The Walter Scott Homicide: 1984 in Reverse?

With the latest video of lethal force by the police -- in this case, a South Carolina officer, Michael Slager, nonchalantly gunning down a fleeing Walter Scott -- topping the national news for a second day, the question I have is how often does this happen? It seems like every other week -- whether it is a homeless guy in Los Angeles, a kid playing with a toy gun in a snowy Cleveland park, or Michael Brown or Eric Garner, to name a few -- we are confronted with another example of the police ruthlessly committing homicide.

A problem I have with television police drama like The Shield, even though I watched all seven seasons, is the body count that the cops rack up does not seem believable to me. Certainly they would be suspended constantly pending interminable investigations conducted by the local department, the FBI or the Justice Department. Right?

Well, apparently not because the Justice Department and the FBI don't know how many of these shootings take place. So, in answer to the question, "How often does a Walter Scott incident take place?" We don't know.

As Michael Schmidt explores today in "Scant Data Frustrates Efforts to Assess Number of Shootings by Police":

Under current federal laws, there is nothing requiring any of the 18,000 police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country to report to the public or to the Justice Department anything about shootings involving officers.

Roughly 91 percent of departments and agencies in the country voluntarily report crimes like murders, rapes, car thefts and burglaries to the F.B.I., which releases an annual report.

But under the current reporting systems, there is no category for episodes in which the officer’s use of force was not deemed legally justified, and there is no category to report police shootings in which the officer has not killed a person. There are categories for “justifiable” or “excusable” homicides by police officers, ones in which officers kill a felon.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund keeps data on how often people shoot police officers, and departments willingly share that data. But the statistics on the police shooting civilians are much harder to find.

In the aftermath of police officers’ using lethal force in Staten Island, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere last year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, have strongly advocated changing reporting requirements. A White House task force created to look into the episodes made similar recommendations in a report released in March.

So far, though, those efforts have not provoked much interest on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers would most likely need to pass legislation to require departments and agencies to report figures to the Justice Department.

In January, Mr. Holder spoke about the issue at a Justice Department ceremony honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington.

“I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policy makers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police,” he said. “I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders, including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police, who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities. Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: We need to do both.”

Mr. Holder said that in the 1990s, Congress passed a law that was intended to help the Justice Department collect better statistics about shootings involving officers. But that law was ultimately not effective because the reporting was optional, and local departments and agencies may not have the proper resources to be able to make reports to the Justice Department in a timely manner.

In a speech in February about the relationship between the police and minorities, Mr. Comey said that during the riots in Ferguson last summer, he had asked his staff members for figures on the number of blacks who had been shot by the police. They told him there were no uniform statistics on such shootings.

“They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault,” Mr. Comey said. 

Mr. Comey said that law enforcement officials and minorities “must find ways to see each other more clearly.” He added, “Part of that has to involve collecting and sharing better information about encounters between police and citizens, especially violent encounters.” 

Mr. Comey said he had spoken with the police chief in a major American city who said that he did not know whether the Ferguson police “shot one person a week, one a year or one a century.”

Since Congress is controlled by a neo-Dixiecrat GOP, I wouldn't expect a mandatory reporting law for the nation's 18,000 police departments anytime soon. Police use of lethal force overwhelming targets blacks, and that works well for the 113th Congress. The more the people are divided -- whether by race or sect -- the better for the money bags that run the show.

Another aspect of the Walter Scott murder that needs to be addressed is the positive role played by technology; here, a smartphone camera. Lately I am coming closer to the conclusion that the explosion of digital technology is creating a dystopia rather than utopia, that The Postmodern Condition leads us to a "dream machine" of endless passivity and distraction and not the upturning of old, rancid power narratives.

But smartphone videos capturing the police in the act of homicide prove that the Panopticon can be turned back on the jailers, a sort of 1984 in reverse.

Massive System Failure

The political system in this country is failing. The GOP is fracturing along a Tea Party Bircher versus Rovian establishment fault. At the end of last month longtime political commentator Thomas Edsall, wrote a story, "The Republican Autopsy Report," that appeared on the New York Times "Opinionator" blog. In it he discusses a 97-page post-2012 election assessment commissioned by RNC chairman Reince Preibus:

The G.O.P. report is an extraordinary public acknowledgment of internal discord and vulnerability, which has intensified the battle between the deeply committed conservative wing and the more pragmatic, pro-business wing for control of the Republican Party. With just a few exceptions, it does not mince words. 

At the federal level, it says, the party is “marginalizing itself,” and, in the absence of major change, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win a presidential election in the near future.” Young voters are “rolling their eyes at what the party represents.” Voters’ belief that “the G.O.P. does not care about them is doing great harm.” Formerly loyal voters gathered in focus groups describe Republicans as “ ‘scary,’ ‘narrow-minded’ and ‘out of touch’ and that we were a party of ‘stuffy old men.’ ”

What's going on is the GOP establishment, which made a Faustian bargain with the Tea Party to combat the Obama tidal wave following the 2008 election, is now, with Karl Rove still the #1 strategist, attempting to eradicate the Bircher jihadists:

More broadly, the alliance between Rove and the R.N.C. does substantiate the view that establishment forces are driving the reform movement within the Republican Party, an establishment that includes much of corporate America, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Bush family and its allies, and the more moderate, traditionalist donor community. 

Conservative analysts like Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review quickly spotted the establishment tilt in the Priebus report. Carney wrote:

Republican elites tend to favor mass immigration and be ambivalent or supportive of legal abortion and gay marriage. So, shouldn’t we take it with a grain of salt when the Republican leadership puts out a document saying that the G.O.P. should change only its rhetoric on economic issues, but change its substance on social issues?

Similarly, Ponnuru wrote that the recommendations “come naturally to Republican elites” who “are more likely to favor same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform on principle.” The report reflects “elite conventional wisdom perfectly, just perfectly.” 

In January, I pointed out that “If the conservative movement continues on its downward trajectory, the American business community, which has the most to lose from Republican failure, will be the key force arguing for moderation.” 

That moment has come. The Priebus report and Rove’s Conservative Victory Project together mark a significant escalation in the battle between the center and the right over the soul of the Republican Party. What has yet to be determined is whether they are fighting over a patient who can be quickly resuscitated or a patient with a chronic but not fatal illness — or a corpse. 

The very bluntness of the Growth and Opportunity report reflects the seriousness of the moment the Republican Party faces: increasing difficulty holding on to its House majority; weakening prospects of regaining control of the Senate; and the threat of unending Democratic control of the White House.

For the Democrats it appears that it is TINA ("There Is No Alternative") to Obamaism, which after much hope and longing on the part of a progressive majority in this country seems to be nothing more than Clintonism. Obama's failure to get a gun control measure out of the Senate along with his proposal to chop Social Security benefits presage an impotence -- a mere six months after his landslide reelection -- that can only grow more pronounced. The AFL-CIO is rapidly shrinking and looking to overhaul its organizing model. How many times have we heard that before? So there is no hope there. Occupy Wall Street, barring another economic meltdown, is unlikely to recapture its former glory.

I was looking to Cyprus to show us a way forward by voluntarily rejecting the euro. We need courage, experimentation. But in the last couple of weeks there is no indication that this will happen. So for now it appears that our best bet is Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement. Rachel Donadio has an excellent story, "President of Italy Nominates Center-Left Official as Premier," in today's paper about the latest political developments in Italy. Luigi Bersani resigned the leadership of the Democratic Party after two months of unsuccessfully attempting to form a government and getting his presidential candidates to succeed President Giorgio Napolitano. With no resolution on the horizon, the 87-year-old Napolitano agreed to serve another term and was reelected. Now, as Donadio reports,

After months of political paralysis capped by a week of turmoil, President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday named Enrico Letta, a high-ranking official in the center-left Democratic Party, to form a broad coalition government to try to steer Italy out of political chaos and its worst recession since World War II. 

And former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the great survivor of Italian politics, emerged as a kingmaker by default, having outlasted most of his adversaries. 

“It’s undeniable that this is a victory for Berlusconi,” said Giovanni Orsina, the deputy director of the School of Government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “He got what he asked for, from Napolitano’s re-election to a political government with broad, bipartisan support.”

Like the current Greek government, a three-party coalition in which historical enemies on the left and right have joined together out of fear of extinction and a lack of viable alternatives, Mr. Letta is potentially the last gasp of a political cycle that in Italy began in the early 1990s with the collapse of the postwar political order and the rise of Mr. Berlusconi.

The party system is collapsing. Television is said to have led to the erosion of political organization in the United States. Now TV is being replaced by the Internet. Life is migrating online. Is this good or bad? Judging from the stasis of the status quo one can only conclude that so far it's not good. We might be at the point where there is so much information available that we are paralyzed -- the "dream machine" that Jean-Francois Lyotard predicted in his seminal La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979).