CORRESPONDENCE
Correspondence HIGH ON THE HOG I enjoyed reading Tucker Carlson's article on the North Carolina Senate campaign featuring incumbent senator and hog farmer Lauch Faircloth ("Lauch 'n' Load," Oct....
...Puddington appears not to have read our report, but rather press clips about the report...
...You do the math for the state's 10 million hogs and guess how much manure farmers let spill...
...Many officers whose abuse is ignored go on to commit more serious abuses...
...Carlson's article notes that environmental groups have denounced Faircloth—the state's fifth-largest hog farmer...
...Nowhere do we use the term "epidemic" to describe the problem of police abuse...
...According to Congressional Quarterly's Who's Who in Congress 1997, Faircloth's North Carolina colleague, Jesse Helms, also did not complete college...
...By comparison, more than two-thirds of all municipal waste-treatment plants spilled...
...The Justice Department had only 30 convictions on this score out of the nearly 11,000 civil-rights complaints filed...
...Let's hope the voters, who do have concerns about hog production, as Carlson reports, get the right information...
...But, as we show, prosecutions are almost invariably launched only after a long train of complaints that should have been dealt with earlier...
...Puddington points out that some police officers are prosecuted...
...Nor do we fail to note, as Puddington charges, that civil-service laws have made it harder to fire abusive police officers...
...Puddington's central theme—that the United States should not be held to the same rights standards we routinely ask other nations to meet—is wrong, both legally and morally...
...You probably do have to be misinformed, however...
...DAVE JUDAY CHURCHVILLE, VA here did Tucker Carlson get the idea that Lauch Faircloth is the only senator who lacks a college degree...
...The city of Wilmington legally dumps more than 500,000 pounds of nitrogen from its sewage into the Cape Fear River annually...
...Carlson wrote that hogs produce more than four times the waste of humans—but if you look at the main pollutants in the waste, the so-called nutrients of nitrogen and phosphorous, the ratio is closer to one-and-a-half to two times...
...That paints a different picture of Carlson's claim that hog-manure lagoons "periodically leak into rivers and streams...
...And unlike human waste, hog waste is used as fertilizer...
...Excessive violence tolerated by a government is a human-rights abuse, whether committed in a dictatorship or a democracy...
...I was a little dismayed, though, that Carlson bought the environmental lobby's party line on hog farms...
...For instance, last year's hurricanes in North Carolina caused about one-half of one percent of all the state's hog farms to spill...
...And Human Rights Watch has the legitimacy to condemn police abuse in, say, Indonesia or Colombia, because we would do the same in the United States or the United Kingdom...
...ALBERT J. MENENDEZ GAITHERSBURG, MD WATCHING EVERYONE Arch Puddington harshly attacks Human Rights Watch for our recent 440-page report on police brutality in the United States ("Looking for Brutality in All the Wrong Places," Oct...
...KENNETH ROTH EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH NEW YORK, NY...
...indeed, one of our points is that we don't know how severe the problem is because no government agency keeps track of it, despite a legislative mandate that the Justice Department do so...
...Conversely, because of tight manure-management controls, hog farms' use of nitrogen in the ground water in North Carolina's most intensive hog-producing region has actually decreased over the past 20 years as the hog population has grown about fivefold...
...While Puddington commends Human Rights Watch for our landmark work in reporting on repression in countries such as China, he disparages our equally comprehensive research on rights abuses in America...
...The more important fact, however, is that hog farms by law can't discharge nutrients, but city sewage plants may do so legally...
...This "recycling," which can happen only if manure is not spilled or otherwise allowed to run off, can add about $3 in revenues per hog...
...Indeed, hog-farm lagoons can spill—like after a hurricane...
...that's what makes it a human-rights abuse, rather than merely the criminal conduct of a few errant officers or, in Puddington's terms, a "social problem...
...The core of our report charges that authorities overlook many cases of police brutality...
...we catalogue that and a range of other obstacles to holding abusive officers accountable...
...He writes that "you don't have to be a wild-eyed environmentalist to have concerns about hog farming in North Carolina...
...Neither did Conrad Burns (R-MT), Rod Grams (R-MN), or Wendell Ford (D-KY), who is retiring...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 7
