November 2014 – Page 9

The Damage Control Is Done, Ctd

A few readers offer their perspective on the awful situation at the University of Virginia:

I’m a former federal prosecutor and an alum of UVA. I think those who advocate for the criminal justice system being used instead of having colleges investigate sexual assault are asking too much of the criminal justice system. While the gang rape at the center of the Rolling Stone article would be a good case for full prosecutorial investigation, most sexual assaults occurring on most campuses would not. Most “date rape” scenarios would never be prosecuted. Without third-party witnesses or evidence of a “roofie” in the girl’s blood, prosecutors would generally not find enough evidence to indict. The beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard is simply too high in those kinds of cases, and if we left them for the criminal justice system to handle, it would likely end up being an excuse for inaction.

Another goes out on a limb:

As a 2005 UVA grad and fraternity member, I am having a lot of trouble formulating any sort of reaction to this situation without coming off as some sort of rape-supporting monster, but I am very uncomfortable with the rush to judgement and the urge to punish the “bad guys” as quickly and severely as possible.

The Rolling Stone story made me feel sick to my stomach with anger when I started to read it. However, by the end of the article, I was surprised that they even agreed to publish it, considering the explosive implications of the allegations and the lack of proof or corroboration that the story was true. The victim deserves to be believed by her friends, support network, and any counselors or professionals whose job involves helping rape survivors, but a journalist is not supposed to be a credulous scribe for any allegation.

There are some people who will literally wish my violent death for saying this, but there is a chance that the accuser made it up or exaggerated. It happens. That doesn’t mean that we refuse to listen to the allegations and say terrible things about her, but it does mean that we as a society should still ask for proof. The fraternity in question has been essentially destroyed as an institution because of this story, and if it’s true, they totally deserve it. But I would have been much more comfortable if the accuser had at least tried to press charges with the police or the university.

I also see many calls for collective punishment for all fraternities, regardless of their actual record of behavior. This is simply unfair. There are 30 frats at UVA, representing about 30% of the males in the student body. It is absurd to claim that 30% of UVA men are rapists, rape supporters, or otherwise implicated in a “rape culture”.

If anyone had that sort of attitude about women, they wouldn’t even be invited back to a rush event at my house or many others. We voluntarily worked with One in Four on educating every single pledge who came into our organization about consent, preventing assaults, and monitoring each other’s behavior to prevent bad situations. We had multiple sober party monitors at every event with alcohol to go from room to room and make sure nothing bad was happening. That included telling brothers not to bring stumbling drunk girls to their rooms. It included helping find people at the party when their friends were looking for them. It even included calling 911 to get an ambulance to our own doorstep to help a girl who was either drugged or drastically over-served at another house and then wandered to our house looking to drink more.

They Ink, Therefore They Are

Chris Weller muses on body art, young adults, and identity:

Each inked-up person on the train appeared to be in the same age group—Millennials, to use the much-maligned descriptor. Being of the same generation, presumably we all post to social media on a regular basis, through profiles and accounts that compel us to confront the question, Who are you? For some, that choice is liberating: It’s a chance to start from scratch. For others, the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing. In either case, modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not. Growing up in a rapidly changing and challenging world, most young people have struggled at some point or another with figuring out who they might be.

Tattoos, recent research suggests, don’t just express identity: They help define it. …

We define who we are by the elements that stick with us—people, stories, places, memories—and we measure ourselves in relation to them, patching the highlights together into what sociologists call a “personal myth.” These myths make sense of often-turbulent lives, integrating our “remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future,” as [Anne] Velliquette wrote in her 2006 report. Some people use institutions such as religion, work, and family to create this myth. Others use material objects like houses and cars to define it. But Millennials are something of a breed apart. Without access to many of the anchors their parents had to create their personal myths, that sense of stability and permanence is often harder to find.

(Photo from Instagram user ane_a)

How Misconceptions Can Kill

Adam Waytz connects his research on the superhumanization of blacks to the Michael Brown shooting:

Wilson seemed to justify his infliction of lethal pain on to Brown precisely because he perceived Brown to be a superhuman threat. It is easy to feel good or indifferent about superhumanization because it seems to “elevate” black people, celebrating their strength and resilience. Some might even argue that superhumanization of black people is our earnest attempt to counteract sub-humanization of black people. But as the case of Michael Brown demonstrates there is a thin line between superhumanization and subhumanization. Both deny black people’s humanity. Therein lies the problem.

