Tag: news

Former Cpl. Jay Cicinelli, who after being
acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of
force in the fatal
beating of Kelly Thomas, announced last week that he would
fight to get his job back. In 2012, the Fullerton police department
fired him after Orange County prosecutors pressed charges, and is
standing by its decision.

“I was wrongfully terminated. How do you argue with a jury of 12
who all agree on the same thing?” the officer questioned. Cicinelli
added a surprisingly tone-deaf, woe-is-me claim that his “whole
life has been stopped” because of his involvement in the brutal
treatment of the schizophrenic and homeless Thomas. The cop’s
lawyer, Michael Schwartz, told the Los
Angeles Times that he expects to win the appeal.

Fullerton Chief of Police Dan Hughes has different ideas. He
doesn’t want Cicinelli back on the force. He said,
“Former Police Officer Jay Cicinelli has alleged that he was
wrongfully terminated and has demanded his job back… I stand
behind the employment decisions I have made.”

A local CBS affiliate covered the
Fullerton City Council yesterday, which met to discuss whether or
not they would approve Cicinelli’s appeal. Hughes
reiterated, “Although a terminated employee has the
opportunity to appeal his or her termination through an
administrative appeal process… I intend to vigorously defend my
decisions.” Thomas’ father and numerous other residents
expressed similar sentiments.

David Whiting of The Orange County
Register suggests that
Cicinelli may not actually be qualified to protect and serve, due
to a physical impairment. The officer previously worked for the Los
Angeles Police Department, during which time he was shot and lost
an eye. He was deemed unable to work in the field he has received
retirement compensation from the city since 1996. Whiting points
out the conflict of “agree[ing] you’re a disabled police officer
and then also accept wages for being an able-bodied police
officer.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum makes a strong case for why Cicinelli
and his fellow officer, Manuel Ramos, should not be retried, lest
they be subjected to double jeopardy.

On whether or not that means Cicinelli deserves his job back,
Whiting makes an equally valid point: “A verdict of not guilty
doesn’t necessarily mean a defendant is innocent. And being
acquitted of involuntary manslaughter doesn’t mean the Fullerton
Police Department wrongfully terminated Cicinelli.”

For more coverage from Reason.com on the death of Kelly
Thomas, watch Paul Detrick’s video of protesters who have
spoken out against the Fullerton Police Department below:

Former Cpl. Jay Cicinelli, who after being
acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of
force in the fatal
beating of Kelly Thomas, announced last week that he would
fight to get his job back. In 2012, the Fullerton police department
fired him after Orange County prosecutors pressed charges, and is
standing by its decision.

“I was wrongfully terminated. How do you argue with a jury of 12
who all agree on the same thing?” the officer questioned. Cicinelli
added a surprisingly tone-deaf, woe-is-me claim that his “whole
life has been stopped” because of his involvement in the brutal
treatment of the schizophrenic and homeless Thomas. The cop’s
lawyer, Michael Schwartz, told the Los
Angeles Times that he expects to win the appeal.

Fullerton Chief of Police Dan Hughes has different ideas. He
doesn’t want Cicinelli back on the force. He said,
“Former Police Officer Jay Cicinelli has alleged that he was
wrongfully terminated and has demanded his job back… I stand
behind the employment decisions I have made.”

A local CBS affiliate covered the
Fullerton City Council yesterday, which met to discuss whether or
not they would approve Cicinelli’s appeal. Hughes
reiterated, “Although a terminated employee has the
opportunity to appeal his or her termination through an
administrative appeal process… I intend to vigorously defend my
decisions.” Thomas’ father and numerous other residents
expressed similar sentiments.

David Whiting of The Orange County
Register suggests that
Cicinelli may not actually be qualified to protect and serve, due
to a physical impairment. The officer previously worked for the Los
Angeles Police Department, during which time he was shot and lost
an eye. He was deemed unable to work in the field he has received
retirement compensation from the city since 1996. Whiting points
out the conflict of “agree[ing] you’re a disabled police officer
and then also accept wages for being an able-bodied police
officer.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum makes a strong case for why Cicinelli
and his fellow officer, Manuel Ramos, should not be retried, lest
they be subjected to double jeopardy.

