Jindal ethics plan good enough to encounter some trouble

Much anticipated, the call for the special session promised for months by Gov. Bobby Jindal is here and, as he had argued he wanted a “gold standard” of ethics laws, that’s what he produced, and he may get it out of the Legislature.

However, he didn’t ask for a titanium standard. That would have meant an outright ban on lobbyist gifts to and elected or appointed policy-maker and applying financial disclosure requirements to all without exclusions for jurisdictions of fewer than 5,000 (who under Jindal’s request will file general affidavits of fidelity). Still, gold is very good and denotes the top rank in things as varied as the Olympics and beer-tasting competitions.

The question now shifts to how much of it will find it way into law. Jindal set the session at three weeks – realistically 15 days given weekends unless that last Saturday gets requisitioned – which shows there’s a lot to do and there will be some controversy. Some items have come up before with varying degrees of progress – a ban on free tickets to events involving sports (in the past almost all) and culture (and barely any instances), offering a constitutional amendment to have forfeited taxpayer-paid portions of pensions if an official is convicted of a crime related to public service, and prohibition of legislators from changing votes made on the floor after disposition of a bill (still practiced in the House of Representatives). Of course, none ever succeeded in getting made into law or rule.

Now, these all ought to go through. Of the first two, with so many new legislators in the House having no exposure to the benefits of free tickets and (most of them) not having acquired any vesting towards a state pension, House majorities on these should be sufficient to put too much pressure on the more-veteran senators who will be more resistant. As for the third, the veteran nature of the Senate probably would lead to its defeat – except the rule already is present in the Senate, and the many new House members never having taken advantage of a switch have little loyalty to the existing rule allowing them to do that.

Also expect the request to extend reporting requirements to candidates for office to get enacted. These legislators will take the attitude that if they have to follow more stringent requirements as elected officials, so ought their future opponents – maybe discouraging some quality challengers to them. And they’ll fall over themselves trying to put into law the item preventing all statewide and legislative candidates, not just those presently in those offices as is current law, from conducting fundraising during legislative sessions.

Where Jindal might find his requests the most endangered are those dealing with the ability of legislators, spouses, siblings, parents, and companies in which they have any “interest” (what portion of ownership of an entity is an “interest” is left undefined, but Jindal may mean any ownership whatsoever) for any retail contract over $2,500. This has been a gravy train for some legislators (does state Sen. Francis and brother Michael Thompson ring a bell here?) as has legislators acting as “consultants,” another item set to stop this, so these could be fought tooth-and-nail especially in the veteran Senate. Also in this category would be the requiring of nongovernmental who get money grooved to them by legislators to turn in for public inspection details about them; such earmarks have been popular with a significant number of legislators.

Of course, the success of the package will depend upon details, like what is an “interest” in an entity, or what details are requested of the entities that get earmarks, or what and how many ranges are used with the disclosure forms. If Jindal can get all of this passed without much watering-down in these details, Louisiana will have a very good ethics code and Jindal will have delivered successfully on a major campaign promise.

GOP favorite to retain special election House seats

Qualifying for the two special elections for U.S. House in Louisiana are over, and conservative Republicans are immediate favorites to take both seats.

That’s not such a bold statement concerning the First District. Vacated by Gov. Bobby Jindal who won overwhelmingly both times out, the winner of the Republican primary in March or April would have to become incapacitated prior to the April or May general election in order for a Democrat to win. The three major Republicans – state Sen. Steve Scalise, state Rep. Tim Burns, and Slidell Mayor Ben Morris – are very likely to pursue conservative policies in the House.

Scalise would be favored among the three. Not only has he served in elective office longest but he has been the most high profile of the three and has picked up some heavyweight endorsements. Further aiding him is that Burns and Morris are northshore candidates, splitting that vote potentially and leaving the southshore entirely to Scalise. It’s not likely Scalise can win without a runoff with Burns being the more likely opponent, but he should be able to get past his former state House colleague in April.

The Sixth District in contrast might have been more competitive but the dynamics in the Democrat primary may hand the election to the Republicans. Louis “Woody” Jenkins would be the favorite on the GOP side because of much more name recognition and past campaign acumen. Many still recall how he beat more prominent Republicans to come within a few thousand votes of winning the U.S. Senate seat still held by Mary Landrieu (and most won’t remember how he waged a futile protracted battle to overturn the decision which cost him support in his failed run to win the old elections commissioner job in 1999.)

