Category: crime

On guilt by association

February 16, 2026 • 10:15 am

UPDATE:  Sastra notes in a comment below that there’s a related piece by Joe Nocera at the Free Press, “The ‘Epstein Fallout’ is Spiraling out of Control.”

The issue of Jeffrey Epstein has brought up a question that still puzzles me. Granted, the man was a horrible pedophile and sex trafficker  (he was convicted of it at least once) who probably deserved years and years in prison after his second arrest, but took his own life to forestall that fate.  Granted, Epstein sought out a fair number of intellectuals and individuals, associated with some, flew a subset of them around—sometimes to his private island where bad stuff occurred—and gave other intellectuals money for their research.  Granted, some of those who palled around with Epstein should have known better than to associate with a convicted pedophile, take his money, or visit his island. Others were involved in rather pathetic interactions with Epstein, like Larry Summers, who asked Epstein for romantic advice. That’s not a crime, but it doesn’t look so good.

Now it seems that almost every academic of note not only had some connection with Epstein, but also has been denigrated and demonized for it.  You can be tarred even if you’re several people removed from Epstein: even I get emails and comments on the website (which are trashed) demanding to know why I am friends with people who had some tangential connection with Epstein (viz., Steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, etc.).

You can look yourself up on the Epstein files at this site, and of course I did, though I never met or had anything to do with the man. I was amazed to see that my name appears ten times! But every mention has to do with my literary agent, John Brockman, who was one of the people cultivated by Epstein (Brockman is the agent for nearly all popular-science writers.)

Below is one example: an email from Brockman to many of his authors calling our attention to an article about him that appeared in the Guardian. I have no idea why this email is in the Epstein files. Email addresses have been redacted.

What puzzles me is that people whose connection with Epstein was tangential or minimal are nevertheless demonized, sometimes with great glee (P. Z. Myers is a great proponent of such glee, expounded in his frequent “Two Minutes of Hate” posts).  I really can’t explain it, except that if you already dislike somebody (perhaps because they’re more famous than you), finding that they’re in the Epstein files gives you even more of an excuse to dislike them, and to flaunt your dislike.

I mentioned Steve Pinker, whose connection with Epstein appears limited to flying on his plane to a conference (not to the island!), being at two conferences where Epstein was in attendance (with Epstein more or less forcing himself to get photographed with Steve and even to sit down at Pinker’s table for a bit), and , finally, for helping Alan Dershowitz when Dersh defended Epstein in his first trial. In that case the “help” was free, and rendered because Pinker knew Dershowitz and wanted to help him out with the proper linguistic analysis of a statute. (See Inside Higher Ed for some tarring.) As you’ll see below, Steve has apologized for that help.  But I really don’t think that such an apology is necessary, as even a rich person deserves a good defense.  Remember that I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team (refusing a fee), because I thought that even Simpson deserved a decent defense and because, at the time, the FBI was using “match probabilities” for DNA in a manner I considered prejudicial. (Match probability was my area of expertise.)  I make no apologies for that, and was appalled when Simpson was found “not guilty.”

At any rate, Pinker has publicly explained his connection with Epstein on Andrew Sullivan’s site (here and here), and I’ll reproduce Steve’s mea culpa below. Greg Mayer put the entire explanation/apology together for me:

You asked “What was Steven Pinker thinking?” with the implication that I was a willing associate of Epstein. I know the question was rhetorical, but let me answer it.

I disliked Epstein from the moment I met him, judging him to be a sleaze and an impostor. I never sought his company, never solicited or accepted funding from him, was never invited to his mansion or island, and would not have accepted. But as we know, Epstein was an obsessive collector of celebrities, including academic celebrities, and he was tight with an astonishing number of my close colleagues, making it difficult to escape associations with him. These included my Harvard colleague and co-teacher Alan Dershowitz; my PhD advisor, department chair, and dean Stephen Kosslyn; my Harvard colleagues Lawrence Summers, Lisa Randall, and Martin Nowak; my former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky; my literary agent John Brockman; and the Director of the ASU Origins Project, Lawrence Krauss. I am astonished that these smart people took Epstein seriously. On the two occasions when I was forced into his company, I found him to be a deeply unserious and attention-deficit-disordered smart-ass.

Nowak, Brockman, and Krauss were prolific impresarios of academic conferences covertly funded by Epstein, and he would often show up unannounced. At one Harvard conference someone snapped a photo with me and Epstein in the frame; it has plagued me ever since. On another, Krauss begged me to allow Epstein to join my meal table for a chat, and the resulting photo has also been endlessly circulated to smear me. In a forthcoming article in a major online magazine, Krauss publicly apologizes for forcing me into that situation. Epstein was also a donor to other Harvard projects, not all of them public.

