In March, four police officers in Oakland California were gunned down while trying to bring child rapist Lovelle Mixon to justice. On Sunday, four police officers in Parkland, Washington were gunned down by another child rapist eluding the law.
Here are the officers killed by Maurice Clemmons in Parkland, Washington on Sunday: ...
Imagine if reporters actually behaved neutrally when approaching subjects like the government’s efforts to stop child predators. Imagine if they sat themselves down and said: I am going to suspend my natural tendency to side with the accused and control my adolescent rebelliousness towards all authority. I am going to behave as if I am the blank slate I am supposed to be, suspending judgment as I gather and report facts.
No? I didn’t think so. ...
Graydon Carter has a problem. How do you pose as a moralist while excusing your own history of peddling young flesh — and justifying the child-rape committed by your friend?
It’s a tall order. Under Carter’s tutelage, Vanity Fair has acquired a strange fixation on certain types of photos of nude young women. It’s simply weird how often the editor feels compelled to litter his pages with shot after shot of extremely youthful actresses in the buff surrounded by other people in clothes — also weird how vehemently and frequently he defends this basement-porn aesthetic in the magazine’s pages. This tightrope act occasionally threatens to unravel beneath the weight of one too many coy verbal gestures toward the breasts of girls who could be one’s daughter, or rather grand-daughter. But Carter just can’t seem to help himself. ...
When the A.C.L.U. manufactures an utterly frivolous legal issue that costs the state millions of dollars to litigate, the St. Petersburg Times views that as money well-spent in the interest of “ensuring the health of our democracy.” When A.C.L.U.-associated lawyers profit from lawsuits arising from the group’s activism, the St. Petersburg Times doesn’t complain. It’s all in the interest of ensuring the health of our democracy, you see, and if lawyers turn a few million dimes “keeping the system honest,” well, power to the people.
When health-care non-profits accept funding from hospitals and medical and drug companies that stand to profit from their activism, the St. Petersburg Times doesn’t smell a rat: they smell roses. As they should. Actually, they usually don’t even notice such transactions, since this is the way non-profits simply do business. ...
Stop the presses! It’s journalistic ethics week, and so perhaps it’s fitting that this first story plopped down in a big steaming mess on the pages of every newspaper that carries the AP.
Anthony Sowell, who was recently found knee-deep in the decaying bodies of his victims, doesn’t deserve to be labeled a rapist, according to the AP. ...
Over the years, I’ve noticed that Saturdays seem to be the day when NPR reporters take a deep breath from the toils of the week, settle down with a steaming cup o’ joe, and recharge their batteries by indulging in a little calisthenic empathy for the pointedly unsympathetic: child killers on death row, for example, or gang members terrorizing neighborhoods full of innocent people they don’t bother to interview (because it would just be perplexing to listen to the grandmas explain that what they really need is more police protection from gangs).
There is a frisson of self-righteousness in such behavior, and a bonus frisson of danger, imagined, not real, of course, because no child killer or gang member worth his salt would bother to shank the PR machine. So, through their empathetic identification with vicious sociopaths, the reporters get to feel simultaneously superior to everyone else and victimized by society. ...
Another great in-depth story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about chaos in the courts. Note that Metro Atlanta courts other than Fulton County aren’t catch-and-releasing murder defendants like muddy-tasting catfish, like Fulton does.
Volume is no excuse: volume of cases means that judges and prosecutors should be appealing to the public for support and banging down doors at the Georgia General Assembly for more resources, not lowering standards. ...
If only journalists and politicians in Atlanta simply acknowledged the real price of crime, instead of arguing over numbers and criticizing the public for caring. Here is how the Memphis Commercial Appeal handles a “drop-in-crime-but-still-too-much-crime” story:
[P]olice crime stats show substantial drops in 2009, more than 16 percent below the same period in 2006. ...
This is Delmer Smith, who is responsible for a recent reign of terror on Florida’s Gulf Coast that left women from Venice to Bradenton terrified of violent home invasions, murder and rape:
...
There goes the AJC again, in its death-spiral of mis-perceiving its readers, running yet another story about fixing “perceptions” of crime in the city. This time they fire across the bow, smugly reminding readers that all this crime talk is bad for property values.
Make that the perception of property values. ...
How easy is it to predict the many ways the media has substituted thinly-disguised advocacy and sheer make-believe for reporting on the alleged “homeless sex offender” crisis? Painfully easy.
Before I even read the latest installment of the homeless sex offender soap opera, the one that appeared in the AJC last week, I made up a list of rules for such stories: ...
Now the Atlanta Journal Constitution has joined other news outlets spinning fairy tales about the plight of homeless sex offenders forced to live in the woods/under bridges/by the wee blarney rock, where the moss grows.
The stories go like this: completely harmless, harshly punished sex offenders are being forced to live in tents for no other reason but that we invented “draconian” laws that limit where they can obtain housing. If only we didn’t insist on these cruel living restrictions, why, they’d all be happily ensconced in little cottages with gingham curtains. But instead, they have to live in the big, bad woods. ...
If you read nothing else this week, read the following two articles by Peter Hermann. Baltimore struggles with crime and court issues very similar to Atlanta’s. More severe, in their case:
Delving More Deeply Into Shooting Stats ...
The Georgia investigative blog — news, not opinion — Atlanta Unfiltered has information about some of the 45 murder defendants reported to be free on bond. Apparently, there are some inaccuracies — two remain in jail, four are facing manslaughter or other charges, and two had charges dropped.
That still leaves 37 murder defendants walking the streets (and who knows how many defendants who shot or raped somebody but didn’t kill them). ...
The comments thread in response to this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution contain a lot more insight than the article itself, which morphed from the purported subject of policing into another attack on the public for caring about crime.* No surprise there. While the criminologists try to minimize crime using formulas measuring relative cultural pathology and other number dances, the public hones in on the courts:
It is time that we stop protecting the young criminals – Start publishing names, parents names and city – Might just be that some parents will be so embarrassed that they will take control of these young people – Start publishing names of judges that continually grant bail bonds or m notes for “REPEAT” offenders. — “D.L.” ...
What’s the matter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
In the last year, the residents of Atlanta stood up and declared that they do not want their city to be a place known for crime, where murders and muggings are taken in stride. They declared that one murder, one home invasion, is one too many. They partnered with the police — ignoring the headline-grabbing anti-cop types who perennially try to sow divisiveness. ...
On September 4, the jury in the Denise Lee murder trial returned a verdict of death for the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered her, Michael King. The next day the Sarasota Herald Tribune ran a story detailing the travails King would face on death row, such as limited access to exercise and no air conditioning:
Air conditioning is forbidden on death row, so inmates mostly keep still. “It’s awful,” said the Rev. Larry Reimer, who has visited for 27 years to minister to a death row inmate. “It is hotter there than you permit animals to be kept.” ...
On August 28, jurors in the Michael King trial in Sarasota, Florida found King guilty of raping and killing 21-year old mother, Denise Amber Lee. Here is a photo of Lee’s father, Rick Goff, listening to the last 911 call Denise managed to make, in which she was recorded begging for her life. It’s worth remembering that the families were forced to sit through all the courtroom games the defense played while trying to get King off on a technicality. Which technicality? Any and all of them, of course.
Immediately following the jury’s conviction, the sentencing hearings began. King’s lawyers set out to argue that a childhood sledding accident rendered him incompetent, a mitigating factor the jurors would have to weight against his crimes — if it was true. ...
With so many opportunities to exclude evidence, and so few ways to get it admitted, it is only the most unlucky offenders who ever see the inside of a courtroom. This terrible reality is what many journalists and defense attorneys call the genius of our system, though, of course, it doesn’t feel that way when it is your daughter or wife begging for her life.
~~~ ...
This is what Michael King looked like when he was caught in 2008 after abducting, raping and murdering 21-year old mother Denise Amber Lee:
Normal looking guy, right? King was a husband and father, a home-owner, a businessman who worked as a plumber. But he’s recently gotten a make-over: ...
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: ...
One day after the on-duty murder of Tampa Police Cpl. Mike Roberts, the St. Petersburg Times actually published a story bemoaning the killer’s hard life.
We learn that Humberto Delgado Jr. had insomnia, was good at fixing things, was a dad just like Roberts — well, not exactly, because he didn’t support his children and he murdered a police officer, but the Times is nothing if not relentless in its efforts to assert that offenders are as much the victims of the crimes they commit as the people they choose to victimize: ...
Do they have no shame, or just no standards?
DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show ...
It ought to take more than 25 seconds and two mouse clicks to find evidence that the media and The Sentencing Project are making stuff up. It ought to, but it does not.
The Sentencing Project is a well-funded, powerful, anti-incarceration advocacy organization. They pose as a think tank that publishes objective academic research on crime and punishment. ...
I had not been watching Atlanta television news until I tried to watch the press conference yesterday morning. They are sending people to bang on doors, looking for the Chief of Police, and challenging the Mayor on her unwillingness to address the issue. My apologies. The media is alive and kicking in Atlanta.
Yesterday morning, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Police Chief Richard Pennington held a press conference to talk about crime. Here is some of what they said, culled from local news reports: ...
Some days, it’s hard to sound constructive. Thursday blues? For once, I’m not gonna try:
Exhibit A: Somebody should demand that Atlanta Police Chief Pennington surrender his day book, so people can see precisely what he is doing for all that money. How often does he go to the office? Where is he at 5:05 p.m.? At 7:05 a.m.? ...
Every weekday, I receive a useful summary of crime, policing, and justice news stories called Crime and Justice News, compiled by Ted Gest at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Considering that there are so many relevant articles from which to choose, Gest and his assistants do a good job of spotting national trends.
But, sometimes, reading through the report is singularly depressing, not only because crime is depressing, but because the trends in crime prevention that crop up regularly these days seem doomed to failure. ...
From PROTECT, the National Association to Protect Children:
Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway fiasco–where about 70 “registered” sex offenders have been herded under a bridge to live–is being challenged in court by the ACLU. ...
Yesterday, while writing about the Times‘ willful misrepresentation of a child sexual assault conviction, I noted:
[W]hen I see an offender with a record of one or three instances of “inappropriate touching,” I suspect that’s the tip of the iceberg. I suspect the conviction is the result of a plea bargain agreed to just to get the sick bastard away from the child and onto a registry, which is the most victims can reasonably hope for in the courts these days . . . ...