Reason.tv has announced the Nanny of the Month for August 2010 — Quincy, Illinois Police Chief Rob Copely. Copely set up –wait for it — a sting operation to catch a driver who took tips to keep drunk drivers off the street.
A video like this shows the divide between current leaders like Copely and the public. Copely, and most of those with whom he surrounds himself, probably consider his explanation for the arrest a sensible one, and deserving of deference. It’s all so rational, you see, and spelled out in his state’s statutes and city’s ordinances.
Still, ever-greater numbers of people have come to see charges in cases like this as both wasteful of resources and hypocritical. It’s wasteful because people understand that policing is expensive, and so officers and equipment are at a premium, and should be directed toward serious offenses. (The ever-greater cost of policing has brought new equipment to police forces, but also made it harder for communities to tolerate a leader whose initiatives bring taxpayer ire. News travels faster than ever, to more people than ever, and the price of foolishness is high.)
It’s also hypocritical to say that this charge had to be brought. Ordinary people have come to see that leaders exercise discretion in charging — for their friends — too often. No one had to charge this man, and any sensible person in his town knows as much.
What’s funny is that older leaders like Copley talk to others like themselves, along with a few office toadies, and so have no idea how a story like this sounds to most normal people. They’re told by those around them that their actions make sense, and that, truly, they’re the victims when bad publicity hits. (“Oh, Chief, those ungrateful complainers, misfits, anarchists, pyromaniacs, whatever, etc. just don’t deserve a great man like you.”)
Did you hear about the Oregon health inspector who shut down a seven-year-old girl’s lemonade stand? How about the California mayor who put the kibosh on a three-year-old’s vegetable stand?.
Sure they’re both big-time buttinskys, but this month top honors go to the top cop who busted a guy who was offering free rides to keep drunk drivers off the road.
Presenting Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for August 2010: Quincy, Illinois Police Chief Rob Copely!
“Nanny of the Month” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Associate Producer: Alex Manning; Animation: Meredith Bragg.
Whitewater, Wisconsin’s last Common Council meeting was held on August 17th. Part of that meeting concerned a proposal for transparency in government, with improved standards for posting meeting notices and agendas online, recording those meetings, and making the records conveniently available online for residents of Whitewater. I’ve written on this topic before. (See, for example, Beyond Paper Packets for Only a Few.)
I’ll consider only the discussion on transparency. That discussion begins at 45:55 on the recording, and continues through 1:05:45. I have embedded a video from that meeting, immediately below.
This video is a fine start – we can and should expand recording to other public meetings. Transparency and openness in government is valuable for many reasons, but consider just this one:
Transparency in government is about keeping citizens informed about public meetings of public officials at public expense with accurate and reliable readings. Does a community want to rely on what officials recall happened at a meeting, through mere notes, or should a community use the accurate and commonplace media of audio and video recording to assure that what was said is preserved accurately and reliably as a reference?
If people watch and record every experience of their children, relatives, and even friends, should government not record the actual words and positions of public officials in public meetings, supposedly held for the benefit of all residents?
From Whitewater’s Common Council, one heard several objections, however indirect, to the prompt adoption of the main transparency proposal.
What’s the rush? It’s all around us — in a city whose municipal administration would have made better decisions had there been a more transparent government years ago. I am convinced that this is true: that widespread awareness of the content of proposals would first have elicited more public comment, and those comments would have prevented so many closed-group decisions that plague us now.
No matter how intoxicating it may be for a small group of career managers to hear only their own voices, their decisions cannot be as sound as those informed by the opinions from among the thousands in this city.
No one person, no group of a dozen or so, is a match for the collective understanding of our city’s residents. Centuries of experience shows this, time and again, in place after place, and on this point one could successfully contend against any number of objections.
That’s the rush, and that would be the improvement in our quality of life — that we’ll be a more honest and practical city — than we are now. Every day delayed is a day we’re less than we could be, both in our principles and in the prudent gathering of community insight.
Committee Support. Saying that transparency depends on what committee members will prefer, as some at council did, is a gross misunderstanding. Those who who advocate inquiring of committee members think they’re being sensible, considerate, whatever. In fact, it only shows how confused they are about governance. These are not private committees and private topics, but public ones. Those who have volunteered for a public body, organized under law, shouldn’t be in a position to object, ‘we’d like a less transparent and less accurate way to memorialize our proceedings, please.’
