Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 217

There's No Place Like Home for Golden State

The Golden State Warriors are in the midst of a historic tear, having won 50 of their first 55 games this season, including 24 straight to start the year.

The games have been silly and exhilarating to watch. Consider this heave by the reigning MVP Stephen Curry to win an overtime game on the road against the Oklahoma City Thunder this past Saturday night.

The shot. https://t.co/D6c12YjTus

— SLAM Magazine (@SLAMonline) February 28, 2016

That shot, by the way, was Curry’s 12th three-pointer of the game, which tied an NBA record.

The Warriors’ ultimate goal, beyond repeating as NBA champions, is to compile the best regular season ever, a mark held by the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls, who went 72-10 during the 1995-1996 season. On Thursday night, the Warriors matched one of the Bulls’ records by winning their 44th-straight regular-season game at home with another victory over Oklahoma City, one of the league’s top-five teams.

“You can’t even dream that stuff up,” said Golden State coach Steve Kerr, who played for Chicago during their streak in the mid-’90s. “It’s been that kind of season for us.”

No NBA team in history has ever finished the season with a perfect 41-0 record at home. The closest any team has come was 30 years ago, when the Boston Celtics went 40-1, losing to the lackluster Portland Trailblazers in a game that some Boston players say still haunts them.

Even if the Warriors beat hapless Orlando on Monday to claim the consecutive wins record, with the season only two-thirds of the way through, the team still have a long way to go in their pursuit of a perfect home record. The remaining 15 games at home include match-ups against some of the league’s best teams, including San Antonio and the Los Angeles Clippers, as well as some teams that could be desperately fighting for a playoff spot.

Coincidentally, the last team to beat the Warriors on their own home floor in Oakland during the regular season was the Chicago Bulls, which pulled off a 113-111 road win in late January of last year.

That was more than 13 months ago. The two teams play again at Golden State’s Oracle Arena at the end of the month.

The Refugee Crisis, 6 Months After Alan Kurdi’s Death

On September 2, 2015, we reported for the first time about the body of a Syrian boy found on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. The boy, Alan Kurdi, was one of 14 Syrians on a boat that sank in the Mediterranean en route to Europe. A photograph of his lifeless body became the defining image of the refugee crisis spawned by the Syrian civil war.

On Friday, a little more than six months later, a Turkish court convicted two people-smugglers each to four years and two months in prison for the death of Kurdi and four others.

That news comes on the same day as two related developments: First, Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, reported Friday that 1.2 million people claimed asylum in Europe in 2015—double the previous year’s number. Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis topped the list. Second, the EU announced a $3.3 billion payment, the first of several, to Turkey so it can deal with migrants and refugees on its territory.

The EU is reeling under the influx of migrants and refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria and unrest elsewhere. As individual member states have taken unilateral measures at the border to slow the flow of the newcomers, much of the pressure is being felt by Greece, often the first country to which migrants and refugees using the Mediterranean route arrive. About 2,000 people are arriving in Greece daily, and some 25,000 people are stuck in migrant camps in the country because their geographic path to their favored destinations—Germany and Sweden—has been blocked off or slowed by other countries. Austria, for example, says it will allow 80 people to enter each day. (The U.S., by contrast, has committed to accepting 10,000 refugees this fiscal year; it took in 114 in February—a number Human Rights First, a humanitarian group, called “lackluster.”)

It is in these circumstances that Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, visited Greece and Turkey on Thursday. He urged them to limit the westward flow of migrants, but also supported the Greek prime minister’s call for a unified response from the EU—something that looks increasingly unlikely given that many member states are pursing their own policies. Tusk also urged those people unlikely to be classified as refugees to not come to Europe. The EU views those people fleeing wars in Syria and unrest in Iraq as having legitimate asylum cases; it does not draw a similar conclusion with people from Afghanistan. (For a difference between the terms refugees and migrants, go here.)

Despite the calls, the number of people taking the Mediterranean route to come to Europe has steadily increased. This year alone, about 135,000 people have made the crossing—with Syrians making up the largest number. The civil war in their country has resulted in 4.8 million registered refugees, 2.7 million of whom live in Turkey. The numbers fleeing to Europe began rising last fall, and spiked at around the same time as Russia’s intervention  in the Syrian civil war in late September on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.

