Crime and Promises

When Greg Ballard ran for mayor, we were treated to a lot of rhetoric about crime. Public Safety was going to be “job one” in a Ballard administration. Well, if crime has been job one, I shudder to think of how we are doing with jobs two through ten.

The media have reported on our distressing rates of violent crime; it seems as if there’s a murder every day or so. But there are fewer reports of the so-called nonviolent and “petty” crimes: thefts from cars parked on city streets, burglaries and house break-ins, etc. And those have grown alarmingly.

I live in the Old Northside now, but my husband and I have lived in downtown neighborhoods for 30 years. We were part of the Hudnut Administration that jump-started the renaissance of the city’s core. In that thirty-year period, I have never seen the rate of what police call “household invasions” anywhere near this high. Just in the past month, I’ve had three neighbors I know personally burgled, and the neighborhood listserv has circulated reports of several others. One friend was in his house, in bed with his wife, when intruders broke in and took computers and other electronics. (Talk about shaking your sense of security!)

My friends in IMPD report significant issues of morale and management in the department. Whether those issues affect the crime rate, I don’t know. What I DO know is that crime is increasingly a topic of concern among my friends and neighbors, and that there is a perception of a significant increase in criminal activity. That’s troubling enough, but what is even more troubling is that the Mayor does not seem to recognize either the problem or the challenge that the growing concern about crime poses to other important city goals.

Promises, promises………

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A Very Interesting Question

The New York Times reported today that well before their recent downgrade of the U.S. AAA credit rating, the Justice Department had begun an investigation into whether Standard & Poor had improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis. As the Times reports, “In the mortgage inquiry, the Justice Department has been asking about instances in which the company’s analysts wanted to award lower ratings on mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by other S.& P. business managers, according to the people with knowledge of the interviews. If the government finds enough evidence to support such a case, which is likely to be a civil case, it could undercut S.& P.’s longstanding claim that its analysts act independently from business concerns.”

After the housing bubble burst, many of us questioned the ethics of a ratings system in which the issuer of the debt being rated paid the rating agency–to those of us uninitiated into the arcane processes of mortgage banking, this seemed to constitute a clear conflict of interest, a practice that suggested the agencies might be, oh, let’s just say “ethically insensitive.” This morning’s report raises the question whether that insensitivity, or ethical blind spot, might have played a role in the recent downgrade of the US credit rating.

Perhaps it was less a matter of acting on the basis of genuine concern (misplaced or not) and more a matter of retaliation for daring to launch an investigation?

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One-Handed Lawyers

You’ve probably heard the old joke about the one-armed man who couldn’t be a lawyer, because lawyers all have to say “on one hand….but on the other hand…”

What made me think of it was an excellent post by Doug Masson this morning, which I encourage everyone to read. Doug was commenting on the unseemly effort by local media outlets and others to find someone–anyone–to blame for the tragedy at the State Fair. (Okay, anyone with money.) Now, perhaps when all the facts come out, there will be evidence that the stage collapse was the result of negligence, but given what is now known, it is more likely that this should be filed under “shit happens.” It’s probably human nature to want someone to blame when bad things happen, but sometimes an accident is simply an accident.

On the other hand (you knew this was coming, right?) some lawsuits that seem frivolous aren’t just examples of our amply documented American litigiousness. One example is the widely mocked and misunderstood “McDonald’s coffee” case. An elderly woman spilled her coffee on her lap, and was so severely burned she had to be hospitalized. When a jury awarded her several hundred thousand dollars,  the “tort reform” chorus took to the airwaves to demand limits on lawsuits, and the case became a rallying point for those who want to make it more difficult for injured people to sue.

What most of the media didn’t report was that McDonalds had been sued numerous times before over injuries caused by their practice of brewing unreasonably hot coffee (apparently, you get more coffee from the same amount of beans if it is really, really hot).  In this case, the elderly woman’s suit initially asked only for payment of her hospital bills, and McDonalds had refused to pay anything.  It’s likely that the size of the verdict was a product of jury outrage, in the nature of punitive damages.

Not long after I was married, I went with my husband to a convention of architects. When one of the other attendees found out that I was a lawyer, he cornered me and lectured on the evils of frivolous litigation. I finally asked him what he would suggest as a remedy. “Why, just outlaw frivolous lawsuits!” he responded, with an inflection suggesting that only an idiot would ask such a question. He didn’t take it kindly when I pointed out that you can’t identify “frivolous” cases until they’ve been litigated.

On one hand, I’d love to be able to weed out suits brought by the greedy and unscrupulous, or just by people looking for a scapegoat.

On the other hand, justice isn’t served by rules that make it difficult or impossible to litigate legitimate grievances.

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Progress is Hard Work

How does change happen?

Too often, we think of broad cultural changes as part of an inevitable sweep of history,  sort of like the process of maturation we go through as individuals: as we grow up, we understand more. This analogy conveniently overlooks the people who grow older but do not grow up. And it overlooks the role that parents, peers and educational institutions play in molding individuals.

Cultural change does not come about accidently either. A lot of blood was spilled in the fight for legal equality for African-Americans—and by forcing legal change, the civil rights movement began the lengthy process of changing attitudes. The evolution from “a woman’s place is in the home” to a society in which working women are a commonplace didn’t begin with bloodshed, but it did begin with suffragette marches and continued with the establishment of feminist organizations like NOW and NARAL. Similarly, the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians has been the product of hard work by gay civil rights organizations.

I mention that because, in my city, it is the time of year for Lambda Legal’s big fundraising dinner. On September 16th, members, supporters and supportive public officials will gather in downtown Indianapolis to hear Zach Wahls, a remarkable young man whose speech to the Iowa legislature went viral a few months ago. At 19, he is representative of a generation that symbolizes the changes in attitudes about gay families—changes that have occurred largely because of the work done by organizations like Lambda.

No organization of which I am aware has been more important than Lambda, although there are certainly many organizations doing great work on behalf of the LGBT community.

The reason I raise the importance of civil rights organizations is that there tends to be a “trajectory” of support for any cause. Early in the movement for equality—whether for African-Americans, women or gays—there is generally a dedicated, even enthusiastic, core group that supports and funds the organizations that have been formed. As those organizations experience successes, as they see progress, and as time passes, the early support dwindles and the enthusiasm flags. (Most recently, you could see this in the fight against AIDS; as new medications were developed and discrimination lessened, so did awareness. The sense of urgency abated.)

It’s well to remind ourselves that winning any battle, let alone the battle for equality, requires persistence above all.

It can be difficult to constantly pump ourselves up, to attend yet another fundraiser, yet another rally. We all get tired of emailing and calling our elected representatives, writing yet another letter to the editor. That’s why organizations are so important—they do the day to day work that absolutely has to be done if a movement is to be successful. Through our donations, we are paying others to be persistent for us. Writing a check is a lot easier for most people than doing the necessary nitty-gritty work.

Writing that check is the least we can do.

Tea and Very Little Sympathy

Ever since the emergence of the Tea Party–with its intransigence, ideological rigidity and hostility–there has been a robust debate about who they are, what they want, and whether they are a genuine grass-roots movement or the product of some canny (and wealthy) Republican operatives. Other than poll results, however, there has been very little empirical research informing that debate.

That has changed. In a recent issue of “Perspectives on Politics,” a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Political Science Association, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin published “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” I don’t know Williamson or Coggin, but Theda Skocpol is a widely-respected Harvard Professor who–among other things–has served as the President of the American Political Science Association.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights:

  • The Tea Party is a new incarnation of “long-standing strands” in American conservatism.
  • Tea Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act is not a manifestation of hostility to social programs per se; the opposition is based upon resentment of “perceived government handouts to “undeserving” people. (Tea partiers see themselves as entitled to Social Security and Medicare.) Their definition of “undeserving” “seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.”
  • The Tea Party owes its emergence not only to the Republican elites that initially bankrolled it, but to Fox News. The authors believe that “the best way to understand Fox News’ role is as a national advocacy organization actively fostering a social protest identity.” (63% of Tea Party members watch Fox, as opposed to 11% of the general population.)
  • Tea Party members are a very small minority of Americans. Only one in five of those who claim to be members have actually attended an event or donated money. Members are older, white and middle-class, and a majority are men. The vast majority are conservative Republicans.

There is much more, but the central finding (in my opinion, at least) was that at the grassroots level, Tea Partiers judge social programs “not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” It will not come as a shock to most of us that deservingness is “an implicit cultural category.” Hence the hysteria over immigration (the study finds–surprise!–that “fears of immigration are closely linked to the ethnic identity of the immigrants in question”). Support for the Tea Party “remains a valid predictor of racial resentment” even after controlling for ideology and partisanship, and this finding goes a long way toward explaining what seems to most of us as an irrational hatred of Obama. As the authors put it, “At a fundamental level, Obama’s policies and his person are not within the Tea Party conception of America, so his election seems like a threat to what they understand as their country.”

And they want “their” country back.

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