Note, also, that any citizen may record open session public meetings, in audio or video. Wisconsin law allows, and encourages, the practice:
Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants.
Wis. Stat. sec. 19.90.
A person who sought, using conventional means, to record an open session meeting would be within his or her rights under our law. That’s not just true for Council meetings, but for those of committees and commissions, too. Attempts to prevent conventional recording would be a violation of Wisconsin law, and would justify legal action against a Wisconsin municipality.
Members of a committee may have an opinion on what they’d like, but as they have no veto against private citizens’ recording of open session meetings, so they would have no legal recourse should the City of Whitewater choose to adopt a more open and honest approach. (Whitewater is not required to adopt a more accurate means of memorializing a meeting; she may not, however, prevent a resident from doing so.)
Public Support. Asking a community that’s been denied a more open politics if it’s clamoring for one is like asking a horse you’ve starved if he feels like galloping around. You might expect that it will take a while for interest to return. An at-large council member in Whitewater can win city-wide office with only several hundred votes in a city of fourteen-thousand. It’s lawful to govern this way, but hardly evidence of popular support. A small clique of a few hundred insiders is not — and never will be — the whole city.
It’s just an expression of temerity for those who have so wearied and exhausted this community to contend that they need to measure popular support. Our leading bureaucrats have so alienated this community than they can only get a retiree or two to show up — at a retirement house — for a community budget meeting.
When they say ‘popular support’ they may be thinking about a few, but they cannot plausibly mean the community.
(This is an opportunity to consider the last so-called community survey that Whitewater’s municipal administration trumpeted as evidence of popular support. I’ll address that flawed survey tomorrow, on Wednesday morning, September 1st, and demonstrate that it shows not popular support, but false bureaucratic claims.)
Cost. I am sure that it’s fair to know the cost of preserving public meetings. Two points are worth making. First, it should not require the very best equipment, but only what’s adequate. Nothing need be gold-plated. Ordinary equipment can produce fine results.
Second, if this proposal is found too costly for the city’s budget, then it’s fair to ask: will it have been less worthy than each and every item that the city does fund? One would be right to list every larger approved expenditure, or smaller ones combined, and say: Was each worth more than transparency?
Soon enough, transparency like this will be the standard across Wisconsin. We’ve much to gain by adopting these measures at the earliest opportunity. more >>
The battle for openness in government is a difficult but necessary one. In some parts of the country, notably northern Virgina, some police departments are doing everything they can to prevent greater openness. Radley Balko of Reason writes about how departments in that state batten on the legitimate need for public safety to justify their own illegitimate desires for concealment and secrecy from the very public that supports and pays for those departments.
Even a modest bill to allow limited public access to public documents has been met with a firestorm of bureaucratic opposition in Virginia.
Consider these objections to open records laws —
When asked why she couldn’t release the name of a Virginia police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man last November, Fairfax County police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings replied, “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure? I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer.”
Pope reported that “police chiefs, prosecutors, and sheriffs from across Virginia” spoke against Edwards’ bill” at last week’s hearing, complaining that “incident reports were raw and unedited documents full of accusations and opinions that would reveal police operations to criminals.”
They also warned that releasing such documents would “create a chilling effect on victims and witnesses,” discouraging them from “coming forward to share information.”
Balko observes that
These worries are red herrings. Nearly every other police department in the country releases police reports to the public without compromising investigations, public safety, or the security of witnesses. Sensitive information such as the identity of police informants or the names of witnesses can be redacted.
What’s the reason for such opposition to simple requests? Keeping watchdog organizations, journalists, bloggers, and families in the dark about incidents shields the small number of bad officers from public view.
In shielding them, corrupt leaders compromise entire departments of good officers for the sake of a few of their incompetent or dishonest friends. Rather than clean house, bad leaders circle the wagons.
Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised by any of this — bad leaders protect bad employees (at the expense of good ones). What’s particularly unfortunate is how those who are supposed to oversee departments impartially are so quick to cover for bad leaders, and to support secrecy and concealment:
Meanwhile, the elected officials who are supposed to oversee law enforcement in these jurisdictions told Pope they saw nothing wrong with all the secrecy. “I am in the corner of trusting our police department,” said Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola.
