According to the Washington Post database, here is the trend in police shootings of unarmed men over the past six years:

Anything above zero is too high, but it does look like we’ve made some progress since Ferguson. I can only guess at the underlying reason, but I imagine that pressure from Black Lives Matter has a lot to do with it. Protest and publicity sometimes work pretty well when you have a righteous cause.

POSTSCRIPT: The Post database includes only shootings, but shootings account for virtually all incidents of lethal force by police officers. Obviously George Floyd is a very high-profile exception

David Swanson/ZUMA

Oh man:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration may not immediately proceed with its plan to end a program protecting about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court’s four more liberal members.

Roberts is really in the soup now. Fox News is going to be calling for his impeachment before long.

Obviously this is good news for Dreamers, but the part that really tickles me is that the ruling doesn’t actually say that DACA can’t be repealed. It just says that Trump was so incompetent that he failed to follow the rules for repealing it. This has always been the silver lining behind the Trump cloud: namely that he’s such an idiot that he’s caused a lot less damage than, say, a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio, who would know how to get things done legally and properly so they could withstand judicial review.

At least, that was the silver lining prior to the coronavirus outbreak, where Trump’s idiocy is just straight up killing people. November can’t come soon enough.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 17. Again, nothing special to report. No big spikes or dips. The number of cases in the US is rising fast in some states, but that hasn’t yet translated into more deaths on a nationwide level. Keep your fingers crossed on that.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

In this era of ubiquitous cellphone video, it’s encouraging that police killings of Black men are finally getting the attention they deserve. But there’s a parallel problem behind the videos that make the headlines. Police shootings have been widely studied and the studies mostly point in the same direction: Black men are stopped at a greater rate than white men, and once you account for that, the rate of police shootings is about the same for both.¹ (I’m comparing men because women of both races are stopped less, though the disparities between them are also pernicious.) In other words, to reduce police shootings of Black men, we need to first tackle the toxic law enforcement mindset that has produced Driving While Black, Walking While Black, and every other police activity that unfairly focuses on Black men and manufactures too many unjustified encounters that can escalate all too easily.

This is one reason why, for example, stop-and-frisk programs like the infamous one in New York City are so damaging. They focus almost entirely on Black men and produce in those men a fully justified resentment toward cops who are constantly harassing them. What’s more they don’t even work: New York’s stop-and frisk program was mostly stopped between 2011 and 2013, and the only thing that happened is that the city’s violent crime rate continued to decline:

This has noodled around in my brain for a while and produced an idea. This might be stupid, and maybe it’s something that other people have already studied, but here it is anyway: Make traffic into traffic stops and nothing more.

What I mean by this is that too often traffic stops are mere pretexts to look for outstanding warrants or search a car on a fishing expedition. And we know that Black drivers are stopped far more frequently than white drivers. So why not eliminate the pretext? Don’t allow cops to randomly “run plates” looking for an excuse to stop someone, and forbid vehicle searches following a stop. In other words, with only a few clearly defined exceptions the only allowed outcome of a traffic stop is either a ticket or a warning, and that’s it. This is no panacea, but it would reduce the incentive for police officers to pull over Black men just because they seem “suspicious.”

Needless to say, it’s different if police have a very specific car they’re looking for. In that case the rules would be different.² And just as obviously, handing out a ticket can be a form of harassment too. Still, it sure seems as if this would cut way down on encounters between Black men and police, and probably without affecting the crime rate much.

Why am I so sure this wouldn’t affect the crime rate? I’m not. But the reason I suspect it would have little effect is one all of my readers are aware of: the crime rate in the United States has plummeted over the past three decades thanks to the elimination of gasoline lead. What this means is that a lot of the things we used to think were necessary for reducing crime aren’t true anymore. Teens and 20-somethings are simply less violent and less prone to crime than they used to be, and a lower key form of police interaction won’t change that. We have moved from a country in which crime was high and (arguably) justified tough measures, to one in which crime is low and is likely to stay that way. We desperately need policing that recognizes this.

¹For example, here, here, here, and here.

²There’s a huge difference between looking for a specific vehicle that’s associated with a crime, and simply running plates on anyone deemed “suspicious” and occasionally coming up with a hit. The former produces a few specific hits for specific crimes, while the latter gives cops an excuse to roam around and stop anyone with an unpaid parking ticket just for the hell of it.

We have finally figured out why voters had to wait for hours in Los Angeles during the recent election. It had nothing to do with the voting machines, but with the electronic tablets that replaced paper lists of voters for poll workers to check off:

The report concludes that these devices — known as electronic poll books — and not the county’s new $300 million voting machines were the source of those delays…Because Los Angeles County did not have backup paper copies of the voter list, poll workers were not able to check in voters when the devices failed, leading to long lines.

….The delays were caused by some poll books taking hours to sync their voter lists with each other and with the countywide voter registration database, making them unusable during this time, the county’s report says. The devices also had another problem: Poll workers were supposed to be able to look up voters’ records by name and address but were limited to name searches, producing hundreds of false positives in some cases that poll workers had to sift through. The report blames a vendor programming error for this issue.

As someone who used to work closely with software development of database applications, I never know how to feel about reports like this. On the one hand, stuff like this happened to us too, and probably to every other team that’s developed a similar application. On the other hand, we’re talking here about a database with a few million records and a peak rate of maybe 30 or 40 transactions per second. This is . . . not rocket science. Not in 2020, anyway. I wonder what the hell this app was doing as it “synchronized” voter lists?

Pavlo_bagmut/Ukrinform via ZUMA

In his new memoir, John Bolton says that Donald Trump is a moron who literally knows almost nothing. Yawn. Tell me something I don’t know:

During a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi . . . defended China’s construction of camps housing as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang — and Trump signaled his approval. “According to our interpreter,” Bolton writes, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Um, OK. I did not know that. What else?

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes . . . Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time “since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers.”

How about Ukraine? Bolton says there was indeed an explicit quid pro quo:

Mr. Bolton echoes allegations that were at the center of the president’s impeachment trial, writing that Mr. Trump repeatedly ordered White House officials to withhold military assistance from Ukraine as retribution for perceived slights during the 2016 election and as leverage to pressure the country to investigate his 2020 presidential opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Mr. Bolton describes the objective as a fantasy based on conspiracy theories pushed by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney.

“Ukraine tried to take me down. I’m not f—ing interested in helping them,” Mr. Trump is quoted in the book as saying during a White House meeting about military aid to Ukraine on May 22, 2019. “I want the f—ing DNC server,” Mr. Trump said, referring to a Democratic National Committee computer server that was hacked during the 2016 elections. There is no evidence to support the claim that any Democratic server wound up in Ukraine.

And it wasn’t just Ukraine:

The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine and provides firsthand evidence of his own that Mr. Trump explicitly linked the security aid to investigations involving Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton. On Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.

Mr. Bolton, however, had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he said they should have also looked at how Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.

That’s our president. As always, click the links for more.

This is a small store in Usme Centro, about an hour outside of Bogotá. Despite its name, it’s not in the center of Usme. In fact, it’s not in Usme at all. It’s about three miles south. Do I have any readers in Colombia who can explain this?

Here’s a fascinating chart from the New York Times:

First of all, it’s interesting to see how fast spending plummeted: it declined by a third within the space of less than two weeks. That’s unreal.

Second, it shows how effective the UI bonus payments have been. These payments go to the unemployed, who are largely in the bottom half of the income spectrum, and those are the people whose spending rebounded most strongly.

Third, it suggests that the upper middle class is still spending way less than it used to. The article notes this, but finds it largely inexplicable. However, given that the top 25 percent are responsible for something like half of all spending, their reluctance to get back to normal is a big deal.

My own guess? Low-income workers cut back on necessities (rent, food, etc.) because that’s all they buy. When they got more money, they started buying that stuff again because they had to. Richer folks cut back mainly on luxuries (theater outings, expensive restaurant meals), and many of those things are still unavailable. More generally, their spending is still down because they mainly cut back on nonessential items in the first place and that means they can afford to wait a while before they get back to normal.

Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/ZUMAPRESS

In the Guardian today, Arwa Mahdawi takes on US jaywalking laws:

Why is jaywalking even against the law? There is no such offence in much of Europe, including in the UK — although Ken Livingstone apparently proposed making jaywalking illegal while he was mayor of London. In the US, however, you can get a hefty fine and even go to jail for it.

….Jaywalking laws are not evenly applied: enforcement disproportionally targets people of colour. In 2019, for example, 90% of illegal-walking tickets issued by New York police were to black and Hispanic people. The laws are one small part of widespread systemic racism, but they are also part of the ongoing privatisation of public spaces. The streets don’t belong to communities any more — they belong to individuals, driving around in expensive cars.

Aside from the usual tedious hit on people who drive cars, I’m on board with this. Not only do I agree that jaywalking laws are mostly dumb and useless, but I’m all in favor of anything that reduces police encounters with people of color—especially those that can be used routinely as a pretext for hassling someone just for the hell of it. One of the goals of police reform should be the elimination of low-level offenses like this that give police too much discretion to harass anyone they want with no good reason. Getting rid of jaywalking laws is a good place to start.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 16. Nothing special to report.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.