It truly breaks my heart. We Americans have been so lied to, so
misdirected, so put down that we are losing our ability to think
clearly.
A good example is the constant pressure to privatize public services.
Take public education. Despite the fact that our nation became great
in part due to the growth of our public education. Even the sons of
farmers, loggers, fishermen and factory workers could rise up on the
social ladder through public education. Abe Lincoln comes to mind.
But somewhere we began being fed the line that public workers were
lazy, incompetent and dull witted. Private corporations could do the
job so much better because they were competitive.
Somewhere we began to believe that we, the common folk, could not
supervise our own public services. Despite school boards and PTSA
organizations, we simply were too dull to see how we were being taken
to the cleaners by our public servants.
Did we think to check and find out how much our state legislatures
were giving to education? Anyone who ever worked for the government
agencies learned quickly that there was lots of "fat" to be trimmed
from programs. Over and over the legislatures "trimmed the fat". We
dull witted folk just went along accepting the fact that there is
always more fat to trim. So when school buildings fall down, when
teachers leave for jobs that pay real wages, when families move to the
suburbs looking for better schools, we are told that it is due to poor
management. Private business could manage things so much more
efficiently.
Do we ask how the private sector can do that, when their bottom line
is profit? And the bottom line for public education is the student?
How does that work?
Someone must think we Working Class folks are pretty simple minded not
to figure out that the problem is a matter of decent funding and
teachers and administrators who are paid a respectable wage.
Are we really so beaten down that we think we need to hire the
Corporate Professionals to run our schools?
If so, the very first thing we common folk need is a brain transplant.
Then we need to sit together and take charge of our lives, and the
lives of our children. The public school system may be dented but it
is not broken. A "Paid For" public education for all of our children,
right up through their college, will return benefits a thousand fold.
But if we allow the privatization of our public schools, we will be
handing over the future freedom of our children.
Do we really want our children to look like corporate CEO's?
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to
> Education 'Reform' Phonies
> ________________________________________
> The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to
> Education
> 'Reform' Phonies
> By Jeff Bryant [1] / Salon [2]
> May 26, 2015
> Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of
> charter schools, he mentioned something about an "original bargain" that
> charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post [3],
> "supposed to do a better job of educating students."
> A writer at Salon [4] called the remark "stunning" because it brought to
> light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no
> better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter
> reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic
> performance.
> But what's most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his
> statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in
> so
> many American communities.
> In a real "bargaining process," those who bear the consequences of the deal
> have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves
> honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are
> measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the
> deal has been struck.
> But that's not what's happening in the great charter industry rollout
> transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms,
> charters are being imposed on communities - either by legislative fiat or
> well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep
> their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no
> one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these
> rapidly expanding school operations.
> Instead of the "bargain" political leaders may have thought they struck
> with
> seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired
> instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their
> families,
> and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing -
> rather
> than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about "what works" - is
> putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by
> charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely
> renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.
> Charter Schools As Takeover Operations
> The "100 percent charter schools" education system in New Orleans that
> Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a
> negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.
> After Katrina, as NPR [5] recently reported, "an ad hoc coalition of
> elected
> leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed," and in "a series of
> quick decisions," all school employees were fired and the vast majority of
> the city's schools were handed over to a state entity called the "Recovery
> School District" which is governed by unelected officials. Only a "few
> elite
> schools were . allowed to maintain their selective admissions."
> In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at
> tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.
> Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of
> students in the New Orleans all-charter system is obtainable only by "jukin
> the stats" [6] or, as the NPR reporter put it, through "a distortion of the
> curriculum and teaching practice." As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek [7] a
> year ago, "the current reality of the city's schools should be enough to
> give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters."
> Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. So
> school districts that have not had the "benefit," according to Arne Duncan
> [8], of a natural disaster like Katrina, are having charter schools imposed
> on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what's currently
> happening in the York, Pennsylvania.
> School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled
> due to chronic state underfunding - only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes
> from the state [9], way below national averages - and massive budget cuts
> [10] imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education
> less than it did in 2008).
> The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit
> high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing
> through state financial records, a report [11] from the state's school
> employee union found, "State funding cuts to the most impoverished school
> districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts
> with the lowest average child poverty." The unsurprising results of these
> cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York,
> instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.
> The York City district was exceptionally strapped [12], having been hit by
> $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher
> furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and
> Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted [13] in
> 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected
> "recovery official," eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.
> The "recovery" process for York schools also entailed a "transformation
> model" [14] with challenging financial and academic targets the district
> had
> little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence
> of
> failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter
> provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the
> education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots
> and give York's citizens very little say in how their children's schools
> are
> run.
> None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of
> York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining
> tables are being heard in the streets [15] and in school board meetings.
> According to a local news outlet [16], at a recent protest before the
> city's
> school board, "a district teacher and father of three students . presented
> the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible
> conversion of district schools to charter schools," and "a student at the
> high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than
> 260
> students opposed to charter conversion." Yet the state official demanding
> charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action
> is "what's bets for our kids." [16]
> What's important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures
> academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going
> by the name Jersey Jazzman [17] stated on his personal blog. Looking at how
> the districts' students perform on state assessments, he found that
> academic
> performance levels were "pretty much where you'd expect them to be" based
> on
> the fact that "most of York's schools have student populations where 80
> percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage," and
> variations in student test score performance almost always correlate
> strongly with students' financial conditions. He concluded that what was
> happening to York schools more represents a "long con" in which tax cuts
> and
> claims of "budgetary poverty" have prompted a rapacious state government to
> "declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures . pick at the
> bones of a decimated school system."
> The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the
> National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in
> Dialogue [18], "It's the same story that played out in Detroit [19], Flint
> [20], and Philadelphia [21] where these 'chief recovery officers' or
> 'emergency managers' have all made the same recommendation: to hand over
> the
> cities' public schools to the highest private bidder."
> Then, hiding behind pledges to do "what's best for kids," these operators
> too often do anything but.
> Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues
> York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school
> takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their
> state
> have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since
> 1997.
> The report [22], "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's
> Charter Schools," was released by three groups, the Center for Popular
> Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.
> Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the
> authors -just in Pennsylvania - include an administrator who diverted $2.6
> million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another
> charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail
> out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school
> operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent
> invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school
> funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
> What's even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by
> state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents,
> every year virtually all of the state's charter schools are found to be
> financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by
> whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a
> history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.
> Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and
> the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the
> minimum
> possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter
> schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an
> investigation.
> The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year [23] that exposed
> $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud,
> waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the
> study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate
> how charter school fraud is spreading.
> What's happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter
> operators being considered for that takeover - Mosaica Education, Inc., and
> Charter Schools USA - have particularly troubling track records.
> According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon
> Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, "complications soon followed."
> After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit
> [24], and when Mosaica realized they weren't making a profit within two
> years, they pulled up stakes [25] and went in search of other targets.
> As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report
> from the Florida League of Women Voters [26] produced earlier this year
> found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts
> taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County
> alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a
> construction
> company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple
> Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations
> and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every
> year.
> In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch [27], Charter
> USA's construction company bought a former Verizon call center for
> $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the
> front
> door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter
> School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees
> for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.
> No wonder York citizens are concerned.
> What Happened To Charter School Accountability?
> Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more "accountable" to
> the public are turning out to be anything but.
> As an article for The Nation [28] recently observed, "Charters were
> supposed
> to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque."
> The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera,
> explained, "Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they
> are
> stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for
> education."
> Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera
> contended, "Most charters lack financial transparency." As an example, he
> offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive "'an
> estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources'
> compared to local school districts." But only a scant portion of that
> disproportionate funding - just $457 in spending per pupil - could
> accurately be accounted for "because KIPP does not disclose how it uses
> money received from private sources.
> In addition to the difficulties in following the money," Noguero continued,
> "there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least
> difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter
> schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many
> cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children."
> This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as
> their
> student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools
> surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs
> students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study
> showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of
> high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the
> "failure" label.
> If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what's
> required,
> Noguera concluded is "greater transparency and collaboration with public
> schools."
> Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.
> This report [29], "Public Accountability for Charter Schools," published by
> the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, "recommends changes to state
> charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce
> student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to
> the communities served," according to the organization's press release.
> According to the report, these recommendations are the product of "a
> working
> group of grassroots organizers and leaders" from Chicago, Philadelphia,
> Newark, New York, and other cities, who have "first-hand experience and
> years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather
> than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to
> assess impact."
> These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter
> school failure to disclose essential information about their operations,
> including financial information, school discipline policies, student
> enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.
> For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of
> Open
> Records in Pennsylvania, "testified that her office had received 239
> appeals
> in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests
> from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters."
> In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management
> Company, "takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually . yet
> has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own
> schools for detailed financial reports." In Philadelphia, the report
> authors
> found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available
> "only
> one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf
> club
> in the Philadelphia suburbs." In New York City, where charter schools are
> co-located in public school buildings, "public school parents have
> complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours,
> and
> earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the
> co-located charter school." The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP,
> which documented public school classrooms "with peeling paint and
> insufficient resources" made to co-locate with charters that have "new
> computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks."
> The Annenberg report's policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of
> "standards," which include:
> 1. Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate
> to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.
> 2. School governance should be representative and transparent.
> 3. Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students
> and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately
> push-out enrolled students.
> 4. Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.
> 5. All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities.
> Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility
> arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.
> 6. Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality,
> transparency and the protection of student data.
> 7. Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect
> the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.
>
> Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National
> Alliance for Public Charter Schools [30], arguing against any regulation on
> charters. That organization's response cites "remarkable results" as an
> excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public
> accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever
> there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry
> loves
> to crow about, the facts are those results really aren't there [31].
> Charter Accountability Now
> Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out
> of the corners of the "black box" the industry uses to protect itself, the
> charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.
> Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on
> a publicity terror with a national campaign [32] claiming to tell "The
> Truth
> About Charters" and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia [33]
> and
> New York City [34].
> But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in
> more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia [35],
> Bridgeport [36], Pittsburgh [37], and Chicago [38], where charter schools
> are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed
> charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan
> [39], where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that
> 73
> percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools
> until
> the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full
> review of the charter school system.
> There's little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other
> leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw
> deal. The deal is off.
> Jeff Bryant is an associate fellow at Campaign for America's Future and the
> editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. Prior to joining
> OurFuture.org he was one of the principal writers for Open Left.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [40]
> [41]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/education/great-charter-school-rip-finally-truth-cat
> ches-education-reform-phonies
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
> [2] http://www.salon.com
> [3]
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/bill-clinton-charter-schools_n_5878
> 084.html
> [4]
> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/25/bill_clinton%E2%80%99s_stunning_statement_on
> _charter_schools_why_its_more_striking_than_it_looks/
> [5] http://apps.npr.org/the-end-of-neighborhood-schools/
> [6]
> http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-dishonest-case-for-the-new-orlean
> s-school-reform-model/
> [7]
> http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/184
> 8/the_great_charter_tryout?page=entire
> [8]
> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/01/duncan-katrina-was-the-best-thi
> ng-for-new-orleans-schools/
> [9]
> http://thenotebook.org/summer-2007/07104/how-schools-are-funded-pennsylvania
> -primer
> [10] http://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/playing-politics-with-education/
> [11] http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=11715
> [12] http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?mid=906&id=8918
> [13]
> http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/06/legislation_for_state-tak
> eover.html
> [14]
> http://www.yorkdispatch.com/portal/breaking/ci_26281976/seven-charter-school
> -groups-submit-york-city-proposals?_loopback=1
> [15]
> http://www.wgal.com/teachers-parents-rally-possible-york-charter-school-take
> over/28115492
> [16]
> http://www.yorkdispatch.com/breaking/ci_26555680/york-city-teachers-say-no-c
> harters
> [17]
> http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/09/everything-wrong-with-education-re
> form.html
> [18]
> http://www.livingindialogue.com/york-pennsylvania-community-rallies-school-p
> rivatization/
> [19]
> http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2014/09/18/charter-schools-mo
> ratorium-legislation-michigan/15804605/
> [20]
> http://www.abc12.com/story/25990669/a-plan-to-outsource-jobs-is-latest-budge
> t-cutting-move-by-flint-schools
> [21] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/20/phil-j20.html
> [22]
> http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/charter-schools-PA-Fraud.pdf
> [23]
> http://integrityineducation.org/release-new-report-charter-industry-exposes-
> 100-million-taxpayer-funds-meant-children-instead-lost-fraud-waste-abuse/
> [24]
> http://michiganradio.org/post/1-4-teachers-muskegon-heights-schools-quit-dur
> ing-first-3-months-school-year
> [25]
> http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2014/04/state_approves_14_milli
> on_emer.html
> [26]
> http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/florida-league-of-women-voters-blast
> s-charter-school-movement/2181931
> [27]
> http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/07/florida-league-of-women-voters-finds-char
> ters-do-not-improve-achievement/
> [28]
> http://www.thenation.com/article/181753/why-dont-we-have-real-data-charter-s
> chools
> [29]
> http://annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/files/CharterAccountabilityStds.
> pdf
> [30] http://www.publiccharters.org/press/annenberg-report/
> [31]
> http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2014/09/review-meta-analysis-effect-char
> ter
> [32] http://www.publiccharters.org/truthaboutcharters/
> [33]
> http://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/20/charters-will-blitz-philadelphia-with-pr-
> campaign/
> [34]
> http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/09/8553454/charter-advo
> cacy-group-launch-big-ad-campaign-Monday
> [35]
> http://articles.philly.com/2014-06-07/news/50390416_1_aspira-philadelphia-sc
> hool-district-mastery-charter-schools
> [36]
> http://connecticut.news12.com/news/voters-reject-proposed-bridgeport-charter
> -change-1.4242074
> [37]
> http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2014/07/23/Pittsburgh-school-boar
> d-rejects-charter-school-expansion-at-Frick-Park/stories/201407230220#ixzz38
> LPk5o6z
> [38]
> http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20131022/downtown/parents-community-groups-pr
> otest-proposed-charter-school-expansion
> [39]
> http://www.freep.com/article/20140831/NEWS06/308310070/charter-schools-poll-
> Michigan
> [40] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Great Charter
> School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to Education
> 'Reform' Phonies
> [41] http://www.alternet.org/
> [42] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to
> Education 'Reform' Phonies
>
> The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to
> Education
> 'Reform' Phonies
> By Jeff Bryant [1] / Salon [2]
> May 26, 2015
> Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of
> charter schools, he mentioned something about an "original bargain" that
> charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post [3],
> "supposed to do a better job of educating students."
> A writer at Salon [4] called the remark "stunning" because it brought to
> light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no
> better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter
> reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic
> performance.
> But what's most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his
> statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in
> so
> many American communities.
> In a real "bargaining process," those who bear the consequences of the deal
> have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves
> honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are
> measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the
> deal has been struck.
> But that's not what's happening in the great charter industry rollout
> transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms,
> charters are being imposed on communities - either by legislative fiat or
> well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep
> their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no
> one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these
> rapidly expanding school operations.
> Instead of the "bargain" political leaders may have thought they struck
> with
> seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired
> instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their
> families,
> and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing -
> rather
> than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about "what works" - is
> putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by
> charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely
> renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.
> Charter Schools As Takeover Operations
> The "100 percent charter schools" education system in New Orleans that
> Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a
> negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.
> After Katrina, as NPR [5] recently reported, "an ad hoc coalition of
> elected
> leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed," and in "a series of
> quick decisions," all school employees were fired and the vast majority of
> the city's schools were handed over to a state entity called the "Recovery
> School District" which is governed by unelected officials. Only a "few
> elite
> schools were . allowed to maintain their selective admissions."
> In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at
> tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.
> Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of
> students in the New Orleans all-charter system is obtainable only by "jukin
> the stats" [6] or, as the NPR reporter put it, through "a distortion of the
> curriculum and teaching practice." As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek [7] a
> year ago, "the current reality of the city's schools should be enough to
> give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters."
> Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. So
> school districts that have not had the "benefit," according to Arne Duncan
> [8], of a natural disaster like Katrina, are having charter schools imposed
> on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what's currently
> happening in the York, Pennsylvania.
> School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled
> due to chronic state underfunding - only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes
> from the state [9], way below national averages - and massive budget cuts
> [10] imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education
> less than it did in 2008).
> The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit
> high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing
> through state financial records, a report [11] from the state's school
> employee union found, "State funding cuts to the most impoverished school
> districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts
> with the lowest average child poverty." The unsurprising results of these
> cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York,
> instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.
> The York City district was exceptionally strapped [12], having been hit by
> $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher
> furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and
> Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted [13] in
> 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected
> "recovery official," eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.
> The "recovery" process for York schools also entailed a "transformation
> model" [14] with challenging financial and academic targets the district
> had
> little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence
> of
> failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter
> provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the
> education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots
> and give York's citizens very little say in how their children's schools
> are
> run.
> None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of
> York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining
> tables are being heard in the streets [15] and in school board meetings.
> According to a local news outlet [16], at a recent protest before the
> city's
> school board, "a district teacher and father of three students . presented
> the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible
> conversion of district schools to charter schools," and "a student at the
> high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than
> 260
> students opposed to charter conversion." Yet the state official demanding
> charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action
> is "what's bets for our kids." [16]
> What's important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures
> academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going
> by the name Jersey Jazzman [17] stated on his personal blog. Looking at how
> the districts' students perform on state assessments, he found that
> academic
> performance levels were "pretty much where you'd expect them to be" based
> on
> the fact that "most of York's schools have student populations where 80
> percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage," and
> variations in student test score performance almost always correlate
> strongly with students' financial conditions. He concluded that what was
> happening to York schools more represents a "long con" in which tax cuts
> and
> claims of "budgetary poverty" have prompted a rapacious state government to
> "declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures . pick at the
> bones of a decimated school system."
> The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the
> National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in
> Dialogue [18], "It's the same story that played out in Detroit [19], Flint
> [20], and Philadelphia [21] where these 'chief recovery officers' or
> 'emergency managers' have all made the same recommendation: to hand over
> the
> cities' public schools to the highest private bidder."
> Then, hiding behind pledges to do "what's best for kids," these operators
> too often do anything but.
> Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues
> York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school
> takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their
> state
> have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since
> 1997.
> The report [22], "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's
> Charter Schools," was released by three groups, the Center for Popular
> Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.
> Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the
> authors -just in Pennsylvania - include an administrator who diverted $2.6
> million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another
> charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail
> out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school
> operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent
> invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school
> funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
> What's even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by
> state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents,
> every year virtually all of the state's charter schools are found to be
> financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by
> whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a
> history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.
> Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and
> the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the
> minimum
> possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter
> schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an
> investigation.
> The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year [23] that exposed
> $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud,
> waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the
> study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate
> how charter school fraud is spreading.
> What's happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter
> operators being considered for that takeover - Mosaica Education, Inc., and
> Charter Schools USA - have particularly troubling track records.
> According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon
> Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, "complications soon followed."
> After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit
> [24], and when Mosaica realized they weren't making a profit within two
> years, they pulled up stakes [25] and went in search of other targets.
> As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report
> from the Florida League of Women Voters [26] produced earlier this year
> found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts
> taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County
> alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a
> construction
> company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple
> Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations
> and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every
> year.
> In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch [27], Charter
> USA's construction company bought a former Verizon call center for
> $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the
> front
> door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter
> School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees
> for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.
> No wonder York citizens are concerned.
> What Happened To Charter School Accountability?
> Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more "accountable" to
> the public are turning out to be anything but.
> As an article for The Nation [28] recently observed, "Charters were
> supposed
> to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque."
> The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera,
> explained, "Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they
> are
> stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for
> education."
> Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera
> contended, "Most charters lack financial transparency." As an example, he
> offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive "'an
> estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources'
> compared to local school districts." But only a scant portion of that
> disproportionate funding - just $457 in spending per pupil - could
> accurately be accounted for "because KIPP does not disclose how it uses
> money received from private sources.
> In addition to the difficulties in following the money," Noguero continued,
> "there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least
> difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter
> schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many
> cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children."
> This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as
> their
> student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools
> surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs
> students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study
> showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of
> high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the
> "failure" label.
> If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what's
> required,
> Noguera concluded is "greater transparency and collaboration with public
> schools."
> Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.
> This report [29], "Public Accountability for Charter Schools," published by
> the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, "recommends changes to state
> charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce
> student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to
> the communities served," according to the organization's press release.
> According to the report, these recommendations are the product of "a
> working
> group of grassroots organizers and leaders" from Chicago, Philadelphia,
> Newark, New York, and other cities, who have "first-hand experience and
> years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather
> than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to
> assess impact."
> These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter
> school failure to disclose essential information about their operations,
> including financial information, school discipline policies, student
> enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.
> For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of
> Open
> Records in Pennsylvania, "testified that her office had received 239
> appeals
> in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests
> from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters."
> In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management
> Company, "takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually . yet
> has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own
> schools for detailed financial reports." In Philadelphia, the report
> authors
> found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available
> "only
> one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf
> club
> in the Philadelphia suburbs." In New York City, where charter schools are
> co-located in public school buildings, "public school parents have
> complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours,
> and
> earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the
> co-located charter school." The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP,
> which documented public school classrooms "with peeling paint and
> insufficient resources" made to co-locate with charters that have "new
> computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks."
> The Annenberg report's policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of
> "standards," which include:
> 1. Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate
> to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.
> 2. School governance should be representative and transparent.
> 3. Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students
> and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately
> push-out enrolled students.
> 4. Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.
> 5. All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities.
> Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility
> arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.
> 6. Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality,
> transparency and the protection of student data.
> 7. Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect
> the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.
> Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National
> Alliance for Public Charter Schools [30], arguing against any regulation on
> charters. That organization's response cites "remarkable results" as an
> excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public
> accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever
> there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry
> loves
> to crow about, the facts are those results really aren't there [31].
> Charter Accountability Now
> Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out
> of the corners of the "black box" the industry uses to protect itself, the
> charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.
> Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on
> a publicity terror with a national campaign [32] claiming to tell "The
> Truth
> About Charters" and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia [33]
> and
> New York City [34].
> But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in
> more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia [35],
> Bridgeport [36], Pittsburgh [37], and Chicago [38], where charter schools
> are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed
> charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan
> [39], where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that
> 73
> percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools
> until
> the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full
> review of the charter school system.
> There's little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other
> leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw
> deal. The deal is off.
> Jeff Bryant is an associate fellow at Campaign for America's Future and the
> editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. Prior to joining
> OurFuture.org he was one of the principal writers for Open Left.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [40]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[41]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/education/great-charter-school-rip-finally-truth-cat
> ches-education-reform-phonies
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
> [2] http://www.salon.com
> [3]
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/bill-clinton-charter-schools_n_5878
> 084.html
> [4]
> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/25/bill_clinton%E2%80%99s_stunning_statement_on
> _charter_schools_why_its_more_striking_than_it_looks/
> [5] http://apps.npr.org/the-end-of-neighborhood-schools/
> [6]
> http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-dishonest-case-for-the-new-orlean
> s-school-reform-model/
> [7]
> http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/184
> 8/the_great_charter_tryout?page=entire
> [8]
> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/01/duncan-katrina-was-the-best-thi
> ng-for-new-orleans-schools/
> [9]
> http://thenotebook.org/summer-2007/07104/how-schools-are-funded-pennsylvania
> -primer
> [10] http://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/playing-politics-with-education/
> [11] http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=11715
> [12] http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?mid=906&id=8918
> [13]
> http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/06/legislation_for_state-tak
> eover.html
> [14]
> http://www.yorkdispatch.com/portal/breaking/ci_26281976/seven-charter-school
> -groups-submit-york-city-proposals?_loopback=1
> [15]
> http://www.wgal.com/teachers-parents-rally-possible-york-charter-school-take
> over/28115492
> [16]
> http://www.yorkdispatch.com/breaking/ci_26555680/york-city-teachers-say-no-c
> harters
> [17]
> http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/09/everything-wrong-with-education-re
> form.html
> [18]
> http://www.livingindialogue.com/york-pennsylvania-community-rallies-school-p
> rivatization/
> [19]
> http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2014/09/18/charter-schools-mo
> ratorium-legislation-michigan/15804605/
> [20]
> http://www.abc12.com/story/25990669/a-plan-to-outsource-jobs-is-latest-budge
> t-cutting-move-by-flint-schools
> [21] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/20/phil-j20.html
> [22]
> http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/charter-schools-PA-Fraud.pdf
> [23]
> http://integrityineducation.org/release-new-report-charter-industry-exposes-
> 100-million-taxpayer-funds-meant-children-instead-lost-fraud-waste-abuse/
> [24]
> http://michiganradio.org/post/1-4-teachers-muskegon-heights-schools-quit-dur
> ing-first-3-months-school-year
> [25]
> http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2014/04/state_approves_14_milli
> on_emer.html
> [26]
> http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/florida-league-of-women-voters-blast
> s-charter-school-movement/2181931
> [27]
> http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/07/florida-league-of-women-voters-finds-char
> ters-do-not-improve-achievement/
> [28]
> http://www.thenation.com/article/181753/why-dont-we-have-real-data-charter-s
> chools
> [29]
> http://annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/files/CharterAccountabilityStds.
> pdf
> [30] http://www.publiccharters.org/press/annenberg-report/
> [31]
> http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2014/09/review-meta-analysis-effect-char
> ter
> [32] http://www.publiccharters.org/truthaboutcharters/
> [33]
> http://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/20/charters-will-blitz-philadelphia-with-pr-
> campaign/
> [34]
> http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/09/8553454/charter-advo
> cacy-group-launch-big-ad-campaign-Monday
> [35]
> http://articles.philly.com/2014-06-07/news/50390416_1_aspira-philadelphia-sc
> hool-district-mastery-charter-schools
> [36]
> http://connecticut.news12.com/news/voters-reject-proposed-bridgeport-charter
> -change-1.4242074
> [37]
> http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2014/07/23/Pittsburgh-school-boar
> d-rejects-charter-school-expansion-at-Frick-Park/stories/201407230220#ixzz38
> LPk5o6z
> [38]
> http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20131022/downtown/parents-community-groups-pr
> otest-proposed-charter-school-expansion
> [39]
> http://www.freep.com/article/20140831/NEWS06/308310070/charter-schools-poll-
> Michigan
> [40] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Great Charter
> School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to Education
> 'Reform' Phonies
> [41] http://www.alternet.org/
> [42] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Attention!Congress Plots to Pay for Reviled TPP Deal by Raiding Medicare
Of course Congress does not act on its own. Raiding Medicare is not
something Congress could come up with unless it has been told to.
And who tells Congress what to do? Is it the American People? The
voters? The 99%?
Bite your tongue!
Think of it this way. A well trained dog responds quickly to its
Master's command. 99% of the people can order that dog around with no
success. The dog may look at them with some interest, but it makes no
move to obey. Its total commitment is to its Master, to the one who
has taken great pains to train, feed, and care for it. It is Loyal.
And that should explain our nation's congress. It is Loyal to its
Master. Congress may look with interest at us, even smiling and
nodding. But Congress will only obey the Master who has bought it,
fed it, trained it and keeps it safe.
For this Congress, no pot of money is off limits...except those
bulging pots of gold belonging to its Master.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/15, S. Kashdan <skashdan@scn.org> wrote:
> Shock: Congress Plots to Pay for Reviled TPP Deal by Raiding Medicare
>
>
>
> By Gaius Publius [1]
>
>
>
> AlterNet [2], May 26, 2015
>
>
>
> http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/congress-plots-pay-reviled-tpp-deal-raiding-medicare
>
>
>
> It just doesn't get more cynical than this. Note that we're talking about a
>
> bipartisan trade deal, thanks to 14 Democratic senators [3] led by Ron Wyden
>
> and Chuck Schumer.
>
>
>
> If Democrats fail to regain the Senate or put their next neo-liberal
> candidate in the White House--or both--they will have done it to themselves
>
> through cynical moves like this.
>
>
>
> Michael Hiltzik, writing in the LA Times [4] (my emphasis):
>
>
>
> Medicare means many things to many people. To seniors, it's a program
> providing good, low-cost healthcare at a stage in life when it's most
> needed.
>
>
>
> To Congress, it's beginning to look more like a piggy bank to be raided.
>
>
>
> That's the only conclusion one can draw from a provision slipped into a
> measure to extend and increase the government's Trade Adjustment Assistance
>
> program, which provides assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of
>
> trade deals. The measure, introduced by Rep. David Reichert (R-Wash.),
> proposes covering some of the $2.7-billion cost of the extension [5] by
> slicing $700 million out of doctor and hospital reimbursements for
> Medicare.
>
>
>
> The plan on Capitol Hill is to move the Trade Assistance Program expansion
> in tandem with fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
> deal, possibly as early as this week. We explained earlier the dangers of
> the fast-track approval [6] of this immense and largely secret trade deal.
> But the linkage with the assistance program adds a new layer of political
> connivance: Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade
> Assistance Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
>
> Medicare, and the Obama White House, which should be howling in protest, has
>
> remained silent [7].
>
>
>
> Let's pause. "Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade
> Assistance Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
>
> Medicare"--and 14 pro-money Democrats voted for it in the Senate. The bill
> was dead [8] without them.
>
>
>
> Now Hiltzik again:
>
>
>
> The Medicare raid was so stealthy that critics in Congress, including
> members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are just now gearing up to
>
> oppose it. "It was sort of buried" in the bill, Rep. Keith Ellison
> (D-Minn.), the caucus co-chair, told me Monday. The caucus expects to
> circulate a letter opposing the arrangement later this week. Ellison, an
> opponent of granting fast-track authority on the TPP, says the Medicare cut
>
> amounts to piling the costs of trade liberalization onto its victims.
>
>
>
> "There will be fabulous wealth generated by the Trans-Pacific Partnership,"
>
> he says. "The people who are hurt shouldn't have to pay for it with their
> jobs and then have inadequate Medicare when they get older."
>
>
>
> If Fast Track passes in the House, it will need both Democrats and
> Republicans to do it. For just this maneuver alone--a move that will result
>
> in deaths [9]--may each of them rot that does it. (My complete coverage of
> TPP and Fast Track is here [10].)
>
>
>
> Share on Facebook Share
>
>
>
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
>
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [11]
>
>
>
> [12]
>
>
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/congress-plots-pay-reviled-tpp-deal-raiding-medicare
>
>
>
> Links:
>
>
>
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/gaius-publius
>
>
>
> [2] http://alternet.org
>
>
>
> [3]
> http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/schumer-organized-democratic-collapse.html
>
>
>
> [4]
> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-congress-plots-to-raid-medicare-20150518-column.html
>
>
>
> [5]
> http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/costestimate/hr_1892.pdf
>
>
>
> [6]
> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150206-column.html#page=1
>
>
>
> [7]
> http://www.rpc.senate.gov/legislative-notices/trade-adjustment-assistance-reauthorization-act-of-2015
>
>
>
> [8]
> http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/05/schumer-organizes-democratic-collapse.html
>
>
>
> [9]
> http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2013/04/08/why-medicare-cuts-will-quietly-kill-seniors/
>
>
>
> [10] http://gaiuspublius.tumblr.com/tagged/TPP
>
>
>
> [11] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Shock: Congress Plots
> to Pay for Reviled TPP Deal by Raiding Medicare
>
>
>
> [12] http://www.alternet.org/
>
>
>
> [13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
something Congress could come up with unless it has been told to.
And who tells Congress what to do? Is it the American People? The
voters? The 99%?
Bite your tongue!
Think of it this way. A well trained dog responds quickly to its
Master's command. 99% of the people can order that dog around with no
success. The dog may look at them with some interest, but it makes no
move to obey. Its total commitment is to its Master, to the one who
has taken great pains to train, feed, and care for it. It is Loyal.
And that should explain our nation's congress. It is Loyal to its
Master. Congress may look with interest at us, even smiling and
nodding. But Congress will only obey the Master who has bought it,
fed it, trained it and keeps it safe.
For this Congress, no pot of money is off limits...except those
bulging pots of gold belonging to its Master.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/15, S. Kashdan <skashdan@scn.org> wrote:
> Shock: Congress Plots to Pay for Reviled TPP Deal by Raiding Medicare
>
>
>
> By Gaius Publius [1]
>
>
>
> AlterNet [2], May 26, 2015
>
>
>
> http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/congress-plots-pay-reviled-tpp-deal-raiding-medicare
>
>
>
> It just doesn't get more cynical than this. Note that we're talking about a
>
> bipartisan trade deal, thanks to 14 Democratic senators [3] led by Ron Wyden
>
> and Chuck Schumer.
>
>
>
> If Democrats fail to regain the Senate or put their next neo-liberal
> candidate in the White House--or both--they will have done it to themselves
>
> through cynical moves like this.
>
>
>
> Michael Hiltzik, writing in the LA Times [4] (my emphasis):
>
>
>
> Medicare means many things to many people. To seniors, it's a program
> providing good, low-cost healthcare at a stage in life when it's most
> needed.
>
>
>
> To Congress, it's beginning to look more like a piggy bank to be raided.
>
>
>
> That's the only conclusion one can draw from a provision slipped into a
> measure to extend and increase the government's Trade Adjustment Assistance
>
> program, which provides assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of
>
> trade deals. The measure, introduced by Rep. David Reichert (R-Wash.),
> proposes covering some of the $2.7-billion cost of the extension [5] by
> slicing $700 million out of doctor and hospital reimbursements for
> Medicare.
>
>
>
> The plan on Capitol Hill is to move the Trade Assistance Program expansion
> in tandem with fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
> deal, possibly as early as this week. We explained earlier the dangers of
> the fast-track approval [6] of this immense and largely secret trade deal.
> But the linkage with the assistance program adds a new layer of political
> connivance: Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade
> Assistance Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
>
> Medicare, and the Obama White House, which should be howling in protest, has
>
> remained silent [7].
>
>
>
> Let's pause. "Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade
> Assistance Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
>
> Medicare"--and 14 pro-money Democrats voted for it in the Senate. The bill
> was dead [8] without them.
>
>
>
> Now Hiltzik again:
>
>
>
> The Medicare raid was so stealthy that critics in Congress, including
> members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are just now gearing up to
>
> oppose it. "It was sort of buried" in the bill, Rep. Keith Ellison
> (D-Minn.), the caucus co-chair, told me Monday. The caucus expects to
> circulate a letter opposing the arrangement later this week. Ellison, an
> opponent of granting fast-track authority on the TPP, says the Medicare cut
>
> amounts to piling the costs of trade liberalization onto its victims.
>
>
>
> "There will be fabulous wealth generated by the Trans-Pacific Partnership,"
>
> he says. "The people who are hurt shouldn't have to pay for it with their
> jobs and then have inadequate Medicare when they get older."
>
>
>
> If Fast Track passes in the House, it will need both Democrats and
> Republicans to do it. For just this maneuver alone--a move that will result
>
> in deaths [9]--may each of them rot that does it. (My complete coverage of
> TPP and Fast Track is here [10].)
>
>
>
> Share on Facebook Share
>
>
>
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
>
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [11]
>
>
>
> [12]
>
>
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/congress-plots-pay-reviled-tpp-deal-raiding-medicare
>
>
>
> Links:
>
>
>
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/gaius-publius
>
>
>
> [2] http://alternet.org
>
>
>
> [3]
> http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/schumer-organized-democratic-collapse.html
>
>
>
> [4]
> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-congress-plots-to-raid-medicare-20150518-column.html
>
>
>
> [5]
> http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/costestimate/hr_1892.pdf
>
>
>
> [6]
> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150206-column.html#page=1
>
>
>
> [7]
> http://www.rpc.senate.gov/legislative-notices/trade-adjustment-assistance-reauthorization-act-of-2015
>
>
>
> [8]
> http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/05/schumer-organizes-democratic-collapse.html
>
>
>
> [9]
> http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2013/04/08/why-medicare-cuts-will-quietly-kill-seniors/
>
>
>
> [10] http://gaiuspublius.tumblr.com/tagged/TPP
>
>
>
> [11] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Shock: Congress Plots
> to Pay for Reviled TPP Deal by Raiding Medicare
>
>
>
> [12] http://www.alternet.org/
>
>
>
> [13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Why Baltimore Blew Up
Good Wednesday Morning Abdulah and All,
Quilcene Washington is a town of less than 2,500 people, including a
large number living far out of town. A number of years ago there was
a drug bust. The county sheriff's department rounded up over 30
people and they were charged with a variety of drug related crimes.
Quilcen has no Black Ghetto, no immigrant camps, no Latino Slums, and
very few Indians living within the town limits. The group of drug
violators were all White, and a wide age spread.
This drug bust was a huge thing here in Quilcene. 30 people out of
2,500? That would be like rounding up around 30,000 people in the
greater Seattle area. But there was hardly any flap over this round
up.
Here's my spin on what occurs. We excuse and cover for our own kind.
When crime occurs, we look for the reasons in our non-White,
non-Christian populations. We go looking for crime among those people
who are "different" than us. Do we really think there are more
violent and anti American Muslims here? Is criminal behavior more
ingrained into Blacks, Mexicans, Homosexuals or American Indians than
in our White population? Reading the morning papers or listening to
the evening news, you would come to that conclusion. Is being super
rich the answer to crime? Certainly we could draw that conclusion by
what is reported. Perhaps we should make every American a
multimillionaire and solve crime once and for all.
We must begin questioning everything told to us. If we simply accept
news reports on their surface, we will be allowing ourselves to be
controlled by our Ruling Class. But we don't seem to have the stomach
for questioning what is being spoon fed to us. But that is our
choice. For those of you who go with the flow, good luck! You'll
need all the luck you can get.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/15, abdulah aga <abdulahhasic@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Miriam and other my friend
> As you know I am Muslim,
> and I thinks non of you didn't have hard time like I did,
> non of you didn't have insolating things on on Skeen like I did about
> discrimination.
> But I say for my people and my religion dis,
> we can't blame some body ales for are fault,
> we can't blame any body ales for situation where we are and why we are in
> situation like this.
> Same way for Africken Americken,
> first I would like askt all of you,
> why Is every alcohol bare almost in africken americken community,
> why is mostly drugs dilers and prostitutes in africken ameriken or Hispanic
>
> community?
> who is faults for it?
> why this people let those staff to bee in them community??
> My best naber was African Americken and I was secure when he was my naber
> we talk about this things often time about this things he say to that
> Africken Americken need more education they are need rights lieder
> and they are need know who to complete and to how complaint about alcohol
> store and many crime in them community.
> On other site police will punish some body for almost nothing but in other
> hand
> some body will not punish for big crime.
> If you drive car and past speed over 7 you will get ticket,
> but if you go in bar and drink who know how much you are drunk
> you can wok out and drive car even if is police there
> they are will not take action.
> I would like know how do you name this?
> is in't monopoly from reach people and influents on governments?
> In my word is nothing more nothing les then crime and corruption.
> thanks Abdulah hasic.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 3:32 PM
> To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
> Subject: Why Baltimore Blew Up
>
>
> Taibbi writes: "When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago
> following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man
> named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race
> crisis: It changed the subject."
>
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. (photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT)
>
>
> Why Baltimore Blew Up
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 26 May 15
>
> It wasn't just the killing of Freddie Gray. Inside the complex legal
> infrastructure that encourages - and covers up - police violence
>
> When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the
> unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie
> Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It
> changed
> the subject.
> Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of
> thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades
> of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or
> not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after
> Gray's
> death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals.
> From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter
> Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of
> African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's
> been
> easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea
> that the killings are the whole story.
> Fix that little in-custody death problem, we're told, perhaps with the aid
> of "better training" or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised
> to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to
> ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But
> body cameras won't fix it. You can't put body cameras on a system.
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene
> quantity
> of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a
> complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are
> designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors
> hidden, even from ourselves.
> Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city
> and
> you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against
> walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets,
> threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and
> arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that
> often don't even rise to the level of being stupid.
> "I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five
> people who ain't been fucked over by the police," says Baltimore resident
> Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at
> Penn and North, site of the protests. "It's small shit - they get taken
> advantage of."
> A. Dwight Pettit, a legendary African-American civil rights lawyer in
> Baltimore, says he and others in the city's legal community stopped
> pursuing
> what he calls "simple civil rights violations" years ago: the verbal-abuse
> cases, the humiliating cavity searches conducted in public, the non-lethal
> beatings. "We were dumping them on each other," he says. "But we had to
> stop. There were just too many."
> Most Americans have never experienced this kind of policing. They haven't
> had to stare down the barrel of a service revolver drawn for no reason at a
> routine stop. They haven't had their wife and kids put on an ice-cold
> sidewalk curb while cops ran their license plate. They haven't ever been
> told to get the fuck back in their car right now, been accused of having
> too
> prominent a "bulge," had their dog shot and their kids handcuffed near its
> body during a wrong-door raid, watched their seven-year-old dragged to jail
> for sitting on a dirt bike, or dealt with any of a thousand other
> positively
> crazy things nonwhite America has come to expect from an interaction with
> law enforcement. "It's everywhere," says Christen Brown, who as a
> 24-year-old city parks employee was allegedly roughed up and arrested just
> for filming police in a parking lot. "You can be somewhere minding your
> business and they will find their best way to fuck with you, point blank.
> It's blatant disrespect."
> This system, now standard in almost all of urban America, is Mayberry on
> one
> side and trending Moscow or 1980s South Africa on the other. Why? Because
> America loves to lie to itself about race. It's able to do so for many
> reasons, including the little-discussed fact that most white people have
> literally no social interactions with black people, so they don't hear
> about
> this every day.
> Police brutality is tough to talk about because white and black America see
> the issue so differently, with white Americans still overwhelmingly
> supportive and trustful of law enforcement. But the current controversy is
> as much about how modern law-enforcement practices have ruined the job of
> policing as it is about racism. There are plenty of good cops out there,
> but
> the way policing works in cities like Baltimore, the bad ones can thrive.
> And disasters aren't just more likely, they're inevitable.
> Baltimore is like a lot of American cities. It has a small, spiffy-looking
> downtown with a couple of nice ballparks and some Zagat-listed restaurants
> for the tourists to visit. But outside those few blocks, much of it is a
> dead zone. Whole sections of town are packed with crumbling, trash-infested
> row houses, and this pothole-strewn mess is where people are somehow
> expected to live. The drug trade has historically dominated Baltimore's
> ghettos. But the city is so screwed these days, jokes one African-American
> resident, that "even the drug game is dead."
> It's against the backdrop of abandoned cityscapes like this that the
> current
> policing controversy rages. The king of modern enforcement strategies,
> Broken Windows, isn't designed to promote economic growth in these
> neighborhoods. It's designed to prevent the "bad" neighborhoods from
> spilling into the "good" ones.
> Broken Windows policing, which gained renown in the Nineties thanks to
> politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is the mutant
> offspring of our already infamous race history, a set of high-tech tricks
> to
> disguise old-school discriminatory policing as cheery-sounding,
> yuppie-approved, Malcolm Gladwell-endorsed pop sociology. The ideas grew
> out
> of a theory advanced in 1982 by a pair of academics, James Q. Wilson of
> Harvard and George Kelling of Rutgers. "If a window in a building is broken
> and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,"
> the pair wrote in The Atlantic, arguing in "Broken Windows" that disorder
> and crime were "inextricably linked" and that fixing the former would
> impact
> the latter.
> The practical application of these ideas was simple. In the interest of
> public order, cops would stop people in troubled neighborhoods for any
> infraction, no matter how minor - a broken taillight, a hopped turnstile,
> an
> open beer - in hopes of deterring more-serious crimes.
> Broken Windows was introduced in New York in 1990, when a Bostonian named
> Bill Bratton was named the city's Transit Police chief. At the time, New
> York was plagued by street crime, with a murder rate north of 2,000
> killings
> a year. Any idea that seemed like it had half a chance of working seemed
> like a good idea.
> After Giuliani made Bratton his police commissioner in 1994, the two men
> took the Broken Windows approach to the next level. New terms entered the
> lexicon - "zero tolerance," "stop-and-frisk," "community policing" (an
> Orwellian euphemism every bit as preposterous as the Clear Skies and
> Healthy
> Forests initiatives dreamed up by the Bush administration). These new, more
> interventionist strategies relied on endless streams of adversarial
> interactions between police and the subject population, stopping and
> sometimes searching people by the thousands.
> Soon, the crime rate began to decline sharply, and the media rushed to laud
> Giuliani and Bratton for slaying the criminal dragon. Time put Bratton on
> its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York
> street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline:
> "Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime." Of course, there would
> later
> be a tremendous controversy over whether these new policing strategies had
> anything to do with the drop in New York's crime rate. Other cities that
> didn't use these programs saw similar declines, in a phenomenon that
> criminologists are still at a loss to explain.
> Bratton instituted a statistics-based system called CompStat, which
> required
> precinct captains to give regular reports to their superiors about numbers
> of arrests, stops and searches. As retired police Capt. Ernie Naspretto
> explained in a piece for the Daily News years later, it wasn't enough to
> merely say you were out there on the street, executing mass numbers of
> field
> interrogations. "If it ain't on paper, it ain't," he wrote. "Stop-and-frisk
> became a means for us to show we were still fighting crime."
> For the officer on the ground, stop-and-frisk meant a commitment to a new,
> highly interventionist kind of policing, and one that was inherently
> discriminatory. Sgt. Anthony Miranda is a retired New York police officer
> and president of the National Latino Officers Association. He's a tall,
> powerfully built man who has the air of someone whose sheer size makes
> telling the blunt truth easier. He recalls a story from the early Eighties
> about how New York developed its two-faced zero-tolerance enforcement
> policy, one that would be imitated all over the country.
> He walked a beat in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. During
> the High Holidays, he explains, many residents in the area refrained from
> using electricity or doing certain tasks, and police traditionally helped.
> But he was with a group of younger cops who didn't want to just stand
> around. "So we used to go out there, and if you were parked illegally,
> bang,
> you summonsed them," Miranda says. "We were doing what cops were used to
> doing - giving activity," he adds, referring to tickets and arrests.
> After doing that a few times, all of the young cops got called in. "They
> lined everybody up on the street, had commanding officers come down, and
> they said, 'You're not out here to give summonses. You're not out here to
> make arrests. You're out here for armed presence.'?"
> Miranda remembered that story later on when Broken Windows started under
> Giuliani. Like a lot of police officers, Miranda liked the idea at first.
> Broken Windows, he says, seemed like a good tool to bring a crisis
> situation
> under control. But after a while, the emergency abated, crime went down,
> and
> what he was left staring at as a police officer was a discrepancy. In
> affluent neighborhoods, that is, generally, white neighborhoods, police
> tended to show up only when they had no choice. "Domestic violence, a guy
> firing a weapon, a car accident," he says. "Cases where, if a cop ends up
> responding, he has to take some action." But, Miranda says, you weren't
> supposed to go looking for reasons to arrest people in those neighborhoods.
> But in poorer neighborhoods, cops weren't waiting for people to call 911 -
> they were, in police parlance, "self-initiating" the action. "If it's
> Bed-Stuy or some poor neighborhood in the middle of a ghetto," he says, "it
> could be a Catholic church and they'll find the priest and bang the shit
> out
> of him with summonses."
> The sociological idea behind Broken Windows was pitched as something much
> more benign, of course. It was supposed to be the government version of
> tough love. And it was an easy sell politically, particularly to white and
> upper-class New York. From the point of view of the uptown crowd, it was a
> cheaper solution to urban decay than creating jobs. It also had the
> advantage of blaming the subject population for the rot and destruction of
> crime.
> The legal precedent for these policies dates back to a 1968 Supreme Court
> case called Terry v. Ohio, in which the high court ruled that police may
> approach, search and demand to see the identification of any person the
> officer has an "articulable" suspicion has committed, or is about to
> commit,
> a crime. Although the court ruled that this "suspicion" needed to be more
> than a mere policeman's hunch and must be based on "articulable facts," the
> reality is that a) Sherlock Holmes, Thurgood Marshall and Miss Cleo put
> together couldn't tell you what qualifies as the "articulable" suspicion of
> a beat cop, and b) this decades-old precedent case essentially transferred
> the power of the state into the minds of street-level patrol officers.
> Giuliani and Bratton, and later Bratton's successor, Howard Safir, made
> themselves famous crime fighters by vastly increasing the scope and number
> of such "Terry stops." Sweep up everyone, see what shakes out.
> Community policing sounds harmless, like they were just sending patrolmen
> out to chat with old ladies on stoops about which neighborhood trees were
> most dangerous for cats. But in practice, it meant sending cops by the
> thousands into tough neighborhoods to, as Miranda says, "bang the shit" out
> of locals. Police braced people on sidewalks and in alleyways, asked for
> IDs, executed pat-downs, turned pockets inside out and emptied pad after
> pad
> of summonses.
> A City University of New York professor eloquently described the mission
> creep of Broken Windows last year. "If the problem is a broken window, they
> should fix the window," professor Steve Zeidman told Reuters. "But somehow
> we don't fix the window, we just arrest people who start hanging out by the
> broken window."
> At the policy's height, in 2011, New York cops were stopping more than
> 680,000 people a year (around 89 percent of whom were nonwhite, in a city
> whose population is more than half white) and issuing upward of half a
> million summonses a year. Though a landmark 2013 ruling by federal judge
> Shira Scheindlin would ostensibly outlaw the stop-and-frisk policies, many
> other cities - among them Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans and Boston -
> would create their own aggressive policing policies. "What New York
> developed," says Miranda, "was the blueprint other states followed."
> Smaller
> towns also adopted it, some with especial verve. A Miami exurb called Miami
> Gardens executed more than 99,000 stops in a five-year period, and
> reportedly stopped the same black man 258 times - including dozens of
> inexplicable arrests for trespassing at the convenience store where he
> worked.
> Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and promptly launched a similar
> program
> there. By 2008, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate
> significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was
> recently found to still be stopping people at a rate four times higher than
> New York at its peak.
> Then, of course, there is Baltimore. When onetime Mayor Martin O'Malley
> launched his own zero-tolerance campaign in the early 2000s, he did so
> under
> circumstances similar to those faced by Giuliani and Bratton in New York in
> the early Nineties. Baltimore was, in O'Malley's words, the "most violent,
> addicted and abandoned city in America," held back by an exploding crime
> problem.
> Though academics were already claiming that stop-and-frisk tactics didn't
> work, those critiques didn't yet enjoy the consensus they do now. In fact,
> stop-and-frisk wasn't just still hot at the time, it was intellectual chic.
> In 2000, America's leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped
> launch his career on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in
> a book called The Tipping Point.
> So when O'Malley started his version of Broken Windows, he had a mandate,
> and it's not surprising that Baltimore's program was wildly aggressive. At
> its peak, in 2005, an incredible 108,000 of the city's 600,000 residents
> were arrested. Later on, critics like The Wire creator David Simon, would
> describe O'Malley's police department as obsessed by statistics, determined
> to produce crime-reduction rates that were "unsustainable without
> manipulation." The emphasis on stats, Simon said, "destroyed police work,"
> forcing cops into the roles not of investigators and protectors, but of
> strong-armers bent on producing numbers above all else. Zero tolerance also
> forced cops to behave in ways that were virtually guaranteed to piss people
> off on a mass scale.
> The policy was ostensibly dialed back in court thanks to a joint NAACP and
> ACLU lawsuit filed in 2006. But Baltimore remains a place where police stop
> pedestrians, ask them for ID and sometimes take them for rides if they give
> the wrong answers. "First thing they say is, 'Gimme your ID,'?" says Malik
> Ansar, 44, who's standing on the corner of Penn and North in the days after
> Freddie Gray's death. "They look and say, 'Oh, you live in ZIP code 21227.
> What you doing way over here?'?"
> Ansar points at a run-down town house behind him. "You can tell him you
> were
> born in this house right here. They don't care. They say, 'You live here
> now?' And you say, 'No, man, I moved outta here 17 years ago.' And they
> say,
> 'What the fuck you doing here now?'?"
> The way residents like Ansar describe it, if you're not at the address
> listed on a photo ID, you go into the paddy wagon. But if you run, it's
> worse. "Then, it's an ass-whipping," says a nearby bystander. "Believe me,
> Freddie [Gray] knew he was gonna get an ass-whipping if he got
> caught.?.?.?.?Everybody knows that. It may not be a real bad one, but you
> gonna get one."
> So most people go along, which at minimum is a huge waste of time. Ansar's
> friend, who goes by the name of Big T, says if you get picked up at
> lunchtime, you're lucky if you make it to central booking by five. You
> spend
> the whole freaking day in that hot, cramped van.
> And once you get to booking? "You're spending the night," says Big T. "It's
> just them saying, 'We're gonna get you.'?"
> Many of these "cases" of loitering, or disorderly conduct, or whatever,
> never amount to anything, and if they do, get dropped as soon as anyone
> with
> half a brain and a law degree sees the charging papers. But the endless
> regimen of street interrogations and "long rides" serves its own moronic
> purpose, being a clumsy, bluntly illegal method of intimidating residents
> and searching whole neighborhoods without probable cause.
> "They hoping that a warrant pop," says Ansar of the trips to central
> booking. "And then they hoping that your ass don't be coming around here no
> more. Because the police be trying to build a reputation."
> People are focused on how violative these policies are to the population,
> but the flip side is that this high-volume, low-yield approach to
> enforcement is a terrible policy for good cops, too. "Right now, it's like
> they're saying, 'We have a robbery problem, and we fixed it,'?" says
> Miranda. "Actually, no, you didn't fix it, you just arrested everybody.
> It's
> lazy policing."
> As fig leaves go, articulable suspicion is a particularly skimpy one, as
> multiple studies of these tactics have shown. In Newark, for instance, a
> Department of Justice investigation found that more than 60 percent of
> police stops failed to articulate reasonable suspicion. An ACLU study of
> Chicago's stop-and-frisk program found officers routinely cited bogus
> reasons like a prior arrest or an observable "bulge" as their articulable
> suspicion.
> You can do the math yourself. If cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and
> New
> York were, or are, routinely stopping and questioning more than half a
> million people a year, and if as many as half of those stops lack real
> cause, then at minimum we're talking millions of potentially illegal
> incidents.
> Decades into this campaign of organized harassment, the worst thing that
> happened to the cops who stopped thousands upon thousands of people with no
> good reason was that they started to become the subject of academic
> studies.
> In 2013, New York University examined the data relating to CompStat and the
> Broken Windows arrests and concluded that they had little to no impact on
> the crime rate.
> Despite such conclusions and lawsuit rulings that declared these programs
> discriminatory, nobody was ever punished. Giuliani didn't show up in
> Bed-Stuy with a fruit basket. Malcolm Gladwell didn't have to give back his
> Tipping Point royalties. And nobody had to apologize.
> Lack of consequence rarely goes unnoticed in big bureaucracies. So it's
> hardly surprising that police started crossing a new line: inventing
> reasons
> not just for stops and searches but for arrests.
> Twenty-year-old Jaleel Fields lives in an East New York project not far
> from
> the one where Akai Gurley - if you're keeping score, he was the young black
> man killed after Michael Brown and before Walter Scott - was shot in a
> stairwell by a rookie officer last fall. Fields' case is typical in most
> ways, which is why you didn't hear about it.
> A thin young man with a quick sense of humor, Fields was heading to the
> grocery store in February 2013 and made the mistake of getting into an
> elevator with two police officers. A civil complaint he later filed
> describes how the problem started when he laughed as the police argued with
> another young man in the elevator.
> Police claimed that Fields blocked the elevator door, then made things
> worse
> after he left the elevator by elbowing a police officer, hiding his hands
> and struggling. Fields' story is different. "He just came, pushed me
> straight back to the corner," he says. "He's like, 'Oh, you think you could
> bump a cop and get away with it?' I looked at him like, 'What? I ain't
> touch
> no cop. I ain't touch no cop. What are you talking about?'?"
> Fields got charged for resisting arrest, attempted assault in the third
> degree, disorderly conduct, and harassment in the second degree. He had to
> spend a day in jail. No one outside his family and friends would ever know
> a
> thing about this case, except for the atypical part of the narrative, which
> was that the action in the elevator was captured on video. (The NYPD says
> it
> can't comment on a sealed case.) The video clearly shows that Jaleel Fields
> not only didn't block the elevator door, he expressly stepped aside to let
> people on and off and stood in a corner for most of the ride. Fields' real
> crime seems to have been laughing near a couple of cops.
