Category: crime

A mystery: Why were all charges against Jussie Smollet dropped?

March 26, 2019 • 11:24 am

I just learned this from CNN (click on screenshot):

As you probably know, Smollett was charged with 16 felony counts for faking a racist and homophobic attack on himself, and according to the Chicago Police, they had him dead to rights, including the cooperation of the fake “attackers” and a copy of the check Smollett paid them to stage the attack.

So why this sudden reversal of fortune? The only thing reported is this:

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office didn’t immediately explain why the felony disorderly charges were dropped, except to say it came after reviewing the case’s facts, and in view of his agreement to forfeit his $10,000 bond.

“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” the state’s attorney’s office said in a statement.

If Smollett was innocent, why did he forfeit his bond? And if they intended to go easy on him, the prosecution could have recommended a light plea deal or a light sentence. I’m truly mystified. Wiping out a potential criminal record, which is what happens when charges are dropped, doesn’t seem to me like a “just disposition and inappropriate resolution to this case.” At the very least, he should have been tried and, if convincted, a sentence imposed as a deterrent. Getting criminal record may have been enough, ensuring that Smollett would suffer some consequences for what he did. Now, by all rights, he can go back to work without disapprobation.

If you’re a lawyer or a savant, explain this to me.

Adam Rutherford calls the Jack the Ripper identification “a joke”

March 19, 2019 • 1:30 pm

This morning I reported on a genetic analysis of the identity of Jack the Ripper, arrived at by analyzing DNA from sperm and bloodstains on a shawl found at one of the murder sites. I didn’t think much of the paper, but Adam Rutherford, a respected geneticist and author, thinks even less. In fact, he thinks the paper, and its identification of Polish butcher Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper, is pure garbage.

Adam emailed me this conclusion as well as a list of his objections, and I asked if those objections were anywhere on the Internet where I could direct readers. His full answer, with all his objections, is indented below, quoted with permission. Since Adam knows a lot more than I about this case, I defer to him and will put a link to this post in the earlier one.

Unfortunately, it’s only in my book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes. It’s in the chapter about Richard III, which is the high bar for cold case forensic DNA identification; the shawl, I argue, is the low point.

We are considering releasing that chapter, but in the meantime, I’m happy for you to post these comments below.

* The provenance of the shawl is fully unverified. There is literally no evidence that a historian would consider even vaguely acceptable that the shawl was at the murder scene or belonged to Kate Eddowes. The claim, which is unverified, is that the duty sergeant (who was not at the crime scene nor was it on his beat) took it from the evidence collection – all her other clothes were burnt – and it was kept, unwashed, for the next century, by various people and in various places (one amateur Ripper historian told me it was in the back of his car for several years, and then in his shed).

* It was bought at auction by Russell Edwards, a man inspired to ‘solve’ the crime after watching the Johnny Depp film From Hell.

* Louhelainen claims to have found epithelial cells, and got DNA out of them. However, the amount of contamination is overwhelming. Apart from its history, Russell Edwards is pictured holding the shawl with bare hands in the Mail on Sunday, AND whilst trying to ID Eddowes’ descendants with whom to compare DNA, they also were in the same room and may have handled the shawl.

* None of that matters anyway, because the mtDNA allele they claim in 2014 is the basis of the +ve ID was mis-labelled. They had it as 314.1C – which is rare, but it turned out to be 315.1C which is a SNP at a frequency of about 90% in Europe.

* Louhelainen claimed a 1/290,000 estimate based on the 314.1C, which is impossible because the database it was drawn from only has 34,617 entries – I got this from none other than Alec Jeffries. I can’t see this corrected in the new paper.

* I interviewed Louhelainen and asked him if he thought the evidence was sufficient if the murders had happened this month, and he said no. ‘it wouldn’t be conclusive in a modern court’ is what he said.

* None of this is corrected in the new paper as far as I can see, which is shockingly bad: the methods contain no primers, or verification of descent, as you say. The display of the alleles is shall we say, unusual.

* Incidentally, there is no evidence that any of the women killed by Jack the Ripper were sexually assaulted or molested in any way. He is not known to have been an emitter. If Eddowes was working as a prostitute, it is quite possible that any semen might be from any one of her clients. While we’re speculating, it’s quite possible that Kosminski was a client. He died after some very serious longstanding mental health issues in an asylum, the cause of his insanity being ‘self abuse.’

The whole thing is a joke. There isn’t a historian or curator on Earth who would consider the provenance of the shawl acceptable. what follows is just bad science. How it made it through peer review is a mystery too.

There you go. That’s not a grain of salt with which to ingest Louhelainen and Miller’s paper, but a mountain of it.

The affair of Jussie Smollett

February 21, 2019 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: Reuters reports that Smollett staged the attack because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire. (It must have been substantial, though!). This motive apparently comes not from Smollett, of course, but probably from the two “assailants” he hired.

And it gets even weirder. Smollett wrote a CHECK to pay off his assailants, or so this NBC reporter says. HOW CAN YOU BE THAT DUMB?

____________

I think that almost everyone has heard of what happened with Jussie Smollett, who’s fairly well known for playing a musician in the ongoing Fox drama Empire. As Wikipedia recounts the details, Smollett, who lives in Chicago where the series is filmed, claimed that he was attacked on the night of January 19 by two white men who beat him, put a noose around his neck, and dumped a chemical on him. They also apparently called him a “nigger” and a “faggot” (he’s gay and black), and shouted, “This is MAGA country.” (That, of course, stands for the Trump motto, “Make America Great Again.”)

