Police, race and misconceptions
Posted inPolitics: National

Police, race and misconceptions

Ferguson,_Day_4,_Photo_26
By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

The recent string of well-publicized police killings of unarmed blacks and the nationwide wave of mass protests by young, multi-ethnic crowds, has once again brought the issue of police and race from the backburner of ethnic-studies classes to the forefront of public debate.

Some incidents triggering the protests are controversial (Ferguson); others, such as the shooting death of a 12-year old boy with a pellet pistol or the death of a sidewalk cigarette salesman from a banned choke-hold appear as unmistakable tragedies to those who have seen the video evidence.

Instead of dissecting these cases on an individual basis, I want to examine the push-back from conservative pundits, whose talking-points and rhetoric mirror police attitudes, including prominent and influential men like Rudy Giuliani, who is widely credited with amazing reductions in crime during his tenure as mayor of New York City, and whose policing models (most notably "broken windows") have been widely emulated.

The rhetoric from law and order conservatives is important because police tactics can best be changed through reforms in police attitudes and in the attitudes of politicians presiding over law enforcement communities. That rhetoric is filled with fictions, half-truths, faulty inferences, and misused statistics. Several prominent talking points deserve scrutiny:

1. "Ninety-three percent of black murder victims in the United States are killed by other blacks" — the "black on black crime" thesis. This comes from a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the period from 1980 through 2008.

The fly in the ointment is that the report also says 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. Yet nobody is talking about "white on white crime" as a means of distracting the conversation whenever a white is the victim of police abuse. Do we really believe that murderers politely decline to kill the members of other races, or is this simply a statistical artifact of demographic segregation and concentration?

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Posted inUncategorized

Cincinnati, USA

"Cincinnati USA" is the cloying marketing term one sees around the airport. It also recognizes not only that the Cincinnati metro area stretches into northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana, but that sprawl has taken its toll on the famous city in Ohio. This is a slow-growing metro in slow-growing states, but the city gained 0.3 percent population from 2000 to 2006, while suburban Butler County grew 8.4 percent and northern Kentucky's Boone County added 34 percent (through 2008). In 1900, Cincinnati was the 10th largest city in America and it topped out at 502,000 in 1960, dropping to around 332,000 now. In so many ways it is sui generis, but in other critical areas it is indeed the USA. Unfortunately, those areas are gloomy.

Winston Churchill called Cincinnati America's most beautiful inland city, and it's an observation that's hard to argue with even now. The city sits on wooded hills along gentle, wide bends of the storied Ohio River. The skyline pops up like a jewel box when you come down "death hill" on the freeway from the airport. Cincinnati is an architectural feast, filled with enchanting neighborhoods, lovely parks and deep history. This was the Miami country before the arrival of the whites, the richest hunting ground of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cincinnati was settled by Revolutionary War veterans, many members of the Society of the Cincinnati, and named after the self-denying Roman general who Americans likened to George Washington. Founded in 1788, it was the Queen City of the West, the gateway for generations of migrants and the haven for Germans who fled the crushing of the liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

This city was so good to me when I was business editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the 1990s. Armed with one of the best staffs of financial writers I was ever honored to lead, we shook up the old-guard companies that weren't used to the prying eyes of journalists or transparency. Now I am using it as the setting for a new mystery series, The Cincinnati Casebooks, of which The Pain Nurse is the first. Seeing it again this month, after being away for 13 years, I was reminded of Mark Twain's witticism about wanting to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, because it's always behind the times. On the surface, the city seemed little changed. And thank God, for that slow pace has preserved so much good architecture. But beneath that veneer, the story was, as is always the case here, much more complicated.

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