On whether or not that means Cicinelli deserves his job back,
Whiting makes an equally valid point: “A verdict of not guilty
doesn’t necessarily mean a defendant is innocent. And being
acquitted of involuntary manslaughter doesn’t mean the Fullerton
Police Department wrongfully terminated Cicinelli.”

For more coverage from Reason.com on the death of Kelly
Thomas, watch Paul Detrick’s video of protesters who have
spoken out against the Fullerton Police Department below:

In December, in a
speech at the Center for American Progress, President Barack
Obama asserted that “we’ve seen diminished levels of upward
mobility in recent years,” further declaring that “a dangerous and
growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” is “the defining
challenge of our time.”

The president is wrong about “diminished levels of upward
mobility” according to a new
study by economists from Harvard University and the University
of California, Berkeley. Parsing data from the 1950s and 1970s, the
researchers involved with The Equality of
Opportunity Project
find that…

…measures of social mobility have remained stable over the
second half of the twentieth century in the United States.

In 2012, President Obama’s former chairman of his Council of
Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, introduced the concept of the
“Great
Gatsby Curve.” Krueger compared income inequality and income
mobility across countries and found that …

…children from poor families are less likely to improve their
economic status as adults in countries where income inequality was
higher – meaning wealth was concentrated in fewer hands – around
the time those children were growing up.”

In other words, as income inequality increases income mobility
decreases: the poor stay poorer and rich stay richer.

The new study reports that it can find no evidence for the
existence of a “Great Gatsby Curve.” Instead the researchers find
that income inequality has indeed increased in the United states,
which means that “the rungs on the income ladder have grown further
apart,” nevertheless, “children’s chances of climbing from lower to
higher rungs have not changed.”

MIT economist David Autor is
surely right when he tells the Washington Post that
the new results will serve as…

…”a sort of Rorschach” test that will support many economists’
preconceived notions about the effectiveness of government programs
in providing opportunity.

Some could view the results as a failure of programs such as
Pell grants, Head Start and nutritional supplements for children
that are intended to promote mobility. Or, he said, “you can view
this as: Social policies have fought market forces to a draw.”

What factors do retard upward income mobility? Among other
things, being located in the Southeastern United States, greater
residential segregation by race and ethnicity, poor public schools,
residing in areas with lower social capital, and living in
neighborhoods with higher percentages of single-parent
families.

For example, the researchers report…

…the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of
family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the
area. As with race, parents’ marital status does not matter purely
through its effects at the individual level. Children of married
parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in
communities with fewer single parents.

As
Brookings Institution analysts Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins
pointed out more than ten years ago, if a person wants to stay out
of poverty and move up the income brackets, do three things:
graduate high school, get married, and then have kids. My Rorschach
blot test tells me that expanding welfare programs have barely made
up for the deleterious social and economic trends they have
exacerbated over the past 50 years.

For more background, see my recent column, “Why
President Obama is Wrong on Inequality.”

Ahead of the ongoing Syria peace talks in
Switzerland the U.S. and the United Nations expressed
their horror at the findings of a report put together by former
war crimes prosecutors, which shows that the Assad regime
systematically
killed about 11,000 detainees from March 2011 to August 2013.
The report is based on roughly 55,000 photographs of the thousands
of dead tortured detainees leaked by a Syrian military police
photographer, who has defected.

Read the report below (contains graphic images):

The report is shocking. But, as Foreign
Policy‘s David Kenner has pointed out, the U.S. has used
the brutality of the Assad regime to its advantage. Kenner’s
article highlights the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian
national who, according to the
Open Society Foundations, was arrested by American authorities
in September 2002 and then sent (after almost two weeks of
interrogation) to Jordan, where he was beaten by Jordanian guards
at a CIA detention center in Amman before being sent to a detention
center in Syria run by the Syrian Military Intelligence.

From Foreign Policy:

The only mystery for Arar is why Americans are shocked at
reports of torture in Syrian prisons. “What surprises me is the
reaction of some people in the West, as if it’s news to them,” he
told Foreign Policy. “As far back as the early 1990s … the State
Department reports on Syria have been very blunt — the fact is,
Syria tortures people.”

