Oklahoma has apparently been toying with the idea of using traffic cameras to ticket drivers of cars that aren’t insured:

Meacham said legislators should get the appropriate language passed during next year’s session. Also by then, technology may be in place to allow a company to have the ability to check insurance verification data of all 50 states.

The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has voiced concerns about the proposal, saying privacy rights of Oklahomans could be violated.

In the meantime, state and local law officers will continue to use Oklahoma’s computerized system that lets law officers know in real time whether vehicles licensed in the state are covered by qualifying liability insurance. It’s been estimated about 20 percent of Oklahoma motorists are driving vehicles without liability insurance.

I support this plan entirely as unlike with speeding and red light camera enforcement, lack of insurance is a law that I never break intentionally or unintentionally. Okay, that’s not really why.

Here at Hit Coffee, we are skeptical of a lot of traffic camera activity. This, however, I don’t actually mind so much. The primary arguments against red-light and speeding cameras is that the tickets are often trumped up with traffic engineering designed not for safety but for revenue-generation. If you want to catch people speeding you simply rig the speed limits by making them artificially low or by having sudden drops in the speed limit at places where it’s difficult to slow down and/or speed limit signs and cops are not particularly easy to see. You can rig red light cameras by shortening yellow lights. Red light cameras have the additional disadvantage of having debatable safety returns (but not debatable revenue returns). Oh, and in both cases you don’t know who is driving the car so you could be ticketing the wrong person.

Insurance, though, is something of a different matter. Either the car is insured or you are not. It doesn’t matter who is driving it. The only way you can rig the system is by having incomplete information and then ticketing drivers blindly and giving them the burden of proof to demonstrate that they are insured. That’s a bit of a concern, but not much of one. Oklahoma has actually put their plans on hold because they don’t have great access to the data. They’re working on it. I get the sense that if they tried to move forward by saying they only update their information quarterly, they’re likely to run into *a lot* of resistance. But absent that, I do not share the concerns of the ACLU that there is a serious infringement of liberty here. When driving on the public road, we do not really have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to checking license plates and whatnot. Nor is having records as to who is and is not insured a particular privacy concern.

In fact, I think that perhaps they should go a step further and also run checks for vehicle registration. That way we can put an end to Steve Jobs’s scofflaw ways should he ever make his way to the OK state.

Did you know that if you smoke pot, child protective services can take away your kids? And if you don’t provide them with many months of clean, regular random drug tests, and possibly also complete a substance abuse program, parenting class, and individual therapy, they can even adopt them out permanently.

With California’s legal marijuana initiative on the ballot in November (Prop. 19), I figure it’s a good time to discuss the related issues of 1) what happens to parents who get caught using cannabis, and 2) how you can reduce your chance of getting your kids taken if you’re one of them.

I deal with this on a weekly basis. People are usually surprised and really angry to find out what the child welfare laws can do to them for using or possessing drugs, even without any criminal charges or convictions. And it’s not just dirtbags. Sometimes it happens to normal, likeable, responsible people you wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with.

I have to explain to many unhappy parents that a “DA reject” of their possession or dealing charge has no effect on their resulting case in children’s court. Their kids are staying in foster care. Or maybe they never even got arrested. Someone who didn’t like them — like their ex — just called in a referral to the child abuse hotline. Maybe it wasn’t even for pot, maybe it was for coke or meth, and they marched indignantly down to the testing site unaware that they screen for every drug, not just whatever they were accused of. Or, more commonly, the children were removed from the other parent due to something else, and this parent’s use got talked about when they interviewed the other parent. Or maybe not, but maybe when they ran your criminal record — which they always do as part of their investigation — they found a pot ticket from a couple of years ago. Or not a conviction, but just an arrest for possession. Or no arrests, but several calls to the cops from or about your address claiming drug-related activity. (Bet you didn’t know there are records kept of cop calls.)

