Tag: Premium

UVA: Pushing Back On The Pushback

Ari Schulman goes after Rich Bradley’s querying of the UVA gang-rape story:

Bradley also gets wrong numerous details of the Rolling Stone article itself: who was and wasn’t interviewed; the claim that all of Jackie’s friends discouraged her from going to the hospital; Jackie’s ostensible lack of identity; Jackie’s inability to identify the perpetrators. He changes a line from the article without noting it, adding quote marks around words that didn’t have them. He mischaracterizes Jackie’s claim that one in three women at UVA are raped. He also invokes the claim as evidence of a broader cultural climate surrounding rape in which “emotion has outswept reason.” The slip here is strange: The emotionality of an alleged rape victim is offered as evidence of the irrationality of those who would believe her. These are not minor problems for any argument, but they are particularly problematic for one that sells itself as a scolding in journalistic carefulness.

Most significant, Bradley says that if fraternity gang rape were so prevalent, “One would think that we’d have heard of this before.” But the article describes other instances of the practice, from two current allegations besides Jackie’s to a conviction in a court of a law for a prior gang rape by members of the very same fraternity at UVA. All of this is also easily verifiable outside of the Rolling Stone article. And the Washington Post, among others, has detailed the extensive history of gang rape at fraternities nationwide.

Kat Stoeffel defends Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s decision not to identify or interview the alleged rapists in her story:

Media critics have taken Erdely to task for not pressing Jackie to confirm their identities and allow her to track them down in person, though single-source narration happens without incident in less sensitive stories all the time. (There probably wasn’t anybody around to corroborate some of the details of GQ’s lauded feature on hermit Christopher Knight, either.) What makes Jackie’s story arguably different is the magnitude of her accusations: Critics of the story say that the men deserved a chance to offer their side of the story before having their names smeared. Except, what names? The only identified entity at risk of reputational harm in Rolling Stone is Phi Kappa Psi, leaders of which Erdely did reach. …

No journalist wants to fall for the next Stephen Glass or Duke lacrosse case. But Erdely wrote the piece in such a way that she and Rolling Stone — not Jackie and Drew — are the ones who will be most damaged by a false report. Meanwhile, the journalist backlash is putting feminists who believe in believing women in the uncomfortable position of hoping Jackie told the truth about her gang rape. Not because we want to confirm our biases about monstrous men, but because we’d hate to see confirmation for sexist biases about lying, attention-seeking women. In other words, we’re backed into the corner of hoping someone was gang-raped on broken glass — and how can that possibly constitute a happy ending? If anything, we should hope that Jackie is lying. Then exactly zero lives will have been ruined in this story.

In a series of tweets, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson points out another high profile rape story in which the rapist was not contacted. Lindsay Beyerstein also counters some of the credibility pushback on the piece:

Some of the details of Jackie’s story do seem surreal, but memories of trauma are often fragmentary. She and one of her attackers allegedly tumbled through a glass coffee table. We’re told she was pinned on the floor with shattered glass digging into her back before she was raped. Hot Air’s Noah Rothman dismissed Jackie’s story as a “fantastical account of college men raping a woman atop piles of broken glass.”

Is the coffee table story really so far-fetched? I spoke to Mark Meshulam, an expert witness who testifies in court on glass and its properties. Mr. Meshulam said that the likely outcome of a fall through a glass table depends on many factors, but the biggest variable would be whether the tabletop was made of regular glass or safety glass. Both types are common, he explained. … If it were a tempered glass table, the glass would have shattered into little pebbles, which are non-lethal but still sharp enough to cut someone who’s lying on them, Mr. Meshulam said. In that case, he’d expect her to be scratched up, maybe badly enough to need stitches, but not necessarily. Which is pretty much the level of injury the story implies.

Wouldn’t all the alleged rapists have been cut up as well? Wouldn’t this have affected the entire horrifying gang rape? And one of Dreher’s readers shares a story that adds credibility to Jackie’s experience with her friends following the rape:

I was a very naive freshman going to her first college party- and I’d never been around alcohol before. I didn’t drink anything that night, but many of the people around me had a lot. One girl got incredibly drunk and a guy who wasn’t very drunk convinced her to go “watch a movie” in his room. I was too naive to understand what may have been happening here, so I didn’t do anything. When we went to leave the party with my friends, we went by that boy’s room to collect our friend- she was disheveled and extremely drunk, and her pants were down. I suspected she had been sexually assaulted.

Our group returned immediately to our dorm and an RA spotted the drunk girl as we walked in. The dorm staff called my friends and me separately into a room and asked us all exactly what we’d witnessed. Apparently their purpose was to figure out how much alcohol the girl had consumed to decide whether or not she needed to go to the ER. I naively told exactly what I’d seen that night, including the part about her disappearing to the boy’s room (so I didn’t know how much she had to drink during that time) and coming out with her pants down. Apparently no one else said anything about the boy. My “friends” figured out that I’d told that part of the story and I was immediately shunned from the social group for “tattling” and “slut-shaming.”

