No More Killing of Anyone, Please
Mind f…king--messing with people’s ability to perceive reality, brainwashing them, undermining them, spreading false rumors and allegations, setting up purposely confusing situations, defaming with outright lies or falsehoods, and planting unjustified fears--is among the most disgusting forms of mental violence.
It’s purposefully setting out to stir up trouble through sabotaging a person’s or a community’s ability to makes sense of what’s happening to them.
Recently, in the wake of the Department of Justice’s far reaching condemnation of the Albuquerque Police Department, we’ve see one particularly egregious form of mind f…king that seems to be trying to scramble Albuquerque’s brains.
A small number of fliers, with the horrendous suggestion: “Save a life, kill a cop,” were put into newspaper stands and pasted on telephone poles around the University last week. We are told that one of the fliers appeared in a newspaper delivered to a policeman’s house.
This menacing suggestion has appeared at the same time that certain police substations have been suspiciously vandalized with spray paint, an innocuous enough practice, if it’s real. Or something quite troubling if it’s not. The vandalism was odd as the painters’ tagged no messages on the buildings, just mindless splashes of flashy color.
No sane person wants to see a police officer killed, nor a demonstrator shot because an atmosphere fear and retaliation has been revved up by mad morons with fliers and spray paint or by hired provocateurs wanting to heat things up even more than they are to deflect attention from pressing matters of reform.
The killing of anyone, in my judgment, is a moral and ethical catastrophe. If there is something as a just war, or a just killing, it must have something to do with true self-defense. Cynically, self-defense is also used as the first excuse of choice in covering up brutal acts of injustice and wrongful killings, as Albuquerque knows only too well. Legitimate self defense, while sometimes necessary, is still never a matter of pride or honor. That’s reserved for the sacrifice of self to save others.
Killing is always a tragedy. The killing of innocent civilians by police corrupts the soul of a community. The killing of a police officer can break a community’s heart. Such was the case in the murder of APD officer Phil Chacon at age 36 in 1980. One of the good guys, Chacon, 36, had been volunteering at a battered women’s shelter and was giving a talk there when he learned of an armed robbery near him at Kinney Shoe store on Wyoming and Central. He saw the robbers leave in a getaway car. Off duty at the time, he put his personal motorcycle and himself in their line of escape. The man in the passenger seat shot him twice and killed him instantly. Two men were convicted of the crime, but the New Mexico Supreme Court overruled the conviction. The court’s reasons can be found here.
In recent years, 2005 saw two APD officers killed by gunfire in the line of duty. Officers Michael R. King and Richard W. Smith, Jr. were ambushed and killed by a man they were going to take into custody for a mental health evaluation. They had no way of knowing at the time that their killer, John Hyde, had already shot three other people that day. Hyde is incarcerated in the behavioral health facility in Las Vegas where he is serving a life sentence.
A website, Officer Down, reports that fourteen APD officers have been shot since records were kept in 1886. Ten have died by gunfire. Statewide, New Mexico has lost 146 officers, 82 of them by gunfire, from almost every county.
From what I can tell, there have been no police deaths in Albuquerque in the line of duty since 2005, thank goodness. Though, three APD officers and one Bernalillo County Sherriff’s officer were shot and seriously wounded in one incident late last year by a man who went gunning for them and led them on a chase through the North Valley.
I can think of only one thing right now as terrible as someone killing another police officer in the wake of public protests and DOJ investigations of the 37 shootings and 23 killings of civilians by police here since 2010, and that would be the killing of an innocent citizen by police in a demonstration. I pray that never happens.
But something seems fishy to me with those ghastly fliers and that meaningless vandalism. It’s as if someone, or some group, were trying to turn citizens of conscience, who are protesting against police brutality in Albuquerque, into menacing villains, guilty by association with people who vandalize substations and send vile fliers to a police officer’s home and post them provocatively around the UNM campus.
Already we’re seeing snide comments about protesters belonging to left wing hate groups, and clearly racist remarks about the Justice Department itself as being just a pawn of “Obama and his political machine.” Letter writers are trying to water down the DOJ report by evoking the old saw of “partisan politics,” and some people characterize the current situation as a “debate,” rather than as a report of findings.
Efforts to discredit the DOJ’s report, to water it down, to divert attention from it, and to seek a bogus balance in interpretation in the media have already taken some of the sting out of the report. Needless to say, shooting a police officer would bury it completely, just as shooting a civilian demonstrator could set Albuquerque aflame.
For all we know the fliers and the spray paint were plants by right wing hate groups or other agitators. Whatever’s the case, both are probably making people around town more jumpy than they need to be and, heaven forbid, more trigger happy too.
