A loaded gun

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria offers advice on how we need to think of this election: 

So what’s a democracy-loving American, Republican or Democrat, to do?

You have to listen to Trump.

If we don’t know what the MAGA folks are saying — and believing — we lose the ability to see the bigger picture of what is happening.

If we don’t pay attention to the lies Trump is telling about FEMA [in hurricane ravaged North Carolina], we can’t understand how significant it is that a lone man with a gun is threatening aid workers.

That man is the intended result: A person so removed from our shared reality that no impartial fact can sway him from his fear, rage and commitment.

With or without weapons, we will see more of these desperate Americans in coming days.

In Congress, in state governments, in local election boards, MAGA believers are being asked to prepare to contest the election — operating on the notion that fraud is inevitable, and Trump needs their help.

Those asks include going to polls to monitor and even record voters — to expose the voter fraud they so firmly believe stole the last election. They are being asked to watch poll workers as they open mail-in ballots, to check signatures as much as elections officials will allow and look for malfeasance. They are being asked to keep a close eye on Black and brown people who they believe are being paid or compelled by Democrats to illegally vote.

... Nov. 5 will not liberate any of us from this post-fact reality — the election will not vanquish it, one way or another.

But ignoring it is like turning our backs to a loaded gun.

It's all horribly exhausting. This election is a test of our national resilience. Those who came before found their inner strength when they needed it. We wouldn't be here if they hadn't. Can we find ours?

 

No wonder violence came for Donald

Still out of the country for another two weeks, but able to get online for a brief comment.

Again he dominates our heads. 

Donald Trump traffics in delight in violence. A convenient list via Jay Kuo.

• Trump urged supporters at rallies to beat up protestors. 

• He called for Black Lives Matter rioters to be shot.  

• He used racist language to inflame hate and hate-based attacks against Asian American during the pandemic.  

• He made fun of the brutal attack upon Nancy Pelosi’s husband.  

• He mocked the notion that radicals had plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  

• His words helped inspire racist mass shooters in Buffalo and El Paso.  

• He approved of chants to “Hang Mike Pence.”  And he incited the violent January 6 attack upon the Capitol.

No wonder violence came for him. That's how the world works. We quite often get what we live by.

The MAGAs work to enable every idiot in the country to run around with weapons of war and then wonder why people, including their Orange Totem, get shot.

I guess I'm glad this incident didn't kill him, but if that broken boy's aim had been better, I'd still think Trump got what he asked for.

Too many MAGAs have put American democracy, the rule of law, and human decency in their gun sites. Most of us aren't among the gun-obsessed nor do we wish to stomp on the freedoms, and the people themselves, with whom we coexist, however uncomfortably at times. 

We still have the choice to practice diligent voting and compassionate justice activism.

And we can be kind to each other, seeking to sow better fruit and a better future. That is all.

• • •

Meanwhile there were the inadvertent casualties, the spectators killed and maimed as forced participants in a spectacle. The frolics of cruelty leave their victims.

• • •

I came of age in 1968, during the last era of directly political American violence. We've forgotten how good we've had it.

Expect violent eruptions. But don't panic.

You probably missed this. I did when James Comey's oped came out. But with Trump romping as expected in Iowa and trying to intimidate E. Jean Carroll (no chance!) and the legal system, it's easy to fear that the Donald and his merry band of fascist cranks are on the rise again. Perhaps their violent assaults are unstoppable?

The former head of the FBI, fired by Trump for insufficient servility, makes the case that fear of Trump-inspired violence is overblown. His argument is strong; I've rendered some key points in bold.

Jan. 6, 2021, was a terrible day, but it was at bottom a security failure. For reasons I still don’t understand, our government didn’t properly assess and prepare for a threat that was moving at the speed of a daytime stroll, broadcast in advance. A mob managed to take a building that sits atop an easily defended hill because it was not properly secured, despite the heroic actions of an understaffed police force. Yes, there were sophisticated actors in the crowd that day, especially the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who operated with seditious intent in organized teams. But, in the overwhelming main, the offenders of Jan. 6 were morons who bought Trump’s lies. They must be held accountable — every last one of them — but they shouldn’t be the monster under our national bed.

That accountability should comfort us. The Justice Department’s prosecution of more than 1,200 Jan. 6 defendants has sent a shock wave of deterrence at those who might otherwise be tempted to take a day off work to literally fight for Trump. They now know it will cost them dearly and most of them have no interest in paying that price, despite his generous offers of pardon. These aren’t jihadis looking to blow themselves up for some reward in paradise. These are mostly people with day jobs who feel a sense of grievance stoked by the amoral demagogue now running for president again. They might vote for him — those who are not yet felons — but they’re not looking to die for him, or even go to jail for him. They weren’t there when he was arraigned in New York or Georgia or Florida or D.C. They aren’t coming. Sometimes, even idiots aren’t fools.

The rule of law must be vindicated regardless of the threat, which is why public servants at all levels around the country are soldiering on despite the torrent of individual abuse. Terrorists, gangsters and drug lords have long been held accountable in this country even when their organizations posed a serious risk of violence aimed at those who operate our legal system. Fortunately, that’s not what we face today. Trump and his legions are not coming for us. The rule of law is finally coming for him.

My sense -- I could be terribly wrong, but I doubt it -- is that Comey is correct. Trump is a terrible threat to the country because of his almost uncanny to ability to spew the poisoned vitriol that is corroding his broken person into our body politic. He will inspire more violence. Some of it will be bad; a few people, vulnerable people, will be harmed. 

This has always been a violent society with surprisingly violent politics. Texas governor Greg Abbott is literally having migrants and women with nonviable pregnancies killed. Upholding the rule of law and democracy will require bravery from many citizens: jurors, election workers, canvassers, minor office holders, even a few big shots. But we can reject Trumpist venom within the framework of this very imperfect democracy.

Recent off-year and local elections show this. We're winning in improbable places: on Tuesday Democrats flipped a Florida legislative district; Dems elected mayors in Colorado Springs and Jacksonville which were once GOP bastions; and prevailing everywhere voters think the underlying issue is access to abortion -- Kansas, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio. These aren't flukes. The voters are not dumb, more tired than anything else.

The Republican presidential run-up is a fizzle. The challengers have no pop with voters. Trump can claim to have won Iowa by a h-u-g-e margin -- but that margin came among a minuscule electorate, barely half as large as Republicans turned out in 2016. They'll say the weak turnout was the weather. We'll see.

Yes, many Democrats aren't enthused either. We would have been glad to turn to another generation of leaders. But there was no way to get there. It will take diligent work to win this November and give this creaky old democracy a chance to right itself. But we can do it; there's nothing in events that says all is lost and much that says we can make a better future. 

Panic at this moment is unnecessary.

Remembering the Birmingham church bombing

I do remember the bombing by KuKluxKlan white supremacists of that Alabama brick Black church in 1963. The next few days, pictures were all over the Buffalo News and the Buffalo Courier which my parents received daily. The horror stuck.

Religion News Service shared a set of pictures from the bombing which I'll post here.

A man falls to his knees in prayer amid shattered glass from windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church and surrounding buildings in Birmingham, Alabama, in Sept. 1963. Four young girls died as a racist’s bomb exploded at 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963, during worship services and Sunday school sessions. In the following outbreak of violence throughout the area, two young black men were shot to death. Pleas for effort to stop further bloodshed were issued from government, civil rights and religious leaders across the nation. Religion News Service file photo

 

Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where an explosion ripped though the structure during services, killing four black girls, on Sept. 15, 1963. Sarah Collins Rudolph lost an eye and has pieces of glass inside her body from a Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed her sister and three other Black girls inside the Alabama church. (AP Photo, File)

Mourners gather around Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Robertson Sr., seated at right, and a sister, at left, of 14-year-old Carole Robertson. Carole and three other young girls, attending Sunday school in the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, died in the 1963 terrorist bombing. Religion News Service file photo

Yesterday's commemoration in the Baptist Church:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court, speaks at the 60th Commemoration of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Friday, Sept. 15, 2023, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Never again? It feels hard to promise ...

Beyond bad cops and bad neighborhoods

Sociologist Patrick Starkey wanted to explain, first why crimes against property and people soared in the 1970s and 1980s -- and then rapidly declined after 1993. In Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, he outlines, both meticulously as befits a quantitative scholar, and journalistically, as suits an author who wants to be read, what he found out.

It's all there, from theories of widespread lead poisoning in inner cities leading to more violence (he's skeptical) to figures on increased militarized policing (he attributes to this both some success and some exacerbation of racist violence) to an examination of what growing up amidst heightened violence does to children (not good, as you might expect.)

The most novel bit of his survey to me -- as someone who lived these years by choice in what is widely considered a violent, depressed urban neighborhood -- was his appreciation of successive nonprofit efforts at community building and rebuilding that characterized some to the worst locales.

Yet for all its virtues, I would describe this book as "stranded." Starkey wrote in the mid-2000 teens -- he identifies 2014 as the deepest year of the "great crime decline," knowing as early as 2017 that crime was again on the rise. Of course he couldn't predict the pandemic and its discontents which seemed to raise the murder rate, then has seen it drop, while reported burglaries and assaults have gone up and then gyrated. He saw trouble ahead. He concludes:

The calls for justice that have dominated recent debates about policing, poverty, and crime are well justified and crucially important to developing effective reforms of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But the war on violence -- with all its tremendous physical, emotional, social, educational, and financial costs --starts with investment.

• • •

I'm suspicious of survey research on crime. Sure, there is hard evidence which enters into this -- there are bodies on the street. 

But not in most places in the country, most of the time. For most Americans, even in the bad old '70s and '80s, crime was something over there, among those people. But our media told us it was bad and out of control. And even when material evidence says it is bad, most of us don't encounter its violence in person everyday. 

I suspect it would take a long period of rising incomes and social peace before most of us would tell a researcher that crime is getting better. Our fears exceed our realities, even when the underlying trends are good. We're not smart about objective observation -- for the good reason that overconfidence might be dangerous.

Casting out demons

 

The Mission's own Xiuhcoatl Danza Azteca led a unity rally at 24th Street and Mission on Tuesday evening ...

... calling on Pachamama to heal the violence that has risen up the 'hood with a mass shooting just down the street and in nearby Precita Park.

 

These folks are tireless ...

 

... even when tired. Who here in these streets is not tired of the violence and neglect and sometimes squalor in our beloved Mission after horrors of the pandemic?

We're in this together.

Not much love at present in the city of Saint Francis

If you are into that sort of thing, there are multiple options for watching video of Banko Brown being shot by a Walgreens rent-a-cop after a shoplifting episode on San Francisco's Market Street. There followed an altercation in which Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony pummels and chokes the young man, then fires on him after Brown goes out the door. Our D.A. thinks there's no provable crime in that execution. Here's a succinct report:

It has come out that the Walgreen's security contractor, Kingdom Group Protective Services which employed the guard, had recently changed its policy: 

Guards were instructed “to engage in ‘hands-on’ recovery of merchandise,” according to the report. “The guards … were to actively work to retrieve or recover any stolen items once it was clear that the individual who concealed the items intended to leave the store without paying.”

Anthony told the police officer interrogating him after the shooting that “we can ask for receipts if we suspect if somebody’s steals or something. I was in my right to ask that individual … um, if they paid for those items. In fact, I seen ’em stealing, so …”

So this was more than an untrained cosplay cop jacked up from a scuffle, turning his gun on a mouthy perp. Anthony had been ordered to play the badass. There's one heck of a wrongful death civil suit coming here. Brown's family has hired attorney John Burris who has spent a career fighting these cases.

In the Guardian, we learn who was lost when Banko Brown was killed: 

In a statement released through the Young Women’s Freedom Center, a local non-profit group where Brown was a volunteer organizer, they argued: “In a city like San Francisco, where so many have to make tough decisions to meet their basic needs, arming stores with the pass to use armed force will result in much more tragedy.

Julia Arroyo, co-executive director of the group, which has demanded an end to armed guards at retail stores and increased investments in housing and resources for trans and queer youth, said in a statement on Monday: “We do not need to see the video to know that Banko Brown’s killing was unjustified. Armed force is not a justified response to poverty. Young people, especially Black and trans youth who experience poverty, deserve love, care and the resources they need to survive and thrive. Banko deserved to live. He deserved to be protected and cherished. He deserved housing and to have his basic needs met.”

This city can do better. Better than responding in frustration about a Downtown economic cycle in the doldrums, increased misery on the streets, assertive young transfolks, and an incompetent political D.A. who excuses a vigilante death sentence for shoplifting.

He got away with murder. Or did he?

Kyle Rittenhouse. Oh yeah, the troubled teenager who grabbed up an AR-15 and drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin to play vigilante during protests in 2020 against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. He killed two young white men playing protester and severely injured another. A Kenosha jury called Rittenhouse's exploit self-defense. His surviving victim is trying to add him to a civil suit against the city and Ritttenhouse is apparently evading subpoenas.

Shortly after he got off on the murder charge, Rittenhouse showed some interest in getting out of the public view and perhaps making a life. But he hasn't gone that way. Instead, he's been performing on the rightwing grifter circuit -- and apparently not being much of an attraction.

His promoters are still using this childish photo, three years after his defining moment. Guess he plays to someone's notion of the innocent all-American white boy.

Mother Jones journalist Stephanie Mencimer has been following the young man's trajectory.  Her account is sad and sensitive.

Rather than slink off into anonymity after his acquittal, Rittenhouse has spent the past year trying to rebrand himself as a free speech and gun-rights activist. Following the siren song of the right-wing industrial complex, Rittenhouse, now 20, spends his time going on podcasts, attending conventions, and taking selfies with fans. ... after a year on the right-wing circuit, Rittenhouse has shaved off any introspection from his public commentary, opting instead for conservative buzzwords about gun rights and the left. 

In public appearances, he seems baffled by the rest of the world’s refusal to exonerate him and embrace the Kenosha jury’s conclusion that he’d acted in self-defense. The problem, of course, is that the verdict didn’t absolve him of taking an assault rifle into a violent protest in the first place. “The conscious choice to impose a risk—even permissible risk, as in the case of driving—opens a person up to moral liability,” the Oxford professor moral philosophy Jeff McMahan told the New Yorker in 2017.  “People who are not culpable can nevertheless be responsible.”

Former First Lady Laura Bush was also 17 when she ran a stop sign and killed another 17-year-old driver. In a memoir, she wrote of losing her faith afterwards, and being “wracked by guilt for years after the crash.” Bush suffered in silence for more than 40 years. “Most of how I ultimately coped with the crash was by trying not to talk about it, not to think about it, to put it aside,” she wrote. “Because there wasn’t anything I could do. Even if I tried.”

Killing those men in Kenosha is all Rittenhouse talks about. From the beginning, Rittenhouse has been preyed on by right-wing opportunists. Bad actors anointed him a hero and absolved him of culpability. They’ve pushed him in front of the klieg lights ...

Mencimer's story feels sad and vacant. And most likely to end badly. 

I'm reminded of another famous killer who seemed to escape appropriate punishment, though not the verdict of society. Ex-cop and ex-elected official Dan White convinced a jury he was high on a twinkie when he killed George Moscone, mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, our first gay member of the Board of Supes. He got off with a short prison sentence. 

White died by carbon monoxide suicide in his garage two years after his release.

DiFi is finally done

So Senator Diane Feinstein is finally ready to go. The pundits are chiming in -- Scott Gerber, her former communications director; former L.A. Times editor Nicholas Goldberg; current L.A. Times political columnists Mark Z. Barabak and many others.

DiFi has been a fixture of my political world for nearly 50 years. Mostly I haven't been happy about that. 

In the mid-1970s she lost a second campaign for mayor because there was no room between loosely left and far right in San Francisco's political spectrum of the day. One could hope that would be the end of this prissy matron. 

The assassination of the city's progressive Democratic mayor George Moscone and gay pioneering elected supervisor Harvey Milk thrust her into the job she'd wanted. She held on through ten tumultuous years. 

When she left the mayor's office, it once again looked as if California politics would be done with Feinstein. She lost a campaign for governor in 1990. It wasn't until four years out of office that she was elected to the U.S. Senate seat she's held since 1992.

To many San Franciscans, she always looked like a centrist clogging up the way forward for more modern, more liberal California Democrats. Though she managed to restrict assault weapons for a time, to lead passage of the Violence against Women Act, and supported gay rights, she wasn't the sort we warmed to in office. For years I would explain proudly that, despite living in parallel to DiFi's political history, I'd never voted for her.

In recent years I've mellowed in my feelings about my Senator -- maybe grown more tolerant.

There's Feinstein at Obama's swearing-in, wearing purple, at the far right next to Nancy Pelosi.

I first softened toward Feinstein watching her perform her role in Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. She served as the official event organizer for the Senate. She came across as careful, very competent, and deeply anxious. I may have been reading into what I saw on TV, but I am pretty sure she feared, as many of us viewers did, that someone might try to kill Obama rather than see him take office. Would they shoot him? This was not abstract for her; after all, she had literally discovered the murdered bodies of colleagues in San Francisco City Hall. She was a right choice to be the formal organizer of that precedent breaking inauguration.

Feinstein finally won a degree of respect from me in the past decade when she led the Senate Intelligence Committee's fight to uncover the tortures used by U.S. spooks in the service of George W. Bush's panicked "War on Terror." U.S. security professionals stonewalled against admitting what they'd done by every legal and some illegal means. Republicans too wanted maximum concealment. Feinstein managed to get 600 pages of summary into the public record. When/if the full thousands of pages of documentation are finally made public, we will know yet more of the crimes done in our name.

”There may never be a right time to release the report,” Feinstein said, but she added that the report is “too important to shelve indefinitely.”

She has always annoyed because she came across as above the fray, a genteel throwback to a different era. Yet this woman has actually seen a great deal of the material violence in politics, very possibly more than some of her bombastic colleagues. 

I'm glad she's leaving, apparently in acceptance of the inevitable. The finale could be worse.

A warning of civil violence

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has described a pattern of developing civil violence that should worry us all. She contends that in societies where political terrorism takes root, there's a pattern.

Violent groups that get involved in politics in other countries follow a common path ... 

At first, politicians recruit experts in violence and intimidation to use those tools as a campaign tactic.  

Later, those violent leaders run for office or take political roles directly, cutting out the political middleman. Usually, what they want is power and impunity, so that they can make money from more lucrative criminal activities, though sometimes they simply want power for its own sake.  

To understand where this can lead: 11 of India’s current national legislators face open cases for murder, 30 have attempted murder charges and 10 serving legislators have been convicted of such serious crimes – a doubling from ten years ago.

In India, with its long history of violent religious sectarian violence, this may not seem so surprising -- though sadly, India once proclaimed itself the world's largest democracy before the current Hindu nationalist government came to power.

In the U.S., we're seeing all too much of Kleinfeld's pattern. In Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate for governor paid for buses to Washington for supporters of Donald Trump's January 6 attempted coup. Doug Mastriano has been subpoenaed to testify about what he did that day.

Here in Nevada, Republican candidates for both U.S. Senate and state governor are adherents to the Big Lie. The GOP candidate for secretary of state (the official who runs elections) insists the vote in 2020 was rigged and that he wouldn't hesitate to overturn a majority vote of Nevadans if he were in office.

Kleinfeld has taken note of ominous developments in the state where we're working on the midterms:

In Nevada, it appears more clear that the Proud Boys are still at the first stage, being recruited by unscrupulous political actors who are using their violence to amass more power for themselves. ... Why would a faction of Republicans still in power or running for office at the federal, state, and local level make common cause with violent criminals? Because violence and intimidation are already bolstering their power. ...

We sometimes look away, but violence from the right has been escalating ever since Barack Obama broke the rule that a Black man could not be elected President.

... Americans may feel that these incidents of political violence are “high politics” that they can avoid if they steer clear of the political arena. That feeling is widespread in countries I have studied where political violence grows to dangerous levels. It Is always a false hope.  

In the United States, it is already far more dangerous to exercise freedom of speech than in the recent past. Driving cars into civilians used to be a tactic favored by overseas terrorists. It had been recorded just twice in the United States before James Alex Fields Jr. murdered Heather Heyer by driving into a crowd of counter-protestors at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Yet from George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 through September 30, 2021, at least 139 drivers drove their cars into protests across America, injuring 100 – sometimes severely – and killing four. ... 

... Violence begets violence – once its use mainstreams, moderates who espouse non-violence appear anemic and unable to offer protection to their side. The middle weakens, while violence eventually takes on a rhythm of reprisal far removed from the original causes. ... Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise – against all Americans.

No one is exempt. And our civil society could become a nightmare.

Michigan school shooting

I don't usually look to Twitter for ethical instruction. But this, from The Rude Pundit, brought me up short.

What the kid did at Oxford High School is horrific. He should be punished. He should not be charged as an adult.

His parents, though, should be imprisoned in a hole under the jail.

Every once in a while, I see just how much liberalism has changed. It used to not even be a question on the left that it’s wrong to charge kids as adults and to do so is just part of this country’s wrongheaded approach to “justice.” But, from the responses, I guess no more.

He's right (the RP's Twitter pic is of a "he"). This particular crime feels so egregious, it was easy for me to forget that I've campaigned against the death penalty and excessive sentences for people who were under 18 when they were guilty of crimes. We know teenage brains have not yet developed all the connections fully formed in adult brains. (Some parental brains may be just as disconnected, but what to do with those people is different problem.) What the kid did is bad enough. We don't raise the level of civilization by pretending this was an adult shooter.

One of the tweet comments captures where I sit on this:

My head agrees with you. My gut does not.

Here's the shooter's mug shot:

• • •

And while we are at it, here are the names of the victims who died:

Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17

More teens.

On the condition our condition is in*

There's a trove of new U.S. attitudinal polling out there from PRRI titled Cultural Change and Anxiety in America. Now that's on point, for sure.

Many commentators are digesting bits of this and I'm sure I'll do my bit. But I want to start with a snippet of what Josh Marshall pulls out:

31% of Americans mostly or completely agree that the 2020 was stolen from Donald Trump. 68% of Republicans believe this.

11% of Democrats believe that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” 30% of Republicans believe this. 39% of people who believe the election was stolen from Trump believe this. 

Yes -- that does seem a prelude to "a gathering storm" -- Marshall's headline.

But I think if we're honest with ourselves, the crisis of electoral legitimacy this describes has been around for longer than we may hold in our consciousnesses. 

• If you'd polled me in the spring of 2001 asking whether I thought George W. Bush had been legitimately elected, I would have said NO. I remember well, on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court awarded him the office in Bush v. Gore, saying to the activist board with which I was meeting: "Well, we've just had a coup." I didn't fully believe Bush II was a legitimate president until he won in 2004.

• If you'd polled me in spring of 2017, asking whether Donald Trump was legitimately elected, I'd have said I had doubts. I didn't exactly think Putin's minions had cooked the results, but illicit foreign interference for the benefit of the Orange Scumbag hung over the election, to my way of thinking.

Neither of these two GOPers was "my president." I also didn't feel that violence was the only remedy for manifest electoral miscarriages. But to what extent was that not a consequence of democratic (small "d") virtue, but of powerlessness?

Now we've got a former guy who a lot of people think was robbed -- and who has incited and delights in violence if he can get other people to do the dirty work. This is appropriately terrifying. The Washington Post investigation of the 1/6 coup attempt is long -- but necessary reading.

Meanwhile the Wapo's Philip Bump has summarized the PRRI findings as well as the paper's additional polling from Marist. We all think the other side threatens democracy.

Click to enlarge.

Weave all of this together, and the picture that results is a bifurcated sense of the threat America faces. That’s reflected in another question asked by Marist: Which party poses the bigger threat to democracy in the United States? Democrats say Republicans, and Republicans say Democrats. Independents blame both parties equally.

I'm a good progressive partisan and the notion that Joe Biden threatens democracy seems hogwash to me -- but that's where we are. And I'm just glad there seem to still be marginally more of us.

Marshall also pulled out of the PRRI findings that:

55% of independents think “the Republican party has been taken over by racists”. 51% of all Americans believe this.

It might be more accurate to say that white America has always been racist -- but at least the Dems have changed enough, intellectually and demographically, to know we should not be.

* Blame my age and The First Edition for the headline.

Is the fix in?

So it seem to me, when I read this headline this morning:

It feels naive to have hoped it might be otherwise. Here's a bit of the report:

A Wisconsin judge ruled Monday that attorneys in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial could refer to the men the teen shot in Kenosha, Wis., last year as “rioters,” “looters” and “arsonists.” They could not, however, describe Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, who were killed, and Gaige Grosskreutz, who was wounded, as “victims” because the term was “loaded,” the judge said.

But Mr. Judge -- those guys are dead. Dead by the hand of Kyle Rittenhouse. 

Sure, they weren't angels. From what I've read, they were a sort of younger white man who often turns up at protests, especially at ones on the edge of violence. Brave, foolhardy, and taking up too much space in circumstances where actual injured parties ought to be front and center. They can be infuriating.

But it can't be alright to shoot them.

I will not be surprised if Rittenhouse gets off on all but the "minor in gun possession" charge -- which is indisputable. 