In light of the new criticisms about the piece, McArdle wants the cops to figure it out:

[T]he university may well be able to identify everyone, because the story strongly suggests that an entire new class of Phi Kappa Psi brothers participated in a gang rape, either of Jackie or of the two other girls who she learned were also gang raped at the fraternity around the same time that she had been.  As far as I can tell, Virginia has no statute of limitations on rape, which means the police should be aggressively investigating these sickening allegations.   The university has a duty to its own community, and to the community at large, to do its utmost to identify as many rapists as possible, and help the police to bring them to justice.  And all of us who have a stake in reducing rape — which is to say, all of us who are not rapists — should be putting as much pressure as possible on the UVA administration to ensure that it does exactly that.

And Rebecca Traister worries that people are losing sight of Erdely’s point, which is that UVA, like so many other universities, has done an abysmal job of responding to allegations of rape on campus:

The dismantling of Erdely’s story—both by anti-feminist agonistes and by those genuinely dismayed by possible journalistic error—would mean that Jackie’s story of being beaten and raped by seven fraternity brothers will be dismissed, and that the reading public will be permitted to slip back into the comforting conviction that stories like Jackie’s aren’t real, that rapes like that don’t happen, that our system works, and that, of course, bitches lie.

What we will all be allowed to happily forget is that there are plenty of real stories of rape: of violent rape, frat house rape, gang rape, date rape; that most rape accusers do not lie and that in fact it’s quite likely, statistically, that Jackie herself did not lie. But the most serious thing that we’ll be allowed to forget is the very point of Erdely’s story, whatever its strengths or flaws may be determined to be: The system does not work. Actually, in both the case of the UVA rape and in the case of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the major takeaway of recent weeks should be that our systems do not work.

Freddie weighs in, saying – in essence – that truth matters:

[W]hy are people so resistant to giving these stories a rigorous and skeptical review, the way we should do with any reporting? What are you so afraid of?

The standard response is that countenancing questions about reports of rape helps denialists, who will seize on problems with reporting and use them to agitate against anti-rape efforts in general. But that doesn’t make any sense, to me. In order for that argument to hold water, you’ve got to prove that preventing these questions from being asked actually defuses rape denialism. That seems to be literally the opposite of the case; denialists are emboldened by such refusal. They seize on such resistance as evidence of conspiracy  and weak evidence. I think it’s profoundly naive to believe that we can hold the line against critical review of rape narratives in such a way as to prevent denialism. Rape denialism is a sad fact of life, but it can be combated with evidence and careful argument. Denialism is an argument for being skeptical and rigorous, not an argument against it.

I’m with Freddie and Megan on this. Get to the bottom of it. And stop trying to deter legitimate skepticism toward a piece whose horrors are so detailed and whose villains so despicable that asking further questions is perfectly natural. At some point, the posturing needs to end and the fact-finding and prosecution go forward.

The DOJ’s Investigation Into Garner’s Death

Damon Root supports it:

Holder’s decision to launch a federal inquiry is fully consistent with the original purposes of federal civil rights legislation, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. That law was passed by the Republican-led 39th Congress in the wake of the Civil War in response to the former Confederate states’ attempts to harass and oppress the recently freed slaves by stripping them of their newfound liberty and property, denying them the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, and failing–or refusing–to provide them equal treatment under the law.

In other words, the whole point of federal civil rights law is to provide a legal check against state-sanctioned injustice, such as the egregious police misconduct that killed Eric Garner. Attorney General Holder should be commended for putting federal law to its intended purpose in this case.

Paul Cassell hopes the DOJ moves quickly:

With regard to substance, the facts are disturbing — and seemingly, in large part, recorded on video.  And with regard to procedure, unlike the Michael Brown grand jury, we don’t have transcripts of testimony to peruse to make an informed assessment about the fairness of the process. Questions abound.

Here’s where the Justice Department could perform a valuable service — by actually completing this civil rights investigation expeditiously.  To be sure, the proof required for a federal rights charge is demanding. But if the Eric Garner facts are as clear cut as the video makes them out to be, there is no reason why the Justice Department can’t rapidly investigate the case and quickly announce what it finds. The Justice Department should live up to the attorney’s general’s promise yesterday to “expeditiously” announce its decision on whether charges are appropriate in the Eric Garner death … and in the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin deaths.

But Amanda Taub isn’t expecting much from the DOJ:

Demanding a federal investigation is a good way for politicians like de Blasio, Schumer and Gillibrand to show their concern about police violence. Unfortunately it’s not likely to bring justice for Garner.

Simple murder and manslaughter aren’t federal crimes. But killing someone can be one in special circumstances, including when it’s an intentional violation of civil rights. What the DOJ can do is bring charges under the federal civil rights statute in order to prosecute Pantaleo for Garner’s death. And that legal standard is difficult to meet: prosecutors would have to prove that Pantaleo willfully deprived Garner of his civil rights. A police officer intentionally killing someone outside of the set of circumstances in which deadly force is permitted would qualify. But a civil rights charge requires proof of intent, whereas a state manslaughter case could be made by demonstrating negligence

Life As A Gay Politician In The 1960s

The rise and fall of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the British Liberal party in one of its more successful periods, is, in retrospect, an excruciating story of what the closet can do. Thorpe died this morning, prompting a flurry of obits and commentary, but also casting a long, dark view back to what life was really like if you were a gay man in public service not so very long ago.

