Cop Fired For Exposing Department Policy Where Officers Have Sex With Prostitutes, Then Arrest Them

A police officer in Arkansas recently lost his job after he exposed a massive scheme that allowed officers to have sex with prostitutes and then arrest them for servicing the undercover cops.

The way that Former Fort Smith Police Department Sgt. Don Paul Bales’ department had it set up, cops would “prove” that they weren’t really police officers, by having sex with prostitutes. The cop who had just broken the law himself would then follow up by arresting the women.


Now, a lawsuit that was obtained by local KFSM, reveal that an officer was fired for exposing the twisted police work.

The suit was just filed in Arkansas’s Sebastian County Circuit Court. The officer in question says he just wants his job back, as he did nothing but expose criminal activity among fellow officers.

This all started when Bales received a photo of an affidavit that had been filed back in April of 2014. That affidavit stated that an undercover cop in the “Street Crimes Unit” had engaged in what it termed “misconduct.”

The undercover officer, who was identified as “J.B.”, met a woman he thought might be a prostitute through the website Backpage.com.

The cop then set up a meeting with the woman at a motel where he later got her to agree to a rate of $150 an hour.


But the affidavit says that the undercover cop got disrobed, engaged in a sex act, and then arrested the woman on suspicion of misdemeanor prostitution.

The cop said that it was absolutely essential for him to do this “because he believed that such action was necessary to gather the proof needed to convict the person for violating the prostitution statute.”

When Bales saw this, he reported the misconduct to his superiors. He turned over the photo of the affidavit to his lawyer “just in case.”


But after an investigation, carried out by Fort Smith Police Department Chief Kevin Lindsey, it was decided that Bales was the one to blame. He had, Chief Lindsey still maintains, “violated department policy” when he allowed the officer’s name on the affidavit.

But Bales has maintained that any communication between himself and his lawyer is protected by attorney-client privilege.

The attorney published the affidavit some time later, but he redacted it to conceal the identity of the officer in question. So this department policy, both the lawyer and Bales maintain, was never in fact violated.

Now, the department is saying that Bales violated a full eight rules. Among them, Chief Lindsey says Bales was guilty of: not being truthful, giving false testimony, revealing confidential information, releasing a confidential report and not respecting his superiors.

Here’s where it gets really crazy… Lindsey says that the undercover officer in question was “in accordance with department policy” when he engaged in sexual relations with the prostitute who he later arrested.

Even worse, and adding insult to injury, the termination of Sgt. Bales has been upheld on appeal by the Fort Smith Civil Service Commission… twice.

UK school group threatens to call police on kids playing adult games

Teachers say games show "neglectful" parenting, will alert social services.

by Kyle Orland


A group of school principals in Cheshire, England is warning parents that they will be on the lookout for evidence that children in their care have access to adult video games at home and will "contact the Police and Children's Social Care" if they are made aware of it.

The Nantwich Education Partnership, which represents 16 schools in Cheshire, sent a note to parents last month expressing concern that "several children have reported playing, or watching adults play games which are inappropriate for their age and have described the levels of violence and sexual content they have witnessed." The letter specifically cites Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Dogs of War (which we assume is a misnamed mangling of God or War or Gears of War) as inappropriate, and also warns parents that children should not have access to Facebook or WhatsApp accounts before they are old enough.

"Access to these games OR to some social media sites such as those above increases early sexualized behaviours (sometimes harmful) in children AND leaves them vulnerable to grooming for sexual exploitation or extreme violence," the letter reads (as reprinted by The Daily Mail). "If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18+ we will are [sic] advised to contact the Police and Children’s Social Care as it is neglectful."

Defending the letter to the Sunday Times, drafter Mary Hennessy Jones said it was simply an effort to "help parents... keep their children as safe as possible in this digital era. It is so easy for children to end up in the wrong place and parents find it helpful to have very clear guidelines.”

At least one parent group isn't so enamored with the group's plan, though. “It will be construed by many parents as a threat and it is not helpful," Margaret Morrissey, a representative for lobbying group Parents Outloud told the Times. "If schools want to get the support of parents and gain their confidence, threatening them with social services will not help... To get the social services involved is an absolute disaster because it starts telling parents that we don’t trust you to be responsible for your children."

On the ratings board’s anniversary, we look at some of its more puzzling choices.Since 2012, PEGI ratings have had the force of law in the UK, with potential penalties for retailers that sell games to children below the European rating organizations 12, 16, or 18+ ratings, as appropriate. This is in contrast to the American system, in which ESRB ratings are assigned and enforced voluntarily by the industry and retailers (with widespread success).

