More laborist policy changes on crime and safety

Changing the war on drugs, improving prosecution, and things to enforce more strictly

My last post began the overview of Laborist crime and safety policy. This post delves into further changes.

Changing the war on drugs

As long as there is a demand for narcotics people will try to supply it. America has had a really poor approach to drugs. We put major resources into border enforcement, which is the least likely way to actually control drug use. We allow for-profit corporations to produce and sell all kinds of narcotic drugs and to give doctors and pharmacies incentive to provide them to whoever wants, or can be persuaded to want, to take them. We make very little effort to get young people not to seek to buy drugs. We make no real effort, and in fact stop real efforts, to control drug money. We make no real effort to stop foreign drug production, and in fact protect Afghan opium producers and others who our foreign policy geniuses think are useful. What we really like to do is to lock up low-level drug dealers and pay DEA agents to play undercover games while protecting all kinds of unsavory people that they associate with.

Laborism will change all of this. We will emphasize reducing demand for illegal, unsafe drugs and we will enforce against money rather than people. We will change the way US pharma companies, doctors and pharmacies do business.

As I have explained in a prior post in regard to reducing teen pregnancy, there is nothing wrong with certain types of government propaganda efforts. They need to be efforts that are above board, where the government is proud to say “yes, we are doing that”, and where all of the information is true and nothing untrue is said. They also need to be properly conducted using modern techniques that work. The tobacco industry knows that adults preaching to teenagers triggers their rebellion response and makes them do the thing more. That is why the tobacco industry shut down the highly effective Brooke Shields ads and funded preachy ads that, as they predicted, actually increased teen tobacco use. An effective anti-drug propaganda effort needs to do things correctly.

The Brooke Shields anti-smoking ads worked - so they were pulled

A laborist government will hire the most capable PR firms to create and fund modern campaigns to shut down illegal drug use by making everyone feel that using illegal drugs is a degraded loser move. Such a campaign will not just use ads, but will also use social media tactics and integration into popular TV shows and movies, just as the financiers have done for decades to control our opinions. Yes, that will make current addicts feel bad, but that is a small price to pay for keeping a new generation from becoming like them. Americans respond to peer pressure, and if drug use does not make you a cool kid or a grown-up but instead makes you a pathetic juvenile trash kid, then few will be motivated to get into it. If a high school boy thinks that if the cute girl learns that he uses drugs she will say “Eww, get away from me, loser! I’d rather drink nuclear waste!”, then he won’t be inclined to use them. The old “your brain on drugs” type ads are ineffective, but we have a large industry in this country that is very effective at making people think a certain way and feel that everybody else thinks that way. Instead of using that talent to support the objectives of the Uniparty, we will use it to change the drug culture. Making people confront the fact that paying money for illegal drugs supports people who do very bad things would work with a large segment of society. Making kids feel that their peers or the cool kids will look down on them if they use drugs will work better.

At the same time, people do have a general attraction to mind-altering drugs. It probably isn’t fully possible to change that, but we can at least stream people to certain low-harm, low-addictiveness drugs. Alcohol is a potentially fatal drug and a potentially addicting drug, but most American adults use it in moderation in a way that can actually be healthy. Part of our culture celebrates and encourages irresponsible alcohol use, but we can counter that. We need to properly legalize marijuana use, but do it correctly now. It will be standardized to a maximum THC concentration and it will be taxed, and we should figure out a reliable way to allow police to test drivers for THC intoxication. THC candy and the like will be banned. It will be regulated to keep criminal groups from being involved. If there are harder drugs that are not addictive or particularly harmful, we can consider likewise legalizing those under a scheme with limited purchasing rights (enforced with secure IDs) and strong penalties (including losing all purchasing rights forever) for anyone who re-sells. All of this should make it easier to get consumers to reject worse drugs and illegal drugs. “Only losers send money to narco-killers to take potentially deadly illegal drugs that rot your brain, and no attractive person will want such a loser” is a pretty simple, completely true message that can be spread across all media.