A Dish reader made a similar point yesterday. Bouie is troubled by how Darren Wilson described his encounter with Michael Brown:

Maybe Wilson was an ordinary police officer with all the baggage it carries. Maybe, like many of his peers on the Ferguson police force, he was hard on black teenagers. Maybe, like many Americans, he was a little afraid of them. And maybe all of this—his fear, his bias, and his training—met Michael Brown and combined to create tragedy.

If so, the lesson of Wilson is that he isn’t unique. That his fear is common. And that the same forces that drove Wilson and Brown to confrontation can—and will—drive another Wilson and another Brown to another confrontation with the same deadly results.

Emily Ekins hits the psychology books:

Academic research … tells us that more than a police officer’s conscious intentions may influence their judgments and actions. University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Payne (2001) conducted an experiment finding research participants were more likely to mis-identify a hand tool as a gun when they had to respond quickly, immediately after being shown the face of an African-American male rather than a Caucasian male. Particularly, white and male respondents were faster to identify guns when “primed” with a black face versus a white face.

This suggests that police officers like Daren Wilson may have genuinely believed their lives were threatened, and acted accordingly—but that their conclusions were unduly and implicitly influenced by their own stereotypes.

The Least-Coveted Job In Washington

https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/statuses/537367784574177280

Michéle Flournoy, the leading candidate to replace Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, has bowed out:

Flournoy, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank that has served as a farm league for future Obama administration officials, would have been the first female secretary of defense had she risen to the position. The news of her decision to withdraw was first reported by Foreign Policy. But in a letter Tuesday to members of the CNAS board of directors, Flournoy said she would remain in her post at the think tank and asked Obama to take her out of consideration to be the next secretary of defense. Flournoy told the board members that family health considerations helped drive her decision and the fact that two of her children are leaving for college in the next two years.

“Last night I spoke with President Obama and removed myself from consideration due to family concerns,” reads the letter, first obtained by FP. “After much agonizing, we decided that now was not the right time for me to reenter government.”

Senator Jack Reed, another contender, has also said he has no interest in a new job. Austin Wright and Michael Hirsh aren’t surprised that nobody seems to want to run the Pentagon these days:

To understand why Flournoy and others are dropping out of the running for secretary of defense, just think about the job description: You’ll be working for a president who once declared that he was elected to end wars but who now finds himself stuck, reluctantly, in a new one in Iraq and a prolonged one in Afghanistan — and who badly wants to finish up both in two years, though that’s probably impossible. He’s also a president who won’t listen much to you, since he apparently has little intention of altering the White House’s tight grip on the national security apparatus, which was the bane not only of Hagel but his two Pentagon predecessors, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates.

Flournoy “doesn’t want to be a doormat, and I think they want a doormat,” said one former Defense Department official who worked there during Flournoy’s tenure. “I do not think they’re looking for someone more aggressive and independent.”

John Fund is on the same page:

It’s well known after Secretary Hagel’s clashes with White House staff that anyone who takes the Pentagon job will be butting heads with Susan Rice, the National Security Council adviser who exercises an iron grip on key aspects of foreign policy. Not to mention Valerie Jarrett, the influential presidential counselor who seems to have both hands in every pie at the White House. “Why should anyone put up with those headaches and not even have full command of your department?” asks one leading Democratic defense analyst I spoke with. He said the White House’s need to micromanage the national-security apparatus is notorious in Washington.

Morrissey recommends that Obama pick a technocrat with as little political baggage as possible, along the lines of former deputy defense secretary Ashton Carter:

The technocrat model may be the answer for the lame-duck period of the Obama presidency in other areas, too. Technocrats make difficult targets, even in a hostile environment. Senate Republicans are not likely to block confirmations on national-security positions, but after Obama’s unilateral declaration on immigration, they will target other appointments from Obama in response to his bypassing of Congress.

Even without that, Republicans would be scrapping for a fight over overtly political nominees, and unfortunately for Obama, there will be a number of openings as his current appointees look for greener pastures than a Democratic administration pitted against a Congress controlled by the GOP. A reliance on experts rather than activists will give Obama the opening to make the changes he needs after his second midterm shellacking, and perhaps restore some confidence in the competency of his administration.

With Reed and Flournoy both out of contention, Carter is now the presumptive front-runner.

Illiberalism In The Art World, Ctd

A reader senses a double standard:

Reading your excerpt of Jerry Saltz’s piece and reflecting on your recent writing on the stifling of debate with cries of racism, sexism, etc., I’m struck by a thought. You say there’s a certain amount of homophobia gays must learn to tolerate because the alternative (i.e., silencing those with politically incorrect views) is even worse. Ditto sexism, ditto (presumably) racism and anti-semitism. Homos, blacks, Jews, women: Toughen up. People will say things that hurt your feelings, but too bad. The world cares not. Free speech is more important than your bruised emotions.

