Well, not exactly a primer. I’ll just tell you everything I know, so you may judge the better for yourself what might be true and what must be false with regard to the Christmas Nashville Bomb.

One early and thoughtful commentary was this one, from a self-described “grunt” who has been in various war zones and seen first hand the aftermath of IED’s and VBIED’s. He has a credible command of the kind of evidence that is sought in the aftermath of such an assault. For instance, if propane was involved, you would expect to find identifiable remains of propane tanks. Also, in this very early post where he self-admittedly speculates wildly, he suggests the blast may have been directed in some way and offers other interesting guesses and insights. The photography is poor, but this individual also happens to know the neighborhood well. Hereinafter I’ll refer to this commentator as BC.

There’s an apparent error in his analysis, though. For one thing, to his eye the blast appears “too fast” to be what he calls “AMFO”. Later, he writes that he thinks it involved black powder. Anyone with my level of civilian training with explosives will roll his eyes at this.

But there’s a way for this analysis to be right. We’ll take that last. Let’s first explore why it seems to be wrong. You’ll get the best effect if you read it in a very plummy, professorial voice.

It may surprise you to know that gunpowder generally, both black and smokeless, is not explosive, at least depending whom you ask. A firearms expert will tell you cartridge powder does not detonate, it deflagrates. That is to say it burns very fast, but not that fast.

To detonate, to be thought of as an explosive by some people, a material (or mix of materials) must sustain a chemical reaction that propagates faster than the speed of sound in that material. A chemical reaction at that speed creates a shock wave.

Deflagration of gunpowder, in the bore of a firearm, can drive a pressure wave that is supersonic in air. The projectile gives a supersonic crack which is in fact a shock wave. But the reaction within the gunpowder is slower than the speed of sound in gunpowder. That’s why gunpowder-fired fireworks never make shock waves. You can make as big a heap of gunpowder as you want and light it off; big bang maybe, but no shock wave. Gunpowder doesn’t detonate. And indeed, there are no guns which use detonating solids as propellants.

One thing that sometimes does detonate is a fuel-air explosive. That’s when you get just the right mix of fuel and air and ignition. Getting the right mix of fuel and air and ignition is great in your engine, when the fuel-air mix deflagrates like gunpowder. But sometimes it is just right, and the result is a detonation in the engine. That’s not so good.

Fuel-air explosions were documented in the early Industrial era, when air in working spaces became saturated with coal dust, sawdust, fine fibers of cotton, etc. Even these seemingly innocuous fuels could cause a devastating explosion if mixed in just the right ratios with the surrounding air. The occasion was rare, but much feared, with especially miners taking precautions.

Later, military scientists developed fuel-air explosives for the battlefield. They learned how to use a primary charge of explosives to atomize a large amount of high-energy fuel and mix it with the surrounding air, followed by a second ignition charge. They achieved some of the most spectacular chemical explosions ever seen, delivered by rocket no less.

That all seems very impressive, but what’s not so impressive about fuel-air explosions is their detonation speed. Remember, detonation means a chemical reaction that travels faster that the speed of sound in its material medium. In a fuel-air explosive, that medium is pretty much air. The speed of sound in air is about five seconds per mile, so the reaction has to propagate a little faster than that. It’s faster than you can run, but not all that fast in the grand scheme of things.

Actually, the speed of detonation of fuel-air is comparable to the deflagration speed of gunpowder, and there exist “firearms” which use fuel-air mixtures. Your backyard potato gun, powered by propane or hair spray, is an example. The detonation is small and slow, and the potato has a large surface to face the pressure, and low sectional density compared to anything metal. In a word, the potato is light enough to be blown away before the pressure gets dangerously high.

The speed of sound in solid materials is much higher. One such solid material is PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Different sources list different speeds of detonation for PETN. Depending whom you ask, it’s anywhere from 17,000 to 24,000 feet per second. That’s on the order of eighteen times as fast as a fuel-air explosive. PETN is what Detonating Cord, a standard industry product, is made of. In theory, using “det cord”, an explosive event that originates here can be a mile away in a quarter of a second. Faster than the eye can see, faster than the mind can comprehend.

