Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson on the run from the media
The New York Times editorial board joins in demanding
Justice for St. Louis County.
The Justice Department took a much-needed step last week when it opened a broad civil rights investigation into police practices in Ferguson, Mo., where the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer last month sparked days of demonstrations and riots.
But the investigation should not be limited to Ferguson. News accounts and a recent study of court systems in neighboring towns strongly suggest that the police in St. Louis County may be systematically targeting poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops (in part to generate fines), which has the effect of criminalizing entire communities. This history of discriminatory stops and abuse fueled the protests and violence that erupted after Mr. Brown was gunned down. ...
The Justice Department will find plenty of evidence of disparate treatment of black motorists in St. Louis County, which is crowded with municipalities. As The Washington Post reported last week, some of these towns get 40 percent or more of their revenue from traffic fines and fees from petty violations. And since there are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, that means drivers can pass through several towns in just a few miles on one main thoroughfare. Motorists who are detained in one town are often dragged through the courts or jails in several communities.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch agrees.
...On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Department of Justice will begin such an inquiry. This is an important and positive step forward, but we suspect when he gets into the numbers, and examines the reality of North St. Louis County, Ferguson will play but a small role in a larger investigation.
...blacks in Ferguson were 37 percent more likely to be pulled over in 2013 than whites, as a percentage of their respective populations. Those black drivers who were pulled over were twice as likely to be searched for contraband, such as drugs, than white drivers, even though police found contraband, percentage-wise, more often in the cars of white drivers. ...
Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of $2,635,400. In 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.
...Nearly every one of the patchwork of municipalities in St. Louis County depends on traffic enforcement to produce too much of the revenue it needs to run a city. The police departments, nearly all of them, pull over blacks at a higher rate than whites. Some of them operate insidious speed- and red-light cameras to increase revenue. They charge fees and fines beyond the ability of most poor people to pay. Those in poverty pay the price by going to jail. Most of them are black.
Sadly, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
On Oct. 1, Flordell Hills becomes the 58th municipality in St. Louis County to have its own police department, the Post-Dispatch’s Jennifer Mann reported Thursday. Twenty-five of those police departments are in cities of less than 5,000 people.
You know what St. Louis County is? Ridiculous, that's what. It's a idiotic mess of tiny little fiefdoms where every tinpot would-be tyrant gets a chance to scrawl his name (and personal prejudices) across some scrap of land that fits between two stop lights. Meanwhile the police departments, made up of officers who almost never live in the communities they "serve," twist arms–and crush hopes–for cash.
I've long maintained that Missouri could sub for a miniature USA, with St. Louis and Kansas City representing the coasts, the bootheel playing the South, and the rest of the state performing the role of North and South Dakomingexas. Columbia gets to stand in for Colorado. But that's no longer true.
St. Louis County has reached levels of corruption that would make New Jersey faint and expressions of obvious racism that might as well be written in neon by the George Wallace Signworks. It's time that the Department of Justice did more than just reorganize failing police departments. It's time to reorganize a failing county.
Come on in. Let's see what other people are ranting about.
Nate Cohn gets down to business as a political numbers guru and does the math on the House.
Republicans and Democrats are struggling for control of the Senate in this November’s midterm elections. But there is no real fight for control of the House of Representatives.
The Republicans are all but assured of retaining control of the House, despite last fall’s unpopular government shutdown and the party’s dismal ratings. ...
How is it possible that the Democrats, who have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, are at such a disadvantage in the House, theoretically the most representative body of government? It is the biggest paradox in American electoral politics.
If you've been paying attention around these parts, you probably know the answer, but Cohn puts up some interesting charts of the city Dem, country Gopper situation.
Nicholas Kristof continues his look at how racism goes ignored by white Americans.
In my column a week ago, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” I took aim at what I called “smug white delusion” about race relations in America, and readers promptly fired back at what they perceived as a smugly deluded columnist. ...
“Probably has something to do with their unwillingness to work,” Nils tweeted. ...
There was a deluge of such comments, some toxic, but let me try to address three principal arguments that I think prop up white delusion.
First, if blacks are poor or in prison, it’s all their fault. “Blacks don’t get it,” Bruce tweeted. “Choosing to be cool vs. getting good grades is a bad choice. We all start from 0.”
Huh? Does anybody really think that we all take off from the same starting line?
I can answer that. Yes. Yes, they do. These people are called Republicans, and their blinders are so thick they think that people who have been oppressed, not for decades, but for centuries, are toeing the same starting line as those who come with a whole set of silverware in their mouths. Read the rest of Kristof's piece if you want all your worst thoughts about a portion of America's white population confirmed.
Ross Douthat says we should all learn lessons from the horrible events in Rotherham, England.
There are enough grim tidings from around the world that the news from Rotherham, a faded English industrial town where about 1,400 girls, mostly white and working class, were raped by gangs of Pakistani men while the local authorities basically shrugged and did nothing, is already slipping out of American headlines.
But we should remain with Rotherham for a moment, and give its story a suitable place of dishonor in the waking nightmare that is late summer 2014. ...
Interpreted crudely, what happened in Rotherham looks like an ideological mirror image of Roman Catholicism’s sex abuse scandal. The Catholic crisis seemed to vindicate a progressive critique of traditionalism: Here were the wages of blind faith and sexual repression; here was a case study in how a culture of hierarchy and obedience gave criminals free rein.
And then of course, Douthat concludes that the problem is that the liberal society was so intent on "diversity" that it gave Pakistani men waivers to rape and torture white girls. Which is a mythology already getting head nods on the right. But wait! Douthat then goes on to prove (nothing up his sleeve) that black is white, left is right, and the Roman Catholic Church scandal is
also all about liberal attitudes! And... Roman Pulanski! And he-knows-Hollywood-is-evil and they're probably raping just tons of girls, though he can't prove it yet and... Oh, hell. I can't even finish this one. Which is a shame, because those poor girls in Rotherham really do deserve attention and rememberence. They also deserve one huge amount more respect than being used as another marker in Douthat's mealymouthed game of "all evil comes from liberalism."
Dana Milbank looks at the horror and disaster caused by SeaTac's minimum wage increase to $15! (hint: there was no horror, and no disaster)
In July 2013, hotelier Scott Ostrander stood before the city council in SeaTac, Wash., pleading with the town not to adopt a $15 minimum wage.
“I am shaking here tonight because I am going to be forced to lay people off,” he said, according to an account in the Washington State Wire. “I’m going to take away their livelihood. That hurts. It really, really hurts. . . . And what I am going to have to do on Jan. 1 is to eliminate jobs, reduce hours — and as soon as hours are reduced, benefits are reduced.”
SeaTac, a community around Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, went ahead with its plan, becoming, on Jan. 1, the first jurisdiction in the nation to set a $15 minimum wage, according to the labor movement. And Ostrander’s hotel, the Cedarbrook Lodge? It went ahead with a $16 million expansion that adds 63 rooms, a spa — and jobs. ...
“SeaTac is proving trickle-down economics wrong,” says David Rolf, the Service Employees International Union official who helped lead the $15 effort in SeaTac and Seattle, “because when workers prosper, so do communities and businesses.”
The free marketeers (all for one, and everyone for themselves) maintain that SeaTac isn't a good test. But then, they say the same is true of multiple deregulatory disasters that really were disasters. Free marketeers know what they know, and evidence isn't going to get in the way.
Colbert King on President Obama's strategy in dealing with militants.
...“The arc of the moral universe is long,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but it bends toward justice.”
That is the context in which to assess events in today’s troubled world.
It took a while, but with the courage and extraordinary leadership of Nelson Mandela, the moral arc finally bent toward justice in apartheid South Africa. It took militancy, legal action and sacrifice to break through the prejudice that legally manacled blacks in this country. But justice prevailed over Jim Crow.
The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany are no more.
As it was with the Third Reich, so it will be with the Islamic State.
Justice will come.
This, I know, is cold comfort to the innocents under siege in Fallujah by armed Islamic State extremists. ...
The question is not when but how to take on the fight against tyranny.
It was a central question during the Cold War. As it was in the struggles against apartheid and colonialism in Africa. And in the challenge to South American dictatorships and in breaking down America’s walls of racial segregation.
An interesting piece from Mr. King that draws from his own history during the Cold War. Give it a read.
Ruth Markus looks at the expanding cloud of vapers.
E-cigarettes pose a public policy conundrum. They are a gateway drug — but it’s not, or hasn’t been, entirely clear in which direction most traffic through that gateway flows.
For some existing smokers, particularly those for whom other efforts to quit have failed, electronic cigarettes offer the advantage of a nicotine delivery device without risking the health consequences of smoking tobacco.
Meantime, for those not yet hooked, e-cigarettes present the risk of an alluring on-ramp to the real thing.
The question is whether the potential public health benefit of helping smokers quit outweighs the public health cost of enticing a new generation of addicts.
The answer seems to be nobody knows... but evidence doesn't look so great. The other question we should be asking is: so? If people continue to use e-cigarettes, and never get off them, should we care? Honestly, I don't know.
Leonard Pitts joins those who, rightly, say that the women whose photographs were stolen on-line, are not to blame.
O.K., so about the hacking of certain actresses’ computer files and the posting of nude photos found therein:
Can we be frank?
There is, within every healthy, heterosexual man, something that, upon viewing an attractive woman clad scantily or not at all, stands a little straighter, smiles a little brighter, and breathes a quiet “Yowza” of appreciation. This is true whether the man be piggish sexist or enlightened feminist. It is true whether he be plumber, pipefitter, professor, rabbi, imam or priest. It is rumored that it is even true of that ultimate paragon of moral rectitude, the newspaper columnist.
To argue otherwise is to argue against biology. And it has always seemed to me that if an adult woman of sound mind decides — without coercion and of her own volition — to trade on her sexuality in that way, it’s her call. Granted, some of us worry about objectifying women. But we should also be wary of infantilizing them. If some actress poses in the altogether for public consumption — and some guy enjoys it — I find it hard to define that as de facto sexism, so long as the choice was hers.
Which is precisely what’s wrong, creepy, slimy and profoundly distasteful about the hacking of those files and the posting of those pictures.
Yowza. I will not make a joke about "stands a little straighter." I will not make a joke about...