Moral panic about sex work leads to law enforcement practices that reach far beyond anyone engaged in or with erotic labor. The latest example comes from San Diego County, California, where cops are putting up a creepy surveillance tower under the auspice of stopping sex sellers and sex buyers from meeting.
The prostitution surveillance tower, stationed along National City's Roosevelt Avenue, will record video of anyone who happens to be in the area.
Normalizing Warrantless Surveillance
A supporter of the surveillance tower told a local CBS affiliate that it will help reduce prostitution by recording the license plate numbers of people who enter the area to pick up sex workers.
Schemes to catch people who want to pay another consenting adult for sex are a waste of money and manpower and a violation of privacy, free association, and bodily autonomy, of course. But even if you think that punishing prostitution customers (or sex workers themselves) is a swell idea, it's hard to see how the surveillance tower makes any sense.
You can't charge someone for simply picking another person up off the street, even if police think the person on the street looks like a sex worker. Even if money visibly exchanged hands—well, it's not a crime to give someone cash. Unless the entire sexual exchange happens right in front of the cameras, it's hard to imagine on what basis cops could possibly make any charges stick.
Besides, the tower is very visible and local media have been publicizing it. Smart sex workers and their customers will simply move to another, less visible area. If the surveillance tower has any impact at all, it will be to drive prostitution from one part of the city to another. That's it.
It seems clear that the idea here isn't actually cracking down on prostitution. It's just a way for authorities to look like they're doing something about sex trafficking while further normalizing the idea of conducting broad, warrantless surveillance of everyone.
So Many Sex-Trafficking Myths
Local reporting on the new surveillance tower has been heavy on human trafficking myths and dubious statistics. Citing a group called The Ugly Truth, Fox 5 San Diego suggested that "there are over 3,000 to 8,000 sex trafficking victims in the county each year."
And on what data does The Ugly Truth base this? Its website doesn't say. But considering that that's vastly more victims than we see in trafficking arrests across the whole country in a year, and considering the fact that "sex trafficking stings" in California and elsewhere routinely turn up few or no victims, I'm going to guess this data is bogus, if it exists at all.
The Ugly Truth's website also states that there are "approximately 18,000 victims in the U.S." If we take that at face value (and again, it's dubious), that would mean that around 17 to 44 percent of all U.S. trafficking victims are in San Diego County. Why, it's almost as if these numbers are completely made up…
Such sketchy figures are par for the course when it comes to activism and reporting about sex trafficking.
Fox 5 also claims that the "the average age of entry into sex trafficking is 16" and that prostitution is "an $800 million industry locally." It does not cite any sources for these statements.
Claims like these tend to be based on shoddy studies put out by anti-prostitution activists and from groups whose funding depends on proving that sex trafficking is a major issue. For instance, there's a persistent claim that the average age of entry into prostitution or the average age at which someone becomes a trafficking victim is somewhere between 13 and 16. Here's what sex worker Maggie McNeill toldReason about this "fact" back in 2014:
There's a researcher named Melissa Farley who does an awful lot of these kind of studies to provide numbers for the anti-prostitution people. And on her site she traced this supposed number of average of 13 to several old studies which all drew back to a study done here in LA actually in the early 80's—in '82. And that study found the average age of entry for underage sex workers—not for all sex workers, but only for underage ones—was about 16. In a different part of the study, they listed 13 as being the average age of first sexual contact. First kiss, first groping in a car, first whatever. Farley seems to have conflated the two numbers to represent that 13 as being the age not of first sexual contact, but of first accepting money for it. Even so, she still was only claiming that that was the age of origin for underage sex workers. Normal distortion, the gossip game syndrome, has changed that from underage to average of all.
Thankfully, there seem to be fewer nonsense statistics about sex trafficking in the media now than a decade ago, when trafficking panic was reaching a peak. But coverage of the National City surveillance tower serves as a good reminder that debunked myths are still out there—and still being used to justify police antics that otherwise might creep people out.
And while sex trafficking panic is arguably less omnipresent now than it was a decade ago, its press coverage should remind us how institutionalized this panic has become.
Authorities overseeing old-school vice stings routinely call them "human trafficking operations" or "sex trafficking stings" now, and reporters and people on social media just casually parrot this language. See, for instance, a recent announcement from Caflironia Attorney General Rob Bonta, who alleged that "sex traffickers capitalize on large events like Comic-Con to exploit victims" (never mind that these sorts of claims around big events have been debunked again and again) and bragged that "an investigation by the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force" led to "14 individuals [being] arrested."
Local, national, and even international media have run with Bonta's framing in their headlines. "14 Arrested at Comic-Con In Anti-Human Trafficking Sting," NBC reported. "Fourteen arrests in undercover sex trafficking sting at San Diego Comic-Con convention," Sky News said.
If you read a few paragraphs down into Bonta's press release, you'll see that no sex trafficking or labor trafficking arrest resulted from this trafficking sting. The 14 people arrested were picked up for trying to pay another adult for sex. That other adult, however, turned out to be an undercover cop.
The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service assisted in these efforts.
This is the sort of vice sting that cops have been doing from time immemorial—and which many people started seeing as a waste of taxpayers' resources when it was done simply to arrest adult sex workers or their would-be clients. So now, authorities dress up their prostitution stings in the language of stopping sexual exploitation and slavery.
In this case, authorities also pretended to be prostitution clients and contacted sex workers. But instead of calling this what it is—a sex worker sting—they say they're recovering "potential victims of trafficking." If you frame all sex workers as potential trafficking victims, then you can call luring them to police under false pretenses a rescue mission, even if all that happens once they're in custody is they get "offered services." (That is, they get the phone numbers of some local charities.)
And while it's unclear if the "victims" here were arrested, this isn't uncommon in these sorts of operations, with police justifying it by saying they need to arrest them in order to save them.
The Comic Con operation did find one 16-year-old selling sex. (A minor selling sex is legally considered to be a sex trafficking victim, even if there is no trafficker.) Helping minors who are selling sex—whether they're actually being "trafficked" or not—is a good goal, of course, and people will point to this one teen as evidence hat the whole operation was a success. But arresting would-be sex buyers had nothing to do with finding this teenager; you didn't need to do one to do the other. And is the best way to help teenage sex workers really to terrify them in a sting and then turn them over to child welfare agents? Shelters and social services for victims—teen or adult—seem like a much more effective and humane approach.
More Sex & Tech News
• The Department of Justice is suing TikTok, claiming the company has violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Much of the complaint turns on the idea that TikTok should magically know whether any user is under age 13, even when users lie about their age or sign in with credentials from another website. The Justice Department also alleges that TikTok collected too much data on users it knew were under 13, and it objects to the fact that the company wouldn't delete minors' accounts upon parental request unless parents certified under penalty of perjury that they were in fact the users' parents.
• The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is legally liable for recalling products sold by third parties.
• Some New Jersey lawmakers want to require adult-oriented websites to verify visitor ages. Meanwhile, a measure sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Inganamort (R–Morris) would require computer manufacturers to block porn sites unless a user pays a $20 fee, and to block "any website that facilitates prostitution."
• Another blow to "net neutrality": The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit "blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge," reports Reuters. The court had already delayed the rules—which were initially adopted under former President Barack Obama then rescinded by former President Donald Trump—after the commission voted in April to bring them back. The court on Thursday said "it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules," Reuters reports.
Today's Image
photo by Elizabeth Nolan Brown—Brooklyn, 2016 (Brooklyn | 2016)
In California, Cajon Valley Union Superintendent David Miyashiro ran up nearly $400,000 in charges on his school district credit card between May 2022 and March 2024. Miyashiro spent thousands of dollars for professional conferences and memberships in education associations, while also spending $76,000 on hotels, $30,000 on airfare, $10,000 on rideshares, and $50,000 on food plus another $115,700 on catering; his average purchase during that period was $19,000. Miyashiro is one of the highest-paid superintendents in the state, receiving a $408,000 annual salary, an $800 monthly car allowance, and a $300 monthly stipend for business expenses.
Shooting fireworks out of a helicopter sounds fun. Shooting fireworks out of a helicopter at a Lamborghini sports car sounds really fun, especially if everyone on the helicopter and everyone in the Lamborghini consents. Alex Choi, a YouTube and Instagram vlogger in California, produced a video of him and his crew doing just that. But he forgot to ask one important group for permission: the federal government.
Earlier this week, the feds indicted Choi for "causing the placement of explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft," a crime with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The indictment also revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had revoked the license from Choi's helicopter pilot in January 2024 for flying less than 500 feet from people, failing to display the helicopter's registration number, and creating "a hazard to persons or property" without the necessary FAA waivers.
By all accounts, the only danger was to people directly involved in the video, which has since been removed from Choi's YouTube and Instagram accounts. (Clips of the stunt are still available elsewhere.) Choi and his crew filmed the stunt at El Mirage dry lake bed, an off-roading recreation area miles away from any town. The indictment quotes Choi talking about his "crazy stupid ideas" and one of his crew members saying that the fireworks are "so loud; it's actually terrifying," which only makes the video sound cooler.
The FAA moved very quickly when it caught wind of the stunt. Choi posted the video on the Fourth of July last year. On July 18, an FAA inspector interviewed the person who transported cars for Choi. A few days later, the FAA tracked down the helicopter pilot and a Bureau of Land Management agent went out to the dry lake to photograph Choi's tire tracks. Since the lake bed is federal land, the indictment notes, Choi should have gotten federal permission.
Soon after the FAA interrogations began, Choi texted an associate that the FAA inspector "has a personal issue with my helicopter pilot friend and every time i do a shoot with him, tries to get more information about him so he can go after him," according to the indictment.
The Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General then decided to charge Choi with a crime. The law against taking an explosive on board an aircraft clearly seems to be aimed at would-be bombers, but the feds argue that it applies to firing explosives out of an aircraft as well.
The case against Choi parallels the case of Austin Haughwout almost a decade ago. In 2015, when consumer drone technology was still in its infancy, the teenage Haughwout filmed himself flying a drone with a pistol attached and firing into the woods. The 14-second video, titled "Flying Gun," caused a national media panic about the danger of armed drones. Haughwout also posted a video of himself roasting meat with a drone-mounted flamethrower.
The FAA subpoenaed Haughwout and his father because the videos showed potentially unsafe piloting of an aircraft. The Haughwout family fought the subpoena in court, arguing that drones are not "aircraft" within the FAA's jurisdiction. (Their lawyer compared the situation to the FAA regulating baseballs, paper airplanes, or birthday balloons.) A district court ruled in favor of the subpoena, and although Haughwout was not charged with an aviation crime, the case became a key precedent for the FAA's ability to regulate drones.
