Idiocracy

Just when you think the stupid barrel’s run dry:

Yes, that is a wanted poster inked onto the arm of defendant Tyree Gland, on trial for killing a young girl, Deandre Brown, in a drive-by shooting.

The real joke?  Our rules of evidence.  Gland’s lawyer has demanded that the tattoo be concealed from jurors because it might “unfairly prejudice” them.  In other words, it might lead jurors to believe that Gland is the type of person who puts out hits on police officers.

The judge rejected the defense’s request.  This threat against an officer of the law will not be brushed under the carpet, like so many others.

But it makes one think: how many times a day does some guilty person walk because a different judge has granted an equally inane demand to suppress facts?

Clockwork Riots, L.A. Lakers Style: These Are Not Sports Fans

Imagine the crappiest job in the world:

You put on your Men’s Warehouse suit and drive to the office, dreading the inevitable outcome of the day.  Settling into your cubicle, you arrange the day’s work on the chipped laminate desk: a billy club, mace, and a copy of the quarterly budget figures for your division, awaiting approval from above.  In the next cubicle, Joey H. is already rocking back and forth in his mesh swivel knockoff, working the screws on one of the padded armrests.

The word comes from headquarters right before lunch: the budget numbers are good.

Joey lets out a guttural shriek, rips the loosened arm off his chair and kicks the front wall off his cubicle, still howling.  You grab the mace and billyclub and follow him as he tears a path of destruction to the break room, carefully avoiding getting too close, shouting at him to step down.

Joey ignores you and smacks out a fluorescent light fixture with his arm-rest, sending bits of glass and toxic powder all over accounting.  Then he pulls a wad of gasoline-soaked newspaper out of his pocket, lights it with a lighter, and throws the flaming mass in the paper recycling bin by the door.

Mike D. wearily rises from his desk, shouldering his fire extinguisher, and heads for the blaze.

You follow Joey into the break room.  He’s already used a folding chair to demolish the front of the snack machine, filling his pockets with KitKats while chanting “We’re Number One.”  You notice he’s been working out.

“Put the Kit Kats down, Joey,” you say.

“F*** You, Pig-Man,” he screams, winging a full Red Bull can at your face.  Luckily, you thought to wear your plexi face shied to work today.  Now that you’ve cornered him, Joey head-buts your belly.  That hurts.  You smack him a few times with the billy-club, always aware that the altercation is being recorded on security cameras for later review.  Finally, you manage to subdue him with the help of Kathy P., the new associate from sales.  She’s brought her handcuffs, and Joey’s taken off to the bathroom to wash up and get ready for Personnel to review the security tapes.

Later that day, the verdict comes back from Human Resources.  While you should have tried to stop Joey before he broke the front of the snack machine, you’re not going to get docked pay for using excessive force subduing him, like last quarter.  Kathy P. however, is going to have to go before the panel and explain why she bruised Joey H.’s wrist while snapping the handcuffs on.

Cop Injured By Lakers Enthusiasm

Joey H. gets assigned five hours of community service, which immediately gets suspended, as HR is testing a new program which will use positive messaging and self-esteem training to encourage him to stop setting the office on fire.  (Nancy W., still recovering from those lycra burns from the spring quarter numbers, stifles a bitter laugh).  Joey takes the rest of the afternoon off to meet his new esteem coach at the Starbucks.  The rest of the staff gets down to sweeping up broken glass and trying to scrub the scorch marks off the walls while running the numbers on the cost of replacing the carpet.

All except Kathy P., who is hiding in the bathroom to avoid those a-holes from PR who want to snap her picture and use it to illustrate a story they’re writing about the proper way to subdue a co-worker.  You settle into your smoke-fill cubicle and tug your rumpled necktie, wishing you could take it off as you start in on the stack of paperwork explaining your actions.

