Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[9]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[24]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[9]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-07 19:18:11.476
	1	+2016-11-07 19:18:11.0

Caselist.CitesClass[24]

Cites

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	1	+Increased litigation against police decimates municipal budgets
	2	+Elinson and Frosch 15 Zusha Elinson and Dan Frosch, Cost of Police-Misconduct Cases Soars in Big U.S. Cities, WSJ, 7-15-2015, Accessible Online at http://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-of-police-misconduct-cases-soars-in-big-u-s-cities-1437013834 SW 11-1-2016
	3	+For most of the police departments surveyed by the Journal, the costliest claims were allegations of civil-rights violations and other misconduct, followed by payouts on car collisions involving the police. Misconduct cases were the costliest for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas and Baltimore. Car-crash cases were the most expensive for Houston, Phoenix and Miami-Dade, a county police department.¶ Video effect¶ The data don’t indicate whether cities are settling such claims more quickly, but some recent cases suggest that might be happening, especially in cases involving video.¶ In April, less than two weeks after a news helicopter captured video of sheriff’s deputies in San Bernardino County, Calif., kicking and beating Francis Pusok , the county reached a $650,000 settlement with him. Mr. Pusok had been trying to escape from the deputies on a horse he allegedly stole. He hadn’t filed a lawsuit at the time of the settlement and still faces charges.¶ “They wanted this to go away fast,” says Sharon Brunner, a lawyer for Mr. Pusok, who is fighting the charges. A spokesman for the county said the quick payout was made to avoid costly litigation.¶ Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by Chicago police last October after officers responded to reports of a man breaking into vehicles. A police account contained in the coroner’s report said the 17-year-old had lunged at the officers with a knife. Lawyers for his family say they obtained a video from a police dashboard camera that shows an officer shooting the teen 16 times as he walked away from the officer. In April, before his family filed a lawsuit, the city agreed to a $5 million settlement.¶ Michael Robbins, one of the family’s lawyers, says the video was “the factor” behind the city’s willingness to settle quickly, along with “what’s going on in the nation right now.”¶ Chicago Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, who heads the city’s law department, characterized the $5 million payout as “comparable to other settlements in fatal shootings in which the evidence in support of liability weighed strongly in favor of the decedent.”¶ A lawyer for the officer who shot Mr. McDonald said his client was “protecting himself, his partners and others.”¶ Dallas paid out $3.4 million in misconduct cases in 2014, compared with just $200,550 in 2010. Chris Bowers, a lawyer for the city, said Dallas had moved more quickly to settle cases over the past two years “if we believed at the end of the day that the city will be liable.”¶ Dallas civil-rights lawyer Don Tittle says the increased availability of camera footage and shifting attitudes toward police are affecting cases.¶ “Up until recently, when it came to civil lawsuits, there were two groups that had a distinct advantage, where you had to knock them out to win. And that was doctors and cops,” he says. “But with the advent of video, and the changing perception of society, I don’t think police are held in the same regard.”¶ Last year, Mr. Tittle negotiated a $1.1 million settlement from the city in a case brought by Ronald Bernard Jones, who was arrested in 2009 on aggravated-assault charges after a confrontation with police officers. According to the lawsuit, camera footage didn’t back up police claims that Mr. Jones had attacked officers after they stopped him. Mr. Jones alleged he was beaten and falsely arrested. Charges against Mr. Jones eventually were dropped.¶ Mr. Bowers, the city lawyer, said the city council decided the settlement was in Dallas’s best interest. Neither the city nor the officers admitted liability.¶ Not all the departments surveyed showed an increase in misconduct payouts. Phoenix, Los Angeles and Baltimore, for example, showed declines. But insurers and lawyers who defend police say current scrutiny of law enforcement is broadly affecting the resolution of lawsuits. ¶ After a news helicopter in April took video of sheriff’s deputies in San Bernardino County, Calif., beating Francis Pusok, who had tried to escape on horseback, the county reached a $650,000 settlement with him. ¶ “We’re there to protect our members,” says Joanne Rennie, general manager of Public Agency Risk Sharing Authority of California, a risk-sharing pool. “However, when there is such a level of attention to the—I’m hoping few and far between—bad actors, it makes it more difficult to pull a jury pool that’s willing to consider just the facts and not just the dramatic aspects.”¶ Robert Shannon, a former city lawyer who defended police in Long Beach, Calif., and Los Angeles, says that in the 1970s there was a public presumption “that the police officer was correct in what he was doing.” Now, he says, “things have changed substantially.” Cases like the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Mr. Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., he says, could influence juries.¶ Taxpayers foot the bill for settlements one way or another. Cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia are self-insured, meaning any payouts come out of city funds. Others have insurance that kicks in at a certain payment level in each case. Smaller municipalities often pool risk with others, but the cost of premiums can increase after incidents occur, much like car insurance. It is almost unheard of that officers pay out of their own pockets, according to a 2014 study on police liability by Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor.¶ Old cases¶ Cities are cutting more checks to people who were wrongfully imprisoned years ago because of police misconduct. As more wrongful convictions come to light, jury verdicts have risen, with some now exceeding $2 million a year behind bars.