COPS AND ROBBERS TODAY
BLOG – Thoughts and Researches
Lucy Warner
December 15, 2015



COPS AND ROBBERS TODAY


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat

CompStat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


CompStat—or COMPSTAT—(short for COMPuter STATistics) is a combination of management philosophy and organizational management tools for police departments named after the New York City Police Department's accountability process, and has since been implemented in many other departments. It's a dynamic approach to crime reduction, quality of life improvement, and personnel and resource management; whereby ranking police department executives identify spikes in crimes using comparative statistics, and address those spikes through the use of targeted enforcement. Today, Compstat includes four generally recognized components: timely and accurate information or intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up. However, Compstat can be expanded and tweaked depending on the specific departments needs. Originally, it was modeled after the "broken windows" theory, whereby minor crimes would be addressed in order to reduce major crimes. However, over time, its use evolved into a system whereby productivity was measured and individuals held accountable for such spikes in crime. Commercial entities began producing turnkey packages (including computer systems, software, mobile devices, and other implements) assembled under the heading of CompStat. The Geographic Information Systems allows departments to map crime, or other types of data, to aid in identifying and solving problems in their assigned area.

The system is also in use in other major cities including Washington, DC,[1] Los Angeles,[2] Philadelphia,[3] Austin,[4] San Juan,[5] San Francisco,[6] Nashville,[7] Oakland,[8] New Haven,[9] and Baltimore, Maryland (where the system is shown in use in The Wire on HBO, though in the show it is referred to as "ComStat." In reality, Baltimore's real-life system is called Citistat.).[10] In 2007, then Governor of Maryland Martin O'Malley implemented the first statewide performance management system based on Compstat- Maryland StateStat.

In Canada the CompStat system is currently in use by the Vancouver Police Department.

In concert with Broken Windows Theory[edit]

By arresting or issuing summonses to people who engage in minor violations and quality of life offenses — such as public drinking and public urination, panhandling, loud radios, prostitution and disorderly conduct — ensures that those behaviors are deterred. As explained in the Broken windows theory, aggressive enforcement of all statutes has been shown to restore a sense of order. By capturing enforcement data as reflected in summons and arrest activity, the department is better able to gauge its overall performance.[citation needed]

Critique[edit]

Some, such as University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, have argued that COMPSTAT's crime-reducing effects have been minor.[11] The introduction of COMPSTAT happened alongside:
The training and deployment of around 5,000 new better-educated police officers
The integration of New York's housing and transit police into the New York Police Department
Police decision-making being devolved to precinct level
The clearing of a backlog of 50,000 unserved warrants
Robust "zero tolerance" campaign against petty crime and anti-social behavior under Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton
Widespread removal of graffiti
Programs that moved over 500,000 people into jobs from welfare at a time of economic buoyancy
Housing vouchers to enable poor families to move to better neighborhoods
Gentrification, displacement of lower income individuals more likely to commit crimes from gentrifying or gentrified communities
Demographic changes including a generation raised in the social welfare systems started in the 1970s and 1980s
End of the crack epidemic and a shift to a marijuana-based drug economy with a larger consumer base and less competition
Advances in emergency medicine allowing more victims to survive
A further reduction in the lead contaminates in the environment

Another criticism of the COMPSTAT program is that it may discourage officers from taking crime reports in order to create a false appearance of a reduction of community problems.[12][13] According to journalist Radley Balko, "some recent reports from New York City suggest the program needs some tweaking to guard against the twin dangers of unnecessary police harassment and underreporting of serious crimes."[14] An anonymous survey of "hundreds of retired high-ranking police officials . . . found that tremendous pressure to reduce crime, year after year, prompted some supervisors and precinct commanders to distort crime statistics."[15]

Similarly, crimes may be reported but downplayed as less significant, to manipulate statistics. As an illustration, before a department begins using CompStat it might list 100 assaults as aggravated and 500 as simple assault. If there were a similar pattern of underlying criminal activity the next year, but instead 550 assaults are listed in CompStat as simple and 50 as aggravated, the system would report that progress had been made reducing major crimes when in fact, the only difference is in how they are reported.

Manipulating reporting data may also negatively affect personnel and financial disbursement; communities whose improvements (on paper) show they need less resources could lose those resources—and still face the same amount of actual crime on the streets.

Many of these negative effects in the possible weaknesses of the COMPSTAT system were dramatized in HBO's The Wire, as part of an overarching theme of systemic dysfunction in institutions.[16] Indeed, "[o]ne of the central themes of the critically acclaimed HBO series . . . was the pressure politicians put on police brass, who then apply it to the department’s middle management, to generate PR-friendly statistics about lowering crime and increasing arrests."[17] In the show, this was referred to as "juking the stats".

The issue was further publicized in 2010 when NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft released recordings of his superiors urging him to manipulate data.[18][19][20]




The “broken windows theory” of policing has been linked with a pattern of harassment of target neighborhoods in which officers make arrests, fine, assault or even kill “perpetrators” for minor offenses, which sometimes leads to the jailing of those citizens for failure to pay their fines. I thought that was illegal. In Ferguson, the officer who shot a young black man for walking down a street in the traffic lane is such a case. There have been other shootings having to do with walking in the street also. Apparently that’s a big bugaboo with the police. He claimed the youth tried to grab his gun, but eyewitnesses disagreed. That case was the beginning of the BLM movement and the use of video cameras on police uniforms. That very thing – originally to provide more transparency in police shootings -- is now under the suspicion of being misused to maintain surveillance of community members in poor minority areas. See the following DC proposed law and this 2013 CBS article on modern day “debtors prisons” such as Oliver Twist’s “workhouse” without the work. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-economy-flails-debtors-prisons-thrive/, “As economy flails, debtors' prisons thrive,” By/ Alain Sherter/ MoneyWatch/ April 5, 2013.

See also Wikipedia on the subject of debtors prisons and their history in this country. They are expressly unconstitutional on both federal and state levels. A major contest of such prisons is being pursued by the ACLU (the good guys), is discussed in the ACLU News article below:

http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/674b81afec3e48abb193e8bd02090c03/aclu-lawsuit-county-jails-people-who-cant-pay-court-fines, By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS and GENE JOHNSON, Oct. 6, 2015.

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union sued a county in Washington state Tuesday, accusing it of sending people to jail or forcing them to toil on work crews if they fail to pay their court fines — a practice that makes the poor poorer and amounts to a "modern-day debtors' prison," the organization said.

The group's state chapter has long alleged that Benton County District Court penalizes defendants without investigating whether they can afford to pay their fines. It detailed the practice in a report last year that drew objections from the court's judges, one of whom argued that defendants have an opportunity to speak up at sentencing if they can't afford the fines.

"The misnomer is that we're imposing jail time without any due process rights," Judge Joseph M. Burrowes told The Associated Press at the time. "We are following the law. We are doing what is just and fair."

The court did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday, but Benton County Prosecutor Andy Miller said he told judges and county commissioners two years ago that he does not agree with the practice.

"The judges do it, and there's not even a prosecutor in the courtroom," he said Tuesday.

The lawsuit, which was filed as class action in Yakima County Superior Court, is part of a long national campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union to combat the effect of court fines on poor defendants. In 2010, the organization published a report that examined the way courts impose fines in Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana and Washington state, noting that the fines can often compound with interest or late fees, contributing to the impoverishment of some defendants.

The failure to pay often results in further arrests and further fines, and the results have disproportionally incarcerated minority defendants, opponents say. While courts can jail people for willfully refusing to pay, they are required to ensure that people are able to pay.

Earlier this year, DeKalb County, Georgia, agreed to reform its system after a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU. The town of Clanton, Alabama, also cut its ties with a private, for-profit probation company that threatened to jail people for nonpayment of fines following a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the national ACLU's Racial Justice Project, noted that the practice has become an especially alarming trend since the recession, when fines hit people especially hard and when some jurisdictions may have started becoming more aggressive in collecting them.

The systems "operate somewhat differently in different places, but the bottom line is the same: There are people being jailed because they are poor," she said.

In south-central Washington's Benton County, defendants often represented by public defenders have little opportunity to explain why they are unable to pay, the ACLU's lawsuit said. That's in part because public defenders are poorly funded and trained, depriving defendants of their right to meaningful assistance of counsel, the lawsuit said.

The ACLU says the court system violated the U.S. and state constitutions, which prohibit incarcerating someone for not paying court-imposed fines, fees and costs without a meaningful hearing and consideration of alternatives to jail.

Defendants were credited $80 toward their fines for each day they served on a work crew, and $50 for each day in jail. Typically more than one-quarter of defendants in the county jail are "sitting out" their fines on any given day, according to a review of jail rosters.

All three Benton County commissioners oppose the practice.

"We told them a year and a half ago they were going to get sued," Commissioner James Beaver said of the judges. "They politely told me I don't have statutory authority to tell them what to do."