When we squelch illegal drug culture it will be easier to help current addicts to dry out for good. Further, we will eliminate the customer money that has been driving American organized crime and gangs since Prohibition.

In the meantime, we will make the contraband drugs business unprofitable. On the medical industry side, we will suppress irresponsible corporations and we will prosecute pill mills and confiscate 100% of the money of, and revoke the licenses of, everyone involved in them. Laborism will fundamentally reform American medicine including eliminating pharma company incentives to doctors to prescribe and push their drugs. Doctors will have no upside for pushing narcotics and will have a lot of downside. Any spike in sales of potentially abusable drugs will be picked up quickly and will be investigated and fixed.

Anyone who makes a lot of money producing and selling narcotics in the US or producing them abroad and selling them into the US leaves a money trail. The Uniparty, because it wants to fund shady activity abroad, has never had a real interest in using our power to track and shut down this money. A friend of mine was involved in a multi-agency effort to shut down drug money laundering back in the 1980s, but when they actually succeeded in finding the banks laundering the money they were shut down and disbanded by some version of the Cigarette Smoking Man. America, in an effort to maximize its imperial power, implemented an international system of requiring banks to identify account holders and track money flows. Once that was in place, though, Cigarette Smoking Man got worried again. The Uniparty has been supporting the rise of crypto currencies and non-fungible tokens¹ that make it easier for international criminals to move money unobserved. America was notorious in other countries as being the country where criminal money was hidden, because we allowed anonymous ownership of corporations and trusts that could deal in huge amounts of money. When that became too embarrassing under international pressure we passed rules that required disclosing who really owns companies, but the Trump administration is reversing those rules.

A laborist government will use the new anti-money laundering systems to find and seize drug and illegal arms money both in America and crossing our borders. We have extremely sophisticated surveillance systems. We can require declaration of everything sold into the US and match that with money and goods flowing out. If we apply our abilities to spotting criminal money flows, we can succeed much more effectively than we can enforce to prevent foreign visitors from swallowing condoms full of cocaine or heroin or worse things, or to prevent Chinese or Mexican shippers from slipping some fentanyl into packages. We may not be able to pick up every domestic free-enterprise moonshiner or small meth producer who sells locally, but we can pick up money flows from interstate street gangs to regional and national kingpins and suppliers, and we can intercept and seize the money. No money, no business. We don’t need a bunch of sleazy undercover detectives making buys. We don’t need to immunize a bunch of criminals to sell out other criminals. We can just take the profit out of crime. And we can apply this to all major crimes. If we just shut down the drug business, cartels will seek to make more in arms sales, human trafficking, stolen goods, counterfeit goods, protection rackets, and the like. If we implement good controls over international money flows, we can seize the profits from all of it.

If drug money stops, gang members and others won’t have reason to be carrying valuable drugs and wads of cash, and won’t need weapons to protect from having them stolen. Low-level dealers already struggle to make a living. We will make them want to quit the business. We can put a major squeeze on crime without having to make a single arrest or search a single apartment or car trunk. Money changes everything.

Improving prosecution

When someone commits a crime, we want them to be caught and convicted quickly and with high certainty. We want to be careful not to convict innocent people, but any time our justice system tosses out useful evidence the quality of justice is reduced, and any time a witness is unwilling to come forward and testify justice suffers.

We need to get serious about taking care of witnesses. Despite the recent advances in forensic science, generally in order to catch and convict a bad guy you need cooperation from people who know or saw something. Commonly, though, such witnesses get nothing for coming forward, and they are not protected from the bad guy or his friends. If they are protected, it generally involves disrupting their lives a lot. Further, judges and prosecutors commonly don’t give much thought to the effect on a witness of releasing a guilty criminal on a technicality or pleading him down to next to nothing for his cooperation against someone else. The bad guy is back on the street with the witness. Few people will want to come forward to testify against someone if, in their experience, there is a good chance the criminal will be back out on the street and looking for payback a short time later.

