BETTER PAPERS, PLEASE: It's a wonderful morning in the Times!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 2012

A look at the way bias works: Truly, it’s a wonderful morning in the New York Times—wonderful if you want to see one way bias can work.

But first, consider the remarkable work which has appeared in the Washington Post the past two mornings.

Gene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize winner. (We know, we know—they all are!) But so what? Yesterday morning, he offered the highlighted thought in paragraph 3 of his column:
ROBINSON (6/26/12): By throwing out most of the anti-Latino Arizona immigration law and neutering the rest, the Supreme Court struck a rare blow for fairness and justice on Monday. Let's hope this is the beginning of a streak.

Let's also hope that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who sided with the 5 to 3 majority in this case, likes the view from the liberals' end of the bench. They could use his vote on the health-care-reform ruling, expected to be announced Thursday.

In a perfect world, the court would have definitively eliminated the most notorious section of the Arizona law: the requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone who is detained. Because of its chilling invocation of police-state tactics, this became known as the "papers, please" provision.
According to Robinson, the “papers, please” provision of SB 1070 includes “the requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone who is detained.”

That claim is baldly bogus, of course. But there it sat, in the Washington Post, penned by an award-winning “journalist”—tied to a designation derived from old Nazi films.

How does a major newspaper manage to print such a statement? We’re not sure, but in today’s Post, Kathleen Parker takes her turn at the helm.

Parker’s a Pulitzer prize-winner too—although, in fairness, they all are. On-line, her column bears the teaser, “Your papers, please:”
PARKER (6/27/12): One [provision the court left in place] allows state law enforcement officers to determine whether someone they stop, detain or arrest for some other reason is in the country legally. The obvious concern is that enforcement would lead to racial profiling. And of course it will because we can be pretty certain that Caucasians pulled over for, say, speeding won’t be required to produce proof of citizenship.

Unless, that is, state officials realize that treating everyone equally is the only way to avoid charges of racial profiling. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has promised that mechanisms are in place to ensure that Hispanics are not singled out.

What those mechanisms might be isn’t clear, but one can imagine at least one possible scenario—a reiteration of the sort of willy-nilly, random granny-search ops we’ve witnessed since 9/11.

Taking a stroll through probability, let’s say that Officer Smith pulls over Paco Ramirez and asks for proof of citizenship, and it turns out that Paco is descended from three generations of U.S.-born, tax-paying Ramirezes. Paco is probably going to be annoyed. He may be sufficiently annoyed to file a profiling (or harassment) complaint with the courts. After all, why, except that he looked Hispanic, would the officer have asked for his papers?
Parker allows herself to “imagine” how this provision may be carried out. As she does, she lets her imagination run free.

Parker says it isn’t clear what the actual mechanisms of enforcement will be. But how odd! In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Fernanda Santos did an excellent job reporting what some of those mechanisms may actually be.

In our hard-copy Times, Santos’ informative report was buried at the bottom of page A12. That said, the little-known Santos reported real facts which came to her from the real world.

One day later, a Pulitzer winner was still “imagining.”

This brings us back to today’s New York Times. In the letters column, a writer from Denver says “it doesn’t take too much imagination” to predict the way this provision will be enforced.

In fairness, he’s certainly right about that. When imagination is our method, there’s little real effort required.

The letter which really grabbed us, though, was one from New York City itself—the letter which sits right at the top of today’s letters pile.

This letter was written by Malika Dutt, described as “president of Breakthrough, a human rights organization.” Dutt is concerned about the Arizona law, as well she might be. That said, her letter starts like this:
LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (6/27/12): The Supreme Court has upheld the most damaging element of SB 1070, Arizona’s cruel anti-immigrant law. The “show me your papers” provision allows law enforcement to profile people based on the color of their skin.

A community in which racial profiling is permitted—even invited—is a community deprived of its basic right to safety and dignity. And such laws have a particular impact on women and families. Under the constant threat of police harassment and possible detention, even simple daily outings—running errands, driving to work, grocery shopping, taking your child to the doctor—become fraught with fear and very real risk.
This letter tops the letters page. In its opening paragraph, it simply states, as a matter of fact, that the provision upheld by the court “allows law enforcement to profile people based on the color of their skin.”

