Official Negligence
Lin, Ann Chih
LIES & VIDEOTAPE Ann Chih Lin he memory of the videotape remains vivid even after seven years: police ofricers beating a man again and again as he writhes on the ground. We remember other...
...Tend t h a t s a f e t y n e t I appreciated your editorial, "Keeping Security Social" [June 5...
...This diffuses the power of both narratives...
...They are the Ardeatine Caves because they are located just off the Via Ardeatina, so named, apparently, because if you follow it long enough it will lead you to the small town of Ardea...
...For instance, when the accused officers were granted a venue change because of intense pretrial publicity, the trial judge, following normal rules of procedure, should have tried to find a California city that resembled Los Angeles but was outside its media market...
...15 percent, 12 times...
...Manuscripts Wanted MANUSCRIPTS WANTED...
...This would be heartbreaking, were it not for the rage that arises as story after story of irresponsibility, inexperience, or personal pique is carefully linked to the eventual riots...
...Interested persons should phone 914/694-3425 or e-mail rdowd@mville.edu...
...Thank you for a well-reasoned editorial...
...WILLIAM J. MONAHAN Saint Louis, Mo...
...We remember the stunning brutality of the cops, but the televised tape we remember did not include a three-second section showing Rodney King charging at police officers prior to the beating, setting off the officers' spiral of panic...
...Celebration CELEBRATING CROSS CURRENTS Barat House at Manhattanville College will celebrate the retiring editors of Cross Currents and the retiring founder Joseph Cunneen on Sunday, October 4, Reid Hall, Manhattanville Campus, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase, NY 10577...
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...When the riots began in South Central Los Angeles, command staff could not create a plan to protect the area...
...The officers' acquittals fanned anger that had slowly burned since the grocer, found guilty of voluntary manslaughCommonweal 2 8 August 14, 1998 ter, was sentenced only to probation...
...These are not general accusations of racism or neglect of the poor: The power of Cannon's indictment lies in the details...
...He describes how chronic underfunding and understaffing in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) led to a situation where a training instructor could not only fail a test in the proper use of the baton but be sent out on patrol that same evening...
...If it is unjust to allow the fear of riots to rule a jury's deliberations, how are we to address the accretion of official injustices and miscalculations that make riots possible...
...Worse, Cannon suggests, the judge did so for no reason other than personal convenience...
...405, N.Y., N.Y...
...Priesthood...
...1 ; I ;iJ-| ' . I . ] "~ I "] | '~ [ - I | (Continued from page 4) tempting her...
...Keep up your support of life throughout the age spectrum...
...Relying on the private markets for all of a person's retirement income is foolish for the individual, and could lead to a significant panic in the event of severe and lasting future downturns...
...It had a history of both civil rights and excessive force complaints, complaints exacerbated by discrimination against black officers and tense relationships with minority communities...
...Cannon's portrayal does not excuse the individual officers who beat King, but it does humanize them and place their actions within the context of the LAPD's institutional failure...
...His portrayal of Rodney King is also honest and generous...
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...He saves his harshest condemnations for the judges and politicians whose thoughtlessness created the conditions for the riots...
...The are the Ardeatine Caves (Fosse Ardeatine), not Ardentine...
...Like a newspaper lead, which puts the facts up top and leaves the least important details to the end, Cannon's book ends without concluding...
...She foils him and his agent, the vicar, by testifying to what she recognizes as a far deeper truth, the moral reality in which she lives...
...But other journalistic conventions serve Cannon less well...
...Instead, they pulled their officers out, effectively encouraging rioters to take over...
...10115...
...Official negligence" indeed--Cannon's story is one of venality compounded into catastrophe...
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...JOHN KENDALL Kensington, Prince Edward Island, Canada RATES: $1.10 per word...
...As a benefits manager for a public retirement fund, I share your concern for the future of Social Security...
...The department did not train its officers in alternatives to the baton, methods that could have been used to restrain King with less violence...
...12 word minimum...
...Theology degrees...
...His insistence on maintaining a chronology often undercuts the book's dramatic power and analysis...
...only months before the first Rodney King trial...
...Ann Chih Lin is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan...
...Commonweal 3 0 August 14, 1998...
...But a picture as careful, as emotionally compelling, and as damning as Cannon's deserves more than the quick fade-to-black at the end of a videotape, more even than the memories we now call up when we hear the names Rodney King and Laurence Powell...
...10 percent, 6 times...
...We remember other images too: verdicts of "not guilty" delivered by an all-white jury, mobs brutalizing innocent bystanders in the riots that followed, smoke rising over Los Angeles...
...In that sense he is evenhanded...
...This focus on the contribution of individuals to history is classic journalism, and few do it better than this veteran newspaperman...
...MARIAN BURKHART New York, N.Y...
...It was King's terrible luck to meet up with that officer, Laurence Powell, and to suffer a rain of blows that looked deliberate and vicious but were actually, according to Cannon, frenzied and often ineffectual...
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...They also take space that might otherwise have been dedicated to summary and assessment...
...But it was, we thought, well enough staged and certainly well enough acted here so that what counted as moral to Rafe and John Hall, as opposed to what morality meant to the vicar, was not particularly obscure at all, only an ambiguity which with the help of Susanna and her maid we could succeed in untangling...
...We enjoy it all...
...She writes frequently on crime and immigration...
...A road that leads from Rome In any future reference to the Nazis' massacre of Italians in the environs of Rome in 1944, you may wish to see that the name of the infamous site is spelled correctly...
...These recollections are true, but as Lou Cannon argues in the magisterial Official Negligence, they are also inaccurate and deceiving...
...While much more should be done to encourage private employers to offer generous retirement savings programs, the core of retirement security for the majority of Americans will remain Social Security...
...After the King beating, Police Chief Darryl Gates's ongoing feuds with both the mayor and the officer corps resulted in a rudderless department...
...1-800-695-9599...
...Instead, the judge moved the trial to Simi Valley, a suburb within the Los Angeles media market that did not match the demographic profile of Los Angeles in any way...
...In a six-hundred-page book, passages like these try the patience of even the most dedicated reader...
...But rather than tell this story as a whole, as a counterpoint to the King trial, Cannon switches back and forth between the trial and the King investigation, keeping the progress of each case roughly parallel...
...Cannon also describes systemic irresponsibility at the LAPD...
...More important, the tape, in making individual officers the focus of our anger, conceals the equal culpability of a police department unable to train or govern its force, and of a judicial system where individual circumstance and social justice often clash...
...The play, it would appear, was far more successfully produced in England...
...Cannon's concern for chronology also leads him to include lengthy passages that keep us fully informed, but distract from the argument...
...For instance, Cannon shows how the trial of a Korean grocer for killing a black high school student inflamed South Central L.A...
...ALL TYPES...
...But without giving us some way to correct official negligence, the only injustices that can be corrected are those to Rodney King and Laurence Powell, not those to residents of Los Angeles...
...The United States needs a clear retirement policy rooted in what is best for the commonwealth...
...Residential program...
...Mindful that only half of America's workers are fortunate Commonweal 2 9 August 14, 1998 enough to have employer-sponsored pension plans available to them, and that many others have a difficult time squirreling away significant monies for retirement savings, we need to keep the safety net genuine, secure, and dependable...
...If it is unfair to convict officers for their supervisors' incompetence, how is that incompetence to be held to account...
...MATER DEI INSTITUTE at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99202-1849.1-800-986-9585 ext 6012...
...Ministry Program DESIRE LAY MINISTRY...
...Cannon is, and teaches us to be, incensed at both official negligence and the scapegoating of individuals...
...In over six hundred pages of careful detail, Cannon shows how an event so seemingly transparent can conceal so much...
...He does not linger, for instance, on the most troubling question he raises: What is to be done when official negligence results in specific injustice...
...Cannon, of course, cannot be expected to solve this problem...
...Discounts 5 percent, 3 times...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