So then the question becomes, will Rittenhouse lend his celebrity as an acquitted killer to the white nationalists who have defended him? Or might he have the decency to slink off and do some growing up in obscurity? If the judicial process is unable to name the reality of what went down, that's the best we can hope for.

Injustice codified

The son of the mid-20th century SNCC leader of the same name, the younger James Forman Jr. was a D.C. public defender in the 1990s and later the co-founder of a high school for students often labelled "at risk." Locking up our own: crime and punishment in Black America describes the process through which the country's Blackest city embraced unforgiving "public safety" strategies which led to mass incarceration of its own Black poor and youth.

Forman does not write to apportion blame for the rising toll of victims of an inhuman system. Rather, he wants to know why men of good will (these Black lawmakers seem to have been mostly men) could have constructed such a horror.

How did a majority black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own? ... [According to a 2014 Sentencing Project poll] how could it be that even after forty years of tough-on-crime tactics, with their attendant toll on black America, 64 percent of African-Americans still thought the courts were not harsh enough?

Forman's book is a catalogue of incidents of injustice -- of kids who made one mistake and ended up doing time, of women supporting a drug habit who get sent up to prison for half a decade because they couldn't get clean, of Black strivers who finally got a good job, only to lose their chance forever over a minor marijuana arrest. He certainly doesn't endorse our country's punitive response to Black crime -- but he's relentlessly determined to understand how D.C. got to such a system.

In Forman's telling, it begins with the scourge of heroin addiction in the 1960s (much of it brought home by draftees from Vietnam -- my note) and the violent crime that accompanied the drug business. Fifteen years later, cheap crack cocaine hit the streets and more violence came along. Neighborhood associations encouraged their members to prepare to defend their homes. They demanded more policing and tougher sentences. A pattern was set.

As they confronted this devastating crime wave, black officials exhibited a complicated and sometimes overlapping mix of impulses. Some displayed tremendous hostility toward perpetrators of crime, describing them as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of the black community. Others pushed for harsher penalties, but acknowledged that these would not solve the crisis at hand. Some even expressed sympathy for the plight of criminal defendants, who they knew were disproportionately black. But that sympathy was rarely sufficient to overcome the claims of black crime victims, who often argued that a punitive approach was necessary to protect the African America community -- including many of its most impoverished members -- from the ravages of crime.

A D.C. political struggle over decriminalization of marijuana in the 1970s became a contest between liberals who were branded as supporting white teenagers and hippies against Black neighborhoods where police allowed drug trafficking to immiserate the residents. In this, then majority-Black, city, marijuana law reform lost.

Although gun control measures were enacted in D.C. in the 1970s, this was over the objections of much of the Black community. As migrants from law-free Jim Crow regions, a substantial fraction of Black citizens were accustomed to the gun kept in the home as the last defense against marauding whites. You naturally didn't give up the gun to depend on the government while drug crime engulfed the neighborhood. And when gun control won, gun possession triggered mandatory minimum additional sentences as part of the "War on Drugs." Most of the community cheered taking the system's losers off the streets.

... the impulse to impose ever-tougher sentences would prove difficult to restrain. And this remained true even when the punitive measures adopted in D.C. and elsewhere did not achieve the desired results. In one respect the policies to combat drugs and guns have a similar impact: the majority of those punished have been low-income, poorly educated black men. In another respect they have had a similar lack of impact: they have failed to prevent marijuana use, and they have failed to protect the community from gun violence.

With determination and grit, qualified Black men (and later women) did integrate the D.C. police force. But the race of the officers failed to make much improvement for the communities policed. Black cops were not much different from many of their white counterparts: they were ordinary lower middle class people looking for a stable job. Their race didn't change law enforcement practices that reinforced race bias with class bias.

When the crack epidemic made violent crime even more common and devastating, Washington's black community overwhelmingly voted for long mandatory sentences for minor drug crimes in the 1980s. The horror had to stop. And the police, under siege from well armed criminals, and finding themselves unable to interrupt the drug plague, adopted the "warrior" posture. Forman spells out the consequences:

... the warrior model inverts the presumption of innocence. In the ghetto, you are not presumed innocent until proved otherwise. Rather, you are presumed guilty, or at least suspicious, and you must expend an extraordinary amount of energy -- through careful attention to dress, behavior, and speech -- to mark yourself as innocent. ... Even proof of innocence is dismissed by a system incapable of questioning the assumptions that led it to mark you as guilty.

... the menace crack presented in turn provoked a set of responses that have helped produce the harsh and bloated criminal justice system we have today.

And this distorted system remained in place when crack use had run its vicious course by the early 2000s.

Finally, in the second decade of the 2000s, Black citizens and Black politicians began to struggle for alternatives. Forman is not particularly hopeful. Some Black individuals may escape the worst effects of the militarized war on crime, but the inertia of the system remains punitive and pernicious for most.

• • •

This is a 2017 book. It remains to be seen whether George Floyd's public murder, Breonna Taylor's inadvertent execution by police, and Black Lives Matter's organized protests will make a substantial difference.

Forman reports that in studying the history of the terrible system he worked inside and against, he came to understand that

African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.

When I wrote about Rosa Brooks' puzzling book about D.C. policing, I concluded my unease was partly a consequence of its being written for someone else: in Brooks' case for her lefty mother. I realize too that I'm not Forman's audience in Locking Up Our Own. He's writing for Black leaders who've achieved some place and power within a racist system, demanding they turn their gaze on what their assimilation has wrought and who has been left behind.

Black Lives Matter has shown those same leaders what an aroused community looks like. Can it lead change?

• • •

As is often the case with books I post about, I first read this by ear, then obtained a hard copy from the public library. I'm glad I did. Forman's volume is illustrated with not-to-be missed contemporary cartoons from Black media that demonstrate how crime and punishment issues were being seen within the Washington community. I'll end with one sample from this fascinating set of historical images:

Interrupting violence

"Police are violence responders, not violence interrupters."

Earlier this week, I discussed Rosa Brooks' tale of becoming certified as a D.C. cop. Today let's listen to another Brooks, Cat Brooks from the Anti-Police Terror Project in the East Bay. On Juneteenth, celebrations at Oakland's Lake Merritt were interrupted by a mass shooting that killed one, injured many, and is probably a consequence of a San Francisco gang feud according to law enforcement.

Cat Brooks wants us to understand that more police aren't the answer. And she has a prescription for a better way.

[Police] do not understand our communities nor do they have our trust. 

I am tired of responding to violent crime. I want to live in a world where we prevent it. 

Prevention is not punitive. Prevention is investment. 

... if BIPOC people had stable incomes, secure housing, more opportunities to excel in life and a pathway to heal from the infectious disease of white supremacy, we would not see violence, we would see thriving communities and healthy people. 

If a child can pick up a gun and kill another child that looks just like him — what does that say about how he sees himself? What have we taught him about the value of his life? And if he doesn’t value his life, how can we expect him to value anyone else’s? 

... Investing in the status quo virtually guarantees more violence, more dead Black bodies, more surveillance, more terrorized communities, more incarceration, more trauma, more devastated families. 

We can build the communities, the cities and the country we all want. But we have to invest in people on the front end instead of tombstones and jails on the back end.

If more policing and prisons made America safe, we’d be the safest nation in the world.

 • • •

 

Today I received an email from San Francisco District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton. District 10 includes Visitacion Valley, Sunnydale, Potrero Hill, Bayview, Hunters Point -- and nearly all the city's public housing. It's the places that tourists never see and "essential" low wage workers can sometimes still rent, living next to old people holding on to dilapidated family houses.

The District has seen several shootings recently. 

Supervisor Walton writes: 

The violence has to stop. I know that we have seen some recent incredibly disheartening tragedies and violence in our communities (particularly in the Bayview). Addressing violence is one of the major focuses of our office and every loss in community takes a piece of me with it. I cannot be clear enough about how it destroys me inside when we lose someone from our neighborhoods due to violence. ...

... Violence prevention strategies have not worked in the district and for decades District 10 has been neglected. District 10 has the highest number of homicides and an overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. We need comprehensive justice reform to address this systemic racist system that continues to fall short from being able to address the root causes of violence. With all the resources that the City invests into District 10, it is clear that we need a comprehensive plan that is community driven, community led, and community implement in order to be effective. 

Walton's Public Safety Plan aims to bring all the considerable city resources together to be coordinated by a new Violence Prevention Convener. It's hard to tell whether this is just words or whether some wizard worker can actually do the job. It does seem that Walton is trying to do the job for his community.