NYDN: A flight attendant who ran from authorities who wanted to search her carry-on bag — which contained 70 pounds of cocaine — has finally landed in jail.
Marsha Gay Reynolds, a JetBlue flight attendant who cops say abandoned $3 million worth of white powder after flinging off her Gucci heels and running from security at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, was arrested Wednesday at Kennedy Airport, U.S. attorney’s spokesman Thom Mrozek said.
One problem with this absurd article is that the Jews on the Supreme Court have very little Talmudic knowledge. Jews who study Talmud daily and observe Jewish law vote Republican. Jews who vote Democrat rarely study Talmud and are rarely observant. Most Orthodox Jews favor the death penalty, oppose abortion, and vote Republican.
Garland, the grandchild of Jews from the Pale of Settlement, would, if confirmed, join a proud tradition of Jewish jurists. The joy in this isn’t solely about celebrating Jews in positions of power; the Jewish “family” of the court has always been a part of its forward-seeing edge. While the court’s darker elements have justified segregation, decided a presidential election on partisan lines and protected the corporate influence in politics, the Jews of the court have been the counterweight.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a civil libertarian and advocate of abortion rights, is celebrated as a feminist icon. Arthur Goldberg helped found the constitutional right to privacy, much to the ire of those who want the government to oversee Americans’ sex lives. Before coming to the bench, Abe Fortas represented Clarence Earl Gideon in the case that would grant the accused the right to an attorney. And, of course, Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo worked as judicial allies to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal.
Jews have been a bigger influence in this arm of the federal government than in any other. That’s perhaps because the Supreme Court is the most Jewish of the branches. The executive branch is cold management, and Congress is less a place of dueling ideologies than it is one of cynical wheeling and dealing. The court, in its ideal depiction, is the place where scholars engage in grand debates about the essence of law, taking a deep look at the interpretation of the mandates our elders gave us. Ethical dialectic is meant to lead these minds to our governing rulings.
The Supreme Court, comprising only Catholics and Jews despite being in a country dominated by Protestants, is the most Talmudic institution in our government.
That is precisely why conservatives, motivated to restrict voting rights and protect corporate interests, are afraid of someone like Garland, by all accounts the kind of scholarly intellect that should be on the court. The whole Republican project since the failed campaign of Barry Goldwater has been based on strict ideological loyalty, which in turn is rewarded through party patronage. That’s easy to pull off in Congress, where election contributions can keep anyone loyal for as long as there are competitive elections.
But legal scholars on the high court — just like yeshiva students — can let their imaginations roam free in the minutiae in hopes of later emerging with broader meaning. Is computer code a form of free speech? Does that comma in the Second Amendment mean you’re allowed to join a militia and have a one-shot musket, or does it entitle everyone to an anti-aircraft weapon? Does it matter what the founders intended when they wrote the Constitution if we’re talking about technologies they could not possibly have imagined? The constant argument and questioning of advocates’ positions is meant to let the discourse bring us to the conclusions that best suit the people rather than showing deference to the pressures of powerful lobbies. And that’s not the way our political interests want things to work.
Comments: The author implies that originalists — those who attempt to find the clear meaning of the founder’s intent — are somehow both obsolete and non-Talmudic. He clearly misunderstands the nature of the Talmud. The Talmud is not just a collection of rabbinic arguments. It is an attempt to understand — through debate — what the original oral revelation “M’Sinai” was. Yes, circumstances and technologies change and Halacha must be able to cope with those changes. But, it attempts to cope with those changes within the original meaning of the law — both oral and written. Any deviation from that goal is decidedly non-Talmudic.
Donald Trump has expanded what you are permitted to say publicly and some Jewish groups such as the ADL fear this free speech and want to destroy it. They want to be able to set the boundaries on permitted speech.
These radical anti-goyim groups in this article are not reflective of American Jews as a whole.