It’s also important to keep in mind the timeline. I did join a group of TED speakers and attendees (including Brockman, his wife and agency president Katinka Matson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett) whom Brockman had invited to fly on Epstein’s plane to the conference in Monterey, California. This was in 2002, many years before any of Epstein’s crimes came to light. Nothing suspicious took place on the flight.

My other association with Epstein came when Dershowitz asked my advice, as a psycholinguist, on the natural interpretation of the wording of a statute which, it turned out, Epstein had been accused of violating. Alan and I were colleagues who had just co-taught a course, and he often asked me for advice on the linguistic interpretation of laws and constitutional amendments. Dershowitz is, of course, famous for legally defending odious defendants such as O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson on the Sixth Amendment principle that even the most despised defendants have a right to vigorous legal representation. I was not a paid expert witness but was doing a colleague a favor. Still, I deeply regret this, because while Dershowitz is willing to apply his professional efforts to push this principle to the limit, I am not. (Note, too, that in 2007 the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were not known.)

Epstein was a sociopath and, we now know, a heinous criminal. He also was a maniacal collector of famous people who knew how to slosh around enough money to gain entrée into prestigious circles. Perhaps I was too polite to run away on occasions when I should have, but it was almost impossible for me to escape being associated with his far-flung social web.

This is about as straightforward as you can get, and I can’t see that Steve did anything wrong—not even helping Dershowitz clarify wording of a statue for Epstein’s first trial. Steve says he “deeply regrets this,” and I believe him, but I don’t think he has much to regret.  Expert witnesses help all kinds of people, rich and poor (as I did, though I mostly helped indigent defendants for public defenders). Ensuring that the law is administered correctly is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, one could make the case that I was far worse than Pinker, as I helped O. J. Simpson, who was later exculpated for a double murder but, in my view, was almost certainly guilty.  I knew there was a substantial chance that Simpson did it, but I wanted to be sure that the prosecution used its DNA data properly, just as Steve gave his best linguistic interpretation of a statute. Remember, the prosecution’s job is not to convict, but to present evidence that is supposed to show the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not supposed to involve twisting the facts, though it does far too often, which is why poor people, assigned overworked public defenders, don’t get the same justice as rich ones.

The big question today is: why are people in almost a moral panic about Epstein? As I said, he was almost surely guilty of odious crimes (I allow him a benefit of the doubt, as does the law, though his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty, and there is other eyewitness testimony.) And yes, perhaps some people, like Prince Andrew, were complicit in Epstein’s crimes. But others were guilty only of associating with him, some more than others and some, like Pinker, hardly at all. Why the demonization of Pinbker? And why should I also be tarred because I’m friends with Steve?

None of this, of course, is meant to exculpate Epstein, nor to minimize the pain and misery that his victims suffered and suffer now. I simply want to discuss a question about a moral panic and its apparent excess.

Greg Mayer brought all this to my attention, and I called him to ask his explanation for the moral panic affecting some people who didn’t deserve it. Besides my own view that people love to see the mighty fall, Greg had three other reasons:

a.) People tend, in moral crises, to believe ridiculous and palpably false things about those considered guilty. An example is the McMartin preschool trial, in which people were arrested for child molestation despite the most ridiculous and unbelievable accusations, including Satanic rituals and flying witches (see here for some of them). It turns out that nobody was found guilty and the allegations were not substantiated. Much of the childrens’ testimony seems to have been due to prompting by therapists. To Greg, who teaches pseudoscience and related matters at U. Wisconsin-Parkside, this is an extreme example of what can happen to a “believe the victim” mentality even when there’s no good evidence.

b.) People believe what they want to believe, and will believe ludicrous or disproven claims if they buttress what they would like to be true. Greg used the example of “facilitated communication“, in which “facilitators” supposedly helped nonverbal people “talk” by holding their hands near a keyboard. We now know that this process has been entirely discredited. Like using a ouija board, the facilitators were actually guiding people’s hands to specific keys.  This relates to Epstein in a way similar to my own thesis: people want to believe that some people they already dislike are guilty, and so rush to associate those people with Epstein, despite the lack of evidence that some of the “accused” had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes.

c.) Greg also said that since the 1980s, as inequalities among Americans began to grow, those who had thinner slices of the pie became eager to blame the rich and elite for their troubles. We see this resentment in many places, including politics.  And Epstein, of course, gravitated to the rich and elite, as he apparently thought that some of their panache would rub off on him.  This is why, Greg says, there are so many articles about the “Epstein elite” being published these days.

At any rate, Pinker’s apologia prompted me to think about all this, and after reading it I really cannot find him guilty of any missteps—even the help he gave Dershowitz. I know I’ll get pushback from people who dislike Pinker, or think that the acccused should not be given help by experts, especially when the crimes involved are dire.  But I stand by my claim: I don’t think Pinker did anything wrong. And that is probably true of quite a few people who are being tarred via guilt by association.

