Month: August 2013

Readers sound off on the controversial policy:

What I would like someone to ask Bloomberg at the next press conference: “Would you support the IRS specifically targeting the tax returns of Jewish Americans for audit, if the practice proved to be more effective in catching tax fraud than random audits?”  I mean, Bloomberg has said recently that he thinks the police should be targeting MORE minorities than they already are. And his sole defense of this practice is that it is effective.  So let’s turn that around: would you accept the targeting of Jews if it was more effective at stopping crime than random sampling?

(I of course am not suggesting such a policy would be effective, having no earthly reason to believe that Jews cheat on their taxes more than Christians or members of any other faith or ethnicity.)

Another reader:

On the one hand, as a life-long liberal New Yorker, I am bothered by how un-bothered I am by the stop/frisk debacle. Profiling seems like a terrible consequence of certain realities. Gang violence in certain neighborhoods is a huge issue that needs solving, but I can’t really argue with the fact that the best way to find illegal guns is to stop young, black men from certain socioeconomic backgrounds.

It boils down to priorities: the mayor has decided (and rightfully so, if you ask me) that gun violence is something he and his team are committed to staunching. For example, if you wanted to crack down on cocaine and molly, stop and frisk all the wealthy club kids buying $800 bottles of vodka in the Meatpacking District on a Friday night. It would be silly to pat down all the bus riders near a project in the Bronx to look for illegal Adderall pills. But the city doesn’t really give a damn about fancy kids and their fancy drugs. It is interested in guns and related violence.

And therein lies the reason why Bloomberg, whom I generally respect a great deal, is so full of shit.

If stop/frisk was really about guns and violence alone, let them pat down each and every person they “suspect” of having guns – and then, when they find a bit of weed on an otherwise harmless teenager, LET HIM GO. You want to send a message that you are seriously trying to combat gun violence? Show how important it is by letting pot possession slide. At least then your motives will match up with your outcomes.

Furthermore – and this is what bugs me – have a little fucking compassion. I’ve seen young Arab-looking men profiled in airports often. Ironically, I’ve seen the least of this in Israel (which knows everything about you before you even step foot in Ben Gurion) and America (which just puts everyone through the ringer, like complete idiots). But in Europe I have seen some pretty targeted treatment of some Arab men. And I noticed in Denmark that the search was done apologetically, with an heir of “sorry, I need to feel your testicles for a bomb, this is ridiculous but you know how it is, right?” In Croatia, the agents acted as if they had caught a terrorist and just needed to find the damn evidence. And the response that the Croatian incident prompted from myself and others around me was irritation and shame at the treatment of this dude. The response in Denmark, however, prompted shame – at the situation in general, and annoyance at the actual terrorists out there who were, in essence, ruining this man’s reputation and morning, by tarring their ethnicity with such stigma.

Now I know the NYPD fighting gun violence is way different than the TSA fighting terrorism. But a little humility, a little apology, a touch of “Listen, it sucks we have to do this” would at least somewhat focus more of the rage on the actual scum who terrorize parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. A stop/frisk by a cop trained to assume that this is likely just a precaution, trained to apologize for the intrusion, trained to ignore angry feedback from those being searched would be a whole different ballgame. From what I have seen, these stop/frisk situations are rather confrontational, and usually involved being bent over a car hood like a criminal. Why? What is gained from that? Why show animosity towards the young black men being stereotyped (maybe justifiably), instead of sympathy?

Another refers to the chart in this post:

Mother Jones’ overall stops-per-seizure numbers are masked by the drug seizures on whites (which was interesting to me that you find a significantly higher number of whites carrying drugs – but that’s a question for another day). But, to the point, if you run the seizure numbers just for guns, you are 2.4 times more likely to find a gun on a black than a white. That’s significant. I’m white, but if I were black and lived in some of the tougher NYC neighborhoods, I might carry a gun too. That doesn’t mean I’m a criminal, but it might mean the neighborhood is dangerous, which circles back to the underlying premise of the argument.

By the way, I am biased towards maintaining stop-and-frisk, as I was held up at 1 am as I walked into the lobby of my NYC apartment in Chelsea.  Yes, he was black, but I would feel the same no matter what his skin color.  I was afraid during the holdup and angry afterwards.  I’m sure there are abuses by the police, as there are with all public officials, but in general I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.  The police actually caught the guy within 15 minutes of the holdup and he went to jail.  If they had stopped and frisked him before the holdup, it would have been better for both of us.

