Law Enforcement

Hands Off!

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Vice Squad notes today that this article suggests that the Sioux Falls, SD city council spent some time dealing with adult behavior:

This insufficient criminalization of voluntary adult activity could not be tolerated by the Sioux Falls City Council, who closed the “loophole” on Monday. I hope that they were a bit more specific than what this article reports: “An ordinance approved Monday night makes it illegal to touch someone in exchange for money.”
Apparently they were a bit more specific as they amended:
…the Revised Ordinances of the City by adding a section prohibiting sexual touching for compensation,…
What’s not clear is exactly what they mean by the words sexual and compensation.1
There is a clue to the first in the news article linked above. At the state level South Dakota plans to clarify their law:
…by characterizing prostitution as any sexual contact that involves touching of female breasts or the genitals of either sex for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification.
While this seems to limit the definition of sexual touching to a subset of possible erogenous zones this sentence like the first one above begs for additonal clarification as it appears to label all sexual activity of these types as prostitution. I suspect that they really are not planning to target those high schoolers in the backseat of their cars or husbands and wives. But, then again, this is South Dakota…
Oh yes, the above use of the word compensation is unbounded so it could reach a myriad of forms of compenstion, e.g., a job, a dinner, a marriage, mmmm, even, pleasure. Let your imagination run wild, well, not too wild…
1The site that appeared to have their City Code online did not respond.

Cameras, Cameras Everywhere…..

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Via Talkleft I see that Chicago will soon have 2000 operative video surveillance cameras:

Officials said the bulk of the cameras already are in use at O’Hare International Airport, on the city’s transit lines and in public housing, parks and schools, along with 30 police are using to try to curb violent crime. An additional 250 surveillance cameras still to be bought will raise the number available to more than 2,000. Locations for the new cameras have not been determined.
Of course, we should not have any privacy concerns:
Daley dismissed privacy concerns, saying the only places where the city installs cameras are public spaces. But he said private companies could choose to join their cameras to the network – for a yet-to-be-determined fee – so that 911 operators would have access to those cameras should something go awry in a private building.
If I were a private company I’m not at all sure I’d want to connect my system to a government operated system. The latter is bound to be innefficient and operated with different goals then I would have.
This does suggest to me that perhaps we private citizens ought to consider making use of this type of technology. I’m thinking of a somewhat enhanced Neighborhood Watch that will assist us in identifying and perhaps preventing crimes by individuals, gangs or government in our local neighborhoods. Perhaps street level cells could be combined with others to form a community network.
Since our current governments seem most concerned with victemless crimes we might even want to consider setting up a program that uses private organizations to identify perps and private court systems that use restitution to victems as the key “punishment.” Of course, perps who do not want to participate in this system can be turned over to government folk to rot in jail.
And, you know, if we can keep enough perps out of jail via restitution then, perhaps, we can start eliminating the police-corrections complex that has led to the US incarcerating over 2,000,000 people in jails.

A Stitch of Protection

This entry was posted in Capitalism Domestic Terrorism Drug Laws Economics Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

Adrian doesn’t tell us where he found this:

“Many Chechens have sewn their pockets up in order to prevent anything being planted on them if stopped by police. One young Chechen exclaimed: “This is how we live, thanks to the Department on Fighting Organized Crime. First we were bandits, then became terrorists, and now we are becoming seamstresses.”
This would be good advice for many victems of the drug thugs (many, many more examples available).
Via Pharyngula and Bitch. PH.D.

Drug War Result

This entry was posted in Capitalism Domestic Terrorism Drug Laws Economics Law Enforcement Libertarianism US Foreign Policy War on Terrorism on by

Science and the market are hard at work in the drug war:

DRUG traffickers have created a new strain of coca plant that yields up to four times more cocaine than existing plants and promises to revolutionise Colombia�s drugs industry.
Why was it worthwhile to traffickers to spend �60,000,000 on this effort:
Such an investment by drugs traffickers is small compared to the earnings from what is the most lucrative business on earth. Traffickers can produce a kilogram of cocaine for less than �1,500. That kilogram will sell in Miami for �14,000, in London for �34,000 and in Tokyo would bring �50,000.
We can all thank the articial pricing created by ongoing domestic and international terrorist activities conducted by US and foreign governments for what promises to be a substantial improvement in both quality and quantity of cocaine on the market.
Via Jacob Sollum at Hit & Run.
NB: At the moment �1 equals $1.79