The scandal of English grooming gangs

January 7, 2025 • 11:15 am

UPDATE:  A UK government report from 2020 suggests that there are conflicting data on the ethnicity of the offending “grooming gangs”. Click below to see the study and I quote from page 10 of the Executive Summary (bolding is mine):

17. A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay,3 the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.4 Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.5 However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending. This is due to issues such as data quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.6 During our conversations with police forces, we have found that in the operations reflected, offender groups come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogenous. However, there are cases where offenders within groups come from different backgrounds.7

Stay tuned, and if you know of more dispositive data, place it in the comments. If this be true,  then even bringing in the element of race is misguided. But as I say below, it doesn’t matter what color or ethnicity the pedophiles were, for nearly everyone agrees that the whole issue of grooming gangs has been grossly mishandled by the UK authorities, and largely swept under the rug.

UPDATE 2: A reader calls attention to this NYT article claiming that Musk’s tactics in exposing the grooming gangs are dishonest and politically motivated.

 

The Free Press headline below may be exaggerated, but it comes close to the truth.  For it’s about the “grooming gangs” that have plagued England for several decades.  They involve groups of men—most often of Pakistani or Bangladesi ancestry—whose goal is to subjugate and rape young children of both sexes. Some children have been killed.  But because the perps are usually people of color, the government, the police, and the public have largely ignored the issue.  This is a huge scandal involving, once again, a clash of ideologies that came down the wrong way. The warring ideologies are to avoid denigrating immigrants of color versus protecting children against pedophiles.

Yes, some of these gangs have been broken up and the perps sent to prison, but only now, with the prompting of Elon Musk, is it being publicized as the heinous crime it is. (The fact that Musk is widely hated makes it hard for people to accept the situation, but his actions in this case are right.) For the grooming is still going on, and not just in the UK but in other places in Europe.  Unfortunately, calling attention to these gangs is seen not only as racist, but as anti-immigrant, both characterizations being horrible to liberals.

I’m not going to describe these crimes in detail, as they makes me sick, but you need to know about them, and the UK needs to start taking the issue VERY seriously.

First, a piece from the Free Press, which you can access by clicking on the headline.

There’s a thread of incidents tweeted by Elon Musk you can find at the link, and of course everybody is festooning them with community notes because Musk. This first one, for example, happened five years ago, and the perps are in jail. But it tells you the kind of things that can happen. Here are the first two tweets, apparently both from 2013.  But as the article above notes, this is still going on,

A quote from the Free Press piece:

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

Although some have said that this is no longer a problem, and the perps are all in jail, that’s simply not true. The first link above goes to a UK government site about the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, and was published in May of last year:

In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims, and build up robust cases to get justice for these appalling crimes.

Established by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April 2023, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce of specialist officers has worked with all 43 police forces in England and Wales to support child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations.

Led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and supported by the National Crime Agency, the taskforce is a full time, operational police unit funded by the Home Office to improve how the police investigate grooming gangs and identify and protect children from abuse. It is staffed by experienced and qualified officers and data analysts who have long-term, practical on-the-ground experience of undertaking investigations into grooming gangs.

Finally, from Unherd, an article about how the cops are complicit in not going after grooming gangs. It’s written by a former detective :


The answer is pretty much what you would expect: going after grooming gangs that largely comprise people of color is seen as racist, and you know how the British cops are with “hate speech”:

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

It is incomprehensible to me how the police, government, and general public prefer to brush this issue under the rug: it’s pedophilia, for crying out loud, and the abuse is both horrible and pervasive. But I’ll close with the observation that again we see a clash of two opposing views: one in which people of color should be treated fairly, which is good, and the other in which children should not be sexually abused, completely incontestable.  But when people of color begin mass sexual abuse of children, and those children appear to be mostly white, you can see how it poses a conflict for the woke. Yet it should not be a conflict, for no matter what color the abusers and rapists are, they are violating the law big time and should be taken off the streets. That has happened to some extent, but not nearly to the extent that should be the case.

h/t: Luana

Why the death penalty?

December 24, 2024 • 9:30 am

As I noted yesterday, Biden has commuted the sentences of all but three federal prisoners on death row; they’ll now be serving life behind bars without parole instead. I insisted that this was an excellent decision, as I have never seen the sense of the government killing a prisoner.  Here are the pros and cons of capital punishment as I see them.

Pro:  People feel that somebody who does a bad crime deserves to be killed for it. The idea is that because the criminal made the victims suffer, he, too, should suffer as retribution for what was inflicted on his victims. It’s retribution, Jake!

Cons:  Because of litigation fees and the length of time before execution, as well as execution costs, it actually costs more to execute a prisoner than to keep him in prison until he dies.

If exculpating evidence surfaces, you can retry or free a living prisoner, but not one who’s been executed.

Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.

Capital punishment is purely retributive and, in the end, seems selfish as it satisfies the wishes of people to see other people dead.

The state should not be in the business of killing people. That is reserved for one’s opponents in wartime.