Beaver, a former mayor of Kennewick, said that when judges order someone to jail over fines, the facility bills whichever city arrested the defendant. That means the cost of jailing them is borne by the cities rather than the county, he said.

When asked why the judges keep sending people to jail for not paying fines, Beaver said, "It's all about the money."

The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring Benton County to create a constitutional system to collect fines.

The named plaintiffs are Jayne Fuentes, Gina Taggart, and Reese Groves, all of whom have been jailed or forced into manual labor because they couldn't pay fines related to misdemeanor theft or other convictions. All three still owe thousands of dollars and fear they could be jailed in the future, the lawsuit said.

Johnson reported from Seattle.



Related to this matter also is a growing number of For Profit Prisons. Vice President Dick Cheney was in the news for having invested in such a prison. How like a really hard core Republican!

The following is an excerpt from the Wikipedia’s article on the history of debtors prisons.

“A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Through the mid 19th century, debtors' prisons (usually similar in form to locked workhouses) were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in Western Europe.[1] Destitute persons unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be sentenced to these prisons until they had worked off their debt via labor or secured outside funds to pay the balance; the product of their labor went towards both the costs of their incarceration and their accrued debt. Increasing access and lenience throughout the history of bankruptcy law have made prison terms for unaggravated indigence illegal over most of the world.

Since the late 20th century, the term debtors' prison has also sometimes been applied by social justice critics to criminal justice systems in which a court can sentence someone to prison over "willfully" unpaid criminal fees, usually following the order of a judge.[2] For example, in some jurisdictions within the United States, people can be held in contempt of court and jailed after willful non-payment of child support, garnishments, confiscations, fines, or back taxes. Additionally, though properly served civil duties over private debts in nations such as the United States will merely result in a default judgement being rendered in absentia if the defendant willfully declines to appear by law,[3] a substantial number of indigent debtors are legally incarcerated for the crime of failing to appear at civil debt proceedings as ordered by a judge. In this case, the crime is not indigence, but disobeying the judge's order to appear before the court.[4][5][6][7][8] Critics argue that the "willful" terminology is subject to individual mens rea determination by a judge, rather than statute, and that since this presents the potential for judges to incarcerate legitimately indigent individuals, it amounts to a de facto "debtors' prison" system.



DANGEROUS PROPOSED NEW LAWS


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is-CWgjrFAY&feature=youtu.be

DC Mayor Calls for Warrantless Searches of Ex-Prisoners
TheRealNews
Published on Dec 14, 2015

THOMAS HEDGES, TRNN: Cities across the country are still reeling from a summer of violence, with homicide rates that increase 70, 80, even 100 percent in some places. City officials and police unions are proposing harsher legislation in an effort to fight what they call the main culprits: drugs, guns, and gangs.

But here in Washington, DC where homicide rates are up more than 50 percent compared to last year, the Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has introduced one of the most controversial bills in the country. The Public Safety and Criminal Code Act of 2015 would make it legal for law enforcement officials to conduct warrantless searches on some newly released prisoners on parole or probation.

AARON GOGGANS: Muriel Bowser's bill is very scary.

HEDGES: Goggans, a writer and Black Lives Matter DMV activist says Mayor Bowser's bill strengthens control and surveillance, but not safety.

GOGGANS: We think that this is kind of the mayor laying out the groundwork to do a predictive policing model in DC. In 2013, the city got a contract with a group out of Colorado Springs to do predictive policing, and to bring a predictive policing platform to DC. This is as scary as it sounds. Predictive policing is actually their name, but the idea that you try and reach out to offenders before they've actually offended. It's a very Big Brother, 1984 kind of way to do policing. It's very terrifying. But also is a model trying to be followed by a lot of states.

HEDGES: When Mayor Bowser introduced the law back in August, she defended her bill amid the shouts and yelling of protesters.

MURIEL BOWSER: There have been erroneous reports in the media that we want to give the police unfettered authority to basically search anyone, anytime, anywhere. That is blatantly false.

MONICA HOPKINS-MAXWELL: I think that people should be watching what's going on here, that this change in rhetoric, and especially in a place that deems itself as progressive as the District of Columbia.

HEDGES: Monica Hopkins-Maxwell is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the nation's capital. She's been fighting the crime bill as well as parallel legislation on the issue of body cameras, which were introduced last year in Washington, and what she fears may become a tool for surveillance rather than accountability.

HOPKINS-MAXWELL: General Provision 3900.4 borders on using body-worn cameras for surveillance by allowing recording of First Amendment assemblies. The ACLU finds this highly problematic.

The racial disparities that you see are infinite in the District of Colombia, where you have 91 percent of the people that we incarcerate are black. So the damage to black communities from this so-called public safety bill is really, really scary.

HEDGES: Goggans says that unfortunately the mayor's efforts are, in fact, precise and intentional.

GOGGANS: The police have a union that is very political and outspoken in trying to get its own PAC and trying to have political muscle to push this. There are private prisons and private corporations that profit off of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration that are lobbying for this bill. There are also a lot of provisions in the bill that would, that came from a--that came from cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce to get security cameras at local businesses, right.

And so there's a lot of business improvement district money tied into all of this. And then there's a lot of folks who really just make money off of traumatizing the black community, right, as black people get more desperate. And a lot of aspects in our lives, it makes communities more likely to take low-paying jobs because they don't have better options. It feeds into this entire system that oppresses black people, which unfortunately is a big business in America.

HEDGES: But others say there's another incentive still for the city of DC to enact draconian measures, and that's the city's campaign to redevelop poor neighborhoods, and to transform them into areas that attract more wealth. The crime bill, for example, would disproportionately target black residents who live in places like H Street, Petworth, and Anacostia, neighborhoods the city desperately wants to develop.

EUGENE PURYEAR: DC's class polarization, which is in the top five in the country in income inequality, some measures the top three, is also almost explicitly racially based.

HEDGES: Eugene Puryear is a DC activist and politician who ran for council in 2014 on the Green Party ticket.

BOWSER: Mr. Puryear, you may not stand there, sir.

HEDGES: He says that a tradition of apparent and persistent racism in the nation's capital is punctuated by the gentrification of traditionally poor neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and H Street, among others. For example, last year at an unrecorded community meeting between residents and the police that took place close to H Street, a number of older black community members said their grandchildren were getting harassed by the police, sometimes getting stopped up to once every week.

Newcomers to the area are misinterpreting everyday scenarios as crimes, Chief of Police Cathy Lanier finally explained in the meeting, like reporting drug deals when they see young black men standing on a corner [...] You have a lot of people here who haven't lived in an urban neighborhood who are calling police for a lot of new things, she said.

PURYEAR: People who are new to the area, read, white, more wealthier people, who don't have any experience living in urban environments, read, living around black people, are seeing everyday behaviors and thinking that they're criminal. So the pressures of gentrification are getting higher and higher on average everyday people, particularly poor black people, and the police are responding more and more to the biased misconceptions of businesses and new residents about what to do about crime, which frequently involves tougher penalties, and more occupation-style policing and more harassment, essentially to get people off the street.

HEDGES: One of the more frustrating misconceptions for Puryear is that DC is relaxed when it comes to criminal pursuit and prosecution, due in part to the fact that it votes overwhelmingly Democrat.

PURYEAR: What we have to recognize is that on the national level you have the DNC and endorsing Black Lives Matter, Elizabeth Warren giving speeches, Bernie Sanders talking about it, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley. But on the local level, whether it's Muriel Bowser here in DC, whether it's Rahm Emanuel, whether it's Jean Quan in Oakland, whether it's even backsliding by Bill de Blasio in New York, it's in these major municipalities that are run by Democrats--certainly St. Louis, Ferguson, governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, run by Democrats, implementing these mass incarceration, militarized policing policies.

And I think it's important that we recognize that it's not, you know, just some right-wing bogeyman or the quote-unquote Republicans. But that really front line, a lot of times it's Democrats who are doing the most harmful policies to these communities, and it's not based on any sort of scientific reality. A lot of it is just based on the same racially based hysteric politics that got us to mass incarceration in 1994. And I think it's key to recognize that when you get new populations moving into cities who feel a certain amount of fear about the old, young, poor black population, their response is always going to be more police, because it makes them feel safer. But it's not based on anything, and certainly it only is going to lead to more of the problems we've seen from militarized policing and mass incarceration so far.

HEDGES: On December 1, the DC Council voted to roll back Muriel Bowser's proposal for limiting access to body camera footage from the public. A small victory for activists and residents who hope for a similar outcome when the looming crime bill comes for a vote in the coming weeks.

For the Real News, Thomas Hedges, Washington.


End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.




