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Hike through Norway’s future library, currently in the form of baby trees
After 100 Years, This Entire Forest Will Be Turned into Mystery Manuscripts
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“We Didn’t Have to Suffer Like That”: Inside a Texas Prison During Hurricane Harvey
In late August, Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the southeast Texas coast bringing with it extreme winds and dropping more than four feet of rain across Houston and the surrounding area. The catastrophic flooding caused thousands to evacuate, including many state prisoners who were moved to drier and safer facilities elsewhere in the state. But the 3,000 men inside Stiles Unit, a Texas state prison near Beaumont, were forced to ride out the storm. Conditions quickly became unbearable.
“Us inmates knew we were in trouble when breakfast consisting of 2 boiled eggs and a piece of cornbread were delivered to our cells,” David Hartvikson wrote. “With no way of flushing our toilets because of no water the feces and urine built up and the smell was horrible in the cell.”
Hartvikson is 55 years old and serving a 20-year sentence at Stiles for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Several weeks after the storm, he wrote Sloan Rucker, a Texas woman who advocates for better treatment of prison inmates and is his pen pal. Mother Jones obtained the letter and confirmed his identity by checking the Texas Department of Criminal Justice offender database and matching it with a grievance complaint Hartvikson filed to TDCJ in October. Hartvikson describes increasingly desperate circumstances in the prison with inadequate food, overflowing toilets, and a lack of drinkable water.
“We did not have to suffer like that,” he wrote.
Legal experts agree. “The courts have made clear that prisoners are constitutionally entitled to be housed in conditions of reasonable safety,” David Fathi, the director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project says. The conditions Hartvikson allege are anything but reasonable or safe.
The Category 4 storm made landfall in Rockport, a small town on the Gulf Coast on Friday, August 25. The next day, the storm slammed into Beaumont, a city of 118,000 located 85 miles east of Houston. Four prisons are there—three of them state facilities and one federal—and the town was hit hard by Harvey. Its water pressure system failed leaving residents with little access clean water. They were told to boil their water starting on September 1. The notice was lifted eight days later.
After the storm, the Houston Chronicle reported that Clifton Cloer, another inmate at the Stiles Unit, told his wife that the facility had flooded and that the water was up to his knees. Conditions at the prison began to deteriorate in the pre-dawn hours on Monday, August 28. “The water at the prison was shut off without notice,” Hartvikson writes in his four-page letter, “and the ceilings in our cells started leaking, causing dirty water to pool up on our floors.”
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice denied those reports, saying that the prison had been inspected, and there was no water in any of the state facilities. “I spoke with offenders and given the situation they were in good spirits,” TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark said. But Hartvikson’s allegations echo Cloer’s.
Unable to flush the toilets, the smell quickly became unbearable, he notes, “They left us locked in an 8 by 12 foot cell for several days with feces and urine piling up in our toilets.” Hartvikson alleges that the prison did not provide enough portable toilets; he says only two were provided for his cell block of 450 people.
“Why weren’t arrangements for food, water, toilets, and things of that nature made for the inmates in the days leading up to the storm?” Hartvikson writes.
Supplies dwindled throughout the week. Hartvikson says he and his fellow inmates were only given four bottles of water, or 48 ounces of water, between August 27 and August 31—the Mayo Clinic suggests that men require at least 124 ounces of fluid a day. Hartvikson also says their meals shrunk drastically. “Some of are [sic] meals during that time were just 1 peanut butter sandwich.”
Jason Clark, a spokesman for TDCJ, refutes the claims that conditions were poor during Hurricane Harvey. “I visited all 3 state facilities in Beaumont during the storm and the allegations are not accurate,” he said in a statement to Mother Jones. Clark says that in addition to thousands of gallon water tankers on-site, 270,000 water bottles were delivered and “offenders had access to food, water, and toilets.”
By Tuesday, August 29, nearly 6,000 inmates from five other Texas state prisons had been evacuated, including three prisons that had been evacuated in May and June, when the Brazos River flooded after heavy rainfall. Inmates finally returned to their facilities after two weeks.
This isn’t the first time incarcerated people in Texas have alleged dismal conditions during hurricanes. In 2008, as Hurricane Ike barreled towards Galveston, the county jail decided not to evacuate the 1,000 people being held at the facility. The city’s mayor had issued an mandatory evacuation and the National Weather Service warned that anyone who stayed behind was facing “certain death.” During the storm, detainees said they could hear air conditioning units banging against the building. Water seeped into their sleeping quarters and caused ceiling tiles to fall off. Once the storm passed, detainees and inmates dealt with a dire sanitation situation and a food and water shortage. Four days after the storm, officials from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards visited the facility and determined that conditions were satisfactory.
“Prisons and jails need to have contingency plans for these kinds of emergencies,” Fathi says, “including workable evacuation plans.”
During Harvey, the flooding was so widespread that many correctional officers were either stuck at work or unable to make the commute. “If you look at any of the maps from the flooding,” Lance Lowry, the head of the Texas prison guard union told Democracy Now, “you can clearly see that the roadways going in and out of the majority of the facilities were severely flooded.” Not only were some inmates not evacuated, many prisons were dealing with staffing shortages which can be dangerous.
From Hartvikson’s perspective, staffers at the prison were well taken care of during the storm. “Arrangements were made for all staff and guards, but nothing for the inmates,” he said. He believes the storm points to a bigger problem:”Once again we inmates our [sic] no better then [sic] hogs in the eyes of the TDCJ staff.”
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Breaking: Arkansas Supreme Court Just Halted Execution of a Severely Mentally Ill Man
In a 5-2 decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court has stopped the scheduled execution of Jack Greene, a severely mentally ill death row inmate. Greene was scheduled to be put to death on Thursday.
“Today’s order means that our client, Jack Greene, will have the opportunity to make the case that he should receive an independent hearing about his competency for execution,” Scott Braden, an attorney for Green said in a statement on Tuesday.
Greene’s lawyers argued their client was too mentally ill to be executed, but the state’s top prison official determined that he was competent. Greene’s lawyers then asked the state’s Supreme Court for a stay of execution so justices could review a lower court’s dismissal of his challenge to the law that gives the top prison official this kind of authority. Today, the Supreme Court halted the execution in order to further review this challenge.
Greene was convicted of the murder of Sidney Burnett in 1991. His attorneys say he suffers from psychotic delusions and should be “exactly the kind of person our laws prohibit from execution.” As Mother Jones previously reported:
In solitary confinement since 2003, Greene’s mental state has deteriorated over his last two decades behind bars. According to his clemency petition, Greene is routinely found with blood smeared on his face, and he stuffs his ears and nose with toilet paper. He eats out of his sink and uses his toilet as a desk. Greene is convinced that prison officials are conspiring to make him sick and have inflicted damage on his central nervous system. Medical tests have found no evidence of these injuries and concluded his accusations are a result of his delusional thinking.
Prison medical staff have described him as mentally unstable and in a letter to Republican Gov. Asa Huthinson, 28 doctors wrote that executing Greene would be “morally and ethically” wrong.
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The Restaurant Where All Staff Members Have HIV
“Being HIV positive, I’ve been called a lot of things,” starts saying one of the Chefs in the promotional video for June’s An HIV Eatery. “unloveable, shameful, reckless, stupid, junkie, untouchable, infectious,” other chefs continue, “but there is one thing I never thought I’d be called, ‘chef’.” sentences the promotional video that is looking to smash the stigma that you could get HIV from food.
The Canadian charity group is hoping to break down stereotypes surrounding HIV patients, by the way of a new restaurant where all the staff members are HIV positive. June’s on Tuesday as its called is a pop-up dinner in Toronto and their motto is “Break Bread, Smash Stigma”.
Only half of Canadians would eat food prepared by someone with HIV.
We have a long way to go as we #SmashStigma .
Thank you @caseyhouseTO and @fidelgastros for an amazing and delicious night at June’s HIV+ Eatery.https://t.co/8fk6cZrPyppic.twitter.com/8FgkLLUTof
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I am Rob Shostak and this is my tweet
(@Robonto) November 8, 2017
I am Rob Shostak and this is my tweet According to a survey ran in October in Canada by Casey House, the charity center that provides health services for with HIV/AIDS, only half of the people surveyed would eat food that was prepared by a cook with HIV. “The numbers are kind of staggering, but it wasn’t overly surprising,” said CEO of Casey House Joanne Simons to the Toronto Star.
“For the clients that Casey House serves, that stigma is very real on a very daily basis,” Simons said. The charity organization was in charge of selling the pre-paid seats to the banquet where staff donned aprons with funny lines like, “I got HIV from pasta. Said no one ever.”
RBC has partnered up with Casey House to present June’s, an HIV+ Eatery! #SmashStigmahttps://t.co/wxYRE8rsEXpic.twitter.com/Fj432SYs9i
— Muhammad U. Tahir (@emyoutee) November 2, 2017
The viral plague can only be spread when infected fluid comes into contact with a person’s bloodstream that is not infected, so it’s impossible to get it from sharing food, cutlery or through skin-to-skin contact. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the menu included such delicacies as Thai potato leek soup and gingerbread tiramisu, that were enjoyed by the more than 200 customers that attended the event.
Casey House also worked with Toronto’s own Matt Basile, a celebrity chef that owns the highly regarded Fidel Gastro restaurant, “to work with 14 HIV positive individuals-turned-cooks to develop the menu, train, and cook for patrons,” said the charity through a statement.
June’s. An HIV+ Eatery. https://t.co/4rhcIj9OFd via @caseyhouseTO DECEMBER 1st 2017,WORLD AIDS DAY,know UR status? If,u crisis, talk2 me
— King Photographer (@kingphotointl1) November 10, 2017
One of the beneficiaries of Casey House said that he was “proud” to be part of June’s cooks and said that the people there work “boldly break barriers and end the isolation I have felt and others continue to feel.” The pop-up eatery completely sold out their first run even with tickets running at $ 98 per person.
Ms. Simons told the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “we’d love to be able to do it in places like New York and San Francisco and London.”
Chef Matt Basile trained an all-volunteer kitchen to run June’s HIV+ Eatery, a pop-up restaurant on Queen West: https://t.co/1UdTjvSZK1
— Toronto Life (@torontolife) November 7, 2017
Article inspired by Independent // World’s first restaurant with only HIV-positive chefs opens to ‘break bread, smash stigma’
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How Rapper Meek Mill Became a Cause Célèbre for Criminal Justice Reform
Celebrities and civil rights groups are rallying around 30-year-old Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill, who was sentenced to two to four years in prison last week after a judge ruled that he’d violated the terms of his probation, which stemmed from charges related to an arrest for carrying a gun to a local grocery store when he was 18. A lingering threat of punishment for relatively trivial probation or parole violations, his attorneys and supporters say, is an all-too-common outcome for black and brown people who come in contact with the criminal justice system.
Mill, whose given name is Robert Rihmeek Williams, was arrested twice earlier this year—once for being involved in a fight in a St. Louis airport (he was breaking it up, he says), and a second time for riding an illegal dirt bike in New York City. Prosecutors dismissed the charges in both cases, and both the prosecutor and Mill’s probation officer recommended to the judge during a probation hearing that Mill not be given prison time.
But Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Genece Brinkey, who has overseen Mill’s case since 2008, wouldn’t heed those recommendations. She ordered him to prison, citing a failed drug test—Mill had previously been treated for opioid addiction—and violations of travel restrictions on account of his touring outside of Pennsylvania. (Mill served several months in prison in 2014 and 90 days on house arrest in 2016 for other violations.) Mill’s attorney says last week’s sentence is unduly harsh and that he plans to appeal it.
Mill’s fans were outraged.
meek been on probation for the same case since he was 18 now he 30. the system is trash smh. https://t.co/7Iv38mV4z2
— STUNNA 🦇 (@LILAFRIMANE) November 6, 2017
Celebrities, including rapper Jay Z, whose management company Mill is signed to, also posted statements or videos.
Sign the petition to overturn the blatant injustice on @Change #Justice4Meek https://t.co/RrM651vrXl ✊
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We wit u young King. Stay Up. This too shall pass. pic.twitter.com/APXMRoEZfZ
— T.I. (@Tip) November 9, 2017
✊Several civil rights groups have now taken up the mantle, arguing that Mill’s sentence is the symptom of a justice system that disproportionately penalizes people of color and drags out their sentences with long periods of probation and/or parole. Mill initially served eight months in prison on the gun charge and then began serving a five-year probation term, which Brinkley extended another five years for a probation violation.