Prisoners sentenced to death have no opportunity to be rehabilitated. And surely some of them could be released eventually and become productive citizens, and enjoy the rest of their lives in freedom.

To a determinist, prisoners who commit capital crimes had no choice in the matter, and you don’t execute people for “making the wrong choice” if they didn’t have one.

Anyone who wants retribution should be able to find it in the idea that someone will spend the rest of his life in prison, which is a harsh punishment in itself.

Note that the cons heavily outweigh the pros. And that is surely why the U.S, is the only Western country to have the death penalty (Japan also has it, though it’s not really “Western”).

My question: is there ANY benefit to society in having the death penalty? It seems to hang around because it to afford a ghoulish kind of closure to those who feel strongly about what should happen to someone who commits a horrible crime. One of the most barbaric things I have seen is the crowd of people massed outside a prison on the eve of an execution, baying for blood.

I have landed (and tout a book).

November 1, 2024 • 8:32 am

All day yesterday I was making my way back to Chicago from Ivins, Utah: first, a two-hour drive to Las Vegas, then a two-hour wait in the airport, with the flashing and music of slot machines IN THE WAITING AREA, and finally a four-hour flight back home. I am exhausted. Which is to say: posting will be very light today—if there is any.

But on the way home I read Salman Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which came out in April. Click the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site. I have to say that the cover is wonderfully designed given the contents:

It’s a short (200-page) account of the attempted murder of Rushdie on August 12, 2022 by accused perp Hadi Matar, a Lebanese-American likely trying to fulfill the fatwa issued on Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini.  The Ayatollah considered Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim blasphemy, and called for the author’s assassination. A $3 million bounty accompanied the fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding, but several people connected with the book were killed.

Finally, after 33 years, the fatwa was fulfilled when Matar ran at Rushdie as the author was about to address a Chautauqua, New York audience about the need for a “safe space” for politically demonized writers.  Matar apparently stabbed Rushdie 15 times in the neck, eye, chest, and hand, blinding him in one eye and rendering his left hand largely useless. For several days Rushdie hovered between life and death, but thanks to expert trauma care, he survived. His eye remains but its sightless, and his hand is only minimally useful. But, Rushdie avers, he was largely saved by the love of his (fifth) wife, the African-American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. In many ways the book is a paean to Griffiths, who was by his side the whole way, and the description of their mutual love is quite moving.

Rushdie, as you see from this book, is back in action, and on to another novel. I have read only one of his, but it was a corker: Midnight’s Children, which I picked up for a pittance in a used-book stall in New Delhi. I was mesmerized by the novel, which won not only a Booker Prize, but the “Booker of the Bookers“, an award for the 25th anniversary of the Prize. In other words, it was judged the best of the 25 Booker winners.  I’ve read a fair number of Booker-Prize winners, and think Rushdie’s award was well deserved. Midnight’s Children is a great classic, a magical-realism account centered on the partition of India in 1947. PLEASE read it if you haven’t.

Sad to say, that is the only novel of Rushdie’s I’ve read, and I must catch up. He’s written about 20 of them, apparently of varying quality, including an earlier autobiography called Joseph Anton, dealing with his post-fatwa journey. But I hear some of the novels are gems, and I must get to them.  He’s a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I think has been delayed only because Stockholm fears Muslim backlash if Rushdie wins.

As for Knife, it’s a gripping short read and the details of Rushdie’s assault and subsequent recovery make the book one that’s hard to put down. I recommend it highly for a short read and for those interested in Rushdie.  A fair amount of the last part of the book is a fictionalized dialogue between Rushdie and his assailant, which changes the pace of the book substantially. At first I didn’t like this bit, but the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. It is, I suppose, a way for Rushdie to come to terms with Matar and his attack, trying to suss out why a New Jersey resident would knife the writer after so many years.

Below is a Wikipedia photo of the post-attack Rushdie. He decided not to have his eye removed but rather to hide it with a dark lens in his glasses. He does have macular degeneration in his other eye, and fears above all that he will go blind. But it looks as though they’ve stabilized his condition:

Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Matar, by the way, is still awaiting trial. They delayed it because his public defender argued that Rushdie’s published account was essential for Matar’s defense.

Anti-Israel protestors vandalize Henry Moore sculpture on our campus, battle with police

October 12, 2024 • 11:00 am

It’s been quiet at the University of Chicago—too quiet!  We almost got through Students for Justice in Palestine’s “week of rage” without nary a megaphone blaring or any graffiti painted on campus walls and sidewalks. But, as I predicted, this was not to last. With Hamas losing the war with Israel, and all universities refusing to divest their endowment from any Israel-related companies, the protestors were bound to get even more enraged than last year.

