Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 774
May 20, 2016
Big penises were for ogres: Why so many classical sculptures are so modestly endowed
Although recent studies have shown the average penis size doesn’t measure up to popular notions, and that women care less about length than other aesthetic attributes, the idea that penis size matters is everywhere. Marketers capitalize on penis size anxiety by convincing men to shell out for everything from pills to enlargement surgery, which runs between $4,000 to $17,000. (In case you’re curious, Germans opt for the surgery more than anyone else in the world. The U.S. came in way down in ninth place.)
But there was a time when smaller was considered better, and the testament to that sentiment can be viewed in some of the world’s greatest museums. If you’ve ever wondered why classical statues—meaning those of the Greek and Roman varieties—are so modestly endowed, the answer lies in societal views on penis size in those eras. The Greeks believed small penises were a sign of intelligence and cultural distinction. Big penises, conversely, were regarded with disdain, a signifier of a lusty, bestial, lowly sex-ogre with animalistic cravings.
Ellen Oredsson, an art historian and head curator at Bangkok’s Rock Around Asia gallery, explains the role Grecian beauty standards played in the small penises attached to some of the world’s most famous classical sculptures:
Today, big penises are seen as valuable and manly, but back then, most evidence points to the fact that small penises were considered better than big ones. One of the reasons historians, such as Kenneth Dover in his landmark book Greek Homosexuality, have suggested that small penises were more culturally valued is that large penises were associated with very specific characteristics: foolishness, lust and ugliness… Meanwhile, the ideal Greek man was rational, intellectual and authoritative. He may still have had a lot of sex, but this was unrelated to his penis size, and his small penis allowed him to remain coolly logical….The ancient Romans might have been more positive towards large penises, but their sculptures continue the trend of small penises. Later, in Renaissance art, sculptors were very specifically influenced by ancient Greek art and their small penis size.
Hence the smaller size phallus on Michelangelo’s Renaissance sculpture David (take a closer look), and Greek sculptures Victorious Youth and early classical period Kritios Boy.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
The Art & Popular Culture wiki noted that “[l]ong, thick penises were considered—at least in the highbrow view—grotesque, comic, or both and were usually found on fertility gods, half-animal critters such as satyrs, ugly old men, and barbarians. A circumcised penis was particularly gross.”
Art historian Oredsson offers examples of this, with images of large-penised figures:
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
That’s a satyr above, and the figure depicted just below it is Priapus (that name should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who’s overdone it with the Viagra), a Greek god of fertility. Oredsson notes Priapus was “cursed with a permanent erection, impotence, ugliness and foul-mindedness by Hera” and was “actually so despised by the other gods that he was thrown off Mount Olympus.”
Revisiting the smaller penises of many Greek statues, it’s worth noting that they’re flaccid, which probably accounts for at least some of the smallness. A 2013 Athens University study also pointed out that “many of these images belong to athletes during or immediately after hard exercise with the penis shrunk.”
Lawrence Barraclough, who made an entire documentary about living with a small penis, visited with Emma Stafford, senior lecturer in classics at Leeds University in the UK. Presented with a cast of Barraclough’s penis, Stafford responded that the Greeks would consider him “the ideal man.”
May 19, 2016
New Mexico pushes for remedies in wake of mine waste spill
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico’s top prosecutor says the federal government and Colorado have made little progress in remedying widespread damages from the 2015 wastewater release from a mine.
Attorney General Hector Balderas sent letters this week to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado officials as New Mexico’s threat to sue the agency, the neighboring state and two mining companies remains on the table.
Balderas says New Mexico reached out to officials to discuss independent monitoring and remedial measures in the wake of the spill, but he’s concerned about the lack of progress.
Balderas says New Mexico’s requests have been disregarded and minimized.
The EPA didn’t comment directly on the letter, but stated that it takes responsibility for the cleanup of the release of 3 million gallons of wastewater from the Gold King Mine.