Stopping the importation of Muslims is just commonsense. These Jewish non-profits are revealing themselves as a fifth column in our midst. They are traitors. They are enemies of America.
If you found poisonous snakes in your bedroom, who would you hate? The snakes or the people who put them there? These Jewish non-profits want to fill your communities with poisonous snakes.
Nathan Guttman writes for the Forward:
Racial GOP Rhetoric Propels Jewish Not-For-Profits Into the Fray
The Anti-Defamation League has been at the forefront, with public statements criticizing Trump for singling out Muslims and for accepting support from white supremacists. On Wednesday, ADL added Ted Cruz to the list, issuing a statement in response to Cruz’s call for special police security patrols in Muslim neighborhoods across America. The group described Cruz’s call as an “irrational approach,” which is “misguided and counterproductive.”
“This is a very unusual political season, and what we’re seeing is another aspect of it,” said historian Jonathan Sarna from Brandeis University. “People are torn between the feeling that Jewish institutions should be neutral, and the moral sense that Mr. Trump represents something the Jewish community can’t really accept.”
The ADL’s February 25 press release calling on Trump to distance himself from former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke and to disavow white supremacist groups garnered national attention after Trump stumbled on national TV when confronted with the question. Trump claimed he did not know of Duke. CNN News host Jake Tapper pressed Trump three times on whether he’d distance himself from the KKK — but Trump never mentioned the group in his answers. “I have to look at the group,” he said, speaking generically about allegedly racist organizations supporting him. “I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about. You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I’d have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them.”
Helpfully, ADL followed up on February 28 with an offer to provide Trump and other candidates with information about hate groups that may get involved in their campaigns. One day later the group issued a list of individuals and groups supporting Trump that it found racist, along with thumbnail summaries of their backgrounds.
ADL’s national director Jonathan Greenblatt, meanwhile, took to the airways with a clear demand that Trump disavow hate groups and make clear he rejects their support.
In an email to the Forward, Greenblatt said his organization has not stepped up its political activity this election cycle. “We are doing what we have always done during the political season, which is speaking out when there are expressions of bigotry or stereotyping of marginalized groups such as immigrants or minorities,” Greenblatt said, “Our founding mission impels us to speak out when there are expressions of racism, prejudice or bigotry from people in public life, whether [or not] those are candidates, and regardless of whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Independents.”
ADL has been the most active in taking on Trump, but other Jewish groups have also weighed in, putting aside stances of strict neutrality to direct strong statements at Trump.
The American Jewish Committee, last November, denounced Trump’s call to create a registry of Muslim Americans, and earlier this month issued a statement condemning violence in the presidential campaign, without mentioning Trump by name.
“AJC is strictly non-partisan. It abstains from taking stands on candidates and is content to let the electoral processes play out,” the group explained in its statement. “But when the process is infected with threats of violence and disruption, it is not a candidate at issue; it is the viability of democracy itself.”
B’nai B’rith International, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and major religious denominations also spoke out against Trump’s comments on Muslims.
COMMENTS:
* If Donald Trump is elected president I hope that he directs the IRS to take a hard look at the ADL’s tax-exempt status. There should be a price to pay for the feeling of feigned moral righteousness, similar to the warm feeling of urinating in one’s pants. The ADL’s foray into partisan politics should carry a price tag, to use a term that will not be unknown to Forward readers.
* I doubt you’d feel safe even if the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, and the president were all Jews. The Jewish paranoia has a life of its own.
* The article doesn’t mention any actual racist rhetoric by any Republican. Muslims are, for the record, not a race– they are a religion, which is to say that they share a belief system. Is there really nothing in that belief system that might be said to warrant our concern?
* The groups mentioned don’t represent the Jewish People and were not elected by them. Anybody can see the AIPAC rally in which Trump received several standing ovations. Those were Jews clapping. The Forward and their fictitious “Washington Bureau ” may not like that. Too bad. Jews love Trump.
* The ADL started out has a worthy organization. Now it’s just a racket. And the idea that the AJC is non-partisan is another joke. I can do without Muslim rape gangs, terrorist cells, and urban “no go ” zones. But I know that there are other Jews who think that becoming like Belgium will somehow make them feel better about themselves.
* Trump disavowed any white supremacists who may have supported his candidacy as fast as he could. The left refuses to let go of this BS because it serves their narrative. A KKK Dragon yesterday endorsed Hillary Clinton, but everyone knows it is BS – just like the Trump thing.
I was at the AIPAC conference and I saw Trump give a great Pro-Israel speech that touched all the bases. I am disappointed that Lillian Pinkas, the new President of AIPAC, felt the need to admonish the 18,000 delegates for giving Trump so many standing ovations. Treating the AIPAC delegates like 3rd grade kids and spanking their hands only made matters worse, because AIPAC is now going to spend the next year doing damage control over this. My AIPAC director claimed it was because the AIPAC Outreach program to the black community was in danger because the black attendees to racial offense to Trumps criticism of Obama. I told him that sounded like complete BS. It was because the liberal donors were shocked when 85% of the crowd gave Trump a resounding SIX standing ovations.
Ms. Pinkas should have taken personal responsibility for not setting boundaries on the candidate’s speeches. Instead, she blames the membership. I really don’t think she is ready to lead AIPAC through these terribly partisan waters. Opps! Now I will be called anti-woman….
* Trump is not preaching hatred and now is not the time to fight hate groups, after he gets into the white house is the time to do that and I think Trump will do this more than any other candidate. Trump seems to me to be the most honestly in favor of Jews and Israel than any other candidate if his daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism it’s a sign her father was a good Jewish father figure.
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner is the Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:
Despite the several thousand cheering in the arena, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews across America reject the divisive and hurtful messages that have been central to Mr. Trump’s campaign. As a community, we know what it is to be targeted because of our faith and to be treated unfairly. We know what it is to experience a dearth of compassion.
As this presidential campaign continues, people of good will have a responsibility to resoundingly reject disrespect and xenophobia coming from any candidate. We must lift our voices in support of inclusion, equality and the dignity present within every individual.
When a candidate abandons our shared commitment to the spirit of pluralism that underpins our democracy and engages in hateful rhetoric, we must speak out. Though I am appalled by what I saw and heard at AIPAC, I have the utmost faith in our community’s ability to respond to the moral imperatives our tradition sets out, even in this fraught election season.
Has the rabbi ever read the Torah? It is filled with divisive, hurtful and xenophobic messages. One essential part of Jewish law is separating Jews from gentiles. Is that not divisive and hurtful and xenophobic? The Torah does not know of such moral categories as racist, bigoted, hurtful (when gentiles say things about other gentiles), and xenophobic.
Violent crime in many American cities began rising in the second half of 2014, after two decades of decline. The Major Cities Chiefs Association convened an emergency session in August 2015 to discuss the double-digit surge in violence besetting its member police departments. Homicides at that point were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore, compared to the same period in 2014; the average homicide increase among 35 cities surveyed by the Association was 19%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro in May. July 2015 was the bloodiest month in Baltimore since 1972, with 45 people killed in 30 days. Arrests, summons, and pedestrian stops had dropped in many cities, where data on such police activity were available.
The violence surge continued into fall. Homicides in Baltimore reached their highest per capita rate in the city’s history. In October, Attorney General Loretta Lynch brought together over one hundred police chiefs, mayors, and federal prosecutors in another emergency meeting to strategize over the rising homicide rates. FBI Director James Comey noted in an October speech that “Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase.”
The media confirmed the experience of law enforcement officials. In September, the data blog FiveThirtyEight found a 16% increase in homicide in the 60 largest cities so far that year. The Washington Post found a nearly 17% increase in homicides in 2015 in the 50 top cities, the largest one-year increase since 1993. (Had homicides dropped 17% in one year, mayors and police chiefs across the country would have been popping champagne corks.) The Brennan Center for Justice estimated a nearly 15% increase in homicides in 25 of the 30 largest cities in 2015. This year, many cities are still struggling with crime increases: the number of homicides in Chicago through March 11, for example, had nearly doubled from the same period in 2015, notwithstanding that homicides had already increased nearly 13% in all of 2015. Homicides in Los Angeles were up nearly 28% through March 9 and violent crime up 13%.
I first noted the rising violence in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in May 2015. And having spoken with police officers across the country, I posited a reason for it: officers were backing off of proactive policing in reaction to the hostility they were encountering in urban areas. Officers had told me about being surrounded by angry, jeering crowds who cursed and threw water bottles and rocks at them when they tried to make an arrest. Suspects and bystanders stuck cell phones in officers’ faces and refused to comply with lawful orders. Officers were continuing to answer 911 calls with alacrity, but in that large area of discretionary policing—getting out of a squad car at 1 a.m., for example, to question someone who appears to have a gun or may be casing a target—many officers were deciding to simply drive on by rather than risk a volatile, potentially career-ending confrontation that they were under no obligation to instigate.
I dubbed this latest outbreak of depolicing and the resulting emboldening of criminals the “Ferguson effect,” picking up on a term first used by St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson. The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 had triggered riots, die-ins, and cop assassinations. It gave rise to the angry Black Lives Matter protest movement, which asserts that racist (insert “white” whenever circumstances allow) cops are engaged in a killing spree against unarmed black men. Activists and academics denounced pedestrian stops and public order policing (otherwise known as Broken Windows policing) as racially biased and oppressive. As a result, officers were doing a lot less of such discretionary enforcement. Arrests in St. Louis city and county, for example, dropped a third after the Brown shooting; misdemeanor drug arrests in Baltimore dropped a third through November 2015.
The relationship between depolicing and crime was hardly a novel discovery; a 2005 University of Washington study of depolicing in Cincinnati following the anti-cop riots of 2001 had found a drop in arrests and a surge in crime in the city’s black areas. And I was hardly the only person to hear from police officers about their reluctance to engage in proactive enforcement. FBI director Comey reported that cops in one big city precinct “described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars.” The cops told Comey: “’We feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars.’” In November 2015, the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chuck Rosenberg, said his own conversations with police officials had persuaded him that cops were worried about becoming the “next viral video,” because even if they did everything right, they could “still end up on the evening news.”
Despite the ample evidence of officers pulling back from discretionary enforcement, my May op-ed unleashed considerable opposition. The American Society of Criminologists sent out an unprecedented alert to its members in June 2015, asking them to try to disprove the Ferguson effect. The ASC helpfully provided sample rebuttals of my op-ed prepared by The Sentencing Project, an anti-incarceration advocacy group. The ASC worried that my article would somehow impede the push for federal “sentencing reform.”
Criminologists David Pyrooz of the University of Colorado Boulder, Scott Wolfe of the University of South Carolina, and Scott Decker of Arizona State University were among those who responded to the op-ed, publishing a complex econometric analysis of the Ferguson effect. They later defended their analysis on this site against criticism by me and others. Pyrooz and his co-authors modelled monthly rates of change in crime rates in 81 of the 105 largest cities in the country in the twelve months before and after Ferguson. Though the rate of change in violent crime increased ten times after Ferguson, that tenfold increase was not enough to be deemed statistically significant, they say. The authors concluded that “there is no systematic evidence of a Ferguson Effect on aggregate crime rates throughout the large U.S. cities . . . in this study.”
But that 81-city average masked important changes in the nation’s crime picture. Before Ferguson, individual cities’ crime rates were largely moving downwards together; after Ferguson, crime trajectories were all over the map. Crime in some cities was still down; in others, it was way up. Variance in homicide rates increased nearly six times. And the cities with the highest homicide surges were exactly what the Ferguson effect would predict: cities with large black populations, smaller white populations, and already high rates of violent crime.
Recall that the Black Lives Matter movement has sent out a relentless message that cops are the biggest threat facing young black men today. It directs a non-stop flow of racially-tinged animus at the police profession. A typical march that I observed this Fall on Fifth Ave. in New York City featured “Fuck the Police” and “Racism Is the Disease, Revolution Is the Cure” T-shirts, “Stop Police Terror” signs, and “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Racist Cops Have Got to Go” chants. Such rhetoric has influenced street behavior. During Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2015, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris opened fire at police officers, and was shot in response. A crowd pelted the cops with frozen water bottles and rocks, wounding three officers, while destroying three police cars and damaging businesses. “We’re ready for what? We’re ready for war,” some protesters chanted. In Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July 2015 when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene, where a 4-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. Bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants.
A recent poll of New York City officers found that active resistance to arrest had increased over the last two years. “There’s a total lack of respect out there for the police,” a female sergeant in New York told me last year, echoing cops across the country. It is in predominantly black neighborhoods where police worry that a videoed use of force will land them on TV in the role of racist cop of the week and where officers tell each other: “‘If you get out of your car, you’re crazy, unless there’s a radio call,’” in the words of a cop in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Newton Division.
In short, it is in high-crime black neighborhoods where the police are backing off the most under the relentless charge that they are racist. And it is in high-crime neighborhoods where a fall-off in proactive policing is going to produce the biggest negative impact. It is in those neighborhoods where informal social controls — above all families — have most broken down and where policing most critically takes up the slack. The per capita rate of shootings, for example, is 81 times higher in predominantly black Brownsville, Brooklyn, than in nearby Bay Ridge. Not surprisingly, the per capita rate of pedestrian stops is also higher in Brownsville than in Bay Ridge—15 times higher—because every shooting will call forth a police response geared to interrupting retaliatory gunfire. There is less public order policing to begin with in low-crime areas, because there is less disorder, but even if police have become equally gun-shy about discretionary enforcement in low-crime areas, the consequences would be less.
The Pyrooz study confirms the relationship between depolicing and an increase in violent crime. Not only have homicides spiked in predominantly black cities, but robberies — the quintessential urban street crime — registered what even the authors deem a statistically significant increase in all 81 cities. Pyrooz and his colleagues struggle mightily against their own findings, however. They attribute the sharp post-Ferguson rise in homicides in predominantly black cities not to depolicing but to the fact that such cities were somehow “primed” for a homicide increase. This is a circular, pseudo-explanation. How do we know that those cities were “primed” for a post-Ferguson crime increase? Because they had such a post-Ferguson crime increase. And why did they have a crime increase? Because they were “primed” for it. They offer a strange analogy to explain their ad hoc “priming” hypothesis: It’s like a “stock portfolio,” they say, “where some holdings increase even in a down market.” But the post-Ferguson crime increases were not random and unpredictable fluctuations among a diversified market basket of data points; they were predictable effects of a racially-driven depolicing phenomenon. If being a high-crime city “primes” that city for further crime increases, the authors need to explain why crime dropped in those same high-crime cities over the previous two decades. (Answer: because of the data-driven proactive policing revolution that started in New York City and spread nationwide.) And if it was obvious that the crime drop in black cities was about to reverse itself—by coincidence at exactly the moment when the Black Lives Matter movement kicked into high gear — the authors might have alerted us to that reversal ahead of time.
The authors claim that their study refutes my Ferguson effect hypothesis because the title of my original Wall Street Journal op-ed was: “The New Nationwide Crime Wave.” Since the post-Ferguson crime increases were not uniform across all 81 of their modelled cities, the title of the op-ed was wrong, they say, and therefore the Ferguson effect hypothesis was also wrong. I did not write the title of my op-ed, consistent with the usual practice, nor did I see it before publication. But in any case, nothing in that first op-ed or in its several follow-ups implied that crime needed to go up uniformly in every American city for there to be a Black Lives Matter-generated pull-back from proactive enforcement and a resulting effect on crime.
