I broke the law over the weekend.

You ever notice how similar the cans for Coke Zero and Budweiser Select are? Being a regular drinker of neither, I didn’t. Turns out that they both have black cans with red lettering. It’s easy to think that you picked up one when you actually picked up the other. Very easy. I did so twice over the course of three days. The first time I simply thought that I was wondering when Budweiser came out with a cola flavored beer (come to think of it, why haven’t they?). The second time, I broke the law. I grabbed a can out of the cooler, opened it, and hit the road.

I realized my mistake after first sip, of course, but that left me with an open can of beer in my cupholder as I was cruising down the Interstate at 70 miles per hour. There are laws about having open alcohol containers on the road and I’m not sure a cop pulling me over would have understood my explanation (or would have wondered how drunk one must be not to notice the difference between beer and coke, which would have had the same effect). I thought about pouring the contents out the window, but figured that would attract undue attention. As would pulling over to the shoulder just to dump a drink.

That got me thinking, though… what exactly is the rationale behind having a separate open container law in addition to BAC drunk driving laws? I mean, if I was drunk, couldn’t they determine that with a breathalizer? Having alcohol in one’s system while driving is not in itself illegal (yet). The process of drinking from a beer can is no different (or more distracting) than drinking from a coke can.

Delosa was actually one of the last states to have an Open Container law. Not too long ago it was ridiculously difficult for a police officer to pull someone over for suspicion of drunk driving. Having a beer can in one’s hand was not sufficient. They’d usually pull people over by simply finding an alternate excuse (“changing lanes too quickly” or whatnot). So maybe the reason for Open Container laws is simply to provide justification for a pull-over. On the other hand, most of the time open containers are not visible until the car has already been pulled over.

I must confess that I don’t know a whole lot about criminal law, but would it be possible to be able to say that having an open container (if the cop can see it, of course) is justification for pulling someone over, but not an offense in and of itself? I’d figured that a behavior’s legality does not prohibit said behavior from being justification for further police scrutiny if it is otherwise suspicious, but maybe I’m wrong about that?

Another thought is that Open Container laws could be aimed at other people drinking in the car and distracting the driver. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either, though, because driving someone that is drunk is not only legally permissible, but actively encouraged (lest they drive themselves).

Will and I have a difference of opinion on the death penalty, but fortunately we’ve never had this argument (and there are even instances where Will admits his anti-Death-Penalty stance wavers, because of people who are “poster children” for the death penalty).

However, a standard attack by anti-Death Penalty advocates uses the “odd” idea that many DP supporters are also anti-Abortion (or, sometimes, the phrase “Pro-Life” is used, since the other size uses “Pro-Choice”).

The attack goes as follows: If you support the death penalty and oppose abortion and still claim to be “pro-life”, you’re a hypocrite. After all, you’re claiming one thing that the “Pro-Choice” people claim isn’t a human yet is worth protecting, but an actual matured human being isn’t.

The alternative is simple, but I’ve never heard it expressed so clearly until a local radio host did. I’ll paraphrase slightly because I can’t remember the wording precisely:

In the first case, you have someone who’s committed a crime so heinous that society needs protecting from that in the most ultimate form we can imagine. In the other, you have an innocent (fetus? baby? child?) that has committed no crime. That’s how I can be pro-Death Penalty and anti-Abortion all at once.

I did something last week that I had never done in my entire life. Just my luck, a cop was right there to see me do it.

I was driving on I-31 from my apartment in Santomas 45 miles or so away to my job in Almeida. Out of nowhere, traffic halted to a scratch. It was so chaotic that I almost got sideswiped by a truck. Then it was dull, because all we were doing was sitting there. It’s not unusual for traffic on the interstate as commuters from one city to the next are not unusual, but never was traffic remotely this bad unless there had been an accident.

I saw hours and hours of my life flash before my eyes when I saw a ton of “Road Work Ahead” signs. Could they really be closing so many lanes during rush hour that everything grinds to a halt? I feared that if they were, my ordinary 45 minute commute was about to become a lot longer.

As more time passed and progress was minimal, I came to the conclusion that there must be an accident. There must, right? So I turned on the radio waiting for the traffic report. The AM dial was full of conservative talk radio hosts lamenting McCain’s victory in Florida the previous day and expressing their views on the immigrants from Cuba that assisted him in his victory. I couldn’t listen to any one of them for too long without getting pissed off, so I started maniacally flipping through of them waiting to hear the magic words.

“traffic report after these messages”

The ads were a welcome relief, and as promised the traffic guy came on. “There are minor slowdowns on Spencer Street and 8th and 9th street as is always the case on work mornings. Traffic hasn’t slowed down on State Highway 8 as much as usual. Traffic on the toll loop is clear sailing, so don’t forget to get your Estags so that you can start having cleeeeeeeear sailing around town. Also, I-31 is closed northbound because of an accident.”

After getting over my irritation that he’d saved the most noteworthy part for a single sentence in the back of his report, I started pondering my options. It didn’t take long because I had none. Ahhhh, well, I thought, and decided that half an hour in traffic wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Then I crossed over a hill and saw cars literally as far as my eyes could see. That was at least five miles and I’d gone one mile in the last half hour. That was when I saw it. The there was a little dirty bridge over the ditch between the interstate and the access road. Further, there was a Happy Burger just smiling at me in the town we were passing.

I had never in my life attempted to illegally exit a freeway. I typically look down on those that do since all it does is clog up the access road and doesn’t seem to speed anyone up. But then I thought about it some more and if I was just going to hang out at the Happy Burger and get myself some breakfast until everything cleared, what was the harm in that? Heck, at the rate things were going I could catch a movie at the theater behind the Happy Burger. By the time the movie was out surely the wreckage would have been moved, right? I was wrong about that, incidentally, and besides no movie would have been playing that early in the day.

So I decided on an impulse to try to make my naughty exit. And there was the officer on the motorcyle who happened to be passing along right then. In the previous 45 minutes I had yet to see a single police car. That was why I had thought that it might just be routine construction. Usually when there is an accident, there are police cars headed towards it, right? Up until that second, there hadn’t been.

Surprisingly, the cop just stopped in front of me and pointed for me to get my ass back in line. I was surprised that he didn’t write me a ticket because illegal exits (like driving on the shoulder) are the sorts of things that really piss cops off when they see it. I think it disturbs their sense of order disproportionately compared to the nature of the crime.

Regardless, the cop let me go and went on his merry way. I easily could have exited again, but decided against it. A Happy Breakfast Sandwich would not have been enough to make me happy at that point.

When I related this to my coworker Pat, she explained a theory that she had. Cops, above all, want to be important. They signed up for important work and instead get stuck on things like traffic detail. One of the reasons that crying when you get pulled over is one of the better ways to get out of a ticket is not because of sympathy on their part, but rather submission on yours. You’ve acknowledged their importance, so no need to be an ass about it. It is when cops feel that their importance isn’t being acknowledged or when they have nothing else to do that they start going all Napoleon. When there’s something big going on, like a wreck, they’ve got better things to do. They’re already important.

It’s an interesting theory.

All told it took me about three hours to get across six miles of Interstate. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even get to see the accident. It happened on an overpass, naturally, and they had forced us onto the access roads at that point. When you pay admission, the least you should get is to see the show.

The Interstate was closed for a whopping six hours in all. A flatbed delivering kitchen tiling hit a car or got hit by a car and there were apparently shards of tile everywhere. No one was hurt, but they had a lot of tiles to pick up and a gasoline leak to manage.

When I finally broke free of the traffic and was going 90 miles an hour (why not? Every policeman in the county had Important Work to contend with and nobody on that freeway was going below 80), I heard another traffic report on the radio. About twenty seconds of explaining that traffic on city roads were going slightly slower or faster than expected, five seconds shilling for the Estag, and one sentence at the end explaining that I-31 was closed due to an accident, once again not even mentioning where precisely the Interstate was closed.