It will be difficult for his two other major opponents to outdistance a longtime fixture on the Baton Rouge and state media and politics scenes with an impeccably conservative reputation. Jenkins could win without a runoff.

Despite knowing that demographics make it impossible for a non-conservative black candidate to win this district, two quality black candidates signed up to run on the Democrat side of the ledger along with two major white candidates. Jason Decuir came within double digits in votes of knocking off prominent former state House member state Sen. Yvonne Dorsey last fall, an impressive showing for a first-timer despite that power broker former state Sen. Cleo Fields supported Dorsey. The other black Democrat isn’t chopped liver, state Rep. Michael Jackson, but whether he can beat DeCuir depends upon how much animus Fields and his political machine feels towards DeCuir and whether that means Fields will actively support Jackson.

Major white candidates are state Rep. Don Cazayoux and former government official under the previous two governors Andy Kopplin. Between these two, Cazayoux has the edge because of his lengthy and relatively uncontroversial legislative service while Kopplin will be associated with the negatives of both the Kathleen Blanco and Mike Foster Administrations which will outweigh any praise from his work on recovery issues, even if he can more easily draw upon votes from the urban parts of the district than Cazayoux from New Roads.

But since all four are running together, really interesting dynamics could occur. Given extant campaign organizations, the propensity for whites to cross over racially to vote for black candidates at higher rates than blacks for whites, and that many white Democrats will not vote because they would prefer to vote in the Republican primary but cannot, it is not inconceivable that both black candidates will make the runoff, retaining the district for sure for the GOP. Even if a white candidate emerges to contest the general election, the ferocity and drain of resources of his getting there might preclude him from winning. This is the kind of district where everything has to go right for a Democrat to win, and the candidate lineup doesn’t make it look like that will happen.

These are early speculations, mind you, and much still can happen. But the most likely scenario is two GOP retentions.

Savoie requests show resistance to Jindal agenda

Just what kind of game are Louisiana higher education systems playing in regard to the hiring freeze implemented by Gov. Bobby Jindal? The executive order mandates that state agencies obtain exemption to hire in any open position, since Jan. 15, from Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis.

While the Louisiana State University system won approval for the one blanket exemption, to hire direct providers of health care in the charity hospital system that it runs, Davis has rejected two other requests from Commissioner of Higher Education (soon to parachute into the presidency of the University of Louisiana- Lafayette) Joseph Savoie, first a blanket exemption for any university hiring, then one adjudged by university heads not Davis just turned down by Davis.

While all of this jockeying from higher education has gone on, other agencies have been dutifully compiling the data and getting exemptions – one of them being Savoie’s employer, the Board of Regents itself. In the meantime, Savoie has been complaining about having universities do the same – and not always recounting his case for blanket exemptions in an accurate way.

In a letter to Davis the day after the inauguration, Savoie wrote “More importantly perhaps, it would send a signal throughout the entire academic community that Louisiana is not a state upon which faculty, researchers and top-flight administrators can depend for good faith recruitment efforts.” If he believes this, it shows that despite his dozen years in his position and almost two decades in higher education prior to that, Savoie hasn’t learned a whole lot about faculty hiring in higher education. Position freezes are not at all uncommon for job applicants to deal with and they are not seen as unusual nor automatic disqualifiers of a prospective employer precisely because they are so common.

Later, Savoie argued that the freeze would affect hiring for adjunct positions. Adjuncts instructors are hired on a course-by-course basis to fill in gaps not able to be covered by the full-time faculty members. But unless I have totally missed something in the wording of the order, the freeze doesn’t apply to adjunct positions because they are temporary and part-time.

We also have to understand to context of the complaints Savoie is making. Remember that Jindal knows full well how higher education works, having led the University of Louisiana system. He probably knows that, in fact, the process of re-justifying new faculty positions is probably easier than what most other agencies face. In academia, new faculty jobs are created at the behest of academic departments who provide evidence of the need of the position – burgeoning enrollments, for example – which then must be approved by a chain of command all the way to the system level before any hiring can begin. This means most of the work Davis is requesting already has been done.

In other words, if Savoie would just give the order to system presidents, universities could take out their old documentation, maybe update them slightly (if they would need to at all), and then send them up the chain eventually to Davis. It’s just not that difficult to do. And, while I’m at the very bottom of the academic food chain, I’ve heard nothing come from the Regents or the system level at my university to do this while Savoie pursues this quixotic quest. Why can’t both, blanket requests and specific requests, be done at once?

