July 16, 2013

Obama confesses to racially profiling black youths

Richard Cohen writes in his Washington Post column:
In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem. It does no one any good to merely cite the number of stop-and-frisks involving black males without citing the murder statistics as well. Citing the former and not the latter is an Orwellian exercise in political correctness. It not only censors half of the story but also suggests that racism is the sole reason for the policy. This mindlessness, like racism itself, is repugnant. 
Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn’t, there’s a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut. 
At one time, I thought Barack Obama would bring the problem into the open and remove the racist stigma. Instead, he perpetuated it. In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, he cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.” 
How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear?

Indeed, as I pointed out in March 2008, following the famous Philadelphia "race speech," the Presidential frontrunner's bestseller Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance includes a passage in a Chicago chapter in which he obliquely confesses to racially profiling black youths:
"That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building, carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I've learned to ignore such disturbances -- where else do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over ...
"'Listen, people, are trying to sleep around here. Why don't y'all take it someplace else?' 
"The four boys inside say nothing, don't even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night.... One of them could be Kyle. One of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie."

Kyle, Roy, and Johnnie are all black male characters in Dreams from My Father -- in other words, as Obama's grandfather might say, the fellas in the car are black. Obama then proceeds to make stereotypical assumptions about young black males' violent tendencies:
"I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can't take me out, the four of them certainly can."

The chapter ends:
"The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment knowing that I've been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all."

Shocking, isn't it?

Let me quote one sentence to show you why so few people ever finish reading Dreams from My Father:
"As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe."

I think this means that the Ivy Leaguer has just now realized he's on the side of the cops, not on the side of the crooks.

But, of course, unlike his grandmother, Obama is allowed to racially profile blacks.

Because he's black.

Have you noticed how 21st Century ethics are just becoming simpler and simpler?

Zimmerman, Martin, Yglesias, and false stereotypes

By the way, regarding Matthew Yglesias's admission today in Slate that the two criminals who knocked him down with punches as he walked about a mile north of the Supreme Court building were black ... I've often been accused of racial profiling and racist bigotry (which, in today's dominant narrative are assumed to be identical) for assuming that Yglesias's assailants were black. After all, Yglesias's original account of the apparently random attack didn't mention the race of the criminals.

My reasoning was two-fold:

- that nonblack criminals generally don't hang around in black neighborhoods to commit random street crimes like beating up strolling white philosophy majors

- and Yglesias would have said so if they weren't black. 

(Moreover, several months after the assault, he mentioned on his former blog that they were black, confirming my initial surmise, but that blog became hard to search after he moved to Slate.)

Obviously, I was right all along from day one. 

But being right is racist.

That's one of the causes of the current vast eruption of liberal white rage -- out of all the screwed up stuff that happens on the streets of America every year, the mainstream media picked this incident out to put all their chips on in their condemnation of profiling.

But then, it turned out that Zimmerman's suspicions were highly accurate. As one commenter says, Trayvon Martin turned out to be a petty criminal with violent tendencies and an apparent history of burglary.

Now, in defense of the late Trayvon Martin, let me point out that a lot of guys with Martin's bad but not horrible record at age 17 pull out of this downward spiral before, say, they start engaging in drive-by shootings. A lot of 17-year-olds are surly, greedy, and stupid. More than a few of them wise up as they get older, as they discover that their rap music isn't really good advice on how to live. Martin was reasonably well-poised to wake up to the trajectory he was upon: he didn't come from the bottom of society, but from a pretty average African-American family. For example, he had a father who was still involved enough in his life to haul him out of Miami to get him away from his low-life friends during his school suspension.

But, all this just makes the story more tragic.

The Martin-Zimmerman story should be an occasion for national reflection about the perniciousness of today's dominant stereotypes, specifically:

-- White liberals' favorite stereotypes about blacks as the eternal victims of the violent white racists hiding under every bed

-- Black males' favorite stereotypes about themselves as bulletproof tough guys who are morally justified by their victimhood in responding to being dissed with violence.

These two stereotypes have the peculiar disadvantage of being both not true individually (unlike the majority of less socially reputable stereotypes) and interacting with horrible consequences. White liberal hatred for white conservatives and black love of gangsta rap interact very, very badly.

In D.C., blacks imprisoned 56X whites

Of relevance to the next post, back in 2001, I wrote for UPI a re-analysis of data in a new report on imprisonment rates in 1997:
The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (www.NCIAnet.org), a liberal think tank advocating less imprisonment, has released a new report, "Masking the Divide," that argues that, "The overuse of incarceration is causing severe and potentially irreparable divisions in society."  
... Nationwide in 1997, non-Hispanic whites comprised 34.8 percent of the prisoners, African-Americans 46.9 percent, Hispanics 16.0 percent, and others 2.3 percent. Overall, the study found that 2.6 percent of the African-American adult population was imprisoned in 1997, compared to 1.1 percent of Hispanics, and 0.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The report does not break out imprisonment rates for Asian-Americans, but most experts believe Asians tend to be imprisoned the least of all major groups. ....
Interestingly, crunching the data in the report's appendices sheds light on a number of fascinating topics that did not particularly interest the report's sponsors.  
For example, "The Sopranos" television drama has revived New Jersey's reputation as a hotbed of white criminals. Yet, to the extent that a tendency to be law-abiding can be estimated from imprisonment rates, that much-maligned state appears in fact to have the second most law-abiding non-Hispanic white people in America. According to a new report that breaks down imprisonment rates by race and ethnicity, white New Jerseyites trail only the notoriously nice white folks of Minnesota in staying out of prison. 
Some findings confirm common sense -- for example, whites in fast-living Nevada are more than twice as likely to be in prison as whites in the mostly Mormon neighboring state of Utah. 
In contrast, some of the data undermine common myths. Besides polishing the tarnished image of New Jersey's whites, the numbers also reveal the surprising news that politically liberal states, not conservative ones, are likely to have the largest gap between the imprisonment rates of blacks and whites. 
These ratios varied significantly from state to state. While one might expect that the highest proportion of black-to-white imprisonment would occur in politically conservative states, the opposite was true. It was in Democratic-leaning states where blacks had the highest rates of imprisonment relative to whites. 
For instance, the racial gap in the highly liberal, black-dominated District of Columbia was found to be off the charts. In D.C., a black person is 56 times more likely than a white person to be in prison. The next-largest racial disparities were found in liberal mainstays Minnesota (a 31-times higher rate of blacks being in prison) and Wisconsin (22 times higher), followed by New Jersey, Iowa, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Illinois. All of these states voted for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. 
Of course, it's not uncommon for regions that are highly liberal in terms of national politics to vote for conservatives in local elections. For example, the Democratic Party's liberal bastions of New York City and Los Angeles each elected law-and-order Republican mayors in the mid-1990s, following the crack epidemic crime wave that began in the late 1980s. 
The smallest difference in the black-to-white imprisonment rate was found in liberal Hawaii (only 2.9 to 1). This may have something to do with many members of Hawaii's small African-American community being active or retired members of the U.S. armed forces. 
After Hawaii, though, the next 10 states closest to black-white racial equality in imprisonment rates were all Southern or Western states that voted for George W. Bush. For example, highly conservative Mississippi and South Carolina each imprisoned blacks only six times more often than whites per person, compared to the national average of nine times more often. 
Eighteen of the 20 states with the least disparity between blacks and whites voted for Bush in 2000. These below-average racial ratios are driven in part by the tendency of whites in Republican states to get themselves thrown in prison more often than whites in Democratic states. The highest white imprisonment rates tend to be in old frontier states of the Wild West. 
The most often locked up whites are in Alaska, followed by Oklahoma, Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

Here's La Griffe du Lion in 2006 offering another elegantly reductionist way to explain this pattern.

Matthew Yglesias on his being randomly beaten by blacks

Matthew Yglesias writes in Slate:
Bayes' Theorem For Dummies—Dummies Like Richard Cohen 
Trolling the universe this morning, Richard Cohen wrote a column arguing that it wasn't racist of George Zimmerman to suspect Trayvon Martin of being a criminal because everyone knows that a disproportionate share of violent crimes are in fact committed by young black men. 
I think what Cohen really means to be arguing isn't so much that neither he nor Zimmerman are racists, but that racism is the correct social and political posture. That white people have good reason to fear black men, and that therefore all black men should be put in a subordinate position. But as a logical argument, Cohen here is falling afoul of very poor statistical inference. For example, the vast majority of newspaper op-ed columnists in America are white men just like Richard Cohen. But that doesn't mean it's reasonable to see a white man walking down the street and assume he's a newspaper columnist. If you look specifically at Jewish men, you'll see the stereotype that we are disproportionately represented in the field of political commentary is absolutely accurate. And yet it is still not reasonable to assume that some randomly selected Jewish man is a professional political writer. Even right here on the mean streets of Washington, DC—a city that's legendary for its high rate of punditry—a clear majority of Jewish men are not pundits. It's just a very rare occupation. 

Here are the demographic backgrounds of the a list of the top 50 pundits in America in 2009, a list compiled by The Atlantic.
By the same token, the fact that young black men are disproportionately likely to be involved in violent crime in no way licenses the inference that you should stop random black men on the street and begin treating them like criminals. 
For example, since moving to a majority black city ten years ago it is the case that 100 percent of the people who randomly assaulted me on the street were African-American. And yet that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis—even the young ones, even the ones wearing hoodies—aren't committing any violent crimes.

Back on May 15, 2011, I wrote: "Was the beating of Matthew Yglesias a hate crime?"
If I were to start questioning every single black male teenager I come across as a criminal suspect, I would very much be engaged in unreasonable behavior. Now everyone makes mistakes, but the fact that Richard Cohen has been making this mistake in print for over 25 years leads me to think he just doesn't care. He knows most young black men aren't dangerous criminals, but he nonetheless thinks they should all be held under a cloud of preemptive suspicion anyway.

Sportswriter Damon Runyon (source of the great musical "Guys and Dolls") once amended the Book of Ecclesiastes:
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets."

As Neil Diamond warned: They're coming to America

From the Washington Post:
In Mexico, rails are risky crossing for a new wave of Central American migrants

July 15, 2013

Something intelligent and interesting in the news

From the NYT:
Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity 
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA 
A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science. 

For example, I have okay two-dimensional reasoning abilities, but I am terrible at three-dimensions. When I was a teen, I was obsessed with golf course architecture and I sketched lots of clever golf holes in 2-D maps (like looking out an airplane window). But, skill at golf course architecture is largely 3-D imagination.
The study looked at the professional success of people who, as 13-year-olds, had taken both the SAT, because they had been flagged as particularly gifted, as well as the Differential Aptitude Test. That exam measures spatial relations skills, the ability to visualize and manipulate two-and three-dimensional objects. While math and verbal scores proved to be an accurate predictor of the students’ later accomplishments, adding spatial ability scores significantly increased the accuracy. 
The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents. 
“Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don’t capture with traditional measures used in educational selection,” said David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. “We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.” 
Following up on a study from the 1970s, Dr. Lubinski and his colleagues tracked the professional progress of 563 students who had scored in the top 0.5 percent on the SAT 30 years ago, when they were 13. At the time, the students had also taken the Differential Aptitude Test. 
Years later, the children who had scored exceptionally high on the SAT also tended to be high achievers — not surprisingly — measured in terms of the scholarly papers they had published and patents that they held. But there was an even higher correlation with success among those who had also scored highest on the spatial relations test, which the researchers judged to be a critical diagnostic for achievement in technology, engineering, math and science. 
Cognitive psychologists have long suspected that spatial ability — sometimes referred to as the “orphan ability” for its tendency to go undetected — is key to success in technical fields.

3-d skills appear to be relative less related to the general factor of intelligence. It's perhaps like how with a personal computer the 3-d processor video card sometimes comes on a separate chip from the CPU.
Earlier studies have shown that students with a high spatial aptitude are not only overrepresented in those fields, but may receive little guidance in high school and underachieve as a result. ...

Because 3-d skills are a little less correlated with g, which correlates pretty well with school achievement, 3-d geniuses on average may be less socialized by school and more eccentric, relatively speaking.
The correlation has “been suspected, but not as well researched” as the predictive power of math skills, said David Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, who was not involved in the study, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The new research is significant, he said, for showing that “high levels of performance in STEM fields” — science, technology, engineering and math — “are not simply related to math abilities.” 
Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult, Dr. Geary added, but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school. ...
It is also a competence more associated with men than women. In the current study, boys greatly outnumbered girls, 393 to 170, reflecting the original scores of the students in the ’70s. But the study found no difference in the levels of adult achievement, said Dr. Lubinski, though the women were more likely than the men to work in medicine and the social sciences.

Presumably adding more 3-d questions to college admissions tests would disparately impact blacks and benefit Asians and whites. I don't know what the impact would be on Hispanics.

Jeantel: Trayvon not racist, just homophobic

From a Mediaite summary of a CNN Piers Morgan interview with Rachel Jeantel:
In the second part of his interview with Jeantel, Morgan turned to the “creepy-ass cracker” comment she made and the major impact it had on the tenor of the case. She explained that the term is actually spelled “cracka” and defined it as “people who are acting like they’re police.” She said that if Zimmerman had calmly approached Martin and introduced himself, her friend would have politely said what he was doing there and nothing more would have happened. ... 
Jeantel insisted that Martin was “creeped out” and believed Zimmerman was following him, even worrying that he might be a “rapist.” She asked, “For every boy or every man who’s not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creeped out?”

Consider two slightly different phrases:

"Creepy ass cracka" v. "Crazy ass cracka"

The latter implies a perception of aggressiveness, recklessness, or hostility, while the former implies homosexuality.

I suggested this general possibility back in March 2012:
Let's try thinking like Tom Wolfe: for maximum discomfiture. Here's a possibility that might come out at, say, a trial of George Zimmerman if Crump dares put the girlfriend on the stand and expose her to cross-examination: It's hardly implausible that Trayvon Martin might have worried that this strange man was following him in the dark for homoerotic purposes, and he might have mentioned that concern to his girlfriend over the phone.  
Of course, if he did, he probably wouldn't have used the term "homoerotic purposes."  
What if Trayvon used the (heavens) "3-letter F-word" to describe Zimmerman? What if he said to her, "I'm going to punch that f__ because I hate f___?" 
Chaos in the courtroom ... 
Of course, then we would be treated to learned disquisitions on how gaybashing is actually okay as long as the bashee isn't actually gay; or that what Trayvon actually meant was that he wanted to punch that pedophile and pedophile-bashing is A-OK.

Now, it didn't work out exactly that way in court, but that appears to have been more or less the situation on that sad, SNAFU night in the condo complex.

Paul Blart v. C-Murder.

By the way, how would Trayvon have felt about all the media depictions of him as a child? Pretty upset, I imagine.

William Saletan speaks sense

William Saletan writes in Slate:
The problem at the core of this case wasn’t race or guns. The problem was assumption, misperception, and overreaction. And that cycle hasn’t ended with the verdict. It has escalated. 
I almost joined the frenzy. Yesterday I was going to write that Zimmerman pursued Martin against police instructions and illustrated the perils of racial profiling. But I hadn’t followed the case in detail. So I sat down and watched the closing arguments: nearly seven hours of video in which the prosecution and defense went point by point through the evidence as it had been hashed out at the trial. Based on what I learned from the videos, I did some further reading. 
It turned out I had been wrong about many things. The initial portrait of Zimmerman as a racist wasn’t just exaggerated. It was completely unsubstantiated. It’s a case study in how the same kind of bias that causes racism can cause unwarranted allegations of racism. Some of the people Zimmerman had reported as suspicious were black men, so he was a racist. Members of his family seemed racist, so he was a racist. Everybody knew he was a racist, so his recorded words were misheard as racial slurs, proving again that he was a racist. 
The 911 dispatcher who spoke to Zimmerman on the fatal night didn’t tell him to stay in his car. Zimmerman said he was following a suspicious person, and the dispatcher told him, "We don't need you do to that." Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda conceded in his closing argument that these words were ambiguous. De la Rionda also acknowledged, based on witness and forensic evidence that both men “were scraping and rolling and fighting out there.” He pointed out that the wounds, blood evidence, and DNA didn’t match Zimmerman’s story of being thoroughly restrained and pummeled throughout the fight. But the evidence didn’t fit the portrait of Martin as a sweet-tempered child, either. And the notion that Zimmerman hunted down Martin to accost him made no sense. Zimmerman knew the police were on the way. They arrived only a minute or so after the gunshot. The fight happened in a public area surrounded by townhouses at close range. It was hardly the place or time to start shooting. 
That doesn’t make Zimmerman a hero. It just makes him a reckless fool instead of a murderer.

