-- Arch City Defenders, "Municipal Courts White Paper"
This week's featured post is "What Your Fox-Watching Uncle Doesn't Get About Ferguson". The featured post from two weeks ago "Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party" continued its viral spread last week. It's now over 100,000 page views, making it the second most popular Sift post ever. But it's still got a ways to go to catch "The Distress of the Privileged" at 332K. (Those numbers make the 2,000 views of last week's "The Ferguson Test" seems puny, but it's actually quite good by normal Weekly Sift standards.)
This week everybody was still talking about Ferguson
Wednesday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell nailed the NYT for police reporting that reminds me of the reporting Judith Miller did for them in the lead-up to the Iraq War: Leaks from government sources are reported as facts, the official framing of events is accepted uncritically, and contradictory evidence is discounted.
A different angle on Ferguson comes from Arch City Defenders, a group that "strives to provide holistic criminal and civil legal services to the homeless and working poor in the St. Louis Region."In a white paper on the St. Louis area municipal courts published before Mike Brown's death, ACD focused on Ferguson and two other municipalities that it described as "chronic offenders" for abuses of the justice system like
being jailed for the inability to pay fines, losing jobs and housing as result of the incarceration, being refused access to the Courts if they were with their children or other family members, and being mistreated by the bailiffs, prosecutors, clerks and judges in the courts.
... In many municipalities, individuals who are unable to pay whatever fines they are assessed are incarcerated — sometimes repeatedly over many years. One defendant described being incarcerated fifteen or sixteen times over a decade on the same municipal charge.
In short, if you are poor in Ferguson, getting a speeding ticket can wreck your life. But it makes money for the town.
Court costs and fines represent a significant source of income for these towns. According to the St. Louis County two municipalities alone, Ferguson and Florissant, earned a combined net profit of $3.5 million off of their municipal courts in 2013.ACD's Thomas Harvey says:
The courts in those municipalities are profit-seeking entities that systematically enforce municipal ordinance violations in a way that disproportionately impacts the indigent and communities of color.
St. Louis Couty municipal courts typically don't provide public defenders, so even if the law makes allowance for poverty, the poor may not know how to claim their rights. Those who can afford lawyers often can deal with minor violations without a court appearance, with the result that (as one resident put it) "You go to all of these damn courts, and there’s no white people."
ACD's white paper draws an obvious conclusion: "This interaction ... shapes public perception of justice and the American legal system."
St. Louis police released a cellphone video of two of their officers killing a different black man. The video contradicts several parts of the police account of the killing, but nonetheless the shooting is judged by experts to be justified. Watching it gives you some idea of what police are allowed to get away with.
Three of the officers involved in policing the Ferguson protests have been disciplined. The first was Ray Albers of the St. Ann police force, who was videotaped waving a gun at the crowd and yelling, "I will fucking kill you." He's been suspended indefinitely.
The second is Glendale officer Matthew Pappert, who was suspended after tweeting: "These protestors should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night."
But the scariest is Dan Page of the St. Louis force. He's been relieved of duty after St. Louis Post-Dispatch released a video of an hour-long talk he gave to a meeting of the local Oath Keepers chapter in April. The articles about him pick out the easy sound bites: his hostility to gays, women, the Supreme Court, and President Obama, as well as several statements expressing pride in being "a killer". But if you watch the whole talk, what's really frightening is Page's paranoid thought process, and the fact that the gym-full of people he appears to be talking to seem to approve.
I have listened to certifiably paranoid people before, and this talk is exactly what they sound like. They present "evidence" for their dark fantasies that you look at and think "Huh?" Page wanders through the Constitution, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and various other apparently authoritative sources, referencing bits that (if you look them up) have little to do with what he's saying. (At the 25 minute mark: "In Psalms 83, Russia invades Israel. They are beat back, eight-fifths of their army are killed.")
At around the 17-minute mark he presents a slide he says came from a talk by the Secretary of the Army. The untitled, unannotated slide is simply a list of ten regions. ("1. America, Canada, Mexico ... 10. Remainder of Africa".) Page finds this slide deeply threatening: "World government, folks. Anybody who resists it is dead."
The idea that Dan Page is on the street with a gun is scary enough, much less that he has wielded the authority of a police officer for 35 years.