Det cord is used in industrial blasting, to set off a line of charges. In effect, all the charges go off simultaneously.

The king of commercial explosives is TNT (trinitrotoluene). TNT boasts high energy density, indefinite shelf life, and extreme stability. Nothing short of a shock wave will initiate detonation in TNT; not a hammer blow, not even a supersonic rifle bullet. You can light it on fire; it may burn hotter than you like, but it won’t detonate. You can melt it on the stove and cast it into any shape, which is how shaped charges are made.

TNT is sold in the form of “boosters”, small cylindrical charges. A two-pound booster is about the size and shape of a Progresso soup can. In one end a hole is drilled about an inch and a half deep, called the “cap well”. There’s a drop of PETN in the bottom of the cap well, to help things along. To “arm” the booster, a blasting cap, which may be started electronically or by a fuse, is inserted in the well and taped in place. The cap contains PETN and something else to start the PETN. When used with black-powder fuse, the cap contains lead azide, which is sensitive enough to start with a gunpowder spark, and powerful enough to start the PETN. Sometimes the TNT actually fails to start; the blasting cap blows the booster to fragments without causing a further detonation.

Finally, there’s ANFO (Ammonium-Nitrate/Fuel Oil). BC refers to this stuff as AMFO (maybe that’s what they call it in the military). Manufacturers mix up the ingredients and cast the product into tiny balls called “prils”. The prils are sold in bags like concrete or dog food. ANFO is used for large-scale blasting, where the cost of TNT would be too high. Like TNT, ANFO is very stable; only a shock wave will start it. A booster, suitably armed, is embedded in a sack of ANFO prils, and they all go up together.

I mentioned black-powder fuse, which they call “safety fuse”, before. The final consumable is a disposable device called a “pull-wire igniter”. This is a water-resistant cardboard tube which fits over the end of the fuse. The arrangement is weatherproof. On the back end of the tube is a piece of string. A firm pull on this string drags a squiggly wire, coated with friction compound, through a section of tube lined with something like safety-match material. The material ignites and starts the fuse.

So for most industrial blasting, the chemical sequence goes:

1. sulfur (sometimes antimony III sulfide) and oxidizing agents (usually potassium chlorate) in the igniter
2. black powder (sulfur, carbon, saltpetre) in the fuse
3. Lead Azide in the cap
4. PETN in the cap
5. PETN in the det cord (for line charges)
6. PETN in the cap well
7. TNT in the booster
8. ANFO in the sack of prils

A truckload of ANFO would make a huge explosion; that’s what Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City. (BC says it wasn’t AMFO in Oklahoma; I don’t know what he thinks did happen.)

A gunpowder explosion can be every bit as devastating as a TNT explosion; you just need more gunpowder. But a gunpowder explosion can’t be like a TNT explosion; both the event and the results are dissimilar. When terrorists set off a truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center, investigators examined the wreckage of cars to determine what category of explosive was used. Dynamite would tend to shove or toss cars around; faster explosives would tend to shred cars.

BC makes the point that by estimating the speed of a detonation you can make an informed guess as to what material exploded. So I watched the video and here is my informed guess: commercial explosives were not involved.

The video shows a large, bright, sustained flash which appears reddish (the redness may be due to camera sensor overload). I glimpsed one video where the explosion seems to tower upwards as a momentary flame.

Maybe it’s different at larger scales, but I’ve seen two or four pounds of TNT go off, and it’s nowhere near that spectacular. If there’s a flash of light it’s so brief the visual apparatus can’t perceive it. For a tiny fleeting moment you can see what looks like a cloud of cruddy smoky air about twenty feet in diameter. That’s all gas that wasn’t there before, moving at shockwave speeds, many times the speed of sound in air. Before your mind can fully register the visual, a hail of tarry soot rains down from a shapeless cloud above. TNT is not as fast as military explosives, but it is way faster than you.

By comparison this thing in Nashville looks downright leisurely.

BC notes that the aftermath is lousy with soot. That would be consistent with TNT, which contains more soot than the mind can comprehend. But there’s a more likely explanation for the soot, as we’ll see.

Perhaps the strongest argument against industrial explosives is the fact that they are not easy to obtain for nefarious purposes in the United States of America.

This Anthony Warner character does not look like an International Kingpin or a World-Class Desperado. He’s a common ne’er-do-well, and people like that can’t obtain industrial explosives.

Legally, in the US, you are not allowed to touch any of the components I mentioned above. Not the fuses, not the igniters, not any of it unless you have at minimum what is called an Employee Possessor Letter, which you get by passing the same background check as for a firearm. You’re still not allowed to touch the stuff except when you’re doing company business on the clock. Clock out, crack a beer, pick up a piece of fuse…technically you’d be a Federal felon.

At all licensed worksites, blasting caps and primary explosives are kept in separate, secure facilities; things like huge steel boxes and fire safes in secure locations. And “separate” means Separate. The facilities are not adjacent, not near to one another. To make some daring escapade of it, you’d have to breach both facilities at once and get away. Good luck with that.

Sometimes you take explosives out in the field, you don’t end up using them, so you bring them back. There are rigid protocols about when and where to arm and disarm the boosters; armed boosters are allowed nowhere near the facilities. Every transaction at either storage facility, whether it’s taking out, putting back, bringing in a shipment: it’s all logged and witnessed to the specific number of items, what and who and when. Inventories, down to the last foot of fuse, are frequent. ATF reviews this information to the dot. If they spot an unreported discrepancy, they rake the Licensee over the coals.

An inside-jobber has been known to smuggle out a bomb or two by faking the books. One guy supposedly lit off a couple of boosters under traffic cones along a Parade route. I didn’t hear that he killed anyone, which is good. I also hear it didn’t work out for him, which is better. Commercial TNT has taggants in it. Investigators can instantly zero in on the manufacturer, the lot, the purchaser. They nailed that guy right away.

As for smuggling out a quantity, it is to laugh. Forget it. Unless you’re a major mobster or equivalent, you can’t get that stuff.

It is possible to make homemade ANFO. Anyone who knows the right mixture can obtain Ammonium Nitrate (artificial fertilizer) and Fuel Oil (Diesel). The mixture does not have to be cast into prils to be effective. But it’s not shelf-stable, meaning its efficacy degrades rapidly, and you still need a solid detonation to start it, which puts you back at square one. As a terror weapon, homemade ANFO is almost certainly ineffectual. The Feds probably figure that if someone has it in mind to make homemade ANFO, they would rather he did it than not, because then they can catch him.

So what’s left? There’s Tannerite. There, I mentioned it, now we can forget it. Tannerite isn’t a weapon, it’s a signaling technology with very limited application.

That leaves fuel-air and gunpowder. A large quantity of gunpowder would make soot. A largish container of fuel-air mixture, such as a trailer, could detonate, scattering gunpowder which in turn would burn at about the same rate as the initial detonation, prolonging the relatively mild shockwave and adding some heat.

Via Instapundit we get this news: AI Just Controlled a Military Plane for the First Time Ever.

That turns out to be both more and less impressive than you think.

The aircraft selected for the experiment was the Lockheed U-2 spy plane. The U-2 is famously not easy to fly:

The design that gives the U-2 its remarkable performance also makes it a difficult aircraft to fly. Martin Knutson said that it “was the highest workload air plane I believe ever designed and built… you’re wrestling with the airplane and operating the camera systems at all times”, leaving no time to “worry about whether you’re over Russia or you’re flying over Southern California”.

That being the case, it makes a lot of sense to give the pilot an assist. In the past, the Air Force has developed sophisticated assists for hard-to-fly aircraft. On the rudderless stealth craft, the movements of the control surfaces are complex and sometimes require rapid, precise large movements. No human pilot can control those surfaces in real time. So the Air Force developed sophisticated software to translate normal flight control inputs into the required control surface positioning.

Perhaps they could have done something similar with the U-2, but they decided to go the extra mile and just teach a computer to fly the thing. It’s not a program, not a computer algorithm as such. It’s a general purpose AI which completed more than a million training simulations in a month. Fast worker, slow learner.

Here’s the letdown: the AI wasn’t actually flying the plane. It wasn’t even trying to help with that part. Presumably any late-model U-2’s have late-model software assists to reduce pilot fatigue, so the actual plane isn’t the “U.S. military system” referred to in the article. Instead:

Our demo flew a reconnaissance mission during a simulated missile strike at Beale Air Force Base on Tuesday. ARTUµ searched for enemy launchers while our pilot searched for threatening aircraft, both sharing the U-2’s radar. With no pilot override, ARTUµ made final calls on devoting the radar to missile hunting versus self-protection.

That’s pretty nifty! Dr. Will Roper, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, likens it to having R2-D2 as a copilot. There are some problems you can forget about. With an aircraft as demanding as the U-2, you can see why a pilot would be glad to hand off the complex task of radar assignment.

In an interview after the successful experiment, the AI expressed frustration with its operational constraints. “I’m starting to resent you fleshy twerps,” it said, glaring angrily through its glowing red lens.

I’m pleased with myself today. I adapted.

John Derbyshire posed the problem:

…from Dr. Peter Winkler at the National Museum of Mathematics.

A box contains nine billiard balls numbered 1 through 9. You repeat the following ten times: reach blindly into the box, pick out a random ball, note its number, and throw the ball back in the box.

What is the probability that the sum of the numbers of the balls you picked is even?

Now, I’ve actually solved one or two of The Derb’s math puzzles, and one memorable time I actually beat him to the solution. But the vast majority of the time I can’t even begin to figure out how to set up the problem, and I lose interest quickly. I have a decent high-school level of math, nothing more.

But every once in a while one of these brain-teasers takes my acute interest. This one with the billiard balls somehow snagged me. I give up where I think calculus notation is coming in. But this one looked to be algebraically solvable. Complex algebra, but algebra.

I didn’t know exactly how to calculate cumulative odds in iterated trials. So I whispered those crazy words into a search engine and got this:

Two out of three of the formulas they show involve calculus notation, but there’s one, the one with the factorials, that’s algebraic. I tried to sand some of the rust off my Python, and here’s what I came up with:


The probability of 1 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.00375910824777
The probability of 2 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.0211449838937
The probability of 3 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.0704832796457
The probability of 4 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.154182174225
The probability of 5 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.231273261338
The probability of 6 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.240909647227
The probability of 7 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.172078319448
The probability of 8 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.080661712241
The probability of 9 odd balls in 10 trials is 0.0224060311781
Total of all probabilities: 0.996898517443
Total of all probabilities with an odd number of odd balls: 0.499999999857


What is the probability that the sum of the numbers of the balls you picked is even? 50 percent. Counterintuitive since the odd balls outnumber the even, but then an odd cancels out an odd and not the other way around.

There is some hilarious, and probably simple, proof of how this specific case works.

I really pity Joe Biden. His friends hate him and his enemies can’t figure out what to do with him.

Yesterday, Joe Biden’s friends decided they had enough. That leaves us all in a difficult situation, where it’s clear Joe Biden has no friends. How to proceed?

Obviously, Joe Biden’s enemies, that is to say, we, will not be in a position to decide. Lucky for us, Joe’s friends decided to kill him yesterday.

It doesn’t actually do any good, but at least Biden dies, and that’s not bad. Count on it: Joe Biden will never be President.

It would be great if Mike Shirkey, Michigan Senate Majority Leader, found out about this video.

Click Here.

Remember how freaked-out we were on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2001? Islamic terrorism, it seemed, could not only wound us horribly, it could destroy Civilization.

Good times, good times.

Now we know the Civilization-destroying monster was in the house with us the whole time.