That’s why, on a bad oversight board, there will be no attempt at balance — sycophants — toadies of every shape and size — will fill the board. There will be not even the pretense of impartiality — just boosters, cheerleaders, and starstruck defenders. Defenders not of good conduct, but of any conduct as though it were good conduct..
Fortunately, the defer-to-authority, don’t-you-know-who-I-am-crowd faces a bleak future. They’ve run out of excuses, and the flimsy ones they’ve offered aren’t credible beyond they tiny spheres in which they circulate. When they leave the scene — and they will, as they’re tired mediocrities — better leaders and overseers will take their places.
Cities and states across the nation are selling and leasing everything from airports to zoos- a fire sale that could help plug budget holes now but worsen their financial woes over the long run. California is looking to shed state office buildings. Milwaukee has proposed selling its water supply; in Chicago and New Haven, Conn., it’s parking meters. In Louisiana and Georgia, airports are up for grabs.
For those who (erroneously) think that the Wall Street Journal writes only one way – to the right — consider Dugan’s description of privatization:
“Privatization” – selling government-owned property to private corporations and other entities- has been popular for years in Europe, Canada and Australia, where government once owned big chunks of the economy.
In many cases, the private takeover of government-controlled industry or services can result in more efficient and profitable operations. On a toll road, for example, a private operator may have more money to pump into repairs and would bear the brunt of losses if drivers used the road less.
While asset sales can create efficiencies, critics say the way these current sales are being handled could hurt communities over the long run. Some properties are being sold at fire-sale prices into a weak market. The deals mean cities are giving up long-term, recurring income streams in exchange for lump-sum payments to plug one-time budget gaps.
There’s a sale, and then there’s an under-sale. Dugan’s story makes the difference clear, and describes how some municipalities aren’t just making deals with private concerns, but bad deals with private concerns.
I’d contend that one of the reasons that many municipalities across America are in trouble now is because bureaucrats falsely believed that they understood business transactions and conditions well, and consequently dabbled in too many projects styled as ‘government-business partnerships.’ These deals were often expensive and ill-conceived (as some in my own, small town have been.)
Across America, some of the same men who made fiscal mistakes (often through these wasteful ‘partnership’ ventures) are now looking to sell as fast as they can – for fire-sale prices. In doing so, they’re compounding their initial errors with subsequent ones.
As they’re the same men, then and now, this is unsurprising.
Of all things, America now faces a bed bug plague. It’s a return of a bed bug plague, really, and more intractable than before, as this generation of insects is resistant to many ordinary pesticides. One often associates bed bugs with the Great Depression, and by coincidence, we face them now while in the grip of a great and lingering recession.
Cuba has issued a pair of surprising free-market decrees, allowing foreign investors to lease government land for up to 99 years — potentially touching off a golf-course building boom — and loosening state controls on commerce to let islanders grow and sell their own fruit and vegetables.
“These are part of the opening that the government wants to make given the country’s situation,” said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who is now an anti-communist dissident.”
….[the] administration’s wanton disregard for both taxpayers and the company shows just how desperate it is getting to deliver some sliver of economic good news to angry voters ahead of the November elections. But its actions only bespeak of the dangers of government bailouts. GM has a long way to go before it is truly back on its feet.
It might make it–eventually–just as Iraq seems to have stabilized seven years after President Bush first declared victory. But as in Iraq, it will remain an open question as to whether the bailout was worth the risk and cost to taxpayers.
The principal attribute of a campaign against photography, or the encroachment on private property rights (see, “Is a Man’s Home Still His Castle? – Washington Examiner“) is that officials aim to take from American citizens rights that Americans now have, and have historically had. This is the dark – and reactionary — side of contemporary bureaucracy. In the name of security, or public health, or simply from officials’ feelings of entitlement, comes the demand that private citizens give up rights of property, association, speech, etc.
The political and legal backlash against this official over-reaching has only begun. I’d guess it will be a years-long effort, so long that it will come to be seen as a distinctive political era. Much of the over-reach one sees now, that has spread its tentacles into America over the last dozen or so years, will wither away. Those who have slavishly and servilely defended officials’ encroachments will find that the next generation holds them only as objects of ridicule. Americans’ natural taste for liberty, coupled with use of social media that are naturally open, will prove irresistible.