> If you live in the other America where this stuff doesn't go on, and you
> didn't know the context of these "self-initiated contacts," you might look
> at Jaleel Fields, and his arrest for resisting, and think he was a
> criminal.
> You might especially think that if you didn't see the video. "Most people
> think that there's a high burden for getting arrested, because maybe for
> them, there is," says Martha Grieco, Fields' attorney. "But they don't pick
> up kids in these neighborhoods because they do anything. They pick them up
> as a form of social control.?.?.?.?We want your fingerprints in the system.
> We want your iris scans in the system. We want to know your tattoos."
> You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find
> stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common
> sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it:
> "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a
> closed
> Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a
> man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state
> police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge
> joint
> before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no
> marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a
> handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction
> of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive
> movements for police guns," he says.
> Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally
> work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or
> fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never
> cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police
> misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to
> outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.
> Say you live in a large American city - Baltimore, for example. Police stop
> and search you, something goes wrong and you end up getting your ass
> kicked.
> You don't die, and more to the point, nobody films you not dying, which
> means CNN doesn't show up the next day.
> You're hauled off to jail. Sometime between a few hours and a few days
> later, you learn the charges against you. It's usually a hell of a list,
> which is part of the game. On what Ansar describes as "that motherfucking
> paper they slide under the door," you might find yourself charged with
> resisting arrest, assault against a police officer, criminal possession of
> marijuana, criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and
> whatever else the on-scene officers can think of.
> The case is weak, however, so a few days or weeks later a prosecutor tells
> you charges will be dropped. In being processed, you sign a paper. It
> reads:
> I, (name), hereby release and forever discharge (complainant) and (law
> enforcement agency), all its officers, agents and employees, and any and
> all
> other persons from any and all claims which I may have for wrongful conduct
> by reason of my arrest, detention, or confinement on or about (date).
> This General Waiver and Release is conditioned upon the expungement of the
> record of my arrest....
> You sign, and your "criminal record" disappears, which is great for you.
> But
> so does the incident, which is expunged from the public record. And, except
> in very rare cases, the same police go right back out on the street. The
> only results of the entire episode are things that can hurt you: Your
> prints
> might now be in the system, you might attract future attention by the same
> police, and your employer might be upset by the whole situation.
> This expungement trick is the way it works in Baltimore. To make the
> charges
> go away, victims often end up overtly forfeiting a right to sue (by signing
> a paper to that effect) or effectively doing so by pleading guilty to
> lesser
> offenses (undercutting, say, any federal civil rights case they might later
> want to bring).
> If a Baltimore case is bad enough to warrant a financial settlement, the
> gory details usually end up disappeared behind a nondisclosure agreement.
> A.
> Dwight Pettit and Baltimore trial lawyer Larry Greenberg can't tell me
> about
> most of their worst cases, because they're sealed. In other words, if the
> victim takes the city's money after a beating or a false arrest, then the
> city typically gets to dispose of the incident without apologizing or even
> publicly acknowledging it.
> It's the street-level equivalent of the "neither admit nor deny"
> settlements
> that Wall Street offenders made infamous after 2008. A bad thing happens,
> but somehow nobody is guilty of anything - money just changes hands.
> But here's the next catch: It's not much money. There's a liability cap in
> place in the state of Maryland, limiting victims to $200,000 per person,
> $500,000 per incident (though there are plans to roughly double those
> amounts). Other states, like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado, have
> similar caps.
> On the streets of Baltimore last week, African-American residents were
> furiously repeating the statistic about the city paying out more than $6
> million in abuse settlements since 2011. But that number is actually quite
> small. In New York, which does not have a cap, abuse victims have received
> more than $420 million since 2009.
> But even getting to a settlement is contingent upon the victim acting
> quickly. In the city of Baltimore, a victim has to file notice of a suit
> within six months. There are plans to expand that limit to a year, but it's
> still a tight window. If you don't hire a lawyer right away, you're
> probably
> not going to make the deadline.
> The game is set up so the only real end for the victim of police abuse to
> pursue is a check from the government. This brings us to the most shocking
> and probably most under-reported aspect of the police-abuse story: In most
> cities it's close to impossible to get a police officer removed for lies,
> abuse or other forms of misconduct.
> A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked
> out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was
> revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police
> received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total
> acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or
> more).
> A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's
> Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian
> Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents.
> The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014,
> New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had
> been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the
> CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw
> significant repercussions.
> The reason for this is that unless a police officer is criminally indicted
> after an abuse case, which very rarely happens, the discipline procedure at
> big-city police departments is generally handled in-house. In New York, a
> civilian complaint usually has to be substantiated by a review panel, which
> will either suggest punishment itself or refer the case to a pseudo-court
> at
> the police department. There, judges - who are employed by the department -
> may recommend discipline. But many of these recommendations can be
> overturned by the police commissioner.
> What this means for the people on the streets of urban neighborhoods is
> simple: For all the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by cities to
> abuse victims, very little is actually done to discipline rogue police
> officers. Cops caught lying in court by judges are not fired. They're back
> in court giving evidence the next day. "The downside [to lying] for the
> police is just that the evidence gets tossed," says Pettit, who notes that
> the problem is especially pronounced in civil courts. "There's no personal
> accountability. There's no reason not to lie again."
> This problem - of police almost never facing consequences - was the obvious
> subtext of the Baltimore revolts. It's the reason the one thing that calmed
> the city down was the curiously rapid decision by the new state's attorney,
> Marilyn Mosby, to file sweeping charges, including manslaughter and murder,
> against the six police, three white and three black, involved with Gray's
> arrest.
> Pettit notes that Mosby's decision was a rarity in that three of the
> officers were also charged with false imprisonment. She essentially
> described the entire arrest as improper and illegal, even going so far as
> to
> assert publicly that the pocket knife Gray was carrying was legal. The
> legal
> fight to come will therefore put the entire rationale behind Broken Windows
> on trial, in the sense that prosecutors will argue - if the case actually
> makes it to court - that the six officers never should have been doing what
> police have been asked to do in mass numbers every day for 15 years now.
> If an individual police officer does have a record of abuse or lies or some
> other misconduct, most cities make it nearly impossible for anyone on the
> wrong side of the blue wall to find it.
> Every regional police force is governed by its own legal procedure, but New
> York and California offer excellent examples of the uphill climb toward
> transparency. In both of those states, a defense lawyer staring at what
> looks like a bogus police statement has to file a motion to the court
> asking
> for disclosure of a police officer's personnel file. In New York, it's
> called a Gissendanner motion; in California, a Pitchess motion. But to win
> these motions, you essentially need to have that information already. It's
> yet another Catch-22. "In 99 percent of these cases, I get nothing," says
> Nikhil Ramnaney, a Los Angeles defense attorney, stressing that he can't
> speak for others' experiences.
> "Police are always complaining about the 'Don't snitch!' campaigns," says a
> Baltimore resident named Kato Simeto, an aspiring clothes designer and
> inventor. "But you almost never see police informing on each other. They're
> more into 'Don't snitch' than people on the street."
> Of course, where bureaucracy fails to cover things up, simple racism often
> steps in. Just ask Makia Smith, a 33-year-old accountant who grew up not
> far
> from where the Baltimore protests broke out. "I was on my way back from
> Wendy's," she says, recounting an incident in East Baltimore from March
> 2012. "My two-year-old daughter was in the back, in a car seat."
> Caught in traffic, Smith noticed a commotion, with a gang of police
> officers
> surrounding a young suspect. As she later alleged in a civil complaint, the
> boy was on the ground and one of the cops seemed to be getting dangerously
> aggressive. Concerned, Smith opened the door of her car and held up her
> phone as though filming the scene. "I was hoping that if they saw me," she
> says, "then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing."
> Instead, she alleges, the following took place: An officer, later
> identified
> as Nathan Church, rushed at her, screaming, she says, "You want to film
> something, bitch? Film this!" Frightened, Smith tried to get back in her
> car. Church took her phone, smashed it on the ground and kicked it down the
> street. Then he dragged her out by her hair, at which point she momentarily
> blacked out. Eventually, she claims, police threw her on the hood of her
> Saturn, where she snapped awake and saw her two-year-old wailing in the
> back
> seat. She began to panic: If she got arrested, who would take care of the
> baby?
> According to Smith's complaint, police told her, in about the least
> reassuring manner possible, that child protective services was coming to
> take her daughter. It's an example of how completely black America
> distrusts
> the police and the government that Smith chose to allow a little girl
> standing on the side of the road, a stranger, to take her baby for her,
> rather than give the child to CPS. As she was dragged off to that seemingly
> omnipresent paddy wagon, Smith called out her mother's cellphone number, so
> that the little girl could get in touch with the baby's grandmother.
> Smith ended up in jail overnight and didn't reunite with her daughter until
> 24 hours later. Playing the usual game of police-abuse chicken, authorities
> hit her with a list of charges, ranging from assault in the second degree
> against a police officer ("They say I took on four healthy male officers,"
> she says), to resisting, to a host of traffic offenses.
> Smith, an educated young woman, did everything right after the incident,
> hiring a lawyer and successfully navigating the traps and land mines
> designed to make cases like hers go away. She never signed away her right
> to
> sue, never allowed the case to be expunged, never took a
> pennies-on-the-dollar deal that would have let the police off the hook.
> And what happened? The police denied her allegations, claiming the arrest
> was legitimate, and she watched her case implode in what's supposed to be
> the corruption-proof stage of the process, a trial by a jury of her
> "peers."
> "The cops' defense team struck every black witness," she says, and her case
> was heard by an all-white jury, which ultimately found the police innocent
> of misconduct.
> Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society,
> primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this
> country. That's a population roughly the size of France.
> You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on
> crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad
> arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to
> fill
> a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that
> misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you
> search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The
> dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.
> The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to
> neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys
> locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says
> Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be
> controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're
> supposed
> to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."
> As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are
> especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the
> force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an
> answer."
> But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it
> can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda.
> "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. (photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526http
> ://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526
> Why Baltimore Blew Up
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 26 May 15
> It wasn't just the killing of Freddie Gray. Inside the complex legal
> infrastructure that encourages - and covers up - police violence
> hen Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the
> unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie
> Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It
> changed
> the subject.
> Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of
> thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades
> of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or
> not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after
> Gray's
> death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals.
> From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter
> Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of
> African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's
> been
> easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea
> that the killings are the whole story.
> Fix that little in-custody death problem, we're told, perhaps with the aid
> of "better training" or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised
> to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to
> ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But
> body cameras won't fix it. You can't put body cameras on a system.
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene
> quantity
> of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a
> complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are
> designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors
> hidden, even from ourselves.
> Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city
> and
> you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against
> walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets,
> threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and
> arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that
> often don't even rise to the level of being stupid.
> "I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five
> people who ain't been fucked over by the police," says Baltimore resident
> Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at
> Penn and North, site of the protests. "It's small shit - they get taken
> advantage of."
> A. Dwight Pettit, a legendary African-American civil rights lawyer in
> Baltimore, says he and others in the city's legal community stopped
> pursuing
> what he calls "simple civil rights violations" years ago: the verbal-abuse
> cases, the humiliating cavity searches conducted in public, the non-lethal
> beatings. "We were dumping them on each other," he says. "But we had to
> stop. There were just too many."
> Most Americans have never experienced this kind of policing. They haven't
> had to stare down the barrel of a service revolver drawn for no reason at a
> routine stop. They haven't had their wife and kids put on an ice-cold
> sidewalk curb while cops ran their license plate. They haven't ever been
> told to get the fuck back in their car right now, been accused of having
> too
> prominent a "bulge," had their dog shot and their kids handcuffed near its
> body during a wrong-door raid, watched their seven-year-old dragged to jail
> for sitting on a dirt bike, or dealt with any of a thousand other
> positively
> crazy things nonwhite America has come to expect from an interaction with
> law enforcement. "It's everywhere," says Christen Brown, who as a
> 24-year-old city parks employee was allegedly roughed up and arrested just
> for filming police in a parking lot. "You can be somewhere minding your
> business and they will find their best way to fuck with you, point blank.
> It's blatant disrespect."
> This system, now standard in almost all of urban America, is Mayberry on
> one
> side and trending Moscow or 1980s South Africa on the other. Why? Because
> America loves to lie to itself about race. It's able to do so for many
> reasons, including the little-discussed fact that most white people have
> literally no social interactions with black people, so they don't hear
> about
> this every day.
> Police brutality is tough to talk about because white and black America see
> the issue so differently, with white Americans still overwhelmingly
> supportive and trustful of law enforcement. But the current controversy is
> as much about how modern law-enforcement practices have ruined the job of
> policing as it is about racism. There are plenty of good cops out there,
> but
> the way policing works in cities like Baltimore, the bad ones can thrive.
> And disasters aren't just more likely, they're inevitable.
> Baltimore is like a lot of American cities. It has a small, spiffy-looking
> downtown with a couple of nice ballparks and some Zagat-listed restaurants
> for the tourists to visit. But outside those few blocks, much of it is a
> dead zone. Whole sections of town are packed with crumbling, trash-infested
> row houses, and this pothole-strewn mess is where people are somehow
> expected to live. The drug trade has historically dominated Baltimore's
> ghettos. But the city is so screwed these days, jokes one African-American
> resident, that "even the drug game is dead."
> It's against the backdrop of abandoned cityscapes like this that the
> current
> policing controversy rages. The king of modern enforcement strategies,
> Broken Windows, isn't designed to promote economic growth in these
> neighborhoods. It's designed to prevent the "bad" neighborhoods from
> spilling into the "good" ones.
> Broken Windows policing, which gained renown in the Nineties thanks to
> politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is the mutant
> offspring of our already infamous race history, a set of high-tech tricks
> to
> disguise old-school discriminatory policing as cheery-sounding,
> yuppie-approved, Malcolm Gladwell-endorsed pop sociology. The ideas grew
> out
> of a theory advanced in 1982 by a pair of academics, James Q. Wilson of
> Harvard and George Kelling of Rutgers. "If a window in a building is broken
> and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,"
> the pair wrote in The Atlantic, arguing in "Broken Windows" that disorder
> and crime were "inextricably linked" and that fixing the former would
> impact
> the latter.
> The practical application of these ideas was simple. In the interest of
> public order, cops would stop people in troubled neighborhoods for any
> infraction, no matter how minor - a broken taillight, a hopped turnstile,
> an
> open beer - in hopes of deterring more-serious crimes.
> Broken Windows was introduced in New York in 1990, when a Bostonian named
> Bill Bratton was named the city's Transit Police chief. At the time, New
> York was plagued by street crime, with a murder rate north of 2,000
> killings
> a year. Any idea that seemed like it had half a chance of working seemed
> like a good idea.
> After Giuliani made Bratton his police commissioner in 1994, the two men
> took the Broken Windows approach to the next level. New terms entered the
> lexicon - "zero tolerance," "stop-and-frisk," "community policing" (an
> Orwellian euphemism every bit as preposterous as the Clear Skies and
> Healthy
> Forests initiatives dreamed up by the Bush administration). These new, more
> interventionist strategies relied on endless streams of adversarial
> interactions between police and the subject population, stopping and
> sometimes searching people by the thousands.
> Soon, the crime rate began to decline sharply, and the media rushed to laud
> Giuliani and Bratton for slaying the criminal dragon. Time put Bratton on
> its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York
> street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline:
> "Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime." Of course, there would
> later
> be a tremendous controversy over whether these new policing strategies had
> anything to do with the drop in New York's crime rate. Other cities that
> didn't use these programs saw similar declines, in a phenomenon that
> criminologists are still at a loss to explain.
> Bratton instituted a statistics-based system called CompStat, which
> required
> precinct captains to give regular reports to their superiors about numbers
> of arrests, stops and searches. As retired police Capt. Ernie Naspretto
> explained in a piece for the Daily News years later, it wasn't enough to
> merely say you were out there on the street, executing mass numbers of
> field
> interrogations. "If it ain't on paper, it ain't," he wrote. "Stop-and-frisk
> became a means for us to show we were still fighting crime."
> For the officer on the ground, stop-and-frisk meant a commitment to a new,
> highly interventionist kind of policing, and one that was inherently
> discriminatory. Sgt. Anthony Miranda is a retired New York police officer
> and president of the National Latino Officers Association. He's a tall,
> powerfully built man who has the air of someone whose sheer size makes
> telling the blunt truth easier. He recalls a story from the early Eighties
> about how New York developed its two-faced zero-tolerance enforcement
> policy, one that would be imitated all over the country.
> He walked a beat in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. During
> the High Holidays, he explains, many residents in the area refrained from
> using electricity or doing certain tasks, and police traditionally helped.
> But he was with a group of younger cops who didn't want to just stand
> around. "So we used to go out there, and if you were parked illegally,
> bang,
> you summonsed them," Miranda says. "We were doing what cops were used to
> doing - giving activity," he adds, referring to tickets and arrests.
> After doing that a few times, all of the young cops got called in. "They
> lined everybody up on the street, had commanding officers come down, and
> they said, 'You're not out here to give summonses. You're not out here to
> make arrests. You're out here for armed presence.'?"
> Miranda remembered that story later on when Broken Windows started under
> Giuliani. Like a lot of police officers, Miranda liked the idea at first.
> Broken Windows, he says, seemed like a good tool to bring a crisis
> situation
> under control. But after a while, the emergency abated, crime went down,
> and
> what he was left staring at as a police officer was a discrepancy. In
> affluent neighborhoods, that is, generally, white neighborhoods, police
> tended to show up only when they had no choice. "Domestic violence, a guy
> firing a weapon, a car accident," he says. "Cases where, if a cop ends up
> responding, he has to take some action." But, Miranda says, you weren't
> supposed to go looking for reasons to arrest people in those neighborhoods.
> But in poorer neighborhoods, cops weren't waiting for people to call 911 -
> they were, in police parlance, "self-initiating" the action. "If it's
> Bed-Stuy or some poor neighborhood in the middle of a ghetto," he says, "it
> could be a Catholic church and they'll find the priest and bang the shit
> out
> of him with summonses."
> The sociological idea behind Broken Windows was pitched as something much
> more benign, of course. It was supposed to be the government version of
> tough love. And it was an easy sell politically, particularly to white and
> upper-class New York. From the point of view of the uptown crowd, it was a
> cheaper solution to urban decay than creating jobs. It also had the
> advantage of blaming the subject population for the rot and destruction of
> crime.
> The legal precedent for these policies dates back to a 1968 Supreme Court
> case called Terry v. Ohio, in which the high court ruled that police may
> approach, search and demand to see the identification of any person the
> officer has an "articulable" suspicion has committed, or is about to
> commit,
> a crime. Although the court ruled that this "suspicion" needed to be more
> than a mere policeman's hunch and must be based on "articulable facts," the
> reality is that a) Sherlock Holmes, Thurgood Marshall and Miss Cleo put
> together couldn't tell you what qualifies as the "articulable" suspicion of
> a beat cop, and b) this decades-old precedent case essentially transferred
> the power of the state into the minds of street-level patrol officers.
> Giuliani and Bratton, and later Bratton's successor, Howard Safir, made
> themselves famous crime fighters by vastly increasing the scope and number
> of such "Terry stops." Sweep up everyone, see what shakes out.
> Community policing sounds harmless, like they were just sending patrolmen
> out to chat with old ladies on stoops about which neighborhood trees were
> most dangerous for cats. But in practice, it meant sending cops by the
> thousands into tough neighborhoods to, as Miranda says, "bang the shit" out
> of locals. Police braced people on sidewalks and in alleyways, asked for
> IDs, executed pat-downs, turned pockets inside out and emptied pad after
> pad
> of summonses.
> A City University of New York professor eloquently described the mission
> creep of Broken Windows last year. "If the problem is a broken window, they
> should fix the window," professor Steve Zeidman told Reuters. "But somehow
> we don't fix the window, we just arrest people who start hanging out by the
> broken window."
> At the policy's height, in 2011, New York cops were stopping more than
> 680,000 people a year (around 89 percent of whom were nonwhite, in a city
> whose population is more than half white) and issuing upward of half a
> million summonses a year. Though a landmark 2013 ruling by federal judge
> Shira Scheindlin would ostensibly outlaw the stop-and-frisk policies, many
> other cities - among them Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans and Boston -
> would create their own aggressive policing policies. "What New York
> developed," says Miranda, "was the blueprint other states followed."
> Smaller
> towns also adopted it, some with especial verve. A Miami exurb called Miami
> Gardens executed more than 99,000 stops in a five-year period, and
> reportedly stopped the same black man 258 times - including dozens of
> inexplicable arrests for trespassing at the convenience store where he
> worked.
> Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and promptly launched a similar
> program
> there. By 2008, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate
> significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was
> recently found to still be stopping people at a rate four times higher than
> New York at its peak.
> Then, of course, there is Baltimore. When onetime Mayor Martin O'Malley
> launched his own zero-tolerance campaign in the early 2000s, he did so
> under
> circumstances similar to those faced by Giuliani and Bratton in New York in
> the early Nineties. Baltimore was, in O'Malley's words, the "most violent,
> addicted and abandoned city in America," held back by an exploding crime
> problem.
> Though academics were already claiming that stop-and-frisk tactics didn't
> work, those critiques didn't yet enjoy the consensus they do now. In fact,
> stop-and-frisk wasn't just still hot at the time, it was intellectual chic.
> In 2000, America's leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped
> launch his career on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in
> a book called The Tipping Point.
> So when O'Malley started his version of Broken Windows, he had a mandate,
> and it's not surprising that Baltimore's program was wildly aggressive. At
> its peak, in 2005, an incredible 108,000 of the city's 600,000 residents
> were arrested. Later on, critics like The Wire creator David Simon, would
> describe O'Malley's police department as obsessed by statistics, determined
> to produce crime-reduction rates that were "unsustainable without
> manipulation." The emphasis on stats, Simon said, "destroyed police work,"
> forcing cops into the roles not of investigators and protectors, but of
> strong-armers bent on producing numbers above all else. Zero tolerance also
> forced cops to behave in ways that were virtually guaranteed to piss people
> off on a mass scale.
> The policy was ostensibly dialed back in court thanks to a joint NAACP and
> ACLU lawsuit filed in 2006. But Baltimore remains a place where police stop
> pedestrians, ask them for ID and sometimes take them for rides if they give
> the wrong answers. "First thing they say is, 'Gimme your ID,'?" says Malik
> Ansar, 44, who's standing on the corner of Penn and North in the days after
> Freddie Gray's death. "They look and say, 'Oh, you live in ZIP code 21227.
> What you doing way over here?'?"
> Ansar points at a run-down town house behind him. "You can tell him you
> were
> born in this house right here. They don't care. They say, 'You live here
> now?' And you say, 'No, man, I moved outta here 17 years ago.' And they
> say,
> 'What the fuck you doing here now?'?"
> The way residents like Ansar describe it, if you're not at the address
> listed on a photo ID, you go into the paddy wagon. But if you run, it's
> worse. "Then, it's an ass-whipping," says a nearby bystander. "Believe me,
> Freddie [Gray] knew he was gonna get an ass-whipping if he got
> caught.?.?.?.?Everybody knows that. It may not be a real bad one, but you
> gonna get one."
> So most people go along, which at minimum is a huge waste of time. Ansar's
> friend, who goes by the name of Big T, says if you get picked up at
> lunchtime, you're lucky if you make it to central booking by five. You
> spend
> the whole freaking day in that hot, cramped van.
> And once you get to booking? "You're spending the night," says Big T. "It's
> just them saying, 'We're gonna get you.'?"
> Many of these "cases" of loitering, or disorderly conduct, or whatever,
> never amount to anything, and if they do, get dropped as soon as anyone
> with
> half a brain and a law degree sees the charging papers. But the endless
> regimen of street interrogations and "long rides" serves its own moronic
> purpose, being a clumsy, bluntly illegal method of intimidating residents
> and searching whole neighborhoods without probable cause.
> "They hoping that a warrant pop," says Ansar of the trips to central
> booking. "And then they hoping that your ass don't be coming around here no
> more. Because the police be trying to build a reputation."
> People are focused on how violative these policies are to the population,
> but the flip side is that this high-volume, low-yield approach to
> enforcement is a terrible policy for good cops, too. "Right now, it's like
> they're saying, 'We have a robbery problem, and we fixed it,'?" says
> Miranda. "Actually, no, you didn't fix it, you just arrested everybody.
> It's
> lazy policing."
> As fig leaves go, articulable suspicion is a particularly skimpy one, as
> multiple studies of these tactics have shown. In Newark, for instance, a
> Department of Justice investigation found that more than 60 percent of
> police stops failed to articulate reasonable suspicion. An ACLU study of
> Chicago's stop-and-frisk program found officers routinely cited bogus
> reasons like a prior arrest or an observable "bulge" as their articulable
> suspicion.
> You can do the math yourself. If cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and
> New
> York were, or are, routinely stopping and questioning more than half a
> million people a year, and if as many as half of those stops lack real
> cause, then at minimum we're talking millions of potentially illegal
> incidents.
> Decades into this campaign of organized harassment, the worst thing that
> happened to the cops who stopped thousands upon thousands of people with no
> good reason was that they started to become the subject of academic
> studies.
> In 2013, New York University examined the data relating to CompStat and the
> Broken Windows arrests and concluded that they had little to no impact on
> the crime rate.
> Despite such conclusions and lawsuit rulings that declared these programs
> discriminatory, nobody was ever punished. Giuliani didn't show up in
> Bed-Stuy with a fruit basket. Malcolm Gladwell didn't have to give back his
> Tipping Point royalties. And nobody had to apologize.
> Lack of consequence rarely goes unnoticed in big bureaucracies. So it's
> hardly surprising that police started crossing a new line: inventing
> reasons
> not just for stops and searches but for arrests.
> Twenty-year-old Jaleel Fields lives in an East New York project not far
> from
> the one where Akai Gurley - if you're keeping score, he was the young black
> man killed after Michael Brown and before Walter Scott - was shot in a
> stairwell by a rookie officer last fall. Fields' case is typical in most
> ways, which is why you didn't hear about it.
> A thin young man with a quick sense of humor, Fields was heading to the
> grocery store in February 2013 and made the mistake of getting into an
> elevator with two police officers. A civil complaint he later filed
> describes how the problem started when he laughed as the police argued with
> another young man in the elevator.
> Police claimed that Fields blocked the elevator door, then made things
> worse
> after he left the elevator by elbowing a police officer, hiding his hands
> and struggling. Fields' story is different. "He just came, pushed me
> straight back to the corner," he says. "He's like, 'Oh, you think you could
> bump a cop and get away with it?' I looked at him like, 'What? I ain't
> touch
> no cop. I ain't touch no cop. What are you talking about?'?"
> Fields got charged for resisting arrest, attempted assault in the third
> degree, disorderly conduct, and harassment in the second degree. He had to
> spend a day in jail. No one outside his family and friends would ever know
> a
> thing about this case, except for the atypical part of the narrative, which
> was that the action in the elevator was captured on video. (The NYPD says
> it
> can't comment on a sealed case.) The video clearly shows that Jaleel Fields
> not only didn't block the elevator door, he expressly stepped aside to let
> people on and off and stood in a corner for most of the ride. Fields' real
> crime seems to have been laughing near a couple of cops.
> If you live in the other America where this stuff doesn't go on, and you
> didn't know the context of these "self-initiated contacts," you might look
> at Jaleel Fields, and his arrest for resisting, and think he was a
> criminal.
> You might especially think that if you didn't see the video. "Most people
> think that there's a high burden for getting arrested, because maybe for
> them, there is," says Martha Grieco, Fields' attorney. "But they don't pick
> up kids in these neighborhoods because they do anything. They pick them up
> as a form of social control.?.?.?.?We want your fingerprints in the system.
> We want your iris scans in the system. We want to know your tattoos."
> You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find
> stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common
> sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it:
> "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a
> closed
> Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a
> man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state
> police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge
> joint
> before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no
> marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a
> handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction
> of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive
> movements for police guns," he says.
> Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally
> work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or
> fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never
> cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police
> misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to
> outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.
> Say you live in a large American city - Baltimore, for example. Police stop
> and search you, something goes wrong and you end up getting your ass
> kicked.
> You don't die, and more to the point, nobody films you not dying, which
> means CNN doesn't show up the next day.
> You're hauled off to jail. Sometime between a few hours and a few days
> later, you learn the charges against you. It's usually a hell of a list,
> which is part of the game. On what Ansar describes as "that motherfucking
> paper they slide under the door," you might find yourself charged with
> resisting arrest, assault against a police officer, criminal possession of
> marijuana, criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and
> whatever else the on-scene officers can think of.
> The case is weak, however, so a few days or weeks later a prosecutor tells
> you charges will be dropped. In being processed, you sign a paper. It
> reads:
> I, (name), hereby release and forever discharge (complainant) and (law
> enforcement agency), all its officers, agents and employees, and any and
> all
> other persons from any and all claims which I may have for wrongful conduct
> by reason of my arrest, detention, or confinement on or about (date).
> This General Waiver and Release is conditioned upon the expungement of the
> record of my arrest....
> You sign, and your "criminal record" disappears, which is great for you.
> But
> so does the incident, which is expunged from the public record. And, except
> in very rare cases, the same police go right back out on the street. The
> only results of the entire episode are things that can hurt you: Your
> prints
> might now be in the system, you might attract future attention by the same
> police, and your employer might be upset by the whole situation.
> This expungement trick is the way it works in Baltimore. To make the
> charges
> go away, victims often end up overtly forfeiting a right to sue (by signing
> a paper to that effect) or effectively doing so by pleading guilty to
> lesser
> offenses (undercutting, say, any federal civil rights case they might later
> want to bring).
> If a Baltimore case is bad enough to warrant a financial settlement, the
> gory details usually end up disappeared behind a nondisclosure agreement.
> A.
> Dwight Pettit and Baltimore trial lawyer Larry Greenberg can't tell me
> about
> most of their worst cases, because they're sealed. In other words, if the
> victim takes the city's money after a beating or a false arrest, then the
> city typically gets to dispose of the incident without apologizing or even
> publicly acknowledging it.
> It's the street-level equivalent of the "neither admit nor deny"
> settlements
> that Wall Street offenders made infamous after 2008. A bad thing happens,
> but somehow nobody is guilty of anything - money just changes hands.
> But here's the next catch: It's not much money. There's a liability cap in
> place in the state of Maryland, limiting victims to $200,000 per person,
> $500,000 per incident (though there are plans to roughly double those
> amounts). Other states, like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado, have
> similar caps.
> On the streets of Baltimore last week, African-American residents were
> furiously repeating the statistic about the city paying out more than $6
> million in abuse settlements since 2011. But that number is actually quite
> small. In New York, which does not have a cap, abuse victims have received
> more than $420 million since 2009.
> But even getting to a settlement is contingent upon the victim acting
> quickly. In the city of Baltimore, a victim has to file notice of a suit
> within six months. There are plans to expand that limit to a year, but it's
> still a tight window. If you don't hire a lawyer right away, you're
> probably
> not going to make the deadline.
> The game is set up so the only real end for the victim of police abuse to
> pursue is a check from the government. This brings us to the most shocking
> and probably most under-reported aspect of the police-abuse story: In most
> cities it's close to impossible to get a police officer removed for lies,
> abuse or other forms of misconduct.
> A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked
> out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was
> revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police
> received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total
> acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or
> more).
> A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's
> Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian
> Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents.
> The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014,
> New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had
> been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the
> CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw
> significant repercussions.
> The reason for this is that unless a police officer is criminally indicted
> after an abuse case, which very rarely happens, the discipline procedure at
> big-city police departments is generally handled in-house. In New York, a
> civilian complaint usually has to be substantiated by a review panel, which
> will either suggest punishment itself or refer the case to a pseudo-court
> at
> the police department. There, judges - who are employed by the department -
> may recommend discipline. But many of these recommendations can be
> overturned by the police commissioner.
> What this means for the people on the streets of urban neighborhoods is
> simple: For all the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by cities to
> abuse victims, very little is actually done to discipline rogue police
> officers. Cops caught lying in court by judges are not fired. They're back
> in court giving evidence the next day. "The downside [to lying] for the
> police is just that the evidence gets tossed," says Pettit, who notes that
> the problem is especially pronounced in civil courts. "There's no personal
> accountability. There's no reason not to lie again."
> This problem - of police almost never facing consequences - was the obvious
> subtext of the Baltimore revolts. It's the reason the one thing that calmed
> the city down was the curiously rapid decision by the new state's attorney,
> Marilyn Mosby, to file sweeping charges, including manslaughter and murder,
> against the six police, three white and three black, involved with Gray's
> arrest.
> Pettit notes that Mosby's decision was a rarity in that three of the
> officers were also charged with false imprisonment. She essentially
> described the entire arrest as improper and illegal, even going so far as
> to
> assert publicly that the pocket knife Gray was carrying was legal. The
> legal
> fight to come will therefore put the entire rationale behind Broken Windows
> on trial, in the sense that prosecutors will argue - if the case actually
> makes it to court - that the six officers never should have been doing what
> police have been asked to do in mass numbers every day for 15 years now.
> If an individual police officer does have a record of abuse or lies or some
> other misconduct, most cities make it nearly impossible for anyone on the
> wrong side of the blue wall to find it.
> Every regional police force is governed by its own legal procedure, but New
> York and California offer excellent examples of the uphill climb toward
> transparency. In both of those states, a defense lawyer staring at what
> looks like a bogus police statement has to file a motion to the court
> asking
> for disclosure of a police officer's personnel file. In New York, it's
> called a Gissendanner motion; in California, a Pitchess motion. But to win
> these motions, you essentially need to have that information already. It's
> yet another Catch-22. "In 99 percent of these cases, I get nothing," says
> Nikhil Ramnaney, a Los Angeles defense attorney, stressing that he can't
> speak for others' experiences.
> "Police are always complaining about the 'Don't snitch!' campaigns," says a
> Baltimore resident named Kato Simeto, an aspiring clothes designer and
> inventor. "But you almost never see police informing on each other. They're
> more into 'Don't snitch' than people on the street."
> Of course, where bureaucracy fails to cover things up, simple racism often
> steps in. Just ask Makia Smith, a 33-year-old accountant who grew up not
> far
> from where the Baltimore protests broke out. "I was on my way back from
> Wendy's," she says, recounting an incident in East Baltimore from March
> 2012. "My two-year-old daughter was in the back, in a car seat."
> Caught in traffic, Smith noticed a commotion, with a gang of police
> officers
> surrounding a young suspect. As she later alleged in a civil complaint, the
> boy was on the ground and one of the cops seemed to be getting dangerously
> aggressive. Concerned, Smith opened the door of her car and held up her
> phone as though filming the scene. "I was hoping that if they saw me," she
> says, "then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing."
> Instead, she alleges, the following took place: An officer, later
> identified
> as Nathan Church, rushed at her, screaming, she says, "You want to film
> something, bitch? Film this!" Frightened, Smith tried to get back in her
> car. Church took her phone, smashed it on the ground and kicked it down the
> street. Then he dragged her out by her hair, at which point she momentarily
> blacked out. Eventually, she claims, police threw her on the hood of her
> Saturn, where she snapped awake and saw her two-year-old wailing in the
> back
> seat. She began to panic: If she got arrested, who would take care of the
> baby?
> According to Smith's complaint, police told her, in about the least
> reassuring manner possible, that child protective services was coming to
> take her daughter. It's an example of how completely black America
> distrusts
> the police and the government that Smith chose to allow a little girl
> standing on the side of the road, a stranger, to take her baby for her,
> rather than give the child to CPS. As she was dragged off to that seemingly
> omnipresent paddy wagon, Smith called out her mother's cellphone number, so
> that the little girl could get in touch with the baby's grandmother.
> Smith ended up in jail overnight and didn't reunite with her daughter until
> 24 hours later. Playing the usual game of police-abuse chicken, authorities
> hit her with a list of charges, ranging from assault in the second degree
> against a police officer ("They say I took on four healthy male officers,"
> she says), to resisting, to a host of traffic offenses.
> Smith, an educated young woman, did everything right after the incident,
> hiring a lawyer and successfully navigating the traps and land mines
> designed to make cases like hers go away. She never signed away her right
> to
> sue, never allowed the case to be expunged, never took a
> pennies-on-the-dollar deal that would have let the police off the hook.
> And what happened? The police denied her allegations, claiming the arrest
> was legitimate, and she watched her case implode in what's supposed to be
> the corruption-proof stage of the process, a trial by a jury of her
> "peers."
> "The cops' defense team struck every black witness," she says, and her case
> was heard by an all-white jury, which ultimately found the police innocent
> of misconduct.
> Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society,
> primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this
> country. That's a population roughly the size of France.
> You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on
> crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad
> arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to
> fill
> a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that
> misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you
> search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The
> dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.
> The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to
> neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys
> locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says
> Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be
> controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're
> supposed
> to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."
> As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are
> especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the
> force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an
> answer."
> But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it
> can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda.
> "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
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>
Quilcene Washington is a town of less than 2,500 people, including a
large number living far out of town. A number of years ago there was
a drug bust. The county sheriff's department rounded up over 30
people and they were charged with a variety of drug related crimes.
Quilcen has no Black Ghetto, no immigrant camps, no Latino Slums, and
very few Indians living within the town limits. The group of drug
violators were all White, and a wide age spread.
This drug bust was a huge thing here in Quilcene. 30 people out of
2,500? That would be like rounding up around 30,000 people in the
greater Seattle area. But there was hardly any flap over this round
up.
Here's my spin on what occurs. We excuse and cover for our own kind.
When crime occurs, we look for the reasons in our non-White,
non-Christian populations. We go looking for crime among those people
who are "different" than us. Do we really think there are more
violent and anti American Muslims here? Is criminal behavior more
ingrained into Blacks, Mexicans, Homosexuals or American Indians than
in our White population? Reading the morning papers or listening to
the evening news, you would come to that conclusion. Is being super
rich the answer to crime? Certainly we could draw that conclusion by
what is reported. Perhaps we should make every American a
multimillionaire and solve crime once and for all.
We must begin questioning everything told to us. If we simply accept
news reports on their surface, we will be allowing ourselves to be
controlled by our Ruling Class. But we don't seem to have the stomach
for questioning what is being spoon fed to us. But that is our
choice. For those of you who go with the flow, good luck! You'll
need all the luck you can get.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/27/15, abdulah aga <abdulahhasic@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Miriam and other my friend
> As you know I am Muslim,
> and I thinks non of you didn't have hard time like I did,
> non of you didn't have insolating things on on Skeen like I did about
> discrimination.
> But I say for my people and my religion dis,
> we can't blame some body ales for are fault,
> we can't blame any body ales for situation where we are and why we are in
> situation like this.
> Same way for Africken Americken,
> first I would like askt all of you,
> why Is every alcohol bare almost in africken americken community,
> why is mostly drugs dilers and prostitutes in africken ameriken or Hispanic
>
> community?
> who is faults for it?
> why this people let those staff to bee in them community??
> My best naber was African Americken and I was secure when he was my naber
> we talk about this things often time about this things he say to that
> Africken Americken need more education they are need rights lieder
> and they are need know who to complete and to how complaint about alcohol
> store and many crime in them community.
> On other site police will punish some body for almost nothing but in other
> hand
> some body will not punish for big crime.
> If you drive car and past speed over 7 you will get ticket,
> but if you go in bar and drink who know how much you are drunk
> you can wok out and drive car even if is police there
> they are will not take action.
> I would like know how do you name this?
> is in't monopoly from reach people and influents on governments?
> In my word is nothing more nothing les then crime and corruption.
> thanks Abdulah hasic.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miriam Vieni
> Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 3:32 PM
> To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
> Subject: Why Baltimore Blew Up
>
>
> Taibbi writes: "When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago
> following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man
> named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race
> crisis: It changed the subject."
>
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. (photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT)
>
>
> Why Baltimore Blew Up
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 26 May 15
>
> It wasn't just the killing of Freddie Gray. Inside the complex legal
> infrastructure that encourages - and covers up - police violence
>
> When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the
> unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie
> Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It
> changed
> the subject.
> Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of
> thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades
> of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or
> not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after
> Gray's
> death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals.
> From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter
> Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of
> African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's
> been
> easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea
> that the killings are the whole story.
> Fix that little in-custody death problem, we're told, perhaps with the aid
> of "better training" or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised
> to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to
> ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But
> body cameras won't fix it. You can't put body cameras on a system.
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene
> quantity
> of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a
> complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are
> designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors
> hidden, even from ourselves.
> Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city
> and
> you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against
> walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets,
> threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and
> arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that
> often don't even rise to the level of being stupid.
> "I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five
> people who ain't been fucked over by the police," says Baltimore resident
> Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at
> Penn and North, site of the protests. "It's small shit - they get taken
> advantage of."
> A. Dwight Pettit, a legendary African-American civil rights lawyer in
> Baltimore, says he and others in the city's legal community stopped
> pursuing
> what he calls "simple civil rights violations" years ago: the verbal-abuse
> cases, the humiliating cavity searches conducted in public, the non-lethal
> beatings. "We were dumping them on each other," he says. "But we had to
> stop. There were just too many."
> Most Americans have never experienced this kind of policing. They haven't
> had to stare down the barrel of a service revolver drawn for no reason at a
> routine stop. They haven't had their wife and kids put on an ice-cold
> sidewalk curb while cops ran their license plate. They haven't ever been
> told to get the fuck back in their car right now, been accused of having
> too
> prominent a "bulge," had their dog shot and their kids handcuffed near its
> body during a wrong-door raid, watched their seven-year-old dragged to jail
> for sitting on a dirt bike, or dealt with any of a thousand other
> positively
> crazy things nonwhite America has come to expect from an interaction with
> law enforcement. "It's everywhere," says Christen Brown, who as a
> 24-year-old city parks employee was allegedly roughed up and arrested just
> for filming police in a parking lot. "You can be somewhere minding your
> business and they will find their best way to fuck with you, point blank.
> It's blatant disrespect."
> This system, now standard in almost all of urban America, is Mayberry on
> one
> side and trending Moscow or 1980s South Africa on the other. Why? Because
> America loves to lie to itself about race. It's able to do so for many
> reasons, including the little-discussed fact that most white people have
> literally no social interactions with black people, so they don't hear
> about
> this every day.
> Police brutality is tough to talk about because white and black America see
> the issue so differently, with white Americans still overwhelmingly
> supportive and trustful of law enforcement. But the current controversy is
> as much about how modern law-enforcement practices have ruined the job of
> policing as it is about racism. There are plenty of good cops out there,
> but
> the way policing works in cities like Baltimore, the bad ones can thrive.
> And disasters aren't just more likely, they're inevitable.
> Baltimore is like a lot of American cities. It has a small, spiffy-looking
> downtown with a couple of nice ballparks and some Zagat-listed restaurants
> for the tourists to visit. But outside those few blocks, much of it is a
> dead zone. Whole sections of town are packed with crumbling, trash-infested
> row houses, and this pothole-strewn mess is where people are somehow
> expected to live. The drug trade has historically dominated Baltimore's
> ghettos. But the city is so screwed these days, jokes one African-American
> resident, that "even the drug game is dead."
> It's against the backdrop of abandoned cityscapes like this that the
> current
> policing controversy rages. The king of modern enforcement strategies,
> Broken Windows, isn't designed to promote economic growth in these
> neighborhoods. It's designed to prevent the "bad" neighborhoods from
> spilling into the "good" ones.
> Broken Windows policing, which gained renown in the Nineties thanks to
> politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is the mutant
> offspring of our already infamous race history, a set of high-tech tricks
> to
> disguise old-school discriminatory policing as cheery-sounding,
> yuppie-approved, Malcolm Gladwell-endorsed pop sociology. The ideas grew
> out
> of a theory advanced in 1982 by a pair of academics, James Q. Wilson of
> Harvard and George Kelling of Rutgers. "If a window in a building is broken
> and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,"
> the pair wrote in The Atlantic, arguing in "Broken Windows" that disorder
> and crime were "inextricably linked" and that fixing the former would
> impact
> the latter.
> The practical application of these ideas was simple. In the interest of
> public order, cops would stop people in troubled neighborhoods for any
> infraction, no matter how minor - a broken taillight, a hopped turnstile,
> an
> open beer - in hopes of deterring more-serious crimes.
> Broken Windows was introduced in New York in 1990, when a Bostonian named
> Bill Bratton was named the city's Transit Police chief. At the time, New
> York was plagued by street crime, with a murder rate north of 2,000
> killings
> a year. Any idea that seemed like it had half a chance of working seemed
> like a good idea.
> After Giuliani made Bratton his police commissioner in 1994, the two men
> took the Broken Windows approach to the next level. New terms entered the
> lexicon - "zero tolerance," "stop-and-frisk," "community policing" (an
> Orwellian euphemism every bit as preposterous as the Clear Skies and
> Healthy
> Forests initiatives dreamed up by the Bush administration). These new, more
> interventionist strategies relied on endless streams of adversarial
> interactions between police and the subject population, stopping and
> sometimes searching people by the thousands.
> Soon, the crime rate began to decline sharply, and the media rushed to laud
> Giuliani and Bratton for slaying the criminal dragon. Time put Bratton on
> its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York
> street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline:
> "Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime." Of course, there would
> later
> be a tremendous controversy over whether these new policing strategies had
> anything to do with the drop in New York's crime rate. Other cities that
> didn't use these programs saw similar declines, in a phenomenon that
> criminologists are still at a loss to explain.
> Bratton instituted a statistics-based system called CompStat, which
> required
> precinct captains to give regular reports to their superiors about numbers
> of arrests, stops and searches. As retired police Capt. Ernie Naspretto
> explained in a piece for the Daily News years later, it wasn't enough to
> merely say you were out there on the street, executing mass numbers of
> field
> interrogations. "If it ain't on paper, it ain't," he wrote. "Stop-and-frisk
> became a means for us to show we were still fighting crime."
> For the officer on the ground, stop-and-frisk meant a commitment to a new,
> highly interventionist kind of policing, and one that was inherently
> discriminatory. Sgt. Anthony Miranda is a retired New York police officer
> and president of the National Latino Officers Association. He's a tall,
> powerfully built man who has the air of someone whose sheer size makes
> telling the blunt truth easier. He recalls a story from the early Eighties
> about how New York developed its two-faced zero-tolerance enforcement
> policy, one that would be imitated all over the country.
> He walked a beat in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. During
> the High Holidays, he explains, many residents in the area refrained from
> using electricity or doing certain tasks, and police traditionally helped.
> But he was with a group of younger cops who didn't want to just stand
> around. "So we used to go out there, and if you were parked illegally,
> bang,
> you summonsed them," Miranda says. "We were doing what cops were used to
> doing - giving activity," he adds, referring to tickets and arrests.
> After doing that a few times, all of the young cops got called in. "They
> lined everybody up on the street, had commanding officers come down, and
> they said, 'You're not out here to give summonses. You're not out here to
> make arrests. You're out here for armed presence.'?"
> Miranda remembered that story later on when Broken Windows started under
> Giuliani. Like a lot of police officers, Miranda liked the idea at first.
> Broken Windows, he says, seemed like a good tool to bring a crisis
> situation
> under control. But after a while, the emergency abated, crime went down,
> and
> what he was left staring at as a police officer was a discrepancy. In
> affluent neighborhoods, that is, generally, white neighborhoods, police
> tended to show up only when they had no choice. "Domestic violence, a guy
> firing a weapon, a car accident," he says. "Cases where, if a cop ends up
> responding, he has to take some action." But, Miranda says, you weren't
> supposed to go looking for reasons to arrest people in those neighborhoods.
> But in poorer neighborhoods, cops weren't waiting for people to call 911 -
> they were, in police parlance, "self-initiating" the action. "If it's
> Bed-Stuy or some poor neighborhood in the middle of a ghetto," he says, "it
> could be a Catholic church and they'll find the priest and bang the shit
> out
> of him with summonses."
> The sociological idea behind Broken Windows was pitched as something much
> more benign, of course. It was supposed to be the government version of
> tough love. And it was an easy sell politically, particularly to white and
> upper-class New York. From the point of view of the uptown crowd, it was a
> cheaper solution to urban decay than creating jobs. It also had the
> advantage of blaming the subject population for the rot and destruction of
> crime.
> The legal precedent for these policies dates back to a 1968 Supreme Court
> case called Terry v. Ohio, in which the high court ruled that police may
> approach, search and demand to see the identification of any person the
> officer has an "articulable" suspicion has committed, or is about to
> commit,
> a crime. Although the court ruled that this "suspicion" needed to be more
> than a mere policeman's hunch and must be based on "articulable facts," the
> reality is that a) Sherlock Holmes, Thurgood Marshall and Miss Cleo put
> together couldn't tell you what qualifies as the "articulable" suspicion of
> a beat cop, and b) this decades-old precedent case essentially transferred
> the power of the state into the minds of street-level patrol officers.
> Giuliani and Bratton, and later Bratton's successor, Howard Safir, made
> themselves famous crime fighters by vastly increasing the scope and number
> of such "Terry stops." Sweep up everyone, see what shakes out.
> Community policing sounds harmless, like they were just sending patrolmen
> out to chat with old ladies on stoops about which neighborhood trees were
> most dangerous for cats. But in practice, it meant sending cops by the
> thousands into tough neighborhoods to, as Miranda says, "bang the shit" out
> of locals. Police braced people on sidewalks and in alleyways, asked for
> IDs, executed pat-downs, turned pockets inside out and emptied pad after
> pad
> of summonses.
> A City University of New York professor eloquently described the mission
> creep of Broken Windows last year. "If the problem is a broken window, they
> should fix the window," professor Steve Zeidman told Reuters. "But somehow
> we don't fix the window, we just arrest people who start hanging out by the
> broken window."
> At the policy's height, in 2011, New York cops were stopping more than
> 680,000 people a year (around 89 percent of whom were nonwhite, in a city
> whose population is more than half white) and issuing upward of half a
> million summonses a year. Though a landmark 2013 ruling by federal judge
> Shira Scheindlin would ostensibly outlaw the stop-and-frisk policies, many
> other cities - among them Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans and Boston -
> would create their own aggressive policing policies. "What New York
> developed," says Miranda, "was the blueprint other states followed."
> Smaller
> towns also adopted it, some with especial verve. A Miami exurb called Miami
> Gardens executed more than 99,000 stops in a five-year period, and
> reportedly stopped the same black man 258 times - including dozens of
> inexplicable arrests for trespassing at the convenience store where he
> worked.
> Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and promptly launched a similar
> program
> there. By 2008, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate
> significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was
> recently found to still be stopping people at a rate four times higher than
> New York at its peak.
> Then, of course, there is Baltimore. When onetime Mayor Martin O'Malley
> launched his own zero-tolerance campaign in the early 2000s, he did so
> under
> circumstances similar to those faced by Giuliani and Bratton in New York in
> the early Nineties. Baltimore was, in O'Malley's words, the "most violent,
> addicted and abandoned city in America," held back by an exploding crime
> problem.
> Though academics were already claiming that stop-and-frisk tactics didn't
> work, those critiques didn't yet enjoy the consensus they do now. In fact,
> stop-and-frisk wasn't just still hot at the time, it was intellectual chic.
> In 2000, America's leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped
> launch his career on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in
> a book called The Tipping Point.
> So when O'Malley started his version of Broken Windows, he had a mandate,
> and it's not surprising that Baltimore's program was wildly aggressive. At
> its peak, in 2005, an incredible 108,000 of the city's 600,000 residents
> were arrested. Later on, critics like The Wire creator David Simon, would
> describe O'Malley's police department as obsessed by statistics, determined
> to produce crime-reduction rates that were "unsustainable without
> manipulation." The emphasis on stats, Simon said, "destroyed police work,"
> forcing cops into the roles not of investigators and protectors, but of
> strong-armers bent on producing numbers above all else. Zero tolerance also
> forced cops to behave in ways that were virtually guaranteed to piss people
> off on a mass scale.
> The policy was ostensibly dialed back in court thanks to a joint NAACP and
> ACLU lawsuit filed in 2006. But Baltimore remains a place where police stop
> pedestrians, ask them for ID and sometimes take them for rides if they give
> the wrong answers. "First thing they say is, 'Gimme your ID,'?" says Malik
> Ansar, 44, who's standing on the corner of Penn and North in the days after
> Freddie Gray's death. "They look and say, 'Oh, you live in ZIP code 21227.
> What you doing way over here?'?"
> Ansar points at a run-down town house behind him. "You can tell him you
> were
> born in this house right here. They don't care. They say, 'You live here
> now?' And you say, 'No, man, I moved outta here 17 years ago.' And they
> say,
> 'What the fuck you doing here now?'?"
> The way residents like Ansar describe it, if you're not at the address
> listed on a photo ID, you go into the paddy wagon. But if you run, it's
> worse. "Then, it's an ass-whipping," says a nearby bystander. "Believe me,
> Freddie [Gray] knew he was gonna get an ass-whipping if he got
> caught.?.?.?.?Everybody knows that. It may not be a real bad one, but you
> gonna get one."
> So most people go along, which at minimum is a huge waste of time. Ansar's
> friend, who goes by the name of Big T, says if you get picked up at
> lunchtime, you're lucky if you make it to central booking by five. You
> spend
> the whole freaking day in that hot, cramped van.
> And once you get to booking? "You're spending the night," says Big T. "It's
> just them saying, 'We're gonna get you.'?"
> Many of these "cases" of loitering, or disorderly conduct, or whatever,
> never amount to anything, and if they do, get dropped as soon as anyone
> with
> half a brain and a law degree sees the charging papers. But the endless
> regimen of street interrogations and "long rides" serves its own moronic
> purpose, being a clumsy, bluntly illegal method of intimidating residents
> and searching whole neighborhoods without probable cause.
> "They hoping that a warrant pop," says Ansar of the trips to central
> booking. "And then they hoping that your ass don't be coming around here no
> more. Because the police be trying to build a reputation."
> People are focused on how violative these policies are to the population,
> but the flip side is that this high-volume, low-yield approach to
> enforcement is a terrible policy for good cops, too. "Right now, it's like
> they're saying, 'We have a robbery problem, and we fixed it,'?" says
> Miranda. "Actually, no, you didn't fix it, you just arrested everybody.
> It's
> lazy policing."
> As fig leaves go, articulable suspicion is a particularly skimpy one, as
> multiple studies of these tactics have shown. In Newark, for instance, a
> Department of Justice investigation found that more than 60 percent of
> police stops failed to articulate reasonable suspicion. An ACLU study of
> Chicago's stop-and-frisk program found officers routinely cited bogus
> reasons like a prior arrest or an observable "bulge" as their articulable
> suspicion.
> You can do the math yourself. If cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and
> New
> York were, or are, routinely stopping and questioning more than half a
> million people a year, and if as many as half of those stops lack real
> cause, then at minimum we're talking millions of potentially illegal
> incidents.
> Decades into this campaign of organized harassment, the worst thing that
> happened to the cops who stopped thousands upon thousands of people with no
> good reason was that they started to become the subject of academic
> studies.
> In 2013, New York University examined the data relating to CompStat and the
> Broken Windows arrests and concluded that they had little to no impact on
> the crime rate.
> Despite such conclusions and lawsuit rulings that declared these programs
> discriminatory, nobody was ever punished. Giuliani didn't show up in
> Bed-Stuy with a fruit basket. Malcolm Gladwell didn't have to give back his
> Tipping Point royalties. And nobody had to apologize.
> Lack of consequence rarely goes unnoticed in big bureaucracies. So it's
> hardly surprising that police started crossing a new line: inventing
> reasons
> not just for stops and searches but for arrests.
> Twenty-year-old Jaleel Fields lives in an East New York project not far
> from
> the one where Akai Gurley - if you're keeping score, he was the young black
> man killed after Michael Brown and before Walter Scott - was shot in a
> stairwell by a rookie officer last fall. Fields' case is typical in most
> ways, which is why you didn't hear about it.
> A thin young man with a quick sense of humor, Fields was heading to the
> grocery store in February 2013 and made the mistake of getting into an
> elevator with two police officers. A civil complaint he later filed
> describes how the problem started when he laughed as the police argued with
> another young man in the elevator.
> Police claimed that Fields blocked the elevator door, then made things
> worse
> after he left the elevator by elbowing a police officer, hiding his hands
> and struggling. Fields' story is different. "He just came, pushed me
> straight back to the corner," he says. "He's like, 'Oh, you think you could
> bump a cop and get away with it?' I looked at him like, 'What? I ain't
> touch
> no cop. I ain't touch no cop. What are you talking about?'?"
> Fields got charged for resisting arrest, attempted assault in the third
> degree, disorderly conduct, and harassment in the second degree. He had to
> spend a day in jail. No one outside his family and friends would ever know
> a
> thing about this case, except for the atypical part of the narrative, which
> was that the action in the elevator was captured on video. (The NYPD says
> it
> can't comment on a sealed case.) The video clearly shows that Jaleel Fields
> not only didn't block the elevator door, he expressly stepped aside to let
> people on and off and stood in a corner for most of the ride. Fields' real
> crime seems to have been laughing near a couple of cops.
> If you live in the other America where this stuff doesn't go on, and you
> didn't know the context of these "self-initiated contacts," you might look
> at Jaleel Fields, and his arrest for resisting, and think he was a
> criminal.
> You might especially think that if you didn't see the video. "Most people
> think that there's a high burden for getting arrested, because maybe for
> them, there is," says Martha Grieco, Fields' attorney. "But they don't pick
> up kids in these neighborhoods because they do anything. They pick them up
> as a form of social control.?.?.?.?We want your fingerprints in the system.
> We want your iris scans in the system. We want to know your tattoos."
> You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find
> stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common
> sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it:
> "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a
> closed
> Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a
> man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state
> police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge
> joint
> before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no
> marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a
> handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction
> of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive
> movements for police guns," he says.
> Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally
> work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or
> fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never
> cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police
> misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to
> outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.
> Say you live in a large American city - Baltimore, for example. Police stop
> and search you, something goes wrong and you end up getting your ass
> kicked.
> You don't die, and more to the point, nobody films you not dying, which
> means CNN doesn't show up the next day.
> You're hauled off to jail. Sometime between a few hours and a few days
> later, you learn the charges against you. It's usually a hell of a list,
> which is part of the game. On what Ansar describes as "that motherfucking
> paper they slide under the door," you might find yourself charged with
> resisting arrest, assault against a police officer, criminal possession of
> marijuana, criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and
> whatever else the on-scene officers can think of.
> The case is weak, however, so a few days or weeks later a prosecutor tells
> you charges will be dropped. In being processed, you sign a paper. It
> reads:
> I, (name), hereby release and forever discharge (complainant) and (law
> enforcement agency), all its officers, agents and employees, and any and
> all
> other persons from any and all claims which I may have for wrongful conduct
> by reason of my arrest, detention, or confinement on or about (date).
> This General Waiver and Release is conditioned upon the expungement of the
> record of my arrest....
> You sign, and your "criminal record" disappears, which is great for you.
> But
> so does the incident, which is expunged from the public record. And, except
> in very rare cases, the same police go right back out on the street. The
> only results of the entire episode are things that can hurt you: Your
> prints
> might now be in the system, you might attract future attention by the same
> police, and your employer might be upset by the whole situation.
> This expungement trick is the way it works in Baltimore. To make the
> charges
> go away, victims often end up overtly forfeiting a right to sue (by signing
> a paper to that effect) or effectively doing so by pleading guilty to
> lesser
> offenses (undercutting, say, any federal civil rights case they might later
> want to bring).
> If a Baltimore case is bad enough to warrant a financial settlement, the
> gory details usually end up disappeared behind a nondisclosure agreement.
> A.
> Dwight Pettit and Baltimore trial lawyer Larry Greenberg can't tell me
> about
> most of their worst cases, because they're sealed. In other words, if the
> victim takes the city's money after a beating or a false arrest, then the
> city typically gets to dispose of the incident without apologizing or even
> publicly acknowledging it.
> It's the street-level equivalent of the "neither admit nor deny"
> settlements
> that Wall Street offenders made infamous after 2008. A bad thing happens,
> but somehow nobody is guilty of anything - money just changes hands.
> But here's the next catch: It's not much money. There's a liability cap in
> place in the state of Maryland, limiting victims to $200,000 per person,
> $500,000 per incident (though there are plans to roughly double those
> amounts). Other states, like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado, have
> similar caps.
> On the streets of Baltimore last week, African-American residents were
> furiously repeating the statistic about the city paying out more than $6
> million in abuse settlements since 2011. But that number is actually quite
> small. In New York, which does not have a cap, abuse victims have received
> more than $420 million since 2009.
> But even getting to a settlement is contingent upon the victim acting
> quickly. In the city of Baltimore, a victim has to file notice of a suit
> within six months. There are plans to expand that limit to a year, but it's
> still a tight window. If you don't hire a lawyer right away, you're
> probably
> not going to make the deadline.
> The game is set up so the only real end for the victim of police abuse to
> pursue is a check from the government. This brings us to the most shocking
> and probably most under-reported aspect of the police-abuse story: In most
> cities it's close to impossible to get a police officer removed for lies,
> abuse or other forms of misconduct.
> A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked
> out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was
> revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police
> received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total
> acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or
> more).
> A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's
> Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian
> Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents.
> The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014,
> New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had
> been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the
> CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw
> significant repercussions.
> The reason for this is that unless a police officer is criminally indicted
> after an abuse case, which very rarely happens, the discipline procedure at
> big-city police departments is generally handled in-house. In New York, a
> civilian complaint usually has to be substantiated by a review panel, which
> will either suggest punishment itself or refer the case to a pseudo-court
> at
> the police department. There, judges - who are employed by the department -
> may recommend discipline. But many of these recommendations can be
> overturned by the police commissioner.
> What this means for the people on the streets of urban neighborhoods is
> simple: For all the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by cities to
> abuse victims, very little is actually done to discipline rogue police
> officers. Cops caught lying in court by judges are not fired. They're back
> in court giving evidence the next day. "The downside [to lying] for the
> police is just that the evidence gets tossed," says Pettit, who notes that
> the problem is especially pronounced in civil courts. "There's no personal
> accountability. There's no reason not to lie again."
> This problem - of police almost never facing consequences - was the obvious
> subtext of the Baltimore revolts. It's the reason the one thing that calmed
> the city down was the curiously rapid decision by the new state's attorney,
> Marilyn Mosby, to file sweeping charges, including manslaughter and murder,
> against the six police, three white and three black, involved with Gray's
> arrest.
> Pettit notes that Mosby's decision was a rarity in that three of the
> officers were also charged with false imprisonment. She essentially
> described the entire arrest as improper and illegal, even going so far as
> to
> assert publicly that the pocket knife Gray was carrying was legal. The
> legal
> fight to come will therefore put the entire rationale behind Broken Windows
> on trial, in the sense that prosecutors will argue - if the case actually
> makes it to court - that the six officers never should have been doing what
> police have been asked to do in mass numbers every day for 15 years now.
> If an individual police officer does have a record of abuse or lies or some
> other misconduct, most cities make it nearly impossible for anyone on the
> wrong side of the blue wall to find it.
> Every regional police force is governed by its own legal procedure, but New
> York and California offer excellent examples of the uphill climb toward
> transparency. In both of those states, a defense lawyer staring at what
> looks like a bogus police statement has to file a motion to the court
> asking
> for disclosure of a police officer's personnel file. In New York, it's
> called a Gissendanner motion; in California, a Pitchess motion. But to win
> these motions, you essentially need to have that information already. It's
> yet another Catch-22. "In 99 percent of these cases, I get nothing," says
> Nikhil Ramnaney, a Los Angeles defense attorney, stressing that he can't
> speak for others' experiences.
> "Police are always complaining about the 'Don't snitch!' campaigns," says a
> Baltimore resident named Kato Simeto, an aspiring clothes designer and
> inventor. "But you almost never see police informing on each other. They're
> more into 'Don't snitch' than people on the street."
> Of course, where bureaucracy fails to cover things up, simple racism often
> steps in. Just ask Makia Smith, a 33-year-old accountant who grew up not
> far
> from where the Baltimore protests broke out. "I was on my way back from
> Wendy's," she says, recounting an incident in East Baltimore from March
> 2012. "My two-year-old daughter was in the back, in a car seat."
> Caught in traffic, Smith noticed a commotion, with a gang of police
> officers
> surrounding a young suspect. As she later alleged in a civil complaint, the
> boy was on the ground and one of the cops seemed to be getting dangerously
> aggressive. Concerned, Smith opened the door of her car and held up her
> phone as though filming the scene. "I was hoping that if they saw me," she
> says, "then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing."
> Instead, she alleges, the following took place: An officer, later
> identified
> as Nathan Church, rushed at her, screaming, she says, "You want to film
> something, bitch? Film this!" Frightened, Smith tried to get back in her
> car. Church took her phone, smashed it on the ground and kicked it down the
> street. Then he dragged her out by her hair, at which point she momentarily
> blacked out. Eventually, she claims, police threw her on the hood of her
> Saturn, where she snapped awake and saw her two-year-old wailing in the
> back
> seat. She began to panic: If she got arrested, who would take care of the
> baby?
> According to Smith's complaint, police told her, in about the least
> reassuring manner possible, that child protective services was coming to
> take her daughter. It's an example of how completely black America
> distrusts
> the police and the government that Smith chose to allow a little girl
> standing on the side of the road, a stranger, to take her baby for her,
> rather than give the child to CPS. As she was dragged off to that seemingly
> omnipresent paddy wagon, Smith called out her mother's cellphone number, so
> that the little girl could get in touch with the baby's grandmother.
> Smith ended up in jail overnight and didn't reunite with her daughter until
> 24 hours later. Playing the usual game of police-abuse chicken, authorities
> hit her with a list of charges, ranging from assault in the second degree
> against a police officer ("They say I took on four healthy male officers,"
> she says), to resisting, to a host of traffic offenses.
> Smith, an educated young woman, did everything right after the incident,
> hiring a lawyer and successfully navigating the traps and land mines
> designed to make cases like hers go away. She never signed away her right
> to
> sue, never allowed the case to be expunged, never took a
> pennies-on-the-dollar deal that would have let the police off the hook.
> And what happened? The police denied her allegations, claiming the arrest
> was legitimate, and she watched her case implode in what's supposed to be
> the corruption-proof stage of the process, a trial by a jury of her
> "peers."
> "The cops' defense team struck every black witness," she says, and her case
> was heard by an all-white jury, which ultimately found the police innocent
> of misconduct.
> Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society,
> primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this
> country. That's a population roughly the size of France.
> You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on
> crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad
> arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to
> fill
> a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that
> misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you
> search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The
> dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.
> The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to
> neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys
> locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says
> Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be
> controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're
> supposed
> to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."
> As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are
> especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the
> force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an
> answer."
> But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it
> can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda.
> "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. (photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526http
> ://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526
> Why Baltimore Blew Up
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 26 May 15
> It wasn't just the killing of Freddie Gray. Inside the complex legal
> infrastructure that encourages - and covers up - police violence
> hen Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the
> unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie
> Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It
> changed
> the subject.
> Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of
> thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades
> of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or
> not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after
> Gray's
> death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals.
> From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter
> Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of
> African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's
> been
> easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea
> that the killings are the whole story.
> Fix that little in-custody death problem, we're told, perhaps with the aid
> of "better training" or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised
> to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to
> ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But
> body cameras won't fix it. You can't put body cameras on a system.
> As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders
> are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene
> quantity
> of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a
> complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are
> designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors
> hidden, even from ourselves.
> Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city
> and
> you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against
> walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets,
> threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and
> arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that
> often don't even rise to the level of being stupid.
> "I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five
> people who ain't been fucked over by the police," says Baltimore resident
> Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at
> Penn and North, site of the protests. "It's small shit - they get taken
> advantage of."
> A. Dwight Pettit, a legendary African-American civil rights lawyer in
> Baltimore, says he and others in the city's legal community stopped
> pursuing
> what he calls "simple civil rights violations" years ago: the verbal-abuse
> cases, the humiliating cavity searches conducted in public, the non-lethal
> beatings. "We were dumping them on each other," he says. "But we had to
> stop. There were just too many."
> Most Americans have never experienced this kind of policing. They haven't
> had to stare down the barrel of a service revolver drawn for no reason at a
> routine stop. They haven't had their wife and kids put on an ice-cold
> sidewalk curb while cops ran their license plate. They haven't ever been
> told to get the fuck back in their car right now, been accused of having
> too
> prominent a "bulge," had their dog shot and their kids handcuffed near its
> body during a wrong-door raid, watched their seven-year-old dragged to jail
> for sitting on a dirt bike, or dealt with any of a thousand other
> positively
> crazy things nonwhite America has come to expect from an interaction with
> law enforcement. "It's everywhere," says Christen Brown, who as a
> 24-year-old city parks employee was allegedly roughed up and arrested just
> for filming police in a parking lot. "You can be somewhere minding your
> business and they will find their best way to fuck with you, point blank.
> It's blatant disrespect."
> This system, now standard in almost all of urban America, is Mayberry on
> one
> side and trending Moscow or 1980s South Africa on the other. Why? Because
> America loves to lie to itself about race. It's able to do so for many
> reasons, including the little-discussed fact that most white people have
> literally no social interactions with black people, so they don't hear
> about
> this every day.
> Police brutality is tough to talk about because white and black America see
> the issue so differently, with white Americans still overwhelmingly
> supportive and trustful of law enforcement. But the current controversy is
> as much about how modern law-enforcement practices have ruined the job of
> policing as it is about racism. There are plenty of good cops out there,
> but
> the way policing works in cities like Baltimore, the bad ones can thrive.
> And disasters aren't just more likely, they're inevitable.
> Baltimore is like a lot of American cities. It has a small, spiffy-looking
> downtown with a couple of nice ballparks and some Zagat-listed restaurants
> for the tourists to visit. But outside those few blocks, much of it is a
> dead zone. Whole sections of town are packed with crumbling, trash-infested
> row houses, and this pothole-strewn mess is where people are somehow
> expected to live. The drug trade has historically dominated Baltimore's
> ghettos. But the city is so screwed these days, jokes one African-American
> resident, that "even the drug game is dead."
> It's against the backdrop of abandoned cityscapes like this that the
> current
> policing controversy rages. The king of modern enforcement strategies,
> Broken Windows, isn't designed to promote economic growth in these
> neighborhoods. It's designed to prevent the "bad" neighborhoods from
> spilling into the "good" ones.
> Broken Windows policing, which gained renown in the Nineties thanks to
> politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is the mutant
> offspring of our already infamous race history, a set of high-tech tricks
> to
> disguise old-school discriminatory policing as cheery-sounding,
> yuppie-approved, Malcolm Gladwell-endorsed pop sociology. The ideas grew
> out
> of a theory advanced in 1982 by a pair of academics, James Q. Wilson of
> Harvard and George Kelling of Rutgers. "If a window in a building is broken
> and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,"
> the pair wrote in The Atlantic, arguing in "Broken Windows" that disorder
> and crime were "inextricably linked" and that fixing the former would
> impact
> the latter.
> The practical application of these ideas was simple. In the interest of
> public order, cops would stop people in troubled neighborhoods for any
> infraction, no matter how minor - a broken taillight, a hopped turnstile,
> an
> open beer - in hopes of deterring more-serious crimes.
> Broken Windows was introduced in New York in 1990, when a Bostonian named
> Bill Bratton was named the city's Transit Police chief. At the time, New
> York was plagued by street crime, with a murder rate north of 2,000
> killings
> a year. Any idea that seemed like it had half a chance of working seemed
> like a good idea.
> After Giuliani made Bratton his police commissioner in 1994, the two men
> took the Broken Windows approach to the next level. New terms entered the
> lexicon - "zero tolerance," "stop-and-frisk," "community policing" (an
> Orwellian euphemism every bit as preposterous as the Clear Skies and
> Healthy
> Forests initiatives dreamed up by the Bush administration). These new, more
> interventionist strategies relied on endless streams of adversarial
> interactions between police and the subject population, stopping and
> sometimes searching people by the thousands.
> Soon, the crime rate began to decline sharply, and the media rushed to laud
> Giuliani and Bratton for slaying the criminal dragon. Time put Bratton on
> its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York
> street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline:
> "Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime." Of course, there would
> later
> be a tremendous controversy over whether these new policing strategies had
> anything to do with the drop in New York's crime rate. Other cities that
> didn't use these programs saw similar declines, in a phenomenon that
> criminologists are still at a loss to explain.
> Bratton instituted a statistics-based system called CompStat, which
> required
> precinct captains to give regular reports to their superiors about numbers
> of arrests, stops and searches. As retired police Capt. Ernie Naspretto
> explained in a piece for the Daily News years later, it wasn't enough to
> merely say you were out there on the street, executing mass numbers of
> field
> interrogations. "If it ain't on paper, it ain't," he wrote. "Stop-and-frisk
> became a means for us to show we were still fighting crime."
> For the officer on the ground, stop-and-frisk meant a commitment to a new,
> highly interventionist kind of policing, and one that was inherently
> discriminatory. Sgt. Anthony Miranda is a retired New York police officer
> and president of the National Latino Officers Association. He's a tall,
> powerfully built man who has the air of someone whose sheer size makes
> telling the blunt truth easier. He recalls a story from the early Eighties
> about how New York developed its two-faced zero-tolerance enforcement
> policy, one that would be imitated all over the country.
> He walked a beat in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. During
> the High Holidays, he explains, many residents in the area refrained from
> using electricity or doing certain tasks, and police traditionally helped.
> But he was with a group of younger cops who didn't want to just stand
> around. "So we used to go out there, and if you were parked illegally,
> bang,
> you summonsed them," Miranda says. "We were doing what cops were used to
> doing - giving activity," he adds, referring to tickets and arrests.
> After doing that a few times, all of the young cops got called in. "They
> lined everybody up on the street, had commanding officers come down, and
> they said, 'You're not out here to give summonses. You're not out here to
> make arrests. You're out here for armed presence.'?"
> Miranda remembered that story later on when Broken Windows started under
> Giuliani. Like a lot of police officers, Miranda liked the idea at first.
> Broken Windows, he says, seemed like a good tool to bring a crisis
> situation
> under control. But after a while, the emergency abated, crime went down,
> and
> what he was left staring at as a police officer was a discrepancy. In
> affluent neighborhoods, that is, generally, white neighborhoods, police
> tended to show up only when they had no choice. "Domestic violence, a guy
> firing a weapon, a car accident," he says. "Cases where, if a cop ends up
> responding, he has to take some action." But, Miranda says, you weren't
> supposed to go looking for reasons to arrest people in those neighborhoods.
> But in poorer neighborhoods, cops weren't waiting for people to call 911 -
> they were, in police parlance, "self-initiating" the action. "If it's
> Bed-Stuy or some poor neighborhood in the middle of a ghetto," he says, "it
> could be a Catholic church and they'll find the priest and bang the shit
> out
> of him with summonses."
> The sociological idea behind Broken Windows was pitched as something much
> more benign, of course. It was supposed to be the government version of
> tough love. And it was an easy sell politically, particularly to white and
> upper-class New York. From the point of view of the uptown crowd, it was a
> cheaper solution to urban decay than creating jobs. It also had the
> advantage of blaming the subject population for the rot and destruction of
> crime.
