Boycotts and bullies

It looks like the Los Angeles City Council is pretty much backing up the reappointment of the city's police chief, William Bratton according to the Los Angeles Times.


Thirteen on city council say they'll back Bratton


Only two have reservations about reappointing Bratton including former LAPD chief and current councilman, Bernard Parks. Councilwomen Jan Perry and Janice Hahn did have some concerns that they raised.


(excerpt)


Predicting that the council would not muster the two-thirds vote to overturn a reappointment decision, Parks said he believed it was important for the department to hear about the community's concerns through a council hearing. Public dissatisfaction with the police over the years has led to two riots in the city.

"If things should erupt in the city, we don't want people to say, 'We didn't know. I wasn't aware,' " Parks said.

Perry questioned whether the police are doing enough to stop killings in the community, and Hahn said she is concerned that efforts to build trust in the police are hurt by the high turnover of command staff transferring out of her district, which stretches from Watts to San Pedro.

"I think LAPD's practice of promoting and transferring is an absolute detriment, and it undermines community policing," Hahn said.


The city's police commission has taken public testimony on whether or not city residents believe that Bratton should have a second term as chief. Many of those of the over 100 who appeared said that they supported the move. However, polls taken among different communities stated that Bratton was supported by less than 50% of the city's Black, Latino and Korean-American residents.




After James Chasse, Jr. died in police custody in Portland, Oregon, the city created a task force to study its use of force policy and how it was used by the city's police officers.

That panel decided that Portland Police Bureau needed to "tighten" its use of force policy, according to this article in The Oregonian. During its examination of the department's application of its use of force policies and procedures, the panel found that police officers used force at a slightly higher level than law enforcement officers in other departments but had not sustained even one citizen complaint during a two-year period.

Chief Rosie Sizer said the policy will be changed.


(excerpt)


Sizer cautioned that policy changes should not make an officer hesitate to use force when necessary.

"We need to be able to effectively use force to protect the community and ourselves," she said.

Sizer also noted that force was rare overall, with officers using it in less than 1 percent of their calls and 5 percent of all arrests. In addition, 83 percent of the time, officers used least forceful tactics, such as control holds and pressure points.

Robert King, president of the Portland Police Association, said the report vindicated Portland police officers' use of force.

"We use it reasonably and appropriately," King said.





Portland's Cop Watch representative Dan Handelman said there were issues about the department's implementation of the use of force policy and its complaint system that disturbed him. He said that the exoneration of officers for allegations of excessive force was much higher than the national average for police departments and added that when departments couldn't exonerate officers, they deemed the complaints unfounded.


(excerpt)


"That's extremely disturbing," said Handelman, of Portland Cop Watch.



The Riverside Police Department has amended its own use of force policy several times, including once after receiving a recommendation from Mayor Ron Loveridge's use of force panel in 1999 to change the language to affirm the value of human life. The policy was also changed in terms of the department's use of the carotid restraint when the Department of Justice visited the department several years later.





In the Inland Empire, the Riverside County District Attorney's office is barring its prosecutors from having their cases heard by Judge Gary Tranbarger, according to this article in the Press Enterprise.

The news isn't exactly surprising. In fact, it's fairly predictable after the recent controversy involving the District Attorney's office's pique over Tranbarger's decision to dismiss two misdemeanor cases because he could not locate courtrooms to serve as venues for trial. Smarting since that action, the District Attorney's office is claiming that its latest boycott of a judge is because of the way Tranbarger handled a death penalty case several months ago.

There's probably not a soul in Riverside County who by now hasn't heard that there's a crisis in the criminal justice system involving too many felony cases(at least 1,000) and too few judges to hear them. Having one less judge to hear those cases will only add to that burden as one judge Helios Hernandez helpfully pointed out. Hopefully, he won't also be boycotted for pointing out the obvious.


(excerpt)


Hernandez expressed concern the move will put more burdens on Riverside County's congested courts.

He said Tuesday that there was a backlog of 1,191 felony cases set for trial, and the cases that would have gone to Tranbarger will have to be divided among other judges.

"One less place increases the odds that something could be dismissed," Hernandez said, but added "We always make do."



The courts are crowded, so much so that civil trials have been suspended like since forever and family court business has been impacted. The parties involved in this gridlock need to start working together to address it, not engage in petty tit-for-tats that seemed guaranteed to do nothing but add to the case backlog, which given the latest numbers has clearly grown in just several months.





In Riverside, the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee met yesterday and its members picked the following candidates to be interviewed by the full city council in order to fill the recent vacancies arising in the Community Police Review Commission. According to a tentative minute order provided by the city clerk's office, six applicants were chosen for interviews.

The applicants to be interviewed for Ward Four are David V. Baker, Debra P. Lunceford, Allison Merrihew and Linda L. Soubirous. For Ward Six, they are William V. Timmons and Arthur J. Santore.

The applicants chosen after the interviews are conducted will replace former commissioners Les Davidson and Ric Castro respectively.





I received an email that "Dying while Black: Coast to coast" was cited in the blog section of the Washington Post's Web site here as part of the column written by Eugene Robinson. That newspaper published several articles in relation to the traffic stop and police contact study that was conducted by the Department of Justice.





Another excellent article written about what's been called, the cyberbulling or the cyberstalking of female bloggers on the internet. It mirrors discussions which have been taking place all over the internet as the first annual "Take Back the Blog" event was held on April 28. It was the day that female bloggers shared their experiences on the internet with other women facing the same thing. Some had received death threats. Others had been subjected to violent pornographic posts, threats and nasty misogyny, the kind that must come from deep inside a person with a virulent hatred of women especially those of us who don't know our proper place. Many of us felt like we're all alone in our experiences only to find that the sorority is quite large and growing. As women get stronger and more independent on the internet, there are those who clearly hate that and want to scare us off of our own sites, perhaps because they can feel more powerful and in control in ways they aren't in their real lives?

Experts apparently think that most of the individuals who engage in cyberbulling are men, especially men who in real life feel very inadequate when dealing with women or men who just avoid women.

A lot of those who bully and are bullied on the internet are teenagers, in part because of the explosion in myspace.com pages and other host sites. Regardless, the experience is often very difficult for the person on the receiving end of this behavior.

I know the feeling.

When it happened to me, I didn't even know that it had a name, let alone that other women who blogged had experienced similar disgusting behavior. I certainly didn't know that unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a rare occurrence. That for too many women, it's the norm of their blogging experience not the exception. If that's true, then that's unfortunate for those women, many who have and will quit blogging altogether. I know what that's like. I almost did the same thing last year.

But I've had people who have encouraged my blogging, some of them coming from unexpected corners and places. I hope that these other women do too.

Men who blog are also subjected to this behavior, but the majority of those affected are female, according to these articles and others. And the threats, harassment and nasty comments are addressed to female bloggers in ways that they weren't addressed to men like the use of pornographic imagery particularly that which is violent in nature in postings.


The Washington Post joined in on the debate with an excellent article over the weekend.


Abuse, threats stifle some female bloggers


(excerpt)


Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."

Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed "a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface." Her site takes a "zero tolerance" policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators "24/7" to filter the comments, she said.

Sierra, whose recent case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.



Reading this article and a similar article in the Los Angeles Times last month, made it clear that this is an issue impacting a lot of women, including those like Kathy Sierra who work in male-dominated fields, in her case computer technology. The Times article details her experiences as a former blogger. The reason that she's no longer blogging is because she no longer feels that it is safe enough for her to do so. For a while, she could barely leave her house and she stopped speaking at conventions.


Abuse, threats quiet bloggers' keyboards


(excerpt)


The threats and vivid sexual taunts aimed at Sierra — and the subsequent uproar — exposed a creepy reality: Cyber-bullies, often emboldened by anonymity, target bloggers who write about even the most innocuous subjects.

"Certainly you need a thick skin if you're going to blog, but you shouldn't also need a bulletproof vest," said Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst who received death threats in December after suggesting that Apple Inc.'s music sales were leveling off.


Experts weighing in on the issue said that the internet emboldens people to act in ways that they may not otherwise. That it's a reflection of what's going on in larger society.


(excerpt)


"They're idea terrorists," said Scoble, a former Microsoft executive whose postings about software once prompted someone to call him to say they wished they could kill him. His wife, Maryam, was also vilified on the sites that attacked Sierra.

"If they don't agree with your ideas, they try to terrorize you or make you feel bad."

Doc Searls, a longtime blogger and senior editor of Linux Journal, said the Internet gave people a sense of intimacy that crossed geographic lines.

"The Internet puts zero distance between everybody," Searls said. "You open a message and somebody can be in the next room or in Russia, and there's no difference. We are all next to each other all the time. And yet we don't have the social cues. We can't see the expression on their faces. This is a new environment for civilization."



That's the thing I think that scares most of these women who blog and that's not knowing who is terrorizing them on their own sites. Is it someone across the country, on the other side of the world or down the street? Other experts say that about half of the time, it's a stranger. Half of the time, it's not. Which doesn't really tell you much.

Some women have said that when it happened to them, they were afraid to leave their homes. I do know what it's like to go to my home looking over my shoulder the entire way especially since I've been the recipient of really creepy postings telling me what I was wearing, where and when. There are neighborhoods I have avoided. Clothes I have gotten rid of rather than look at them and have them serve as reminders.

But if you're a woman that blogs in a world that appears to have individuals flaunt their resentment of that, you are left to make the decision of whether to blog or to surrender to the bullying of others. It's not always an easy one I've found.

And I hope Sierra returns to blogging some day when and if she feels she can do so, freely without having to worry about her life being in danger. Maybe others like her can do the same.


Some resources:


Cyberbullying information for parents

Stop Cyberbulling

Cyber Angels



Blogger Pho Akron tells men how they should respond here when female bloggers are being harassed. More on that also in an article titled blograge written by a journalism instructor at San Jose State University.

The well named Unapologetically Female chimes in on this issue as well as "Take Back the Blog" day.

Then there's the Salon article that's been the topic of much discussion. Sierra's advice given in that article was this.


(excerpt)


"I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified," she writes, adding as part of an of apology to conference organizers and attendees, "If you want to do something about it, do not tolerate the kind of abuse that includes threats or even suggestions of violence (especially sexual violence).

Do not put these people on a pedestal. Do not let them get away with calling this 'social commentary,' 'protected speech,' or simply 'criticism.'"



That article generated many responses here, including more than a few by cyberbullying apologists.