If I were to vote in Estacado in the primaries, would I be able to vote in another state in the general election? I’d think so since I wouldn’t be voting twice in the same election, but I’m not positive on that. Voting absentee in Estacado in November also strikes me as problematic if I’ve officially changed residence. Would I be disenfranchising myself by moving?

You guys want to know a bit of irony? Clancy has refrained from getting an Estacado Driver’s License thus far is now has to scramble and get one because she’s about to start a long haul temporary job in another state (Sierra). Her license is due to expire while she’s out there. She has to get it done today because she leaves Sunday.

There are two particular areas that come to mind wherein we take our usual Constitutional safeguards and put them on the hold for the sake of judicial expediency: rape and drunk driving.

I’m going to sidestep the whole rape issue for the moment because it’s such a contentious debate that it will sidetrack the main topic for discussion here. I’ll just say that I don’t bring it up because I am outraged. It’s a sticky subject and I think I fall more on the expediency side of the debate than the other.

Drunk driving is a bit more topical as we approach the New Year, so I want to address that one.

Normally, the accused has the right to refuse to self-incriminate, but in some (many? most? all?) if you refuse to take a drug test, the cop can (on the spot) arrange the holy fires of hell to rain down upon you. In Delosa they can take your drivers license and impound your car for 30 days or until trial on the spot. Even if you are exonerated, you still have to pay the impound fees. In some jurisdictions from what I understand they can technically sell your car before you’re convicted or exonerated, though I’ve never heard of this actually happening (I have heard of it happening in drug cases, though). Also, the fact that you refused to submit to a breathalizer test can be used in court, when no other case of refusing to self-incriminate is that the case (that I’m aware of).

As with rape, this is a response to a very real problem and it would be much more difficult to prove drunk driving cases without it. Drunk driving kills countless people every year and we depend on the breathalizer test to sort it all out.

What’s interesting about this, though, is that in many jurisdictions, including Delosa, you can be convicted even if you pass a breathalizer test. They hammer this point home when you take defensive driving. Passing the breathalizer test is not a fireproof defense against drunk driving. The ostensible reason for this is that if someone takes medication that makes the effects of alcohol more potent, someone with a .04 Blood Alcohol Content (BCA) is more drunk than the average driver at .08. There is also the more inconvenient rationale that some people really are incapacitated at .06 and need to be taken off the road.

Why do I refer to that as “inconvenient”? Because if some people are more affected at .06 than others at .08, then we have to admit that other people are not as impaired at .11 as the average person is at .08. If we’re judging the drunkenness based on impairment, then some .11 should theoretically not be convicted. The ability to effectively drive drunk should be a defense. If we’re judging it based purely on BAC levels, then nobody at .06 should be. Maybe the latter should be convicted of driving recklessly or something like that, but not of the same crime that is usually based on the BAC number.

I have the same discomfort with this that I do with paternity tests… an affirmative result is enough to get you, but a negative result is not necessarily enough to set you free. Paternity tests only involve money, though. Drunk driving tests can involve a lot more.

For the most part, though, drunk driving convictions when someone passes the breathalizer are very difficult to get and are rarely pursued. Juries have the BAC threshold ingrained into them and they will trust a breathalizer over a cop’s word about what constitutes drunken behavior. Even so, the time and money that goes into defending oneself is problematic. And unlike with traffic tickets, you’re going to go through every effort you can to defend yourself because you can’t make it go away with a $100 fine.

Of course, you can’t make it go with a $100 because the stakes are not only higher for the accused, they’re higher for society as a whole. Drunk driving has killed thousands upon thousands and arguably the authorities need every tool they can get in order to fight it. Despite having these tools, any 2am drive on a public street near a bar will indicate that they are failing miserably. Despite all of the threats that they can levy, people do it anyway.

In Santomas, Estacado, where I currently live, the SPD is having every officer from the Cheif of Police on down manning a car on New Years Eve to track down drunk drivers. I’m sure they’ll catch many, but for every one that they catch, dozens will go uncatched. The Santomas Taxi Association will also be offering free rides home to those that can’t afford it, but for every one of them they get, dozens more will drive themselves so that they don’t have to leave their car in the parking lot or will believe themselves not to be incapacitated. Tow companies will offer free tows, but there aren’t enough tow trucks.

No matter how you look at it, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to need to get home somehow. Some won’t be able to afford going home in any way except their car (even a free taxi ride will require an unfree one back to the bar to pick the car up). Without a solid public transportation infrastructure, the most efficient way for them to do it is to play roulette with their lives and the lives of other drivers. Most are willing to gamble that they can get home safely and without incident. The overwhelming majority are right.

All of the tools in the world that we give police can’t refute that logic, so I guess all we can hope is to scare the bejeezus out of enough people that as many lifes as possible are saved.

People that live in the City of East Oak have a sticker on the back of their cars with the letter “CEO” on it. The primary reason for these stickers are in the case of a flood, only cars with this sticker are allowed in the city and back into their homes. They serve a dual purpose, though, because it lets the Oakfield Police Department, which covers both East Oak and West Oak, know who is and is not a resident of the town. You’re considerably more likely to get pulled over if you don’t have the sticker than if you do, and if you are pulled over the sticker will sometimes help you get out of the ticket.

Some friends and I used to eat at an IHOP in Phillippi late at night on a regular basis. One of the games we would play would be calling “First!” whenever a cop would be pulling someone over on Tannon Road outside. On “Step Nights” it would happen 3-4 times an hour. I was dating Julie at the time and her father was a firefighter that knew a lot of cops. He would sometimes give me a heads up when it was Step Night, which was the term the PPD used when they’d put an extra emphasis on traffic enforcement. The PPD was legally prohibited from having traffic quotas, so what they would do was offer their officers overtime working traffic enforcements on certain weekend nights. They didn’t have to write any tickets, but if they didn’t they wouldn’t get to do the overtime the next Step Night because their overtime was being paid for, more-or-less, by the revenue from speeding tickets.

I’ve gotten maybe a dozen tickets in my life. Nine were while I was dating Julie and seven or so of those were on Tannon Road on a Step Night.

My Webmaster and I are having a conversation on the ins and outs of traffic law and traffic court on my post about wrongly convicted innocents.

Web takes great issue with the current system of traffic courts. I agree with him that it is very problematic (though we disagree as to the prosecutor’s culpability). The main problem is that traffic tickets are as often as not seem to be revenue-generators rather than attempts at keeping the roads safe.

Delosa has a great law on the books that prevents municipalities from getting too much of their revenue from traffic tickets by capping the city’s traffic revenue at 35% of the city’s entire revenue. This prevents cases where towns get to dodge tax and revenue issues by taxing passers-through by way of traffic tickets. The problem with the law is that it has loopholes the size of Alaska.

Delosa allows its residence to take Defensive Driving once a year to get out of a traffic ticket. The accused pays a $75 administrative fee and then $35-50 for defensive driving class. By the end you’re not paying much less than you would be for the ticket, but the advantage is that it doesn’t go on your driving record, so in that sense it’s a bargain. Some industrious municipalities also created something called Deferred Adjudication. If you get DA you pay an “administrative fee”, which is usually the cost of the ticket, and if you don’t get another ticket within 90 days it is dropped from your record (so again, the insurance company never hears about it).

The problem with DD and DA are that since they are “administrative fees” they don’t count towards the 35% revenue cap. Both programs are extremely popular because they are such a bargain compared to the alternative. In effect, though, they actually hurt drivers because it undoes the revenue cap and the ticket that they got off with DD or DA for they quite likely wouldn’t have gotten if the city wasn’t making money from it.

The other big loophole is that only municipalities are subject to the revenue cap. Delosa has several layers of law enforcement. There are city cops, constables, sheriffs, and state patrols. Only the cities are subject to the cap, and only cities have deferred adjudication because they’re the only ones that need it. So while the cities are limited, county constables (whose primary purpose are court bailiffs and court security) make no secret of the fact that their primary source if income is traffic tickets (they also are paid to police municipalities that don’t have their own police departments and enforce toll roads).

I recognize the unfairness that Web and others point out. I used to get really worked up about it, but I don’t as much as I used to. I’ve come to view traffic tickets as road fees of a sort that are weighted towards those that break the law. That being said, I’m very much in favor of closing the Deferred Adjudication loophole that help provide so much motivation for cops doing nothing but waiting for people to go a reasonable speed in a section of road with an unreasonable speed limit. People think that they’re getting away with something with DA, but in the end they’re pulled over more often than they otherwise might be and because it’s so infrequent that tickets appear on someone’s record the insurance companies act ferociously because they know that if you got caught and couldn’t DD or DA your way out of it, you’ve probably been pulled over several times without their knowing about it. In Deseret, where there weren’t nearly so many ways to get out of a ticket, insurance response to tickets was much more mild.

Because of the popularity, though, I don’t expect anything to be done about it. As much as the argument makes sense, it’s hard to convey the abstract truth that telling their insurance companies about their automotive misdeeds and raising taxes (which these jurisdictions would have to do to make up for the lost revenue) is a good idea.

Megan McArdle is confused:

The more important question, I think, is why the rest of us don’t spend more time worrying about false convinctions. What I’ve read about the Jeffrey MacDonald case, for example, makes it clear that at the very least, prosecutorial misconduct and dubious forensic testimony played some role in his conviction. This should bother us whether or not he’s guilty, since presumably the kind of games the prosecutors played with the evidence have been inflicted on other, less notorious, defendants who may have been innocent. Yet there’s been little interest from any quarter.

I inadvertently came across an answer to this question when writing the novel last year. A conservative politician named Neil was explaining to his old friend (the narrator) how he became a staunch social conservative over the years. I’ll put an excerpt below the fold, but the long and short of it is that Neil used to be a public defender and came to the conclusion that whether his clients were guilty or not they were usually failures in the system. The wrongly convicted man usually isn’t the banker you see on TV who stumbles across his dead boss and touches the knife and body trying to figure out what happened. It’s more often going to be someone with a long rap sheet that’s been in and out of the system for years. They were people that nobody had any reason to believe.

I think that by and large we don’t see ourselves as being in the position to be wrongly convicted. There is probably an implicit assumption that those that were wrongly convicted were guilty of something or had made poor life decisions that made them look guilty. We believe that police and prosecutors, while they may not always get the right guy for the right crime, only go after the bad guys. We don’t see them going after us. We don’t see prosecutors fudging facts in pursuit of us. We see ourselves behind them, pointing our finger at the miscreant, saying “tut, tut”.

Our belief and faith is often misplaced. For the most part it’s not even conscious. We almost all agree that people being wrongly convicted is bad. We believe that those that have been wrongly convicted should be set free. I think that we’re often reluctant to admit that the system got it wrong in the first place and when we think of “collateral damage” of an imperfect system, we think a lot more of “their kind” going free when guilty than we do “our kind” being targeted.

Even to the extent that we concede, consciously or unconsciously, that innocent people are jailed and even innocent people that are like us from time to time, our chances of being falsely convicted are logically much smaller than the likelihood that we will be victimized by someone that the system cut loose. If we’re going to be negative impacted by errors in the system, it’s far more likely that it will be an error that allowed a guilty man to go free than an innocent man convicted.

Anyhow, below the fold is the dialogue that came to mind when pondering Megan’s confusion. A fair portion of the book is spent criticizing the character Neil and his beliefs. This is Neil’s attempt at explaining himself. (more…)

A UN “study group” has decided that Tasers are a form of torture with the capability to cause death.

Aside from illustrating some of the mind-numbing stupidity I’ve come to associate the UN with by default, it reopens a long debate on what tools and rights the police should have.

In the 1990s, many “civil rights” organizations were pushing for the police to be given (and presumably, forced to use) more ‘nonlethal’ methods of solving violent confrontations. Minority-rights groups especially contended that police were “too quick” to draw weapons and fire on members of their races, who may or may not have been bloodthirsty killers and axe murderers who attacked the cops. The Taser was the inevitable result; a weapon capable of incapacitating someone, quickly drawn and fired like a gun, and which would (at least in most cases) leave someone alive to be handcuffed and taken to jail rather than dead at the scene.

A brief side note – in Colosse, we have our own cop problems. Of the cops I’ve met, given that the city has a police force 1/2 the size of cities 1/4 its population, there seem to be precisely 2 types of cop: the overworked ones (let’s face it, if you’ve worked 16+ hour days for months on end with no vacation, you’re not at your best) and the corrupt ones. Still, I’d rather be tased by either than wind up in a grave.

The Taser is not completely nonlethal, nor should any weapon ever be considered to be; even handcuffs can be lethal. It is not un-painful, but again, the purpose of any weapon is to inflict enough pain to incapacitate someone. A quick look at a Youtube search will pull up plenty on it, including demonstrations of people being tasered and explanations of how it works. However, it is a far sight better than the alternative “nonlethal” means of sandbag shotguns, pepper spray, and the “old reliable” metal nightstick.

The Taser is better than the nightstick because it does not require the officer to enter melee with someone, quite probably someone either (a) armed with a gun or knife or other melee weapon, (b) physically capable of attempting to take a weapon from the officer, (c) troubled enough by drug abuse or some other illness that may or may not be physically capable of being transferred to the cop, or (d) some frightening combination of the previous.

The Taser is better than the pepper spray because it is less likely to affect nearby people as well; I’ve been in a room when a young girl mistakenly sat on (and cracked) the pepper spray cartridge on her keychain, and it was enough to clear out a room of 50 people with their eyes watering. It also has a better range than the pepper spray and can more easily be used while keeping the officer at a safe distance.

The Taser is better than the sandbag shotgun because, instead of inflicting physical bruising, it inflicts a shock that incapacitates muscles directly. If someone is mentally ill or on many forms of drugs, their pain response to the physical bruising will likely be minimal (heck, just an adrenaline rush can cause people to ignore all sorts of pain). The Taser bypasses this and goes directly to the neuromuscular level, at least knocking someone over (by causing convulsions of the leg muscles) even if they do get up again. The Taser also does not require such precise aim as the sandbag shotgun.

And yet, we are now barraged with various news stories of why cops are “abusing” Tasers, and how they should be taken away. My suspicion is that most of the groups responsible for these stories simply have an agenda of stopping the cops from doing their jobs. Yes, I recognize (living in Colosse, it’s hard not to as I noted above) that there are times cops will overreach their authority. But I’m also painfully aware that there is a sizable population that are quite willing to attempt to kill cops merely for being cops, or in an attempt to evade arrest, and that the cops need to have the tools necessary to take these people in and defend not only their own lives but the communities they are sworn to protect.

Prior to the issuance of tasers, the default cop option was not the sandbag shotgun, or the pepper spray, or the nightstick. Why not? For all the reasons previously stated – each of them opens up the cop to more risk of being physically assaulted or killed. The default option was to pull the gun and be prepared to shoot.

When a cop is forced by a situation to draw their gun, the likelihood is someone is going to get shot with a weapon intended to kill by someone who is trained to shoot to kill in self-defense. When a cop is forced by a situation to draw a taser, the likelihood is that someone is going to get hit by a weapon intended to leave them alive.

I think the tasers should remain, and I think the UN idiots who called them “torture” need to have their heads examined.

Every now and then, CNN and other newsmedia run puff pieces on people who are exonerated of previously convicted crimes, usually through DNA evidence and the work of groups like Innocence Project.

In this one, however, I found something that disturbed me.

Sometimes an Innocence Project client is confirmed to be guilty by DNA evidence, but the group doesn’t make the number of those cases available. Theoretically, If key DNA material in a case is properly preserved, there’s no time limit on revisiting old cases, according to the Innocence Project.

This worries me slightly – I understand that their goal is a reform of the justice system. In many ways I sympathize with their cause, since psychological science has proven time and again that certain longstanding identification techniques (books of “known criminals”, badly arranged lineups) can easily be abused and give false information, and that memory fades and changes over time.

At the same time, the question this passage raises is, is Innocence Project wilfully exaggerating the extent of “wrongful” convictions for their purposes? What other purpose does hiding the record and ratio of guilty/innocent determinations by their DNA testing serve, except that it may come out that most of the people they test are in fact guilty, and that the justice system may be mostly working as it should?

And if they were getting a whole lot of exonerations, wouldn’t they be willing to say, perhaps, that “over 50%” or “over 75%” or even “over 25%” of the people they tested were innocent? Heck, 10% or even 1% (1 in 100) would be a not-inconsequential figure and better evidence for their cause. Instead, they only list “208 exonerated.”

There’s an old rhetorical fallacy from the baloney detection kit known as “Observational Selection” (aka “counting the hits but forgetting the misses”) and I submit today that Innocence Project, in presenting the statistic of “208 exonerated” on their webpage while refusing to tell us how many of their subjects are confirmed guilty, are very guilty of this.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger pre-emptively discuss the possibility that racial “preferences” used by Louisville and Seattle to enforce a “minimum” and “maximum” African-American presence in each school (while conveniently neglecting to watch other races) might be struck down as unconstitutional. Both opposed the idea.

The eventual decision (by 5-4 ruling, as most of this term’s have been) was that opponents were right. I think Justice Kennedy’s line was the best: “Crude measures of this sort [as illustrated in this case] threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.”

Where I grew up, there was a forced busing system actually worse than Louisville’s. Instead of being limited to within ISD districts, it actually was an “exchange” system; students from certain districts with high minority populations were bussed out to less-populated suburban districts. The results were staggering, and I’m confident in saying not helpful.

But I don’t think the results actually had anything to do with race.

The actual results of the program, which may or may not still exist (and hopefully will die with this decision if it does still exist) were the following:

– Increase in violence and gang activity in the suburban schools.
– Decreased involvement by parents and bussed kids alike in school programs.

By the time I was of high school age, these were bad enough for the local high school that my parents sent me to a private school (another 7 miles away). The high school had had at least one violent incident involving a weapon every week.

However, I believe that neither of these complaints has a direct relation to race. For the first, if a majority of kids were from any low-income area (“white trash”, latino, asian, black) there would likely be a larger number of latchkey kids, bad parents, violent behavior, and yes, crime and gangs and drugs.

For the second, I believe the primary problem was partially the income of parents, but also partially the onerous nature of the busing program. When kids are near a school, or “nearer” compared to a 3-hour bus ride, it’s not as far for parents to pick them up after school events. It’s not as far for parents to drop them off early. And it’s an extra amount of time for parents to drive to make it to games and cheer their kids on, and then bring them home again.

Even if the 3-hour bus trip equates to a normal 30-minute ride (and my parents usually dropped me off rather than have me have to sit and wait for a bus that took 2 hours to make what would have been a 30-minute bicycle ride, 15 in the car), that’s an hour lost from someone’s day trying to participate in these extra things. It’s harder for them to make it to parent-teacher conference night, harder for them to be there for band practice or sports programs, harder for them to be there even for a school dance. It’s also an hour of lost sleep, or lost potential study time, for the child.

And that’s setting aside the fact that school buses, even more than the school building themselves, are havens for a Lord of the Flies mentality – bored kids sitting in a confined space, with nothing to do but cause trouble and the only “supervision” an adult whose primary point of attention is not the kids, but the road. A lot of damage can be done to kids on a bus, and the longer the bus trip, the worse it gets.

The end result is a net loss for the kids on both sides of the equation. The school attendance numbers may not change, but the school community numbers do.