Nationally, nearly 5 million people are on probation or parole—about a third of them black, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics—on top of the nearly 2 million who are incarcerated. A Marshall Project survey published in April found that at least 61,000 of those people were in jail or prison for probation or parole violations. And one 2014 study found that black defendants can be up to twice as likely to have their probation revoked than white defendants.
On Monday, Color of Change and #Cut50, a criminal justice reform group founded by former White House policy adviser Van Jones, released statements slamming the sentence. “The public attention to Meek Mill’s case is an opportunity for all of us to demand broader reforms to our unjust criminal justice system,” said Color of Change director Rashad Robinson. “We need to be calling on local courts, judges, district attorneys, and state legislators to use their power to stop filling prisons with people who have committed minor probation and parole violations.” Hundreds of Mill’s also supporters rallied outside the courthouse where he was sentenced to call attention to his case. Rapper Rick Ross and NBA legend Julius Erving were among those in attendance.
If you’re in Philadelphia today…. please come through to #Rally4Meek at 5pm!! Join us and @JuliusErving @cut_50 @JustineSkye & more pic.twitter.com/qHHkhsh9zD
— Justice League NYC (@NYjusticeleague) November 13, 2017
Hundreds of protestors outside the CJC for #Rally4Meek #Justice4Meek #FreeMeekMill @KYWNewsradio pic.twitter.com/a6wAM1XqOa
— Andrew Kramer (@Philly_Kramer) November 13, 2017
Meek Mill Rally, w/ @SIXXKING @JuliusErving @RickRoss @pnbrock and his grandmother.
Shot for @NoiseyMusic #Rally4Meek #FreeMeek pic.twitter.com/mNBPotcEjM
— Aaron Ricketts (@aaronricketts_) November 14, 2017
Passionate crowd wants to #FreeMeekMill at #Rally4Meek. @FOX29philly @MeekMill pic.twitter.com/CWFX1PZWIP
— Dave Kinchen
FOX (@DKinchenFOX29) November 13, 2017
FOX (@DKinchenFOX29) Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, an advocate for criminal justice reform, also tweeted about Mill’s case yesterday.
Sadly there are Black folks going through the same radicalized injustice(s) within the justice system that Meek Mill has experienced for over a decade EVERY SINGLE DAY. This requires more than just gradual reform in laws—It requires a swift overhaul. pic.twitter.com/Mt13BwnIvJ
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) November 13, 2017
Philadelphia, which is among the 10 largest cities in America, has the highest incarceration rate. About one-third of Pennsylvania prisoners—and about half of the people in Philly’s jails—are there for violating probation or parole, not for new charges, according to Color of Change and #Cut50. But last Tuesday, Philadelphians elected Larry Krasner, a criminal defense attorney who ran as a reformer, as their new district attorney—his win was seen as a rebuke of the tough-on-crime ethos that has dominated city politics in the past.
In a bizarre twist, Page Six reported on Monday that the FBI is investigating whether Judge Brinkley attempted to extort Mill. The rapper’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, has said that Brinkley encouraged Mill to leave his management company and sign with a local agency run by one of her friends—she also allegedly asked him to give her a “shout out” in one of his songs. Color of Change and #Cut50 are circulating a petition calling for Brinkley to recuse herself from Mill’s case—or for her supervising judge to intervene.
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How Pete Souza Fits Into the Storied History of Presidential Photography
On Pete Souza’s Instagram, it’s almost as if Barack Obama is still president. The former chief official White House photographer, who shot up to 1,000 pictures a day over the eight years of the Obama administration, has plenty of material to share. Since January 20, he’s been going through his seemingly endless stream of images, satiating his nostalgic audience of 1.6 million followers—and sometimes offering a sly contrast with the optics of the current administration.
Souza selected more than 300 photographs for his new book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait (Little, Brown and Company), released this month. It’s a comprehensive look, starting with the moments before the 2009 inauguration, as President Obama reflects in the mirror before heading out to the stage, to his departure following Trump’s inaugural morning, as Obama gazes down at the White House through his helicopter window. In the foreword, the former president admits “I probably spent more time with Pete Souza than with anybody other than my family.” Souza, whose book tour is selling out from Los Angeles to London, will be speaking at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on November 20.
Originally from Massachusetts, Souza studied communications at Boston University and Kansas State University. He served as an official photographer in President Reagan’s White House, and later, in 2005, as the national photographer for the Chicago Tribune, met Obama, when the future president was a newly elected senator from Illinois. Souza published The Rise of Barack Obama in 2008, chronicling the politician’s first days as senator to presidential primaries. In the years since first meeting, they’ve developed an obvious trust, one that enabled the photographer to so thoroughly capture the dynamics and legacy of the Obama presidency.
Many of the photos are familiar. There is the one of administration officials in the Situation Room watching the raid on the Osama Bin Laden compound, the elevator ride with the President and the First Lady sharing an intimate moment on their way to an inaugural ball in 2009 and the President flexing his muscles with a young trick-or-treating superman in the halls of the White House. But a number of lesser-known images are a reminder of the unique access Souza was granted as he documented midnight meetings with foreign leaders and covert helicopter rides.
Since John F. Kennedy, each president, save Carter, has had an official photographer. Some have been able to get up close and personal, like David Hume Kennerly who documented the Ford administration and was treated like a close friend, while others were kept at a distance. Nixon unsurprisingly shied away from his photographer, Oliver F. “Ollie” Atkins, whose most famous image is a meet-and-greet between Nixon and Elvis. The first photographer to have worked in two administrations, Souza was also the first to fully embrace social media as a way to connect the president with the people.
In his introduction, Souza writes, “On paper, the job of Chief Official White House Photographer is to visually document the President for history. But what, and how much, you photograph depends on each individual photographer.” He continues, “It was my job to capture real moments for history. The highs and lows, the texture of each day, the things we didn’t even know would be important later on.” His book offers a chance to reflect on how the medium has shifted the public’s relationship with the office through history.
Before photography, disseminating the president’s likeness was a complicated process, explains David Ward, former senior historian of the National Portrait Gallery. Oil paintings became lithographs and woodcuts, often degraded with each reproduction. What started as a sophisticated piece of art could end up looking “like a third grader’s drawing of an egg,” joked Ward. But there was always a curiosity about the president and first family, starting with George Washington.
Representations of the president, Ward says, “definitely increased whatever tendencies there were for the kind of imperial president.” Through the increased visibility, the executive shifted from being one of three equal branches to the dominant one. As he points out, “we’ve got every president in the National Portrait Gallery but we don’t have every representative or even every chief justice.” The medium of photography, Ward posits, “made the office more powerful…[because] you’re seeing the President on the job all the time.”
Although President William Henry Harrison was the first to be photographed while in office, Abraham Lincoln was the first president to fully embrace the medium as a way to connect with his constituents. In his 1860 campaign, Lincoln distributed buttons with tintype photos of him and his running mate, Maine Senator Hannibal Hamlin. The reliance on photography continued even after his initial victory: during the Civil War, Lincoln was frequently photographed to show the country he was on duty. Historian Ted Widmer, who served as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, explains, “In the early months of his presidency, Lincoln more than tolerated his photographers; he intuitively understood that they were helping him a great deal as he tried to give the Union a face—his own.”
Following Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt was the next to truly embrace the medium. And he took the camera on the road, inviting photographers to document his time outdoors and his journey to Panama. By the time he entered office, reprinting photographs in newspapers was more commonplace. Combined with smaller and more portable cameras, the technology allowed for an easier distribution of the president’s photograph in papers around the country and the world.
It was Kennedy who appointed the first official chief White House photographer. Before his election, he relied on Jacques Lowe to photograph his personal life and campaign. When he became president, he hired Cecil Stoughton whose “unusual access to John F. Kennedy’s private life expanded the public’s view of the presidency,” writes Bijal Trivedi at National Geographic. “The pictures were pivotal in projecting the image of a youthful, dynamic President ushering in a new era in U.S. history.” The creation of the White House photographer position meant that Stoughton was aboard Air Force One after JFK’s assassination. He was responsible for getting the only photos of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as president.
Ann Shumard, curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery, sees a parallel between Souza’s and Stoughton’s images: they capture “affecting moments, such as when President Obama leaned down to allow a little boy to feel the hair on his head.” Souza’s book also includes photos of Obama playing with his daughters in the snow after a major storm and coaching Sasha’s basketball game, images that certainly echo some shots Stoughton grabbed of JFK with his children. Among Stoughton’s favorites is one of President Kennedy clapping while Caroline and John Jr. dance in the Oval Office. “He was doing fatherly things and the children [were] cavorting and competing for his attention. I snapped 12 frames,” Stoughton told National Geographic. “That afternoon the President flipped through the pictures and chose one to send to the press—it showed up in every metropolitan daily in the U.S. and around the world.”
Despite the similarity between the Kennedy and Obama photos, Souza writes in his book that President Johnson’s photographer, Yoichi Okamoto, was his inspiration: “Okamoto pushed the bar and photographed seemingly everything Johnson did.” During LBJ’s administration, Okamoto was granted Oval Office walk-in privileges after he made his case to the president: “Rather than just take portraits, I’d like to hang around and photograph history being made.” He dedicated some 16 hours a day to documenting the presidency, and in doing so set a high standard for the position and what it meant.
“The more access a White House photographer is given, the more complete his or her record will be,” says Shumard. The sheer number of images (just under 2 million in eight years for Souza) means that Obama’s is one of the most thoroughly photographed presidencies. “How meaningful or accurate that record proves to be can only be judged with the passage of time, when every image can be judged in light of what history tells us about the moment it documents,” says Shumard.
The White House photographer’s work can be seen in two ways. It at once promises transparency: the images convey a sense of immediacy and information. But the photographer’s image choices and the later selection of photos to share are in themselves a curation of the presidency, which either creates or reinforces a particular narrative.
While Obama may have the most photographed presidency, the wider press wasn’t necessarily part of that effort. In 2013, the White House Correspondents’ Association warned in a letter to the press secretary that the administration was limiting their access to cover newsworthy events. By claiming the opportunities were private, and then publicly releasing photographs through controlled channels, the White House was “blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government.” With President Trump, limited access for press and photographers has been a constant concern. But, unlike Obama, Trump’s even shied away from his appointed chief official photographer, Shealah Craighead, leaving his administration less documented.
Obama only left office in January and given the political upheaval since then, it’s not surprising how quickly nostalgia set in for his supporters. The curated Obama: An Intimate Portrait might be a welcome sight for their sore eyes, but the works of Souza’s photographs, forever held in the National Archives, will have value for years to come as a historical record.
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Inmates Are Using Masturbation as a Weapon. Female Guards Have Had Enough.
A pair of class-action lawsuits filed recently against the sheriff’s office in Cook County, Illinois, allege that the office has failed to protect female workers and female public defenders against frequent and egregious sexual harassment—by male inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago.
Inaction by Sheriff Thomas Dart has left the jail “an objectively abusive and hostile workplace for women,” but not for men, claims a lawsuit filed in federal court last Wednesday by five female guards. The second lawsuit, filed on Sunday by attorneys at the Cook County Public Defender’s Office who visit their clients in the jail, makes a similar claim. Dart’s neglect, both lawsuits say, amounts to sex-based employment discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Illinois Civil Rights Act and violates the women’s constitutional right to equal protection.
The guards claimed that male inmates regularly engage in “exhibitionist” masturbation in the presence of female guards, medical staff, and other jail personnel, sometimes aiming at them when they ejaculate; the inmates also grope women’s breasts, press their penises against women’s buttocks, throw feces and urine at them, make lewd comments about their physical appearance, proposition them for sexual favors, target them with sexual slurs, and/or threaten them with violence including rape and murder. One guard was allegedly harassed by members of a prison gang formed specifically to intimidate female staffers. Marni Willenson, an attorney for the guards, told me gang members earn points based on the egregiousness of their behavior. Another guard was confronted by penises inserted through the delivery slot in cell doors as she walked down a tier bringing food from inmate to inmate, according to the suit.
The women in question, both lawsuits assert, fear for their safety—the women also claim male supervisors discourage them from reporting the harassment, and that when they make a report (a frequent occurrence), it is rarely taken seriously.