Is that claim even dimly accurate? The provision hasn’t gone into effect; reporters like Santos to the side, papers like the Times have made little effort to explain the criteria which will be involved in its execution. This allows people like Parker, Dutt and the reader in Denver to put their imaginations to work, producing the dystopian musings which make our tribe feel good.

Dutt imagines a world in which Arizonans will live “under the constant threat of police harassment and possible detention.” Indeed, the world she and Parker imagine would be a very bad world indeed.

The irony is, we already have such a world within our national borders! It’s found right there in New York City, where various people screech and wail about the things they can imagine in Arizona.

Why is today’s New York Times a delight? For this reason: Right there on the paper’s front page, reporter Wendy Ruderman describes the world Parker and Dutt are forced to imagine. Ruderman writes a highly respectful but detailed report about New York City’s stop-and-frisk procedure, in which blacks and Hispanics are treated in precisely the way Parker and Dutt imagine.

No one has to imagine this. As Brother Gaye once sang, this is what’s goin’ on:
RUDERMAN (6/27/12): Last year, city police officers stopped nearly 686,000 people, 84 percent of them black or Latino. The vast majority—88 percent of the stops—led to neither an arrest nor a summons, although officers said they had enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk in roughly half of the total stops, according to statistics provided by the New York Police Department and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Behind each number is a singular and salient interaction between the officers and the person they have stopped. In conducting the interviews, The New York Times sought to explore the simple architecture of the stops—the officers’ words and gestures, actions, explanations, tones of voice and demeanors.

What seems clear is that there is no script for the encounters, or that if there is one, it is not being followed. Under the law, officers must have a reasonable suspicion—a belief that a crime is afoot—to stop, question and frisk people. One thing an officer cannot do is stop someone based solely on skin color. Yet many of those interviewed said they believed that officers had stopped them because of race—and race alone.
Rachel, Lawrence and Big Ed all broadcast from the city where this is occurring. Question:

As these corporate pseudos screech and wail about the things they imagine in Arizona, have you ever seen them do a segment about this practice right there in New York?

Go ahead! Search your recollection!

Tomorrow, we’ll look at that informative news report by Santos, who is or was Phoenix bureau chief for the Times. We’ll also discuss a few basic facts about the provision of SB 1070 which the Supreme Court didn’t strike down—the provision which lets us have our fun yelling slogans from old Nazi movies.

But it’s just as we’ve told you in the past: The New York Times very much enjoys dropping R-bombs on “those people” in Arizona and Alabama. Also, B-, X- and N-bombs (xenophobe and nativist.)

That said, the paper adopts a strikingly different tone with respect to the brilliant work of its very rich billionaire mayor. If you want to understand more about the different ways “bias” can work, we’ll suggest that you spend some time pondering this double standard.

We’ll also suggest that you ask yourself this: How can Robinson still be employed? After more than two years of this discussion, he’s still writing that pure, perfect pap? In what world can that happen?

Truly, we live in a broken world, a world which boasts a Potemkin “press corps.” Little-known reporters are sometimes allowed to introduce a few stray facts. Other than that, it’s slogans and narrative:

Narrative all the way down.

Tomorrow: Santos' report. Also, what "papers" are we discussing?

17 comments:

  1. Speaking of news via imagination, Bob quotes Ruderman as writing

    Yet many of those interviewed said they believed that officers had stopped them because of race—and race alone.

    It's generally impossible to deduce profiling from a single event. One needs to look at a pattern. So, those stoppees who say they'd been stopped solely due to race are using their imagination.

    Also, how big is "many"? That vague word tells nothing about the percentage of stoppees who thought they'd been stopped due to race alone. For all we know, the overwhelming majority might disagree not think so.

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    1. Yes, it's generally impossible to deduce profiling from a single event. You want pattern?

      Ruderman also reports: "Last year, city police officers stopped nearly 686,000 people, 84 percent of them black or Latino. The vast majority -- 88 percent of the stops -- led to neither an arrest nor a summons, although officers said they had enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk in roughly half of the total stops, according to statistics provided by the New York Police Department and the Center for Constitutional Rights." Wikipedia reports that, according to the US Census Bureau, in 2011 25.1% of NYC's population was black, 27.5% (any race) Hispanic, 11.8% Asian, and 44.6% white. Consider also: virtually all those frisked were young men, even though young men constitute a tiny percentage of each of these groups. According to the NYCLU, young black men make up 25.6% of NYPD stops but only 1.9% of the city's population, for instance.

      I'd like to know why officers feel free to acknowledge that they had "enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk in roughly half of the total stops." I thought the fourth amendment (as interpreted by centuries now of interpretation), which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, required ALL frisks to be conducted only when an officer had "enough reasonable suspicion."

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    2. David, you could observe racial profiling by sitting through one session of traffic court.
      Try it.

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    3. I, too, wondered why the officers acknowledged that they had "enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk in roughly half of the total stops." Why only half?

      Perhaps the explanation might be that in the other half of the cases, the officers felt that they had enough reasonable suspicion to stop the person, but not enough to frisk him. That would mean that they frisked only half the people they stopped.

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    4. David in Cal -- I think you're right there. A distinction was intended between stopping but not frisking, and stopping and frisking. That makes sense.

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  2. Parker makes the obvious point that police enforcing AZ 1070 would be open to charges of racial profiling.
    Parker also make the point that the only way police can avoid charges of racial profiling is to question Caucasians; Betty White, for instance.
    But cops in New York have been harassing Blacks, Latinos, and long-haired freaks for decades with bogus "probable cause" claims like "the license plate looked loose", or "one brake light was out."
    NYPD officers regularly harassed homosexuals until the Stonewall Inn riots.

    As soon as SB1070 was signed into law the Governor’s office made a training video, "Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board."
    The video was revised for June 25, 2012 to reflect the three areas SCOTUS voted down.

    Some of the original standards:
    Dress
    Poor command of English
    Lack of ID or foreign ID
    Flight and/or preparation for flight
    Evasive maneuvers in vehicle or on foot
    Foreign vehicle registration
    Counter-surveillance or lookout activity
    Location (where unlawful aliens are known to congregate looking for work)
    (Note: this may have been edited out since the SCOTUS decision)
    Traveling in tandem
    Vehicle is overcrowded or rides heavily
    Passengers in vehicle attempt to hide or avoid detection
    Inability to provide his or her residential address
    Nervousness or refusal to make eye contact

    Some of these observations are very subjective, so a less than stellar peace officer could easily make up a story of suspicious activity after the fact.
    Anyone that lived through the 70’s knows that.

    Parker also rehashed that Romney had said the Arizona immigrant law was a “model.” Romney’s comment was about Arizona employers using E-verify.
    But, what the hell, both sides lie.

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  3. It gets even worse in NYC, because tens of thousands of those seemingly arbitrary "stop and frisks" lead to arrests for possession of small quantities of marijuana -- in direct contravention of police policy (and local law), which order police not to make arrests in such cases.

    But because the cops have arrest quotas to fulfill, they haul these young men into the system. The end result, of course, is that cops are regarded as occupying armies from the white suburbs.

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  4. In addition to leading to arrests for very minor offenses (often with huge consequences for those arrested, like their whole family's loss of access to city housing), stop and frisk creates a general feeling of being watched, besieged, even terrorized among those likely to be stopped and frisked. In fact, the policy's avowed purpose is to make those who would carry guns, for instance, less likely to do so out of generalized fear of being caught. (Gang members and such have found ways around this, btw. They have spots where they stash guns and systems for reporting to one another where guns have been stashed. So stop and frisk may slow down a little the avowed targets of this policy but doesn't stop them.) Trouble is, the sense of fear doesn't stop with gang members, and the law-abiding (or trivially law-breaking, like the 25 year old with a tiny bit of marijuana in his pocket) get caught in the same net of fear as real criminals.

    The abuse of the state's (limited) rights of search and seizure was a major cause of the American Revolution, after all.

    The NYT may not have been attending much to stop and frisk maybe because few of its readers are in the demographic groups likely to be subjected to the policy, and not just because of the paper's cushy treatment of Bloomberg. But other NYC newspapers and news sources have been attending to it, ever since the policy began to be applied big-time.

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  5. "Is that claim even dimly accurate?"

    Down to criticizing letters to the editor in the Times?

    Allow me to answer your question, Bob. Yes it is "even dimly accurate."

    For instance, if you are driving through Arizona and get pulled over for speeding in Sheriff Joe's county, you think they are going to ask you to prove your citizenship?

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    1. It's not so much the *letter* that's being criticised, to my mind, as the atrocious *reporting* that leads readers to be so poorly informed.

      As to your comment about speeding, the question re profiling is: Are people going to be detained for no other reason than their presumed ethnicity, due to the provisions of this bill? Your example doesn't address that question. Thanks for trying though.

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    2. Every time I've been pulled over, I've been asked to "prove" my citizenship by producing my drivers license. I think a lack of one, or an obvious forged one would probably be the sort of thing they were looking for. It's really not that hard, people

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    3. Let me put the scenario this way. Biff O'Reilly is speeding at 100 mph through Sheriff Joe's county in his Mustang. Jose Rodriguez gets stopped for a burned out taillight.

      Both guys' great-grandparents were born in the U.S.A.

      Which one is more likely to get detained by Sheriff Joe's troops until he can prove his citizenship or legal residency?

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    4. Does this law allow detention "until he can prove his citizenship or legal residency?"

      No.

      It works in the other direction.

      IF someone may be detained for legal reasons, THEN their status may also be determined.

      Your example: still very broken.

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  6. Sorry, but Fernanda Santos says the same thing about the law that Gene Robinson says. Bob, you call Robinson's claim bogus, but you praise Santos's article. I'm very confused.

    Here's what Santos writes:

    "...there was confusion and consternation on Monday at the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to uphold the most controversial portion of Arizona’s contentious immigration law, the part that requires law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people in custody who they suspect are in the country illegally."

    Explain, please?

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    1. Here's what Santos writes:

      "...there was confusion and consternation on Monday at the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to uphold the most controversial portion of Arizona’s contentious immigration law, the part that requires law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people in custody who they suspect are in the country illegally."

      Robinson:

      "In a perfect world, the court would have definitively eliminated the most notorious section of the Arizona law: the requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone who is detained."

      It is not the same thing by any means. Santos writes the Arizona law states law enforcement officers are required to check those they SUSPECT that are IN CUSTODY. Robinson changes that to L.E are required to check ANYONE DETAINED.

      "In custody" is defined as “a situation when there has been a formal arrest or when, under the totality of the circumstances, there has been a restraint on freedom of movement of the degree associated with formal arrests.” United States v. Lacy, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86970, 2-3 (E.D. Wis. Aug. 13, 2009)

      A Detention is a non-consensual temporary denial of liberty. A police officer must have "reasonable suspicion" that


      1. you are about to commit a crime
      2. you are in the act of committing a crime, or
      3. you have committed a crime

      in order to Detain you. The officer has the authority to temporarily deny you the ability to leave while he investigates his suspicion. You may still refuse to answer any questions, but you have no right to leave. The officer must use a reasonable amount of time to investigate his suspicions until the detention elevates to the level of "probable cause" to arrest you. If the officer fails to determine there is probable cause for an Arrest, he must release you in a reasonable amount of time. The courts have determined that what is a reasonable amount of time is relative to the criminal activity being investigated. If you attempt to leave a detention without the permission of the police officer, you may be subject to Arrest. During a Detention, absent certain circumstances, a police officer may not move you to another location or the Detention becomes a de facto Arrest.

      Those are two completely different situations with differing thresholds to check immigration status. Robinson prefers to push the demonstrably false narrative of the lower thresholds need to be met that would affect many more people than the actual Arizona law, because it makes a more pleasing tale. He is basically arguing against a law that doesn't actually exist. Yet, another example of MSM inner circle wasting our time with fantasy B.S. Shocking...

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  7. Hey, where's Greg?

    Is he waiting for a Maddow post, so he can complain that's the only thing Somerby cares about?

    Greg? There's a partial Maddow one today (Thursday), but your love interest is so egregiously deceptive and wrong you probably won't show up there to defend her honor either, will you?

    [/insert boilerplate Greg]
    "Maddow, Maddow, Maddow. Oh, the Howler's gotten so useless anymore. That's all he talks about."
    [/foolishness]

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    ReplyDelete