So you’re a New York politician. One of your colleagues is facing allegations that he hoarded rent-controlled apartments, cheated on his taxes, and committed various other financial improprieties. Oh yeah, he also headed up the House committee that writes tax policy until forced to step down in disgrace. But golly. It is his 80th birthday. What do you do? Isn’t it obvious? You throw him a big birthday bash, and celebrate the man’s commitment to public service!
I think my favorite allegation against Rangel is the one where he’s not in trouble because he offered hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to companies in exchange for a donation to the City College of New York to support a new wing named in his own honor. He’s in trouble because he solicited those donations on official House stationery.
Because that besmirches the integrity of the institution.
(Photo via TPM. Video via Huffington Post.)
When I interviewed him for my column this week, Fraternal Order of Policy Executive Director Jim Pasco differentiated citizen-shot video from police dash cam and surveillance video this way:
How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.
Pasco may be right about the potential for citizen-shot video to be edited, though from what I understand that’s pretty easy to detect. The problem with Pasco’s statement is that there are too many stories where dash cam and surveillance camera video has gone missing, particularly in cases where there’s alleged police misconduct.
Repeatedly, we are asked to review records of DWI stops during which there is no audio or video record of the event. Why do I believe there should be audio or audio and video record of the DWI stops? Because the law requires, and did so at the time of this stop, either an audio or audio and video record or the filing of a racial profiling report for each stop. See Tex Code Crim. Proc. art. 2.133-.135. The City of Fort Worth has conscientiously provided the means for complying with this law.
An appellate court should give no weight to testimony that is disproved by the objective record of the actual events. And I believe that the majority should address the issue of an officer’s intentionally disabling the audio recorder and testifying directly contrary to the audio record. …
At some point, courts must address the repeated failure of officers to use the recording equipment and their repeated inability to remember whether the car they were driving on patrol or to a DWI stop contained the video equipment the City of Fort Worth has been paying for. If the law requires recording to qualify for the exception to filing racial profiling reports, then is the officer not obligated to make sure that there is tape in a traditional video camera or that a digital camera is activated? When the actual recording conflicts with the officer’s testimony, the defendant’s testimony, or another witness’s testimony, a court cannot pretend that the emperor is wearing new clothes just because someone testifies that he is.
It’s commendable that more and more police departments are using dash cameras. I’m less enthusiastic about the increasing government surveillance of public spaces. But neither is a compelling reason to prevent citizens from protecting themselves by making their own recordings of their interactions with on-duty police officers.
A couple weeks ago on John Stossel’s show, I debated sex crimes with Wendy Murphy, the TV pundit and former assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts (where, like Scott Harshbarger and Martha Coakley, Murphy fought the release of Cheryl Amirault in the bogus Fells Acres sex crimes case). During the debate, Murphy threw out a statistic that only 2 percent of sex offenders are actually on sex offender registries. I’m still not sure where she got that figure. I’m also not sure what it’s supposed to measure, or what conclusions we’re supposed to draw from it. I still haven’t been able to find any study that produces that statistic
Last night I saw another clip from Murphy in a segment from The Daily Show. This time she was discussing birthright citizenship and the “anchor baby” issue. The Daily Show‘s clip was so completely outrageous, I looked up the interview that the clip was pulled from to make sure Murphy wasn’t taken out of context. She wasn’t, but more on that in a bit.
When I found the full interview (watch it here), I saw that Murphy again threw out a statistic that sounded preposterous on its face. At the two minute mark in the immigration debate Murphy says:
In prisons, half—half—the prisoners in California are illegal aliens.
She even pauses for effect. I can find no study, report, or government data to support that assertion. In January, the Sacramento Bee cited California state government data that put the number at 13 percent. This incoherent Fox News scare story (note that the final few graphs negate the entire premise of the article) puts the number at 12.4 percent (that figure is as of 2004, which the article says is the most recent year figures were available).
The only support I can find for Murphy’s claim is this passage from a 2005 Investors Business Daily editorial:
Some estimates show illegals now make up half of California’s prison population, creating a massive criminal subculture that strains state budgets and creates a nightmare for local police forces.
It isn’t clear what “some estimates” means. The claim is unsourced. My guess is that the figure comes from the same number crunchers who gave us Lou Dobbs’ Mexicans-and-leprosy figures. This particular IBD passage was excerpted by Newsmax in 2006, and has since been cut-and-pasted by immigration opponents on message boards all over the Internet. (Murphy’s underlying premise is wrong, too. The evidence increasingly shows that border cities and states have lower crime rates than the rest of the country.)
So where did Murphy get her “half” figure? I’d hate to think an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law would carelessly pull a bogus statistic from Internet message boards, then repeat the figure to a television audience. But then, we’re talking about the same woman who once said that disgraced North Carolina prosecutor Mike Nifong “deserves to be promoted and celebrated.”
Murphy’s continuing saturation of the cable news airwaves is nauseating. Her punditry career should have ended with the Duke lacrosse case, when she appeared all over cable news to defend Nifong and to damn the falsely accused lacrosse players, first prematurely, then even as it became clear to the rest of the world that they were innocent. (As late as last year Murphy was still griping about the lacrosse case). K.C. Johnson wrote of Murphy at the time, “In addition to the outrageous quotes highlighted above, on at least 18 occasions over the past nine months, Murphy has made demonstrably untrue statements. She also has engaged in a pattern of wholly unfounded speculation and has routinely denigrated due process.” Johnson ably shows his work in that post.
To my knowledge Murphy never apologized for repeatedly slandering the Duke players (she once claimed, with no evidence, that they had “ripped open” the accuser’s vagina). Yet her punditry career took off. She was rewarded with a book contract and dozens more TV appearances. William Anderson noted earlier this year that Murphy was recently invited onto the Today show to vouch for Catoosa County, Georgia’s shameful sex abuse persecution of Tonya Craft. (Craft was acquitted on all counts.)
In a 2007 interview with the American Journalism Review, here’s how Murphy justified going on TV to publicly convict potentially innocent people in spite of the evidence against them:
“Lots of folks who voiced the prosecution position in the beginning [of the Duke case] gave up because they faced a lot of criticism, and that’s never my style.” She notes that she’s invited on cable shows to argue for a particular side. “You have to appreciate my role as a pundit is to draw inferences and make arguments on behalf of the side which I’m assigned,” she says. “So of course it’s going to sound like I’m arguing in favor of ‘guilty.’ That’s the opposite of what the defense pundit is doing, which is arguing that they’re innocent.”
It’s all theater, you see. She’s just playing a part. It’s fine if she slanders some people, ruins some reputations, spouts flat falsehoods, and generally dumbs down the public discourse. Because it’s just entertainment. It’s what pundits do.
The sad thing is, Murphy is mostly right. Cable news is about lining people up on either side and letting them go at it. There’s no room for subtlety. There’s certainly no time for fact-checking a guest’s claims, even after the segment airs. Murphy is pretty, provocative, and confrontational. She’s great TV. That she’s inaccurate, slanderous, and hysterical is beside the point.
Let’s get back to that segment on immigration. Here’s what Murphy had to say about birthright citizenship:
I know we’re talking about babies, and it’s hard to be tough on babies, but let’s remember, we’re talking about illegal aliens coming to this country for the purpose of birthing a child, not because they love the kid, but because they want the child to provide them with the benefits of U.S. citizenship. In other words, that’s not the kind of child who’s going to be raised well and be a productive citizen. The child is barely loved. It’s more like a thing and a commodity than a human being.
At some point you have to wonder, is it even possible to be too shameless for cable news?
A pretty stark illustration of where public service unions put their priorities.
Sorry I’ve been out. Migraine put me out of service for a good 36 hours.
For my crime column this week, I spoke to three law enforcement officials who support the arrest of citizens who record on-duty cops: two prosecutors currently purusing felony charges for the offense, and the head of the country’s largest police union.
The quote in the headline comes from the latter, though the column includes some pretty incredible quotes from all three.
Connecticut police say they arrested a man at a management company after he mentioned the shooting rampage across the state that killed nine people and said he understood the killer’s mindset.
Fifty-eight-year-old Francis Laskowski of Derby was charged with breach of peace Wednesday after making the comments while working at Fusco Management Co. in New Haven.
Nine people died in the shootings Tuesday at Hartford Distributors in Manchester, including gunman Omar Thornton. Thornton told police in a 911 call that he wanted to avenge racial discrimination, allegations that company officials denied.
Laskowski told The Associated Press on Friday that his comments were blown out of proportion. He says his arrest was “ridiculous” and he didn’t make any threats.
Laskowski posted bail and is due in New Haven Superior Court on Tuesday.
And from Chicago:
The manager of a North Chicago sandwich shop learned in a Lake County courtroom this week that the difference between a joke in poor taste and an inflammatory remark is 75 bucks.
Arjunsinh Sindha, 64, doesn’t agree with the judge who hit him with a $75 fine after finding him guilty of disorderly conduct for asking a Pakistani-born customer if he was a terrorist.
“I don’t think it was a fair deal,” said Sindha, who manages the Subway sandwich shop at 2302 Green Bay Road in North Chicago. “We all talk when something happens. We just kid around.”
I guess “I’m calling the cops” is the new “Hey, why don’t you shut up, asshole?”.
I saw the best concert I’ve ever attended last night. I’ve plugged Josh Ritter on this site a number of times. His album The Animal Years is in my all-time top ten. (Hear him invoke Paul Simon or Bob Dylan).
But last night was the first time I ‘ve seen him live. It’s always refreshing to see a musician who enjoys himself and doesn’t pull the angsty, ennui-filled rock star routine. Ritter writes his share of pensive, contemplative songs. But on stage, he grins like a boy who’s just seen his first naked woman. He showers his audience with gratitude. It’s damned charming. Last night he invited his opening act (Tift Merritt, who in a just world would be a star) onstage to join him in what I think was a six-song encore. I lost count. The guy clearly loves what he does, and it’s infectious.
He’s also an amazing musician, singer, and songwriter backed by a talented band, who also were clearly having a good time (including a bassist with a rockin’ Rollie Fingers handlebar ‘stache). Last night Ritter covered John Prine, Talking Heads (sort of), and “Moon River.” I suppose it helped my enjoyment of his show that between songs he bantered about SWAT teams, heirloom tomatoes, and dogs.
Nashville’s Cannery Ballroom and Mercy Lounge are great venues, too. As the name suggests, the building is a converted cannery. Lots of exposed brick and warehouse chic. It’s also right next to the train tracks, which hammers home the retro-industrial vibe. Trains roll by in the middle of performances. The crowds cheer.
Anyway, if Ritter plays in your town soon, go see him. Here’s “The Temptation of Adam”.
New York.
This week, Illinois prosecutors dropped all charges against Jerry Hobbs and released him from prison. Hobbs, 39, has been in prison since 2005 for the rape and murder of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend. Last month, a man was arrested in Virginia whose DNA fit the biological evidence found at the crime scene.
I wrote a short piece for Reason last year about the man who prosecuted Hobbs, Michael Mermel, chief of the criminal division for the Lake County, Illinois, State’s Attorney’s Office.
Mermel’s greatest hit might be the case of Jerry Hobbs, who was accused of killing his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend in 2005. When Hobbs’ attorneys revealed in court that DNA tests showed the semen found in the mouth, rectum, and vagina of Hobbs’ daughter didn’t belong to Hobbs,Mermel postulated that the semen must have found its way into the girl’s body while she was playing in a patch of woods where teenagers were known to have sex. The girl was found fully clothed.
The only evidence against Hobbs was his confession, which he gave after 16 straight hours of interrogation. (His attorneys say he was also up the entire night before, helping in the search for the girls.) False confessions aren’t uncommon, especially when there’s pressure on police to solve a high-profile murder.
Assistant State’s Attorney Mermel has a history of standing behind his hunches, even when DNA shows the state got the wrong guy. When DNA testing came back showing the semen in the underwear of a 68-year-old woman didn’t match Bernie Starks, who was convicted in 1986 for the woman’s rape and murder, Mermel dismissed the results because the semen came from the victim’s clothing. Had it come from the woman’s vagina, Mermel said, “I would be standing over there advocating the side that the defense has in the case.”
Three years later, defense attorneys were able to find the rape kit. They then tested semen recovered from the woman’s vagina. Again, no match. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Mermel didn’t keep his word. This time he argued that the woman must have had sex with someone else just before the rape.
In 2005, when DNA testing on another rape and murder victim didn’t match his suspect, Mermel again argued that the victim—this time an 11-year-old—must have been sexually active at around the time she was raped and killed.
Even in releasing Hobbs last week, Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Waller told the media he still thinks Hobbs was involved in the murders. But he was graciously dropping the charges against Hobbs because after five years, a negative DNA test, and, finally, a DNA match to another man, he could no longer prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.
How kind of him.
New York.
Yet another cop-kills-the-family-dog story today, this one from Willits, California:
Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force agents, aided by a uniformed Willits police officer, serving a search warrant at 64 Franklin Avenue on July 27, shot and killed a family pet, an 8-year-old half-pit bull mix named Tonka.
When agents searched the home, they found nothing directly linking the residents to the arrest of Craig Anthony Gelber, the target of the search, according to MMCTF Commander Bob Nishiyama.
Apparently the raid came after police spotted their suspect at or near the residence with marijuana starts.
“I know the officer felt terrible,” says [police chief] Nishiyama about the shooting. “You may have the nicest dog in the world, but we don’t know it. Officers are authorized to defend themselves. We offered to take the dog and take care of it, but the family preferred to handle the arrangements themselves.”
According to resident Anna White, Tonka’s owner, the police shot her pet while it was in a fenced area on her front porch. “We found the shell casing outside by the fence area. Tonka then ran into our house, got onto my bed and died.”
White described her bedroom following the search, claiming Tonka’s body had been dumped from the bed onto the floor and items from her room dropped onto the body and into the dog’s blood. “They destroyed our house and found nothing,” says White. “Tonka lived long enough to die on my bed, which we shared each night.”
Tonka was one of three dogs at the home. White’s father was the only family member at home during the first part of the search. Her father got to the door after the shot had been fired, says White. The three dogs then ran into the home. Her father did not know at first Tonka had been shot since he was handcuffed and lying on the floor during the search.
Just collateral drug war damage. Nothing to see here.
I’ve been to many a dog park. I’ve seen lots of dogs scuffle at those parks. It happens. Most owners pull the dogs apart and, if they can’t get along, one or both dogs leave the park. The possibility of someone pulling out a gun and shooting a dog has never really even crossed my mind. But maybe that’s because I’m not a cop.
Stunned dog owners and residents of a Severn neighborhood are shocked that authorities won’t be charging a federal police officer who shot and killed a Siberian husky Monday night at a community dog park.
Bear-Bear, a brown and white husky that was about 3 years old, was playing in the Quail Run dog park at about 6:30 p.m., running off leash inside the fenced-in area, when the officer and his wife arrived with a German shepherd, who was kept on a leash. When the dogs began to play roughly, the federal officer asked Bear-Bear’s guardian, his owner’s brother, to call off the dog. But before he could do anything, the officer pulled out a gun and shot Bear-Bear, according to the husky’s owner.
Bear-Bear, who belongs to Rachel Rettaliala, died of his injuries a few hours later. County police did not name the federal officer.
The article points out that huskies have a rough style of play, so it’s likely that this cop, like plenty of others, mistook non-aggressive behavior for an attack. (Huskies are also an especially gentle, non-aggressive breed.) The fact that the cop had his dog on-leash at an off-leash park is more evidence that he doesn’t know much about how dogs behave. That’s never a good idea (most parks don’t allow it). It invites an altercation.
But that’s all really beside the point. I’m certain that if I (or anyone else who isn’t a cop) pulled out a gun and shot a dog at a dog park in a residential area, I’d be facing criminal charges. And rightly so. Even if the dogs were fighting, there’s no justification for shooting one of them, particularly around other dogs and people. It’s reckless, trigger-happy, and dangerous. It’s also safe to say that if this had been anyone other than a cop, the local police department would have no qualms about releasing his name to the press.
MORE: Baltimore radio station WBAL interviews Rachel Rettaliata, the owner of the dog, here and here. According to Rettaliata local animal control officials said neither animal had any scratch or bite marks.
New York.
New York.
The tease:
When Pennsylvania resident Brian Kelly was arrested and charged with a felony in 2007 for recording a police officer during a traffic stop, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania District Attorney David Freed told a local newspaper that he sympathized with Kelly’s plight. Kelly was arrested based on a tortured interpretation of an old state wiretapping law. Still, Freed told the paper, “Obviously, ignorance of the law is no defense.”
As it turns out, Freed was the one who was ignorant of the law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the wiretapping law doesn’t apply to recording on-duty public officials because those officials have no expectation of privacy. As Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko explains, while citizens who don’t know the law can be fined, arrested, and jailed, cops and prosecutors who wrongly threaten with arrest and wrongly charge people based on a misunderstanding of the law typically face no sanction at all.
Read all about it here.
Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga looks at the recent history of federal dietary guidelines and finds they may well be killing us.
As a recent review of the latest research in Scientific American pointed out, ever since the first set of federal guidelines appeared in 1980, Americans heard that they had to reduce their intake of saturated fat by cutting back on meat and dairy products and replacing them with carbohydrates. Americans dutifully complied. Since then, obesity has increased sharply, and the progress that the country has made against heart disease has largely come from medical breakthroughs like statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, and more effective medications to control blood pressure.
Researchers have started asking hard questions about fat consumption and heart disease, and the answers are startling…
According to Scientific American, growing research into carbohydrate-based diets has demonstrated that the medical establishment may have harmed Americans by steering them toward carbs. Research by Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, concludes that diets rich in carbohydrates that are quickly digestible—that is, with a high glycemic index, like potatoes, white rice, and white bread—give people an insulin boost that increases the risk of diabetes and makes them far more likely to contract cardiovascular disease than those who eat moderate amounts of meat and fewer carbs. Though federal guidelines now emphasize eating more fiber-rich carbohydrates, which take longer to digest, the incessant message over the last 30 years to substitute carbs for meat appears to have done significant damage. And it doesn’t appear that the government will change its approach this time around. The preliminary recommendations of a panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines urge people to shift to “plant-based” diets and to consume “only moderate amounts of lean meats, poultry and eggs.”
My colleague Jacob Sullum wrote last week about how the dietary guidelines have been reluctant to embrace overwhelming scientific research showing the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.
I think my favorite example of self-proclaimed nutrition expert oopses was a campaign run by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in the late 1980s and early 1990s to get restaurants to switch from animal fats to trans fats. From a 1988 CSPI newsletter:
“All told, the charges against trans fat just don’t stand up. And by extension, hydrogenated oils seem relatively innocent.”
Of course, CSPI now wants to ban the stuff outright.
As the government takes over more of the health care system, expect to see more calls for more government “nudges” to help us eat healthier in order to save the government money. It’s worth remembering that like everything else government does, the government’s dietary recommendations are susceptible to all sorts of pressures and influences, which may or may not have anything to do with nutritional science.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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