“The Public Safety and Criminal Code Act of 2015 would make it legal for law enforcement officials to conduct warrantless searches on some newly released prisoners on parole or probation. …. In 2013, the city got a contract with a group out of Colorado Springs to do predictive policing, and to bring a predictive policing platform to DC. This is as scary as it sounds. Predictive policing is actually their name, but the idea that you try and reach out to offenders before they've actually offended. It's a very Big Brother, 1984 kind of way to do policing. It's very terrifying. But also is a model trying to be followed by a lot of states. …. Monica Hopkins-Maxwell is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the nation's capital. She's been fighting the crime bill as well as parallel legislation on the issue of body cameras, which were introduced last year in Washington, and what she fears may become a tool for surveillance rather than accountability. HOPKINS-MAXWELL: General Provision 3900.4 borders on using body-worn cameras for surveillance by allowing recording of First Amendment assemblies. The ACLU finds this highly problematic.” …. The police have a union that is very political and outspoken in trying to get its own PAC and trying to have political muscle to push this. There are private prisons and private corporations that profit off of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration that are lobbying for this bill. There are also a lot of provisions in the bill that would, that came from a--that came from cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce to get security cameras at local businesses. …. He says that a tradition of apparent and persistent racism in the nation's capital is punctuated by the gentrification of traditionally poor neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and H Street, among others. …. Newcomers to the area are misinterpreting everyday scenarios as crimes, Chief of Police Cathy Lanier finally explained in the meeting, like reporting drug deals when they see young black men standing on a corner [...] You have a lot of people here who haven't lived in an urban neighborhood who are calling police for a lot of new things, she said. …. and the police are responding more and more to the biased misconceptions of businesses and new residents about what to do about crime, which frequently involves tougher penalties, and more occupation-style policing and more harassment, essentially to get people off the street. …. But on the local level, whether it's Muriel Bowser here in DC, whether it's Rahm Emanuel, whether it's Jean Quan in Oakland, whether it's even backsliding by Bill de Blasio in New York, it's in these major municipalities that are run by Democrats--certainly St. Louis, Ferguson, governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, run by Democrats, implementing these mass incarceration, militarized policing policies.” …. On December 1, the DC Council voted to roll back Muriel Bowser's proposal for limiting access to body camera footage from the public.”


Clearly voting for a Democrat isn’t a cure-all, and in fact one of the candidates who are currently running for President on the Democratic ticket is Martin O’Malley, Governor of MD, who is using a statistical method StateStat (CompStat) of dealing with crime. These computerized statistics have been linked with the now infamous “broken window policing,” which is the origin of much of the harassing, violent policing cases. Broken windows theory is now being considered by many as a problem to be solved. It harshly punishes what are “human problems” rather than using a community-police cooperation plan such as neighborhood meetings with police officers, and foot patrols to improve the “broken windows” situation by encouragement rather than a fine and jail or, worse, a lethal encounter. Young police officers tend to enter the force with the aim of helping people to solve problems, and become jaded over the years so that they begin to be bullies or worse. Their resulting violence is causing more hatred of the police than we had before, and more “cop killings.” Not only is it illegal and unfair, it is not as effective as a helpful approach would be. On first amendment issues, see the Wikipedia article below.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly

Freedom of assembly
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sammankomsten" ("The Meeting"), oil painting by Ester Almqvist (sv), original at the Swedish National Museum. the painting was chosen by the UN as a motif for a stamp commemorating the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, paragraph 20: the Right of Assembly

Janitorial workers striking in front of the MTV building in Santa Monica, California. Striking in a trade union is a way of exercising freedom of assembly and freedom of association.

Posted excerpt from the US Constitution, at an Occupy Oakland event, 2011

Freedom of assembly, sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of association, is the individual right or ability to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend their ideas.[1] The right to freedom of association is recognized as a human right, political right and civil liberty.

Freedom of assembly and freedom of association may be used to distinguish between the freedom to assemble in public places and the freedom of joining an association. Freedom of assembly is often used in the context of the right to protest, while freedom of association is used in the context of labor rights and the Constitution of the United States, is interpreted to mean both the freedom to assemble and the freedom to join an association.[2][

The United States Constitution explicitly provides for 'the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances'" in the First Amendment.

Common constraints on the right to assemble are a class of time place manner regulations. A second type of constraint is the requirement to obtain a permit, where coordination may be needed to ensure public safety.

Human rights instruments[edit]

The freedom of assembly is written about in the following human rights instruments:
Universal Declaration of Human Rights - Article 20
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - Article 21
European Convention on Human Rights - Article 11
American Convention on Human Rights - Article 15



Please read the following article from the ACLU on what’s happening in my favorite city (except for Chapel Hill, NC), Washington, DC. I do love the ACLU. They keep a close check on issues that most people don’t even think about until they become a major problem, and they are in my book “Good Guys.” I’m sorry if DC Democrats are involved in an aggressive “gentrification” which has “unintended consequences” such as putting more blacks and other poor people who live in lower rent housing areas in jail.




http://aclu-nca.org/news/frequently-asked-questions-about-mayor-bowser%E2%80%99s-public-safety-and-criminal-code-revisions-amend

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT MAYOR BOWSER’S PUBLIC SAFETY AND CRIMINAL CODE REVISIONS AMENDMENT ACT OF 2015


B21-0357 promotes ineffective and counterproductive “tough on crime” approaches to public safety.

In response to the recent rise in crime in the District of Columbia, Mayor Muriel Bowser (“Mayor”) proposed B21-0357, the Public Safety and Criminal Code Revisions Amendment Act of 2015. The Mayor’s proposal would employ policies that have proven ineffective and counterproductive in ensuring public safety.

Over the past 25 years local politicians have adhered to the conventional wisdom that being “tough on crime” will win elections and appease the public’s appetite for safety. To alleviate public fear and thirst for retribution, our lawmakers have deemed more acts criminal and doled out harsher punishments. Many of these laws have been selectively enforced on the District’s Black community and communities of color and have produced a dramatic rise in incarceration and criminal justice control.

Despite dramatic shifts in public opinion, with the public now supporting common sense and fair sentencing, B21-0357 adheres to the tradition of punishment and incarceration. The policies in this proposal will result in more District residents being incarcerated, and drive more people into the cycle of disenfranchisement and other collateral consequences characteristic of our criminal justice system. There are also serious constitutional concerns with some of the provisions contained within the proposal. Oppose B21-0357 and urge the D.C. Council to reject “tough on crime” rhetoric in favor of smart, evidence-supported public policy.

WHAT DOES B21-0357 DO?

B21-0357 expands the District’s power to conduct warrantless searches of certain people’s homes; promotes more aggressive forms of policing; violates due process; promotes harsh sentencing; increases the length of time police can retain footage from video surveillance systems; and, promotes other ineffective criminal justice policies.

Warrantless Searches

Expands the authority of officers to conduct suspicionless, warrantless searches on the homes of a class of individuals on parole, probation and supervised release.
Aggressive Policing

Expands the power of police and prosecutors to arrest and charge people for Felony or Aggravated Assault of a police officer even when the person has been wrongfully arrested. Allows the severity of an assault on a police officer charge to be based on the police officer’s self-reported level of pain, on a 1-10 scale, and increases the maximum sentence for assault on a police officer to 15 years.
Due Process Violations

Expands preventative detention for people charged with a list of enumerated offenses.
Harsh Sentencing

Enhances penalties by 1 1/2 times for several dozen offenses when they are committed against a public transit passenger or worker, or against any person while located on or near a park, recreation center and/or property regulated by the Department of Parks and Recreation.
Increases Surveillance

Provides financial incentives to property and business owners to install security camera systems and increases the retention period for MPD surveillance footage captured by MPD cameras, and;
Expands police access to the GPS records of people under court supervision, both before they have been convicted of anything and after.
Ineffective Criminal Justice Policies

Allows the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) to hire retired MPD officers while the officers continue to receive compensation in the form of retirement benefits from the MPD, which could in effect make the DFS an arm of the MPD instead of the independent, unbiased scientific agency it is supposed to be.

WHO WILL B21-0357 IMPACT?

The proposal will likely almost exclusively impact Black people in the District of Columbia.

B21-0357 will impact a class of returning citizens that have been charged and/or convicted of dozens of enumerated offenses; people on parole, probation and supervised release; juveniles; innocent people charged with crimes, and; the family and friends who house returning citizens. Given the racial disparities that plague every stage of the District’s criminal justice system it is very likely that, this proposal will almost exclusively impact Black people.

WHY DOES B21-0357 POSE CIVIL LIBERTIES ISSUES FOR THE ACLU?

The erosion of civil liberties in the name of public safety damages the relationship between law enforcement and communities and makes it harder for law enforcement to do its job.

B21-0357’s reliance on criminal justice responses to what are largely public health issues is counterproductive and violates the protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Deprivation of an individuals’ physical freedom is one of the most severe interferences with liberty that the government can impose. Imprisonment is harsh, frequently counterproductive and costly. Incarceration should be a penalty of last resort, to be imposed only when no less restrictive alternative is appropriate. We oppose the excessive use of incarceration and furthermore oppose sentences that are disproportionate to the crime.