Another also speaks to his own experience:

The NYPD and police union are pushing back against the ruling in the stop-and-frisk case requiring officers to be equipped with cameras. I am entirely unsurprised, and that specific reaction is likely prima facie proof that the judge was right about the fact that stop-and-frisk was probably, without regard to the race component, done without a “reasonable and articulable suspicion,” as required by the Terry case. The defense by the mayor, saying the Terry case allows stop and frisk, seems to ignore the fact that Terry has constitutional requirements beyond a raw hunch by a police officer.

The reason many police are not equipped with cameras, increasingly cheaper technology, is that a tool that would in many instances conclusively show very relevant facts, paradoxically makes their job of the officer harder, not easier. Take, for example, the job of a stock broker. SEC rules require all calls with clients to be recorded so everyone has a clear record of what occurred. When something goes wrong, those calls can be really helpful, or really bad. This does not work for police. The innocent reason is that cameras will not capture everything, so what is on film can be misconstrued, and if the equipment fails for some reason, a nefarious reason would be ascribed to the police. The less innocent reason is that a clear and accurate record of what occurred is in many cases not a good thing.

The criminal justice system works in a sense with a wink and a nod – that unless the officer honestly reports a sequence of events that is constitutionally infirm, or screws up embarrassingly in lying about the sequence of events, an officer’s version as to what occurred is almost always accepted as fact in evidentiary hearings on Fourth Amendment issues no matter how much everyone in the room suspects something else happened. That is part of the unspoken societal price for safer streets. As with the national security debate, the issue is what level of invasion of privacy are we willing to accept or ignore for safety (except that in the national security context it is largely Middle Eastern; and in policing, Black or Latino).

The proliferation of cameras makes the wink and nod harder. Famously in South Florida, following a traffic accident involving an off-duty police officer, the police arrested a woman who was involved in the accident for DUI and causing the accident. However, the off-duty officer may have been inebriated and actually had caused the accident. Caught on the audio from one of the police vehicles at the scene was the supervising officer directing the other officers that they would have to do “a little Disney” on the accident report, which was then partially fabricated and used for the arrest of the woman.

As a lawyer, I have encountered, on numerous occasions, law enforcement aversion to cameras. My first was as a prosecutor years ago in NJ when the State Police first installed dashboard cameras in Trooper’s vehicles. The NJ State Police have a reputation for being extraordinarily professional, even militaristically disciplined, including testifying in courtrooms. After a particularly contentious motion to suppress evidence that focused on the videotape, the cameras disappeared from all patrol vehicles, for a time while the agency tried to assess what the agency gained and lost from the use of cameras. The issue of cameras in patrol cars remains an issue in NJ as in other states.

As a defense attorney, I have encountered other examples of police aversion to cameras, including a case where my client was arrested in an undercover drug sting and was charged as a co-conspirator; the police alleged he was a lookout. The police department had a surveillance van and about 15 officers for the takedown. The surveillance van, an expensive piece of equipment with cameras, boom microphones and recording equipment, was on the scene and monitored by two of the agents. The police had used the same location, and same cocaine, about 10 times over the course of a number of months to arrest a large number of people.

However, when the attorneys received the evidence, there was a video that ended before the transaction and arrest. At depositions it became clear that some of the officers were confusing one arrest from others that had occurred at the same location. When it came to the agents in the surveillance van, the lawyers asked if there was a surveillance van there for the purpose of the arrest and capable of recording everything, why was there no recording of the most important part. The answer was “for safety of the officers.” Asked over and over again what that actually meant, the agent finally settled on, “we had to be ready to jump out and assist other officers if something happened so there would be no one to monitor the equipment.” When then asked why they didn’t just go there in a car for all the use the surveillance van provided, the answer was, “I don’t know.”

The NYPD do not want stop-and-frisk monitored by videotape because then practice would likely not stand up to factual scrutiny.

The music-making, fame-seeking robot Cybraphon will soon join the National Museum of Scotland’s permanent collection. The museum explains:

Inspired by early 19th century inventions such as the nickelodeon self-playing piano, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Image conscious and emotional, Cybraphon behaves like a real band, obsessively Googling itself every 15 seconds to see how popular it is. The results affect its emotional state (on a scale of ‘delirium’ to ‘desolation’), which in turn affects its playing style. Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe. Volume is controlled by opening and closing the wardrobe door, while its hidden computer ‘brain’ resides in one of the drawers. Using custom software, the ‘brain’ monitors the web and updates Cybraphon’s emotions according to the rate at which its popularity is changing over time.

Katie Collins reports on the social media reaction to the robot:

Cybraphon has its own social media account and regularly tweets updates about its own moods.

As a result, people from all over the world – many of whom will never actually see Cybraphon in all its wood and brass glory – have gone above and beyond to cheer it up when it’s been down in the dumps. Some people have even gone so far as to send it Facebook gifts and write it poems, which obviously has no more effect than would a simple mention. “We ended up with this totally unexpected dialogue between the fans and this machine. The thing that really struck is me how much people want to suspend disbelief about it. They obviously know its not a real sentient being,” says [co-creator Simon] Kirby.

Recently, Alyssa picked a bone with comic creator Todd MacFarlane over his claim that superhero comics are destined to be dominated by males because the form is inherently testosterone-driven:

McFarlane’s arguments, of course, ignore that superheroes don’t actually exist, and that the production of superhero comics is not actually a biological function determined by whatever bodies we’re born with. A lack of equality in the nobility’s ranks in the medieval military hasn’t kept Tamora Pierce from writing dozens of fantasy novels involving female knights, because that is a thing that you can do in fiction. If superheroes actually existed, and their ranks were exclusively male, writing fantastical fiction to consider how women might handle that sort of power, and how the world might react to their use of it would be a perfectly legitimate subject for superhero fiction to explore.

And having two X chromosomes hasn’t actually kept women like Gail Simone from writing wonderful characters of both sexes for decades–nor has possession of a Y chromosome kept men like Dan Slott and Jeff Parker from doing well by characters like She-Hulk and Red She-Hulk. The decision to stay within the narrow lanes of your own fantasies is a choice, not biological determinism.

Noah Berlatsky takes on MacFarlane’s suggestion that feminist comics “makes for boring stories that drive people away”:

If you want to restrict the discussion to comic books, the two most successful female superhero comics–and for that matter, two of the most successful superhero comics period–were both feminist.

Sailor Moon was all about sisterhood, girl power, and women triumphing over evil together while wearing frilly outfits. It just about single-handedly transformed the comics market in the U.S., so that suddenly the biggest growing sector was girls, and the biggest growing series were Japanese. (The decision of comics critic and small manga publisher Erica Friedman to learn Japanese just to read Sailor Moon is telling, if not exactly typical.)

The original Wonder Woman comics were even more politically engaged. Creator William Marston believed that women were better suited than men to rule, and his comics were devoted to explicit feminist moralizing. In one issue, Wonder Woman becomes the president of a future utopia. In another, she teaches girls that they can perform amazing feats of strength and skill if they only believe in themselves. In a third, Wonder Woman has to dispel an ectoplasmic doppelganger of George Washington who attempts to convince the United States that women should not be allowed to contribute to the war effort. Back in the 1940s, these issues moved hundreds of thousands of copies each — dwarfing sales of all those present-day non-ideological superhero comics that Todd McFarlane draws.

(Image by Fan Art Exhibit)

Millennials appear to be having less sex than Gen Xers did. Allie Jones summarizes the claim:

A new study presented at the American Sociological Association on Tuesday shows that the “hookup culture” narrative might be a myth. Martin A. Monto, a professor of sociology at the University of Portland, found in the comparative study “no evidence of substantial changes in sexual behavior that would support the proposition that there is a new or pervasive ‘hookup culture’ among contemporary college students.”

Daniel Stuckey digs into the numbers:

Martin Monto and Anna Carey looked at data from the General Social Survey which included 1,800 18 to 25-year-olds who had graduated from high school and completed at least one year of college. The researchers compared results from 2002-2010 with 1988-1996, and found that 59.3 percent of college students from today’s cohort reported having sex weekly or more often in the past year—while 65.2 percent of their predecessors had reported such frequencies.

Molly Redden wonders about all the “hook-up culture” stories in the media:

Monto has illuminated, definitively, that the real trend driving these stories is not an actual change in student behavior. What is driving them?

Perhaps, as Kathleen Bogle, a LaSalle University sociologist, suggested to the Chronicle, these stories are the natural result of a culture that merely talks about casual encounters more than we used to. Young peoples’ ability to order up a booty call via text message has certainly proved alarming to their elders, even though booze probably remains the real culprit behind hookups—as I imagine it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Tracy Clark-Flory is skeptical of the study:

These are compelling findings, but keep in mind that this study has yet to be published, peer-reviewed or substantiated with further research — so, yeah. Another major consideration: The survey looks at students in college and doesn’t take into account the number of partners that one can accumulate post-college, which is especially relevant as the age of first marriage continues to skyrocket. Also important are ever-changing and inconsistent definitions of what constitutes sex, a sexual partner or a hookup.

