Posts Tagged Public Policy
Public policy favors release of police report.
The state Supreme Court has found that a teacher’s interest in protecting his reputation does not outweigh the public’s interest in the release of information about a police investigation of that teacher.
The July 2 decision in Linzmeyer v. Forcey, 01-0197, highlights the importance of balancing open records interests against public policy interests favoring nondisclosure of a police report. The six-person majority decision, written by Justice Jon P. Wilcox with Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson concurring, held that the circuit court was correct in ordering the report’s release.
“We hold that the open records law applies to the report in this case and there is thus a strong presumption in favor of release,” Wilcox wrote. “Additionally, we hold that the presumption was not overridden in this case by the public interest in protecting Linzmeyer’s privacy and reputation.”
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Terrorism, interest-group politics, and public policy: curtailing criminal modes of political speech.
Terrorist incidents have occurred in the United States and around the world for centuries. Tax revolters, anarchists, war protesters, and other critics of government policy have often used violence to send messages to the policymakers controlling the issues of interest. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, have been widely interpreted as a comment on U.S. policy toward the Islamic world, especially U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, terrorist attacks might be defined as violence for the purpose of sending a political message with the aim of influencing policy or at least of voicing disapproval. In this sense, terrorism is one possible method of “political dialogue.”
Even when political analysts do not share the goals of terrorist groups, they may defend the use of violence as a method of sending messages because of the political nature of the message sent. After all, political messages and popular protests receive special protection in all liberal democracies, and civil disobedience has often generated improvements in government policies. The conjunction of the “political message” explanation of terrorist actions and a “free speech” justification of those actions clearly resonates with some proponents of popular resistance, but it is nonetheless a bit puzzling for most proponents of free speech. Those who advocate the former explanation might argue that the United States brought the recent attacks on itself by various foreign-policy mistakes made over the years. Most proponents of free speech will reject this conclusion as a justification for terrorism, but they have not yet found a clear line of argument with which to respond to it.
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Can Internet Users Alter Public Policy on Climate Change?
There are an estimated 295 million English speaking internet users and somewhere around 1,000 million users worldwide. Within the internet there are thousands of groups, chats and forums. What would happen if internet users joined into one overwhelming group to lobby for action to reduce global warming? What would happen if millions of emails were sent, on a given day, to the world’s policy makers? What would happen if the U.S. Congress, the White House, members of Parliaments, Prime Ministers and other world leaders received hundreds of millions of emails, in a single day, demanding that action be taken now to end the pollution of or planet?
This year, Earth Day is April 22nd.
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