Additionally, the Fourth Amendment ensures that all persons have the right to privacy in relationship to the government in their bodies and personal effects, homes and other areas or items maintained as private, unless the person has affirmatively waived that right by freely, knowingly, and voluntarily either consenting to the government intrusion or abandoning the area or item. We oppose policies that erode these fundamental constitutional protections.

WHY SHOULD WE PROTECT CRIMINALS?

Everybody, guilty or innocent, has the right to fair treatment and due process under the law. Respecting peoples’ rights makes law enforcement more effective at doing their jobs.

Not everybody who is accused of a crime is guilty. Furthermore, we should support everybody’s rights. Members of our community are outraged by crime and want people who commit crimes to be charged and prosecuted. However, the rights of fair treatment and due process must be respected for people who are accused of crimes and even people who are convicted of crimes. Respecting these rights does not cause crime, nor does it hinder police from pursuing people who commit crimes. It should, and does in fact, cause police to be more effective at doing their jobs. Research and history demonstrate that people are more likely to obey the law when they believe those enforcing it have the legitimate authority to tell them what to do.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE POLICE TARGETING PEOPLE WHO HAVE A HISTORY OF BREAKING THE LAW?

People with criminal records have constitutional rights that must be protected. Our communities are safer when we support returning citizens in reintegrating as productive members of society.

Even people with a history of breaking the law are entitled to constitutional protections. A punishment should be based on additional wrongful acts, not motivated by speculation that the person may commit illegal acts in the future. Punishment should not be based on the unscientific notion that society can predict with any reasonable standard of accuracy how a particular individual will act at some unspecified time.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO OPPOSE B21-357?

Call and/or email your D.C. Councilmember and the Mayor to let them know that you oppose B21-0357, which does not serve the interests of public safety.

If you are not sure what to say, please feel free to use the script below:

Hello, this is [YOUR NAME]. I am a resident of [YOUR WARD] and I am calling to voice concern about Mayor Bowser’s Public Safety and Criminal Code Revisions Amendment Act of 2015. This bill proposes an ineffective “tough on crime” approach to public health and safety issues in the District. I believe that the D.C. Council and the Mayor should be redirecting our public resources to evidence supported approaches that strengthen communities and reduce violence by providing jobs, housing, mental health and drug rehabilitation services. The D.C. Council should approach violence as a public health issue and promote accountability and transparency in our criminal justice system. As a District resident I demand the D.C. Council reject B21-0357.

CLICK HERE FOR CONTACT INFORMATION

THE ACLU SUPPORTS THE FOLLOWING BILLS:

Councilmember McDuffie introduced Bill 21-0360, the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Act of 2015, which applies a public health approach to address the recent surge in crime.

In response to the recent rise in crime in the District of Columbia, Councilmember McDuffie proposed B21-0360, the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Act of 2015. Councilmember McDuffie’s proposal would employ policies that have proven effective and productive in ensuring public safety.

As introduced, this bill establishes the Office of Neighborhood Engagement and Safety to engage individuals with a high risk of participating in, or being a victim of, violent criminal activity. The executive director of this office must report to the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice. It establishes an Office of Violence Prevention within the Department of Health which among other things will embed social workers in hospital emergency rooms to offer counseling and mediation. It creates grant-making authority for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice to issue grants for neighborhood violence intervention and prevention program initiatives. It requires data collection and analysis by the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice on felony crimes. It places social workers in the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and requires MPD to include training on preventing biased-based policing, and the unlawful use of force. MPD is also required to collect stop and frisk data, use of force data, data regarding citizens’ complaints as well as in custody deaths.

This proposal reinvests in community-based violence interdiction models that are not tied to law enforcement or prosecution. The proposal also uses instances in which people are the victims of intentional violence as opportunities to provide wrap around services that heal and address trauma. Finally, the proposal moves the District closer to removing barriers to re-entry for returning citizens and providing services and resources to the populations who most need it. We support Bill 21 0360 as a smart evidence supported approach to public safety.

Councilmember Cheh introduced Bill 21-0189, the Police and Criminal Discovery Reform Amendment Act of 2015, which seeks to restore greater confidence in the criminal justice system.

Councilmember Cheh introduced Bill 21-0189, the Police and Criminal Discovery Reform Amendment Act of 2015, which seeks to restore greater confidence and fairness in the criminal justice system. The bill aims to more precisely define the misdemeanor of “assault on a police officer” (APO), reform how MPD officers conduct eyewitness identification procedures, increase the information available to the Office of Police Complaints (OPC), and expand the rules of discovery in criminal prosecutions.

Specifically, the bill would narrow the scope of the District’s APO statute by limiting the language to those individuals who deliberately assault an officer, modify how MPD officers conduct eyewitness identification procedures so that officers conducting lineups will not purposefully or inadvertently influence the witness, provide OPC with information related to: the number, types, and dispositions of citizen complaints received, investigated, sustained, or otherwise resolved and then any discipline related to those complaints, and codify the criminal discovery rule and expand its scope in the following areas: witness statements; documents, tangible objects, and data; reports of examinations and tests; expert witnesses; disclosures related to the defendant’s mental health; and information relating to eyewitness identification procedures.

This proposal contains essential reforms to increase the transparency of our criminal justice system, providing our residents with the necessary tools and safeguards while ensuring our law enforcement officers are adequately protected. For these reasons, we support Bill 21-0189.

Moving the criminal justice system out of the center of our public safety solutions is a necessity for the health and safety of our entire community. We look forward to working with the Council to shape policy to address public health and public safety issues facing the District.

The Mayor introduced Bill 21-0382, the Bail Reform Amendment Act of 2015, which removes the prohibition of allowing pretrial inmates ordered by the court to work release from doing so from the Central Detention Facility or the Correctional Treatment Facility.

The ACLU agrees with the spirit of the Bail Reform Amendment Act of 2015. The bill would allow judges to order detainees into work release while they are incarcerated at the DC Jail or CTF, and not limit the program to those housed at halfway houses. Incarceration, even for brief periods of time, frequently leads to individuals missing work and therefore going without a regular income or losing their jobs entirely. This can have devastating ripple effects on the individual and his or her family. We support an expansion of those eligible to participate in the DOC’s work release program.

However, this expansion should not come as an alternative to increasing and improving halfway house availability, and the District should simultaneously endeavor to improve halfway house conditions and expand the number of available beds at halfway houses.

The Mayor introduced Bill 21-0384, the District of Columbia Good Time Credits Amendment Act of 2015, which increases the amount of good time credits a misdemeanant inmate can earn from 8 to 10 credits per calendar month.

The ACLU supports expansion of good time credits for individuals incarcerated in the Department of Corrections. Good time credits further not only the goals of good behavior and prison safety, but provides the additional benefit that the individuals are better prepared for reintegration into their communities and are equipped with tools for success. Good time credit also promotes the rehabilitation of individuals, reducing the risk of recidivism when released and improving public safety.

Along with this expansion of the amount of good time credits inmates can earn must come an expansion of programs so that all eligible candidates can be accommodated. The expansion’s impact will be greatly reduced if individuals who are eligible for good time credits do not have the opportunity to earn those credits if the programs are oversubscribed. Similarly, the DOC must ensure that programs are equally available for men and women.

The ACLU also advocates for an additional expansion of the good time credit program, so as not to exclude those with felony convictions from the opportunity to earn good time credits for good behavior, or participation in rehabilitation programs, work details, and special projects. The felony/misdemeanor distinction is often a somewhat arbitrary line that has little to do with one’s ability to benefit from incentivized programming and has little to do with rehabilitation and risk of recidivism.




https://www.predpol.com/predictive-policing-definition/

BLOG
Defining Predictive Policing
Posted on Mar 23, 2015 in PredPol, Predictive Policing, Analytics

Predictive policing has become a widely discussed phrase in the last few years, sometimes being used so broadly and for so many technologies that the real performance features and technical specifications get lost. This post seeks to succinctly establish parameters for a current definition of what predictive policing is.

Predictive Policing Definition: NIJ

Predictive policing tries to harness the power of information, geospatial technologies and evidence-based intervention models to reduce crime and improve public safety. This two-pronged approach — applying advanced analytics to various data sets, in conjunction with intervention models — can move law enforcement from reacting to crimes into the realm of predicting what and where something is likely to happen and deploying resources accordingly.

The National Institute of Justice, the research, development and evaluation agency of the United States Department of Justice, notes that law enforcement work is frequently reactive: officers respond to calls for service, quell disturbances and make arrests. In contrast, notes the NIJ, proactive policing uses data, geospatial models, and intervention models to predict what and where [and when] something is likely to happen and to deploy resources accordingly.

