Whenever someone who once held a position of power speaks out, there is a gush of appreciation by those who feel validated by the words, the acknowledgement that they weren’t wrong, weren’t crazy. After all these years.

Of course, it usually happens after they’ve left their position of power, when they can no longer do anything about it other than complain and tacitly admit their failure.

But not Vanita Gupta, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She may be part of a very lame duck administration, but she still gets to sit at the big desk at DoJ until next January. And give the occasional talk at an academic conference, where she “explains” what’s wrong:

But we know that the true causes – the real reasons – for unrest run far deeper than any individual incident.  And we know that while public attention to these issues might be new, these causes are long-standing and systemic.  We’ve found these causes time and again through several of the 23 civil pattern-or-practice investigations we’ve opened into local police departments during this administration.  These cases focus not on individuals but on systems.  Broken systems – plagued by unlawful practices and tainted by bias – can devastate a community and corrode public trust, letting down not just the victims of police misconduct but the officers who seek to proudly wear the badge.

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The headlines blared that an off-duty Muslim NYPD officer was the victim of a hate crime. A HATE CRIME!!! Putting irony aside, given the fresh mouths of New York’s Finest toward pretty much everyone, the brass got a sudden case of the feelz when it was one of their own.

A Brooklyn man allegedly yelled xenophobic insults at an off-duty Muslim NYPD officer and her teenage son, police sources said.

An NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist that the officer was dropping off her 16-year-old son on Ridge Boulevard and 67th Street in Bay Ridge on Saturday around 6 p.m. After the officer parked her car, she saw a man shoving her son. Police said the man was in his 30s.

She approached the man—but did not identify herself as a police officer—who told her “ISIS [expletive], I will cut your throat, go back to your country!” The suspect fled the scene, and the NYPD Hate Crimes Unit is investigating the incident as a bias crime.

According to the Daily News, Officer Aml Elsokary is a hero. Continue reading →

Reading through the Ars Technica post twice, it’s still unclear what the problem is. Is there a failure with the software? Is the failure due to human error, garbage in, garbage out? Is it because there just aren’t enough bodies doing input to keep up with the volume of cases? Or are the clerks confused because the lingo demanded by the new case management system is different from the old, legacy system they learned on, had gotten used to?

The question isn’t whether there is something wrong:

Typically, when a judge makes a ruling—for example, issuing or rescinding a warrant—those words said by a judge in court are entered into Odyssey. That information is then relied upon by law enforcement officers to coordinate arrests and releases and to issue court summons. (Most other courts, even if they don’t use Odyssey, use a similar software system from another vendor.)

But, just across the bay from San Francisco, one of Alameda County’s deputy public defenders, Jeff Chorney, says that since the county switched from a decades-old computer system to Odyssey in August, dozens of defendants have been wrongly arrested or jailed. Others have even been forced to register as sex offenders unnecessarily. “I understand that with every piece of technology, bugs have to be worked out,” he said, practically exasperated. “But we’re not talking about whether people are getting their paychecks on time. We’re talking about people being locked in cages, that’s what jail is. It’s taking a person and locking them in a cage.”

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It’s not entirely clear what Stephani Clemons Thompson, assistant director of residence life at Ohio State, had in mind when she took to Facebook to threaten to “unfriend” anyone who failed to share her view. Nor is it clear whether her inclusion of “DO NOT SHARE THIS POST,” twice, in all caps, was somehow going to dictate how her post would be received.

The post refers to Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Ohio State junior who attacked, first by car and then by knife, eleven people, whereupon he was shot dead by a campus officer. Pics of his dead body were posted online, along with the expressions of outrage for his attacks. Thompson’s post was in reaction.

Granted, Thompson’s manner of expressing her reaction was surprisingly aggressive under the circumstances. In the grand scheme of victims, it remains worse to be dead, run down, cut by a butcher knife, then to be thought ill of. But here, Artan was dead as well, though with some justification, and to significant appreciation in that it prevented him from harming more people. Continue reading →

“Mind if I take a look?”  It’s Consent 101 for a cop, the seemingly innocuous question backed up by the implicit, or explicit, “you wouldn’t mind if you have nothing to hide.” We even have a name for it, submission to the shield. If some random dude asked for consent to search your car, you would have no problem telling him where to shove it. But a cop?

The problem isn’t that the police officer didn’t ask nicely. The problem is the implicit threat that a refusal is tantamount to an admission that you are concealing something, that you have just invited the next level of scrutiny from the cop. Will he then get a warrant based on some phony claim of cause? Will he arrest you? Will he beat you?