Pyrooz, Wolfe, and Decker repeatedly put themselves on the side of “science” against some presumed group of science-deniers. But their analysis of the motivations of people concerned about depolicing is anything but “scientific,” consisting merely of a dizzying set of non sequiturs and ungrounded speculation.
The trio alleges that their critics “want a Ferguson effect to exist” (emphasis in original) and that those critics somehow want a Ferguson effect to exist because they “believe that police are not professional enough, not trained well enough, and too hesitant under pressure to withstand the new reality that their actions can be caught on camera.” Such a belief, they say, is the true “anti-cop” position, compared to the “pro-cop” belief that “a vast majority of officers are well-trained professionals who can withstand pressure from public scrutiny.” The trio then asserts: “If one accepts this premise, we would certainly not expect large groups of officers to de-police and cause higher crime rates in our communities.”
As an initial matter, it is impossible to tell here and elsewhere whether they are arguing that depolicing is not going on, or that it should have no effect on crime rates, or that depolicing would cause higher crime rates but officers are too professional to cut back on discretionary enforcement. In any case, it is an empirical matter whether it is going on or not, regardless of whether acknowledging it is “pro-cop” or “anti-cop.”
Pyrooz, Wolfe, and Decker need to get out there and talk to some officers. “Public scrutiny,” as they call it, is not the problem impeding urban policing today; the problem is hatred, aggression, and sometimes violent resistance to arrest. A police officer in Los Angeles tells me: “Several years ago I could use a reasonable and justified amount of force and not be cursed and jeered at. Now our officers are getting surrounded every time they put handcuffs on someone. The spirit and the rhetoric of this flawed movement is causing more confrontations with police and closing the door on the gains in communication we had made before it began.” Cops are human. It is wholly unrealistic to think that the relentless propaganda campaign against them, accompanied by a volatile, hostile street environment, is not going to lead many to hesitate before initiating encounters that politicians and the press have labelled as racist and that they are under no mandate to undertake.
Moreover, policing is political. The outrage among Black Lives Matter allies at the mere suggestion that the police may be backing off of proactive enforcement is the strangest aspect of this whole episode. A decline in pedestrian stops and Broken Windows policing is exactly what the activists have been demanding. Now they’re getting it. Isn’t that how political pressure is supposed to work?
The authors suggest that “we should spend more time worrying about the legitimacy crisis rather than a Ferguson effect on crime.” But it is the falsehoods about a police reign of terror spread by the Black Lives Matter movement that has brought on that “legitimacy crisis.” Since Wolfe, Decker, and Pyrooz pride themselves on their fealty to “science,” perhaps they could “scientifically” analyse police shootings in the context of crime. They would discover that police shootings of blacks are lower than what black violent crime rates would predict. Police shootings constitute a much lower share of black homicide deaths than of white and Hispanic homicide deaths. And police officers are two and a half times more likely to be fatally shot by a black man than a black man is to be fatally shot by a cop.
The three criminologists’ final argument against the Ferguson effect is the least “scientific” of all. They accuse their critics of “threatening people with the prospect that violent crime will increase if they protest police behaviours,” and of thereby implying that “the police should not be accountable for their behaviour.” No one is “threatening people with the prospect” of a violent crime increase; the violent crime increase was well underway before anyone noticed it and hypothesized a reason. It is a question of fact whether violent crime is rising in urban areas, regardless of any untoward implications the authors think such a fact would have for the Black Lives Matter movement. And no one is saying that “the police should not be accountable for their behaviour.” What analysts such as myself are saying is that the current frenzy of cop hatred is affecting proactive policing. If that effect somehow delegitimates the Black Lives Matter movement in the eyes of Pyrooz and his colleagues, so be it. “Science” is silent on such a matter.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the forthcoming The War on Cops.
