For those of us who have pondered the benefits of, and problems with, police video, it has long been understood to be the most critical weapon in changing attitudes about cops while falling far short of a panacea.  Understanding the complexity of solutions, and addressing them, has been hard for many to wrap their heads around, and ignoring the myriad problems does little to fix them. Okay, nothing surprising or new in that obvious observation.

So when Bronx Defender Sarah Lustbader’s op-ed in the New York Times screams of the “real problem with police video,” those of us who have struggled with the many problems, the depth of the problems, the forces and countervailing forces affecting the problems, shake our collective heads.  Why do people persist in reducing complex issues to simplistic solutions?  Do they really hate Mencken that much?

But putting aside the hype of the title to her op-ed, Lustbader has a point about the broad adoption of police cameras.

But as currently implemented, body camera programs in the United States too often fail to serve those goals because the police own and control the footage. This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Not only can the police retain footage that they would rather not release; they can also use it for purposes that have nothing to do with transparency and accountability, such as mass surveillance. Until control of this footage is taken away from law enforcement and vested in a neutral third party, with equal access for all interested parties, body cameras will further empower the very party they were designed to check.

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The video was concealed from the public for about 13 months, but boy, did it have an impact when it was finally disclosed.  Laquan McDonald’s murder, as with other videos of the killing of young blacks, left little to the imagination when it was finally seen publicly, but unlike others, raises an entirely different issue by dint of its taking so long to go public.

Chicago, with its seemingly never ending series of police scandals, may have finally hit the wall this time.  Not just because another black teen was gunned down in the street like a dog, but because there was a conspiracy to conceal it.

The cover-up that began 13 months ago when a Chicago police officer executed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on a busy street might well have included highly ranked officials who ordered subordinates to conceal information. But the conspiracy of concealment exposed last week when the city, under court order, finally released a video of the shooting could also be seen as a kind of autonomic response from a historically corrupt law enforcement agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality — and even torture.

It would seem impossible that the second city could pull off a conspiracy like this.  There are too many people, too many loose ends, involved in keeping a murder by cops under wraps.  But more than that, there is a mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, late of the Obama administration where he served as chief of staff, who was supposed to be someone to break the city’s chain of corruption, racism and police misconduct.  And instead of being the champion of black youth, he was in the middle of a cover-up. Continue reading →

Years ago, sitting at a linoleum table in a kosher deli with a friend who had just been elected to political office, I asked him was it worth it?  He shook his head and replied, somewhat incongruously, that politicians were people you would never invite to dinner if they didn’t have money to give out.  He was learning to play the game. I finished my pastrami on rye, with mustard and cole slaw, and never ate another meal with him.

Sheldon Silver was one of the “three men in a room” that ran New York State.  The other two were the governor and the Senate majority leader.  The latter, Dean Skelos, is under indictment and on trial. The governor, Andy Cuomo, abruptly terminated a commission on corruption when it turned its attention to his fundraising. At the moment, there is only one man in the room, talking to himself. The rumor is that if Preet Bharara has his way, the room will be silent.

Shelly Silver, a Manhattan liberal, was convicted of seven counts of corruption.

Sheldon Silver, who held a seemingly intractable grip on power for decades as one of the most feared politicians in New York State, was found guilty on Monday of federal corruption charges, ending a trial that was the capstone of the government’s efforts to expose the seamy culture of influence-peddling in Albany.

The verdict was a quick and unceremonious end for Mr. Silver, who, during his more than two decades as the State Assembly speaker, displayed a Teflon-like quality in deflecting questions about his outside income as well as calls for his ouster.

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Well, I might take a plane, I might take a train,
But if I have to walk I’m going just the same…

–Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, 1952

There is no right to fly from one place to another. Not even if it’s a great distance away. Not even if it’s across a great ocean. After all, you can drive, take a train, take a boat, or walk. It’s true, of course. It’s also insane nonsense, which means that it’s a rationale that would only appeal to a government whose purpose is to regulate. It’s not that travel isn’t a right. It is. It’s that there is no right to any particular mode of travel. Like flying.

Not only has this rationale given us the Transportation Safety Administration’s ability to scan, poke, prod and occasionally insert digits into orifices, and a list of people who are not allowed on any plane, but the more pedestrian limitation of giving any member of a flight crew the authority to toss a person off a plane. At will. For any reason. Or no reason. Or no good reason. Continue reading →

Granted, the internet is prone to hyperbole.  Sure, hyperbole is a traditional rhetorical means of making a point that might otherwise be overlooked.  And in this e-barrage of information, the use of hyperbole can distinguish a story that might otherwise be missed.

But nobody was going to miss the story about some whackjob named Dear shooting up Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.  Especially when he murdered a police officer, Garrett Swasey, in the process.

While it might have been noted that Swasey’s death was no more tragic than those of Ke’Arre M. Stewart, a 29-year-old former soldier, and 35-year-old Jennifer Markovsky, a mother of two, married to an Army veteran, it wasn’t a good time to draw such distinctions. There was no need to argue over whose death mattered more.