There are many benefits of a more open society, one of which Professor Reynolds of Instapundit.com highlights in an email from a reader:
….nearly all of our officers and their chiefs strongly support audio and visual recording of officers while on duty. Most jurisdictions here have voice-activated microphones and video cameras mounted in their patrol cars and remote microphones clipped to their officers’ collars. Many of these devices automatically download video and audio feeds directly to remote servers to prevent tampering with the raw footage.
But the cameras cannot capture everything that happens around an officer and the microphones have a limited range, so bystanders’ portable video can be a potent source of evidence documenting that an officer acted properly – which they do in the vast majority of instances.
In Alaska, there’s a United States Senate primary, with a close vote yet to be decided between incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski and challenger Jeff Miller. If Murkowski should lose the primary, there’s speculation that she might run on the Libertarian ticket in the fall. The Independent Political Report cites polling that shows Murkowski would do fairly well. (I’ve quoted the IPR story below.)
Murkowski’s not a Libertarian (or libertarian), has not espoused libertarian views, and would only be running on the LP line to have a chance at staying in office. On principle — and the LP refers to itself as the ‘party of principle’ — it’s a cynical idea.
If big-government, status quo incumbent Murkowski gets on the LP ticket, she’s likely to lose. Even now, Republican Jeff Miller polls ahead of her in a three-way race with Murkowski, Miller, and Democrat Scott McAdams. I’d guess (like Charlie Crist in Florida) that Murkowski would only fall father behind the Republican, after people considered her switch, and concluded she was just another incumbent eager to stay in office forever. (Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is another variation on this doomed, party-switching scheme.)
Murkowski may win her primary, and run as a Republican. If not, the LP should avoid her, and reject any overtures she might make.
The Libertarian Party is better off without an needy incumbent who considers herself deserving of a Senate seat, perpetually, policy and philosophy notwithstanding.
Here’s an excerpt from that Independent Political Report story —
This poll does not mean that Murkowski will run as a Libertarian. Wes Benedict, the national party?s Executive Director, has come out against such a move. However, Alaska LP State Chair Scott Kohlhaas is at least open to the idea for the press it could give the party. (This may not be surprising; Kohlhaas is running a serious campaign for the state legislature and is likely hoping for a down-ballot effect).
This lingering recession has affected many businesses, great and small. Among those small businesses are any number of unusual and eccentric tourist spots. Many were vulnerable even before the recession, and a good number will likely be lost during these difficult times.
Prairie Dog Town, near Oakley, Kan., is for sale, with an asking price of $450,000, says its owner, Larry Farmer, who also wants to retire. It comes with 37 billboards advertising the attraction, 400 prairie dogs and – for anyone not sufficiently excited by burrowing rodents – a live, six-legged cow. Deer Forest in Coloma, Mich., is also on the market. The owner, John S. Modica, says he would throw in the llamas and pot-bellied pigs. Dinosaur World, near Beaver Lake in Arkansas, closed five years ago.
“Some of the classic tourist stops have disappeared,”says Doug Kirby, publisher of roadsideamerica.com. Snake farms are in a rut, and mermaid springs are evaporating. When owners decide to retire, there often is no one willing to take over. Even so, Mr. Kirby’s website still lists more than 9,000 attractions and & oddities including the world’s largest hairball in Garden City, Kan., and the Cockroach Hall of Fame in Plano, Texas.
Snowball the dancing parrot doesn’t just bob to the beat. The YouTube sensation, who proved last year that humans aren’t the only species that got rhythm, gets his groove on better with a dance partner.
“It’s not just an automatic response to sound,” said neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “It’s concerned with bonding.” Patel presented new research about the boogieing bird Aug. 24 at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seattle, Washington.
For the famous sulfur-crested cockatoo, it’s about bonding with his human caretaker, Irena Schultz. Snowball became an online celebrity in 2007 after Schultz, who runs the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service in Indiana, put a video of him dancing to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys up on YouTube.
Two papers in Current Biology in May 2009 showed that Snowball — plus a total of 14 species of parrots and one species of elephant — move rhythmically to music in a way that other animals don’t, demonstrating that dancing is not uniquely human. The ability to dance could come from a connection between the auditory centers and the motor centers in avian and human brains, which allows for speech and lays the foundation for synchronizing our bodies to music.