Still, this is the first we've heard of parents allowing their own children access to such games being described as "neglectful" to the extent that social services need to be involved. The Nantwich letter pointedly does not call out children's potential access to adult films, TV shows, music, or other entertainment as similarly harmful.

Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurial

Research shows that when governments provide citizens with economic security, they embolden them to take more risks.

Walter Frick

In 1988, Ronald Reagan traveled to the Soviet Union and gave a speech at Moscow State University, making the case for capitalism. America’s secret, he argued, was its entrepreneurs, whose “courage to take risks” was responsible “for almost all the economic growth in the United States” and much of its technological edge. This risk-taking was made possible, he continued, by economic freedom, which he associated with “limited, unintrusive” government.

Reagan was right about the link between startups and growth, but wrong in assuming that small government was the way to encourage them.

His belief in a tradeoff between taking care of citizens and promoting innovative new businesses is at odds with the evidence. In fact, one way to get more people to start companies, according to a growing body of research, is to expand the welfare state.

Pundits and researchers often note the negative correlation between government spending and entrepreneurship, both within the U.S. and internationally, and conclude that growth requires trimming social welfare programs. Jim Manzi of the National Review, for example, a thoughtful commenter on economic policy, wrote last year that, “we must accept some amount of social dislocation in return for innovation.” But correlations can be misleading. A series of more recent studies challenge the view that larger or more activist government necessarily threatens entrepreneurship. In fact, that may get the relationship precisely backwards.

Entrepreneurs are actually more likely than other Americans to receive public benefits, after accounting for income, as Harvard Business School’s Gareth Olds has documented. And in many cases, expanding benefit programs helps spur new business creation.

Take food stamps. Conservatives have long argued that they breed dependence on government. In a 2014 paper, Olds examined the link between entrepreneurship and food stamps, and found that the expansion of the program in some states in the early 2000s increased the chance that newly eligible households would own an incorporated business by 16 percent. (Incorporated firms are a better proxy for job-creating startups than unincorporated ones.)

Interestingly, most of these new entrepreneurs didn’t actually enroll in the food stamp program. It seems that expanding the availability of food stamps increased business formation by making it less risky for entrepreneurs to strike out on their own. Simply knowing that they could fall back on food stamps if their venture failed was enough to make them more likely to take risks.

Food stamps are not an isolated case. In another paper, Olds looked at the creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which offers publicly funded health insurance for kids whose families don’t qualify for Medicaid. By comparing the rate of entrepreneurship of those who just barely qualified for CHIP to those whose incomes just barely exceeded the cutoff, he was able to estimate the program’s impact on new business creation. The rate of incorporated business ownership for those eligible households just below the cutoff was 31 percent greater than for similarly situated families that could not rely on CHIP to care for their children if they needed it.

The same is true of recent immigrants to the United States. Contrary to claims by the right that welfare keeps immigrants from living up to their historic role as entrepreneurs, CHIP eligibility increased those households’ chances of owning an incorporated business by 28 percent.

The mechanism in each case is the same: publicly funded insurance lowers the risk of starting a business, since entrepreneurs needn’t fear financial ruin. (This same logic explains why more forgiving bankruptcy laws are associated with more entrepreneurship.)

A 2010 study by RAND found a similar effect with Medicare. American men were more likely to start a business just after turning 65 and qualifying for Medicare than just before. Here again, government can make entrepreneurship more appealing by making it less risky. By this logic, Obamacare doubles as entrepreneurship policy by making it easier for individuals to gain health insurance without relying on an employer.

Sometimes, though, a robust safety net may serve to discourage entrepreneurship. The best path in such cases, however, may not be to cut the program, but rather, to reform it. When France lowered the barriers to receiving unemployment insurance, it actually increased the rate of entrepreneurship.. Until 2001, citizens on unemployment insurance had little incentive to start businesses, since doing so would terminate their benefits. Instead of gutting the program, the state simply decided to let anyone who founded a business keep drawing benefits for a limited period, and guaranteed that they would be eligible again if that business failed. The result: a 25 percent increase in the rate of new-firm creation.

In the United States, though, many social welfare benefits still function like the old French system, disincentivizing entrepreneurship, and some popular reform proposals would actually worsen the situation. With food stamps, for instance, there has been a push to tie benefits to finding and holding a job, which actually does raise a barrier to starting a business.

Of course benefits are only one side of the ledger. Taxes are just as often held up as a threat to entrepreneurship and a dynamic economy. A lower capital gains tax rate does seem to be associated with a greater supply of entrepreneurs. But keeping the capital gains rate low to help startups is incredibly inefficient, since only a small portion of realized capital gains are from entrepreneurial activity. As Harvard Business School professors Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner write, “policies that increase the relative attractiveness of becoming an entrepreneur and promote technology innovation probably would have more of an effect on venture capital investments than an across the board cut in the capital gains tax rate.”

