kerry Howley called attention to the wide reach and onerous requirements of state and local sex offender residence restrictions in a reason online essay last year. In a column last fall, I noted that such restrictions are part of a broader political fashion.

Justice Collides With the Rule of Law

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:51:00 EST

According to The New York Times, FBI investigators have concluded that at least 14 of the 17 Iraqi civilians killed by Blackwater guards at Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16 died as a result of unjustified shootings:

Investigators found no evidence to support assertions by Blackwater employees that they were fired upon by Iraqi civilians. That finding sharply contradicts initial assertions by Blackwater officials, who said that company employees fired in self-defense and that three company vehicles were damaged by gunfire.
Government officials said the shooting occurred when security guards fired in response to gunfire by other members of their unit in the mistaken belief that they were under attack. One official said, "I wouldn't call it a massacre, but to say it was unwarranted is an understatement."

The FBI agents found that three of the fatal shootings may have been justified by a fear of attack (a fear that in each case proved to be mistaken). By contrast, the Times notes, "A separate military review of the Sept. 16 shootings concluded that all of the killings were unjustified and potentially criminal. One of the military investigators said the F.B.I. was being generous to Blackwater in characterizing any of the killings as justifiable."

The problem now is that it's not clear what law can be used to prosecute the Blackwater guards. The U.S. government has exempted American personnel from Iraqi law, and the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) applies only to Defense Department contractors, while the Blackwater guards were working for the State Department. Nearly a year after he shot and killed a bodyguard for an Iraqi vice president in a drunken rage, another Blackwater guard still has not been charged in the homicide because prosecutors can't settle on a satisfactory legal approach. In this light, the comments of Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), who has introduced legislation that would extend MEJA's coverage to all U.S. contractors operating in war zones, are a bit puzzling:

Just because there are deficiencies in the law, and there certainly are, that can't serve as an excuse for criminal actions like this to be unpunished. I hope the new attorney general makes this case a top priority. He needs to announce to the American people and the world that we uphold the rule of law and we intend to pursue this.

Among other things, however, the rule of law means that Price's bill, which was overwhelmingly approved by the House last month and is being considered by the Senate, can't be applied retroactively. And if the "deficiencies" in current statutes are so severe that prosecutors can't figure out how to charge State Department contractors who have committed criminal homicides in Iraq, the rule of law could require letting them go. In this case what the rule of law demands may be different from what justice demands.

Addendum: One possible approach is to charge the Blackwater guards under the War Crimes Act, which applies to U.S. nationals (not just military personnel) throughout the world and covers various violations of international agreements laying out the rules of war. The question then would be whether the recklessness seen in Nisour Square constitutes a war crime.

Do More Cops Equal Less Crime?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 06:50:00 EST

The Democratic theme song is "Happy Days Are Here Again," and nowhere do Democrats think that axiom applies better than in the realm of fighting crime. They recall that thanks to legislation passed in 1994, Bill Clinton put 100,000 new cops on the street, and the result was an abatement of violence. Give Democrats their way, they suggest, and we can repeat that success.

Leading the charge is Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., who sponsored that bill and is pushing legislation to hire another 50,000 officers, at a cost of $3.6 billion over six years, under the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. He says it was because of the last round of hiring that "murder and violent crime rates went down eight years in a row."

It's hard to find Democrats who differ. Among his co-sponsors are fellow presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. The House has already passed a similar measure.

But anyone who expects this approach to work as promised should take a closer look at what actually happened the last time. In the first place, the 1994 bill didn't make good on its goal of adding 100,000 cops to the streets. A study commissioned by the National Institute of Justice estimated it produced a net increase of just 82,000, while allowing that it might have been as few as 69,000.

Those numbers aside, the retreat of lawlessness began before any of those new police were sworn in. The murder rate peaked in 1991, and property crime began a steady decline in the mid-1970s. Biden blames the demise of federal hiring grants two years ago for the rise in violent crime in 2005 and 2006. But the murder rate has been essentially stable since 1999, with only minor year-to-year variations. The overall crime rate, meanwhile, continued to fall over the last two years.

Some criminologists find no evidence that the new cops did anything to lower the level of mayhem. A study by John Worrall and Tomislav Kovandzic of the University of Texas at Dallas, published this year in the journal Criminology, concluded that "COPS grants had no discernible effect on serious crime." A 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office disagreed, but said the effect was very small. About 95 percent of the decline in crime in the 1990s, it said, was attributable to other factors.

We shouldn't be surprised that adding all those patrol officers would produce little or no improvement. Given the multiple shifts, vacation and sick days, the additional number of personnel on the street at any given moment is only about 10,000, spread across a nation of 300 million people. That's fewer than one extra cop per local police department.

Flooding the zone in high-crime areas might yield significant results. But the money also wasn't targeted at those cities with the worst crime. It was allocated, with majestic impartiality, among places that are dangerous and places that are safe.

As Worrall and Kovandzic note, the average COPS hiring grant was practically a rounding error, amounting to about one half of one percent of a typical department's annual budget. Expecting that amount of money to have a dramatic effect on crime is like losing a pound and thinking you'll need to have all your pants taken in.

"If you doubled the size of the police force," Worrall told me, "you'd expect crime to decline. But at this level, it's not enough to make a noticeable difference."

The sponsors suggest the Bush administration has abdicated its crime-fighting duties by not providing funds for additional hiring. What they conveniently forget is that the program was supposed to be a temporary boost rather than a permanent obligation. Local law enforcement has historically been the responsibility of cities and counties, not the federal government.

If more cops really translate into safer streets, you would think local taxpayers would be more than willing to bear the expense. But if they don't think their safety is worth what it costs, why should the rest of us foot the bill? The idea that residents of one city can finance their police operations at someone else's expense is a fraud. Everyone gets federal money from the COPS program, but everyone also pays for it.

In the case of a new version of the program, what we'd have to pay is clear. What we'd get back is not.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

He Should Have Hung the 'Please Don't Charge Into My Room and Have Me Arrested on a Ridiculous Sex Charge' Sign

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:44:00 EDT

The Telegraph reports that a Scottish man has to register as a sex offender after being caught trying to ride his bicycle at a hotel in Aur:

[A prosecutor] said: "They [two members of the cleaning staff] knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.
"They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white T-shirt, naked from the waist down.
"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."
Both witnesses, who were extremely shocked, notified the hotel manager, who in turn alerted the police.

Although the incident occurred a year ago, the man pleaded guilty to "sexual breach of the peace" last week. "How do you have sex with a bicycle?" wonders the Telegraph's Bryony Gordon, and so do I. More than that, though, I wonder why it's the government's business what a man does with a bike in the privacy of his hotel room. I mean, as long as it's not a children's bike.

[Thanks to ChicagoTom for the tip.]

A Message to You, Rudy

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:17:00 EDT

The same day it was reported that the five families of the New York mafia came within a single vote of putting a hit out on Rudolph Giuliani in 1987, this item appeared in The New York Times:

Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.

"They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium -- how’s that?" said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. "They should burn it on TV so I can watch."

Rudy Giuliani: Everyone wants to send him a message. Why, you could almost say... I mean, it brings to mind... it raises... screw the setup, I'm just gonna roll the film:

Middle-Agers Today...

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:25:00 EDT

In a New York Times op-ed piece, contrarian sociologist Mike Males notes disturbing trends among 35-to-54-year-olds that should worry every teenager:

• 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
• 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today's middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19, according to the national center.
• More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.
• 630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
• 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government's National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.
• 370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.
• More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Males concludes that "what experts label 'adolescent risk taking' is really baby boomer risk taking."

Addendum: As a few commenters noted, the government's definition of "binge drinking," mentioned in the fifth item above, is questionable. For more on this point, see my 2003 essay "Binge Responsibly."

O.J., Meet J. Edgar...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:08:00 EDT

Please hold off on the tight end, wide receiver, etc. jokes; the sexual orientation of the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (below, center) is unclear. But do take a gander at this curio, which ranks up there with the shot of Elvis and Nixon comparing capes:

The image comes courtesy of The Smoking Gun, which notes that this is one of the items that O.J. Simpson was trying to recover when snagged by police for allegedly trying to rob a Las Vegas casino.

The man on the right? Not Clyde Tolson 2.0, but future NFL standout Larry Csonka.

The War on Drugs in Bizarro World, a.k.a. Santa Cruz

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:29:00 EDT

Last week a 19-year-old called the Santa Cruz police to report a robbery: He had been sitting in his car when he was approached by two men who took his property at gunpoint. Oddly, he was not deterred from contacting the authorities by the fact that the property in question was four ounces of pot he had planned to sell to the men who robbed him. Even more surprisingly, the police did not charge him with drug dealing, correctly viewing his as a victim rather than a criminal. "From our standpoint," a police spokesman told the Santa Cruz Sentinel, "it's more important to address the fact there are individuals out there who are willing to use a weapon to commit robberies."

[Thanks to jimmydageek for the tip.]

Think How High the Homicide Rate Would Have Been If We Hadn't Banned Guns

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:33:00 EDT

This week the District of Columbia filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold D.C.'s gun ban. The district's lawyers argue that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which overturned the ban last March, was wrong to conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms. But even if the appeals court were right about that, they say, D.C.'s restrictions on gun possession should still be upheld as reasonable public safety measures:

It is eminently reasonable to permit private ownership of other types of weapons, including shotguns and rifles, but ban the easily concealed and uniquely dangerous modern handgun....Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.

There are two problems with this argument. First, D.C. not only bans handgun ownership by anyone who isn't a current or former law enforcement officer; it also requires that long guns be kept locked or unloaded and disassembled, which makes using them against home invaders impractical. The law effectively prohibits armed self-defense, which is hard to reconcile with "the right to keep and bear arms."

Second, there is no reason to believe that D.C.'s gun ban has reduced violent crime. While it disarms law-abiding citizens, criminals have little difficulty obtaining guns, to judge by the city's consistently high homicide rate. As University of Maryland economist John Lott notes in a Washington Times op-ed piece, D.C.'s homicide and violent crime rates, which were falling in the years before the gun ban, climbed after it took effect:

In the five years before Washington's ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. But there is one fact that seems particularly hard to ignore. D.C.'s murder rate fluctuated after 1976 but has only once fallen below what it was in 1976 (that happened years later, in 1985). Does D.C. really want to argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate?
Similarly for violent crime, from 1977 to 2003, there were only two years when D.C.'s violent crime rate fell below the rate in 1976.

Lott notes that other jurisdictions, including Chicago, England, Ireland, and Jamaica, also have seen violent crime rise after adopting strict gun control. He does not explicitly argue (as you might expect from the author of More Guns, Less Crime) that disarming law-abiding residents encourages crime, but he does show that D.C. will have a hard time constructing even a prima facie case in support of its gun laws' effectiveness.