But that wasn’t good enough to stop the other side’s crazies from going to town. Continue reading →

A video, yet again, changed the public perception of a police killing from a mundane shooting of a bad black kid threatening a cop to an execution.  At the New York Times, Charles Blow is on it.

Disturbing video had been released of the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He had been shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. Most of the shots were fired when McDonald was no longer standing. Some entered through his back.

There was no column 400 days earlier, when the murder occurred, though McDonald was every bit as dead the night it happened as he was when Blow reached his epiphany as to why it happened. Continue reading →

Barry Deutsch is an indefatigable defender of fragile womanhood, a white knight. an ally to the bitter end.  I admire tenacity, as well as the willingness to take the risk of going where his view may not be received with a warm embrace.

He did so here in defense of the statistics claiming that women in college are raped at 27 times the rate of Somalia in mid-revolution.  Barry is hardly a fool, even if he’s blinded by the feelz. That’s not to suggest any malevolence to him based on his single-minded adoration of the feminist mystique, as Hanlon’s Razor applies. I accept the premise that he is utterly sincere in his support of the cause, even if his politics makes him incapable of reasoned detachment.

So it came as no surprise that he was the creator of this very funny, if mind-numbingly stupid, comic at Everyday Feminism.* Continue reading →

More than a year has passed since Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann executed Tamir Rice.  Had Tamir shot Loehmann, he would have been indicted within the hour. The story is that a grand jury presentment commenced in October and is ongoing, because of empty words like “justice.”

But the other Timothy, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, is riding the coattails of the Big Lie sold America following the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, that the charging step is performed with extreme caution, intricate evidence and all relevant evidence.

After McGinty obtained “expert” opinions validating the tragedy that couldn’t be helped, lawyers representing the Rice family obtained their own.

At the legal team’s request, police procedures consultant Roger Clark and former deputy police chief of the Irvine Police Department Jeffry J. Noble, both California-based nationally renowned experts in police use-of-force issues, pored over investigative material and determined the shooting was not justified.

Clark and Noble, in a combined 31 pages of documents, reasoned that officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback placed themselves in harm’s way by driving within feet of Tamir and shooting him Nov. 22, 2014 outside the Cudell Recreation Center on Cleveland’s West Side.

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If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. This was the catch phrase of a TV character, Baretta, which was embraced by the public because it was short and simplistic, thus encompassing the full depth of the American grasp of the legal system. But even if you could do the time, you still couldn’t vote after your time was done, at least in some states.

In places like Mississippi, one of 12 states that permanently bar at least some felons from voting, the reason typically involves the notion that people have displayed very bad judgment by committing a felony, by definition a serious crime. No argument there. But having done so, the thinking goes, they have also proven themselves unfit to make one of life’s most important decisions: choosing the nation’s leaders. As Roger Clegg, president of the conservative advocacy group Center for Equal Opportunity, neatly puts it, “If you aren’t willing to follow the law, you can’t claim the right to make the law for everyone else.”

Not nearly as pithy as the Baretta slogan, but then, that’s why there’s no TV show Clegg. However, it’s similarly simplistic. Remember the good ol’ “no taxation without representation”?  We still tax ex-cons. And in a republican form of government, voters don’t “make the law for everyone else.” Yeah, Clegg was just spouting nonsense, but it’s the sort of nonsense that Americans love because it validates their desires and requires no heavy thinking. Yay, ‘Murica!

From a more cynical, thus more practical, perspective, the restoration of voting rights to ex-cons could create a block of voters (assuming they actually voted) that could wreak havoc with carefully gerrymandered districts. Politicians would suddenly have to contend with their interests to remain in office, and the easily spewed “tough on crime” rhetoric might no longer assure re-election. Continue reading →

In a New York Times op-ed, Brandon Buskey, a staff lawyer with the ACLU, stirs the pot against the target of a suit in which he’s lead attorney. This little detail is artfully acknowledged in the text, so artfully that it doesn’t strike the reader that this is a problem. A very serious problem.

Judge [Marcus D.] Gordon has robbed countless individuals of their freedom, locking them away from their loved ones and livelihoods for months on end. (I am the lead lawyer in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Scott County and Judge Gordon.) In a recent interview, the judge, who sits on the Mississippi State Circuit Court, was unapologetic about his regime of indefinite detention: “The criminal system is a system of criminals. Sure, their rights are violated.” But, he added, “That’s the hardship of the criminal system.”

The paragraph is chock full of really bad stuff about Judge Gordon, so that the parenthetical about the author seem almost subliminal, falling below the threshold of conscious recognition. But there it is, as big a horse in the race as can be, and describing the allegations against the defendant with words that are tantamount to a confession.

Not to question Buskey’s claims, but the place to make his case is in court, not the newspaper. The Times editors lack remedial powers, though you might suspect they’re unaware of that fact. Continue reading →