They’re already back at it at Columbia University, and yesterday afternoon the terrorism-lovers struck our campus again. One of their targets was a famous Henry Moore sculpture on campus called “Nuclear Energy.” It sits on the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor, built by Fermi and his colleagues underneath the old Stagg Field, an athletic field. Wikipedia gives the themes of this work:

Moore cited a number of inspirations for the sculpture, from earlier works with similar forms to natural objects like stones. About the shape of the sculpture, Moore said:

When I had made this working model I showed it to them and they liked my idea because the top of it is like some large mushroom, or a kind of mushroom cloud. Also it has a kind of head shape like the top of the skull but down below is more an architectural cathedral. One might think of the lower part of it being a protective form and constructed for human beings and the top being more like the idea of the destructive side of the atom. So between the two it might express to people in a symbolic way the whole event. (Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 1973, p.286)

Moore’s work explores the hopes and fears of the Atomic Age. The potential of controlled nuclear power or a nuclear holocaust is tied to the historical events of the site with the iconography of a mushroom cloud or skull, supported by pillars topped by arches like a protective cathedral. Interviews with Moore highlight the dual nature of the top and bottom portions of the sculpture, meant to represent the creative and destructive power possible with nuclear energy. An abstract sculpture was chosen by the University to highlight the importance of the events at the site, and their implications for humanity, rather than the importance of Fermi in bringing them about.

Curiously, this campus attraction draws a lot of Japanese tourists, who visit it by the busload, competing to have their picture taken in front of the mushroom cloud.

But yesterday, the enraged activists covered it with red paint and then spray-painted “FREE GAZA” on the sidewalk beside it. Here’s a picture taken by a member of the University community, who sent it to me.  What on earth do the protestors think they are accomplishing by doing this? They sure aren’t enlisting sympathy. They are simply acting out, like the petulant toddlers they are.

The person who took the photo sent it to me along with this email (all words and photos are used with permission):

I just came back to work to find this (see attached). It is probably a very good thing that I was not around a few minutes ago.
The protestors are now one block down and I cannot see any signs of arrests having been made, regardless of heavy UC and City police presence. About one hundred and fifty children of privilege, calling the UC Police “the KKK’. To their face—with most officers present being black. We are dealing with imbeciles of a species the world has never seen before.
Every single student involved in the desecration of this monument needs to be expelled, ipso facto. The whole lot.

Another member of the University community weighed in, and sent some photographs as well:

Today at about 3pm, pro-Palestine protesters forcefully attempted to lock the University gate on 57th Street with chains and padlocks. Two brave UChicago police officers fought back and were able to prevent that. Police cars joined the scene shortly afterwards. I was about to walk through the gate when this happened.

Actually, according to the news report below, they protestors did lock the gate.

Below: the photos (captions are mine). The protestors put their signs on Hull Gate, which is right outside my building, and then tried to lock the gate so their signs would be visible and conspicuous (see more below):

Both campus cops and Chicago city police were on the site. Here two campus cops try to prevent the protestors from locking the gate, the main entry from the north to the Quad:

Note that many of the protestors are masked. That is not for health reasons, but because they are cowards, fearful of being identified because they might be punished. Many are also wearing keffiyehs, sometimes described as “swastikas for hipsters”.

Whoops—there’s a coward inside the gate:

Masks everywhere. I can’t tell you how reprehensible I find acts of civil disobedience that are not only not peaceful, but whose perps try to disguise themselves:

The outside. Whoops, we have an identifiable human here:

More from outside the gate. My building is to the left, and the Anatomy building, housing Organismal Biology and Anatomy, is to the right:

University of Chicago cops on the scene:

The student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, did a live-stream report on the protests that is now a full news report. There were student scuffles with cops, three arrests, and reports that police used batons and pepper spray. Here are a few indented excerpts from the news, with my words flush left.

A UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) rally saw three protesters arrested and physical altercations between protesters and officers. Earlier, protesters locked Cobb Gate using a bike lock despite UCPD’s efforts to keep the gate open. During the rally multiple police officers used pepper spray and batons. Protesters damaged UCPD vehicles and kicked at least one officer.

The rally, which began with a walk out at 2:30 p.m., morphed into a brawl that involved at least 200 University- and community-affiliated protesters, 20 University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers, and 30 Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers.

Deans-on-Call informed UCPD at approximately 2:15 p.m., that the University had “zero tolerance” for excessive noise before attempting to hand out warning cards to protest leaders using bullhorns to lead chants on the quad at 2:45 p.m. The cards read, “FINAL WARNING: This card serves to inform you or your student organization that your conduct is violating policies outlined in the Student Manual.” The cards also contained four QR codes linked to relevant University policies, which were updated in advance of the beginning of the academic year. Protesters refused to accept the cards.

The Deans-on-Call have always been useless in these altercations. From the lack of punishments last year, the protestors know that “zero tolerance” really means “infinite tolerance.”

. . . At approximately 3 p.m., protesters marched from the center of the quad and proceeded through the Hull and Cobb Gates on the north end. Once all protesters had passed through Cobb Gate, protesters pushed the gate closed and secured it with a bike lock despite police attempts to stop them. They also hung a banner on the gate that read “Free Palestine” and “Hands Off Lebanon.”

By this point, the protest had grown to include over 150 people, spilling out onto East 57th Street. Protesters allowed space for cars to pass through, but UCPD patrol cars blocked the street on both ends.

Protesters told police officers “Pigs go home” and chanted “Intifada, intifada, long live the intifada.”

The “intifada” is an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israel. The protestors want that, and doubtless many of them are proud of the butchery of October 7.

At 3:15 p.m., protesters left Cobb Gate and proceeded north on S. Ellis Avenue. They stopped in front of the Nuclear Energy Sculpture next to the Regenstein Library, at which point some protesters threw paint on the statue and wrote graffiti in the surrounding area that read “Free Gaza,” “hands off Lebonan” [sic], and “fuck the bombs.” CPD officers arrived on scene, joining at least 20 UCPD officers. Some were in riot gear and carried batons and zip-ties.

At approximately 3:30 p.m., the protest moved further north along the street, stopping between Ratner Athletics Center and the Court Theater. Police searched for and then tackled and detained one protester, whom they put into a patrol car. Protesters attempted to prevent the detainment, physically confronting officers. The Maroon was unable to confirm why that protester was detained.

Other protesters began chanting “Let him go!” and surrounded the patrol car that held the detained protester. An officer attempted to drive the UCPD patrol car away from the scene but was blocked by the crowd of protesters. Officers and protesters continued to push against each other.

Another protester struck the side mirror of a separate police car several times with what appeared to be a rock and then rejoined the crowd.

As tensions escalated, a third protester kicked a CPD officer in the back of his leg. Officers attempted to detain the protester, hitting him with a baton. They chased him briefly and tackled him halfway down the block, at which point they detained him and placed him into a patrol car.

The attack on cops takes the protest out of the realm of civil disobedience, which is supposed to be peaceful protests. And of course rule #1 of that type of demonstration is NEVER HIT A COP.

Officers used pepper spray on protesters, who were seen afterward rubbing and washing their eyes with water. One student told the Maroon that he was pepper sprayed by an officer who had “harassed students at the encampment.” A Maroon reporter witnessed a UCPD officer inadvertently pepper spraying a Chicago Police Department Captain, an incident which the UCPD officer later apologized for.

I don’t know about the pepper spray, but I saw the encampment taken down, at least the beginning of it, and I saw no harassment of students by the University police.

At approximately 3:45 p.m., protesters began dispersing north along South Ellis Avenue, south towards the quad, and through the SMART Museum courtyard. One CPD officer remarked to gathered officers, “that was fun for a little while.” Shortly after, CPD and UCPD officers also dispersed. By 4 p.m., the lock on Cobb Gate was removed and the gate was reopened.

And of course the mess around the sculpture, involving painted vandalism, had to be cleaned up by workers from Facilities. The protestors don’t care that workers have clean up after them.

The University issued a statement (below) that seems to me a bit ambiguous. Yes, university policiers prohibit disruptive violations and destruction of property, but what will happen if (as happened during the last academic year) the arrested protestors have their charges dropped by the Chicago district attorney, who seems sympathetic to the protests?  Here’s the statement:

According to a University spokesperson, “the University of Chicago is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express their views on any issue. At the same time, University policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the University’s operations, or involve the destruction of property.”

This year, I hope, the University will actually enforce violations of the law and of university regulations. As far as I know, despite arrests and dismantling of the encampment last academic year, in the end not a single student was punished. Last spring I recounted four protests by Students for Justice in Palestine and their umbrella organization, UChicago United, and yet though all of these constituted legal or university violations, not a single student was punished. 13 of them had their degrees withheld, but they all got them reinstated after a short while. And though a sit-in in the admissions office led to the arrest for criminal trespassing of 28 people by Chicago Police (18 undergraduates, eight graduate students, and two professors), all the charges were dropped.

As far as I know—and there may be proceedings of which I’m unaware—the only punishment meted out the entire academic year was a mild rebuke to Students for Justice in Palestine–just a note on their record that if they continue to violate university regulations, there may be trouble for them in the future.

Frankly, I’m tired of the University proclaiming that violations will be punished, but then doing nothing about it. I don’t want to live through another year with protestors illegally shouting through megaphones during class hours, spraying graffiti on University walls, and holding sit-ins in University buildings.  Many of us feel that the University, despite eventually dismantling the illegal encampment, is doing as little as it can to punish protestors—perhaps because they don’t want the attention. But if this kind of mishigas continues, it will eventually lead to more attention focused on the University of Chicago, and perhaps, as has happened at Harvard, a decline in the number of Jewish students applying for admission.