In many ways, Thorpe deserves little sympathy, compared with the plight of other gay men of his era. He was a true aristocrat whose second wife was the Queen’s cousin and whose illustrious ancestry stretched to the rein of Edward II, when Speaker Thorpe of the parliament was eventually beheaded by a mob. He went to Eton, wore dashing Edwardian clothes in the era of swinging London, and had a sharp wit, a big conscience, and debating prowess. He led a double life, and, critically, had the class credentials to keep it double.

But he made one obvious mistake in having an affair with a young male model, Norman Scott, who was not entirely stable. And after Scott went public about the affair, Thorpe decided he had to contain the threat to his public career. He denied everything, but when intimate letters emerged of the affair – Thorpe called Scott “Bunnies” in rather British fashion – Thorpe had to resign as leader of his party.

Then it all got really surreal.

A man who had been in jail for shooting Norman Scott’s dog – yes, his dog – on the moors of Southwestern England confessed upon being released that he had actually been hired by friends of Thorpe to kill Scott, but he had lost his nerve and shot the dog instead. The evidence was tilted overwhelming toward the prosecution, which took twenty days to make the case, while the defense could only muster one day of arguments in response. Nonetheless, the upper-class judge all but instructed the jury to find the old Etonian Thorpe innocent, which they duly did – and which prompted the eternal sketch by Peter Cook about the biased judge, as recounted above.

Thorpe almost certainly conspired to murder someone. His career was over – and never recovered – for that very good reason. But it’s hard not to look back and see this case as part and parcel of the long reign of terror against gay people that lasted until well past the date, 1967, when gay sex was legalized in the UK.

Thorpe was an undeniably gifted man – an early campaigner against apartheid, a champion of human rights, a skilled parliamentarian – but came undone because his country could not accept him as he was. A double-life is, in fact, a life half-lived – especially a double life that requires a human being to repress and deny the love that alone makes human experience bearable. For those with far fewer resources than Thorpe, this meant often criminal arrests, social ostracism, lies, deceit, pain and shame that gutted soul after soul and life after life. Thorpe was the elegant tip of this unforgiving iceberg. And one can only hope that the occasion of his death does not only mean we should feel some retrospective compassion for the tangled, strangulating knot of his existence – but also for the countless human beings, unknown to history, whose personal tragedies were far deeper and less alloyed.

In an interview on the subject, in 2009, Thorpe, then struggling with the Parkinsons that killed him, had said:

If it happened now, I think the public would be kinder.

Wiser, I hope, too.

What’s The Point Of Body Cams?

Uri Friedman talks to criminologist Barak Ariel about the impact of putting body cameras on officers:

The technology is “surely promising, but we don’t know that it’s working,” Ariel told me. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve drugs until they’ve been studied extensively, he explained, and governments should take a similar approach with body-worn cameras. It’s a solution that has yet to be proven.

Ariel should know. He’s currently researching the effects of body cameras on policing everywhere from Brazil to Ghana to Israel to Northern Ireland, and finding that some police departments (and police unions) love the idea and others hate it. Nearly all of these tests have yet to be completed, but Ariel recently co-authored a study on the practice in Rialto, California, where he found that police officers who weren’t wearing cameras were twice as likely to use force as those who were. During the 12-month experiment, the police department also saw a reduction in citizens’ complaints compared with previous years. The researchers concluded that the benefits of wearing cameras trumped the costs.

But Ariel insists that there isn’t enough evidence so far to generalize the finding and assert that body-worn cameras offer a net benefit to community policing.

Jason Koebler contends that “lack of indictment in the Garner case doesn’t fundamentally change the police body camera argument, and shouldn’t be used as an argument for or against body cameras one way or another”:

Body cameras are not a cure-all, and they don’t treat the underlying problem of police brutality or power tripping. But, well, they’re better than nothing, and they’re a good first step toward creating a culture where cops think before they act.

The main thrust of the argument behind police body cameras has never been the idea that video evidence can be used to convict a cop of murder in court or even that they can be used as evidence at all. Instead, body cameras create an environment where police intrinsically know they are being watched, that there’s at least the possibility that they’ll be held accountable for their actions.

Rebecca Leber spells out why video evidence often doesn’t make a difference:

Police still have wide leeway for using deadly force. Juries remain deferential to officers’ judgements of when to incapcitate a person or fire their weapons. As Amanda Taub has explained at Vox, “That means that to press criminal charges in a police shooting, the prosecutor has a heavy burden to overcome. The officer is likely to claim that he believed the suspect was a threat and made a split-second decision to use force. The jury is likely to believe him, even if his decision was a bad one.” At The Nation, Chase Madar pointed to the case of Kajieme Powell, John Crawford III, and Milton Hall, all of whom were shot by police and all of whose deaths were filmed on camera. None resulted in charges.

In other words, body cams can help—but they still don’t entirely fix police abuse. Juries still show officers extreme deference, even when police violence gets caught on tape.

Matthew Pratt Guterl reflects on the countless videos of police brutality circulating online:

[T]hese videos do more than simply provide convincing evidence for lawsuits. They show the willful resistance and inventiveness of poor and racially marginalized Americans. In settings that are emotionally charged and dangerous, ordinary people are acting as interpreters and recorders of history—of police brutality racism, yes, but also of our cops’ post-9/11 militarization and depersonalized policing strategies. There are other cameras out there—dispassionate security cameras and dashboard cams, and body cameras showing the police officer’s perspective—but witness videos are as close as we, the viewers, get to the victim’s perspective. While the cameras stop nothing, they do allow us to see.