And yet. Saltz seems quite to have had his feelings hurt by being called a racist, a perv, a hater of women. Should he not toughen up as well? It would appear to me there is a quite a debate going on – about whether Saltz’s views are out of bounds. Is that not a debate worth having as well? And if it is, then Saltz and his hurt feelings can get in line with all the gays who are tired of homophobia, all the black folks who are tired of racism, all the women who are tired of catcalling, and just realize that the debate is more important.

Yes, I think the targets of the left’s various public shamings – shamings now put on rhetorical growth hormone by the Twitter and Facebook mobs – should take it on the chin, unless their very existence as a writer is under threat. I’m fine with my being hauled out and shamed, even by Dish readers – but that’s because I have real freedom here to write what I think and take whatever lumps come my way. That’s the beauty of an independent site and the free speech zone here at the Dish. I am not directly threatened by these new puritans in the discourse. But so many others are – in academia, especially, but also in journalism. And when the point of the shaming is to shut down a person’s job or livelihood, to stigmatize so as to punish views that are violations of left-wing church doctrine, then I think the victims have every right to point out the threat to free discourse. That’s different than whining about having one’s feelings hurt.

Because the real troubling part of Saltz’s piece was the pressure to have him fired:

People stormed off the internet in disgust; letters were written to my editor demanding that I step down and asking me to “explain myself.”

I have a real issue when ideology requires that others be silenced or fired. And this line is a real one. It’s perfectly possible to chew someone out in public in devastating ways, while still defending that person’s absolute right to be part of the conversation. We should want our opponents to stay in the ring, if we want to advance discourse and ideas and win hearts and minds in a public debate. And yet, the deeper impulse behind the left’s latest burst of outrage is precisely the opposite. It is to deny that there is any debate worth having, and then to silence or remove those who are on the other side. I despise that impulse, whether it comes from the right (such as their use of the anti-Semite card to police criticism of Israel) or from the left (such as the shutting down of debates on abortion). And it seems to be on a major upswing on the left.

(Composite image from Saltz’s piece)

The Case For Police Reform Remains Strong

Reflecting on the Michael Brown case, Friedersdorf insists that, “when it comes to the problem of police officers using excessive force, including lethal force, against people they encounter, there are scores of cases that better illustrate the problem”:

[E]ven protesters who want to highlight the specific problem of white police officers shooting black men—even those who want to do so by saying “don’t shoot” while raising their arms in the air—needn’t rely on a murky incident with conflicting eyewitness testimony where there’s a chance that the unknowable truth would exonerate the officer. Instead, they can show skeptics this video from Columbia, South Carolina:

When I want to persuade a skeptic that police can misbehave so badly that it’s hard to believe until one sees it, that is the incident I thrust before them. Given an hour of their time, I could fill it with other incidents on YouTube, almost all of which were totally ignored by most of the commentators who are now flaunting their outrage at anyone evaluating evidence in Ferguson differently than they do. This alienates potential allies and converts on the larger issue of police abuse … for what?

Some of the reforms Conor advocates for:

So what specific reforms are needed? Too many to list them all in this article. But here are some measures, beyond video cameras, that would improve policing:

• Decisions about when to charge police officers should be made by independent prosecutors, not regular district attorneys, who must rely on police to testify in most of the cases they bring. That gives these district attorneys a perverse incentive to refrain from aggressively prosecuting misconduct.

•Police unions should be able to negotiate salary, benefits, and nothing else–firing an abusive police officer should be easy.

•All police departments should have strong civilian oversight.

•The War on Drugs should be ended.

•Most military-grade police equipment should be returned to the federal government or destroyed.

• Civil asset forfeiture should be reformed.

•No-knock raids should stop in almost all cases.

Alfred Blumstein suggests a related reform:

Communities should find ways to establish a police-accountability commission that has the unchallenged authority to remove from the police force any officer who has demonstrated grossly inappropriate use of lethal force. Their investigation could well include a review of the officer’s prior record in interactions with the community, to provide a context within which to judge a current incident. Such a high-level commission representative of the larger community could serve to remove high-risk officers, to serve as a deterrent to irresponsible use of lethal force, and to provide greater comfort to the citizenry that the police will act responsibly in their use of lethal force.

More generally, Linker objects to “granting to cops of an a priori presumption of virtue that no one else in our culture enjoys”:

Of course there’s nothing wrong with admiring and expressing gratitude for the work police officers do. But shouldn’t it also be part of our civic education to inculcate a healthy suspicion of people we empower to enforce order on our streets with live ammunition? Shouldn’t we expect that citizens impaneled on grand juries will usually opt for indictment in cases where a cop is implicated in the death of an unarmed man or woman, if only to establish the facts and enable our society to take public stock of what happened?

