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From Google News

One Woman's Fight Against a Tribute to an Early Leader of the Ku Klux Klan

Alabama native Malika Fortier is leading a battle to block a controversial monument to a Civil War general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Abigail Pesta reports.

by Abigail Pesta

Malika Fortier doesn't think the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is someone to celebrate.

Fortier is leading a charge against the construction of a monument in honor of Nathan Bedford Forrest in her hometown of Selma, Ala. Forrest, a Confederate general hailed by some as a Civil War hero, is believed to be the first national leader of the Klan. Fortier calls the proposed monument “boldly racist.” On Tuesday, she helped organize a protest and turned in a Change.org petition with more than 325,000 signatures to the Selma city council. Her efforts paid off; the city council reportedly voted Tuesday night to halt all work on the statue until the courts decide who owns the property where the monument would be based—the city or a Civil War historical society. *

“I never dreamed that we might, as a town, go backwards,” says Fortier, 39, who works in a local law office. “I grew up here meeting giants of the civil-rights movement. I was inspired by the sacrifices that these leaders were willing to make so life could be better for all people. I thought that during my lifetime, things would get better and better.”

A bust of Forrest was first placed on a pedestal in the town more than a decade ago, Fortier says. It caused such a controversy that it later was moved to a more out-of-the-way cemetery called Live Oak. This past spring, the bust mysteriously disappeared. A local group that calls itself “Friends of Forrest” is now pushing to build a new monument—a “bigger and better one,” Fortier says. “They are just determined to celebrate this hate.”

A member of Friends of Forrest, Todd Kiscaden, told a local TV newscast that he thinks Forrest was a hero. “I'd recommend this man for any young people to model his life after,” Kiscaden said. “The man always led from the front. He did what he said he was gonna do. He took care of his people. And his people included both races.” Forrest was known as a powerful cavalry leader in the Confederate army; two schools and a state park are named for him in the South. But he was also controversial, having been accused of war crimes in the Battle of Fort Pillow in Tennessee, where he allegedly led a brutal massacre. He joined the Klan after the war, reportedly becoming its national leader.

Fortier says Friends of Forrest wants to make sure “the Old South rises again.” She adds, "Unemployment is high and people are suffering in Selma. This is a very dangerous plan to keep Selma moving backwards.” She says she and other activists had enlisted people to “sit at the worksite" so no one could "pour the cement.”

The ownership of the cemetery land is in dispute. According to a report in The Selma Times-Journal, the city council donated the property to the Confederate Memorial Association—which would later become the United Daughters of the Confederacy—in April 1877, but “no deed seems to have been ever created or transferred.”

The Selma mayor's office and city council didn't respond to requests for comment on the controversy.

‘Most of us would not want bin Laden celebrated near the Twin Towers or Hitler celebrated in a Jewish neighborhood.'

Selma is known for several high-profile civil-rights marches in the 1960s, including one in 1965 that involved hundreds of marchers who were beaten and tear-gassed by police, earning the name “Bloody Sunday.” The marchers later regrouped, picking up thousands of participants. A monument to Martin Luther King Jr., who helped marchers get organized, stands in Selma today.

“In people's homes or on their private property, people do celebrate many things, and we are not challenging that, but on public property, it is entirely different,” says Fortier. “Also, even on private property, most of us would not want bin Laden celebrated near the Twin Towers or Hitler celebrated in a Jewish neighborhood. We would understand how this could be highly offensive, even dangerous. However, oftentimes people are less sensitive to how being indifferent to the systematic murder of black people is just as horrific.”

Fortier says the local reaction to her campaign has been mixed. “Blacks, who understand the issues associated with this monument, generally think the monument should be stopped,” she says. “Many local whites think that it's just history, so what is the big deal?” But “killing African-Americans for sport was a part of the legacy of the South, and this monument celebrates that tragic history. More importantly, it creates a culture where black life is not valued today. It says that it was OK then and it is OK now. These people still haven't reached the conclusion that slavery was wrong.”

However, she adds, “I did hear some whites for the first time today say they were not in favor of the monument being built here. For our town, where both blacks and whites can be pressured to leave town if they don't follow the neo-Confederate line, this is progress.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/26/one-woman-s-fight-against-a-tribute-to-an-alleged-leader-of-the-ku-klux-klan.html

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How the Federal Government is Killing Community Policing

by Sudhir Venkatesh

If you've ever watched a television series, like “Hill Street Blues” or “NYPD Blue,” you are probably well acquainted with the mutual disdain between local and federal law enforcement. While the script for these shows was predictable, it was engrossing nonetheless. Cops were local bumpkins who policed on gut instinct, and whose ties to locals made corruption an ever-present danger. Feds were arrogant ‘suits' who used wiretaps and hi-tech devices to drag in dozens at a time—cops included. When I recently joined the FBI in an advisory position—I spent two years visiting field offices around the country in an effort to understand how federal agents put together a case, and to gauge their impact on local public safety—such antagonism is exactly what I expected to find.

Instead, I saw a different drama, one that has received far less attention, but is no less compelling. Increasingly, across the country, the town cop who walks a beat and relies on trust with locals may be a thing of the past; your neighborhood police investigation is increasingly likely to be a federal initiative, built on cooperation between your local police department and Washington, DC. In fact, with feds and local cops increasing their collaborations and seeking funding to expand their joint investigations, we may be seeing the end of “community policing” as we've known it. In the short run, this has been a good thing, since crime has grown more complex and stiff federal penalties are often necessary deterrents. But in the long run, it's shaping up to be the biggest challenge to liberal governance and local autonomy that we've seen in some time.

FEDERAL-LOCAL PARTNERSHIPS currently target a surprisingly wide range of crimes and it's hard to pinpoint the criteria determining the involvement of FBI, DEA, ICE and other Department of Justice officials in local matters. Sometimes the locals are out-matched, at other times multiple-jurisdictions require federal coordination, and on occasion, a federal prosecutor simply finds a racketeering case too good to pass up. It's almost always true, however, that the relationship is openly transactional. The feds bring gifts to the locals, in the form of cars, decent pay, and fancy surveillance gadgetry. In return the feds “rent” local cops (and the local knowledge they possess).

And the results can be impressive: For violent gang interdiction alone, the FBI's “Safe Streets” Taskforce has worked with police to net 55,000 arrests and 23,000 convictions. That is an extraordinary number given that the modern gangs are working out of prisons and communities that cut across the jurisdictions of local police departments—and sometimes national borders.

The arrests are not the only victories. In Chicago, I assessed the outcome of such so-called “taskforce”-style partnerships and the evidence was promising: Residents felt safer using public spaces, storeowners experienced less extortion, and even gang members exited their organizations at a greater rate after a federal operation—unlike the past, today's local-federal collaborations are well publicized. In the city's Southside communities, where a typical month now hosts several hundred incidents of gun violence, this is no trivial accomplishment. And, of course, with towns, counties, and states struggle to fund services, federal resources are that much more attractive. Everyone wants the feds.

It's worth remarking, however, that this marks an enormous shift in American policing. Federal taskforces pose a direct threat to community policing, the enforcement strategy based on the belief that public safety is strongest when local cops and local community leaders work hand-in-hand. For decades, this style of policing was the national model of crime prevention. It kept money in the hands of mayors, police chiefs, and the unions. The biggest domestic law enforcement initiative in the last 30 years—Bill Clinton's “Community Oriented Policing Services” (COPS) program, which funded 100,000 officers at a cost of $7.6 billion—was based on the community policing strategy.

But the COPS initiative, ultimately, did little to stop or solve crimes. (The Government Accountability Office attributed only a 1.3 percent of crime reduction to the program.) Indeed, there's reason to believe that community policing has become less effective as crime has become more complex. Criminals now routinely cross (state and international) borders, they work through prison networks even for local gang recruitment, and they are as likely as cops to draw on their own hi-tech tools. Local police in high crime areas simply couldn't keep up on their own, and were forced into essentially becoming war-time surgeons performing triage. They had to choose which crimes to follow, prioritizing only those conflicts most likely to unravel and harm innocents. And they could not follow any particular crime or criminal for very long.

Until, that is, someone gave them money to do more. Small wonder local police put up little resistance when federal agents asked to lease their staff. In police departments from Camden to Jacksonville to Oakland, where layoffs and restricted budgets have made classic daily beat patrols a luxury, the feds have deployed their technological arsenal—wiretaps, web scraping, voice and image recognition—to great effect. And necessity is breeding innovation. In the cities where taskforces dominate, policing is becoming unprecedentedly dynamic and nimble, involving police, when necessary, from a wide range of jurisdictions.

After reviewing the data on taskforce impacts on crime, it's hard not to admit that federal law enforcement deserves its preponderance of funding. In many ways, old fashioned community policing was no longer getting the job done, and it needed a face lift. The traditional big city approach looks clunky in comparison.

But federal money is no panacea. The goals of beat policing and federal investigations are not always closely aligned. A dirty little secret of good policing is that cop and thug communicate more often than we think. In nearly 20 years of watching cops and criminals duel one another on inner-city streets, I've rarely heard a beat officer say their first priority is to prevent crime. Most often, they are intervening in order to put out fires before innocents get hurt. This means knowing what thug to call (or threaten) after a flare-up. So what happens when federal agents and prosecutors want high-profile arrests for racketeering or other federal crimes? The answer is that when a police chief accepts federal largesse, she may also have to accept federal priorities—even if they hurt her ability to maintain good relations on the street.

