We begin with
Eugene Robinson running the numbers on police use of force:
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police — defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.
By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police shootings average about a dozen a year.
The Washington Post:
Mr. Obama seeks to remedy that by requiring civilian input and by compiling more information about how police use the equipment they obtain. Those changes, to be embodied in an executive order, are welcome. He balked at more substantial reforms, however, such as bipartisan proposals on Capitol Hill to limit military equipment transfers. It’s going to be up to Congress to rein in the flow of military equipment, in the face of what is already strong lobbying from police unions and others. The president did propose $263 million in funding for police training and community policing, the most important aspect of which was $75 million for body cameras for officers. That could be enough to put a video recording device on 50,000 police officers — or less than 10 percent of the total working in cities and suburbs.
Cameras could bring more transparency to police work, deterring violence by both officers and civilians and rendering more accurate any investigations of violence that does occur.
The Denver Post:
It's disappointing that the report doesn't simply call for a ban on the transfer of certain types of military equipment. Instead, it calls for additional oversight and says that any equipment transferred to police should have "a legitimate civilian law enforcement purpose."
But of course. That goes without saying. So what "civilian" purpose does an MRAP — a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle — have?
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
On the issue of immigration,
Peter Shane explains why the president's order respects the rule of law:
The President’s actions respect, even advance, the rule of law in at least five ways. First, they are firmly rooted in statutory authority. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 vests DHS with responsibility for “[e]stablishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” The Immigration and Naturalization Act likewise gives the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security broad power to regulate as they “deem necessary” to carry out the immigration laws. The new DHS policy is consistent with repeated congressional directives, noted in a 2013 Congressional Research Service report, to “give priority to the removal of ‘criminal aliens.’”
Second, the President has advanced no innovative claim of inherent executive authority to support the DHS programs. ...
The New York Times editorial board examines the issue of online threats:
Threats can terrify people and disrupt lives, but in a country devoted to broad speech protections, it is not too much to require the government to prove that a speaker intended to make a threat before it can put him behind bars.
John Cassidy explains why OPEC's war on fracking is good news "for the rest of us":
As in any price war, the oil cartel’s ultimate goal is to stabilize prices at a higher level. But, if it is serious about driving marginal North American shale producers out of business, OPEC will have to keep prices low for a long time. To a large extent, the investments that have already been made in these fields are sunk costs. But, rather than writing them off and shutting up shop, producers will surely try to ride out the price war, extracting what they can and servicing their debts as best they can.
A few months of low prices probably wouldn’t have much impact on the fracking industry. It could well take several years for production to decline sharply. But can OPEC live with oil prices under seventy-five dollars a barrel until 2017 or 2018, which is the scenario that the futures markets have been pricing in over the past few days?
John Nichols calls for a retail workers' bill of rights:
Now that the Thanksgiving holiday is done, the discussion about forcing people to work on holidays should be ramping up—not dying down. There is no question that thousands of retail workers were placed in untenable and abusive circumstances by retailers and restaurants that opened on Thanksgiving or at absurdly early hours on “Black Friday.” But the untenable and abusive circumstances will continue throughout December, a month of multiple religious and community holidays and immense pressure by corporate retailers on their employees.
So, instead of simply celebrating the firms that did treat their workers well or condemning the firms that did not, it is time to turn up the volume on demands for workplace standards—and to recognize them as essential complements to demands for living-wage pay. “Erratic, constantly changing schedules aren’t just a nightmare for workers, they’re bad for business,” says national Jobs With Justice Executive Director Sarita Gupta, who argues that there is a crying need to “adopt 21st-century policies that keep up with the changing nature of today’s workplace.”
Finally,
Joshua Keating looks at how the U.S. is now beating Europe as a destination for immigrants:
Opponents of immigration in Europe may applaud this, but it should be a cause for long-term concern in a continent with both high levels of out-migration and continuously falling birthrates. [...] Not that America’s immigration debated has been particularly rational or enlightened over the past few years, but for now, relative economic strength seems to be making America the more attractive destination for foreigners. It would be nice if American politicians thought of that as something to be proud of.