Any little thing, they’ll use to get you to drug test, long before you get appointed a lawyer who’d tell you not to do it. And once they’ve got a test, with any level of marijuana in it, they’ve got you. And they’ve got your kids, probably for three months at least whether you take it to trial or settle. Don’t think of this like a criminal court case. These courts allow hearsay, the standard of proof is not “beyond reasonable doubt” but rather the same as in civil court, and there’s no way to exclude evidence on a Constitutional basis. Worst of all: You can’t bail your kids out of foster care while you fight your legal battle. This is why the better trial or appellate prospect I think a parent is, the less likely he or she is to want to be my guinea pig. Most parents with a shot at winning a protracted fight don’t want it.

Yet there is no law specifically prohibiting a parent from possessing or using illegal drugs. If you just read the actual law the department uses, you’d mistakenly think it set forth a high standard for taking away someone’s kids. Here it is, Welfare and Institutions Code section 300(b):

(b) The child has suffered, or there is a substantial risk that
the child will suffer, serious physical harm or illness, as a result
of the failure or inability of his or her parent or guardian to
adequately supervise or protect the child, or the willful or
negligent failure of the child’s parent or guardian to adequately
supervise or protect the child from the conduct of the custodian with
whom the child has been left, or by the willful or negligent failure
of the parent or guardian to provide the child with adequate food,
clothing, shelter, or medical treatment, or by the inability of the
parent or guardian to provide regular care for the child due to the
parent’s or guardian’s mental illness, developmental disability, or
substance abuse.

[Emphasis added.] (more…)

The topic of trademarks has come up recently, which reminded me of something I ran across a while back when I was car-shopping: The Story of Nissan.

Uzi Nissan, that is. Uzi Nissan is an Israeli-turn-American that had the gall to use his last name for his various business ventures. Noteworthy here is that he was using the name Nissan when the car company now known as Nissan was known as Datsun in the US. That did not matter, however, as Nissan Motors took him to court anyway seeking ten million dollars in damages. Uzi Nissan ultimately prevailed, but had only a small portion of his substantial legal fees recouped.

Through Mr. Nissan’s website I read about another case of aggressive trademark protection. Apparently, a company called Entrepreneur Media (publishers of Entrepreneur Magazine) declared the word “entrepreneur” their trademark. A PR firm that took the name EntrepreneurPR was taken to court and ultimately lost a 1.4 million dollar judgment. The lawsuits are ongoing. There is a website dedicated to taking the word back from Entrepreneur Media.

Lastly, and perhaps most outrageously, Monster Cables owns the word Monster. They’ve gone after Monster.com (which, perhaps as part of a settlement, has a link to Monster Cables on their main page), the Chicago Bears (for calling themselves “The Monsters of Midway”), Fenway Park (for having “Monster seats”), Disney (“Monsters, Inc.”), and various others. I can’t remember where I first heard about this one from.

Arapaho is a Rights Restorative State, which means that felons get back their right to vote and participate in the system once their sentence is complete. In my view, this should be the case in all states. I might be more sympathetic to barring felons to vote if felonies were still limited to only the worst of the worst crimes. I was on the fence on this issue until I lived in Belle Rieve for a while and got to know people that would never again be allowed to vote or run for office (in Deseret, anyway) because of a mistake they made when they were 18 or 19.

I only know about Arapaho’s law because there is a local state assembly race that has garnered some statewide attention. One of the candidates, Steve O’Reilly is on something called the Violent Offender’s Registry. Arapaho’s sense of forgiveness apparently only goes so far. Far from being a fringe candidate, he has been endorsed by some powerful conservative groups in the state. The current assemblyman, who happens to be the brother of the first real estate agent we talked to in the area, has a reputation for being something of a squishy moderate.

O’Reilly attributes his crime (the equivalent of a bar fight, except that he found something within arm’s reach to use as a weapon) to an alcoholism he has since conquered. In addition to being an independent businessman, he has apparently been doing some good works in the area. He can appeal to be removed from the VOR, which he evidently plans to do.

I haven’t decided whether I am even going to vote in the next round of current elections. I haven’t really been in the area long enough to know the issues at play. But the Rights Restoration issue is another in a string of rather pleasant things I have discovered with regard to state law that make me feel better to be an Arapahoan than I expected.

While on break, couple of employees at a US Sprint store (or kiosk) took off after a shoplifter of a nearby Apple Store and were fired for their trouble:

Sadly, it seems someone at Sprint corporate was not fond of their heroism or the way they had boosted business. Unbeknownst to the two Sprint sprinters, the company has a rule about employees not intervening in shoplifting. This was something they only discovered when they were given their marching papers.

Though stunned, they still don’t seem to resent Sprint. They just wish they hadn’t been let go for ensuring a shoplifter didn’t get away. It wasn’t as if the chase happened on Sprint premises, and the two were on a break.

Still, they seem remarkably sanguine in the circumstances. They have created a Facebook page, on which McGhee wrote: “I want to tell everybody out there that we do not want you to hate Sprint and their service, we want people to continue to be Good Samaritans and look out for each other.”

The two already have more than 870 Facebook friends and are looking for work at a difficult time, particularly for Shoemaker, who has just got engaged.

Well, that’s their story anyway. Sprint won’t comment.

There are basically two reasons why Sprint would behave in such a peculiar manner. The first is that there is a company policy against the pursuit of shoplifters intended for when they are on-duty and they refused to carve out a common-sense objection. The second and more likely is that this policy exists for liability reasons and even though the employees were on break, they were still on the clock and therefore had something happened to the employees, the thief, or a bystander, they would have been liable.

And this is, apologies to Sheila, Kevin, TL, and any other lawyers reading this blog, why people hate lawyers. As much as I want to come down on Sprint on this, does anybody doubt for a second that a lawyer finding out that they were on the clock (even if on break) would not consider suing Sprint? Because it didn’t happen on Sprint property and because they were not acting under the explicit or implicit direction of Sprint, they might have a harder time of it than a similar incident that occurred at Best Buy, which I will get to later. Why risk it, though? A failure to fire these heroes here could help another plaintiff’s attorney in a future case where another Sprint hero acts against company policy by saying that the policy wasn’t enforced and thus Sprint is liable. Better not to risk it and fire a couple of disposable employees.

Even in the current economy, I suspect that they will be getting job offers soon.

There was a similar story about Best Buy from a couple years ago. Some companies, like Best Buy, seem to attract stories like this one. They were caught with a memo outlining who were and were not “desirable customers” and encouraged employees to give the latter an unpleasant experience. They rigged the internal computers to go to a fake Internet site that showed deals different than the ones that people saw on the real Internet and expected to get in the store. They had an employee that called the Secret Service because they did not believe that there was such a thing as a $2 bill. And they’re the kings of the Mail-in Rebate Scam which I consider to be a bad business practice all-around. And, of course, they fire employees for trying to stop thieves.

At least in the Best Buy case, BB has an argument that they were company employees acting on company time under company direction. Their own manager got hurt in the scuffle. Even if the Corporate HQ people in Minnesota wanted to cut the kids some slack, they wouldn’t have had the maneuvering room that Sprint had to carve out an exception.

But what I find interesting about these cases, and leaving liability issues aside, is the notion that such things are better left to the people whose job it is to take care of them. More than one commenter on the Sprint article said that everybody in retail knows you’re supposed to leave that sort of thing to the security guards (according to the boys, the security guard was requesting help). Of course, because of liability issues again it’s often that security guards themselves are not supposed to intervene. Better left to the police. That’s an argument you hear regularly about gun control, too, which police generally support. “Leave it to us,” and “don’t get a gun because somebody might get hurt.” That’s not to say that it’s not often sound advice most of the time, but even so I find the whole idea a little unsettling.

In the greater scheme of things, shoplifting is not all that big of a deal. Letting shoplifters go may encourage more shoplifting, but people don’t generally get hurt too badly. I don’t know if it’s just my testosterone-fueled id, but that, too, doesn’t sit right with me. I mean, I can understand Best Buy saying “our stuff isn’t worth that” but what about if it’s someone’s shopping bag that’s lifted? This is of course obscenely hyperbolic, but if a Sprint employee is liable for intervening in a mall against a thief who stole from another store and liability law says that this is right, are we actively encouraging social disinterest?

Or is it in its own way the opposite of “Leave it to the experts.” A mall guard is liable for chasing down a shoplifter. A kiosk employee is liable. So the only person left to do it is… somebody with no connection to anything whatsoever. At least they’re (usually) protected by Good Samaritan laws.

Reading a story about a young cop that goofed up, Dave thinks that we should have a minimum age for cops.

It’s an interesting idea. My main concern is the negative effect it would have on recruitment because what are they supposed to do in the meantime? The military is the most obvious option. Security work is another obvious fillgap, though it can be hard to get by on the kind of money we pay entry-level security guards. Particularly if there is a family, and one observation I had with the Phillippi Police Department outside of Colosse was that cops had a tendency to marry and reproduce at pretty young ages. It seems that most of the obvious places they could go, except the military or perhaps working as a guard at a prison, is quite a bit to ask of people to do for 5-10 years when they know that it’s not something they plan to advance in. Or maybe they will advance and decide not to become cops.

In the current economy, as Dave points out, this is not likely to be an issue. Police work can pay pretty well, it’s steady, and it comes with a sweet pension. Dave is also right that in departments like the one in the cited article where the danger is minimal this is less of an issue.

In fact, one of the things I noticed about the Oakwood Police Department, which served the townlets of West Oak and East Oak where I was raised, was that there were no young cops. They tended to hire from other departments. You work for a while in the Colosse Police Department or Colosse County Sheriff’s Department and then you get hired on where the chief requirements are diplomacy and a steady hand. I think that the main thing that the OPD and similar departments are considering is experience, but the maturity that comes with age is probably also a consideration.

I know that there are at least a couple ways to become a cop. If you get hired by a large department like the Colosse Police (pop >1mil) Department or even the Phillippi Police Department (pop >100k) run their own academies. With Colosse in particular, below a certain (pretty high) rank, you have to go through the city’s academy. Delosa’s second largest city, Delianapolis, has no such requirement. For a while the DPD would have billboards posted in Colosse trying to pick off CPD officers. There was talk a couple of years ago of the CPD changing their policy, though I don’t know what became of it.

I had a flat tire at Southern Tech University back when I was a student. A University Police Department officer helped me out with it and we talked in the meantime. He had apparently gone to an independent academy and had run up head-first into the CPD policy wherein if he wanted to become a Colosse cop he would have to go through the academy all over again. The UPD had no such requirement, so that’s where he joined. He eventually wanted to relocate to the Colossean suburb where he was raised, but they, like Oakwood, wanted you to cut your teeth somewhere else.

As kind of an aside, one ambitious constable of one of Colosse’s worst sectors, Lucas Horton, assembled a mostly-volunteer department or Reserve Deputies (“Rangers”). Due to the local politics of the area, the Colosse PD kept a sort of hands-off approach unless called. Patrols avoided the area and arrest warrants were going unserved. The area was developing a vigilantism problem. So he let weekend warriors everywhere know that if you wanted to be a cop he would let you do real police work (including felony warrants). The Rangers had to pay for their own training through one of the independent academies (as well as pay for your uniform, equipment, etc.).

If Constable Lucas Horton’s success (albeit controversial success) is any indication, it’s hard to see how an age limit would act as a deterrent. And in the current economy it’s pretty unlikely that any department will have any difficulty recruiting officers. In the longer term it might be more iffy, especially if the economy picks up. I’d be interested in knowing more about what percentage of current officers are former military and/or did something else for a while before going into the academy.

In a follow-up to Sheila’s post about bikers, the story of some folks talking about their Lego-thieving habits while appearing on the Dr Phil show:

The couple was under investigation for shoplifting before the “Dr. Phil” appearance, but detectives did not suspect them of being large-scale thieves until they appeared on the show.

The show also aired a video of the couple’s three small children accompanying them on a three-day shoplifting binge.

The Eatons were arrested last September, nearly a year after they appeared on the show and claimed they made as much as $3,500 a week by selling stolen goods.

Interestingly, it took the cops a year or so to make the arrest.

I ran across this image attached to a rather vitriolic post (the thrust of which was, in essence, “only stupid inbred hicks oppose gay marriage and this map proves it”), but it struck something of a thought process. Here goes.

First of all, the map’s not entirely accurate with respect to what the author was trying to say. Five states, at least, shouldn’t be listed as “allowing” cousin marriage, since their restrictions make it so that an impossibly small portion of their population will realistically participate. There’s a considerable overlap with gay and cousin marriage allowability in the northeastern section of the US. And of course the Granola State on the west coast, a place which carries almost entirely the opposite of the “inbred hick” stereotype, allows cousin marriage and has gone back and forth on the issue of gay marriage for a few years now.

Secondly, the science against cousin marriage is muddled. The usual argument put against it is that it encourages genetic diseases. In certain populations, specifically populations where cousin marriage is encouraged and founder effects come into play, this is true. Small, isolated rural villages of current/past ages, the inbred lines of European royalty, and the lines of fundamentalist Mormonism come to mind here. Another example is the Dutch settlers to South Africa (the “Afrikaners”), who carry magnified risk of Huntington’s Disease because an abnormal percentage of the original settlers were carriers.

On the other hand, research into larger, more diverse genetic populations indicates that “once in a while” cousin marriage carries relatively small risk – about the same risk as a woman having kids at the age of 40 rather than 30. The further argument is that laws against it in the US were motivated not by risk of genetic disease, but by a desire to force immigrants to intermarry into the population (and thus assimilate) in a quicker manner.

Oddly enough, the argument about “inbred hicks” falls apart when comparing the map of European gay marriage laws. I’d put a map up comparing it to European laws about cousin marriage, but there’s no real point to it: cousin marriage is legal in 100% of Europe. Two countries have recently begun discussing the option of banning it, and oddly enough, it’s not even the condition of their oddly buckteethed/colorblind/hemophiliac (that last being the origin of the term “blue-blood” as a reference to royalty) royal lines that did it, but rather the high rate of genetic diseases in recent immigrant populations from the rural sectors of Islamic countries, who perpetuate societal cousin marriage rates of 55% or above in a population where it’s not uncommon to be the child of a chain of 8-10 cousin marriages (including “double cousin” marriages, wherein the kids are not simply cousins but where mother/aunt and father/uncle, or mother/uncle and father/aunt, constitute sibling pairs as well making the kids almost genetic siblings) in a row.

The trouble with this is discussion that it’s a perfect example of a “where do we draw the line” sort of argument. On the one hand, in a (mostly healthy) genetic population where cousin marriage would be rare and genetic diversity a given, arguers against cousin marriage would quickly expire upon the line of “well why do we let 40-year-old women have kids then?” On the other hand, we have definitive proof of the genetic risks of allowing multigenerational cousin marriage. There even comes the risk that at some point, society could start stopping non-sibling people from marrying because they both carried a recessive gene for some debilitating genetic disease like Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs, or even something as merely inconvenient as Celiac. It’s not that farfetched; some states to this day still require a blood test, a holdover from times when they were screening for sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Another justification (now that the technology exists) for genetic testing as a marriage requirement could be to ensure that they aren’t unknowingly marrying their half-sibling or even full sibling, due to the high percentage of absentee/unknown fathers or potential for siblings to be separated too early in life to remember each other in certain populations.

A while back, Web and I got into it over tasers. One of the items of contention was this video:

Web and I both agree that the pastor is question is a jackass (even if we are not in precise agreement as to why). One of the difference seems to be, however, that when it comes to the enforcement of some crimes, including drugs, he is inclined to give police a greater amount of leeway in enforcing the law compared to, say, traffic stops, which represent infractions much less significant to public safety:

When it comes to dealing with violent criminals, illegal drug/personage smuggling, gang violence, or other things of that nature, though, we’re getting into a different area of law enforcement.

I hear him on that point. For better or worse, we call it a “war on drugs” for a reason. And unlike a lot of my contemporaries, I am not in favor of mass decriminalization. And while I believe that civil rights are important in the abstract, there’s no point in denying that I am less concerned with the crossed T’s, dotted I’s, and so on when it comes to a certain criminal element. At the same time, the spillover that occurs in attempting to identify those individuals from regular citizens represents a significant problem in cases when police officers are acting in good faith. Web has a good deal of skepticism towards Pastor Anderson. I share some skepticism, though I don’t believe nearly to the degree that he does. However, I do have a general skepticism of Arizona law enforcement. A skepticism, I should add, that pre-dates my learning of this incident.

Maybe my skepticism is warranted and maybe it is not. But there are a lot of reasons to have a degree of skepticism of law enforcement in general. I don’t believe that we should mistrust everything they say or do or automatically lend faith to people that make accusations against law enforcement. On the whole, I consider myself to be pro-cop. When a suspect says A and the cops say B, I am more inclined to believe B.

On two occasions I have actually let officers search my car. Once I did it because I was young and the notion that a cop wouldn’t be on the up-and-up hadn’t fully occurred to me. More recently because I got the sense that the cops were looking for someone in particular who was not me and I made the determination that the faster they realized that it was not me the better off everyone was going to be. Sure enough, they determined that I wasn’t the guy they were looking for and once they got over their curiosity of some brown powder in the back of my car, I was released thereafter.

However, there are parts of the country, including pockets of the south, Arizona, and Odessa, where I would not be so obliging. And there are some circumstances in which I wouldn’t trust cops anywhere because I might be worried that they were more concerned about finding something than whether or not I am actually somebody up to no good. Particularly in the age where highway departments can impound a car that they find drugs or a weapon in and the treasure goes to the department or their retirement fund. Even if you have faith in the court system to find you not guilty, they can still keep your car. I have to think that the vast majority of cops are above planting something, but I am to say the least unenthusiastic at wagering my livelihood that the cop I am dealing with isn’t an exception to the rule.

That brings me back to the Arizona checkpoint. On the whole, I am probably less inclined to assume the best at checkpoints. The motive and opportunity are there. They have to justify their existence, which means that if they don’t find people with drugs they could lose their funding. Further, if it’s a state that raises revenue off of forfeitures, that provides an additional motive. I believe (and want to believe) that the vast majority of cops have better motives than that. But if an officer was not above that sort of thing, checkpoints would provide the perfect opportunity to be below it. Catch a legitimate drug trafficker, put a little of the evidence off to the side, and plant it on the stud driving the Camaro that would bring in some serious cash at an auction. Or on the guy that just really looks suspicious. Or on the guy that’s way too cocky and disrespectful. Maybe I am just being way too paranoid here, but again, I’m not comfortable betting my livelihood that I am.

I act as though I have a choice. Sometimes I do, but sometimes I don’t. If the cops say that the dog smelled something, either I get out of the car voluntarily or they force me out. In the event that they “find” something, I am going to be dealing with jurors like myself who is going to believe cops over some drug-carrying miscreant.

That’s why, despite sharing with Web a real distaste for Pastor Anderson, what happened to him makes me extremely uncomfortable. Maybe he had put some traces of drugs solely so he could make a movie. Maybe the dog smelled a ham sandwich. Maybe if he hadn’t been holding a camera or hadn’t been a jackass they would have let him through. But while any of these things could be the case, they really don’t have to be. It’s a corrupt cop’s dream. And there is very little recourse if you happen to be the chump that they’re going to make an example of.

Of course, at the same time we have to have at least some faith in the cops for the system to work. If the cop says he saw A and the suspect says B happened and we always believe B and there is no hard evidence either way, the result could be making their jobs nearly impossible. Cops would be the only people in front of whom it would be safe to commit a crime.

I’m not sure what the solution to this dilemma is. One of the things that law enforcement has been doing more and more of is taping their interactions. This has the potential to be a win-win because when people make bogus claims against the cops they can immediately show them to be bogus. Likewise, in cases where there is actual abuse, we’re not left giving all benefit of the doubt to the officers if there is video tape. And just by knowing that they’re being taped, it makes abuse less likely to begin with. Another thing that would make me more comfortable is if there was an independent witness that I was allowed to call. Someone that could watch the cops searching my car and make sure that everything is on the up-and-up and if everything is not could testify to that effect. But having something to avoid being railroaded by corrupt cops would make me a lot less uncomfortable with what happened to Anderson and make me identify less with people that charge police misconduct during drug searches.

A little while back there was a big to-do about a group called Kopbusters that set up a sting on the cops in Odessa, Texas. The basic gist is that former narc and now pro-pot activist Barry Cooper was approached about some allegedly corrupt cops in Odessa. Cooper and his group, called KopBusters, made a house up to look like a “grow house” where pot is grown. Nothing illegal and nothing demonstrating probable cause, but still the sort of thing that cops look for when determining whether or not drugs are being grown indoors. They got the raid on video. Since that big splash, it has been alleged that the KopBusters planted the tip that the cops used for the raid. However, since it was an anonymous tip there are still questions about whether they really had probable cause. On the other hand, if the KopBusters did plant a tip, that is illegal, though KB is denying it and it all becomes a matter of which side one chooses to believe. Google “KopBusters” and “Odessa” for all sorts of information, much of it contradictory.

This post is only tangentially related to the Odessa raid and is more concerned with KopBusters themselves and the advancing degrees of disgust I felt on reading about them. Not because they’re bad people or even that their cause isn’t worthy. If they catch corrupt cops, they’re doing the public a great service. Further, while I am not in favor of large-scale drug decriminalization, I do favor decriminalization of pot and I am skeptical of the lengths to which we go on the War on Drugs. So in many ways I am on the same page as they. In fact, it’s that more than anything that makes me irate.

It’s not easy for proponents of drug legalization to be taken seriously. Advocates are often their own worst enemy in this regard and KopBusters are exemplars of this. People are not going to listen to some kid with long, shaggy hair and Birkenstocks on law enforcement. They lack credibility because it seems obvious that they want pot legal because, well, they want to smoke pot. People that don’t want to smoke pot – and whose support you need – are not particularly likely to climb on board. As much as one might believe that the arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, who is making the argument is crucial. Potheads for Pot Legalization is a PR Loser. Likewise, people that hate authority in all its forms are not likely to carry people that… well… don’t hate authority in all its forms.

The first sign that KopBusters was not a group that I was going to be donating to any time soon was when I went on their websites and they repeatedly refuse to identify police officers as anything except “kops”. Spelling “cops” with a “k” for the group’s name for the sake of trademarkability and recognizability is one thing, but it’s different when you’re crossing the line into disrespecting the people that you disagree with (whether they deserve the respect or not). You also want a webpage to load correctly, which theirs does not uniformly do (this is only a minor quibble, however). Hawking Cannibis Culture magazine is also a bad idea. Cooper himself has long hair, pictures of himself indulging in pot, and a couple interviews where the guy looks and sounds stoned.

This is not who you want leading the cause.

You want well-spoken, clean-cut guys with short hair wearing suits. You want guys that refer to the police officers as Officer This and Lieutenant That. You want to deprive the opposition of any and every argument you can make that you are not dead serious about what you’re doing. You want people to believe that you support legalization because you believe the War on Drugs is wrong and not because you hate “kops” and want to smoke pot with impunity. That Cooper himself is a former narc could have been a godsend to the movement, but it was squandered away by Cooper’s need to express himself in his appearance.

This is exactly not to say that Cooper is wrong here. I really don’t know. He says in the video that he’s doing this for Yolanda Madden, the young woman arrested and convicted on dubious grounds for drug possession. To the extent that she was railroaded, he’s letting her down.