The county sheriff is the problem child among California elected officials. No office is less accountable, or more reliable in producing scandal.

Once elected, sheriffs in all 58 counties have power over jails and policing, and act pretty much as they please. When sheriffs do wrong, there is little that Californians can do to stop them. Under our state’s structure, a sheriff in California can’t really be fired. And those most liable to complain about a sheriff—inmates and those accused of crimes—have trouble gaining the public’s ear, let alone its sympathy.

You can see this absence of accountability in more than just the public swagger of so many sheriffs. In the Trump era, some sheriffs, especially in more conservative precincts, have flirted with anti-California treason, cozying up to the California-hating president by defying state laws designed to protect our immigrant families from federal abuses.

“The power of sheriffs,” historian Andrew Isenberg has written, “is inextricably tied up in the concept of a popular justice that is not bound by anything so mundane as the law.”

In theory, sheriffs should be accountable precisely because they are elected. Indeed, the California state constitution requires every county to have an elected sheriff for that reason. But in practice, sheriffs’ elections are not healthy contests. They draw little media attention compared to other races, so voters know little about the contenders or the issues. Sheriffs often run unopposed, since it’s a scary prospect to challenge an official who holds such virtually unchecked control over who goes to jail.

And when there are challengers, they typically come from among the sheriff’s own staff. This turns sheriffs’ elections into departmental civil wars, forcing deputies to choose sides and distracting departments from their ostensible job of protecting the public. In a typical example, last year’s nasty fight in Santa Clara County between Sheriff Laurie Smith and her former undersheriff John Hirokawa focused on which of these two bosses was more responsible for excessive force, racist texts, and sexual solicitations among their mutual underlings.

The job’s unaccountable nature is, like our two houses of Congress, a nasty artifact of America’s history as an English colony. Going back to the 9th century, English sheriffs apprehended criminals, but mostly used violence to collect taxes and extort bribes. That’s why we still celebrate Robin Hood and curse the sheriff of Nottingham.

That’s also why England turned the sheriff into a ceremonial position in the 1800s. But California, like other U.S. states, has preserved the problematic power of the sheriff. Last year, Governing magazine criticized the American sheriff as highly susceptible to corruption.

Californians know this all too well. The two most prominent sheriffs of this century—Lee Baca of L.A. County and Mike Carona of Orange County—are now both convicted felons (Baca for obstruction of justice in an investigation of inmate abuse, and Carona for witness tampering).

In both cases, state and local officials failed to police their corruption, so federal investigations were required to push them out of office.

The fact that the feds are often the only people who can stop such abuses is an unspoken reason why so many California sheriffs prioritize the immigration-related whims of federal authorities over fealty to state law. In this era, the sheriffs of Sacramento and Stanislaus Counties, facing constant questions about their behavior, have embraced President Trump’s false attacks on California’s sanctuary laws.

Sacramento’s Scott Jones has also been dogged by a constant problem for sheriffs: questions over whether contributions to his campaigns, both for sheriff and for Congress, have influenced his official actions. And like other California sheriffs, he has refused to submit to civilian oversight, even after questionable shootings and uses of forces by his deputies. When an inspector general with deep experience was appointed to look into a deputy-involved shooting, Jones locked him out of department facilities and refused him access to records and personnel.

The fact that sheriffs can’t be held to account locally undercuts the idea that these elected officials somehow represent local communities and local control. Indeed, local sheriffs have irresponsibly exploited high-profile crimes to build their national profiles.

In Stanislaus County, Adam Christianson, who has visited the White House to praise Trump’s irresponsible immigration policies, made headlines by falsely claiming that state law was responsible for the shooting death of a local police officer by an unauthorized immigrant. (In fact, ICE had never sought the immigrant’s deportation, and the state sanctuary law was not in effect when the migrant had previous arrests for DUI). The president and national media quickly parroted the sheriff’s claim, while ignoring Christianson’s awful record as sheriff—of millions paid out to settle lawsuits brought against the department, training problems that led to deaths, and accusations of treating all Latino inmates as gang members.

Mercifully, Christianson retired in January, but he was succeeded by one of two deputies who ran for the post. The winner, a Christianson ally, is pledged to uphold his policies. And Christianson, classy to the end, used social media to mock the loser, who had ties to the famous Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who has suggested that one million Americans be shipped to the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

To be sure, excesses are not limited to politically conservative sheriffs. In the November 2018 elections, incumbent Sheriff Jim McDonnell, a distinguished LAPD commander who became sheriff after his predecessor’s conviction, lost in an upset to a little-known sheriff lieutenant, Alex Villanueva.

Democrats and liberal groups backed Villanueva to punish McDonnell, who had worked to soften the sanctuary state law. While Villanueva wisely promised to kick ICE out of the county jail, he won by also promising his fellow deputies to reverse McDonnell’s righteous efforts to fight corruption and install more outside oversight of the sheriff’s department.

In his first few weeks in office, Villanueva, who has no experience running a large organization, sowed chaos by removing 18 high-ranking officials from their posts and reevaluating the ranks of 500 other commanders. Some deputies say it’s no longer clear who is in charge.

When the media questioned these moves, Villanueva’s response was classic California sheriff: “The state constitution lays out that the oversight of the sheriff is the voters.” In other words, you’ll have to wait four years before you can do anything to me, no matter what I do.

There is another solution. Voters should change the state constitution—protecting ourselves by writing the elected sheriff out of it.

