Efforts to try to illuminate legal issues and problems that result in catastrophe often feel a lot like pissing into the wind.  Few who aren’t engaged in the effort get it. Many attribute it to bizarre and ridiculous conspiracies or simplistic hatred of perceived enemies easily cured by resort to a firm and resolute insistence on adherence to constitutional rights, or a well-aimed bullet.

Others, often smart people who don’t realize they’re behaving like dilettantes, come up with half-baked ideas that not only fail to offer anything remotely realistic, but tend to make people stupider by reflecting no grasp of the problem.

One wag, Joseph Steinberg, wrote at Forbes “[p]roperly crafted laws could criminalize” revenge porn.  He’s not a lawyer, but a self-proclaimed “cybersecurity  expert.” Naturally, other non-lawyers seized upon this to prove that it can happen. All we need are “properly crafted laws.” To a non-lawyer, this seems so very simple. Solutions are easy to the clueless.

But such mindless drivel is of little consequences compared to cops killing people for the crime of being deaf, complying with commands too enthusiastically or wearing earbuds when the police demand you hear them.  Yet, these three examples were held up as the problem by history professor David Perry for the purpose of proffering his solution.

I’ve been working, though, on ways of re-describing the strategic problems with police procedure as it feeds the cult of compliance. Police operate on a presuming non-compliance basis, so as soon as they get any evidence to confirm that presumption, they too often strike.

What would “presume compliance” policing look like? How dangerous would it be? I keep thinking that to roll back the proto-police state, we have to ask police to assume more risk, and that’s going to be a very hard argument to make.

He proposes a paradigm shift by police from the presumption of non-compliance, meaning that the police expect non-compliance and, upon any sign that confirms their expectation, act upon it.

Being deaf in front of the cops is dangerous. That’s long been clear. But just as we all move in and sometimes out of different stages of disability, putting on earbuds or listening to a phone call also renders you less likely to process verbal commands, functioning like hearing loss in terms of creating a vulnerability to a trigger-happy law enforcement officer.

The only solution that I can see is to change the strategic approach on a fundamental level to “presume compliance.”

No, you didn’t miss anything. Nor did I.  He asks some hard questions up top, but hits bottom without any answers.  As long as nobody expects anything deeper than a puddle, here’s my solutions:

Police should stop arresting innocent people and lying about them.

Police should stop shooting people who pose no actual threat of harm to anyone.

Police should scrupulously honor constitutional rights.

Problem solved?  Not quite. Yet this is the level of discourse being fed by academics and the big time online media outlets.

What this raises is a secondary problem, aside from the foundational problem of police doing what police do, courts doing what courts do, etc.  No matter how much effort is being put into addressing enormously serious problems by knowledgeable people, whether lawyers or not, it is dwarfed by the plethora of shallow, ignorant, clueless commentary atop a big soap box.

Have you read Vox, Salon, Slate, Forbes lately.  Granted, their reason for publishing is to get clicks for advertising, and they couldn’t give a damn whether their content is worthwhile or sheer crap.  The business of business is business, and make no mistake, these are businesses.

Most of my time this morning was spent catching up on weekend reading, and it was beyond painful.  Many of the posts I read concerned very serious matters, where very real people suffered very real harm.  And the dilettantes reduced these stories to absurdities.

They will get many times the eyeballs that a post like Tim Cushing’s at Techdirt will get, even though Tim’s is an extraordinary story that involves so many pervasive issues of misconduct that afflict the criminal justice system.  But then, Tim doesn’t offer a platitude or fortune cookie solution.

Perhaps the most important question we ask ourselves daily is what it will take for ordinary people to understand the nature and pervasiveness of this cancer within our system.  We know they don’t care until it touches them.  We know it’s easier to sleep at night pretending that bad things don’t happen to good people.

But for all the posts like Tim’s, there are posts at these big time online media outlets telling us that there are easy answers. All we need are “properly crafted laws” and “presumed compliance” and everything will be fine.  Reading this, ordinary people feel comforted and can then go about their daily lives, safe with the knowledge that there is nothing happening here that can’t be easily fixed.

Then another deaf person gets killed for standing there, being all deaf, and we all feel really bad about it. We ponder momentarily if we should do something, but instead order a Mocha Frappuccino and get on with our day, because we know it can be easily fixed. Forbes says so.