Two high profile screw ups have brought a great deal of heat on two heads of late, and both have chosen to fight back.  One, New York Police Benevolent Association president, Pat Lynch, chose the path of attacking the attackers. The other, Colorado Congressman Jared Polis, tried the path of human error, spun to his advantage.

Lynch sent out an open letter to “arm-chair judges,” pulling out the usual tropes used by cops to justify why no one but a cop can criticize a cop. He responds to the criticism of Officer James Frascatore for leaping to violence to take out tennis great James Blake.

If you have never struggled with someone who is resisting arrest or who pulled a gun or knife on you when you approached them for breaking a law, then you are not qualified to judge the actions of police officers putting themselves in harm’s way for the public good.

It’s a variation on the quasi-biblical defense, John 8:7, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” We, non-cops, don’t understand. We’ve never stared death in the eyes like cops do.  It’s not only an effective retort, but one that most judges have accepted to absolve police of their poor choices in crafting exceptions for what would be murders if performed by anyone else. Continue reading →

There is a battle being waged in Congress over a law called the Safe Campus Act, which is intended to restore a measure of due process to campus sexual assault and rape adjudications. It would blunt the efforts of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to turn its mandate under Title IX into an overarching requirement to eliminate all vestiges of a sexually hostile environment on campus.

Organizations like FIRE are all for it.  College rape victim advocacy groups are vehemently against it. What hasn’t gotten much attention is how a law, enacted in response to women being denied the opportunity to engage in college sports, morphed into a quasi-criminal rape law.

Title IX, 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a), provides that:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial
assistance.

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Fire James Frascatore?  The New York Times says so. Ken Womble says so. It’s not just for his needlessly forceful takedown of James Blake. His resort to force was well established before it hit the front page, though few knew or cared until they saw it for themselves. Some still refuse to see a problem.

Fire James Frascatore?  The Times says that Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his sidekick, Mayor de Blasio, need to “make an example of him,” which is another way of saying they should send a message.  But communication isn’t so simple. The message transmitted isn’t necessarily the message received.

To the rank and file police officer, Frascatore will be a scapegoat, and his firing will be taken as a lack of support for their self-perceived risk in doing a job that the City wants done, but lacks the courage to admit.  While the numbers fail to support a “war on cops,” the war they perceive isn’t just a body count, but a lack of respect and appreciation. They believe it’s their due. Continue reading →

Since the day when a 300 baud modem connected to the world wide web instead of Gopher, the question has been posed whether the internet makes people stupider. And at Techdirt, Karl Bode asks it yet again.

Google is making us stupid. Smartphones have ruined the art of conversation. Video games make you violent. There’s simply no limitation to the number of people quick to assume that technology is to blame for long-standing human foibles despite generations of historical evidence to the contrary. There is, however, usually a very sharp limit to the science actually supporting these positions. At the forefront of this yeah I bet that’s probably true movement has long sat Susan Greenfield, whose expertise in the field of “justify-my-Luddite-beliefs-at-all-costs” has gained endless media attention. 

Nice, Karl. Make fun of Baroness Susan Greenfield (hi, cousin Susan) for being a Luddite. Only kidding. The closest my branch of the Greenfield family ever came to peerage was cleaning their floors. But I digress.

Of course, Karl is right, that the internet doesn’t make anybody anything. It’s merely the tool by which we are handed the opportunity to make ourselves stupider.  As with all tools, it can be used for good or evil, and the internet-gods have left the choice in the mouse in our hands. Continue reading →

At This Week, Ryan Cooper gets all snarky as he grabs at the low-hanging fruit of the sexting case against a couple of 17-year-olds, Cormega Copening and his girlfriend, Brianna Benson.

New ground has recently been broken in the incarceration of American teens, however. Several children have been charged as adults for possessing child pornography — of themselves. Apparently, moral panic over sexting means we must entrap our children in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic sandpit before turning them into hardened criminals.

Well, not exactly “recently,” as this involves phenomena that have been happening for years already.  Sexting has been a source of terrible problems for youth since its start, but that doesn’t seem to trouble Cooper too much.  He recognizes the system’s “brutal treatment of minors,” but no one is suggesting that Copening get life without parole for sexting.

[R]iddle me this: How can you simultaneously be a minor being victimized by a sex criminal (yourself), and an adult violating an innocent victim (also yourself)?

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In a great post at Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle reminds us that rude talk and offensive slights have always been with us, but our culture over time has given rise to different ways of addressing it.  Today, they’re called “microaggressions.”

We used to call this “rudeness,” “slights” or “ignorant remarks.” Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)

Cutting to the chase, we’re now in victim culture.

Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights.

Victim status is rewarded, and thus incentivized. Good stuff. Read it. But that’s not why I was moved to write about McArdle’s post.

The debate over microaggressions often seems to focus on whether they are real. This is silly. Of course they’ve always been real; only the label is new.

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At PrawfsBlawg, Miami lawprof Tamara Rice Lave has now made three attempts to show that the nouvelle criterion for campus sex, affirmative consent, shifts the burden of proof from accuser to accused.  To say that it’s been a difficult battle is an understatement.

The crux of her argument is that there is an implicit presumption built into affirmative consent that sex was nonconsensual, and to overcome that presumption, the accused is compelled to testify or produce evidence.  If he remains silent in the face of evidence of sex, he loses.

First, this discussion matters because the infiltration of affirmative consent into the world outside of campus sex is happening, as demonstrated by the American Law Institute’s efforts to change the model penal code to redefine rape and sexual assault using affirmative consent.  If you think this is just some cockamamie nonsense developed for campus feminists, you’re going to be blindsided when criminal sex offenses are modified to incorporate the new standard. It’s coming. At least, the effort to do so will be coming. Continue reading →

Should there be a “Recipe of Remembrance” for 9/11?  Sam Sifton, New York Times food editor, thinks so.

The first restaurant meal we had in the chaotic, somber days after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center was downtown, in TriBeCa, with an awful, smoky stench in the air and a tiny child sleeping in a stroller beside us. The setting was the Odeon, a bistro that opened in 1980 and for a long time defined the neighborhood’s possibility, back when its streets were empty and dark.

Some people remember 9/11 for the death and destruction. Some for the steak frites.

As that city lay wounded, the Odeon seemed the very best place to take a newborn to dinner.

We had country salad and steak frites that night.

My old pal, Dan Arshack, didn’t really think that tying a recipe to the deaths of thousands was appropriate, and let Sifton know. Continue reading →

Some have questioned what the big deal is with a NYPD detective’s take down of tennis star James Blake.  Now that the video has been released, two points are raised by those inclined to trivialize the incident.

In his description in the Daily News, he said that the officer who rushed him was wearing shorts, and as the video shows, he was not. Aha, he’s lying. Except that this detail is irrelevant to what transpired, and a guy who, out of the blue, gets taken down sometimes misperceives details.  There’s a video. The core description is not merely intact, but conclusively proven.

The next challenge is that he wasn’t exactly “slammed to the ground,” as in a pile-driver type WWR move. Yet again, the video shows what happened, and even though police-defenders can claim they got a different impression from the description, that’s a problem with their imagination based on the description. It doesn’t change that he was rushed, grabbed, spun immediately to the ground face down, and cuffed. Continue reading →

Via Matt Apuzzo at the New York Times, it turns out the feds, who arrested Temple University’s head of its physics department, Dr. Xi Xiaoxing, for spying by sending schematics to China of a secret device, a “pocket heater,” blew it. The very serious looking schematic turned out to be the plans for, well, something else.

It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand — and did not do enough to learn — the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi’s career and left the impression that he was spying for China.

He was arrested, led away in cuffs, reputation stained and life upended.  Because he was a spy the agents had no clue what all the squiggly lines meant, but it sure looked spy-ish.

“I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”

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