The usual holiday weekend in Chicago: 109 shot, 19 killed

July 9, 2024 • 10:15 am

Actually, this was an unusually homicidal weekend given that it lasted from Thursday (the Fourth of July holiday) through Sunday: four days of shooting opportunities.  And the bad actors were out in force: as everyone reports, there were 109 people shot in that period, 19 of whom died. From ABC News:

One hundred and nine people were shot, 19 fatally, in gun violence across Chicago from midnight Wednesday to midnight Monday during the extended Fourth of July holiday weekend, police said.

CPD Supt. Larry Snelling and Mayor Brandon Johnson both called for accountability for those responsible for the shootings during a press conference on Monday.

“This is a choice. The choice to kill. The choice to kill women, the choice to kill children, the choice to kill the elderly. These are choices that the offenders made and they calculated,” Johnson said. “We are holding every single individual accountable for the pain and from the torment that they have caused in this city.”

Chicago Mayor Johnson and Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling give an update after more than 100 people were shot in Chicago over the 4th of July weekend.

Snelling said adjustments were made after the Fourth of July heading into the weekend, including canceling officers’ days off, but ultimately, he said, they need communities to come forward.

“We have to really stop and think about the mindset of someone who will shoot a child, a helpless child an unarmed mother and think that that’s OK. And go about their days,” he said. “Those people have to be taken off the street. They have to be put away if we’re not doing that. Then we’re failing other families.”

Johnson said he has asked for more resources from the federal government to help invest more resources into communities.

When pressed to address what adjustments need to be made to keep the community safe, Johnson’s response was simply that the city needs more support.

“I am urging all of you across the entire city to step up and say, ‘We’ve had enough,'” Johnson said. “And I’m hopeful that our ongoing discussions will ensure that our state partners, as well as our federal partners, will swiftly come into the support of the city of Chicago. The city cannot afford to wait any longer.”

Well, if you’re a determinist, it’s not really a choice: you could not have done otherwise but pull the trigger. But of course future shootings can be reduced by modifying incentives, behavior, and so on, so determinism doesn’t justify this level of shooting. Further, gun control is vital, but almost useless to fight for given America’s love of guns. (One bright spot: a week ago the Supreme Court decided to leave in place Illinois’s ban on assault-style weapons.)

Brandon Johnson talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, and weapons are one of the things he needs to deal with as Mayor (not to mention our many potholes that go unfilled). My prediction is that he will not be re-elected, as he’s perceived as a do-nothing mayor. Look at his response when asked what he will do to stop the killings!

One assault occurred only a few blocks from my office on Sunday morning. While driving to the grocery store at 7 a.m., I found my route blocked off by many police cars and “do not enter” tape. I took a roundabout way to the store, and the street was still blocked off when I came back. It turns out that right by the University, three people had been shot at 5:30 that morning. Thank Ceiling Cat that none were killed. And the shooting was only a block from our Emergency Room, so treatment must have been timely.

I suspect this was a gang-related shooting, but the aim was poor: two guys were shot in the leg and one in the nose. (How you can be shot in the nose and survive eludes me, but perhaps the guy was standing in profile.)

Coleman Hughes on the death of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin’s trial and conviction

June 17, 2024 • 11:15 am

I’ve been meaning to write about this issue for a while, as I covered the beginning of it (see all posts here).  And the longer I delayed, the more complicated the issue became, until I became unable to remember everything, much less synthesize it.

The story in short: two people made a documentary movie, “The Fall of Minneapolis” (watch it here) maintaining that George Floyd was not murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, but died of his many ailments (including a big titer of fentanyl in his blood), not from having his neck compressed so that he was asphyxiated. (Nor, the movie maintained, was his neck really compressed: Chauvin was supposedly using procedures taught him by his department).  The movie convinced both John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, as well as me, that Chauvin was not guilty of murder—at least if you use the “reasonable doubt” standards mandated in such a case.

Then a former Washington Post reporter, Radley Balko, wrote a multipart attack on the movie on his webpage arguing that the thesis of “The Fall of Minneapolis” was wrong on several counts, including its claim that Floyd was not asphyxiated.  Balko’s analysis was enough to convince Loury (and, to some extent, McWhorter) that they were wrong—that perhaps Chauvin really did murder Floyd. Having read all this stuff, and intending to post on it, the sheer magnitude of the task defeated me. But I felt remiss in not calling attention to Balko’s attack. And I couldn’t come to my own conclusions, for essential material, like the training procedure for Minneapolis police, was missing.

In January, Coleman Hughes, now an essayist for The Free Press, wrote a piece arguing that Chauvin was not a murderer but a scapegoat for all those who wanted him convicted for supposedly killing a black man.  Hughes and Balko went back and forth about having a debate, and eventually had one, but one that, says Coleman, was stacked because the moderators were on Balko’s side.

Now we have the longest article yet published in the Free Press, a second piece by Coleman Hughes reiterating his claim that Chauvin should not have been found guilty of the murder of Floyd. His claim, as you’ll see below (click on the headline to read) is not that Chauvin was clearly innocent, but that the standards of evidence supposed to be applied by the jury, involving “reasonable doubt,” would have found such doubt in the prosecution’s evidence against Chauvin. Ergo, Chauvin should have been found not guilty.

The article is informative and, to me, convincing—Chauvin seems to have gotten a bad trial, including jurors biased against the prosecution, a prosecution that didn’t properly give the evidence, a defense that didn’t do its job, a judge who didn’t seem to know what was going on, and the venue (and the judge’s instructions) terrifying the jurors that if they didn’t find Chauvin guilty, there would be riots.

Read it; it has all the links that you need, including to Balko’s work and the debate.

Here’s Coleman’s main points in the essay:

The purpose of this essay is to set the record straight on Balko’s claims, which range from useful counterarguments to misleading assertions and outright errors. Our disagreements fall into two basic categories: the first is the question of how exactly Floyd died. And the second pertains to whether or not Chauvin was following his training.

One final, important note before I dive in: Balko’s series generally mischaracterizes my essay as arguing for the definite truth of various propositions—or doing a “just asking questions” routine—when in fact I was arguing for the existence of reasonable doubt.

In a typical debate, each side is trying to prove a claim by summoning more evidence than the other side—“guns are helpful” vs. “guns are harmful,” for instance. The burden assigned to each side is symmetric. If either side summons more evidence than the other, then that side wins.

Criminal trials are deliberately not like this. They are highly asymmetric—and that’s intentional.

It’s not enough for a majority of the evidence to indicate guilt. And it’s not enough if the defendant’s guilt is “highly and substantially more likely to be true than untrue.” That is the “clear and convincing evidence” standard.

Rather, “beyond a reasonable doubt” means that “there is no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented at trial” other than the defendant having committed the crime in question. Keep that phrase—no other reasonable explanation—at the top of your mind. My Free Press piecewas written from the perspective of reasonable doubt. In the essay, I summed up my thesis like this: “In short, there are two major justifications to reasonably doubt Chauvin’s felony murder charge: whether he caused Floyd’s death and whether he committed a felony.”

There remains significant uncertainty about the death of George Floyd—uncertainty that was not settled at trial. My purpose in this essay, as in my original column, is not to settle that uncertainty for good by putting forward a definitive version of events—that is not the defense’s burden anyway. My purpose is to convey the existence of other reasonable explanations.

With that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s move on to Balko’s substantive arguments.

The arguments turn on what really killed George Floyd (he had several medical conditions and was full of drugs), whether the restraint technique used by Floyd really involved asphyxiation, whether that technique was part of the regular training, verbal or written, by the Minneapolis police, what “homicide” means to a coroner versus a jury, whether the jury was tainted by people who were pro-Floyd to begin with, and what are the criteria for conviction.  And more.

Read it for yourself; I’ll simply give Hughes’s conclusions in brief:

I think there was clearly reasonable doubt on whether Chauvin caused Floyd’s death. There were two rival theories of his death: the positional asphyxia theory (put forth by Dr. Tobin and endorsed by the prosecution), and the adrenaline surge theory (put forth by Dr. Baker and rejected by the prosecution). Both were reasonable theories, but only the former implicated Chauvin. That alone should have introduced reasonable doubt on all three charges.

As for whether Chauvin assaulted Floyd—that is, whether he used unlawful force outside the scope of MPD training—reasonable people can disagree on whether there was reasonable doubt. Balko would emphasize that MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] officers were trained to worry about positional asphyxia, move people to the side-recovery position as soon as possible, and use the hobble.

. . . .What are the odds that Chauvin received a trial in accordance with these instructions? Given the jurors who spoke about their fears for their physical safety, given the juror who was found wearing a “GET YOUR KNEE OFF OUR NECKS” t-shirt before the trial, given that everyone knew the city would burn if he was acquitted yet the trial location wasn’t changed, and given that the jury wasn’t sequestered in one of the most talked-about trials in modern American history—I would submit that the odds are close to zero.

Ultimately, we’ll never know how a jury might have weighed the evidence under even halfway normal conditions. And it is probably too late for any of this to matter for Chauvin himself. What is clear, however, is that there were many reasons to doubt that Chauvin was guilty of the crimes he was charged with, and the American public should not be afraid to say so.

Once again, this is a complicated issue that you should judge for yourself, ideally after having watched the movie, read Balko’s ripostes, and having read at least Hughes’s second essay: the one quoted here.  Chauvin’s conviction for murdering Floyd spawned the “racial reckoning” that has persisted until today, and regardless of whether we need a reckoning or not, the conviction that started it all needs to be carefully examined. More important, the conviction of a man for a “crime” that carries reasonable doubt is a miscarriage of justice that needs to be rectified (Chauvin is serving 22 years in prison, and will be 60 when he’s released). In my view, they need to try Chauvin again, but bringing in all the evidence and with a jury that is not intimidated.