Research Paper Links Police Unions To Increased Officer Misconduct
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Some research [PDF] has emerged indicating handing officers extra rights results in more citizen complaints. This may seem to be of the "water is wet" research variety, but there's no reason to shrug this off. While most of us can infer that shielding officers from the consequences of their actions would naturally result in increased misconduct, almost all evidence to date has been anecdotal. (h/t Marginal Revolution)University of Chicago researchers were given the perfect chance to weigh the addition of a collective bargaining agreement against year-to-year complaint totals. Thanks to a 2003 Florida state supreme court decision, Florida sheriff's deputies were allowed to unionize, finally joining their police department counterparts. This gave the researchers a dividing line for a before and after comparison. The results were unsurprising.We construct a comprehensive panel dataset of Florida law enforcement agencies starting in 1997, and employ a difference-in-difference approach that compares sheriffs’ offices and police departments before and after Williams. Our primary result is that collective bargaining rights lead to about a 27% increase in complaints of officer misconduct for the typical sheriff’s office. That's an impressive jump and it can be tied to the addition of a collective bargaining agreement. The union's bargaining power secured a lengthy list of extra rights for deputies. While due process should be afforded to everyone, the version of due process citizens make do with contains none of these perks and protections.[F]lorida provides by statute a Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights (“LEOBOR”), which includes a variety of procedural protections for officers facing disciplinary investigations. One provision gives such an officer the right to “be informed of the nature of the investigation before any interrogation begins,” and to receive “all witness statements . . . and all other existing evidence, including, but not limited to, incident reports, GPS locator information, and audio or video recordings relating to the incident under investigation, . . . before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer” (F.S.A§ 112.532(1)(d)). That is particularly generous given another requirement that “[a]ll identifiable witnesses shall be interviewed, whenever possible, prior to the beginning of the investigative interview of the accused officer” (id.). And that's not even the whole list of additional "due process" goodies Florida deputies received.[S]ome Florida CBAs give law enforcement officers the right to challenge any discipline the local government seeks to impose through arbitration or other administrative review, thus depriving the government of the power to make independent disciplinary decisions. Other rights include a time limitation on internal disciplinary investigations, expungement of old records even when the officer is found to have engaged in misconduct, and inspection of investigation files prior to a disciplinary hearing… [A]ll of these additional procedural rights raise the cost of terminating misbehaving officers and thereby lower deterrence. The researchers note the conclusions aren't definitive. There's no control group to observe and it's tempting to let correlation infer causation. But the research is as thorough as it can be, given the limited dataset. Law enforcement agencies closely guard internal documents on police misconduct. In some states, public records laws make it illegal to release any of these files to the public, forcing researchers to work blind.But this paper does show there's something wrong with union agreements and has the math to back up the seemingly obvious conclusions. When you give people with power more power and less accountability, abuse is usually the result. Whether the union agreements are responsible for all of the 27% jump in complaints is debatable, but the numbers show the agreements have made policing worse, rather than better.
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posted at: 12:00am on 22-Feb-2018
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Court Realizes It Totally Screwed Up An Injunction Against Zazzle For Copyright Infringement
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Last year we wrote about a bizarre and troubling DMCA case involving the print-on-demand company Zazzle, in which the judge in the district court bizarrely and wrongly claimed that Zazzle lost its DMCA safe harbors because the allegedly infringing works were printed on a t-shirt, rather than remaining digitally (even though it was the end user using the infringing work, and Zazzle's system just processed it automatically). To add insult to injury, in November, the judge then issued a permanent injunction against Zazzle for this infringement.However, it appears that no one is more troubled about this permanent injunction issued by Judge Stephen Wilson... than Judge Stephen Wilson.In early February, Wilson released a new order reversing his earlier order and chastising himself for getting things wrong.The Court finds that there is a manifest showing of the Court's failure to considermaterial facts presented to the Court because the Court did not provide any justification for thepermanent injunction. Yes, that's the judge chastising himself for not providing the necessary justification for an injunction after finding Zazzle to not have safe harbors (some of the background here involves a question about which rules -- federal or local -- the court should be using to reconsider the earlier ruling, which isn't that interesting). Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't go back and revisit the DMCA safe harbors question -- this new ruling just focuses on why he was wrong to issue a permanent injunction after finding that the DMCA safe harbors didn't apply.For that, the court notes (correctly, this time!) that under the Supreme Court's important MercExchange standard, courts should be careful about issuing injunctions for infringement, and that the plaintiffs need to show irreparable harm and that other remedies aren't more appropriate (and that an injunction won't cause greater harm to the public). Here, the plaintiff failed to do all of those -- and somehow the court missed it.In addition, the court does note that it never even considered the question about whether the artwork that is displayed on Zazzle's website, but not printed on t-shirts, still gives Zazzle safe harbor protections -- and the injunction would have applied to those works too, even though they might have been protected under the DMCA:Plaintiff's proposed permanent injunction was ambiguous and went beyond the issues attrial, facts which the Court did not consider when it granted the initial motion for a permanentinjunction. Before trial, the Court never decided whether Zazzle had a viable DMCA defense asto images only displayed on Zazzle's website and never physically manufactured. Dkt. 81.Plaintiff withdrew its claims as to such display-only artworks prior to trial, so the issue was nottried. Dkt. 110 at 2:11-25. As such, it is unclear whether the injunction applies to both themanufacture and distribution of physical goods, or also to display of images on the Zazzlewebsite. It is also unclear if Zazzle must take reasonable steps to address the display of imageson its website as well as its manufacture of products. The Court did not consider these materialfacts in determining the scope of the permanent injunction; upon reviewing these facts, theproposed injunctions go beyond the issues at trial. It's good that the court has realized its own mistakes and fixed them -- though it would be nice if it went further to the point of recognizing the problems of saying that by printing an image on a physical good the DMCA protections disappear.But, really, reading this new ruling, you almost (almost) feel bad for Judge Wilson as he complains about Judge Wilson's failings in this case:The Court recognizes that it failed to consider material facts in granting the permanentinjunction in October 2017. The Court also recognizes that it provided no rationale for thepermanent injunction, manifestly showing the failure to consider such facts. Upon consideringthose facts, the Court finds no basis for a permanent injunction in this matter. Don't be too hard on yourself, Judge. Admitting your mistakes is the first step.
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