So why is Savoie digging in his heels so much? The answer comes from Jindal’s oft-stated goal of making universities in the state more outcome-oriented, focusing not so much on inputs (money, students attending, etc.) but on outputs (degrees awarded, graduation rates, and the like). The very first step in implementing this sea change in philosophy is to align human resources with desired outcomes – and Savoie, not just as outgoing leader of higher education but also as incoming university head, fears this larger agenda (as probably does his employer the Regents and the university system boards they oversee).

Davis has publicly stated that she would give great deference to university hiring, and I’m willing to predict that over 90 percent of such requests she’ll end up approving. However, she will make approvals with the realigning agenda in mind focusing on “critical” needs. And the university administrative culture, for the most part insulated in its own world, is such that it disdains any interference and resists change. The easiest way to accomplish this goal facing this crisis is to ask for a blanket exemption to help blunt realignment. So that’s why Savoie would rather throw up artificial barriers than get down to business like other state agencies have that would aid Jindal in his initial effort to imprint his agenda on Louisiana higher education.

"Article VI" good to see before casting primary vote

An interesting addition to the political landscape that connects to politics in Louisiana is the documentary film “Article VI” co-directed by Bryan Hall and co-produced by former Shreveporter Reed Dickens the statewide premier of which occurred Monday at LSUS. It raises provocative questions that, among others around the country, Louisiana voters will have to grapple with over the upcoming days as votes are cast in the presidential preference primary.

Its timing and content contributes to the debate about the next occupant of the White House (the goal of the film, Hall and Dickens say, to make people think about how religious belief affects these choices) because the 2008 presidential election seems to be producing the most specific questioning of particular religious beliefs of candidates in recent memory. To be simplistic if not crass, major candidates include one whose religion just over a century ago practiced polygamy, another who has preached Bible inerrancy, a third who was in his youth educated in schools whose religious backers maintain the acceptability of holy war, and a fourth whose religious leaders forbid him to receive Communion.

Perhaps the central point made by the film through the vehicle of asking people, usually with some prominence in the political, academic, or religious sectors, about the intersection of religion and politics (its title refers to that section of the Constitution which states “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”) is that, while the Constitution does not demand a religious test, some people do supply one when they evaluate candidates. Related to this, it then begs the question whether a myopic view of the specific religious beliefs of individuals would, in the minds of some, disqualify candidates who in most every other respect would gain that particular person’s vote.

By way of example, Pres. Ronald Reagan was divorced (only the second president ever) and, until latter in life, only an occasional attendee of Presbyterian services (he seldom attended services during his presidency because of the public complications and distractions involved). Yet Reagan, who would describe himself as “born-again,” was well-known for forcefully championing a number of issue preferences that Christians, particularly evangelicals, liked and in his private life placed much emphasis on basing his own actions on religious belief.

In contrast, Pres. Bill and his wife, now presidential candidate and Sen. Hillary Clinton were regular attendees of (a very liberal) church in Washington (although they had attended a Baptist church in Arkansas). Yet many faithful questioned not only Clinton’s issue preferences that did not seem very Godly to them, but also acts in his personal life as president as well.

It’s this question about how voters consider the translation of the political beliefs of candidates into actual policy that looms as presidential party nominees are decided. To cite just one example, on issues that matter to Christians one prominent pro-evangelical organization gives high praise to former Gov. Mitt Romney even as it asserts Romney “admitted” his Mormonism was not a “Christian” religion – an inference the Romney campaign says is not accurate. Even if the organization appears to be reticent to appear as granting approval of Romney’s specific religious beliefs, it has no such hesitation concerning his campaign.

Especially for Republican voters in a state which on the one hand is a fertile ground for Protestant evangelical beliefs but on the other hand displays a fair degree of religious tolerance because of the presence of a substantial Catholic population, Louisiana will serve as one of the more interesting laboratories of how people’s perceptions of the prominence of a candidate’s specific religious beliefs play out in their vote decisions. In fact, on the GOP side it may make the difference in who wins the most delegates – especially if things work out so convention delegates a week after the primary end up making that apportionment. “Article VI” would make some good watching for them as they pondered that decision.

