Month: December 2014

When it comes to helping families in need,
the Salvation Army turns a cold shoulder to one class of people:
Teenage boys. A family in Johnson City, TN, found this out recently
when, on a freezing cold night, they asked the organization for
shelter. But because their family of five contained a 15-year-old
boy, they were turned down. 

As the dad, Tim Lejeune, explained to WMC Action News 5:

“They said he’s too old to stay on the women’s side, because of
the women running around in their pajamas and they said he’s too
young to stay on the men’s side in case some pervert wants to do
whatever,” Lejeune said.

Lejeune says his wife, their 15 year-old son, 16 year-old
daughter and five year-old son, all down on their luck, have been
living in their car for the last several weeks.

So instead the family headed to their car. The temperature: 18
degrees.

Somehow, local police officers came upon them and brought them
to the Johnson Inn. The officers then pooled their money to pay for
a room. When the night clerk figured out what was going on, he
comped the room, so the officers’ money went to groceries for the
family.

Meantime, 911 dispatchers who had been in on the action
pooled their money to provide the
Lejeunes some more food.

And after that, the Salvation Army did take the family in—minus
the teen boy.

He’s not sleeping on
the streets. He’s now in a mental health facility. He had a breakdown, his
dad says, because he thought it was his fault the family was turned
away from shelter.

I blame a society so obsessed with sex crimes and predators that
it has lost its mind. It cannot imagine a 15-year-old male, chilled
to the bone, simply and gratefully sleeping through the night. In
our worst-first fantasies, which we give the weight of fact, all
young men are either innocent victims about to be violated by
predators, or predators eager to prey upon innocent victims.

The Salvation Army told WMC it is now reconsidering its
longstanding prejudice against teen boys.

That should make us all sleep a little easier.

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Michael
Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson,
Missouri, in August. Protests over the shooting yielded a
militarized response from police. Renewed protests continued in
October and again after a grand jury declined to indict Darren
Wilson, the officer who shot Brown. The Brown shooting may have
been a flash point for civil rights protesters. It’s also provided
an opportunity for politicians to attach themselves to the highly
publicized incident and score political points for themselves.

Yesterday, for example, four members of Congress
raised their hands on the House Floor to “show solidarity with
the protesters” in Ferugson. Those four are Reps. Yvette Clarke
(D-NY), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), and Al
Green (D-Tex.). All four voted AGAINST an amendment in July that
would’ve limited the transfer of military equipment from the
Department of Defense to local police agencies.

It’s just another reminder for protesters more interested in
policy reforms than partisan agendas that elected leaders, by and
large, are only interested in how they look vis a vis police issues
and not what they can do to improve the situation.

President Obama’s announcement on police militarization, for
example, included no roll backs, just more bureaucracy, which
promises more inertia. Nevertheless, the move was
hailed as some kind of progress on the state of policing,
including by Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), who represents Ferguson and
also voted against limiting police militarization in July.

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Yesterday I
noted that the Oath Keepers, a controversial group that
I’ve covered
in the past, had organized rooftop anti-arson patrols in
Ferguson, Missouri—and that police there had ordered them to stop.
Here are some updates on the story:

• The Oath Keepers are
challenging the order in court. The authorities
“claim that they had a St. Louis County ordinance that prevented
anyone from securing a building or conducting a security operation
without a St. Louis County license,” one of the group’s organizers,
Sam Andrews,
tells KTVI. The Oath Keepers intend to argue that the
regulation restricts businesses, not volunteers.

• The rooftop patrols have not ceased entirely.
There are a number of retired cops in the Oath Keepers, and they’re
still on the roofs. “They’re exempt from local regulations about
security,” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes
explains to Vice. “[But] you shouldn’t have to be a
cop to do the right thing by your neighbors.”

• The group is about to try its hand at community
organizing. More from Rhodes: “When I get [to Ferguson],
my main goal is going to be to organize the community and encourage
them to start their own neighborhood watches. They don’t need
outside help. They should be able to do it themselves. We’re going
to offer assistance in training them.”

Rhodes also gave Vice this explanation for the Oath
Keepers’ interest in the situation:

in Ferguson, what they’re being told is you only have
two choices: 1) a hyper-militarized police state to stop violence,
including arson, or 2) let it go and burn the town down. Twenty
different buildings have burned to the ground. That’s a false
choice.