Since then, the FAA has scoured social media for potential drone violations. Earlier this year, a federal court banned Philadelphia YouTuber Michael DiCiurcio from flying drones and fined him $182,000 for violating FAA rules. DiCiurcio had gotten famous for making slapstick videos of himself fighting birds, buzzing fishermen, and crashing into himself with his drone, all while narrating in a thick South Philly accent.
Last year, aviation vlogger Joe Costanza had a friend follow his small Piper Cub airplane down a private runway with a drone. When Costanza posted the video to a Facebook group—and joked that "the pilot knew that the drone was there because I was flying both at the same time"—he was contacted by an FAA inspector. In the end, the FAA did not press any charges, but Constanza took to YouTube to complain about the investigation.
"You know, no matter how stupid the complaint is or how out of the ordinary it is, we have to investigate every single complaint that comes out way," the inspector said, according to Constanza.
Today's technology companies are increasingly sandwiched between the regulatory requirements of the European Union (E.U.) and those of California. While the U.S. federal government may adopt a light touch, pro-innovation approach, California's state legislation can undermine this with a regulatory approach with impacts far beyond its borders.
A new California bill imposes a rigorous regulatory regime on Artificial Intelligence (AI), making it the latest technology caught in this potentially innovation-stifling squeeze between Brussels and Sacramento. The term "Brussels Effect" often refers to the outsize influence of E.U. policy—particularly in technology—as a de facto global standard. But now, companies are also experiencing the "Sacramento Effect," where California's stringent regulations effectively set de facto federal policy for the rest of the country.
California is not the only state diving into significant tech policy legislation. Colorado recently enacted notable AI regulations, Montana attempted to ban TikTok, and many states are pursuing data privacy or youth online safety regulations.
For better or worse, states can move faster than Congress, acting as laboratories of democracy. However, this agility also risks creating a fragmented tech policy landscape, with one state's regulations imposing heavy burdens on the entire nation. This is particularly pronounced with California.
The impact is profound not just because many leading tech companies are based in California but rather because of the nature of the technologies California seeks to regulate. For example, in some cases, the only feasible way to implement regulations is at a national level. In data privacy, the laws apply to California residents even when their actions are not occurring within the state's borders, pushing companies toward broader compliance to avoid legal pitfalls.
While some of these laws could be challenged under the dormant commerce clause, without judicial intervention, they become de facto federal policy. Many companies find it easier to comply with California's stringent regulations rather than juggling different standards across states and risking non-compliance.
This dynamic was evident in 2018 when California enacted its regulatory approach to data privacy. Now, we could soon see California—either by regulation or legislation—disrupting the crucial AI innovations currently taking place. Unlike some technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, the development of large language models and other foundational AI models cannot, in most cases, simply be removed from a state due to regulations.
Perhaps the "best-case scenario" from the actions of states like California and Colorado might be a problematic patchwork of AI regulations, but more realistically, California's proposal (if it becomes law) would deter innovation by creating a costly compliance regime. This would limit AI development to only the largest companies capable of bearing these costs and would come at the expense of investments in product improvements.
Moreover, beneficial AI applications could be thwarted by other proposals California's legislature is currently considering. As R Street's Adam Thierer notes in an analysis of state laws surrounding the AI revolution, the California legislature has considered a variety of anti-AI bills that could "ban self-checkout at grocery and retail stores and ban the use of AI in call centers that provide government services, making things even less efficient."
It is not only legislation that could result in California derailing a pro-innovation approach to AI. The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), established under California's data privacy laws, has proposed a regulatory framework for "automated decision-making." The E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation shows how data privacy regulation can inadvertently stifle AI development by imposing compliance requirements designed for older technologies. Regulating "automated decision-making" could give the CPPA an unintended yet significant role in obstructing AI and other beneficial algorithmic uses.
America's tech innovators and entrepreneurs are already facing challenges from the E.U.'s heavy-handed AI regulations. In the absence of federal preemption or an alternative framework, they may also be hindered by the heavy hand of Sacramento. Such a sandwiching of significant regulation could harm not only the tech sector's economy but also all Americans who stand to benefit from AI advancements, as a single state or region's policy preferences dictate the national landscape.
Last week, Reasonreported on the rising trend of Colorado police departments increasingly using aerial drones as first responders to certain 911 calls.
A new investigation out this week reveals how such a system could work in practice, with startling implications for privacy and civil liberties.
In WIRED, Dhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx write about Chula Vista, a town in southern California roughly equidistant between San Diego and Tijuana. In 2018, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) launched the Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, allowing 911 operators to deploy drones either in lieu of or in addition to uniformed officers—the first U.S. city to do so.
DFR "is not a replacement for officers, it's an enhancement," Police Chief Roxana Kennedy told KPBS at the time. In the program's first week, drones responded to 30 calls and led to three arrests, including a domestic violence case in which a man suspected of stabbing a woman fled back to a homeless encampment and a pursuing drone led police to his location. The program was initially limited to within one mile of the police station, but it expanded over time before receiving federal authorization to operate citywide in March 2021.
In the nearly six years since, as Mehrotra and Marx detail, CVPD drones have taken nearly 20,000 flights, "often dispatched for serious incidents like reports of armed individuals [but] also routinely deployed for minor issues such as shoplifting, vandalism, and loud music. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the city even used drones to broadcast public service announcements to homeless encampments."
WIRED examined "nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023," encompassing "more than 22.3 million coordinates from flight paths," to assess CVPD's claim that drones are only dispatched in response to specific 911 calls or lawful searches and do not merely go roaming in search of suspicious activity.
"Drones were used in about 7 percent of the city's service requests," the authors found, including "nearly half of the incidents involving reports of armed individuals and about a quarter of those related to violent crime," plus mental health and domestic violence calls.
"The vast majority" of the 10,000 flight records analyzed "could be linked to corresponding 911 calls. But not all of them." In fact, about 10 percent "lacked a stated purpose and could not be connected to any relevant 911 call; for 498 flights, the department lists the reason as an 'unknown problem.'" Further, "nearly 400 [flights] didn't come within half a mile of where any call in the preceding half hour originated."
Even specifically sanctioned flights may be cause for concern: "Operators are trained to start recording with the drone's camera immediately, capturing video throughout the entire flight, from takeoff to landing," Mehrotra and Marx note. The cameras, "powerful enough to capture faces clearly and constantly recording while in flight, have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of the city's residents," the vast majority of which the city has refused to release.
"On average, each drone flight passes above 13 census blocks and potentially exposes approximately 4,700 of the residents below to a drone's camera," the WIRED analysis found. And potential exposure did not fall equally: "Residents on a typical block in the working-class and largely immigrant west side of Chula Vista had drones in the skies above 10 times longer than a resident of a typical east-side block," Mehrotra wrote in WIRED's Politics Lab newsletter yesterday. West-side residents "alleged that police drones were following them personally, lingering unnecessarily in their backyards, or watching them during their most intimate moments," and others complained about the noise of drone rotors. (The CVPD claimed the disparity is due to the unequal number of 911 calls that each area receives; the WIRED analysis "confirm[ed] that this is largely the case.")
Interestingly, support for the drone program is also strongest among the lower-income Chula Vista residents most likely to be subjected to it. One Latino man—who lives in an apartment complex that CVPD drones have flown over more than 300 times since July 2021—told WIRED that the drones make him feel safer, especially after a stranger tried to steal his child and police deployed a drone to look for the suspect. This isn't unheard of: Polls show black Americans are significantly more afraid of the police than their white neighbors, yet they still want a strong, effective police presence in their neighborhoods.
Regardless, Chula Vista's drone program could be a concerning sign of where American policing is headed. Even apart from DFR, city residents have been subject to a shocking amount of surveillance in recent years: automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, and a partnership with Amazon for access to its Ring doorbell cameras. In December 2017, the CVPD partnered with a company to share its data with other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
As Colorado's example makes clear, police departments increasingly see DFR programs as a plausible alternative to traditional policing, in which an officer would be dispatched to the scene of an emergency. While that's certainly true, it would also expose everyday citizens to a shocking new world of state surveillance.
While christening a new UCLA technology and research center in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom let loose with some fairly typical rhetoric about California's leading-edge role in tech development: "California is the epicenter of global innovation—from the creation of the internet to the dominance of artificial intelligence, humanity's future happens here first."
Yet for the so-called epicenter of innovation, our state certainly doesn't give innovators a lot of room to experiment with new ideas. California lawmakers and regulators are so intent on limiting and controlling any promising new development that we've instead become the poster child for Ronald Reagan's famous quotation: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
Maybe Newsom and the Democratic Legislature haven't noticed, but California has been facing a tech exodus, as many prominent firms leave for states that give them more elbow room to create the next wave of promising innovations. Given the state's dependence on capital gains revenue, it's one reason we're now facing a $45-billion or more budget deficit.
On the good news front, Crunchbasereports that the San Francisco Bay Area may be experiencing a tech resurgence based around artificial intelligence systems, with the region receiving "more than 50 percent of all global venture funding for AI-related startups." But will the state kill that boom before it takes off? Based on the latest actions of the legislature, the answer is "probably."
The Senate Appropriations Committee recently gave the go-ahead to Senate Bill 915, which would "prioritize local control in the decision to deploy autonomous vehicle services." In addition to gaining all the many state approvals, robo-taxi firms would also have to deal with exploding local regulations.
The legislation has been amended to apply to the 15 largest cities and it would forbid localities from banning self-driving cars, but that doesn't ameliorate my concern. This technology is rolling out mainly in big cities anyway. It's easy to kill a technology without outright banning it by, say, forcing these companies to face dramatically different driving rules in every different city where they go.
Like all cutting-edge innovations, self-driving cars strike many of us as an ominous and dangerous development. But most new cars already have various self-driving features (lane assist, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring). And computers are almost certainly better drivers than people. Nearly 43,000 Americans die in car crashes each year, almost all of them at the hands of human drivers. Widespread A.V. use could save thousands of lives, per research from RAND.
AVs offer fabulous benefits for disabled people, the elderly, and others who cannot or choose not to drive. Yet federal, state, and local officials are worried about a few minor and inevitable problems that have popped up as this technology experiences growing pains—e.g., minor accidents and concerns about traffic violations (as if ordinary drivers don't also sometimes violate traffic laws).
One advocate for S.B. 915 expressed concern about robo-taxis getting stuck at a tricky turn—as if that's a good excuse to add a pointless mish-mash of local regulations to the mix. Ironically, AV development is one area where state regulators have taken an admirably low-key approach. In March, the California Public Utilities Commission gave Waymo, the Alphabet company's driverless-car division, the ability to expand operations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles region and even drive on freeways up to 65 mph. But even when the state takes a sensible approach, the locals want to step in to gum up the works.
And SB 915 isn't the only example of the California Legislature's kneejerk hostility to innovation. Many states are trying to regulate artificial intelligence technology, but California's Senate Bill 1047, which passed out of the Senate and has moved to the Assembly, is easily the most far-reaching example. The bill would create a new state regulatory division to regulate A.I. We all know how effective the state's bureaucrats are at handling complex matters—as well as the impact of lawsuit-promoting statutes.
Basically, the measure forces A.I. developers to mitigate every conceivable harm from their technology by engaging "in speculative fiction about imagined threats of machines run amok, computer models spun out of control, and other nightmare scenarios for which there is no basis in reality," opined an opposition letter from the pro-tech Chamber of Progress. The group rightly fears that the measure undermines California's leading-edge role in the tech sector.
Last week, I wrote about the legislature's effort to limit A.I. technology in a simple, real-world application—self-checkout lanes. Under the guise of helping stores battle retail theft, Senate Bill 1446 is a union concoction designed to limit the use of this technology to protect union grocery jobs.
So, yes, California has been the epicenter of global innovation, but it's apparently not going to continue being so for long. Let's hope Newsom heeds his own words and gets out the veto pen.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The recent wave of headlines about shoplifting and retail theft, accompanied by viral videos of people brazenly walking out of stores with stolen goods, has captured the attention of the media and politicians. The tough-on-crime crowd has advocated for a crackdown on shoplifters through more aggressive prosecution and harsher penalties. Others have emphasized the need for rehabilitation for offenders.
One group of progressive California lawmakers claims to have found an even better solution: banning self-checkout machines from stores in the name of fighting crime. In reality, this "anti-crime" bill is nothing more than naked protectionism for union jobs.
The proposed legislation would prohibit groceries and other retail stores from using self-checkout machines unless a host of conditions are met. These include having at least one staffed employee for every two self-checkout machines (and the employee must be exempt from any other duties), only permitting the machines to be used by shoppers with 10 items or fewer, and ensuring at least one regular cashier lane is also available at all times.
The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D–Los Angeles), calls her approach "smart" on crime instead of "hard on crime," telling The New York Times: "We have so many bills in this Legislature that are trying to increase penalties….We know that what makes our community safe is not more jail time and penalties. What makes our community safe is real enforcement, having real workers that are on the floor."
To underscore her point, Smallwood-Cuevas cites a study suggesting that retail theft is up to 16 times more likely to occur at self-checkout machines than at traditional registers, leading to an estimated $10 billion in annual losses for retailers.
A closer look at the fine print of the bill, however, reveals the true intent behind it. The legislation mandates that any store seeking to install self-checkout machines must first produce a study analyzing, among other things, the number of employees "whose duties would be affected by the workplace technology," as well as the "total amount of salaries and benefits that would be eliminated as a result of the workplace technology." The study must then be provided to employees potentially impacted by the technology (or their collective bargaining representatives) and posted "in a location accessible to employees and customers."
Were this a game of poker, this mandated study would be the tell: Smallwood-Cuevas and her fellow progressives are trying to tuck a pro–union jobs bill inside the Trojan horse of crime prevention.
Smallwood-Cuevas was a labor organizer before her legislative career, and some of the bill's biggest sponsors are labor unions. A press release on the United Food and Commercial Workers' website lauds the legislation, with the president of the local chapter complaining that "employers have increasingly implemented automated checkout to drastically cut staffing and reduce labor costs." The press release does not mention the word crime at all and only uses theft twice and shoplifting once. In contrast, jobs, staffing, and worker displacement are referenced a total of 10 times.
Efforts to limit self-checkout in other blue states provide corroborating evidence, such as a proposed anti-self-checkout ballot initiative in Oregon that labor interests tried to get on the 2020 ballot, explicitly positioned as a pro–union jobs measure.
While a pro-labor bill in California may seem utterly unremarkable, some on the right may be buying the bill's anti-crime framing. Both Fox Business and the New York Postran articles highlighting the bill as an anti-theft measure, with little reference to the real motivations behind the legislation. Given the right's increasing embrace of labor unions, it is not hard to envision an unholy alliance of pro-labor progressives and tough-on-crime populist conservatives supporting bills around the country to eliminate self-checkout.
Supporters of the bill and numerous media outlets have cited two examples of large retail chains making their own internal decisions to reduce or remove self-checkout machines to clamp down on theft. The aforementioned statistics about self-checkout lanes leading to more shoplifting are also frequently referenced. But these points ironically cut against the need for government involvement: If self-checkout machines are really leading to massive inventory losses for stores, then retailers themselves have a direct bottom-line incentive to scrap self-checkout.
No one cares more about inventory loss than store owners, whose entire business model is predicated on customers actually paying money for their products. That is why some retailers are reevaluating the efficacy of self-checkout and experimenting with new monitoring tactics such as "smart video" cameras that can halt the self-checkout process if they notice a customer declining to scan any items.
There already is a built-in market response to theft concerns around self-checkout—more government interference is simply not needed. If lawmakers still want to ban self-checkout machines anyway, they should at least be honest about why.
There's yet another attempt to revive California's shuttered redevelopment agencies—those crony-capitalist abominations that abused eminent domain, ran up debt without a public vote, and distorted development decisions at the local level. This year's redevelopment effort is renamed the Reconnecting Communities Redevelopment Act, but a cute new name doesn't hide redevelopment's sordid history.
It's oddly delusional even by Capitol standards to revive these tax-draining agencies when the state lacks sufficient revenues to meet its current spending. Last year, Assemblymember David Alvarez (D–Chula Vista) proposed recreating the agencies largely as they existed before Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature eliminated them in 2011 to help plug a gaping budget hole. It died in committee, the victim of a budget deficit estimated at around $32 billion.
Alvarez is back this year with Assembly Bill 2945 even though the current deficit is estimated at around $45 billion or higher. The state dissolved the agencies 12 years ago. Since then, lawmakers have passed measures that bring back modest portions of redevelopment—such as Infrastructure Finance Districts that use tax-increment financing to pay for limited infrastructure-related developments.
However, broader redevelopment revivals have failed—and likely will do so again. AB 2945 passed through committee but is headed toward rocky terrain. In 2019, former Gov. Brown threw shade on that year's revival effort: "A lot of people wanted to see it go, and it did free up almost $2 billion a year for schools. And if people want to bring it back they're going to take billions from the schools, and I would assume those people who care about the California public schools will fight that very hard."
Brown was spot on. As much as I'd like to think that free market arguments against redevelopment swayed lawmakers, the real bill killer came from the powerful California Teachers Association. The teachers' union clearly wouldn't ignore efforts to tap their funding sources. Sure the state backfilled those lost education dollars, but California doesn't have the spare cash to do that in the face of its remarkably large deficit.
As a refresher, California created redevelopment agencies in the 1940s to help rebuild inner-city slums. The basic redevelopment financial structure allows city governments to float bonds to pay for infrastructure related to urban-renewal projects. Cities gained the resulting increase in property taxes—called the tax increment—under the thinking that the projects spur gains in property values. That money then paid off the bonds.
By declaring an area blighted, agencies could unilaterally divert property tax revenues from traditional public services toward these privately built projects. Cities could declare virtually anything blighted (too little urbanization or too much of it, buildings with chipping paint, excessive vacant lots, insufficient tax revenue in the area, etc.) and then seek out developers to build new shopping centers or venues, or whatever is preferred in City Hall.
Traditional urban renewal projects caused their share of widely known problems, namely the obliteration of neighborhoods to make way for the above-mentioned developments. I strongly support Proposition 13, which keeps Californians from being taxed out of their homes. But after it limited tax revenues, localities came up with creative means to bolster their tax base. They learned that redevelopment could subsidize auto malls, shopping centers, and hotels that brought in additional sales taxes, so it quickly became a tax-grabbing scheme rather than an urban renewal tool.
Most noxiously, redevelopment law gave cities the power to invoke eminent domain—a property-taking power they used and abused early and often. They bulldozed neighborhoods, drove small businesses off of their land, and bullied people who lacked the resources to fight back. Often, the envisioned projects never materialized, leaving cities with vacant lots. There were some arguably successful projects, but the process worked as one would expect when the government gains unchecked power to take and redistribute property.
Redevelopment advocates claim that California needs to restore these agencies because of the housing crisis. They had set aside 20 percent of their tax increment toward affordable housing, but the state has since stepped up funding of such housing. It's a topic for another day, but because of the various union and environmental rules that come with subsidies, these projects cost far more than market-rate alternatives and haven't made a dent in the state's housing shortfalls. So adding more such spending isn't the answer.
And redevelopment exacerbated the housing crisis by teaching cities to view land-use decisions through a fiscal lens. With redevelopment, cities preferred commercial projects that brought in their sought-after sales-tax bonanza over housing developments. The best way to boost housing supply is to reduce regulations and fees—not give cities an incentive to choose big-box stores over new neighborhoods.
I know it's hard to let go of a shuttered government program, but it's time for lawmakers to move on. There's no conceivable reason to recreate these disastrous agencies.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
When arguing about whether the Treasury needed to take urgent action to deal with soaring federal debt in the 1980s, the late former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Herb Stein coined Stein's Law. It was simple and obvious: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
I hate to pick nits with such an esteemed economist, but I'll offer Greenhut's Corollary: "Never underestimate politicians' ability to kick the can down the road." In 1986, federal debt was $2.1 trillion. In 2024, the debt is $34 trillion. Debt spending of this magnitude cannot go on forever, but it can fester for a long time and cause economic damage in the process. But, yes, it probably will stop eventually.
I thought of Stein's oft-cited quip when pondering California's pension crisis. A recent CalMatters report reminds us the state never has gotten its pension debt under control and that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature keep making the problem worse: "More generous-than-expected raises for California state workers are nudging up the cost of public employee pensions."
Back to my corollary: The report adds that Newsom "sidesteps the growing cost of CalPERS pensions" by using an accounting gimmick. The California Public Employees' Retirement System is only 72 percent funded, which means it only has 72 cents on the dollar to pay for the promised pensions—and they are one of the state's senior obligations. If the state budget ever collapses, government retirees are at the top of the list to get paid.
Per CalMatters, the Legislative Analyst's Office questions whether Newsom's shifting of funds from paying down CalPERS debt toward funding next year's pension costs runs afoul of Proposition 2, the 2014 ballot measure requiring the state to pay down certain debts. But let's not get too deeply into the weeds. The point: Even as the state's pension debt continues to spiral, Newsom and the Legislature won't tackle the problem head on.
Peruse the state legislative website and you'll find lawmakers fixated on every miniscule concern—concert ticket monopolies, landlord pet policies, healthcare wages, social-media age-verification policies—but nothing dealing with pension costs. The reason is obvious. The state's public employee unions rule the roost in the state Capitol and lawmakers better not touch their pensions.
Most normal people find pension reform to be mind-numbing. I'm not particularly normal, having written a
This comes at a cost: fewer public employees providing services, higher taxpayer-funded debt, and higher taxes. Note the large number of local tax measures on every ballot. Officials sell them as ways to improve public safety, upgrade parks, provide affordable housing, and fix the roads. But money is fungible. The growth in pension costs is fueling these tax grabs. These costs are "crowding out" spending on public services.
A dozen years ago, pension reformers predicted, a la Stein, that this could not go on forever. Some believed the state's then $30-billion-plus deficit would lead to fundamental budgetary changes. Local governments and voters—even in liberal jurisdictions such as San Jose—passed pension-reform measures that reduced pension formulas (or limited pensionable pay) in the face of budget cutbacks. But they ultimately lost every battle.
The courts rebuked San Jose's measure based on the California Rule, which refers to a series of court interpretations claiming that governments can't reduce pensions even going forward unless they provide something of equal or greater value in return. The California Supreme Court sidestepped that issue when it had a chance to change the rule. A union-friendly state agency derailed San Diego's effort at reform.
In the end, Gov. Jerry Brown passed a useful but exceedingly modest pension reform law and spearheaded large tax increases to fix the budget deficit he faced. The pension reform movement lost steam. As usual, the unions flexed their muscle in the Capitol, in the courts, and in the state's administrative agencies. Reformers tried and failed—and since then talk about serious reform has been verboten in Sacramento.
Can this go on forever? Probably not. The pension problem isn't going away, but neither is the power of the unions or the desire of the state's leaders to delay the reckoning for another day.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The Los Angeles Press Club on Thursday announced the finalists for the 66th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best work in print, online, and broadcast media published in 2023.
Reason, which is headquartered in L.A., is a finalist for 14 awards.
A sincere thanks to the judges who read and watched our submissions, as well as to the Reason readers, subscribers, and supporters, without whom we would not be able to produce impactful journalism.
Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist for best technology reporting across all media platforms—print, radio, podcast, TV, and online—for her November 2023 print piece, "Do Social Media Algorithms Polarize Us? Maybe Not," in which she challenged what has become the traditional wisdom around the root of online toxicity:
For years, politicians have been proposing new regulations based on simple technological "solutions" to issues that stem from much more complex phenomena. But making Meta change its algorithms or shifting what people see in their Twitter feeds can't overcome deeper issues in American politics—including parties animated more by hate and fear of the other side than ideas of their own. This new set of studies should serve as a reminder that expecting tech companies to somehow fix our dysfunctional political culture won't work.
Science Reporter Ronald Bailey is a finalist for best medical/health reporting in print or online for "Take Nutrition Studies With a Grain of Salt," also from the November 2023 issue, where he meticulously dissected why the epidemiology of food and drink is, well, "a mess":
This doesn't mean you can eat an entire pizza, a quart of ice cream, and six beers tonight without some negative health effects. (Sorry.) It means nutritional epidemiology is a very uncertain guide for how to live your life and it certainly isn't fit for setting public policy.
In short, take nutrition research with a grain of salt. And don't worry: Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) says "too much salt can kill you," the Daily Mail noted in 2021 that "it's not as bad for health as you think."
Managing Editor Jason Russell is a finalist in print/online sports commentary for his August/September 2023 cover story, "Get Your Politics Out of My Pickleball," which explored the emerging fault lines as the government gets involved in America's weirdest, fastest-growing sport:
Pickleball will always have haters—and if its growth continues, local governments will still face public pressure to build more courts. Some critics think the sport is a fad, but strong growth continues for the time being, even as the COVID-19 pandemic ends and other activities compete for time and attention. There's no need to force nonplayers to support it with their tax dollars, especially when entrepreneurs seem eager to provide courts. If pickleball does end up as an odd footnote in sporting history, ideally it won't be taxpayers who are on the hook for converting courts to new uses.
Reporter C.J. Ciaramella is a finalist in magazine investigative reporting for his October 2023 cover story, "'I Knew They Were Scumbags,'" a nauseating piece on federal prison guards who confessed to rape—and got away with it:
Berman's daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.
Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a finalist in magazine commentary for "Biden's 'Marijuana Reform' Leaves Prohibition Untouched," from the January 2023 issue, in which he disputed the notion that President Joe Biden has fundamentally changed America's response to cannabis:
By himself, Biden does not have the authority to resolve the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. But despite his avowed transformation from an anti-drug zealot into a criminal justice reformer, he has stubbornly opposed efforts to repeal federal pot prohibition.
That position is contrary to the preferences expressed by more than two-thirds of Americans, including four-fifths of Democrats and half of Republicans. The most Biden is willing to offer them is his rhetorical support for decriminalizing cannabis consumption—a policy that was on the cutting edge of marijuana reform in the 1970s.
Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature. But not all transgressions are equal. In the wake of the Iran team's silent anthem protest, an Iranian journalist asked U.S. men's soccer captain Tyler Adams how he could play for a country that discriminates against black people like him. What makes the U.S. different, he replied, is that "we're continuing to make progress every day."
The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn't have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.
Reporter Christian Britschgi is a finalist for best long-form magazine feature on business/government for "The Town Without Zoning," from the August/September 2023 issue, in which he reported on the fight over whether Caroline, New York, should impose its first-ever zoning code:
Whatever the outcome, the zoning debate raging in Caroline is revealing. It shows how even in a small community without major enterprises or serious growth pressures, planners can't adequately capture and account for everything people might want to do with their land.
There's a gap between what zoners can do and what they imagine they can design. That knowledge problem hasn't stopped cities far larger and more complex than Caroline from trying to scientifically sort themselves with zoning. They've developed quite large and complex problems as a result.
Associate Editor Billy Binion (hi, it's me) is a finalist for best activism journalism online for the web feature "They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits," which explored an underreported form of legalized larceny: governments across the U.S. seizing people's homes over modest tax debts, selling the properties, and keeping the surplus equity.
Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.
Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.
If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.
Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, Producer John Carter, and freelancer extraordinaire Andrew Heaton are finalists for best humor/satire writing across all broadcast mediums—TV, film, radio, or podcast—for the hilarious "Everything is political: board games," which "exposes" how Republicans and Democrats interpret everyone's favorite games from their partisan perspectives. (Spoiler: Everyone's going to lose.)
The Bragg brothers are nominated again in that same category—best humor/satire writing—along with Remy for "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor Swift Parody)," in which lawmakers find culprits for the recent uptick in thefts—the victims.
Deputy Managing Editor of Video and Podcasts Natalie Dowzicky and Video Editor Regan Taylor are finalists in best commentary/analysis of TV across all media platforms for "What really happened at Waco," which explored a Netflix documentary on how the seeds of political polarization that roil our culture today were planted at Waco.
Editor at Large Matt Welch, Producer Justin Zuckerman, Motion Graphic Designer Adani Samat, and freelancer Paul Detrick are finalists in best activism journalism across any broadcast media for "The monumental free speech case the media ignored," which made the case that the legal odyssey and criminal prosecutions associated with Backpage were a direct assault on the First Amendment—despite receiving scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates.
Associate Editor Liz Wolfe, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Producer Justin Zuckerman are finalists in best solutions journalism in any broadcast media for "Why homelessness is worse in California than Texas," which investigated why homelessness is almost five times as bad in the Golden State—and what can be done about it.
Finally, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Audio Engineer Ian Keyser are finalists in best documentary short for "The Supreme Court case that could upend the Clean Water Act," which did a deep dive into a Supreme Court case concerning a small-town Idaho couple that challenged how the Environmental Protection Agency defines a "wetland"—and what that means for property rights.
Winners will be announced on Sunday, June 23 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Subscribe to Reasonhere, watch our video journalism here, and find our podcasts here.
During a sleepover in August 2017, three 14-year-old boys, two of whom were about to start attending St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, took a picture of themselves wearing dark green acne masks. One of the boys, who was hosting the other two, had severe acne, and his friends applied the masks in an act of playful solidarity. They took the picture because they thought they looked "silly."
Three years later, after another teenager obtained the picture and posted it online, the two St. Francis students were falsely accused of posing in blackface and forced to leave the school under the threat of expulsion. This week a California jury awarded the boys, identified as A.H. and H.H. in their lawsuit against the school, $1 million in damages, plus a tuition reimbursement of about $70,000.
"A photograph of this innocent event was plucked from obscurity and grossly mischaracterized during the height of nationwide social unrest," the boys' familes said when they filed their lawsuit in 2021. The photo came to light in June 2020, a month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. "St. Francis became involved in a number of racial scandals," NBC News reports, "including one where recent graduates of the school posted a meme about Floyd's death on Instagram." Because of that context, A.H. and H.H. argued, St. Francis officials rushed to judgment, tarring the students as racist and disrupting their lives without giving them a chance to explain the photo.
"The boys did not use the facemasks or take the photograph with any ill-intent, bias or prejudice, let alone in connection with any racist sentiments or epithets," the lawsuit said. "Defendants took it upon themselves to use the innocent and wholly unrelated photograph of the boys to make the malicious and utterly false accusation that the boys had been engaging in 'blackface,' and to recklessly assert that the photograph was 'another example' of racism" at St. Francis. That false accusation, according to the complaint, interrupted the boys' educations, destroyed their local reputations, and forced their families to move.
The jury agreed that St. Francis had treated the boys unfairly, thereby violating an oral contract. More controversially, the jury accepted a claim under the California Supreme Court's "common law doctrine of fair procedure," which extends due process requirements to private actors such as unions, hospitals, insurers, and professional organizations. Last year, the court ruled that the doctrine also applies to private universities. But according to the attorneys who represented A.H. and H.H., this is the first time the doctrine has been applied to a private secondary school.
"This case is significant not only for our clients but for its groundbreaking effect on all private high schools in California, which are now legally required to provide fair procedure to students before punishing or expelling them," said Dhillon Law Group partner Krista Baughman. "The jury rightly confirmed that St. Francis High School's procedures were unfair to our clients and that the school is not above the law."
Karin Sweigart, another lawyer at the firm, emphasized that it took four years to definitively refute the school's erroneous claim about the supposedly racist nature of the photo. "The jury's verdict finally cleared our clients' names after four long years of repeated personal attacks from St. Francis High School," she said. "Schools are supposed to protect and nurture children, not sacrifice them when it is convenient for public relations purposes."
