Big Brother Just Might Really Start Watching

Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!

We live in a complex society, centered in an increasingly complex world. Anyone, politician or preacher, who offers a panacea, is a charlatan.

That being said, because it would cost over a million dollars upfront, with maybe another half-million annually, I don’t think we’re going to see body cameras become ubiquitous anytime soon on St. Louis police officers. St. Louis County may have a little more money, but I doubt that it has THAT much more. That says nothing about the larger cities, like my own Webster Groves or Kirkwood, Ladue, Clayton, etc. And then we have mini-fiefdoms scattered around the county. I can see it now: “Good news! Bella Villa police now have body cameras. They only had to triple the outrageous number of (trap) tickets they wrote to pay for them.”

Of course, even being able to spend that kind of money would virtually, if not actually, require approval from the local police union. I think you could get better odds on the Cubs winning a World Series than that happening.

Perhaps I’m wrong in that assessment. Perhaps police officers would recognize that there are protections built in for them as well as citizens when they wear the cameras. How many bogus complaints of police brutality and harassment are filed each year? I would think (almost) everyone would like to see the number of complaints filed be reduced, and it seems to me that body cameras might make a significant dent in that number. Given the fact that (so-called) Smart Phones have made almost everyone on the street a potential recorder, if not reporter, I’m not sure privacy claims have any relevance for any of us any more.

But I get their trepidation. As a teacher I’m pretty sure I would have resisted cameras recording every word, every lesson, every movement of mine in the classroom. It certainly would have changed the classroom dynamic, negatively impacted the establishment of relationships with students. I don’t think I ever used it, but when I moved into the guidance office at Hancock I had a recorder at the ready, just in case, because when you close the door to a small office, even one with a vertical window in it, you (ironically) open yourself up to specious accusations from a disgruntled student or parent.

I freely admit that, for better and worse, I had a less active filter than many teachers. Even when my lessons were sort of scripted, there was no telling what might come out of my mouth based on the background noise of either the class or my mind. That was my style; I like to pretend it made me more effective, more honest, more open, and, probably, at least on occasion, more annoying. Still, it was a style that served me well for over four decades; I don’t think I would have been as successful with Big Brother recording every move.

That’s another cost, incidentally, that no one is talking about, at least not yet. Someone (or, in the case of large departments, schools or school districts, or municipal co-operatives, several someones) is going to have to watch, or be available to watch, all this data (the vast majority of which will be mind-numbingly boring). The good news is that concerns about your every move being watched are overblown; no one has the time or resources to make that happen. The bad news is that one person, with skill and proper motivation, can gain a tremendous amount of power over law enforcement (or educational) personnel. The answer to the old question of Who will watch the watchers? will certainly add to the cost, as well.

While it may sound like I’ve almost talked myself out of supporting these body cameras, we cannot ignore the cost, both financial and social, of Ferguson’s current tribulation. However you see either Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson, how quickly might that tragedy have been resolved (or perhaps even prevented) had body cameras been in play and the information immediately available? I’m not sure it would thrill County Prosecutor McCullough, but I’d sure like to see something like that if I were on the Grand Jury. Won’t the overall, and continually rising, price tag of that misfortune be several multiples of $2 million? Wouldn’t ALL of us prefer that? And wouldn’t that expenditure be more worthwhile than an urban tank?

9-11: A Different Kind of Throwback Thursday

One of my formers, on this 13^th anniversary of 9-11, posted on Facebook, asking what we were doing that awful day. I was in my second year of my counseling gig at the high school. Obviously, not a topic covered in Counselor School. The news came in that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. To be honest, the thought of terrorism occurred only fleetingly to me (I tend to the naive when it comes to bad things), but I did wonder how such a terrible mistake could have happened. After calling Carolyn to tell her to turn on the TV, I gravitated to a television in Chris Ventimiglia's classroom, just in time to see the second plane hit the other tower, and then I knew that the inconceivable had happened, which was quickly confirmed by subsequent events.

For reasons I still don’t get, the district and/or middle school administration tried, more or less successfully I guess, to quarantine information from their building. Delaying information does not change the information itself and I, at least, was confident that the staff was more than competent to help kids make sense of it all. Postponing the bad news for 5 hours changed nothing and deprived students and staff of a chance to work together to share grief and knowledge.

But I had my own kids to worry about, so other than a shrug and shake, I moved on, from classroom to classroom. I don’t recall any kids being overtly traumatized, although my daughter was. (Then living in Ohio, she spent most the morning on the phone with Carolyn and didn’t fly for several years.) I do remember telling kids, “Your life has just changed forever, and in ways you can’t imagine. You may not see it right away, but your life now will be very different than it would have been yesterday.”

    As I watched President Bush address the nation, I remember thinking, “Maybe the right guy did get elected.” His speech made me calm, confident and comfortable; despite my misgivings about him politically, he seemed, well, presidential. Of course, I didn’t know he would move beyond a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan to a conquest of Iraq, a country which, as an enemy of Bin Laden, clearly had had nothing to do with the horror of 9-11. Despite my words of warning to our students, I could not envision how widespread the chaotic fall of dominoes would become. But on that day, all of that was as inconceivable as terrorists flying airliners into the WTC.

Truth in Labeling

Conservative? Liberal? Radical? Right-wing Reactionary? Socialist? Communist? Fascist?

From Primary Election Day a month ago here in Missouri, now heading into the election season, these words will continue to be bandied about more and more.

Here’s my problem with trying to label people, especially with the goal of either demonizing or lionizing them. You don’t get to provide both the label AND the definition, because there is no single definition. In the same way you can’t cherry pick your quotes from the Founders (and retain any claim to intellectual honesty), you can’t label me AND provide your own personalized (or, even worse, rehashed from some polarizing group) definition of me.

Want to call me a liberal? Okay, but I get to say what “liberal” means, because YOU don’t really know what I believe, in all its complexity.

Labeling is just one more attempt to reduce civil discourse to simple bumper sticker slogans. My dad used to quote a boss who said, “When you find the solution it will be simple.” I would add, “…and at least incomplete if not wrong.” Even going back to the Founders (with their diverse points of view), society and life was far too complex to be etched so simply.

Case in point. Thomas Jefferson, occasional hero to the conservative political wing in the United States. Never mind that he was feared by the then conservatives as a dangerous radical, whose skepticism about Christianity made him a heathen in the eyes of most of the devout. Would it have been accurate to label him, “Thomas Jefferson, the rapist”? Offended? Could Sally Hemmings, his slave, have said, “No”? Simple, and simply biased, ignoring inconvenient evidence, like most of the memes you find on Facebook.

I’ve never understood why the Tea Party crowd has allied themselves with what today would be considered acts of terrorism. Tarring and feathering was not a harmless pastime. Burning the governor’s house, certainly an act of terror. Destroying private property in the form of tons of tea, criminal vandalism at its most generous appraisal. (Did you know the tea being shoveled into Boston Harbor, which remained polluted for all its citizens for a long time, piled up so high it actually starting spilling back into the ship from whence it came?) Remember, at this point the colonies had not declared independence, were not at war.

Had the British won the Revolution, certainly a realistic possibility, THEY certainly would not have celebrated such thuggery. 

Neither can you grab a label and make it a positive. Conservative? Lovely. You get Alexander Hamilton, the big government advocate and pet of George Washington, who sided with him against Jefferson on virtually every big issue. You were on the wrong side of history when it came to the American Revolution (Tories were, and are, conservative), the Constitution itself (Conservatives of the time feared the encroachment of a too powerful national government), abolition and slavery, women’s rights and suffrage, civil rights.... Proud of that are we? Liberal? Do you really want to be associated with the anarchists and Communists of the late 19th and early 20th century? Thought not.

I don’t have answers to the incredibly complex problems that face our increasingly complex society. However, I am certain that simplistic labels are not going to help us find those answers.

I would have sworn I had published this previously (I was looking for a different piece), but only the draft version exists on my "posts list." Apologies if this is a repeat.

Fracking Ferguson

The tragic death of Michael Brown has, like water injected into the earth’s crust, pushed to the surface energy and power, with consequences both potentially beneficial (dealing with issues long buried and kept dormant) and toxic (increasing violence, rioting, and looting).

It’s so easy to sit in judgment of others, to say what we would have done in a particular situation, even though we’ve never been in that position nor would we want to be. Darren Wilson, the unfortunate officer who fired the fatal shots, has been both lionized and demonized by people who don’t know him or what really happened. Michael Brown, similarly, has been made into either a martyr or a villain who deserved his fate, again by people who didn’t know him or the circumstances.

I find it ironic that so many of those defending Officer Wilson, saying that we should not judge him harshly because none of us know how we would react under those circumstances (I’ve used the same argument) are also quick to abandon it so that they can pass judgment on the way political and police leaders have responded to the resulting crisis, failing to give them the same benefit of the doubt. 

It’s easy to criticize politicians and others tasked with restoring order and investigating the tragedy. Make no mistake, I’m not defending the politicians; that’s an impossible task anymore. But it’s also too easy to say they should be doing something differently. Are they overreaching, not doing enough, too soft, too hard.... Political and police leaders are being criticized all across the spectrum; no matter what they do, or fail to do, they will be criticized. If they make you happy, they will undoubtedly anger someone else. Can we not at least try to give them credit for doing their best, as they see it, in a no-win situation? I freely admit that the older I get, the less certain I become. But I also am more willing to ask myself, “What if I’m wrong?”