¶ New York City agreed last year to pay $41 million to five black and Hispanic men imprisoned for the 1989 beating and rape of a jogger in Central Park, then freed after another man confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his story. City lawyers under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg had fought a lawsuit brought by the five men, which alleged that detectives coerced confessions from them as teens. Under current Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city agreed to a settlement equal to about $1 million for each year each man spent behind bars.¶ New York City Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter said the settlement “should not be construed as an acknowledgment that the convictions of these five plaintiffs were the result of law-enforcement misconduct.”¶ Chicago has been trying to resolve cases stemming from allegations that detectives, led by former commander Jon Burge, tortured black and Hispanic suspects with implements like electric cattle prods, coercing confessions from them and putting them behind bars from the 1970s to early 1990s for crimes they didn’t commit. Those cases have cost the city more than $60 million in payouts. In May, Chicago launched a $5.5 million reparations fund for some of the victims.¶ A Chicago police spokesman called Mr. Burge’s actions a “disgrace.” Mr. Burge was convicted of federal perjury and obstruction charges in 2010. Mr. Burge, who has been released from prison, declined to comment.¶ In New York, settlements and judgments in misconduct cases hit $165 million in fiscal 2014, up from $93.8 million in 2010. Both New York and Los Angeles, which paid out $10.7 million on such cases last year, now are tracking claims more closely and trying new approaches to risk management.¶ New York City’s government-run hospitals were for years the city’s leading source of liability payouts, primarily because of medical-malpractice settlements. But beginning in the 2010 fiscal year, the police department surpassed the city hospitals in total liability payouts.¶ The trend caught the attention of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who launched a program to track legal claims called ClaimStat. “Instead of accepting rising claims and settlements as the cost of doing business,” Mr. Stringer says, the city can use the data to identify underlying problems and make changes to prevent future suits.¶ The number of new claims filed against New York City police, including allegations of police misconduct and damage from car crashes, rose 71 between 2004 and 2013, according to the comptroller.¶ “While the filing of a lawsuit does not prove any misconduct on the part of an officer, the department is aware of the increasing number of actions filed against the NYPD,” a spokeswoman said, adding that the department is “addressing these very real concerns” with the creation of a risk-management bureau and police litigation unit.¶ The settlement with Mr. Garner’s estate came nearly a year after his confrontation with officers who accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes—a scene captured in a widely viewed video. Mr. Stringer said the settlement “acknowledges the tragic nature of Mr. Garner’s death while balancing my office’s fiscal responsibility to the city.”¶ The impact on smaller cities can be more dramatic. According to Ms. Schwartz’s study, which tabulated civil-rights payouts in 44 large police and sheriff departments from 2006 through 2011, Albuquerque paid out the most per officer—more than $2,000 a year over that time.¶ The city of about 550,000 has had a high number of fatal police shootings and has spent more than $25 million on civil-rights and police-misconduct settlements over the past five years, with annual payouts nearly quadrupling over that period. Earlier this month, Albuquerque officials reached a $5 million settlement with the family of James Boyd, a mentally unstable homeless man who was shot by police in 2014 in an incident captured on video.¶ Last October, the city agreed to change how its officers use force in a settlement it reached with the Justice Department, which said it found a widespread pattern of excessive and sometimes lethal force by officers.¶ Albuquerque officials say the city has been bracing for more settlements and has had to allocate funding it could have spent on raises for employees, parks and other municipal projects to cover the payouts in police cases.¶ “Any time you are putting more money into a risk-management fund, you are taking away money from somewhere else,” said city councilor Ken Sanchez. “Having to put more money into that fund to pay for the lawsuits has really been challenging.”
	4	+
	5	+Turns case—excessive policing
	6	+Kopf 16 Dan Kopf, data journalist. The Fining of Black America, Priceonomics, 6-24-2016, Accessible Online at https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/ SW 11-1-2016
	7	+In March 2010, years before Ferguson, Missouri, became known for sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, the city’s Finance Director contacted the Chief of Police with a solution to the city’s budget problems. ¶ The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines — money paid for infractions like traffic violations and missing court appointments. He warned that the city would be in financial trouble “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year.” “Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall,” he wrote, “it’s not an insignificant issue.”¶ The Finance Director’s request surfaced as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The investigation was instigated by the civil unrest that followed the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown in August 2014. Its goal was to better understand why the citizens of Ferguson felt so at odds with the police department chartered to protect them.¶ The Justice Department concluded that the mistrust between the police and the community primarily resulted from excessive fining. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report read. The use of fines to fund the government undermined “law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.” ¶ Ferguson has a population of just over 20,000 that is 67 African American, and it raised over $2 million from fines and fees in 2012. This accounted for around 13 of all government revenue, and a disproportionate amount of this money came from the African American population.