The holy war against pattern recognition

Another op-ed in the New York Times on the crime of Noticing:
July 15, 2013 
The Truth About Trayvon 
By EKOW N. YANKAH 
... Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details. 
The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored. 
Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager. 
But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination. 
Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation. 
Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter. ...
We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative. 
Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach. 
There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight. 
Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again. 
What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him. 
I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.

NYT/NBC: "Zimmerman Prosecutors Duck the Race Issue"

An op-ed in the NYT by Gloria Allred's daughter elaborates the emerging spin I remarked upon earlier: George Zimmerman wasn't convicted of murder because the judge only allowed the prosecution to accuse him in the opening statement of "profiling," not the high crime of "racial profiling." 

The interesting question now is not the details of this run-of-the-mill exurban tragedy, but why so many people these days find this kind of condemnation of pattern recognition so persuasive.

Being right is racist.
Zimmerman Prosecutors Duck the Race Issue 
By LISA BLOOM 
Driving to Target on his Sunday grocery run on Feb. 26, 2012, George Zimmerman looked out the window of his S.U.V. and saw a stranger who he instantly concluded was “a real suspicious guy.” 
“Punks,” he said, adding an expletive. “They always get away.” There were unsolved burglaries in his community, and as he said in a call he made to the police, “this guy looks like he’s up to no good.” Mr. Zimmerman’s recorded profanity-laden police call became a focal point at his murder trial, but not because of its obvious significance: that Mr. Zimmerman jumped to insulting conclusions about Trayvon Martin primarily on account of Mr. Martin’s race. 
What began as a local crime story gained national attention after African-American journalists and civil rights leaders immediately grasped the racial implications of the confrontation between Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Martin, and ended with Mr. Martin’s death. Mr. Zimmerman’s acquittal on Saturday sparked nationwide civil demonstrations against racial profiling and hate crimes. But in the courtroom, race was a topic carefully controlled by the judge and handled awkwardly by the prosecution team. 
In an odd ruling, Judge Debra Nelson decided that the word “profiling” — but not the phrase “racial profiling” — could be used in opening statements. But what other kind of profiling could possibly have been involved here? Could jurors — and the public — seriously imagine that Mr. Zimmerman considered Mr. Martin a criminal solely because he was walking slowly in the rain as he chatted on the phone? Lawyers were free to use the profanity involved in the case over and over again, but initially the “r” word was off limits. 
Shortly thereafter, it seemed the prosecution was building its case, at least partly, around Mr. Zimmerman’s obvious racial profiling, which was the run-up for the altercation and shooting that followed. The state fought hard outside the jury’s presence to enter into evidence police calls Mr. Zimmerman had made in the months before the shooting; 100 percent of the calls about suspicious persons involved African-Americans. 

Think about that for awhile.
Though the judge ultimately granted the state’s request and admitted tapes of these calls into evidence, the prosecution did not use the evidence and remained strangely silent on Mr. Zimmerman’s pattern of racial profiling during its two closing arguments. ...
To those who followed the trial closely, as I did, it seemed a decision was made midstream to abandon the strategy that included calling attention to Mr. Zimmerman’s pattern. Prosecutors apparently trusted jurors to dispassionately evaluate photos of a dead teenager’s remains and of the bullet hole through his heart as well as photos of blood dripping from George Zimmerman’s head. But the state was too squeamish to put the touchy issue of race squarely before the six-woman jury. ...
The most discordant note in the entire three-week trial came in the prosecution’s rebuttal closing argument, its last chance to drive its points home with the jury. John Guy, a prosecutor in the case, insisted forcefully that the case was not about race; relying on a strategy reminiscent of John Grisham’s book “A Time to Kill,” Mr. Guy asked the jury to consider a role reversal: would Martin be convicted if he had followed and then shot George Zimmerman? After this obvious, if implicit, reference to race, Mr. Guy finished up by reminding the jury that the case was not about race. 
Huh? 
Mr. Martin’s family, too, wavered on the subject. Mr. Guy’s remarks mirrored those made by Benjamin Crump, the Martin family lawyer, who said in September that the case “shouldn’t be about race,” though if the roles of the two young men were reversed, an arrest would have occurred quickly. (Mr. Crump had concluded with “that’s why race is involved in this case.”) 
And after Mr. Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel testified to the only racial epithet uttered in the courtroom — Mr. Martin’s characterization of Mr. Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” — another family attorney stood alongside Mr. Martin’s parents at a news conference and said, “To this family, race is not a part of this process. Anybody who tries to inject race into it is wrong.”

