Don't interact with strangers' children.

The way current law is set up, being a Good Samaritan and trying to rescue someone else's kid can only get you in trouble.

Browsing the Internet, I've found a few anecdotes which support this view. I don't have any verification that they're true, so you'll just have to take my (and their) word for it.

First story: a young woman is waiting at a street corner. She sees a mother, who is not paying attention, whose child wanders out into the street in front of an oncoming bus. The young woman jumps out and pulls the child back onto the sidewalk. Her reward? The mother yelling "how dare you touch my kid!!" and our would-be hero is treated as a villain, and forced to flee the scene.

Second story: a young man is on the beach. He observes a small male child falling off his surf board a long distance from land. The young man swims out and rescues the child from drowning. On returning to shore, he's greeted by an irate mother who calls the police and wants to press charges for child molestation. Luckily, witnesses confirm the man's story and the cops let him go.

Following this second anecdote a (self-proclaimed) lawyer comments, describing how this situation could have led directly to the young man being registered as a sex offender. By the time police would have questioned the child, his head would be full of misinformation from the angry mom, causing him to tell the police what they "want to hear", possibly putting the Samaritan behind bars or at least requiring a costly and life-disruptive legal defense.

Now, I'm not blaming either the moms in this situation (they are probably freaked out and will naturally accuse the first person they see who might be responsible for their child's endangerment) or the harsh treatment of sex offenders (children should obviously be protected from predators). But it's worth noting the incentive effects that these sort of stories have on potential Good Samaritans.

My personal stance is to never interact with a stranger's child no matter what the circumstances are. I won't engage in conversation, nod, smile, or hold a door open. I was about to say that the most proactive thing I'd do if I saw a child in danger would be to record the incident on video to give to YouTube the authorities later, but even taking pictures of kids can get a guy in trouble... So I probably wouldn't even do that.

Being a Good Samaritan is really a lose-lose proposition. If I succeeded in saving the child, best-case scenario I get a pat on the back, worst-case is a sex-crimes trial that will haunt me for the rest of my life. If I fail to save the child (it still falls under the bus) then maybe I get accused of murder or assault because the angry parent saw me "push" the kid instead of trying to rescue it!

There is absolutely no upside to helping or interacting with a stranger's kid. Perversely, this fact makes being a Good Samaritan far worse: because rational people know it's a bad idea to help a kid, the people who do try to help are even more likely to be creeps or labeled as such (the selection effect).

In its efforts to prevent strangers from harming vulnerable children, society has also unintentionally deterred strangers from assisting vulnerable children. It's hard to say which impact is more important, but given the relative magnitudes (there are lots more healthy, well-intentioned people out there than sex offenders) it's very possible the overall effect has been negative for child safety.

One small victory for Privacy vs. GPS Trackers

The Supreme Court ruled today that a warrant is required for police to attach a GPS tracking device to a suspect's car. Previously, officers could use GPS to track a car's movements for suspicious activity, and then substantiate criminal charges using those findings.

Prosecutors justified this practice by saying it was no different from tailing or following a suspect. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that

The Government’s attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.

It's a welcome victory for privacy rights advocates. After the controversial passage of the NDAA on Dec. 31, civil libertarians must have been hoping for some good news.

How much tangible impact will this decision have on criminal investigations? Probably a very small one. Police departments will have to pay more overtime for old-fashioned surveillance on suspects, instead of using a fancy GPS unit.

Alternately, wireless technology and smart-phones have provided even better ways for law enforcement to establish location. As the BBC article on this case concludes,

...the ruling is unlikely to have an impact on the use by law enforcement agencies of another surveillance method, mobile phone tracking software.

 Police, and executive agencies with support of the Obama Administration, have had no trouble requesting location data from iPhone or iPad services to aid in criminal prosecution. I'm no legal expert, but this Supreme Court decision might establish precedent for that practice to be challenged in court as well.

One subsidy I can get behind: Public Defenders

Interpreted at the most literal (or cynical) level, public defenders can seen as a subsidy for criminals because society pays for their legal fees. Of course, not everyone who is arrested is guilty of a crime, but if police are doing their job correctly, most people who are arrested will be guilty of something.

To quote a former police officer: "I don't want to put anyone that's innocent in jail. But, I try not to bring anyone into the interview room that's innocent."

Free legal counsel reduces the cost of being arrested, increasing the net "payoff" to a life of crime. In an anarcho-capitalist system (which some of my classmates at GMU think would be just swell) there'd be no public defenders, the accused would pay the cost of legal representation, and in theory this would provide an additional deterrent to criminal activity.

That's all very well and good, as far as it goes. Ideally, the criminal justice system should take criminals off the streets, and also deter potential criminals with the threat of punishment.

But, there's also a very serious negative externality to the justice system when it puts innocent people in jail. This takes several forms: harm to the person imprisoned and their family and friends, but also society as a whole. People in jail become burdens on the taxpayer and produce nothing (except maybe license plates). The justice system loses credibility when it convicts the innocent. Finally, for each person wrongfully imprisoned there is a criminal walking the streets with impunity, out committing more crimes.

Economists are often skeptical of externality justifications for government subsidies. But, I'd submit that the harm of imprisoning innocent people is so great, that money spent on public defenders is well worth it. Even if career criminals benefit slightly as well, that's a tradeoff worth making (80% of people in jail confess anyway, according to the police officer quoted above, so the harm of that cross-subsidy is pretty minimal in my view).

A last tidbit for thought: being convicted in a criminal trial requires evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" which amounts to 98% or 99% certainty from a jury. There are a little over 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. currently. If 99% certainty means being wrong 1% of the time, that's 20,000 people sitting in jail for crimes they didn't commit, at the minimum. Combined with the over-confidence effect (people are lousy at estimating confidence intervals around what they are certain of) it's likely to be much more. A tragic situation, and one which might be made even worse without access to public defenders.

How to judge campus safety?

A few days ago I was emailed a pdf document: the 2011 Annual Security Report for George Mason University. As mandated by the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (yeah I hadn't heard of it before either) it provides a breakdown of all criminal activity which occurred on campus, by year, and with special columns for "Hate Crimes." The picture I attached has the numbers for Fairfax. This is the most interesting part of the document to me because it contains some raw figures on different offenses committed in the campus I attend. Statistics for the other George Mason campuses (Arlington, Prince William, Loudoun, etc.) are also available but are a lot less edifying, because the columns have just a bunch of zeroes. Coincidentally, Fairfax also happens to be the only campus with attached undergraduate housing -- make of it what you will.

The most exciting table I've seen since breakfast.

This report is obviously intended to increase public awareness about crime rates on campus, allowing potential students and their parents to make an informed decision when comparing different universities. What I wonder is, how does someone look at this report and get any sense of the probability that they themselves will be victimized? This blog post is a rough attempt at answering that question.

Some useful figures to get started with:

• Roughly 30,000 students attend GMU, 7,000 of them on living on campus.
• From the BJS, around 35% of property crimes and 45% of violent crimes are reported to the police.

How to live rent-free the rest of your life. OR, Five Big Mistakes Criminals Make During Police Interrogations.

 "...the technique of violence was first developed in 2 million B.C. by the australopithecines and tried by forthwith primates, who had no brains to speak of, but nonetheless invented the tomahawk and used it on each other. This practice led to the enlargement of the brain, another useful weapon. Yes, murder was invented even before man learned to think. Now, of course, man has become known as the 'thinking animal.'"
- spoken during the credits of Death Race 2000 (1975).

One of the reasons I love reality television is that it can make you feel like an expert in fields you have no personal knowledge or training in whatsoever. From watching many episodes of A&E's crime show, "The First 48" I feel pseudo-enlightened about the workings of the criminal justice system, and I'm here to share that almost-wisdom with you.

Laws against 'texting and driving' haven't made us any safer.

We've all seen it: alarming, dangerous driving behavior perpetrated while under the influence of cell phones. In response to this threat, many locales (including my home state of Washington) enacted bans on texting-while-driving. Has the menace of distracted drivers been curbed?

According to a USA Today article, traffic accidents have actually gone up in areas where anti-phone laws were enacted. To quote the most interesting part:

"Texting bans haven't reduced crashes at all," says Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, whose research arm studied the effectiveness of the laws.

Private funding for prison rehabilitation -- latest British innovation.

Say what you will about eccentricities in the United Kingdom's political structure, they aren't afraid to try some new things. Particularly, in the area of penal reform.The U.K. prison system is struggling with extremely high recidivism rates; according to the BBC "60% of criminals who serve short sentences reoffend within a year of leaving prison."

So what's the plan? Much like purchasing a bond, investors can put money into the rehabilitation program (currently limited to male inmates with sentences less than one year). If reoffenses among the subject group drop by a specified amount, the investors receive dividend payments.

Quoting the BBC: