GIT R DONE: Why throwing more money at cops won't help.

Madison journalist wonders why cops dont arrest people before they commit crimes: https://t.co/gSxe0WoFhZ. @ChrisRickertWSJ

— BrianePagel (@BrianePagel) August 26, 2017

There was recently a spate of shootings and related retaliatory violence in Madison, Wisconsin, where that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen.

This morning, Chris Rickert, a columnist for whatever is left of the local media, posted an editorial which has some remarkably backward thinking in it.   The gist of Rickert's editorial (that link leads to the whole thing) appears to be that long-term action is useless and we should devolve to a police state because that GITS THINGS DONE.

Seriously: The piece's title is "Madison do-gooders haggled over shootings police stopped." It begins "provocatively":

Madison’s mayor and City Council spent valuable time this spring and summer feuding among themselves and with local activists over how to respond, ahem, quickly to a rash of shootings.
Madison Police Chief Mike Koval on Aug. 9 announced plans to round up those suspected in the violence and two weeks later announced that the shootings had largely stopped...

Wait for it...

— at least for now.

The best problem solving is always temporary! Rickert went on to ask why the cops hadn't just arrested the bad guys BEFORE they committed the shootings, and when I questioned Rickert's commitment to creating a pre-crimes unit at the MPD he suggested the police already had warrants for the future-shooters and could've just picked them up.

Rickert's piece plays up the notion that all we have to do is GIT THINGS DONE by throwing more money at the cops. He talks about how all the money already thrown at social programs aimed at ending violence haven't stopped ALL THIS VIOLENCE and whether it's worth it to try again.  This is the same fatalist debate that people use to argue guns ought not be outlawed: people will still HAVE guns won't they? Can't turn back the tide might's well just let people do what they want.

The argument that something has not worked at 100% capacity is a false argument. First of all, my computer crashes about 10 times a week. According to Rickert's philosophy, since all previous fixes have not corrected the problem permanently, I should go back to an abacus. Secondly, NO law or social program is 100% effective. Kids fail school. Murders happen even though murder has been illegal since Moses broke the tablets. The internet hasn't yet killed local newspapers. So just because social programs haven't ended all violence is not a reason to simply say "well they failed SADDLE UP BOYS WE'RE FORMIN' A POSSE."

Rickert talks about how the cops don't have the resources to track down the 8000 outstanding warrants MPD has, and finishes his piece with this bon mot:

[The chief] doesn’t think the shootings have stopped for good. But given how much police have been able to accomplish in a few weeks of targeted effort and overtime, it’s hard not to wonder whether violence could become less prevalent if the mayor and City Council were slightly more receptive to Koval’s calls for more resources.

The well-intentioned social progressives who  run Madison don’t like to consider it, but there may just be some hardened criminals who can’t be reformed by anything paid for by government or carried out by Madison do-gooders.

None of which is to say the do-gooders shouldn’t keep trying.
But if all the trying fails, it’s nice to know something as simple as more policing hasn’t.

So piece that out: we need only "slightly" more resources -- in an unknown amount -- thrown at the police to achieve... what? Rickert's piece admits the police DO NOT THINK THE SHOOTINGS HAVE STOPPED. That undermines Rickert's whole thesis: quick action achieved a temporary lull at best and maybe achieved nothing at all.

More importantly, it is not a matter of SLIGHT increases in resources.  Give the police 8,000 more men, say, one for each of those warrants. Those guys go out and arrest EIGHT THOUSAND people in the Madison area.

The Dane County Jail, where MPD keeps criminals awaiting charging who have not been released, has 341 beds and 24 segregation cells. Maybe we could just put 25 guys in each bed.  Or, if we still consider human rights, what would happen is at least 7,659 arrestees would be IMMEDIATELY released back out on the streets on some form of bail or signature bond. At least that would give the 8,000 new cops something to do: they could monitor them! And arrest them and release them again if something new happens!  Catch And Release as law enforcement.

Once those 8000 guys are booked, they will have to be arraigned.  Dane County has 17 judges and about 8 court commissioners who can do initial hearings and other LEGALLY REQUIRED steps in prosecuting cases.  One Dane County judge recently commented -- ON THE RECORD -- about how more and more accused were demanding speedy trials (it's only a constitutional right, after all) and that was placing a burden on the court system.

Those 8000 guys will need lawyers. Most criminal defendants get public defenders. In Wisconsin, the public defender system is so overburdened it led to the Seattle University of Law releasing a study in which it described Wisconsin's system as "Justice Shortchanged."  Public defenders in Wisconsin are paid $40 per hour by the state. Average overhead per hour for a lawyer in Wisconsin is just over $41, so assigned counsel public defenders barely make ends meet. I won't go into what that means because I don't want to demean the GOOD lawyers who do that work. But there simply aren't the resources to dump 8000 new cases onto public defenders and private lawyers willing to do pro bono or extremely cheap work.

But maybe you're one of those people who doesn't think the criminals deserve lawyers and all that liberal do-gooder nonsense. Even for you, there's problems: Wisconsin's prosecutors are overburdened and underpaid. In 2016 a study said Wisconsin needs at least 140 more prosecutors -- about 2 per county. District attorneys described what they do  as "a public safety crisis" and "essentially malpractice."

Hey, guys -- here's 8000 MORE CASES to prosecute.  Have fun!

This "crisis" it should be noted is almost ENTIRELY the fault of the Republican party.  While Wisconsin's criminal justice system and law enforcement was already in trouble in 2008, the GOP has controlled Wisconsin since 2010 and it was in 2016 and 2017 that the nation began to notice just how truly bad Wisconsin's justice system is. So much for law and order, right? Republicans talk a good game but don't back it up.

It's easy to write up six quick paragraphs about how we need to GIT THINGS DONE. It's a lot harder to actually try to understand the systemic problems that lead to an 8000-warrant backlog, and even harder to understand the failure of a nation to even TRY seriously to undo the terrible educational, social welfare, and medical 'systems' we have allowed to develop. We do a terrible job of helping people get educated, find work, take care of their children, get medical care, stay off drugs, and generally be good people. Anyone wanting to fix any of those systems runs into billion-dollar opposition from the Republican party, and gets no help from a Democratic party that has given up and exists solely to promote the good of a few people within it.

All of THOSE problems are worsened by editorials which make no effort to investigate the facts or understand the problems, but instead just blithely suggest that if we were willing to just pay the cops a bit more everything would be all right.  People read those things, and believe them, and it makes it harder to fix things. It is a failure of the media to publish that kind of drivel.

It began with just wanting to find one book

A while back I started trying to find a copy of the book Master Of The Five Magics, a book I read long ago and wanted to re-read again as part of my 100-Book-Year to see if it held up the way I thought it might.

Only the book wasn't available (at the time) as an e-book, and they didn't even have a paper copy of it at the library.  So I decided I would try to find it at a used bookstore, because why not? I mean sure I could have gone on Amazon and ordered it and had it in 5-8 days, but that didn't appeal to me.

So with that I began occasionally stopping at the used bookstores in town and seeing if they had a copy. They didn't, but they had many other paperback books I'd read once before.  I no longer had hardly any of my books; I'd sold many of them to the bookstore years ago when ebooks first became a thing.

But as I walked around the store trying to find a copy of the book Master Of The Five Magics I decided that I liked the way paper books looked, and I began missing my old collection of paperback scifi and fantasy books (and some other favorites), so I decided that if I had a chance I'd pick up some of my other old favorites, too, and re-stock my collection; not necessarily to read but because I liked them, liked having them around and the way they looked. They were nostalgic and interesting and fun.

With that, I sort of gradually slid into just plain book collecting, and that's where I realized I was the day I was in a used bookstore and came across some old E E Smith scifi books that they were selling for just a buck each. E E Smith is one of the early scifi writers (I once read most of his Lensmen series after hearing it might have been an inspiration for Green Lantern, my favorite superhero).  So I bought the books. I'm not particularly a fan of Smith, but they were old and collectible books, and I liked them, so I bought 'em.

That was the tipping point, so now I'm more or less committed to building up a library of books I loved and/or find interesting, particularly focusing on scifi/fantasy paperbacks, with a side of paperback movie novelizations, which I have always loved. As a kid I often liked reading movie novelizations for movies I'd seen, and generally preferred them over the movie.

That's all the intro to this post, in which I proudly display the three latest books I picked up, during a stop at the library yesterday to return books.  They are:

The first two I got mainly because they were movie novelizations; someday when I own a bookstore/toy rental company/book museum there'll be a whole wing devoted to those.  The last one is a book I first saw when the boys and I were spending the day at the Madison library (the big one). We were hanging out on the level where they let you eat snacks, because libraries are cool now, and while the boys were eating I was looking at the display books where the librarians group together books in themes like "Back To School" or "Beans!!!" or something. I'm not sure the grouping that had Willis' book in it, but I was drawn by the cover and the description

 Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.

I put it on my list of books to eventually read, but the problem was that there isn't an electronic version of the book at the library, which means that I can't get it through the library as an ebook, and the volume of books I read is such that I never want to buy them if I don't have to. (I'm still reading about 100 books per year, so it'd be like $500 or more on books per year to read this.) Then I saw it at the library and decided I'd spend all of 50 cents -- the cost for used books at our library sales -- and picked it up.

So there you go. I'm a book collector, having come full circle from when I eschewed ever reading a paper book again.

PS I found Master Of The Five Magics about a year into the search, at a bookstore near the home of my elderly uncle, because I now go to bookstores in cities where I have business, too. I re-read it, and it was still a solid book. A bit more basic than I remembered but not a bad read.

The sound of one hand not even clapping

The sound of a glass plate shattering on the kitchen floor can be terrifying...

but it is nowhere near as bad as the silence of a little boy who has no other way to express strong emotions.

Hey why were all these CEOs willing to back Trump and be in his White House?

"In the months after the election, the stock price of CVR, Icahn’s refiner, nearly doubled—a surge that is difficult to explain without acknowledging the appointment of the company’s lead shareholder to a White House position. The rally meant a personal benefit for Icahn, at least on paper, of half a billion dollars."

-- from The New Yorker, in an article about how billionaire Carl Icahn failed -- their word, not mine -- in his 'raid on Washington.



Although perhaps a better question than the headline would be "Why are publishers and reporters so committed to not actually reporting what is going on?"

Taking down Confederate statues is a move to make white liberals feel better about their own very real racism.

Today the first headline I saw was that some university is now taking down it's Confederate statutes, which makes me wonder just why we have so many freaking statues celebrating people whose sole motivation in life was to rend a country in two simply to preserve their right to own (and treat cruelly) other people.

But the big point here is this: taking down Confederate statues is liberal pandering to other liberals, whites, mostly, to avoid confronting their own inherent racism.

Take Madison mayor Paul Soglin, whose 60s radicalism is mostly expressed these days in trying to make sure the homeless are driven from Madison's business district rather than treated humanely and helped.

Soglin last week received plaudits for ordering the removal of Confederate somethings from somewhere.

Soglin was invisible for most of the Tony Robinson shooting: you could not find him taking a stance, on anything related to the cold-blooded murder of a young, unarmed black man by Madison cops. When those same Madison cops settled by paying $3,350,000 to Robinson's mom, Soglin defended them, and criticized the settlement.

Racism doesn't always dress in white robes, and racism isn't cured by easy fixes like pulling down statues.