Last weekend marked the beginning of my annual ritual of spending a bunch of money on various plants, putting them into the ground and then watch them die due to a combination of the killer Pocono soil and my own poison thumb.
So I picked up this cool looking flower and of course immediately forgot its name. The color is really striking.
I highly recommend this post and, even more so, the comments to it by Megan McArdle of the Atlantic.
The rundown is this: The Atlanta PD, in an effort to make their warrant/arrest quota (yeah, read that again…they felt you could treat conduct law enforcement like an assembly line) shot and killed a 92 year old woman. That’s not all. Then, they decided to plant evidence on her and cover everything up.
The whole mess highlights some of the major problems with law enforcement today.
We grade our prosecutors not on being right, but on winning. Also, our law enforcement agencies. We grade them on arrests, not on who is guilty. Worse, we grade them on a whole bunch of things except reduction in crime, the most obvious and important metric they should be judged on.
A prosecutor has discretion as to the exact charge brought against a suspect. He can make criminals seem to be much worse or more powerful than they are by making different charges. If a glorified courier gets popped with drugs that are ready to sell he can use kingpin statutes and make it appear he is doing great things in the war on drugs. Remember this the next time you read about arresting ‘the 20th hijacker’ or a gang ‘kingpin’. Pay particular attention to these things in the months leading up to 1) elections for prosecutors/attorney generals or 2) contract negotiations for police departments. You’ll be surprised how many terrorist/gang/drug leaders coincidentally get arrested exactly when police and prosecutors need good press.
These are two reasons why I coming to suspect intelligence in law enforcement is ultimately doomed without a major overhaul in the system. True intelligence in a law enforcement environment should be geared towards developing tactics and strategy which leads to a reduction in crime. But, the problem is we hand out rewards in the criminal justice system only when we ‘get the bad guy’ which, in a perverse way, actually requires ‘bad guys’ to get. And if they don’t exist, we need to create them.
Just iamgine this. One prosecutor/police chief that instituted programs that reduced crimes but resulted in no major arrests during their tenure. Another that saw no real reduction in crime but had numerous high profile arrests and has a reputation for a no-nonsense, get tough approach to criminals.
Who’s going to have a better chance of getting promoted/elected?
Ok…brief procrastination break.
Normally, I have a deep distrust for Norwegians. They celebrate their national day in another country. They have tons of oil and know it (they’re the Texans of Scandivania). And they have all those suspicious sounding fjords.
Despite that, they have some pretty good music. Here’s one band I really dig. Kaizers Orchestra. They sing in Norwegian (I guess, quite frankly they could be just talking goobly gook and I wouldn’t know) but it does sound so good I don’t mind not knowing what the hell they’re talking about.
Here, enjoy a video:
I’m in Borders right now doing some homework and enjoying some ‘Foo-foo’ coffee (the only kind I can drink). In my attempt to use this place as a kind of hip library I went to see if they had anything that could help me on a question I had about Niger. Well, believe it or not, there isn’t one non-fiction book in the whole store about Africa.
Not one.
Even the Polar regions have a small section dedicated to them. You’d think every continent would merit at least one book.
Yeesh…I just now this is some sort of metaphor for U.S. policy towards Africa. It’s so far off our radar we don’t even know it’s missing.
I can’t explain why, but I have the urge to move the phrase ‘douche bag’ higher up in my vocabulary rotation. That’s particularly odd because I’ve never really thought of that phrase before (let alone used it) but I have this sensation that its time has come.
Now I just need to find an unsuspecting subject to unleash this phrase upon.
Stay tuned…
I’ve received a torrent of comments about my earlier post about The Lucifer Effect (ok, one comment and an email) and so I’ve figured that I should expand upon the subject, particularly, as the findings might relate to intelligence analysis.
First of all, let’s look at how situational factors might might influence the act of intelligence analysis using an obvious example. It’s estimated that upwards of 70% of the classified intelligence budget at the federal level goes towards private intelligence contractors. These individuals and companies are (and have been) making huge gobs of money since 9/11. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the government contract gravy train will stop if the threat from the “Global Jihadist/fascist/communist/Chavezist/vast right wing conspiracy” network disappears. So, just how likely to you think individuals and companies are going to be (even on an unconscious level) to provide assessments which indicate the threat to the United States is decreasing or low? That would be essentially like sending a memo to your boss explaining how your job is redundant and if they fired you they could realize big savings with no loss of productivity. It just ain’t gonna happen.