Albuquerque has had enough killings – some 70 over from 2012 to 2013. They range from children being killed by random gunfire to domestic violence deaths to murders committed in robberies and hold ups, and people killed by the police.
We don’t need the people who are supposed to protect us from violent crime either to become victims themselves or shooters who add to the tragedies all around us.
APD, WIPP, KAFB – Watch Out For Dilutions and Distractions.
You can almost hear the whitewash being splashed around.
Albuquerque and New Mexico, at the moment, are confronting three of the most significant, if not to say monumental, happenings in our recent history. And they are happening all at once, unfolding before the public eye, and then fading onto the back pages, only to reappear again slightly watered down, the edge taken off by contradictory statements or declarations of denial.
As we know, Albuquerque finds itself the victim of the largest jet fuel contamination in the nation at Kirtland Air Force base, one that threatens a major source of our water supply. To repeat, that’s the largest such contamination in the nation!
The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), 2,150 feet underground near Carlsbad, leaked radioactive contamination into the atmosphere around the WIPP site and near or in Carlsbad itself, with at least 21 WIPP workers suffering contamination from nuclear exposure at surface level. Such an occurrence was never supposed to happen, as we know.
And two weeks ago the most damning analysis of the Albuquerque Police Department’s use of lethal and non-lethal force was released from the U.S. Department of Justice, a document of historic importance and one that, as we can imagine, will be referred to or watered down for decades to come.
I’ve been covering news here for nearly 50 years, and I’ve never seen the appearance of such momentous developments in such a short period of time.
It’s hard for many of us to focus on one thing at a time, much less three, especially when the time honored tricks of taking key issues off the front pages as much as possible are used with cunning and efficiency.
And that’s unhappily the case with each of these vital developments.
The best technique to defuse hot news and thwart revealing coverage is using a variant of the polluter’s dog-eared and discredited, but still reliably confusing, idea of “the solution to pollution is dilution.” That has never been the solution to cleaning up toxic waste, of course, particularly carcinogenic industrial solvents and fuel additives and radioactive wastes that can be deadly in even the smallest doses.
But if the universal solvent isn’t water but time, then it’s powerfully effective. Time dilution can be a very successful means of taking the public’s eye off embarrassing happenings that the powers that be would rather us not watch too closely.
News to them is a form of political pollution. It soils their environment with what they consider to be toxic questions and suspicions.
But even the military, the nuclear industrial complex, and the police can’t tell the media and their audience not to pay attention to their doings. The solution is to make their doings, and their errors and mishaps, less interesting than they really are. In other words, the solution is to bore the public and then dazzle them with jargon, fancy footwork and rope-a-dope techniques.
The best way to do that is to dilute the news with huge amounts of time and then continually contradict yourself and deny any real importance to initial reports.
Time dilution works wonders. WIPP’s accidental leak of radiation happened on Valentine’s Day. That’s almost two months ago at this writing. Surely one of the major catastrophes in nuclear waste storage that could have repercussions around the world, the coverage of the WIPP mishap flashed and flared, and then sputtered. Revived from time to time, the story updates appear without the same force as the initial breaking news. There’s so much time interlarded among news moments and events the casual reader loses track of what’s going on and often even the sophisticated observers of WIPP get tangled up in the empty spaces howling among the scattered stories.
The KAFB jet fuel horror show has so much time dilution around it, and so many statements, counterstatements, denials, and frowning expressions of concern mixed with braggadocio and action thwarting optimism that most people forget about it until the next little news snippet pops to the surface. And by that time all the basic unanswered questions have escaped into the ether. How long will it take to clean up 24 million gallons from the water table? What methods will be used? How much will it cost? Will the water be drinkable? Where is the plume now? How do you know? It’s taken years since the first disclosure to find out about anything. Time dilution has worked its magic.
And so we watch perhaps the greatest environmental disaster in the city’s history float from consciousness like a child’s balloon escaping into the springtime breezes.
The Justice Department’s 46 page indictment of the APD, certainly one of the most important law enforcement documents in the city and state’s history, is already watered down by time dilution and a curious kind of “pro/con” reporting, giving “balance” to police “supporters” as if those who agreed with the crushingly well-documented revelations of police brutality and unconstitutional misconduct over the last four years were somehow involved in a debate with police boosters. There’s no debate here as far as what’s happened is concerned. The only point of discussion involves how to bring about meaningful and long lasting change in police culture and behavior.
No one in their right minds, and I mean that seriously, is “against” a well regulated, service oriented, constitutionally accountable police department that looks after the well-being of the public rather than terrorizing it with the random application of lethal force and Taser assaults on bothersome people.
If Albuquerque ever gets to the point of making significant reforms within the APD so much time could well have elapsed since the DOJ report of April 10th was released that the major issues will have been so severely diluted that the public’s memory and attention will have focused elsewhere.
The antidote to time dilution and the creation of imaginary contradictions is citizen activism. And in all three of these issues – APD, WIPP, and the KAFB spill – the eyes of dedicated, activist observers will not be averted or shuttered by dilution induced boredom. I just hope they can wake up the rest of us to the deep realities of these issues when they bob to the surface again like revolting debris in the churning oceans of news in the future.
Bud Davis and Lobogate
If you find yourself in the middle of an unexpected, foolish, or even devilish mess that must be handled with maturity and candor, the model you might want to follow could well be UNM’s former president Bud Davis when he was confronted with what’s come to be known as Lobogate.
In l979, the recently 4th ranked UNM Lobo Basketball program was hit with NCAA and federal allegations of grade fixing and other crimes. The FBI was, according to reports, “swarming” around the South Campus athletic facility with dozens of agents looking for evidence. The whole state was aghast. UNM had suffered through the turmoil of late l960s and l970s with national guard troops on campus breaking up anti-Vietnam war protests and with something called The Lovelust controversy which set the New Mexico legislature against the university with a ferocity unknown in the past. An English Department graduate student had given his poetry class a contemporary erotic poem to read and a student complained to her father who went to his legislator. The general sentiment was that the crazy eggheads at the university had gone too far this time.
But that was nothing compared to Lobogate. It became clear to many people that basketball in New Mexico had fallen into a kind of madness. Winning at all costs was the rule of the day. Gambling on games was normal practice and wild rumors of gaming tycoons using Sandia Lab computers to keep track of bets on the Lobos circulated around like dust devils.
William E. “Bud” Davis found himself in the middle of it, four years into his Presidency of UNM where he was instrumental in supporting the creation and expansion of UNM’s world class medical school.
A tireless advocate for the role of higher education in the life of a community and a state, Davis was known for his barnstorming travels around New Mexico and his rousing speeches extolling not only the life of the mind, but the role that UNM played in economic development and the school’s overall contributions to quality of life.
But Lobogate blindsided him, the university’s regents and practically everyone else in the state. How was it possible that the university could let its basketball program get into such a mess? Why didn’t anybody do something about it before it got completely out of hand?
Everyone loved Lobo basketball so much in this period of what’s been described as its “golden age,” that nobody wanted to rock the boat. But more likely, the violations were so fantastic and so craftily arranged that no one was aware of what was going on right under their noses. It might just be as simple as that.
The investigations revealed that UNM had violated close to 34 NCAA rules and committed other illegal acts. The grade fixing was amazingly complicated, involving forged academic transcripts from community and junior colleges that allowed players to enroll at UNM. As it turned out UNM wasn’t the only miscreant. Some 55 other schools were charged with similar infractions. But UNM’s was big time because UNM was at last becoming a big time basketball program.
To make a long story short, Davis fired the much beloved basketball coach and his assistant and set in place systems that would assure such cheating would be mighty hard to pull off in the future. The team came apart. The program almost shut down completely. The rest of the season was played with walk-ons who struggled gamely, but went to a 6-22 record.
In the world of sport Lobogate was the equivalent to a Justice Department investigation of a rogue police department. The sky had fallen. No killings or brutality was involved, but cheating on grades, forging official documents, and rampant gambling were. Nothing could be worse in a university setting where honest scholarship was the sacred rule. And to top it off, Lobogate made UNM a sitting duck for its many reactionary and anti-intellectual detractors, around town and in the Legislature.
Everyone was looking for someone to blame. It was, of course, an inside job, a problem in the athletic department, not the university as a whole. The regents were attacked and President Davis was attacked. But Davis handled it all with remarkable candor and aplomb. He did not dodge and weave. He didn’t blow it off. And he certainly didn’t try to cover it up. He was eventually completely exonerated of any blame by two independent commissions. Still, it happened on his watch and he didn’t chicken out. He didn’t pat the culprits on the head and say they were doing a great job against great odds. He canned them. Eventually his handling of the whole affair, and his wide knowledge of educational administration, was looked upon with such respect by other universities around the country that Davis became the Chancellor of the LSU and Oregon systems and other college communities.
From his Lobogate experience Davis had this advice for other presidents: “to hire athletic directors and coaches he thinks he can trust and then scare the daylights out of them….[Above] all, let them know that if in any way they embarrass the university, compromise its integrity or violate or transgress any of the rules, that their exits will be certain, sudden, and final.”
I wish someone had said that to the leadership of the APD.
April 21, 2014