The city cops and police chiefs I met were hesitant to talk openly about this (and with so much money at stake, I wasn't expecting them to confess their grievances.) But local police are not naïve; they know that they are not just cooperating with the Feds, but competing with them. The Feds are getting a bigger share of funding, while they are forced to continually make layoffs. (President Bush was a game changer in this respect, in the way that he prioritized international terrorism; President Obama has continued the tradition, favoring funding of federal agencies over local departments. His $2.2 billon crime-fighting grant (2010) sounds impressive, but only 8 percent of the local police applications were honored, and only 10,000 cops were hired—a far cry from Clinton's efforts. 2011 funding for community policing was a paltry $111 million.)

But even if local police remain tight-lipped about these trends, it's our civic responsibility to recognize that even the best top-down policies can have unintended consequences. Reducing beat-style community policing creates a vacuum in local communities. A good cop spends far more time settling disputes informally than arresting people. From domestic violence to gangbanging, community policing can bring about timely, on-the-spot mediations and compromises where parties can go back into their corner and cool off. Though I saw a few FBI officers display this skill set, for the most part federal agents are too busy shuttling between crises to do this kind of work. Their solution is incarceration, which is a terribly ineffective means of creating daily public safety.

If you're wondering how these vacuums get filled, look no further than Sanford, Florida, where a gun-toting self-appointed neighborhood watchman shot and killed a young man he suspected of involvement in a crime. When it comes to the Guardian Angels or volunteer citizen patrols and block clubs, America's tradition of self-reliance deserves recognition. But the line between a citizen army and a vigilante force is often blurry.

Still, in the absence of community policing, communities of citizens will continue to try to solve their problems on their own. In Chicago, where a wave of gun violence is currently cresting, neighborhood residents have given up on calling 911, instead reaching out to work directly with local gangs when the cops aren't around. It's not inconceivable, of course, that they will soon simply find themselves calling 411 to get the number of their local FBI office.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/107675/how-big-brother-killing-community-policing

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Prescription drug abuse drops among U.S. young adults

Sept. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Prescription drug abuse among young adults ages 18 to 25 in the United States fell 14 percent between 2010 and 2011, according to a federal report released Monday.

During that time, the number of young adults who reported using prescription drugs for non-medical purposes in the last month decreased from 2 million to 1.7 million. However, prescription drug abuse among children ages 12 to 17 and among adults 26 and older remained unchanged.

The 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health also found that rates of drinking, binge drinking and heavy drinking in the past month among underage people continued to decline from 2002, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said.

Among young people ages 12 to 20, past month alcohol use fell from nearly 29 percent in 2002 to about 25 percent in 2011. Binge drinking -- consuming five or more drinks on a single occasion on at least one day in the past month -- declined from more than 19 percent to about 16 percent, and heavy drinking decreased from about 6 percent to 4.4 percent.

The use of illicit drugs remained stable. Illicit drug use within the past month was reported by 8.7 percent of Americans aged 12 and older in 2010, compared to 8.9 percent last year, according to the report released during National Recovery Month.

Marijuana remained the most commonly used illegal drug. It was used by 7 percent of Americans in 2011, compared with nearly 6 percent in 2007. The rate of marijuana use among 12- to 17-year-olds was about the same in 2011 (7.9 percent) as in 2009 (7.4 percent).

Among the other findings:

- The number of people who reported heroin use in the past year rose from 373,000 in 2007 to 620,000 in 2011.

- Between 2006 and 2011, there were reductions in reported past month use of cocaine (44 percent) and of methamphetamine (40 percent). There was a 19 percent decrease in past-month use of hallucinogens between 2010 and 2011.

- Past month use of tobacco by 12- to 17-year-olds continued to decline from more than 15 percent in 2002, to 10.7 percent in 2010 and 10 percent in 2011.

"These findings show that national efforts to address the problem of prescription drug misuse may be beginning to bear fruit and we must continue to apply this pressure to drive down this and other forms of substance use," SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde said in an agency news release.

"Behind each of these statistics are individuals, families and communities suffering from the consequences of abuse and addiction. We must continue to promote robust prevention, treatment and recovery programs throughout our country," she added.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of National Drug Control Policy, said in the news release: "Drug use in this country creates too many obstacles to opportunity -- especially for young people. The good news is that we are not powerless against this problem. By emphasizing prevention and treatment, as well as smart law enforcement efforts that break the cycle of drug use, crime and incarceration, we know we can reduce drug use and its consequences in America."

More information: The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse explains how to identify and prevent prescription drug abuse .

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/19625121/prescription-drug-abuse-drops-among-us-young-adults