I like that part about Trayvon Martin's expression of racial and sexual orientation animus being "the only racial epithet uttered in the courtroom." Obviously, the prosecution was remiss in not simply making up some some racial epithets and wrongly attributing them to the defendant.
Lisa Bloom is a lawyer, author and NBC News legal analyst.

Unlike the wimpy prosecutors, you won't catch NBC News failing to edit the tape to make Zimmerman look racist.

Slate commends profiling (of males)

From Slate:
Massachusetts’ Simple Solution for Preventing Domestic Homicide 
By Amanda Marcotte | Posted Monday, July 15, 2013
In theory, domestic homicide should be easy to prevent, since men who kill their wives or girlfriends (85 percent of victims are female) generally give us lots of warning by beating, stalking, and even raping their victims, usually for years before they finally kill. ... 
Rachel Louise Snyder, writing for the New Yorker, details one solution that's being implemented in Massachusetts. Domestic violence social workers there developed a high-risk assessment team that, using statistical methods and employing the court system in creative ways, has figured out a way to target the men most likely to kill and take special care to make it that much harder for them to do so. ... 
How do they do it? They take the details of each reported case of abuse, looking at risk factors such as stalking and chronic unemployment, and rate each abuser on a point system for how violent and controlling he is. Men who are rated high are then subject to heightened risk monitoring, and their victims are given extra resources to stay safe. If the abusers start acting up, they can have their child visitations terminated or be made to wear GPS trackers. They may even be put in jail or in a psychiatric hospital for violating probation or restraining orders—courtesy of a preventive detention program that was mostly used to prevent gang or drug violence in the past, a program that gives the government leeway to restrain you even if your behavior otherwise falls short of the threshold to charge you with further crimes. 

Moving the goalposts

A commenter writes:
Has anyone outside the Steve-o-Sphere noticed that, in typical fashion, the grounds for outrage keep subtly shifting? 
Month 1- "A crazed white vigilante murdered an innocent, angelic boy!". Then it turned out that Martin wasn't so innocent or angelic, and was for all practical purposes a man, not a boy. Zimmerman was also revealed to be not so crazed and not so white. So that angle was dropped. 
Later- "It's those awful 'Stand your Ground' laws, that's what's wrong!". But the defense didn't even need to mention that law at trial, because was totally irrelevant to the case. That line was abandoned pretty swiftly by the smart media players, though some stragglers still haven't wrapped their heads around it yet. 
During the trial (after it became clear that there was no way to prove murder)- "Zimmerman recklessly provoked a confrontation, ignoring police instructions!". But police testified that he cooperated fully and followed all their instructions, and the jury subsequently agreed. 
After the acquittal- "Anyone who is going to carry a deadly weapon should be more careful, and more knowledgeable!" i.e., GZ was a little bit of a bumbling incompetent, which is more-or-less true. 
This kind of "outrage distillation" is common when the press push a bull***t narrative and then discover that they were mostly wrong. The can't continue lying, but they can focus the same amount of anger and opprobrium onto smaller and smaller sins.

July 14, 2013

Obama restarts hate crime investigation of Zimmerman

From the NYT:
Justice Department to Restart Hate Crime Investigation in Trayvon Martin’s Death 
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Sunday that it was restarting its investigation into the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin to consider possible separate hate crime charges against George Zimmerman.

The federal inquiry, which was started shortly after the shooting last year but had been delayed while the state criminal trial in Florida was under way, was being restarted after civil rights leaders called on the Justice Department to re-examine the case. The leaders said Sunday that they remained convinced that the shooting had a racial element. Mr. Martin, 17, was black. 
“There is a pattern of George Zimmerman making dozens of calls to 911 over several years, frequently about young men of color,” Benjamin T. Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in an interview on Sunday. . ... 

Zimmerman is guilty of disparate impact in noticing things. Noticing things is a hate crime.
But the Obama administration’s Justice Department has been cautious in its use of the expanded law. In 2010, for example, it turned down calls by civil rights leaders to file charges in New York City in the 2006 death of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who was fatally shot by police officers outside a Queens club just hours before he was to be married.

