Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

May 16, 2012

Zimmerman: CYA by the NYT

The New York Times has a long article Trayvon Martin Case Shadowed by Series of Police Missteps by Serge F. Kovaleski. You can smell the CYA positioning all over the article as more evidence emerges and the media's Narrative crumbles. 

The first part of the article insinuates that police incompetence must be the explanation for why the prestige press has come up with so little strong evidence against George Zimmerman during the two months of media frenzy. But the rest of the story shows, despite the reporter's and editor's bias, that the cops did, on the whole, a decent job of investigating the case. Certainly, the local law enforcement folks, before politics kicked it upstairs to that comic special prosecutor, have done a far better job than the national media at uncovering the facts and evaluating them in a rational manner.

May 15, 2012

The Urge to Purge: James Q. Wilson edition

Economist Glenn C. Loury, former conservative establishment affirmative action hire, sniffs in The Boston Review that the late James Q. Wilson held politically incorrect views.
Much to Answer For: James Q. Wilson’s Legacy
Glenn C. Loury 
The esteemed political scientist and criminologist James Q. Wilson died in March. ... 
His most significant legacy, however, lies in the impact of his scholarship and journalism on the contemporary structures of social control in the United States. His 1975 book Thinking About Crime provides academic justification for a massive increase in imprisonment in the United States that began in the late 1970s and has yet fully to run its course. (The United States incarcerates at five times the rate of Britain, the leading jailer in Europe.) It is therefore entirely fitting—indeed, imperative—that there be extensive, critical public discussion about the intellectual impact of this towering figure of the study of American government. 
While I came to disagree sharply with him on criminal justice policy, I must acknowledge that I liked Jim Wilson, the man. He was urbane, witty, and generous with his time. He was unfailingly open to hearing both sides of any argument. I knew him to be loyal to a fault, even-tempered, and often a wise observer of American politics. I admired his modesty and his prodigious work ethic. Indeed, my appreciation of “Gentleman Jim” dates back nearly three decades, to 1983, when he came to my humble Afro-American Studies office at Harvard, practically hat in hand, with a draft chapter on “race and crime” for an as-yet-unpublished book, Crime and Human Nature. He was writing it with Richard Herrnstein, who would go on to write The Bell Curve (1994) with Charles Murray. Wilson asked for my unsparing critique, which I provided. It impressed me that, when the book appeared two years later, he and Herrnstein had taken my criticisms seriously. 
... That last association ended for me in 1995, when I publicly resigned my position after AEI fellows wrote two incendiary and what seemed to me borderline racist books—The Bell Curve and The End of Racism (1995), by Dinesh D’Souza. In those years, and partly in response to those two books, I began my long march out of the right wing of American intellectual life. And, in so doing, I slowly came to the view—which I continue to hold—that some of Wilson’s labors have done enormous damage to the quality of American democracy. His rationalizing and legitimating of over-reliance on incarceration in U.S. social policy have been particularly destructive. It frustrates me that even as mounting evidence over the past decade showed that crime control had become too punitive, Wilson stubbornly reiterated the views that he had developed four decades ago. 
... Considered from today’s perspective, much of what the nascent neoconservative thinkers had to say was pretty appalling. Banfield’s classic lament of the failures of 1960s urban policy, The Unheavenly City, looks an awful lot like reactionary drivel. (His argument that persistent poverty is due to the bad values and character of the poor—first set out in his book about Italy, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society—might have made sense for Sicily, but did not travel well to the South Bronx.) And in retrospect Moynihan—whose work Wilson often extolled—hardly comes off looking like a great thinker. Calling a spade a spade turns out not to be a social policy. 
In my long march out of the right wing, I came to believe that Wilson’s labors did enormous damage to American democracy. 
Call me unforgiving, but I can still remember sitting at Jim and Roberta Wilson’s dinner table in Malibu, California in January 1993 listening to Murray explain, much to my consternation and with Jim’s silent acquiescence, that social inequality is inevitable because “dull” parents are simply less effective at child-rearing than “bright” ones. (I rejected then, and still do, Murray and Herrnstein’s claim that profound social disparities are due mainly to variation in innate individual traits that cannot be remedied via social policy.) Neither can Glenn Loury in 2012 ignore what he failed to see in 1983: that Wilson and Herrnstein’s Crime and Human Nature—a book that sets out to lay bare the underlying bio-genetic, somatic, and psychological determinants of individuals’ criminal behavior—is an enterprise of dubious scientific value. The behavioral theories of social control that Wilson spawned—see, for instance, his 1983 Atlantic Monthly piece, “Raising Kids” (not unlike training pets, as it happens)—and the pop–social psychology salesmanship of his and George Kelling’s so-called “theory” about broken windows is a long way from rocket science, or even good social science. This work looks more like narrative in the service of rationalizing and justifying hierarchy, subordination, coercion, and control. In short, it smacks of highbrow, reactionary journalism. 
But, unlike most tabloid scribblers, Wilson’s writings had a massive effect. The broken windows argument—by cracking down on minor offenses, the police can prevent the perception of disorder that leads to more serious crimes—has influenced urban law enforcement strategists throughout the nation. Even so, as scholarly critics across the ideological spectrum have noted, there is little evidence beyond the anecdotal to show that such “quality of life” policing actually leads to lower crime rates. When I consider the impact of his ideas, I can’t help but think about the millions of folks being hassled even as we speak by coercive state agents who are acting on some Wilsonian theory recommending stop-and-frisk policing.
Neither can I overlook the reinforcement of subliminal racial stigmata associated with the institutions of confinement, surveillance, and patrol that Americans have embraced over the past two generations under the watchful and approving gaze of Professor Wilson. 
I don’t think Jim Wilson had a racist bone in his body. Neither do I doubt his sincerity when he expressed regret, as he often did, that blacks are overrepresented among those being punished for having committed crimes. But intent is one thing; results are another. A politics of vengeance has abetted the unprecedented rise in U.S. incarceration rates since 1980. I am made keenly aware of the deleterious impact these policies have had on residents of urban black communities, law-abiders and law-breakers alike. This was not Wilson’s intent, but plainly it was one consequence of ideas that he championed. ... 
But is his 1997 book The Moral Sense—which cites human nature to make a case against moral relativism, and which Wilson thought his most important publication—a work for the ages? I doubt it seriously. Is Thinking About Crime up there in the pantheon of American social criticism along with Silent Spring, The Other America, The Feminine Mystique, or The Fire Next Time? Not hardly. 
James Q. Wilson was not the Thomas Hobbes of our time—though it is a good guess that he fancied himself grappling with a Leviathan. A cloistered moral sanctimony (“Tobacco shortens one’s life; cocaine debases it”) coupled with an enthusiasm for police work (“prison in America . . . helps explain why this country has a lower rate of burglary than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands”): that’s another way to think about the legacy of James Q. Wilson. Unkind to be sure, but not inaccurate. 
With all due respect to the influence of his writings on bureaucracy, policing, and social policy, I’m just not buying the hagiographies that appeared in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe after his passing. For my money, he died with an awful lot to answer for.

So, let's go back to the soft-on-crime policies of the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, a lot innocent people will be murdered and raped, but that's a small price to pay for purging racist crimethink.

May 6, 2012

Pym Fortuyn, RIP

This is the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Dutch immigration restrictionist politician Pym Fortuyn on Monday, May 6, 2002. The instantaneous response of European opinion was that he had it coming

The Narrative remains that Fortuyn was assassinated by some wacko animal rights activist, but that's a lot like saying Poland was invaded in 1939 by an animal rights activist. The assassin was a well-educated white leftist who was found sane by exhaustive inquiries. The only thing crazy about the killer was that he took seriously what the media was saying about the Fortuyn Menace. From Wikipedia:
In court at his trial, van der Graaf said he murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak members of society" in seeking political power.

You'll notice that today is the day of the French presidential election, which happens every five years. In 2002, Fortuyn was murdered the day after the French election. That year, the elder Le Pen had eked into the final round against Chirac two weeks before, which unleashed a Continent-wide Two Weeks Hate against immigration restrictionists carried out by all respectable elements of European opinion. Whether this uproar helped provoke the Dutch assassin remains speculative, but of course nobody speculates about it.

May 4, 2012

Dept. of Dubious Damage Control: Norfolk police chief inadvertently issues Vibrancy Alert

From WND:
But at a press conference today, interim Norfolk Police Chief Sharon Chamberlin said the department is not investigating the case as a hate crime. 
“At no time in our investigation or in statements taken from the victims did it appear this assault was racially motivated,” she said. 
... “The streets of Norfolk are safe. We are a vibrant city, we are growing, we are changing each and every day and citizens should not judge our streets in light of this particular thing.”

May 1, 2012

Non-ironic racism apparently not a crisis, ironically enough

Two weeks ago, two white reporters for the Virginia Pilot, evidently out on a Saturday night date, on their way home from a Norfolk, VA theater were beaten by a mob of blacks. 

Now you might think that a racist mob terrorizing passer-bys downtown would qualify as local news, especially when the victims were newspaper reporters. But, their newspaper didn't report the incident, until finally an editorial appeared today:
The next day, Forster searched Twitter for mention of the attack. 
One post chilled him. 
"I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light," wrote one person. 
"I don't," wrote another, indicating laughter. "(do it for trayvon martin)"

April 30, 2012

Was I wrong about the Rodney King riots?

Last week in The Secret History of the 1990s, I suggested that the 1992 Los Angeles riots served as a shameful wake-up call to blacks at the nadir of the crack / gangsta rap era to check themselves before they wreck themselves, and that the relative improvement in black performance in the later 1990s may date from that turning point.

A number of commenters demurred, pointing out, among other objections, that I hadn't produced a lot of quotes suggesting that African-Americans had actually been ashamed of how significant numbers of their younger people had behaved during those three days two decades ago. 

So, I did a Google search on 

ashamed 1992 riots south central

and came up with ... not much. 

A Korean academic claims, "I was embarrassed and ashamed, because many Koreans had established a negative image among the media and the African Americans. " 


That kind of thing ... 

This isn't to say that black private individuals didn't feel ashamed by the riots, but it sure isn't part of The Narrative.

April 29, 2012

Memories, misty watercolor memories ...

It's nostalgia time at the Daily Beast:
L.A. Riots Anniversary: Two Gang Members Remember 
... It wasn’t an unusual anecdote for Townsend and fellow former gang member Alfred Lomas, who shared their memories of participating in the riots with The Daily Beast. The riots were a sudden opportunity to vent frustrations with the police, with a judicial system that favored everyone but them, with limited employment. By taking to the streets and looting, they were only getting what was theirs. The two said that violence on the same scale could spring from those Los Angeles neighborhoods again, and that while fewer residents believe that a riot in the next five years is likely, many of the same problems remain. 
And although Rodney King’s beating mattered to the rioters, it wasn’t their sole or even always their primary motivation for rioting. Townsend was less upset by Rodney King than he was by the shooting of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was killed with a single bullet by a Korean convenience-store owner who suspected her of shoplifting. That was in March 1991, one day after the four policemen charged with assault in King’s beating pleaded not guilty. Townsend says he couldn’t understand why Harlins’s shooter was let off with a sentence of only five years’ probation. “The liquor-store owner said she had stolen a bottle of orange juice,” Townsend said. “That penetrated my heart.” 
On April 29, when the not-guilty verdicts were handed down in the case of the four LAPD officers who had beaten Rodney King, faith-based groups tried to keep demonstrations peaceful. Townsend, in fact, was on his way to church with his cousin as the first bottles flew. On their way, he said, he saw a Korean liquor store being looted, one of many Korean businesses targeted out of anger over the Harlins shooting. “I went to the church, and while we were in the church everybody’s pager and phone was going off saying it was a riot,” Townsend remembers. 
“None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.”   
As the riots spread beyond Florence and Normandie, Townsend said, it seemed the natural order had gone unhinged. “There was no such thing as a red light,” Townsend said, and the Los Angeles Police Department was nowhere to be seen. When he did see police, “they weren’t making arrests”—not even the cops in two squad cars that pulled up when Townsend’s buddies were robbing a pawn shop. He says the cops shooed them away, got back in their cars, and drove off. 
The gangs were on their own, and they seized the opportunity. “Pretty much we started thinking in terms of what is of value,” Townsend recalled. “Where are the jewelry stores, the television store, the furniture store.” When they saw an automotive store, they “went in and started stealing tires. None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.” ...
Former Florencia 13 heavy hitter Alfred Lomas says that gang members were far from the only participants in the riots. 
“It wasn’t entirely a gang issue as much as people assume,” Lomas told The Daily Beast. “The L.A. riots represented a population that involved all different kinds of ethnic groups, that involved more a population unrest than a gang unrest.” 
Lomas had gotten his start in gang life early, crewing up as a 12-year-old drug addict with the city’s largest Latino gang in 1976, a process that involved him being beaten by the other members of his new fraternity for 13 seconds. A few years later, at the age of 18, Lomas volunteered to serve his country because he “wanted to learn how to shoot and kill people.” 
“My specialty was using that skill set”—skills he acquired at the expense of the American taxpayer—“to further the gang and support my drug habit, and it took me into some pretty high-profile stuff,” Lomas said. “I was part of the introduction of crack cocaine in the area I was from in South Central,” said Lomas, who grew up in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood and helped coordinate his gang’s drug trade. “I’ve been involved in every major gang war in South Central until about 10 years ago.” 
To this day, despite having left gang life, Lomas says that he remembers the simmering tensions that bubbled and bubbled before boiling over in 1992.
“Being a young kid growing up in one of these areas, there’s always a sense of harassment from the police,” Lomas said. “We’re talking about a high-crime, a high-unemployment area, and you grow up and you know you’re disadvantaged.” 
“At the time I was watching the actual riots, the Reginald Denny thing, I was located one block east of South Central in Huntington Park,” Lomas said. He was with other Florencia 13 members; Lomas says the very fact that he was a career lawbreaker seemed to separate him from most rioters. For one thing, his gang was more organized than the neighborhood toughs of the 8 Tray Crips who flogged Denny. Lomas’s gang disapproved of that kind of display, he said. 
“The criminal element, we’re looking at this like, ‘We don’t agree with this beating, that’s obviously wrong, they’re assholes, but where is the LAPD? Where are the illustrious blue lights?’” Lomas said. “It was actually days, one or two days, before we saw any sort of action from law enforcement.” 
After the first day, Lomas said he and his friends had to expand their scope to find fresh shops to loot, driving into Koreatown as well as neighborhoods on the city’s west side, including Hollywood. “Our areas got burnt up pretty quick,” Lomas said. “We’re an equal-opportunity gang, so we drove around looking for other places. I remember seeing some, now we would call them hipsters, with a shopping cart taking TVs, taking clothes, taking furniture.” It’s this last observation that has most stuck with Lomas through the years—what one may call the egalitarian nature of the pillaging and pilfering. 
“Given what occurred then, in the state of mind I was in, it was like, F the police, F the government, F everyone,” Lomas said. “And I think the L.A. riots—I don’t care what anyone says—the L.A. riots represented that kind of catharsis on a mass level.”

Good times, good times ...

Thank God that Ron Paul has finally renounced that disrespectful joke that appeared in his newsletter in 1992 about how the riot ended on May 1, 1992 because the looters stayed home to await their welfare checks. What a scandal. Some things are too sacred to joke about.

April 27, 2012

Wait ... wait ... Don't tell me!

From the New York Times:
Police Chiefs Focus on Disparities in Gun Violence, With an Eye Toward Solutions 
by Erica Goode 
In a single week last April, 3 people were killed with guns in Philadelphia, 14 more were shot and wounded, 68 robberies were carried out at gunpoint and a total of 144 crimes involving firearms were reported.During that same week in San Diego, a city of roughly the same size with far fewer police officers, there were no gun-related homicides, 2 people wounded by gunshots, 4 robberies committed at gunpoint and a total of only 20 gun-related crimes. 
What made the difference? About 250 police chiefs from around the country debated this question and gun violence more generally at a meeting here this week, taking as their focus a survey of crimes occurring in six cities — Philadelphia, San Diego, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Austin, Tex., and Toronto — over a seven-day period in April 2011. The survey was carried out by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research group that sponsored the session as part of its two-day annual meeting.

I hear Carmel, CA has even less gun violence. The Police Executive Research Forum should go investigate Carmel.


The Secret History of the 1990s

With the 20th anniversary of the South-Central L.A. riot of 1992 coming up, I was glancing at a thumbsucker in the Books section of the L.A. Times by a diligent literary critic who concludes that, unlike the 1965 Watts riot, literary types have avoided the subject of the latter riot:
But 20 years later, the shelf of books addressing the disaster is threadbare, conditional even, as if we've never figured out how to write about these events.

My explanation for this is that the most true and interesting things anybody can say about the Rodney King riot are A) that it was a shameful tantrum by African-Americans (which of course few aesthetic writers dependent upon grants would dare say), and B) that blacks actually were embarrassed enough by it to slowly start behaving better. 

By a variety of measures, the early 1990s represented a crisis among black. The most obvious is the peak in the black homicide offending rate, especially among very young blacks. But lots of other things went wrong: test scores went down and teen fertility was up.

The invention of crack in the mid-1980s was obviously one big problem, but another was rap, especially as it evolved toward celebrating criminality in the late 1980s. Put crack and rap together and what do you get? In the intellectual sphere, the early 1990s were the peak of multiculturalist postmodern whoop-tee-doos in the academy.

On a more conscious level, blacks were even more embarrassed three years later by their celebration of O.J. Simpson getting away with murdering those two white people. That led quickly to Minister Farrakhan's Million Man March, which had a remarkably penitential aspect to it by the standards of anything black-related. But, I think the aftermath of the Rodney King riot was the moment when blacks collectively stared into the abyss of where they were headed and started to take a few halting steps back toward collective sanity.

April 25, 2012

Why the most hated man in America looks a little like Obama

The New York Post runs a long Reuters article on George Zimmerman full of valuable information. Here's a minor bit that answers one question that struck me: Whereas he looked quite mestizo in the notorious orange shirt photo, why, lately, does a skinnier, shaven-headed, suited Zimmerman look a bit like the President?
The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather - the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

So, he's not just a mestizo, he's a "pardo," like Hugo Chavez calls himself.

More good stuff:
A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men. 
Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account. 
"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin." 
"MIXED" HOUSEHOLD 
George Michael Zimmerman was born in 1983 to Robert and Gladys Zimmerman, the third of four children. Robert Zimmerman Sr. was a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970, and was stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, in 1975 with Gladys Mesa's brother George. Zimmerman Sr. also served two tours in Korea, and spent the final 10 years of his 22-year military career in the Pentagon, working for the Department of Defense, a family member said. 
In his final years in Virginia before retiring to Florida, Robert Zimmerman served as a magistrate in Fairfax County's 19th Judicial District. 
Robert and Gladys met in January 1975, when George Mesa brought along his army buddy to his sister's birthday party. She was visiting from Peru, on vacation from her job there as a physical education teacher. Robert was a Baptist, Gladys was Catholic. They soon married, in a Catholic ceremony in Alexandria, and moved to nearby Manassas.

Okay, so, yeah, we all know Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman, but there really are a whole bunch of people in America with Germanic names who aren't Jewish at all or are only marginally Jewish. They just tend to be less famous per capita than Jewish people with Germanic names. A Baptist American named Robert Zimmerman, George's father, is more likely to never become famous than a Jewish American named Robert Zimmerman
Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was involved in the church's outreach programs. Gladys would bring young George along with her on "home visits" to poor families, said a family friend, Teresa Post. 
"It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need, people more in need than themselves," said Post, a Peruvian immigrant who lived with the Zimmermans for a time. 
Post recalls evening prayers before dinner in the ethnically diverse Zimmerman household, which included siblings Robert Jr., Grace, and Dawn. "It wasn't only white or only Hispanic or only black - it was mixed," she said. ....
Zimmerman's maternal grandmother, Cristina, who had lived with the Zimmermans since 1978, worked as a babysitter for years during Zimmerman's childhood. For several years she cared for two African-American girls who ate their meals at the Zimmerman house and went back and forth to school each day with the Zimmerman children. 
"They were part of the household for years, until they were old enough to be on their own," Post said. 
Zimmerman served as an altar boy at All Saints from age 7 to 17, church members said. 
"He wasn't the type where, you know, 'I'm being forced to do this,' and a dragging-his-feet Catholic," said Sandra Vega, who went to high school with George and his siblings. "He was an altar boy for years, and then worked in the rectory too. He has a really good heart." 
George grew up bilingual, and by age 10 he was often called to the Haydon Elementary School principal's office to act as a translator between administrators and immigrant parents. At 14 he became obsessed with becoming a Marine, a relative said, joining the after-school ROTC program at Grace E. Metz Middle School and polishing his boots by night. At 15, he worked three part-time jobs - in a Mexican restaurant, for the rectory, and washing cars - on nights and weekends, to save up for a car. ...
In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said. 
Then came 2005, and a series of troubles. Zimmerman's business failed, he was arrested, and he broke off an engagement with a woman who filed a restraining order against him. ...
Zimmerman enrolled in Seminole State College in 2009, and in December 2011 he was permitted to participate in a school graduation ceremony, despite being a course credit shy of his associate's degree in criminal justice. Zimmerman was completing that course credit when the shooting occurred. ...
 By the summer of 2011, Twin Lakes was experiencing a rash of burglaries and break-ins. Previously a family-friendly, first-time homeowner community, it was devastated by the recession that hit the Florida housing market, and transient renters began to occupy some of the 263 town houses in the complex. Vandalism and occasional drug activity were reported, and home values plunged. One resident who bought his home in 2006 for $250,000 said it was worth $80,000 today. 
At least eight burglaries were reported within Twin Lakes in the 14 months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to the Sanford Police Department. Yet in a series of interviews, Twin Lakes residents said dozens of reports of attempted break-ins and would-be burglars casing homes had created an atmosphere of growing fear in the neighborhood. 
In several of the incidents, witnesses identified the suspects to police as young black men. Twin Lakes is about 50 percent white, with an African-American and Hispanic population of about 20 percent each, roughly similar to the surrounding city of Sanford, according to U.S. Census data. 
One morning in July 2011, a black teenager walked up to Zimmerman's front porch and stole a bicycle, neighbors told Reuters. A police report was taken, though the bicycle was not recovered. ...
But it was the August incursion into the home of Olivia Bertalan that really troubled the neighborhood, particularly Zimmerman. Shellie was home most days, taking online courses towards certification as a registered nurse. 
On August 3, Bertalan was at home with her infant son while her husband, Michael, was at work. She watched from a downstairs window, she said, as two black men repeatedly rang her doorbell and then entered through a sliding door at the back of the house. She ran upstairs, locked herself inside the boy's bedroom, and called a police dispatcher, whispering frantically.
"I said, 'What am I supposed to do? I hear them coming up the stairs!'" she told Reuters. Bertalan tried to coo her crying child into silence and armed herself with a pair of rusty scissors. 
Police arrived just as the burglars - who had been trying to disconnect the couple's television - fled out a back door. Shellie Zimmerman saw a black male teen running through her backyard and reported it to police. 
After police left Bertalan, George Zimmerman arrived at the front door in a shirt and tie, she said. He gave her his contact numbers on an index card and invited her to visit his wife if she ever felt unsafe. He returned later and gave her a stronger lock to bolster the sliding door that had been forced open. 
"He was so mellow and calm, very helpful and very, very sweet," she said last week. "We didn't really know George at first, but after the break-in we talked to him on a daily basis. People were freaked out. It wasn't just George calling police ... we were calling police at least once a week." 
In September, a group of neighbors including Zimmerman approached the homeowners association with their concerns, she said. Zimmerman was asked to head up a new neighborhood watch. He agreed. ...
Less than two weeks later, another Twin Lakes home was burglarized, police reports show. Two weeks after that, a home under construction was vandalized. 
The Retreat at Twin Lakes e-newsletter for February 2012 noted: "The Sanford PD has announced an increased patrol within our neighborhood ... during peak crime hours. 
"If you've been a victim of a crime in the community, after calling police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman." 
EMMANUEL BURGESS - SETTING THE STAGE 
On February 2, 2012, Zimmerman placed a call to Sanford police after spotting a young black man he recognized peering into the windows of a neighbor's empty home, according to several friends and neighbors. 
"I don't know what he's doing. I don't want to approach him, personally," Zimmerman said in the call, which was recorded. The dispatcher advised him that a patrol car was on the way. By the time police arrived, according to the dispatch report, the suspect had fled. 
On February 6, the home of another Twin Lakes resident, Tatiana Demeacis, was burglarized. Two roofers working directly across the street said they saw two African-American men lingering in the yard at the time of the break-in. A new laptop and some gold jewelry were stolen. One of the roofers called police the next day after spotting one of the suspects among a group of male teenagers, three black and one white, on bicycles. 
Police found Demeacis's laptop in the backpack of 18-year-old Emmanuel Burgess, police reports show, and charged him with dealing in stolen property. Burgess was the same man Zimmerman had spotted on February 2. 

And there's much else, such as why Zimmerman bought a gun.

Here's a question: Whom would you rather have as a neighbor: George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin?

The overall picture that has finally emerged is the opposite of the Prestige Press's narrative: while an occasional screw-up, Zimmerman was way above average in altruism and pro-social activity, while Martin was increasingly seduced toward the dark side by hip-hop culture: apparently involved in burglary of jewelry.

On the other hand, let me point out that Trayvon's trajectory through age 17 didn't inevitably doom him to a life in and out of prison: three school suspensions of increasing severity and an unproven but probable suspicion of burglary or fencing burgled goods is pretty bad.  But if he'd had the same track record at 15, his chance of pulling out and getting back on the straight and narrow would seem far worse. As of 17, he didn't appear to belong to an organized street gang, which strikes me as key. My impression is that the appeal of joining a criminal gang starts to diminish pretty rapidly in the late teen years, so the key for his life would likely have been staying out of trouble enough to graduate from high school. His parents had some resources to move him around to get him away from the bad influences he was hanging out with in Miami. In general, he comes across as a classic victim of hip-hop, the kind of kid who would have been okay if pop culture wasn't constantly telling him to act like a thug.

My vague impression is that younger people in America are trending in the direction of Zimmerman rather than Martin: away from outlawry, toward pro-social behavior, conformism, authoritarianism, and so forth. You'll notice that the prestige press's response to this case was to play up Martin not as a would-be thug, but as an angelic innocent, while Zimmerman was portrayed as a Loose Cannon.

April 22, 2012

Talk Left on Zimmerman bail hearing

For addicts, here's an intelligent legal analysis of the Zimmerman bail hearing on the Talk Left website, plus some above-average comments.

Meanwhile, Your Lying Eyes points out that the prosecution's strong suit is that the police apparently didn't interview the girl on the phone with Trayvon before Lawyer Crump got to her, so in a trial her testimony will be well coached, with little in the way of a pre-Crump record of statements to contradict the talking points Crump wants her to emphasize. For all the media fantasizing about "sloppy police work," that might be the cops' biggest failing, which could well  redound to the detriment of Zimmerman.

As I've mentioned several times before, it's hardly impossible that Dee Dee heard Martin refer to the unknown man using a racist or homophobic slur, and that, therefore, by current law, the physical encounter may have begun as a hate crime on the part of Martin. If so, Lawyer Crump, I would imagine, would have made sure to have had a talk or two with Dee Dee about how not to mention any of that under oath.

Some sci-fi questions on my part: How closely would cell phone records be able to determine the whereabouts of Zimmerman and Martin in the minutes leading up to the shooting? Cell phone systems keep track of which cell a phone is in, so would that be precise enough to evaluate the "stalk" versus "double-back" narratives? What about GPS options on phones?