Really effective witness protection would be complicated and probably expensive, but cooperating parties deserve to be treated right. Our constitution guarantees a right of speedy trial, but in practice our criminal cases move slowly. Prosecutors are required to disclose information to defense attorneys, so there is generally a long period when a criminal defendant knows that a witness will be used against them but the criminal has not yet been convicted. A laborist government would take the obligation to conduct speedy trials seriously. This would reduce the problem of persons who have not been tried sitting in jail for failing to make bail, and it would reduce the primary threat period for witnesses. (The most tempting time to go after a witness is before they have testified at trial. Going after them later out of revenge is less useful to the criminal.) Speedy trials are a matter of resources and priorities. There is no good excuse for our habit of ignoring this constitutional obligation. If we can speed up trials by providing adequate resources, then it becomes easier to provide witnesses and their families with pre-trial protection that is relatively nice and convenient. We can also use modern technology to assist here. There is no particular reason why a witness can’t give sworn testimony and be cross-examined on the record on video before the main trial, with that testimony available to be shown the jury if the witness is murdered or clams up or disappears later.

We will put heavy resources into investigating, prosecuting, and punishing any incident of witness intimidation. Anyone who facilitates the intimidation in any way will be considered to be part of the criminal enterprise and will be punished.

Most criminals are not very bright. Gangsters tend to post their crimes on social media. It is commonly pretty easy for the police to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. However, there are certain rules in the law that can make it easy for people who undoubtedly have been involved in a crime to get off. For example, some of those rules, which vary from state to state, involve holding that a crime has not been proven when it is not clear which one of a group of people, all of whom were clearly involved, did a particular thing². Those rules can be modified to convict the group unless they can prove which one of them did the particular thing. The other general item is the exclusionary rule.

The exclusionary rule prevents prosecutors from using evidence that the police obtained in an unconstitutional way, by violating the rules on searches and seizures or the rules on confessions. Further, evidence that the police find using information that they obtained illegally is also tossed out as “fruit of the poisonous tree”. The only people who get a direct benefit from the exclusion of evidence are guilty criminals. Innocent parties who are searched, harassed, or improperly interrogated don’t benefit.³ The exclusionary rule was put in place by the courts on the theory that without it there would be no effective mechanisms for enforcing the search and seizure and compulsory confession rules of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In practice, lawyers wrestle over whether the written statements in a warrant application were adequate or the specific things a police officer can recite as to what made him think he should stop and investigate someone were enough. The system is particularly perverse in that much of what actually amounts to probable cause rides on the professional judgment of an experienced police officer, which feeds her intuition. But the way the rule is applied, an officer who is wrong 100% of the time will never have a search questioned because no evidence will be found, while an officer who is right 100% of the time will have every search questioned. That’s just silly.

But we could introduce a two-part mechanism that would set up funds to compensate victims of illegal searches and seizures and that would discipline police officers and prosecutors who knowingly or recklessly break the rules. That would actually protect the innocent, which should be our primary concern. Given successful implementation of that foundation, then the exclusionary rule would not be necessary.

Setting up that kind of a system shouldn’t be too difficult. Authorities would be required to fund citizen-compensation pools and independent boards would determine when an innocent civilian had been subjected to an illegal search or seizure, and that person would receive a standardized amount of compensation for it. (In particularly bad cases, they could get a higher, individualized award.) That gives the relevant government authority incentive to try to minimize the number of awards handed out. Police compensation would be changed to have a significant variable component that would be affected by the number of awards issued based on the officer’s activities. If a given officer had enough bad searches to exceed the variable pay range, then that officer would be subject to further discipline. That wouldn’t be dollar-for-dollar, but it would be enough to give the officer reason to really understand the rules and try not to get dinged. If a city was paying out a lot of awards, they would have incentive to strengthen that variable-pay component to bring the officers in line. Importantly, if a jurisdiction failed to demonstrate that its program was being administered in a way that controlled police behavior at least as much as the current system, then that jurisdiction would fall back under the exclusionary rule. Therefore, we could not end up less compliant with the Constitution than we are today. If the compensation alternative has its intended effect, though, then we would compensate the innocent rather than the guilty for the errors of police officers, and we would not degrade the justice system by excluding true information.