Lauren O’Neal pans Holly Grigg-Spall’s forthcoming book, Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control, which insists that the pill is a tool of oppression that separates women from their natural state:

[Grigg-Spall’s] ideal birth-control method … is a secular update to the rhythm method, and we get pages of detail about taking temperatures, checking cervical mucus, observing cervical position, and charting this information every day. Honestly, this all sounds like a wonderful way to avoid pregnancy for women who have the time and inclination and who don’t experience certain menstrual, uterine, and ovarian disorders. For most people, though, it’s impractical. … [T]he book presents birth control as a simple issue. The only criterion a woman need involve in her decision is whether or not a given method is natural and therefore healthy. The demands a job and children make on her time are not factors. Rape, abuse, and coercion are not factors. There is only natural and unnatural.

Marcotte also criticizes the book’s focus on “naturalness”:

Grigg-Spall presents the rhythm method as more natural than the birth control pill, but it can easily be argued that the behavior of monitoring cervical mucus and using technologies like calendars and thermometers is also “unnatural”. Indeed, one of the more irritating problems with the naturalistic fallacy is the tendency to assume that technologies become more “natural” with time, but there was a time before humans were using calendars and the thermometers and clocks used to chart your menstrual cycle are even newer inventions. This tendency to think that technology x time = natural shows how intellectually vapid the entire argument from nature really is. Bizarrely, nothing is more natural than developing new technologies to make our lives easier, in the sense of “natural” meaning “inherent to humanity” or “hardwired”.

Kelly Bourdet’s bottom line on the book:

Sweetening the Pill will appeal to many people who believe in the power of collective menstruation, the rightness of our connection to moon phases, and the oppression of patriarchal capitalism. But it’s not going to convince many women who feel they “need” birth control to switch to other methods.

But Bourdet also highlights some constructive parts of Sweetening the Pill and the troubling aspects of hormonal contraception featured in the book:

The alteration of testosterone [by the pill] factors into women’s choice of sexual partners and mates. A study from last year revealed that women on hormonal birth control—which suppresses naturally occurring testosterone—were attracted to men with lower testosterone levels (usually the opposite is true). However when women go off of the pill, and their testosterone levels increase, their attraction to their partners decreased. This is a powerful, life-altering side effect to be sure. And it’s fair to wonder whether a drug that could alter our choice in long-term partners is too powerful for comfort. …

In a constructive suggestion on how women unhappy on their birth control can still control their fertility, Grigg-Spall quotes from Heather Corinna’s article, “Love the Glove”:

If we’re going to talk about condoms changing how sex feels, we need to remember that something like the pill does too, and unlike condoms, it changes how a woman feels all the time, both during and outside of sex. Condoms are the least intrusive and demanding of all methods of contraception.

Though less effective (given perfect adherence and use) than birth control, the essay brings up an excellent point. We frame access to hormonal contraception as a hard won right for women—and it is—but neglect to represent the idea that it has its consequences. The idea that condoms muffle sexual sensation in a burdensome way for men, and thus hormonal solutions are “better,” is an extension of a worldview that women are solely responsible for both providing sexual pleasure and for controlling their own fertility. While some women don’t experience uncomfortable side effects when taking the pill, some do, and it’s important to consider men equally capable in taking steps to prevent pregnancy.

People underestimate the risk of catastrophic events when they can’t think of any recent ones:

Take the possibility of a major impact by an asteroid or other near-Earth object. The last impact that did serious damage was the Tunguska event over central Russia in 1908 (though there was no actual impact with the surface of the Earth—an asteroid or comet roughly 300 feet across apparently exploded in the air). Small wonder, then, that “20 years ago the near-Earth-object field practically didn’t exist,” says Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s near-Earth-object program. … Back then, “we had ‘the giggle factor’ when it was mentioned that these objects could be dangerous and could be looked for,” Yeomans says. “People would laugh and say, ‘Yeah, when was the last time?’ Simply because we didn’t see them, they didn’t take the threat as seriously as we have come to.”

But in 1993, astronomers Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker and David Levy spotted a comet (now called Shoemaker-Levy 9) on a collision course with Jupiter.

Millions saw the incredible video of the massive explosions. There were 21 separate impacts, the largest of which was 600 times more powerful than the entire world’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The crater it left was 7,500 miles across, almost big enough to reach from the North Pole to Rio de Janeiro. A single impact like that would have wiped out life on Earth. The movies Armageddon and Deep Impact followed in the next few years, along with a couple of ultimately false alerts from the astronomy community about possible near-Earth objects headed our way that got huge press coverage. In the past 10 years, funding for NASA’s work to spot objects that might collide with Earth has gone from practically nothing to more than $20 million a year, and we’ve located more than 90 percent of the big ones that could do serious damage.