How do we know the National Security Administration doesn't have a recording of the Trayvon-Dee Dee phone calls? Back in the 1990s, I used to occasionally read of French government and corporate officials complaining that the "Anglo-Saxons" were listening in on their calls as part of "Echelon." Being young and naive, I dismissed such allegations, but, evidently, I was wrong. How do we know the NSA doesn't have a record of most cell phone conversations? I've never heard that they do, but nobody seems terribly interested in the question.

April 21, 2012

The rules don't apply in NYC

Much of the fury directed by the national press at George Zimmerman has been over the allegation that he "profiled" Trayvon Martin. How dare there be some backward corner of the Confederacy where people are more suspicious of blacks than of everybody else!

And, yet, like IQ tests for 4-year olds, Things Are Different in New York City. For example, NYC elected a black mayor ... once, and ever since the Democrats have gone 0 for 5 in mayoral elections there.

Crime is hugely down in New York City, in sizable part because the NYPD targets NAMs for stop-and-frisks. Profiling? Well, of course. But, it's not really a big issue because, well, because it's made life in New York City a lot better for everybody who is anybody.

Michael Powell writes in the NYT:
In that year [2002], the police stopped and questioned 97,296 New Yorkers; 82 percent of them walked away without so much as a ticket. Nine years later, in 2011, his officers stopped 685,724 New Yorkers; 88 percent of them were also completely innocent. A vast majority were black or Latino men. … 
Less than 2 percent of police stops led to the recovery of a weapon. ...

If you do the math, that's about 10,000 guns per year being taken off of people who don't have permits, which is ... a lot. But, still, if those Ku Klux Klanners in Sanford, Florida were doing it, it would be different.
I tried this around my dining room table this weekend. I am white and my sons — Aidan, 19, and Nick, 24 — travel to many corners of a city that they love. Has a cop, I asked, ever stopped you? 
Both shook their heads no. 
On Monday morning, I put that question to eight black male students who attend the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Cumulatively, they said they had been stopped 92 times. They spoke with surprisingly little rancor. 
But they wonder at the casual humiliations. The police stopped Mario Brown, who dreams of a career in theater arts, and forced him to take off his sneakers in the subway. (“It’s kind of ridiculous; I don’t see any Caucasian kids doing this.”) They forced Jamel Gordon-Mayfield, 18, the son of a police detective and a doctor, out of his parents’ S.U.V. one afternoon and demanded he take a Breathalyzer. (He passed.) Then they searched him and the car. 
Jasheem Smiley, 19, sweet and soft-spoken with a neat goatee, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his uncle. Two months ago, he says, a van drove up on the sidewalk and a man jumped out. “I’m a cop!” the man yelled. “Get down on the sidewalk!” Mr. Smiley complied but feared he was being robbed and asked to see a badge. The officer, he said, responded by putting his shoe to his face and pressing it to the pavement.

Has the American-born black male population of New York City been dropping for years, in part because of police harassment?

Sure. But, it's different because this is New York we're talking about, not some racist backwater.

April 20, 2012

Stereowiping and the Zimmerman Teletravesty

According to ABC News today, this is a picture of George Zimmerman's head taken two minutes after the shooting.  I cannot, of course, vouch for its authenticity.
It was a bad day for The Narrative. And that raises broader questions.

At George Zimmerman's bond hearing, according to the New York Times:
As part of his effort to win Mr. Zimmerman’s release on bond, Mr. O’Mara challenged the prosecution’s case, going through the state’s probable cause affidavit line by line, turning the bail hearing into what appeared to be a foretaste of the trial. 
He aggressively questioned a state investigator, Dale Gilbreath, about the accusation that Mr. Zimmerman had racially profiled Mr. Martin, and he demanded to know what evidence the state had for the statement that “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.” 
“Do you know who started the fight?” Mr. O’Mara asked Mr. Gilbreath. 
“Do I know?” Mr. Gilbreath said. “No.” 
Mr. O’Mara then asked Mr. Gilbreath if the state had any evidence to contradict Mr. Zimmerman’s statement to the police that he had been making his way back to his car when he was punched by Mr. Martin. ... 
Mr. Gilbreath responded, “No.”

On the other hand, the prosecution hinted that it was sandbagging evidence against Zimmerman, which seems plausible. 

Meanwhile ABC News posted online what it claims is a photo of the back of Zimmerman's head shortly after the shooting.

Now they tell us.

As I've pointed out for weeks, the Trayvon Martin story is mostly interesting for what it shows us about what's wrong with the media. 

As an individual story, Martin-Zimmerman is more or less the same depressing Stuff Happens as occurs hundreds of times per year across this huge country. The main difference, in this case, was that the press initially got wrong the race of the shooter and thought it had, for once, its Great White Defendant. 

Determining fault justly in each of these cases depends upon small details of who did what to whom first, details that shouldn't be assumed a priori to Fit the Narrative. For example, in the 2010 case of plainclothes law enforcement officers killing an 18-year-old violist while "debriefing" in a parking lot I've walked through hundreds of times, I initially smelled a rat because the official spokesman the morning after the shooting implied that the parking lot was a drug-trafficking hot spot. I knew that's not true, and that raised obvious questions about what else the cops were distorting. 

But, here's the thing: two years later, I still don't know what exactly happened in the last ten seconds of that young man's life. Unfortunate decisions were made, but I don't know the precise chain of events, much less how to allocate fault. At least, that case didn't disappear down the memory hole due to citizen activism (no thanks to the press, which showed minimal interest in challenging law enforcement's version of the story).

That the Martin-Zimmerman story was foretold so accurately a quarter of a century ago in the most famous book by the most famous journalist since Mencken only underlines that lesson: most of the journalists who have huffed and puffed this local small-time tragedy have personally read Bonfire of the Vanities. Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves

By any objective standard, the prestige press has shamed itself by its repeated distortions of the facts to make them fit its desires for a tale of White Privilege, Innocent Black Victimization, and Stereotyping. (Of course, by controlling the narrative, there will be virtually no accountability.) As I've mentioned before, when the press decides to go all in on a race story, they seem to pick ones that unravel into travesties at a higher than random rate. This story began to fall apart the moment George Zimmerman's picture was printed.

The central mechanism that leads the press astray is its War to Wipe Out Stereotypes, to wipe clean the collective mind, to render the blank slate as blank as possible. The fundamental problem of journalism, in the minds of the more elevated sort of journalist, is that its readers can notice patterns for themselves.

We can abbreviate this War to Wipe Out Stereotypes to stereowiping. 

There are several reasons for why the prestige press is so fundamentalist in its fervor to stereowipe. The first, of course, is money: Man Bites Dog stories are more profitable than vice-versa. Another is class: "Two-Headed Calf Is Born" stories are always popular, but they're not very exalted. The press wants to have their cake and eat it, too by pretending that they are dealing with the massively important issue of white-on-black street violence or the lacrosse players raping black hookers epidemic or whatever is the latest two-headed calf story to come down the pike. The third is ideology: learning from the news is evil. The fourth is the sheer will to power.

That raises a final question about the Zimmerman Fiasco that probably can't be definitely answered, but is worth thinking about: why now? Why the frenzy to take a run-of-the-mill bit of bad news and get it so badly wrong?

I suspect Obama's re-election run plays into it in various complicated ways.

But, I suspect something that hasn't been mentioned much is a technological change brought about by cell phone videos and Youtube. The last two or three years have seen a flood of footage posted online by amateurs of Blacks Behaving Badly (much of it, indeed, posted by those behaving badly themselves). I don't see much statistical evidence that African-Americans are behaving worse than in the past, but, wow, there sure is a huge amount of video that has gotten past the national news gatekeepers to the public. If you've read a half dozen James Q. Wilson social science books since the mid-1970s, none of this behavior will come as a big surprise, although it still is pretty fascinating to watch. But if you get your world view from The News, it's hard to know whether you should believe trusted, authoritative media sources or your lying eyes.

The Trayvesty, therefore, would be media's attempt to strike back, to put the genie back in the bottle, to get the National Conversation on Race back on its well-worn tracks where it belongs.

April 17, 2012

Is there anything left to say about racial profiling?

The George Zimmerman case, in which the special prosecutor signaled the Epitome of All Evil out for having "profiled" an unfamiliar 6'2" young black male, has, as they say, Reignited the Debate over Racial Profiling. But is there any actual debate in terms of either side grappling with the other side's arguments, rather than for one side to have the other side's proponents fired?

For example, here is what I wrote in VDARE way, way back in October 2000 after listening to a Presidential debate in which Bore and Gush Gore and Bush denounced racial profiling. As iSteve readers, but nobody else in the whole world, will recall, Bush was particularly insistent that profiling of Arab and/or Muslim airline passengers as potential terrorists -- "flying while Arab" -- would be abolished by a new Bush Administration. And so it came to pass ...

I went on to say in 2000:
This debate over racial profiling shows how utterly divorced American political discourse has become from personal reality. Every single person who lives in a diverse part of the country racially profiles every other pedestrian as he walks down the street at night. Jesse Jackson notoriously admitted that he does exactly that - and sighs with relief when he finds that the footsteps following him don't belong to a young black male.  
Indeed, the black-white ratio would be even higher if the FBI didn't insist upon counting most Hispanics as whites. This obfuscatory tactic makes it hard to break out precise crime figures for Hispanic groups. Most estimates place their rates of violence as well below those of African Americans - but well above those of whites. For example, Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times on August 10, 2000 that Hispanics are imprisoned at a rate three times higher than "Anglo" whites. 
The reason we all do this is simple: African Americans commit far more violent crimes than anybody else. For example, according to official Clinton Administration statistics, in 1998 on a per capita basis blacks were seven times more murderous than whites. And this ratio is down significantly from the early nineties when the black crack wars were blazing. [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm]
Actually, now I come to think about it, I do recall meeting one (1) man who never engaged in racial profiling. At a wedding reception in 1985, I got to talking with someone from Grant's Pass, Oregon. He was most upset by how whites (other than himself) worried more about black muggers than muggers of other races. "That's pure racism!" he insisted. 
I proposed to him a thought experiment. Say your wife's car runs out of gas in the middle of the night in a desolate neighborhood. She has no idea which way to walk to find a gas station. However, if she walks one way she has to pass by a half dozen black youths lounging on a corner. If she walks the other way, she would have to pass by a half dozen Indian immigrant youths. Which way would you prefer she went? 
"I would be completely indifferent," he replied. 
"Well, then, for your sake, I'm glad you live in Grass Pants, Oregon." 
"Where I live is irrelevant!" he responded triumphantly. "I've already been mugged three times!"

About all I can think of to add after all these years is this: Is it shamefully illiberal and politically incorrect for one sex to profile the other sex while walking down the street late at night with little security around? Is it a violation of our most sacred beliefs in gender equality that, for example, I try to make women walking late at night on an empty street feel less nervous by the presence of a strange man by my, say, crossing to the other side of the street, or by my walking on the far edge of the sidewalk out of arm's reach of them when passing them? Should I be deeply insulted that these good manners make women less nervous? Should I nurse a deep sense of rage over how these women are, subconsciously profiling me as a possible violent crime threat to themselves based solely on my accident of birth as a man?

On the other hand, on a busy, safe afternoon in broad daylight, would I resent it if a woman expected me to inconvenience myself by crossing the street? Sure. Especially if she were wearing a chador and didn't want me come close enough to her while walking down the street to cause a scandal with her in-laws that might lead to her brothers setting her on fire or whatever. 

Yeah, of course, who needs that kind of drama and those kind of people in their own neighborhood?

Now, the feminist explanation is purely Who? Whom? I possess Patriarchal Privilege so I must sacrifice for women. But my perspective is more realistic and sophisticated: that politeness suggests different behaviors for different people in different situations. Moreover, I also believe in political responses: treat rape as a serious crime, have the police hassle gangs of men who make weird sucking noises at women as they walk by, and so forth.

Of course, much of the response to allowing Women to Take Back the Night involves racial profiling and other police tactics with disparate racial impact. The liberal response is that to point out conflicting interests between liberalism's various sacralized victim groups (women, blacks, illegal immigrants, etc.) is crimethink, so we should all engage in crimestop, or protective stupidity.

April 13, 2012

The Triumph of Reverend Bacon

From the Washington Post:
Al Sharpton, power player 
By Dana Milbank, Friday, April 13, 4:12 PM 
The Rev. Al Sharpton is lord of all he surveys. 
“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said. 
Sharpton grinned. “They bash me on Fox News,” he said. “But they sponsor my conference.” 
Everybody wants to be on Sharpton’s good side these days. No fewer than five Cabinet officers and a senior White House official went to this year’s convention to kiss his ring. President Obama spoke at last year’s conference and has sought Sharpton’s advice on policy. Sharpton has a show on MSNBC five nights a week, and he doles out airtime to a procession of politicians and journalists (including me). 
Wednesday night brought the sweetest moment yet in Sharpton’s long and controversial career: the announcement that Florida authorities would charge Trayvon Martin’s shooter. Sharpton, at the request of the boy’s parents, had done more than anyone else to bring the case national attention. 
Just hours before the announcement that George Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder, Martin’s parents held a joint news conference with Sharpton — and a few hours before that, Attorney General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton for his “tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless.” 
It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player. 
“It was a huge moment, because it was the coming together of everything,” Sharpton said, with his trademark vainglory. “We had the attorney general here and one of the biggest civil rights cases of the 21st century, and having to do TV and radio shows at the same time, it was all combined for everybody to see.” ...

On Thursday, the day after his most visible career triumph, Sharpton worked the ballroom at Washington’s convention center, grinning for photographs. Opening up for his breakfast speaker, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sharpton regaled the crowd with a story of how Obama invited him and Newt Gingrich to the Oval Office and asked them to launch a five-city tour promoting education reform. When Duncan took the microphone, he requested “a huge round of applause for our leader, Reverend Al Sharpton.” 

I suspect Milbank will get the message quickly: Ixnay on the Sharptonian Triumphalism (Rev. Al 24x7 is not one of Team Obama's re-election talking points).