Did The Nanny State Kill Eric Garner?

In Robert Tracinski’s opinion, the thing “most important about the Garner case is how stupid the reason was for arresting this guy”:

[H]e was being busted for selling single, “loose” cigarettes in order to evade heavy taxes on tobacco products. Basically, he was arrested for doing something that, in a previous era, thousands of people would have been doing in New York on any given day: selling goods on the streets of the city without any particular permission. It’s a low-grade form of entrepreneurialism.

But not in the nanny-state New York of today. In a city where everything is taxed and regulated and you can’t put trans-fats in your food or buy a soda that’s too large, it makes perfect sense that they would harass a guy for selling cigarettes on the streets without permission. After all, they’re bad for people. Somebody might die.

The meat of his argument:

We should remember that whenever the police use force, there is the danger that they will kill someone, whether through malice, poor judgment, poor training, or sheer accident. From time to time, they’re going to shoot the wrong person or wrestle a guy to the ground without knowing that he has serious health problems and can’t survive this kind of rough handling. That is one good reason (among many) to make sure that police are only authorized to interfere with someone whose actions are a threat to the lives and property of others, and not just to enforce some dumb, petty regulation.

The contradiction of the left is that they want to inject government into every little aspect of our lives and mandate that the police confront us all the time over everything—and then they scream when some of those confrontations go wrong. In this way, they are not only hoping for a new series of contentious, racially charged killings. By extending the reach of government and the omnipresence of police power in our lives, they are creating the conditions that make those cases inevitable.

A. Barton Hinkle wants to lower taxes accordingly:

Thanks to New York’s laughably high cigarette taxes ($4.35 state plus another $1.60 in the city) and higher prices generally, a pack of smokes in New York City costs $14 or more. That creates a powerful incentive to smuggle smokes in from states such as Virginia, where you can buy a pack for a third of that price. Fill a Ford Econoline van with a few hundred cartons and you can make a nice five-figure profit in a weekend. Some people do.

The robust cigarette smuggling irritates officials in New York, because they miss out on a lot of tax revenue. The trade irritates officials in Virginia for the same reason, because smugglers buy wholesale to avoid the retail sales tax. There’s an easy fix for all of this: Cut New York’s cigarette taxes.

Vinik responds to such complaints:

Are cigarette taxes smart policy? There are benefits to the law—it reduces smoking and makes Americans healthier—and consequences to it—the costs of it fall disproportionately on the poor. There are also value judgments involved: libertarians will argue that the law is an undemocratic intrusion into the private lives of U.S. citizens. Liberals believe the health benefits of cigarette taxes outweigh any loss of freedom. That argument has been ongoing for years.

He finds that “Eric Garner is not dead because New York City imposes high cigarette taxes. He’s dead because a cop put him in a chokehold, in violation of NYPD rules, and held his head against ground.” But J.D. Tuccille sees the issue differently:

You want a society taxed and regulated toward your vision of perfection? It’s going to need enforcers. … Those enforcers aren’t an equal problem for everybody. They spare the people who pay them to look the other way. They give a pass to friends and relations. But they often take a dislike to individuals or whole groups that rub them the wrong way or cause them extra grief. Poor minorities, in particular, are always on the short end of the stick when it comes to dealing with cops. When they break petty laws, they don’t often turn enough profit to grease police palms enough to be left alone, they don’t have the political power to push back, and at least some of the enforcers have a hard-on for them anyway.

Government, at its core, is force. The more it does to shape the world around it, the more it needs enforcers to make sure officials’ wills are done. “The law is the law,” says New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, but it’s creatures like him who make so much damned law.

Why Do NYC Cops Use Banned Chokeholds?

Chokeholds

Roberto A. Ferdman asks:

The answer might be because the department is not enforcing the rule stringently. A recent study (pdf) by the review board says that:

Put simply, during the last decade, the NYPD disciplinary decisions in NYPD administrative trials of chokehold allegations failed to enforce the clear mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule. In response to these decisions which failed to hold offending officers accountable, the CCRB and NYPD Department Advocate’s Office [internal affairs] failed to charge officers with chokehold violations pursuant to the mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule.

By failing to properly punish officers who have used a banned method of apprehension, the department effectively shapes the understanding of the rule by officers, the study says.

Josh Voorhees is unsurprised that Pantaleo wasn’t indicted:

While the officer’s use of the banned maneuver received significant scrutiny in the court of public opinion, it likely received much less in the court of law. As Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argued earlier this week, there is a difference between an act that is banned in the NYPD’s rulebook and one that is deemed criminal. “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else,” wrote O’Donnell.

Grand jury proceedings happen behind closed doors, so we may never know exactly what convinced at least 12 of the 23 jurors to vote against an indictment of any kind. But by deciding—despite the damning video—that there was not enough evidence to justify the case going to trial, the jurors are effectively declaring that Garner’s death was, at worst, a horrible mistake, one that might amount to misconduct but that falls short of murder or manslaughter.