In this system, individual judges would still issue warrants. However, the review board would then apply a uniform standard in reviewing the warrants that resulted in searches of innocent parties to determine whether those warrants were properly issued. The results, along with statistics on good warrants issued by judges, would be public information. Anyone who has practiced before judges, especially since the court system has become politicized, knows that they are not all the sharpest tools in the shed. Having convenient public information as to which judges are frequently determined to have been wrong, and thus to have cost the taxpayers money and the innocent to suffer, would be a good thing. Further, the judges would have incentive to learn which police officers exercised good judgment and which did not, rewarding good police work.

A laborist government would support bail reform so that an innocent poor person would not have to rot in jail pending trial while a guilty rich person would be roaming free. However, under laborist policy that issue would be less important in many cases. When the justice system is revised to have those offenders who are just messed up and need a re-set get the help and discipline they need to get on a better, happier path, that process will start at arrest. Rather than being tossed in jail with the real bad guys, they would be diverted into a helpful context. That part of the justice system should also move pretty quickly. It should be possible to get to a quick guilty plea in most cases because the result would be fixing their lives rather than wrecking them. The label of being a graduate of that wing of the justice program will not be like the stigma of being an ex-con⁴ today, because the graduates will be certified as not bad people to begin with, and as now being rehabilitated. If they can be processed quickly, then that leaves more resources for similarly situated innocent people to get attention for their cases and likewise get them resolved quickly. But, in the meantime, if they don’t make bail it won’t be so bad. Still, innocent persons accused of bad-guy crimes would be in jail with bad guys, and bail reform will be less likely to help them because we will still seek to confine persons considered likely to be dangerous to others, but at least speedy trial reforms will help them, and we will treat rich people the same way.

Some things should be more strictly enforced

Some parts of the justice system under-enforce because enforcement is inconvenient to the financiers. Laborism will rebalance those for the protection of working Americans.

A laborist government won’t tolerate human trafficking. We will use a social media campaign for this (on media not watched by young children, of course – the PR firms will know how to reach the people who use prostitutes) and combine it with heavy penalty, name-and-shame prosecution of anyone who uses illegal prostitutes.⁵ We will make a real, NSA-supported, internationally-coordinated effort to shut down child pornography and any pornography that uses unwilling or desperate subjects. That may involve government licensing and inspection of creators of allowable pornography, which may feel uncomfortable, but if it allows us to shut down the trafficked version then that is well worth it. Laborism, unlike the Uniparty, won’t be led by politicians⁶ that have a fondness for sex with young trafficked people, so a laborist government will be able to make a sincere and vigorous effort to shut such things down.

We will greatly increase anti-stalking restrictions. It is completely unacceptable for any woman to live in reasonable fear of a stalker and be unable to do anything about it. By using magic words such as “I invoke the anti-stalking law – stop”, she will be able to put the stalker under strong restrictions against any further intentional contact. Violators will not only face stern penalties, but also lifelong disabilities from firearms ownership and other suitable restrictions to help prevent them from threatening, endangering, or harassing others. Stalking victims will receive heavy investigative and prosecutorial resources to find and deal with stalkers.

We will get serious about roofie rape and date rape. The current rate of those offenses is way too high, and a serious enforcement effort should be effective to snuff them out. There are things that a person just does not need to do in life. One of those is having sex with a girl who is drunk or drugged out when the guy does not otherwise have an ongoing consensual relationship with her. If society issues the warning “don’t even come close to that – it’s a REALLY bad idea”, then it can be controlled like statutory rape. Reasonable 30 year old males should not be inclined to try to have sex with 16 year old girls anyway, but in any event we have made it clear to them that doing so is a really bad idea, so if they are generally law abiding they don’t do it, even if the girl in question is obviously willing. Don’t start a sexual relationship with a girl when she is drunk or drugged out, even if you think she wants to. It is an easy rule. Anyone can follow it. Combined with making the phrase “this is rape – stop” a magic line that no male dares to cross on penalty of prison, we could ensure that nobody gets into trouble by mistake. We would still need to sort out instances of false accusation, but making it clear that even rich boys and star athletes need to steer clear of this behavior would eliminate a lot of crime and make it feasible to spend the resources to sort out the remaining cases.

A laborist government will require that disturbing suspect behavior be flagged and tracked. Today, when there is evidence of possible child abuse or spouse abuse or other offenses, the choices offered are “do nothing” or “make a serious intervention”. Obviously, when a child shows up in the hospital with an injury of a type that kids get on their own initiative, we don’t want to have a big brouhaha with family services. But if something weird is observed in a hospital, a doctor’s office, a school, a daycare center, or anywhere else, it should be flagged with an adequate description of why it seems weird relative to what is going on with other kids. That should then trigger a check as to whether an adult in contact with the child has a history of abuse. Even if there is no such adult, if there are 2 or 3 or 6 incidents that seem weird, the authorities should know about that series of coincidences and be on the alert to look into it. Today one or more kids can be abused for years by a particular adult without anybody putting the pieces together. In cases of Munchausen by proxy (which is a real thing, not just on crime shows, and surprisingly frequent) the attention-seeking adult will try various doctors until she finds one who gives her what she wants, even if family members, nurses and teachers have expressed concern, with horrific, life-destroying results. I am pleased that I live in a county where stalking, spouse abuse, child abuse, and the like are taken seriously, investigated, and prosecuted, which I am pretty sure is not the norm in the county next door, but even here it takes way too long before the police have any notice that there is anything to investigate, and lives are destroyed in the meantime. While having a confidential electronic record that an adult has been flagged raises a risk of improper leaks and accusations, the potential harm from that is not as bad as the harm that occurs daily to real victims. Further, cover-up of abuse by lying or hiding evidence will be considered to make the person covering up an accessory. Precisely because false accusations in this area are bad, we need to have zero tolerance for people behaving in ways that make it difficult to trust what investigators are being told when they ask questions.

We will really go after telephone and cyber fraudsters as part of a global effort. There is no valid technological reason why we have to allow anyone access to the US telephone system without being able to specifically trace where they are calling from. We will implement such a trace on anyone accessing our phone system, and we will engage with foreign authorities to vigorously prosecute any foreign-based criminals, as well as vigorously prosecuting any domestic ones. Email is a more sensitive area⁷, but we will make it possible for consumers to designate that no email can be sent to a given account unless the sender is specifically traced and identified in a way that allows them to be effectively reported to US or foreign police. Other email accounts will not have that feature. Email providers can then set up their systems accordingly for different purposes, security/spam proofing versus privacy. We will energetically seek out consumer and investor fraud of all types and go after the perpetrators early on, before they claim substantial numbers of victims. While investor fraud should be less common in a laborist system, one should never underestimate the creativity of grifters.

A laborist government will treat convicted non-citizen criminals⁸ in one of three ways: 1) arrange with their home country to imprison them, and send them home to serve the sentence; 2) if their home country won’t guarantee to confine them and they are potentially dangerous if they get back in, then imprison them here and deport them after their sentence is up; or 3) if it is a relatively minor (but not petty), non-dangerous crime and not a major fraud, just deport them. When I was a visitor in other countries, resident or not, I respected their laws. That is not too much to ask. If we wish, we can do a one-for-one exchange, allowing one extra law-abiding person from that country to become a resident here for each criminal from that country that we deport. In any event, given that America can only take so many immigrants, it is insane to give those slots to people who commit crimes here instead of giving them to people who are law abiding and productive. Our immigration policy has been nonsensical for the reasons explained in another post, allowing the financiers to exploit foreigners and undercut American working people, and the game of trying to act strict on unauthorized immigration while actually encouraging it has allowed for nonsensical treatment of criminal aliens as well. We will rationalize this in favor of law-abiding entrants.

We will shut down fencing of stolen goods. The mass shoplifting phenomenon and other large-scale theft operations have been enabled by on-line fences, and a lot of violent crimes are associated with small-scale fencing operations that encourage robbers. It wouldn’t be that difficult to make a big dent in the sales of stolen merchandise.