Instead of preserving low tax rates, entrepreneur-friendly tax reform would encourage startup investment by shifting the tax code away from its current bias for debt over equity, and could preserve or expand key tax credits like the exemption for long-term investment in small businesses.

Even the assumption that bureaucratic “red tape” holds back startups is less obvious than it sounds. Professors at George Mason created a novel measure of federal regulation in the U.S. and compared the amount of federal regulation to the number of new business establishments in each industry. They found a slightly positive correlation: more regulation was actually associated with more new establishments. (Though the number of “new establishments” correlates with entrepreneurship, they’re not quite the same thing since the former counts expansion by existing firms.)

That’s not to say regulations don’t hamper entrepreneurs; of course, they often do. It may even be the case that a better measure of entrepreneurship would correlate negatively with the amount of regulation. But what evidence we do have squarely challenges the intuition that it’s government that holds back startups.

It would be silly to argue that bigger government is always and everywhere good for startups. But the standard critique of big government throttling economic growth appears increasingly at odds with the available evidence. So why do pundits and politicians, on both sides of the aisle, so often assume the opposite?

In truth, the what matters more than the how much. Some government programs likely boost entrepreneurship, while others hold it back. The same is true of taxation, and of regulation.

This argument is particularly important today for two reasons. First, despite the headlines coming out of Silicon Valley, American has actually become less entrepreneurial over the past few decades. The research described above suggests that reversing that decline need not include cuts to the welfare state. Second, entrepreneurship is central to the ongoing debate over stagnating economic growth. Just as mainstream institutions like the IMF and OECD have publicly questioned the assumption that growth requires tolerating income inequality, we must revisit the idea that an expanded welfare state comes at the expense of entrepreneurs and innovation.

The evidence simply does not support the idea of a consistent tradeoff between bigger government and a more entrepreneurial economy. At least in some cases, the reverse is actually true. When governments provide citizens with economic security, they embolden them to take more risks. Properly deployed, a robust social safety net encourages more Americans to attempt the high-wire act of entrepreneurship.

Judge Wanted: Must Be Able to Read, Tell Time

A recent order from the Supreme Court of South Carolina (thanks, Anonymous) has updated the initial eligibility requirements for those who would like to be magistrate judges in that state. All applicants must now take and pass both the Wonderlic Personnel Test and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. I'm not sure about the latter, but here's how the court describes the former:

Because this is a test of general intelligence, it does not lend itself to a study aid or other preparatory materials.  However, successful examinees will need at least a sixth grade reading level, knowledge of basic mathematics, how to tell time, days of the week and months of the year, and a basic knowledge of the U. S. monetary units and the U. S. Customary System of weights and measures.

I hasten to add that these are minimum requirements, or as the court puts it, the requirements to become a "successful examinee." Successful applicants, it goes on to say, "will not only demonstrate a suitable level of learning ability, but also a mastery of fundamental basic skills." So this should not be interpreted as a suggestion that, say, just being able to make change for a dollar would cut it if you wanted to be a magistrate judge in South Carolina. You would probably need to be able to make change for bills of several different denominations, at a minimum.

I don't actually have a dim view of judges in South Carolina or anywhere else, I also hasten to add. It's more that the minimum standards seem nonsensically low. I mean, I question why you'd need the Wonderlic Personnel Test or anything like it to make sure people meet the minimum standards described above. Wouldn't they have demonstrated that just by showing up at the test site to begin with? They read the flyer, understood where they needed to be and when, and managed to get there either in a personally managed vehicle or via public transit. Might need to require them to use their own car to be sure they know what "gallons" are, but otherwise that really seems to cover it. You make it into the right parking lot on the right day—boom, you're a candidate.

Anyway, the order includes this link to 50 sample questions that are said to be similar to those on the Wonderlic test. You have 12 minutes to answer, and I think it takes 34 correct answers to pass. If that doesn't go so well, you might try another test at that site which is described as the "Sample NFL Wonderlic Test." It seems to be even easier. For example, the first of those sample questions asks which of the six numbers that follow is the smallest. That's it—which is the smallest number. To be fair, there are decimals involved. Still, if you make it into the NFL, you can hire someone to move decimal points for you, so again I don't know what this is for.

Good luck.

