#JusticeForEthan and the Media Narrative continued

Something is happening to the media narrative.

Since Saylor died in January, the only people to cover the story were local reporters, especially the people for Washington Post Local (this op-ed from July has a wrap-up of links). This is part of why I tried to write about the story in a way that would nationalize it, to show that this is not an aberration. I didn't especially succeed based on my readership numbers.

But with the new petition, with the reporting by WUSA*9 in D.C., MD lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate Heather Mizeur pushing for answers (this may be the catalyst) and .. well, who really knows, the story is spreading. CBS picked up the story, and Yahoo!, and now ABC. It may be that the petition, which now has over 200,000 signatures, is driving the story. Hey, maybe you could go sign it.

It's heartening to see. Last May, when I wrote my first blog post about Saylor, no petition had more than about 1000 signatures, because the issue had gained no traction outside of the disability community. Now things are moving.

So what are the questions we still have about the case?

1. If you read the 98-page report and all the witness statements, the chain of events from the moment the police put their hands on Ethan until he was dead on the floor remains a little unclear. Did they take him out of sight of people for a moment? Did they put their knee on his back? What is the exact chain of events that happened here. I'm still not sure we totally know and I'd feel a lot more confident if the MD Gov's office investigated, rather than the Tea Party Sheriff of Frederick County Maryland. The more I learn about him and his supervisors (the more I learn about Blaine Young, the chair of the country board, the less I think he's likely sensitive to disability rights), the less confidence I have in their desire to do anything but cover their liabilities. So that's one - have an outside party establish the chain of events.

2. To what extent did this have to do with disability and lack of training (that's the Mizeur argument, and it's a fine argument), and to what extent is this about the cult of compliance that increasingly (I argue) shapes police response to non-compliant individuals. I keep making this case and am getting no traction. Either I'm wrong or continued evidence will bear me out. But people like me, who are angry, have to remember that it's possible the police followed all their procedures exactly correctly and this was a freak accident. That's part of why I am arguing that the mistake was responding to swearing and non-compliance with physical contact, rather than patience.

3. Who is to blame? The movie theater manager? The police? The aide? Ethan himself? His parents for letting him go out without more supervision? I'm very concerned that this last will be the lesson many take away from the case, that to let someone with DS into their business is to court trouble. You can see that in other writing about disability, where the person with disability becomes rendered into a permanent child, incapable of making their own decisions. I don't want Justice for Ethan to reinforce ableism, and I can see a clear pathway to that happening.

What else? What else do we need to know?

Justice

A few weeks ago, after writing about Ethan Saylor for The Nation, I received a number of questions about why President Obama didn't speak out about Saylor's death the way he did for Trayvon Martin.

I argued that these questions were misguided. People get murdered every day, the president weighed in because it became a national question about race, violence, and the miscarriage of justice: Zimmerman wasn't even charged initially before public pressure moved the prosecutor to act (with the results we all know). But people inclined to see the president as a racist, which is one of the dumb things that Fox News and other conservative media outlets say constantly, of course view Obama's engagement with the Martin case as a sign that he only cares about black people.

The key issue with Martin is that his death became the symbol for a much wider phenomenon - the racial profiling of young black men as criminals - therefore it caught much of the national imagination and became something of a Rorschach test. Ethan Saylor is not seen as a pattern, just a local tragedy, and so it remains a story only for those who live in the area and for those, like me, who argue differently. This is why in my writing I've been arguing both that police often treat people with disabilities particularly badly and for the broader cult of compliance.

So now Fox News and The Daily Caller and the like (no links provided intentionally) are arguing that Obama and Sharpton and all their other favorite black people must speak out on the murder of  Christopher Lane, the Australian baseball player in Oklahoma, or prove their racism.

Well, I'm ready to speak out about Lane's death: He was murdered. His killers were identified, apprehended, and questioned. At least two have confessed. They will go to jail for a long time. If OK has the death penalty, they may even get executed, but I hope not. In any event, this is what a justice system looks like.

I'll leave the comparisons between the justice system's outcomes for Martin and Saylor as opposed to Lane, to the reader.

Isolation and Inclusion continued

Today began much the same as yesterday, except we walked out to the bus. Nico has always had a special needs bus, a "short bus," pick him up, and for the last year it was right in front of our house. We'd watch the neighbor kids gather at the bus stop from our porch, but Nico took the special bus.

I knew that had to change, because riding happily on a bus with other kids is in fact one of Nico's skills, but let it play out over the first year. Still, I saw the opportunity for inclusion and our special ed director agreed. The plan was for Nico's aide to meet us at the bus stop and ride the bus back to her car at the end of the school day for as long as necessary.

I really don't think it's going to be necessary for long.

We walked towards the stop with a little resistance. Nico really just wanted to go for a walk somewhere, or maybe walk to his old school down the block (it's a middle school where they also held early childhood). But we arrived on the corner and Nico walked quickly by the other kids, did recognize his aide (but didn't say hi), and from a few feet away crouched down and waited. Isolated again.

Until the neighbor girl, H., who knows Nico got to the stop. She walked right over to him and hugged him, and asked if he wanted to come meet her friends. Nico crouched down again and H. ran back to her friends to say hello and pose for pictures. So, that was nice, I thought, but he still doesn't want to go.

But then H. came back to Nico again and kept talking to him, leaning out to point out the bus as it arrived, then taking his hand and getting Nico in to line. Nico briefly held his aide's hand too, then got onto the bus, walked to the middle, climbed into a chair, and H. sat down next to him. The bus goes around the block then drives past again, so a few minutes later H.'s mother and I saw them sitting together, waving, as they headed off towards school.

This is going to work. By next week, it will become normal. By the week after that, I bet we can ditch the aide. It's not a long bus ride anyway.

Isolation and Inclusion

Today my son started first grade. There was no busing today, just hundreds of parents and kids in their various spots along the school. Nico was happy to walk from the car to school (it was a longish walk due to parking hundreds of parents) and was willing to leave the playground alone, but got very upset when we approached the line. He yelled. He resisted. I was carrying his backpack and some extra bags, so picking him up (when resistant) was difficult. I felt eyes turn to me and Nico - as happens because when someone shouts wordlessly and loudly, you turn to look - then slide away. There was no way he was going into the scrum/lines of kids and parents waiting to go into class, so we eventually found a spot at the edge and sat down, bending in the middle to hide his face.

I sat with him on the asphalt for a few minutes as around me parents and children chatted happily. He was quiet, so no one was looking at us, and gradually the special ed teacher and his aide came and found us. As the second graders went inside, Nico stood up and took my hand and told his aide, "Bye." After a few false starts and some re-collapses to the ground, but no more shouting, He finally took his aide's hand and walked inside with her, though not especially joyfully.

Eventually, his actual class followed.

This is hard. Shame and embarrassment, mixed with defiance (how DARE you look at me kind of thing) are normal responses for parents of kids with disabilities. I generally reject these emotions, but am allowed to feel them when everyone stares at my child. I get over that quickly.

The real issue is that Nico chooses to sit apart, isolated on the asphalt, waiting to go in, making no contact with other parents and children. I don't know a single name of a single parent of any of Nico's classmates. They all seem to know each other. I don't know the kids' names, though many seem to know Nico. Somehow I need to make these connections, I need to help Nico make these connections to the extent possible.

Of course, in the end, he took his aide's hand and walked inside to the first day of class, where right now everything is hopefully going pretty well. 
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I sometimes get angry when people deny the disability aspect of Down syndrome - the "just different" rah rah rah cheery folks, because it can make you feel ashamed when things get really hard. We need to own the challenging stuff too - recognize it, discuss it, ameliorate it, empathize, and avoid twee sympathy and platitudes. Things get to be hard. We get to be tired. We get to cry. We get to complain. Doing these things does not make us bad parents, ableists, or somehow devalue our children's existence. We get to look straight at the hard thing, agree that it was challenging, then try to find our way through or around it. That's my goal anyway.

And this morning was hard.

No evidence for Stop-and-frisk reducing crime

There's a long piece in the Washington Post (Wonkblog) today about claims that stop-and-risk reduce crime. I'm now becoming obsessed not with police brutality, per se, but with the discourse of police explanations. 

“No question about it, violent crime will go up,” New York police commissioner Ray Kelly declared on Meet the Press on Sunday, when asked if a recent ruling striking down the city’s “stop and frisk” policy would cost lives. “What we’re doing — and what we’re trying to do — is save lives,” he added on This Week.
Actually, there are some questions about it. The research is clear: Stop and frisk is applied racially unevenly. But there’s precious little evidence that it has worked to reduce crime. And then there’s the question of whether it could actually be undermining effective policing by alienating the very communities it’s meant to help.

What I like about the piece is the way the author then moves through social science research, the claims it makes, the claims it can make, and the limitations of available data. He concludes:

Ultimately, Weisburd argues that this is the kind of question that you need a true experiment to resolve. “Let’s say they did a randomized experiment, with 500 control blocks and 500 treatment blocks, where you measure the number of minorities who live on each block,” Weisburd says. “They would have answers to the questions being asked.” Until then, Kelly is operating on the basis of precious little evidence, and in the face of serious drawbacks to the approach he’s chosen.

Also this lead poisoning thing - that violent crime is down because we are not being poisoned by lead - seems to have legs.

On the phrase, "Retard Barbie"

An online conservative on Twitter called Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, "retard Barbie." The leading Republican candidate for governor thanked him. Thirty hours later, that candidate noted that he thanks his supporter, but to "stay positive."

This language stops ONLY when people inside a movement stops. I know some of you are Republicans. I know that some of you are social conservatives. You have to call this out. And next time Rahm Emmanuel uses similar language, I'll be delighted to do likewise.

Not that I find much common cause with Mayor Emmanuel, but don't get me started there.

America and the Middle East

Today, word has come that Hosni Mubarak will be released, cleared of his corruption charge, and surely this government will not hold him accountable for the killing of protesters, given the blood that flows in Egypt's streets.

The turmoil in Egypt is matched by this story, in which the CIA admitted what we all knew - it was behind the 1953 Iranian coup that put the Shah onto the throne. I don't feel like that really worked out well for U.S. interests.

It's enough to make one become an isolationist. Instead, I think about universal human rights and their defense, not as a doctrine when "if X happens then we must invade," but as a set of principles that must always guide our actions and shape our engagement with other nations.

Violence in America - A historical look

A friend and historian asked me, in the wake of yesterday's post, to think about the ways that compliance might track against overall reduction in crime in the last few decades. This is important. Ray Kelly defended stop and frisk by saying it's lowered crime rates. TASER notes the 110,000+ lives saved thanks to their products. These arguments are complicated - exactly how many people should TASER CEWs (conducted electrical weapons) save in order to justify each death? How much do we need crime to go down to justify racial profiling and the abandonment of our Fourth Amendment rights?

Two articles on crime over time caught my eye of late, both from Talking Points Memo.

The first, "Humility and History," makes the argument that it is very hard to track causality while living in a moment of change, but that this is part of the role of the history. It's a particularly good piece for people looking for ways that liberal learning matters.

Marshall, the writer, then follows up with "Was Lead the Killer?", which looks at the decline in lead poisoning and violent crime. He considers a number of possible reasons for the decline in crime, then concludes:

Lead on the other hand has two big evidentiary chains behind it. One is the abundant evidence that lead poisoning early causes decreased IQs, diminished impulse control and various sorts of sociopathic behavior. It seems to take the ‘natural’ aggressive impulses of young men and put them into overdrive. Second is the very granular correlation between rising and falling rates of lead poisoning and rates of violent crime - offset by about 23 years. This doesn’t seem to apply just broadly in the USA but in other countries and even state by state in the USA.

That’s serious evidentiary backing. And I’d call it a solid theory. I just don’t believe it’s case closed. I think we need more research and also we’ll need to see what happens over the next ten to twenty years. More candidly, I think there’s part of me - perhaps the historian part of me - that’s inherently resistant to such monocausal explanations. But that may be bias more than clear thinking.

So that’s where I come down on this. Lead’s the only theory with solid evidentiary backing. But I don’t think it’s case closed.

I really like the "inherently resistant to such monocausal explanations" phrase, as I think that's exactly how historians ought to operate - open to understanding causality, resistant to single explanations (see 10,000 pieces on the "Fall of Rome" for another good case).

To me, I'm increasingly convinced by the argument that police have always acted this way (the cult of compliance) but are now being recorded by camera-phones and car-cameras (which police shout NOT be able to turn off), so have to make up explanations for their brutality. Hence, we end up with "non-compliance" as the catch-all. I am also increasingly convince that there has been a fundamental shift in police culture, the "Rise of the Warrior Cop," in a society increasingly tolerant of violating civil liberties in the name of security. This places the change into the post-9/11 change in American culture.

I am aware that these two explanations may lightly contradict each other. At the moment, I'm comfortable with that.

The Cult of Compliance

I've been trying to write about non-compliance and police violence to no avail, so far. I'm not sure what's not catching editors' eyes about my various essays (and soon I'll just start posting them here), as I think there's a very big story happening before us, but we get distracted by tasers, by drones, by tanks, by SWAT, by racial profiling, by guns, by all the VERY REAL and very troubling symptoms of deep problems in American police culture. I call it the Cult of Compliance, in which police demand instant compliance or feel free (and unaccountable) to respond with force.

We only hear about it in the news, in fact, when something goes horribly wrong, such as recently in Indiana. In Evansville, IN, a firefighter waved at some police officers. They thought he flicked them off and charged him, put a taser in his face, made him drop his phone (he was calling the chief of police, a buddy of his), cuffed him, and then found out the mistake they made.

The story made the news (links below) because the firefighter had connections and we fundamentally know he was wronged here. I'm not worried about the firefighter. I'm worried about the stories that aren't making the news because they happen to poor people, to people of color, and to people who just don't have connections, to people who the police successfully blame, etc.

Digby, who writes about police violence (especially tasers), blogged about the incident (here's the original link) and went on to talk about the way that the cult of compliance has permeated every aspect of our law enforcement, from police to the TSA and beyond. Digby writes:

This is creeping authoritarianism. We've got millions of people in America wearing uniforms and carrying some kind of government authority and we're all going to have to learn that they will not be disrespected, even if they are delusional idiots. No, it's not the end of the world and we're not being rounded up and sent to the gulag. But it's not exactly freedom and liberty either.

 My good friend Bruce Schneier always says the following: "I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying."

The cult of compliance is in danger of slipping out of the news and into the normal. We can't let it happen.

Contested History and Public Sculpture

The Atlantic Cities had a great piece on Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. It explores the re-writing of Macedonian history and the ways in which public sculpture plays a role.

Skopje 2014 wants to settle Macedonian history once and for all: to root an ethnically-diverse, 21-year-old modern state in a unifying and uncomplicated vision of the past. Whether it succeeds or not, the attempt has left a deep mark on an already-dizzying cityscape.

My scholarly work on Venice focuses on the use of images, texts, and rituals to shape and re-shape Venetian identity, so this is right my alley. Much of the battle is over Alexander the Great, but it's so much bigger. This is well worth reading (and looking at the pictures), for all of you interested in the ways that historical memory infuses contemporary issues.

Loring Danforth, a professor of anthropology at Bates College and author of a book on the Greece-Macedonia dispute, says that claims on the region's ancient history get at sensitivities that are unexpectedly contemporary.

"If you grew up going to Greek or Macedonian schools, it would be as if somebody claimed that George Washington was British, or if the British claimed that he was one of their national heroes," Danforth says of the controversy over which country Alexander the Great rightfully belongs to. In controversies over national symbols—the name included—both sides believe that the other is claiming some indelible aspect of their national being. And neither is secure enough in its national self-definition to cede any ground to the other.

One possible and deeply problematic way out of this is to double down—to glorify a single, straightforward, and unapologetically nationalist narrative in marble and bronze, and at a scale meant to eliminate any and all doubt. It’s a narrative of historic accomplishments, from St. Cyril’s invention of the Cyrilic alphabet to Czar Samuel’s conquests, and of heroic resistance against centuries of outside rule—against Ottoman occupation, Bulgarian and Greek conspiracies, and the total indifference of the great powers. Like any good national myth, it ends in victory and revival, with the glories of the past fueling an equally glorious present.