April 12, 2012

Trayvon's mom calls it "an accident"

On the Today Show today, there was the following exchange between interviewer Ann Curry and the mother of the late Trayvon, Sybrina Fulton:
Q.: I want to ask Tracy and Sybrina, either of you can take this question. If you were to come face to face with George Zimmerman, what do you want to tell him? What do you want to ask him? 
A.: One of the things that I still believe in: a person should apologize when they are actually remorseful for what they've done. I believe it was an accident. I believe that it just got out of control, and he couldn't turn the clock back. I would ask him, did he know that that was a minor, that that was a teenager and that he did not have a weapon? I would ask him -- that I understand that his family is hurting, but think about our family that lost our teenage son. I mean, it's just very difficult to live with day in and day out. I'm sure his parents can pick up the phone and call him, but we can't pick up the phone and call Trayvon anymore.

That seems about the most sensible thing anybody has had to say so far about this tragic mess-up. 

Not surprisingly, a few hours later, it was retracted.

2nd degree murder requires "depraved mind"

Special Prosecutor Angela B. Corey has accused of George Zimmerman of 2nd degree murder, which in the state of Florida requires evidence of a "depraved mind." While researching this legal concept on Google News, I stumbled upon this March 16th article from the Southwest Florida News-Press about another recent case in Florida where prosecutors also brought 2nd degree murder charges for killing while "evincing a depraved mind." I think this case provides some helpful context and perspective for understanding the Florida law: 
Details released today in documents by the State Attorney’s Office reveal a catalogue of hundreds of bloody items examined by investigators in the home of a Naples man accused of beheading his girlfriend last July. 
Christopher Serna, 35, is charged with second-degree murder while evincing a depraved mind. ... Bishop's head was stuck on a pole in the living room. Her nude body was found on the floor in a pool of blood in a bedroom.

I'm leaving out a number of other details from the article even more grotesque. (You'll notice that I'm too squeamish to review movies of the Saw / Hostel ilk.)

On the other hand, Zimmerman was accused by NBC News of racially profiling Trayvon Martin, so I guess that's about equal evidence of a depraved mind.  These days, if you suspect that a black youth with a what appears to be a track record of being a burglar might be a burglar is pretty much the same as sticking your girlfriend's head on a pole in the living room. By the standards of 2012, it's kind of a toss-up which is more depraved, isn't it?

April 11, 2012

Not reassuring ...

I was hoping that this special prosecutor lady in Florida would bring some reassurance that George Zimmerman isn't being railroaded due to racial hatred and hysteria. I don't know what exactly happened that night and I don't know what should happen next. So, I was a good target audience for her.

I'm a natural born chump when it comes to trusting authority figures. You don't have to do much to get me to give you the benefit of the doubt ... Yeah, I may try to sound like a hard-boiled cynic, but that's because I've been played the fool so often. My natural disposition is naive and trusting.

All Ms. Corey would have needed to do to get me on her side is start off with some boilerplate about how this is a very complex case, and there has been much misinformation in the media, but a careful review of all the evidence has led her to decide, after careful consideration, that the state must go ahead with the prosecution. Maybe hint that there are pertinent facts that aren't in the public domain. 

But, hoo boy, this speech of hers is not at all reassuring to a Martin-Zimmerman agnostic like myself. Here's the opening paragraph:
Good evening everyone. I am Angela Corey, special prosecutor for the Trayvon Martin case. Just moments ago, we spoke by phone with Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton. Three weeks ago our prosecution team promised those sweet parents we would get answers to all of their questions, no matter where our quest for truth led us. 

I was hoping for some gravitas, but instead we get a character out of a Dave Barry column on Florida politicians.

Does Constitution's double jeopardy ban protect Zimmerman?

Assume for a moment that a jury finds the state of Florida's case for second degree murder unconvincing beyond a reasonable doubt, refuses to compromise to a lower charge, and frees George Zimmerman, thus setting off riots. 

Is he then free for good, under the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy?

Of course not. As seen in the two trials of the cops who whomped Rodney King, the government gets two shots at defendants whose unsatisfactory verdicts cause black riots. 

Of course, in the Rodney King trials, the first one was a state trial and the second one a federal trial. As everybody knows, when it comes to Bill of Rights protections, state governments and federal governments don't have anything to do with each other in the slightest. That's why the states can do anything they want regarding civil rights, such as having an established state church. You see, Constitutional rights only apply to the Federal government. 

Oh, wait ... that's how it was in 1790, but that got changed a long, long time ago. Well, never mind about that ...

Okay, the real reason the LAPD cops weren't protected by the 5th Amendment's prohibition on double jeopardy is that their two trials were on utterly separate charges. The first trial was on charges of whomping Rodney King and the second trial was on charges of violating Rodney King's civil rights by whomping him: totally different!

Also, you might think that the second trial was inherently likely to be biased since the jurors were under vast pressure to convict so that Los Angeles wouldn't be burned down again by drunken mobs. How can you have a fair trial with a vengeful horde standing in the wings ready to loot, rape, and pillage if they don't like the verdict?

I think, however, you'll find that you've just answered your own question.

Seriously, the most interesting thing I saw about the second Rodney King trial, in which two officers were acquitted and two convicted, was an interview with three of the jurors soon afterwards. I believe it was in the New York Times, but I've never been able to find it online. At the very end of the interview, tossed in as aside, was the stunning revelation by the three jurors that they had only voted to convict based on the last of the 60 or so blows the videotape showed landing on King. They had spent a large amount of time studying the full videotape (not the truncated part shown on TV) in slow motion and had concluded that only the very last of all the blows could be seen beyond a reasonable doubt as unnecessary to subduing the large and energetic King.

My jaw fell about six inches reading this, but as usual with most things that interest me, this fact seems to have disappeared down the memory hole without leaving a ripple in the Narrative. So, maybe I'm just imagining it all ...

My overall opinion of the Rodney King case is what I've always told my sons when giving them "The Talk:" if you make the cops chase you at 100 mph, you get their adrenaline up. And you really don't want to do that because they will likely do very bad things to you when they finally catch you because they will be so worked up they will have a hard time controlling themselves.  It's like the end of a fox hunt in England. The hounds don't carefully eat the fox after they finally catch it, they rip it to shreds because the dogs are so overwhelmed with adrenaline. 

Moreover, Rodney himself had plenty of adrenaline flowing, too, so he put up a helluva fight. (His friend in the front seat calmly stayed in the car and was untouched.)

Something I've noticed about myself is that I'm the opposite of most people in that I tend to find deciding upon the morality of specific, idiosyncratic cases unappealing. It looks like to me that the cases that most get people worked up over who is the good guy and who is the bad guy tend to be the cases that are most arguable. I look at the Rodney King story and say, wow, that's not very good, how can we more often avoid that kind of thing from now on?

Most folks' turns of mind are judgmental, retrospective, and moralistic. My turn of mind is probabilistic, future-oriented, and technocratic. So, for example, the Rodney King case seems to have been an example of the bad consequences of a 100 mph chase. But you can't let criminals escape just by driving away fast. So, the best thing to do is to discourage criminals from, in the first place, trying to get away by driving 100 mph. How? By making sure they almost always get caught. And, indeed, it appears the LAPD actually has managed to get better at tracking fugitives with helicopters, so that they are now less likely to try it. 