Update from a reader:

I’m a lawyer in NYC (I hate it nearly as much as you do). You quoted Vorhees quoting a John Jay professor claiming “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else.” That’s just wrong. Section 121 of the Penal Law (pdf) provides:

§ 121.11 Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation

A person is guilty of criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation when, with intent to impede the normal breathing or circulation of the blood of another person, he or she:

a. applies pressure on the throat or neck of such person; or
b. blocks the nose or mouth of such person.

Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation is a class A misdemeanor.

The Garner grand jury certainly could have indicted for that.  Note too that it doesn’t matter whether it was a chokehold, meant to impede breathing, or a headlock, meant to impede blood flow.  Both are crimes.  I’ve seen some chatter on Fox News making a big deal out of the difference, Hannity included.

The NYT lists some “of the most notable deaths since 1990 involving New York Police Department officers.” Friedersdorf provides further context:

Even with the NYPD’s history of killing people with chokeholds that violate policy, hundreds of non-lethal violations of that policy every year, indisputable video evidence of multiple officers blithely ignoring the fact that a colleague was violating that policy, and their subsequent dishonesty about the chokehold when filing a report on the incident, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton still had the brass to say earlier this year that “he would not support a law to make chokeholds illegal, insisting that a departmental prohibition is enough.” He also said, “I think there are more than sufficient protocols in place to address a problem.”

In context, that’s sufficiently absurd to cast a shadow over the man’s honor. It’s hard to believe it won’t come up when New York City is sued for negligence. At minimum it undermines Bratton’s credibility. “Every time this happens,” Hamilton Nolan observes, “there’s a lot of talk about ‘training’ and ‘changing the culture’ of the police.” Yet chokeholds persist. “What will change this situation,” he adds, “is putting police officers in jail for killing and abusing people. And it’s abundantly clear that our current laws are too lax to accomplish that. The laws need to change.”

Historical context suggests he is absolutely right.

The Schumer Consensus, Ctd

A reader points out:

I agree with everything you said re: the myth of Obama not having “putting the economy first,” but I wanted to note that TARP was actually signed into law by Bush just before the 2008 election.

Many others look at recent history:

I think you are managing to get it exactly wrong about where and how President Obama jumped the shark with the American working class.  You cite TARP, the stimulus and auto bailout as three examples of how this is incorrect.  But consider an alternate take on these three pieces of legislation:

1) TARP: a massive giveaway to rich Wall Street Types who screwed us and the economy by being reckless, and bad at business.

2) The stimulus: a massive giveaway to unions and other Democratic constituencies that seems to have built precisely zero infrastructure or really any other lasting result.  (“Inflecting the curve” of a recession hasn’t cut it as an explanation.)

3) The auto-bailout:  a massive giveaway to failed businesses that were bad at what they were doing.  (See also, #1)

And here is the Democratic rude awakening:

if you add up the Wall Street bankers, the union members, and the employees of the Big Three auto companies … it doesn’t add up to very many voters. 

Finally, I would ask that you not indulge the liberal canard that the PR failure of these items was due to “perception,” i.e. the Americans can’t understand what is good for them.  Americans have judged that the cost-per-unit of any macro-economic benefit from 1, 2 and 3 above was simply much too high to be worth it. And they are correct about that.

But don’t forget that regarding the so-called “massive giveaway” of TARP, the big banks paid that money back. Another dissent:

I have to respectfully disagree with your narrative of the economic situation in 2009 and Obama‘s reaction to it. Let’s forget what the Republicans have to say on the issue, as they have no intellectual honesty on the matter. If we go back to the White House’s own predictions on economic growth during the 2009 debate, we see that the stimulus failed to hit its own expectations. We were told we would have GDP growth of 4% per year since, and we’ve gotten close to half. Ditto for TARP. Americans were told if not for the bailouts millions would lose their homes and jobs. But all of that happened anyway. It was only the banks themselves and their unscrupulous executives that benefited.

The common rebuke to this argument is “yeah, but without either program, things would have been worse.” Maybe, maybe not. But that’s not how these programs were sold. They were sold with specific promises by Obama and his supporters that did not materialize. And frankly, to tell someone that lost their house or their job, or the 50 million people currently on food stamps that they should be grateful because things aren’t as bad as they could be is an insult.

The same narrative problem exists with the ACA. People are upset because they were promised something that they didn’t get. I thought it rather odd that when Obama first launched that campaign in 2009 he talked about a program that would drastically increase coverage, help reduce costs, not add to the deficit and take on the insurance companies while also allowing people who were happy with whatever they had to keep it. It was an impossible goal, just as unlikely as a diet plan that says you could eat all the cheeseburgers you want and lose weight while living longer. That’s why people are upset. When they see the plan they liked get cancelled, the doctor they had get dumped or their premiums spike just as the health insurance companies report record profits thanks to the law they feel like they were sold a bag of goods. Even if that wasn’t the laws intentions, that’s what it became.

I wish you and other intelligent people would stop making the argument that this is all a communication or perception problem. It’s a cynical argument that presupposes tens of millions of people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and the real work that lies ahead is for the smart people in charge to convince them otherwise.

Another reader broaches a new issue:

I largely agree with your analysis of Schumer‘s position and those like it, but there was one big area where Obama could have improved: housing policy. This is arguably the main reason perceptions like Schumer‘s exist in the first place. Obama’s housing policies were total failures in doing much of anything to unravel the mortgage mess left by the financial crisis. Obama could have forced a much more aggressive response from his administration towards the mortgage issues, breaking through institutional resistance to helping people refinance their homes, and begin to unwind the mortgage foreclosure process before robo-signing became a thing. Had he done a better job handling the mortgage crisis, he probably would have retained a lot more goodwill from whites than he has.

And, to be fair to Schumer, there was another way for Obama to possibly achieve more than he has, but it would have required a total surrender to Gruberism: he could have followed Chris Rock’s advice, let everything go to hell, and then used the ensuing panic with his popularity and control of Congress to pass anything he wanted. And honestly, considering the depth and breadth of the institutional rot in international finance, that might not have been such a bad thing (not that we knew about the numerous mafia-style schemes Wall St. had hatched at the time). Still, it’s impossible to picture a moral person choosing to dive into that chaos, letting everyone suffer massively for their own political gain. Can you imagine if everyone was like the House GOP?

Another also looks at housing:

It bears repeating that, despite the Tea Party’s current scattershot rhetoric, what galvanized the movement as a national force was Rick Santelli’s fierce opposition to Obama’s proposal of the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan in February 2009, under which the government would subsidize home mortgage refinancing.  In other words, within a little over a month of Obama taking office, it was clear that the full force of Republican opposition would be placed in front of any additional attempts to directly address the poor economy, especially demand-side solutions.

People also forget that, as recently as the fall of 2008, the entire country had broadly agreed that the U.S. healthcare system was broken and needed radical reform – Michael Moore’s Sicko had been nominated for an Oscar in 2007, and while McCain opposed mandates, he at least campaigned on the idea of universal coverage being a goal of national healthcare policy.  There was broad bipartisan consensus in late 2008 that our healthcare system was broken.

So, in mid-2009, the president shifted from the fight on the economy, which was prompting full-throated histrionics from the opposition party, to healthcare, proposing a Republican idea in a policy area in which there had weeks before been a bipartisan call for action. We all know what happened then.

A political wonk goes into great detail:

I’m broadly supportive of what you said, but let me add a few points.

1. Who is health care reform supposed to benefit if not working-class people on the way up? These are EXACTLY the people who lacked insurance, who were at risk from even small hospital bills, and so forth. To argue otherwise is just to dismiss what – and who – the facts on the ground actually are. Per Kaiser Family Foundation:

Who are the uninsured?

Most of the uninsured are in low-income working families. In 2013, nearly 8 in 10 were in a family with a worker, and nearly 6 in 10 have family income below 200% of poverty. Reflecting the more limited availability of public coverage, adults have been more likely to be uninsured than children. People of color are at higher risk of being uninsured than non-Hispanic Whites.

How does the lack of insurance affect access to health care?

People without insurance coverage have worse access to care than people who are insured. Almost a third of uninsured adults in 2013 (30%) went without needed medical care due to cost. Studies repeatedly demonstrate that the uninsured are less likely than those with insurance to receive preventive care and services for major health conditions and chronic diseases.

What are the financial implications of lack of coverage?

The uninsured often face unaffordable medical bills when they do seek care. In 2013, nearly 40% of uninsured adults said they had outstanding medical bills, and a fifth said they had medical bills that caused serious financial strain.  These bills can quickly translate into medical debt since most of the uninsured have low or moderate incomes and have little, if any, savings.

2. What were the elements of Schumer‘s extended economic package that Obama never took up? There never were any. You can demagogue on the minimum wage, but that is a political show more than an economic one, as justified as a minimum-wage hike might be. The remainder of Dem ideas on the economy in term one were mostly about community colleges and work-training subsidies – snooze. At best, they have a long-term impact. Mostly, they are just trifles – sops to public-worker unions Schumer spends too much time talking to. As for inequality, even Krugman begrudgingly and belatedly figured out that Obama raised taxes on the rich – in the fiscal cliff deal, in the ACA and elsewhere. All of that went, ultimately, to protect and expand spending on the middle and working class. Maybe this is Wall Street Chuck’s big problem. There never was a Democratic package for short-term stimulus that Obama didn’t sign on to in 2009-2010. Not one.

3. If the head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee wants to spread blame for this year’s election, ask him who picked Bruce Braley, the Iowa candidate who thought it would be a good idea to use “farmer” and “dumbbell” as synonyms at a fundraiser. Especially when talking about Chuck Grassley. Or ask him who told Senator Udall to never talk about the fact that Denver has the second-lowest unemployment of any US metro. Amy Klobuchar needed no prompting to say on Election Night that St. Paul-Minneapolis has the lowest. Udall also never managed to mention, in his Rachel Maddow interview or much of anywhere else, that the ACA cut the unemployed in CO by 45% AND provided a third of the profit growth at HCA, which has more CO hospitals than anyone else. He did manage to bring up at least three different kinds of gay rights and talk a lot about pot with Rachel. Was he overcompensating for who Maddow is, or does he really think gay adoption rights are a bigger deal than job growth and an historic expansion of health care that will save tens of thousands of lives a year?  Either way, Hickenlooper ran about six points ahead of this bozo, who couldn’t talk about much of anything but birth control for months, even after it was obvious that it wasn’t working.