¶ Is Ferguson an anomaly?¶ Using the U.S. Census’s Survey of Local and State Finances, we investigated the proportion of revenues that cities typically receive from fines, as well as the characteristics of cities that rely on fines the most. What are these cities like? Are they rich or poor? In certain parts of the country? Heavily Black or White?¶ We found one demographic that was most characteristic of cities that levy large amounts of fines on their citizens: a large African American population. Among the fifty cities with the highest proportion of revenues from fines, the median size of the African American population—on a percentage basis—is more than five times greater than the national median.¶ Surprisingly, we found that income had very little connection to cities’ reliance on fines as a revenue source. Municipalities that are overwhelming White and non-Hispanic do not exhibit as much excessive fining, even if they are poor.¶ Our analysis indicates that the use of fines as a source of revenue is not a socioeconomic problem, but a racial one. The cities most likely to exploit residents for fine revenue are those with the most African Americans.
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	9	+City budgets key to the national economy.
	10	+Morath 10/26 Eric; covers the economy from The Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau; 10/26/2016; “Slowdown in State, Local Investment Dents U.S. Economy”; http://www.wsj.com/articles/slowdown-in-state-local-investment-dents-u-s-economy-1477495758; JLB (11/5/16)
	11	+A sharp pullback in spending by cities and states on infrastructure—from highways to sewage systems to police stations—is weighing on U.S. economic growth.¶ Such government austerity is unusual in the eighth year of an economic expansion, and it is acting as a headwind just as the worst effects of the energy-industry bust, a strong dollar and inventory drawdown are fading.¶ State and local governments spent an annualized $248.47 billion on construction in August—the least since March 2014 and down nearly 11 from its recent peak in mid-2015.¶ The decline depressed gross domestic product growth this spring and was on track to weigh on growth again in the third quarter.¶ “We’re seeing anemic government revenue growth and consistent austerity-oriented budgets,” said Gabe Petek, managing director for state ratings at SandP Global Ratings. States are trimming investments in infrastructure and higher education, “areas of the budget helpful for generating economic growth going forward,” he said.¶ In Kansas, officials this spring delayed 24 road-construction projects to help balance the state budget. The more than $500 million in work had been slated to start between this year and the end of 2018, including expanding U.S. 50 into a four-lane expressway near Dodge City.¶ Instead, the state will spend money to maintain existing roads. “We want to make sure the roadways we currently have are in the best condition as possible,” said Joel Skelley, director of policy at the Kansas Department of Transportation. Total state and local government spending last year accounted for roughly 11 of U.S. economic output, four times as large as federal nondefense spending, and swings in public investment can have outsize effects on the growth rate. The Commerce Department will release its first estimate for third-quarter GDP on Friday.¶ ENLARGE¶ Many state governments have yet to fully recover from the recession and associated steep declines in tax revenue. In late 2015, inflation-adjusted tax revenue was lower in 21 states compared with the peak before or during the recession, according to Pew Charitable Trusts.¶ The situation doesn’t seem to be improving. Preliminary data indicate that state tax revenue fell 2.1 in the second quarter from a year earlier after advancing just 1.6 in the first quarter, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. The recent drop reflected mixed stock-market returns and slowing growth in sales-tax collection and paycheck withholding.¶ Revenue declines restrain the ability of state and local governments to borrow money for capital projects. Such a situation prompted Connecticut to cancel or delay selling about $1 billion in bonds earlier this year. By law, the state has a debt limit tied to tax collections, and lawmakers must make cuts when the limit can’t be raised.¶ As a result of the lost funding, the University of Connecticut delayed a $150 million renovation of its Gant Science Complex by several months and postponed plans for a $10 million overhaul of the roof at Gampel Pavilion, home of the national-champion Husky basketball teams. Instead, the university will fix leaks.¶ “We’re trying to balance priorities,” said Scott Jordan, the university’s chief financial officer. The cuts are “forcing us to take a look at what things support our core mission and Connecticut’s economy,” he said.¶ At the same time tax revenue is falling, costs for Medicaid, public-employee health care and pension obligations are rising, leaving many states with little discretion to deploy tax dollars elsewhere.
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	13	+Economic collapse causes war.
	14	+Harris and Burrows 9 Mathew, PhD European History @ Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer is a member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf Increased Potential for Global Conflict
	15	+Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups_inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks_and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-11-07 19:18:15.155

Judge

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	1	+Tim Alderete, Yash Kamath, Adam Torson

Opponent

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	1	+Harvard-Westlake SK

ParentRound

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	1	+9

Round

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	1	+Octas

Team

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	1	+Palos Verdes Le Barillec Neg

Title

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	1	+NOVDEC - Departments DA

Tournament

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	1	+Damus