The post California’s Elected Sheriffs Are Accountable to No One—And That’s a Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In July, three people were found dead at the Hard Summer Music Festival near Los Angeles. During the two-day festival, which drew a record 147,000 attendees, an additional six people were hospitalized. Prior to these deaths, the Los Angeles Times counted 26 rave-related fatalities in the American Southwest since 2006. That doesn’t include non-fatal overdoses, a number which could easily reach triple digits if tallied across the country.

The reaction by lawmakers in cities like Los Angeles has been to clamp down on the events themselves, either banning them entirely or demanding strict control over the crowds. Promoters have instituted stricter security policies, while contending that at such large-scale events, drug use is inevitable. But the recent deaths suggest that these “solutions” haven’t solved anything.

Even though this latest tragedy is fresh, the problem is so familiar—and so unchanged—that a Los Angeles Times write-up of the Hard Summer deaths didn’t even bother to find a new doctor to talk to. They just recycled a quote from last year, in which a doctor frets that “there’s something about these events that leads to this rampant drug abuse,” but is unable to put his finger on why.

I’ve been going to raves for six years, and I don’t find the current approach to addressing the problem convincing. What I am convinced of is that it’s possible to have raves without any deaths at all.

Why has it been so hard to “fix” raves? Because we have not accurately identified the problem, which to my mind does not stem from kids disregarding their own lives, but rather from the fact that they never learned how to handle the spectacular, seductive freedom offered by raves.

Future Music Festival, Sydney, Australia, 2013.

The way I see it, the danger presented at raves stems from the fact that more than a few attendees are the products of our culture of over-protective parents. These ravers grew up highly supervised without the chance to be left to their own devices. Add to that the subtly influencing hand of teenage hormones and it’s almost surprising that there aren’t more tragedies.

Our society has become increasingly afraid of letting children run wild, and young kids today don’t have the same opportunities as previous generations to venture out into the world on their own, to learn how to handle the small freedoms of youth, to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. Instead, children are funneled from an early age into a myriad of adult-monitored activities such as team sports, school dances, and summer camps.

As teenagers, these hothouse kids begin to break out of their confinement. Raves are the perfect venue for youthful experimentation. Even the word “rave” sounds new and different from the “concerts” or “shows” of which adults hold fond memories.

Rave culture has always celebrated the illicit. The very definition of the word “rave,” meaning “to talk wildly or incoherently, as if one were delirious or insane” conjures intoxication. The first raves were born as a mutation of 1970s and ‘80s discotheques, the distinction being that raves were held in basements, lofts, and abandoned warehouses, rather than established venues. These parties often lasted for upwards of 10 straight hours, and people could bring in their own substances hassle free.

At raves, kids are given a shot at unmonitored social interaction, and the chance to finally partake in all sorts of risk-taking away from hovering parents. Unfortunately, these are not the baby-step risks of younger years. And without past lessons to guide them, it’s easy for bad choices to escalate without anyone realizing.

The question of rave safety is not a narrow one. In the past few years, the American electronic dance music (or EDM) scene has exploded, with longer, multi-day festival events routinely pulling in crowds of over 100,000 people. EDM has penetrated the heart of the musical world; it has its own category at the Grammys, and heavily influences the sound of contemporary pop music.

When I got into raving in 2010, I had always felt like a social outcast, but raves connected me with a group of likeminded people who I would never have met otherwise. It wasn’t long before I started going out more, getting into trouble with my parents, and having more fun than ever before.

Since then, the rave scene has become firmly cemented in the realm of popular culture. But that didn’t mean the end of drugs or danger. Even as security checks have gotten stricter, drugs have been present at every rave I’ve ever been to. And security checks haven’t prevented deaths.

The good news is that thoughtful alternative approaches have emerged. Some raves are starting to protect their attendees, often by bringing together people who understand how raves work and getting them to work together in the crowds.

The Bunk Police, a group now a few years old, built a strategy on the insight that most overdoes happen after kids at raves take mystery drugs they bought from strangers. Many of these drugs are actually harmful chemicals masquerading as popular club drugs.

The Bunk Police show up at events armed with tests kits that can tell whether a bag of powder is real MDMA, or one of the countless synthetic chemicals that have flooded the rave scene since the popularization of online drug dealing websites, such as the fabled “bath salts” scare of years past. Since their existence acknowledges the presence of drug use, festivals have tried to ban groups like The Bunk Police. Despite this, members hop fences, bribe security guards and risk jail time so that they can keep other people safe.

At Steez Promo’s Moonrise Festival in Baltimore, Maryland, volunteers make sure attendees stay safe while they’re partying. They check on people who look sick or zoned out, and hand out gum, water, and fruit. The best thing about the volunteers is that they’re also ravers, and can be considerably less intimidating than the security staff. In the event of an emergency, a volunteer can help you feel better, whereas a security guard might just detain you. When things get too rough for volunteers, Moonrise is also equipped with two medical tents near high traffic areas, staffed by a team of emergency medical technicians.

While unsupervised spaces like raves inevitably invite dangerous activity, they also provide a place for youths to grow, experiment, and flourish, free to make mistakes away from the judging eyes of adult society. Regardless of what the law says, the youth will continue to party on. The best thing we can do is to ensure the spaces they party in are as safe and nurturing as possible.

The post Why Is It So Hard to Stop Rave Overdoses? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are three different approaches a country can take against violent extremism and terrorism: prevention, repression, and intervention. Mostly, Western countries rely on prevention and repression. They focus on containing the active extremist movement through law enforcement operations or they finance large-scale educational and advocacy programs directed at those deemed to be at risk of violent radicalization. However, Western governments often overlook more targeted deradicalization programs (sometimes called “off-ramps”) that engage the families and the immediate communities of individuals deemed to be falling under the sway of extremist narratives.

Two years ago I founded GIRDS, the German Institute for Radicalization and Deradicalization Studies, which works worldwide to figure out how to intervene when people become radicalized. I first became interested in the topic growing up in a small suburb of Berlin where neo-Nazi skinheads were an accepted part of the youth culture. I went away to university and then on a Fulbright to study violent extremism and counterterrorism. Since then, I have been working as a family counsellor to develop deradicalization programs, including specially designed family counselling programs for relatives of Jihadi fighters.

As governments increase the pressure on extremist groups through sting operations and raids, some members begin to crack, facing a choice to either withdraw from the group (which they might want to do, if given a path to do so) or escalate their commitment by doing something violent. Intervention programs aim to provide that first path, allowing wavering members of an extremist cell a way out. A key ingredient of such programs is the debunking of appealing extremist narratives. We strive to destroy the “jihadi cool” by having someone say, “I’ve been there … And it sucks.” In the end prevention and repression are much more effective when complemented by such targeted intervention programs.

If we want to prevent future attacks, we need to recruit family and close friends of potential attackers into the counterterrorism effort and provide them with specially trained experts. In almost all previous attacks by lone actors or members of small terror cells, someone in the attackers’ close social environment recognized a disturbing change in their behavior. Sometimes, this close relative or friend even knew about the attack plans.

Frequently these families or friends are desperate to get help and advice on what to do, despite their mixed feelings about betraying a loved one, but law enforcement rarely offers a strategy for making this seem possible.

In every country that has introduced a dedicated family counselling hotline and support program against violent radicalization to date, these programs were almost instantly overwhelmed with calls and requests for help from families of individuals from all different stages of radicalization. This indicates the high demand and the success in reaching out to the affected families once they are offered specially designed programs and neutral third party counsellors.

Designed and conducted correctly, these programs empower families and communities to counter the appeal of violent extremism. We work by reaching out to the gatekeepers—family and close friends. Because these gatekeepers know their friends and relatives best, they also know what might have motivated them to join the radical group and what drives them. These gatekeepers also have the legitimacy to suggest alternatives and bring in other solutions. But for that, they need help and strong support networks.

Mothers are essential gatekeepers. Most of the mothers I have worked with who have lost their children to ISIS or other terrorist groups have noticed something changing about their children, but were mostly alone without any outside help. When these families contact me from around the world, what I hear almost every time is the urge to understand what is happening and how to do something about it. Many parents act on their own, take away passports, lock their children up, or move with them into another town. These reactions are understandable but are counterproductive and can further push the radicalization process.

There is a common saying amongst Jihadis: “Allah tests the ones he loves,” meaning that any obstacle on the path to martyrdom will be seen as proof that one is the chosen one. In addition, recruiters and the Salafi-Jihadi ideology explain to those drawn to terrorism that these signs of rejection by their own family are a natural consequence of the perfect truth they have found. The biological family is superseded by the spiritual one—the ummah— and in this way even your own mother can be labelled as “infidel” and part of the enemy.

When a mother comes to us, she is assigned a trained case manager. Together they will analyze the child’s situation and try to identify the “radicalization recipe.” What is driving the son or daughter towards ISIL? Together they will design a step-by-step plan, identify external partners, and build support networks around the family. The counselor will teach the family de-escalation techniques to reduce frustration, fights in the family, and bullying in school. They will bring in positive alternatives addressing the motives of the son/daughter. Does he or she want to help women and children in Syria? The mother might suggest that the youth work with a Muslim charity, or do a fundraising campaign with a legitimate organization. Also, the mother will get constant risk analysis from the counselor so that they will be able to decide if and when to bring the matter to law enforcement. The counselor is a bridge between the family and all relevant external partners.

To connect mothers to one another, we’ve built a community called Mothers for Life, which exists mainly online but also has met a couple of times in person. When we wrote an open letter to ISIL in the summer 2015 and the group responded the same day on Twitter, we knew that they were afraid of the parents’ power to block their recruitment efforts. This letter contained the feelings and questions mothers around the world had when their beloved ones were taken away against their will—in stark contrast to the fundamental values of Islam. We wanted to pose questions designed to dissolve parts of the ISIS narrative. After receiving letters from imprisoned fighters saying they have realized what they did to their own mothers and that they want to leave jihadism behind, we knew it worked.

Mobilizing mothers fixes another hole in the law-enforcement strategy. Parents in the Mothers for Life network have told me that they do not have a problem in principle with cooperating with law enforcement agencies, but that they have lost trust in them. Sometimes intelligence and police placed surveillance on their children and did nothing to stop them from leaving. Sometimes the mothers were treated as terrorists themselves during house searches. At other times they have even been charged by courts with providing material support to terrorist organizations, despite doing everything they could to get their children back. Sometimes I have to explain to the authorities what the role of the families is, that they are allies and want to help, that they should be respected and seen as partners, not suspects.

Mothers for Life is currently active in 11 countries (U.S.A., Canada, France, U.K., Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Norway). Most of the parents involved have their own national organizations to support other families. GIRDS experts are based in six countries (Germany, France, England, U.S.A., Canada, and Denmark) and have trained experts and advised governments around the globe on how to counter violent extremism. Most recently I was asked to train probation officers in Minneapolis on deradicalization interventions and to conduct risk and radicalization evaluation studies for a number of defendants.