It’s a history that the U.S. government knows all too well —
because, at times, it has exploited the Assad regime’s brutality
for its own ends. Arar was sent to Assad’s prisons by the United
States: In September 2002, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) detained him during a layover at New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport. U.S. officials believed, partially
on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canada, that
Arar was a member of al Qaeda. After his detention in New York,
Arar was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was driven across the
border into Syria.  

“Successive U.S. administrations may not agree with the politics
of Bashar al-Assad, but when you have a common enemy called al
Qaeda — that changes everything,” Arar said. “[S]ince 9/11,
Assad’s regime has been used for what the media now calls ‘torture
by proxy.'”

More from Foreign Policy:

The U.S. government has also never apologized to Arar for
rendering him to Syria, or admitted that he was tortured in Assad’s
jails. So it’s no surprise, perhaps, that Arar believes U.S.
officials’ surprise at the latest revelation is more than a little
hypocritical.  

“Of course, the U.S. government will always ask for assurances
for people not to be tortured,” he said. “But they know that those
assurances are not worth the ink they’re written with. They know
that once a person gets there — they know what’s going to
happen.”

During his first presidential campaign then-Senator Barack Obama
spoke out against the Bush administration’s policies relating to
the War on Terror. However, although Obama did order the closing of
the CIA’s “black” detention sites in January 2009, the Obama
administration’s record on the treatment of terror suspects is

far from ideal. 

Ahead of the ongoing Syria peace talks in
Switzerland the U.S. and the United Nations expressed
their horror at the findings of a report put together by former
war crimes prosecutors, which shows that the Assad regime
systematically
killed about 11,000 detainees from March 2011 to August 2013.
The report is based on roughly 55,000 photographs of the thousands
of dead tortured detainees leaked by a Syrian military police
photographer, who has defected.

Read the report below (contains graphic images):

The report is shocking. But, as Foreign
Policy‘s David Kenner has pointed out, the U.S. has used
the brutality of the Assad regime to its advantage. Kenner’s
article highlights the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian
national who, according to the
Open Society Foundations, was arrested by American authorities
in September 2002 and then sent (after almost two weeks of
interrogation) to Jordan, where he was beaten by Jordanian guards
at a CIA detention center in Amman before being sent to a detention
center in Syria run by the Syrian Military Intelligence.

From Foreign Policy:

The only mystery for Arar is why Americans are shocked at
reports of torture in Syrian prisons. “What surprises me is the
reaction of some people in the West, as if it’s news to them,” he
told Foreign Policy. “As far back as the early 1990s … the State
Department reports on Syria have been very blunt — the fact is,
Syria tortures people.”

It’s a history that the U.S. government knows all too well —
because, at times, it has exploited the Assad regime’s brutality
for its own ends. Arar was sent to Assad’s prisons by the United
States: In September 2002, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) detained him during a layover at New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport. U.S. officials believed, partially
on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canada, that
Arar was a member of al Qaeda. After his detention in New York,
Arar was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was driven across the
border into Syria.  

“Successive U.S. administrations may not agree with the politics
of Bashar al-Assad, but when you have a common enemy called al
Qaeda — that changes everything,” Arar said. “[S]ince 9/11,
Assad’s regime has been used for what the media now calls ‘torture
by proxy.'”

More from Foreign Policy:

The U.S. government has also never apologized to Arar for
rendering him to Syria, or admitted that he was tortured in Assad’s
jails. So it’s no surprise, perhaps, that Arar believes U.S.
officials’ surprise at the latest revelation is more than a little
hypocritical.  

“Of course, the U.S. government will always ask for assurances
for people not to be tortured,” he said. “But they know that those
assurances are not worth the ink they’re written with. They know
that once a person gets there — they know what’s going to
happen.”

During his first presidential campaign then-Senator Barack Obama
spoke out against the Bush administration’s policies relating to
the War on Terror. However, although Obama did order the closing of
the CIA’s “black” detention sites in January 2009, the Obama
administration’s record on the treatment of terror suspects is

far from ideal.