Here's another technocratic idea: as we know, whomping hell out of Rodney King with batons came about in part because LAPD officers weren't allowed anymore to use the windpipe-closing chokehold that they had formerly been taught to use on out-of-control arrestees. The problem was that cops would periodically choke people to death, especially black guys who had really pissed them off. Was this because cops were seized by an irrational, uncaused hatred of black guys or because black guys tend more often to do things that really piss cops off? The first answer is the only socially acceptable one.

So, the two dozen cops trying to apprehend Rodney King saw themselves as having not much alternative to bouncing truncheons off Rodney until he decided to come quietly. (Plus, they'd been chasing him at 100 mph, so whomping him just seemed like a good idea at the time.) 

To me, it seemed like there has to be some kind of technological improvement that was better than either whomping or wading in and getting a chokehold. And, indeed, we've seen police forces equipping cops with stand-off weapons such as tasers and pepper spray.

P.S. Commenter gwern found an article from the LA Times, not the NY Times as I recalled. (I was a subscriber to the NY Times in Chicago at the time, but I was vacationing at my parents' house in LA at the time of the verdict in the second trial.)
> Jurors also played and replayed the best evidence in the case--the videotape of the beating that had been taken by an amateur and enhanced by the FBI.
>
> "We went through it frame by frame, slow-motion, fast-motion, God I don't know how many times we watched that thing," Juror No. 9 said.
>
> The tape, made by a bystander, could not answer all their questions. It was blurry at one crucial moment after King was struck and fell to the ground. Some jurors said they could see Powell using his baton to bash the fallen King in the head. But others had difficulty seeing head blows, even when the tape was viewed frame by frame.
>
> All could see a powerful blow that Powell later landed across King's chest. King was on the ground at the time, on his back.
>
> "That chest blow was unreasonable and we felt it was not to effect an arrest but just to hurt the guy," No. 9 said. "That convinced about a third of us."
>
> Powell's laughter while making a radio call to request an ambulance for King also contributed to jurors' impressions that he had acted callously. But the panel stopped short of taking a vote.

So, to the extent that this is the article I remembered, it doesn't say that it was the last blow that led to the conviction, just that there was one blow that was seen by a significant fraction of the jury as unjustified beyond a reasonable doubt. But, in any case, that's awfully different from The Narrative.

Martin-Zimmerman announcement

Before the special prosecutor's announcement this afternoon in the Martin-Zimmerman case comes out, let me reiterate what has been my position from the beginning:

- Sad, messed up incidents like this happen all the time in a huge country like this. For example, I spent a lot of time in 2010 playing amateur snoop in a local incident where a bunch of law enforcement agents in plain clothes "debriefing" out behind a bar started a brawl in the parking lot and would up killing an 18-year-old violist who was either trying to kill them with his car (the shooters' story), rescue the man the out-of-uniform cops had attacked, flee, or something else. 

- It's a good thing for citizens to take an interest in unresolved shootings, such as this one in Florida or the one in my neighborhood, to prevent abuses. By the standards of my local shooting, where even the names of the shooters were not released for months, the Martin-Zimmerman case is practically a model of respectable police work. The big difference is that Zimmerman was not a real cop, so the cops were relatively even-handed. The decision not to arrest him came down not from the cops but from high up. 

- As far as I can tell, the facts are about equally ambiguous in the Florida case as in my local case. To get a better understanding of either case, I'd need a picture of exactly where each individual was at each moment. That's not impossible to put together, but I haven't done it. Hopefully, the special prosecutor in Florida has done that, although, obviously, the political pressures on her are immense. (Here's the Wagist website, which seems to have tried harder than any other media source to bring out the facts of the case.)

- Nor have I made a study of the applicable law. I'd like to know what actually happened first. 

- The initial decision not to arrest Zimmerman seems reasonable. Didn't we learn a lesson from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn fiasco? This case seems more like the Conrad Murray case, in which the doctor who gave Michael Jackson his fatal injection was not arrested for many months as the prosecutors took the time to figure out what they were doing. Presumably, Zimmerman was judged not to be a flight risk, since nobody assumed at the time that the national media would try to rouse up a lynch mob against him. In my local shooting, in contrast, the law enforcement agencies investigated themselves, engaged in what sounds like witness intimidation, and, finally, after about a year, released a report completely exonerating themselves. Only at that point did the mother of the dead violist file a large civil suit (a course of action which my wife and I advised her to pursue when we accidentally met her in the parking lot 168 hours after her son's death). I look forward to someday learning the resolution of that case, but I don't have much of an opinion on what it should be. I'm just glad it wasn't completely swept under the rug. (Let me point out that I doubt if there was ever the slightest possibility that either shooter would be arrested in the local case. The only plausible outcomes other than the whole event disappearing down the memory hole would be some kind of discipline or reassignment to a desk job for the law enforcement agents and some kind of civil suit payout.)

- Zimmerman, himself, seem like a Paul Blart, Mall Cop type, one of these pro-social pro-authoritarian youngish people I've noticed a lot of in this century. He seems way too trusting of the fairness of American institutions to wage an effective legal-political-media campaign for himself. Wagist has an account of how Zimmerman has done a terrible job of lawyering up, apparently trusting too much for his own good in the criminal justice system that he has always wanted to be part of, but never managed to join.

- Of course, that raises the question of just how much good lawyering up would have done Zimmerman in the media-political battle. For the Martin parents, there was an obvious, socially acceptable game plan: hire a black civil suit attorney who is friends with Al Sharpton, which will bring Jesse Jackson sniffing around, and then, hopefully, bring in Eric Holder, and if you roll the dice right, the big chalupa of black spokesmen, Barack Obama. All the while, the prestige press will act exactly like in Bonfire of the Vanities, to play your son up as Henry Lamb. But if you are somebody with a German, possibly Jewish, surname whose mom was from Latin America, who, exactly, is going to be your ethnic champion? Right: Geraldo Rivera! Fat lot of good that does you ...

- The big story, here, of course is not what, precisely, happened that sad night in Florida, but what it teaches us about the media and the media-indoctrinated public in the 21st Century. In contrast, nobody in the press took more than a grudging interest in the local shooting of the violist. One reason is that the victim was white, so identity politics narratives couldn't be brought into play. In contrast, the Florida case was played along the lines of 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities. (I wonder what Tom Wolfe thinks? Does it annoy him that nobody ever learns from his famous book? I suspect, though, it mostly warms the cockles of his quintuple-bypassed heart that his novel remains such an excellent guide 21st Century race hysteria).

- In Florida, the press's behavior has been both stupid and shameful even by the standards of a Tom Wolfe novel. Let me point out something that hasn't been brought up much. There has been very little interviewing of pro-Zimmerman witnesses by the press. You mostly hear their accounts through leaks from the investigation. Why are they clinging to anonymity? Because most of them are terrified of being murdered by some media-inspired hothead from Team Trayvon. Now, obviously, that makes it hard for the press to interview them. But, shouldn't the media tell us that