Even if you ultimately beat the rap, you can’t beat the ride. There are myriad bad things that can come of refusal, and you have no clue whether your exercise of your constitutional right to say no will produce a world of pain or, if the law goes as it’s supposed to go, an officer who responds, “Okay then, have a nice day,” and walks away.

Are you feeling lucky? Continue reading →

In the “early days*” of body cams, there were mostly voices proclaiming how they would be the magic bullet that changes everything. After all, seeing is believing, and we would now be able to see what really happened rather than rely upon the police version. The defendant, assuming he survived to tell his side, was never credible, because “why would a cop lie”?

The body cam showed that they do. Asking “why” is a fool’s errand, though so many people fixate on it to “understand” how their belief system could be so badly screwed up. No matter. The “why” can launch a thousand law review articles. In the courtroom, we worry about the “what,” and video showed us what really happened.

Except a few of us didn’t stop at screaming “yay” at the magic bullet that would change everything, realizing that there were issues, problems, that would come of this. Radley Balko was one of the wet blankets who sucked some of the joy out of the magic. I was another.

When it comes to missing video, the question is whether this is best addressed by a presumption designed to overcome the gap of responsibility, or as a remedy for wrongdoing in the management of the video by the police. As the police video lies entirely within the control of cops, and as an incentive to do everything possible to assure that evidence that shows what transpired exists, the contract analogy is more properly the basis for the presumption than the good faith analogy.  We aren’t punishing the cops for tech failure, but requiring the police to do whatever is necessary to assure that evidence of police/public encounters is recorded. Continue reading →

The jury foreman, the only black person on the jury, got right to the point: “It’s just one juror that has the issues.” His note was to tell Judge Clifton B. Newman that the jury was deadlocked. Hung is what we call it. They were hung on Slager’s killing of Walter Scott. How could this be possible?

But confusion reigned in the courtroom as the jury wavered about whether it was hopelessly deadlocked about the killing, which was recorded on video and became a symbol of the nation’s heated debate about race and policing.

Slager’s lawyer, Andy Savage, did his best to present a defense that Slager feared for his life. It’s the go-to defense for cops, although there is an industry dedicated to manufacturing excuses for cop shooting with some tricky explanations available to police and no one else. But Savage stuck to the tried and true Graham v. Connor defense.

Mr. Slager, whom North Charleston fired after the shooting, testified that he had become involved in a physical struggle with Mr. Scott over his Taser device, leaving him in “total fear” and causing him to open fire in a lot behind a pawnshop in the city of about 108,000.

“He didn’t shoot him because of the brake light,” Andrew J. Savage III, Mr. Slager’s lead defense lawyer, said of the former officer during his closing argument. “He shot him in fear of his life.”

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The title to the op-ed stands in contrast to the substance, as the former is the sort of insipid snark favored by children in response to a serious question.

Really, You’re Blaming Transgender People for Trump?

The content, on the other hand, is far more thoughtful.

I wanted to hear Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, but she was late to the podium. On TV, a commentator speculated that Mrs. Clinton had lost because of her party’s focus on things like trans rights — “boutique issues,” they were called.

A boutique — a place where you’d shop for, say, artisan pantyhose — is not the first place I’d associate with an individual’s quest for equal protection under the law, but then what did I know? I was now one of the people from whom the country had been “taken back.”

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Orleans Chief Public Defender, Derwyn Bunton, took a chance when he made the painful decision to take no more cases than his lawyers could competently handle.  He was sued by the ACLU for his efforts, but Judge Arthur Hunter made the decision to free unrepresented defendants rather than blame Bunton for the state’s intransigence in funding indigent defense.

New Mexico’s Chief Public Defender Ben Bauer wasn’t so lucky.

A Lea County judge this week found the state’s chief public defender in contempt for failing to provide lawyers for indigent defendants and imposed a $1,000 fine in each of five criminal cases in which the cash-strapped Law Offices of the Public Defender failed to enter an appearance.

The judge’s action, described by the state Public Defender Commission chairman in a letter Tuesday, represents the clearest consequence yet of a funding crisis that the agency and the courts have been warning lawmakers about for years as the governor and the Legislature slashed state budgets in the face of declining revenues.

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Is it fair to characterize an academic as “dangerous”?  Of course it is. These are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room, responsible for teaching something to impressionable young minds. Many of them abuse their position by using it to indoctrinate their students to their politics.

Many make their grades, and therefore their futures, contingent on the students accepting, or at least spewing back, their political fantasies. They do so under color of academic freedom, as if teaching a course on the anatomy of tree frogs includes the authority to demand that students admit to their racist white privilege and sit silently in the back of the classroom so that they don’t impair the rights of others to express their deepest tree frog feelings about being marginalized.

But make a list? Continue reading →