Author: Tom Sullivan

StateWrek: The Next Generation

by Tom Sullivan

Just a quick thought or two about tactics. I ran across yet another Koch-funded astroturf website this week aimed at Millennials. It was a spinoff of Generation Opportunity. Plus, there was an article featuring an eighteen year-old Republican legislator from West Virginia. It’s StateWrek: The Next Generation.

I have written extensively on the right’s push to promote photo identity cards by hyping the threat of fraud at the polls. The GOP “plowed cash into state legislative efforts in 2010” to wrest control of redistricting. We’ve seen the results of the Republican State Leadership Committee’s (RSLC) REDMAP efforts up close and personal here. The result is, as Charlie Pierce calls it, the newly insane state of North Carolina.

And if you really want to get into the weeds, there is the continuing saga of the RNC’s efforts to void the 1982 consent decree forbidding it from engaging in election protection efforts in the states without preclearance from a federal judge. They apparently want, you know, FREEDOM to use caging lists and to place off-duty cops wearing armbands reading “National Ballot Security Task Force” outside polling places in minority precincts.

With an aging base and facing unfavorable demographics, Republicans aren’t looking for a silver bullet to keep them politically viable. They know there isn’t one. They’re investing in a scattershot of initiatives that buy them a fraction of a point here, a couple of percentage points there, a slice of this demographic, a judgeship or two, etc. Pretty soon any demographic or coalition advantage Democrats think they have going forward is gone.

They’re not looking for a silver bullet. They’re using silver buckshot.

A 21st-century lynching?
by Tom Sullivan

Questions surrounding the August hanging death of Lennon Lacy, 17, of Bladenboro, NC have been percolating since the summer. With fall election campaigns and higher-profile deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police, the black teenager’s hanging death, quickly ruled a suicide, went largely unnoticed outside North Carolina. But Lacy’s family did not accept the official conclusion that the youth killed himself. Lacy was found hanging by a dog leash wearing someone else’s shoes. Two sizes too small:

Days after he was buried, Lennon’s grave was defiled – an act of vandalism that Lennon’s family believes supports their claim that he was killed in a racially-motivated homicide.

After calls from the North Carolina NAACP and Lacy’s family, the FBI has stepped in:

The FBI will investigate the case of Lennon Lacy, the black teenager found hanging in August from a swing set in North Carolina, whose parents have disputed the official ruling that he killed himself and asked whether his death amounted to a modern-day lynching.

It was confirmed on Friday that a federal agent has been assigned to investigate what happened to Lacy, 17, a budding high-school football prospect found hanging in the middle of a predominantly white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina, on 29 August. The move follows a formal request from the Lacy family and from the North Carolina branch of the NAACP to the US attorney asking for the federal authorities to throw their weight behind the investigation.

Lacy’s mother, Claudia, wants answers. She tells the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington that her son was involved with an older white woman. Black men were lynched for less back in the day.

Moral Mondays organizer, NC NAACP President Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, welcomed the FBI investigation:

We are glad to hear that the request made by the North Carolina NAACP and the family of Lennon Lacy for a federal investigation has been accepted. There must be a thorough investigation. There are too many questions and contradictions raised by our independent pathology report and stories in the community about the facts, quick conclusions, and how the death scene was not protected to leave this case unprobed and unevaluated.

I have never been to Bladenboro, NC, but have spent enough decades in the Carolinas to know about other out-of-the-way places such as this stretch of country road in South Carolina. The locals prominently display these cultural artifacts on poles right beside the road to let outsiders know just who is whom and what is what. My guess is the Lacy family wouldn’t feel too at home there.

Alas, Babylon
by Tom Sullivan

Daniel 5:27 (KJV)

TEKEL, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

This morning the estimable teacherken weighs his leaders in the balances and finds them wanting. Having watched the release of the torture report this week and the budget vote in the House last night, he is sickened:

Tom Harkin is supposed to be a Liberal. Then why in Hell has he moved to pay off education loan lenders by cutting funding for Pell Grants?

If Obama is opposed to torture, why are not there criminal investigations of the CIA, starting with the destruction of the waterboarding tapes, a destruction that was NOT properly authorized even within the CIA?

If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House is in theory committed to the environment, why agree to a bill that slashes even further funding for environmental initiatives?

If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House believes in real fiscal responsibility, why agree to a bill that slashes the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service?

I refuse to watch TV right now.

If the Liberal and Progressive Senators will not filibuster this bill, then they have succumbed to the terrorism of Wall Street and the Tea Party. The Republicans not only take hostages, they get Democrats to acquiesce in their slaughter.

You have to wonder how much longer oligarchs can continue to strip America to the walls to enrich themselves before the walls collapse on them. Wikipedia’s explanation of “the hand writing on the wall” from the Book of Daniel is a negative event “easily predictable based on the current situation.” Teacherken wonders whether we are seeing “the last gasp of an Ancien Regime before the guillotines made their appearance.”

This week we watched good, “churchgoing” neighbors defend morally abhorrent, clearly illegal practices contrary to everything they learned at their parents’ knees and everything their faith declaims. We watched as politicians and “good men of business” voted for relaxed rules that Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned will guarantee more bank failures requiring taxpayer bailouts of the very same banks We the People bailed out last time. Whatever happened to moral hazard? teacherken wonders.

But I wonder something else. What are the long-term effects on the psyche of spending 40-60 hours per week for decades on end working within an economic system that values the interests of amoral artificial persons above those of flesh-and-blood ones? Has anyone done a study on that? (Not that anyone of means would pay for it.) Do we really think a few hours in church each week provide a counterbalance? I submit instead we are breeding “persons” who would sell you the air you breathe if they could control how it gets to your nose. And if you cannot afford to buy “their” air? You should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more.

“The thing is,” Ken says of events this week, “when I get sickened I get determined.”

Cynics find it easy to sit on the sidelines and not get their nice, white vinyl souls besmirched by contact with either of the major parties. When such people ask why I do what I do, I tell them if I’m not in the fight I feel like roadkill. And I don’t like feeling like roadkill. I may still get run over, but I don’t feel like roadkill. Not terribly idealistic, but there it is.

I used to be a victim. I’m not anymore.

Becoming them
by Tom Sullivan

A few years back I wrote an op-ed about extraordinary rendition flights and the case of Maher Arar, asking readers whether the Bush administration was fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them. In a case of mistaken identity, Arar had been detained at Kennedy International while changing planes on his way home to Canada. He was taken by police in front of his family and sent to Syria where he was tortured for months. He’s been on Twitter recently for some reason:

"4 of the 20 cells at the facility included a bar across the top of the cell"- #TortureReport. A copycat of cell I was detained in in Syria— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Mistaken identity as a terror suspect'd keep u in a Syrian dungeon 4months on end. Not any different in CIA-run prisons as in #TortureReport— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) December 10, 2014

Given the release of the SSCI torture report and this news from the Guardian, I guess the answer to my original question was all of the above.

Abu Ahmed (nom de guerre), a jihadist with misgivings about the brutality of the so-called Islamist State, spoke with Martin Chulov about the inner workings of ISIS and the rise of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the Americans’ Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq:

“We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he told me. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

Baghdadi had inside “a darkness that he did not want to show other people,” Abu Ahmed explained. But he hid it well from the Americans.

Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors. According to Abu Ahmed, and two other men who were jailed at Bucca in 2004, the Americans saw him as a fixer who could solve fractious disputes between competing factions and keep the camp quiet.

“But as time went on, every time there was a problem in the camp, he was at the centre of it,” Abu Ahmed recalled. “He wanted to be the head of the prison – and when I look back now, he was using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.” By December 2004, Baghdadi was deemed by his jailers to pose no further risk and his release was authorised.

“He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”

As Isis has rampaged through the region, it has been led by men who spent time in US detention centres during the American occupation of Iraq – in addition to Bucca, the US also ran Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, and, for an ill-fated 18 months early in the war, Abu Ghraib prison on the capital’s western outskirts. Many of those released from these prisons – and indeed, several senior American officers who ran detention operations – have admitted that the prisons had an incendiary effect on the insurgency.

Mission accomplished, eh?

“Enough is enough”
by Tom Sullivan

After #TortureTuesday, I needed a break from thinking about rectal rehydration.

Here’s a link to video of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s keynote address to the “Managing the Economy” conference this week in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by Americans for Financial Reform, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Roosevelt Institute. (sorry, no embed; transcript here)

The speech is being called Warren’s sharpest rebuke to date of President Obama’s nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss for Treasury’s undersecretary of domestic finance. It is another example of “the revolving door at its most dangerous” between Washington and Wall Street, Warren believes, and for a nominee unqualified for the job and from an industry already overrepresented in Washington. The Boston Globe cites an unnamed Treasury official as being unaware of “any prominent Wall Street officials currently serving at the department.”

While Warren spoke alone, she cited her own exprts.

Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin on Weiss’ qualifications:

“The shock of Mr. Weiss’s supporters that anyone would dare question his suitability reflects an unspoken assumption that anyone from Wall Street is of course expert in all things financial. That’s hooey.”

Quoting Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC (a Republican) on the $20 million golden parachute from Weiss’ employer that supporters justify as necessary to induce Wall St. executives to serve in public policy positions:

[She] responded that “only in the Wonderland of Wall Street logic could one argue that this looks like anything other than a bribe.” End Quote. She went on: “We want people entering public service because they want to serve the public. Frankly, if they need a $20 million incentive, I’d rather they stay away.”

Warren concludes her case against the revolving door:

This is about building some counterpressure on the Wall Street bankers. Members of Congress, their staffs, and the regulatory agencies are going to hear the Wall Street perspective loud and clear, each and every minute of each and every day. That isn’t going to change. But we need a real mix of people in the room when decisions are made. When the President has an opportunity to decide who will be at the financial decision making table, he should think about who knows about the economics of job creation, about community banks and access to financing for small businesses, about who has the skills and determination to make sure that the biggest banks can’t take down our economy again.

The titans of Wall Street have succeeded in pushing government policies that made the megabanks rich beyond imagination, while leaving working families to struggle from payday to payday. So long as the revolving door keeps spinning, government policies will favor Wall Street over Main Street. I hope you‘ll all join me in saying “enough is enough.”

I guess she didn’t take Larry Summers’ advice.

“It’s the nature of the business”
by Tom Sullivan

And all this time I thought regulatory capture of the Supreme Court just had to do with the sitting justices. Reuters’ lengthy, 3-part series on the attorneys who appear most frequently before the Supreme Court is titled, “The Echo Chamber.” Really, though, these lawyers need their own “Lifestyles of” show. (An overwhelmingly white-male cast, of course.)

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

They represent less than 1 percent of lawyers who file appeals to the Supreme Court, yet appear in 43 percent of the cases the court heard from 2004 through 2012. Fifty-one of the 66 represent firms whose work is primarily for corporations. “It’s the nature of the business,” Ashley Parrish, a partner at King & Spalding told reporters. Which is why firms avoid individuals’ cases against current or prospective corporate clients. Pro bono First Amendment and criminal cases that don’t conflict with moneyed clients’ interests are the exception.

Michael Luttig is general counsel for Boeing Co.:

“It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other,” Luttig said. The court and its bar have grown “detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law.”

We’ve come a long way from first principles and our rustic notions of citizen legislators. Why should we expect any different for our courts? Specialization is the name of the game, and law firms that hope to play attract elite, former law clerks to their Supreme Court practices, attorneys who know sitting justices personally. Reuters explains that “Supreme Court clerks are so prized that the market-rate signing bonus is $300,000.”

Which is not to say that these attorneys are just mercenaries.

“It’s not that there aren’t lawyers at these large firms who aren’t public-spirit minded and don’t want to do these [individual] cases. It’s that their business model won’t allow it,” said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the mid-sized firm Cohen Milstein, who argued against Wal-Mart at the Supreme Court.

Nor is it to say that these elite law firms don’t have principles.

Law firms have different goals than advocacy groups – profit, for one – but their Supreme Court practices often share an ideological interest in shaping the law for clients. For firms that are most active before the high court, those clients are more often than not corporations.

[snip]

“We hired people with commitment, belief and purity of purpose,” said Claffee, who can quote by heart phrases from Powell’s 1971 memo. “It’s all part of strengthening our brand and our substance.”

That would be the memo from soon-to-be Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging them (among other things) to exploit the judiciary to advance the interests of business.

In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), corporate monies flooded electoral politics nationwide from city hall to state legislatures to congressional and presidential elections. And the Sunlight Foundation estimates (2012): “For every one member of Congress, the influence industry produces about $12.5 million in lobbying.” Meanwhile, the America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) crafts corporate-written bills that get filed verbatim in state capitals — the analogue of what lobbyists do in Washington. “The Echo Chamber” simply confirms the corporate capture of the judicial branch as well. As if we didn’t already see that in SCOTUS decisions.

Getting back to first principles, what vestigial meaning has the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it is all the same power?

Workingman’s Dems
by Tom Sullivan

Like a lot of columns dissecting the Democrats’ nonperformance this fall, Thomas Frank’s in Salon focuses on how Democrats have largely abandoned their erstwhile working-class base. Mocking David Brooks’ call for a “common project” to fight the scourge of “classism,” Frank believes instead we need a project to help wealthy professionals understand the struggles of working people:

By “we,” I mean the Democratic Party. Once upon a time it was the dedicated champion of the interests of average people, but today Democrats are hemorrhaging the votes of the white working class. This catastrophic development is the pundit subject du jour, replacing the happy tales of demographic inevitability of two years ago. Since the beginning of September, according to Lexis-Nexis, there have been no fewer than 46 newspaper stories predicting, describing and analyzing the evaporation of Democratic appeal among this enormous slice of the electorate.

This is not merely disastrous, it is pathetic. What kind of lamestain left can’t win the working class . . . in year seven of a crushing demonstration of the folly of free markets? What kind of political leadership can’t figure out a way to overcome the backlash sensibility after four decades?

After losing the white working class by 30 points this fall, you’d think it would be obvious to Democratic leaders. And you’d be wrong. The “courthouse gangs” of old boys who dominated Democratic county-level politics for years have yet to get religion or exit the stage in many parts of the country. Higher up the food chain, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party — New Dems and other corporate-friendly Democrats — holds dwindling authority in Washington, yet will not readily change course either. At best, most will give new lip service to the concerns of working-class Americans even as their lips remain firmly planted elsewhere.

Frank again, on the impact of passing NAFTA on the Democrat’s base:

The deal crushed enthusiasm for the Democratic Party among the working-class voters who were then considered part of the Democratic base and contributed to the Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, a disaster from which, the economist Jeff Faux wrote in 2006, “the Democratic Party still has not recovered.” And, indeed, from which the party seemingly has no desire to recover. Just the other day, President Obama announced that he is fired up and ready to go . . . with the Republicans in Congress on the Trans Pacific Partnership, even though much of his own party is opposed to it.

Democrats who sign up for our master class on classism might also look back over their response to the financial crisis, during which they bailed out their BFFs on Wall Street and let everyone else go to hell. Or the many favors they failed to do for their former BFFs in organized labor. Or their lack of interest in getting a public option included in health-care reform.

When Democrats give voters the choice of Republican or Republican-lite, voters choose the real thing. Howie Klein and others noted how Democrats who ran this fall on a populist message won even as Blue Dogs and New Dems lot even more ground. North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan, who lost narrowly, ran instead on being America’s most moderate senator. Meanwhile, progressive ballot initiatives won even in red states.

But it will take more than a populist message to win back a working class Democrats abandoned with NAFTA. It will take admitting the error and a changing of ways. In the South at least, repentance is something working-class voters understand. Yet it is not clear that it is even possible to return to a twentieth-century economic model that seems extinct. It will take a bold, new vision of an economy that has a place for America’s working class and a future for Millennials entering the workforce. And it will take Democratic politicians willing to fight for it.

A small conclave over the weekend discussed what kind of message in 2016 might resurrect Democrats’ fortunes in North Carolina. The concerns of the working class were a prominent theme. Yet a yearning to return to what worked back in the day was an undercurrent. Via email, a friend described the consultants working for a major 2016 candidate here as “super old school.” That’s about as auspicious a beginning for Democrats’ redemption story as, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

They’re not always crazy
by Tom Sullivan

Out here in the Laboratories of Democracy, ALEC is testing market-based solutions to problems other market-based policies created. But unless one of these solutions barrels right into you (ask Mike Stark), you might not know about it ahead of time.

You know when you hear a speech (or read a quote) by a not-as-crazy conservative and a phrase strikes your ear a little odd? After you baroo, the speech continues and you shrug it off as random weirdness. Something I learned during the George W. Bush administration was to pay attention to those odd phrases. They are usually either racial dog whistles or else a reference to some issue conservatives know about and the left needs to (unless you like getting blindsided). That happened again here recently.

In an article on the Cesspool of Sin’s $4.8 million effort to reduce its carbon footprint, a critic from a local business-owners’ organization argued that the money would have been better spent on transportation improvements, even though half the investment has already paid back in energy savings [emphasis mine]:

Regardless, Swicegood said, the money and energy would be better spent on projects such as rerouting and widening the tangle of interstates around Asheville. Efficient roads will be crucial to bringing new businesses and jobs to the area, he said.

Baroo!? But funding interstates is a state and federal matter, you say? And how much interstate would $4.8 million in local money buy anyway? What’s this guy smoking?

Funny you should ask. As it happens, in 2013 Republicans here passed the Strategic Transportation Investments (STI) bill. (Primary sponsor? One of Swicegood’s friends.) Having cut taxes and facing Kansas-like revenue shortfalls, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and friends want to fund future highway projects around the state using public-private partnerships and tolls rather than gas or other taxes. The state Department of Transportation’s formula for prioritizing highway projects provides two ways local planners can boost their project’s STI score [emphasis mine]:

A project’s benefit/cost can be improved if funding is provided during the project submission phase through local entity contributions or tolling approved by the local planning organization. In addition, a bonus allocation of up to 50% will be returned to the contributing area for a subsequent project scored through STI.

The 50% bonus? “A little sweetener slipped into the bill” to make up for “the bitter pill of a half century of tolls.”

As it also happens, a needed project to widen and improve I-26 through our area has long been in the works. We have suspected that, as with Thom’s Tholl Road on I-77, tolling might be in this project’s future. Unless, of course, locals would like to avoid that and hasten the project along by enacting a local sales tax to raise the score.

As Admiral Ackbar said, “It’s a trap!”

Should Democratic officials pass local sales taxes to help fund highway construction, what do you think the attack ads will look like in coming elections? Or if they sign on to plans to bring tolls to local highways for the next 50 years? Like most states, in North Carolina the largest blocks of blue votes are in the cities where Democrats tend to control. So cities are next on the target list in the GOP’s effort to defund the left. One side benefit of cutting taxes for the rich at the state and federal level is to push the cost of government and infrastructure down to the cities where Democrats can take the blame for cutting services and/or raising taxes.

Not so crazy after all.

[h/t Barry Summers]

The failure of human rights
by Tom Sullivan

Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School looks at how the human rights agenda crafted in the latter 20th century has foundered in the 21st. Nine “core” treaties with weak enforcement and loose interpretation. Idealistic perhaps, but too impractical. Inauspiciously, given this week in the U.S., Posner begins his long examination in the Guardian with examples of extrajudicial killings (summary executions) by police in Brazil, “not as a matter of official policy, but as a matter of practice.” (We can relate.) Posner writes:

The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations. In most countries people formally have as many as 400 international human rights – rights to work and leisure, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to nondiscrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think is worth protecting. The sheer quantity and variety of rights, which protect virtually all human interests, can provide no guidance to governments. Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another.

Everybody gets to pick and choose. The Americans focused on political rights. The Soviets on social and economic ones. But even if enforcement is lax, the effort at least requires governments to take human rights seriously.

But while governments all use the idiom of human rights, they use it to make radically different arguments about how countries should behave. China cites “the right to development” to explain why the Chinese government gives priority to economic growth over political liberalisation. Many countries cite the “right to security,” a catch-all idea that protection from crime justifies harsh enforcement methods. Vladimir Putin cited the rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine in order to justify his military intervention there, just as the United States cited Saddam Hussein’s suppression of human rights in order to build support for the Iraq war. Certain Islamic countries cite the right to religious freedom in order to explain why women must be subordinated, arguing that women must play the role set out for them in Islamic law. The right of “self‑determination” can be invoked to convert foreign pressure against a human-rights violating country into a violation of that country’s right to determine its destiny. The language of rights, untethered to specific legal interpretations, is too spongy to prevent governments from committing abuses and can easily be used to clothe illiberal agendas in words soothing to the western ear.

The result of NGO efforts to expand and secure human rights, says Posner, has been too top down, and more directed to satisfy the psychology of donors than the needs in individual cultures we fail at understanding. It is the same failure in top-down development economics. He suggests an approach to promoting well being in other countries that is “empirical rather than ideological.”

But given the turmoil of the last few weeks, perhaps America should get started by removing the beam from its own eye.

“There’s a history we have to overcome”
by Tom Sullivan

So, by now you know that the New York grand jury we wrote about on Tuesday returned its decision yesterday not to indict NYPD’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner. The 43 year-old black man died gasping “I can’t breathe” while in the custody of white officers outside a Staten Island convenience store after being accused of selling untaxed, loose cigarettes. The death was ruled a homicide by a New York medical examiner in August.

Oh, but the grand jury did indict the man who videoed the whole thing on his cellphone, so there’s that.

Protests broke out over the grand jury’s non-indictment, as expected, disrupting the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Plaza. Police made about 30 arrests.

Arrests going down at 47th and 6th Avenue. Massive standoff between police and protesters. pic.twitter.com/b9Xcgqhuzo— ANIMALNewYork (@ANIMALNewYork) December 4, 2014

Reacting to the grand jury decision, the New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote that biases are pervasive and sometimes unnoticed, just beyond our awareness:

I would love to live in a world where that wasn’t the case. Even more, I would love my children to inherit a world where that wasn’t the case, where the margin for error for them was the same as the margin for error for everyone else’s children, where I could rest assured that police treatment would be unbiased. But I don’t. Reality doesn’t bend under the weight of wishes. Truth doesn’t grow dim because we squint.

We must acknowledge — with eyes and minds wide open — the world as it is if we want to change it.

But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s statement went to the heart of the matter. De Blasio has had to have “the talk” with his own son about how to behave in encounters with police:

This is profoundly personal to me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. And I said to him, I did.

Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

And that painful sense of contradiction that our young people see first, that our police are here to protect us, and we honor that, and at the same time, there’s a history we have to overcome, because for so many of our young people, there’s a fear. And for so many of our families, there’s a fear.

So I’ve had to worry over the years. Chirlane’s had to worry. Is Dante safe each night? There are so many families in this city who feel that each and every night. Is my child safe? And not just from some of the painful realities—crime and violence in some of our neighborhoods—but is safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Justice Department will conduct a civil rights probe into the episode.

“We are dealing with centuries of racism that has brought us to this day,” the mayor said. “That is how fundamental the task at hand is: to turn from that history and make a change that is profound and lasting.”

Eric Garner didn’t get a chance to hold his breath waiting for that.