This is both unsurprising and misleading. It’s unsurprising because something about the Florida lifestyle seems to attract smooth-talking grifters (the less smoothing-talking ones go into local politics). But it’s misleading because it only measures garden variety consumer fraud; to do fraud on an epic scale requires a bank. Places like California (Wells Fargo) and New York (Wall St.) surely have us beat six ways from Sunday in that department. Unless of course the FTC counts those by victims too in which case we could well be #1 after all…
I’m at the University of Florida Levin College of Law 2019 Technology, Media & Privacy Law (TMPL) Conference. One of the speakers, Michael Braga, pointed us to a series of articles on racial bias in judical sentencing in Florida (TL/DR: there’s a lot of it).
Orange bars are length of sentences given to blacks, grey to whites. The first column is all Florida judges. Each subsequent column is some subgroup of judges, either all whites/all blacks, male whites/blacks. The last column on the right–the only group that sentences both groups equally–is female black judges. Does this mean we should prioritize appointing black women as judges until we can figure out how to eradicate bias in other groups?
PS. And yes, I realize there are probably so few female black judges in Florida that that this might reflect the exceptional personal characteristics of the ones who survived the sieving process that keeps them off the bench. But there might well be more where they came from.
Update: A later speaker mentioned that while the black female judges were the most even-handed they also gave the longest sentences across the board. So much so that a black defendant often might be better off appearing in front a white male judge even if that judge gave longer sentences to blacks than whites — because even the biased sentences were shorter overall.
This is the report about possible crimes. What we don’t know is whether there will be a second report direct to Congress on the (arguably more important?) counter-intelligence project about foreign attempts to influence the election, and perhaps even more reports.
The Miami Herald’s Kyra Gurney reports Miami Beach could soon arrest people operating Airbnb-like rentals without a license. The city is banning unlicensed apartment rentals with a term of less than six months, which seems like a long time to me. Asheville, NC, for example, requires a minimum of a month’s lease, which seems enough to keep out the riffraff, preserve the character of neighborhoods, or whatever they are doing.
Anyway, Ms. Gurney and I had a nice talk about how you enforce a rule against short-term rentals which are commonly advertised and rented online, and a small fragment of that talk ended up near the end of her article.
…. in fraud. And according to a report from the Federal Trade Commission last year Florida was home to 18 of the country’s top 50 cities for consumer fraud.
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