I was just ruminating yesterday to all those within earshot that since the New York Times lifted their online paywall (aka TimesSelect), I haven't read (nor blogged about, natch) much of the vaunted NYT columnists recent work. Frank Rich, yes, and Bob Herbert, but I used to read both religiously before the TimesSelect fiasco. Maureen Dowd, for instance, is much less interesting without the added spice of 'sticking it to the man', ie, ballooning my site traffic by evading subscriber restrictions to within an inch of copyright law. I don't think I have read a single column of hers (beyond the teaser paragraph) since the paywall went down. Don't miss her words either. Same with David Brooks, though to be fair, I couldn't stand his facile reasoning in any circumstance. William Kristol is just a joke, and even Paul Krugman has lost his lustre, with his defense of the Clinton's bridge-burning primary strategies.
Anyway, pointless rambling aside (blame the FDA! I had to self-medicate! I had to, honest.), Bob Herbert is worth your reading time today. He writes about a strange, racially tinged incident that occurred in New York a few months ago.
Thirty-two people were arrested on that Bushwick street last May 21, including young women and children. They had been walking along a quiet, tree-lined block of Putnam Avenue on their way to a subway station where they had hoped to catch a train to attend a wake for a friend who had been murdered. The police, who have said that the friend was a gang leader, surrounded the group and closed in.
The youngest person arrested was 13. All of the kids were handcuffed, cursed at and humiliated, and several spent 30 hours or more in jail.
To date, there has been no evidence produced — no witnesses, no photographs or videotapes, no dented vehicles or broken mirrors, nothing whatsoever — to indicate that any of the youngsters had done anything at all that was wrong.
How is it that you can have a rampage in broad daylight on a street in New York City and not be able to show in any way that the rampage occurred?
[From Cruel and Gratuitous - New York Times]
The police and the district attorney seemingly perjured themselves (well, if they had been speaking in a court of law. Public officials are free to lie to the media without repercussion) describing the alleged crime in the most dire fashion:
The police commissioner’s office and a New York City police captain tried to convince the public that a marauding band of kids had gotten out of control and terrified residents, motorists and pedestrians on a street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.Very, very curious. Read the rest for yourself
The cops were wrong. And they must have known that they were wrong, that the picture they were creating of youngsters climbing on top of cars and blocking vehicular and pedestrian traffic was completely false.
The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, carried the canard further. That had to have been deliberate, too. He went on the Brian Lehrer radio program on WNYC and said that his office had investigated the matter — had conducted what he described as an “independent inquiry.”
“We had many, many interviews with local store owners and people who live in the neighborhood who are, frankly, scared to death of these kids,” he said. “And they were not just walking on one car; they were trampling on all sorts of cars. It was almost as if they were inviting their arrest.”
