Ex-NYC top cop Kerik pleads guilty

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33655845/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded guilty Thursday to lying to the White House and tax crimes in a deal that could send him to prison for about 2 1/2 years.

The nominee to run Homeland Security also admits lying to the White House

Kerik, who was police commissioner when New York was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, won glowing reviews for his leadership. He eventually was nominated for the Homeland Security post in 2004 but withdrew as corruption allegations mounted. The lies to the White House occurred during that vetting process.

"Guilty," he said eight times in a firm voice as he appeared in the suburban courtroom.

New Smart CCTV Cameras Will be Watching You

By Mike Swain

There are four million CCTV cameras in the UK but most of them are useless for fighting crime.

Cameras watch us on buses trains and at airports but their effect on reducing crime has been negligible.

That's because they simply record huge amounts of film and virtually none of it is ever viewed.

It just gets put on a disc and stored and never looked at again unless the police want to check it while investigating a crime.

But a new generation of CCTV cameras is being tested which will not only film you but assess and analyse everything you are doing.

They make an assessment of your age, gender, the colour of your clothes and other factors to assess whether you are at risk.

Changing your seat on a bus, standing on the stairs or loitering too close to the driver could trigger the computer to think you are a threat.

Pictures will be beamed back to a central control room where a computer will filter out the pictures and highlight the ones where there is the biggest crime risk.

Instead of watching a bank of screens security analysts will just need to watch three or four which the computer has highlighted for them to watch in "real time."

If the security officer thinks there is a threat they could appear on a screen in a bus or train and tell you: "We've got our eye on you."

Or the CCTV film could be relayed to the nearest police patrol car and a police officer would appear on the screen with the same message.

These smart CCTV cameras are already being tested and are set to become the latest weapons in fighting crime on public transport within the next five years.

The software for the cameras is being developed at the new £25 million Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Belfast University.

Dr Paul Miller, Research Director of Intelligent Surveillance Systems, said there had been a "lost decade" of massive investment in CCTV cameras.

"Current CCTV cameras operate in a very passive way. They simply collect enormous amounts of data but very little is watched in real time.

"The system will instantly give every live feed a score, based on factors such as time of day, crime statistics for the location, a threat assessment of the people shown and so on. The score will determine where each feed is placed in the queue for the controller's attention," said Dr Miller.

"We aim to develop a system which will make crime-free buses, trains, stations and airports a reality."

A camera at a bus stop would analyse everyone in the queue and make a judgement whether it was a risky group. Factors such as whether the stop was in a high crime area and whether it was late at night would be included.

The passengers would be assessed again on the bus with help from simple metal detectors on the doors and driver microphones picking up any shouting or disturbance

Dr Miller rejected the idea that the cameras were an invasion of privacy and said they would encourage people back onto the buses.

"It reduces the amount of surveillance because it only looks at what is appropiate. It is protecting privacy in many ways, " he said.

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/09/new-smart-cctv-cameras-will-be.html

'Do the Right Thing': Still a Racial Rorschach at 20

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/greene_tinson
Article about how when Do The Right Thing came out, Spike Lee was branded as another angry black man and in reviewing the movie, white people almost invariably were upset over the destruction of Sal's pizza place while seemingly ignoring the police-brutality involved in Radio Rahim's choking death. Rorschach, indeed:

Recalling reactions to the film's violent climax, Lee would later remark, "If in a review, a critic discussed how Sal's Famous was burned down but didn't mention anything about Radio Raheem getting killed, it was pretty obvious that he or she valued white-owned property more than the life of this young black hoodlum." The frankness of Lee's rhetoric and the film's content led the mainstream media to label him an angry, confrontational filmmaker. In her 1989 Time review of Do the Right Thing, titled "He's Got to Have It His Way," Jeanne McDowell observed, "Looking for racism at every turn, [Lee] finds it." An August 1990 cover of US asked, "Spike Lee: Why Is He So Angry?" And in a classic example of ironic racism, an October 1992 Esquire headline declared: "Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass."

Two decades and considerable mainstream success have done little to change the portrayal of the director and his films. In a New Yorker profile of Lee published last year, writer John Colapinto describes--and thereby confirms--Lee's reputation as that of "a filmmaker obsessed with race." For Lee the consistency with which his films' messages regarding race are overshadowed by fear and paranoia is frustrating to say the least. He recently observed, "White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window. No black person ever, in twenty years, no person of color has ever asked me why."

The nation decided to ask for some reactions to the 20th anniversary and I found these two particularly interesting:

Jared A. Ball
Morgan State University

Do the Right Thing still relevant? Well, none of Spike's characters likely still live on that block. "Larry Bird" hasn't just stepped on Buggin' Out's new Jordans. He has taken the entire neighborhood. The same killer cops patrol the newly displaced in their now-suburban colonies in precisely the same manner, mildly harassing Harvard professor "Mookies" while killing the everyday Oscar and Sean Raheems. Today, Mookie still bends to pick up the scraps thrown to the ground by his white benefactors; but Love-Daddy can no longer tell us "the truth, Ruth" because he is syndicated by Sal's nobles, assuring that that either a Hot 97 or a hot 50 kills Radios everywhere, in vestibules, cars or while awaiting trains. And worst of all, throughout black America radical change is simply individual, disorganized, stammering signifiers of defeat. Relevant? It is so relevant that nothing of its kind will again grace a mainstream screen.

---

Ed Guerrero
New York University

Regarding the chemistry of the cinematic and the social, the most interesting "thing" about Do the Right Thing is both how little and (perhaps) how much "things" have changed since '89. As I have argued elsewhere, the "new black film wave" started to plateau at the end of the '90s with about twenty or so black-focused or -directed features of varied scale and quality released yearly by the mainstream film industry. Here, nothing has really changed. Accordingly, Do the Right Thing's social themes--police profiling and brutality; urban, ethnic conflict; the crisis in black families and relationships--all endure, if they haven't intensified. Conversely, the "Age of Obama" suggests some remedy to these issues. Yet the rhetorical jujitsu of "race" continues. Note some senators accusing Judge Sotomayor of "racism" during her confirmation hearings, or the "Skip Gates police affair" blowing up and sustained in the national media. Tellingly, we now need many more filmmakers with the cultural, aesthetic creativity and social focus of Spike Lee, as evinced in Do the Right Thing.

it's interesting how a lot of white people were quick to say that we were now in a post racial America after Obama's win (despite what we saw at McCain/Palin rallies). That was put to rest after the racism at the tea parties, the racism with Sotomayor (even before she was nominated!!), the racism at the healthcare town halls, and the absolute backlash against Obama with the Skip Gates stuff - and that was only in the past year! Eric Holder was right.

Katrina's Hidden Race War

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson/single
long but really informative article about roving band of white gangsters who used looters and the absence of the law in post-Katrina New Orleans as an excuse to get their militia on - one "ni**er" at a time. Here's a snippet:

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

The existence of this little army isn't a secret--in 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." Herrington, for his part, recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

I'm sure Bobby Jindal would be interested in citing these militias as a tribute to the private sector.

Police Taser Grandfather, Pregnant Woman in Virginia at Baptism Party

of course, they were minorities