Very importantly, the NIJ explains, “The predictive policing approach does not replace traditional policing. Instead, it enhances existing approaches such as problem-oriented policing, community policing, intelligence-led policing and hot spot policing.”

DEFINITION PARAMETER: PREDICTIVE POLICING IS NOT “HOTSPOT” MAPPING OF PAST CRIMES

Near repeat burglary

While crime may afflict the same neighborhoods year after year, the day-to-day fluctuations in where and when crimes occur are large. Extensive research has shown that day-to-day crime patterns are the result of:

Crime generators that are fixed features of the environment
Repeat and near-repeat victimization that leads previous victims and their neighbors to be at greater risk of follow-on crimes
The routine activity patterns of offenders that keep risk local
substantial random noise.

Each of these processes is well known empirically, but when put together, their impact on how crime hotspots emerge, spread, and disappear is incredibly complex. This makes predictions for where crime will occur in the next 10-12 hours very difficult.

Predictive Policing Definition: RAND Corp.
The application of analytical techniques, particularly quantitative techniques, to identify promising targets for police intervention with the goal of reducing crime risk by preventing future crimes or solving past crimes. (source)

Developments in mathematical and statistical modeling, high-performance cloud computing, and GPS-enabled mobile devices now make it possible for frequently updated crime forecasts to be at the disposal of officers in the field. Knowledge, skills, and experience are essential and indispensable. They can reliably direct officers to the top two or three riskiest locations in their operational environment for any particular shift on any particular day. It is much harder and time-consuming, though, for law enforcement to identify and choose between a few dozen locations where risk might be lower and is highly variable from day to day.

Opportunities to disrupt crime in these places are missed and thus crime prevention and reduction becomes unnecessarily difficult. Chronic hotspots are long term in duration and necessitate problem-oriented policing strategies to address the root causes of crime. Temporary hotspots, on the other hand, last on the time scale of days to weeks.

DEFINITION PARAMETER: PREDICTIVE POLICING DOES NOT REPLACE LAW ENFORCEMENT VETERANS’ INTUITION OR EXPERIENCE

Using high-powered mathematics and near real time crime data housed in a department’s RMS, yesterday’s crime can be evaluated in the context of all crimes occurring over a long horizon and wide spatial fields to calculate accurate probabilities for where and when crime will occur today.

DEFINITION PARAMETER: PREDICTIVE POLICING IS NOT A FASTER REACTION TO ONGOING CRIME, BUT A MORE ACCURATE FORECAST OF FUTURE EVENTS

Within these parameters, predictive policing can help law enforcement agencies intelligently inform patrol officers of where and when crime may occur, allowing them to effectively prevent crime. A minimal amount of data is needed to go beyond traditional “hotspot” mapping and define predictive policing.

More About Field-Tested Predictive Policing with PredPol:

PredPol needs only three pieces of data: type of crime, place of crime, and time of crime. There is no personal data or confidential information, thus avoiding any privacy and profiling risks, while obviating the need for PredPol access to a department’s more sensitive information.

Newer events are weighted heavier than older ones so that predictions more effectively reflect near term events.

PredPol’s technology has been helping law enforcement agencies to dramatically reduce crime in jurisdictions of all types and sizes, across the U.S. and overseas.




This recent tendency of cities to make more restrictive, punitive and what appears to be illegal laws, rather than fostering a benign and helpful communication between neighborhoods and the police, is something that I didn’t foresee in the 1970s when I was young. I thought our Constitution and philosophical traditions were safe from such tampering by a rightwing minority. The fact is that jailing a drug addict is easier for the police to do than guiding him to a treatment facility. I think most cops view themselves a Matt Dillon rather than a psychologist or social worker.

Restricting a citizen’s freedom of association and freedom of assembly is a basic constitutional right in this country, but cities and states are experimenting lately on new laws in a dangerous way. The numerous Republican ruled state legislatures are in many cases adopting model laws taken from the rightwing membership organization called ALEC. Even Democratic office holders are doing the same thing.

The legal structure that has protected human rights in this country is being eroded rapidly. We are in serious danger of losing our democratic Constitutional rights as police departments are too often being armed with military equipment and given total freedom as to how they do their job. Much of it is race and class based, which is despicable, but it will eventually affect the “good” white Middle Class people as our choice of political party, union membership and religion are attacked. The US cannot afford to let that happen. To see the truth about ALEC, go to the following article.

ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection | The Nation;
www.thenation.com/article/alec-exposed-koch-connection

“This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council.”

ONE MAN, ONE VOTE – SCOTUS – DECEMBER 8, 2015
Lucy Warner

I received this Salon article in an email a couple of days ago and was unhappy to find that the Supreme Court is going to review a basic tenet of the Constitution in relation to the commonplace and usually Republican tactic of gerrymandering for racial and political inequality. It was my understanding that this sort of gerrymandering to achieve an improvement in a specific party’s chance to win elections is not actually legal, but of course it is a basic part of what the party in power does regularly in most states, and most recently in Florida. They claim they don’t do it, but both parties have been accused of the practice down through the years. They just have to do it in a legal way, in other words, a politically balanced way. This court case is about the question of whether or not the redistricting can be done on the number of eligible voters rather than overall population. In the articles that follow, different viewpoints and arguments are given on which way is best.

Black and Hispanic people, due partly to practices like red-lining, tend to be clustered in certain city neighborhoods rather than rural areas or with whites, and they too often are not registered to vote. Laws that are restrictive on who will be given eligible status, like the requirement of a specific type of picture ID, the absence of a prior felony conviction, or in the case of Hispanic naturalized citizens the requirement of a birth certificate is commonly being used to limit the registration of minorities who are likely to vote with, rather than against, the Democratic Party. Having pared down the number of registered voters of certain groups in this way, Republicans are now trying to group people together as more powerful or weaker districts by party. They want to rig the dice.

This case is related to a change made some fifty years ago to achieve racial balance in elections. The Supreme Court has been reconsidering the laws basic to Civil Rights for the last five to ten years at the behest of the “conservatives” who now have a majority in the Republican Party and unfortunately on the Supreme Court. Today the argument on Evenwel v. Abbott is scheduled in the Court.

I will collect more articles on this subject as they appear and present them for the reader’s consideration along with opinion pieces. This is a “fact-finding tour” for me, so I will say little except that whatever rolls back Civil Rights in practice, whether legal in theory or not, is not good for our nation.



Evenwel v. Abbott – December 8, 2015 Supreme Court Trial



http://www.salon.com/2015/05/28/the_supreme_court_case_that_could_doom_the_democrats_inside_the_rights_cynical_scheme_to_cement_power/

"Supreme Court case could doom Democrats... justices could help GOP rig the game"
Salon

The Supreme Court case that could doom the Democrats: How the justices could help GOP rig the game
A new proposal to change how legislative districts are drawn shows conservatives' ruthless cynicism in action
SIMON MALOY
THURSDAY, MAY 28, 2015

Photograph -- Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts (Credit: AP/Dave Tulis/Larry Downing/Photo montage by Salon)


This week, the Supreme Court opted to hear arguments in Evenwel v. Abbott, a case out of Texas that challenges the ways in which states draw their legislative districts. The longstanding status quo has been that when state governments set the boundaries for legislative districts, they use census estimates of total populations to determine where the boundaries should be drawn so that each district contains roughly the same number of people. The plaintiffs in Evenwel, and the conservative activist group representing them, argue that the districts should be drawn based on the number of eligible voters, not the total population. It’s a challenge to the existing notion of “one person, one vote,” and up until now, the high court has been unwilling to consider cases that seek to redefine that principle.

This case is yet another testament to the conservative movement’s boundless creativity when it comes to exploiting the courts to achieve policy outcomes. Conservative activists know that if they can wrap their policy agenda in a legal argument that at least sounds plausible, they have a pretty good chance of getting a favorable decision from the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc.

In this case, the policy agenda is restricting the political power of Democratically-aligned populations. The reason conservative activists are seeking this change to “one person, one vote” isn’t to satisfy an ideological argument. As law professor Richard Hasen noted at Slate, the argument being put forth by the conservative group behind the case actually hampers the abilities of local governments to determine their own systems of political representation. They’re urging the Supreme Court to restrict the rights of the individual states, which tends not to comport too well with the conservative ideal of “small government.” But, as Hasen writes, “a ruling favorable to conservatives in the Evenwel case, especially if extended to congressional redistricting, could shift more power to Republicans, who are more likely to live in areas with high concentrations of voters.”

Urban areas have greater concentrations of people who, for one reason or another, are not eligible to vote. By removing them from the tallies when redrawing district lines, you’re effectively diminishing the number of districts that will be more likely to vote Democratic. In states like Texas, the impact could be huge. “Drawing districts based on the number of voters would mean that Hispanic districts in many parts of Texas would need to contain more actual people (each a constituent), than comparable suburban white districts,” the Brennan Center for Justice notes. The conservatives pushing for this change understand this, and the overall goal of increasing Republican political power outweighs the ideological considerations.

It also outweighs the practical considerations. Determining district boundaries is a messy business as it is. States use estimates of total population because it’s the least troublesome way of counting and, at the very least, they are consistent across the board. Mandating a shift to counting only the eligible voting population introduces a huge amount of complexity and chaos into an already uncertain process. Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw explains:

Among those who are currently ineligible, how many will finish their prison terms and regain the right to vote? How many will complete the naturalization process? The list goes on and it’s a dizzying problem to even contemplate. I suppose the court could say something vague along the lines of demanding that the state make their “best effort” to determine the numbers, but then you’re just in line for an endless series of lawsuits from plaintiffs who claim that the best effort in question wasn’t good enough or was corrupted by biased politicians.

It has the real potential to be a great big disaster in the making, and pretty soon you’re going to hear pretty every conservative with access to a media platform demand that it happen. As Paul Waldman writes at the Washington Post, the conservative posture towards Evenwel will very likely be similar to what’s happened with another bit of right-wing legal exotica, the King v. Burwell challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s insurance subsidies:

First, a conservative advocate comes up with a novel legal theory, one few people had considered before, to accomplish a Republican goal. Though it flies in the face of either logic, history, and common sense (as is the case in King) or settled precedent (as in this case), Republicans everywhere quickly realize its potential and embrace it wholeheartedly, no matter how many silly arguments they might have to make along the way. And in the end, five conservative justices on the Supreme Court might or might not give the GOP a huge and unexpected victory.

It’s a bluntly cynical way to realize one’s policy agenda without actually having to bother with elections and lawmaking, and conservatives have demonstrated time and again how ruthlessly effective it can be.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting

Redistricting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Redistricting is the process of drawing United States electoral district boundaries.

In 33 states, the state legislature has primary responsibility for creating a redistricting plan, in many cases subject to approval by the state governor. To reduce the role that legislative politics might play, seven states (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey and Washington) determine congressional redistricting by an independent or bipartisan redistricting commission.[1] Four states, Florida, Iowa, Maine, and New York give independent bodies authority to propose redistricting plans, but preserve the role of legislatures to approve them. Seven states have only a single representative for the entire state because of their low populations; these are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Each state has its own standards for creating Congressional and legislative districts.[3] In addition to equalizing the population of districts and complying with Federal requirements, criteria may include attempting to create compact, contiguous districts, trying to keep political units and communities within a single district, and avoiding the drawing of boundaries for purposes of partisan advantage or incumbent protection.[4] In the states where the legislature (or another body where a partisan majority is possible) is in charge of redistricting, the possibility of gerrymandering (the deliberate manipulation of political boundaries for electoral advantage, usually of incumbents or a specific political party) often makes the process very politically contentious, especially when the majorities of the two houses of the legislature, or the legislature and the governor, are from different parties. The state and federal court systems are often involved in resolving disputes over Congressional and legislative redistricting when gridlock prevents redistricting in a timely manner. In addition, the losers to an adopted redistricting plan often challenge it in state and federal courts. Justice Department approval (which is known as pre clearance) was formerly required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in certain states that have had a history of racial barriers to voting.

Partisan domination of state legislatures and improved technology to design contiguous districts that pack opponents into as few districts as possible have led to district maps which are skewed towards one party. Consequently, many states including Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas have succeeded in reducing or effectively eliminating competition for most House seats in those states. In 2003 Republicans in Texas increased their representation in the U.S. House through a controversial mid-decade redistricting.

Other states including California, New Jersey and New York have opted to protect incumbents of both parties, again reducing the number of competitive districts. The Supreme Court's ruling on the Pennsylvania gerrymander[5] effectively cemented the right of elected officials to select their constituents by eliminating most of the grounds for disenfranchised constituents to challenge gerrymandered lines.

Redistricting has to follow certain criteria to be accepted.
1.compactness
2.contiguity
3.equal population
4.preservation of existing political communities
5.partisan fairness
6.racial fairness [6]

Gerrymandering[edit]

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district lines to achieve political gain for legislators. The practice of gerrymandering involves the manipulation of district drawing in aims to leave out, or include, specific populations in a legislator's district to ensure his/her reelection.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment

United States congressional apportionment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

United States congressional apportionment is the process[1] by which seats in the United States House of Representatives are distributed among the 50 states according to the most recent constitutionally mandated decennial census. Each state is apportioned a number of seats which approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate population of the 50 states.[2] However, every state is constitutionally guaranteed at least one seat.

Because the size of a state's total congressional delegation determines the size of its representation in the U.S. Electoral College, congressional apportionment also affects the U.S. presidential election process as well.

Representatives is currently set to 435, and has been since 1913, excluding a temporary increase to 437 after the admissions of Alaska and Hawaii. Though the actual reapportionment will normally occur in respect of a decennial census, the law that governs the total number of representatives and the method of apportionment to be carried into force at that time can be created prior to the census.

The decennial apportionment also determines the size of each state's representation in the U.S. Electoral College. Under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, any state's number of electors equals the size of its total congressional delegation (i.e., House seat(s) plus Senate seats).

Federal law requires the Clerk of the House of Representatives to notify each state government of its entitled number of seats no later than January 25 of the year immediately following the census. After seats have been reapportioned, each state determines the boundaries of congressional districts—geographical areas within the state of approximately equal population—in a process called redistricting.[3] Any citizen of the State can challenge the constitutionality of the redistricting in their US district court.[4]

Because the deadline for the House Clerk to report the results does not occur until the following January, and the states need sufficient time to perform the redistricting, the decennial census does not affect the elections that are held during that same year.

Constitutional texts[edit]

The subject of Congressional apportionment is addressed twice in the U.S. Constitution. Initially, the apportionment of House seats was guided by two sentences in Article I, Section 2, clause 3:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative;…”

Following the end of the Civil War, the first of those provisions was superseded by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,[5] But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male[6] inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,[7] and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Apportionment methods[edit]

Apart from the requirement that the number of delegates for each state is at least one, a state's number of representatives is in principle proportional to population, thus assuring reasonably consistent representation to the people regardless of the state boundaries and populations. No method of calculating a fair distribution of voting power across the various states was known until recently and five distinct apportionment methods have been used since the adoption of the Constitution, none of them producing fully proportional distribution of power among the states.

The current method, known as the method of equal proportions, has been used since the 1940 Census. The Vinton or Hamilton method, used from 1850 to 1900, was susceptible to what is known as the apportionment paradox or Alabama paradox.[17]

In 2008, a so-called One-Person-One-Vote model was suggested by Jurij Toplak in Temple Law Review,[18] which would distribute the states' power in the House of Representatives exactly 'according to their Numbers'. Under this system, however, members of the House of Representatives do not have equal voting power. Some claim that this method would be constitutional, asserting that the U.S. Constitution does not require Representatives to have equal voting powers but does require the voters to have votes of equal weight.[citation needed][19]




http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/evenwel-v-abbott/

Evenwel v. Abbott
Docket No. Op. Below Argument Opinion Vote Author Term
14-940 W.D. Tex. Dec 8, 2015
TBD TBD TBD OT 2015

Issue: Whether the three-judge district court correctly held that the “one-person, one-vote” principle under the Equal Protection Clause allows States to use total population, and does not require States to use voter population, when apportioning state legislative districts.

SCOTUSblog Coverage
Argument preview: How to measure "one person, one vote" (Lyle Denniston)
Symposium: Evenwel v. Abbott and the Constitution’s big data problem (Nathaniel Persily)
Symposium: Ideology, partisanship, and the new “one person, one vote” case (Richard Hasen)
Symposium: Misguided hysteria over Evenwel v. Abbott (Richard Pildes)
Symposium: Taking voter equality seriously (Ilya Shapiro)
Symposium: Does “one person, one vote” really mean what it says? (Hans von Spakovsky)
The new look at "one person, one vote," made simple (Lyle Denniston)
Major test on voter equality set for review (Lyle Denniston)
Petition of the day (Maureen Johnston)

Oct 9 2015 SET FOR ARGUMENT on Tuesday, December 8, 2015




http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/05/major-test-on-voter-equality-set-for-review/

Major test on voter equality set for review
Lyle Denniston Independent Contractor Reporter
Posted Tue, May 26th, 2015

Cartoon -- SCOTUS takes Evenwel v. Abbott (Art Lien)


The Constitution has been understood for the past half-century to require that no individual’s vote count more at election time than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday, for the first time, to clarify how that concept of equality is to be measured, when legislatures are drawing up election districts.

The Court took on a case challenging the 2011 redistricting of the thirty-one seats in the Texas Senate, focusing on what measure of population should be used to judge whether the “one-person, one-vote” mandate has been met. That mandate originated in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964. The new case of Evenwel v. Abbott will be heard and decided next Term, as will two new criminal cases the Justices also agreed on Tuesday to hear.

