Maybe you heard about this, but yesterday the Senate Intelligence Committee released the summary version of its six-year investigation into CIA torture during the Bush administration. The summary is 525 pages long. It describes detainees who were subjected to medically unnecessary rectal hydration procedures, detainees who were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, detainees made to stand on broken feet—you know what? Let’s just go ahead and call them prisoners. Once you’ve waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the 183rd time, he’s your prisoner. The president has condemned these behaviors as torture. But he refuses to comment on whether they produced meaningful intelligence that deterred terrorist attacks.
Author: Dan Brooks
Hey, what’s contemporary racism look like?
Ended slavery, repealed Jim Crow laws, desegregated public schools and drinking fountains—this country has done so much for black people! Yes, You’re Racist brought us this tweet, which in addition to embarrassing some poor woman who can’t think, neatly captures what 21st-century racism looks like. Okay, the two high-profile cases of cops who killed unarmed black men and suffered absolutely no consequences captured what contemporary racism looks like. But this tweet reflects the silent majority that sustains such behavior.
In The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset remarked that for most people, modernity is the condition of using a bunch of technology that you cannot make yourself and consider a natural feature of the world. A liberal reading of his work suggests that social developments—like, say, reduced expression of institutionalized racism against black people—might be considered technology, too. That certainly seems to be the case for Chelsea A. Carlen, who takes as given the prevailing modern attitude that we shouldn’t discriminate against black people and ignores the historical abuses that made that attitude necessary.
She sees scholarships for black kids to go to Harvard, in other words, and ignores the history that starts with slavery and moves through racist admissions policies to get us there. Black people should be grateful that we’re killing them in the streets less than we used to. It’s an understandable perspective, albeit extraordinarily ignorant.
I bet Chelsea Carlen doesn’t even hate black people. She just regards them as a monolithic, protected class that hates America. We’ve done so much to treat you slightly less badly, and this is how you repay us? By freaking out just because cops can still murder you? How long do we have to let you vote and not sell you as chattel before you get over it?
Is it possible for a cop to commit murder on duty?
We don’t know how many Americans are killed by police officers each year. The FBI asks for voluntary annual reports of so-called fatal encounters from local police departments, but they don’t comply. Even those departments that submit reports don’t include circumstantial information like the races and ages of those killed. No less an investigative authority than the New York Times was forced to admit that “no precise figures exist for the number of people killed by the police in the United States,” which is kind of astounding when you consider that the FBI does have records of every email and text message. But we do know this:
Research by Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, reports that 41 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in shootings while on duty over a seven-year period ending in 2011. Over that same period, police departments reported 2,600 justifiable homicides to the FBI.
Even if we ignore the consensus that police killings are significantly underreported, that’s a charge rate of 1.6%. And that’s not to say that 1.6% of cops who kill people on duty are convicted of crimes. Only 1.6% are even charged.
Friday links! I can’t breathe edition
The picture above shows Officer Daniel Pantaleo applying a rear naked choke to Staten Island man Eric Garner in the moments before Garner’s death. The NYPD forbids choke holds, because they can kill people when applied improperly. In the picture above, Pantaleo fails to get his elbow below Garner’s chin; instead of applying pressure to the carotid arteries, cutting off the blood supply to Garner’s brain, he presses against Garner’s throat, potentially damaging his trachea. But an autopsy found no injury to Garner’s windpipe. He died of cardiac arrest, which just happened to result from four officers using explicitly prohibited force to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. As you have certainly heard by now, none of those officers will be charged. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, who testified that he was merely trying to wrestle Garner to the ground. Today is Friday, and the police are above the law. Won’t you stagger beneath it with me?
Fourth administrator suspended in 90 days, and districts won’t say why
Those of you who do not live in town are hereby forewarned that the names of Missoula-area schools are kind of crazy. Many of you are already familiar with Hellgate High, a pleasant reminder of my days in Astoria living by the Hellgate Bridge. But even the straightest face can be shaken by learning about Target Range School, which is named for a local mountain range and not for an unfortunate trend in modern gun violence. None of that matters now, since the new name of every school in Missoula is Fuck City, USA. Local districts have suspended a grand total of four administrators at three different schools this semester and refused to say why in each case, calling them “personnel matters.” You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. Then you can read the comments section of just about any story on the subject in the Missoulian, where anonymous people will happily tell you details of these administrators’ personal lives that they heard from their kids. I would say that allowing comments on news stories is a sneaky way for the Missoulian to get around sourcing, but they’re perfectly happy to ignore such ethical constraints the old fashioned way. That’s the name and photo of a Billings man arrested for sexually assaulting a toddler, although at press time they didn’t know if he’d been charged or whether the toddler was okay, hadn’t talked to police, and couldn’t get ahold of any court documents. Run it! I dislike both keeping secrets and publishing unconfirmed information. There’s no pleasing me. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, pretty much all of which will be about police officers killing people.