4. When did Obama’s alleged dilution of focus due to climate change occur? He folded like a suit on the carbon tax in 2009, killing it off before it became a distraction and disappointing some liberals in his base, and cap and trade died in the Senate. He turned back to climate only in his second term. In the meantime, his stimulus and related legislation had funded a huge portfolio of programs that lay the groundwork for combating climate change, including financing Tesla’s first factory, Nissan’s Leaf factory and the lines that build Ford’s more efficient EcoBoost engines. All of these provided plenty of middle-wage jobs that are short in the economy overall (largely because construction and government employment are so weak) – but Schumer never had anyone campaign on them. All that and Obama made a very big deal with the industry on fuel-economy standards, and stayed out of the way of fracking, which proved to be enough encouragement to boost U.S. oil production by 80% (it will have doubled by next year from 2008 levels). I’d have approved Keystone XL both to get the “war on energy” talking point off the table, and because the oil is going to get used anyway.

Whatever political damage Obama took from climate issues is really about things that were happening anyway. Coal is getting killed by gas without any help from D.C – that help is just arriving now in the form of power-plant emission standards that were proposed in June and haven’t taken effect yet. Offshore drilling was barred for a few months after BP’s rig exploded off a state that has 4% unemployment today. That people campaigned against Landrieu based on that moratorium reflects something other than the idea that Louisiana job growth is slow under this administration. Look at the data. It’s really straightforward.

In Louisiana, the problem is that Obama, like oil, is black. And a Yankee, Harvard, wiseass, etc. But that’s all culture, not policy. And the culture is moving in Dems’ direction; the only real risk is that the GOP will figure out too soon for Dems’ liking that maybe they should lose the homophobia and the pretend belief in evolution and the rest. And the future certainly isn’t going to be found, economically or culturally, in West Virginia, Arkansas, or the like. There aren’t enough votes or House seats in the Dakotas to worry about much, though you should try for them and Montana. The game is the states that are now purple – North Carolina, Colorado, Virginia. And maybe some Dems  hope they  can make purple — GA, AZ and the like. If you have to pander, pander to the constituencies that are key to turning those states bluer, and then get them to vote.

One last thing: Pre-election polls showed the GOP with a large edge over Dems in trust over handling the economy, in sharp contrast to Ray Fair’s economic model, which said Dems should get 52% of the House vote. That’s absurd, a political failure the likes of which we’ve never seen. The economic policies didn’t fail. The politicians did. All Dems had to do was draw the charts: Stocks crashed under them, went up under us. Jobs crashed under them, came all the way back under us. And so forth.

In 1982, Reagan spun much worse short-term economic facts than these into his Stay the Course speech, which effectively fought that midterm to a draw. In 2014, the argument for Staying the Course was much stronger. And it’s on Chuck Schumer, as much as anyone else, that it never got made.

Did Broken Windows Theory Kill Garner?

Kai Wright marshals the evidence pointing to yes:

As WNYC’s Robert Lewis reported back in September, Pantaleo is a poster boy for broken windows policing. He’s been on the force since 2007, and in that time records show him as the arresting officer in 259 criminal court cases. They are overwhelmingly for minor crimes like pot possession; just 24 of them were for felonies. “Two-thirds of Pantaleo’s cases that made it to court ended with a dismissal or a guilty plea to a disorderly conduct violation,” Lewis reported, “which is a little more serious than a speeding ticket. He is one of the most active cops on Staten Island.”

This is what broken windows cops are supposed to do.

They beef up their ranks in priority neighborhoods and get in folks’ faces over anything and everything. I’ve lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for about a decade. Our neighborhood has for many years been on NYPD’s list of target spots for broken windows—“impact zones,” as they’re called. It’s unexceptional here to swap stories of run-ins with bizarrely unreasonable cops—telling us stop lingering by the subway entrance, to get out of the street, to move along. Eric Garner’s frustrated response to that constant harassment will appear routine to anyone who’s lived in neighborhoods like ours. He’d just broken up a fight, and now here was NYPD in his face, again. “Every time you see me you wanna arrest me,” Garner snapped. “I’m tired of it. It stops today.”

Justin Peters is on the same page:

The cornerstone of effective policing is discretion. If the cops enforced every single law on the books in every single precinct at all hours of the day, New York City would become a police state. Is that what de Blasio and Bratton want?

For mayors and police commissioners, being “tough on crime” means actively implementing some specific policy. But given that violent crime seems to be declining on its own regardless of what they do, there’s a case to be made that de Blasio and Bratton are only making things worse. Here’s a suggestion for a new policing policy for New York City: First, do no harm.

“The Acquittals Of Their Killers Are Not Mistakes”

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/540225070090964994

Brian Beutler responds to TNC’s above tweet about the Eric Garner case:

[I]f Coates is right, then at least some of the effort expended on making police officers wear cameras has been misdirected. It should be redirected toward the source of the impunity, which isn’t the quantity or quality evidence, but the officials that so freely disregard it.

If prosecutors and police departments are too tightly linked for due process to mean anything, then puncturing the impunity requires breaking the link. One way to do this would be for citizens at the state and local level, through ballot initiatives, to take the authority for presenting evidence of police misconduct to grand juries out of the hands of local prosecutors. That authority could be handed to publicly accountable review boards staffed with civilian lawyers from within the jurisdiction, or to special prosecutors’ offices.