In one of the other cases, Foster v. Humphrey, the Court will clarify the ban on the use of race in excluding potential jurors from the panel at trial — a ban laid down in the 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky. In a Georgia death penalty case, defense lawyers discovered evidence, after the trial, that the prosecutor had created black-juror strike lists contradicting claims of being neutral on race during seating of the jury.

In the other new criminal case, Lockhart v. United States, the Court will spell out when a mandatory minimum prison sentence is required under a federal law against child pornography, based on a prior conviction under state law for sexual abuse. The federal appeals courts are divided on the scope of that requirement.

The Justices’ move into the Texas Senate redistricting case comes fourteen years after Justice Clarence Thomas, in Chen v. City of Houston in May 2001, was the sole member of the Court who went on record in favor of sorting out “what measure of population should be used for determining whether the population is equally distributed among the districts.”

The usual choice considered by legislatures is to make districts more or less equal by dividing up shares of the state’s total population, or, as an alternative, to draw lines based upon some measure of the voting members of the population — such as the numbers actually registered to vote.

Two Texas voters, who wound up in state senate districts where they say their votes will count less than the votes in another district even though each of those districts has about the same total number of people, argued that this contradicts the “one-person, one-vote” guarantee of voter equality. Their votes would have counted equally, they contended, if the legislature instead had used voting-age population as the measure.

The voters, Sue Evenwel, who lives in Titus County in Senate District 1, and Edward Pfenninger, who lives in Montgomery County in District 4, said their votes were diluted because of the disparity between the two measures as applied to those districts, where more of the people vote proportionally. Both districts are rural. Other, more urban districts have proportionally fewer registered voters, so the redistricting plan based on actual population is said to give those who do vote more weight — that is, fewer of them can control the outcome.

“A statewide districting plan that distributes voters or potential voters in a grossly uneven way,” the two voters told the Court, “is patently unconstitutional under Reynolds v. Sims and its progeny.”

The voters do not argue that legislatures should be forbidden ever to use total population as the districting measure, but only when it results in the kind of disparity, compared to a plan based on voters’ numbers, that resulted in Texas.

At the theoretical core of this dispute is the theory of representation that a legislature should follow. Texas, supported by the lower court in the new cases, argued that this is a question of how to define democracy, a question that it said should be left to the people’s elected representatives, and not decided by the courts. The state also contended that the Supreme Court had said explicitly in a 1966 decision (Burns v. Richardson) that the choice of population measure was a matter for legislatures.

The Justices, while taking on new cases for decision, also denied review on Tuesday of a number of significant controversies, including these:

** Whether the mental disability of an individual convicted of murder, and claiming to be too handicapped to be executed, should be analyzed as of the time of the crime, or many years later when the issue arises anew. That was the question in Murphy v. Texas.

** Whether it is unconstitutional for a local government to shift to out-of-state companies most of the cost of disposing of unsold prescription drugs that may pose a safety or health hazard. The issue in Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America v. Alameda County tested the scope of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to local recycling ordinances.


Posted in Foster v. Chatman, Lockhart v. U.S., Evenwel v. Abbott, Cases in the Pipeline, Featured, Merits Cases

Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Major test on voter equality set for review, SCOTUSblog (May. 26, 2015, 12:14 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/05/major-test-on-voter-equality-set-for-review/




http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/08/symposium-evenwel-v-abbott-and-the-constitutions-big-data-problem/

Symposium: Evenwel v. Abbott and the Constitution’s big data problem
Nathaniel Persily Guest
Posted Mon, August 3rd, 2015


Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford University Law School. (For a more developed version of the argument presented here, please see Nathaniel Persily, The Law of the Census: How to Count, What to Count, Whom to Count, and Where to Count Them, 32 Cardozo L. Rev. 755, 775-81 (2011).)

The plaintiffs in Evenwel v. Abbott deserve credit for highlighting an unappreciated feature of our system of representation and exposing a gap in the jurisprudence of one person, one vote. Their constitutional argument, however, is academic, at best, and at worst, dangerous and destabilizing for the redistricting process and the U.S. Census. Leaving aside the weighty and contested philosophical arguments concerning the proper basis for legislative representation, a constitutional rule of redistricting based on citizenship or eligible voters presents insurmountable logistical difficulties. These difficulties are of constitutional import because no national database of citizenship exists at the level of granularity necessary to draw legislative districts that comply with one person, one vote.

First some basics on the redistricting process. With each decennial census virtually every level of government in the country – from Congress to state legislatures to school boards and any other manner of local government – must redraw their districts to adjust to population shifts the Census reveals. The redistricting dataset released by the Census (the so-called PL 94-171 datafile) and used by virtually all jurisdictions in the United States includes information regarding the total population and voting-age population, as broken down by race. The data are derived from the Census form we now receive every ten years, which only asks questions as to race/ethnicity, age, gender, and owner/renter status of the home. It does not ask anything about citizenship, voter registration, or anything comparable.

From where, then, do all of the data concerning citizenship we hear so much about come? They come from a yearly survey of 2.5% of American households called the American Community Survey (ACS). As one of many surveys conducted by the Census, the ACS contains a host of questions covering everything from a house’s plumbing, internet connectivity, and tax rates, to its occupants’ citizenship, marital, employment, and veteran status. The Census releases results from each year’s ACS, as well as averages for the previous three- or five-year period. Whenever you see citizenship rates reported in the news, the ACS is usually the source. Unlike the decennial census, the ACS is not mandated by the Constitution, and Congress could terminate or defund it at any time, as some representatives have threatened.

The ACS does not produce a dataset, however, that is appropriate for redistricting. First, because they sample such a small share of the population, the yearly surveys do not produce data at sufficient granularity for redistricting, namely the census block or neighborhood level, akin to the decennial census. Just like other public opinion polls, a survey like the ACS can paint, in broad outlines, the profile of a state or large subsections of it. But as you move down to your neighborhood, a 2.5% national survey will often not include enough people from your immediate vicinity in order to create accurate estimates of citizenship rates. Any such estimates, therefore, come with margins of error, just like other public opinion polls.

Because any yearly ACS is too small and inaccurate to be used for redistricting purposes, three- and five-year averages might give better estimates of the citizenship rates at smaller levels of geography. Even those statistics, though, are not released at the census block level, which is the building block for redistricting plans. Even if they were, they do not provide estimates of the citizenship population at the time of redistricting – that is, they are averages of earlier years and give estimates of what the citizenship rates have been, not what they are at the time districts need to be drawn. Unlike the decennial census, which presents a snapshot of the population, the ACS is more like a movie, highlighting general movements in the population data viewable only on the big screen. (To make matters even more complicated, those ACS averages are derived from the earlier census geography – i.e., the census tracts as they were drawn for the census ten years earlier – not the census immediately preceding the redistricting.)

The other population base for redistricting put forward by the Evenwel appellants is registered voters. With this suggestion, they appear on more familiar ground, given that the Supreme Court in Burns v. Richardson (1966), upheld, though clearly did not mandate, the use of registered voter data for redistricting purposes. Burns somewhat reluctantly sanctioned the use of registered voters as the population base, only because in that context, “registered voters was chosen as a reasonable approximation of both citizen and voter population.” Requiring as a constitutional rule redistricting on the basis of equal numbers of registered voters comes with its own set of serious problems, however.

First, as with a “citizen census,” the Constitution does not require voter registration. In fact, North Dakota does not require its voters to register and nothing prevents other states from following suit. Another fourteen states allow for Election Day registration; for them, the number of registered voters in a given jurisdiction can fluctuate considerably depending on whether one uses data before or after the election.

Indeed, the extreme variability in voter registration data for any jurisdiction is a key reason such data should not be used for redistricting purposes. The size and accuracy of a voter registration list will often depend on the proximity to an election. When voter registration drives are in full force, especially for an impending presidential election in a battleground state, the number of registered voters can increase substantially. If the next election is a congressional election or even an off-year local election, the number of registered voters in a jurisdiction might be smaller or out of date. The voter registration list is, in this sense, a moving target. If it is to be used for redistricting, the decision as to which voter list to use, and when, can lead to dramatically different outcomes. (Expressing caution as it blessed the use of registered voters, Burns recognized this problem: “[F]luctuations in the number of registered voters in a given election may be sudden and substantial, caused by such fortuitous factors as a peculiarly controversial election issue, a particularly popular candidate, or even weather conditions.”