Yeah, but that's merely the little old NYPD. The Zimmerman Menace is the main threat to civil rights.

Earlier, Newsday reported:
The U.S. Justice Department, which opened an investigation into the George Zimmerman case Sunday, could charge him with federal civil rights violations, local attorneys said. 
While a Florida jury found neighorbood watch volunteer Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder, a federal probe would examine whether he violated Martin's civil rights when he fatally shot him Feb. 16, 2012, in Sanford, Fla. 
To prove such violations requires a different standard of evidence and law than what was used in the state case against Zimmerman. So a federal prosecution would not be double jeopardy, they said.
Robert Valli, a Garden City-based civil rights attorney said if a probe proceeds, the local federal prosecutor would likely seek a grand jury indictment on charges that Zimmerman violated the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act. 
Valli said potential charges would be the government's "version of a homicide charge, coupled with the intention to do so because of the person's membership in a protected class."

Constitutionally speaking, wouldn't it just be simpler for Obama to order a drone strike on Zimmerman's condo?

Peter Schaeffer: The meaning of "amnesty"

Peter Schaeffer writes on the Senate immigration bill:
Paul Ryan says it’s not Amnesty. Believe it or not, he is actually correct. It's far better than Amnesty. 
In a tax Amnesty, you still have to pay your back taxes. In an Amnesty for property crimes, you still have to return the stolen property. 
If this was just an Amnesty for illegals, they would have to pay a fine and go back to their own countries without legal sanction for having violated our immigration laws. 
This is far better than Amnesty. More like winning the lottery and getting a pot of gold. 
The advocates claim that it's not Amnesty because of the trifling fines ($500). Guess what? The 1986 Amnesty had fines too and no one lied about it not being Amnesty. Indeed, the authors admit that the 1986 law was Amnesty. This time, only the honesty to use the 'A' word is missing.

Breaking News in NYT: Emmett Till murdered

In the top story at NYTimes.com at the moment, Adam Nagourney reports:
Emmett Till, 14, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, reportedly after flirting with a white woman.

Obama: "a jury has spoken"

The President has released a statement appealing for calm, etc. 

The funniest line was, "But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken."

You've got to give Obama credit for being gifted at these tiny lawyerly passive-aggressive verbal digs: "a jury has spoken," not "the jury has spoken." 

This choice of indefinite over definite article doesn't commit the Obama Administration to any action, but holds out hope for Obama's supporters that Obama will have his feds subject Zimmerman to double jeopardy in front of another jury. (The Justice Department just announced they are mulling trying Zimmerman over again.) Plus, it quietly questions the legitimacy of a jury with no blacks on it, suggests that a different jury would have found differently, and so forth. 

Of course, 99% won't notice the difference, but Obama probably feels pretty satisfied about his wording right now.

Well played, Mr. President!

Top headline at NYTimes.com: "Talk of Race, Barred in Trial"

This seems to be the New York Times' designated complaint:
Talk of Race, Barred in Trial, Drives Verdict Reactions

Similarly, a week ago the NYT tried to alert its true believers to the likelihood of an acquittal with the headline:
Zimmerman Case Has Race as a Backdrop, but You Won’t Hear It in Court 

That was a doozy of a news article, as you'll recall, reading like a parody I had written.

In other words, the jurors would have come up with the appropriate verdict if only the judge hadn't restricted the trial to mostly just the evidence. How can a jury be allowed to come up with a verdict based on facts without us explaining to them The Narrative?

Local News

From the Chicago Tribune on Sunday morning, police beat reporter Peter Nickeas' standard summary:
At least 8 wounded in overnight shootings 
Shootings left at least 8 people on the South and West sides wounded overnight, according to police. 
Three of the shootings happened between 4:50 and 5:40 a.m., police said. 
A 60-year-old woman was shot in the chin about 4:50 a.m. in 4500 block of South Wolcott Avenue in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. Police said she wasn't the target and are investigating whether she was stuck in crossfire between two shooters. She was taken to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where her condition has stabilized.

And so forth and so on.

These are just the usual dog-bites-man (or thug-with-poor-marksmanship-wings-grandmother) stories, which help explain both the pit-bull like obsessiveness with which the national media glomped on to their Trayvon-Zimmerman man-bites-dog story, and also why it predictably unraveled.