Human Rights

If you’re trying to make sense out of recent Dispatch reporting on racial profiling by the Columbus Police Department (CPD), forget it. The Dispatch coverage suggests that since 28% of the traffic tickets issued in 1999 were given to African American drivers in Columbus and the city’s black population is 25%, there obviously isn’t any racial profiling.

James Moss, President of the Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER), the organization that spearheaded the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Columbus Police, has a different take than the daily monopoly.

Moss, who holds a master’s degree, points out the obvious shortcomings in the Dispatch analysis. By uncritically reporting the statistical data supplied by Deputy Chief Rockwell of the Columbus Police, the paper bought the assumption that African Americans in Columbus are licensed drivers and use cars for transportation at the same rate as the white population. Labor statistics indicate that the black population is disproportionately younger, unemployed/underemployed and out of the labor market. They’re also disproportionately COTA bus users and far less likely to own or drive a car.

Now, it's Al Gore, crime fighter, outlining his plans in a recent speech in Atlanta. The reportedly erstwhile dope smoker from Tennessee fears that the Texan who's so coy about his past relationship with cocaine has the edge on the crime issue. Hence, Gore's grab-bag crime package. Among the Atlanta pledges: The minute he's settled into the Oval Office and signed a pardon for the former incumbent, President Gore will be calling for 50,000 more cops (more half-trained recruits like the ones who shot Amadou Diallo) and allowing off-duty cops to carry concealed weapons (which almost all of them do, anyway).

No, it's unlikely President Gore will endorse medical marijuana, despite, reportedly, his former post-Vietnam therapy with opium-laced marijuana in the days when he worked for The Tennessean. In the words of his former friend John Warnecke (who says he imported the Thai sticks from the West Coast), Al "smoked as much as anybody I knew down there, and loved it."

Maybe Elian Gonzalez will have achieved a miracle after all, alerting mainstream America to the fact that the Bill of Rights have disappeared, restrictions on the role of the military in domestic affairs have been thrown overboard, and all the appurtenances of a police state are in place. Twenty-five years after the war ended in Vietnam, we see what happened when that war came home. We lost abroad. And at home, we've lost, too.

For blacks and Hispanics, the reactions to that famous photograph of the Elian snatch by the INS team have been comic in a macabre sort of way. After all, they've been putting up with these no-knock forcible entries by heavily armed cops or INS agents for decades. On the religious right, fears about the onrush of tyranny hardened into certainty back at the time of Waco, in the dawn of the Clinton era.

Across the country, many gays are smarting after a hefty slab of California's voters took the opportunity last month to say "no, absolutely not" to the notion of gay marriage. But the dismay is tempered by other gays asking, "Why did we ever want the sacred institution in the first place?"

Still militantly campaigning for gay marriage is Eric Rofes, who teaches in the department of education at Humboldt State. Rofes says it's now time to take the gloves off. "Some of us have grown impatient, and are no longer satisfied with strategies which fail to directly confront mainstream resistance to same-sex marriage. We may take up the tactics most necessary for social change but largely absent from a contemporary queer movement comprised almost entirely of suit-and-skirt lobbyists, splashy television advertisements and upscale, black-tie dinner banquets."

“Yeah, they got us listed as subversive. We expect a police helicopter to follow the march,” James Moss, President of Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER) assured me as we lined up to march to the Stand Up For Justice Rally. At first I thought he was joking. What was so subversive about a bunch of black people marching for civil rights on the predominantly black Near East side from an attorney’s office to a church?

Marching from Hamilton Park toward East Broad Street with a black police helicopter hovering overhead seemed a bit odd in everyone’s all-American city, Columbus, Ohio. It did stimulate a quick flashback to my stint as an election observer and journalist in Suchitoto, El Salvador. But hell, I’d expected military and police helicopters to intimidate people in a repressive Third World sham-democracy undergoing its first real democratic elections. After we crossed Broad Street, we were treated to Soviet-era police state tactics: undercover cops in church parking lots, plainclothes officers lurking in alleys with videocameras and a massive display of squad cars on a street where crack houses usually operate openly.

Welcome to Corcoran state prison, 170 miles northwest of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin valley; built at a cost of $288.9 million on what was once Tulare lake, home of the Tachi Indians; opened in 1988, designed for 3,000 prisoners, now holding 5,030. Kings County has dairies, cotton fields, Corcoran and two other state prisons besides. When they were selecting a jury for a recent trial of four prison guards in Hanford, 15 miles from Corcoran, 500 residents were called to be available for jury service, and more than a third said they either worked at one of the prisons or had a relative in the corrections sector.

Corcoran vividly incarnates the peculiar horrors of our national gulag. It was conceived in the eighties' prison boom as a new model of "absolute control," whose heart was the Secure Housing Unit, holding 1,500 of those deemed to be the most dangerous inmates in California's metastasizing prison population. In Corcoran's SHU, the guards -- many of them fresh out of the academy -- determinedly pursued a policy of forced integration of deadly rivals -- Aryan Nation with Mexican Mafia, gang with gang.