New poll shows strong support for paid family leave programs
CHICAGO (AP) — Time off from work to care for a child or relative is codified in federal law. Now, an overwhelming majority of Americans 40 and older want that time away from the job to be paid.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Friday said 72 percent support paid family leave. Democrats were more likely to back it, but Republicans also expressed strong support. Overall, support was stronger among people age 40-64 and among women.
At least 19 states are considering paid family leave laws, but only three have active programs. New York, the latest to approve it, will launch its program in 2018.
“There is a lot of interest and a lot of momentum,” said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work, an advocacy group. “We hope that over the next five years a critical mass of states will win these policies.”
Bravo said the state wins are paving the way for a federal law.
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act provides for up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for most workers to care for a newborn or adopted child or a spouse, child or parent who is seriously ill.
A bill to make that leave paid was introduced in the Senate last year but has gone nowhere in Congress. Among the presidential candidates, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have voiced support for paid family leave. Donald Trump hasn’t offered a clear opinion.
“I support (paid family leave) because I feel that in the U.S., we need to realize that employees, or the workers, can’t really do the best job possible if you are worrying about a family member,” said Mary Jo Morelli, of the Detroit area.
Morelli, 52, said she expects that someday she’ll need time off to care for her aging mother and in-laws who are now in their 80s.
Paid family leave works like insurance and is funded via mandatory contributions from workers’ paychecks.
In New York, about $1 a week will be deducted. Workers could receive a portion of their pay for up to eight weeks in the program’s first year. That will increase to 12 weeks, double what other states offer.
Most workers use the benefit to care for a newborn or adopted child, according to data from the California, New Jersey and Rhode Island programs. Workers also can use it to care for an aging parent, spouse or other relative.
About a quarter of older workers who support paid family leave said they would be hesitant to ask for time off. Of those, nearly half worried it would negatively affect their future salary or promotion opportunities. About 4 in 10 said they felt pressured by employers not to take time off.
“Workers are, and for good reason, nervous about retaliation from their employer,” said Ruth Milkman a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who has studied paid family leave.
Some people also cited the need for their full salary.
Farmworker Adan Lopez said he supports the law but it would be impossible to live on just 55 percent of his wages, the benefit in California. He makes about $500 per week and the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Salinas, California, is about $1,800 a month. During lean times, he said, his family is forced to share an apartment with others.
California will raise its weekly benefit in 2018 to 60 percent or 70 percent of wages, depending on earnings. The state also is pushing to increase awareness of the decade-old program.
The AP-NORC poll found that about 44 percent in California had not heard of the law.
In New York, advocates are working with state officials to educate people, especially low-income residents and minorities, about paid family leave. “Passing the law was step one,” said Dina Bakst, co-founder of A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center.
The poll also found overwhelming support for policies to help caregivers with long-term care costs. Eighty-three percent support tax breaks for caregivers and 73 percent favor a credit toward Social Security benefits for caregivers who take time off work.
As the only unmarried sibling in his family, Tim Mitchell, 51, of Portales, New Mexico, cared on-and-off for his grandmother and, later, his mother. He said he’d support any help for caregivers, who, like him, struggle financially later in life. “What I did was a heck of a sacrifice,” he said.
The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey was conducted Feb. 18 through April 9, with funding from the SCAN Foundation. The nationally representative poll involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,698 Americans age 40 or older. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Alejandra Cancino is studying health care and long-term care issues as part of a fellowship at the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which joins NORC’s independent research and AP journalism. The fellowship is funded by The SCAN Foundation, an independent nonprofit that supports research and other initiatives on aging and health care.
___
Online:
AP-NORC polls on long-term care: http://www.longtermcarepoll.org
How the AP-NORC poll on long-term care was conducted
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll on long-term care was conducted from February 18 through April 9 by NORC at the University of Chicago, with funding from the SCAN Foundation.
It is based on landline and cellular telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,698 adults age 40 or older, including 403 California residents age 40 and over. Interviews included 1,117 respondents on landline telephones and 581 on cellphones.
Digits in the phone numbers dialed were generated randomly to reach households with unlisted and listed landline and cellphone numbers.
Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population’s makeup by factors such as age, sex, education, race and landline or cell phone use.
No more than 1 time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.4 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults in the U.S. were polled. For the California results, the margin of error is plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.
There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.
The questions and results are available at http://www.longtermcarepoll.org
A President Trump could trump his club’s fight over planes
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — There are many questions about what Donald Trump would do if elected president, so let’s add another: Would he ban planes leaving Palm Beach International Airport from flying over his prized Mar-a-Lago Club?
Trump has tried for two decades through the Federal Aviation Administration and the courts to force departing airliners to turn before reaching the historic and exclusive 17-acre estate, which is 2.5 miles east of the airport’s primary runway.
An Associated Press analysis of airport data between late April and early May found the majority of planes flew directly over or near Mar-a-Lago, some taking off or landing at an altitude between 500 and 2,000 feet. On a typical day, for example, the AP tracked scores of planes flying over Trump’s resort before heading north or continuing east.
The presumptive Republican nominee charges in his current lawsuit that the jetliners’ roar disturbs his members, who pay $100,000 initiation fees and $14,000 annual dues. He also says the vibrations and jet exhaust damage the fragile Dorian stone, antique Spanish tiles and Cuban roof tiles used by cereal tycoon Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, financier E.F. Hutton, to build the 126-room, 10,000-square-foot mansion in the mid-1920s, a decade before the airport opened and three decades before passenger jets took flight.
While the legal games are being played, if elected, Trump could play the ultimate trump card. As president, he could order the FAA to shift Palm Beach International’s takeoff and landing patterns to avoid Mar-a-Lago. But would he? It is a possibility airport manager and Trump nemesis Bruce Pelly raised in a 2011 interview with The Palm Beach Post during an earlier noise fight where the airport refused to bend.
“The solution for him is to get elected president,” Pelly said. Through a spokeswoman, Pelly recently declined to comment.
Trump, in a recent interview with the AP, said he wouldn’t use the presidency to settle the issue.
“I would stay out of it,” he said. But he said the airport should fan out departing planes, having some turn north or south almost immediately instead of having them head straight east. That, he said, would allow planes to take off with less time in between and turn one runway into the equivalent of three.
Trump has long held particular scorn for Pelly, singling him out in his latest lawsuit and calling him “the worst airport manager in the U.S.” in a signed 2011 letter to the FAA obtained by the AP through a public records request. He even criticizes him for infrastructure projects unrelated to the noise.
“Frankly, Bruce Pelly has done a horrible job,” Trump told the AP. “He built a road system that has made it harder for people get into the airport. It cost the taxpayers $500 million and is extremely impractical.”
Sid McGuirk, a lawyer and an associate professor of air traffic management at Florida’s Embry-Riddle University, said Trump as president could order the FAA to direct planes to avoid Mar-a-Lago, “but, boy, the backlash.” Changes to takeoff and landing patterns require safety and noise studies and allow time for public comment, he said. Circumventing the process by executive order would lead to congressional investigations and lawsuits by those now underneath the departing planes, he said.
“Would it be worth it? It would be on the front page of The New York Times and Washington Post for weeks,” McGuirk said. Of course, he added, anytime President Trump visited Mar-a-Lago, the airspace would become a no-fly zone as is anywhere a president visits, but those are usually temporary.
Trump purchased Mar-a-Lago — “The Greatest Mansion Ever Built,” according to its website — from Post’s foundation in 1985 for $10 million and renovated it. After using the estate as a residence for 10 years, he opened it as a club in 1995. The property now boasts 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a 20,000-square-foot ballroom, tennis and croquet courts and three bomb shelters.
With buildings totaling 77,000 square feet, it has an appraised market value of $20.3 million, according to county tax records. That number is artificially low primarily because Trump signed away its development rights to the National Trust, lowering his property taxes. Otherwise, Mar-a-Lago’s value would easily be $60 million to $80 million, said county property appraiser Gary Nikolits.
Trump filed his first noise lawsuit against Palm Beach County, which owns the airport, in 1995. It was settled a year later with the county agreeing to lease him the land where he built Trump International Golf Club. But the truce did not hold.
Trump filed a lawsuit against the county in 2010 to block preliminary plans to add a second east-west runway, telling the FAA in a letter that the proposal was “a deeply embarrassing performance, which has already wasted millions of dollars of public funds. The consultant who did it should be fired.”
Responding to Trump’s letter, airport attorney Peter Kirsch told an FAA administrator in a 2011 email he would call him, adding, “You might not be surprised to learn that most of what Mr. Trump states in the letter is not accurate.” The lawsuit was withdrawn that year.
Trump sued the county again last year, alleging that Pelly pressures FAA controllers to direct jetliners over his property in retaliation for his earlier lawsuits.
“Pelly is seeking revenge by attacking Mar-a-Lago from the air,” the lawsuit said.
That lawsuit, which seeks $100 million in damages, is unlikely to be resolved before next year. Between the legalese, it sometimes reads like a travel brochure.
“Whether dining on the patio, using the outdoor pool, using the beach facilities, playing tennis, or hosting an outdoor wedding by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean or Lake Worth, the only property to front on both, the once serene and tranquil ambience of Mar-a-Lago is essential to the Estate, just as it was in Ms. Post’s era.”
___
Gillum reported from Washington.
___
Follow Terry Spencer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/terryspen . His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/author/terry-s...
US says Iraqi forces have retaken southwestern town of Rutba
BAGHDAD (AP) — U.S. military officials say Iraqi forces have retaken the southwestern town of Rutba after Islamic State fighters who had occupied the town fled or put up only light resistance.
The top U.S. commander in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, told reporters Friday that it is an important victory for the Iraqi security forces, even though Rutba is a small town.
MacFarland says that taking Rutba from IS will allow the reopening of the main road from Amman to Baghdad, which he says is an important economic lifeline for Iraqi commerce. IS had been using Rutba as a staging area for weaponry and foreign fighters flowing into Iraq.
Another U.S. officer, Marine Brig. Gen. Bill Mullen, says the decisive action in Rutba was U.S. airstrikes outside the town.
Congo’s political crisis stokes fears of widespread violence
WASHINGTON (AP) — A simmering political crisis in Congo that the U.S. and its allies have been unable to defuse is stoking fears in Congress that one of Africa’s largest countries is on the verge of slipping into widespread violence.
Tension is building in Congo over President Joseph Kabila’s maneuvering to avoid national elections and remain in office beyond his constitutionally permitted term, according to U.S. officials and members of a coalition opposing Kabila. The Obama administration has threatened to sanction anyone who undermines security and democracy in Congo. Yet that warning has so far failed to sway Kabila and members of his government, who’ve been accused of cracking down on political foes and activists in a bid to remain in power.
“It’s a really dicey situation,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of several lawmakers who’ve used their oversight role to draw greater attention to conditions in Congo. McCain last month wrote to the Congolese ambassador in Washington, telling him that the advocacy group Human Rights Watch has documented dozens of cases of arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention. Congolese authorities even have threatened to kill those who’ve challenged Kabila, McCain wrote.
A delegation of Kabila’s political opponents traveled to Washington earlier this week to urge the administration to act quickly against Kabila and his top aides. Sanctions could include freezing the overseas assets of key figures and a ban on travel visas.
“President Kabila has deliberately sabotaged the electoral process,” said Olivier Kamitatu, a member of Congo’s national assembly and Kabila’s former minister of planning. Kabila, he said, has instituted a “policy of chaos and fear.”
Congo’s ambassador, Francois Balumuene, denied any misconduct.
Kabila is committed to holding fair and peaceful elections, but a host of logistical and financial problems have to be resolved first, Balumuene said. Among them is securing nearly $600 million in foreign aid that Congo needs to set up polling stations, acquire voting kits, and more. The U.S. is planning to provide $313 million in financial assistance to Congo in 2017.
“Kabila can’t change the constitution to stay in power,” Balumuene said. “It’s impossible.”
Congo, which has vast mineral deposits, is nearly one-fourth the size of the United States and has a population of more than 79 million. Since Congo won independence from Belgium in 1960, there has never been a peaceful, democratic transition of power in the country and the window for Kabila to ensure the first orderly changeover is closing rapidly.
More than a decade after Congo’s back-to-back civil wars ended, the country’s east remains perpetually in discord. Scores of militias and armed groups are blamed for violence against civilians, and nearly 2.7 million Congolese are internally displaced as a result, according to figures compiled by the United Nations.
But a bad situation could soon become worse. Congo’s sprawling borders reach nine other African countries, and an implosion in the vast nation could spark instability in its neighbors.
Secretary of State John Kerry stressed the importance of timely elections in Congo to Kabila last month when the two met briefly on the sidelines of the signing of a global agreement on climate change at the UN.
Leaders of African nations often have entrenched themselves in office, a practice that fuels corruption and leads to autocracies. Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Congo from 1965 to 1997. In neighboring Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni was sworn in last week for a fifth term.
Kabila, 44, has represented an opportunity to break that mold — to be a “model for his peers,” Thomas Perriello, the U.S. special envoy for Africa’s Great Lakes region, told the Senate earlier this year. But without a clear political path forward, Perriello said, Congo could fall into a violent, destabilizing crisis.
Kabila has been in office since 2001, taking over less than two weeks after his father, President Laurent Kabila, was shot by a bodyguard in the presidential palace. He was elected president in 2006 and again in 2011. Kabila is barred by Congo’s constitution from a third term. He is supposed to leave office in December.
Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, said in a February letter to Kerry that “public perceptions that President Kabila is clinging to power have created a very real risk of violent upheaval or even renewed warfare.” At a May 10 hearing, Markey asked a senior Obama administration official if the time had arrived for sanctions.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the administration is “looking very, very actively at sanctions as they relate to those who are involved in violence.”
Sanctions are not an elixir, however. The United States has maintained sanctions since 2003 against Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, his wife Grace, and members of his government for human rights violations and election rigging. Mugabe, 92, is still in power after 36 years and is the world’s oldest head of state.
But Kabila’s opponents are urging swift action while there is still time to organize elections.
“If we allow Joseph Kabila to remain in power, he’s going to become a president for life,” said Francis Kalombo, a member of Kabila’s ruling party. “He’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and that will lead to chaos.”
Kalombo said he left Congo last year for his own safety after publicly opposing Kabila’s attempts to remain in office.
___
Associated Press writer Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.
___
Follow Richard Lardner on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rplardner
NATO chief: ‘Broad agreement’ to seek meeting with Russia
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg waits for the start of a meeting of the North Atlantic Council at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, May 19, 2016. NATO foreign ministers this week will discuss how the alliance can deal more effectively with security threats outside Europe, including by training the Iraqi military and cooperating with the European Union to choke off people-smuggling operations in the central Mediterranean. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) (Credit: AP)
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO’s chief says the alliance has reached “broad agreement” to seek another meeting with Russia before NATO leaders meet in Warsaw this July.
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that, at a dinner the previous evening, alliance foreign ministers agreed on a “dual track approach” toward Moscow: to keep reinforcing NATO defenses against what they see as a mounting Russian threat, but also to pursue dialogue with the Kremlin.
Stoltenberg said the ministers “all agreed in the current situation that we need a platform (like) the NATO-Russia Council to pursue transparent and predictability.” The council, created in 2002 when relations between Russia and NATO were much better, met for the first time in nearly two years last month. That meeting failed to bridge differences between Russia and the U.S.-led alliance.
Golden urn holding Buddha relics returned to Cambodia shrine
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Thousands of Cambodians have joined a procession to return what they believe are Buddha’s relics to the mountaintop shrine from where they were stolen three years ago.
The golden urn containing the relics was placed in a decorated car and driven some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh to the Oudong mountain shrine on Friday.
The reinstallation took place on a national holiday to celebrate Buddhism’s holiest day marking the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha.
Monks, government officials, students and laypeople joined the procession.
The urn was stolen from the shrine in 2013 and recovered a year later but was temporarily placed at the Royal Palace. Four guards at the shrine and one more person were arrested.
San Francisco police chief out after yet another shooting
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The death of a young black woman in a stolen car proved to be the last in a series of shootings and racially tinged scandals that finally led to the resignation of San Francisco’s police Chief Greg Suhr.
A new acting chief is now tasked with mending the department’s strained relations with the black community.
Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin, a 26-year department veteran who is black, was appointed acting chief by Mayor Ed Lee after Suhr’s resignation Thursday.
Chaplin had the confidence of at least one key supporter.
“Toney Chaplin has the charisma, chemistry and courage to lead this department,” said Rev. Amos Brown, the president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP.
Brown had also supported Suhr through the department’s difficulties, and said the police’s problems “are bigger than one man.”
Pressure had been mounting for the resignation of Suhr since December, when five officers fatally shot a young black man carrying a knife. Since then, there have been protests, moves to reform the police department and a federal review of its protocol.
Mayor Ed Lee supported the chief in December and again in April after it was disclosed that three officers had exchanged racist text messages.
But hours after Thursday’s shooting, Lee asked for Suhr’s resignation and received it.
The texting scandal was the second to rock the department after it was also disclosed that several officers had exchanged racist messages dating back to before Suhr was chief. But Suhr was criticized for moving too slowly to fire the offending officers, all of whom have retained their jobs because of the chief’s failure to start disciplinary action when he first found out about the inappropriate.
Suhr could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Protesters demanding Suhr’s resignation drowned out the mayor’s second inaugural speech in January, and demonstrators forced the mayor to abandon a planned speech on Martin Luther King Jr. Day later that month.
Nonetheless, the mayor stood behind the chief, and the two announced a series of reforms aimed at reducing police shootings. The two also called in the U.S. Department of Justice to review the department’s policy and procedures.
Suhr renewed his call for reform April 8 after an officer shot and killed a Latino homeless man who police said refused orders to drop a large knife.
But Suhr lost Lee’s backing Thursday, after a patrol car prowling an industrial neighborhood for stolen vehicles came across a 27-year-old black woman sitting behind the wheel of a parked car.
Police said the car had been reported stolen.
Officers turned on the patrol car’s lights and sounded its siren, and the woman to sped off in the stolen car. A few second later and about 100 feet away, the stolen car slammed into a parked utility truck.
The officers jumped out of the patrol car and raced to the wreckage, where the woman was revving the car in an effort to disengage the auto from the truck. Suhr said a witness reported that the officers opened the driver’s door and began grabbing the woman in attempt to arrest her.
At that point, a sergeant fired one fatal round.
“This is exactly the kind of thing with all the reforms we are trying to prevent,” Suhr said Thursday, less than two hours after the shooting and before he resigned.
“The progress we’ve made has been meaningful, but it hasn’t been fast enough,” Lee said in a brief statement at City Hall. “Not for me, not for Greg.”
The identity of the dead woman has not been released. She was shot in the same neighborhood where the five officers shot and killed Mario Woods, the 26-year-old black man carrying a knife.
Video of Woods’ shooting circulated widely online and led to protests and calls for Suhr’s resignation.
But at the time, the chief still enjoyed the backing of the mayor and other community leaders, who said they wanted to give Suhr time to implement the reforms he promised.
“Some of the reforms underway might have prevented or clarified today’s incident,” the mayor said Thursday. “We need to turn these plans into actions.”
Lee appointed Suhr chief in 2011. He was a 34-year veteran of the department who rose through the ranks despite several professional missteps.
He was demoted from deputy chief to captain in 2009 after failing to file a police report after a female friend told him she had been assaulted by her boyfriend.
The city last year paid $725,000 to settle a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a former department lawyer who recommended Suhr be fired for failing to report his friend’s assault. When Suhr became chief, he fired the lawyer.
Suhr was also re-assigned from head of patrol in 2005 to guarding the city’s water supply, which was widely viewed as a demotion.
Two years earlier, he was one of several officers indicted in the city’s so-called “Fajitagate” for allegedly trying to cover up an investigation of three off-duty officers who had beaten up a waiter and took his bag of Mexican food. The indictment was tossed out.