Even if it was so obvious that the threat was so small that it could not be denied (and let’s face it, that would be quite a feat…, apparently it’s possible for some people to believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the U.S.) you could be rest assured that these contractors would have a long list of new threats that desperately require not only all the resources currently under contract but a host of new ones as well (all available at a very reasonable price, if you act now).
There’s an even more prevalent instance of how situational factors can negatively affect intelligence products. Every agency has its own culture and set of assumptions. Challenging those assumptions risks having your analysis marginalized or even damage to your career. Paul Pillar wrote about these issues in his article about how intelligence was manipulated to lead us into the Iraq war:
Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts — for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success — felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.
A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of analysis: reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time making it through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones that do not. (Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the judgments of the analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also the concurrence of those who cover related topics and the review, editing, and remanding of it by several levels of supervisors, from branch chiefs to senior executives.) The Silberman-Robb commission noted such inconsistencies in the Iraq case but chalked it up to bad management. The commission failed to address exactly why managers were inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of laying unwelcome analysis on a policymaker’s desk.
As Pillar and Zimbardo both point out (although in different ways), an even more subtle form of bias is the imposition of norms or standards that take on the equivalent of physical laws. Those norms and standards make it difficult to do ‘macroanalysis’ of the system and even more difficult for such analysis (if done at all) to be accepted and acted upon. For example, in law enforcement circles the common response to a criminal problem is suppression through the use of (or threat of) arrest and imprisonment. The underlying assumption is that everyone (including criminals) make their decisions based upon cost-benefit analysis and the threat of arrest trumps virtually benefit. If crime continues (assuming that’s the benchmark used to determine success), it’s not that the underlying assumption is wrong, rather it’s that the penalty isn’t stiff enough or we aren’t arresting enough people. But what if that’s not how people make decisions? Or, if what is motivating criminals is more basic (a la Maslow) that the fear of imprisonment?
That might prompt some analysis to look for alternate ways to deter crime but would require everyone to shift their perspective from the established current one that says “You fight crime by locking people up.” That could be a scary idea for people who’ve made their career based upon that idea. When ideas like that pervade an organization it’s difficult for metaanalysis to crack that mindset and so analysts are left with little option but feeding the organizational delusion. From Pillar:
As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer…On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.
Not particularly encouraging, I know. If anyone has an idea of how to overcome such obstacles, I’ll buy ya a beer.
It just doesn’t get much cooler than this. Forget the Wii, I want one of these.
Here’s the story from the AP.
I live in an apartment complex and one of the ground rules for living here is that you’re supposed to pick up after you dog. Now Shiloh has a thing about privacy and so prefers to go in the woods to poo (perhaps he thinks he’s a bear…or the pope?) When he’s in the thick underbrush I refrain from picking up after him because:
When he gets the urge to poo in public however I always pick up after him (I haven’t kept track but I suspect he does that sometimes when he just wants to see me carry around a bag of crap).
About a year ago, I noticed a lot of people getting large dogs and walking them around and they all seemed to have one thing in common (other than having large dogs and walking them around that is): none of them were picking up the huge dog patties their pooches were leaving everywhere. It was getting so bad that I wasn’t able to walk Shiloh in our regular circuit and we had to go further afield in order to find a ‘poo free zone’.
Now, our current bathroom area has been invaded by a husky who produces massive poos right in the areas people are most likely to walk. The owner used to just open up his door and let his dog out (attached to a leash) making it go to the bathroom within six or eight feet of the guy’s door. I always thought that was kind of gross but since I never needed to get within eight feet of his door it didn’t really bother me. Now that the weather is getting better, the owner is willing to walk distances up to 20 or 30 feet from his door and let his pooch relieve itself in a wider area. The owner doesn’t even pretend to make an effort to clean up after his dog.
Now, Shiloh and I have to relocate yet again. I’m starting to feel like some small Gothic tribe getting pushed around by the Huns during the migration period.
Wow, who knew early May was such a big music month.
Nine Inch Nails is releasing their new album online…for free! (thanks Digital Detritus for the news). Just a short while ago Trent Reznor (the person behind NiN) offered an instrumental (Ghosts I-IV) 4 CD set for download for only $5.
You gotta love this guy. He’s expressed his extreme dislike for the recording industry for quite some time now and the fact that he doesn’t have to sweat rent gives him the freedom to experiment with alternative ways of getting his music out there to the public.
Absolutely brilliant.
I was checking my Amazon recommendations and I saw that Firewater is coming out with a new album tomorrow! Check out their stuff. No, really. Check it out. Great lyrics. Great sounds.
The album is called The Golden Hour. Here’s a video of Tod A explaining the album a bit.
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