The school's representatives said they "respectfully disagree with the jury's conclusion" about "the fairness of our disciplinary review process." They added that the school is "exploring legal options," including a possible appeal.
The plaintiffs' attorneys note that "St. Francis expelled the boys within 24 hours, without considering their evidence or offering any hearing." They add that "the school's actions led to significant personal, educational, and emotional consequences for the students."
The boys' parents amplified that point. "We would never wish the pain, humiliation, and suffering St. Francis has inflicted on our families on anyone," they said, "but we are thankful that the jury has spoken," "vindicated our boys," and "forced St. Francis to finally take responsibility for their repeated personal attacks."
Even with "time to reflect and contemplate after the heat of the moment had subsided," the parents said, St. Francis officials "don't regret their actions" and "would do the same thing today." Although the case has consumed "twenty percent of our boys' lives," they said, "the sacrifice is worth it to clear our boys' names" and "to try and make sure that St. Francis can never again assume a child is guilty" without giving him "the opportunity to show [his] innocence."
Modern public-education history is littered with novel education theories that have failed so spectacularly that the terms are now used as pejoratives. For instance, when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, the "New Math" focused on teaching abstractions rather than fundamentals. You can find reams of research documenting its failure decades later, but the evidence was recognized almost immediately.
That then-new approach "ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations if one does not know the older ones," according to Morris Kline's 1973 "Common Core," a set of educational standards embraced by California and 39 other states in 2010. On hindsight, it also deserves a failing grade.
"Despite the theory's intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality," read a 2021 Brookings Institution report. "The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers' flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students." Don't get me started on some of the loopier ones: pass-fail grading, the replacement of phonics with whole-language learning, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL).
"Education in the United States has lurched from fad to fad for the better part of a century, finding ever-ingenious ways to underperform preceding generations," explained investigative reporter Joe Herring in a 2022 piece reviewing some of them. Apparently, there isn't enough productive employment for education PhDs, so they spend their time dreaming up big experiments to improve education rather than focusing on the obvious ones.
The process gains life as evidence pours in about the latest underperformance. And the latest data certainly is impressive, albeit in a depressing way. Following COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, traditional public schools (and California's in particular) couldn't rise to the occasion. Teachers' unions slowed re-openings. Test scores plummeted, especially for poor and minority students. Many students checked out permanently, as soaring chronic absentee rates prove.
Always eager to embrace easy-button solutions rather than, say, ideas that promote competitiveness and excellence, our school bureaucracies are on to some "innovative" ideas that have a ballpark-zero chance of improving educational outcomes. The new ones are based around the concept of equity. As with every education reform fad, they sound OK in the elevator pitch. Who doesn't support equity? But they will create a mess that further impedes student progress.
For instance, some Bay Area schools have approved "equity grading." It's strange to focus on grading rather than teaching, but the details are even stranger. The Mercury Newsreports that one district removed "the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were 'reasonably attempted.'" It also eliminated extra credit for class participation. EG offers students "multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework's impact on a student's grade." Now it will be almost impossible to get an A or an F.
It brings to mind Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." Parents rightly worry that the new grading system will promote slacking. Why work extra hard when you won't be able to get an A? Why try to improve when you won't get worse than a C? It will create a false sense of equity—and make it tougher for colleges to recognize the best students.
Education theorists and consultants who promote this nonsense claim that it will encourage students and teachers to focus entirely on the mastery of material rather than surrounding fluff. They say it will better prepare students for the work world. Yet a lot of that so-called fluff—class participation, completing homework, handing in assignments on time—contribute mightily to such mastery.
Regarding the work world, ask my editor what he thinks if I miss my deadlines and still expect a paycheck. "Supporters of mastery-based grading say it could promote equity," notes an Education Nextarticle. But will it improve learning and test scores? One needn't be a math whiz to know the answer.
State education officials also have jumped on the equity bandwagon. The California State Board of Education last year approved a new 1,000-page math framework that, as Education Weekreported, "aims to put meaning-making at the center of the math classroom" and "encourages teachers to make math culturally relevant and accessible for all students." The framework isn't binding on districts, but it will influence everything from textbooks to teaching standards.
I'm not sure how to make mathematical computations more meaningful and relevant, but I suppose someone will write a book about its failures in a few years. Meanwhile, many parents know what succeeds: competition. But providing additional schooling options would pressure school bureaucracies and jobs-protecting teachers' unions to improve, and to them that's not a tolerable outcome.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The Los Angeles County Probation Department has placed 12 officers on administrative leave pending an investigation of violence at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. Video taken in December 2023 showed officers standing around watching, and perhaps encouraging, fights among the youth housed at the facility. "We will not tolerate misconduct like that depicted in the video, nor will we tolerate a lack of urgent response, if and when these incidents happen," said Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa in a statement.
American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry.
Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to fully implement it. In the past month, more than 30 leading conservative organizations and individuals, hundreds of state and local chambers of commerce, and the U.S. agricultural sector have pleaded with the EPA to help stop this piece of extremism from escaping one coastal state.
Railroads may not be something most Americans, whose attention is on their own cars and roads, think about often. But rail is the most basic infrastructure of interstate commerce, accounting for around 40 percent of long-distance ton-miles. It's also fairly clean, accounting for less than 1 percent of total U.S. emissions. Private companies, like Union Pacific in the West or CSX in the East, pay for their infrastructure and equipment. These facts haven't stopped the regulatory power grab.
Most importantly, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation would have all freight trains operate in zero-emission configuration by 2035. At the end of the decade, the state is mandating the retirement of diesel locomotives 23 years or older, despite typically useful lives of over 40 years. Starting in 2030, new passenger locomotives must operate with zero emissions, with new engines for long-haul freight trains following by 2035. It limits locomotive idling and increases reporting requirements.
Given the interstate nature of railway operations, California needs the EPA to grant a waiver. If the agency agrees, the policy will inevitably affect the entire continental United States.
The kicker is that no technology exists today to enable railroads to comply with California's diktat, rendering the whole exercise fanciful at best.
The Wall Street Journal's editorial board explained last November that while Wabtec Corp. has introduced a pioneering advance in rail technology with the launch of the world's first battery-powered locomotive, the dream of a freight train fully powered by batteries remains elusive. The challenges of substituting diesel with batteries—primarily due to batteries' substantial weight and volume—make it an impractical solution for long-haul trains. Additionally, the risk of battery overheating and potential explosions, which can emit harmful gases, is a significant safety concern. As the editorial noted, "Even if the technology for zero-emission locomotives eventually arrives, railroads will have to test them over many years to guarantee their safety."
The cost-benefit analysis is woefully unfavorable to the forced displacement of diesel locomotives. To "help" the transition, beginning in 2026, CARB will force all railroads operating in California to deposit dollars into an escrow account managed by the state and frozen for the explicit pursuit of the green agenda. For large railroads, this figure will be a staggering $1.6 billion per year, whereas some smaller railroads will pay up to $5 million.
Many of these smaller companies have signaled that they will simply go out of business. For the large railroads, the requirement will lock up about 20 percent of annual spending, money typically used for maintenance and safety improvements.
Transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions, yet railroads' contribution amounts to not much more than a rounding error. The industry cites its efficiency improvements over time, allowing railroads today to move a ton of freight more than 500 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Its expensive machines, which last between 30 to 50 years and are retrofitted throughout their life cycles, are about 75 percent more efficient than long-haul trucks that carry a comparative amount of freight.
As Patricia Patnode of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which signed the aforementioned letter to the EPA, recently remarked, "Rather than abolish diesel trains, CARB should stand in awe of these marvels of energy-efficient transportation."
President Joe Biden talks a lot about trains, but his actions since taking office have consistently punished the private companies we should value far more than state-supported Amtrak. In this case, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and the White House need not think too hard. They should wait for reality to catch up before imposing on the rest of us one state's demands and ambitions.
In 2021, Whittier, California, police arrested Victor Manuel Martinez Wario on an outstanding warrant related to a 2012 child molestation conviction. The only problem? Police had arrested the wrong person. However, despite Wario frequently telling police he didn't have any warrants out for his arrest, they didn't bother to check—leaving Wario imprisoned for five days.
Now, Wario is suing, claiming that police negligence amounted to a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. The officer's actions caused Wario to suffer "emotional and mental trauma," according to the suit. "He also missed time at work, and was unable to provide care to his disabled fiancée."
In March 2021, Wario was pulled over by several Whittier police officers for a minor traffic violation. During the stop, police mistakenly found that he had an active warrant out for his arrest. Even though Wario denied that he had any active warrants, he was still arrested and booked into a nearby jail.
According to the lawsuit, during the booking process, police told Wario that the warrant originated from Wario's failure to register as a sex offender and "check in with the probation department" after a 2012 conviction for child molestation. Wario again "adamantly told them that they had the wrong person," the complaint reads. But, again, no one decided to double-check that the police had arrested the correct person.
Two days later, Wario was transferred to another jail. This time, "he was assigned special housing for custodies with child molestation cases, given a specially colored jumpsuit indicating his status as a sex offender, and a wristband was placed on his wrist also showing that his case involved child molestation," the suit reads. "Because of his perceived status as a convicted child molester, Mr. Wario was in serious jeopardy of being attacked by fellow inmates."
That day, he was taken to be arraigned. During a brief discussion with his attorney, he again insisted that he was the wrong person. However, when the attorney relayed this to Judge Mary Lou Villar, she set a $30,000 bail and refused to release Wario.
"She ordered a fingerprints expert to appear in court the following week to take his fingerprints and verify his identity," the suit reads.
However, the following day, someone finally took basic measures to check Wario's claims. According to the suit, "the Deputy District Attorney assigned to the case obtained the booking photo of the actual defendant in the case and determined that it was not Mr. Wario."
It took another day for Wario to be released—five days after his arrest.
On Tuesday, Wario filed a lawsuit against the Whittier Police Department, claiming that his false arrest was a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that police had no reasonable basis for arresting and jailing him.
"No reasonable conclusion could be drawn that such an arrest and confinement was reasonable," his suit reads. "No objective facts readily available and known to Defendants could have reasonably led them to conclude that Plaintiff was a fugitive from justice stemming from a 2012 child molestation case."
What do the state's insurance and housing crises have in common? Obviously, homeowner policies have an impact on housing costs, but I'm referring to something different, namely the concept of open-ended risk. Insurers are exiting the market because state policies limit their ability to price policies to reflect the risk of a major wildfire season. They rather pull out of California than risk the destruction of their assets.
I'd argue the same thing is happening in the rental market, thanks to a fusillade of pro-tenant laws that subject landlords to an incalculable level of risk. Landlords have freely entered the business and understand the various ups and downs. They can calculate the costs of mortgages, taxes, insurance, and maintenance. They expect to, say, replace carpets and paint between tenants. They know the cost of the eviction process in those instances where it's necessary.
But the Legislature's anti-property-rights crusade—done in the name of protecting tenants in a tight housing market—has not only increased those easily calculated costs, but also the costs that are potentially devastating. It's one thing to realize it might require x-number of legal fees to remove a bad tenant and quite another to wrap one's head around the possibility of someone staying in a rent-controlled unit forever.
And it's impossible to calculate the emotional drain of, say, fighting with highly sophisticated squatters who have illegally moved into your temporarily vacant home, exerted some right—and are going to strip the place to its studs while you scurry for a legal remedy. I know plenty of would-be landlords who wouldn't dream of renting out their home for those reasons. Most mom-and-pop landlords I know are discussing an exit strategy.
That's reducing needed rental inventory. Why does San Francisco, which has some of the strictest tenant laws in the country, have 52,000-plus vacant rental units? Some of the explanations are ordinary (units are in process of renovation or are on the market), but a major one often is overlooked—especially by city politicians who recently passed an Empty Homes Tax that essentially blames property owners for the situation.
Many owners are afraid if they let strangers rent their units they'll never be able to reclaim them. They rather forego $3,300 a month in rent than take that potentially devastating risk. That's because the risk is not calculable. Investors can navigate their way around costs they understand (extra property taxes, higher insurance rates) but will exit if the risks are too high.
We've seen the news stories. Someone moves into a short-term rental then refuses to leave. In Oakland, a group of organized homeless women commandeered a vacant house. In Los Angeles, alleged squatters turned an empty mansion into a party house. If housing is a "human right," then owners no longer have a right to their property.
The number of incidents has soared, so much so that one entrepreneur has started a business helping landlords retake their own properties. In a sane society, no one should have to worry about this. Other states have passed (or are considering) laws to expedite the removal of these home invaders, but California requires an overly drawn-out process, leaving owners at the mercy of progressive judges.
Does that situation make you more or less likely to invest in rental properties? What's your tolerance for risk? Same questions regarding Assembly Bill 2216 by Matt Haney (D–San Francisco) that's moving through the Legislature. It requires landlords to accept pets and forbids them from charging extra rent or security deposits. Landlords can expect obvious costs (carpet cleaning, various repair costs), but they can't calculate the less-obvious ones.
The landlords would not be allowed to ask tenants if they plan to have a household pet until after they've accepted the application. They would be allowed to impose "reasonable conditions" on the pets, but "reasonable" is ill defined. For instance, the bill refers to "common household pets" but is not limited to cats and dogs. Apparently, that means a tenant could have large aquariums with heat lamps that can cause incredible damage. There's no limit (beyond local ordinances) on the number of pets. It keeps owners from dealing with tenant pet disputes.
Sure, the Assembly analysis explains that a "reasonable condition" includes the right to limit potentially dangerous pets, but it does not allow a prohibition based on breeds, such as Pit Bulls and Rottweilers. Yet insurers typically use a list of potentially vicious breeds that they forbid owners from allowing. If a landlord allows such a breed and it mauls a neighbor, the landlord won't be covered. If this bill becomes law, lawmakers will force landlords to accept an unlimited amount of risk.
I love pets, but don't be surprised when landlords exit the business and invest their money into, say, a mutual fund that doesn't bite toddlers or call them about unplugging a clogged toilet.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
This week, the University of Southern California (USC) announced that the college's valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, would be barred from speaking at commencement. The school cited concerns that Tabassum, who had recently come under fire for an anti-Israel social media post, would create safety concerns.
USC announced that Tabassum had been selected as the school's valedictorian on April 4, after choosing her from among over 100 students with a GPA of 3.9 or higher.
But less than two weeks later, the school announced that Tabassum would not be allowed to speak at commencement, following complaints from several USC student groups over Tabassum's social media postings. Namely, many cited a link in Tabassum's Instagram bio that calls Zionism a "racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land" and calls for "the complete abolishment of the state of israel."
"Unfortunately, over the past several days, discussion relating to the selection of our valedictorian has taken on an alarming tenor," Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Andrew Guzman wrote in a letter to USC students and faculty. "The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement."
Rather than directly citing the political content of Tabassum's speech, USC officials made nebulous claims that her speech might imperil student safety.
"While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety," wrote Guzman. "This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation—including the expectations of federal regulators—that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe."
Ironically, Guzman argued that the decision had nothing to do with free expression concerns. "To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech," he wrote. "There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement. The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period."
However, Guzman is hardly convincing.
"Implicit in the idea of a campus committed to robust expressive rights is that administrators won't censor their students just because they have controversial views," wrote Alex Morey, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). "Here, USC should have been palms up about any genuine security threats, with administrators first doing everything in their power to provide adequate security for the event so it could proceed. Canceling it should be a last resort."
While it's easy to view this censorship as reflective of USC taking a side in the Israel-Hamas war, the reality is much more mundane. USC, like many colleges, is primarily concerned with avoiding controversy at all costs—not with taking a side in a complex political debate. For example, just last year, the school banned a Jewish professor from campus after he was filmed calling Hamas "murderers" and calling protesting students "ignorant"—though the sanctions against him were eventually reversed under pressure.
The cancellation of Tabassum's speech presents a clear example of just how risk-averse university administrations tend to be. When controversy arises—either from the left or right—the prevailing response is censorship, rather than a principled stand for free expression.
Surveys consistently show that owning a home is one of the keys to overall happiness, which no doubt explains why debates about housing prices are so emotional—and so dominant in the Legislature and at city councils. Thanks to low supply and the resulting price surges, many Californians now struggle to buy homes. The nationwide homeownership rate is nearly 66 percent, but that number is only around 55 percent in California.
Obviously, homeownership comes with drawbacks. Replacing a roof or repairing a foundation is expensive. It's harder to take a new job in another city if you've got to first sell your home. But owning a home allows you to design it to your tastes. You're not living in fear the landlord will sell it. You get tax breaks and can build equity over time. You can settle in and become part of the community. The feds have long viewed homeownership as a key to economic stability.
A brewing battle in Northern California 60 miles east of San Francisco in exurban Solano County will determine whether our state is serious about building new housing. It will also show whether YIMBYs—the Yes In My Back Yarders who promote housing construction—are true to their own rhetoric, or are just the urban version of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) who oppose any construction they don't like.
People often have the misconception that home prices are so high in the Bay Area because urbanization has limited places to build. In reality, there's seemingly endless open land throughout the eight-county region—but government growth controls are limiting opportunity for development. For instance, across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, 84 percent of the land is off limits to development. No wonder the population is only 260,000—and home prices are absurd.
It's the same story throughout the area. Growth-control measures in Alameda County have assured that one sees nothing but lovely empty hillsides on the drive to Oakland, but they have scuttled development plans and assured million-dollar median home prices. Solano is home to some major suburbs but is dominated by vast tracts of ranchland (and wind farms) as one heads eastward to the Sacramento County line. I love the open spaces, but it's an ideal spot for a new city.
That's exactly what savvy venture capitalists from the Bay Area are planning. Beginning in 2017, a group called Flannery Associates has quietly purchased 50,000 acres—in a move that echoes the Walt Disney Co.'s secretive purchase of swampland around Orlando in the 1960s as it pursued the construction of Disney World and eventually Epcot Center. Big dreams require bold action, especially if one wants to build an entirely new city in regulation-choked, growth-controlled California.
The project has become the biggest thing in Solano County in perhaps forever, which makes the proposal's name, California Forever, apropos. A New York Timesarticle in August turned local buzz into a statewide controversy. It described the idea as follows: "Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation, and dense urban life."
California Forever representatives have been holding the usual array of public meetings, as they prepare for a November countywide ballot initiative that's necessary to rezone the land from agricultural uses. That's necessary because in 2008 county voters overwhelmingly passed the Orwellian-named Orderly Growth Initiative—a common type of NIMBY open-space measure that has paved (actually, not paved) the way for the state's housing crisis.
The Press Democratreports that the initiative campaign is off to a "bumpy start," which isn't surprising for a project of this scale. It's also not surprising that some locals take a burn at the idea of tech moguls from the Bay Area helicoptering into a somewhat rural area and imposing their big ideas on them.
Fortune magazine reported that, "The Silicon Valley billionaires' Astroturf city being built from scratch is running headlong into a NIMBY backlash." Ironically, it's not only NIMBYs who are a problem. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the proposal has divided YIMBYs. "It's sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name," one YIMBY activist told the newspaper.
I've found many YIMBY critiques on social media, which is odd given the plan is filled with the latest urbanist concepts. "All cities were once 'new' cities," California Forever notes. It's also spot on when it explains that "we will never, ever come close to solving our housing affordability challenges through infill alone." But many YIMBYs aren't so much about building housing, but shoehorning us into tiny apartments along bus lines.
The project certainly is shaking up the housing debate across the state—and might determine whether new generations will be able to take part in the American Dream.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
California state Sen. Anthony Portantino, (D–Burbank) has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to annually register their firearms with the state. The registration information would be available to law enforcement agencies. "SB 1160 will give the state better data and help us understand how many firearms are in private hands and who owns them," said Portantino.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing back against claims that he sought to include a special exemption in a new minimum wage law to help a longtime friend and donor—but the governor's objections only underline how the entire law was a giveaway to his political allies.
Starting next month, fast-food chains operating in California will have to pay workers at least $20 per hour, even though the minimum wage for other jobs in the state will remain at $16 per hour. Newsom signed the bill to create that higher wage mandate, but the law includes a special carve-out seemingly tailored to exempt Panera Bread (and other chains that sell bread as a standalone menu item). Newsom had pushed for that exemption, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, as a favor to Greg Flynn, owner and CEO of the Flynn Restaurant Group, which operates 24 Panera locations in the Golden State.
After the story took off in the media, a spokesman for the governor's office claimed the allegation of favoritism was false. Newsom "never met with Flynn about this bill and this story is absurd," wrote Alex Stack in a statement to Reason and other media outlets that covered the story. "Our legal team has reviewed and it appears Panera is not exempt from the law."
The first claim might be true in only the narrowest sense. The Associated Press has confirmed that Flynn met with the governor's staff regarding the minimum wage bill and that he suggested exempting "restaurants like bakeries, bagel shops and delis" from the higher minimum wage law. Flynn denied speaking to Newsom directly, but it certainly appears that he attempted to exercise some influence over the lawmaking process.
