Tag: Radley Balko

Categories
crime and punishment

Your Local Vortex of Despair

I don’t know about you, but through the years I’ve received my share of traffic tickets and parking citations. Minor stuff overall, seventy dollars here, a hundred bucks there, a couple hundred smackeroos if caught in the wrong speed trap.

Sometimes the cost made me say ouch. But like most folks I just pay the tickets. And try to slow down.

But if you are poor, struggling, climbing the ladder from one of the bottom rungs?

Different story. And a speed trap set up by your local police or the state troopers, then, has a much different punch to it.

Could traffic tickets be instruments of tyranny?

Well, the $150 some of us can pay with a mere wince another simply cannot pay, or can only pay at the expense of a child’s supper, or replacing a balding tire on the car, or . . . worse.

And those who cannot pay, despairingly, often shirk the “duties” they cannot perform. Like coming to court to pay the fines they can’t pay. And then they get arrested. And then serve time.

A few more “and thens” and their lives are wrecked. Along with the lives of their children.

Radley Balko tells several such stories in his recent article, “How municipalities in St. Louis, Mo., profit from poverty.” He explains the very human costs of speed traps and other penny ante scofflaw “services” the police inflict all around Ferguson, the scene of last month’s protests and violence.

Balko quotes one observer, who describes the whole system as a trap for the poor, sucking them into a “vortex of despair.”

Stop punishing the working poor with excessive fines. Vanquish the vortex!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
video

Video: Balko Talks to Vice

“There are people out there who fear the police more than they fear the criminals.”

Radley Balko interviewed about the militarization of America’s police, community policing, the Ferguson atrocities, and the “criminalization of poverty”:

Categories
crime and punishment

Policing the Prosecutors

Those who prosecute our laws have a solemn responsibility to seek justice, not simply victories in court. Their duties include not prosecuting the innocent and allowing defendants to examine all evidence.

Yet, in their zeal to look good with superiors — or to have better material for their political re-election ads — prosecutors too often forget about the justice part.

That’s why media watchdogs like blogger Radley Balko are so important.

Longtime Common Sense readers may remember Balko for helping free Corey Maye from Mississippi’s death row.

Now Balko brings us the 2011 Worst Prosecutor of the Year Award. Folks like us get to decide the winner from the ten prosecutors he’s nominated. (Mark your ballot here.)

You could vote for District Attorney Tracey Cline. She replaced disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong, who tried to frame the Duke Lacrosse team, and she’s following in his footsteps.

Or consider Grant County, Wisconsin, District Attorney Lisa Riniker. She charged a 6-year-old boy with first-degree sexual assault for playing doctor with a neighbor girl.

There’s Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, who charged Mark Fiorino with “reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct” for tape-recording police threatening to kill him for openly and legally carrying a gun.

I’m voting for my local prosecutor, State’s Attorney Paul Ebert of Prince William County, Virginia. It’s Ebert’s third nomination in a career of failing to investigate official corruption . . . too busy hiding evidence from defendants.

Mulling over the list of nominees, one’s reminded that power must be checked.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom

Videotape Police Abuse, Go to Jail?

George Donnelly may be wondering what country he is in right now.

Recently, he and other activists trying to hand out pamphlets published by the Fully Informed Jury Association were confronted by U.S. marshals in Manhattan. Attempting to record the encounter, Donnelly found himself being pushed to the pavement by the marshals. Then arrested. He is accused of “assaulting a federal marshal.” Another FIJA activist on the scene, Julian Heicklin, was also arrested.

The Libertarian News Examiner is among those reporting about the injustice.

In another recent case, documented by Reason magazine’s Radley Balko, a Maryland motorcyclist was arrested for videotaping an encounter during which a state trooper pulled a gun. Andy Gruber thought this out of bounds. So he posted the video, which he had captured with a camera tucked in his helmet, on the Internet. This resulted in a raid and arrest, and the possibility of imprisonment. Maryland police officers claim that it’s “illegal” to record anybody’s voice — ever — in Maryland, a willful misinterpretation of the state’s wiretapping laws.

Miscarriages of justice have often been rectified only when video comes to light exposing falsehoods in the official story. As inconvenient as it is for law enforcers to be held accountable for how they do their jobs, the alternative of letting them make up the rules as they go along and hide or destroy evidence of their conduct is grotesquely unreasonable and dangerous, and should be itself punishable by law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.