For Ferguson in particular if…they don’t believe that the police
department is legitimate, they should be protecting themselves and
secure themselves because the more they secure themselves, the less
reason there is for the police to be in their neighborhoods and
communities. So they should take care of themselves for both
reasons—to be secure, but also to be more free.

In addition to charging the authorities with failing to protect
people (“it became apparent on Monday that the National Guard was
only guarding government buildings”), Rhodes criticizes them for
the ways they’ve mistreated peaceful protesters in the past few
months, accusing the police of “gross violations of free
speech and assembly, shooting rubber bullets at everybody, pointing
their guns at everybody, spraying CS gas at everybody.”

It’s not surprising that local business owners
appear to be pleased with the guards. More interestingly,
Andrews claims that the Oath Keepers and the protesters have been
getting along, despite some initial mistrust: “Once they got to
know us they said, ‘We’re so glad you’re here. Thank you for
coming; we appreciate everything you’re doing.'” On the other hand,
there have also been exchanges like this one. Rhodes
calls the reaction to the group “mixed.”

I wrote a feature on the Oath Keepers and their critics four
years ago; you can read that article here.
I discussed their activities in Ferguson here
and
here. For yet more from Reason on the group, go
here.

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Outgoing Attorney General Eric
Holder is making the rounds, promising that the Department of
Justice will soon reveal new “guidance” to end racial profiling. He
went so far in a speech in Atlanta to suggest that the feds will
end it “once and for all.” Here’s a quote from the Atlanta CBS
affiliate and Associated Press from his
speech yesterday at Ebeneezer Baptist Church:

“In the coming days, I will announce updated Justice Department
guidance regarding profiling by federal law enforcement. This will
institute rigorous new standards — and robust safeguards — to help
end racial profiling, once and for all,” Holder said. “This new
guidance will codify our commitment to the very highest standards
of fair and effective policing.” …

“We are dealing with concerns that are truly national in scope
and that threaten the entire nation. Broadly speaking, without
mutual understanding between citizens – whose rights must be
respected – and law enforcement officers – who make tremendous and
often-unheralded personal sacrifices every day to preserve public
safety – there can be no meaningful progress,” Holder said. “Our
police officers cannot be seen as an occupying force disconnected
from the communities they serve. Bonds that have been broken must
be restored. Bonds that never existed must now be created.”

Why are the police seen as an “occupying force”? Because the
police, hand in hand with the Department of Justice, have been
perpetuating the drug war for decades. They’re now doing it with
actual military equipment! The administration will not announce an
end to the drug war, and therefore the “occupation” will
continue.

To be fair, the Department of Justice under Holder has made
changes to reduce the use of mandatory minimum sentencing in
non-violent drug cases and increase accessibility to federal
clemency for non-violent crimes. But as long as there is a drug
war, there will be a black market for drugs and money shunted to
police departments (including money from Holder’s own agency).
There will be a drive to get results in a war that cannot possibly
ever be won, and therefore a pursuit for low-hanging fruit. That
would be poor people without the ability to secure skilled lawyers
to protect their interests. And in urban settings that will often
end up hitting minorities hardest. That’s where
communities like Ferguson extract their fines to get the
revenue to keep their governments running.

I also suspect the Department of Justice will not announce
changes to its asset forfeiture program, where the DOJ shares money
and property taken from people suspected of crimes with local law
enforcement agencies. The system has proven to be an incubator for
police abuse and outright theft from citizens from law enforcement
agencies looking to pad their budgets. Yesterday’s
somewhat lackluster report from the White House about police
militarization explored the Equitable Sharing Program and seemed to
determine the program had adequate oversight, pointing out that
five whole law enforcement agencies have been booted from the
program for violations (three of which were civil rights
violations). There isn’t any sort of indication in the report that
the Department of Justice sees any sort of twisted incentives
resulting from the very existence of the program.

So nobody should be holding his or her breath at the possibility
of large changes. The administration and the Department of Justice
still do not acknowledge that the police abuse of communities is a
direct result of the power the government has given them or the
power of police unions to protect officers from being held
responsible for misconduct. Doing so would require believing that
government is the cause of—not the solution to—the abuse of
minorities.

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