The Upside of Downtime

Jackie Coleman and John Coleman

One of Jackie’s first jobs after graduate school necessitated that she be on call 24/7. That schedule tested her ability to leave work at the office and fully engage with the rest of her life. Similarly, John spent time in consulting where the sometimes hectic travel and work schedules forced him to think hard about how to guard personal time — to “punch out” from work and create downtime to recharge and rejuvenate.

Many modern workers find it hard to take downtime. The idea of leaving work so cleanly at the office seems quaint in a world of smartphones, laptops, and global companies that are always on to accommodate employees from Hoboken to Hong Kong. But drawing brighter lines between work and time off — family, friends, outside activities, and old-fashioned daydreaming — has clear benefits for productivity, creativity, and wellness. There’s an upside to downtime.

For one, creating the space for downtime increases productivity. Subject to heavy workloads and never-ending to-do lists, it’s easy to put our heads down and charge through tasks, thinking we have no time for days off, free evenings, or weeklong vacations. But driving too hard without breaks can make us less productive and less focused. One experiment conducted at BCG, for example, found that forcing employees to take days, nights, or extended periods of time off actually increased productivity. And other studies show that brief periods of downtime, like afternoon naps, can restore focus and energy. Taking the time to get out of the details and view of the larger picture can also help us better understand the purpose and priority of our tasks. As Tony Schwartz has written, “human beings perform best and are most productive when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal.”

Similarly, employing downtime — on a planned and ad hoc basis — unleashes creativity. 3M is one of the most innovative companies in history, and to feed their innovation engine, the company introduced “15% time” back in 1948 — giving employees 15% downtime to pursue their own projects, a practice that has since been replicated at companies like Google. Jonah Lehrer has written for The New Yorker about the virtue of daydreaming, and in his book Imagine notes the necessity of downtime for problem solving, saying, “While it’s commonly assumed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to relentlessly focus, this clenched state of mind comes with a hidden cost: it inhibits the sort of creative connections that lead to breakthroughs.”

Finally, downtime can dramatically improve mental and physical health and our personal relationships. One study, for example, found that employees who unplugged and took time off reduced serious health issues like coronary heart disease. Victor Lipman has written in Forbes that exercising midday can help to reduce workplace stress. As John has written previously, just six minutes of reading can reduce stress by 68%. John Tierney and Ron Baumeister state in Willpower that midday breaks can rejuvenate willpower and improve judgment and decision making in the afternoon. And as we have written before, cleanly taking time off from work to focus on your spouse, family, or friends can only improve your relationships. Downtime can be essential for mental, physical, and social health.

So how can you better use downtime? Here are a few tips that might help.

• Clearly schedule your time: Just as you would schedule a work meeting and stick to it, schedule evenings off, one to two days a week free of work, and weeklong chunks of vacation every year. Unplug, and stick to it.
• Allow for ad hoc downtime when you need it: Google’s headquarters have a game room and on-site massage. One of John’s former employers had arcade games, an on-site coffee house, and scenic hiking trails. If you’re feeling stuck on a problem, frustrated, or simply tired of sitting down, take 10 minutes to walk, read for fun, or grab coffee with a friend to clear your mind.
• Shut off your smartphone: Constant interconnectedness (like smartphone use) is a stressor. Leave your laptop at the office when you’re able. Carry two phones — one for work and one for personal use — and leave the work phone in your bag when you come home or in the safe at your hotel when you’re on vacation. If work requires you to be on call, mentally “shut off” the phone until it rings. Find ways to create clear boundaries between work and life.
• Free up your RAM: In Getting Things Done, author David Allen states that having tasks on our mind is like using up RAM on our personal computers because there is limited capacity in our short-term memory. Instead of going through the day on mental overload, distracted by those fleeting to-dos, it helps to keep an organized list and physical folders containing all of the tasks that take up mental space. Feeling organized enables worry-free downtime.
• Create rituals and routines: Scientists have long recommended developing routines for sounder sleep, and many professionals, like Stephen King, have routines that get them ready for work. Create rituals and routines that signal to your mind that it’s time to start work, leave work, meditate, or engage with family.

It can be hard to carve out space for downtime in a 24/7 world. But it’s precisely this chaos that requires the knowledge worker of the twenty-first century to be more vigilant than ever about cultivating the discipline to use downtime when the moment calls for it. Just as it’s healthy to focus at work — ignoring Facebook and personal email — it’s essential to occasionally leave work behind and make space for life.

11-Year-Old Suspended for a Year for Possessing Leaf That Repeatedly Tested Negative for Pot

An 11-year-old Virginia boy was suspended for 364 days after being caught in possession of a leaf that, as it turned out, repeatedly tested negative for marijuana, the Roanoke Times‘ Dan Casey reports.

Last September, officials at Bedford Middle School learned of a rumor that a student was bragging about having marijuana. When the vice principal searched the student, he found a lighter and a “leaf” in the boy’s backpack, and in accordance with the school’s “zero tolerance” policy — which applies to both actual and “lookalike” or “imitation” drugs — suspended the boy for a year.

The vice principal and school resource officer also contacted the police, who filed marijuana possession charges against the 11-year-old.

However, when the prosecutor had the leaf tested — on three separate occasions — the tests came back negative for marijuana.

The boy’s parents, both of whom are teachers, have filed a federal lawsuit against Bedford County Schools, claiming that assistant principal Brian Wilson, resource officer M.M. Calohan, and operations chief Frederick Duis violated their son’s due process rights.

“Essentially they kicked him out of school for something they couldn’t prove he did,” their attorney, Melvin Williams, told the Roanoke Times.

“The field test came back not inconclusive, but negative,” he continued. “Yet [resource officer Calohan] went to a magistrate and swore he possessed marijuana at school.”

When the boy’s parents were contacted by the school and asked what had happened, they were told different stories. First, Vice Principal Wilson told the boy’s mother that he had been showing off the leaf on the bus on the way to school.

Then, she said, “he told me [her son] had been seen in the bathroom with a marijuana leaf and lighter.” Wilson later said that her son “had been seen in the classroom with a lighter and a leaf,” and had been bragging about his family having “marijuana growing in our back yard and that his dad knew about it and didn’t care.”

According to Wilson, the boy claimed to have “no idea” how the leaf got into his backpack. When his mother asked to see the leaf, she was allegedly told that “it’s already in evidence.”

“We have never seen the leaf. He’s been out of school for six months,” the boy’s mother said.

Paypal Cuts Off Mega Because It Actually Keeps Your Files Secret

There are way too many stories of Paypal unfairly and ridiculously cutting off services that rely on it as a payment mechanism, but here's yet another one. Mega, the cloud storage provider that is perhaps well-known for being Kim Dotcom's "comeback" act after the US government shut down Megaupload, has had its Paypal account cut off. The company claims that Paypal was pressured by Visa and Mastercard to cut it off:

Visa and MasterCard then pressured PayPal to cease providing payment services to MEGA.

MEGA provided extensive statistics and other evidence showing that MEGA's business is legitimate and legally compliant. After discussions that appeared to satisfy PayPal’s queries, MEGA authorised PayPal to share that material with Visa and MasterCard. Eventually PayPal made a non-negotiable decision to immediately terminate services to MEGA. PayPal has apologised for this situation and confirmed that MEGA management are upstanding and acting in good faith. PayPal acknowledged that the business is legitimate, but advised that a key concern was that MEGA has a unique model with its end-to-end encryption which leads to “unknowability of what is on the platform”.

MEGA has demonstrated that it is as compliant with its legal obligations as USA cloud storage services operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Spideroak etc, but PayPal has advised that MEGA's "unique encryption model" presents an insurmountable difficulty.

That last line is particularly bizarre, given that if anyone recognizes the value of encryption it should be a freaking payments company. And, of course, Paypal can't know what's stored on any of those other platforms, so why is it being pressured to cut off Mega?

Mega's theory -- which is mostly reasonable -- is that because Mega was mistakenly listed in a report released by the "Digital Citizens Alliance" that insisted Mega was a rogue cyberlocker storing infringing content, that payment companies were told to cut it off. If true, this is problematic on multiple levels. The methodology of the report was absolutely ridiculous. Because most Mega files are stored privately (like any Dropbox or Box or Google Drive account), the researchers at NetNames have no idea what's actually being stored there or if it's being done perfectly legitimately. Instead, they found a few links to infringing works, and then extrapolated. That's just bad research practices.

Furthermore, the Digital Citizens Alliance is hardly an unbiased third party. It's an MPAA front group that was the key force in the MPAA's (now revealed) secret plan to have states attorneys general attack Google. Think the MPAA has reasons to try to go after any potential revenue source for Kim Dotcom? Remember, taking down Megaupload and winning in court against Dotcom was a key focus of the company since 2010 or so, and Dotcom recently noted that he's out of money and pleading with the court to release some of the funds seized by the government to continue to fight his case. The lawyers who represented him all along quit late last year when he ran out of money. It seems like the MPAA might have ulterior motives in naming Mega to that list, don't you think?

And, this all goes back to this dangerous effort by the White House a few years ago to set up these "voluntary agreements" in which payment companies would agree to cut off service to sites that the entertainment industry declared "bad." There's no due process. There's no adjudication. There's just one industry getting to declare websites it doesn't like as "bad" and all payment companies refusing to serve it. This seems like a pretty big problem.

Statement by Ms. Farida Shaheed Special Rappourteur in the Field of Cultural Rights (about copyright)

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1686212/statement-sr-cultural-rights-11-march.pdf

Medical Technology Makes 'Time of Death' Harder to Pinpoint

Advances in medicine can prolong life, but they can also make it more difficult for doctors to know when a patient has truly died.

Tim Lahey

We tried our best, but CPR, an injection of epinephrine, and 360 joules of electricity all failed to restart Mrs. Melnyk’s heart. When everybody on the resuscitation team agreed that we could do no more, I said the words:

“Time of death, 9:32.”

As we cleaned up, a young nurse began to tuck a clean white sheet around Mrs. Melnyk’s body—and then suddenly stopped.

“Wait!” she shouted, pointing at the heart monitor. There on the screen, an electrical impulse registered and quickly disappeared, replaced by a flat green line. “It’s too soon to give up!” the nurse said.

Sadly, she was wrong. Her mistake was an understandable one for somebody still new to the job: The isolated electrical impulse that she believed signified a beating heart was actually just the last gasp of electricity released when a few molecules of salt escaped a dying heart cell. I explained that there was no way to bring Mrs. Melnyk back, and then switched off the heart monitor and went to notify the family.

Later that day, looking back on the incident, I wondered: What time did Mrs. Melnyk really die?

Her death certificate would read 9:32, but in reality, Mrs. Melnyk had died sometime in the preceding moments. Perhaps it was as she sagged to the floor while returning to her hospital bed from the bathroom, or as the nurse ran to get the emergency-response team. Maybe it was the moment my intern put his palms to her chest and started CPR. We would never know. All the green EKG tracing could tell us was that there was some electrical activity in the heart—it couldn’t tell us when the activity that kept her alive became the activity of the heart simply shutting down. Sometimes machine signals are meaningful, but other times they’re just noise. Sometimes machine signals are meaningful, but other times they’re just noise.

Mrs. Melnyk’s case is not an isolated one: As medical technology becomes more advanced, it also becomes more difficult for doctors to discern the line between life and death.

PET scans, which have been widely used since the 1990s, are a good example. Rather than solely showing body anatomy like an MRI or CT scan would, a PET scan can actually detect cellular activity in tissues. In a study published last year in The Lancet, 13 out of 41 patients in a persistent vegetative state showed detectable brain activity on PET scans, results that the investigators thought were consistent with “minimal consciousness.” The investigators were not, of course, able to tell what those 13 patients were thinking, just that some cells in their brains were active and doing … something. “Minimal consciousness” is an optimistic term; the PET scans may have been detecting only the play of random signals across neural wires that had long since failed to relay coherent thought. One year later, four of those 13 patients with detectable brain activity had died, and the remaining nine had either stayed “minimally conscious” or recovered “a higher level of consciousness,” though the authors did not elaborate on what that meant.

This is an interesting finding, but it also complicates how doctors might approach the end of life. Families and clinicians could wonder if all patients in a coma should have a PET scan, or whether patients whose scans show residual brain activity should be kept alive longer than they would have been otherwise. What we don’t know is the most important thing: whether any of the patients in the Lancet study regained the kind of lives they would find meaningful.

In a similar vein, an emerging resuscitation technology called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is complicating not how doctors pinpoint a time of death, but how and when we admit that death is inevitable. ECMO is a portable machine the size of a microwave oven that pulls blood out of the body, bubbles oxygen into it, and then circulates the oxygen-rich blood back into patients whose hearts or lungs have failed. Used by a growing number of hospitals around the world, ECMO can keep patients alive in the intensive-care unit while they await surgery or recover from a cardiac arrest, and has been credited with some miraculous saves. Recently, for example, a Canadian hospital reported that 47 percent of patients who received ECMO after in-hospital cardiac arrest had a good neurological outcome, an unheard-of success rate. Physicians may need to look a conscious patient in the eye and tell them the time has come.

But as more and more institutions adopt ECMO, they will also have to confront the ethical issues that come with it. ECMO can sustain life for weeks and even months, but not indefinitely. Eventually, the synthetic tubing that connects the ECMO machine to the body can get clogged or infected, or obstruct blood flow. That means the technology is best used as a bridge to more definitive fixes like heart transplantation. But if that eventual fix becomes impossible—for example, because the patient is too ill—then doctors may need to admit ECMO is a bridge to nowhere and let the patient go. There is no formal stopping point for ECMO, which means it can be up to the physician to decide which day is the right last day for a given patient. Moreover, unlike most patients on life support, some ECMO patients can be awake and interactive. That means physicians may need to look a conscious patient in the eye and tell them the time has come. Once the ECMO machine is turned off, death will likely come within minutes.

