NEW JERSEY - Governor Christie's Apology

"Gwen's Take:  The art of the authentic apology" by Gwen Ifill, PBS Newshour 1/10/2014

In many ways, it was a relief to hear New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declare he was apologetic, humiliated, embarrassed and sad after an odd tale of bridge and tunnel retribution exploded on his watch this week.

"I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or its execution," Christie said of the George Washington Bridge lane closures allegedly carried out by his staff last fall.  "And I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here, regardless of what the facts ultimately uncover.  This was handled in a callous and indifferent way."

So often, apologies come couched in arm's-length formulation.  Public figures apologize if they offended someone, implying that the offense itself is not the problem.  They often suggest that they were not really responsible for their actions and disappear briefly into rehab.

And sometimes, they never apologize at all.

Not Christie.  With his national reputation as a straight-talking potential president on the line, he conducted a tour de force press conference in Trenton, holding forth for nearly two hours until reporters began repeating the same questions over and over again.  Tom Kean, a former New Jersey Republican governor, was among those who suggested that Christie lay everything on the table.  "If he doesn't," he told the Washington Post, "it's going to be like water torture."

But while Christie declared himself mortified by what he considered a betrayal by his staff, he had to be prodded to express similar concern for the actual actions they took -- basically ordering up a traffic jam to punish New Jerseyans who did not support the governor.

"It was an awful, callous indifferent thing to do," he said -- only when he was asked -- of the political vendetta carried out by his close aides.  He spent far more time holding forth on what their lies had done to him.

Authentic apology is a tricky thing to pull off in politics, which is why it so seldom occurs.  Plausible deniability must be preserved.  True contrition has to be displayed.  Traitors to the cause must be immediately be jettisoned.  Most of all, the goal is to stop the bleeding.

I watched Hillary Clinton do this in the White House East Room years ago as she sought to tamp down a brewing scandal involving her old Little Rock law firm.  It was later tagged the "pretty in pink" press conference because of the color she chose to wear.  It went on, I recall, for a long time.

Anthony Weiner apologized too, more than once.  David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer did too.  President Obama admitted his administration "screwed up" the rollout of his signature health care plan.  Trey Radel, the Florida congressman who got caught purchasing cocaine, expressed tearful regret to members of his party caucus when he returned to Washington from rehab this week.

The ritual is always fascinating to watch, and three cable networks hung with Christie's mea culpa for the entire time.

I was reminded of what authentic apologies can look like when Melissa Harris-Perry, an MSNBC host, took to her own airwaves to apologize for a discussion on a year-end panel on her program with comedians that briefly mocked a photograph of Mitt Romney holding one of his grandchildren, who is African American.  It was tasteless.

She did not blame her staff, although she could have.  She did not blame the comedians who made the unfunny joke.  She just said, flat out, that it was an insensitive thing to say, that she was in charge, and that the Romneys had the right to be offended.

Romney accepted the apology right away.

This sort of honest exchange seldom occurs with anyone searching for an elevated life in elective office.  Christie, who enjoys enthusiastically batting down speculation about his presidential ambitions, made sure he was most offended by being lied to by staff he trusted.

"I was being led to believe by folks around me that there was no basis to this," he said.  "I was wrong."

This is where plausibility deniability comes in.  Christie fired his deputy chief of staff and directed another top political adviser to step aside.  But he apparently never spoke to them directly.

"The political nature of this would lead to charges of interference," he said.  "I'm just trying to be a safe and careful steward of the public trust."

Trust is, of course, at the heart of every authentic apology.  In politics and in life, the trust only holds if the water torture ends.

CYBERCRIME - Update, 70 Million Additional Target Customers At Risk by Breach

"Target:  Up to 70 million more customers were hit by December data breach" by Amrita Jayakumar, Washington Post 1/10/2014

Target said Friday that the massive cyber attack it suffered during the height of the holiday shopping season may have affected an additional 70 million customers and swept up far more information than it originally reported.

The giant retailer told customers in December that up to 40 million customers’ credit and debit card information had been stolen.  But now the company says that an additional 70 million customers also may have had their personal information — including names, mailing addresses, e-mail address and phone numbers — stolen.

There could be some overlap between the groups, said Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder, but the total number of shoppers affected by the attack may be more than 100 million.

Friday’s announcement is the result of an ongoing investigation into the security breach, Target said.  The company is working with the Secret Service and the Department of Justice to determine who was behind the attack.

“I know that it is frustrating for our guests to learn that this information was taken, and we are truly sorry they are having to endure this,” Gregg Steinhafel, Target’s chairman, president and chief executive officer said in a statement.  “I also want our guests to know that understanding and sharing the facts related to this incident is important to me and the entire Target team.”

Affected customers will be sent an e-mail providing them with general security tips, the retailer said.  No personal information would be requested in the e-mail.  In addition, Target is offering one year of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection to shoppers whose payment data was stolen. Customers are not liable for any fraudulent charges made to their cards as a result of the breach, the company said.

The company has a list of tips for shoppers as well as follow-up measures on its Web site.

Customers should be on the lookout for “consumer scams,” Snyder said.

The attack that was reported in December resulted in the theft of credit card and debit card data from Target customers who had shopped at the store between Nov. 27 and Dec 15.  The 3-digit security code found on the back of payment cards was also taken at the time.

The breach highlighted vulnerabilities in the massive, interconnected shopping systems used for billions of dollars of retail transactions every day.  Customers at Target’s nearly 1,800 stores in the United States were potentially affected, though those who shopped online were not, the company said.

Target’s breach was already one of the largest ever reported, according to security experts, and occurred during the critical holiday shopping season.  Already fearing that budget-strapped consumers would scale back their spending, the company offered 10 percent off all in-store purchases after the attack.

“In light of the recent data breach, our top priority is taking care of our guests and helping them feel confident in shopping at Target,” John Mulligan, Target’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.

Target also cut its fourth-quarter earnings forecast and said it expects sales to decline by 2.5 percent in that quarter.

“While we are disappointed in our 2013 performance, we continue to manage our business with great discipline and leverage our expense optimization efforts to reinvest in multichannel initiatives that generate long-term value for our shareholders,” Mulligan said.

SPACE - Message From the Interstellar Safety Council, Humans Terrifyingly Dangerous

"What if the rest of the alien universe was terrified of humans?" by Casey Chan, Sploid 1/9/2014

In almost every scifi movie worth re-watching, it seems that us humans are always less technologically advanced, dumber and only serve as a mere speed bump into an alien race eliminating humans to take over our planet and suck Earth dry of its resources.  We're always the weaker ones in alien wars.  Well, what if we're not?  Tom Scott imagined a scenario where everyone else in the universe was afraid of humans.  It's fantastic.

The premise of the video, Danger: Humans, is simple, it's a PSA from the Interstellar Safety Council notifying alien races how terrifyingly dangerous and awful humans can be.  The video is perfect because it turns basic everyday things that humans do into something much more frightening (and completely true), like eating other life forms for sustenance.  The PSA video also admits some of our weak points which is our need for oxygen and comedically, our self-delusion but it does stress that if humans reach another planet that has oxygen, we will take it over.

It's fascinating to imagine the other side in a scifi story, like if we were the aliens who invaded somebody else's home planet and wanted to take it over and not the other way around (as it is in most movies).  It's a premise—humans as the bad guys—that should be explored in more movies and stories.  We don't know what's out there, we don't know where we rank, so why can't we be the people most feared in the universe?

SPACE - The "Hand of God"

"'Hand of God' captured in NASA image" by Jolie Lee, USA Today 1/10/2014

What looks like an X-ray of a hand is actually the remains of a star that has exploded 17,000 light-years away.

The astronomers who captured this image with a NASA space telescope are calling it the "Hand of God."

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," said Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in a statement from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission.

What the image shows is a pulsar wind nebula, a dying star and the cloud of materials left over from the star after it exploded.  The particles are interacting with nearby magnetic fields, causing the particles to glow in the image, according to NuSTAR.

It's unclear if the nebula looks like a hand because of the way the particles are interacting with the magnetic fields, or if the particles are actually shaped like a hand.

NuSTAR says the star itself is about 12 miles in diameter and is spinning at nearly seven times a second.  As the star spins, it spews particles "upheaved during the star's violent death."

The NuSTAR space telescope was launched in June 2012 with the goal of observing black holes, dead and exploded stars and "other extreme objects," according to NuSTAR.

U.S. INFRASTRUCTURE - Bipartisan Push to Revitalize

It is important to note that this type of spending CREATES jobs and promotes transportation infrastructure.

But I expect that the Money-Worshiping Republicans will insist it be paid for by cuts to programs that help ordinary citizens, no matter how good it would be for our nation.  It a part of their psyche that nothing is worth spending money if it's too expensive in their eyes (aka does not benefit their rich paymasters).

"LaHood, Rendell make bipartisan push to revitalize America's infrastructure" PBS Newshour 1/8/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Finally tonight, a conversation about rebuilding the country's roads, bridges and other critical components, as seen through the lens of American competitiveness.

Infrastructure investment rarely captures national attention, until there's a tragic failure or accident, such as the 160-foot chunk of Washington State's Skagit River Bridge that suddenly gave way in May, the deadly 2007 collapse of the 1-35 bridge spanning the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the historic failure of New Orleans' levee system during 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

But some experts say the problems are exacerbated by a lack of investment that can leave the nation's transportation, communications, and energy networks outdated and unreliable.

Still, there's been more investment in the years since the recession began, the most prominent being President Obama's 2009 stimulus bill.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as it was called, allocated $150 billion to a wide array of public works projects.  While the stimulus fund has expired now, the president has continued to press Congress for more spending.

Build America's Future link

WAR ON POVERTY - 50th Anniversary and No Victory

"50 years on, what strides have we made in the war on poverty?" PBS Newshour 1/8/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson launched a broad platform to abolish American poverty.  Fifty years later, Kwame Holman looks back on the historic legislation, while Jeffrey Brown talks to presidential historian Robert Dallek, Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink, and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University about our progress.

ALSO SEE:

"The War on Poverty:  Not Just a Liberal Campaign"

"Who Counts as Poor in America?"

EDUCATION - Questioning Zero Tolerance Rules in Schools

"Are some U.S. school discipline policies too punitive?" PBS Newshour 1/8/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  The Obama administration made a big move today on the question of school discipline policies around the country.  It issued new guidelines to urge school administrators to ensure they are not being overly zealous with strict punishments for students that are sometimes called zero tolerance rules.

The Departments of Education and Justice warned schools to make sure they are being fair and equitable and that they are complying with civil rights laws.

Two years ago, the NewsHour's Tom Bearden looked into a story in Texas that was drawing international attention to the unintended consequences of such policies, often for minority students.

TOM BEARDEN (Newshour):  Seventeen-year-old Diane Tran is still upset after spending 24 hours in jail for missing class.  The 11th grade honor student in Willis, Texas, was locked up for contempt of court after being warned by a justice of the peace to stop skipping school.

The judge who issued that warning in April sentenced her to jail last month when the absences continued.

LANNY MORIARTY, judge:  If you let one of them run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them?  Let them go too?

TOM BEARDEN:  But after Houston's KHOU reported her story, the international spotlight fell on Tran and Texas' school truancy laws, laws that were originally crafted in the mid-19th century to keep kids in class and prevent parents from pulling them out to work in the fields and then later in factories.

But for students like Tran, life is more complicated than it used to be.  She is a straight-A student who holds down two jobs in order to help support her younger sister and another sibling in college.

SYRIA - Chemical Weapon Destruction Update

"Ongoing conflict slows chemical weapons shipments out of Syria" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 1/8/2014

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Chemical weapons are finally being shipped out of Syria.  But getting the stockpile of raw materials for poison gas and nerve agents destroyed has proven to be a uniquely complicated challenge.

Even as chemical weapons leave Syria, the deadly conventional war continues.  Outside Damascus today, men rushed to rescue children trapped in rubble after an airstrike blasted a house.  More explosions in Latakia province, where military helicopters buzzed overhead, dropping possible barrel bombs.  Miles away, in the port city of the same name, chemical weapon ingredients are arriving from across the country, brought by Russian armored vehicles.

But fighting has slowed the shipments, which were supposed to begin last month.  A Danish ship finally departed yesterday with the first batch, nine containers believed to hold about 700 metric tons of precursors for creating mustard and sarin gas.

MICHAEL LUHAN, Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons:  We're happy to see that there is finally movement.

GWEN IFILL:  Today, the group overseeing the effort, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, noting the delay, urged the Syrian regime to pick up the pace.

MICHAEL LUHAN:  Certainly, we are exhorting the Syrian government to intensify its efforts, so that we can conclude this critical part of this mission absolutely as fast as the conditions allow.

GWEN IFILL:  Under a U.N. plan, naval vessels from a number of countries will escort the chemical agents to an undisclosed port in Italy.  There, they will be transferred to a U.S. Navy ship, the Cape Ray.  It's been outfitted with a special chamber that heats chemical agents and renders them inert.

The U.N. has given Syria until the end of June to destroy its chemical arsenal and everything associated with it.

"In goal to destroy Syria's chemical weapons, security conditions are big unknown" PBS Newshour 1/8/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  For Syria, a country at war with itself, the process of removing and destroying its dangerous arsenal comes with great and evolving challenges.  Gwen Ifill talks to Sigrid Kaag of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons about the logistical, diplomatic and security complications at play.

WALL STREET - Chastened Investors

"Investors Are Chastened.  That’s A Good Thing." by Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica 1/8/2014

What a spectacular year was 2013.

Markets boomed.  Stocks hit a record, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up almost 30 percent, the best performance in almost 16 years.  Capital-raising is back, baby, with initial public offerings, like the one for Twitter, giving us that sweet 1990s feeling all over again.  Investment banks had a great year.

In previous eras, all of this might have been enthusiastically celebrated.  Street vendors would break out Dow 16,000 hats.  The chief executive of Snapchat would be named Time magazine’s man of the year, children’s division.  The media would serve up adulatory profiles of successful investors, glorious winners, implying they had achieved something close to heroic.

This time around, reaction is tempered.  We are older and more jaded.  It’s almost as if we are displaying wisdom.

Well, maybe that goes too far, but at a minimum, people know not to be too excited.  Today, these successes are underscored with three vital observations: that the exuberance could just as easily disappear, leaving a crash in its wake; that strong capital markets don’t necessarily signify a strong economy; and that the gains are unequal.

Sadly, those hard lessons had to be won by living through two huge bubbles, stagnating wages and an economy suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome.

First, the most widely and easily grasped lesson.  There is an innate skepticism about the stock market.  Investors and the media voice a steady undercurrent of concern about high valuations.  I did research on the news search service Factiva for mentions of the “Dow Jones industrial average” and “bubble,” comparing 2013 with the great bubble year of 1999.  Last year, 1,832 articles shared both terms, while in 1999, there were only 1,342.

Perhaps we are not in a bubble today — it’s something that doesn’t have a clear definition, after all.  Perhaps in many of those articles, bubbles are mentioned only to dismiss the notion that we are experiencing one.  Perhaps investors in those articles are invoking the cliché that stocks have more room to rise because they can climb the proverbial wall of worry.  (In investing circles, markets are due to rise if there is a sufficient number of worried people on the sidelines, holding their money back.)  No matter.  It’s a good sign that bubble-caution lines the intestines of investors and the media.

Bubble-consciousness means that investors, the media and the public may finally be mistrustful.  Considering how treacherous the markets are, that mistrust is warranted.

In more financially naïve times, the stock market served as shorthand, a neat little number that told us whether the United States had a good day or poor one, depending on whether the market went up or down.  That antiquated notion has been more or less retired.  Now, when we see the markets doing well, we understand that it has little to tell us about the broader economy.  Large publicly traded companies make up a small portion of the overall economy, and large portions of their profits come from overseas.  The Dow Jones industrial average accounts for a relatively small sliver of employment and wages.  Today, job growth remains weak, while the portion of employment-age workers is low.  The stock market is not us.

So as companies’ profits zoom upward, we react more cautiously.  Last year, corporate profit margins were about twice as high as where they have been on average since World War II, according to the economist Mark Zandi.  Investors care about whether those margins are sustainable.  Investors think about margins relative to the price of stocks.

But the public — especially the non-stock-investing portion — doesn’t.  Today, the public cares more about the other side of the corporate equation: wages.  Median income hasn’t gone up in more than a decade and is actually down from the late 1990s, when adjusted for inflation.  Those rising profits reflect companies’ success in keeping labor costs low.

Investment banking fees rose 3 percent, to almost $80 billion globally, the best year since 2007, according to Thomson Reuters.  I need not remind you that was the year before the crash.  Bonuses for traders and bankers will provide plenty of rolling-on-a-pile-of-money time.  The bonuses will be especially lucrative for those paid in deferred stock of their own banks, the current solution to linking pay to performance.

But again, we understand how to interpret that.  High profits at financial firms mean that someone, somewhere has taken on added risk.  And it also means that we have a simple number to use when assessing how seriously to take the constant whining from bankers about how governments are regulating them out of existence and threatening our capitalist way of life.

The wealth of billionaires soared.  In a measure of 300 billionaires, Bloomberg News calculated that they added more than half a trillion dollars to their fortunes last year for an aggregate total of $3.7 trillion.  Today, no longer is the 1 percent viewed through the prism of celebration and envy.  Now, wealth is inextricably linked to income inequality.  Half of the United States population is either poor or “near poor,” according to census statistics.

We haven’t solved the problems of depressed employment and wages, widening income inequality or inequitable economic growth.  But at least we are beginning to define the issues correctly.  The interesting test will be whether the lessons we seem to have learned will stick this time.  Or will these niggling complications invading our prosperity be sloughed off as the markets continue to rise?

SAN DIEGO - Police Department

"What It Means to Be ‘Black While Blue’" by Liam Dillon, Voice of San Diego 1/8/2014

Benjamin Kelso thinks parents in minority-dominated areas of San Diego should be aware of the color of clothes their children wear.  Their children might draw negative attention from police who think they’re in a gang, he said.

Kelso knows because he’s a police officer.  And he knows because in the early 1990s, fellow San Diego police officers pulled him over for wearing blue and driving a blue Cadillac.

Kelso now heads the San Diego Black Police Officers Association and he’s risen to become a detective sergeant in SDPD’s domestic violence unit.

He said police and community race relations have improved since he’s been on the force, but SDPD still has a long way to go.  We spoke with Kelso for our investigation into the department’s approach to racial profiling issues.

He talked about how his organization’s appearance at Trayvon Martin marches led some SDPD officers to question his loyalty to the force and how certain police practices have upset minority community members.

Q: Can you talk about how the department has changed since when you were pulled over?

A lot of things have changed, not just department-wide.  If we look at our national views on race relations over the past 20 to 30 years, let’s go back further, from the Civil Rights era forward, there’s been significant change, significant progress leading up to now.  There’s been significant progress on the San Diego Police Department.

Being openly racist is not condoned.  In fact, it’s shunned.  In some cases it’s disciplined when it’s brought out, when it’s discovered.

The gray area is those situations that lie in between – that could have racial connotations but they also have justifiable law enforcement applications, so to speak.  That’s that crossroad between criminal profiling and racial profiling.  Depending on the circumstances and the situation, one could be deemed totally justifiable where another one may not be.

They have certainly not solved any sort of larger context race relations problem.  Are there officers in the police department that are racist?  Certainly.  Of every color.  Because racism is still alive and well in the United States.  It’s just not open.

Q: Can you give me an example of the blurred line between criminal and racial profiling?

Because people of different races commit crimes race can’t be completely eliminated as a potential factor in a certain crime.  If a robbery is committed and the perpetrator happens to be black, that’s probably the No. 1 criteria associated with that.  But you can’t use that alone as the basis for a stop.  Otherwise we go back to what we had in the pre-Civil Rights era.

Q: All of the experts we’ve spoken with and folks in the community have said the key issue with respect to racial profiling is the issue of trust between the community and law enforcement.  When profiling incidents happen here, do they erode trust within the community?

They do erode trust.  They create problems.  They create political backlash, so to speak.  They ultimately wind up being situations that organizations like the Black Police Officers Association or the Latino Police Officers or some of the other minority organizations within law enforcement, we work in those communities to build those bridges again, to repair that damage, to try to keep those lines of communications open for when something goes wrong.  It’s not a contest of loyalties because we’re law enforcement officers first and foremost.  But even that gets questioned.

The damaging thing, the hurtful thing, is to have individuals that we work with question our loyalty because we are out trying to solve a problem, trying to mend a fence.

Q: Can you give an example?

The Trayvon Martin situation was certainly a nationally volatile situation.  It raised a lot of community concerns.  There were a lot of protests, marches.  Nationwide.

We attend those things.  Then we have officers that know who we are, see who we are.  We’re identifiable as law enforcement, but we’re in the crowd at those things to help show the community that we support you.  We don’t necessarily have to believe what your organization believes or whatever.  But we support your right to protest, we support your right to feel pain about something that has happened in law enforcement.

Those things are huge.  Those things build huge amounts of trust between us and the community.  But it has a backlash.  Everything has a cost.  We get dirty looks from officers on the periphery that are watching the thing wondering,  “What’re they doing there?  Are they with them or are they with us?  What is going on?”

Q: So that happened?  You were at events and you sort of got a side-eye from other folks on the force?

Yeah.  It became a big topic of discussion.  People actually bring up questions.  Officers do.  They come out with it: “Well, what would have happened if there would have been a riot?  Who would you have sided with?”

Q: That happened?

That question did come up, yeah.  Obviously we keep those things in-house and we talk about those things.  I had a very candid conversation with one individual who brought that subject up, as did others.  When it ended, the individual walked away with a better understanding of what we’re here for and what we’re about.  But what was it that made him question it?  Only he can say what that was.

Q: What can police leadership do to address these kinds of issues?

Supporting efforts for training, making mandates that people should be treated fairly.  I’m not saying that they don’t, either.  I’m saying that if executive leadership supports change, change takes place.

I’ll bring up a prime example: making people sit on the curb.  It has a safety concern for officers.  In certain situations when an officer is outnumbered, it’s reasonable.  But when suddenly those situations become the common practice for everyone, everyone at least in those areas, maybe it’s not so reasonable.

Maybe the commanding officers can get involved in those sorts of things, and say, you know what, if you need to do something like that because it’s a legitimate safety concern, do that.  But when help arrives, move the person, have them sit in the back of the police car.  Or have them sit in the back of the police car from the beginning if you can.

Because [sitting on the curb] is not the procedure that’s taught in the police academy – that is a cultural thing that’s taught in the field by other officers.  It’s demeaning.

When we bring that up to officers, it’s actually met with anger sometimes.  Because the cultural belief is that doing so impacts their safety.  Now, by asking you to not put a person on the curb, you are now asking me to not be safe.  And I want to go home at the end of the night.  That’s not what the issue is at all.

Q: City Councilman David Alvarez said at a mayoral debate that it’s come to his attention that cultural competency training within the department might not be as strong as it used to be.  Have you seen any changes to it?

Have I seen changes in cultural competency training over the years?  Yes.  Specific programs?  I can’t name specific programs.  I can only say that the training of today is not what it was once in the past.  I think that those trainings should always be a part of ongoing training to help people deal with recognizing the impact of our actions as law enforcement officers.

We do a lot of things because we can and not necessarily because we have to.  I guess we have to know where the intersection is of taking an action.  Is this action absolutely necessary, or am I taking this action simply because I can take the action without consequence?

I think nationally we feel like we don’t have race problems anymore.  We believe we’re post-racial. San Diego PD, do they feel they’re post-racial?  Probably.  But we know that we’re not.

"San Diego Has Fallen Behind on Combating Police Racial Profiling" by Liam Dillon and Megan Burks, Voice of San Diego 1/8/2014

The San Diego Police Department and its chief, William Lansdowne, used to be national leaders in addressing concerns about racial profiling.  Now they’re not.

More than a decade ago, San Diego police were among the first to use data to examine how frequently officers targeted minorities in traffic stops.  Today, that policy has become the norm in big urban departments across the country.  But in San Diego, the effort has largely fallen by the wayside.  Officers here now track race in fewer than one out of every five stops and a sergeant in the department’s research and analysis division wasn’t aware that the requirement to gather the information still existed when we asked about it.

Lansdowne isn’t troubled by the decrease in the department’s data collection efforts.  He and his top deputies said residents don’t believe racial profiling is a problem.

“It hasn’t come up in years and years and years in interactions with the community,” said Assistant Chief Shelley Zimmerman, who’s in charge of the department’s neighborhood policing efforts.

But those who monitor San Diego police don’t share that perspective.  The head of the local Black Police Officers Association, the president of the local NAACP and a city councilman all said racial profiling happens in San Diego and they hear about it.

“Everyone knows it exists,” said Lei-Chala Wilson, the local NAACP president.

And city taxpayers recently had to foot the bill for an incident where police officers stopped young minorities for no reason.

This spring, a federal judge ruled that two officers violated the Fourth Amendment rights of two black residents, Dante Harrell and Shannon Robinson, during a City Heights traffic stop in 2010.  Harrell and Robinson’s lawsuit didn’t specifically allege racial profiling, but Harrell said he believed the stop happened because police look for reasons to pull over minorities in minority neighborhoods.  The city agreed to settle the case last month for $450,000.

The lawsuit and renewed national scrutiny over racial profiling got Lansdowne’s attention.  He has ordered a new round of data collection on race at traffic stops, saying profiling has again become an issue in San Diego.

Criminal justice experts, however, say racial profiling is always an issue: Incidents can erode trust between police and the communities they serve.  For some people of color who believe San Diego police officers have pulled them over for that alone, the traffic stops have taken their toll.

"Nobody that I know or myself do I feel safe around [police],” said Abdihakim Afewerki, a 26-year-old engineering student who is black.  Afewerki frequently spends time in Encanto and Lincoln Park.  “In my eyes, they're not there to protect me, they're there to harass me.”


‘We Can’t Be Afraid to Look at the Statistics’

In the late 1990s, civil rights groups in San Jose demanded action after allegations emerged of racial profiling in traffic stops.  Lansdowne, San Jose’s police chief at the time, responded.

His department pledged to gather race and ethnicity information voluntarily on traffic stops to see how frequently officers pulled over people of color.  Criminal justice researchers hailed Lansdowne as the "father of data collection" on police racial profiling.

"We can't be afraid to look at the statistics," Lansdowne said when San Jose released its initial 1999 report, which showed only small disparities between minorities stopped and the citywide population.

But more than a decade later, Lansdowne, San Diego's chief for the last 10 years, has few statistics to look at.

The San Diego Police Department has had a policy to collect race and ethnicity data during traffic stops since 2000, making it one of the first big urban departments to do so, along with San Jose.  The department has told officers they needed to gather this information multiple times in the years since.

But the message didn’t stick.  A sergeant in the department’s research and analysis division wasn’t aware that a data collection policy still existed when we asked in late October.

“We do not keep any demographics on traffic stops,” Sgt. Laura McLean told us in an email.

It turns out officers were keeping demographics on traffic stops – just not very much.  In the first 10 months of 2013, officers gathered racial information on roughly 16,000 traffic stops, an amount equivalent to about a fifth of the citations issued over the same time.  Officers pulled over an untold number of additional drivers without giving them tickets – or noting their race.  Many officers gathered the information diligently, police officials said, but the amount of data the department collected decreased substantially over time.

Lansdowne said the effort slowed because no one demanded the department analyze racial profiling in traffic stops, so he didn’t emphasize the requirement to collect the data.  In the meantime, other law enforcement agencies have surpassed the San Diego Police Department when it comes to being proactive on the issue.

Seven of the 10 largest police departments in the country currently have policies requiring them to gather race and ethnicity information on traffic or pedestrian stops even if officers don’t arrest or cite the person stopped.  An eighth department, Washington D.C., documents the race of those frisked by police.

These data are the cornerstone of a high-profile legal challenge over the New York City Police Department’s practice of stopping and frisking pedestrians in an effort to fight crime.  Researchers found 84 percent of those stopped and frisked by New York police were black or Hispanic.  Civil rights groups have argued these numbers show the practice is unconstitutionally biased against minorities.

Researchers who study the issue say data collection is a key part of a larger effort, along with robust diversity training and strict anti-bias policies, to prevent racial profiling.

“If there is a spirit and culture of transparency and accountability in the department, they’ll collect the data,” said Carol Archbold, a criminal justice professor who specializes in racial profiling issues at North Dakota State University.

SATIRE - 'Noted' Climatologist Donald Trump

Noted climatologist Donald Trump weighs in on global warming, and a Fox & Friends report targets Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Colbert Nation
"Donald Trump and Fox & Friends vs. Global Warming"
The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

POLITICS - Long-Term Unemployment Debate

"Should lawmakers extend emergency benefits for long-term unemployed?" PBS Newshour 1/6/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Emergency benefits for the long-term unemployed stopped for 1.3 million Americans at the end of December.  Kwame Holman recaps the political debate over restarting those payments.  Gwen Ifill gets perspectives from Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum on how to address unemployment.

"Senate advances bill to restore benefits for long-term unemployed" PBS Newshour 1/7/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A bill that would restore benefits to the long-term unemployed cleared its first hurdle when six Senate Republicans voted with the Democrats to limit debate.  The measure would extend unemployment benefits to 1.3 million Americans for three months while lawmakers work on a long-term deal.  Kwame Holman reports.

WEATHER - Polar Vortex Descends on U.S.

BOY!  Am I glad I live in San Diego (Southern California).

"Polar vortex descends on U.S. with dangerously low temperatures" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 1/6/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A cyclone of arctic air known as a polar vortex stretched from the Dakotas to the deep South, bringing wind chill warnings on the heels of near-blizzard conditions in some regions.  Several Midwest states shut schools and urged everyone to stay inside, while airlines canceled thousands of flights.  Gwen Ifill reports.

"Confronting bitter weather, Midwest mayors address help for vulnerable citizens" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 1/6/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Gwen Ifill talks to Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay about the precautions they are taking in their cities and what special help they offer for citizens like the elderly and the impoverished who may be in greater danger during this winter chill.

"Polar vortex chills Americans with another day of record cold temperatures" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 1/7/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The polar vortex held its grip over the U.S., bringing frigid winds to places accustomed to cold winters and even sending ice and snow into the Deep South.  The record negative temperatures caused some towns in Indiana to lose power and stranded train passengers near Chicago.  Judy Woodruff reports.

"How a winter 'wobble' brought freezing North Pole temperatures to the U.S." (Part-2) PBS Newshour 1/7/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The strong winds that normally keep the masses of very cold air contained near the North Pole weakened this week, allowing frigid temperatures to reach down into the United States.  Judy Woodruff talks to Andrew Freedman of Climate Central about the science behind the polar vortex.

HUMOR - Dilbert, On Being Insightful

Dilbert
1/6/2014

CLIMATE CHANGE - New York City Ex-Mayor's Legacy

"What will Bloomberg’s legacy on climate change be?" PBS Newshour 1/5/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  Michael Bloomberg left office a few days ago after serving twelve years as the mayor of New York City and people are already trying to assess his legacy.  Some pointed to the city’s plunging crime rate, others to its soaring real estate prices, and income inequality.  Still, others to the mayor’s health initiatives.  When I spoke with Reporter Katherine Bagley, of Inside Climate News, she said it was something else altogether.  I began by asking her why she considers the mayor’s efforts to address climate change to be so significant.

KATHERINE BAGLEY, Inside Climate News:  So, he has been working for the past six years on sustainability and climate change initiatives, and it is something that gets very little attention in the public and by the media, and yet what he has done is both a physical transformation of the city.  And also something that a lot of people do not see; things like reducing emissions and reducing harmful pollutants in the air – things that have public health dangers.

ALSO:

New York Natural Resources Defense Council, Sustainability

New York City Buildings, Sustainability which includes Green Roofs

CANADA - New Vancouver Drunken-Driving Law Cuts Deaths 50%

"Vancouver law cuts drunken-driving deaths in half" PBS Newshour 1/5/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  New drunken-driving laws in British Columbia have led to a dramatic decrease (roughly 50%).  Officials ramped up penalties on drivers who tested at a lower blood alcohol level (.05, as opposed to the current .08 legal standard) and authorized police to immediately impound cars.

MIDDLE EAST - Iran and Hezbollah Deal Threatens Region

"Hezbollah upgrades missile threat to Israel" PBS Newshour 1/5/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  With all the talk the past many months about a possible military conflict between Israel and Iran, a new source of conflict might be emerging.  The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Islamic militant group, Hezbollah, is getting more advanced weaponry that could be far more precise in their attacks.  Charles Levinson was one of the authors of the piece and joins us now.  So, there has been this arms race under the guise of the Syrian war that has been happening in the neighborhood.  Who is getting what kind of weapons?

CHARLES LEVINSON, Wall Street Journal:  Right.  So, when Assad starts losing control in Syria in 2012, Iran and Syria want Hezbollah to lend its expertise to the fight.  Hezbollah was reluctant because of its own domestic political considerations inside Lebanon.  To sweeten the deal, Iran basically offered Hezbollah to upgrade its weapons arsenal from having tens of thousands – about a hundred thousand unguided, dumb bombs and rockets and missiles to having smart, guided missiles that can hit precise targets inside Israel.  So, the weapons transfers that we are looking at so far are the SA-17.  It is an anti-aircraft, sort of highly mobile, advanced anti-aircraft missile that would really threaten Israel’s dominance in the skies above Lebanon, especially its helicopters.  You are talking about the Fato-110, which is very precise within a… I cannot remember the exact… but within a few dozen/few hundred meters let’s say.  A surface-to-surface missile that can reach basically all of Israel, and the same thing called the surface-to-ship/anti-ship missile, which can basically take out any Israeli (or U.S.) ship patrolling the Mediterranean off the coast of Lebanon.

CHILDREN - Music and Young Brains

"Making sure young brains get the benefits of music training" PBS Newshour 1/4/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The percentage of students receiving music education has been in decline for decades.  The Harmony Project, a music program for inner-city kids in Los Angeles partners with a neurobiologist to study the impact of music training on the learning skills of poor children.
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DR. NINA KRAUS, neurobiologist at Northwestern University:  There have been a number of studies.  And the language abilities seem to be strengthened by the music instruction more than the art.  And so these language-based skills seem to profit from music instruction.

JOSH ARONSON :  The Harmony Project has 17 sites in Los Angeles and one in Ventura.  And there are 16 more in three other states.

CONDUCTOR:  Here we go.  From the Allegro.  Measure 37…

JOSH ARONSON:  What are the goals, where do you want to take this?

MARGARET MARTIN:  Oh man, my dream is to build Harmony Project programs in inner cities throughout the country because our students are achieving their unique potential.  They are blossoming.

OPINION - Shields and Brooks 1/3/2014

"Shields and Brooks discuss how government can address economic inequality" PBS Newshour 1/3/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's top political news, including the inauguration of New York's new Mayor Bill de Blasio and his pledge to address economic inequality, plus how new laws on legal marijuana signal a U.S. cultural shift.

MEDICAID - Upsurge in ER Visits by the Newly Covered, Trend or Hype

COMMENT:   Medicaid serves the poor, which do not have an experience with preventive medicine visits to a doctor, the DO have a long experience of using the Emergency Room.  So it will take some time to teach them to use their doctors vs the ER now that they are covered.

This study was taken much too soon to be definitive.

"Study on ER visits by people with Medicaid challenges theory they would go less" PBS Newshour 1/3/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  A study published in the journal "Science" this week found that low-income people with Medicaid insurance go to the emergency room about 40 percent more often than their uninsured counterparts do.  The study raised questions about the long-held theory that extending Medicaid coverage to more Americans would cut down on emergency room use.

It involved thousands of poor people in the Portland, Oregon, area, and it was part of the Oregon health insurance experiment.

Hari Sreenivasan takes the story from there.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  Joining me to discuss this now report is Katherine Baicker.  She is the professor of health economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and was one of the authors of the report.