ISIS itself has announced that taking away its territory in Syria and Iraq will not defeat its brand and core ideas. It will continue to recruit and shift its tactics and strategy to overseas terror attacks. That makes it all the more important for Western societies to counter ISIS’s appeal and that of other violent extremist and terrorist organizations, and there can be no more effective fighters in that cause than the families and immediate communities of those disaffected youths tempted by the perverted promise of martyrdom.

The post The Most Overlooked Resource in Fighting Violent Extremism? Moms. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By way of comparison, if everybody would express their opinions about how to improve the medical profession, we as the larger public would not be so accepting of everyone’s opinions. Many of us would vigorously challenge anecdotal accounts and “solutions” based on personal experience and videos seen on the Internet. Because we see medicine as a real profession, with nationally accepted professional standards, we tend to leave it to real experts to express their views on how the profession might be changed.

Treating policing as some sort of haphazard trade, about which everybody can have a valid opinion, is not helping policing or our current national conversation about it. Indeed, it aggravates the problems faced in policing. As a former police officer and somebody who has written many books and articles about the police profession over the decades, I resent the current rush-to-judgment environment and the ubiquitous pontification about the solutions. The overwhelming majority of police officers in this country mean well and take their jobs seriously, risking their lives to protect others, most of the time for meager pay. They certainly deserve better tools to hone their skills and much respect from the public they serve.

It is remarkable that very few academics who actually study policing and police-community relations are part of the discussion in public and in the media. We academics hear public officials quote out-of-context statistics, repeat catch phrases like “community-oriented policing,” and fuel the anger. For example, national and reputable media outlets often quote the number of people killed by police officers in a given year as an example of police use of force or brutality—an alarming figure, but one that would also include homicidal criminals like Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas sniper who killed five officers on duty at last week’s Black Lives Matter protest.

Almost 20 years ago I started teaching a course about police training, and the scarcity of available resources prompted me to write my first book, Critical Issues in Police Training. Published in 2002 and based on years of fieldwork and research, I identified five main areas that are extremely problematic for policing: recruitment, selection, training, supervision, and discipline. And I outlined four topics to address these problems: leadership, an approach to police-community relations called “Open Communication Policing,” multicultural policing, and stress management for law enforcement.

Fast forward almost 15 years, and we are now talking about all the same problems and topics—as if they were new and we still need to study them and create commissions to identify what needs to be done. This is wrong and a dangerous waste of time for both officers risking their lives and communities living in fear of their local precincts. Research is clear: we know quite a lot about what needs to be done—we need to transform the way police organizations operate. We just need to do it.

It’s gratifying to hear so much in the conversation about the need to change how we train police to reduce violent encounters with citizens. But I can’t help but stress that how we recruit and select officers should come first, before training.

For over two decades, research has shown a direct correlation between the emotional maturity of officers and their problem-solving capacity. Yet, as if deliberately ignoring the scientific research finding, most police departments in the United States continue to recruit and select their officers at the very young ages of 19 or 20.

In their late teens and early 20s, these men and women are expected to display wisdom, maturity, judgment, and social and emotional intelligence that most of us do not display until our late 20s and beyond. In some departments, some recruits are even exempt from the basic requirement of finishing high school if they possess some characteristics that would qualify them for special waivers. (Albuquerque, New Mexico is one such department).

Instead, we should be identifying the highest standards for recruitment and selection of officers. These standards must be expressed in something the U.S. has never had for its police: a standardized, mandatory curriculum of training for all our law enforcement agencies. This would cover not only the use of force but also other essential tools of effective and impartial policing like leadership, multiculturalism, stress management, and open communication. Each department would then be free to add as much or as little to this mandatory template, based on their needs.

This training must cover a minimum number of hours that will approximate, at the very least, a two-year college degree. Don’t we owe it to our communities to give the officers we charge with guarding our lives at least as many hours of training as beauticians and hairdressers?

We would not have to invent such standards. We already have the templates, primarily from other countries. Take, for example, Finland, which has the sort of comprehensive standardized training that makes experts like me envious. The Police College in Finland offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its police force. Completed in about three years, the bachelor’s degree is composed of 180 credits and qualifies the person for the position of police officer—or to act independently as an expert in police work. And the program is just the beginning of lifelong study that encourages police officers to seek new approaches and best practices in their profession.

While we have some police departments trying to transform recruitment, selection, and training (Dallas PD is one of them), we have close to 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country, most of them smaller than 50 sworn officers. The IACP (International Associations of Chiefs of Police) does much to further the culture of training but, unfortunately, it cannot mandate a standardized training. It can only recommend. And the time for recommendations has passed. We need mandates. Teaching de-escalation techniques at the NYPD or the Dallas PD academies did not change the behavior of officers in Louisiana or Minnesota. If we want change nationally, we need to institute a standardized mandate for all.

So, who and what are standing in the way of this change? The obstacles are federal and local. On a federal level, a transformational change would require revisiting the autonomy of the states to determine their own standards for police forces—the sort of changes politicians don’t want to touch. On a local level, sometimes unions oppose raising the standards. (Last year, I testified in front of the local council in Suffolk County, New York in favor of requiring a bachelor’s degree for its force, but was very strongly opposed by the union). Sometimes local politicians fear they will lose control over the hiring process. And many times, there are concerns about the lack of money; most of the police budget is allocated to salaries and there is very little left for recruitment and training.

Yes, many police departments around the country have gotten better at recruitment of ethnic and racial minorities, but diversity is not a stand-in for emotional maturity. Nor does having a department where members of minority communities are in the highest leadership ranks of the police, as in Dallas, change the perception that policing is a profession that is inherently racist and discriminatory in its application of the law.

It is impossible to convey here, in a short essay, the importance of perceptions about policing that are based, at one end, on centuries of oppression going back to the Southern Slave Patrols, and, at another end, a tsunami of social media visuals—of beatings, shootings, and victims’ dead bodies. Such visuals, with enough repetition, become etched in people’s minds not as a single event but rather as a series of events that represent a norm. Opinions are then derived from these perceptions, and actions from these opinions. In the absence of uniform policing standards based on scientific evidence, it is easy to misinterpret legitimate uses of force that from time to time accompany police officers’ day-to-day interactions with an error of judgment or actual abuse of the rights of their office.

It’s also easy to mistake the relative success of a few departments in training and recruitment with the nationwide sea change we need. I don’t know about you, but I cannot live with the notion of the authority to use coercive force against me being discharged by people who are not recruited, selected, and trained to the highest possible standard. The promise of this moment is that we can raise those standards, and reach the goal that any use of force must be necessary.

But to get there, we can’t rely on opinions. We need to start with the many things we actually know about policing. We need to let the real experts in this field drive the transformations of policing. And then we need to pray for the right leadership to enable these changes.

The post Not Everybody Is an Expert on Policing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A few years later, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire judge, in a modern version of excommunication, ordered a Labrador mix named Prince to vacate the city after killing a rooster.

And in 2014, a pit bull named Dream that bit a child was executed in Denver while an appeal was pending, apparently due to a courthouse paperwork mix-up.

In a large number of these cases across the United States, it is the canine itself on trial. The dog, not the owner, is charged. The dog, not the owner, is convicted. And the dog, not the owner, is punished for its crimes. When it comes to capital punishment, dogs sometimes attain a human-like standing in our courts. This practice may feel decidedly modern and particularly American, the inexorable dark side of our excessive pampering and “humanization” of our furred friends. At a glance, it isn’t even that different from pet boutiques, gourmet food, luxury lodging, and the like. But scholars trace the roots of humans putting animals on trial back millennia, long before we began showering creature comforts on our canine companions.

One remarkable case involves crops, disease, and some especially pernicious rats in 16th century France. Rodents descended on Autun, a medieval town near Dijon, destroying the barley crop and multiplying rapidly. In 1522, after numerous extermination attempts had failed and Autun was on the verge of a famine, residents turned to the only option they had left: They put the rats on trial. They took their case to the town magistrate, who relayed it to the bishop’s vicar, who ordered the animals to appear in court. The vicar also appointed one of France’s rising legal stars to defend them, a Burgundy-born jurist named Bartholomew Chassenée.

Chassenée was no fool. He knew he was fighting an uphill battle. The power of the Church was supreme, and the voracious rodents didn’t exactly make sympathetic defendants. (This was two centuries after their ancestors had brought the Black Death to Europe.) So Chassenée did his best to delay and derail the trial. He argued, for example, that the rats were too spread out to have heard the summons. In response, the vicar asked every church in every parish harboring the animals to publicize the trial.

When the rodents still didn’t show, Chassenée claimed that the journey to into town was too dangerous. Not only would the rats have to travel vast distances to reach Autun, they’d need to avoid the watchful eyes and sharp claws of their mortal enemy, the cat. Surely the vicar was aware, he said, that defendants could refuse to appear at trial if they feared for their own safety.

When that didn’t work, Chassenée appealed to the court’s sense of humanity: It wasn’t fair to punish all rats for the crimes of a few. “What can be more unjust than these general proscriptions,” he asked, “which destroy indiscriminately those whom tender years or infirmity render equally incapable of offending?” The vicar, whether moved by Chassenée’s words or simply exhausted by his objections, adjourned the proceedings indefinitely.

This was just one in a long line of cases of Europeans taking animals to court. The earliest incident dates back to 824, when an ecclesiastical judge excommunicated a group of moles in Italy’s Aosta Valley. In 1314, a French court sentenced a bull to hang for goring a man with his horn. In 1575, the Parisian parliament sent a donkey to the stake for having sexual relations with a man. And in 1864, a Slovenian pig was tried and executed for biting the ears off an infant.

In hundreds, perhaps thousands, of proceedings throughout the continent, animals were treated just like human defendants. The courts appointed them lawyers, heard testimony from witnesses, and considered the possibility of pardon or parole. Even the punishments were surprisingly human—though not particularly humane.

Some creatures were drawn and quartered. Others were stoned to death. And still others were tied to the rack, their cries a form of confession. Due process for animals was so highly valued that when a hangman in Germany took matters into his own hands before the trial of a sow had commenced, he was permanently banished from his village.

What was the point of these trials?

Scholars disagree. Some say they were merely a way to dispatch troublesome animals. But why all the pomp and circumstance? Why not just run a sword through them (or sic a cat on them) and be done with it? Others say the proceedings were an attempt to impose order on an increasingly chaotic world—a means to assert man’s god-given dominion over often unpredictable creatures during a time when we were living in closer quarters with them than at any point in our history. By putting animals on trial, we ascribed them rational thought, and thus we were able to make better sense of their actions. And still other scholars claim that our forbearers simply made less of a distinction between man and beast than we do today, at least for legal purposes. Animals were given human trials because they had human standing in a court of law.

Today, we put a different animal on trial, but the reasons appear remarkably similar. We dragged rats and pigs before judges in medieval Europe because they had violated the cosmic order. Today, we have a new cosmic order: a world where pets are family. When dogs treat us as enemies instead of as friends, they violate this order. And we punish them in kind. We put them on trial in an attempt to restore the world as it should be—or at least, as we would like it to be.

The way we punish these dogs also shares similarities to the penalties of the past. Today’s sentences may be carried out with a lethal injection behind the closed doors of a city shelter, but are they so different from the hanging of bulls in the town square? In the case of Taro the Akita, justice took a more favorable turn: In 1994, after three years and more than $100,000 had been spent on the case, the state’s new governor—acting on a campaign promise—pardoned the pooch.

The post Why Do Americans Put Pets, Not Their Owners, on Trial? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When a police commander like me says something like this, sometimes skeptics will dismiss it as just political correctness or public relations or confusion about the difference between policing and social work. Those skeptics are wrong. Relationship building is an essential ingredient in the historic reductions in crime we’ve seen across the city, and especially in parts of South L.A. with longer histories of violence. As of mid-May, Watts, where I’ve spent years working with the community through the Watts Gang Task Force, had had only one homicide so far this year, and we had a recent stretch of almost two years without a homicide in any of the three public housing developments; Jordan Downs has had only one homicide in nearly six years.

There are many reasons why crime and violence have been reduced in South L.A. One important one is that the police have the credibility to enforce the laws because they have the trust of the community.

Building that trust has been the focus of our work. The LAPD has tried to create ways for officers to get to know members of the community in settings that don’t involve the enforcement of the laws. We have police participate in community programs (football, baseball, running clubs, Girl Scouts, tutoring—anything that reaches kids) and even raise money for local charities. We have police visit schools, and we bring community members in to talk to officers at roll calls and orientations for new officers assigned to the station. My wife, who is a police lieutenant, and I make a point of supporting local charities and community-based organizations as partners, particularly children’s organizations that focus on the mental health of kids who are affected by trauma and violence that is all too common in their neighborhoods and homes. I’ve seen that traumatized kids and families become the sources of future crime and violence.

One reason I appreciate the value of relationship building involves my own personal relationship to South L.A. I was born at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood and grew up in South L.A. and east L.A. County. My parents were both from the neighborhood—my dad grew up at 110th and Vermont, my mom at 98th and LaSalle—and both graduated from Washington High in the early 1950s. When I was born, my parents were living at 85th and Hoover. We moved to Whittier when I was in grade school, but I spent summers with my grandfather, who lived in Baldwin Hills and owned a meat market at 23rd and San Pedro. And if you go to 74th and Hoover today, you’ll find a little pink church that used to be the Greek Orthodox Church where we worshiped.

I have very vivid memories of the 1965 riots. I was 8 and I remember standing at Century and Western near my grandparents’ home, and my grandmother trying to explain what was going on. I remember the fear between white and black people, the discomfort people had then because they were very ignorant of each other. And I draw on those memories and experiences today, in trying to get people together so they can better know each other.

My return to South L.A. as a police commander was improbable. After high school, I spent years in the military, from Germany to Key West, before joining the LAPD in 1980. I worked in the Southeast Division my first year and a half, but I got moved around a bit. I ended up back in Southeast while working in the Metropolitan Division in the late ‘80s during Chief Gates’ Operation Hammer, which was a response to gang shootings that involved putting people in jail for any violation that the officer had a constitutional right to address. I was torn—many people in Southeast thanked us for addressing the problem and we were genuinely trying to do the right thing and protect the community. But I’ve learned in policing that “it’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it.” We were aggressively detaining people for any legal cause, and our tone made it appear we were looking down on people and the community.

In 2006 I made captain, far beyond anything I expected to do at LAPD (my original dreams had stopped at lieutenant), and 10 months later I found myself assigned to South L.A.—the Southeast Division, where there was a lot of hatred between the community and the department. A small number of officers were responsible for a good part of the controversy.

A heart-of-gold commander named Rick Jacobs took me to the Watts Gang Task Force, which brought together law enforcement, various agencies and leaders, and community stakeholders. For two hours every Monday I attended those meetings, and for the first two years, I got yelled and screamed at about the conduct of our officers. It took some time to get those officers moved out of the division, and longer to open up communication.

After some time, I began to push back and make the point that the community—not just the police—has obligations to counter crime by taking responsibility for the neighborhood, which means partnering with law enforcement to fight crime.

We did everything we could to get officers, particularly new officers, in situations where they could just talk with people from the community, and understand that South L.A. residents were just regular citizens like themselves. That’s how we started bringing community people to the station for roll calls and to talk to new officers. (Twenty years ago, that would have pissed off a number of cops). We had officers work and develop partnerships with a wide variety of community organizations.

One of our most important early partnerships was with 99th Street Elementary School and its innovative principal, Sherri Williams. At her invitation, we had officers who visited the school and read to kids. It allowed the kids to see the officers in a different light, and it allowed officers to see these were normal kids who wanted to achieve. Each year, we would make an appearance at the school; one time I wore a chicken suit, another time I let the kids spray my hair pink and shave it off, and a third year we rode into the school on horseback with Buffalo Soldiers.

Now, 10 years later, that, and many other things have changed. Officers who worked Southeast a decade ago come back and the first time they walk into Nickerson Gardens, they’re shocked that people are saying hi and kids are running up to the police car, not away from it.

We continue to be aggressive about talking with everybody, and that means engaging schools, parks and recreation, business groups, and all manner of officials. And sometimes our message is quite tough.

I’ve had serious discussions with school officials about their tendency to suspend so many kids, instead of working to keep them engaged in school. Gompers Junior High was the worst offender for a while—kids would act up and they’d just suspend them. It wasn’t entirely the school’s fault—they had very few staff and huge numbers of special education kids. But they wouldn’t even require the parents to pick the kids up. In many meetings, we’ve convinced Gompers and other schools to keep nonviolent kids on campus and supervised.

When the police are deeply engaged in the community, we can speak and advocate for its needs. As police, we see that South L.A. needs much more programming for kids; such programming has made a big impact in the housing developments, where much of it is focused. South L.A. also needs the schools to bring back music and the arts in a much bigger way. The area is totally ripe for children’s diversion programs, and not just for offenders but also for kids who haven’t offended but may be at risk of doing so.

But South L.A.’s biggest need, by far, is jobs and businesses right here in the community. Education levels have risen and job training has improved; there are plenty of people ready to work, and not enough work for them.

One reason we don’t see more business is that people don’t understand the gains in South L.A. For doubters, I’d encourage them to check out all the housing being built in South L.A. I see people buying lots and subdividing them to create a couple of homes. Or you could check out Chef Roy Choi’s new restaurant in Watts, LocoL, where you’ll often find me. LocoL is a symbol of where this community is going—new business and local hiring. When I was last there, I was glad to see a few people working there who I know didn’t used to be pillars of the community. We all change.

But another reason for the lack of business is a problem police are too familiar with: property crimes. California law doesn’t really take property crime seriously—it’s been more focused on violence, understandably. We’ve seen gangs move into theft and we’re seeing more so-called “knock-knock” residential burglaries because the criminal justice system currently doesn’t address property crimes with meaningful consequences.

I also don’t want to minimize violent crime and gang activity; it’s less visible, but it’s still there, just different. Gangs used to wear bright colors and be about turf and drugs. But increased penalties related to gang involvement curbed that. Today, social media can be the cause of shootings, and shootings can be more dangerous for people not involved in gangs when members don’t necessarily know each other by face. We recently had an arrest on a homicide at 55th and Vermont where a battle started on the Internet, and the guy went to the neighborhood of the other person and just opened up on people standing there, as if he was retaliating against the neighborhood.

When I think about the future of South L.A. and the policing of it, I’m hopeful that we can continue to build relationships and the momentum that comes with them. But I’m also fearful about a reversal of gains. South L.A. needs more resources of all kinds—more mental health care options, services for families, and new answers to address the growing homeless population. And while schools have gotten better at teaching science and math, they need more funding for staff and services that support students and their parents. It is hard to work with dysfunctional parents and families, but there are ways to bring them into school. Our friends at 99th Street Elementary used to hold exercise classes for the moms with the goal of bringing in parents.

We also need more police officers to keep building more of the relationships that provide a wall against gangs and crime. Relationships are fragile, and personal connections can endure in ways that are surprising.

About four years ago, I went to my grandparents’ old house at 98th and LaSalle. I saw an African-American lady on the front lawn, and so I introduced myself as a kid who used to play in her front yard.

“Oh, you must be Maxine’s grandson,” she immediately said.

She explained that her family had bought the house from mine. And she told me how nice my grandparents were, how they reassured her it was a good place to raise kids, and how they lowered the price and gave them their washer-dryer and even their kitchen table, because it was bigger than my grandparents needed.

I was flabbergasted—it had been 45 years. But a long-ago personal connection, a bit of conversation and generosity, still had not been forgotten.

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The mug shot might be a particularly clear connection between photography and law enforcement, but it’s just one example in a larger story. Since photography was born as a medium in the mid-19th century, photographs have helped to document and investigate foul play. Police and forensic investigators pour over crime-scene snaps. Journalists publish them to share the truth with readers—and sometimes to shock, astonish, or titillate. Meanwhile, those known principally as fine-art photographers—figures like Walker Evans, Richard Avedon, Helen Levitt, others—have taken inspiration from law enforcement work as well as the sometimes-shadowy worlds it pursues.

A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Crime Stories,” traces these connections—from the journalistic to the artistic and from the supposedly scientific to the obviously political. The show includes a shot of the gangster John Dillinger’s feet in a Chicago morgue and a photograph of the murderer Ruth Snyder being executed by electric chair at Sing Sing. It includes an “automobile murder scene” from 1935—photographer unknown—that could be a still from an early noir.

Crime pictures like these raise the stakes of an old question about objectivity. Photos seem to offer transparent access to reality—but their “reality” is partial and subject to manipulation. Bertillon’s own methods of investigation were not nearly as scrupulous as he professed them to be. Some pictures from tabloid newspapers held by the Met were “altered, painted over, cropped in different ways, in order to intensify the sensationalism,” said Mia Fineman, one of the curators who organized “Crime Stories.” As viewers, we may think that we’re savvy about such practices. Still, every photograph has a “frisson of truth to it,” which makes us want to believe in it, Fineman explained.

Altered images aren’t the most pernicious issue raised by the exhibition, either. It also demonstrates how photography widened and deepened ways of measuring and watching people. From the very beginning, Fineman pointed out, “photography was used as a method of social control.” It’s a short step from mug shots and crime scene photos to cameras perched in all sorts of public and private spaces. The show includes some pictures from bank surveillance cameras, including one of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst robbing a bank. The “visual and auditory surveillance that’s become so widespread today is part of a continuum from these earlier uses of photography,” Fineman explained.

Walker Evans was one artist who understood this. Though best known for his documentary-style photographs of people suffering during the Great Depression, he also, in the 1930s, photographed anonymous people on the subway with a hidden camera under his overcoat. The resulting works, Fineman said, show how a photograph can make ordinary citizens seem suspicious or vulnerable simply by capturing them on film.

Today, the power of the photo is no longer just for law enforcement, journalists, or even professional artists. Footage from smartphone cameras has helped to demonstrate police misconduct in the deaths of Eric Garner and Walter Scott, among others. Even if, as Fineman noted, “visual evidence only goes so far in convincing people of things that they might not want to be convinced of,” photography still offers information that’s hard to dismiss. It will continue to play a part in crime stories—recording what we should know, suggesting what we want to know, and reminding us of what we never really can.

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Why, Hollywood, why? Every 10 years or so, the studios feed us a glossy if noirish postcard from Los Angeles past. Like all postcards, they’re beautiful on the front, blank on the back. The pitch: nearly real characters, acting out a nearly true history where a beautiful city always competes to win best supporting actor. There are mobsters and gangsters and crooked cops, driving old cars and being played by beautiful young stars.

But we never learn, much less remember, the real people who stood up to L.A.’s gangsters. Who were they?

If you look hard enough around the city, their names are preserved. Fletcher Bowron Square downtown, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, John Dockweiler State Beach, and perhaps the most quietly famous, Clifford Clinton of downtown’s Clifton’s Cafeteria. Silent monuments to great men that we know only by the places named for them.

Clinton was perhaps the greatest of all, a man who protected us from the protectors. A decade before the likes of Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel came to town, Clinton fought overwhelming forces of corruption in an era when mayors were crooks and L.A. cops were bagmen and bombers.

He was a World War I veteran and missionary in China who moved to Los Angeles and continued his family’s history in the restaurant business by starting Clifton’s Cafeteria in 1931.

Clifton’s was called the “Cafeteria of the Golden Rule.” Clinton, after all, was a former missionary who believed in helping the poor. As the country slid into the Great Depression, Clifton’s policy was “No guest need go hungry for lack of funds.” In its first three months, Clifton’s served 10,000 free meals.

Two years later, Frank Shaw—former grocery clerk, city councilman, and county supervisor—was elected mayor of Los Angeles, setting up a showdown that Hollywood could never imagine.

Though opposed by the Los Angeles Times’ Chandler family because he was a “reform” candidate, Shaw won over the paper by reappointing former Police Chief James “Two Gun” Davis. With the Chandlers appeased, Shaw was ready to get to the real work ahead. He quickly hired his brother, Joe, to become the mayor’s “private secretary” on the city payroll. Joe kept the machine humming by selling jobs and fixing rackets—business as usual in the city.

Meanwhile, County Supervisor John Anson Ford asked the civic-minded Clinton to apply his restaurant expertise to rooting out suspected food service corruption at L.A. County Hospital. Clinton succeeded so well at this task that Ford convinced Judge Fletcher Bowron to appoint Clinton to a grand jury to investigate corruption at City Hall.

Clinton and the grand jury delivered the goods. Clinton’s grand jury report outlined how mob money, controlled by Mayor Shaw and protected by Chief Davis, was funneled into city elections; in return, city officials ignored the widespread vice strangling Los Angeles.

Following the report, Clinton was declared the city’s public enemy No. 1 by Mayor Shaw, Chief Davis, and District Attorney Buron Fitts. Even the grand jury foreman, John Bauer, called Clinton “out of control” and derided him as the “Cafeteria Kid.” But when notary Frank Angelillo appeared before the grand jury to testify that Bauer was on the Shaw payroll, Bauer and D.A. Fitts arrived at Angelillo’s house with a squad of detectives and beat him badly enough to put him in the hospital.

Clinton was undeterred. He raged against corruption on the radio during a nightly 15-minute broadcast. Something had to be done, and something was. On October 29, 1937, a bomb ripped through Clinton’s family home in Los Feliz. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt. Unfazed, Clinton ratcheted up his crusade by recruiting a former LAPD officer, private detective Harry Raymond, to expand his investigation of Mayor Shaw. Two months after the Clinton bombing, LAPD Captain Earl Kynette and his men of the LAPD “intelligence squad” blew up Raymond’s car.

The Los Angeles Times suggested that Raymond and Clinton staged the bombing for publicity—until witnesses testified that the police had had Clinton’s house under surveillance for weeks. Raymond took his story to William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner and placed the blame on LAPD Captain Earl Kynette, who’d been spying on Raymond. Kynette took the Fifth to avoid testifying and was sent to San Quentin. It was proved that Kynette had personally bought the pipe for the homemade bomb.

With the police captain bombing story featured above the fold for weeks on end, Angelenos were finally pushed beyond the brink of complacency. In a special election, voters turned Shaw out of office, making him the first U.S. mayor to be recalled.

Judge Bowron became mayor and stayed in office for years until his support of a public housing project in Chavez Ravine allowed the L.A. Times’ Chandler family to take him down. The rest is a story for another time.

For the record, I didn’t make it to the end of the movie Gangster Squad, so I can’t even guess what happened to Sean Penn’s Mickey Cohen. But I do know I would buy a ticket to see a movie about Clinton and Mayor Shaw.

Today, Clifton’s last cafeteria downtown, the Brookdale, is undergoing renovations. It should be reopening soon.

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