Democracy is No Place for the People

Americans love democracy so much that some will kill or attempt to harm those who they think oppose it.

(Image from Flickr, by dahnielson)

Yet what is it that they love so much?

If it is the notion that “The People” get make the social and political decisions that most impact their own lives, they are in love with a fantasy that has never existed. Democracy is about voting for others who get to make these decisions and almost always in the interests of the wealthiest subset of “The People.”

Yet even the part of democracy that does include “the people,” (e.g., voting or speaking at public hearings), includes them only so long as they glorify the system and do not challenge it. Consider the case of Oakland, California, which aborted a meeting of their city council last week rather than endure public criticism and protests of yet another murder of an unarmed black man by the police.

The most recent police shooting involved the death of teenager Alan Blueford, who was killed by police in April, just prior to his high school graduation. Police say he had been brandishing a gun. His family and witnesses deny the charges and are demanding a full investigation, accusing the police of lying. Blueford’s mother said she wanted changes in how the police department is run so that police were more accountable to and had deeper understanding of the communities in which they work. She also accused council members of turning their heads when she spoke of her grief and expressed outrage and frustration that they would shut off the microphone when she spoke. (Blueford’s comments were broadcast on KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” on October 3, 2012.

Meanwhile, a recent court-ordered report blasted the Oakland police department for failing to make adequate improvements in how it addresses deadly force by police, and in another lawsuit, lawyers are expected to ask for federal oversight of the Oakland police department for failing to make court-ordered reforms.

The city council met again yesterday in closed session to decide how to prevent such disruptions of its meetings in the future. When the closed door session ended and the “public” portion of the meeting began, attendees found the balcony closed and the doors barricaded, with seating reduced by 50% and more than 100 people barred from getting inside.

One might argue that the city council has important business to attend to and that it cannot be hampered by protests or filibustering by unelected members of the public. The public be damned if they cannot understand this simple fact. After all, they elected the council members and should be satisfied with what the council members do and how they do it.

Yet it seems as though some Oakland residents have a different understanding of democracy, one in which they get to directly influence the agenda and decisions made by their representatives. If the city council cannot be bothered to prioritize and resolve the problem of police violence, then perhaps they need more forceful persuasion by having to face so many angry, frustrated and grieving constituents that they must stay extra late just to hear them all, let alone have time for their other business.

The Oakland city council’s new policies are designed to have the opposite effect. It will become harder for residents to use the democratic process to air their grievances or to use their voices and bodies to disrupt or commandeer council meetings. However, this won’t be a substantive change from the status quo. The elected officials will continue to be the ones who make the decisions, listening or not to the concerns of their constituents. But when they choose to ignore “the people,” they will now do so with less blowback. Their decisions will still heavily favor the interests of the city’s wealthiest business leaders, but now with less public oversight and scrutiny. And “the people” will not have any less say in the policy matters that affect them; it will simply be more difficult for them to irritate their elected leaders when things don’t go their way.

Georgia School Has 6-Year Old Arrested

You're Under Arrest, Young Lady. Anything You Say . . . (Image from Flickr, by cwwycoff1)

Six-year old Salecia Johnson had a temper tantrum in class last week, according to her teachers at Creekside Elementary in Milledgeville, Georgia. Temper tantrums are not unusual for children at this age. However, her school’s response was extraordinary—they called the police, who handcuffed her and charged her with battery, according to Change.org. Police held her for an hour before notifying her parents. The school also suspended her for the remainder of the year.

While the charges have since been dropped and Salecia has been allowed to return to school, she has been traumatized by the experience, according to her mother, who has created a Change.org petition to ensure that her arrest records are purged and to end the use of the police for minor school discipline issues.

If you are interested in her signing her petition, you can click here.

(Thank you Miriam for the heads up on this news item)

The Irrelevancy of DNA

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, brian0918.

DNA has become an almost mythical molecule in the past 20 years. The Human Genome Project and the promises of personalized medicine and genetic testing companies like 23 and Me, give hope that we will find new treatments or cures for many tragic diseases, increase longevity and improve quality of life for millions of people. Hollywood has helped fuel our love affair with DNA with television shows like CSI and Dexter, which make DNA seem even more powerful than the police in catching bad guys.

What is often left out of the explanation is the fallibility of the police who collect the evidence and the scientists who analyze it. From the crime scene to the lab there are dozens of opportunities for contamination, damage or loss of specimens, either through carelessness, incompetency or maliciousness. Garbage in, garbage out: sloppy police work can easily invalidate or corrupt DNA evidence.

A suspect can be absolved if his DNA does not match any of the suspects’ DNA at the crime scene (assuming his attorney ever gets access to this evidence). However, even if his DNA does match the crime scene, if there were any breeches in security or protocol, he should also be released, since it is now unclear if his DNA got mixed in by mistake or in a deliberate frame-up.

These examples highlight just a few of the ways that DNA can “lie,” and result in an innocent person being punished.

A new report has found that the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has withheld critical evidence for decades that could have exonerated hundreds of prisoners and parolees. The defendants and their lawyers were not informed of flawed forensic work that could have led their acquittals. (See Democracy Now, 4/18/12) The DOJ investigated cases going back to 1995, but only focused on the work of one sloppy scientist, despite complaints that the problem was widespread and included numerous scientists. Further investigations will likely find many more people who should be exonerated.

14 Year Old Tasered by Police at San Diego Middle School

A 14-year-old student at Correia Middle School, in the affluent San Diego neighborhood of Point Loma, was tasered twice by police officers as he was arrested on suspicion of possessing of a stolen iPod. According to police, they had been alerted to a theft of $5000 worth of iPods and were questioning several students when one of them began to resist. The teen is being charged with theft and assaulting a police officer.

The 5-foot-10-inch, 150-pound teen produced two of the stolen iPods during the questioning, according to the OB Rag. When an officer told him he was under arrest, he refused to cooperate, telling the officers, “No, you’re not putting handcuffs on me.” Police say he thrashed and kicked so much that one of them was hospitalized with a knee injury.

School administrators were present during the questioning and the incident is being investigated to determine if the police used excessive force.

It reminds me of the time when I was a teenager and a cop accused me of resisting arrest, hit me in the head, and then sued me because his finger broke.

These were supposedly professional cops and a scrawny 150 pound teen. They couldn’t get cuffs on him without resorting to weapons?

School Cops Gone Wild (Again)—Unarmed Student Killed Near Bus Stop

Last November, San Antonio school cop Daniel Alvarado was told by his superior to stay with the victim and not to search for the suspect in a minor assault near a school. However, according to MySanAntonio.com, Alvarado ignored his boss and chased the suspect into a nearby backyard where he shot and killed Derek Lopez, an unarmed 14-year old boy.

This was not Alvarado’s first blunder. The Northside Independent School District Police Department has reprimanded or counseled him least 12 times since 2006, half of those for not following orders. He has also failed to show up for jobs and been caught lying. He had been reprimanded for making no effort to complete cases. He had been repeatedly reprimanded for insubordination. Finally, in 2008, he was suspended for a day for not showing up for an assignment. He was told that any further missed assignments would result in his immediate termination. He then showed up four hours late for an assignment and was allowed to continue working.

All told, Alvarado was suspended five times without pay, according to Courthouse News, yet somehow was allowed to continue serving as a school district police officer.

The fact that the cop had a long history of disobeying orders and was specifically told not to chase the suspect would suggest that it was not a justified homicide at all but pure incompetence, negligence or maliciousness. The fact that the boy was unarmed would also suggest lethal force was unwarranted. Despite all this, the San Antonio Police Department has ruled that the shooting was justified.

The boy’s mother has sued the school district, accusing the district of acting with "deliberate indifference" by keeping Alvarado on the force despite his terrible record. She is seeking punitive damages for civil rights violations, liability and negligence.

Crying Wolf: Another Unnecessary Lockdown In Oakland

Oakland Unified School District has now locked down three schools within the first two days of the school year. In at least one of the cases, officials admitted that the children’s safety was never in jeopardy, which begs the question: Why were children’s personal freedom, comfort and learning undermined by being confined to their classroom for hours?

In the latest incident, children at Oakland's Horace Mann Elementary School were locked in their classrooms for most of Tuesday, while police searched for suspects in a string of early-morning home-invasion robberies, the Bay Citizen reported today. OUSD spokesman Troy Flint said that Oakland schools experience lockdowns two to four times per week on average and largely as a precaution. “That figure doesn’t really represent an imminent threat to the school.”

Flint specifically stated that the 350 children at Horace Mann were not in danger. The men surrendered voluntarily to the police, except for one suspect who was obese and got stuck in his hiding place and had to be rescued by the fire department.

Despite the lack of danger, parents were forced to wait over an hour to pick up their children in the afternoon. Many complained that the school did not explain the process sufficiently to them.

Regardless, one has to wonder if there is a better alternative to locking kids in their classrooms for hours at a time on such a regular basis. The two to four times per week figure quoted by Mr. Flint likely means that some schools are being locked down on a regular basis as a result of being located in high crime neighborhoods. During these lockdowns, learning is disrupted, activities are canceled and freedom placed on hold. Secondary students cannot switch classes, causing them to lose valuable instructional time in those classes. K-5 students are disrupted from their usual routines which no doubt creates anxiety and discipline problems for some.

During lockdowns, students cannot use the restroom or the drinking fountain or get food from their lockers or the cafeteria. Lockdowns have become so commonplace that LAUSD has equipped classroom with buckets so students can relieve themselves.

Yet when officials publicly declare that the lockdowns are just a precaution and do not represent an imminent threat, the message to parents and students is that they do not have to take them seriously. Districts like OUSD and LAUSD that lockdown their schools on a weekly “precautionary” basis run the risk of being ignored, like the little boy who cried wolf.

I am not suggesting that children’s safety be ignored. When OUSD locked down two schools Monday, police and suspects were exchanging gunfire. Under such circumstances it is prudent to secure school buildings. However, there was no reason to keep children locked down for as long as they did. And apparently the school district did not find Tuesday’s lockdown to be necessary at all.

It’s The Class

Of course there is also a large gorilla in the room that everyone is ignoring: the violence that has become so common in some communities. This is not a side issue that is only indirectly related to children’s academic success. Rather, much of the violence is directly related to or caused by poverty, which tends to be concentrated in certain communities, and which undermines students’ academic success, even when there is no violence involved. In other words, children who attend low income schools in neighborhoods with high rates of violence tend to be poor themselves, just like those who are committing the acts of violence. In some cases, they are the victims of violence outside of school, violence that does physical and/or emotional harm to them.

Having spent most of my career in low income schools, I have seen plenty of this, including one boy whose father murdered his mother in front of him, and another, whose father was gunned down on his doorstep. I’ve had dozens of students who came to class only because it was a parole requirement for violent crimes committed by the student. I’ve had several students who stopped coming to class because they were either tired of getting beaten up on the way to school or could not get to school without crossing through dangerous or rival gang territory.

Of course I could go on and on, as could many of you other teachers out there. But rather than ignoring this gorilla, because we think there is nothing we can do about it as teachers, we should be confronting it directly, as teachers, union members, and community members, and not only for our students’ safety, but because it is a necessary prerequisite for seeing any large scale improvement in the academic success of low income populations.

Ending poverty, closing the wealth gap, ensuring that all members of society have adequate housing, nutrition, health care, and the other necessities of life, not only will help reduce the violence that results in school lockdowns, it will improve the school readiness and success of our students.