The guards’ lawsuit says male supervisors have responded to complaints of harassment by telling the women it’s what they had “signed up for,” that the harassment was a “compliment,” or that the masturbation shouldn’t bother them because they have likely seen a penis before. When one guard reported that an inmate had threatened to rape her, a male superior allegedly responded that “men can be raped too.” Male colleagues often don’t intervene when the abuse is happening, Willenson told me, because the jail has a policy against touching inmates—a rule aimed at preventing excessive force lawsuits. (The Cook County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions related to this story.)
The harassment is “everywhere in every context where there’s contact with the inmates,” says Willenson. “For correctional officers, they are directly responsible for the supervision and transport of the detainees. So they are on the floors with them. They have to deliver food and other items to their cells. They have to do well-being checks, so they have to walk up to the cells and look in through the open area of the cell to count people.”
Inmates spend most of their time out of their cells, however, Willenson notes, and it occurs even then—especially the masturbation. “Whether someone is sitting in an office and meeting with someone, whether they’re waiting to be with visitors or they’re waiting to go to court, waiting to meet with their lawyers, it is pervasive throughout the facility.”
Sometimes when rehabilitation workers meet with their clients in communal areas of the jail, “either their client or another detainee will get right near them and masturbate right in front of them—walk up on a table and masturbate right there,” Willenson adds. “If there’s one incident or something occasional,” then one might write it off as a hazard of the job. “But this is just way beyond anything that’s tolerable or can be justified. It doesn’t happen to this degree in most other institutions.”
The lawsuits come at a moment of national reckoning with sexual harassment in a range of industries, except the harasser in this case is not a boss or colleague, but a third party. The women are seeking a court order that compels the sheriff’s office to enact policies to curb the harassment and to appoint a monitor to oversee the changes.
Willenson told me she and her team interviewed several dozen female jail staffers, including veteran guards who have worked at the facility for 15 years. Such behavior was rare back then, she says, but it has become rampant within at least the last two years, in part because of policy changes at the sheriff’s office, such as the “no touch” policy. “If a detainee is pulling out his penis to masturbate, you should be able to handcuff them,” Willenson says. Guards “need to be able to stop the behavior when it’s happening.”
The lawsuit filed by the female attorneys also names the Cook County Public Defender’s Office and chief public defender Amy Campanelli as defendants. Among other allegations, the suit faults Campanelli for asking the sheriff’s office to end certain policies aimed at curbing the harassment, such as handcuffing inmates who are waiting to attend court.
A March 2017 letter Campanelli sent to Sheriff Dart said harassment of her staff attorneys had reached a “crisis” point and was “affecting my ability to provide legal counsel to my clients.” She has blamed staffing cuts in the jail for exacerbating the problem. The sheriff’s office has said that budget cuts necessitated the reductions—the county is in the midst of a financial crisis.
The sheriff’s office, meanwhile, has pointed the finger at the PD’s office, whose attorneys, it says, constantly file motions to have their clients’ cases extended, which lengthens their jail stay—and, Dart has suggested, encourages them to lash out. More than half of the detainees in lockup at the Cook County courthouse are represented by a public defender, according to the Chicago Reader—and many of them are in pretrial detention. (Detainees don’t usually masturbate in front of their own attorneys, Campanelli notes, but do so when female attorneys come to visit other clients.)
Dart’s office has made some attempts at changing inmates’ behavior. According to the public defenders’ suit, the jail for a time “instituted a program rewarding serial masturbators with pizza” if they stopped for 30 days. But then inmates started jerking off so they could quit and get the pizza. In early 2017, some inmates were required to wear “special jumpsuits to help prevent them from reaching their penises,” but the practice was ended after some “burned the jumpsuits using microwave ovens.”
Guards also began handcuffing inmates waiting to go to court, but stopped after Campanelli complained about the practice. In May, fewer women were harassed after more guards were added to each shift, but the sheriff’s office soon removed the extra staff to save money, according to the attorneys’ suit.
The sheriff’s office supports legislation that would increase penalties for inmates who commit sexual offenses. But Campanelli’s office—whose attorneys often represent the same inmates—has called that a bad idea.
The sheriff’s office does have additional options short of hitting inmates with new charges, Willenson points out. For instance, it could cut off an inmate’s access to “commissary, visits, privileges, probably movement around the jail. There are art activities and other activities, and maybe they don’t get access to some of those…There is also an appropriate use of segregation.”
Charges are warranted when there’s a physical assault, she says—including charging inmates with sex crimes. Some legal advocates argue, though, that stacking charges doesn’t deter people who are already in jail from behaving badly—and they worry that hitting them with offenses that require registration as a sex offender will have long-term consequences. They concur with Dart that the increase in harassment could be detainees’ way of protesting the conditions of their detention, which may have worsened in recent years due to budget cuts. “I think masturbation is a distraction,” Alan Mills, a civil rights attorney who has represented Illinois inmates in lawsuits challenging jail and prison conditions, told the Chicago Reader earlier this month. “It’s not the real problem—it’s just the symptom of the problem.”
Willenson does not disagree that the detainees are lashing out: “They’re inmates in a jail, they’re disempowered, the government has taken them and detained them and put them in a correctional facility and taken away their freedom. And this is a way they’re exercising what power they have.”
Even so, Willenson argues, it’s not okay to let abusive behavior go unchecked. “You have to impose a discipline that is painful for people so they don’t want to do it. There has to be enforcement of the rules of conduct,” she says. “C’mon! Honest to God.”
Image credit: fatihhoca/Getty
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This Ambitious Landmark Hip-Hop and Rap Anthology Was Successfully Funded
Ed Note 11/16/2017: The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap Kickstarter campaign ended successfully with a total of $ 368,841 funded by nearly 3,000 backers. The original goal of $ 250,000 had been met eight days earlier. “We have shown how the world has fully embraced the importance of hip-hop to American culture,” said the museum’s director Lonnie Bunch.
Few cultural phenomena capture the complexity and tension of modern American life better than the ascendance of hip-hop and rap across the past four decades. Characterized by impassioned, rapid-fire lyrics laden with rhyme, alliteration and other poetic devices, the twin art forms have distilled both the lived experiences and the elusive aspirations of African-American communities all over the country into infectious, pulsating music.
Oftentimes, the art is as critical as it is catchy. It throws social inequities into sharp relief, and implicates the work of other artists via sampling, forcing listeners to consider it in a new light. And while much hip-hop and rap has acted as a force for uplift in neglected urban enclaves, there is a darker side to the music too, a side notorious for its violent anger and exploitative themes. Now a worldwide sensation, hip-hop and rap are filled with as many contradictions and questions as the nation in which they arose.
In an effort to illustrate the nuances of rap and hip-hop across their rich histories, and to celebrate the ingenuity and enduring relevance of their pioneers, nonprofit record label Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has embarked on a project of unprecedented scale: the production of a nine-disc chronological compendium of over 120 songs from the two groundbreaking genres.
The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, no trifling “greatest hits” collection, will contain cuts painstakingly selected by a panel of artists, music critics, academics and industry pooh-bahs. All three major international music labels—Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment—will be represented.
And the music itself is just the beginning. To contextualize the various tunes, and to tease apart the thematic strands uniting them, numerous scholars and songwriters will contribute original essays, the museum will supply never-before-published photography, and Folkways will provide extensive liner notes in conjunction with the printed song lyrics. All told, the supplementary materials, presented seamlessly in a single reference volume, will span 300 pages. The aesthetic vision for the package will be left to none other than Cey Adams, former artistic director for Def Jam.
“We anticipate getting something which is a perfect mix of image, words and music,” says Huib Schippers, director of Folkways, “which is very much representative of what hip-hop culture is.”
Indeed, the blending of disparate forms of pop culture is at the very heart of the hip-hop tradition. So too is community involvement, and Schippers and his Folkways colleagues have just launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $ 250,000 or more to put toward production costs. “It’s always wonderful to contribute to a project that documents major cultural movements,” Schippers says.
In case that’s not enough of an enticement, Folkways is also offering donors a juicy deal: everyone who contributes upwards of $ 100 will receive advanced access to the anthology at production cost—far cheaper than they would pay for it commercially. Other tantalizing rewards, including a tour of the museum with Questlove of The Roots, are also on offer.
Folkways will need all the help they can muster. Schippers tells me that “the whole production cost is close to $ 1 million”—the label will need to sell thousands of the finished anthologies to break even. For Schippers, the undertaking has always been a labor of love. “It’s a very big project for a very small record label,” he says, “but it’ll be worth it. We’re delighted to be working with NMAAHC on it. We have no regrets so far, and we’re full of confidence the Kickstarter will work.”
Dwan Reece, curator of music and performing arts at African American History Museum, shares Schippers’s passion for the project. This music “is really part of a cultural evolution,” she says. “We learn from the past, we take from the past, and reinvent a new perspective—a new way of creating music, a new way of speaking about music and expressing ourselves. That’s really part of an ongoing tradition, and in a sense a continuation of the African-American experience.”
There is no doubt in Reece’s mind that hip-hop and rap deserve the attention of an institution like the Smithsonian. “We explore history and culture from all diverse perspectives,” she says. “Sometimes people think, ‘Why is hip-hop at the Smithsonian?’ Or, ‘Why is hip-hop in a museum?’ It’s because it’s worthy of preserving, and it tells us so much about ourselves and where we are today.”
From rock ‘n’ roll to jazz, popular music across the eras has always come under scrutiny from the old guard. Hip-hop and rap are no exception, and the essays and liner notes of The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap confront their controversial aspects head-on. The music in the collection exhibits both the genres’ positivity and negativity, Schippers contends, citing the violent, misogynist lyrics as well as the messages of empowerment and support of movements such as Black Lives Matter. “Most of the things in history, and most of the things in our museums, have these two sides,” he says.
Whatever one’s personal thoughts on hip-hop and rap music, there can be little debate that the two related art forms have come to shape African American culture, and American culture more broadly, quite significantly. Schippers and Reece believe that The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap is a project that everyone can get behind, because hip-hop and rap inform our day to day experience of our country, whether we are cognizant of it or not.
By donating to this Kickstarter campaign, Reece says, “you’re contributing to telling the stories, the important stories, that the museum and Folkways want to tell—exploring how music really defines a culture, and how it defines who we are. You become part of that community in supporting this story, and raising the profile.”
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Selena’s New Children’s Book Hot On Harry Potter’s Heels For Amazon’s Top Book
There is one true constant in life and that is, everything that you can do, Selena can do better. Even though our beloved Tejano music queen left this plane of existence 22 years ago, the light that she left in this world will never go extinct.
Her legacy will transcend many generations, inspiring a whole array of future Latino artists that will forward our culture. Although Selena didn’t live long enough to venture into literature, she will soon become a character in a book that has the potential to dethrone literature’s most popular teen wizard, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.
“La Vida de Selena” isn’t due on bookstore shelves until March, but pre-orders have pushed the book to No. 2 on Amazon’s Spanish book list. Order yours inside! https://t.co/oRrxJAIuGT
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) November 13, 2017
The authors of the new Selena board book are Patty Rodriguez and Ariana Stein. While it isn’t due to appear on bookshelves until March of next year, the pre-orders for it have already pushed the book all the way to number two on Amazon’s Spanish booklist.
Sitting just one place under “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which is the first book in the magical series by Mrs. Rowling, it’s likely Selena will take over soon. If you think about it objectively, it is highly probable that “La Vida de Selena” will become a must-read for every child.
The singer is a much more relatable character than a child wizard who just so happened to be the “chosen one” and inherited a great fortune from his parents. Harry Potter is loved by all the community for no other reason than his name.
“La Vida de Selena” is a new book by Patty Rodriguez and Ariana Stein and even though it’s not out until March pre-orders of the book have already pushed it to No. 2 on Amazon’s Spanish book list. #Selena#Books#Amazonpic.twitter.com/Xbunfr9K7u
— CENNOW (@CENKids) November 14, 2017
The book is going to be released in both English and Spanish. Since it’s actually a board book meant for small children, we are already picturing its place next to other children’s classics like “Where The Wild Things Are”, “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss and of course, Harry Potter.
‘La Vida de Selena,’ as the name suggests, will tell the story of the award-winning Tex-Mex singer and her rise to fame where she became the “Queen of Tejano music.” The book will also include small trivia games, like her favorite food being pizza and that the people that she loved the most were family and friends.