Online arguments about the Brown shooting are so formulaic that The Daily Dot has a taxonomy of the ten kinds of trolls you'll run into.
As part of a long article that is well worth reading end-to-end, an ex-cop compares Ferguson to the Bundy Ranch showdown.
On the Bundy Ranch, armed protesters were violently obstructing law enforcement from performing their duties. Sniper rifles were pointed at those law enforcement officers. Then those “snipers” openly gloated about how they had the agents in their sights the entire time. And what was the police response? All out retreat. Nobody was arrested. No tear gas deployed. No tanks were called in. No Snipers posted in the neighborhood. No rubber bullets fired. Nothing. Police officers in mortal danger met with heavily armed resistance and no one had to answer for it.
... Just imagine if there were 150 black folks walking around Ferguson with assault rifles right now. Imagine if a couple of them took up sniper positions on the tops of buildings with their rifles pointed at the police officers. Take a quick guess at how that story ends.
and ISIS
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria beheaded American journalist James Foley -- and posted the video on YouTube -- after the U.S. government refused a 100 million Euro ransom demand and a rescue attempt failed. This sparked a lot of discussion about widening the U.S. involvement in Iraq beyond the current air strikes.
I don't doubt that a lot of people in ISIS are bad guys. But it gets old watching the pro-war spin machine work. Once again, we face a group of insane, unstoppable monsters far worse than the last group of insane, unstoppable monsters we were warned about. Rick Perry thinks they're coming over the Mexican border, and a former CIA deputy director warns us that they could get an AK-47 and shoot up a mall -- not because either man has any evidence that such things are in the process of happening, but because we have a new name for the Boogie Man.
The problem with the panic-mongering is that it just raises the pressure to do something. It doesn't increase the effectiveness of any of the somethings we might do. Couldn't we someday have a rational discussion of what our options really are, and what good or bad things are likely to result from the various things we might do?
and Ukraine/Russia
The Ukrainian government forces seem to be advancing against the pro-Russian rebels who hold several cities near the Russian border. Russia is moving what it claims is humanitarian aid across the border, but Ukraine says it's military re-supply for the rebels. It's hard for American journalists to verify anybody's story.
and you also might be interested in ...
It's still in the laboratory (at my alma mater, BTW), but wow is this cool: transparent solar cells. Someday, your windows could generate electricity without blocking the view.
The pressure to change the name of the Washington NFL team continues its slow, inexorable build. The editorial board of The Washington Post announced Friday that it will no longer refer to the team as "Redskins" in its editorials. (Presumably, the announcement itself was the last time.) That move was mostly symbolic, since the R-team isn't mentioned that often on the editorial page, and the news and sports sections of the paper will continue to print "Redskins". But it's something.
As of June, The Seattle Times won't use the name at all. It'll be interesting to see how they cover the Seattle-Washington Monday Night Football game on October 6. Maybe this article from The Kansas City Star could be a model.
Wednesday it came out that longtime NFL referee Mike Carey had been quietly boycotting Washington games since 2006. When confronted with the fact that he had not refereed a Washington game in many years, Carey owned up:
The league respectfully honored my request not to officiate Washington. ... It just became clear to me that to be in the middle of the field, where something disrespectful is happening, was probably not the best thing for me.
Carey has retired from the NFL and now works for CBS' football coverage team as a rules analyst. He was the first African-American to referee a Super Bowl. A coaches' poll once named him (tied with another guy) as the league's best referee.
CBS' Phil Simms and NBC's Tony Dungy have said they will try to avoid saying "Redskins" while announcing or commenting on games.
Sooner or later, these little grains of sand will turn into a landslide. For now, not cooperating with the misnamed team requires an explanation. But we're approaching a tipping point, where those who do cooperate will be expected to explain.
and let's close with some creative law-breaking
Cracked has compiled a list of "The 7 Most Badass Acts of Vandalism Ever Photographed". I mean, would you have thought to paint a giant penis on a drawbridge, so that would rise every time the bridge goes up? Or turn a Soviet monument in Bulgaria into colorful American comic-book characters and other mythical beings like Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald? Or let half a million brightly colored plastic balls bounce down the Spanish Steps in Rome? Somebody did.