Hypocritical BR Advocate chides Jindal for what it does

Lest one think the Shreveport Times has the only hypocritical editorialists of newspapers in the state, the Baton Rouge Advocate showed it doesn’t want to be left out when discussing media that says one thing and then does another.

The Advocate, joining the head of the state’s Democrats, took a shot at Gov. Bobby Jindal and his campaign staff that, by all accounts, made an inadvertent, incorrect entry on campaign finance documents. The state GOP spent money on the campaign’s behalf in June but campaign operatives overlooked to note it on the next filing due in June. In August, they were alerted to it and amended their previous form in September. However, this was too late to escape a fine which will be levied in the next few months.

Democrat Chairman Chris Whittington, with so little for his party to crow about last fall, took the opportunity to ask that Jindal’s chief of staff Timmy Teepell resign over the matter, prompting Jindal’s communications director Melissa Sellers to describe the request as “silly” and that the process that led to the complaint was a “political stunt.”

Hiring freeze tactics align to larger strategic goals

Gov. Bobby Jindal has bent, slightly, in his order to freeze hiring of essentially all unfilled positions in state government. The move to allow a blanket waiver for all health care positions in direct contact with patients, after at first saying there would be no blanket waivers, represents only a small tactical shift in a larger strategy.

Some wondered when as one of his first official acts Jindal implemented the freeze by executive order. After all, promises of budget surpluses rung, on top of recent surpluses, so why was it that Jindal seemed so concerned about saving $25 million? There are three reasons why.

First, it was campaign promise of sorts. Jindal had long and loudly complained about an expanding government. Even if most of the recent increase came as a result of recovery monies from outside the state, there still was some government spending growth at a time the state actually had fewer people to service. On top of that, Jindal had expressed annoyance that the state not only continued to keep hundreds of jobs unfilled for years running, but that these open slots got pay raises in 2007. The freeze was a way to make good on this campaign issue.

Second, one of the great con jobs of last year by the Kathleen Blanco Administration and Democrat legislative leadership was the creation of programs and redistribution into them of monies coming from temporary sources (even if technically these funds were classified as eligible for spending on recurring items), as well as their ignoring of the false economy created by recovery spending which resulted in increased but in part temporary revenues. The Jindal Administration recognizes this fully as a ticking time bomb and one way to deal with it is cutting back basically unneeded personnel spending.

Third, the freeze helps Jindal in his quest to reform certain areas of government. For example, the current indigent care system rewards state institutions to be less efficient by dropping a sum of money in their laps rather than tying their rewards to performances on indicators – which is how the non-government sector must work compelled by market forces. Even if only a few million dollars can be pulled from the existing charity system, it reduces its size and frees the money to be used to implement a money-follows-the-person regime that eventually will force the charity system to perform more efficiently.

Jindal was correct that blanket exemptions as a whole would detract from the basic goal of his administration – hinging on another campaign promise – that is tied into the reform idea: it’s not the savings of money that is as important, but that agencies use the opportunity to justify its use as the first step towards a more performance-based attitude reigning in agency budgeting and operation. Jindal and Republicans like House Speaker Jim Tucker have insisted that fat still remains in the state’s spending habits: this exercise can initiate the process of agencies to get thinking in those terms as well.

Nonetheless, the Jindal Administration realized that on the direct provider issue that the nature of the service and the turnover in it made the exemption sensible; otherwise, Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis would be spending far too much time reviewing exemption requests while agency heads would spend too much time writing them. It does not mean, for those reasons cited, that the Administration’s strategy will change anytime soon.

GOP LA caucus results point to Romney benefitting

Just as at the national political level there are attempts to define victory in Iraq in a way to withdraw U.S. forces without actual victory in place, here in Louisiana a battle rages to declare victory for Republican candidates in the party’s recently-conducted caucuses.

As far as any one candidate goes, the edge seems to be held by Sen. John McCain, a situation trumpeted by a pro-McCain news aggregator website. But in real terms, the victory likely will go to former Gov. Mitt Romney – but “likely” for now for two reasons.

One is that the actual winner – both plurality and majority – of the delegates statewide appears to have been an uncommitted slate termed the “Pro-life/Pro-family” delegation. They seem to have captured a smashing 86 of the 105 slots, while the McCain slate looks to have gotten fewer than 10. (These numbers might change a little as the party is still verifying provisional ballots.) Given these candidate's records of the issues the uncommitted delegates signal are important ot them, it would appear that the bulk of the uncommitted delegates will swing Romney’s way if given that chance, in addition to the handful of Romney delegates by name winning.

The other reason it's not set in stone is because Louisiana Republicans can moot this. The week after the Feb. 9 caucuses comes the state convention where the actual delegates to attend the national convention will be selected. If state GOP voters give any candidate an absolute majority, that candidate gets pledged to him all of the convention delegates apportioned in this manner – 20 delegates. If no candidate does, these and 24 other delegates are up for grabs on Feb. 16. It seems unlikely any candidate will win an absolute majority.

While inexact at to claim to know the intent of all the uncommitted delegates, probably enough of them backing Romney will control the convention to decide who gets 44 of the GOP's 47 available. Thus, claims that McCain had the best outcome of all candidates running ring very hollow.

Reform officials must rid state of pest legislation

If anybody unfamiliar with traditional politics in Louisiana needs any instruction into how dysfunctional the situation has been, one need look only at the mess created over pest control in the state’s Department of Agriculture and draw lessons from there on how to change it.

Former commissioner Bob Odom diverted funds dedicated to fighting boll weevils, in part paid for by cotton farmers for that very purpose, to projects that, if they had any connection to agriculture at all, were money-losers to the state as a whole. Now it seems the so-called dedicated funds to the project won’t be enough to cover the expenses needed to maintain progress on the eradication.

The trouble began years ago when Odom first got the state Legislature to pass a law apportioning as much as $12 million a year culled from slot machines at race tracks to fight the pest. Initially, the money went for that purpose but as the program became more successful needing less money to keep progress going, Odom began to find these creative outlets to finance other ventures.

Romney-leaning, not Roemer, LA ticket best for GOP

Within the hour Republicans will gather at statewide caucuses to select delegates to attend in about a month a state convention to pick delegates to the party’s national convention. Not only will this affect the outcome of a GOP nomination for president still very much in flux, but may also shed light into competition and the eventual nominee for the House Sixth District for Congress for the party.

Courtesy of a web site that shills for former Gov. Buddy Roemer, e-mail was sent to drum up support for Sen. John McCain. In the note, Roemer argued that McCain was the only candidate that could defeat front-runner for the Democratic nomination Sen. Hillary Clinton – a highly mistaken notion, given Clinton’s negatives are so high that any GOP nominee would enter the contest at worst even odds against Clinton. In fact, because McCain would discourage the conservative base of the GOP who would be likely to take the attitude that the inevitable failure of a Clinton presidency would strengthen the conservative cause more than the as-inevitable failure of a Clinton-lite (McCain) presidency, McCain would be the least likely of the major Republican candidates to beat her.

Despite his mistaken analysis, Roemer’s endorsement and placement on a ticket to support McCain firmly places him ideologically within the state GOP, reducing his chances of wining nomination for the 6th District seat. With the advent of closed primaries for federal elections, conservatives will have the greatest say in determining Republican nominees (as will liberals for Democrats). Roemer has more recently dismissed rumors that he will run for the seat of resigning Rep. Richard Baker and instead his son Chas (who appears on the McCain ticket as well) has expressed interest in the seat.

Shreveport Times irresponsibility could hurt policing

Maybe it’s because it appears to have dropped quite a chunk of change on getting the data for the stories. Or maybe it wanted to make a big splash for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Whatever the motivation, the Shreveport Times produced a series on “racial profiling” riddled with muddled thinking, inappropriate insinuation, and harmful public policy prescriptions.

The Times studied traffic citation data and found that black drivers were receiving perhaps twice as many citations – usually for minor offenses – as were white drivers in both Shreveport and Bossier City given population levels. On this alone, it concluded there must be something “troubling” about this outcome, without ever spelling out exactly what that is.

But instead of providing a fair and balanced analysis of the issue (the closest it ever came was one quote from my colleague at LSUS who pointed out the many factors that go into decisions made by police about traffic stops and admonished it to “do a little more work” before making any conclusion), instead it made the elementary mistake, intentionally or otherwise, about which I warned my statistics students on many occasions to avoid, treating association as if it were causation.

As an example of this error, suppose you observe that the larger a fire is, the more firemen there are that show up to fight it. As a result, you conclude firemen cause fires: where there are no fires there are no firemen, and the size of the fire grows directly with the number of firemen present. What you have done is erroneously posited a relationship between to things based solely on the evidence that they covary. They are associated, but that does not then imply they must have a causal relationship. Without paying close attention to plausible theory, any causal conclusions are recklessly made.

Causation is demonstrated only when there is theory that most plausibly explains why there must be a relationship and what affects what. On this issue, The Times and a number of “experts” (with the exception of an academician all vocal politically liberal elected officials or activists) used the association of race determining probability of ticketing and grabbed their ideological biases to give an immediate, unreflective, erroneous conclusion (that, again, they are reluctant to state unambiguously no doubt because it would sensitize readers to that bias and lead them to dismiss their argument): blacks are disproportionately ticketed because local police departments refuse to change irredeemably racist institutionalized policies and to punish racist behavior.

This is despite the fact that local departments (including Shreveport’s black police chief) steadfastly maintain that “hard” profiling (with race being the only standard being used to decide whether to make a stop) is forbidden. It is despite the fact that policies are in place to prevent hard profiling (which is dismissed by The Times and the consensus of its interviewed as unsuitable without releasing data to the state). It is despite the fact the departments handle and resolve complaints of this. It is despite the fact that in three crucial ways the analysis failed to explore evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.

One was to look at the conviction rates of the offenses cited. That data is not presented but chances are it was pretty high. In other words, legitimate crimes were being committed, but in one sense The Times is nevertheless blaming the police for being too vigilant. Its response probably would be that this shows selective enforcement, or that white motorists committing the same crimes were being given a pass because of either cut-and-dried racist attitudes among the police and/or because they were making race the primary factor in deciding about a traffic stop.

This leads to the second piece of evidence that The Times easily could have (or did?) gather – the race of the citing and/or arresting officer. One would expect that if hard profiling if not racist behavior was going on, you would find white officers ticketing significantly more black offenders than would black officers. Indeed, the data collected by The Times contained the names of the officers; unless the departments objected, it should have been little problem and just taken a few extra hours of coding to put that information into the database, and then analyze whether officer race made a difference in proportion of tickets issued by race.

But The Times didn’t do this. If it couldn’t because of departmental objections, it needed to act responsibly by noting this argument and tempering its own. If it could but didn’t, this was a simple, stupid mistake that greatly detracted from the series. If it could and did but chose not to report the results, it was disingenuous if not outright fraudulent. Even though their editor preaches about how there needs to be “transparency,” The Times appeared not to practice that, nor did it do sufficiently what he counsels the reading audience to do, analyze the numbers.

(Also interesting: The Times has a comment feature on its stories where registered users can leave notes which are moderated. For the stories in this series, the function was disabled – doesn’t seem like they want a whole lot of debate on this despite their editorializing in favor of it.)

This neglected the probable true explanation, the final bit of evidence ignored by The Times, for why we see differences in proportions cited by race is a possibility confirmed by every statistic and study on crime in America: like it or not, unfortunately blacks simply are more likely to commit crime, in almost every category of crime. It may well be that, for example, you have, given relative population, twice as many black motorists being cited for windows too heavily tinted or music played too loud because twice as many engage in that behavior. But, once again, The Times could, and maybe did, excuse itself from entertaining and investigating this notion by blindly believing crime rates are disproportionately higher for blacks because of that old bogeyman racism again – even as what federal government evidence does exists seems to indicate blacks are more likely to operate vehicles unsafely than whites.

While it is undesirable that The Times should choose to create an issue out of nothing or at least half-baked, the real damage can come as its insinuations could detract from law enforcement optimally carrying out its job. As summarized in a report about the issue of racial profiling which revealed the ideological politics behind the crusade against it in all forms and gave examples of the harm a prior assumption that racism was behind the use of race in fighting crime, “The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime,” that threatens to shatter the “commonality between law-abiding inner-city residents and the police.”

In the final analysis, it’s not bad that The Times looked into this issue, it’s that it did so in such an manner, neglecting a complete, thorough, and balanced analysis, that has the hallmarks of wanting to promote an agenda. One argument it made in its series was that the interpretation they supplied to the data when circulated would lead to greater distrust of the police and thus hamper crime fighting, unless police behavior subsequently changed. It was spectacularly irresponsible of The Times to float an easily-detected flawed argument, raising alarms about the results of such an incomplete, if not ideologically-driven investigation that threatens to lead to the outcome it so piously claims to want to prevent.