But there is a faint glimmer of hope in the five-year-long conflict. A cessation of hostilities mediated by Russia, which backs Assad, and the U.S., which supports some of the groups fighting him, is mostly holding after one week, and it has resulted in a sharp decline in the violence. European nations are now hoping that the temporary halt in fighting—which does not include ISIS or the al-Qaeda-backed al-Nusra front—leads to a permanent cease-fire, one that would slow, if not end, the flow of people fleeing Syria. The UN is expected to resume indirect talks with the government and rebel groups next Wednesday.

House of Cards Season 4, Episode 6: The Live-Binge Review

As in previous years, I’m binge-reviewing the latest season of Netflix’s House of Cards, the TV show that helped popularize the idea of “binge watching” when it premiered in 2013. Don’t read farther than you’ve watched.

(Previously: Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Episode 6 (Chapter 45)

Frank lives, and his ammonia visions have shown him the way and the light of Claire. When he says he needs her more than she needs him, he’s acknowledging an imbalance that’s long been hinted at but never articulated. He’s admitting to the reason Claire’s mother hates Frank, and the reason Frank’s floundered whenever Claire has wandered from his side in past seasons. He’s also probably relaying what Zoe Barnes and Peter Russo told him in their painful-looking dreamworld ménage à trois. As a viewer, it’s nice that the Underwoods have reconciled, of course. Somehow, the show made you feel for Claire even as it very clearly demonstrated that she was taking advantage of her husband’s near-death experience and that she might even have wanted him to die. When she curled up at the foot of her bed before greeting Frank, it was a rare moment of wariness and visible nerves from her. So it’s a visceral relief for her and for us when it turns out that he’s not mad.

But can I admit to a smidge of trepidation? This season is the most fascinating Cards has been in a long time, and that fact stems from the dynamic created by Claire vs. Frank. When it’s them against the world, we come to realize the world is mostly a jumble of proper nouns—congress members, foreign leaders, brunette journalists—all trying to bring down the un-bring-downable couple.

The rest of the episode offered the umpteenth reminder of the message of the show, which is that doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is usually correct. Claire shouldn’t have left her husband’s side and she certainly shouldn’t have been allowed to represent the U.S. in private negotiations with a foreign head of state, but it all worked out. (Perhaps the most wrenching moment of the season so far, surprisingly, was the couple of seconds when it looked like Claire had failed at persuading Petrov—before she landed on the appropriate blend of ridicule, intimidation, and emasculation needed to bring him to heel and deliver herself a much-needed policy win.)

And when Dunbar highmindedly chose honesty in her deposition about Lucas, she wrecked her campaign. Of course, the underlying message about the virtues of less-than-virtuous pragmatism becomes a bit muddled when viewers realize that there was a third way for Dunbar—she could have just stuck to telling the truth without grandstanding so much. But for however much the show might want you to think it deals in shades of grey, its moral vision is pretty absolute. There is Frank and Claire’s way through the world, and there is the way of Dunbar, Blythe, and other parties yet to be steamrolled.

Read the review of the next episode.

House of Cards Season 4, Episode 5: The Live-Binge Review

As in previous years, I’m binge-reviewing the latest season of Netflix’s House of Cards, the TV show that helped popularize the idea of “binge watching” when it premiered in 2013. Don’t read farther than you’ve watched.

(Previously: Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4)

Episode 5 (Chapter 44)

Oh good, dream sequences. Frank’s visions of someone I believe is his great-great-great grandfather Augustus, a Confederate soldier killed in battle, suggests that the secrets and sins in his past are catching up to him. But mostly they helped break up an hour of what felt like a condensed version of all the previous House of Cards mid-season slog episodes. Raymond Tusk and Remy Danton, China and Russia, Kim Dickens and Tom Hammerschmidt, that crooked-nosed FBI agent and the tragic tale of Donald Blythe’s wife: all back to weave a web for the viewer’s mild amusement and confusion, evoking the chaos that surely would ensue following a president’s incapacitation.

The driving storyline continues to revolve around Claire’s scheming and manipulation, for as yet unclear ends. Seeing her upset the poor/evil Stamper makes me like her less, but you have to give her credit for the way she’s able to nail the appearance of being a grieving wife on national TV then turn around and tell Remy Danton to not waste condolences in private. Truly a consummate politician, she is. When Stamper murders someone for their liver (does Seth have Type-O blood?) and allows Frank to wake up, perhaps he’ll have seen that she’s proven her worthiness for the Oval Office. Or perhaps she’ll have taken his spot there already.

But also important is the ongoing interest in Lucas’s investigation into the Underwoods. For not the first time on this show, a character (in this case, Hammerschmidt) wrote off some theories about Frank’s criminality … and then, haunted by some lingering curiosity, returned to his notes, portentously. If Dunbar’s campaign ends up going down thanks to her unwanted meeting with Lucas, you can bet that she’s going to start taking a hard look at some of the writings that Claire has savvily labeled the rantings of a troubled young man.

The real question, as a viewer, is who or what to root for in this scrum. A bailout of Russia backed by big business, the IMF, China, and the U.S.? I’d call it preposterous, but maybe this is the kind of terrific deal that Trump wants to start cutting as POTUS. Underwood’s survival? Sure, pray for him for entertainment’s sake, though we all know he has to fall permanently, eventually. As far as I can tell, the only actual good guys in this show, the only ones who give viewers the warm fuzzies, are Jackie Sharp and Remy Danton, furtively holding hands as they get in an elevator. So it’s scary that their relationship has been turned into a liability by Claire’s blackmail, amid so much Francophone promise.

Read the review of the next episode.

House of Cards Season 4, Episode 4: The Live-Binge Review

As in previous years, I’m binge-reviewing the latest season of Netflix’s House of Cards, the TV show that helped popularize the idea of “binge watching” when it premiered in 2013. Don’t read farther than you’ve watched.

(Previously: Episodes 1, 2, 3)

Episode 4 (Chapter 43)

If you’re don’t like how the table’s set, flip it over. House of Cards has taken Frank’s maxim to heart, resolving an intractable—and, honestly, preposterous—stalemate between the Underwoods by shooting one of them.

A work of plausible storytelling caused by carefully set plot dominos falling into place, this is not: A lot of coincidences had to happen for Lucas to get free, and then to get homicidal. But as a work of near-Shakespearian thematic convergence meant to keep this TV show lively for at least another season and a half, it’s fabulous. With this twist, a longstanding loose cannon in the form of Lucas finally fires; a longstanding ally, Meechum, gets to make his heroic sacrifice; the violent motifs of the season pay off but in an unexpected way; what had been an intractable storytelling knot gets torn apart, opening up fascinating possibilities for the next tangle.

My biggest quibble was with how the show blew its surprise. You knew something bad was going to happen during Frank’s meet and greet with protestors, which went on for longer than any benign scene of its kind would normally have. I remember when Fitz was shot on Scandal—now that was well-timed. Then again, from another perspective, the timing of this assassination attempt wasn’t so bad. What I perhaps loved most about this bombshell episode was that it nestled the assassination attempt in the middle, so the misdirecting build-up and the immediate aftermath could unfold without having to hit “next” at the cheap urging of a cliffhanger.

Ellen Burstyn hopes Frank dies, but that isn’t likely, given how delicious it will be to watch him come to in a presidential race that Claire has reshaped. As soon as the first bullet rang out, you knew she would use this catastrophe for a power play; the suspense is over how exactly she’d do it (and over whether she’ll show any discernible remorse or concern for her husband’s life; so far, she hasn’t). Her persuasion of weak-willed Donald Blythe to find a gonzo third way out of the Russian diplomatic dilemma reads ambiguously. Is she trying to sabotage Donald with bad advice? Or is she trying to bolster her own position with what she believes to be good advice?

Farewell, Lucas—you might have planned on surviving and bringing attention to the fate of Zoe Barnes during trial, but you were facing a bodyguard dedicated to his president in more ways than you could imagine. So farewell, too, Meechum. If you’re in heaven, I’m sorry to report your threesome buddies will not likely ever join you there.

Read the review of the next episode.

House of Cards Season 4, Episode 3: The Live-Binge Review

As in previous years, I’m binge-reviewing the latest season of Netflix’s House of Cards, the TV show that helped popularize the idea of “binge watching” when it premiered in 2013. Don’t read farther than you’ve watched.

(Previously: Episodes 1, 2)

Episode 3 (Chapter 42)

It turns out Frank is having the same stabby suspicions about Clare that I was having. Those suspicions are warranted on a metaphorical level—she indeed plays Brutus in this episode—but I have to say it’s disappointing if her long-con goal really is to end up as her husband’s running mate. The show’s writers lost me a bit when Frank’s first reaction to her proposal at the end of this episode was to insult her and say she’s not worthy of the VP spot.

Isn’t the actual rational objection a practical one? Can’t a first lady have just as much de facto power as a VP? Aren’t people already factoring her in when they consider whether to vote Underwood? Isn’t putting her in the VP spot redundant? Why doesn’t she see that? In moments like this it’s good to remember that Cards really, fundamentally is a stupid TV show instead of a particularly cunning comment on political reality.

Of course, echoes of political reality are inescapable, regardless. Frank Underwood’s dad was once photographed at a KKK rally—just as Donald Trump’s dad was once arrested at a KKK demonstration. At first, thinking back to when Frank peed on his dad’s grave and made reference to his Confederate great-great grandfather, I thought this revelation would be a chance for Frank to give a forceful and thorough repudiation of his family’s racist past (just as the David Duke endorsement might have been a nice chance for Trump to forcefully and thoroughly condemn the white supremacists who’ve backed his campaign). But instead, Frank gave a weird story about his father needing a loan (and then taking a nice photo for some reason)—a story that, you imagine, would read as plenty reprehensible to a lot of voters. Frank, we all know, believes there’s nobility to sacrificing your own principles to expediency, but most upstanding people would like to say they don’t share that view. Trump’s strategy for dealing with the would-be scandal about his dad—basically declaring it off-limits for discussion—so far has turned out to be the more effective one.

Other ongoing hints of danger for the president abound. Frank keeps sidelining and modulating his dealings on the Russian crisis because of his campaign, which is maybe not what an International Relations textbook would recommend he do. Lucas prostituted himself (and walked into a future extortion and blackmail scheme) in the name of enlightening Heather Dunbar about Frank, an attempt that in the moment seemed quixotic but that might pay off by planting seeds of suspicion. And—sorry, but the headlines are on the brain—now that Frank has insulted his wife yet again, she might just make like Mitt Romney and go make a speech about a conman.

Read the review of the next episode.

A Legal Win for the EPA

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request Thursday to block the EPA’s mercury-emissions rule while legal challenges proceed, handing a temporary victory to the the Obama administration and environmental groups.

Twenty states asked lower courts to block the rule’s enforcement while their case against the EPA is ongoing. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied their motion in December, and the states turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees stay requests from the D.C. Circuit. Although Roberts can refer those requests to the entire Supreme Court for consideration, he rejected it on his own authority as the circuit justice.

The EPA adopted its long-awaited emissions rule in February 2012, targeting mercury and other toxic byproducts of fossil fuels emitted by power plants. Agency officials estimated the new regulations would reduce those emissions by 90 percent and prevent about 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has broad authority to regulate residual emissions from power plants and other major sources of air pollution when the agency considers it “appropriate and necessary.” Almost two-dozen states challenged the rule in court, arguing the EPA failed to consider the financial burden of its regulations when it decided to intervene. The EPA countered that while it did not weigh that burden at the beginning of its process, the agency did consider it multiple times thereafter.

A sharply divided Supreme Court sided with the states last June in Michigan v. EPA and ordered the agency to weigh costs when making its initial decision to regulate.

“It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’ to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for a 5-4 majority.

After the Court’s ruling, the case returned to the D.C. Circuit as the EPA conducts a full cost review of the mercury-emissions rule. While that review takes place, the states hoped to block federal regulators from enforcing it, citing the financial impact of compliance.

The Court granted a request to halt enforcement of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan last month in a 5-4 vote in West Virginia v. EPA, dealing a serious blow to the Obama administration’s efforts to curb climate change. Both Roberts and Scalia voted for a stay then; granting it was one of Scalia’s last official acts as a justice before his death on February 13. The four justices from the Court’s liberal wing dissented without comment.

But a similar intervention didn’t occur in Michigan v. EPA. Roberts’ refusal to grant a stay will allow the Obama administration to rein in toxic emissions while the EPA tabulates the rule’s cost. The agency’s review is expected to be finished in April.

The Murder Charge Against an Alabama Police Officer

A white officer who killed a 58-year-old black man in Montgomery, Alabama, last week was arrested and charged with murder Wednesday.

Protesters had for days called for the arrest of Officer Aaron Smith, a 23-year-old who has been on the force for four years. Montgomery Police Chief Ernest Finley had initially defended Smith’s actions after he shot Gregory Gunn on February 25. Gunn was walking the street at 3 a.m. when Smith stopped him, Finley said, because he looked “suspicious.” Gunn then ran from Smith, he said, and threatened him with a weapon. That weapons appears to have been a retractable painter’s pole—though there are doubts about that, as well.

On Wednesday afternoon, Daryl Bailey, the Montgomery County district attorney, held a news conference to say the state, which had assumed control of the investigation, had found enough evidence against Smith to bring murder charges against him. Smith was arrested, and freed on bond. A grand jury will decide whether to indict him.

The Mobile Heights neighborhood where Gunn lived, Mickey McDermott, Smith’s attorney, told the Montgomery Advertiser, is a police-designated “red district” with a high crime rate. McDermott painted Smith as an eager officer who took the shift when others wouldn’t.

Details of what exactly happened that morning are unclear. Smith’s version of events, as well as those of neighbors and Gunn’s family who heard gunshots, don’t explain why the situation escalated so quickly. Bailey, the district attorney, said “most of the rumors that have been put out there about this case and the different aspects of it are untrue.”

Here’s what we do know to be true: Gunn had left a late-night card game with friends around 3 a.m. Within 20 minutes, he was dead.

Gunn had been headed toward his mother’s house, where he lived. When Smith stopped him, Gunn reportedly ran, though it’s unclear why––if indeed he did. The Advertiser reported that aside from a few traffic tickets, Gunn’s only arrest had been for stealing a refrigerator more than a decade ago.

“There was no violence, no altercations with police, no signs of a dangerous man,” the paper reported.

Smith’s lawyers said the two men fought, and that Smith used his taser on Gunn six times.

“After all of that, Mr. Gunn picked up a weapon,” Smith’s lawyer said, referring to the retractable paint stick.

Gunn’s brother, Kenneth, told the Advertiser that Gunn was “scared to death of police,” and that “he might run from them, but he wouldn’t attack one. No way.”

Gunn was killed in his next-door neighbor Colvin Hinson’s yard. Hinson told the Advertiser he heard Gunn banging on the door and window, screaming for help, and eventually for his mother. Scott Muhammad, who lived across the street, said he saw two men fighting, so he walked over to break it up.

“It escalated. You could just feel the energy,” Muhammad told the Advertiser. “I turned around and told my wife to call the police. Then I saw him shoot four or five times and said, ‘Damn, that was the police.’”

As the community waits to hear whether Smith will be indicted, protesters and some in Gunn’s community demanded that white officers stop patrolling the neighborhood. Montgomery is almost 57 percent black, and in 2014 the Advertiser reported that its police department of 524 sworn officers was 43 percent black. Gunn’s father was one of the first black officers on the force.

Bailey, the district attorney, said Smith “did have a choice” when he stopped Gunn. And of any escalation afterward, he said: “Why did any of that happen? That’s the crux of the matter.”

Why Was Officer Peter Liang Convicted?

At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock. They wanted to feel its weight in their hands, to jerk its trigger, as he said he had, before deciding the officer’s guilt. Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell. While on a routine patrol of the Brooklyn public housing building with his partner, Liang said he drew his gun for safety. Liang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”

It takes a lot to indict and convict an officer in New York. The last time it happened was in 2005, with the death of Ousmane Zongo, a West African immigrant shot in a warehouse during a raid on a counterfeit CD operation. The officer was disguised as a postal worker, and, seeing a mailman with a gun, Zongo ran and was killed. Convictions of officers are usually restricted to extreme circumstances like this, which makes Liang’s case all the more surprising.

“Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have been prosecuted,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a professor at George Washington University Law School, and former  U.S. Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney. “And if he was, they would have acquitted him.”

“As a former prosecutor and an academic who has been writing about police killings since the late ’90s, I see this case as the one least likely to result in conviction under normal circumstances,” Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, wrote me in an email.

A week after the conviction, thousands of protesters said they knew why jurors found Liang  guilty: He’s Asian. Liang was a minority scapegoat, they said, sacrificed to a nation incensed by officers killing black men. Take the case of Eric Garner, the protesters argued. In that case, a white officer jumped on Garner’s back and choked him as Garner yelled 11 times those now famous words, “I can’t breathe!” Garner had done little more than argue with officers, and a chokehold was outlawed by police guidelines. A camera recorded everything, but even then the officer never faced a jury. That contrast raised a question—was Liang’s conviction evidence of increased accountability, of racial bias, or of both?

Liang had graduated from the police academy the year before the shooting. In November 2014, he and his partner, another recent graduate, patrolled the eighth floor of the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn. Liang’s defense called the building notorious among officers for crime, and said that’s why as he opened the door to the stairwell, Liang drew his gun, his finger off the trigger. In the dark, Liang said a loud noise surprised him. “It was a quick sound and it just startled me. And the gun just went off after I tensed up.”

Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, had just walked into the stairwell a flight below. After Liang fired, Gurley was left on the ground bleeding from his chest, while Liang and his partner walked back into the hallway to debate who would report the shot. Liang’s partner, Shaun Landau, said Liang seemed most concerned about losing his job. (Liang later said he didn’t know he’d shot anyone.) When Landau and Liang returned, neither offered to perform CPR. Instead, Butler took instructions from an operator over the phone. For failing to try to save Gurley’s life, Liang would be charged with reckless endangerment. And for shooting Gurley, he was charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault, and reckless endangerment.

Before Liang killed Gurley, about six months after Garner died in 2014, the New York Daily News reported that in 15 years, and in at least 179 NYPD officer-involved deaths, only three officers had ever been indicted. So Liang’s case going to trial in itself was a milestone. The contrast between the two cases––Garner and Liang’s––was taken by Asian protesters in New York as evidence of racial bias. In Garner’s death, Officer Daniel Pantaleo made an active decision to escalate the confrontation and choke Garner on the Staten Island sidewalk. Neither Pantaleo, nor other officers, nor four emergency medical responders tried to save Garner––just as Liang and his partner never helped Gurley. “The fact that the prosecutor in Staten Island couldn't even secure an indictment when a white police officer violates his own patrol guide ... but an Asian officer can be indicted and convicted for what appears to be completely unintentional behavior, rubs raw the existing frictions of race relations,” Delores Jones-Brown wrote me.

Gordon Zhang shares that frustration. He’s a member of the Long Island Chinese American Association, and he protested against Liang’s conviction. Liang made the perfect scapegoat, Zhang said, because the Chinese-American community in New York is often silent. They don’t march. They don’t make waves.

“The Asian community is also concerned with police brutality,” Zhang said. And while there are many reforms that need to be made in how police operate, and though Liang’s actions were questionable, “his sentencing shouldn’t be meant to cover all the mistakes of others, because it’s the system's mistake.”

The writer Jay Caspian Kang raised similar concerns in a New York Times article after the protests, writing that, “there are many within the Asian-American community, for example, who believe that Liang deserved to be convicted of manslaughter, but who also wonder why it was the Asian cop, among many other equally deserving officers, who took the fall.”

Liang and Landau said they hadn’t received proper CPR training from the police academy. (Landau testified that instructors fed recruits answers during their test.) But they were certified, and two officers standing by as an operator instructed Gurley’s girlfriend didn’t play along well with Liang’s good-man-caught-off-guard defense. “If the officer had attempted to render aid to the victim, I believe he could have still escaped a conviction,” Jones-Brown wrote me. “Not rendering aid and reportedly calling his union rep, makes him appear callous, uncaring and neglectful.”

Even so, police have always enjoyed unusual public trust. But in the year between the shooting and when Liang was indicted in February 2015, the American public had watched a stream of videos of shootings that appeared to contradict the testimony of officers. In Garner’s case, in July 2014, the officer who jumped on his back omitted the use of a chokehold––or as he preferred to call it, a “takedown technique”––from his first report. The video clearly showed otherwise. That video made “I can’t breathe!” a rallying cry. Anger thickened that August with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; in November, with the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland; in February 2015 ,with the death of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington;  and in April 2015, with the deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.

By the beginning of 2015, the public's confidence in police had sunk to a 22-year-low. Many white Americans (mostly liberal white Americans) seemed to have caught onto what black Americans have known for a long time: some cops lie. The video of Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who pulled Scott over for a broken taillight, brought this into sharp relief. Scott ran after Slager pulled him over for a broken taillight and was shot eight times. Slager said that during a struggle Scott grabbed at his taser and that he feared for his life. Then a video showed Scott already some 20 feet away at the time of the shooting. Slager even walked back to drop an object near Scott’s body––the taser, some said.

Saltzburg, the George Washington University law professor,  said that after all this “jurors are much more likely now to doubt the credibility of an officer on trial.”

When asked why, in a building full of families and people going on about their lives, Liang drew his gun, his defense argued the decision wasn’t reckless because Liang kept his finger off the trigger, as he’d been trained. But the jurors wouldn’t take him at his word. So in a rare moment for court trials, jurors held Liang’s Glock, touching the metal slide, its polymer handle, squeezing and jerking the 11.5-pound trigger. “It all revolves around that shot,” one juror, Carlton Screen, later said.

The NYPD’s Glock has more than twice the trigger resistance of the model sold to the public. The trigger also has what Glock calls its Safe Action System, an extra button designed to keep the gun “always safe and always ready”—free from the sort of accidental slip of the finger that Liang described. After clicking and pulling it themselves, jurors decided that Liang had lied. “It was very hard to pull the trigger,” Screen said. After that, “we knew his testimony wasn’t completely true.”

It may seem unfair. After the killings of so many black men by white officers, why should the first major conviction be Asian?

Last week a young white officer in Alabama stopped a 58-year-old black man as he walked home at 3 a.m. because he looked “suspicious.” The man reportedly ran, and the officer shot and killed him. Officials first backed the officer, then changed their minds. He was charged with murder. So it may be that Liang is less an exception in need of explanation, than an evidence of a sustained shift in scrutiny of police-involved homicides. The proliferation of video evidence seems to have opened the possibility that a badge will no longer confer the benefit of the doubt.

Banksy Unmasked?

For years, the true identity of Banksy— the British artist, guerrilla graffitist, and/or provocateur-rapscallion—has more or less eluded an increasingly indifferent public.

In 2006, he was supposedly first unmasked as Robert Banks from the graffiti-rich town of Bristol. A few years later, the “Scarlet Pimpernel of Modern Art” was said to be Robin Gunningham, a former Catholic school student—the most widely accepted theory yet.

Whomever (s)he may be, Banksy has left another kind of trail that no disguise can cover up: a geographic profile. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have used a statistical mapping the artist’s works around Bristol and London, as well as other public data, to help narrow down possible candidates for who the artist really is, much in the way that technology is used in criminology or to pinpoint potential sites of disease outbreaks.

Here’s a brief explanation from the study’s authors:

The model takes as input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability of ‘offender’ residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy.

As it turns out, the technique may have actually worked too well. The release of the study was delayed by a week after its results seemed to buttress the Gunningham theory. That’s when Banksy’s lawyers got involved.

“Banksy's legal team contacted QMUL staff with concerns about how the study was to be promoted,” the BBC reported. “Those concerns apparently centered on the wording of a press release, which has now been withdrawn.”

Among the practical potential uses of this technology would be to curtail serious crime or even terrorism. But the methods behind the Banksy study did not come without its criticisms.

“The method itself is incredibly imprecise, and uses only suspected cases of Banksy’s artwork (Banksy performs his art anonymously, so it’s not obvious which pieces belong to him, or if the work is performed by multiple people),” wrote George Dvorsky at Gizmodo. “What’s more, outliers in the location data were not excluded, and the researchers did not use a timeline to consider when the art appeared.”

Nevertheless, Banksy’s lawyers still cared enough to worry that their tagger had been tagged.