“La Vida de Selena” will be released in March of next year and will be in both English and Spanish. https://t.co/XZtCQ3bOi0
— KIII 3 News (@kiii3news) November 10, 2017
For Rodriguez and Stein, this book will mark the next on their ongoing bilingual biography series of ‘Lil’ Libros’ for children. The two authors, who have been best friends since age twelve, came together after becoming moms to release this book series that they claim every Latino mom will love.
Just saw this on Amazon: The Life of /La Vida De Selena: A Lil’ Libr… by Patty Rodriguez for $ 9.68 https://t.co/Fw54Uex87P via @amazon
— hugo (@vox025) November 8, 2017
Article inspired by ABC // Selena children’s book catches up to ‘Harry Potter’ on Amazon
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2017 Was the Deadliest Year For Trans People In At Least a Decade
At least 25 transgender people have been violently killed in 2017, more than during any other recorded year in the past decade, according to a new report from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The report notes that 84 percent of the victims were people of color and 80 percent identified as female. Trans women are four times more likely than cisgender women to be homicide victims, according to the report.
“Each of the stories featured in this report is unique, tragic and devastating,” Trans People of Color Coalition Executive Director Kylar Broadus said in a statement. “Unpacking these stories is a difficult but necessary process if we as a society want to protect the most vulnerable and address the root causes for their unjust and premature deaths.”
Violence against trans people isn’t new and even still, we’re far from understanding the full scope of the problem. In the past five years, HRC calculated more than 100 trans deaths due to violence according to media reports, though this is likely an underassessment as many cases go unreported and victims sometimes aren’t identified as transgender in news reports. More than half of those 100 victims lived in the South, nearly 60 percent were victims of gun violence, and about 85 percent were people of color.
Increased violence against trans men and women reflects a larger shift in how the country addresses trans rights, particularly under President Trump. Just this year, Trump proposed a transgender military ban and appointed several anti-LGBT public officials, including federal judges. In October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo allowing businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals on the basis of “religious freedom.” And several states have blocked transgender people from using the bathrooms suitable for their gender identity. A 50,000-youth HRC survey found that 70 percent of participants say they witnessed bullying and harassment as a result of the election and 79 percent said the harassment occurred more frequently since the start of the presidential campaign.
HRC’s report came in advance of Monday’s annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to remember transgender people who have lost their lives because of transphobia.
“There is still so much to be done to combat transphobia across our country and around the world. Nowhere is that more evident than at the doorstep of the White House, where Donald Trump and Mike Pence have made discrimination against LGBTQ people, as well as so many others, a top priority,” write Broadus and HRC president Chad Griffin in an opening letter in the report. “Now, more than ever, we must continue to stand with our transgender friends and family in the fight for a world free of fear, violence, and discrimination.”
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The Opioid Epidemic Is Devastating. It’s Also Really Expensive.
The opioid epidemic, which each year claims more lives than the entirety of American deaths in the Vietnam War, is also a growing financial burden.
According to a new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the epidemic cost the nation $ 504 billion in 2015—about 2.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. And that figure has likely increased substantially, as 2016 brought a 21 percent increase in overdose deaths.
The estimate is more than six times higher than previous estimates, largely because it includes the cost of lost productivity of those who died of overdoses—a standard practice for evaluating public health problems as federal agencies determine which issues to prioritize. It also used more recent overdose figures and accounted for both prescription and illicit drug use. Last year, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers pegged the cost of prescription drug abuse in 2013 at $ 78.5 billion.
“A better understanding of the economic causes contributing to the crisis is crucial for evaluating the success of various interventions to combat it,” read the report, noting that the council plans to research the cost of proposed and actual solutions to the epidemic.
President Trump has repeatedly acknowledged the need to address the epidemic, which, he said Monday, is “ravaging so many American families and communities.” The president declared a public health state of emergency last month, but stopped short of allocating new funding to address the epidemic. Meanwhile, repealing Obamacare would cut insurance coverage for an estimated 2.8 million Americans suffering from addiction disorders.
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The FBI Reported More Than 6,000 Hate Crimes Last Year. Here’s Why It’s Probably A Whole Lot More.
An FBI report released earlier this week claims that hate crimes increased 4.6 percent in 2016 over the previous year, from 5,850 in 2015 to 6,121 last year. Mainstream media outlets widely reported on these statistics (see here and here), with several outlets calling out a specific spike in hate crimes around Election Day and reporting the largest group of victims, about 60 percent, were targeted because of their race. The Huffington Post calls the report “the most comprehensive hate crime data available” for the 2016 election year. That’s technically true, but the statement and other conclusions from the data are also somewhat misleading. The report might in fact provide the best data available at the national level, but it— and the data on hate crimes more broadly—are deeply flawed; the number of hate crimes in the US is almost certainly much higher than what the FBI has reported. Here, we’ve broken down the main reasons why:
There is no agreement among states for what counts as hate crime.
The first federal hate crime statute was passed in 1968 with a relatively narrow definition, making it a crime to “use, or threaten to use, force to willfully interfere with any person because of race, color, religion, or national origin.” It wasn’t until 2009 that President Obama signed a law which also classified crimes based on disability, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity as hate crimes. However, what constitutes a hate crime still varies a lot between states, which makes it nearly impossible to understand the full scope of hate crimes that occur. States may not be reporting entire categories of crimes in their jurisdictions; for example, five states—Wyoming, Arkansas, Indiana, Georgia, and South Carolina—don’t have any hate crime laws on their books and so may not track crimes that the federal government defines as hate crimes. Only 14 states, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have fully inclusive hate crime laws, meaning those that protect against and track crimes committed based on religion, race, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.
Reporting hate crimes is voluntary. And many big cities simply don’t report them.
According to the FBI, a whopping 88 percent of the 15,000 law enforcement agencies that voluntarily shared their data in 2016 reported zero hate crimes. And, according to the ADL, 90 cities with populations greater than 100,000 also reported zero hate crimes, or didn’t report anything at all, including major metropolitan areas such as Tallahassee, Honolulu, and Kansas City.
This means the FBI’s numbers are low. Really low. The true number of hate crimes committed in a given year, according to a 2003-2011 survey conducted by the Department of Justice, is closer to 260,000 annually—36 times the numbers reported by the FBI for those years. “There’s a dangerous disconnect between the rising problem of hate crimes and the lack of credible data being reported,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said this week in a statement. “Police departments that do not report credible data to the FBI risk sending the message that this is not a priority issue for them, which may threaten community trust in their ability and readiness to address hate violence.”
There were 6,121 hate crimes reported to the @FBI in 2016, and that doesn't even factor in the dozens of cities that either don't report hate crimes or underreport them. See the breakdown year over year in our interactive map: https://t.co/EFuE1WHrNY pic.twitter.com/aixOsAsFeH
— ADL (@ADL_National) November 15, 2017
And lastly, it can be difficult to determine a hate crime was actually committed out of hate.
To conclude something is a hate crime, the offender’s intentions must be clear. That of course isn’t always the case. Perpetrators don’t always say racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted slurs before or after committing a crime. For instance, if a gay club is vandalized, it’s not always clear why. “The problem is not all hate-mongers are stupid,” Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University and co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, told Vox earlier this year. “They may not let you know that they hate the members of a particular group. They may realize that they’re better off not voicing a racial slur or [putting] racist graffiti on a sidewalk or wall of a building.”
Regardless, it’s fair to say that hate crimes do in fact happen everyday. The data science behind tracking victims could just be vastly improved. Former FBI Director James Comey said in a statement in May that the bureau needs “to do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime, to fully understand what is happening in our communities, and how to stop it.”
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'The Problem with Apu' Does More Than Pick Apart a 'Simpsons' Stereotype
In the world of American animated television, Matt Groening’s The Simpsons towers, in terms of both its cultural prominence and its improbable longevity. Viewership has steadily declined since the first season (1989-90), when the average episode attracted 30 million pairs of eyeballs. But the show has nevertheless endured through 28 additional years, and Springfield remains a cherished send-up of life in the U.S.
When Indian American comic Hari Kondabolu set out to create his new documentary film, The Problem with Apu, he knew he was taking aim at “an institution in this country.” Specifically, Kondabolu’s movie—now accessible on truTV—delves into the dubious depiction of Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, a first-generation Indian immigrant voiced by a Caucasian and bearing a bogus surname derived from the Sanskrit translation of “bullsh*t.”
For Kondabolu, the story of a misguided cartoon character is just the beginning. “I’m thinking about the future,” he says after an advance screening of his film, sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates and held at the National Museum of Natural History. “I’m using this as an example to have a bigger conversation.”
From a young age, Kondabolu was an admirer of The Simpsons, but as he grew up, he began to take serious issue with the over-the-top accent and shallow dialogue of the program’s sole South Asian character—one of the first, and hence most influential, on mainstream TV.
The humor of Apu stems solely from his voice, Kondabolu contends, a voice first conjured up by actor Hank Azaria as a gag in an early reading of a first script. Kondabolu reveals in the film that the character was originally flagged as specifically non-Indian—the price-gouging Indian convenience store proprietor seemed like too much of a stereotype—but that the creators were persuaded to rethink his race on the basis of Azaria’s outrageous accent.
Throughout the documentary, Kondabolu engages in heart-to-heart dialogues with fellow performers of South Asian heritage—Kal Penn, Aziz Ansari, Aasif Mandvi—who recall being on the receiving end of Apu jokes growing up, and fielding requests to “do the voice.”
White conceptions of what people of Indian descent should sound like have haunted many of the profiled actors across their careers. Finding work as a South Asian American entertainer is not easy. Often, Kondabolu’s interviewees point out, those who are hiring want their characters portrayed in a particular, decidedly non-nuanced way. One of Kal Penn’s early onscreen roles was a guy named Taj Majal; though he was desperate for employment at the time, Penn can’t help but regret having allowed himself to be so flagrantly debased.
In the view of Nafisa Isa, program manager at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, The Problem with Apu succeeds in leveraging a community’s perspective on a single issue to raise much larger questions. These questions, she says, force us to think about “speaking up against stereotypical representation, and about why representation matters” in the first place. “Because sometimes, given everything that’s happening in the world right now, I think the importance of that can get lost.”
Kondabolu is careful not to despair. In the Internet Age, he sees many ways for entertainers to move forward, paths that simply weren’t available in the days when a handful of major TV stations held control over popular media.
Producers no longer want “the biggest piece of the pie,” Kondabolu notes, “they want a piece of the pie. It’s in their best interest to get a wider range of points of view, and find a niche.” In short, inclusivity isn’t just the right move—it’s a profitable one.
Isa points to the success of recent African American programs as a positive sign of change in the industry. “You see how successful Hidden Figures has been,” she says, “and the anticipation for Black Panther is phenomenal. Empires is still doing really well on Fox. So there’s a huge market for this kind of content.” She is optimistic that a wave of complex Asian American roles will soon be hitting the big screen.
Given this favorable climate, and the affordances of modern technology, Kondabolu adds that it is increasingly incumbent on underrepresented individuals with stories to tell to take the initiative and do so themselves. He points to the example of Issa Rae, whose YouTube series Awkward Black Girl garnered the attention of HBO, ultimately resulting in the creation of her own full-blown TV show, Insecure.
“We have fewer excuses now,” says Kondabolu. “We can buy a decent camera for not very much. Our phones, actually, are higher-quality than a lot of the stuff that was made 20 years ago. We can make art! We can write!”
As Asians and Asian Americans rise through the ranks as their authentic selves, Kondabolu hopes that they will bring an end to the homogenous, white male-dominated production pipelines of the sort responsible for Apu.
“We need to get into those positions,” he says. “We need to be the executives, we need to be the producers, we need to be the writers. We need to own it. Just like it’s important to own land, as a person of color, you need to own the property.”
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The Invisible Way That Marketers Set the Menu for Your Thanksgiving Feast
I have always been intrigued by Thanksgiving – the traditions, the meal, the idea of a holiday that is simply about being thankful.
For my family, Thanksgiving is all about the food. Some foods, like turkey and mashed potatoes, may be familiar. But there are a few twists. Since I grew up in the Caribbean, I’m allowed a Caribbean dish or two. The reliability of the menu – with a little flexibility sprinkled in – seems to unite us as a family while acknowledging our different cultural backgrounds.
Chances are you and your family have similar traditions. Filipino-American families might include pancit. Russian-American families might serve a side dish of borscht. That’s what makes Thanksgiving unique. It’s a holiday embraced by people regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
Yet despite this adaptability, there’s a core part of the meal that almost everyone embraces. How did this come to be? Although few appreciate it, advertisers have shaped the meal as much as family tradition.
A uniquely broad appeal
When Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, first advocated for Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1846, she argued that it would unify the country. In our research, my colleagues and I have been able to show that Hale’s vision for the holiday has been largely fulfilled: Inclusivity of people and traditions has been Thanksgiving’s hallmark quality.
A reason for its broad appeal is that it lacks any association with an institutionalized religion. As one interviewee told us, “There is no other purpose than to sit down with your family and be thankful.” And after interviewing a range of people – from those born in the U.S. to immigrants from countries like South Africa, Australia and China – it became obvious that the principles and rituals they embraced during the holiday were universal no matter the culture: family, food and gratitude.
But as a relatively new holiday – one not tied to a religious or patriotic tradition – a shared understanding of the celebration and the meal is crucial to ensure its long-term survival.
While there might be subtle variations, the Thanksgiving meal is the lodestone of the holiday, the magnet that brings people together. Today, familiar items constitute the meal: turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, alcohol, salad, apple pie and pumpkin pie. Many of our interviewees tended to serve some version of this list.
But why these items and not others? What makes turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie so special? My colleagues and I studied 99 years of Thanksgiving ads in Good Housekeeping magazine to find out.
Marketing a ritual
Starting with Thanksgiving’s early champion, Sarah Josepha Hale, the history of Thanksgiving is rooted in marketing. Marketers not only helped create many of the rituals and cultural myths associated with the Thanksgiving meal, but they also legitimized and maintained them.
Initially, the Thanksgiving turkey competed with other meats, like duck, chicken and goose, for centerpiece at the Thanksgiving table.
But by the 1920s, turkey had become the only meat advertised. Early ads would focus on how to prepare and present the perfect bird, promoting branded tools like roasters, ranges, pop-up thermometers and oven-cooking bags.
Iconic Swift’s Premium turkey ads focused on the sacredness of the meal by featuring families at prayer, giving thanks before the meal begins. The importance of the turkey to the Thanksgiving celebration dominates, helping to perpetuate the Thanksgiving turkey tradition.
Meanwhile, early ads for the Eatmor Cranberry Company positioned their whole cranberries as a perfect complement to any and all Thanksgiving meat dishes. This brand dominated until the 1930s when another brand, Ocean Spray, entered with its canned gelatin cranberry sauce.
Ads for both brands implied that cranberry sauce has been around since the first Thanksgiving dinner, which was highly unlikely. However, the brand positioning war successfully promoted cranberry sauce as the natural condiment for the Thanksgiving turkey. Ocean Spray would triumph and, to this day, promotes whole cranberries and canned gelatin.
Considered by many to be the quintessential Thanksgiving dessert, pumpkin pie also wasn’t present at the first Thanksgiving meal. (The Pilgrims lacked the butter, wheat flour and sugar to make the pastry.) Nonetheless, beginning as early as 1925, a range of brands – for example, Borden’s, Snowdrift, Mrs. Smith’s and Libby’s – have competed fiercely to connect pumpkin pie to the season, the holiday and the meal. It’s a rivalry that continues to this day.
The role of the consumer
Not every product category or brand succeeded in becoming a core part of the Thanksgiving meal.
A Welch’s ad from the 1960s implies that the first Thanksgiving meal included juice made from grapes. In 1928, Diamond marketed their walnuts as an accessory to dress up Thanksgiving dishes. Despite vociferous ad campaigns, few associate Welch’s grape juice or Diamond walnuts with Thanksgiving today.
But those early 20th-century ads for turkey clearly resonated: Today, nearly 88 percent of U.S. households have turkey on Thanksgiving, and approximately 20 percent of the turkeys consumed in any given year are consumed at Thanksgiving. This is a testament to the enduring influence of marketing on the holiday. For brands like Butterball (formerly Swift’s Premium), Thanksgiving is big business.
Whether you’re a turkey fan or not, prefer apple pie to pumpkin pie, enjoy canned gelatin over whole cranberry sauce, by celebrating Thanksgiving, you play a role as well. Marketers may have shaped many of the rituals of the holiday. But all Americans – from all backgrounds – certainly do their part to maintain them.
After all, brands need customers to survive.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Samantha N. N. Cross, Associate Professor of Marketing, Iowa State University
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Colombian Women’s Soccer Team Mad At Adidas For Picking Miss Universe Over Them
Adidas decided to use Miss Universe for the showcase of Colombia’s Women’s National Soccer Team’s new kit. The players feel snubbed out of their work and commitment to their jersey.
The honor of being the first to pose with the national team’s shirt went to former Miss Colombia and Miss Universe, Paulina Vega Dieppa, who now performs as an actress, model, and television host. For the men’s jersey, Adidas used Colombian icon and Bayern Munich’s summer star-signing, James Rodriguez.
“The new shirt of the Colombia’s national team empowers me. Ready to support them next year in Russia. #HereToCreate @adidasco @adidasfootball @jamesrodriguez10 @d_ospina1 @cuadrado,” wrote Vega Dieppa on her Instagram picture. She showed the jersey off, tagging the brand, James Rodriguez, Arsenal’s goalkeeper, David Ospina, and Juventus’ star-winger, Juan Cuadrado.
Colombia’s women’s team’s goalkeeper, Vanessa Cordoba, got outraged at Adidas’ decision to use a model instead of a player. She then took to social media outlets to voice her discontent.
“I have nothing against Adidas, and I acknowledge that football belongs to everyone, whether they play or not. I also appreciate that they gave the shirt to a successful and influential woman for advertising purposes,” wrote Cordoba on her Twitter account.
“However, in terms of respect and merit, one of the players should have received it first. It’s fine that they include celebrities to help promote football, I just don’t agree that Paulina Vega should wear the shirt before, say, Catalina Usme,” sentenced the daughter of Oscar Cordoba, Colombia’s greatest goalkeeper in the history of the team.
Vanessa, who labors as a goalkeeper in the United States at the Ohio University, received countless support from her teammates and even the men’s national team. They said that, “Cordoba’s unhappiness is completely justified. Adidas made an involuntary mistake that we’re sure they’ll make up for.”
She’s actively fighting for gender equality in football. This time her whole country stood by her and took to Instagram to appreciate the people’s support.
“MANY THANKS to all the people who have become involved in this opinion about the new shirt of the Colombian Soccer Team. It has been an enriching experience to be able to read and listen to different points of view,” wrote Vanessa.
“My only feeling towards the women of our country and the rest of the world (athletes or not) is respect and admiration because we are in this together. I am happy to have been able to give visibility to the subject and I hope that everyone contributing can shape our society. We use that shirt for the love of our country so let’s make it represent UNION, EQUALITY, and EQUITY!”
Article inspired by the New York Daily Post // Colombia women’s soccer furious at getting snubbed for Miss Universe
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Walking While Black
This story originally appeared on ProPublica and was co-published with the Florida Times-Union.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office issues hundreds of pedestrian citations a year, drawing on an array of 28 separate statutes governing how people get around on foot in Florida’s most populous city. There is, of course, the straightforward jaywalking statute, barring people from crossing against a red light. But in Jacksonville, pedestrians can also be ticketed for crossing against a yellow light, for “failing to cross a street at a right angle,” for not walking on the left side of a road when there are no sidewalks, or alternatively for not walking on a sidewalk when one is available.
The sheriff’s office says the enforcement of the full variety of pedestrian statutes is essential to keeping people alive in a city with one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the nation. The office also says the tickets are a useful crime-fighting tool, allowing officers to stop suspicious people and question them for guns and or drugs.
However, a ProPublica/Florida Times-Union analysis of five years of pedestrian tickets shows there is no strong relationship between where tickets are being issued and where people are being killed. The number of fatal crashes involving pedestrians, in fact, climbed every year from 2012 to 2016, the most recent years for which complete data is available.
What the analysis does show is that the pedestrian tickets—typically costing $ 65, but carrying the power to damage one’s credit or suspend a driver’s license if unpaid—were disproportionately issued to blacks, almost all of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the last five years, blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only accounting for 29 percent of the population. Blacks account for a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida.
Blacks, then, were nearly three times as likely as whites to be ticketed for a pedestrian violation. Residents of the city’s three poorest zip codes were about six times as likely to receive a pedestrian citation as those living in the city’s other, more affluent 34 zip codes.
Tickets for some of the less familiar statutes were issued even more disproportionately to blacks. Seventy-eight percent of all tickets written for “walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided” were issued to blacks. As well, blacks accounted for 68 percent of all recipients of tickets issued for “failing to cross the road at a right angle or shortest route.”
John Fitzgerald Kendrick, a truck driver, got out of his truck after encountering Jacksonville sheriff’s officers in April of 2015. Once out of his truck, he was immediately ordered to the ground by an officer, who pointed a Taser gun at him. He was arrested and issued a ticket for “walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided.” Kendrick fought the ticket and it was dismissed by a judge.
Brianna Nonord, 13, wound up in handcuffs and detained by an officer that same month in 2015 after she walked away from an officer trying to write her a ticket for having “failed to cross in a crosswalk” on her way home from school.
Maurice Grant, a lawyer with the federal public defender’s office, was walking near the federal courthouse in May of 2016 when he was cited for crossing against a red light.
The ProPublica/Times-Union analysis also found that the sheriff’s office had issued hundreds of erroneous tickets for crossing the street while not in a crosswalk. The mistakes, identified by a detailed ProPublica/Times-Union review of the locations where the tickets were given, appear to have resulted from a misunderstanding of the statute on the part of the sheriff’s officers. The often misapplied crosswalk statute accounted for more tickets than any other, and again, blacks were over-represented in that category of ticket.
In interviews, the sheriff’s department’s second-in-command, Patrick Ivey, said any racial discrepancies could only be explained by the fact that blacks were simply violating the statutes more often than others in Jacksonville.
“Were the citations given in error?” Ivey asked. “I have nothing to suggest that. Were they given unjustified? I have nothing to suggest that.”
In response to the ProPublica/Times-Union findings, Sheriff Mike Williams said, “Let me tell you this: There is not an active effort to be in black neighborhoods writing pedestrian tickets.”
Ivey said stopping people for pedestrian violations as a means for establishing probable cause to search them was also fully justified.
“Shame on him that gives me a legal reason to stop him,” Ivey said.
Lots of police agencies across the country in recent years have been found to have improperly targeted African Americans and other minorities. The New Jersey State Police profiled minority drivers on the state’s highways. The New York Police Department’s policy of stop-and-frisk was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge after statistics showed minorities, while making up half the city’s population, accounted for 83 percent of all such encounters with police. Similar issues with stop-and-frisk practices have surfaced in Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
Most recently, U.S. Department of Justice investigators found that police in Ferguson, Missouri, had been enforcing traffic violations and civil codes—high weeds in your yard was one of them—disproportionately against African-American residents to generate revenue for the city. Many of those ticketed wound up unable to pay, and, as a result, were cast into a cycle of debt and incarceration.
The issuing of pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, a city of 880,000, does not produce large sums of money for the city’s coffers. There were slightly more than 2,200 tickets issued over the five years examined by the Times-Union and ProPublica, accounting for just under $ 70,000.
But the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis shows that more than half of the 2,200 pedestrian tickets from the past five years have not yet been resolved, meaning that the fines have not been paid or the cases adjudicated. Fines and fees associated with open cases are sent to collections agencies, and those whose cases were sent for collection can see their credit damaged. The tickets also can lead to suspensions or revocations of driver’s licenses. Even after the tickets are paid, the tickets can cost a person points on their driver’s license or commercial license, which is especially damaging for truck and bus drivers.
Kenneth Nunn, a law professor at the University of Florida, said the pedestrian ticket data in Jacksonville suggests a selective enforcement of the statutes that can feel like harassment for the communities being targeted.
“If we’re seeing searches on a broad basis that seem to be concentrated in poor black communities that suggests an ulterior motive for the searches that are ongoing,” Nunn said.
Such concerns—expressed in dozens of interviews with residents, defense lawyers, and a variety of legal experts—are only deepened by how infrequently it appears the issuing of tickets results in arrests for more serious crimes. Our examination of local court records turned up only 149 instances in which a pedestrian ticket written from 2012 to 2017 resulted in additional criminal charges. The review found that just 27 of those instances involved a gun charge, or 1.2 percent of all tickets written. (Under New York City’s stop-and-frisk enforcement, only 2 percent of stops resulted in arrests for weapons.)
Ojmarrh Mitchell, an associate professor in criminology at the University of South Florida, said the sheriff’s office’s claim that stopping people for pedestrian violations is an effective way to suppress crime is both unfounded and grimly familiar.
“You could stop anyone—in a car, on a bike, on foot—for breaking traffic laws because there are so many violations,” Mitchell said. “If you’re willing to follow someone for a couple of minutes, you’re going to find a reason to stop them.”
“Certain leaders, regardless of the evidence,” Mitchell added, “are going to employ these head-knocking strategies, even if they don’t work, and even if they alienate the community.”
Almost a third of all tickets issued in the years examined by the Times-Union and ProPublica went to African American males from age 14 to 35. Michael Anderson was one of them.
Anderson, then 29, said he was headed from his mother’s house to the grocery store on Jacksonville’s East Side last April when he was approached by three officers. Anderson said he was told he was jaywalking, asked for identification, and then threatened with being handcuffed for resisting arrest after he balked at an officer’s attempt to search him.
“I said, ‘Why are you all bothering me? You’re only harassing me because I’m a black male, with dreads in this high crime area,’” Anderson recalled telling the officers. “’If you check my I.D., you’ll see I grew up in this area.’”
Anderson contested the ticket for walking in a roadway where sidewalks are provided, and it was dismissed when none of the officers showed up for the hearing.
The more than 2,200 tickets examined by the Times-Union and ProPublica included all those written in Duval County, the borders of which are nearly identical to those of the city of Jacksonville. The total number of tickets included 311 written by agencies other than the sheriff’s office. Most of those were issued by the Florida Highway Patrol, which accounted for 199; a single ticket was given by the Florida Fish and Wildlife agency.
Looking only at tickets issued by the sheriff’s office, the percentage of tickets given to blacks—59 percent—is higher than if tickets issued by all agencies are considered.
Mayor Lenny Curry would not comment on the racial disparities in pedestrian tickets found by the Times-Union and ProPublica.
Anna Brosche, president of the Jacksonville City Council, said she would review the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis. She said she did not want to prejudge the policies or conduct of the sheriff’s office.
“My next step would be to have a meeting with the sheriff to better understand the data you put forth and what it means to the overall operations of our city as it relates to public safety,” Brosche said.
Death Trap
Year after year, Jacksonville has been ranked among the five most dangerous American cities for pedestrians. There were 30 deadly crashes involving pedestrians in 2012, increasing each year to 41 in 2016, the most recent year for which calendar data was available.
In 2015, the federal government took notice. The Federal Highway Administration identified Jacksonville as one of its “focus cities,” a designation that came with an offer of help in devising solutions. Jacksonville soon hired consultants to develop a plan of action for saving lives.
The consultants eventually produced a report titled “Pedestrian and Bicyclist Master Plan.” At its heart was a recognition that Jacksonville, built in the 1960s automobile boom and largely unchanged since, was its own kind of death trap. Highways and expressways constructed decades ago carved through low-income communities, sending high-speed traffic from the city’s downtown business district to the beaches, suburbs and affluent neighborhoods.
Communities along those arterial roads were left with treacherous four-lane thoroughfares that stretch for a half-mile or longer before offering crosswalks. Along Beach Boulevard, for instance, there’s one stretch where crosswalks are 1.3 miles apart. There are multiple low-income apartment complexes in between those crossings.
But the city’s issues for pedestrians went beyond its network of dangerous highways and broad avenues. Those who travel on foot in Jacksonville are faced with a disconnected network of sidewalks, which are often in disrepair. City officials haven’t even completely mapped all of them.
And while Jacksonville is the country’s largest city by land mass, its public transportation system has consistently been found wanting in national studies. People who rely on the bus system can put themselves in danger just trying to access their rides. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority, for example, has 321 bus stops on roads without sidewalks and 993 bus stops not within 300 feet of a crosswalk, according to the most recently available data.
The master plan developed by the consultants—aspects of which were regularly shared with city officials and the sheriff’s office—offered two essential means to cut civilian deaths: slow down traffic and build up pedestrian infrastructure like sidewalks and bus stops and formal crossings with crosswalks.
The plan also was emphatic about what wouldn’t work—trying to get pedestrians to behave more safely, and writing tickets in an attempt to compel them to do so.
No amount of education, encouragement, or enforcement will make a significant change in pedestrian behavior, the report concluded.
In an interview, Andy Clarke, the lead author of the plan, stood by the report.
“Trying to educate people to cross the road safely when there aren’t crosswalks or where there’s missing sidewalks,” Clarke said, “it just doesn’t work.”
He said ticketing pedestrians would not improve public safety, and that anything that didn’t involve addressing the city’s dangerous layout and lack of adequate infrastructure would certainly be seen as a cynical decision.
“It seems unfortunate to say the least, and capricious at worst, to be ticketing people for behavior when it just isn’t possible to do the right thing or be in the right place,” Clarke said.
Mayor Curry’s office said the administration plans to update its sidewalk inventory in 2019 to include more details about the nature of the infrastructure. The office also said that it has taken action to fund more signalized crosswalks in Jacksonville.
The sheriff’s office wrote 264 pedestrian tickets in 2012, 353 in 2013, 422 in 2014, 252 in 2015, and 411 in 2016. Jacksonville is ranked sixth among the state’s largest counties for the issuing of pedestrian tickets.
Ivey, the sheriff’s office’s second in command, defended the merits of writing tickets to help fight pedestrian fatalities. He said that unless and until the city spends the money on things like street design and more and better sidewalks, the office had no choice but to write tickets.
“I’ll throw a scenario out,” Ivey said. “A camera—I don’t care what camera, from convenience store, cell phone camera, I don’t care—catches a policeman sitting there watching people jaywalk all day long across the street, and he’s sitting right there. Then all of a sudden, a car comes along. Kid’s killed. What does the family say, you know? ‘Why didn’t the policeman stop them, tell them, give them a ticket? I don’t care. Why didn’t they do it?’”
“I think we have a duty to educate, warn, and enforce where appropriate until infrastructure is fixed,” Ivey added. “Otherwise, I think we’d be doing a disservice to the community.”
A couple of hours spent observing who jaywalks in Jacksonville suggests Ivey’s education effort should include his own officers. Over a two-day span, dozens of uniformed Jacksonville police officers were observed jaywalking downtown by ProPublica and Times-Union journalists.
Ivey and his boss, Sheriff Williams, said they could not comment or take action until they had seen evidence of the routine jaywalking by their officers.
Tickets Don’t Make Sense, or Much of a Difference
In 2014, the sheriff’s office, bolstered by state grants from the Florida Department of Transportation, began implementing what it regarded as a strategic effort for issuing tickets in pursuit of greater public safety. It said it identified a variety of “data-driven hot spots” and deployed officers whose specific mission was to warn and ticket offenders in those danger zones. The office updated its targeted hot spots every year with the goal of reducing the number of pedestrian and bicycle accidents by 15 percent over three years.
But the identified hot spots don’t seem to really correlate with where deaths were happening. Seventeen percent of the 94 deadly crashes in subsequent years took place on streets identified by the sheriff’s office as locations at which they wanted to focus their ticket enforcement.
A broader look at the five years, 2012 to 2017, shows a similar disconnect between where pedestrian tickets were issued and where fatalities took place. Just one of the top six census tracts in Jacksonville for pedestrian deaths was among the top six for tickets. Indeed, one of the deadliest tracts—six deaths—saw just 10 tickets in five years. The neighborhood with the most tickets had just two deaths.
And while 25 percent of all deadly crashes occurred in majority-black census tracts, 40 percent of pedestrian tickets were given there. Six of the top 10 ticketed census tracts are majority black.
Williams and Ivey insisted the sheriff’s office’s ticketing had indeed been targeted at locations with greater numbers of deaths and serious accidents, but did not say what kind of data analysis had generated those locations. They said they would have to examine the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis before commenting in greater detail.
Billy Hattaway, considered by many to be the foremost expert in the state for pedestrian design, said that if one wants to cut pedestrian deaths, any proposed solution has to focus not on pedestrians but on motorists.
Eboni Dekine was trying to cross Ricker Road on April 28, 2016. She had her 8-month-old and 10-year-old daughters in tow so she chose to go what she felt was the safest route. An officer stopped her and gave her a ticket for crossing outside the crosswalk.
Dekine doesn’t believe the ticket was about keeping her and her family safe.
“If they wanted to make people feel safe, they need to sit at these intersections and watch how many of these cars are running through these lights. People are getting scared just to cross the street the right way. I feel more endangered crossing in the crosswalk than I do the way I did that day. And that’s the honest to God truth.”
Smart Policing or Selective Enforcement
In his more than two decades on the Jacksonville sheriff’s force, Patrick Ivey said it’s always been seen as legitimate to use a pedestrian violation as an opportunity to stop and question someone acting suspicious. The person might be behaving erratically or have an unusual bulge in their clothing when an officer notices them, say, cross the street outside a crosswalk.
“If I have a legal reason to stop him because he commits a pedestrian violation,” Ivey said, “I don’t think I would be an astute policeman to not use the tools at my disposal.”
The question of what constitutes suspicious behavior was at the center of the controversy around New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy.
In her 2013 decision declaring stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, Judge Judith Scheindlin concluded that New York police routinely stopped people they had no objective reason to suspect of wrongdoing.
Often, when officers stopped people with “suspicious” bulges in their clothing, they turned out to be commonplace objects like wallets and cellphones that should not have justified frisks or searches. And the vast majority of those stopped on the basis of such observations and things like “furtive movements”—which officers testified could be anything from being fidgety to changing directions to looking over one’s shoulder—were black.
“Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” Scheindlin wrote. “It is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group are criminals.”
She emphasized “the human toll of unconstitutional stops,” characterizing them as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”
The sheriff’s office said Jacksonville’s use of pedestrian violations to stop suspicious people could not be compared to New York’s stop-and-frisk program. For one thing, each stop meets the legal standard for probable cause because officers have observed a violation, giving them a reason to engage with the person.
Undersheriff Ivey said officers typically then questioned the pedestrians and often got them to consent to a search. Officers could also search an individual if they felt in some way threatened or the person failed to cooperate in showing identification. He said that if such searches did not yield a weapon or drugs, the deputies were free to simply give the person a warning about the pedestrian violation.
It’s not easy to say how many of the police encounters with people allegedly violating pedestrian statutes lead to searches. The sheriff’s office said it does not actively track how many of the tickets it issues result in searches and or added charges.
What’s more, there is even less information kept on instances where police stop someone for a supposed pedestrian violation, and only issue a warning. The sheriff’s office again said it kept no formal count. Records suggest the office issues about 11,000 warnings of all kinds every year. The records indicate the yearly number of warnings could run to the hundreds. A ProPublica/Times-Union review of the office’s work under the state Department of Transportation grants shows police issued more than 1,900 warnings in a 15-month span.
Still, it’s clear such searches are happening. The Times-Union and ProPublica used court records to identify at least 149 cases in which a pedestrian violation led to a search and subsequent additional charge. Even more than the total pool of pedestrian violators, those that are charged with more serious offenses tend to be African American. Overall, the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis showed, 80 percent of those for whom pedestrian violations were accompanied by other charges were black; 77 percent of the additional charges involved drugs.
The Times-Union and ProPublica’s reporting—interviews as well as a deeper examination of some ticket records—makes clear there are more cases where tickets lead to searches and added charges than show up in the court records. It is unclear, however, just how many more.
The Times-Union and ProPublica found a number of additional cases where drugs or weapons were found on those ticketed. But the reporting also found black men who said they were issued a ticket, searched and left enraged when the officers found nothing.
It happened to Bobby Wingate in December of 2012. Wingate was stopped for walking on the wrong side of the wrong road, and was so upset by the officer’s actions he called 911. Some of that encounter was captured on the 911 tape. Wingate accused the officer of punching him in the face. The officer charged Wingate with resisting arrest. Ultimately, the city, while admitting no wrongdoing, wound up paying Wingate $ 9,500 and the ticket and arrest were voided.
“What did I do? Nothing,” Wingate told the 911 dispatcher. “Walking down the street, minding my business … He stopped me for no reason.”
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia Law School who was involved in the legal fight against stop-and-frisk, said Jacksonville’s pedestrian ticketing program resembles New York’s approach in several regards. It gives officers wide discretion in conducting searches; there are profound racial disparities in who gets stopped; and it yields small crime-fighting dividends.
He said the imbalance of pedestrian stops on poor and black people resembled a “fishing expedition” or “dragnet “to conduct pat downs and look for outstanding warrants.
“Whether they’re outstanding warrants for traffic or misdemeanor cases, for failure to pay fines, they’re for all kinds of reasons,” Fagan said. “They get sucked into the criminal justice system, and so that citation … translates to an arrest.”
Williams, the Jacksonville sheriff, sees no parallels with stop-and-frisk. African Americans were not being targeted, he and Ivey underlined. Officers were under no mandate to meet quotas for tickets given. As a whole, the tickets were warranted and legitimately issued.
“There’s got to be a reason why we do it,” Williams said of the ticketing. “Ultimately, it’s got to be done because we’re trying to make communities safer.”
He said that the merits of any search and or arrest resulting from an initial pedestrian violation could only be explored by “digging into” individual cases.
“My point is, and my position is, just like police shootings and everything else, you’ve got to dig down to each individual one,” Williams said.
Williams did not indicate he felt any reason to dig into the pedestrian cases in light of our analysis.
Error Prone
Jacksonville’s enforcement of pedestrian violations briefly became an internet phenomenon last summer. Devonte Shipman, 21, video recorded his encounter with an officer who had stopped him for jaywalking. In the encounter, Shipman said, the officer said explicitly he was using the jaywalking citation in order to check Shipman for weapons. The video was seen by more than half a million people.
One of the claims of the officer who encountered Shipman was that he could be ticketed, and even arrested, for failing to have identification on him. The officer was wrong. It is a requirement only of motorists.
The video makes clear the error on the officer’s part only inflamed the situation, but Shipman said he remained calm because he thought the officer was purposely trying to get him to act out.
“That way, he couldn’t catch the criminal he was trying to create,” Shipman said.
Our analysis of the data shows Shipman wasn’t the only one wrongly cited for not carrying an ID while walking. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has erroneously ticketed six other people on foot for the same citation since 2012, according to court records. Five of the six were black and none of the tickets were dropped or corrected, according to records. Two of those cited paid the flawed ticket; the cases of the other four remain unpaid and open.
But the ProPublica/Times-Union examination shows significant numbers of erroneous tickets are given for violations other than not carrying identification.
From 2012 to 2017, 658 tickets were issued in Jacksonville for people crossing the street while not in crosswalk. It turns out, more than half of those tickets—353 – were issued in error, according to the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis. And, again, a disproportionate number of those erroneous tickets—48 percent—were issued to blacks.
The scores of mistaken tickets appear to result from confusion about the subsection of pedestrian law that police use to cite people for crossing mid-block, or “outside the crosswalk.” The statute—which accounts for more pedestrian tickets than any other in Duval County—actually only applies to those crossing between “adjacent intersections with traffic signals.”
We examined the listed locations for the tickets using Google Street View to determine whether citations for crossing outside the crosswalk adhered to Florida law. That examination showed tickets were given in places where there weren’t adjacent intersections with traffic lights. Scores of the tickets were given in locations where no traffic lights exist.
At least eight people in Jacksonville have been charged with felonies—six cases involved drug possession and two were gun charges—stemming from the flawed pedestrian stops, according to our analysis. All but one of those charged were black.
It is not clear how many of the flawed tickets led to searches, or driver’s license suspensions for failure to pay fines.
“I am not beyond apologizing for us making mistakes,” Williams said. “Many of those cases are long gone, an apology may be it.”
Williams has now asked the local state attorney to review the statute to determine if his office had indeed been enforcing it erroneously.
Mac Heavener, chief assistant state attorney, said the question of whether large numbers of tickets had been issued in error was a “novel issue” for his office. He said it would be up to defense lawyers to question the validity of the ticket, and any subsequent arrest that occurred as a result of the pedestrian violation.
Charlie Cofer, the local public defender, said he saw a problem with the enforcement of the statute. Cofer said after seeing the ProPublica/Times-Union analysis, he sent a memorandum to all of his attorneys to be on the alert about the statute and what it does and does not prohibit. Cofer said the confusion around the statute offered him the training opportunity to emphasize to his attorneys that they should drill into any civil ordinances that are the basis of a stop, and he said he was considering sharing his memorandum with the state’s other 19 public defenders.
Jacksonville Councilwoman Lori Boyer has been trying to get the sheriff to address his office’s problem with the statute for years.
Boyer said the ProPublica/Times-Union findings on flawed tickets was indicative of the lack of understanding by law enforcement.
“I would certainly hope that there would be heightened interest in education among law enforcement,” Boyer said. “They have the authority to write tickets and we want them to educate people correctly.”
“What I never thought about was the cumulative repercussions which lends even more importance to the accuracy on the enforcement side,” she added.
Chris Burns, a Jacksonville civil attorney who litigates pedestrian and bicyclist issues, said that even the traffic investigators for the sheriff’s office don’t understand the complex statutes governing the issue.
Burns said he offered to train the sheriff’s office to apply the law properly, but the arrangement never materialized.
Hattaway, the state’s top expert on pedestrian safety, was not surprised by the office’s confusion. He said there is widespread misunderstanding of the statutes statewide, among officers and citizens. He said the array of statutes need to be clarified or rewritten.
Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, an organization that ranks the most dangerous cities for pedestrians, said that African Americans in dangerous cities for pedestrians such as Jacksonville wind up harmed in a variety of ways.
“Walking while black means getting profiled more, it’s getting ticketed more,” Atherton said. “It also means being more exposed to traffic violence and at the same time having the least amount of safe infrastructure to use.”
Leslie Scott Jean-Bart is a lawyer in Jacksonville with experience in discrimination cases, and the granddaughter of the first black woman elected to the city council. In an interview, she said the racial disparities found by the Times-Union and ProPublica were predictable and unacceptable. But she said she didn’t even need the analysis to conclude that ticketing lots of poor people was not going to meaningfully improve traffic safety or reduce crime.
“You have communities that are already suffering economically, and then you’re putting additional economic burdens on the people there that then affect the driver’s license,” she said. “You’re talking about work. You get pulled over a couple times, you end up in jail. The next thing you know, it’s a felony. It just keeps going and keeps going.”
“This is very real,” she added. “This supports the fear that is in the African American community in Jacksonville and so many other communities. Now that we have the numbers, it’s time to talk about what are we going to be do about it?”
Correction, Nov. 16, 2017: An editing error resulted in an earlier version of this article misstating the name of the federal judge in New York who ruled the police department’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional. She is Shira A. Scheindlin.
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A Migrant Teen Got the Abortion She Sought. But the Trump Administration Is Still Fighting.
The legal battle over a migrant teen’s right to an abortion appeared to come to a close last month when a federal appeals court allowed the procedure to take place. But the Trump administration is still fighting—to stop other pregnant teens like her from obtaining abortions and to get the Supreme Court to sanction the lawyers who challenged the administration.
On November 3, the Justice Department appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which it hopes will penalize the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who succeeded in getting an abortion for the teen, identified in court filings as Jane Doe. Legal experts say the government’s argument is weak and that a politicized Justice Department is effectively declaring war on attorneys who challenge the administration.
Amy Myrick, a staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, sees the move as part of a continued effort to chip away at the constitutional right to an abortion, enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. “The administration continues to defy the Constitution by obstructing reproductive rights and the rule of law,” she says in an email. “They couldn’t stop Jane Doe, so they want another shot to undermine the right to abortion. It’s a reckless attack on women, minors, immigrants, and the legitimacy of the courts wrapped into one.”
Though the ACLU succeeded in helping Jane Doe get an abortion, it is also pursuing a class-action case to protect other pregnant migrant teens in government custody. As an unaccompanied, undocumented minor, Doe was placed into the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services. The Donald Trump appointee who runs the office, Scott Lloyd, is an anti-abortion activist who has made it a policy of ORR to discourage and even block teens in the office’s shelters from obtaining abortions. It is this new practice that the ACLU is attempting to halt in federal court.
According to court filings by the ACLU, there were approximately 726 pregnant unaccompanied minors in ORR custody in 2014, 450 in 2015, and 682 in 2016.
The Justice Department did not specify to the Supreme Court exactly how it wants the court to punish the ACLU lawyers for alleged misconduct in the case, although it cited past cases in which attorneys were suspended from the Supreme Court bar for misconduct. The department also wants the Supreme Court to vacate the appeals court’s order to allow Doe to get her abortion, fearing that decision could help other minors obtain abortions. The petition to the Supreme Court alarmed legal experts, who describe it as legally unjustified and ethically dubious. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Marty Lederman, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and former Justice Department official, wrote on the legal blog Balkinization. Lederman and others have noted that the career attorneys working for the Justice Department’s solicitor general did not sign on to the brief, as they normally do, suggesting that the brief does not have the support of nonpolitical department lawyers. They also say the brief largely fails to cite legal precedents to back up its arguments.
“So many things about this document are totally unprecedented,” says Deepak Gupta, an appellate lawyer and former Justice Department attorney. “And it’s hard not to read it and come away with the conclusion that the real reason they wanted to do this was they wanted to attack the ACLU’s lawyers. Maybe it’s for reasons that go beyond this case?”
The solicitor general’s office, which determines the government’s position on cases before the Supreme Court and regularly argues before the high court, is often referred to as the “10th justice.” It’s expected to remain above the political fray in determining its legal positions and interpreting the law. So the signatures of the solicitor general, a Republican lawyer named Noel Francisco, and his deputy, Jeffrey Wall, on this brief suggest to some legal experts that the Justice Department under Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being turned into a political weapon.
“It is, I think, the most troubling sign yet of political interference in the Justice Department’s core legal work,” says Gupta. “It’s hard to read this petition and not come away with the impression that it is a major hit to the credibility of that office.”
Doe is in custody in Texas, which requires a woman seeking an abortion to receive counseling at least 24 hours before the procedure by the same doctor who will perform the abortion. Doe received this counseling in mid-October. A week later, the appeals court gave her the green light, and Doe obtained her abortion early the following morning by the same doctor who had counseled her. The government could have immediately appealed the decision but assumed it had 24 hours because a different doctor would have to provide counseling and then the abortion. When the first doctor became available, the government believed that Doe was going to receive her counseling, when in fact she had the procedure. The government accuses the ACLU lawyers of misleading the government. But the ACLU lawyers promised only to keep the government apprised of Doe’s appointments, and they did that.
In fact, as legal ethics expert David Luban wrote in an op-ed in the Hill, the ACLU lawyers had a legal obligation to protect their client, which meant not informing the Justice Department that the abortion had been moved up. “Not only were Jane Doe’s lawyers not required to tell DOJ that the abortion would happen early Wednesday morning, they were prohibited from telling them,” he wrote. “The true ethical violation would be if Jane Doe’s counsel revealed confidential information to her adversary that might damage her.”
Luban suggested that it is the Justice Department attorneys who are entering ethically dubious territory. “The irony is that filing frivolous accusations with the Supreme Court is itself an ethics violation—and DOJ’s accusations against Jane Doe’s lawyers come perilously close to crossing that line,” he wrote.
As the drama has escalated to the Supreme Court, the case for other teens like Jane Doe continues in district court, where the government is seeking to delay proceedings until the Supreme Court decides whether to weigh in. “We won’t let this distract us from the real issue here,” David Cole, the legal director for the ACLU, told the New York Times, “which is that there are many more young women like Jane Doe out there who are still unable to get the care they need because of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional policies.”
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A Mexican Painter Changed by the City, Changes Art
It’s not only the people one meets in a big city that can be inspirational. For artists, it’s often the work they see there.
The Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo got acquainted with a number of artists the first time he moved to New York City in the 1920s, among them Reginald Marsh and Stuart Davis.
But the greatest impact of that city on his painting was chiefly visual, from the skyscrapers outside his terrace, to the swirl of amusements at Coney Island to the exciting gallery work in the international art capital that struck him like thunder. A colorful new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum traces the connections between New York’s cultural dynamics and what Tamayo put on canvas in the first half of the 20th century. Forty-one works from 1925 to 1949 comprise Tamayo: The New York Years, the first major retrospective of the artist in a decade, and the first to concentrate on his crucial New York years.
In the early 20th century, New York City was becoming the place for artists to be, says E. Carmen Ramos, the museum’s curator of Latino art, who spent three years creating the show. “There,” she says, “Tamayo saw works by major European modernists for the first time.” Face to face with the work, Tamayo would later say.
“In New York, I went berserk over painting. There, I experienced the same passion that I had felt during my encounter with popular and pre-Hispanic art,” he said.
Those influences had informed his work and served him well; it was the native influence, too, that was motivating contemporaries from Jackson Pollack to Marc Rothko. But suddenly Tamayo was face to face with Europeans that included Matisse, Braque and Duchamp.
“One of the artists he was taken with was, surprisingly to me, Giorgio de Chirico,” Ramos says. He was really interested in how De Chirico mixed all of these different temporalities, in part because the cultural scene in Mexico was also interested in merging the past and present, given the strong interest in indigenous culture as well as the modern era.”
It was difficult for Tamayo to find a footing in New York; he only stayed two years in the 1920s, returning in the early 1930s just as the Depression was having its effect, making staying difficult. He returned for the longest period from 1936 to 1949. All told, he lived in the city 15 years before he left for Paris in the postwar period.
During that time, he became more enamored with the city, as seen in his attraction to the swirls and sounds of Coney Island in the 1932 Carnival, a recent acquisition to the museum; and in the colorful 1937 cityscape, New York Seen from the Terrace, a kind of self-portrait, as it depicted the artist and his wife surveying the spires all around them.
Most influential to him that decade may have been a Pablo Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, which coincided with the unveiling of Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica at the very gallery where Tamayo was also showing.
“These two events had seismic implications not just for Tamayo, but for many artists in New York,” Ramos says.
Tamayo was inspired to depict the scenes of Mexican folk art he had been doing using masks, in the way that African masks had influenced Picasso. But Guernica in particular struck Tamayo to the core, Ramos says. “It really signaled a different approach to engage with the crises of the day.”
Picasso’s masterpiece was seen “not only as an antiwar painting, but as an aesthetic antiwar painting. And Tamayo really drew inspiration from that example.”
It’s clearly seen in a series of paintings Tamayo did between 1941 and 1943, using animals as an allegory for exploring the anxiety surrounding World War II. The twisted face of his howling dogs in Animals, as well the creatures in Lion and Horse, mirror the same agonized expression as the horse in Picasso’s painting.
One sure sign of his success, Ramos says, is that his works of this period “were acquired almost immediately after they were created.” Animals, painted in 1941, was already in the Museum of Modern Art collection by 1942.
“Tamayo is hailed again during this period for redirecting Mexican art and for creating work that responded to the moment in which we’re living, and art that was based on the culture of the Americas,” Ramos says. He extended the allegory in a 1947 work that gets prominent placement at the Smithsonian exhibition, Girl Attacked by a Strange Bird.
“He wanted to explore this anxious moment in global history, this post-war moment, but he didn’t want to do it in narrative terms,” Ramos says. “He really turned to allegory.”
In doing so, he also returned to subjects he had long been using, she says. “He blended his interested in Mesoamerican art and Mexican popular art with this idea of engaging the modern crises of the day, in allegorical terms.”
The attacking bird certainly conveys this postwar anxiety, if not the off-kilter tilt of the girl.
Throughout his career, Tamayo’s paintings never abandoned the representational—which may explain why his star fell a bit amid New York art circles embracing abstraction to the exclusion of anything else.
Tamayo stayed with figures, Ramos says, because it remained important for him to continue to communicate with an audience. He painted his last work in 1990, a year before his death at 91 the following year. Like his fellow Mexican artists, Tamayo worked in murals—an influence that rose north to America and helped inspire the Federal Art Project of the Workers Progress Administration during the New Deal.
But unlike colleagues like Diego Rivera, Tamayo was not interested in using his art for overtly political reasons.
Instead, he was interested in concentrating on form and color, Ramos says, and in adopting the color of Mexican ceramics and of popular Mexican folk art.
In his influential time in the city, Ramos concludes her essay in the accompanying catalog, “Tamayo absorbed the New York artistic scene, was transformed by it, and also helped redefine notions of the national across the Americas at a crucial time in history.”
“Tamayo: The New York Years” continues through March 18, 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
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Gulliver's Travels Wasn't Meant to Be a Children's Book And More Things You Didn't Know About the Literary Classic
Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift. Widely recognised as the leading satirist in the history of the English language, Swift found his way into the world 350 years ago on November 30, 1667. Celebrations of his life and legacy have been underway across the globe – not only in his home city of Dublin but also Philadelphia, Münster, Yokosuka City, Dundee and beyond.
Gulliver’s Travels is Swift’s most famous work. Since it first appeared in 1726, it has captivated readers, authors and artists alike. But many people’s engagement with this astonishing book tends to get lost in fantastical images of scampish little people and baffled giants. So here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to all things Gulliver.
1. Not really a children’s book
Most readers will fondly remember Gulliver as a children’s book, but the unexpurgated version is full of brutality. The ruthlessly logical Houyhnhnms – highly intelligent horse-like creatures – plan to wipe out the bestial humanoid Yahoos by castrating them all. This plan is inadvertently inspired by Gulliver’s description of how horses are treated in England.
There is a particularly unsavoury scene in the Lilliput voyage where Gulliver urinates on the queen’s home to quench a devastating fire. This is routinely included in the children’s edition, albeit in sanitized form. And then there’s the scene in one of Gulliver’s final adventures where our hero has to fend off a highly libidinous female Yahoo who appears intent on raping him.
2. Coining new words
Gulliver’s Travels has given the English language a number of notable words, not least Houyhnhnm (move your lips like a horse when saying it). There’s also Yahoo, an uneducated ruffian; brobdingnagian, meaning huge, after the giants in the second voyage; and lilliputian, meaning small, after the miniature humans of the first voyage.
Swift also loved puns. Lindalino, a most unusual place, is another name for Dublin (double “lin”). The flying city of Laputa is a harsh allegory of England and its colonial dominion over Ireland – the name means “the whore” in Spanish (la puta). As for the kingdom of Tribnia, it is an anagram of Britain. Its residents call it Langden, an anagram of England.
3. Roman à clef
Like any successful satirist, Swift had many enemies. Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, is recreated as Flimnap, who as the pompous Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput has an equivalent role in their society. Either the Duke of Marlborough or Earl of Nottingham is the inspiration for his war-hungry governmental counterpart Skyresh Bolgolam, the Lord High Admiral of Lilliput.
Other authority figures are roundly mocked throughout the book. The pettiness of politicians – Whigs and Tories alike – is compellingly conveyed by rendering them small. That moment where Gulliver urinates on the palace is sometimes interpreted as a reference to the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ceded Gibraltar to the UK – and by which the Tories put out the fire of the War of Spanish Succession with some very ungentlemanly conduct.
4. Big in Japan
Konnonzaki in Japan, just south of Tokyo, is a tourist delight. In addition to stunning mountains and beautiful beaches, it is thought to be where Gulliver first set foot in Japan – represented as the port of Xamoschi.
Local tourist associations in neighbouring Yokosuka City hold a Gulliver-Kannonzaki Festival every November. American sailors from the Yokosuka Naval Base dress up as Gulliver and parade around the district. In the first Godzilla movie, the monster also lands at Kannonzaki, then heads toward Tokyo – just like Gulliver.
5. Gulliver goes Martian
The book jokingly mentions the presence of moons around Mars. After Phobos and Deimos were discovered by astronomers in 1872, Swift crater on Deimos was named in the Irishman’s honor.
6. Swifter things
Before the advent of film, Gulliver appeared in stage adaptations, musical rearrangements, visual caricatures – and on fans, pots and various other knick-knacks. Pioneering French illusionist Georges Méliès directed and starred in the first cinematic adaptation in 1902, the spectacular Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et Chez les Géants.
Yet it’s the live-action version from 1977 with its Disneyfied Lilliputians that tends to stick in our minds. That film features an ebullient Richard Harris as Gulliver, but many other actors have portrayed him – including Jack Black, Ted Danson and Vladimir Konstantinov. Gulliver even appeared in a 1968 Doctor Who serial (The Mind Robber) and in the first volume of Alan Moore’s comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2000).
7. Inspiring other writers
Writers expressly influenced by Gulliver’s Travels include HG Wells (most obviously in The Island of Dr Moreau and The First Men in the Moon) and George Orwell (Animal Farm). Margaret Atwood’s adventure romance Oryx and Crake takes a quotation from Swift for an epigraph. Atwood has also written an important essay on the mad scientists depicted in Gulliver’s third voyage.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the main character, Guy Montag, alludes to the Big Endian-Little Endian controversy about the proper way to break a boiled egg (“It is computed that 11,000 persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end”).
8. Gulliver’s encores
Our national hero’s life ends unhappily – by his own account – when he returns home to a wife and children he has come to loathe. Nevertheless, scores of secondary authors keep taking Gulliver on yet more journeys, typically beyond the world Swift created for him, but sometimes back to where it all began.
The earliest of these was the anonymously authored Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, published less than a year after Gulliver took his first bow. More recently, a 1965 Japanese animated film took an elderly Gulliver to the moon – along with a new crew comprising a boy, a crow, a dog and a talking toy soldier. New countries, new planets, new companions, new adventures: Gulliver has had a busy afterlife.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Daniel Cook, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Dundee
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Jeff Sessions’ Russia Testimony Cited in Defense of Cop Who Killed Walter Scott
In a pre-sentencing memo obtained by CBS News on Monday, lawyers for Michael Slager—the former South Carolina police officer who pleaded guilty in May to federal charges of using excessive force and violating the civil rights of the late Walter Scott—invoke the testimony of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who told congressional investigators he had poor recollections about his meetings with Russian contacts.
“The text below reflects the sworn testimony of Sessions in his opening remarks. The highlighted portions are particularly apropos to describe memory’s imperfections, and in fact, could have been spoken by Slager himself,” reads one section of the memo.
Slager’s murder trial, which resulted in a hung jury, was covered in depth by Michael Sokolove for Mother Jones. Sokolove got to know the families of the former North Charleston cop and his victim, Walter Scott, whom Slager shot five times in the back as he fled from a routine traffic stop in an incident that was caught on video and made national headlines.
Slager, Sokolove writes, claimed on the stand that he feared for his life—the standard police defense—even though the suspect was unarmed and fleeing:
“In my mind,” he said, “it was total fear.” Scott had grabbed his Taser, he insisted. (In the video, Scott is seen running away from Slager, without the Taser.) “I pulled my firearm and I pulled the trigger,” Slager testified. “I fired until the threat was stopped, like I’m trained to do.” … The adrenaline from the fight and the trauma of the shooting had impaired his recollections: “My mind,” he said, “was like spaghetti.”
Scott’s family, of course, wasn’t buying it. “He flat-out lied. He sat on the stand and lied. The whole world knows he lied,” said Walter’s younger brother, Rodney Scott.
In the memo, Slager’s lawyers argue otherwise, using Sessions as Exhibit A: “A failure to recall, or an inaccurate recollection, does not a liar make…. Like Sessions, Slager’s testimony has always been consistent with the memory he had at the time and he has responded to questions asked in the context of the Questions.”
In a followup post about the guilty plea, Sokolove wrote…
Slager was not under imminent threat. After the shooting, he appeared to plant evidence by retreating to where the scuffle had taken place to retrieve his Taser and then placing it beside Scott’s prone body. Slager described a different sequence of events in the hours after the shooting, but more recently he has testified that he has no memory at all of those interviews with investigators.
His memory loss could be viewed as a calculated strategy. Or, alternatively, as an indication of a defendant who was not in the best of mental states to withstand a new trial.
Slager’s sentencing is set for December 4. Prosecutors, citing the former officer’s dissembling and failure to accept full responsibility for what he did, are pushing for a punishment of life in prison. According to CBS News, legal experts predict he will most likely get 5 to 20 years.
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