How Many Civilians Do Drone Strikes Kill?

A new report from the human rights group, Reprieve, has some truly disturbing statistics:

Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets. In Yemen, 17 named men were targeted multiple times. Strikes on them killed 273 people, at least seven of them children. At least four of the targets are still alive.

Available data for the 41 men targeted for drone strikes across both countries indicate that each of them was reported killed multiple times. Seven of them are believed to still be alive. The status of another, Haji Omar, is unknown. Abu Ubaidah al-Masri, whom drones targeted three times, later died from natural causes, believed to be hepatitis.

The data here are deduced from public news accounts of the various strikes, their successes and their collateral damage. I can’t verify all the details. But if they are even close to being accurate, they decisively shift the moral equation behind drone strikes as a least worst option for killing terrorists. What we need is more data from the Pentagon, the CIA and JSOC to have a better idea of what is actually happening if we are able, as an informed public, to judge the effectiveness and basic morality of this war. Quite simply, we need to know how many innocents we are killing in the attempt to neutralize terror. And whether this war is actually – through these massacres of civilians – making things even worse.

The View From Your Window

Madinat Zayed, United Arab Emirates, 10.22 am

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd

Some remaining thoughts from readers regarding the grand jury decision and aftermath:

Your correspondent compared Ferguson to Benghazi:

There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.

You know, s/he’s not entirely wrong. But even if Micheal Brown had been holding an AR-15 in each hand when he was shot, everything that we’ve been talking about in the aftermath of his death about the systemic corruption, violence, impunity – and yes, institutional racism – of policing and incarceration in this country would still be true. The ugly, simple truth is that very few people will rally against injustice in the abstract, regardless of the scale. We just aren’t wired for that kind of empathy. (Stalin was right about tragedies and statistics.) So is it a mistake to try to leverage a particular case to bring the bigger issues to the fore? It certainly is risky, and I think we are seeing why right now. But if there is a better way to go about it, I don’t think we’ve seen it yet.

Another would seem to concur:

I agree with your take on Ferguson. If your objective is to make an example of how police interact with young men of color, this isn’t a perfect case. It’s just attracted the most attention. And the response is making it worse. But this is where we are, with the incompetence and violence and rioting and everything. And every day that sees a riot, we get a little bit closer to forgetting Michael Brown.

Taking in the non-indictment and aftermath of the Brown tragedy, I think I understand a little bit more about your perspective on Matthew Shepard. One thing you can’t say about Shepard is that his life was wasted. He just wasn’t the person who took advantage of it. His parents and advocates of gay rights and hate crimes legislation – good or bad – made sure his name would ring out after he died. They took an imperfect case and made it count.

I want to remember Michael Brown as the namesake of laws around the country that require all police to wear body cameras. “Michael’s Law” has a nice ring to it.

Another goes after his fellow left-liberals:

When I listen to the commentary on the left, I can’t help hearing benevolent racism.

Because they do not seem inclined to accept that Michael Brown had the capacity to rise above the difficult socioeconomic disadvantages in his life. Because if they did have that faith in him, they would find fault with some incredibly bad decisions he made leading up to the altercation: 1) Getting super-high, 2) Stealing the cigars, 3) Walking down the middle of the street after commission of a crime, 4) Charging a police car, 5) Assaulting a police officer, 6) Evading arrest, 7) Turning back toward the police officer instead of going to the ground.

Did he deserve to die for this? Hell no! But nor is he the squeaky-clean victim of circumstance he is to much of the left. Yes, his low-income status, the racial disparities between the police and the neighborhoods, the failure of our education system, and on and on. There are structural factors that undoubtedly played a major role in this tragedy. But sending Darren Wilson to prison does not resolve any of those issues, nor does it provide “justice” to Brown’s family, despite the family’s claims to the contrary.

Yes, it’s damned hard to be black in America, today or any day. Or Hispanic. Or a woman. Or gay. But if we absolve disadvantaged groups of personal responsibility when something bad happens, how can we credit them with playing a role in their successes? We liberals need to be mindful of dehumanizing, demoralizing and frankly racist assumptions that inform our opinions.

An expert reflects on the previous commentary from readers:

Greetings from a charter subscriber, and many thanks for your wonderful blog. A number of your readers have already addressed these points, but I’d like to add my perspective on the no true bill returned by the grand jury against Darren Wilson.