PET scans and ECMO have brought new challenges to end-of-life care, but newer technologies will surely emerge, presenting their own challenges. Not least among them is the temptation to use these technologies in a way that defines life only in biomedical terms. It can seem logical to equate life with the detection of brain activity by a PET scan; the miraculous saves possible with ECMO, too, might lead physicians to equate the circulation of oxygenated blood in and out of the body with living.

But both equations are too simple, reducing complex issues about the end of life down to scientific definitions that lack nuance. PET scans and ECMO are great technologies, but they cannot answer a question that is primarily about a patient’s values and preferences. The line between life and death is best defined not by machines, but by patients’ beliefs about what kind of life gives them meaning, and how much they would endure to extend it. If PET scans and ECMO fit into a patient’s wishes, then it makes sense to marshal the full power of these technologies, even with the understanding that they may fail. On the other hand, if these machines cannot restore for a patient the kind of life he wants, then the way to use these technologies may be to do what I did with Mrs. Melnyk’s heart monitor: hit the off button, or better yet, don’t turn them on at all.

Conformity Starts Young

Toddlers will hide their knowledge of a solution around untrained peers

By Bret Stetka

Nobody likes a show-off. So someone with a singular skill will often hide that fact to fit in with a group. A recent study reported for the first time that this behavior begins as early as two years old.

In the study, led by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and published in Psychological Science, two-year-old children, chimpanzees and orangutans dropped a ball into a box divided into three sections, one of which consistently resulted in a reward (chocolate for the children; a peanut for the apes). After the participants figured out how to get the treat on the first try, they watched as untrained peers did the same activity but without any reward. Then the roles were flipped, and the participants took another turn while being watched by the others. More than half the time the children mimicked their novice peers and dropped the ball into the sections that did not produce chocolate. The apes, on the other hand, stuck to their prizewinning behaviors. The children did not simply forget the right answer—if no one watched them, they were far less likely to abandon the winning choice.

The results suggest that the human desire to conform is inborn or at least develops at a very young age. This urge to conform probably evolved to be stronger than that of our ape cousins because group harmony was extremely important in growing hominin communities dependent on the exchange of cultural information, according to the authors. “We all like others who are similar to us,” explains psychologist and lead author Daniel Haun. Conforming boosts these feelings of sameness.

Of course, conformity is not always the best choice, nor is it always the norm—plenty of people prefer to lead, not follow. Yet in the absence of all other information about a group, “following the majority is usually a very good first choice,” Haun says.

Half of people shot by police are mentally ill, investigation finds

A Maine-based study found a lack of training and oversight and a system that justifies deadly use of force

Natasha Lennard

An investigation by the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram has found that a disturbingly high percentage of individuals shot by police suffer from mental health problems. There are no federal statistics on police shootings of mentally ill people, but according to the investigation published this week, “a review of available reports indicates that at least half of the estimated 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems.”

The newspapers analyzed in detail the incidents of police deploying deadly force in Maine — a state with a comparatively low crime rate — since 2000. The report noted:

42 percent of people shot by police since 2000 — and 58 percent of those who died from their injuries — had mental health problems, according to reports from the Maine Attorney General’s Office. In many cases, the officers knew that the subjects were disturbed, and they were dead in a matter of moments.

In September, as I noted here, police in Houston shot dead a wheelchair-bound double-amputee diagnosed with severe mental health problems when officers saw him wave a shiny object (which turned out to be a pen) in the air. The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram cited this and a number of other incidents this year, which garnered national attention:

In Saginaw, Mich., six police officers gun down a homeless, schizophrenic man in a vacant parking lot when he refuses to drop a small folding knife. In Seattle, Wash., a police officer fatally shoots a mentally ill, chronic alcoholic as he crosses the street, carving a piece of wood with a pocket knife. In Portland, Ore., police check on a man threatening suicide and wind up killing him with a single gunshot in the back.

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The report notes a lack of police training in crisis intervention as fueling the problem, undergirded by a lack of oversight and accountability: “While the Justice Department counts every assault, robbery and drunk-driving arrest — as well as every police officer shot on duty — it gathers no numbers on mentally ill people shot by police,” the report stated. Meanwhile, the FBI does not quantify police shootings that are found “unjustified”: “the FBI tallies only police shootings that result in ‘justifiable’ homicides; 373 to 411 of these shootings occurred each year from 2006 through 2010. Unjustified police shootings are counted among all other homicides. The FBI doesn’t specifically count any incidents involving mentally ill people.”

Deadly force is rarely ruled unjustified — the investigation noted that in Maine, for example, the Attorney General’s Office has justified every single police shooting since 2000. Corroborating statistics in other states, although rarely collected, attest to the near-ubiquity of justification of use of deadly force. Colorines found that in Chicago between 2000 to 2007, only one police shooting out of 84 was considered to be “unjustified” (meaning no probable cause was found for believing a suspect to be a threat).

Despite the lack of national data, the investigation was able to piece together specific findings in other states outside of Maine:

In New Hampshire, four of five people shot and killed by police in 2011 had mental health issues (80 percent); a sixth person shot by police also was mentally ill but survived, according to reports from the state’s Office of the Attorney General. All six shootings were found to be justified. A review of the New Hampshire attorney general’s reports on police shootings from 2007 through 2012 showed that seven of nine people killed by officers during that period had mental health issues (78 percent).

In Syracuse, N.Y., three of five people (60 percent) shot by police in 2011 were mentally ill, according to news reports. One of three people who died in those shootings was mentally ill…

In Santa Clara County, Calif., officials reported that nine of 22 people (41 percent) shot during a recent five-year period were mentally ill, according to a crisis intervention training guide.

In Albuquerque, N.M., 75 percent of police shootings in the last two years had a “mental health context,” the state’s Public Defender Department noted in its annual report for fiscal 2012.

Cutbacks in mental health services nationwide, along with the return of veterans from war, concern experts as exacerbating conditions for more deadly police encounters, the investigation noted.

Texas Town Experiences 61% Drop in Crime After Firing Their Police Department

By Matt Agorist

Sharpstown, TX — Sharpstown is a Texas community, located just southwest of Houston, and the way they maintain security in this community has gotten our attention.

In 2012, they fired their cops.

The Sharpstown Civic Association then hired S.E.A.L. Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

The statist fearmongers will have you believe that “privatizing” anything would result in mass chaos and a Mad Max scenarios of warlords and rampant crime. But they are wrong.

“Since we’ve been in there, an independent crime study that they’ve had done [indicates] we’ve reduced the crime by 61%” in just 20 months, says James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL.

Government police, despite not acting like it, are still part of the government. This means that any progressive change for the better takes ten times longer than it would in the private sector; if it happens at all. Government police are not driven by efficiency and threats from liability, as neither one of these things are needed when you have a tax farm to rob when things get tight.

Contrary to the government apparatus, private police, must be efficient as well as safe, for one small mistake or claim could end their entire operation. If an inefficiency is spotted within the system, changes must be implemented swiftly to avoid the loss of revenue.

The reason for the success rate of SEAL Security is that they can see a problem and quickly adapt versus trying to spin the rusty cogs of the bureaucratic process. And that is exactly what SEAL did in Sharpstown.

According to guns.com, Alexander cites the continuous patrol of SEAL’s officers in their assigned neighborhoods as opposed to the strategy of intermittent presence that the constable embraced. “On a constable patrol contract, it’s either a 70/30 or an 80/20. Meaning they say they patrol your community 70 percent of the time, [while] 30 percent of the time they use for running calls out of your area or writing reports.”

He continues, “The second thing that drastically reduces the crime is that we do directed patrols, meaning we don’t just put an officer out there and say ‘here, go patrol.’ We look at recent crime stats, and we work off of those crime stats. So if we have hotspots in those areas say for that month, we focus and concentrate our efforts around those hotspots.”

Another aspect, and possibly the most important, that sets privatized police apart from agents of the state, is that they have a negative incentive to initiate force. Force and violence are vastly more expensive than today’s police lead us to believe.

Causing injury or death, or wrongfully depriving someone of their rights is very expensive if these costs are realized for the ones who cause them. The state does not care, however. They can and will defer their liability to the tax farm.

The act of deferment of liability is a function solely reserved for the state, and it creates an incentive to act in an unethical manner. In the case of SEAL Security, each of their officers, as well as their entire operation, can be held liable, both criminally and financially. This is something about which the state knows nothing.

As guns.com points out, over 70 communities in Harris County and most of the major management districts have contracted with SEAL. They’re less expensive, better at crime prevention, they do not target citizens for revenue, and, best of all, each officer is personally accountable for his or her actions.

It’s time Americans start seriously considering this option.

Law enforcement is a product that we are forced to buy. When any product is not subject to the forces of consumer demand, there is no way of changing it. It is time we applied the fundamental lesson of competition to our supposed protectors.