Monday, April 26, 2021

Holman Jenkins Jr.: "Keep Making Martyrs Out Of Black People - And Cops Will Keep Shooting!"


The  long list of reprehensible Holman Jenkins Jr. WSJ columns numbs the mind and beggars simple decency, but readers have noted some of the worst already - the ones I've skewered on this blog.  But few approach the one he let loose in his weekend column ('How To Have More Police Shootings',  p. A13) wherein this scurrilous little hack wrote; 

"The press always plays up the 'oh, not again' angle whenever police shoot a black person.  This will quickly become absurd. There's always going to be a next time and soon.  60 million Americans have encounters with police every year and 10 million re arrested, 2 million involve officers using force.   

 Making martyrs out of people who resist arrest only encourages others to make the same foolish, self-defeating decision.  The result will be predictable unless police stop trying to apprehend lawbreakers altogether:  more deaths in custody like that of George Floyd and more accidental shootings like that of Daunte Wright."

The  lack of reasoning and moral sense in this twaddle is mind blowing until one reads the twisted logic that preceded it.  For example, this twit offers the following as a "general proposition": 

"Most of what people say isn't about true and false, but about self- protection and advancement."

Of course, this makes no sense at all.  The reason being that in this era of rampant fake news, a good proportion of the educated population still regard truth and facts as an essential standard in communication.  Hence, if "self protection" and "advancement" doesn't also include attention to truth and facts then that posture ends up being self defeating. No one with sense would wish to hire such a person who treats truth as being expendable, nor would one award such a creature any kind of promotion.   Why would an employer if truth is totally fungible for this person?

Jenkins Jr. then proceeds to put this codswallop to use in several examples, demonstrating his own yen for self protection over facts (aware of his previously spewed bilge) e.g.:

- The Georgia voter laws recently enacted were actually "more permissive" than those in blue states given the latter (e.g. enacted in 2020) "hurriedly put into place unlegislated improvisations during the pandemic emergency."

EXCEPT it represented a rational use of an alternative -  mail ballots - which we use as a standard here in Colorado,  and which Holman piffle  ("unlegislated improvisations") I shot down in an earlier blog post, e.g.

Then barking more bollocks:

 "As long as the universe consists of matter and energy even a single human being exhaling will have some effect on climate." 

Uh, yes, bonehead, but not all effects are equal in magnitude hence don't warrant inclusion in climate models, say like rapid permafrost melting is included (while sneezing isn't).

But this lowbrow imp -  because his default move is always insipid conflation -  then wants to claim "To admit any nuance would be (e.g. for the NY  Times) to be accused of denialism".

Here, the jughead is clearly using a comparison to his pet favorite climate stooge - Steven Koonin- because this particular quack regards climate science as "unsettled", hence offering "nuance"- which blather I already torpedoed, e.g.  

All of this Holman- brand loose reasoning, disinformation and manipulation paves the way for his equally specious "arguments" regarding police behavior and standards in the U.S.   Thus when a person "resists arrest" he or she - according to Holman:  "creates a condition that cannot possibly end well.  You commit a chargeable offense when you might have had no charge at all. You put police in a terrible position of having to vindicate the lawful authority of the state."

Interesting here that this creature of habit -  who likes to employ the "nuance" in  climate change as being "unsettled"  -   is averse to admitting it in policing.

For example, the odious case of how the cops in Aurora CO took down Elijah McClain merely for walking home at night - in a Balaclava. Ordered to halt, despite his righteous protests he was doing nothing wrong, they stopped him,  tossed him to the ground, subdued him with a choke hold. Then when he resisted a little ('Why are you doing this?')  they had a paramedic inject him with ketamine   - a dose for a guy 50 lbs. heavier.  This  resulted  in McClain going into cardiac arrest then suffering brain death en route to the hospital.  Where is your "nuance" now, Holman? 

McClain's was the classic case of a busybody's interference resulting in needless death. In this instance, Elijah had just purchased his snacks to eat at home and was walking the short distance back at night, wearing his favorite ski mask-  as he usually did - for security. (He was an introvert as he proclaimed to the cops.)   He was unaware, however, that a nosey dope spied him exiting the convenience store and called the cops, reporting a "suspicious person".  Which, btw, is not a crime given there are a thousand ways any human can look "suspicious" to another.  But the Aurora cops acted on the busybody's call and soon had stopped Elijah - the slight, musically talented kid who wouldn't hurt a fly.

How does Holman's template of resisting arrest enter here? It doesn't because Elijah was guilty of no crime  He was throttled merely for being an introvert, walking home and minding his own business. When he pleaded with the cops as to why he was being manhandled one responded: "Because you were looking suspicious!"  Really? Seriously?  McClain tried to rightly resist the injustice but soon was stuck with the needle dosed with ketamine. The reason?  He'd been instantly  diagnosed with "excited delirium", which even the therps don't recognize as any genuine condition.

Another black kid dead through no fault of his own and who didn't merit any "lawful authority of the state" coming down on his hide.  But in Holman Jenkins' world Elijah deserved whatever he got because he didn't instantly submit to the cops' authority, misplaced though it was.

Incidents such as this have now triggered a Denver pilot initiative called STAR  (Support Team Assistance Response )  designed not to involve police response to each and every call.   Especially after the Elijah McClain incident it's now been realized that highly reactive and aggressive cops are not the ones to deal with 95% of reported situations - mainly those involving citizens with social dysfunctions (like McClain) or mental illness..  Basically, STAR directs emergency calls to a two-person team: a medic and a clinician, staffed in a van from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays.  The program, which launched in June, has reported promising results in its six-month progress report. The program aims to provide a "person-centric mobile crisis response" to community members who are experiencing problems related to mental health, depression, poverty, homelessness, or substance abuse issues.

Denver is among several U.S. cities working to develop an alternative emergency responder model for people who are experiencing mental health crises. This  is critical as police officers fatally shoot hundreds of people experiencing mental health crises every year, according to a Washington Post database of fatal shootings by on-duty police officers. Since 2015, police have fatally shot nearly 1,400 people with mental illnesses, according to the database. Something clearly needs to change and it isn't Holman's way of black people becoming more submissive. Especially if like Elijah McClain they didn't do anything wrong other than "walking while black".

Over the first six months of the pilot, Denver received more than 2,500 emergency calls that fell into the STAR program's purview, and the STAR team was able to respond to 748 calls. No calls required the assistance of police, and no one was arrested. Paying attention there, Holman?   Had this option been used with Elijah McClain he'd likely still be alive today.

Denver police responded to nearly 95,000 incidents over the same period, suggesting that an expanded STAR program could reduce police calls by nearly 3%, .


The intent of STAR is to send the right response, not a one-size fits all force response like Jenkins surmises.  According to Carleigh Sailon - a social worker with the Mental Health Center of Denver who works out of the STAR van:

"People call 911 for an array of reasons and it’s not always something that involves risk or a criminal element," 

 Adding:

 "If the STAR van can handle someone in crisis and that frees up police to handle a robbery or domestic violence call, then that’s an incredible success."

Meanwhile, it is now evident that Holman Jenkins' column is the latest example of what's been called "dysfunctional motivated reasoning"  (See 'After The Fact - The Erosion of Truth and the Rise of Donald Trump' , by Nathan Bomey).  In this case - and for such "reasoning" (p. 93) : "Facts are only considered for acceptance if they are unobjectionable within one's preferred ideological framework."   

Thus all Jenkins's skewed arguments- whether on the GA voter laws, the supposed "nuances" of climate science which demand it being "unsettled", or the necessary "forceful" actions of cops, are all derived from his motivated (and warped) ideological reasoning. 

See Also:

Officers laughed about arrest

Excerpt:

The Loveland police officers who violently arrested a 73-year-old woman with dementia last year laughed about the incident afterward and congratulated themselves about the arrest, video released Monday by the woman’s lawyer shows.

The aggressive arrest not only put Karen Garner in a hospital, but also drastically worsened her dementia symptoms, her family said in an interview Monday, speaking publicly for the first time. Garner barely communicates now. Her family placed her in an assisted living facility in August because they no longer believed she would be safe living alone.

AND:

Loveland places 4 police officers on leave over violent arrest of 73-year-old with dementia


AND:

by Dave Lindorff | April 25, 2021 - 5:39am | permalink


No comments: