Political Words & the Murder of NY Cops….Unequal Justice?…Strip Searching Kids

AN ARRAY OF REACTIONS TO THE MURDERS OF NEW YORK CITY POLICE OFFICERS RAMOS AND WENJIAN

The terrible and heartbreaking news of the murders of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu on Saturday continues to produce grief around the nation. We all now know that 32-year-old Liu was married three months ago, and that he was passionate about his choice to be a cop. We also know that Officer Ramos, 40, left behind two sons, and that the youngest is 13 years old. We know too that Officer Ramos loved the Mets, and was a chaplain-in-training.

In addition to sorrow, the execution of Ramos and Liu by the clearly disturbed 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley has released a storm of commentary about—among other things—who other than Brinsley is at fault for the murders. Here is some of the latest, along with clips:

Former NYPD Police Commissioner Howard Safir wrote in TIME that police bashing is the worst he’s seen it in 45 years.

When Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley brutally executed Officers Ramos and Liu he did so in an atmosphere of permissiveness and anti-police rhetoric unlike any that I have seen in 45 years in law enforcement. The rhetoric this time is not from the usual suspects, but from the Mayor of New York City, the Attorney General of the United States, and even the President. It emboldens criminals and sends a message that every encounter a black person has with a police officer is one to be feared. Nothing could be further from the truth. We will never know what was in the mind of Brinsley when he shot officers Ramos and Liu. However we do know that he has seen nothing but police bashing from some of the highest officials in the land.

We should all be concerned about the reaction our police officers will have. I have seen times when police bashing has resulted in officers doing the minimum necessary to complete their tours and go home safely to their families.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf writes about the importance of treating police officers as individuals:

Following an outrageous murder of two policemen who seem to have been good cops, it’s emotionally understandable that most people nod along to statements about NYPD officers being “New York’s Finest.” There are a lot of good cops in New York City. There are, as well, a lot of bad cops in the force of 34,500. People who hate all police officers because some act badly are being prejudiced and irrational. It is also irrational to extol everyone who wears an NYPD uniform despite the fact that some of them abandon whistleblowing colleagues when they need backup, accost an innocent kid with racial slurs and physical threats, retaliate against a fellow officer who exposes systemic misbehavior by trying to have him involuntarily committed to a mental institution, or assault women with pepper spray for no reason. Unions that fight to keep even misbehaving officers from being fired bear some responsibility for the reputation that the NYPD has among its critics, as does every cop that observes misbehavior by colleagues but stays silent. Only by distinguishing among police officers—praising the ones who do their jobs honorably and capably, and disciplining or firing the ones who fall short—can the proposition that the profession is worthy of respect be rationally defended.

At the Washington Post Eugene Robinson writes that protesters against police brutality did not cause the shooting of Officers Ramos and Liu.

It is absurd to have to say this, but New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, activist Al Sharpton and President Obama are in no way responsible for the coldblooded assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn on Saturday. Nor do the tens of thousands of Americans who have demonstrated against police brutality in recent weeks bear any measure of blame.

A disturbed career criminal named Ismaaiyl Brinsley committed this unspeakable atrocity by himself, amid a spree of insane mayhem: Earlier in the day, he shot and critically wounded a woman he had been seeing; later, on a subway platform, he shot and killed himself.

[SNIP]

Not for the first time, one of the loudest and least temperate voices has been that of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. “We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said on Fox News. “I don’t care how you want to describe it, that’s what those protests are all about.”

No, no, no. The demonstrations sparked by the exoneration of the officers who killed Brown and Garner were pro-accountability, not anti-police. As I’ve pointed out many times, no one better appreciates the need for an active, engaged police presence than residents of high-crime neighborhoods. But nobody should be expected to welcome policing that treats whole communities as guilty until proved innocent — or a justice system that considers black and brown lives disposable.

New York police officials and union leaders should explain this to the officers who bitterly turned their backs on de Blasio — their commander in chief — as he arrived to pay his respects to slain policemen Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

Yet Ed Mullins, president of the police sergeants’ union, made this inflammatory charge: “Mayor de Blasio, the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands.” And Ray Kelly, a former New York police commissioner, accused de Blasio of running an “anti-police” mayoral campaign and said there was a “firestorm” of anger within the department over remarks de Blasio made regarding Garner’s death.

Jesse Walker at libertarian-leaning Reason Magazine expresses a similar point but from a different angle.

Pat Lynch, the combative chief of the city’s biggest police union, blamed Liu and Ramos’ deaths on “those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest,” then declared that the “blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the mayor.”

I don’t think the mayor’s office is actually on the steps. But you get what the man is saying.

[SNIP]

Where exactly do you draw the line? If you’re really intent on blaming other people for Brinsley’s crimes, how far are you going to take that? If any piece of speech played a role in directing Brinsley’s anger, it was the cell phone video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner. If it weren’t for that recording, hardly anyone would know Garner’s name. But much as Pat Lynch might love to blame that video for last weekend’s killings, he probably knows that any argument to that effect would open a can of worms. The videographer, after all, was simply recording events; the man whose actions made the video newsworthy was Pantaleo. Since Lynch is intent on arguing that Pantaleo isn’t even responsible for the slaying he did commit, I doubt he’d want to risk linking him to any slayings committed by someone else.

No: People like Lynch want to keep our focus on their foes. Their baseless accusations are tools in a political war, and they’re a tool we’ve seen politicians use before. As I once wrote, it lets them discredit mainstream as well as radical political opponents….

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway is not hopeful that the murders of the officers will bring productive debate.

Unfortunately, I can already see from much of the online reaction to yesterday’s tragedy that meaningful debate is the exact opposite of what is likely to occur. Much like the Brown shooting and the Garner death, and the Grand Jury proceedings that occurred in their wake, quickly became politicized, the deaths of these two officers shot in cold blood will be exploited by people with their own political and power agendas. It is, sadly, the way things work in this country any more.

Before that starts, though, I hope that someone stops to remember the families of these two men, as well as the tens of thousands of members of the NYPD and other officers around the country who will be impacted by this horrible tragedy. They didn’t deserve to die, and they don’t deserve to be turned into political symbols either.

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THE MURDER, THE SENTENCE & THE POLITICIAN’S KID
On Saturday Oct 4, 2008, four San Diego State University students were jumped and stabbed by four strangers. One of the four, Luis Santos, was stabbed in the chest. The knife pierced Santos’ left lung and cut the left ventricle of his heart. Santos died of his wounds.

The four who started the fight fled the scene and drove north. Two of the four eventually dumped two knives in the Sacramento River. Those same two stripped off their bloody clothes, stuffed them in a bag, poured on kerosine and set the bundle on fire.

On December 2, 2008, two months after Santos’ death, the young men who had tossed the knives and burned the clothes were arrested. One of them was named Esteban Nuñez, the nineteen-year-old son of Fabian Nuñez, the powerful former California assembly speaker.

In May of 2010, the younger Nuñez pleaded guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea deal. In June 2010, Nuñez was sentenced to 16 years in state prison.

On January 2, 2011, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last day in office, the then governor announced that he had commuted Nuñez’s sentence down to seven years. Nuñez is expected to be paroled in 2016.

So, was justice done? Did a good young man get a break? Or did the son of a powerful politician with powerful friends get a very different kind of justice than that which would be visited on most any other 19-year-old in this state who participated in a murder.

In a fascinating 2-part longread for the LA Times, Christopher Goffard lays out the facts of the matter so that the reader may draw his or her own conclusions.

Here is a clip:

At 5:29 p.m. that day, a surveillance camera captured Nuñez, Jett and Garcia at a 7-Eleven near Nuñez’s Sacramento apartment. Jett left the store with an empty Big Gulp cup. He carried it back to the car with $1.30 worth of gasoline from the Union 76 station next door.

News of the stabbing had been online since that morning, and they were determined to sever their ties to the crime. They drove a little ways and parked near Interstate 5 along the Sacramento River. They got out and climbed down to the water. It is a broad river, the banks thick with foliage, its shores sometimes populated by transients.

Jett carried the clothes he and Nuñez had worn in the fight. He dumped them in a pile, doused them with gas and set them ablaze. He said he watched Nuñez throw the knives in the river.

The clothes burned; the knives sank; the friends would keep quiet. What could link them to a stabbing 500 miles away?

Detectives made the connection within hours.

A young woman had approached them at the crime scene, hoping to help. Her cellphone held text messages from a friend named John Murray. He’d had to leave town fast, he wrote to her, because his buddies had been in a stabbing.

Reluctantly, Murray, 19, told detectives what he knew. He admitted that he’d partied with the Nuñez group that night, then drank himself to sleep, missed the fight and joined the group for the hasty car ride north. He had been at the river during the destruction of the evidence, and said he’d overheard Nuñez and Jett agree not to speak of this again. It would be a secret among friends.

Another tip came from Brianna Perez, 19, a cousin of Nuñez’s friend Rafael Garcia. The Nuñez group had stopped by her apartment near Fraternity Row before the stabbing. They had backpacks full of beer and a large bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

They were angry that they had been rebuffed when they tried to get into a frat party earlier, she said. They were cursing the frat boys. Some of them used knives to open their beer cans. She remembered some of them talking about burning down the frat house, about finding a fight.

“They were going to show them how they did it in Sac-town,” she would say. When they left her apartment, she worried that they were looking for “drama…”

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STRIP SEARCHING CA KIDS BY THE CDCR?

Contraband—from drugs to cell phones—is a huge problem that the California prison system is struggling to control—without much success.

Dinky Manek Enty reports for the Chronicle of Social Change on a newly proposed policy aimed at the CDCR’s contraband dilemma that, while sensible on the surface, may need to be rethought, in that it involves kids.

Here’s a clip:

For the more than 2.7 million children in the United States with an incarcerated parent, the holiday season brings a poignant mixture of torment and joy. On the one hand, it may mean a rare opportunity to visit a parent behind bars—for some, the only visit of the year. But the love and connection a visit can bring are tempered by the fear of driving past razor wire, passing through metal detectors, and being subjected to the scrutiny of uniformed guards.

This holiday season, some children may face an even more disturbing intrusion. Under new regulations recently proposed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), visitors will be subjected to canine searches in an effort to prevent the flow of contraband such as drugs and cell phones into the state’s prisons. Should the search result in a positive alert (even a false positive, which research has shown comprise as many as 80 percent of all positive identifications), the visitor in question must submit to a strip search or else forgo the visit. The regulations make no exception for children, and existing CDCR paperwork regarding unclothed searches explicitly includes accompanying minors.

Statistics show clearly that kids of incarcerated parents already have a tough path to navigate. Let’s not add the trauma of possible strip searches to the mix.