> The legal precedent for these policies dates back to a 1968 Supreme Court
> case called Terry v. Ohio, in which the high court ruled that police may
> approach, search and demand to see the identification of any person the
> officer has an "articulable" suspicion has committed, or is about to
> commit,
> a crime. Although the court ruled that this "suspicion" needed to be more
> than a mere policeman's hunch and must be based on "articulable facts," the
> reality is that a) Sherlock Holmes, Thurgood Marshall and Miss Cleo put
> together couldn't tell you what qualifies as the "articulable" suspicion of
> a beat cop, and b) this decades-old precedent case essentially transferred
> the power of the state into the minds of street-level patrol officers.
> Giuliani and Bratton, and later Bratton's successor, Howard Safir, made
> themselves famous crime fighters by vastly increasing the scope and number
> of such "Terry stops." Sweep up everyone, see what shakes out.
> Community policing sounds harmless, like they were just sending patrolmen
> out to chat with old ladies on stoops about which neighborhood trees were
> most dangerous for cats. But in practice, it meant sending cops by the
> thousands into tough neighborhoods to, as Miranda says, "bang the shit" out
> of locals. Police braced people on sidewalks and in alleyways, asked for
> IDs, executed pat-downs, turned pockets inside out and emptied pad after
> pad
> of summonses.
> A City University of New York professor eloquently described the mission
> creep of Broken Windows last year. "If the problem is a broken window, they
> should fix the window," professor Steve Zeidman told Reuters. "But somehow
> we don't fix the window, we just arrest people who start hanging out by the
> broken window."
> At the policy's height, in 2011, New York cops were stopping more than
> 680,000 people a year (around 89 percent of whom were nonwhite, in a city
> whose population is more than half white) and issuing upward of half a
> million summonses a year. Though a landmark 2013 ruling by federal judge
> Shira Scheindlin would ostensibly outlaw the stop-and-frisk policies, many
> other cities - among them Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans and Boston -
> would create their own aggressive policing policies. "What New York
> developed," says Miranda, "was the blueprint other states followed."
> Smaller
> towns also adopted it, some with especial verve. A Miami exurb called Miami
> Gardens executed more than 99,000 stops in a five-year period, and
> reportedly stopped the same black man 258 times - including dozens of
> inexplicable arrests for trespassing at the convenience store where he
> worked.
> Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and promptly launched a similar
> program
> there. By 2008, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate
> significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was
> recently found to still be stopping people at a rate four times higher than
> New York at its peak.
> Then, of course, there is Baltimore. When onetime Mayor Martin O'Malley
> launched his own zero-tolerance campaign in the early 2000s, he did so
> under
> circumstances similar to those faced by Giuliani and Bratton in New York in
> the early Nineties. Baltimore was, in O'Malley's words, the "most violent,
> addicted and abandoned city in America," held back by an exploding crime
> problem.
> Though academics were already claiming that stop-and-frisk tactics didn't
> work, those critiques didn't yet enjoy the consensus they do now. In fact,
> stop-and-frisk wasn't just still hot at the time, it was intellectual chic.
> In 2000, America's leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped
> launch his career on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in
> a book called The Tipping Point.
> So when O'Malley started his version of Broken Windows, he had a mandate,
> and it's not surprising that Baltimore's program was wildly aggressive. At
> its peak, in 2005, an incredible 108,000 of the city's 600,000 residents
> were arrested. Later on, critics like The Wire creator David Simon, would
> describe O'Malley's police department as obsessed by statistics, determined
> to produce crime-reduction rates that were "unsustainable without
> manipulation." The emphasis on stats, Simon said, "destroyed police work,"
> forcing cops into the roles not of investigators and protectors, but of
> strong-armers bent on producing numbers above all else. Zero tolerance also
> forced cops to behave in ways that were virtually guaranteed to piss people
> off on a mass scale.
> The policy was ostensibly dialed back in court thanks to a joint NAACP and
> ACLU lawsuit filed in 2006. But Baltimore remains a place where police stop
> pedestrians, ask them for ID and sometimes take them for rides if they give
> the wrong answers. "First thing they say is, 'Gimme your ID,'?" says Malik
> Ansar, 44, who's standing on the corner of Penn and North in the days after
> Freddie Gray's death. "They look and say, 'Oh, you live in ZIP code 21227.
> What you doing way over here?'?"
> Ansar points at a run-down town house behind him. "You can tell him you
> were
> born in this house right here. They don't care. They say, 'You live here
> now?' And you say, 'No, man, I moved outta here 17 years ago.' And they
> say,
> 'What the fuck you doing here now?'?"
> The way residents like Ansar describe it, if you're not at the address
> listed on a photo ID, you go into the paddy wagon. But if you run, it's
> worse. "Then, it's an ass-whipping," says a nearby bystander. "Believe me,
> Freddie [Gray] knew he was gonna get an ass-whipping if he got
> caught.?.?.?.?Everybody knows that. It may not be a real bad one, but you
> gonna get one."
> So most people go along, which at minimum is a huge waste of time. Ansar's
> friend, who goes by the name of Big T, says if you get picked up at
> lunchtime, you're lucky if you make it to central booking by five. You
> spend
> the whole freaking day in that hot, cramped van.
> And once you get to booking? "You're spending the night," says Big T. "It's
> just them saying, 'We're gonna get you.'?"
> Many of these "cases" of loitering, or disorderly conduct, or whatever,
> never amount to anything, and if they do, get dropped as soon as anyone
> with
> half a brain and a law degree sees the charging papers. But the endless
> regimen of street interrogations and "long rides" serves its own moronic
> purpose, being a clumsy, bluntly illegal method of intimidating residents
> and searching whole neighborhoods without probable cause.
> "They hoping that a warrant pop," says Ansar of the trips to central
> booking. "And then they hoping that your ass don't be coming around here no
> more. Because the police be trying to build a reputation."
> People are focused on how violative these policies are to the population,
> but the flip side is that this high-volume, low-yield approach to
> enforcement is a terrible policy for good cops, too. "Right now, it's like
> they're saying, 'We have a robbery problem, and we fixed it,'?" says
> Miranda. "Actually, no, you didn't fix it, you just arrested everybody.
> It's
> lazy policing."
> As fig leaves go, articulable suspicion is a particularly skimpy one, as
> multiple studies of these tactics have shown. In Newark, for instance, a
> Department of Justice investigation found that more than 60 percent of
> police stops failed to articulate reasonable suspicion. An ACLU study of
> Chicago's stop-and-frisk program found officers routinely cited bogus
> reasons like a prior arrest or an observable "bulge" as their articulable
> suspicion.
> You can do the math yourself. If cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and
> New
> York were, or are, routinely stopping and questioning more than half a
> million people a year, and if as many as half of those stops lack real
> cause, then at minimum we're talking millions of potentially illegal
> incidents.
> Decades into this campaign of organized harassment, the worst thing that
> happened to the cops who stopped thousands upon thousands of people with no
> good reason was that they started to become the subject of academic
> studies.
> In 2013, New York University examined the data relating to CompStat and the
> Broken Windows arrests and concluded that they had little to no impact on
> the crime rate.
> Despite such conclusions and lawsuit rulings that declared these programs
> discriminatory, nobody was ever punished. Giuliani didn't show up in
> Bed-Stuy with a fruit basket. Malcolm Gladwell didn't have to give back his
> Tipping Point royalties. And nobody had to apologize.
> Lack of consequence rarely goes unnoticed in big bureaucracies. So it's
> hardly surprising that police started crossing a new line: inventing
> reasons
> not just for stops and searches but for arrests.
> Twenty-year-old Jaleel Fields lives in an East New York project not far
> from
> the one where Akai Gurley - if you're keeping score, he was the young black
> man killed after Michael Brown and before Walter Scott - was shot in a
> stairwell by a rookie officer last fall. Fields' case is typical in most
> ways, which is why you didn't hear about it.
> A thin young man with a quick sense of humor, Fields was heading to the
> grocery store in February 2013 and made the mistake of getting into an
> elevator with two police officers. A civil complaint he later filed
> describes how the problem started when he laughed as the police argued with
> another young man in the elevator.
> Police claimed that Fields blocked the elevator door, then made things
> worse
> after he left the elevator by elbowing a police officer, hiding his hands
> and struggling. Fields' story is different. "He just came, pushed me
> straight back to the corner," he says. "He's like, 'Oh, you think you could
> bump a cop and get away with it?' I looked at him like, 'What? I ain't
> touch
> no cop. I ain't touch no cop. What are you talking about?'?"
> Fields got charged for resisting arrest, attempted assault in the third
> degree, disorderly conduct, and harassment in the second degree. He had to
> spend a day in jail. No one outside his family and friends would ever know
> a
> thing about this case, except for the atypical part of the narrative, which
> was that the action in the elevator was captured on video. (The NYPD says
> it
> can't comment on a sealed case.) The video clearly shows that Jaleel Fields
> not only didn't block the elevator door, he expressly stepped aside to let
> people on and off and stood in a corner for most of the ride. Fields' real
> crime seems to have been laughing near a couple of cops.
> If you live in the other America where this stuff doesn't go on, and you
> didn't know the context of these "self-initiated contacts," you might look
> at Jaleel Fields, and his arrest for resisting, and think he was a
> criminal.
> You might especially think that if you didn't see the video. "Most people
> think that there's a high burden for getting arrested, because maybe for
> them, there is," says Martha Grieco, Fields' attorney. "But they don't pick
> up kids in these neighborhoods because they do anything. They pick them up
> as a form of social control.?.?.?.?We want your fingerprints in the system.
> We want your iris scans in the system. We want to know your tattoos."
> You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find
> stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common
> sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it:
> "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a
> closed
> Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a
> man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state
> police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge
> joint
> before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no
> marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a
> handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction
> of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive
> movements for police guns," he says.
> Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally
> work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or
> fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never
> cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police
> misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to
> outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.
> Say you live in a large American city - Baltimore, for example. Police stop
> and search you, something goes wrong and you end up getting your ass
> kicked.
> You don't die, and more to the point, nobody films you not dying, which
> means CNN doesn't show up the next day.
> You're hauled off to jail. Sometime between a few hours and a few days
> later, you learn the charges against you. It's usually a hell of a list,
> which is part of the game. On what Ansar describes as "that motherfucking
> paper they slide under the door," you might find yourself charged with
> resisting arrest, assault against a police officer, criminal possession of
> marijuana, criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and
> whatever else the on-scene officers can think of.
> The case is weak, however, so a few days or weeks later a prosecutor tells
> you charges will be dropped. In being processed, you sign a paper. It
> reads:
> I, (name), hereby release and forever discharge (complainant) and (law
> enforcement agency), all its officers, agents and employees, and any and
> all
> other persons from any and all claims which I may have for wrongful conduct
> by reason of my arrest, detention, or confinement on or about (date).
> This General Waiver and Release is conditioned upon the expungement of the
> record of my arrest....
> You sign, and your "criminal record" disappears, which is great for you.
> But
> so does the incident, which is expunged from the public record. And, except
> in very rare cases, the same police go right back out on the street. The
> only results of the entire episode are things that can hurt you: Your
> prints
> might now be in the system, you might attract future attention by the same
> police, and your employer might be upset by the whole situation.
> This expungement trick is the way it works in Baltimore. To make the
> charges
> go away, victims often end up overtly forfeiting a right to sue (by signing
> a paper to that effect) or effectively doing so by pleading guilty to
> lesser
> offenses (undercutting, say, any federal civil rights case they might later
> want to bring).
> If a Baltimore case is bad enough to warrant a financial settlement, the
> gory details usually end up disappeared behind a nondisclosure agreement.
> A.
> Dwight Pettit and Baltimore trial lawyer Larry Greenberg can't tell me
> about
> most of their worst cases, because they're sealed. In other words, if the
> victim takes the city's money after a beating or a false arrest, then the
> city typically gets to dispose of the incident without apologizing or even
> publicly acknowledging it.
> It's the street-level equivalent of the "neither admit nor deny"
> settlements
> that Wall Street offenders made infamous after 2008. A bad thing happens,
> but somehow nobody is guilty of anything - money just changes hands.
> But here's the next catch: It's not much money. There's a liability cap in
> place in the state of Maryland, limiting victims to $200,000 per person,
> $500,000 per incident (though there are plans to roughly double those
> amounts). Other states, like Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado, have
> similar caps.
> On the streets of Baltimore last week, African-American residents were
> furiously repeating the statistic about the city paying out more than $6
> million in abuse settlements since 2011. But that number is actually quite
> small. In New York, which does not have a cap, abuse victims have received
> more than $420 million since 2009.
> But even getting to a settlement is contingent upon the victim acting
> quickly. In the city of Baltimore, a victim has to file notice of a suit
> within six months. There are plans to expand that limit to a year, but it's
> still a tight window. If you don't hire a lawyer right away, you're
> probably
> not going to make the deadline.
> The game is set up so the only real end for the victim of police abuse to
> pursue is a check from the government. This brings us to the most shocking
> and probably most under-reported aspect of the police-abuse story: In most
> cities it's close to impossible to get a police officer removed for lies,
> abuse or other forms of misconduct.
> A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked
> out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was
> revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police
> received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total
> acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or
> more).
> A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's
> Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian
> Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents.
> The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014,
> New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had
> been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the
> CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw
> significant repercussions.
> The reason for this is that unless a police officer is criminally indicted
> after an abuse case, which very rarely happens, the discipline procedure at
> big-city police departments is generally handled in-house. In New York, a
> civilian complaint usually has to be substantiated by a review panel, which
> will either suggest punishment itself or refer the case to a pseudo-court
> at
> the police department. There, judges - who are employed by the department -
> may recommend discipline. But many of these recommendations can be
> overturned by the police commissioner.
> What this means for the people on the streets of urban neighborhoods is
> simple: For all the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by cities to
> abuse victims, very little is actually done to discipline rogue police
> officers. Cops caught lying in court by judges are not fired. They're back
> in court giving evidence the next day. "The downside [to lying] for the
> police is just that the evidence gets tossed," says Pettit, who notes that
> the problem is especially pronounced in civil courts. "There's no personal
> accountability. There's no reason not to lie again."
> This problem - of police almost never facing consequences - was the obvious
> subtext of the Baltimore revolts. It's the reason the one thing that calmed
> the city down was the curiously rapid decision by the new state's attorney,
> Marilyn Mosby, to file sweeping charges, including manslaughter and murder,
> against the six police, three white and three black, involved with Gray's
> arrest.
> Pettit notes that Mosby's decision was a rarity in that three of the
> officers were also charged with false imprisonment. She essentially
> described the entire arrest as improper and illegal, even going so far as
> to
> assert publicly that the pocket knife Gray was carrying was legal. The
> legal
> fight to come will therefore put the entire rationale behind Broken Windows
> on trial, in the sense that prosecutors will argue - if the case actually
> makes it to court - that the six officers never should have been doing what
> police have been asked to do in mass numbers every day for 15 years now.
> If an individual police officer does have a record of abuse or lies or some
> other misconduct, most cities make it nearly impossible for anyone on the
> wrong side of the blue wall to find it.
> Every regional police force is governed by its own legal procedure, but New
> York and California offer excellent examples of the uphill climb toward
> transparency. In both of those states, a defense lawyer staring at what
> looks like a bogus police statement has to file a motion to the court
> asking
> for disclosure of a police officer's personnel file. In New York, it's
> called a Gissendanner motion; in California, a Pitchess motion. But to win
> these motions, you essentially need to have that information already. It's
> yet another Catch-22. "In 99 percent of these cases, I get nothing," says
> Nikhil Ramnaney, a Los Angeles defense attorney, stressing that he can't
> speak for others' experiences.
> "Police are always complaining about the 'Don't snitch!' campaigns," says a
> Baltimore resident named Kato Simeto, an aspiring clothes designer and
> inventor. "But you almost never see police informing on each other. They're
> more into 'Don't snitch' than people on the street."
> Of course, where bureaucracy fails to cover things up, simple racism often
> steps in. Just ask Makia Smith, a 33-year-old accountant who grew up not
> far
> from where the Baltimore protests broke out. "I was on my way back from
> Wendy's," she says, recounting an incident in East Baltimore from March
> 2012. "My two-year-old daughter was in the back, in a car seat."
> Caught in traffic, Smith noticed a commotion, with a gang of police
> officers
> surrounding a young suspect. As she later alleged in a civil complaint, the
> boy was on the ground and one of the cops seemed to be getting dangerously
> aggressive. Concerned, Smith opened the door of her car and held up her
> phone as though filming the scene. "I was hoping that if they saw me," she
> says, "then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing."
> Instead, she alleges, the following took place: An officer, later
> identified
> as Nathan Church, rushed at her, screaming, she says, "You want to film
> something, bitch? Film this!" Frightened, Smith tried to get back in her
> car. Church took her phone, smashed it on the ground and kicked it down the
> street. Then he dragged her out by her hair, at which point she momentarily
> blacked out. Eventually, she claims, police threw her on the hood of her
> Saturn, where she snapped awake and saw her two-year-old wailing in the
> back
> seat. She began to panic: If she got arrested, who would take care of the
> baby?
> According to Smith's complaint, police told her, in about the least
> reassuring manner possible, that child protective services was coming to
> take her daughter. It's an example of how completely black America
> distrusts
> the police and the government that Smith chose to allow a little girl
> standing on the side of the road, a stranger, to take her baby for her,
> rather than give the child to CPS. As she was dragged off to that seemingly
> omnipresent paddy wagon, Smith called out her mother's cellphone number, so
> that the little girl could get in touch with the baby's grandmother.
> Smith ended up in jail overnight and didn't reunite with her daughter until
> 24 hours later. Playing the usual game of police-abuse chicken, authorities
> hit her with a list of charges, ranging from assault in the second degree
> against a police officer ("They say I took on four healthy male officers,"
> she says), to resisting, to a host of traffic offenses.
> Smith, an educated young woman, did everything right after the incident,
> hiring a lawyer and successfully navigating the traps and land mines
> designed to make cases like hers go away. She never signed away her right
> to
> sue, never allowed the case to be expunged, never took a
> pennies-on-the-dollar deal that would have let the police off the hook.
> And what happened? The police denied her allegations, claiming the arrest
> was legitimate, and she watched her case implode in what's supposed to be
> the corruption-proof stage of the process, a trial by a jury of her
> "peers."
> "The cops' defense team struck every black witness," she says, and her case
> was heard by an all-white jury, which ultimately found the police innocent
> of misconduct.
> Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society,
> primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this
> country. That's a population roughly the size of France.
> You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on
> crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad
> arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to
> fill
> a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that
> misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you
> search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The
> dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.
> The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to
> neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys
> locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says
> Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be
> controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're
> supposed
> to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."
> As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are
> especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the
> force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an
> answer."
> But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it
> can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda.
> "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
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