Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 128, Ed. 1 Monday, December 8, 2014 Page: 4 of 18
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4A
Monday, December 8, 2014
NATIONAL
Denton Record-Chronicle
BRIEFLY
ACROSS THE NATION
Washington
Obama could start
using veto pen more
Veto brinkmanship between
congressional Republicans and
President Barack Obama was
virtually absent in his first six
years in ofiice, but it’s about to
unleash itself on Washington.
Until now, controversial Re-
publican-backed legislation
rarely reached the president’s
desk because Senate Democrats
blocked it. Starting in January,
however, Republicans will con-
trol both the House and Senate,
and Obama may have to decide
more often whether to sign or
veto GOP-crafted bills.
Obama gave lawmakers an
early taste of veto politics recent-
ly when he forced congressional
leaders to drop a proposed pack-
age of tax breaks that were pop-
ular with many Republican con-
stituents. Some Democrats did
support the plan, but liberals
and the White House said it tilt-
ed too heavily toward corpora-
tions, not lower-income work-
ers.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Pearl Harbor veterans
find travel tougher
Veterans who survived the
Pearl Harbor attack that
launched the United States into
World War II attended Sunday’s
73rd anniversary ceremony with
the help of canes, wheelchairs
and motorized scooters.
Wearing purple orchid leis,
about 100 Pearl Harbor and
World War II survivors attended
the ceremony overlooking a me-
morial that sits atop sunken bat-
tleship USS Arizona. Many of
them arrived well before the sun
came up.
This year’s anniversary of the
Japanese attack is the 10th con-
secutive one that USS Utah sur-
vivor Gilbert Meyer attended.
But it’s getting harder for Meyer,
91, to travel to Hawaii from San
Antonio.
Asked if he planned to attend
next year’s anniversary, he re-
sponded with a chuckle, “That’s
like asking me if I’ll still be alive.”
Harold Johnson, 90, is mak-
ing it a goal to attend the 75th
anniversary, even though travel-
ing from Oak Harbor, Washing-
ton, isn’t always easy. “I’ve got a
little scooter that’s a real life sav-
er,” the USS Oklahoma survivor
said.
New York
Royal couple begins
3-day U.S. visit
Britain’s Prince William and
Princess Kate arrived in New
York City on Sunday, the royal
couple’s first official visit to the
U.S. and their first experience
with the Big Apple.
The Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge’s black Cadillac Es-
calade pulled up in front of the
Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan to a
throng of media and shrieking
admirers, who were kept behind
police barricades across Madi-
son Avenue.
“It’s good to be here,” William
told the hotel’s managing direc-
tor Giovanni Beretta, who was
standing outside the entrance to
greet the royal couple, who had
just spent seven hours on a flight
from London.
Rosemont, III.
Chlorine gas sickens 19
at hotel convention
Chlorine gas sickened several
people and forced the evacua-
tion of thousands of guests from
a suburban Chicago hotel early
Sunday, including many dressed
in cartoonish animal costumes
for an annual furries convention
who were ushered across the
street to a convention center
hosting a dog show.
Nineteen people who became
nauseous or dizzy were treated at
local hospitals, and at least 18
were released shortly thereafter.
Within hours, emergency work-
ers decontaminated the Hyatt
Regency O’Hare and allowed
people back inside. Six-foot-tall
rabbits, foxes and dragons
poured into the lobby, chatting
and giving each other high paws.
The source of the gas was ap-
parently chlorine powder left in
a ninth-floor stairwell at the ho-
tel, according to the Rosemont
Public Safety Department. In-
vestigators believe the gas was
created intentionally and are
treating it as a criminal matter.
— The Associated Press
Stats lacking on police-involved deaths
James Keivom, New York Daily News, pool/AP file photo
Mourners gather during a funeral service July 23 for Eric Garner at Bethel Baptist Church in the
Brooklyn borough of New York. A grand jury ruled not to indict the police officer involved in
Garner’s death.
By Allen G. Breed
AP National Writer
Ferguson, Missouri. Cleve-
land, Ohio. Staten Island, New
York. Eutawville, South Caroli-
na.
In each place, individuals —
all unarmed except for a child
carrying a pellet gun — died at
the hands of police officers. All of
the dead were black. The officers
involved, white.
To many Americans, it feels
like a national tidal wave. And
yet, no firm statistics can say
whether this spate of officer-in-
volved deaths is a growing trend
or simply a series of coincidenc-
es generating a deafening buzz
in news reports and social me-
dia.