I have never served as a police officer, but I am a lawyer and have served as an FBI agent for 25 years. Throughout my career I have worked extensively with various state and municipal police agencies. I have undergone training that is no doubt similar to (though, because the federal government has a greater training budget than most municipal agencies, probably more extensive than) that received by Officer Wilson. One of your other readers correctly pointed out that all law enforcement officers, when confronted with a situation in which deadly force is justified, are trained to shoot until the threat is eliminated. That’s the precise language used in my training: shoot to eliminate the threat. If Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown, he was justified to shoot him as many times as it took to eliminate him as a threat (whether he was in fact a threat is a question for a jury to decide, typically).

Your reader was also accurate in his description of the 1986 FBI Miami shootout, which had a tremendous impact on not only how FBI agents are armed and trained, but also impacted the arming and training of law enforcement officers throughout the country. The FBI, specifically, adopted the short lived 10 mm pistol, and eventually the .40 caliber pistol, to give their agents more “stopping power” when confronted with deadly force situations.

With regard to the rarity of grand juries issuing no true bills, one of your other readers has already pointed out that prosecutors typically self-select the strongest cases for presentation, which in part accounts for the cited statistics. It’s also important to note that the statistics cited were for federal grand juries, which tend to be even more selective regarding case presentation than state grand juries. In the federal system, with which I am very familiar, prosecutors have absolute discretion over what cases they present to the grand jury, and typically present only those of which they are certain to obtain an indictment. Several states (and I believe Missouri is one, though I may be mistaken) mandate that all officer involved shootings be presented to a grand jury (a friend of mine went through this following his killing of an armed subject; the shooting was justified and the grand jury returned no true bill). I’d imagine the return of no true bills before state grand juries aren’t quite as rare as they are in the federal system.

While the overwhelming majority of police officers I know are dedicated, competent and moral individuals, there is a systemic problem with how we police racially diverse urban areas. There is an “us against them” attitude among the officers I’ve known regarding significant numbers of the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect. It is not, strictly speaking, a racial issue; some of the officers I’ve known with the greatest disdain for racial and ethnic minority communities are themselves members of those minority groups. It is, I believe, more a function of the militarization of our police – not militarization in the sense of using tanks or other military hardware (though that is a problem), but rather the adoption of a military, or warrior, mindset.

Walk into the squad area of any police station or precinct in the country and you’re likely to see inspirational posters espousing the warrior ethos. Many officers, including ones I admire in many ways, buy into this and believe they are going into combat each time they hit the street. This has proved beneficial for police officers in general: line-of-duty deaths have steadily declined over the past decades, and part of this is likely due to increased awareness of the dangers of their job that is, at least in part, attributable to the adoption of this mindset. But it has come at great cost to the communities they police.

One more reader:

Apologies if this seems too obvious to mention, but the pieces and comments I’ve read regarding Michael Brown all suffer from the same error. People are trying to look through both ends of the telescope. On the one hand, we know that cop-on-black violence is a problem that raises profound questions of racial and economic justice. On the other hand, we are trying to deal with the facts and the system of evidence that the law requires. It seems that people who say, “Well, the evidence does seem to suggest that the officer acted reasonably, given what we’re now learning” are being accused, either implicitly or explicitly, of denying that our nation has a systemic problem with these kinds of issues generally.

We need to be able to say that even if we have a systemic problem in our economy and culture that produces a lot of cases of unjust and tragic violence against black men (amongst others), we still may conclude in any given case that the violence was justified. Or, looked at in the other direction: if we conclude (and we may not) that officer Wilson’s use of violence was justified, we can still conclude that our nation has a very serious problem that leads law enforcement to give violent expression to an economic and cultural system that is racially biased and unjust and that we have to change that system.

Those who feel that they have no way to express their outrage and who are protesting violently as a result, and those who are online decrying the injustice in this particular legal case have something in common: they are looking at the evidence of this case through the lens of larger questions of race and justice. That lens distorts the evidence in any given case.

(Photo: Thousands of people protesting the grand jury’s decision about the fatal police shooting of black 18-year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri march onto the lanes of Interstate 580 after blocking the traffic for several hours near Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, California on November 24, 2014. By Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

One Thing I’m Thankful For

I woke up this morning to the following headline:

It will be appealed. But did I ever think I’d read that headline in my lifetime?

I love this country because, for all its deep divisions and constant insanity, it moves forward, and not by sudden elite fiats, as in Western Europe, but by the long and winding road of debate, lawsuits, legislative action, court action and presidential nudging. This struggle isn’t over – and the debate should never be over – but what a long way we’ve come. Mississippi.