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January 09, 2009

Yum yum, secret lists

Ah, the Oregonian editorial board certainly knows what buttons to press....

The Portland Police Bureau has a secret weapon called The List, containing 373 names. It's potentially dangerous, powerful -- and also extremely effective...

The very idea of a secret list alarms some civil libertarians, of course, and you can see why. This week, in fact, the American Civil Liberties Union has been challenging the constitutionality of the list in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Critics say the list shouldn't be secret, that it should reflect only conviction data (not arrests) and that the district attorney's office shouldn't use the list as it does now to intensify penalties. And the critics may be right....

But it also may be that the civil libertarians are working off an old model, in which a secret list of names inevitably breeds abuses. The reality is that this list epitomizes community policing. It's used to connect frequent offenders to services, and help them turn their lives around...

Way to take a bold stance there, Oregonian.

This is the same, disjointed editorial board that endorsed Barack Obama's promising wave of hope and change... and then turned right around and said we needed to hold the course with Gordon Smith in the U.S. Senate race.

In an era of awful intelligence, is it just me or is our paper bending over backwards to defend this program? Remember, this is the era where abuses weren't just "inevitably bred" - they were engineered quick and dirty, and on a widespread scale.

Posted by Ben at January 9, 2009 09:02 AM