‘We have a huge scandal in
that we don’t have an accurate
count of the number of people
who die in police custody,” says
Samuel Walker, emeritus pro-
fessor of criminal justice at the
University of Nebraska at Oma-
ha and a leading scholar on po-
licing and civil liberties. “That’s
outrageous.”
There are some raw num-
bers, but they’re of limited value.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime
Reports, for instance, track jus-
tifiable police homicides — there
were 1,688 between 2010 and
2013 — but the statistics rely on
voluntary reporting by local law
enforcement agencies and are
incomplete. Circumstances of
the deaths, and other informa-
tion such as age and race, also
aren’t required.
The Wall Street Journal, de-
tailing its own examination of
officer-involved deaths at 105 of
the nation’s 110 largest police de-
partments, reported last week
that federal data failed to in-
clude or mislabeled hundreds of
fatal police encounters.
Put simply: It’s hard to know
for certain what is happening on
the ground.
We want a comprehensive
picture... so people can be aware
of what really goes on, and not
the claptrap put out by people
with agendas,” says David Klin-
ger, a professor of criminology at
the University of Missouri-St.
Louis who has studied use of
deadly force and hopes to get
funding for a pilot project that
could provide better national
statistics.
To those who have taken to
the streets to protest in recent
weeks, that lack of context is al-
most beside the point.
“These are communities that
have been living for generations
under the yoke of what has felt
like an occupying force,” says
Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of
UCLAs Center for Policing Eq-
uity. ‘And regardless of what any
of the stats are ever going to say,
if we don’t address the reality of
that experience, then we’re
shooting ourselves in the foot in
our attempts to make good on
our promise of democratic prin-
ciples.”
The high-profile cases have
erupted one after the other.
On July 17, 43-year-old Eric
Gamer died after officers tried to
arrest him on suspicion of sell-
ing untaxed cigarettes on a New
York City street. Cellphone video
captured the scene as one officer
wrapped his arm around Gar-
ner’s neck, and the black man re-
peatedly pleaded, “I can’t
breathe.”
Tensions escalated on Aug. 9,
when Officer Darren Wilson fa-
tally shot unarmed, 18-year-old
Michael Brown in the St. Louis
suburb of Ferguson.
On Nov. 22, a Cleveland offi-
cer shot and killed 12-year-old
Tamir Rice after responding to
reports of an armed man at a city
park. Rice had been holding a
pellet gun.
Two days later, officials an-
nounced that a grand jury had
declined to return an indictment
in the Brown case. Fires from the
resulting protests in Ferguson
had barely stopped smoldering
when word came there would be
no charges against the officer in
New York City. Again, angry pro-
testers marched.
Then a grand jury in Orange-
burg County, South Carolina, re-
turned a murder indictment
Wednesday against a former
small-town police chief in the
May 2011 shooting death of an
unarmed black man.
Richard Combs, who was the
sole officer for the town of Eu-
tawville, had been charged with
official misconduct for shooting
Bernard Bailey, who had come
to the town hall to argue about a
ticket his daughter had received.
Combs’ attorney questioned
prosecutor David Pascoe’s mo-
tives in seeking the murder
charge.
“He’s trying to make it racial,
because his timing is perfect,”
John O’Leary said. “He’s got all
the national issues going on, so
they want to drag him [Combs]
in and say, ‘Look what a great
community we are here, because
we’re going to put a police officer
who was doing his job in jail for
30 years.’ That’s wrong.”
Walker, co-author of the
book The Color of Justice: Race,
Ethnicity, and Crime in Amer-
ica, says much of the anger out
there comes from years of con-
flict between the black commu-
nity and law enforcement.
‘Within the African-Ameri-
can community, there has been
an experience of disrespect, of-
fensive language, mistreatment
in terms of stops and so on,” he
says. ‘And there’s a sense that the
police are out to get them.”
It’s not just the killings that
“Once something is
trending, so that it’s
in the American
consciousness,
people become
aware of it. ”
- Phillip Atiba Goff,
co-founder of UCLA’s
Center for Policing Equity
have minority communities “fed
up,” says Inimai Chettiar of the
New York University law
school’s Brennan Center for Jus-
tice.
