The Heritage Insider: What NATO should be talking about, policing policies examined, and the NLRB threat to the economy

July 9, 2016

 

 

NATO has a host of issues to discuss, including how it should prepare for Russian provocations. The sniper who killed five police officers in Dallas on Thursday targeted a police department that had one of the best relationships with the community it served. In Chicago, on the other hand, the relationship is much more strained, to the detriment of the public’s safety. If the National Labor Relations Board continues its new policies toward subcontractors, it will wreck the value of subcontracting to the economy. Plus, over 50 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.

 

 

 

What issues should the NATO summit be discussing? There are eight, according to Luke Coffey, Daniel Kochis, and Lisa Curtis: Keeping Georgia on track for membership, increasing member spending on defense, developing an arctic strategy, reaffirming the alliance’s “open door” policy, reinforcing a commitment to Afghanistan, defending the Baltic states, protecting Turkey, and deepening the Ukraine-NATO partnership. [The Heritage Foundation]

 

NATO needs to become nimbler in order to deal with Russia. Writes Phillip Lohaus: “[T]he bureaucratic, consensus-driven nature of NATO has left the alliance unable to respond to Russian aggression, as they fall outside the traditional conception of ‘war.’ Such restrictions limit NATO’s ability to coordinate allied ‘shaping operations’ directed at Russia, because doing so would be tantamount to admitting that the alliance is gearing up for conflict. The real challenge this week will be for NATO to find a way to counter Russia’s persistent ‘shaping activities.’ Even if the alliance isn’t at war in a technical and legal sense, Russia’s ability to create leverage over its European neighbors, to change the narrative in European capitals to further its aims, and to develop increasingly sophisticated technical capabilities will allow it to further shape perceptions and strategic realities on the continent and to ‘prepare’ territories along its periphery for a return to Russia’s sphere of influence (as it did in Eastern Ukraine).” [American Enterprise Institute]

 

The Dallas Police Department is one of the best. On Thursday, 11 Dallas police officers who were on duty during a protest against police violence were shot by a sniper. Five of the officers died. Radley Balko writes that there is a double tragedy here: “The city’s police department is a national model for community policing,” that “has implemented a host of policies to improve the department’s relationship with the people it serves.” Those policies—including expanded use-of-force training, firing more bad cops, and making data on police shootings publicly available—may now be more difficult to pursue if they lead to calls for more aggressive police tactics. [Washington Post]

 

Violence in Chicago is way up this year. Heather MacDonald contends that one the mains reasons for the trouble is that a false narrative about racist police targeting blacks for stops has gained currency. That has put the police under pressure to disengage from the communities that most need a police presence. MacDonald writes: “On January 1, 2016, the police department rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops, developed to meet ACLU demands. The new form, traditionally called a contact card, was two pages long and contained a whopping 70 fields of information to be filled out, including three narrative sections. (Those narrative sections were subsequently combined to try to quiet criticism.) The new contact card dwarfs even arrest reports and takes at least 30 minutes to complete. Every contact card is forwarded to the ACLU. Stops dropped nearly 90 percent in the first quarter of 2016. Detectives had long relied on the information contained in contact cards to solve crimes. […] Earlier this year, a detective working armed robbery had a pattern of two male Hispanics with tattoos on their faces sticking up people in front of their homes. But virtually no contact cards had been written in the area for three months. So he made car stops in the neighborhood himself, coming across the stolen car used in the robberies and the parolees responsible for the crimes. This is not a maximally efficient division of labor.” [City Journal]

 

The NLRB v. the Economy. Subcontracting increases specialization and helps keep prices lower for consumers. That value may be lost, however, thanks to a recent decision of the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB wants to redefine many contractors as joint-employers of their subcontractors’ employees. That means firms with unionized subcontractors would no longer have the option of switching service providers if they are dissatisfied. One little recognized consequence of this new joint-employer rule is that it would eliminate a lot of competition from smaller firms, as James Sherk explains: “Joint employment would further require joint employers to engage in unwieldy multi-firm bargaining with all the other companies who jointly employ their contractors. […] If the large business competed directly against the small businesses they could easily prefer higher costs, in order to put their less well-capitalized rivals at a disadvantage. Just the legal fees from prolonged negotiations would strain many small businesses’ finances. The new joint employer standards would make it prohibitively difficult for many businesses to sign service contracts. Service contracts would instead become agreements to partially merge with another business.” [The Heritage Foundation]

 

 

 

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