Author: Shawn K. Quinn

The infamous soda battle of New York City

A recent ABC News story details the by-now-well-known proposal by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. From the article:

In his latest effort to fight obesity in this era of Big Gulps and triple bacon cheeseburgers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is proposing an unprecedented ban on large servings of soda and other sugary drinks at restaurants, delis, sports arenas and movie theaters.

Drinks would be limited to 16 ounces, which is considered a small serving at many fast-food joints.

Now, let’s think about this for a minute: A 16-ounce (473 mL) limit would even ban 20-ounce (591 mL) bottles. A typical medium-size drink in most national chains is 20 ounces, sometimes up to 24 ounces (710 mL). (I say “national” because at Taco Cabana and Whataburger, 20 ounces is the small, 32 ounces (946 mL) is the medium, and 44 ounces (1.3 L) is the large. But what do you expect from Texas companies? We’d never let some Yankee tell us 16 ounces is as big as you can go.)

Once upon a time, sodas were commonly available in 16-ounce (glass) bottles. I’m not sure of the exact year of the change, but the common size for bottles now is the 20-ounce size (with some locations offering 1-liter bottles in some flavors). I know at least Coca-Cola offers aluminum bottles in 8.5 ounce (251 mL) which roughly correspond to a former glass bottle size (which I’m not sure if it’s still being made), but this is a specialty item that’s not sold very widely. The ones I bought were mainly purchased for the package design (that, and I was at a hotel and I didn’t feel like going all the way back down to the gift shop on the first floor).

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for a major soda company’s PR department to fire one right back:

“The people of New York City are much smarter than the New York City Health Department believes,” Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement. “New Yorkers expect and deserve better than this. They can make their own choices about the beverages they purchase.”

Kudos to Coca-Cola for striking back against this insanity. To be fair, they’ll feel anything that would kill sales in a city the size of New York, so it’s in their interest to say this is dumb. But I’m sure their customers feel the same way.

The article goes on to cite this nugget of dubious wisdom:

Bloomberg said people who want to guzzle soda would still be free to order more than one drink. But he said restricting servings to 16 ounces each could help curb consumption.

Now, I doubt this is actually true, and I’ll explain why. For one, most fast food restaurants allow free refills. Even some movie theatres allow free refills, which to be honest, at the prices charged is the least they can do. It’s not clear from everything I’ve read whether or not Bloomberg plans to ban those as well. If so, this is even worse than I could have imagined, and I would even say it could be considered restraint of trade if looked at in the right way.

Second, what I predict will happen is that people will start becoming less restrained about bringing in their own drinks. The sale on two 12-ounce cans or two 16-ounce fountain drinks will be lost to the convenience store with no limit. And the restaurant owners, rather than risk irking their customers and losing the sale entirely, will grow accustomed to seeing someone bring in a soda from the convenience store around the corner and just not say anything.

It’s obvious why Mayor Bloomberg is floating such an outrageous policy: in New York, the term limit for mayor is three terms, and this is his third term. So, not surprisingly, voters have little recourse should they feel he stepped over the line. However, it would not surprise me in the least if Bloomberg’s successor decides to repeal this law should it pass very early in the term.

So my response to this short-sighted proposal is this: If Mayor Bloomberg really cares about health, how about an aggressive tax against tobacco products (cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco, etc)? Make it so expensive to smoke in New York that people will have to quit due to financial reasons. That will do far more for health than any silly “you can only have a small soda” law. And if for some reason cities can’t tax cigarettes in New York State, then the law up there is even more broken than I thought.

Why asset forfeiture laws need to be repealed

It pains me to say this, and I hope nobody out here ever needs this advice. If you ever get arrested in Wisconsin, don’t post bail in cash. In fact, if you cannot post bail with a bail bondsman (Wisconsin is one of four states that don’t allow them; Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon) and most post using actual money, pay with a registered check, cashier’s check, or a credit/debit card.

This recent Huffington Post story tells the tale of Joel and Beverly Greer. The timeline of the events is as follows: Joel gets arrested for a drug charge (not specified in the story), Beverly (his wife) goes to post the $7,500 bail in cash, the cops have drug dogs sniff the money, and then use the dog alerting on the presence of narcotics on the bills as a pretext to keep the money under asset forfeiture laws–without accepting it as bail for Joel.

Something similar happened to Jesus Zamora, who was arrested on a drug possession charge and a gun charge. From the article:

“My girlfriend borrowed some money from her sister and mother and a few friends, and they came to bail me out,” Zamora says. “But then they started asking her if she had brought drug money. They took the money away and said they were going to have the drug dogs sniff it. She asked them when I would be let out, and they told her, ‘He isn’t going anywhere’.”

Most alarming, however, is this quote later in the story:

Brown County Drug Task Force Director Lt. Dave Poteat says the dog alerts were not the only factors. According to Poteat, the Greers and Zamora’s girlfriend appeared nervous when they brought in the bail money. “Their stories didn’t add up. Their ATM receipts had the wrong times on them. And they were withdrawing from several different locations. The times just didn’t correspond to their stories.”

My question for Lt. Poteat: Who would not be a little nervous holding that kind of cash? Should I have my family send in an android to post my bail (that I have programmed never to appear nervous)?

Poteat says an additional reason Zamora’s bail money was confiscated was because during calls from the jail to multiple people, he indicated that the money was drug-related. “Mr. Zamora made a number of calls in which he appeared to be trying to disguise or hide where the money was coming from,” Poteat says. “At one point, he even said to another party, ‘of course the money is dirty.'”

Now, Jesus has a reason to say that, given that numerous studies have indicated that well over a majority of the bills in circulation–a 1994 ruling from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals cited studies showing 75%, more recent studies in 2008 and 2009 have found as many as 90%–have traces of drugs on them. But, taken out of context, ‘of course the money is dirty’ is a convenient excuse to say it’s drug money.

Here’s one for Lt. Poteat: Go take $500 or more out of your bank account, and see if the drug dogs alert on it. Now, imagine you’re just an average citizen without a badge, and that’s $500 you are using to post bail for a family member, and the cops take that $500 and keep it under the pretense of it being drug money, without releasing the person you’re trying to make bail for.

But the real reason we need to get rid of asset forfeiture laws: especially in cases like this, the amount most attorneys want to take the case exceeds the amount at stake. And, at least in Wisconsin, an indigent defendant in an asset forfeiture case is not entitled to a public defender.

Basically, for law enforcement agencies, it’s a license to steal. They won’t call it that, but that’s what it is. Arrest the money, the owner has no right to a public defender; arrest the suspect, he does. (Of course, there’s nothing stopping them from arresting both.)

Attorney Steven Kessler is quoted later in the story on contested asset forfeiture cases:

“I would think that one of these cases would be the perfect opportunity for a court to impose punitive damages against the police department[.] … You need to make it clear that it would be damaging for the police to attempt this sort of thing in the future. Considering how appalling these cases are, I don’t see why a court couldn’t do that.”

Of course, the problem is that it usually doesn’t come to that. And in a lot of these smaller counties, the cops, the prosecutors, and the judges are often on a first-name basis with each other. In theory, the judges are impartial. In practice, the judge, DA, and police chief are often fishing buddies. How often do you think a judge is going to fillet his fishing buddy in open court? Honestly, I think I have better chances of winning a large lottery prize.

Cop fibs about his identity, then gets promoted

Is there something in the water in New Zealand I don’t know about? Because this is so far “out there” it’s not funny.

The Wellington, New Zealand newspaper The Dominion Post (story posted online by stuff.co.nz) reported on the antics of one officer Aaron Bateman, who apparently had no moral or ethical qualms about fibbing about his identity when stopped for a council bylaws violation (towing a person without an observer). Mr. Bateman gave the name of a friend, who was shocked to get the citation, and Mr. Bateman went as far as to call the incident a “practical joke gone wrong.”

The limit of Mr. Bateman’s punishment by the council was a (NZ)$200 fine on top of the original violation’s (NZ)$200 fine. From the article:

Rotorua area commander Inspector Bruce Horne said Mr Bateman did not commit a criminal offence, but acknowledged he had breached a council bylaw.

“The actions of the officer involved were clearly not of the high standards the police expect, and he was subject to an internal code of conduct investigation.”

Mr Horne said he was “bound by employment law”, which meant he could not reveal the outcome of the investigation.

But this is the most shocking part:

Three months after the incident, sources have revealed Mr Bateman has been promoted from constable to sergeant.

Promoted? Seriously?

I’d like to know what they were thinking when they decided to promote someone who had committed a breach of the public trust, criminal offense or not. This course of events is outrageous enough reading about it thousands of miles away. Is it any wonder we have cops thinking the badge is a “get away with it” card all over the globe, when things like this happen?

The right thing to do, at minimum, is strip Mr. Bateman of his promotion immediately and apologize to the citizens of Wellington and the Rotorua district. I have serious doubts that someone willing to lie to escape a small fine has any business carrying a badge and a gun and enforcing the law.

Companies that run prisons show their true colors and conflict of interest

A recent news story on Truthout starts off with a few sobering facts–and then goes straight to the heart of the matter. The two biggest prison companies in the US–The GEO Group (formerly known as Wackenhut) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)–are hard at work to keep people going to prison in the name of their own bottom line.

This despite the fact the US already leads the world in the number of its own citizens that are imprisoned. I’m not even going to quote the article here (but I encourage you to read it), as this isn’t even about a specific news article but about common sense.

Until reading about this, I was sort of on the fence about privatizing prisons. Now, I see what should have been obvious from the beginning: that it’s more or less the same can of worms opened up when any former government service is privatized, and the motive to make profit has destructive tendencies nearly impossible to see at first glance.

There are at least two ways I can see to solve this problem.

The more obvious one by far is for the government’s penal authorities to take back the prisons and kick GEO Group and CCA to the curb. This would certainly solve the immediate problem, but it might result in a few angry stockholders at those two companies (and any other private prison companies not mentioned in the story).

The other one would more likely keep the companies happy, but require a radical change in how they operate. Right now, the prison companies’ profits are purely a result of how many people are in prison (i.e. “full beds”). So if the prisons are full and more have to be built every year, this is great for them, but arguably, it isn’t very good for society at large. So why not pay these companies to have a role to keep people out of prison, and make it more profitable long term for them to keep people in the free world? Is there a way to do this that doesn’t amount to just giving these companies a handout? It’s a bit like oil companies reinventing themselves as energy companies.

Maybe it’s doomed to not work, and we should just get the private sector out of prison security entirely. But I figured I’d float it as an alternative.

The Red Cross actually gets it!

Finally, there appears to be hope. An international organization has spoken out against drug prohibition, and it’s up to us to raise awareness.

I first read about this in an article on thedailychronic.net. The organization is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The full statement is avaiable on the IFRC’s own website.

I’ll summarize the key points here:

  • Injectable drug use, when combined with prostitution to pay for drug habits (a consequence of prohibition is increased prices), increases the likelihood of spreading HIV, Hepatitis C, and other diseases;
  • Recreational drug use is a health issue, not a crime issue, and criminalizing drug use only serves to make the problem worse;
  • Drug prohibition simply does not work.

I’m glad the Red Cross “gets it.” How much longer until the world’s various governments, including law enforcement, figure it out?

[Edit 2023-10-10: Update long-dead links to archive.org copies.]