“African-American commu-
nities are tired of being over-po-
liced, over-prosecuted, sent to
prison, having men taken away
from their communities, having
families broken,” says Chettiar,
director of the center’s Justice
Program. “I think there’s much
more than just an instinctual
sense that there is something
amiss in these communities. I
think people are tired of ‘tough
on crime.’”
Whether such incidents are
on the rise, says Walker, “we’re
certainly more aware. And, cer-
tainly, the digital revolution has
had a huge impact.”
Goff compares it to the ice
bucket challenge phenomenon
of this past summer — in which
a series of viral videos raised mil-
lions of dollars for research into
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or
Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“Once something is trending,
so that it’s in the American con-
sciousness, people become
aware of it,” he says.
Goff has begun work on cre-
ating a policing database, with
funding from the Department of
Justice, the National Science
Foundation and private groups.
“Is it getting better? Is it get-
ting worse? What are the actual
numbers?” asks Goff. “You
know, when a plane crashes, it
feels all of a sudden like it’s not
safe to fly. But if you look at the
statistics, it’s way safer to fly —
and always has been — than to
drive a car.”
Deaths renew
calls for action
on lookalike guns
By Dan Sewell
and Mark Gillispie
Associated Press
CINCINNATI - Twice in
less than four months, police in
Ohio have opened fire with real
bullets on young people carrying
lookalike guns, raising an-
guished questions about what
could have prevented the deadly
encounters.
The questions have been
raised before: after the death last
year of a 13-year-old California
boy carrying what a sheriff’s
deputy thought was an AK-47
assault rifle, after the 2012
shooting in a Texas middle
school hallway of a 15-year-old
student holding an air gun that
resembled a Glock, and after the
2006 shooting of a 15-year-old
Florida student with a pellet gun
that looked to police like a 9mm
handgun.
Such deadly cases, while rare,
have led to laws and legislation
in states and cities across the
country. But some gun and law
enforcement experts are skepti-
cal about how effective they are.
Criminals, they say, could
disguise real guns. And realistic
lookalikes remain widely popu-
lar among youths who use them
for both play and competitions,
they say. Pellet and air guns are
also popular among people who
use them for target practice or
hunting small game.
‘Anything we can do to make
police and the public safer is posi-
tive, but let’s not pass laws that
provide a false sense of security or
are unenforceable,” said Sgt. Ed
Buns, a veteran weapons trainer
for the city of Hamilton’s police
department near Cincinnati.
State Rep. Alicia Reece, D-
Cincinnati, said the Aug. 5 police
shooting of 22-year-old John
Crawford III in a suburban Wal-
Mart store and the Nov. 22 po-
lice shooting of 12-year-old Ta-
mir Rice in Cleveland make it
clear that action is needed. Her
bill would require lookalike
guns to be brightly colored.
“This bill is but one small step
in addressing this tragedy and
helping to prevent future deadly
confrontations with someone
who clearly presents little to no
immediate threat or danger,” said
Reece, who leads the Ohio Legis-
lative Black Caucus. Both Craw-
ford and Rice were black.
Associated Press research
found at least 20 deaths involv-
ing lookalike guns mistaken by
police for actual firearms across
the country in the last two de-
cades, dating to the 1994 slaying
by a housing police officer of a
13-year-old New York City boy.
National Conference of State
Legislatures records show that at
least 12 states, along with Wash-
ington, D.C., and Puerto Rico,
have laws restricting sales or uses
of imitation firearms. New York
City and many other municipal-
ities have their own ordinances
on lookalike guns. Minnesota
passed a state law in 1988 after a
series of toy gun cases including a
fatal police shooting, but an AP
check with state court officials
found no record of any prosecu-
tions under the statute.
The laws’ approaches vary:
Some require the lookalikes to
be brightly colored, others set up
stiff penalties for those who use
lookalikes in alarming or crimi-
nal behavior.
“The two recent tragedies in
Ohio are unfortunate examples
of a trend we will continue to see
unless we change our laws to
make imitation guns distin-
guishable from real firearms,”
said California Sen. Kevin de
Leon, D-Los Angeles, who
sponsored state law signed this
year requiring bright colors and
fluorescent strips for lookalikes.
Veteran police such as Buns
say criminals could paint over
real weapons, causing officers to
hesitate: “The next thing you
know, my wife is getting an
American flag and they’re saying
I was a good police officer.”
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 128, Ed. 1 Monday, December 8, 2014, newspaper, December 8, 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1108822/m1/4/: accessed June 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .