New Orleans Police Beat 64 Year Old Man

I recognize that I have been uncharacteristically silent about the beating of Robert Davis in New Orleans. What else is there to say? If I could somehow make sense of it, it would not be so awful. The officers claim he resisting arrest and that was what justified beating the 64 year-old man into a bloody pulp. I've spent a lot of time in lively college towns. I've seen officers wrangle with drunk men resisting arrest. I have never seen officers behave in such an extreme fashion for a misdemeanor.

More disturbing than the video of the officers beating Mr. Davis is the video of the interaction of the officers and Mr. Davis after the beating. To see the aftermath of the beating, go to CNN and click on the link for "CNN video of the aftermath (viewer discretion advised)". The video is 2:27 minutes long. Note how Mr. Davis is allowed to lie in a pool of his own blood. Note how the officers casually step over him and kick him proddingly. Mr. Davis has no humanity in their eyes. He is smply not a person deserving of humane treatment or consideration. We would be appalled if a video surfaced of men beating a dog, even a rabid dog, and leaving him to flounder in this own blood and bodily fluids the way the officers left Mr. Davis. I would wager that animal-lovers would tear up upon seeing such a video and there would be an outpouring of general outrage. I know that people tend to feel more warmly towards animals than they do toward humans, but can we agree that humans should be treated with at least the same care as dogs? Where is the outrage? The story passed with no fanfare. Mr. Davis is 64 years old. He could be someone’s grandfather. He could have been my grandfather, not because either of my grandfathers was given to public drunkenness, but because they were black men who might have found themselves on the wrong end of a police baton.

I have been told that I take these infractions too personally. After all, the police in New Orleans did not beat my grandfather; Bob Bennett did not suggest that my parents and I ought to have been aborted to decrease the crime rate; the police department and the INS are not dragging my siblings off of school grounds and deporting them to Mexico without their parents; and no one I know has yet been killed while shopping at Dillard’s. I have led a blessedly violence-free life. However, isn’t it time that someone took these issues personally? Shouldn’t someone be outraged? Christians? Whatever happened to protecting “the least of these”? Civil rights activists? Whatever happened to the “Beloved Community”? Progressives? Whatever happened to making progress?

The silence is deafening, yet speaks volumes. Our half-hearted protests and short-attention span boil down to a garbled public discourse: “Oh my goodness. That is totally unacceptable—does my butt look good in these jeans? I can’t believe the police—do you think Brad and Angelina are gonna have a baby—beat that old man in the street. Did Bill Bennett ever apologize? I think Nick is totally better off without Jessica. Are there still Katrina evacuees living in the nation’s sports stadiums? Poor Katie Holmes.”

The consequence of the negroification of "Welfare Queens", the former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett assuming that all blacks are natural-born killers, and the adoption of the "omnithug" and "readi-ho" personas by the MTV generation has been the conflation of "black", "immoral" and "poor". This conflation robs individuals blacks of their humanity and excuses violent mistreatment and discrimination.

I really want someone to tell me that Mr. Davis would not have been beaten if he had been black. I want desperately to be convinced. And it won't make me feel any better to say that he would have been beaten if he had been Latino. We all know the anti-immigration forces are working harder than a Know-Nothing to denude Latinos of their humanity as well. I strongly believe, I have to believe, that if the humanity of members of racial and religious minorities was not in question, that if they were viewed as human beings, as individuals with families and hopes and feelings, then the violations of human and civil rights that I so often write about would not occur.

Robert Davis may or may not have been drunk that night. His drunkenness is not at issue; his humanity is.

Random Thoughts: On Terror Threats

How much information is too much? Too little? I live in a city that is a seething cauldron of terror threats. In the space of one week, my workplace was under investigation twice (both times I was told by the supreme homeland security experts, senior attorneys, to continue working and ignore my desire to evacuate the building) and twice the subways that shuttle me around were under heightened alert. I recently had a cab driver whose last name was "Jihad." Poor guy, he was a black American who had converted to Islam long before 9/11. He chose the name "jihad" because its meaning of religious freedom and struggle resonated with him. We laughed about it the entire way home. Each morning I nearly bump into New York's Finest posted at the mouths of subway entrances as I throw myself down the stairs while fishing for my metrocard, fumbling with my blackberry and balancing my work bag. Each morning, I, Selfish Spoiled American, secretly hope that I am not stopped on my way to the train because I just don't have a minute to spare for the sake of national security. And on many afternoons, my colleagues and I can watch officers in full riot gear with machine guns and dogs hunting around in the subway beneath the building where we work. In comparison to the cops, we feel totally naked, yet confident that no one ever wants to kill corporate attorneys. In the course of history, what shadowy underworld figure has ever cared about corporate attorneys one way or the other?

Living in New York City forces one to develop a sense of numbness to the terrorist threat. I can see Ground Zero from my apartment window and I only try to avoid walking past it because the throngs of tourists that choke the surrounding sidewalk and streets confound my New York haste. However, the relentlessness of the events of the last few weeks: multiple terrorist threats, a new wave of Bali bombings, and now this threat/non-threat in Baltimore, have prompted me to start to giving the threat of terrorism deeper personal consideration.

I was particularly thrown by the comment made by Maryland's Governor, Robert Ehrlich, when he explained that the state's alert level was not raised because "you don't want to give advance notice to the bad guys." Huh. On a law-enforcement level, I can understand. Catching terrorists off-guard is an important weapon that allows us to meet them on their own turf, which is the realm of surprise. However, isn't the purpose of the levels of alert to give the public information based on which they can make decisions, and not to lull the terrorists into a false sense of comfort hoping they will slip up? We have to be clear because playing with the public in this way is unacceptable. The system of alerts may give terrorists too much prior warning or tip our hand about our intelligence capabilities. If this is the case, then on balance it may be smarter to stop the alerts. However, if we are to maintain the alerts as a method of giving ordinary citizens information, then that information has to be as accurate as the providers of that information can make it because the public is led to believe that the information is dependable. Parents may make decisions on whether they will drive into the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel based on the level of the terror threat. Commuters may decide whether to take a cab or the subway based on the level of threat. Information, when the authorities decide to provide it, must be provided accurately.

Cutting edge intelligence work and a system of public information on terrorism are not easy bedfellows. In this shaky new world, it is the responsibility of public officials to weigh the value of each interest. There must be a balance between the Cold War cloak-and-dagger propaganda game and hourly terror threat updates that keep the population perenially anxious and "give advance notice to the bad guys". Unfortunately, this Baltimore episode missed the mark. Let's either use the alert system honestly or scrap it.

William Bennett and Vicente Fox: Bosom Buddies

Bill Bennett, Bill Bennett, Bill Bennett. Where to begin?

The obvious cries of racism have already been yelped from the hilltops. I would like to look at another aspect of Bill’s comment. To do so, I refer to Vicente Fox’s statement that Mexican immigrants would do the jobs that “not even blacks” were willing to do. What bothers me is that both men were trying to make very general points – immigrants tend to do work that Americans eschew, targeting a certain population for pre-birth annihilation could bring down crime rates but would be monstrous – but fell easily into the race trap and reflexively called out blacks as the bottom of societal barrel. Who are the laziest out-of-work Americans, asked Vicente. Blacks! Who are all the criminals, asked Bill Bennett? Again, “blacks” was the knee-jerk reply.

The gratuitous insertion of race – no, the substitution of the entire race of black people for all things malevolent is just getting tiresome. There are in fact a few black babies who are not destined to end up in jail. And, I must point out that much as the overwhelming majority of the population is white, so is the overwhelming majority the criminal population. By sheer force of numbers, whites are the majority of almost every group in America. And yes, while many blacks represent themselves as hard thug gangsters because it has somehow become cool in a countercultural way, most blacks are not gangsters or even petty criminals. And yes, while the media stretches and strains to pin welfare exclusively on black women, white women are also recipients of AFDC. True, blacks are overrepresented in those populations in comparison to our numbers in the population, however Vicente and Bill, WE ARE NOT ALL CRIMINALS or nor do we constitute ALL UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE and I will thank you to STOP CALLING MY MOM and DAD and STEPDAD and COUSINS and FRIENDS shiftless criminals. We have all had quite enough. The next time you want to refer to slothful people or to criminals, please just do so. Leave us out of it.