Finally, a laborist government will not tolerate purchases of guns by felons, stalkers, wife beaters and psychotics. The whole point of gun ownership for self-defense is to be better armed than the bad guys. If the bad guys have equal or better guns, what sane person wants to be involved in a shoot-out? Poll after poll shows that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys, but we make no real effort to make that happen because it would interfere with the profits of the gun industry. The nation of Mexico has sued US gun companies, rightly, because they have knowingly facilitated the supply of high-powered weaponry to the Mexican cartels. That is how our financier-owned gun companies operate. We will rebalance our gun laws and enforcement in favor of what working Americans want, which is protection against bad guys and dangerous lunatics.

Likewise, we will ban Teflon-coated cop-killer bullets and other things that are designed to kill police, as well as high-capacity magazines. If the government seriously wants to suppress citizens with force, the military has plenty of stuff that will make them superior to anyone with an AR-15. Outgunning the army is not a serious possibility. The Afghans did not beat our troops with rifles, they did it with Improvised Explosive Devices. There is no point in allowing actual, current criminals to have the upper hand on the streets just to feed a boyish fantasy about shooting oppressive government troops in some future dystopia.⁹ Laborism will prevent that dystopia from happening by enforcing what the Second Amendment really says, which is that the states will control the militias and the federal authorities will not be allowed to keep a standing army capable of oppressing the citizenry. We will let law-abiding, sane citizens have guns adequate to deal with bad guys, rather than allowing bad guys and would-be school shooters who are specially interested in having a lot of firepower have the advantage. Normal people don’t propose to defend their home against invaders by bringing out a 50-round high-powered rapid-fire gun to shoot up their living room. They can use a pistol, rifle, shotgun, or even an AK-47 if they want,¹⁰ but not with so many bullets in the clip that they could shoot up a school before a police officer had a chance to shoot back.

To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe (it’s free and you won’t get spam from me, just posts) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.

1. significant piece of the high-end auction market in physical art is actually money laundering by criminals. Because crappy art can have weirdly high values, it is relatively easy to arrange auctions or purchases where an anonymous party pays a crazy high amount of money for an artwork from a particular foreign seller. Electronic tokens make such games that much easier.

2. The particular thing may be pulling the trigger, driving the stolen vehicle, possessing the banned item, etc. When they were all voluntarily involved and the ones who didn’t do the particular thing are stingy with the truth, why should that help them?

3. Having an improperly coerced confession thrown out can benefit an innocent person, but that’s a different thing. An improper confession is tossed largely because it is likely to be false, unlike the fruits of an improper search. You can preserve that rule and just not have it illogically extended by the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, since finding further evidence actually proves the confession was accurate.

4. We would need a new, distinct word for them. As long as the public actually had good experiences with the reformees that would help. Changing a term for a group that the public has continuing bad experiences with isn’t helpful.

5. Legal prostitution, where it exists, is a different animal in that it can be subjected to regulation to make sure that the sex workers are making a free choice. We should question why they feel that is a good choice and why they don’t have better options, but those are different questions from stopping human trafficking.

6. The Uniparty system of professional politicians, slick grifters who raise money from fatcats in order to pursue political power for its own sake, tends to attract a certain warped personality type.

7. People are used to the idea that the government can find out which numbers we have called and been called by, but these days email contacts give a lot of information regarding what you read, where you shop, and so on, which is why companies like Google and Microsoft are willing to provide the service in exchange for seeing your contact data and reading your mail.

8. To be clear, here I refer to immigrants who commit discrete crimes here, as opposed to all those who violate our immigration laws. Immigration policy in general has been discussed in a different post.

9. In any event, if the future dystopia ever comes, rebels will be hunted down with fast-moving drones and bullet proof kill-bots. The government has already been working on that technology in the Ukraine war. Avoiding that dystopia is another reason to support laborism.

10. I did target practice with a friend’s AK-47, which was fun, but we didn’t need to fire 50 rounds without reloading to do that.