The inaccuracy of voter rolls, moreover, has been a continuing source of frustration for election administrators and should caution against using voter registration as a population base for redistricting. As the Report of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, for which I served as Senior Research Director, detailed, roughly eight percent or sixteen million voter registration records are invalid or significantly inaccurate. But the degree of inaccuracy varies considerably by state and over time. For some states, as many as fifteen percent of the names on their voter registration list constitute “deadwood”: names of people who have likely moved or died since they were registered at the given address. As a result, states conduct periodic purges of their voter rolls, as regulated by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Whether a jurisdiction redistricts on the basis of a list before or after a purge can lead to different results. To guard against disenfranchisement by way of purging, furthermore, states retain different lists of voters: an active voter list of those who have regularly voted and an inactive voter list, which includes people who have missed voting in the last few elections. As with the ACS citizenship data, mandating redistricting on the basis of “registered voters,” as the Evenwel appellants urge, does not settle the question concerning the proper population base for redistricting: It would require further decisions as to which voter registration list, at which time.

These points concerning the inaccuracy and variability of the potential alternative data sources for redistricting will likely receive less attention in Evenwel than familiar constitutional arguments concerning the proper interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. But these seemingly technical and logistical issues should foreclose the constitutional debate. Current data on citizenship or on registered voters is simply too inaccurate or contested to be used in redistricting. Unless the Justices are prepared to mandate a new kind of “citizen census” or to constitutionalize the voter registration process, then they should leave it to the states to draw their districts using the most accurate data available.

Posted in Evenwel v. Abbott, Featured, One person, one vote and Evenwel

Recommended Citation: Nathaniel Persily, Symposium: Evenwel v. Abbott and the Constitution’s big data problem, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 3, 2015, 12:01 AM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/08/symposium-evenwel-v-abbott-and-the-constitutions-big-data-problem/




http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/07/symposium-taking-voter-equality-seriously/

Symposium: Taking voter equality seriously

Ilya Shapiro Guest
Posted Wed, July 29th, 2015


Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. He filed an amicus brief supporting the jurisdictional statement in Evenwel and will be filing another at the merits stage. Shapiro became a U.S. citizen just last year. Like most immigrants, he does a job few native-born Americans will: defending the Constitution.

The issue in a nutshell

The “one person, one vote” standard (OPOV) has become an axiomatic part of election law: Whatever mischief happens during the decennial redistricting process, states can’t draw districts with wildly disproportionate populations, such that a vote in lightly populated districts is worth much more than a vote in heavily populated districts.

It’s an easy principle to understand. You can avoid getting tied into knots determining whether a given regulation is “congruent and proportional” to the problem it addresses – and you can stay out of the thicket of “undue burdens” and other jurisprudential monstrosities.

Instead, OPOV solves the old “rotten borough” problem, where some British parliamentarians represented constituencies where very few – or no! – people lived. This became an issue in the United States as the country urbanized but depopulated rural areas maintained disproportionate voting power in state legislatures and congressional delegations. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims that political map-designers can’t dilute the franchise that way and instead must draw districts with roughly equal numbers of people.

In other words, each person’s vote should be equal, as guaranteed by the Constitution; nobody gets more votes based on wealth, education, occupation, sex, race, or geography. None of this is or should be controversial.

But a funny thing happened on the way to electoral utopia: just as the Industrial Revolution fomented radical population shifts, modern immigration patterns have created disparities in the number of voters per district. Just as it was intolerable for a rural district with 500 voters to have the same representation in a state legislature as an urban district with 5000 voters, it’s now constitutionally suspect to have that disparity between a heavily (non-citizen) foreign-born district and one with mostly native-born citizens. In each case, the Supreme Court must intervene to maintain voter equality.

While the specific case now before the Court, Evenwel v. Abbott, doesn’t present the stark 10:1 ratio in voting power I just stylized, the disparities are nonetheless significant: as detailed by the challengers to Texas’s districting map detail (see tables on pages 8-10 of their jurisdictional statement), some state senate districts deviate by as much as fifty percent from the ideal. That means that twice as many voters may elect a state senator in one district as in the smallest district.

In sum, regardless of one’s views of Evenwel’s particular facts, it has to be the case that disparities between the number of voters in state districts raises a constitutional issue. Otherwise, even 10:1 or 100:1 ratios wouldn’t be a problem. And if all we’re talking about here is line-drawing rather than first principles, then the challengers win.

Cato’s briefing

I don’t want to simply summarize the challengers’ arguments, so let me focus instead on two points that Cato is developing for our Evenwel merits brief: (1) the inaptness of the so-called “federal analogy” (which I’ll explain); and (2) that when the Voting Rights Act (VRA) conflicts with the Constitution, the latter trumps.

The federal analogy
When the Supreme Court was asked more than fifty years ago to uphold grossly disproportionate state legislative districts, Alabama argued that states should be allowed to implement a “little federal system” that would be “framed after the Federal System of government—namely one senator in each county of the state.”

The Court correctly realized then that “the federal analogy [is] inapposite and irrelevant to state legislative districting schemes.” After all, the states are “separate and distinct governmental entities which have delegated some, but not all, of their formerly held powers to the single national government,” whereas “[p]olitical subdivisions of States—counties, cities, or whatever—never were and never have been considered as sovereign entities, [but rather] have been traditionally regarded as subordinate governmental instrumentalities created by the State to assist in the carrying out of state governmental functions.” Further, because “[t]he system of representation in the two Houses of the Federal Congress . . . [arose] from unique historical circumstances,” “the Founding Fathers clearly had no intention of establishing a pattern or model for the apportionment of seats in state legislatures when the system of representation in the Federal Congress was adopted.”

The Court is now presented with a new, twenty-first-century federal analogy, this time relating to the other chamber of Congress. Texas and its supporters are arguing that because the Constitution allocates congressional representatives by total population rather than voter population, states should be able to do the same for their own legislative districts.

This federal analogy works no better than the last one. Careful study of the original public meaning and history of both Section 2 of Article I and Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment show that the rule they established is one for dealing with separate states that possess a great deal of legal autonomy – first and foremost in defining for themselves who shall have the right to vote. Once again, states are asking that they be allowed to treat their legislative districts as if they were separate states.

Since the federal rule provides no support for state inequalities, we’re left back at the same simple principle the Court has consistently upheld, that “[t]he conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote.”

The Voting Rights Act vs. the Constitution
Another argument has been put forward to justify violating OPOV – that Section 2 of the VRA requires gerrymandering state legislative districts to create majority-Hispanic districts where possible, and that this “compelling interest” justifies the effect of unequal voter strength. This argument fails because even if the VRA does ask states to do such gerrymandering, such legislation can’t trump the Constitution. Where the VRA conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment, the VRA must give way.

Let me explain. States are now caught in the inevitable trap of (1) maintaining majority-minority districts under complex, overlapping legal precedents and (2) administering electoral schemes that do little to advance racial equality while doing much to undermine voter equality. In the background of this conflict, there lurks a cacophony of precedent and oft-conflicting court-administered standards that have arisen from cases interpreting Section 2 of the VRA. Basic constitutional guarantees of equal protection inherent in the Fourteenth Amendment – such as OPOV – get lost in this thicket.

Avoiding racial discrimination is particularly difficult in jurisdictions where “total population” and “citizens of voting age population” (CVAP) – standard metrics for evaluating whether a district violates OPOV – diverge due to varied concentration of non-citizens. As I’ve described before, jurisdictions navigating between the VRA’s Scylla and the Constitution’s Charybdis are bound to wreck individual rights – here, voter equality – on judicial shoals.

Over the years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the potential for devaluing individual votes by drawing majority-minority districts in a manner that accords greater weight to minority votes in protected districts and diminishes the relative weight of voters elsewhere. In 2000, in Chen v. City of Houston, the Fifth Circuit also recognized this danger while ultimately ruling the other way. Nevertheless, here the special district court adhered to that flawed lower-court precedent – refusing to acknowledge CVAP as integral to OPOV and thus a required element of equal protection.

At least one Justice – Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting from the denial of certiorari in the Chen case in 2001 – has already recognized the urgency of the problem: “Having read the Equal Protection Clause to include a ‘one-person, one-vote’ requirement, and having prescribed population variance that, without additional evidence, often will satisfy the requirement, we have left a critical variable in the requirement undefined.”

The VRA’s Section 2 and the Fourteenth Amendment have thus reached an impasse that has been highlighted by a conflict among lower courts’ application of OPOV. (The Fifth Circuit has held that states can choose either total population or CVAP on the grounds that the Equal Protection Clause is ambiguous, the Fourth Circuit reached the same conclusion but through the “political question” doctrine, and the Ninth Circuit held that states can only use total population, in a split 2-1 decision that provoked a strong dissent by Judge Kozinski.) It’s thus heartening that the Court took up Evenwel – and hopefully it will resolve that conflict once and for all by explaining the proper use of different population metrics. The noble principle of OPOV needs to be saved from the legal morass of Voting Rights Act jurisprudence.

Posted in Evenwel v. Abbott, Featured, One person, one vote and Evenwel

Recommended Citation: Ilya Shapiro, Symposium: Taking voter equality seriously, SCOTUSblog (Jul. 29, 2015, 12:01 AM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/07/symposium-taking-voter-equality-seriously/