Just about the time that POTUS Obama was snarling traffic getting to his starzilla party in Studio City, civil rights attorney and best selling author Michelle Alexander was rockin’ the house across town in Compton, where she gave a 90-minute speech in front of a large and wildly enthusiastic crowd at a the New Philadelphia AME Church, talking about how Jim Crow is alive and well in this country’s criminal justice system.

Alexander is a legal scholar and a racial equality advocacy lawyer with an impressive resume that includes a Supreme Court clerkship and lots more after that.

But what has really put her on the map is her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which, with mounds of research, Alexander lays out her thesis that the mass incarceration the U.S. has embraced since the mid-1980’s as its primary method of social control is, for black communities, simply devastating. The result is a second class caste system in which, in some major American cities, more than one half of all working age black men, and a growing number of black women, and other minorities, are relegated to a permanently disenfranchised status—much like in the days of Jim Crow, but in far greater numbers. Right now if you are a black man anywhere in America, there is a 32 percent chance that you’ll go to jail or prison at some point in your life.

The New Jim Crow has been the book that criminal justice activists and experts have been urgently recommending above all others these past two years—to the point that when it came out in paperback in January, it became a surprise NY Times best seller.

I first became aware of Alexander’s work when I watched an April 2010 episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal that featured her together with superstar civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, and the combination of what they had to say grabbed my attention, as it encapsulated and quantified what I’d seen anecdotally in my reporting for years.

The usual wiggly iPhone videos below will give you a glimpse of what she has to say as they are from the very beginning of Alexander’s 90-minute talk Thursday night.

You might also enjoy the clip of Alexander with Stephen Colbert on the Cobert Report.

Better yet, just get the book.

However you do it, find a way to check out what Michelle Alexander has to say. Hers is a deeply important American voice that is very much worth your time and attention.

PS: THIS WILL BE A SHORT POSTING because everyone at WitnessLA is working on stories. So stay tuned. There’s a lot coming up soon.

IN THE MEANTIME, TAKE A LOOK AT THIS STORY ON THE CRIME REPORT: CRACKING THE BLUE WALL OF SILENCE, in which former and serving NYPD cops talk about racial profiling and arrest quotas.

ALSO CHECK OUT THE 30-YEAR SENTENCE FOR A FIRST TIME OFFENSE BY THE TEXAS GRANDMOTHER who may or may not have known she was smuggling a ton of drugs in the tour buses that she co-owned, but who got the book thrown at her because she wouldn’t take a deal and had nobody else to give up, so had nothing of value to trade to prosecutors. The Houston Chron has the story.

PS: I’M DELIBERATELY IGNORING THIS STORY, but it’s not that I didn’t see it.

IS DEATH PENALTY A DETERRENT?

More than three decades after the moratorium against capital punishment was lifted, the prestigious National Research Council released a report that, after reviewing dozens of studies, failed to find reliable evidence that the death penalty is actually a homicide deterrent. In fact, the Committee of Deterrence and the Death Penalty said that any past research on the subject should be disregarded in death penalty debates as incomplete and unsupportable.

The LA Times has the story.

Here’s a clip:

The Committee of Deterrence and the Death Penalty concluded that studies on the death penalty and its potential effect on homicide rates — both pro and con — contain fundamental flaws that essentially make them moot.

For example, the studies do not include the effects of other forms of punishment – such as life in prison without possibility of parole, and whether it too acts as a deterrent. The studies, study authors wrote, don’t “consider how the capital and noncapital components of a regime combine in affecting the behavior of potential murderers.”

In other words, previous studies don’t determine whether potential killers think about the possibility of spending their lives in prison or ending up on death row before they commit their crimes.

The lack of comprehensive information makes the research inconclusive, the study authors said. “We recognize this conclusion will be controversial to some, but nobody is well served by unfounded claims about the death penalty,” committee Chairman Daniel Nagin said in a telephone news conference.

“Nothing is known about how potential murderers actually perceive their risk of punishment,” he said.

SLASHING NATIONAL JUVENILE JUSTICE FUNDS

Funding for juvenile justice programs is likely about to get slashed—again.

The Crime Report’s Ted Gest has the story.

Here’s how it opens:

Federal funding for state and local juvenile justice programs seems likely to take another big hit as Congress continues to slash federal “discretionary” spending.

The Republican-controlled House committee that appropriates money for the Justice Department today issued its proposal for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. It would cut juvenile justice funding to $209 million–a figure that stood at $424 million in fiscal year 2010.

Federal aid for juvenile justice already had fallen more than 50 percent to its lowest level in more than a decade, says the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which represents state advisory committees in Washington, D.C. The coalition is asking Congress for $80 million for “formula grants” that helps states comply with mandates in a key 1974 juvenile crime law, such as separating juvenile and adult defendants in jail and keeping minor offenders out of custody.

House appropriators, rather than adding funds for those purposes, would cut them to $33 million.

The Obama administration’s funding request of $140M for three important juvenile justice programs would be slashed to just $53M under the House committee’s proposal.

FIRST RACIAL PROFILING HEARINGS SINCE 9/11

A Senate committee hearing for the End Racial Profiling Act featured testimony from 225 different organizations on Wednesday. If passed, the legislature would forbid officers from using race as a component in standard law enforcement decisions.

Salon’s Jefferson Morley has the story.

Here’s a clip:

….as profiling has become entrenched in drug enforcement, counterterrorism and immigration control, said criminologist David Harris, research shows it is an ineffective law enforcement tool. “In many contexts, in many types of police agencies, the results all fall in the same direction: when racial or ethnic profiling is used, police are less likely, not more likely, to catch bad guys,” Harris said.

Ron Davis, police chief in East Palo Alto, Calif., said his experience as a cop on the streets confirmed that finding. Admitting that he himself had engaged in profiling, he called profiling “an ineffective tactic that wastes scarce law enforcement resources and it harms our relations with communities whose cooperation we need.”

Davis said passage of S. 1670 would help police nationwide.

“Without the legislation and updated Department of Justice guidance we will continue business as usual and only respond to this issue when it surfaces through high-profile tragedies such as Oscar Grant case in Oakland, Calif., and the Trayvon Martin case in Sanford, Fla.,” he said.

The Obama Administration has yet to have joined the bill’s supporters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: SHOULD THE LA TIMES HAVE PUBLISHED THOSE PHOTOS?

There has been, and continues to be, a lot of controversy around whether or not the LA Times should have posted the two graphic photos of American soldiers posing with dismembered Afghan corpses. The Pentagon asked the Times not to publish the photos, contending that the publication would incite violence.

It is a thorny question. I happen to think the Times did the right thing.

Yet, I’m grateful that I wasn’t one of those who had to make the decision.

On To the Point, Warren Olney interviewed David Zucchino, the award-winning LA Times reporter who wrote the story accompanying the photos.

The New York Times has a report on the Pentagon’s objections—and how the Times’ came to be in possession of the photos in the first place.

And here the Poynter Institute weighs in, with two stories.

As of this writing, there are more than 2000 comments on the LA Times website regarding the issue.

Photo by Phil Sandlin for the AP

TODAY, MONDAY, SCOTUS BEGINS HISTORIC HEARINGS ON HEALTH CARE—OR MAYBE NOT

Say what? Can it be true that, after all this lead up, the Supreme Court won’t begin hearings on the Affordable Health Care Act on Monday? Really????

Uh, yeah. Apparently it’s quite possible the Supremes may decide that, legally speaking, they’re jumping the gun in hearing the case—or at least on the most important part of the challenge. (No matter what, the court will hear the Medicare expansion part of the arguments on Wednesday).

Both David Savage of the LA Times and Robert Barnes of the Washington Post have stories on this perplexing turn of events.

As an introduction, you need to know that everybody involved—the Obama Administration and the challengers from the various states, et al—want this sucker—ahem….this Constitutional challenge—to move forward now, for crying out loud.

Here’s a clip from Savage’s article (which I’ve excerpted from the Sac Bee, although it will also be in the LA Times but, as I write this, it isn’t on the LAT site yet).

The Supreme Court’s opening day of arguments on the health care law will not focus on whether the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Instead, the justices will consider whether the legal challenge to it has arrived too soon.

The problem is the Anti-Injunction Act, which dates to 1867. It says, “No suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person.”

Question: How does this figure in the health care case?

Answer: It could block a suit against this key part of the health care law if it imposes a tax. The law seems to say that no one can sue over a tax provision until he or she has paid the tax.

Q: How is the Affordable Care Act a tax law?

A: During the debate over it, President Barack Obama insisted it did not impose new taxes. However, people who do not have minimum health coverage in 2014 will be assessed a “penalty” to be paid on their tax return, which will be due in April 2015.

And here’s a clip from Barnes in the WaPo.

The Supreme Court begins its constitutional review of the health-care overhaul law Monday with a fundamental question: Is the court barred from making such a decision at this time?

The justices will hear 90 minutes of argument about whether an obscure 19th-century law — the Anti-Injunction Act — means that the court cannot pass judgment on the law until its key provisions go into effect in 2014.

[SNIP]

At the heart of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the requirement that almost all Americans either obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty. The question the court will consider Monday is whether that penalty should be considered a tax. And if it is, does the Anti-Injunction Act mean that courts must stay out of the way until someone is actually required to pay it?

The first time that could occur is when someone files a tax return in 2015, because that is how the penalty would be collected.

TRAYVON MARTIN AND THE “BLACK MALE CODE”

Thus far, WLA hasn’t commented or reported on the heart-shattering story of Trayvon Martin’s death, in part because so much has already been said and written, thus I wasn’t sure what exactly we could add to the conversation.

But speaking personally, the main reason I’ve not written about the issue is because every time I stare at Travon’s photo, rather than being inspired to post something wise and meaningful, I find that I am simply struck dumb with grief for his mother—and for his dad, and the rest of his family of course too. But I am a mother of a son, so it is to Sybrina Fulton that my deepest sorrow goes.

If course, Trayvon is far from the only young person to die tragically and violently these past weeks. LA’s Youth Justice Coalition head, Kim McGill, tells me they’ve buried five of their own young members in the past two months. (I’ll have more on the five in the future.)

But some deaths get to you more than others; perhaps in that way they stand in for stand in for all the others. Travon Martin’s is one of those deaths.

Still, as much fearful empathy as I feel for Travon’s mother Sybrina, I do so with the understanding that there is one part of her experience that I cannot adequately feel into, at least not in the bone-deep way that many other American parents, sadly, can.

That difference has to do with the fear described in this story by Jesse Washington writing for the Associated Press. It is titled “Trayvon Martin, my son, and the Black Male Code,” and I’ve excerpted it below. But I urge you to read the whole thing.

I thought my son would be much older before I had to tell him about the Black Male Code. He’s only 12, still sleeping with stuffed animals, still afraid of the dark. But after the Trayvon Martin tragedy, I needed to explain to my child that soon people might be afraid of him.

We were in the car on the way to school when a story about Martin came on the radio. “The guy who killed him should get arrested. The dead guy was unarmed!” my son said after hearing that neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman had claimed self-defense in the shooting in Sanford, Fla.

We listened to the rest of the story, describing how Zimmerman had spotted Martin, who was 17, walking home from the store on a rainy night, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head. When it was over, I turned off the radio and told my son about the rules he needs to follow to avoid becoming another Trayvon Martin — a black male who Zimmerman assumed was “suspicious” and “up to no good.”

As I explained it, the Code goes like this:

Always pay close attention to your surroundings, son, especially if you are in an affluent neighborhood where black folks are few. Understand that even though you are not a criminal, some people might assume you are, especially if you are wearing certain clothes.

Read the rest. It’s worth it.

WHY DID THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TAKE SO LONG TO BEGIN REPORTING ON THE TRAYVON MARTIN STORY?

Howard Kurtz asked that question on CNN on Sunday, and opened it for a round-table discussion you can read here.

I can’t say that the discussion is brilliant or even all that insightful, frankly, but listening in may stimulate your own thinking. (Really, I think Jon Stewart had the right take when he said of another big story that the media has two settings: blackout….and circus.

In truth, I think, the better question is what made the mainstream media finally snap awake. I credit Trayvon’s parents who refused to let the injustice of their son’s death go unnoticed and, together with supporters, were able to frame a clear narrative around the shooting of their son, together with a good picture, that gradually got the press’s attention—and has kept it. In a similar way, Kelly Thomas’s father in Fullerton exhibited the same well-focused determination, in which he was clear about what the story needed to be, and managed to keep it in the news rather than letting it be reported on once or twice and then vanish without a trace. As a result, Jim Thomas may get some kind of justice for his son.

Moreover, the rest of us should be grateful that Trayvon’s parents did not let their son’s death go unrecognized. As a consequence, out of their sorrow we are being shoved into having another round of the national conversion about race that we very much need to continue to have, but too often avoid.

AND SPEAKING OF THAT CONVERSATION….

Here’s Marion Wright Edelman (pictured above) president of the Children’s Defense Fund, with her own thoughts about Trayvon Martin, what his death should signify.

Here’s a clip:

….Just as sadly, Trayvon’s death was not unique. In 2008 and 2009, 2,582 black children and teens were killed by gunfire. Black children and teens were only 15 percent of the child population, but 45 percent of the 5,740 child and teen gun deaths in those two years. Black males 15 to 19 years-old were eight times as likely as white males to be gun homicide victims. The outcry over Trayvon’s death is absolutely right and just. We need the same sense of outrage over every one of these child deaths…

Photo by AP, for the Children’s Defense Fund

ARE AMERICAN POLICE DEPARTMENTS BECOMING INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED—AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY)?

The Huff Post’s Radley Balko has a well-researched story about the increased militarization of American police departments in the 10 years since 9/11.

Here’s how it opens:

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants – also known as “sneak-and-peek” warrants — have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It’s a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America’s police departments.

Balko follows up with a lot of compelling facts and stats about the over the top acquisition of military weapons and overuse of SWAT teams, among other issues.

(By the way, the latter issue is a problem that I don’t believe really applies to LA, where SWAT originated, and which has arguably the most disciplined and professionalized SWAT teams in the nation. But earlier this year Forbes had an anecdote-filled story about the overuse of SWAT teams, which, together with the tank-like Bearcat, were being deployed to serve warrants on nonviolent offenders.)

However the use of powers granted for purposes of combating terrorists, and legal tools like RICO, which were designed for organized crime, and employing them for street-level drug and gang crime is an increasing trend that affects LA along with other areas of the country.

To make this point, Balko quotes critics like longtime San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara, now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. McNamara told Balko that this trend, now driven by the war on terror in addition to the war on drugs, has caused police to lose sight of their role as keepers of the peace.

“‘Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed,’ McNamara wrote in a 2006 article for the Wall Street Journal. ‘An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.” Noting the considerable firepower police now carry, McNamara added, “Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.’”

Anyway, read the rest of the story. It’s worth your time.

JAILS AND PRISONS AND RACE

Marc Mauer, head of the highly regarded Sentencing Project, released a paper on Monday that looks at the causes and consequences of the “extreme racial disparities in incarceration in the U.S.”

The paper is a chapter in a soon-to-be-released special edition of the Prison Journal, a prominent peer review quarterly that looks (as the title suggests) issues surrounding incarceration practices and policies.

Here’s an overview of the raw numbers Mauer is attempting to explore:

….If current trends continue, 1 of every 3 African American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can 1 of every 6 Latino males, compared to 1 in 17 White males. For women, the overall figures are considerably lower, but the racial/ethnic disparities are similar: 1 of every 18 African American females, 1 of every 45 Hispanic females, and 1 of every 111 White females can expect to spend time in prison….

Why is that so? As LA’s Chief Public Defender Ron Brown said to me at a conference a few months ago, either we postulate that “Black and Latino people have a criminal gene or something else is going on.”

Mauer goes looking for that “something else,” and finds a complex weave of reasons and influences in his sober-eyed examination and analysis. Yet, when looked at together the weave adds up to racial inequities on a massive scale—that must be addressed for all of our health and well being.

Read the full article here.

NOTE: WE’RE BUSY WORKING ON THE FIRST PART OF THE “DANGEROUS JAILS” SERIES THAT WILL BE OUT LATER THIS WEEK.

This will be Part I of a new series about abuse inside the LA County jail system, and it’s part of the WitnessLA and Spot.Us-sponsored LA Justice Report project. It’ll be out later this week.

So stay tuned.

TOO IMPORTANT TO FAIL

The terrible fact is that a staggering 48-percent of all African American males will drop out of high school. Tavis Smiley explores what amounts to a national tragedy and looks at what to do about it.

The PBS show debuts Tuesday night in LA, but check listings for your cable provider to find out what time and which PBS station will have it.

LA TIMES SAYS STATE SHOULD BE FORCED TO DEFEND PROP 8 AGAINST CHALLENGES

The Times editorial board makes an interesting and worthwhile argument. I still don’t happen to agree with them, but their points in Monday’s editorial are good ones and essential to consider as you make up your own mind.

HOW 9/11 COMPLETELY CHANGED SURVEILLANCE IN THE U.S.

This story is from Sunday’s Wired Magazine by Ryan Singel, and is a definite must read. Here’s a clip:

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

Klein’s story encapsulates the state of civil liberties 10 years after the shattering attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. After a decade, the country is left with a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure whose scope and inner workings remain secret with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that obsequiously bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power or who is watching out for abuses.

Read the rest.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF A SECOND CHANCE – A FORMER GANG MEMBER GETS TO STAY IN THE U.S.

Hector Tobar’s LA Times story is one you shouldn’t miss. Here’s a clip from the story’s opening:

Before this week, the last time I’d seen Obed Silva was in an immigration court in downtown L.A. On that day, he rolled his wheelchair to the witness box and explained to a judge why he shouldn’t be deported.

That was in 2009. Born in Mexico but raised in Orange County, Silva is a 32-year-old former gang member paralyzed from a gunshot injury who reinvented himself as a scholar. It was the errors of his youth — as a teenager he shot and wounded a man at an O.C. party — that led to the deportation proceeding.

Professors at his alma mater, Cal State L.A., testified in immigration court on his behalf. After I told his story in this column, even a conservative talk-show host said he deserved to stay in the U.S. And in December, the government agreed to stop the deportation proceedings against him.

After nearly four years of court dates and adjournments, Silva’s final appearance before a judge lasted only a few minutes, he recalled. “Next thing I knew, the judge said, ‘You’re free to go.’”

This week Silva and I met again, at his mother’s home in Buena Park. I’d come to see what he was doing with his second chance.

He’s teaching writing at Cypress College and tackling his own painful story in a book. Much of his manuscript is about another man born in Mexico, a heavy drinker who was deported many years ago, and who isn’t missed on this side of the border:

Obed’s father, the late Juan Silva.

Juan Silva was, as Obed writes, “an alcoholic, a drug-addict and a wife beater.” Juan Silva, aged 48 at his death, was one of those fraught men who live hard and leave a lifetime of wreckage in their wake.

“I came to this country to run away from him,” Obed’s mother, Marcela Mendoza, told me. Juan Silva was, by Mendoza’s account, obsessed with the family that had escaped him. Soon after they left, he followed them northward……

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF PRISONS: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A RESEARCHER COMPARES U.S. PRISONS WITH LOCK-UPS ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER: THE NEWS IS NOT GOOD

“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the spring and summer of 2010, law professor and researcher Lucian Dervan, traveled to prisons in the United States, The Netherlands, and Israel to “compare the way each country detains its most violent and culpable residents.” The results of this research, he wrote afterward, “indicate something quite striking about what makes prisons around the world successful.” His results also indicated an alarming view of the way the United States treats its prisoners and what results from that dehumanizing treatment.

Here is a long clip from Dervan’s conclusions. (You can download the entire paper here.)

What makes one prison a violent and uncontrollable badland, while another is a calm, relatively safe, and productive facility for both staff and inmates? From my travels to three continents in search of an answer to this question, one aspect of each prison seems to contribute significantly to its success or failure. Where prisoners believed they were treated like human beings and were provided with reasonable living conditions and opportunities to utilize their time in meaningful ways, the prison environment was relatively healthy and rates of violence were low. In comparison, [in U.S. prisons] where prisoners were subjected to abhorrent living conditions and no efforts were made to treat them with a modicum of respect or provide them with even a scintilla of meaningful stimulation during the day, the prison environment was poisoned and violence ran rampant.

One final story from my travels will summarize the distinction between treating inmates like human beings and treating prisoners as mere objects for confinement.

[W]hen I traveled to Israel three prisoners were asked if they would volunteer to meet with me and, for their services, they were personally thanked by a prison official. During my visit to the state maximum-security prison, however, the treatment of the prisoners was quite different. At one point, a prisoner was sitting inside his cell reading a book. A
guard, who was showing me this particular wing of the facility, decided to demonstrate how he could control the lights inside this prisoner’s cell from outside. Without acknowledging the prisoner was even present, the guard then began switching the light on and off several times. When he was finished with his demonstration, still not having even acknowledged the presence of the prisoner inside the cell, he simply continued to walk down the corridor. It is striking to observe that the guards at this state facility treated prisoners with considerably less respect than the officers tasked with supervising convicted terrorists in Israel.

In conclusion, it is important to clarify why we care what type of environment exists inside a prison. It is certainly not clear that how prisoners are treated has any positive impact on recidivism rates. In fact, of the four prison systems examined in this Article, the one with the highest rate of recidivism is The Netherlands.Nevertheless, the environment inside prisons is vitally important. First, prisons in which inmates feel a sense of community appear to be less violent than those that serve as little more than warehouses for the one out of every hundred Americans currently behind bars. Second, prisons with high rates of violence are expensive facilities to administer because they require large staffs and incur incidental costs associated with medical treatment, overtime, and sick days. As such, prison systems can perform their functions in a more economically efficient manner by creating environments where prisoners are provided with incentives to cooperate and reject violence. Finally, treating prisoners as human beings and creating positive prison environments is simply the morally correct manner in which to administer a penitentiary.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky stated, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Even without the significant added benefits of reducing violence and lessening the administrative costs of running our prison systems, treating prisoners with dignity is the moral duty of any government. That abiding by this duty creates a safer environment for both staff and inmates and provides for the possibility of creating better prisons with less money should merely be considered a significant and
wonderful ancillary benefit.

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE – “WE COME TO BURY HIS HEART BUT NOT HIS LOVE, NEVER HIS LOVE”

Like most news outlets, NPR had a string of good 9/11 stories. This, about the death of NY City Fire Department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, is a particularly sweet one.

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan friar and a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was also a true New York character. Born in Brooklyn, Mychal Judge seemed to know everyone in the city, from the homeless to the mayor.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Father Mychal arrived at the World Trade Center shortly after the first plane hit. And as firefighters and other rescue personnel ran into the North Tower, he went with them.

Bill Cosgrove, a police lieutenant, was also there. When the South Tower collapsed, it sent debris flying into the neighboring building. When the dust cleared, Mychal Judge was dead. Soon after, Cosgrove found him. Then, Cosgrove and a group of firefighters emerged from the rubble, carrying Father Mychal’s body….

Listen to the rest here.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT….FOX SPORTS AND THE STUNNINGLY RACIST USE OF USC STUDENT

As you may or may not know by now, Fox Sports ran a video about the inclusion of two more college teams—Utah and Colorado— in the PAC 10, which will now be the PAC 12. In order to publicize the change on Fox’s college sports show, the show’s “reporter” Bob Oschack interviewed students at USC about their reaction to the new of the change, and asked them to “give a good old fashioned American welcome” the two new schools. Oschack, however, did not interview just any USC students. He picked only Asian students and only Asian students with strong accents. The result was racial caricature that was utterly flabbergasting in its creepiness.

The story was first reported by the Colorado Daily Camera and in short order calls and emails began to stream into the network, Fox Sports at first issued a tepid apology that was little more than an “Ooops. Our bad.” Then, a few hours later, as the fury over the vile video grew, there were evidently some hurried meetings in FoxLand because the apology from the Fox Sports head got a little bit stronger—but not much.

We sincerely apologize to President [C. L. Max] Nikias and the entire USC community for the production and posting of the video. The context was clearly inappropriate and the video was removed as soon as we became aware of it. We will review our editorial process to determine where the breakdown occurred, and we will take steps to ensure something like this never happens again.

The fury continued, thus on Wed, Fox cancelled its college sports show, The College Experiment which had produced the horrid segment, yanked videos from the network site and Hulu, and apologized all over again. (Of course Fox couldn’t stop a million video flowers from blooming on YouTube and the like. For example, here at KCET in it is posted along with a commentary by blogger/teacher Ophelia Chong, which—by the way— is very much worth reading.

Although the news on the incident died down over the weekend, all is far from forgiven. After all, said one Asian commentator, Fox is the network that called Obama’s birthday party “a “hip-hop BBQ” that “didn’t create jobs”—and other fun racist moments. In other words, they created the environment in which it was only a matter of time that the racist crap on the news segments would bleed into areas like sports coverage.

The first of two hearings on the proposed redrawing of boundaries for the five LA County Supervisors’ districts took place on Tuesday of this week and the house—meaning the LA County Sups chamber—was packed. Eight hundred residents filled the chamber plus multiple overflow rooms and approximately 500 people signed up to speak on the three proposed redistricting plans, one put forth by Gloria Molina, a second by Mark Ridley -homas, a third by Don Knabe. The Molina and the Ridley-Thomas plans would redraw district lines—radically in some areas in the case of the Molina plan—in order to create a second majority Latino district, giving Latino residents influence that is more commensurate with their numbers in the county. (Molina’s district 1 is already 75 percent Latino. )

However creating a second district with a high majority of Latino residents under the Molina plan would mean, among other changes, moving nearly 3.5 million county residents from one district to another district with which they are unfamiliar. This means that, with the stroke of a pen, approximately 3.5 million residents would be represented by a supervisor whom they don’t know, and for whom they never voted. In the case of the large numbers of residents moved out of Zev Yaroslavsky’s District 3 and into Don Knabe’s District, the dislocated residents would have the added disenfranchisement of not getting to elect a new Sup until 2016 when Knabe terms out, instead of in 2014 when Yaroslavsky terms out.

Critics of the Molina plan also said that district rejiggering would splinter blocks of ethnic minorities and interest groups in such a way that would radically reduce their influence and effectiveness.

For example, one of the most vocal groups at Tuesday’s hearing was a contingent of around 50 Cambodian-Americans from Long Beach who said they represented 50,000 Cambodians now living in Knabe’s 4th District. They would be split up by Molina’s plan, said those who spoke from the Cambodian contingent, thus they strongly opposed it. “We do not believe the theory that people will only vote for a candidate of their own race. We believe that people will vote for the best candidate [to] represent them…”

Asian Pacific Islanders were another group who said that the Molina plan would unnecessarily damage their political influence in the county. Thus in giving more voice and power to one ethnic group, voice and power was being taken away from a whole list of other ethnic minorities, they said..

Those living in and around the Santa Monica Mountains also expressed their opposition to the Molina plan, which they said would fracture hard won alliances built over decades to promote and support fire suppression and disaster preparedness and recovery in the fire and flood-prone hills. (Full disclosure: many from this group had driven to the meeting from my hometown of Topanga.)

The LA Times has a good set of interactive maps that let you see how the various plans compare.

The next hearing on the issue will be held later this month. After that, the supervisors will try to arrive at a decision. Since three supervisors— Yaroslavsky, Antonovich and Knabe— are all in favor of Knabe’s plan, they are expected to attempt to horse trade with Ridley-Thomas to get his vote, making it a passing vote of four.

If the horse-trading fails and one side or the other cannot get a four-vote majority, the decision will go to an outside committee made up of Sheriff Lee Baca, DA Steve Cooley, and Assessor John R. Noguez.. This is a solution that the Sups on both sides of the question are hoping to avoid.

UPDATE:

PS: I just noticed that, according to 2010 figures, the combined Asian and Pacific Islander population of LA County is 14 percent, as opposed to LA County’s Black population of 8.7 percent (by 2010 figures). Yet, the Molina plan has no trouble further fracturing the distribution—and thus the influence— of the Asian/Pac Island populations with this moving about of lines, nevermind that the API group is the 2nd largest ethnic population in LA County, ahead of Blacks.

On Friday the jury began deliberations in the case of Johannes Mehserle, the BART officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant as Grant was laying face down on a subway platform in Oakland.

The jury deliberated for a couple of hours before quitting for the long weekend because one of the jurors got sick. When they came back on Tuesday it turned out that another juror had a doctor’s appointment while a third had to leave for a previously planned vacation.

The vacationing juror had to be replaced by a brand new juror so deliberations started from scratch on Wednesday, but didn’t get all that far before the day was over.

They will resume yet again today, Thursday.

The San Francisco Chronicle has more details.

Meanwhile, in a lot of neighborhoods, as the LA Wave points out, people continue to worry about post-verdict reactions.

YOUNG MAN SUCCEEDS DESPITE TIME SERVED IN LA COUNTY PROBATION CAMPS

The LA Weekly has a good story by Sam Slovick that combines a sort-of round-up of the horrid state of things at LA County’s Probation Department together with a tale of a kid who’s doing well, in spite of his awful experiences in one of the county’s camps.

Tonight I’ll be participating in a panel called “Race, Crime and Violence“ sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. As the title suggests, we’ll be talking about the way the media deals with race when reporting on crime and violence.

The panel organizers have gathered an interesting line-up that includes: Otto Santa Ana from UCLA, columnist Sandy Banks from the LA Times, and the wonderful poet/author Ishmael Reed.

(I’m the…um…white chick outa the bunch.)

Filmmaker/author M.K. Asante, Jr.. is moderating.

The panel starts at 7:30 p.m., with music and refreshments starting at 6:30.

It’s being held at Eso Won Books, in Leimert Park, 4331 Degnan Blvd.

Come on down and talk….jeer…applaud….throw fruit, whatever you like.

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And while we’re on the subject of race in relationship to the coverage of crime…….blogger (and sometimes WLA commenter) Browne Molyneux has some interesting things to say over at LA Eastside about why she wasn’t one bit sorry to see the demise of the LA Times Homicide Report.

As you know, I’m an ardent supporter of the Homicide Report, and was furious when the Times suspended it. But Browne’s points are thought-provoking and very much worth a read.

Here are a couple of clips from Browne’s list regarding why she she doesn’t miss the blog in question:

2. [It] Gave the Times a whole section to point to when asked if they were covering the African-American and Latino communities, “We have the Homicide Blog, so we cover them everyday, actually we over cover them. We are quite diverse in our coverage.” Why could not murders in our neighborhoods make the real paper?

3. Though I believed Jill Leovy’s heart was in the right place, that blog was like a nuclear bomb. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and quite a few book deals, yeah that would also include you Steve Lopez.) I understand that the point was to showcase and put a face on the violence. I think in general it just made people even more desensitized to Latinos and African-Americans dying in violent ways.

Race, Crime and Violence. How we report about that weave of issues ain’t a simple matter.

On Monday the ACLU released a report stating that a significant percentage of LAPD officers are still engaged in racial profiling. The Police Protective League, predictably howled that the study—which was conducted by a guy named Ian Ayres at Yale—had it entirely wrong. (“Dr. Ayres is trying to manipulate existing data to prove what 9,700 individual officers are thinking when they make traffic stops—which is an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.” Blah, blah, blah. Hey, we understand. It’s the union’s job to support the troops.)

And LAPD Chief Bill Bratton said the study was bogus (or words to that effect) because it was based on figures that were much too old.

He had something of a point. Ayers and company analyzed upwards of 700,000 cases in which Los Angeles Police Department officers stopped pedestrians and/or drivers—but the figures came from between July 2003 and June 2004.

Ayres and the ACLU would have liked newer data, they said, but they were unable to wrench it away from the department.

Now Dr. Ayres has volleyed the ball back at his critics with an excellent Op Ed in this morning’s LA Times.

In it he challenges LAPD Chief Bill Bratton to let him do a brand new racial profiling study, but for the cops themselves this time, not for the ACLU—and using the departments most recent stats.

Here are some clips from Ayers’ Op Ed.

The study, which I wrote with my research assistant, Jonathan Borowsky, asked not simply whether African Americans and Latinos are stopped and searched by the LAPD more often than whites — it’s clear that they are — but the more complex question of whether these racial disparities are justified by legitimate policing practices, such as deciding to police more aggressively in high-crime neighborhoods.

We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, “over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested.”

[SNIP]

Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband. We found similar patterns for Latinos.

Not only did we find that African Americans and Latinos were subjected to more stops, frisks, searches and arrests than whites, we also found that these additional police actions aren’t because of the fact that people of color live in higher-crime areas or because they more often carry drugs or weapons, or any other legitimate reason that we can discern from the rich set of data we examined.

Police Chief William J. Bratton quickly rejected these findings, primarily because the study used data that was more than 4 years old. This is a fair point. But we had no other choice: The department has not released the more recent stop data that it has been collecting, nor has it analyzed the more recent data to test for racial disparities. If Bratton is truly confident that unjustified racial disparities are a thing of the past, he should be able to show the change in the current data. I would be happy to organize a group of respected academics to help analyze it.

I was talking to Connie Rice the other day, and she mentioned that, while Bratton and the LAPD brass were really quite enlightened these days (and I would agree), she didn’t think the enlightenment had filtered down to the majority of the rank and file on the street. What did I think? Yes and no, I said. I think it has for some, not so much, for others.

We talked about the excellent officers we know….and those who fall in the still-needs-improvement catagory.

“I wish someone would study the issue and find out,” she said. “We need to ask how much the department has changed at a street level. And how much does it still need to change?”

A comprehensive racial profiling study with full access to all the departments’ facts and figures would take a giant leap the direction of answering Connie’s question.

So, how about it, Chief?

(But let’s get those rape kits done first.)

FIVE quick must reads—but all worth your time and attention.

1. OBAMA AS PERSONAL SYMBOL

In Sunday’s LA Times, Ruben Martinez has a lovely meditation on what the Obama candidacy means to him as a “person of color” who, despite the fact that he’s a well-regarded author and a respected university professor, sometimes still finds himself both deeply affected by—and trapped inside—the “person of color” designation.

2. ACORN-RELATED SLAP-DOWN

And in this morning’s LA Times the editorial board rightly slaps John McCain upside the head for his “malicious misrepresentation” of the importance—or lack thereof—of the whole ACORN issue. (Don’t worry, the Times doesn’t let ACORN off the hook either.)

And while we’re on the subject, according to this morning’s LA Times, a man was arrested in Ontario on a homegrown voter fraud charge. Evidently the owner of a company that the California Repubs (and others) use to register voters, is accused of tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans. (Although, as with ACORN, what good that would do anyone in a national election isn’t quite clear.)

3. THE DOCTORS CONTEMPLATE THE CANDIDATES

The story that will get the most attention in this morning’s NY Times is about the candidate’s health—and how we still don’t have enough information about any of them. (How comforting.)

4. UNTANGLING THE INNER WORLD OF AUTISTIC TEENAGERS

If you can tear yourself away from the election and the economy for a minute or two, Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had an excellent story about a school that’s having great luck helping autistic teenagers develop their strengths and interests while keeping them more engaged in the world, and with each other.

5. MoDo SAYS OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

Maureen Dowd is having very angry and vengeful, Madam Defarge-like fantasies about the “heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism”—and then, after they’d trashed the place, still walked around stuffing gobs of cash in their own pockets.

“Payback doesn’t have to go as far as the French Revolution,” she writes. “The grifters shafting us don’t have to shed blood, but they do have to give the money back. As far as these self-serving corporate con men and short-selling traders are concerned, off with their headsets.”

Definitely. What Maureen said.