Meanwhile, the governor's office's claim that the exemption doesn't apply to Panera only raises other questions—like, why is that exemption there at all?
That's a question that reporters in Sacramento have seemingly been trying to answer for months. Asked directly about the bakery exemption at a press conference last year, Newsom said it was "part of the sausage making" of the legislative process. In the wake of the Bloomberg story, Newsom's office has not offered a better explanation for the carve-out. Until that changes, the questions will persist.
"If [Newsom] is unable to provide a better justification for this carve-out, it raises serious questions about the integrity of his administration," a group of Republican lawmakers wrote in a letter requesting that state Attorney General Rob Bonta investigate the matter.
Newsom's explanations about the carve-out seem to be "falling apart in real time, particularly because Californians are accustomed to watching this administration hand out favors to its friends," Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, tells Reason.
Swaim drew a parallel to the aftermath of the passage of California's Assembly Bill (AB) 5 in 2019, which effectively banned freelancing in many industries. After newspapers complained that the law would make it more difficult for them to use freelance labor, Newsom backed a short-term and then a longer-term exemption for the industry.
Of course, the debate over the narrow bakery exemption to the minimum wage law seems to miss the larger point: the entire law is a bizarre exemption from the state's existing minimum wage statute. Maybe a special interest and personal friend influenced that one section of the new law, but there is no doubt that other special interests—labor unions that give huge campaign contributions—are the reason why the rest of the law singles out fast food restaurants while effectively exempting other employers.
In short: Newsom's claims that special interests didn't influence one part of the bill would be more believable if special interests hadn't obviously influenced the entire bill.
"This was a bad bill to begin with—imposing an unsupportable minimum wage on businesses that operate on razor-thin margins has already raised menu prices and accelerated layoffs in the industry," says Swaim. "Its victims will be small franchisees who don't have Panera's pull and workers who are now facing mass layoffs."
The state of California employed Kendall Jones as a correctional officer for 29 years and as a firearms and use-of-force trainer for 19 years. But in 2018, when Jones sought to renew the certificate of eligibility required for firearms instructors, the California Department of Justice (DOJ) informed him that he was not allowed to possess guns under state law because of a 1980 Texas conviction for credit card abuse. Jones committed that third-degree felony in Houston when he was 19, and his conviction was set aside after he completed a probation sentence.
According to the DOJ, that did not matter: Because of his youthful offense, which Jones said involved a credit card he had obtained from someone who falsely claimed he was authorized to use it, the longtime peace officer was permanently barred from owning or possessing firearms in California. That application of California law violated the Second Amendment, a federal judge ruled this week in Linton v. Bonta, which also involves two other similarly situated plaintiffs.
"Plaintiffs were convicted of non-violent felonies decades ago when they were in the earliest years of adulthood," U.S. District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, notes in an order granting them summary judgment. "Each conviction was set aside or dismissed by the jurisdiction in which the offense occurred, and the record indicates that all three plaintiffs have been law-abiding citizens in every respect other than the youthful misconduct. Even so, California has acted to permanently deny plaintiffs the right to possess or own firearms solely on the basis of the original convictions." After considering the state's cursory defense of those determinations, Donato thought it was clear that California had "violated the Second Amendment rights of the individual plaintiffs."
Like most jurisdictions, California prohibits people with felony records from buying, owning, receiving, or possessing firearms. That ban encompasses offenses that did not involve weapons or violence, and it applies regardless of how long ago the crime was committed. Federal law imposes a similar disqualification, which applies to people convicted of crimes punishable by more than a year of incarceration (or more than two years for state offenses classified as misdemeanors). But the federal law makes an exception for "any conviction which has been expunged, or set aside or for which a person has been pardoned or has had civil rights restored."
California's policy is different. "The DOJ will permit a person with an out-of-state conviction to acquire or possess a firearm in California only if the conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor, or the person obtained a presidential or governor's pardon that expressly restores their right to possess firearms," Donato explains. The requirements for California convictions are similar.
In Jones' case, the same state that suddenly decided he was not allowed to possess guns employed him as the primary armory officer at the state prison in Solano, where he specialized in "firearms, chemical agents, batons and use of deadly force training," for nearly two decades. Despite all that experience, the sudden denial of his gun rights put an end to his work as a law enforcement firearms and use-of-force instructor in California. The other two plaintiffs told similar stories of losing their Second Amendment rights based not only on nonviolent offenses that happened long ago but also on convictions that were judicially nullified.
According to the 2018 complaint that Chad Linton filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, he was pulled over by state police in 1987, when he was serving in the U.S. Navy at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington. The complaint concedes that Linton was "traveling at a high rate of speed" on his motorcycle while "intoxicated" and that he initially "accelerated," thinking "he might be able to outrun" the cops before he "reconsidered that idea, pulled over to the side of the highway, and voluntarily allowed the state trooper to catch up to him."
Linton was charged with driving under the influence, a misdemeanor, and attempting to evade a police vehicle, a Class C felony. He pleaded guilty to both charges and received a seven-day sentence, time he had already served. In 1988, he "received a certificate of discharge, showing that he successfully completed his probation." It "included a statement that 'the defendant's civil rights lost by operation of law upon conviction [are] HEREBY RESTORED.'"
Linton, who was born and raised in California, returned there in 1988 after he was discharged from the Navy. He successfully purchased several firearms after passing background checks. But when he tried to buy a handgun in 2015, the DOJ told him he was disqualified because of the 1987 felony conviction. In response, he asked the Superior Court of Washington to vacate that conviction, which it did in April 2016. The order "set aside" the conviction and released Linton "from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the offense." But when he tried to buy a rifle in November 2016, he was rejected.
The same thing happened in March 2018, when Linton tried to buy a revolver for home protection. The following month, Donato notes, "DOJ agents came to Linton's home and seized several firearms from him that he had legally acquired and owned for years, including an 'antique, family-heirloom shotgun.'"
Although Linton moved to Nevada in 2020, partly because of these experiences, he still owns a cabin in California. He said he felt "unsafe and unprotected" there "without at least the option of having appropriate firearms available or at hand if needed." He added that he "would like to be able to possess or handle firearms or ammunition for recreational purposes, such as target shooting," while visiting friends and relatives in California.
Paul McKinley Stewart's disqualifying offense dates back even further than Jones' and Linton's. In 1976, when he was 18 and living in Arizona, he "stole some tools from an unlocked truck in a commercial yard." He was found guilty of first-degree burglary, a felony, and served three years of probation, after which he was told that his conviction had been dismissed.
Stewart moved to California in 1988 and tried to buy firearms in 2014 or 2015 (the record is unclear on the exact date). The DOJ "advised him that he was 'disqualified' from purchasing or possessing firearms 'due to the presence of a prior felony conviction.'" Like Linton, Stewart went back to the court of conviction. In August 2016, Donato notes, the Arizona Superior Court "ordered 'that the civil rights lost at the time of sentencing are now restored,' 'set aside [the] judgment of guilt,' ordered the 'dismissal of the Information/Indictment,' and expressly held that the restored rights 'shall include the right to possess weapons.'" The DOJ nevertheless blocked a gun purchase that Stewart attempted in February 2018, citing the 1976 conviction that officially no longer existed.
Defending these denials in federal court, the state argued that the plaintiffs were not part of "the people" whose "right to keep and bear arms" is guaranteed by the Second Amendment because they were not "law-abiding, responsible citizens." In California's view, Donato writes, "a single felony conviction permanently disqualifies an individual from being a 'law-abiding, responsible citizen' within the ambit of the Second Amendment." He sees "two flaws" that "vitiate this contention."
First, Donato says, "undisputed facts" establish that all three plaintiffs are "fairly described as law-abiding citizens." Judging from the fact that "California entrusted Jones with the authority of a sworn peace officer, and with the special role of training other officers in the use of force," that was the state's view of him until 2018, when he was peremptorily excluded from "the people." And as with Jones, there is no indication that the other two plaintiffs have been anything other than "law-abiding" since their youthful offenses. "Linton is a veteran of the United States Navy with a clean criminal record for the past 37 years," Donato notes. "Stewart has had a clean criminal record for the past 48 years."
Second, Donato says, California failed to identify any "case law supporting its position." In the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller, he notes, the Supreme Court "determined that 'the people,' as used throughout the Constitution, 'unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.'" That holding, he says, creates a "strong presumption" that California failed to rebut.
Donato notes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected California's argument in no uncertain terms last year, when it restored the Second Amendment rights of Bryan Range, a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of misdemeanor food stamp fraud. "Heller and its progeny lead us to conclude that Bryan Range remains among 'the people' despite his 1995 false statement conviction," the 3rd Circuit said. "The Supreme Court's references to 'law-abiding, responsible citizens' do not mean that every American who gets a traffic ticket is no longer among 'the people' protected by the Second Amendment."
Since Jones, Linton, and Stewart are part of "the people," California had the burden of showing that disarming them was "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the test that the Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. "California did not come close to meeting its burden," Donato writes. It did little more than assert that Americans have Second Amendment rights only if they are "virtuous," a criterion that is highly contested and in any case would seem to be satisfied by the plaintiffs' long histories as productive and law-abiding citizens.
"California otherwise presented nothing in the way of historical evidence in support of the conduct challenged here," Donato says. "It did not identify even one 'representative analogue' that could be said to come close to speaking to firearms regulations for individuals in circumstances akin to plaintiffs'. That will not do under Bruen."
Donato rejected "California's suggestion that it might have tried harder if the Court had asked." Under Bruen, "the government bears the burden of proving the element of a national historical tradition," he writes. "California had every opportunity to present any historical evidence it believed would carry its burden. It chose not to do so."
Donato was dismayed by the state's attitude. "The Court is not a helicopter parent," he writes. "It is manifestly not the Court's job to poke and prod litigants to live up to their burdens of proof."
The policy that Jones, Linton, and Stewart challenged seems inconsistent with California's criminal justice reforms, such as marijuana legalization and the reclassification of many felonies as misdemeanors. It is also inconsistent with the way California treats voting rights, which are automatically restored upon sentence completion. Gun rights in California, by contrast, are easy to lose and hard to recover, even when they have been restored by courts in other states. That disparity seems to reflect the California political establishment's reflexive hostility to the Second Amendment.
"This case exposes the hypocrisy of California's treatment of those convicted of non-violent crimes," says Cody J. Wisniewski, an attorney with the Firearms Policy Coalition, one of several gun rights groups that joined the lawsuit. "While California claims to be tolerant of those that have made mistakes in the past, that tolerance ends when it comes to those individuals [who want] to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. Now, the state has no choice but to recognize the rights of peaceable people."
When COVID-19 shuttered virtually everything in 2020 and forced public schools to begin distance learning, those schools responded with the agility one would expect from a decrepit battleship forced to make a quick change of course in the face of an unexpected enemy. In other words, the state's hulking K-12 system barely responded at all, even as small and nimble private and charter schools quickly adapted to the new reality.
I remember news stories about public schools unable to set up even the most basic Zoom classes, of teachers who had no idea what they were supposed to do—and then of unions and administrators resisting efforts to re-start classroom teaching even after the rest of society was getting back to normal. Instead of re-ordering procedures to help kids stay current on their schoolwork, the school establishment mainly whined about not having enough money.
Anyone who needs a reminder about why government bureaucracies are incapable of providing quality public services need only look at the resulting disaster. A Stanford University study found, "a substantial decline in student learning in both English language arts/literacy (ELA) and mathematics between the 2018–19 and 2021–22 academic years." Those are the general figures, but the results for poor and minority students were a travesty.
California's lowest-income students already fared second to last in the nation in 2018, before anyone had even heard of coronavirus. After the pandemic closures, the study found that only 16 percent of Black students met or exceeded state math standards—a number that was below 10 percent for English learners. And then there are the appalling truancy numbers: Nearly a third of the state's K-12 students were chronically absent during the ruckus.
We heard rumblings of a "parent revolt," which manifested itself in some high-profile school board elections. But, again, it's hard to turn around a giant ship—especially one that for years has been taking in water. In the private sector, unhappy customers take their business elsewhere. With government agencies, the process for making change is daunting. Booting bad school board members is a start, but there are so many obstacles to improving matters at the classroom level.
A recent settlement has been touted as a way to force the state to enact meaningful reforms that might improve achievement after several parents had filed a lawsuit against the state. "The change in the delivery of education left many already-underserved students functionally unable to attend school," they noted in their complaint. "The state continues to refuse to step up and meet its constitutional obligation to ensure basic educational equality or indeed any education at all."
The agreement earmarks $2 billion in remaining COVID funds to pay for tutoring, counseling, and after-school activities, CalMattersreported. I applaud the agreement, but have limited expectations. Mainly, as the publication noted, "the case has drawn attention to the magnitude of the learning loss during the pandemic." How much more drawing attention do we need? And more than 40 percent of the state budget goes to K-14 education, so a little more money won't institute the change we need.
I also take issue with CalMatter's description of the "herculean efforts by school staff to keep students engaged." I'm sure many teachers and administrators tried their best, but Herculessucceeded at completing his nearly impossible 12 labors—and most public schools failed to complete even the most elementary educational tasks.
Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-dominated Legislature have been taking aim at one reform that has enabled many ill-served students get a quality education. At the behest of teachers' unions, they restricted the growth of charter schools. Empowered by the new laws, Los Angeles Unified School District this month "passed a sweeping policy that will limit when charters can operate on district-owned campuses," the Los Angeles Timesreported.
That above-mentioned Stanford study noted that dismal test scores "should sound a loudly screaming alarm: The task of transforming our schools can no longer be delayed." Yet warning sirens have been sounding for years and the public-school establishment continues in the wrong union-dictated direction.
The latest lawsuit echoes the Vergaradecision, a 2014 Los Angeles case that initially tossed teacher-employment protections including tenure. The court found that these firing restrictions leave "grossly ineffective teachers" in the classroom. The impact, which disproportionately harms lower-income students, "shocks the conscience," it added. Higher courts eventually overturned the ruling. The state didn't heed the alarm bells. They mainly energized teachers' unions, which feared the impact on their protected employment.
So here we are again. How much more evidence do we need? California's poorly served public school students need more than a few more dollars diverted to tutoring programs. We need to airlift them off a sinking ship and into competitive educational vessels. Quite frankly, with the money the state spends on education, every student could have a room on a luxury cruise liner.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
Earlier this week, protestors at the University of California, Berkeley, violently shut down an event organized by a Jewish student group, which featured Israeli attorney Ran Bar-Yoshafat. Protestors organized by the student group Bears for Palestine prevented students from entering the building where the talk was supposed to take place, chanted "Long live the intifada," and broke glass doors.
Several students who attempted to attend the event claim they were physically assaulted by the protestors. One attendee claims she was grabbed by the neck and another says he was spit on.
"It was an extremely frightening experience," Berkeley student Veda Keyvanfar told Fox News on Wednesday. "The door to the venue was ripped out of my hand by a mob of protesters and my hand was injured in the process…we are allowed as students to host any type of speaker, and to attend any event we want to, we are not in the wrong at all."
The disruption wasn't simply a protest that got out of hand—it was a pre-planned attempt to prevent the event from going forward. An Instagram post from Bears for Palestine about the event said "We are 'combatting the lies' by SHUTTING IT DOWN," adding that Bar-Yoshafat "is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on."
The event was canceled after university officials determined that they couldn't guarantee student safety "given the size of the crowd and the threat of violence," according to a university statement. Students attending the event had to be escorted out the back of the building. According to the Associated Press, the local police department received multiple calls over the event, and a university spokesperson confirmed that the school was opening a criminal investigation into students' behavior.
So far, the Berkeley administration has taken a strong stance against the students who disrupted Monday's event.
"We deeply respect the right to protest as intrinsic to the values of a democracy and an institution of higher education," reads a Tuesday statement from Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin. "Yet, we cannot ignore protest activity that interferes with the rights of others to hear and/or express perspectives of their choosing. We cannot allow the use or threat of force to violate the First Amendment rights of a speaker, no matter how much we might disagree with their views."
Videos of the protestors have received significant social media attention, leading to calls to expel or discipline students who engaged in the disruption.
"Everyone has a right to due process. But violent rioters have no place at any institution devoted to the fearless pursuit of truth. Certainly not at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement," Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) President Greg Lukianoff and FIRE senior writer Angel Eduardo wrote in a recent column in The Free Press."Violence is not extreme speech, but the antithesis of speech—and the antithesis of what higher education is supposed to be all about."
Lukianoff and Eduardo are right—if you care about securing university students' free speech rights, punishing disruptive and violent protestors is absolutely necessary. While students have the right to peacefully protest an event, preventing individuals from hearing a speaker, damaging a building, and physically assaulting attendees obviously crosses a line into unprotected conduct.
The only way to prevent speaker disruptions is for administrators to take a clear stand against them, and punish those responsible. When universities crack down on disruptive or violent protest tactics, they set a precedent, and send a clear message to student activists who are planning on protesting an event: that disruptive, speech-quashing conduct won't be tolerated.
Sultan Kösen of Turkey stands 8 feet 2 inches, making him the tallest living person in the world. This week he reunited with Jyoti Amge of India, who measures under 2 feet 1 inch and is the shortest living woman in the world. — Read the rest
On March 5, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would decide whether or not to make them into guinea pigs for surveillance experiments by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).
Proposition E purports to streamline the SFPD, with sections on community engagement, recordkeeping, and the department's vehicle pursuit and use of force policies. But its portion on department use of surveillance technology is troubling.
Under an existing ordinance passed in 2019, the SFPD may only use "surveillance technologies"—like surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, or cell site simulators—that have been approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city and county legislative body. The process requires that the SFPD, like any other city or county agency, submit a policy to the board for approval before using any new technology. The 2019 ordinance also banned the use of facial recognition technology.
But Prop E adds a clause stipulating that the SFPD "may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy."
In other words, the SFPD could roll out an unapproved method of surveillance, and it would have free rein to operate within the city for up to a year before ever having to ask city officials for permission. And until the city passes a statute that specifically forbids it—that is, forbidding a technology that is by that point already in use—then the SFPD can keep using it indefinitely.
"Let's say the SFPD decides they want to buy a bunch of data on people's geolocation from data brokers—they could do that," says Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "They could use drones that are flying at all times above the city. They could use the robot dogs that were piloted at the border. These are all surveillance technologies that the police doesn't necessarily have right now, and they could acquire it and use it, effectively without any sort of accountability, under this proposition."
If those scenarios sound implausible, it's worth noting that they've already happened: As Hussain notes, the Department of Homeland Security recently tested robot dogs to help patrol the U.S./Mexico border. And in 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department enlisted civilian aircraft to fly over Compton and surveil the entire area.
Not to mention, federal agencies already routinely purchase people's cell phone geolocation information and internet metadata without a warrant.
In a sense, Prop E would make San Franciscans into guinea pigs, on whom the SFPD can experiment with all manner of surveillance technology. If that sounds hyperbolic, a member of Mayor London Breed's staff told the board of supervisors in November 2023 that Prop E "authorizes the department to have a one-year pilot period to experiment, to work through new technology to see how they work."
The San Francisco Ballot Simplification Committee's description of the proposition notes that it would "authorize the SFPD to use drones and install surveillance cameras without Commission or Board approval, including those with facial recognition technology."
The ACLU of Northern California calls Prop E "a dangerous and misleading proposal that knocks down three pillars of police reform: oversight, accountability, and transparency." Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the EFF, wrote that under Prop E, police could "expose already marginalized and over-surveilled communities to a new and less accountable generation of surveillance technologies."
Despite these concerns, Prop E has its share of support. Breed defended the proposal, saying "it's about making sure that our police department, like any other police department around the country, can use 21st century technology." By January, groups supporting Prop E had raised more than $1 million—ten times the amount raised by opponents and considerably more than has been raised for any other proposal on the March ballot.
It also seems to be popular among the public: A January survey released by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce found that 61 percent of San Franciscans favored Prop E, with only 37 percent opposed. (One possible explanation: The same survey found that 69 percent of those polled feel that crime has gotten worse. Recent data indicates that violent crime rose during 2023 even as it declined nationally, and while the rate of property crime fell, state and national rates fell faster.)
San Francisco is no stranger to potentially abusive surveillance practices. In 2022, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance that would allow the SFPD to request and receive real-time access to citizens' private security camera feeds. While city officials like Breed and newly-appointed District Attorney Brooke Jenkins touted that the ordinance would help crack down on smash-and-grab shoplifting rings, a recent city report detailed that in the third quarter of 2023, the vast majority of requests were for narcotics investigations.
Los Angeles station NBC4 reports that the California Department of Motor Vehicles may have improperly charged tens of thousands of drivers late fees for their vehicle registration. It found that the DMV has often rejected electronic checks even when the account had sufficient funds and there were no other issues, then billed the drivers late fees. The DMV told the station it isn't sure exactly how many drivers were affected or how much revenue it collected from those improper late fees.
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