The Sound and Fury of Law Enforcement

Discussions on the internet often pit against one another persons with completely different personal experiences and thinking on very tough issues. Over the last day, on a local message board in which I participate, a fierce discussion has raged in one such area where a vast chasm exists between two groups.

Troubling questions about the nature of truth and experience have arisen over a drug raid in a suburb between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. From early stories, there was in this area apparently a distribution scheme by drug traffickers involving shipping packages of marijuana to random homes and intercepting the shipments before the uninvolved householders could return home.

Tracking one such shipment, officers staked out the address, one of them posing as a deliveryman and depositing the package on the front porch. The homeowner returned shortly thereafter, carried the box inside and went to change his clothes. Officers burst into the house, forcing the occupants to the floor and in the process shooting two dogs that were family pets. It turned out that the homeowner was the mayor of the suburban town, who after four days was acknowledged by authorities to have been uninvolved in the scheme, simply a random resident selected by the drug dealers. Investigations are proceeding, including a F.B.I. probe of possible civil rights violations.

Pending the results of the various investigations, not all the facts are available for consideration, but the message board erupted anyway into emotional posts by two sides, law enforcement professionals and those who are civilians. The civilians responded with empathy for the mayor and his family, lent poignancy by the death of the pets. The law officers responded vigorously on two grounds; all the facts not being in, it was premature to prejudge the officers involved, and the experience of confronting possible criminals in such a raid was so outside the experience of non-law enforcement persons that any judgement was sure to be biased.

There have been plenty of posts on other events on this board, harshly accusing the police of brutality on little evidence, to make this attitude understandable. Very few, like myself, who have never faced the possibility of armed confrontation on a daily basis can comprehend such experience without a considerable effort of empathy and understanding. As one of the police professionals involved in this debate has posted on his own blog:

There is a world you live in, a world that by all appearances is Normal and Safe. And then, there is the world that exists outside your windows, where Freaks flee across your lawns . . . Everything outside that Window is easy to ignore. But it’s there. And that…is where I come in.

Two worlds, two collective experiences that both have their truth. For those of us on the safe – temporarily – side of that Window, our empathy is immediate, and focused on the family suffering the trauma of a police raid and the killing of their pets. For the police, they understand the risks of going into a house where all they know is that an enterprise which considers violence, cruelty and murder as legitimate elements of their business plan is somehow involved with this house, and such ruthlessness may be just on the other side of the door.

One of the strengths of any forum of discussion is to give some understanding on the part of each side of the other’s reasons for their opinions. Listening is better than shouting, although sometimes it is hard to hear for the volume of emotion.

Seeking Redemption

In the Chattanooga Times Free Press this morning, in the Metro section, there is a story on the efforts of the UTC football players cleared of rape charges to re-establish their eligibilty under NCAA rules:

Five of the six former UTC football players cleared of rape charges last month have asked the university to restore their NCAA eligibility so they can play at other colleges, officials said.

The charges of rape against the six former UTC athletes were dismissed Jan. 18 after a judge found insufficient evidence to bind the case over to a grand jury. The players are waiting to hear the results of a university conduct hearing that will determine whether they are readmitted as students or permanently expelled.

This is on the face of it, a question of fairness following acquittal under rape charges. In the course of the trial, however, most of the players acknowledged, I believe, that they engaged in group sex with the young woman who brought the charges. Is such behavior of itself likely to be a bar to scholarships elsewhere, or at UTC?

Ponderous. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Link

(Go to Metro on sidebar menu)

A Tale of Two Bridges

A pair of bridges, displaying two bits of history, one dark, the other hopeful.

The John Ross Bridge

In Chattanooga the old bascule drawbridge spanning the Tennessee River is being restored; most of the old, decaying concrete is being replaced. A two-year job, estimated in the contract, now in the seventh month. Much concrete has been stripped away, along with a hundred feet of the approach decking from the north bank of the river. The main piers of the bridge, out in the river, have not really been touched yet. I am not sure how those will be done, replaced entirely (the mind boggles) or somehow re-coated with fresh concrete. I am always fascinated to watch these big projects. And glad I have no responsibility for them.

There is another bridge, a couple of hundred yards upstream from the bascule bridge, a bridge much older than the drawbridge, which at one time connected Walnut Street with the north bank of the river. Repeated inspections of the bridge by state engineers in the 1970s led to the closing of the bridge due to structural decay. A long debate ensued about rehabilitation of the bridge, finally leading to the restoral of the bridge as a pedestrian bridge, part of the planned revival of the riverfront, in 1993. A happy conclusion to the issue, but there was a darker history to the bridge. In 1906, the last lynching of a black man in Chattanooga took place from the third arch of the Walnut Street Bridge. The case of Ed Johnson became a footnote to legal history, involving the Supreme Court of the U.S., and in 2001 a local attorney Leroy Phillips, collaborated with a newsman to write a history of the case, Contempt of Court.

A couple of stories appeared about this case in local papers this week, as the centenary of the lynching approaches. Apparently there is finally going to be a historical marker of some sort placed on the restored bridge to memorialize Ed Johnson. Here is an article about the newest chapter in the Ed Johnson story.

Two kinds of progress in Chattanooga, two bridges.