While I agree with those demonstrating in the streets that reform is necessary, I’m concerned that the gulf between the objectives that the demonstrators presumably want to accomplish based on the interviews I’m hearing and the means at hand to accomplish them is too great for them ever to be accomplished. In the interests of furthering the discussion let me propose my program for improvement:

1. Eliminate qualified immunity

“Qualified immunity” is the legal doctrine by which government officials including police officers are shielded from suit for discretionary actions performed within their official capacity. It also needs to be clearly understood that no action that is expressly against the policy of the jurisdiction by which government officials are employed can be deemed “within their official capacity”.

2. Sovereign immunity should be restored

There has been a movement over the last half century to allow state and local governments to be sued for the misconduct of government officials. The City of Chicago was sued for the misconduct of Jon Burge and those under his command. I have no problem with with people being sued over their own malfeasance. I do have a problem with the people of Chicago continuing to pay for things that are beyond their control. The accountability should be at the ballot box not from the public purse.

3. Reduce the power of police unions

Police unions are among the impediments to providing necessary discipline to police forces.

4. Better training for police officers with more community involvement.

IMO if all of those things were done in combination it wouldn’t unconditionally eliminate the greater problem that people are demonstrating about. It might mitigate it somewhat. I don’t know what measures would unconditionally eliminate the problem in a country of 330 million people.

I find the spectacle of governors and mayor who have unswervingly kept their states and cities locked down for the last three months but have suddenly become concerned about violating First Amendment rights or the right to freedom of assembly with respect to the sometimes demonstrators, sometimes protesters, sometimes rioters and looters who are destroying their cities baffling. They set aside free speech areas during political conventions why not now?

Yesterday I endured an excruciating presentation by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot in which she and city department heads including the police commissioner, one after another, explained to us how hard they were trying. I am not their mother. I honestly don’t care how hard the situation they face is or how hard they’re trying. I did not ask the mayor to take the job. Quite to the contrary she campaigned for it. If it’s too difficult for her, she should resign and let someone else undertake the responsibilities.

I think I understand the predicament they face. They don’t want to undermine their own authority, they don’t want to aggravate the situation, but they don’t want their city to burn, either. There’s quite a bit of knowledge about dealing with crowds although for some reason or other it hasn’t been much studied lately. The main thing to remember is that a crowd can transform into an aggressive mob in which the people are doing things they wouldn’t think of as individuals with frightening suddenness. Really, sometimes all it take is one individual yelling “Hey, let’s start looting!”

If they’re unwilling to limit demonstrations to designated areas, far from shopping areas, they need to be ready to demonstrate overwhelming presence if not overwhelming force and be prepared at the same time for mass arrests, something that should take place the moment the first rock, bottle, or brick is thrown. Something else that surprised me was that they seemed to think that 500 arrests in a day was a lot. It’s a lot if there are only 500 people engaging in mob action or disorderly conduct. If 1,000 people are engaging in such actions, it’s not nearly enough.

They can’t allow the demonstrators to overwhelm the system. They’ll need to cut some corners. They should have a lot of cable ties on hand. And if incarcerating those engaging in disorderly conduct or mob action results in all of them contracting COVID-19, so be it. Certainly exercising their rights of free assembly and speech were worth it.

The editors of the Washington Post are outraged over President Trump’s behavior:

Mr. Trump’s dog whistles and bullhorn blasts help ensure that police will remain unaccountable — rarely indicted when they kill unarmed people; frequently cleared when they are disciplined; often reinstated when they are fired for misconduct. They suggest there will be no change in racial profiling or unjustified officer-involved killings. Having torn up his predecessor’s blueprint, Mr. Trump now has nothing to offer — no prescriptions, no healing and no vision beyond a status quo many Americans abhor. In reality, his slogans and impulses signal a disrespect for law, and path away from order.

Okay, I get it. The editors don’t like Trump and think his approach is counter-productive. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Spokane, and many American cities experienced looting and destruction again last night. What do they propose?

I also think that President Trump is over-estimating his authority under the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Acts. In short, there’s little he can do legally unless asked for help by the legislature of a state or the state’s governor if the legislature is unable to act.

I started reading this New York Times op-ed by epidemiologists Dillon C. Adam and Benjamin J. Cowling on “superspreading” with some excitement, thinking it might be an important contribution to understanding. I was disappointed.

The phenomenon of “superspreaders”, individuals more likely to infect others, has been recognized for some time and has been described in the context of COVID-19 since it’s been known that the virus was spread person-to-person. To save you the trouble of reading the op-ed 20% of cases account for 80% of transmission. There’s also a survey of the literature.

Here’s the most valuable paragraph in the piece:

We are not aware of any study having been published that identifies individual characteristics that might account for an infected person’s degree of infectiousness or could otherwise help predict who may be a superspreader.

and here’s their conclusion:

The epidemic’s growth can be controlled effectively with tactics far less disruptive, socially and economically, than the extended lockdowns or other extreme forms of social distancing that much of the world has experienced over the past few months.

Forget about maintaining — or, if infections resurge, resuming — sweeping measures designed to stem the virus’s spread in all forms. Just focus on stopping the superspreading.

Okay, I’ll bite. How? As they pointed out there are no known characteristics that can account for degree of infectiousness. That’s just about as helpful as pointing out that you can end crime by stopping criminals.

In their editorial on the violence over the weekend, the editors of the Wall Street Journal sound a lot of the themes I did in my post on the subject above:

The violence that broke out in American cities this weekend goes far beyond justified anger at the killing of George Floyd on Monday. The rioters are looting shops and attacking police with impunity, and they threaten a larger breakdown of public order. Protecting the innocent and restoring order is the first duty of government.

The violent scenes in more than 30 cities were the worst in decades. Minneapolis police were overrun on Friday as neighborhoods and a police precinct burned. Los Angeles police were assaulted and their vehicles vandalized and burned. In Milwaukee a 38-year-old police officer was shot and 16 buildings were looted. In Dallas a shopowner trying to defend his property with a machete was stoned, beaten and left bleeding in the street.

Americans watching on TV saw reporters grabbed and pushed by protesters who flashed obscene gestures for the cameras. Police were pelted with rocks and bottles amid “Defund the Police” signs. Mayors across the country set curfews, and in Minneapolis and elsewhere the National Guard was called in.

This was more than spontaneous anger at the grotesque video of a white cop, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of the African-American Floyd for nearly nine minutes as he pleaded to breathe. Many protests were peaceful. But the riots in many places had the earmarks of planned chaos by those using Floyd as an excuse for criminality.

Gov. Tim Walz blamed agitators from outside Minnesota, including white supremacists and drug cartels, for feeding the violence, though he offered no evidence. Attorney General Bill Barr on Saturday blamed much of the trouble on “anarchistic and far left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from out of state to promote the violence.”

Antifa are loosely affiliated agitators who claim to be anti-fascists. They dress in black and cover their heads, often letting others man the front lines while directing assaults on police from a distance.

Amid this chaos, police in most cities have shown notable discipline. A police car drove into a crowd surrounding it in New York City, but even Mayor Bill de Blasio noted it would not have happened if protesters had not been threatening. The risk is that, as confrontations escalate, some police will lose their cool and someone will be killed, producing another cycle of protest and violence.

Contrast all of this with the progress of the justice system in the Floyd case. Officer Chauvin was charged Friday with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The Hennepin County district attorney brought charges in record time that he will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and he says he may bring more charges, presumably against one or more of the three other officers involved in Floyd’s arrest.

In other words the judicial system is not the problem. It’s functioning well. Look to the executive and legislative branches for solutions. They have created problems they are failing to deal with. They conclude:

The main victims of a summer of chaos in America will be the poor and minority neighborhoods going up in flames.

Long after the thieves and vandals and the news channels have left the neighborhoods, like those on Chicago’s South and West Sides that are bearing the brunt of the violence and chaos, the burnt out stores and buildings will remain. Stop complaining about “food deserts” while grocery stores are being burnt to the ground. Stop complaining about a lack of jobs when businesses are driven away.

I wish that Nikolas Kristof had included a deeper dive into the statistics in his New York Times column about the issue of COVID-19 among the Navajo:

CHINLE, Ariz. — The Navajo Nation is a vast, awe-inspiring land of desert crags and canyons, the largest reservation in the country, but today it reverberates with grief and fear.

The Navajo have had more people infected with the coronavirus per capita than any state in the country. Decades of neglect, exploitation and discrimination mean that even before this pandemic, Navajo here had a shorter life expectancy (72) than people in Guatemala (74) — and now Covid-19 is hitting Native Americans with particular force.

If Native American tribes were counted as states, the five most infected states in the country would all be native tribes, with New York dropping to No. 6, according to a compilation by the American Indian Studies Center at U.C.L.A.

because according to the figures I came up with in a quick crosscheck with the Navajo nation itself, it isn’t true. The number of cases is high but the mortality due to COVID-19 is lower than many other states, particularly New York and New Jersey which, whatever else may be printed, remain the locus of most infections.

I agree with his broader point. I think our priorities are screwed up. I think a lot more attention should be devoted to the problems of the rural poor, particularly rural blacks, and people living on Indian reservations. They are the poorest of the poor in this country—poor by global standards not just relative to their richer urban fellow citizens. An outrage.

I suspect the urban poor will continue to receive a lot more attention both because that’s where the votes are and for the same reason a drunk searches for his car keys under a lamppost.

I think that the intentions of psychologist Pamela Paresky and sociologist Bradley Campbell as expressed in their New York Times op-ed are good. Here’s their conclusion:

Solving the complex problems of the pandemic cannot be accomplished without considering ideological opponents’ views. We just don’t know how long lockdowns can serve as a life-saving, medically induced coma, and at what point they become lethal. Partisans need to replace “us versus them” thinking with the intellectual humility necessary to get the best thinking from political opponents.

Blame and recrimination are certainly common responses in pandemics. But they’re also counterproductive. Those who fall on the safetyism side of the spectrum are not fascists, and those who fall on the anti-saftetyism side are not human sacrificers.

If politicians would reject the tribalism of partisanship and do the hard job of listening — with open-mindedness and curiosity — to those with whom they disagree, we’d stand a much better chance of protecting both lives and livelihoods from not only the effects of the pandemic, but the effects of our responses to it.

What they don’t seem to recognize is that there’s good money to be made from demonizing your political opponents. Not to mention the power. You’ll never get rid of the “tribalism of partisanship” without changing the incentives.

The last several days have been extremely distressing. Local police simply aren’t prepared for as much widespread lawlessness as we’ve seen. So far the responses of the city and state have been ineffectual. Quelling the disorder is going to require a much greater show of presence and, possibly, force than either the mayor or the governor have been willing to provide.

The most fundamental purpose of government is not to provide health care or housing or to educate children or to pay pensions to public employees. It is to preserve order. If it can’t do that it loses all legitimacy and we’re well on our way.

There are at least four different groups involved:

• Peaceful lawful protesters
• Protesters who aren’t above doing a little rioting and looting
• Casual rioters and looters who are using legitimate protests as cover for their vile conduct
• Organized criminal “smash and grab” gangs

I don’t know what the situation is in Minneapolis or New York or Los Angeles but here in Chicago the last three categories far outnumber the first. There are few if any signs of anarchist gangs, Antifa, or white supremacists here.
There have been dozens, maybe even hundreds of incidents of rioting, looting, and violence. A huge number of shopping malls have been affected, all over the metropolitan area. 24 people have been killed, 66 wounded. None of those killed have been killed by police.

There have been dozens of videos of looters shown on local television. All of the faces of the rioters and looters in these videos are black. Their boldness is simply remarkable. They’re operating in broad daylight and without even attempting to conceal their identities. Needless to say they’re not observing social distancing and generally their facemasks are dangling around their necks.

Unless people just start getting tired of rioting and looting or the thieves and vandals run out of things to steal or destroy I don’t see how this ends without ordinary people starting to take matters into their own hands. We’re entering Max Max territory.

Read the transcript of this interview with Cornel West at RealClearPolitics and my remarks might make sense.

More than one sort of “social experiment” is going on in the United States as has been recognized from its very beginnings. The experimentation isn’t limited to capitalism vs. socialism. There is also, for example, an ongoing experiment as to whether a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-confessional country can exist without tyranny or tearing itself apart. The worst thing that might happen to him is if he were to convince people that experiment were the one that is failing.