If you’re posting or reposting snarky memes, re-tweets of unverified information, videos, verified or not, that purport to “prove” that there is a simple solution or clear cut evidence, etc., you may be part of the problem. You are certainly encouraging the division and polarization that is at the heart of everything and working at cross purposes to even trying to find a solution, if there can even be one. I am hopeful that, given the time to do a thorough job, an investigation will do what it is supposed to do; it may not be able to discover the “truth,” which, like beauty, is often in the mind of the beholder, but perhaps, just perhaps, it could start us on a path of how we as a society can do things better. Not simple, but, ideally, unifying.

Ferguson +

Trying to get a handle on the big picture.

This is America. As we see daily on social media, talk radio, and television, there is no requirement to actually have facts or know what we’re talking about to express an opinion. Facts, real facts, are in short supply, so people on both sides of the equation mutate opinions viewed through their own biased lenses and call them facts. Was Michael Brown a young man on the verge of turning his life around or a punk with a juvenile record? Could he have been both? Where do you stand on the possibility of redemption even if it were the latter? I have no answers to these questions (joining a long list). A young life lost or wasted is always tragic.

Empathy became a dirty word some years ago. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh mocked the concept. Of course, I think he and his ilk have clearly, and on an almost daily basis,  become eminently mockable themselves. I know John Stewart is grateful for them. I also believe empathy is a crucial attribute if we are to become the society we say we want to be, the society to which we, and our founding documents, aspire. That feeling of empathy cannot be a convenience. It cannot be applied to only one person or group, only for people who look or act like you. Like pregnancy, you either are (empathetic) or you ain’t. (Of course, like empathy, HOW pregnant you are is an ongoing process.)

I’ve known more than a few cops, dedicated and decorated public servants. The SROs I knew at Hancock were good men who cared about the kids (all of them, black and white) and the community. I am proud of the several former students who have taken on the thankless job of law enforcement. It’s not a job I could do, not a job I would want to do. I had enough trouble trying to enforce classroom discipline and hated it when I had to get tough, even out of self-preservation or for the benefit of a larger group, like other kids in the classroom. 

But I absolutely do feel empathy for police officers; I feel even more for their families and loved ones. If you carry a gun as part of your job (not for fun or fear or some misdirected need to demonstrate your rights or masculinity), your job is, by definition, at least potentially dangerous. There are people who will try to do you harm just for doing the job with which you are tasked by society.

Your family, knowing that, will worry about you every minute you’re on the job, and your friends and family will want you to not only be vigilant but to (aggressively?) protect yourself so that you can return home to them safely. That is even easier to empathize with. Hesitating, waiting even a second or two to act, can have fatal consequences, not just for the officer but his/her family. These are human beings making these split-second decisions and their own lives hang in the balance.

But I can empathize, as well, with those who face the consequences of an embattled law-enforcement officer’s (perhaps justifiable) paranoia or instinct for self-preservation. Was there really a threat to the officer’s safety or well-being? Did (s)he over-react, based on that perceived threat? How would we have acted or reacted in those same circumstances. I know only that I do not want to have to find out. However, the answers to those question change nothing for the, I don’t want to use the word “victim” too casually here, person who is on the other side of the equation. 

It is naïve to think that there are no police officers who are overly aggressive. Some are bullies. Some are just not nice people; of course, that is true of every profession and occupation, including my former calling. Some start out that way, others evolve doing a job that requires them to interact, day after day after day, with people who do not respect society, laws, others, even themselves. It is completely understandable that many have developed something of a siege mentality, a feeling that too many in society view them as more of a problem than a solution when they are simply trying to protect and serve some of those same people. That pervasive negative view, and their resulting attitude in response, seems almost inevitable, given the nature and pressures of the job, especially in tougher locales. But let’s be honest with ourselves here, at least a few are closet bigots.

Even I have had to deal with these types, and I’m an old white guy with zero criminal tendencies or even opportunities. As the Ferguson situation erupted and devolved, I couldn’t help but recall a time driving in Dalton, Georgia, as a tourist, confused about which way to turn. I’m sure I was driving a little erratically (not dangerously, there was no one else on the road) when the red lights started flashing behind me. I was treated with courtesy and respect, given directions, and sent on my way. But what if I had been black? Would it have turned out the same way? Pardon my skepticism if I think that’s a legitimate question, and not just in Dalton, Georgia.