The Bull in Full

Listening to noise, not hearing much

I know I shouldn't, but sometimes you can't help it.

I put on waders and headed back into the rather icky waters over at Liestoppers, which is pretty much Grand Central for those most inclined to see the Duke lacrosse/Nifong mess as a grand conspiracy involving liberals, black people, the media, corrupt police, reptilian shape-shifters, and probably the Loch Ness monster, all centered in that city perched atop the hellmouth itself, Durham.  The odd thing is, mixed in with the true loonies, there are a few people who come across as objecting out of principle.  Given that, and the fact that I was sure these folks were obsessively watching Durham for signs of Masonic child sacrifices or what not, I was sure they had some take on Eve Carson.

Funny, just like almost exactly two years ago, there's a media frenzy going on, with suspects being arrested and a lot of evidence appearing in the media appearing to implicate them.  Now, if there's one rock that the Liestoppers folks tether their ark to more than any other, it's the constitutionally protected presumption of innocence until proven guilty.  Would these stanchions of constitutional and legal ethics insist on the presumption of innocence for Lovette and Atwater? 

You can probably guess, or you can see for yourself.

Speeding, broken windows, panhandling, and all that

Busy day today, but I can't let this topic go without commenting.  Kevin today tag-teams off of one of Barry's posts earlier this week about the hesitancy of the Durham Police Department in going after speeders.  I meant to get to Barry's post earlier, but I can't let yet another one on this topic go by without commenting on it.

My master's thesis was on crime in Durham and various location-based strategies for addressing crime, and what their results are.  In the process, I did a pretty extensive review on the criminology literature surrounding order maintenance policing, better known as the "broken windows" theory, based on an article of the same name that James Q. Wilson and William Kelling wrote in the Atlantic in 1980.  Back in early '06, when I was in the thick of finishing the thing, we got into quite the conversation on the PAC2 mailing list about the panhandling ban, and whether it represented an effective "broken windows"-style approach to crime prevention.  I thought it was not, and put forward, oddly enough, residential speeding as something that the police should crack down on instead.

This message came in the middle of a conversation, so it refers to e-mails written by Chris Sevick and Ken Gasch previously.  I think it's still pretty apparent what's going on, and this post laid out my case for how broken windows applies to Durham better than I think I could write now.  And since I don't have a whole lot of time, I'll just quote the thing in its entirety below the fold, edited slightly for formatting:

Innovative crime-fighting solutions

Bull in Full foreign correspondent Kathryn Bacon Goldman, on location in Uganda, sends in this nugget on innovative crime fighting techniques being used in Kenya:

The threat of witchcraft has scared looters into returning goods they stole during unrest which followed last month's disputed Kenyan elections.

TV stations broadcast pictures of people returning to places they robbed in the coastal city of Mombasa carrying beds, sofas and other items.

A police commander confirmed the reports and said the rumours of witchcraft had made his job "easy".

Feel free to discuss ways to apply this technique in Durham in the comments section.

Anson County DA still harrassing Floyd Brown

From the Charlotte Observer this morning:

What Anson County District Attorney Michael Parker is trying to do to Floyd Brown goes beyond unreasonable. It's unconscionable.

A judge on Monday dismissed charges against Mr. Brown, who had spent 14 years locked up in a mental hospital for a murder charge he was never tried on, based on a confession experts say he couldn't have made. But now he has no suitable place to go. After a visit from the Anson County DA, a group home reneged on an agreement made months ago to take Mr. Brown when he was released.

Betsy Muse at BlueNC dug up an article from the Denver Post, of all papers, detailing just how ridiculous and corrupt the continued incarceration of Brown is.  And now, the DA is trying to keep him from being accepted into a group home.  Of course, given the events around here of the past week, another case jumps to mind.  Apparently, that's not just because we're in Durham here; the Observer noticed it too:

DA Parker reminds us of disgraced and disbarred Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong in this regard: Like Mr. Nifong, Mr. Parker has doggedly pursued a case where evidence and fairness clearly say he should not.

Well, some might say, at least the cops weren't in on the act too, right?  Well, according to the Post, the murder weapon, a large wooden stick with bloody palm prints on it that didn't match Brown's, has now disappeared from the evidence locker.  More from the Post:

Sheriff Allen was asked in court what he did when he learned the evidence in the case had been lost.       

"I didn't do anything," he testified.       

Prosecutors surmised that the evidence may have been lost while being returned from North Carolina's crime lab via United Parcel Service within three weeks of Lynch's murder. But court records show a lab report sent attached to the evidence arrived safely at sheriff's headquarters.

Hmmm...  Let's ask the lead investigator. Bud Hutchinson:

Asked three times whether he destroyed it, Hutchinson answers, "I don't know."       

"If I did, I wouldn't say," he continues. "It's not your business what happened to that evidence. It's nobody's business what happened to that evidence."

"The evidence? I'll be honest with you. It disappeared into thin air. Into thin air, I tell you. Only the Lord knows where it went," adds Hutchinson's partner, Robert Poplin, a former Anson County sheriff's deputy who sells cookware now that he, like Hutchinson, has lost his badge.

In an unrelated case, both detectives pleaded guilty in 1998 to federal racketeering charges for at least four years of shaking down money from people in exchange for not pressing charges in criminal cases. Hutchinson also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to racketeer.

"I've been in law enforcement for 30 years, and they were the worst I've ever seen," the SBI's Ramsey says. "I mean, that's just straight up. I've never seen more crooked officers than these. They were just as corrupt as they can be. I wouldn't put anything past them. Nothing would surprise me in dealing with those two guys."

Well, clearly the judge should have done something!

They cited Poplin's and Hutchinson's records of criminal corruption. They noted the detectives failed to investigate what happened to evidence they were responsible for keeping. And they argued the sheriff's deputies acted in bad faith by mishandling evidence that early tests found didn't match Brown and therefore were persuasive of his innocence.

A judge denied their bad-faith claim, saying it's "merely speculative" the missing evidence would have proved Brown didn't kill Lynch.

So, again, someone tell me about how this kind of thing happens "only in Durham?" 

I don't mean to be flippant about either the lacrosse case or Brown's case; both were dangerous miscarriages of justice.  But I frankly don't see much good in putting complete control of the Durham police in the hands of a federal judge, or suing the pants off of Anson County, while simultaneously ignoring the conditions in North Carolina's judicial system which made it possible.  This isn't just Durham's problem, or Wadesboro's problem -- it's North Carolina's problem.  I honestly have no idea what the technical details of any kind of redress would look like, but I think providing some formal statewide oversight and review of local district attorneys and law enforcement offices would be a start. 

The lacrosse civil case, pro-lacrosse blogs, sifting noise, etc.

Kevin takes a look at the decision by the formerly accused lacrosse players at Duke, and does his best job to untangle why the lawyers decided to tie the two cases together.  I think his main premise, that Nifong is unlikely to be able to afford the big monetary settlement the city could provide, is certainly a part of it, I think there may be a little more going on here.

I've been spending the last month trying (with lots of nose-holding and antacid) to read a couple of the anti-Nifong blogs, specifically Durham in Wonderland and Liestoppers.  While both are pretty substantial fonts of hysterical screed (the former's content is probably 50% sanctimonious nonsense, the latter 90%), they do get into a lot of nuance that isn't covered in the media.  In any case, here's some of the nuggets I've managed to extract from the mud:

Panhandling ban, revisited

Carolyn Rickard reports in today's H-S that Lewis Cheek's proposed roadside panhandling ban for unincorporated areas of the county is once again put off, with not much momentum behind it.  Back before I had a blog, I had quite a bit to say about this, mostly on the Partners Against Crime - District 2 mailing list (pac2).  My point was that whatever you think about panhandling, passing an ordinance against doing it in a particular place is not the way to go about it.  I've included an entire post I wrote to the pac2 list January of last year below the fold, and although some of the facts on the ground have shifted a little bit, the points still stand.  (At the time of writing, the City was considering a similar ban for inside the city limits, which, as expected, never went anywhere.) 

A much more constructive solution, I think, is the "Durham Can You Spare a Change" program that the INC has been talking about.  (Reyn over at DCVB did a pretty good summary in August.)  This is a joint effort to try to redirect funds towards more organized programs that provide structure and intervention for folks with various mental health problems, including addictions, that keep them asking for money.  All that said, I still object to admonitions of "don't ever give out money."   Most of the programs that we want to redirect people into are very targeted towards people in very specific situations.  (Temporarily homeless, chronic addicts, etc.)  While there continue to be the scheisters (like the guy who's been telling me for 8 years that he "just got into town a couple of weeks ago") who invent stories, I've met folks whose stories sound very reasonable who've described in frustration how they can't find anyone who will help them (as well as some real howlers of unreasonable ones).  Quite simply, there will always be good people who will find themselves dependent upon the kindness of random strangers.  That kindness will always be exploited by those who can, and I don't think either "give freely" or "never give" are the perfect answers.

Welcome attention to prison reform

Three bloggers at The Atlantic -- Ross Douthat (a conservative), Matt Yglesias (a progressive), and Andrew Sullivan (a political mutt) -- raise their voices in favor of reform of the hopelessly broken American prison system.  I've actually only posted once on this topic on the blog, but I've got at least a half dozen half-baked ideas for posts related to prisons and gangs that I can't ever get fully written.  I have a clear idea on how to approach a lot of political issues, but prison reform is one that just stumps me.  Ross notes that this is one area where nearly all political forces conspire to enforce the status quo, with few countervailing winds to try to sail.

The two greatest arguments I can make against the current prisons system are, one, the sheer brutality of it should offend our sensibilities, even if it does not, and two, that as I've noted elsewhere, our prisons frequently serve as little more than state-run gang recruitment centers.  All of the other moral arguments about rehabilitation, forgiveness, human rights, and human decency all seem to fall flat when it comes to talking about convicts, and we get more and more "get tough" rhetoric, which usually only serves to make things worse.

Given that my readership is a fraction of those of the Atlantic blogs, maybe this marks the start of some actual political movement on the issue.

Late Update: Reader CC e-mailed me this link to a story in the Denver Westword about ADX Florence, home of some of America's most notorious convicts.  Since September 11, there have been 100 media requests for access to any aspect of the prison, all of which have been denied. The article also mentions that Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser is working on a book about prison reform, which I think is fantastic.  (I'll admit to never having read FFN, but I know a lot of folks who have.  Which if nothing else means that Schlosser has the ability to write with a fair amount of mass appeal, something which is critical for any push to get anywhere.)

Prisons: The New Growth Industry

I linked without comment to a YouTube video, which was a fake drug ad for a compound called Incarcerex.  The ad promotes haphazard incarceration of drug users as a means to fix political ills, and is a brilliant piece of satire—I can't recommend it highly enough.

After posting that video, I was leafing through my print edition of the Herald-Sun, and came across the latest from Malcolm Berko in the business section.  I like reading Berko—he's certainly not handing out tips for socially responsible investing, but his irreverence for the icons of the financial world, like brokerage firms and Alan Greenspan, make him fun to read.  This week's column (linked from a paper with a more reasonable archiving system), though, was a tad disturbing.  A reader wrote in asking about his shares in GEO, which used to be called Wackenhut, which Berko had recommended a few years ago.  As Berko notes, the company's revenues have gone up 450% in the past decade.  Why?  Because they run prisons.