Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 416

When the U.S. Government Classifies People's Memories

“The government,” the Huffington Post’s Nick Baumann wrote on Twitter on Thursday, “is giving former CIA detainees their memories back.”

Baumann was referring to a Huffington Post report that U.S. authorities are relaxing sweeping rules that prohibited prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility from publicly telling their stories of CIA detention and interrogation, since disclosing those experiences could reveal the agency’s secret sources and methods for combatting terrorism. The report included these jarring opening lines:

For years, Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ memories of their time in CIA custody have been considered classified state secrets. Abu Zubaydah's lawyers can’t talk publicly about how he lost his left eye. Lawyers for Mustafa al Hawsawi, who can now only sit on a pillow, can’t tell the press or the public about anal feedings that left him with a rectal prolapse. And until recently, Majid Khan's lawyers couldn’t bring up the time he was hung from a pole for two days, naked and hooded, while interrogators threw ice water on him.

But all that is changing, albeit gradually, following the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing extensive abuses in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration. The revelations thrust many of the intelligence agency’s techniques into the open, prompting the government to rethink its classification rules for detainees remaining at Guantanamo.

“Under the new rules, the torture methods used in CIA prisons are no longer subject to classification, although any information that could reveal the locations where torture took place or the people who helped facilitate it remains secret,” the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and Jessica Schulberg reported on Thursday. Lawyers for detainees must still petition the government to declassify their clients’ memories on a case-by-case basis.

In a first test of the new system last week, Atlantic contributor and Reuters reporter David Rohde aired allegations by Majid Khan—a Guantanamo detainee turned government witness who has confessed to plotting attacks with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—that Khan was tortured and sexually abused at a CIA “black site.” Khan’s lawyers had captured his account of the ordeal in 27 pages of notes taken over seven years, which were only cleared for release by the government in May.

It’s the latest heave in a tug of war between the government and civil-liberties advocates over a fundamental question about the limits of secrecy: Can a government classify people’s memories? More specifically: Can the U.S. government deem anything a detainee says secret?

In 2012, U.S. Army Colonel James Pohl, the military judge in the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, barred testimony or discussion about “the enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied to an accused … including descriptions of the techniques as applied, [and] the duration, frequency, sequencing, and limitations of those techniques,” ruling that “without limitation, observations and experiences of an accused” were classified.

“A person’s own experiences are what make them a person, and the government can never own or control them.”

But James Connell, an attorney representing Guantanamo detainee Ammar al-Baluchi, rejected such reasoning in a 2012 motion to declassify prisoners’ accounts. “A person’s own experiences—whether the smell of a rose or the click of a gun near one’s head—are what make them a person, and the government can never own or control them,” he wrote, according to the Huffington Post. Connell added that detainees “were exposed to classified interrogation techniques only in the sense that Hiroshima was exposed to the classified Manhattan Project.” Their classified memories had been imposed on them against their will through a program that President Obama had since banned.

In a separate motion filed around the same time, Connell pursued another line of reasoning: that by preemptively classifying detainees’ statements, the government was violating its own classification procedures. Information relayed by detainees in court or to their lawyers was “born classified” rather than born free and then classified—a standard of “presumptive classification,” Connell argued, that the U.S. government had previously only applied to public discussion of America’s nuclear program:

The most egregious example of the government’s use of overclassification to suppress unclassified but embarrassing information at Guantanamo Bay is the device of “presumptive classification.” Presumptive classification—more mythology than law—attempts to extend traditional classification rules beyond information damaging to national security to all statements made by or information learned from Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Under the regime of presumptive classification, if a prisoner says that he misses his family, this information is “born classified” even though no original classification authority would or could ever classify it. This practice, unchallenged for years, violates every relevant constitutional, presidential, statutory, and regulatory principle of classification.

Under the terms of Executive Order 13526, classification of information is an act: a person, specifically delegated authority, decides that the risks of disclosing a specific piece of information to the public outweigh the democratic imperative for transparency in the operation of government. Only one type of information—Restricted Data about nuclear weapons-—is “born classified.” Every other type of information must go through the classification process, which applies strict criteria, a presumption of non-classification, and mandatory declassification rules, before it becomes classified.

In a 2013 brief challenging the government’s arguments for classifying detainee statements, the American Civil Liberties Union also rejected equating “the government’s ownership of and control over documents to its ownership of or control over human beings or their personal thoughts and experiences of government-imposed torture. In other words, while ‘illegal activities’ might be able to ‘produce classified documents’ … they cannot produce classified memories and experiences of those illegal activities.”

Now, more than six years after Obama signed executive orders to shutter Guantanamo and ban the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques, those memories are just beginning to come to light.

A Short History of Rupert Murdoch's Heirs Apparent

In every empire with an aging monarch, the hint of a new crown price is enough to whip courtiers into a frenzy. So it was Thursday, when CNBC reported, based on inside sources, that James Murdoch, Rupert’s son, is being tapped to take his father’s chair as CEO of 21st Century Fox.

There’s a great deal that’s still unclear about the change—for example, when it will happen and exactly what role James Murdoch will play. His older brother Lachlan is also getting a new role, as co-chairman. There’s also some questions about how serious a role change this is. The 84-year-old Australian mogul doesn’t seem ready to fade off into retirement anytime soon. CNBC cautioned that “no one doubts the elder Murdoch will still have the final say on whatever goes on at Fox.” (Markets, apparently not so sure, battered Fox’s stock after the news.)

See also

The Age of Murdoch

James Murdoch, 42, seems to have survived a near-death experience as head of News International, the British division of the company. (Lachlan is 43.) When the company was investigated in a massive phone-hacking scandal, he was forced to testify before Parliament, was repeatedly accused of being a liar, and eventually resigned. In contrast to the prevailing politics at the company, he is said to be “steadfastly liberal.”

But obscure palace intrigue in the Murdoch empire is nothing new. In fact, it’s the norm, as a quick trip through old news headlines makes very clear. Let’s look back.

1997: Rupert Murdoch states that Lachlan Murdoch is “first among equals” in the race to succeed him. July 2005: Lachlan Murdoch abruptly resigns from News Corp., “relinquishing his status as heir apparent,” The Los Angeles Times reports. “The departure of the 33-year-old Lachlan Murdoch, who was being groomed to succeed his father, appears to signal the ascendancy of Murdoch's younger son, James, 32, who runs News Corp.'s British satellite operations.” August 2011: Reuters reports that Chase Carey, Murdoch’s magnificently mustachioed longtime lieutenant, is next in line for the throne at News Corp.: “Rupert Murdoch acknowledged publicly for the first time that his son James is not the preferred choice to succeed him as News Corp. CEO, at least in the near-term.” CNBC reports, however, that “Murdoch has made it clear he wants his family to remain in charge of News Corp.” February 2012: USA Today reports that Carey has solidified his position as second-in-line to the boss with James’s resignation from News International. "James' resignation was inevitable," Louis Ureneck, a Boston University journalism professor, tells the paper. "He either condoned the hacking or was irresponsibly unaware. Neither is acceptable in a top executive of a media company." August 2012: “Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth has moved to distance herself from her brother James and position herself to play a major role at the helm of News Corporation,” The Telegraph reports. July 2013: The Guardian reports that in a secretly taped conversation with staffers at his tabloid The Sun, Rupert Murdoch said his son Lachlan would succeed him. "Will the company's support vanish overnight if you're not here?" an editor asked. "Yes—if I wasn't here, the decision would be—well, it will either be with my son, Lachlan, or with Robert Thomson [News Corporation chief executive],” Rupert replied. “And you don't have any worries about either of them.” March 2014: The Guardian again reports that Lachlan is once again the heir apparent. “The decision caps a remarkable comeback for the 42-year-old, who once dared to turn his back on his father's empire, and who had long been seen as lagging behind younger brother James and older sister Elisabeth in the eagerly studied succession race,” writes Roy Greenslade. But

Jurassic World: Come for the Dinosaurs

Early on in Jurassic World, a corporate apparatchik at the titular theme park explains the ongoing pressure to constantly offer visitors a bigger, more frightening thrill. “Let’s face it,” she says, “no one’s impressed by dinosaurs anymore.” This is in fact the central dilemma that has bedeviled Universal Pictures ever since its original 1993 Stephen Spielberg-directed hit Jurassic Park: How ya gonna get ’em back in the seats, after they’ve seen T. rex?

Related Story

The Jurassic Park Period: How CGI Dinosaurs Transformed Film

In the first sequel, the solution was to go with two T. rexes; in the next, to pretend that the amphibious Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was a still more fearsome predator. (It almost certainly was not.) Now, 14 years after the most recent installment of the franchise, its custodians have come up with a new idea: Scientists at the reopened park decide to genetically engineer a super-dino more terrifying than any to walk the Earth before it. The result is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-aggressive monster spliced together from the DNA of a T. rex, a cuttlefish, a tree frog, and at least one secret ingredient I will not reveal but you’ll probably guess on your own. Both the (fictional) park and the (real-life) studio are hoping this new creature, Indominus rex, will make for boffo box office.

There are plenty such moments of commercial overlap between the movie and its subject matter. Jurassic World may be a make-believe place, for instance, but I assume Samsung still paid hard cash to get its name prominently displayed on the park’s “Innovation Center.” Indeed, some of the cleverest moments in the movie play on the most cheesily recognizable elements of the theme-park experience: the bored, probably stoned attendants hustling kids on and off rides; the lamely comic introductory video in which a bumbling Jimmy Fallon plays himself.

But the glazed quasi-contentment of the theme-park experience gives way to something more violent and dramatic soon enough. The Indominus gets out of her enclosure (of course); the park tries to keep its initial recovery efforts quiet from the tourists (of course); and things (of course) gradually go all to hell—notably when said tourists start getting picked off by dive-bombing pteranodons.

Pinballing through the escalating dino-saster are a cast of character types so familiar that they represent brands almost as pre-sold as the movie they appear in.

Pinballing through the escalating dino-saster are a cast of character types so familiar that they represent brands almost as pre-sold as the movie they appear in. Two squabbling teen brothers (Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson) are sent by their parents from the winter snows of home—“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is playing, in what may or may not be a deliberate inversion of Home Alone—for a little Jurassic recreation. Instead, they sneak into a restricted part of the park and proceed to wander again and again into the jaws—often literal—of danger. But at least along the way they learn a valuable lesson about the meaning of brotherhood. (In one of the movie’s oddest twists, the idea that the boys’ parents are getting divorced is brought up precisely long enough to squeeze out a couple of tears, and is then forgotten entirely.)

In theory, the brothers are being looked after by their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), an executive at the tropical-island park off the coast of Costa Rica. But because she is a Tightly Wound Career Woman, she instead foists the kids off on a careless assistant who promptly loses track of them. Howard’s character has already achieved some notoriety thanks to a critical tweet by Joss Whedon, and she is almost exactly as awful as advertised: shrill, sexless, unable to remember her nephews’ ages, afraid not merely of flying but of flies. Fortunately, with the help of charmingly roguish raptor wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt)—who snatches flies out of the air single-handed!—she gradually strips off her corporate couture to discover the tough, tank-topped warrior woman beneath.

One might assume that Pratt’s casting meant that his character would have some wit to him, as with his Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy. One would, alas, be mistaken. Owen is every bit as two-dimensional as the other characters in the film, who also include a tedious baddie (Vincent D’Onofrio) who wants to weaponize dinosaurs for the military; the billionaire owner of the park (Irrfan Khan), who also fancies himself a helicopter pilot; and Owen’s Nonwhite Best Friend (Omar Sy). The only actors in the film who appear to be having any fun at all are TV vets Jake Johnson (New Girl) and Lauren Lapkus (Orange Is the New Black), who receive minimal screen time as low-level park techs.

That said, this is not a movie that you go to for the human beings, and the dinos on display are consistently first-rate, from the armor-plated ankylosaurs to the whale-sized mosasaur, to the wide variety of flying pterosaurs. Director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) has a nice eye for the action sequences, and he keeps the film moving along at a sharp enough clip that its deficiencies of characterization and plot never quite prove fatal. (Among the latter is the decision to release a pack of deadly, poorly trained velociraptors in the hopes that they’ll hunt down the Indominus, a plan that practically comes in a manila envelope with “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” stamped on it in red lettering.)

Whether one considers the movie to be giddy with nostalgia or flat-out drunk will largely come down to a matter of taste.

Though Jurassic World is probably the best addition to the franchise since the first film, it nonetheless lacks the innocent wonder of its predecessor. This is perhaps inevitable—the “no one’s impressed by dinosaurs anymore” quote carries more than a whiff of truth, after all—and for the most part the movie wisely responds by foregoing quieter moments in favor of big set pieces. One exception, a scene in which Owen and Claire stop to grieve over a pack of dying herbivores when they’re supposed to be rushing to save her nephews from a grisly, imminent death, represents an unusual—and, frankly, remarkable—misstep.

That said, fans of the first Jurassic Park will find this latest installment stuffed to overflowing with references and callbacks: Park founder John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough in the earlier films) is name-dropped constantly; a dilophosaurus rears its frilly head in a holographic display; and the boys stumble into the ruined lobby of the original park, where they find a tooth of that very first T. rex. Whether one considers the movie to be giddy with nostalgia or flat-out drunk will largely come down to a matter of taste.

Late in the film, as all hope seems (once again) lost, the younger of the two brothers declares that in order to defeat the Indominus “we need more teeth.” Those four words are a wonderfully concise and elegant enunciation of the ethos undergirding the entire movie. If you limit your expectations for Jurassic World to “more teeth,” it will deliver on that promise. If you dare to hope for anything more—relatable characters, narrative coherence—you’ll only set yourself up for disappointment.

The Dragnet Effect: How TV Has Obscured Police Brutality

Nearly 50 years ago, the NBC show Dragnet, the most influential police procedural ever, broadcast an episode that called for its hero, Sergeant Joe Friday, to debate fictionalized 1960s critics of American-law enforcement. The plot was “designed to educate viewers about policemen in general and the LAPD in particular,” Michael J. Hayde and Harry Morgan write in their history of the show. It aired on September 19, 1968, about three years after the Watts Riots, during a decade when anti-police attitudes were pervading mass culture as never before.

Watching the episode today affords insight into how a current debate was framed in a bygone era. But there is a larger reason that this cultural artifact rewards scrutiny now.

Dragnet was a lie.

The idealized image of the Los Angeles Police Department that the series portrayed, of a thoroughly modern agency dispassionately dispensing justice, is sharply at odds with the historical reality of an imperfect force beset by racism, brutality, and decades of scandals. Dragnet’s writers didn’t know that at the time. But the LAPD brass that they worked with formally and informally knew, as they advised and shaped a show that billed its stories as true “with names changed to protect the innocent,” that it elided what many policemen routinely did on the job.

Dragnet would never have a plot device as suited to grappling with the LAPD’s shortcomings as that 1968 debate. But it substituted polarized views for a true reckoning, helping to set a dysfunctional pattern for similar debates right up to our own time. Then as now, defenders of law enforcement made a compelling argument for its general importance and for the sometimes forgotten humanity of individual cops. But in doing so, they refuted the premises only of their most radical critics while ignoring much more urgent evidence of grave dysfunction and abuses.

In that sense, Dragnet exemplifies a myopic pro-police posture that has, for decades, stymied reforms needed if law enforcement is to live up to its professed ideals.

The Debate Episode  

The setup was simple. At the request of LAPD public affairs, Sgt. Friday and Officer Joe Gannon agreed to appear on a program called Speak Your Mind. The host “is not exactly what you’d call a friend,” they were told. “Maybe you could change his mind a little.” The two police officers would turn out to have answers to every criticism.

Host Chuck Bly kicked off the show, which had a studio audience, by saying,  “Tonight we're going to get to the nitty gritty about your friendly fuzz, your local police.”

He introduced the officers and the two men they’d be debating:

Professor Tom Higgins, historian, social critic, and political activist. Jessie Chaplain, editor and publisher of LA's favorite underground newspaper.

The producers of Dragnet worked closely with the LAPD to present police officers in a good light. Per usual, the episode showed viewers the world from the perspective of exceptionally eloquent, honorable cops who were nonetheless portrayed as typical. Pitted against caricatures of police critics that AP called “very avant garde types with beards,” Sgt. Friday and Officer Gannon were often persuasive.

The Character of Police Officers

The first exchange began with Mr. Chaplain, the alternative newspaper editor, who said, “As the topic tonight is, ‘The Fuzz: Who needs them?’ let me begin by saying, not me… As far as I’m concerned you might as well ask who needed the Gestapo.”

He argued that it is “the establishment” in every fascist state that needs police, not the people. “The establishment needs the goon squads with the mace and the clubs and the guns and the tear gas to preserve the evils of the status quo,” he continued. “You ask me who needs them and I say it’s not the black people, it’s not the Mexican Americans and it’s not the students. They’re just trying to make a new and better world.”

Sgt. Friday was unruffled.

“Mr. Chaplain, I’m not sure who or what this establishment is that you keep talking about,” he said. “If you’re talking about the people who hire us and pay our salaries, well you’re talking about yourself and Professor Higgins there and Mr. Bly. You’re talking about the taxpayers ... Do you really think that when we get a call about a robbery or a killing the first thing that we do is check out the victim’s bank balance?”

Police and Protesters

Enter Professor Higgins, who  pursued a different line of criticism.

“I’m less concerned with the police as a so-called law enforcement agency than as a social arbiter,” he said. “If they’d stick to playing cops and robbers it would be okay. If someone swipes my car, sure, I want it back. And it’s your job to find it for me.”

But if demonstrating against a president or a war contractor, “I don’t want some goon who I as a taxpayer am supporting to break my head or shoot me!” he insisted. “I’ve yet to meet a cop who wasn’t a reactionary. Whose attitude wasn’t I’ve got mine, buster, and I couldn’t care less if you starved. Now they like their guns and badges and they like the power that it gives them. It’s people they don’t like.”

Sgt. Friday remained unruffled.

“Frankly, I wish we could stick to cops and robbers. It’s hard work but at least the only enemies you make are the criminals, not the very people you’re paid to protect,” he observed.  “We’re not supposed to be social arbiters. We’re policemen. If the president of the United States visits Los Angeles it’s our job to protect him because he is the president. Now if you want a parade all you need is a permit from the police commission. We’ll be there, but not only to protect his life–to protect you from people who might violently disagree with your point of view. Now, as a citizen, you have the right to demonstrate. But you have no right to break the law and interfere with the rights of others in so doing. And that includes the president.”

Mr. Chaplain was having none of that argument. “Break whose law? The establishment’s,” he said. “Property rights are all they’re concerned about, not human rights. And the president: if we don’t demonstrate, how do you suggest we reach him?” Sgt. Friday countered that “like most of us, you might try the ballot box.”  He added that “the same book of laws that gives you the right to demonstrate ... gives others protection of life and property if your demonstrations get out of hand.”

Good Cop, Bad Cop

By this point, Mr. Bly, the host, was impressed. “We’d all agree that you’re exceptions to the general run of policemen,” he told the detectives. “What about the boys in the black and white patrol cars? Are they concerned with anything but busting heads? They’re hardly made of the same stuff as you and Officer Gannon, right?”

“Wrong. They’re made of exactly the same stuff,” Sgt. Friday said. “Everybody on the job from the chief on down starts the same way in those black and whites. And everybody takes civil service exams for promotion.”

Gun Control

After a commercial break the debate changed formats, with members of the studio audience posing questions to the panel. A middle aged man named Harry Wilson complained about gun laws. “It’s my constitutional right as an American citizen to own a pistol,” he said. “If I’ve got the cash to pay for it, it’s nobody’s business if I buy one.”

The two officers asked the man why he wanted a gun, how he’d hide it from his children, and why he didn’t just dial 911. And they suggested that in a nuclear age his gun was highly unlikely to make the difference in defending America from foreign attack.

Here Mr. Bly interjected, “In other words, you men are in favor of gun registration.”

“No sir, we didn’t say that,” Sgt. Friday said. “It’s not our position as civil servants to state any preference. Gun registration and control, like all other laws... is a matter for the people to decide. And we work for the people. Whatever they decide we’ll enforce.”

The War on Drugs

A younger audience member asked “why smoking pot is illegal but drinking booze ain’t.”

Mr. Chaplain answered first.

“It’s because society is corrupt and because things are run strictly for the profit of the establishment and enforced by the hypocrites in uniform,” he says, “that’s why.”  

Sgt. Friday disagreed.

“Society puts restrictions on drinking: get drunk and you get arrested,” he said. “Even bartenders don’t want you to go away drunk. There’s too much chance you won’t live to come back. Besides, nobody likes to be around a drunk, not even another drunk.” Then he strayed farther into fantasy. With marijuana, he said, “the whole purpose is to get so high that you don’t know who or what you are. There’s no such thing as a quickie or one to be sociable. And in pot-smoking circles if you’re not flying you’re a square. And flying means you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. Son, no matter how you slice that, that’s dangerous.”

“What about LSD?” the young man asked. “The police are against that too. Even Aldous Huxley dug acid.”

“Aldous Huxley experimented with LSD under a doctor’s supervision,” Sgt. Friday said. “And the total amount of LSD he took in all of his experiments amounted to less than most kids take for a single trip.” What came next has got to be the very best line in the episode and maybe the series. “Now I’ve heard an awful lot of propaganda about how the right kind of sugar cube can expand your mind,” he said. “Son, if you want to expand your mind pay a visit to your public library. Try the library, boy. You’ll discover the place is full of magical cubes. They call them books.”

When Laws Conflict With Conscience

“Before you were talking about respecting all the laws,” another questioner said. “What about the bad laws? Thoreau said that one man could be a majority if he was in the right. Doesn’t a man of conscience have the obligation to disobey outmoded laws?”

Mr. Chaplain replied that “he has the obligation and the duty to his country.”

Said Professor Higgins, “If he doesn’t every good man from Jesus Christ on has been all wet.”

Sgt. Friday was having none of it.

“If you break the law you must stand trial. Then it’s up to your peers to judge your crime,” he said, affording proper respect to jury nullification. “It’s their twelve consciences against yours. If you don’t like a law,” he continued, “you can try to persuade your Congressman to help change it. Or you can join together and demonstrate that your conscience isn’t the only one opposed to the law. In a democracy, the minority has the right to convince the majority that laws should be changed. But that does not give the minority the right to ignore the laws that exist.”

Officer Gannon concured.

“A killer’s conscience tells him it’s okay to murder,” he said. “What happens to your majority of one then?”

Sgt. Friday added, “without laws and the people to enforce them you’ve got anarchy... the law of the jungle. Now an awful lot of people have bled and died for an idea called democracy, and idea that people are better than animals and that a civilized nation is better than a jungle. A lot of people are still fighting and dying for that belief. A lot of them wear badges because they believe in those American ideals.”

Cops Beating Up Blacks

The only black questioner was a crude caricature named Mambo Mabanda. “I’m the president of the Black Widow Party and I’m here to tell you honkies where you can put all that bull about democracy,” he said. “Y’all are a bunch of Nazis only you don’t dress as sharp. Not near as sharp, man. You boys drive through Watts and all you want to do is catch one of us alone so you can work it over or blow our heads off. You tell us about that, Mr. Charley, and tell us good, ‘cuz I been there man, I been there.”

Here Sgt. Friday channels the white moderate that so disappointed Martin Luther King. “I’m not here to say that race relations have always been perfect on either side,” he said. “But things are improving. The chief of police is seeing to that and that’s our number one priority.” He didn’t mention what, exactly, the chief was doing.

As for police brutality, he continued, “that’s another story. We try to prevent it in the first place by not hiring brutal men. Only one of twenty-five who applies for a job in the department ever makes it. We have three man panels composed of one sergeant and two civilians who pass on every man who wants to go to the academy. One black ball and that man is out.” He acknowledged that the system is not perfect. “Occasionally a bad apple slips through or a good apple turns bad,” he granted.

“Well, my friend, you don’t want him on the job and the department doesn’t either. One trigger happy cop making headlines is all it takes to give all police officers a black eye.”

Personally, he said, “I’ve been on the job 12 years. In that time I’ve drawn my gun eight times and I’ve fired it twice. And that’s about average. There are a great many officers who’ve never fired their revolver.” And there was a shooting board for those that did. “If any police officer fires his gun, even if he misses, he has to make a report to that board. If he doesn’t have a good reason… he’s in big trouble.”

Officer Shoots Kid

Here’s how Dragnet addressed the issue:

Mr Mabanda: What about that 15-year-old boy who was shot down last week by one of you brave boys in blue. Tell us about him, will you do that, man?

Officer Gannon: That 15-year-old was sniping at passersby from a rooftop. He wounded six people, one of them seriously, before the officer got there. The officer was a better shot.

Sgt. Friday: You can be shot just as dead by a 15-year-old as by his grandfather.

A subsequent exchange addressed cop killers and community policing:

Mr Mabanda: Oh yeah? Answer me this. Let one of you blue cats catch it and you all get excited. You really drop everything to go after a cop killer, don’t you?

Sgt. Friday: You bet we do, but not just because he killed a friend of ours. Now you figure it. If a man shoots down an armed officer, do you think he’d hesitate to shoot down an unarmed citizen?

Mr Mabanda: Okay, answer me this. Why is it that you guys is always in patrol cars sitting on cycles? Why don’t you boys walk a beat like the fuzz back east? you don’t mind protecting us, you just don’t want to have to mingle with us, is that the idea?

Officer Gannon: This is a city on wheels so we have a police department on wheels. We have to cover 54 square miles and we’ve got only 5,700 men to cover them. 5,700. New York has 28,000 policemen. Chicago has 12,000.

Then a Latino man came to the microphone. He said that he applied for a job with the LAPD and was denied. He demanded to know why the LAPD was prejudiced against Mexicans.

“I can assure you that it wasn’t because you’re a Mexican American,” Sgt. Friday assures him. “Just offhand, I’d guess you were rejected because of the height requirements.”

The man acknowledged that he wasn’t nearly 5 foot 8, but said he could take care of himself and knew judo. “What’s height got to do with it?” he asked. Sgt. Friday answered that in the police department’s experience, “a taller man is less likely to have to take care of himself, as you put it. Studies have proven that the injury rate is much higher for shorter policemen.” So no racial discrimination in LAPD hiring circa 1968, just confused minorities who didn’t realize that they were too short to be cops.

Final Statements

Professor Higgins began by complimenting his adversaries. “I think the officers have made some good points,” he said. “They’ve defended the system about as well as they could.”

He added, “but the system is actually indefensible. The system promises equal justice for all. But for the poor, the black people, the Mexican American, that promise is a lie. Oh, for the rich, the police are a protective agency. For the poor they’re professional harassers. I don’t like the system and I don’t like the sort of people who wear guns and badges and enforce that system’s rules like so many machines.”

Sgt. Friday followed with his closing speech.

“We’re not machines,” he said. “If we were maybe we’d never make mistakes. We’d never overreact, never make errors... Unfortunately we’re human beings, not computers. Now, the book tells us to use the force necessary to apprehend the suspect. How much force is necessary? No computer can make that decision when you’re chasing an armed suspect down a dark alley. A man has to make that decision and he has to make it fast. Sometimes he doesn’t use enough and he gets himself killed.”

Mr. Bly interjected, “A man with a gun has no business making mistakes.”

“We try not to,” Sgt. Friday said. “But we all make mistakes. Now maybe its only a matter of putting the carbon paper in backwards in the typewriter or burning the toast or missing a business appointment. You make that sort of a mistake and you say, nobody’s perfect. I’m only human. But a police officer’s mistakes are a matter of life and death and his decisions are made in a split second. Give him some credit for having the guts to make those decisions. His job and his life are riding on each one of them.”

Dragnet In the Context of  History

The message of Dragnet was never articulated more directly and fully than by Sgt. Joe Friday in that single episode. The script, written by
The police smashed furniture, punched holes in walls, destroyed family photos, ripped down cabinet doors, slashed sofas, shattered mirrors, hammered toilets to porcelain shards, doused clothing with bleach and emptied refrigerators.  Some officers left their own graffiti: "LAPD Rules." "Rollin' 30s Die." Dozens of residents from the apartments and surrounding neighborhood were rounded up.  Many were humiliated or beaten, but none was charged with a crime.  The raid netted fewer than six ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine.  The property damage was so great that the Red Cross offered assistance to 10 adults and 12 minors who were left homeless.   

Now what was it that Sgt. Friday said? “Occasionally a bad apple slips through or a good apple turns bad.” In the 1990s, during the Rampart Scandal, 70 of those bad apples all somehow wound up associated with the same unit. What are the odds?

Over the last 50 years, no LAPD sergeant with his eyes open could possibly have held the LAPD in the high esteem of a Sgt. Friday, at least if he had Friday’s professed values; improving race relations was seldom the LAPD’s number one priority, “bad apples” were always numerous among its rank-and-file, “mistakes” were as often driven by official policy as unavoidable human fallibility, political spying happened again and again, and police brutality was both common and frequently unpunished by department brass and prosecutors. This history is a disgrace, and those who knowingly obscured large parts of it from the public acted disgracefully.

To many modern viewers, raised with a painful awareness of the racism and brutality of policing 50 years ago, what’s ultimately striking about that Dragnet episode is how hard it tried to make Friday and his partner into the voices of reason, knocking down a caricatured liberal and leftist in the debate; and how despite the stacked deck, it's Friday and his partner who look as much like caricatures today. They’re blind to the LAPD’s problems and deaf to those trying to articulate them.

Today, there are still some defenders of law enforcement who go so far in refusing to acknowledge its problems that they may as well be engaged in propaganda.

Others earnestly see a different reality than I do.

“I still tend to side with police in these controversies because all I see are thugs getting beat up, and why would I have any sympathy for black thugs or white thugs?” Prelutsky said. “I don't think Jack Webb or I would say there's no such thing as a bad cop. But I keep reading that we're supposed to believe all the cops hate black people, that they're all thugs and racists. How is it that they're so discerning as to never beat up a black lawyer or a black accountant? If you’re a racist you hate everybody with that skin color, not just the thugs. Even the teenagers at the pool party were thuggish. They were encouraging each other, don't take this shit from the cops.” He acknowledged that the case of Walter Scott, the South Carolina man shot while running from a police officer, appeared to be a murder. I then pressed him on the subject, asking about other YouTube clips of police officers deploying excessive force. “I guess I haven't seen those,” he explained. “And I keep waiting to see people coming out on behalf of the cops, the ones risking their lives. If they would do that, I think that everybody would start to accept that there are good cops and bad cops, good blacks and bad blacks.”

In the age of YouTube, the number of people who haven’t seen multiple police officers engaged in excessive force is vastly lower than ever before, and the trend will not reverse.

But insofar as rose-tinted views of policing persist in American culture, it seems to me that both they and the fringe, “fuck the police” style of opposition to law enforcement are two sides of the same coin. Both attitudes are expressed as if the character of the profession can be put in one category, whether “hero” or “brute;” in fact, police officers are fallible individuals like everyone else and need to be treated as such, which is to say, with the expectation that some but not all will abuse their power.

Sgt. Friday is our archetype of a good cop for a reason. Who can doubt his integrity? If I dialed 911, I’d hope a police officer just like him would show up at my door.

But good cops like Sgt. Friday who fail to see, acknowledge, and fight the abuses around them—whether brutality or friendly TV producers getting special treatment when driving drunk—are inadequate to their jobs as they rise through the ranks and render police departments unable to quash all manner of dysfunction. If law enforcement is to regain the degree of respect and popular esteem that men like Friday once had, its good cops must learn from rather than repeat his failures.

Twitter's Costolo Years: An Annal of Missed Opportunities

Oh, but what is to be done with Twitter.

On Thursday, in a press release posted to its eponymous social network, Twitter Inc. announced that its CEO, Dick Costolo, would resign. Jack Dorsey, one of the company’s founding quadrumvirate and the company’s first CEO, will take his old job in an interim role.

Some investors have called for Costolo’s resignation for more than a year, calls which became more strident after extremely disappointing quarterly results in April. (Twitter's weaker-than-anticipated growth was dismal enough that it drove down stock prices 18 percent that day.) By appointing Dorsey as acting executive, the company seems to be hearkening back to the idealism of its early days.

Yet Dorsey’s naming means, too, that it will be hearkening back to early drama. The half-decade which followed Twitter’s founding in 2006 was marked by strange and petty power struggles among its founders. According to Nick Bilton’s history of the period, Hatching Twitter, Dorsey could be a distracted, showboating leader, missing company activities to attend yoga and fashion classes. Another cofounder, Evan Williams, even told him, “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter. But you can’t be both.”

By 2008, Dorsey was out and Williams was CEO. Two years later, Williams himself would leave (though remain on the board) and Costolo—then the company’s chief operating officer, hired from Google—would become CEO. Dorsey also rejoined the board. Now nearly five years later, the company remains incestuous: Of its eight board members, three are former CEOs.

This is all to say: Twitter isn’t in the clear yet, and if investors were looking for a caretaker executive as interim, they didn’t seem to have gotten one.

So what did Costolo accomplish during his five years? The headline is: He took Twitter public, a messy process that created a lot of wealth for bankers and some of its early investors. To his credit, he also continued its advocacy for freedom of speech. Twitter, alone among social networks, does not take down content when ordered to by a national government but merely blocks it from being seen in that country. It also publishes some of the best, most exhaustive data about the government requests—censorship, copyright, or user data-related—it receives.

But to recount the last five years of Twitter’s history is to create an annal of missed opportunities. Twitter seemed, almost systematically, to frustrate those who saw themselves as the company’s allies—or, at least, its most loyal users. After encouraging developers to build applications around the service for many years, it altered who could access its data, creating an atmosphere of instability for any third-parties who thought about investing time improving its service. For years, too, it barely addressed the rampant abuse that people—and women in particular—face on the service. This sowed fear and frustration for many of its power users, who could face threats or cat-calls sometimes just for tweeting about movies or video games. (It does not help that seven of Twitter’s eight board members are men.)

The company also failed to capitalize on the boom in messaging services. Despite serving as the web-facing identity for many Internet power users, it never appeared to prioritize its buggy messaging service, which would sometimes tweet text that was supposed to be a private correspondence. It shipped small improvements—like letting users send photos to each other—but never broke out its DM service into a separate app, as Facebook has done. Meanwhile, WhatsApp and Snapchat’s user bases swelled.

The more irredeemable loss might be in how the service is perceived. In 2010, Twitter was ascendant, an insurgent peer to Facebook—if anything, it was the kinder, friendlier, more open public square to Zuckerberg’s castle. Its format was hailed as revolutionary, and it was credited with fomenting revolutions. Now Twitter usernames and hashtags are ubiquitous, appearing on the sides of billboards, before every major sports broadcast, in street art, on church pamphlets—even on Facebook. The @-symbol before a username, first seen on Twitter, is the global standard for setting off a username in text.

Yet despite this ubiquity, people are no longer flocking to the service. More than one billion people have signed up for Twitter accounts and never returned. The company has become something of an also-ran, now in an entirely different class of companies than the Facebooks and Googles to which it is often compared.

Twitter has, however, been widely embraced by two industries: journalists and marketers. Journalists have made it integral to the news cycle, the place to go for first-person sources and photos of any event. Marketers like it because it is a simple, cheap way to reach a mass audience anytime, anywhere. Neither of these two groups, though, create the sort of user who keeps people actually coming back: someone’s friends. If Twitter can be saved, its new, permanent CEO will have to make the social network more of exactly that. She will have to create a more stable, less antagonistic social space where people might find old friends and make new ones.

Or maybe Jack Dorsey will just take over. His first term went so well.

'Probable Cause' in the Killing of Tamir Rice

Updated on June 11, 2015, at 5:35 p.m.

A judge in Cleveland has ruled that there’s probable cause to charge two officers involved in the November 2014 shooting death of Tamir Rice.

In response to a petition from citizens, under an obscure and little-used provision of Ohio law, Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine agreed that Officer Timothy Loehmann should be charged with several crimes, the most serious of them being murder but also including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide and dereliction of duty. Adrine also found probable cause to charge another officer, Frank Garmback, with negligent homicide and dereliction of duty. He rejected aggravated murder charges against both officers. (The Guardian has the full order here.) Referring to the “notorious” video of Rice’s death, the judge wrote, “This court is still thunderstruck at how quickly this event turned deadly.”

But Adrine did not order the two men to be arrested. He stated that because the law under which the affidavits were filed had been amended in 2006, judges no longer have the authority to issue warrants themselves in such cases.

Instead, Adrine forwarded his opinion to city prosecutors and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who says he is currently investigating the case. And he took pains to note that prosecutors are required to apply a different standard before filing charges, determining that it is more probable than not that a reasonable “trier of fact” would hold the officers accountable for any alleged crimes.

The affidavit filed Monday was intended to jumpstart the process of prosecution; it’s been more than 200 days since Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was shot and killed in a city park. Adrine’s finding of probable cause may increase pressure on McGinty. But since all murder prosecutions have to go through a grand jury under Ohio law, Adrine’s order just funnels the case back to where it was before—waiting for McGinty to act.

It’s been 199 days since Tamir Rice was shot to death by a Cleveland police officer. And for a group of community leaders in the Forest City, that’s too long to wait for prosecutors to charge the officers involved in the shooting. Instead, they went to a municipal court judge Tuesday morning and asked him to issue a warrant for the officers on charges of murder, aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide, and dereliction of duty.

If that sounds confusing, it’s not just you. The activists made the request under an obscure provision of Ohio law that entitles citizens to file an affidavit demanding an arrest. While a few other states have similar clauses, the law is little-known and seldom-used—especially in cases of murder. A close reading of the statute suggests that it’s unlikely to seriously change the direction of the case, since any murder charge ultimately has to go through a grand jury. But the filing of affidavits sends a signal, and might add some pressure on the prosecutor to file charges against Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback.

“What you see here is one of the most American things I’ve seen in my life,” said Walter Madison, an attorney for the Rice family, at a press conference on the courthouse steps after filing the affidavits. “The people have taken the opportunity to make the government work for them. This is not a circumvention. This is simply applying the law that is available.”

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the union representing Cleveland police did not agree, calling it an attempt to “hijack rule of law.” Yet the statute is clear—the coalition behind the affidavits is well within its rights. (The full filing is here.) The law states: “A private citizen having knowledge of the facts who seeks to cause an arrest or prosecution under this section may file an affidavit charging the offense committed with a reviewing official...” As long as the judge or magistrate who receives the affidavits finds them to be both in good faith and valid, he or she has to issue the warrant.

In this case, it seem clear that the activists are working in good faith—they truly believe a crime was committed. It also seems clear that there’s probable cause, as anyone who has seen the video of Rice’s shooting can attest. Even if a trial court were ultimately to rule that Loehmann was justified in firing on Rice, all evidence suggests that a homicide was committed and justifies an arrest.

A judge could take another tack, deciding that the petition was either in bad faith or didn’t show probable cause. In that case, he or she would refer it to a prosecutor—essentially sending things back to right where they are. But how likely is that?

“It seems to me that the judge would have no choice but to issue a warrant.”

“Given the video evidence of the case and whatever else they have, including the police officers’ report, I’d think the judge would be hard-pressed to say it’s not filed in good faith, and that the claim is at least meritorious,” said Michael Benza, a senior instructor in criminal law at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University Law School who’s been following the case. “It seems to me that the judge would have no choice but to issue a warrant.”

The decision could come quite quickly. Judges and magistrates generally move quickly on issuing warrants, though this one might take longer since it’s a murder case and uses a little-known law.

From there, however, things get messier. For one thing, police can’t be compelled to go out and haul Loehmann and Garmback in; as Benza noted, there are legions of people out on the streets with warrants against them. And even if the officers were arrested, it’s unclear what would happen next. Any murder charge in the state of Ohio has to go through a grand jury.

“There is no means to compel a prosecutor to take a case to a grand jury,” Benza noted. “Even if the judge would issue an arrest warrant, it still doesn’t force a prosecution. This statute does not allow a private person to take a case to a grand jury.”

In fact, there seem to be very few cases where the statute in question has led to prosecutions. Benza said he’d been unable to find a single case that went forward—although, he noted, there may be others that did but aren’t easily discoverable because they don’t cite the law. And he did find several cases in which clerks ordered courts to accept the affidavits. The oddball nature of the law means that many attempts to obtain warrants under it tend to be frivolous—for example, a convicted criminal attempting to obtain warrants for witnesses against him, alleging that they had perjured themselves while putting him behind bars.

Ohio’s law is unusual but not unique. North Carolina has a similar law (as you can find out in this somewhat diverting account of a war between a mayor and town commissioner in Belville, North Carolina, population 1,936), and so does New Jersey. The Buckeye State’s law dates to 1960, but Benza said he’d found references to what appeared to be similar laws farther back. In fact, the idea of allowing citizen complaints harkens back to a much, much older age in the English legal tradition. As Lawrence Friedman notes in Crime And Punishment In American History, around the time England was colonizing the U.S., private citizens were in charge of bringing accused criminals before the system:

One striking aspect of trial was the system of private prosecution. English law had no district attorney, no public prosecutor. If you were a shopkeeper, and you caught a thief robbing your store, it was your responsibility to bring him to justice. A constable might help you chase and catch the thief; but that was all. In any event, the money for the prosecution would have to come out of your pocket.

What’s happening in Cleveland is an ironic twist on that outdated system. Professional prosecutors were intended to make the system more equitable and fair, by eliminating the need for citizens to front the financial resources necessary for prosecutions.  But activists in Cleveland are reaching back to the older system of private prosecution, because they feel that the official channels have been insufficiently responsive.

Whether the system is actually non-responsive is a different question. Rice’s family and its allies are understandably upset that months after a shooting captured on camera, there have been no charges. In some ways, that’s a clear travesty of justice. But prosecutors are working on the case, and say that their investigation is ongoing. As clear as the facts might seem, cases in which officers shoot citizens almost always take a great deal of time. As David Jaros, an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, told me in May, that’s because the justice system works for police officers in much the same way that people (incorrectly) expect it to work for ordinary citizens. In contrast to run-of-the-mill crimes, district attorneys tend to be exhaustive and meticulous with officer-involved shootings.

One reason for that is that prosecutors have an interdependent relationship with police: They rely on the cops to arrest people, bring them in, and testify against them. As the tension between Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and the Baltimore Police Department has shown, bringing charges against officers can create strained relationships. In the Rice case, County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty has shown the dangers of erring too far in the other direction, producing concern that he’s not serious about the case. But can the activists succeed in altering his course?

“From a legal standpoint, they should be able to get arrest warrants for these officers to be issued, but after that the case goes back to exactly where it is now,” Benza said.

The affidavits may be an effective way to place public pressure on McGinty, but the Rice case is still ultimately going to come down to prosecutorial discretion.

America Is Sliding Into Open-Ended Conflict in Iraq

On Wednesday, the White House announced the deployment of “450 additional U.S. military personnel to train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces at Taqaddum military base in eastern Anbar province.” It is easy to conceive of this latest limited addition of U.S. troops to Iraq, and nearby countries, in isolation, and as the logical and necessary next step in the expanding campaign against ISIS. However, the White House has been announcing troop deployments, with varying justifications and objectives, for over a year now. If you are one of the few people truly interested in how the United States has gradually slid into this open-ended conflict, with little public debate, and zero congressional input, it is worthwhile to review some of the notable milestones along the way.

On June 16, 2014: “275 U.S. military personnel are deploying to Iraq to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.” This package was initially described as being for force-protection and intelligence-gathering purposes. Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby pledged that the deployment “will be of a limited duration” and would be “a discrete, measured, temporary arrangement to help us to get eyes on the ground, to figure out what’s going on and get a better sense of it.” This language is worth bearing in mind, because Kirby told MSNBC earlier this week that even if the U.S.-led coalition went “all in” to defeat ISIS “it’s still going to take three to five years.”

If 450 more U.S. advisors actually have the promised impact on the course of the conflict, it would be astonishing and unprecedented.

The bombing campaign against ISIS began on August 8, 2014, with President Obama declaring that he had no intention of the United States “being the Iraqi air force.” With U.S. pilots having conducted almost 80 percent of all of the airstrikes against ISIS—in Iraq and Syria—Obama’s expressed concern from last year is now the reality. Since the bombs started dropping there were other intermittent deployment announcements, including on September 2: “350 additional U.S. military personnel to protect our diplomatic facilities and personnel in Baghdad,” and on November 7: “1500 additional U.S. military personnel in a non-combat role to train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces, including Kurdish forces.”

What Obama administration officials have attempted to emphasize with each new announcement is that the latest introduction of troops or tasks is logical, necessary, and will have an impact on achieving the strategic objective of the degrading and destroying ISIS. Just Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the deputy special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, told reporters: “Given the fact that the Iraqis have put the Anbar operation center there, I think this will have a fairly dramatic effect on just their situational awareness of the enemy.” If 450 more U.S. advisors—who will not arrive at the base for six to eight weeks—actually have this substantial of an impact on the course of the conflict it would be astonishing and unprecedented. And when they eventually fail to achieve this effect, most politicians and pundits will have forgotten this pledge, as they have for many others made by Obama administration officials over the past year regarding the campaign against ISIS.

Finally, as I pointed out recently, with each new U.S. troop deployed to Iraq, you should expect that at least one additional private military contractor will be sent to support them. Naturally, none of the White House or Pentagon proclamations about U.S. troops going to Iraq ever mention the contractors that go with them, because officials want to maintain the impression of a more limited U.S. military footprint and commitment. Yet, between June 2014 and today, the number of private military contractors has grown from between an estimated 1,700 to fully 6,300. That is just another troubling component of America’s growing and deepening commitment to Iraq’s security that interested readers might want to look into.

This post appears courtesy of CFR.org.

Ornette Coleman, Still the Shape of Jazz to Come

Jazz’s version of the famous—or infamous—1913 Armory show that introduced Americans to modern art came on November 17, 1959, when Ornette Coleman began a run of shows at the Five Spot Cafe in New York.

It was an era when giants walked the jazz landscape. Charlie Parker had been dead for four years, but bebop, his brainchild, had propelled jazz to musical peaks, even as the genre’s commercial appeal faded. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, perhaps the greatest jazz record ever, had just been released. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps was about to ship. Then Coleman, a short, eccentric alto saxophonist from Texas by way of Los Angeles, arrived with his band, playing something that sounded nothing like what was on the scene—but sounding quite a bit like a provocation.

New York was baffled by Coleman’s music, a style now known as “free jazz.” As Francis Davis described it in The Atlantic in 1985, “All hell broke lose.” Listeners stormed out. They derided him. Others sat in stupefied silence, unsure whether what they were hearing was charlatanism or genius. Davis pronounced, “The man is all screwed up inside.” Dizzy Gillespie, a founding father of bebop, scowled, "I don't know what he's playing, but it's not jazz.” (Whether Gillespie, whose own bebop had been derided by swing musicians not two decades earlier, appreciated the irony is unclear.)

Coleman died Thursday morning at 85, of a heart attack. Listening to his 1959 LP The Shape of Jazz to Come (the title another provocation) today, it doesn’t sound much less weird than it did in 1959. The first track, “Lonely Woman,” is the closest thing free jazz has produced to a standard. First you hear Billy Higgins’s drums, playing what seems like it might turn into something conventional. Then Charlie Haden joins in on bass, playing a menacing melange of chords and notes, nothing like a swinging walking bass line. Finally, Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry enter in unison with a haunting, meandering melody. The tune is hummable, just, but completely alien. There’s no piano and no discernible chord structure. The two duos—Haden and Higgins, Coleman and Cherry—slide around each other, occasionally locking in together and at other times appearing to have hardly any relation to each other at all. At any given moment, it seems the whole thing might fall apart. Of course, it never does.

Despite his detractors’ insistence that he was toppling all that was right and good in jazz, and despite his own grandiloquent stylings (the follow-up record was titled, no less arrogantly, Change of the Century), Coleman’s music wasn’t the calamitous break with the past that his critics imagined. They missed two essential ways that he was firmly tied to the black American musical tradition. One reason they might have missed that was because of jazz’s increasing focus on an urbane, northern-born sound during the 1950s. Coleman, by contrast, was a product of the South.

A Fort Worth native, he belonged to the storied lineage of Texas saxophonists. The state was once famous for producing horn players with a big, raw sound that was deeply rooted in the blues—from Herschel Evans to Illinois Jacquet to David “Fathead” Newman. As a teenager and young man, Coleman played juke joints and blues bars, and he could honk out R&B with the best of them. From the early recordings, through Coleman’s strange experiments with electric music, up to his final records, the blues sensibility is central—far more, in fact, than it is in many of the musical descendants of the mainstream players who dismissed him as noise. As they got deeper into elaborate harmonies, they lost some connection to the dance-centric African American roots of jazz. Not so with Ornette: If the plaintive wail of “Lonely Woman,” delivered in Coleman’s eerily voice-like sound, isn’t blues, the blues doesn’t exist.

More on Ornette Coleman Francis Davis: Ornette's Permanent Revolution Robert Palmer: Ornette Coleman and the Circle with a Hole in the Middle Charlie Haden, Jazz's Rooted Radical

The second way Coleman was rooted to tradition was how his group interacted. In mainstream jazz, the band plays the melody and chords through, and then each player takes a turn soloing while the rhythm section—usually piano, bass, and drums, and perhaps a guitar—play the chords and rhythm beneath. Coleman’s great early groups dispensed with a chordal instrument altogether. They also dispensed with the standard song form, adopting a practice of collective improvisation in which the musicians listen to each other, bobbing and weaving together, stepping forward or stepping back. That approach was reminiscent of nothing so much as the earliest jazz—the collectively improvised music of New Orleans, often called Dixieland. “In the music we play, no one player has the lead. Anyone can come out with it at any time,” Coleman explained to Robert Palmer in a 1972 Atlantic article.

Testimony to the way Ornette’s music was, while revolutionary, still inside the tent came during a star-studded 2010 concert to celebrate the 80th birthday of Sonny Rollins. Rollins launched into a rendition of his syncopated blues “Sonny Moon for Two,” then paused partway through to announce that there was one more unannounced guest. A few minutes later, Coleman slowly shuffled on stage, alto sax in hand. (The recording, released later, captures the applause; it doesn’t capture the collective gasp when he emerged from the wings.) It was a rare summit of two legends with radically different approaches to their horns. For more than 10 minutes (starting around 8:09) the two men went back and forth, part conversation and part competition. Coleman showed he could play Rollins’s brand of jazz—and Rollins demonstrated he was at home with Coleman’s freer approach, too.

As Francis Davis wrote in 1985, “For those of us who began listening to jazz after 1959, it is difficult to believe that Coleman’s music was once the source of such animus and widespread debate.” That’s true, but one reason was surely that jazz elders felt Coleman must be poking fun at them. In addition to the bizarre sounds he produced, Coleman often played a plastic saxophone. He would also frequently pick up a trumpet or a violin on stage, producing sounds that were interesting but clearly less proficient than what he could do with a sax. It must have seemed like he was clowning them.

In fact, Coleman seemed to be an earnest oddball. As a teen, Palmer wrote, Coleman “was dismissed from the tent show for playing bebop, stranded in New Orleans, threatened by racist sheriffs in Mississippi. In Baton Rouge a gang of roughnecks beat him up and threw his tenor off a hill, so he went back to the alto, which is still his principal horn.” He reportedly adopted the plastic sax when his instrument broke and he couldn’t afford to replace it. He tended to make oracular statements that fascinated even as they kept comprehension at arm’s length. His speech was like his music, Palmer decided: “circling around the theme, moving far afield, returning to the starting point when you least expect it, and moving away again, progressing by variations of feelings and ideas, balanced like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of the void, the hole in the middle of space and time.”

Moreover, Coleman proved his sincerity by continuing to push musical boundaries up to the end of his life. His 1972 record Skies of America was a single long composition for orchestra and saxophone. Later, he attempted a synthesis of jazz and rock that sounded nothing like the increasingly commercial and Muzak-y fusion many other jazz musicians were making. (He called what he was doing “harmolodics,” a concept I’ve tried to understand repeatedly with little success.) Take this track from his 1988 album Virgin Beauty, with a band he called Prime Time. It’s funky, rhythmic, and propulsive, yet never cheap or compromising. It seems to prefigure world music, but there’s a hillbilly breakdown in the middle. It sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard.

Taking in the full sweep of Coleman’s music—Wikipedia’s discography lists more than 60 recordings—would be practically impossible. He recorded with Lou Reed, joined the Grateful Dead on stage, and cut a challenging disc with Pat Metheny. Coleman also recently sued members of the indie-Afrobeat band Antibalas for releasing recordings of a jam session, reportedly without his consent.

In his laudatory 1985 essay, Davis wrote that Coleman, despite his musical creativity and integrity, had failed to redefine jazz as decisively as many had expected when he arrived at the Five Spot. With the benefit of another 30 years of hindsight, I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s true that no one sounds quite like Coleman, though that may be mainly a testament to his originality. It’s also true that “Coleman’s way has never really supplanted Charlie Parker’s as the lingua franca to jazz.”

But today, jazz may not have any lingua franca at all—Parker’s or anyone else’s. The music has splintered into so many different directions that there’s no single vocabulary. That split has allowed Coleman’s influence to grow, both through his own former sideman—guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer keeps harmolodics alive and well—and through a new generation. Perhaps his most influential followers at the moment are the Bad Plus, a band that, like Coleman, is deeply immersed in the history of the music but refuses to take orthodoxies (or itself) too seriously. The Bad Plus has produced a reinterpretation of Coleman’s classic Science Fiction, and its pianist, Ethan Iverson, has produced some of the most important writing on Coleman.

Coleman also won some mainstream acclaim late in life. He earned single-name status, becoming known mostly as “Ornette,” even to non-jazz fans, and snagged a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. Yet unlike some aging radicals, his music remained implacably weird and adventurous. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his album Sound Grammar. It’s a magnificent disc, recorded live with a quartet that included his son Denardo on drums and two bassists—perhaps the least likely jazz band format imaginable. On the opening track, the band surges forward, halts abruptly, waltzes sideways, prances back forward—each member doing something different and maybe dissonant, but each one inextricably following each other toward a common destination.

I saw Coleman with the same band in 2008. The show wasn’t in a dark, smoky jazz bar like the Five Spot, and the audience wasn’t critics and jazz luminaries. Ornette was by now a living legend, and that status brought all the trappings: a packed house in a baroque wedding cake of a hall at the University of North Carolina, full of patrons who had paid handsomely to be there.

Coleman seemed physically fragile but musically strong. His band was in fine fettle, and his playing on all three instruments was powerful. The music was mystifying and transfixing, and I wouldn’t pretend to have grasped all that he was doing. Yet even in this refined setting, nearly 60 years after the Five Spot gigs, some patrons shook their heads in confusion and disapproval; a few even walked out. I have to believe Coleman wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

A Humanitarian Mission Becomes a Disaster

If anything could stand to rival the devastation of the natural disasters to strike Haiti, it would be disasters of the manmade variety.

Just over five years after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed well over 100,000 people in the country and destroyed countless government, religious, and cultural landmarks, Haiti’s recovery is not only far from over, it’s far from certain. An ongoing domestic political crisis is just one culprit.

Other sources of considerable trouble are the very humanitarian organizations that are supposed to help revive the country. Much of the food aid given by the United States in the wake of the 2010 earthquake—totaling well over $100 million—is believed to have actually harmed struggling Haitian farmers, who were already trying to sell corn and rice against cheaper imports.

Worse yet, the United Nations is almost certainly responsible for importing a cholera epidemic that infected roughly 700,000 Haitians, killing more than 8,000 people, just months after the earthquake. (Earlier this year, a U.S. judge declared the international organization “immune” from a lawsuit leveled against it by the country.)

This week has offered another cascade of dispiriting news. Tuesday brought allegations that that indicted soccer official Jack Warner had stolen $750,000 in earthquake relief money. On Wednesday, a Minnesota legislator called for a congressional hearing after an NPR/Pro Publica report asserted that the staggering $500 million raised by the Red Cross to build housing for 130,000 people had only yielded six houses following the earthquake. And a United Nations draft report obtained by the Associated Press shed light on the rampant problem of UN peacekeepers bartering relief goods for sex in Haiti.

In nearly 500 reported cases over five years in Haiti and a handful of countries, one-third of the claims involved children.

More than 225 Haitian women told investigators of having had “transactional sex” for cash or goods. “For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items were frequently cited as the ‘triggering need,’” the AP quoted the report as saying.  

Of the nearly 500 claims of sexual abuse documented over five years in Haiti and Liberia, where the UN also has a peacekeeping mission, one-third involved children. In Haiti specifically, “[o]nly seven interviewees knew about the United Nations policy prohibiting sexual exploitation and abuse," the AP quoted the report as saying. They did not know the mission had a hotline for reporting such abuse.

The draft report’s wording—“[t]ransactional sex is quite common but underreported in peacekeeping missions”—offers a pretty clinical way of saying that these problems are rampant. It’s still not clear exactly how many people might have been abused and not reported it. And we still don’t know exactly how much aid money has been squandered or lost to corruption. But how can a country rebuild while its benefactors keep damaging it?

The False Promise of Black Political Representation

The recent unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, and other cities is puzzling in one important respect. Unlike in earlier eras, when African Americans’ political exclusion drove them to protest, blacks today are as likely to vote as whites and are well represented at all levels of government. The mayor of Baltimore and a majority of its city council are black. So are forty-five members of Congress—an all-time high. And, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, so is the current occupant of the White House. Why all the turmoil, then, at a time when blacks—finally—seem to be enjoying the fruits of American democracy?

One answer is that the appearance of black political clout is deceiving. Despite their gains in participation and representation, blacks continue to fare worse than whites in converting their policy preferences into law. This poor performance is more revealing than statistics on turnout or black electoral success. And even though its causes remain mysterious, it is very much a rationale for frustration with the status quo.

In a recent study, I analyzed group political power at the federal and state levels. At the federal level, I relied on a remarkable database compiled by Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens. It includes responses to thousands of survey questions from the last few decades. Crucially, it also tracks whether each policy referred to by a question was adopted by the federal government over the next four years. At the state level, I measured people’s ideologies using exit polls that asked whether they are liberal, moderate, or conservative. And I assessed state laws using an index of overall policy liberalism created by another pair of scholars.

As support for a policy rises within the black community, the odds of it being achieved actually decline.

At both levels, I found that blacks hold much less sway than whites. For example, a federal policy with no white support has only a 10 percent chance of being enacted, while one with universal white support has a 60 percent shot of adoption. But while a proposal with no black support has a 40 percent chance of becoming law, one enjoying unanimous approval has only a 30 percent probability of enactment. In other words, as support for a policy rises within the black community, the odds of it being achieved actually decline.

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Likewise, whether most black voters are conservative or liberal, state legislative outcomes barely budge. But vary the views of white voters to an equivalent degree, and a state’s policies go from looking like Alabama’s to resembling Michigan’s, even controlling for black and white population size.

The story is similar for several other groups. The more that women, the poor, or Hispanics support a federal policy, the less likely the policy is to be enacted. Strikingly, as women move from universal opposition to a proposal to universal support, its odds of adoption plummet from 75 percent to 10 percent. Changes in the ideology of female or poor voters also have no effect on state legislative outcomes (although shifts in the views of Hispanic voters do). In contrast, both federal and state laws are acutely sensitive to the preferences of whites, men, and the rich.

These results help explain the rage that has recently coursed through America’s cities. If blacks seem not to be satisfied with (mostly) uninhibited access to the polls and (close to) proportional representation, this is because they should not be content with these achievements. What really matters in a democracy is getting policies enacted that correspond to people’s views. And on this front, blacks still have a long way to go. Their opinions—on vital issues like crime, welfare, and housing—are too often ignored by elected officials when they conflict with whites’ preferences. This grim reality is well worth getting upset about.

What really matters in a democracy is getting policies enacted that correspond to people’s views.

More broadly, the results also highlight other distortions of the political process. Unsurprisingly, in this era of skyrocketing inequality and campaign finance deregulation, policymakers pay closer attention to the views of the rich than to those of the poor (or of the middle class). More unexpectedly, women are largely ineffectual politically despite their large numbers, high turnout rates, and substantial representation. None of these assets provides them with what a healthy democracy should: laws as reflective of their preferences as of those of men. And Hispanics seem to hold an intermediate position, neither as weak as blacks nor as influential as whites.

So how might the promise of American pluralism be fulfilled—so that public policy is about equally responsive to each group’s views? Unfortunately, this is where we reach the limits of current academic knowledge. We can now quantify the power wielded by different groups. But neither my work, nor anyone else’s, has determined what the causes of group influence might be, let alone how disparities in clout can be corrected.

Still, even in the absence of hard data, it is possible to speculate. In particular, three drivers of group power come readily to mind: participation, resources, and ideology. Perhaps groups whose members engage more actively in politics—by voting but also by attending meetings, contacting representatives, volunteering for campaigns, and so on—have more sway over policy outcomes. Or maybe wealthy groups have more influence. If money is the mother’s milk of politics, as Jesse Unruh once said, it is the affluent who control more of this vital resource. And ideology may matter too. Extreme groups may have trouble making deals and forming alliances as effectively as moderate ones.

These hypotheses point to an agenda of sorts for those who are troubled by the power imbalances of modern American politics. Automatic voter registration and other electoral reforms might broaden political participation. Reducing income inequality, and introducing public financing or more vigorous campaign finance regulation, could lessen the impact of money on politics. And groups could try aiming for tactical moderation even as they keep fighting to achieve their ideological goals.

Ultimately, it is unclear if these policies would eliminate the power differentials that my study identified. But they would likely help. The first step, though, is simply recognizing the hurdles facing many groups as they struggle to translate their views into law.