President Obama has called on the nation to accept the decision of the Ferguson grand jury. But looking forward, across much of this country, our system for dealing with police use of deadly force is broken. Police shoot and kill civilians at a rate unheard of in many other advanced nations, and even after incidents where there are indications that excessive force was used, police across many parts of the country seldom face trial or even dismissal from the force. A system for review of police misconduct must take care to vindicate and protect the innocent cop, but it also needs to deliver a credible promise of justice to the communities being policed. As a front-line means of regulating lethal force, grand juries — which are secret, remote from the truth-finding of an adversary process, and dependent on prosecutors’ guidance — do not command broad public confidence. We see that in Ferguson today.

The grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson is not surprising because police officers are rarely prosecuted for on-duty shootings. And in the rare instances in which criminal charges are ever brought against police, juries are reluctant to hold them accountable with a felony criminal charge. A report on Cato’s Police Misconduct web site found a conviction rate of only 33% — roughly half the percentage in non-police, civilian prosecutions. It remains to be seen whether Wilson will be held accountable in some other way. We must remember that just because a jury has declined to bring criminal charges does not automatically mean that Wilson should return to duty. Police commanders may conclude, given all the surrounding circumstances, that he may not be right for police work. Certainly his involvement in Brown’s death will create problems for prosecutors who will have to rely on his future work. Wilson’s testimony in future trials could be very problematic.

With respect to the unrest in Ferguson, there seems to be a reluctance to acknowledge the crimes that are being committed by thugs who are taking advantage of the situation. It seems wildly inaccurate to say that protesters have started fires and are looting stores, for instance. The people doing that are criminal troublemakers, not “protesters.”

The violence in Ferguson is inexcusable. But it should not be seen as primarily a reaction to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson. Rather, it should be seen as a reaction to years of racially charged policing and a discriminatory justice. Focusing on Officer Wilson’s culpability detracts from the bigger, nation-wide story: That every month there are innumerable police abuses throughout the country that go unnoticed and unreported, and, even if they are reported, the accused officers will likely never be disciplined, much less charged with a crime. Unfortunately, many of these abuses are disproportionately felt by people of color. Abuses can be small and nearly impossible to discover, such as stopping a car full of black men without probable cause, or they can be large and public, such as unjustifiably gunning down an unarmed black teenager. Sometimes the police action may be justified, and sometimes it may not, but the systems in place for determining culpability are egregiously biased in favor of police officers. Add to this an over-militarized police force that uses surplus military gear to violently break into homes 100 times per day, usually to only execute search warrants, and you have a recipe for disaster and an urgent need for reform. We should take advantage of this time of heightened awareness to reform a justice system that has too much power and too little accountability. Hopefully the violence in the street will not overshadow the legitimate protests, but I fear it may. 

The World Trade Organization (WTO) seems on the verge of approving an agreement with India to allow the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) to move forward. The TFA is to be applauded. It will make a useful contribution toward helping goods move across borders more efficiently, which will tend to increase trade and promote economic growth.

The problem is not with the TFA, but rather with the high price that the global community seems ready to pay for it. India has asked that it be allowed to exceed the level of domestic agricultural subsidies to which it agreed twenty years ago in the Uruguay Round negotiations. For the first time in history, those talks led to limits on the ability of countries to use trade distorting agricultural supports. Those subsidies had been rampant, often leading to surplus production that depressed crop prices in global markets. Farmers who were being subsidized generally were happy enough with that arrangement, but it was a very different story for unprotected farmers in other countries. Many of the world’s farmers are quite poor to start with. Government-driven decreases in commodity prices make them even poorer.

A teachable moment is slipping away because no WTO member has been willing to stand up and explain what’s going on. India sanctimoniously declares that it needs to promote food security through use of a robust public stockholding program, and would like the world to believe that existing WTO rules prohibit them from doing so. This is simply not correct. The Uruguay Round includes specific provisions detailing how public stockholding may be used for food security purposes. A great deal of time, effort and tough negotiating went into developing those provisions. There is no limit on government expenditures to provide food – including free or reduced-price food – to low-income people. However, there is a clear requirement that purchases of commodities for public stocks must be made at open-market prices. It is not allowable to purchase commodities at above-market prices in order to provide a subsidy to farmers. 

India’s public stockholding program does exactly that – purchase commodities from farmers at prices set well above the market. Those high purchase prices provide incentives for farmers to increase production of subsidized crops. Not surprisingly, this has led to surpluses of rice, sugar and wheat that are diverted to export markets. In 2013 India was the world’s largest exporter of rice, the fifth largest exporter of sugar, and the ninth largest exporter of wheat. Not bad for a country that thinks it needs even higher levels of distorting subsidies to promote its food security. The fact that India ranks second in the world in terms of arable acreage underscores the potential for its subsidies to do damage to global markets.

It would not be difficult for India to bring its agricultural support regime into harmony with WTO requirements. It would start by purchasing its food stocks at market prices. This would save billions of dollars that now are being spent on above-market purchases. Those savings could be devoted to some of the many policy measures that were explicitly agreed in the Uruguay Round to be considered non-distorting. Those include providing “decoupled” income support payments (not linked to current production or price of a crop) directly to farmers. They also include policy options designed to spur development in underprivileged rural communities, such as: agricultural research, pest and disease control, extension advisory services, marketing services, infrastructure services (roads, electricity, irrigation, etc.), and insurance programs.

The argument is sometimes raised that developed countries, including the United States, also utilize distorting agricultural subsidies, so why criticize India? Other countries have made efforts to bring their farm support programs into conformity with WTO commitments; those support regimes create fewer distortions now than in the past, but further liberalization is badly needed. A key goal of the still-unfinished Doha negotiations was to continue to reduce or eliminate distorting agricultural subsidies. The world of agriculture still is beset by an abundance of within-the-rules subsidies. However, expanding the rules to permit even more subsidies does nothing to help the situation. Granting India’s request would shift the reform process into reverse.

It is to be hoped that WTO members will remember the origins of the organization, which was created to pursue open markets and freer trade. Policy backsliding would be tantamount to abandoning the vision of the WTO’s founders. There seems little doubt that millions of poor farmers would bear the costs of a decision that leads to more-highly-distorted global agricultural markets.

In their effort to provide the public with information about controversial yet important world events, journalists face constant intimidation. Whether it takes an extreme form—such as beheading or death threats—or a less violent one—like government censorship or enforced political correctness—it nonetheless constricts their ability to convey truthful information about key issues.

No one knows this better than Flemming Rose.

In 2006, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, stoking the fires of a worldwide debate about what limits—if any—should constrain freedom of speech in the 21st century.

Rose, then the paper’s culture editor, defended the decision to print the drawings, quickly becoming the target of death threats and more, all of which he recounts in his new book, published by the Cato Institute.

In The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, Rose provides a personal account of an event that has shaped the global debate about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy and how to coexist in a world that is increasingly multicultural, multireligious, and multiethnic. Rose writes about the people and experiences that have influenced his understanding of the crisis—including meetings with dissidents from the former Soviet Union and ex-Muslims living in Europe—and takes a hard look at the slippery slope of attempts to limit free speech.

Rose’s message clearly resonates with lovers of liberty around the world. A special one-on-one conversation between Rose and Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution, hosted at the Cato Institute in mid-November, saw over 100 in-person attendees with another 53 people tuning in online.

That impressive showing, however, was far outpaced by the mass response to Cato’s very first Reddit AMA, featuring Rose, which has been viewed well over 200,000 times since it was first published on November 13th, and continues to draw thousands of Reddit viewers every hour, almost two weeks later.

Rose’s AMA, entitled “I am a journalist and free speech advocate who has received hundreds of death threats since 2006. AMA,” quickly broke into the top ten discussions on the iAMA forum that week. As questions continues pouring in, Rose sat down for a second full hour session the day after the original session was scheduled.

You should definitely read the AMA yourself, but here are some highlights:

Enjoyed the discussion? You can read the whole thing here. And, of course, don’t forget to buy the book to read all of Rose’s harrowing tale.

Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, also known as the Fair Housing Act (FHA), makes it illegal to deny someone housing on the basis of race and other protected characteristics. Applicable to governments, private entities, and individuals, the FHA prohibits racially discriminatory practices in most if not all transactions relating to housing.

For example, a landlord can’t refuse to rent an apartment to an otherwise qualified tenant, solely on the basis of race. Similarly, banks and credit unions can’t take a borrower’s race into account when deciding whether and on what terms to extend credit for the purpose of buying a home.

While it’s clear that the FHA bars such discriminatory intent, it remains an open question whether it covers claims of “disparate impact,” where a neutral policy disproportionately harms members of the protected class. Under this theory, a landlord insisting that all applicants pass a credit check could be held liable if it turns out that applicants from one protected group are disproportionately unlikely to have a sufficiently high credit score. That landlord would be held liable even though a satisfactory credit score is required of all potential tenants, regardless of race, and the landlord’s only intent was the (perfectly legal) desire to avoid tenants who would get behind on their rent—not to deny housing to any particular group.

In the decades since the FHA was passed, disparate impact has been used by the government and private litigants to exact tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from banks and developers whose facially neutral policies were alleged to have excluded members of a protected class from the housing market. The problem is that unlike with other anti-discrimination laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act—which expressly prohibits policies that have a disparate impact—the text of the FHA explicitly forbids only intentional discrimination.

In 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to decide once and for all the simple question of whether the FHA allows for disparate-impact claims. Before the Court had the chance to rule on the case, however, the government and certain interest groups intervened — in part at the instigation of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, who was then head of the Justice Deaprtment’s Civil Rights Division. Fearing (not without justification) that the Court would decide that the FHA only allows claims based on intentional discrimination, they arranged a settlement package that induced the parties challenging the FHA to drop their case. The same thing happened in 2013.

Now the Court is facing the issue a third time, in a case arising out of a Texas program that allocated federal tax credits for developers to build low-income housing projects. An advocacy group called the Inclusive Communities Project sued the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, claiming that by attempting in good faith to spend the federal funds in the poor neighborhoods where they’re most needed, the Department violated the FHA by concentrating low-income housing in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Together with the Pacific Legal Foundation and five other groups, Cato has filed a brief arguing that the FHA can’t be read to prohibit innocently adopted policies that happen to have a statistically disproportionate impact on one group.

The brief makes three key points. First, the text of the FHA doesn’t support disparate-impact claims. The relevant provision—making it unlawful to “refuse to sell or rent … because of race”—connotes a purposeful, causal connection between the refusal to deal and the person’s race. Second, the FHA’s legislative history reveals that Congress only intended to target intentional discrimination, not the unpredictable consequences of nondiscriminatory policies.

Finally, allowing for claims against government bodies to be based on disparate impact forces them to engage in unconstitutional race-conscious decision making to avoid potential liability. The only way to avoid claims based on disparate impact is by designing policies which work backwards from the desired result, essentially requiring unconstitutional devices like racial quotas.

But discrimination can’t lead to equality. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a Supreme Court plurality in 2007: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The Supreme Court will hear the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project on January 21. Regardless of Tom Perez’s whereabouts between now and then, this case is unlikely to settle.

Today we add the following essays to Cato’s online growth forum:

1. Enrico Moretti wants to increase the R&D tax credit.

2. Daniel Ikenson calls for more foreign investment.

3. Scott Sumner argues for better monetary policy based on nominal GDP targeting.

4. Don Peck worries about growing dysfunction in the middle class.

5. William Galston offers a potpourri of proposals for faster, more inclusive growth.

6. David Audretsch highlights the central importance of entrepreneurship.

The remaining essays will posted next week.