It’s common practice in the United States for men to be charged more for automobile insurance than women. Apparently, that’s about to change in Europe:

The decision means that women can no longer be charged lower car insurance premiums than men, and the cost of buying a pensions annuity will change.

The change will come into effect in December 2012, although customers could see premiums alter in the interim.

Representatives of the insurance industry said they were disappointed.

The court was ruling on a challenge by a Belgian consumer group Test-Achats.

It had argued that a current exemption for insurers contradicted the wider European principle of gender equality.

It’s not all gravy for men, though. Men had previously received greater pension annuities on the basis that they are less likely to live as long to collect them. So the end result is that men get less pension for their work, in the aggregate.

I have mixed feelings about this. My natural inclination is to see the first part as being relatively fair but to be outraged about the second. My mental wiggle room on this is that driving is something that each individual has a good deal of control over and so you can take a look at my driving record and compare it to a woman’s driving record of the same age and determine who is a better driver*. On longevity, though, behavior certainly plays a role but biology seems to favor women and so not only do men die younger, but now we leave money on the table when we go!

But really, this is splitting hairs. Either you accept aggregate probabilities as a legitimate factor or you do not. And so I am mixed. In the case of gender, I actually lean towards discrimination being okay within certain contexts. I am iffier on other topics. I’ve complained in the past about some of the criteria that auto insurance companies use (precipitated by a huge increase in my auto insurance rates due to some mythical problem with our credit) such as housing (if you live in a poor neighborhood, you may dinged whether you are a safe driver or not even though the correlation is without causation).

* – Along these lines, I have no problem with discrimination among the young, where driving records are less firmly established. And really, this may undercut my thoughts on the matter because I’m not sure how prevalent the discrimination is as you get older and have established your own driving record.

I have a question for the lawyers that will probably betray a lot of ignorance, but here it goes… when it comes to privilege, what is the line between attorneys and employees of the attorney (or people hired out by the attorneys). Specifically, investigators. I assume that an investigator working under the employ of an attorney cannot be called to testify against the client. I assume that this is the case whether the investigator is a full-time employee of the attorney or just hired for a specific job. Are these assumptions correct?

But let’s say that a business is up to something illegal and wants to know if an employee has figured it out. What is to stop him from hiring an attorney to hire an investigator to keep tabs on the employee? If I recall, attorneys cannot actively assist in illegal activity, but what happens if the investigator, while following the employee around, discovers it? I assume if the business hired the investigator independently, he could be called on to testify. But would hiring him through a lawyer (an outside lawyer, in this case) be a way around that?

I’m thinking that there’s something I’m missing here, but I just can’t figure what.

State settles suit over 6 abused brothers for $6.6 million

According to the 2009 lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court, the abuse occurred while the boys were living with their mother in Seattle in a home where drugs and alcohol were rampant. Their mother, a drug addict, neglected the children and their biological father was physically abusive, according to Tamaki.

But it was a series of the mother’s boyfriends, he said, who potentially caused the most “horrific” damage to the younger children by sexually and physically abusing them for years.

The two older boys, who were not victims of sexual abuse, each received awards of $300,000, according to Tamaki’s co-counsel Bryan Smith. The four younger brothers were together awarded $5.95 million, Smith said.

Tamaki said most of the 33 complaints filed with the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) between 1992 and 2000 were made by the boys’ maternal grandmother, but there were several “serious incident” reports made by health professionals and counselors. A number of the complaints were found to have merit, Tamaki said, but no meaningful action was ever taken to protect the children.

Sherry Hill, a spokeswoman for the Children’s Administration, said the caseworker who failed to appropriately follow up on the complaints left the agency years ago for unrelated reasons.

She said better protective policies and procedures have been established in the years since.

It’s hard to read about what happened to these kids and not be sympathetic. I don’t begrudge them their awards. At the same time, though, this sort of thing makes me rather uncomfortable. Even though there are ways that the state could have put a stop to this and there were screw-ups, the kids were not in the care of the state and this kind of penalty for inaction would make me concerned that it could lead authorities to be too pro-active in removing children from their home.

Many years ago, when I went up to Canada for an acquaintance’s wedding, I had prepared myself to get an earful about America and Americans. My experiences with Canadians online told me that I was probably going to hear all about how they do everything better than we do. Apparently, Canadians (like most people) are much nicer in person. I did get a fair amount of ribbing, though. Interesting, not about our health care system. Not about our lack of a safety net. Nor how we’re less committed to world peace. Nor the death penalty (which more than one told me they wish Canada had). No doubt many of them thought Americans are crazy about these things, but almost all of them devoted their energy to two topics: American attachment to the American flag, and… more on this and on Canada in a minute.

The last couple times I was in Deseret, dropping off and picking up the dog, I went to the neighborhood of some friends I have out there. The GPS was flawed, and as a result I took a scenic detour trying to find my way back to the highway. Part of the difficulty was navigating my way around a whole bunch of cars that were parked around… what? I could figure it out. Then, finally there was a break between them and I looked down and saw that there was this huge crater thing in the ground. Everyone was sledding to the bottom, walking back to the top, and sledding again. It looked awesome.

All fun things must come to an end, however. At least in New Jersey:

Lawsuits filed by injured sledders, it seems, have struck fear in the hearts of municipal and county government officials, prompting them to simply ban sledding at some of the state’s erstwhile sledding meccas. On today’s webcast, we look at two of them – Galloping Hill Golf Course in Kenilworth and Camp Dawson in Montville Township – and compare two childhood sledding crashes, decades apart, that ended in two very different ways, shedding some light on how we got to a point where some of the best sledding hills in the state sit snow covered and silent. {h/t}

Yeah, that was the other thing. The lawsuits. This was back when being on a jury that awarded bazillions of dollars to somebody got you a spot on the Oprah Winfrey show. The time of the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit that made it forever difficult to get a really hot cup of coffee on the go. They just commented with amazement at how crazy American juries and our civil litigation system.

Meanwhile, the state of Texas is considering going to a loser-pays system, where if you sue someone and lose you have to pay the legal costs of your adversary. For my part, that’s one thing that you can get very, very wrong if you don’t implement the right way and Texas’s governor does not strike me as the type of person that is going to get that right. Be that as it may, I was not remotely surprised to read the third comment:

I’ve commented on it before, but it bears repeating again: to any opponents of this rule, it’s actually NOT crazy. For real. We have it up here in Canada and it seems to work pretty well. {…}

And, as always, nuance is important. There are different schedules of costs that are ordered depending on a variety of factors – merit, complexity, etc. – and they’re left to the discretion of the judge as an extra tool to encourage good behaviour and discourage bad. Waste 10% of a trial with nonsense? Pay the other side’s legal costs for that 10%. Were you a jackass? No costs for you. Cause a delay? Front the other side’s bills for anything caused by the delay. It’s easy and effective. Even people who are suspicious of leaving too much power to judicial discretion don’t seem to care much about it from anything more than a theoretical standpoint.

Sounds pretty Canadian in its straight-forwardness and sensibility, though I have little doubt that we would screw it up somehow. This isn’t the only thing that Canadians do differently. The perils of law school are commented upon here with regularity, and the Canadians have a straight-forwardly, sensible Canadian approach to that, too:

Having already figured out how to provide health care to all of its citizens, Canada seems to have also come up with a system of legal education that doesn’t hobble its young lawyers before they even start practice.

Canada’s key to success seems to be actually regulating its law schools and assuring a basic level of high quality across the board. There are only 20 law schools in Canada, which means that (gasp) not everybody who wants to go can go. Yet despite demand, Canadian law schools also cost less than their American counterparts.

It appears that much like their health care system, not every Canadian gets exactly what they want precisely when they want it. But their magical ability to behave like adults when faced with delayed gratification somehow makes things better for everybody. Chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” all the way to debtor’s prison if you like, but clearly the Canadians are doing something right — and maybe we could learn from them here in the States…

Slate carries a column on the aging and senility of the federal judiciary, a topic that could very well be related to the US Supreme Court, where the current average age is 65 (this doesn’t sound so bad till one realizes that it’s the arithmetic mean and that the “I stayed till I was too damn old and finally retired” crowd are often deputized back into courts of appeals).

One major problem is that the federal judiciary is where much of the law concerning new technology is being made, and as Slate’s article makes plain, the elderly/senile judiciary is chock-full of people who have major issues understanding, much less ruling on, technology. To wit:

Some of the lawyers figured that Owen, whose chambers came with a mimeograph machine when he became a judge in 1973, was just behind the times. Others wondered if the judge’s memory was failing him. After all, the most famous case in his long career—the back-to-back trials of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone—had revolved around a single e-mail. Yet he now acted as though this was the first he was hearing about it. “He didn’t understand what was happening in his own courtroom,” said one lawyer present that day.

The implications of a senile judiciary are staggering. For instance, some lawyers have taken to sticking a boilerplate “copyright phrase” in the signature for each of their emails, and there’s surprising debate on whether you can, legally, do things like publish the Cease-and-Desist letter some shyster snake just sent you claiming a blog entry ‘s fake name is too close to his non-trademarked, imaginary trucking company’s name; imagine the chilling effects on public discourse should some 85-year-old fool actually decide that someone letting the world know when, say, The National Pork Board do something stupid constituted a “criminal act.”

It goes beyond that, however. Consumer rights are constantly eroded thanks to overbroad “copyright laws” that forbid going around “Digital Rights Management” and shrinkwrap-licenses, the net effect of which is to put pretty much nothing but a speedbump in the way of those who will copy various things (the term “Piracy” being not quite apt, and perhaps the term “Jesusing” after the parable of the fishes and the loaves being a better choice for creating multiple copies out of nothing), but offers all layers of annoyance and nuisance for people who want to do very legitimate things like load an alternate operating system into a computer-system such as the Sony Playstation 3.

If the federal judiciary were not so ancient, senile, and easily bamboozled, consumer rights might not vanish quite so rapidly. As it stands, though, the senile fools on the US Supreme Court could not even be convinced that the US Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws would block things such as Bill Clinton’s retroactive tax increases or Congresses repeated, retroactive “copyright term extensions.”

In the event that a drug-sniffing dog is alerted to someone’s car, more often than not there are no drugs nor any drug paraphernalia:

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. {…}

Dog-handling officers and trainers argue the canine teams’ accuracy shouldn’t be measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs. They said the scent of drugs or paraphernalia can linger in a car after drugs are used or sold, and the dogs’ noses are so sensitive they can pick up residue from drugs that can no longer be found in a car.

But even advocates for the use of drug-sniffing dogs agree with experts who say many dog-and-officer teams are poorly trained and prone to false alerts that lead to unjustified searches. Leading a dog around a car too many times or spending too long examining a vehicle, for example, can cause a dog to give a signal for drugs where there are none, experts said.

On the face of it, 44% sounds pretty bad. Reason, with their typical sense of perspective, says “a drug-sniffing coin would be cheaper.” Well, only if you disregard what that 44% figure actually means. Given that the actual number of cars with drugs is exceedingly low, a dog-sniff being correct nearly 50% of the time actually isn’t all that bad. If 1% of cars had drugs (a high estimation, for sure), and you cointested 200 cars, a coin would would falsely implicate 99 cars for ever 1 it actually finds drugs in. A dog would alert two cars, one of which would have drugs. I recognize that Sallum is being hyperbolic, but he’s pretty much stretching it beyond all reason.

Now, because dogs are right a little less than half of the time, should that legally justify probable case? I really don’t know. Does anyone know how the law would treat tips from an informant who is right a little less than half the time? I’d consider such an informant to be reasonably reliable. On the other hand, with that human informant you would need a judge and a warrant involved. Maybe the cops should have to call up a judge to sign off on the barking dog?

I know that I would be pretty pissed if cops were taking my car apart for an hour because of some false positive. And heaven knows, Hit Coffee is often unfriendly to law enforcement in general. But I do think that we have to keep things in perspective here and not compare this to a coin-flip or police dogs assaulting people.

The City of San Fransisco is looking at implementing a bait car setup. For those of you that don’t know what a bait car is, it’s a car that is left with the keys in the ignition (sometimes running), theoretically in a part of town where car theft is a problem. Now, most anybody here if you pass a car with the keys in the ignition, your response is to maybe say “idiot” and walk on. A car thief, of course, thinks differently.

Hit Coffee has been pointedly critical of a lot of police behavior on this subject and that… and so it continues!

I mean, you look at a setup like this and say “How could it go wrong?” Nobody accidentally steals a car the same way they might accidentally speed or accidentally run a red light. It’s not something that is going to affect people who aren’t, well, criminals. On the face of it, the only real objection I might have is whether or not this is the best use of resources. But even then, the cars themselves are often donated by insurance companies. There’s still the manpower issue and all that, but this is actually one of those cases where they don’t have the financial incentives that they do with traffic tickets. I mean, these aren’t people that are just going to pay a fine and move on to get caught another day. They’re charged with felonies. They’ll cost the system far more than they will pay back.

And yet… somehow, the police department in Austin, Texas, managed to screw it up. There was a case where a couple noticed the car sitting near his house and their first response was… to call the police. It seemed odd to them that someone would leave a car there with the keys in the ignition and all. Their imaginations were running away with them, but their first instinct was one of civic duty. The officers who showed up expressed no interest and said that as long as the car was legally parked they should just ignore it. And maybe they should have, but after three days or so they became concerned and their imaginations got a bit carried away with some of the oddities of the car (broken window, rope, men’s work boots, bikini top in back. They decided to investigate. They were arrested thereafter and charged with burglary of a vehicle.

Now, the two could be lying, but their police call is a matter of record and it seems pretty clear they were investigating rather than thieving. Ledford, the man in question, has it right when he said that maybe he’s guilty of trespassing but not burglary. Even so, the evidence that they were acting on anything but good faith is pretty slight. Obviously, you don’t want people going vigilante, but when people see something curious and they’ve already tried to contact the authorities, do you want them to just ignore it for fear that they might be criminally charged for their concern?

So why did Austin charge forward with this? I can think of a couple reasons. First, perhaps they were worried that Ledford was going to muck up their investigation. But the criminal charges were completely unnecessary. Instead, I fear the reason is that once you have a setup like this going with thousands of dollars put into it, you have to get results wherever you can find them. I have similar concerns with some checkpoints run by officers in departments that I expressly don’t trust (a relatively small number of departments, in the overall, to be honest). Here they are getting grant money as well as some free equipment. It may not be enough for the system to pay for itself, but the need for results is still there if you want to keep getting the money that you can (it’s not a cop’s job to try to keep expenditures down).

San Fransisco is apparently lining up with TruTV (formerly Court TV) in order to put their findings on television. On the one hand, it leads to somewhat questionable motives. On the other hand, the SFPD would probably be embarrassed to charge Ledford if he was a TV star.

They convinced Ledford to plead guilty of something irrelevant. I can’t remember what because it post-dates the article and I don’t care to listen to the whole NPR sequence where I first heard it.

Quothe Kirk:

I’ve been driving since ‘83 and have never had a ticket. You guys seem to get one a week. Slow down, you Mad Max wannabes.

Actually, I have gotten only three tickets since starting this blog, which considering that I have driven some 150,000 in that period (2.5x the average) I don’t consider to be all that bad. In the year or two before that, I got two tickets. Prior to that, I got them every 90 days like clockwork. The problem was that I was dating Julianne which had me driving up and down a particular street in Phillippi that was a major revenue-generator for the city. It wasn’t a “speed trap” in the traditional sense with the speed limits set unreasonably low. Mostly it was just under heavy enforcement at on sporadic nights and for some reason it was just an easy street to speed on. When my friends and I would eat at IHOP on that street we would watch endlessly as one person after another got pulled over.

I don’t know how much of it was Sullivan Street and how much of it was that I was young and hadn’t learned proper speed control. I did periodically get tickets on other streets, but it was pretty rare.

Sheila chimed in:

I haven’t had any tickets since I bought a four-door sedan and moved a few miles from work.

I wonder if there is something to the 4-door sedan thing. Cause the car I got in the most trouble it was a red car, which are supposed to be bad. I didn’t generally speed as much in that car as in others, though. The worst car was my grandmother’s car, The Trawler. That car drove very comfortable at rather high speeds and no cruise control. After a back-to-back car accident and ticket, my folks threatened to put me back in The Trawler, which I told them would be fine (I wasn’t particularly deserving of generosity at that point) but that I was more at risk in that car than any other. The thing is… I never once got a ticket in The Trawler. Not once. The fact that the car was a land barge and older than I was and a granny’s car in more than just the sense my grandmother gave it to me is probably not a coincidence.

Right now we live on a street with a 15mph speed limit that is almost certainly going to get us a ticket at some point. It’s a school zone, but the speed limit doesn’t have school hours (and extends way, way beyond the school) so you can be driving at 3 in the morning and still get a serious ticket. I find that I avoid the street as best I can. Not because I can’t stand going 15mph, but because my internal speedometer doesn’t register appropriate speeds below 20 or 25 at all. It could become my new Sullivan Street, though I don’t know how vigorously the School Zone limit is enforced off-hours.

Anyhow, I am not really a member of the chorus because I am constantly getting tickets. I talk about it more than I get them. I think it’s one of those internal justice things. Part of the time I dismiss ticket machines as a sort of road tax. The other part of the time I get annoyed because sometimes (not always, but sometimes) something under the guise of public safety is serving something else.

To hear is lawyer tell it, Mark Ashford was walking his dog when he saw a man erroneously pulled over for failing to stop at a stoplight. He volunteered to the driver that he saw what happened and would testify for him in court. The officers asked to see some ID. A scuffle occurred and Ashford was eventually charged with Interference and Resisting Arrest. The charges were later dropped.

Here’s the story, here’s a video taken of the incident:

There are a few ways to look at this. Strictly in terms of excessive force, it’s not entirely clear that excessive force was, in fact, used. This is the case, however, only if you stipulate to the apparent legitimacy of the arrest. It looks to me as though Ashford did indeed resist arrest at around (2:48) and didn’t fully stop until he was subdued.

What is not clear, however, is the legitimacy of the arrest. The officers went apespit when Ashford pulled out a camera to take a picture of the officers to document the event. Perhaps not the wisest thing to do, but not something that should be illegal (more on this in a bit). However, does the illegitimacy of the arrest which Ashford resisted absolve him of resisting arrest? I can see the merits of both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, if he did nothing wrong to warrant the action of the officers, why should he be held accountable for his actions during the illegimate police action? There seems to be something vaguely… unfair about that. It’s like trying somebody for murder, finding out that they did not commit said murder, but then finding out that they had lied about their alibi and charging them with perjury.

Of course, in this case, both the charges interference and resisting arrest charges against Ashford were dropped. Would this have happened if there had been no video account of the incident? I’m not sure. Had Ashford not fought back and had the cameraman lost interest, it’s also quite likely that this never would have garnered attention and it’s possible that he would have been convicted of interference. So in a sense, he was rewarded for fighting back. That’s not good.

It’s also dicey terrain as to whether someone should believe they are allowed to resist arrest on the basis that they believe the arrest to be illegimate. There is an argument to be made that when a police officer tells you to put your hands behind your back, you should do so. Nothing good comes from resisting. Ever. So putting this into law clarifies this a bit. Do as your told, sort it out later. The alternative is not just that people guilty of no crime resist arrest, but that people that erroneously believe that they haven’t done anything illegal resist arrest. Leaving aside the legal ramifications (because you simply convict those that did something else illegal of resisting arrest, too), the end result is a lot more people getting beat up which serves nobody.

It’s analogous, I suppose, to the rationale used by a lot of schools with regard to school fights. We were taught never to fight back because anybody caught fighting, regardless of who starts it, gets a minimum of 3 days in-school-suspension. The downside to this rule is that it was patently unfair to those that did not start fights and were expected to stand there and take it, run away, or get suspended. But the policies did have a degree of utility. Knowing that it didn’t matter who threw the first punch made you avoid baiting people into punching you. It stopped a lot of fights before they really began simply because the rules were so clear. There is a similar argument to be made, I suppose, for obeying an officer. An officer tells you to do something, you do it. If he’s telling you the wrong thing, we’ll take care of that later.

Of course, that requires a great deal of trust in law officials.

Ultimately, though, this was brought about because of something that has been getting increasing attention lately. Namely that cops really don’t like being on camera (unless it’s their own). The cameraman should be glad that he was in Colorado because had he been in Maryland or a number of other states he could have been charged with a felony. Ashford probably couldn’t have been charged because he was taking a still-photo (I think?) or if not that than because he was never given the opportunity to take the picture before all hell broke loose.

I have more to say on the subject, but I should probably avoid getting too far off track. It does seem to me, though, that whatever our laws on video-taping cops are, they need to be clearly expressed. The wiretapping laws that are being used now are dubious on the face of it because one doesn’t really know whether one is breaking the law or not when they bring the camera out. If prosecutors and cops really believe that it should be illegal to record your interactions with the police, they need to push for a law. And they have to be able to defend its necessity and fairness.

East St. Louis is of the few cities city in the US that can make Detroit look decent by comparison. On a scale from 1-100, East Illinois scores a 3 on crime. Detroit is a 4 and Memphis is 2, though violent crime in East St. Louis surpasses that in Memphis and every other city I can find with over 17 violent crimes per 1,000 residents. I read not long ago the town is cutting its police force by one third:

“I want our citizens to know we have some of the bravest police officers and firefighters in the country,” Parks said. “But we don’t have the money to pay them. We have to have fiscal responsibility.”

City officials wanted police and fire unions to accept a furlough program that would have required employees to take two unpaid days in each twice monthly pay period. If accepted, emergency responders would have seen a pay cut of about 20 percent for the rest of the year.

Parks said the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement. On Friday, he stared at a standing-room only crowd and told his emergency response chiefs words they didn’t want to hear: “Tell your workers to start packing their things.”

The sheriff’s department does not appear willing to step in. It’s likely that Illinois has budget problems of its own.

My introduction to East St. Louis was when I discovered that it was the inspiration behind Hub City, home of DC’s The Question for a time. The picture it painted was quite bleak. At the end of the series, there’s nothing really left for the mayor to govern as The Question and a few remaining citizens fly out by helicopter, defeated. There is a point earlier in the series where the Governor’s office refuses to render aid to the city as it can’t save a city from itself. The scene was supposed to make them heartless and evil (and they were crass about it, if I recall), but it was hard to argue with.

It brings to mind the much bigger question of what, if anything, we can do about places like Detroit or East St. Louis. Places that exist, have buildings already built, but are for various reasons beyond dysfunction. Of course, at the rate we’re going, we may soon be asking ourselves that question about entire states. It would be nice if places came with a Start Over button.