Along the same lines, Albert Burneko insists that it’s not our justice system that’s broken:

The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.

America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizens—the physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiers—might actually just be that they’re more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that’s OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.

How Coates thinks about the struggle to change America:

I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could have been born in 1820, if you were black, and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619, looked forward another 50 or 60 years and seen nothing but slaves. There was no reason to believe, at that time, that emancipation was 40 or 50 years off. And yet, folks resisted and folks fought on.

So, fatalism isn’t really an option. Even if you think you won’t necessarily win the fight today, in your lifetime, in your child’s lifetime, you still have to fight. It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes. So, fatalism is not an option.

Vincent Warren believes that “affected communities – and youth of color in particular – must be at the center of the process of crafting reform solutions”:

The heart of the reform ordered after we won the stop-and-frisk case is a joint remedial process that brings community members and other stakeholders together to discuss and hammer out the actual law enforcement and accountability reforms.

A similar model was used in Cincinnati a decade ago, after the city was torn apart by scores of wrongful death lawsuits, a city-wide curfew, a boycott, a DOJ investigation and the most violent summer in the city’s recent history. Bringing those groups to the table yielded a decrease in the number of racially discriminatory stops and the number of civilian complaints, and an increase in black residents’ perception of fairness and professionalism by the Cincinnati police department.

The community-based reform processes in Cincinnati and just underway in New York are the models to follow. But we have to acknowledge that we need far more than a conversation, and right now, the protests in the street are bringing the pressure that will make real reform possible.

The protests are the road to reform.

The Right’s Response To Eric Garner

Yglesias observes that “early reactions suggest that anger over the decision not to prosecute [NYPD officer Daniel] Pantaleo spans the political spectrum.” Andy McCarthy, for one, freely admits that the Staten Island grand jury may have made a mistake:

I don’t think race had anything to do with what happened between Eric Garner and the police. I intend to keep an open mind until we learn all the evidence the grand jury relied on. And I continue to believe the NYPD is the best police force there is. But I also know, as good cops know, that there is a difference between resisting arrest by not cooperating, as Garner was doing in Staten Island, and resisting arrest by violent assaults and threats of harm, as Michael Brown did in Ferguson. Police deserve a very wide berth in responding to the latter, but less of one with the former. I thus cannot in good conscience say there was insufficient probable cause to indict Officer Pantaleo for involuntary manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.

Many more conservatives are outraged. Sean Davis is one of them:

There’s an America where people who kill for no legitimate reason are held to account, and there’s an America where homicide isn’t really a big deal as long as you play for the right team. Unfortunately Eric Garner was a victim in the second America, where some homicides are apparently less equal than others.

Dreher echoes:

Maybe, just maybe, a trial would have found these cops not guilty of negligent homicide in Garner’s death. But based on that video, how can there not even be a trial? This is messed up.

It strikes JPod “as understandable that a grand jury would look at the events and not see something they would call a murder.” But even he sees the need for change:

The real question that is going to be asked, now, is just how aggressive law enforcement can and should be in an era of low crime, which is what we’re in now. If you defang cops, you are inviting a return to trouble. As I wrote last week, “if we send police officers the message that it is safer for their careers and reputations to stand down, stand down they will. We are the ones who will have to reckon with the results.” At the same time, no civilized society can view the tape showing Garner’s desperate pleading and not ask some very difficult questions of itself.

Jonathan Last adds, “It would be helpful if the country could let go of Ferguson and focus our attention on Garner.” And Pete Wehner has a typically humane response:

I get that when citizens don’t obey orders from a police officer, they will sometimes need to be subdued. But there’s also such things as judgment and discretion. In this case, Mr. Garner committed the lowest-level transgression imaginable, he wasn’t armed, and he wasn’t really violent. He certainly wasn’t a man who deserved to die. Most people watching this video and hearing Mr. Garner scream “I can’t breathe!” before his body goes limp will, I think, be disturbed by it. Call it basic human sympathy.

I’m not in favor of rushing to judgment, and I’ll be happy to revise my own views based on evidence, if that’s warranted. But for now, based on the evidence we do have, my reaction is that a lethal mistake, an injustice, and a genuine human tragedy happened on the streets of New York on July 17.

Shortly after he was killed, a woman at Mr. Garner’s home, who identified herself as a cousin named Stephanie, said: “The family is very, very sad. We’re in shock. Why did they have to grab him like that?”

That’s a very good, and a very haunting, question.

I know that some will cavil at my relief that conservatives and liberals can agree on something, but we have to treasure these moments while we can. The exception to all this was Fox News last night. Megyn Kelly’s coverage proved that there is almost no incident in which a black man is killed by cops that Fox cannot excuse or even defend. She bent over backwards to impugn protesters, to change the subject to Ferguson, to elide the crucial fact that the choke-hold was against police procedure, and to imply that Garner was strongly resisting arrest. Readers know I had very mixed feelings about Ferguson. I’m not usually inclined to slam something as overtly racist. But there was no way to interpret Kelly’s coverage as anything but the baldest racism I’ve seen in a while on cable news. Her idea of balance was to interview two, white, bald, bull-necked men to defend the cops, explain away any concerns about police treatment and to minimize the entire thing. Truly, deeply disgusting.