It’s going to be a long night.  There’s no way you’re going to catch that Lakers game.

~~~

That job would really suck.

It’s called “policing.”

I think most police would be grateful if the media and political leaders would just drop the fiction that such premeditated and utterly predictable riots (oh, I’m sorry, University of Santa Cruz: “uprisings”) really have anything to do with uncontrollable fan excitement over sporting events.

For every honest person knows that certain sporting events are just used by criminals and criminal wannabes to justify — to schedule — their own main events: destroying property, setting fires, looting stores, and throwing heavy things at policemen who are damned if they do respond and damned if they don’t respond.  The Los Angeles Times described the mayhem this time as a “a sour note as Los Angeles Police Department officers clashed with rowdy fans.”  Clashed with?

Imagine what a strictly factual report would say:

Police were forced to prepare for weeks in advance, planning and deploying tactical forces at great personal risk, including risk of lawsuits, and all at taxpayer expense, to try to minimize the anticipated violent lawbreaking scheduled for the conclusion of the Lakers game.

Rowdy fans? Do these look like rowdy fans, or do they look like people who showed up knowing they’d have some consequence-free fun breaking things and attacking bystanders and cops?

Psychologist and author Robert Cialdini, who has studied the behavior of sports fans, said the seemingly inevitable reaction by fans on the winning side is rooted not only in the emotional connection they build to their teams but in a chemical one as well.  Fans are so heavily invested in their teams that studies have shown that their testosterone levels spike significantly after they watch a major victory, Cialdini said. Elevated levels of the hormone are known to cause increased aggression, especially in young men.

See, they’re not responsible.  They’re just hormonal.

“When the team wins, we win and we feel it in a very personal way,” Cialdini said. “We’re likely to experience a great sense of arousal and joy even though we haven’t done anything.”

OK, why do people riot when their team loses, too?  Shouldn’t they be taking up needlepoint and thinking about changing their hairstyles instead?  And does this really look like joy over a championship season?

~~~

How about holding the rioters accountable, instead of the police? L.A.T. columnist Sandy Banks did acknowledge that the police presence was necessary, but even she couldn’t resist minimizing the actions of the criminals and reserving too much irritation for the cops putting their lives on the line . . . to protect people like her.  It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but why is it so difficult to look at images like this and just blame the guilty parties . . . full stop?

The antics of a bunch of losers shouldn’t obscure the patience, goodwill and high spirits of the thousands of fans who ventured downtown for a communal party and wound up being treated like pariahs. . .  The basketball game had barely begun when LAPD officers were summoned to dispatch growing crowds in the area.  “Keep moving, keep moving.” The command came over the loudspeaker as a phalanx of officers advanced, moving us off the paseo and onto crowded Figueroa Street. They pulled metal gates across the entrance to the complex to keep us out. . . . [The police] deserve a lot of credit for controlling the chaos. Everywhere you looked there were cops: on horseback, scooters, motorcycles and bikes, in buzzing helicopters and siren-blaring black-and-whites. If that set some nerves on edge, it also made clear who was in charge.  But it was hard not to feel unwanted. “If you don’t have a ticket, go home” was the officers’ message — explicitly delivered and universally ignored.

Throwing chunks of concrete at cops’ heads and trying to pull people out of their vehicles aren’t “antics.”  And what Banks labels a police message here is actually a message from the criminals, to people like her: they own the streets, and law abiding people don’t.  The police were merely stuck in the middle, trying to prevent innocent people from being injured by violent, lawless criminals.

I’d like to see Ms. Banks follow up by following the cases of fifty-or-so rioters arrested for violent “antics,” as they get serially dismissed by the courts.

Maybe then she’ll gain a better understanding of why it really is that L.A. — and other cities, like Atlanta — can’t host public events for decent people like her.  And the answer has nothing to do with whether your team wins, or how the police react to it.

Jonathan Redding, 30 Deep, the Blue Jeans Burglaries, the Standard Bar Murder, and Disorder in Atlanta’s Courts

Jonathan Redding, suspect in the murder of Grant Park bartender John Henderson, suspected of firing a gun in an earlier armed robbery outside the Standard (Why isn’t it attempted murder when you fire a gun during a robbery?  Are we rewarding lack of aim?), suspect in a “home invasion gun battle” in which Redding shot at people, and was shot himself (Two more attempted murders, at least, if sanity existed in the prosecutor’s office), suspected member of the “30-Deep Gang,” one of those pathetic, illiterate, quasi-street gangs composed of children imitating their older relatives, middle-schoolers waving wads of cash and firearms on YouTube: Jonathan Redding is 17.

How many chances did the justice system have to stop Johnathan Redding before he murdered an innocent man?  How many chances did they squander?

In May, Fox 5 ran a chilling story about the 30 Deep Gang.  Deidra Dukes reported:

Police say 30 Deep is based in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville community. The gang reportedly popped up on their radar about three years ago, and recruits members as young as in middle school.

“They know that the juvenile laws are a little more lax than they are when they are adults so they get them to do so they get them to do more serious crimes between the ages of 14 and 16, they won’t get into as much trouble,” said Harper.

Everybody knows this.  Everybody knows that there are 14-year olds waving guns on the streets and 16-year olds committing murder.  How can they not know, when there is video evidence of it, not to mention the bodies?  Spend a few minutes on YouTube watching the videos in which young men identify themselves by their housing project, some by the names of housing projects that were torn down but have managed to survive in the imaginations of eighth-graders as places where life was good in direct, not inverse, proportion to violence and chaos.

Look at the apartments these kids live in, that appear in the videos: they have little cathedral ceilings and nice fixtures, but nothing else — no beds, just mattresses, no pictures on the walls.  Nobody is starving: this is cultural poverty.  These are children: they take pictures of themselves in their classrooms, pictures of the school bus, then, inevitably, pictures of wads of cash and guns and little groups of kids who would have a hard time reading Goodnight Moon throwing gang signs with their hands.

What never ceases to amaze me is that I went to college with people who looked upon this stuff as romantic, not tragically stunted.  From the first time I walked into an apartment like the ones on these videos, I could see that what we were doing wasn’t working, if this was the result.  And yet people still debate this, as if there is anything left to say in the face of such colossal ignorance, and violence, and wasted lives, subsidized by us.

For the last year, the Mayor, the Police Chief, the usual editorialists and academicians, have all been denying that any of this is a problem.  One Jonathan Redding is one too many, but the powers-that-be, even at this late and tragic date, want to punish the public for daring to say this out loud.  If voters don’t reject this status quo next week, it will be a shame.

~~~

Jonathan Redding’s defense attorney is laying the groundwork to claim that her client’s profound ignorance is some type of defense — that he “doesn’t understand” the charges against him.  His life was empty, nihilistic, wasted, violent: this is an argument in favor of him.  Such routine suspension of disbelief in favor of defendants, and the rules of evidence that block the search for truth at every turn, are in Redding’s favor from now on.

It is not believable that Jonathan Redding is such a naif in the courtroom.  Some prosecutor or judge let him go, over and over — first as a truant, then as a juvenile, then as “just a robber” or “just a kid breaking into cars,” or “just a member of the gang stealing blue jeans.”  Now he is lucky to be alive, having been shot, and he is facing a lifetime in prison, and John Henderson is dead.

“They know that the juvenile laws are a little more lax.”  Our justice system has tied its own hands in a thousand different ways, and the judge wants Redding to testify before a Grand Jury, to give up names.

Who are we kidding?  Nobody in the juvenile justice system, nobody on the police force, knows who Redding was running with?  How many bites at the apple did they have with this kid?

Sure, put him in front of the Grand Jury; however, the Grand Jury is too little too late: plenty of people with authority to stop him knew precisely what Johnathan Redding was doing and who he was doing it with, but they didn’t take it seriously, and two more lives are over.  When will this price finally seem too high?

Gang Outreach or Just Enforcing the Law: Chicago, LA, Atlanta

Will Atlanta be the next Chicago or L.A.? Those cities have been shelling out big bucks to “ex-gang members” and holding summits and negotiating with gangsters rather than prosecuting them.

Imagine the impact this must have in communities where these thugs live, where they now draw paychecks because they are/were thugs, and walk the streets empowered by their special relationships to certain politicians.  How does that not teach children the value of going bad?

Predictably, the people drawing paychecks from these programs declare them a complete success, while, jarringly, also insisting that if the money doesn’t stop coming, the killings will start again.  Think about that for a moment: do gang prevention programs just create a new ways for gangs to shake people down?  Meanwhile, despite the purported success of these programs, the body count keeps growing:

A 15-year-old Chicago girl who was shot in the head outside her Far South Side home Wednesday as she shielded a younger relative from gunfire has come through surgery, a relative said this morning.

And in L.A.:

The gang member accused of murdering a local high school football player will face the death penalty, prosecutors announced Wednesday. . .

Espinoza, an 18th Street gang member and illegal immigrant, had been released from jail on a firearms charge the day before Shaw was killed.

So what would have kept 17-year old Jamiel Shaw from being killed?

• A fiscally unaccountable, money-hemorrhaging program with a fancy name that pays politically-connected ministers to “pastor walk” the streets (as Mayor Franklin is proposing), or a policy of not releasing offenders caught with guns prior to their convictions?

• A “gang negotiation” program that pays thugs who pretend to have gone clean (and later it turns out they haven’t, even when powerful politicians get snowed by them), or sentencing laws that take thugs off the street for significant periods of time when they get caught with guns?

I worked in the world of non-profits and community outreach for a long time, and that is precisely why I’m so cynical about gang summits and pastor walks.  We already spend billions on this stuff, and there is little untainted evidence that it does anything but enrich the non-profits themselves and feed the machines of local politicians.

I’m always amazed when people say to me: “why don’t we do more to reach out to delinquents and help them get jobs and other services they need, instead of throwing them in jail and throwing away the key?”

Well, to answer the first part of the question, we already do, and to answer the second part, that is precisely what we don’t do, even though it would save lives.

Do readers have any idea how much is already spent doing social services, and to what little effect?  The city, county, state, and Federal Department of Justice (DOJ) already directs billions of your dollars into job training and outreach and gang prevention and social service programs  — as Stephanie Ramage details in this excellent article about money spent on Atlanta’s Vine City, and the dubious results:

[M]oney is not the area’s primary problem.  According to Ivory Lee Young, who represents them on the Atlanta City Council, English Avenue and Vine City get more government money than any other neighborhoods in Atlanta. They have received more than $23 million in public funding in recent years. . .There’s the Parcel 25 Trust Fund, which takes a small percentage of earnings from the Courtyard at Maple apartment development and reinvests it in Vine City. . . There’s the Urban Residential Finance Authority (URFA), which has shelled out more than $10 million to the area over the past 20 years. . . The Westside Tax Allocation District (TAD), managed by the Atlanta Development Authority, also includes both neighborhoods. On Aug. 17, it made $2.8 million available for capital improvement projects only . . . In 2005, the Westside TAD disbursed almost $14 million to English Avenue and Vine City. The federally funded Title 20 empowerment zone has allocated $5.8 million for the area.  A Weed and Seed resource audit found that between $4 million and $5 million in funding was disbursed into English Avenue and Vine City in 2008 alone.

And so on.  That doesn’t include all the other resources from private and corporate non-profits, not to mention the vast amounts of taxpayer dollars that go into high-need education, day care, after-school care, city-funded summer camps, Head Start, housing, food stamps, W.I.C. free health-care, transportation, and job training programs, all the types of outreach that activist and the Mayor and Police Chief are now saying we need more of.

Frankly, I wish people would start talking back a bit when their elected officials tell them they’re not doing enough.  It’s utterly untrue, and it’s also pretty insulting.  If you spent a couple of years bopping around in those “outreach” programs, you’d be amazed at what some people are milking off your largesse.  I was surprised.  Salaries of 80K, 150K are hardly uncommon in community outreach — and salaries, frankly, are only the tip of the iceberg.  Then there are the questionable land investment deals that enrich the activists, the power that comes from being able to employ (and thus indebt) vocal community activists and naive VISTA and AmeriCorps neophytes, and the ever-so-flexible category of “administrative costs” that are used to build astonishingly cushy fifedoms, thus laying the ground for future grant-getting.

From Ramage’s article:

There is the Northyards Business Park Improvement Fund, which takes a portion of the money earned from the office park where Bauder College is located and infuses it into English Avenue. The fund is overseen by Antioch Baptist Church North, which boasts a $4.5 million annual budget on its Web site and runs the Bethursday Development Corporation.

Bob Jones, the head of Bethursday, failed to return calls for this story. However, the church’s Web site states the following:

“In addition to the ultra modern, multi-million dollar worship center which was dedicated in 1991, the church campus includes a bi-level administrative complex, a large formidable business plaza that houses the offices of the Antioch Urban Ministries, a community computer center, and the membership orientation facilities, four major parking lots, and a multi-functional Youth Center and adjoining recreational green space for outdoor activities. Dr. [Cameron Madison] Alexander [the church’s minister] has organized the Bethursday Development Corporation to manage building development and other investment opportunities of the Antioch Congregation. In late 2003, construction began on the church campus for a 261 unit apartment building.”

Look, if community programs and community development worked, I’d be the first person in line to support them.  But in addition to largely being theft and waste of taxpayer money, they don’t work.  They often make problems worse, because once you’ve got activists being enabled by tax dollars, those people are empowered through their political connections and your money to promote agendas that actually undermine public safety.

Like doing away with minimum mandatory sentencing, which Attorney General Eric Holder mentioned as part of that “gang summit” Mayor Franklin and Chief Pennington famously attended last week.

How on earth, one might ask, would doing away with laws that take the most violent offenders off the streets actually help with the gang problem?

Good question.  In order to answer it, you have to first understand that the people overseeing the movement to “talk to gangs, not prosecute them” are philosophically opposed to incarceration as a response to crime.  They’re not just anti-incarceration: they believe that people who commit crimes are not really responsible, just deprived.

They believe that you are responsible, for not giving these folks enough things, and that’s why they’re stealing your television set.

Broad strokes, I’ll admit.  But this is the philosophy of the courts, where municipal and criminal court judges have been drawn narrowly from anti-incarceration activist circles for decades.  It’s not the philosophy of the cops on the streets, but it is the philosophy of many Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, many chiefs and sheriffs being elected officials first and cops second.

And it is definitely the philosophy of our new Attorney General, who by saying the things he said at that gang summit clearly delivered the message that he, and the feds, plan to impose themselves on a government power that is not theirs, that is supposed to lie in the hands of the states: sentencing for crimes.

Listen very carefully as Pennington and Franklin and even Fulton D.A. Paul Howard talk about the new gang initiative in coming weeks.  Think about the weird undercurrent of chatter about how this isn’t about putting people away, and we can’t possibly get these people off the streets.

And while you’re at it, take a good look at that child holding up his pants with one hand while trying to break into your car with the other.

How well do you think “negotiating” with him is going to work?

And who’s going to get paid to pretend it did?

Middle-Class Gangsters: Is Poverty a Good Excuse for Being a Gangster?

The subject of middle-class youths joining gangs was raised in both the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the New York Times last weekend, but in very different ways.

The Times, predictably, describes such youths as “swept up” by forces beyond their control, like their poor counterparts, as if they have no responsibility for choosing to commit armed robbery:

“Raylin [Footman] comes from a good background,” said Mr. Footmon’s aunt Lisa Polite, 44, the correction officer.  [Footman was killed while participating in a violent armed robbery where the store owner opened fire after the robbers began pistol-whipping his employee] “My nephew didn’t have to rob anybody. His mother took care of him. I don’t know why he was there.”

Actually, nobody has to rob anybody.  People don’t commit crimes in order to pay community college tuition: they commit crimes because they choose to break the law.  “Mr. Footmon was a marketing student at Technical Career Institutes in Manhattan,” the Times irrelevantly tells us, going on to describe the academic accomplishments of fellow criminal Bernard Witherspoon in even more detail:

[A] 20-year-old man from East Harlem hoping to get a job with the city sat down at a computer in a building near City Hall and took civil service exam No. 8309. . . Witherspoon, had graduated two months earlier from Borough of Manhattan Community College with an associate’s degree in liberal arts. . . The passing score on the exam is 70. Mr. Witherspoon earned 82.5.  Nearly a year later, Mr. Witherspoon’s life has taken a dramatic turn: He sat last week inside the Manhattan Detention Complex, not as a guard but as a prisoner . . . “I’m not a naïve mom,” said Mr. Witherspoon’s mother . . . “He was really a good kid. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He really was.”

“[H]ad taken a dramatic turn.”  As if Witherspoon just looked up from his studies one day and was standing in a store, beating an innocent man while his friend waved a gun.  “[W]rong place at the wrong time.”

~~~

The Times seems annoyed that the public was not appalled, as they were, when an innocent store owner defended himself and his employees with a gun (“a simple Western-style parable,” they sneer).  They set out to correct their wayward readers:

[T]hat reality coexists with another, less publicized narrative: That while the four men may have put their lives and the lives of others at risk, not all of them fit the stereotypical profile of violent offenders.

More whitewashing.  Armed robbery is not secondhand smoke.  Walking into a store, pulling out a gun, and threatening to kill people cannot be couched in the soft verbiage of “putting others at risk,” at least not by people writing honestly.  But the Times is not interested in honesty.  They are unwilling to examine their ruling preconception: that criminals are merely poor people expressing their feelings about the injustice they experience, that they are victims of society.  The fact that virtually all poor people do not engage in criminal activity to “express themselves” is irrelevant: law-abiding poor people are merely one group they misrepresent, in the interest of mythology.

Then, faced with a situation that even the Times cannot fit into this chosen narrative, they don’t question the narrative: they simply manufacture a new one.  These “sons and strivers,” as they label the armed thugs, are just a slightly different style of criminal-victims, led astray by authentic (“stereotypical”) criminal-victims, but no more culpable than they are, which means not culpable at all:

“No matter what people might say, they did not know [Footmon],” Umar Abdul-Jalil, an imam who is the Department of Correction’s top chaplain, told those gathered. “We knew him. He was a good son.”  Moments later he reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and held it up in the air, to applause. It was a pebble.  “Let those who do not sin cast the first stone,” Mr. Abdul-Jalil said.

In other words, even though a young man of some promise is dead as a consequence of his own action, that action — participating in a violent armed robbery — must not be seen as the cause of his death.  Footmon was not responsible — how could he be responsible?  Maintaining the illusion of “not responsible” is more important, even, than learning how to prevent the next dead young man.

~~~

The Times, likewise, learns nothing, even though they are forced by minimal adherence to journalistic standards to include another fact that says a lot:

Raylin Footmon had one previous arrest. Last June, he was charged with robbing a Queens gas station attendant; he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal facilitation, was given a conditional discharge and served no jail time.

Curiously, other papers reported that Footmon’s record was more extensive:

Raylin Footman, 21, who had prior arrests for robbery and weapons charges . . .

Either way, Footmon was not really a naif.  He had committed robbery before, probably many times before being caught, and (according to the Post) had been arrested on other weapons charges.  When he was caught victimizing a poor working person in Queens, there had been no consequences.  This is all about the courts: the police arrest them and the courts let them go.  Through the magic of non-prosecution and plea bargaining, Footmon’s Queens robbery became “criminal facilitation.”  The sentence was “no time” for a violent crime.  The other arrests, if they exist, which I’m sure they do, must have ended in non-prosecution as well.

The judge, the D.A., the newspaper, the prison chaplain: all of these people sheltered Footmon (or his post-mortem reputation) at the expense of people he had targeted and would target in the future.  The experiences of his victims — the gas station and the employee — were officially purged, disappeared in multiple travesties of justice benefiting an armed thug.

Of course, for Footmon himself, said benefit was both dubious and short-lived.  Had he served prison time for the gas station robbery, it is possible that he might have decided to lead a different kind of life when he was released.  That’s a moot point now.  But this point is indisputable: had he really been held responsible for that crime, he would be alive in jail right now, thinking about his future options, instead of dead and buried.

~~~

The Atlanta Journal Constitution article explores similar territory, but it is not a brief for excusing criminal conduct.  Quite the opposite.  Where the New York Times tries to downplay the New York robbing crew’s culpability on the grounds that two of its members also attended college, AJC reporters Bill Torpy and Steve Visser elicit reactions from observers who are shocked that Atlanta college graduates and other middle-class youths would choose a life of crime:

[Defense lawyer Mawuli] Davis said more middle-class kids were being drawn into gangs, which he partly blamed on the media-generated “thug culture.” “It is almost like a kid who is embarrassed by his privilege, trying to show he is as hard as those guys,” he said. . .

That point was driven home to Morehouse College history professor Augustine Konneh last March when he testified at a bond hearing for a star student charged with murder.

Derek Davis, 27, a former Morehouse student from an accomplished family, is accused of joining another family: Prosecutors say he participated in the Nine-Trey Bloods’ “discipline” of [Jesus] Cintron and is among those charged with his murder.

Konneh came to the hearing believing he knew his favored student well and that the charges would be dismissed. After all, Davis’ mother was a banker, his father was a counselor dealing with deviant behavior and his stepfather was a school board president in Texas.

After hearing the case against Davis, the professor no longer knew what to believe.

“When the prosecutor said there were other members of the gang at Atlanta University Center, that really scared me,” he said. “I left that place trembling.”

Did Derek Davis get bonded out?  Is he one of the 43 accused murderers walking Atlanta’s streets?

~~~

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, the Mayor and the Chief of Police are gearing up to introduce a new “gang intervention” initiative that will probably be just another expensive, “expert” driven pony show to cover up the fact that they are not really removing dangerous people from the streets.  Expect more of your tax dollars to go into the pockets of ministers and activists who have already made untold millions from your taxes already — all under the guise of “outreach, not incarceration.”

No wonder middle-class kids are joining gangs.  There are few consequences, beyond lots of attention, which kids crave, and the chance to have some exciting times and get some “bling.”  And the possibility of death, of course, but that’s hard for the adolescent mind to conceive.

Everything’s OK in Here, Bob: The D.A., the Police Chief, and Atlanta Gang Story

I am still trying to puzzle out why District Attorney Paul Howard and Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington keep insisting that they do not need more resources to fight crime and prosecute criminals, while they also keep holding press conferences to warn the public that today’s criminals are more numerous, dangerous and better organized:

“We don’t have one person breaking into a store,” Howard said. “We now have eight people.”

I would add that, in addition to organized gangs, there are still plenty of free agents out there.  Nevertheless, Howard keeps buffering his statements about the tidal wave of gang violence with assertions that it is not his aim to prosecute all criminals involved in gangs.  From a July 16 interview with Fox 5:

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard spoke out Thursday about what he called an explosion of gang activity in Metro Atlanta. Howard talked about the wave of gang crimes that have been committed mainly by teenagers.  Howard said that gang violence was never really a big problem in Atlanta until now.  There are now more than 100 active gangs in the city and the number of crimes just keep growing.  “It started as a small stream and now it seems like there is a river of them,” said Howard. . .

[H]e said the rise in gangs is a new phenomenon.  “It’s a warning and I think people ought to heed the warning.  I think we should start getting ready,” said Howard. . .

OK, we need to start getting ready, right?  The problem is exploding and the public needs to act?  Well, wouldn’t that mean that the prosecutor’s office needs more lawyers to deal with this explosion of organized crime?  Not according to Howard:

When asked if locking up the people involved in the gangs would solve the problem Howard said, “It’s not going to solve it and that’s what I want to say to people. I’m the DA and I tell you we cannot lock up every gang member in our community.”

Howard said he was looking at options outside the courtroom, starting with sponsoring a community-wide gang summit.

Ah-ha: a gang summit.  They’re not going to arrest gang members and impose consequences: they’re going to make gang members feel even more important than they already do by sitting down and talking with them and with the activists who view them as victims of society.  That’ll show ‘em.  Oh, and by the way, they’re not even going to try to prosecute them.  Howard continues:

“As prosecutors we’re not on some campaign to add more prosecutors,  we’re not asking the governor to strengthen laws to fight gangs . . .

To state the obvious, why not?  Why would any prosecutor not want this, especially when his office has dropped the ball on gun crimes and dropped the ball on recidivism cases, at least one of which led to the released offender committing cold-blooded murder (see my posts here and here)?

Paul Howard, prosecutor, has decided that gang members need to be understood:

“[W]hat we are asking to do is to start to look for the roots, the sources,” said Howard. . . “We have to ask ourselves, ‘why are young people attracted to this gang activity?’”

Meanwhile, over at Pennington’s beat, the chief who denied that crime is a problem is now acknowledging it is a problem — but not for the law abiding.  Crime is a cry for help by criminals who feel squeezed by the economic crisis.  You see, it’s all your fault:

Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington told the crowd that crime spiked when the city cut recreational programs for children.

“Kids are idle in our community,” Pennington said.  When you talk to them after you arrest them, they say, ‘I don’t have anything to do.’”

Oh, come on.  Did anybody bother to ask the Chief to produce the figures that support such gawking claims?  The population of school-age children has dropped substantially in Atlanta as public housing populations dispersed, often outside city limits: that represents the only reduction in publicly funded recreation programs for children.  The city still has an enormous (and politically connected, and well-heeled, thanks to taxpayer dollars) network of programs that do all the parenting from cradle to adulthood for its population of parents (read: absentee fathers) who cannot bother to parent their own children or simply have come to expect somebody else to pay.

There has been no denial of spaces for children who need them because of their parent’s choices.  There is also no proof that the economy has anything at all to do with youth crime.  It’s all lies.

Does anybody ever ask these people for any proof to back up the things they say?

Here is what is really going on: the Chief and the D.A. are gearing up to blame the public for failing to provide enough social programs for deprived youths.  They are doing this to punish you for having the temerity to tell them to show up and do their jobs and get criminals off the streets.  They are reverting to a narrative that has tremendous support among the anti-incarceration crowd: offenders are merely victims of society.  We need to understand them, not punish them.  It’s all your fault that they are kicking down your doors.  If you gave them more things than you are already giving them, they would stop victimizing you.  Shame on you.

Of course, that’s just a perception of failing to provide social programs for deprived youths.  But that is one “perception” nobody is going to question on the editorial pages of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The “blame the public, not the criminals” narrative is seeping out in every new public interaction.  The “crime summit” where politically connected activists pretended to teach self defense and community organizing is where Pennington made his contemptuous remarks about the public being responsible for youth crime.  And don’t forget, he showed up there.

Think about it: well-intentioned, taxpaying, law-abiding residents spend six months trying to get Pennington to show up for work and he stays disappeared and heaps contempt on them from undisclosed locations: now he shows up and blames them for the crime problem that he also says doesn’t exist anywhere but in their minds.  Nice.

This is just like Bill Campbell’s last days.

More narrative, on your dime?  There is a very snazzy, very expensive-looking new interactive computer “gang intervention” game posted on the Atlanta Police Department’s website.  Go to this page, or you can find it on the bottom of the department’s homepage.  I encourage you to explore Atlanta Gang Story and let me know what you think.  In fact, let Pennington know what you think, too.  It’s your money.

I think Atlanta Gang Story is a disturbing glamorization of gangs, complete with a cool gun-logo which is inappropriate in so many ways that I’m tempted to contact Francis Ford Coppola to see if he’s interested in copyright infringement.  It looks like a movie poster.  How smart was that?  How long before vendors start hawking t-shirts that say Atlanta Gang Story, gun and all?

I think Atlanta Gang Story will do exactly nothing except amuse those gang members literate enough to use computers and then make them feel all puffed up for being the center of attention.   Self-esteem pieties aside, the last thing 14-year-olds with guns need is to feel more important.

I think this type of intervention is doomed to fail because it rewards the kids who join gangs instead of rewarding the vast majority of kids who do not (and are also most vulnerable to violence by gang members).  Everybody except apparently the D.A. already knows why young people join gangs: they join gangs in order to gain recognition for being tough, and to belong to something, and because it’s exciting and fun and gets them power and gets them noticed.  This is why they put videos on YouTube showing themselves waving wads of twenties and flashing not-so-secret hand signals.  Acknowledging their identity as gangsters will merely reinforce this sense of toughness, and of belonging.  It will enhance their identities as gangsters, not discourage it.

Atlanta Gang Story is also directed at earnest-yet-naive citizens who believe in this stuff, the types who get excited by the idea of the special role they imagine they play in understanding misunderstood gang-bangers.  In other words, this is also PR, directed at that slice of residents most likely to overlook the Chief’s lack of commitment to actual crime fighting in the first place.

I think somebody made a LOT of money producing this site.  I think reporters should start asking what got spent to produce Atlanta Gang Story and what is being spent on the whole rest of this gang summit boondoggle.  Remember Shirley Franklin’s 8 million dollar (according to NPR) “re-branding” campaign?  Atlanta needs to grow up: the party needs to end.

Millions disappear on this type of junk, while you still can’t get a 911 operator to take your call.  Of course, it’s hard to get the money to do something as mundane as hire more 911 operators and train and supervise them correctly.  It’s easy these days to get a fat grant to hold a conference where important people bloviate predictably and then evaluate each other positively while spreading the cash around.  Your cash.

How much money?  Who is getting it?  And in the interest of tracing the future path of the status quo, who do they support in the next election?

Why won’t the city’s chief prosecutor simply commit to prosecuting every single crime?  Which crimes will be deemed unimportant enough to ignore?  Small businesses that have been hit five times?  Certain neighborhoods?  Who, exactly, is going to be denied justice this time?