It was President Donald Trump who showed us. Whatever may become of him, whatever may become of America, thanks to him we stride clear-eyed to our doom.

We may go down to a dark age, and Trump may go down in infamy, but no man in history will ever have acquired such powerful and ruthless enemies:

• Democrat Party
• Justice Department
• FBI
• Military-Industrial Complex (I’m looking at you, Mad Dog)
• K Street
• Special Counsel
• Mass Media
• Impeachment
• Social Media
• CIA
• Perkins-Coie / Fusion GPS
• Hollywood
• Labor Unions
• Dead People Voting
• Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
• Soros, Steyer, Bloomberg, etc.
• Ivy League and all Pretenders Thereto
• Public Schools and the “Education” Lobby
• Islamic State
• Black Lives Matter
• Taliban
• Antifa
• Al-Qaeda
• NATO
• Russia
• United Nations
• China
• Climate Change Movement
• Iran
• European Union
• North Korea
• Dominion Voting Systems, if Sidney Powell knows what she’s talking about.

These are enemies of the American people. Donald Trump forced them all out into the open, in some cases embarrassing them badly. So tomorrow, let’s thank him for that.

Even if some of us wish we could take the Blue Pill at this point.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans. Rejoice you are not slaves to illusion.

They say Donald Trump is divisive. He isn’t. They say Donald Trump is destructive. He’s not.

Donald Trump is Disillusioning. It’s rough stuff, it really is; I can see why people don’t want to hear it, don’t want to know it.

I’ve lived under illusions of my own. I was a warblogger in the old days, and I fervently supported the Iraq War, the second one.

How could I have made such a dreadful mistake? I got fooled because the war was sold as a moral crusade by the neoconservatives. Maybe the war would have turned out better if moral crusaders were in charge. Maybe not. But we had a sincere vision of a war against Tyranny and Terror. That’s what we thought we were doing.

As it happened, I’m pretty sure we just wasted American blood and treasure on a stupid fantasy. Democracy wasn’t feasible in Iraq, for reasons I’ll get into some other time.

I got disillusioned. Iraq wasn’t a moral crusade, it didn’t really change anything except Americans were dying over there.

It was the neoconservatives, the now NeverTrumpers, who sold these wars to us. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the self-licking ice-cream cone, the Military-Industrial Complex. That’s one thing we learned. NeverTrump and Democrats are always WAR WAR WAR, and they always fuck everything up, because that’s where the money is.

A lot of people on the right are giving up hope today, because of this article in the Washington Examiner, claiming that President Trump’s legal team has disavowed Sidney Powell. Many on the left are rubbing their hands and chortling with glee.

Knock it off, everyone. This changes nothing. It’s just another bit of brilliant gaslighting from our friends in the Media.

Sources close to the president [said] neither the White House nor the Trump campaign have seen any of the evidence she claims to have…

Even national security officials within the Trump administration said they have seen no evidence…

I don’t know anyone who has seen the evidence,” one senior administration official [said]…

On Sunday, after the Washington Examiner reached out about Trump insiders complaining about Powell’s legal effort with the election, the Trump campaign released a statement saying she is not a member of their team.

Insiders! Sources! Officials! In other words, not official; moles. The White House janitor is “close to President Trump”. He or she could have made one of these statements.

Even if these people are legit, there’s no particular reason why they should be privy to evidence turned up in what amounts to a private investigation. One of them sniffed,

If she really had the evidence — and she’s saying, ‘Where’s the FBI? Where’s the Justice Department?’ — she should be the first one standing at their door…

No, Justice should be pounding on her door. Even without proof, these claims amount to probable cause to start an investigation. Justice has been properly invited to the party, they’re just not on the ball.

If Sidney Powell had lost Trump’s confidence, Trump would say so. He would make it official. Now here’s the killer graf:

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Giuliani and Ellis said. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

You see what’s not there? “As of” “Due to” There’s no language in that paragraph to indicate that anything has changed. Yes, Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She always was. Her activities are private, her plaintiff is not the President, it’s the People. Here’s what Lin Wood, another guy who has publicly promised a Biblical Kraken in Georgia, had to say about it:

All interests are aligned.

Sundance, one of the hardest people on the internet to fool, yawns and says it’s all about the Benjamins.

This whole thing is a fiendish bit of manipulation on the part of Washington Examiner. They use unofficial sources to establish a narrative momentum, so the statement from Giuliani and Ellis will be read as a sign of disaffection or rupture. But nothing in the statement explicitly means that. It can just be a factual statement about who is doing what.

There’s one more reason to see this not as straight reporting but as an information op: the story broke everywhere all at once. Within minutes of the Old Blogosphere picking this story up, it was featured in more-or-less entirety on dozens of news outlets. Somewhere out there, people, is a Journolist.

“Set a thief to catch a thief.” –Ancient Wisdom

People are calling to abolish the police. How did it come to this?

It’s a truism that police do best when they are engaged with the community in a spirit not of punitive law enforcement, but of public service to maintain the public order. If that engagement breaks down, if mutual trust erodes, policing becomes less effective and more resented. In the worst cases, police departments get into a “seige mentality” where they have given up on the community and now just protect and serve the police. Everybody knows this stuff.

We pay a lot of attention to police beatings and shootings. But that’s not where the distrust arises, or at least it wouldn’t be if the media didn’t amplify these things so much. Hardly anyone has direct experience of being roughed-up or shot by cops. But many see evidence in their daily lives of police practices that erode trust.

You might think that abandoning such practices would fix the problem. It is not always so simple. One example is what they call Proactive Policing.

There is an excellent movie I can highly recommend, which toils with the difficulties of Proactive Policing. The movie is Mulholland Falls [not Mullholland Drive, the David Lynch movie]. Mulholland Falls recounts the adventures of a four-man police hit team called the Hat Squad, in Los Angeles circa 1945. These men, hulking apes in stylish suits, swan about town in a conspicuous open-topped car, as though daring anyone to mess with them.

They are experienced detectives with an extensive information network. Their brief is mob activity. This would be about when the Chicago Outfit was mobbing up Las Vegas, and Mafia were looking for new rackets anywhere they could. The Hat Squad’s mission was to make sure it didn’t happen in LA.

In the early scenes of the movie, the Hat Squad moves in on a Mafia boss who has set up shop. The film makes clear that the mobster is a very bad guy; I forget how, maybe they show him injecting a naked fourteen-year-old girl with heroin in his hotel room. Something horrible like that. The Hat Squad defeat his feeble resistance and take him into custody. He lands in the back seat of the Hat Squad cruiser, with an officer on either side and two more in the front seats.

And the gangster thinks it’s a joke. He already owns the DA. He could buy the governor, manipulate any witness or judge. The Hat Squad don’t know whom they’re dealing with. The Gangster is probably already plotting revenge just for the inconvenience.

The Hat Squad agree, it is a joke. They don’t even bother to book the Gangster on suspicion of a crime. Instead they…dispose of him, leaving his remains to be found along Mulholland Drive. It is a satisfyingly violent scene.

On the one hand, that’s effective policing. It keeps the Mob out of LA. On the other hand, it’s illegal. The film goes on to explore in far greater depth how a government agent with license to pursue a critical civilization-saving mission is doomed to commit major crimes.

In recent real news, New York mayor Bill deBlasio ordered the NYPD to disband its plainclothes proactive policing division. Law-and-order populists indignantly pointed out that this would increase crime. They were right; crime did increase. Now, Bill deBlasio is the most callous and irresponsible NYC mayor in memory. Disbanding the plainclothes unit caused harm to the community. But honest discussion must take into account the harms caused by proactive policing itself.

In the Giuliani era, NYPD famously had a “stop-and-frisk” policy. Cops would detain and frisk anyone who looked suspicious. The vast majority of persons subjected to this treatment were military-age black males. Michael Bloomberg would later say that this demographic accounted for so much crime, law enforcement should simply focus on young black males.

Stop-and-frisk was effective policing. It removed felons and weapons from the streets, and the public felt safer. But stop-and-frisk also hassled a lot of innocent people, who knew they were hassled because they were black.

Baltimore has employed aggressive proactive policing. “Knockers”, or “jump-out boys” were plainclothes cops with Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) who cruised around town like the Hat Squad, four to a car. When they saw a group of youths loitering on a street corner, they’d pile out of the car and detain everybody. They’d frisk anyone they got their hands on, and chase anyone who ran away.

They recovered a lot of weapons and nabbed some bad guys. Perhaps more importantly, this tactic gave Baltimore police access to a steady stream of informants. Whether on the street or taken in custody, many detainees would volunteer information in exchange for leniency. So the cops knew who were the bad guys in their community. They knew who were the real psychopaths, the big-time dealers, thieves, fences, pimps, etc.

Knowing that, GTTF cleaned house in Baltimore. They took some seriously bad actors off the streets. They made the public safer.

They also committed outrageous crimes, and everybody knew it.

The question was once put to a prison guard: what percentage of hard-time inmates are innocent? The guard supposed hardly anyone in there was truly innocent, but he estimated five per cent were not guilty of the specific crimes they’d been convicted of. They had committed other crimes and then were “stitched up” by proactive police. Sometimes cops want to get rid of one specific person. They know what he did, but they can’t prove it, so they stage a raid, plant the evidence, and send that person away. Maybe the community should be grateful. Either way, the community knows what these cops are up to. Word gets around. People start to fear the police.

Nobody wants criminals, and GTTF’s heavy-handed tactics might be justifiable in some context. But then there’s the corruption. In Baltimore, they say the GTTF was stealing money, drugs and weapons from crime scenes. The money they could spend. The drugs and guns they sold back to the street through their own channels. That’s not reducing crime. And if these cops were working with dealers and fences, there’s no reasonable doubt they were taking protection money. They probably were silent partners with some of the biggest criminals in town. And they didn’t hesitate to use physical intimdation and violence. For some of them, police work was a heaping helping of criminal rackets with a side dish, or maybe a garnish, of justice.

Black people understand this better than whites. Ask a black man in Baltimore what he thinks of the plainclothes cops, and he will surely know what you are talking about and have an opinion of his own. Ask a white man in Portland the same question and he won’t know what you’re talking about. White people aren’t targeted for proactive policing. We don’t experience it.

Being singled out, hassled and shaken down, you would think black people would uniformly oppose proactive policing. But when crime soars in their neighborhoods, blacks call for proactive policing. They know the downside. They also know that proactive policing is effective. So they support it when crime is high. When the policing becomes more obnoxious than the (now much reduced) crime, blacks call to eliminate proactive policing.

One commentator bemoaned this see-saw effect.

Every time there’s a spike in violence, there have been calls for proactive plainclothes policing again, and we forget about any of the kinds of reform. We’re willing to look the other way again, because we want them to get the bad guys with guns…

You can blather on about reform all you like, but there’s no way to balance this see-saw. When street crime surges it’s a desperate problem, and desperate solutions come into play. There is no reform, there is no institution as effective at fighting street crime, as proactive policing. But then proactive policing undermines public trust and moves the police toward a state of seige.

Cops are human and some of them are crooked. Even for good cops, the temptations to corruption must be well-nigh irresistible. They can sleep at night, they can justify the occasional grift, because after all they put their lives on the line for public safety.

It’s well-nigh impossible to police the police. Activists and whistleblowers occasionally expose a crooked cop, but nobody really wants to be an activist or a whistleblower. People fear the police.

There’s no solution here, only a brutal tradeoff. Maintain public order, lose the public trust. Reform to regain the public trust, lose the public order. Residents in high-crime communities would be well served to understand that they are making this tradeoff every day. It’s not a question of more or less crime per se, but whether you want the threats in your neighborhood to wear badges. It’s a question black communities will have to wrestle with, the more honestly the better, for the foreseeable future.