This seemed fishy from the outset. How could these guys have known who he was unless they were tracking him? The shouted motto and noose seemed stereotypical, a bit over the top. More important, Chicago police couldn’t find any evidence of an attack from video surveillance, and when the cops came several hours later, Smollett was still wearing the noose around his neck. Why didn’t he take it off?

As the police investigation continued, with a dozen officers assigned to the case, Smollett’s story began to unravel. It was found that his assailants were both black; why would they attack another black man and use racist epithets? Moreover, both of the supposed assailants, brothers, had tangential connections to the show Empire, and that was deeply suspicious. They both knew Smollett. Finally, it appeared that both men, who were from Nigeria, told the police that Smollett had hired them to conduct the attack.

Now, as the New York Times reports, Smollett, who turned himself in to police this morning, has been charged with faking an accident report, which is a class 4 felony in Illinois—a crime for which he could face up to three years in prison. There’s also a threatening note that Smollett received, and if he’s complicit in that, as seems likely, he faces federal charges on top of the state charges (he used the U.S. Mail).

The story, as the NYT recounts, was initially taken up widely by the media as an example of not just racism and homophobia, but also bigotry inspired by Donald Trump. There wasn’t much skepticism or withholding of judgment, despite the holes in Smollett’s story.

Why did Smollett, though, who was pretty famous and certainly well off, have to concoct an incident like this? Writing in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, an author and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and also a black man, has a thoughtful answer. Click on the screenshot below to read it.

Now it’s almost too easy to use this incident—and I’m assuming the police allegations are true—to indict not just the social justice crowd but also the credulous media. After all, it plays into the hands of all of us who hate Trump and his administration, and also to that moiety of the Left that sees racism and homophobia as institutionalized in this country (I see this bigotry as a recurring problem to be solved, but not, in general, as an institutionalized one). But there’s another side of the coin: these incidents of false reporting play into the hands of the Right as well, actually strengthening Trump’s supporters and giving people an excuse to dismiss any claim of violence motivated by bigotry. For these reasons we should maintain skepticism from the outset, trying to be compassionate but also looking hard at the evidence.

Still, the question remains: why did Smollett do this?  And that’s the topic of McWhorter’s essay. While noting that racism is still with us, he raises the tropes of “victimhood chic” and “professional martyrs”:

Until this twist [the Chicago police changing the “trajectory of the investigation” after looking at the evidence], smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.

Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.

Indeed, McWhorter argues later on that the fact that being a victim of racist and homophobic bigotry gives you fame and admiration shows that this country has ascended the moral arc for civil right and gay rights, for in the bad old days you would not be a hero if you were a black or gay man who was attacked.

Certainly, the professional martyr is a race-neutral personality type. However, since the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, when whites became open in a new way to understanding black pain, that personality type has been especially useful to black Americans. With positive racial self-image possibly elusive after hundreds of years of naked abuse, the noble-victim position can seem especially, and understandably, comforting. It can also be handy, in a fashion quite unexpected to anyone who was on the front lines of race activism 50 years ago—as a road to stardom.

“Professional martyr” is a useful term for such cases, and there are many incidents in which people have faked attacks like this to either buttress their cause or claim victim status. (I’m not denigrating, of course, those true reports of attacks based on racism and other forms of bigotry.)

As far as what Smollett had to gain, it was this admiration. He already had it, but presumably craved more:

[Rachel] Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.

One could imagine that Smollett, if he was playacting, had a similar motivation. For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.

Assuming, again, that the reports are accurate, Smollett’s clumsiness would be an especially poignant indication of how deeply this victimhood chic has taken hold—almost as if he thought this was such an easy score that he didn’t even need to think too hard about the logistics.

Now of course McWhorter is psychologizing Smollett here, and we don’t know what was in Smollett’s mind, but, for a rational person, I can’t think of any other motivation. In his last sentence, McWhorter finds a silver lining in this cloud:

. . . Smollett, if the latest reporting is true, was an eager puppy, jumping with joyous inattention into American social politics as he has encountered it coming of age in the 21st century. He would have known that in this moment, very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about being jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera. (Yet again, I’m assuming the latest reporting is accurate.)

Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.

I don’t feel any Schadenfreude in this incident. Smollett is a figure to be pitied, and, given that his career is ruined, I don’t see why (if he’s found guilty) he needs to spend much time in jail, except perhaps a modicum of incarceration to deter others from the same kind of behavior. No matter how much time he does, he’ll always be known as the bozo who faked his own attack. The lesson, as everybody has already drawn, is to be skeptical of claims like this, and not bruit about the mantra “believe the victim.”

Empathy yes, credulity no. For it is stuff like this that will help Trump in 2020, and contribute to the division of America.

Armed robbers apprehended at the U of C after a chase and a crash; school paper publishes photo of one suspect; students use the incident to criticize our armed cops

February 13, 2019 • 1:00 pm

We had a bit of excitement here on Monday when, sitting at my desk, I got three successive email alerts from the campus authorities that there were criminal suspects loose on campus. The final one was that they were apprehended. But the first ones, like this, were a bit scary:

Shelter in place! That sounds ominious. Eventually we got the all clear, and it turned out that, according to the Chicago Maroon, there was a crime, a crash, and a chase (click on screenshot):

Summary from the paper (it was an armed robbery):

At around 11:48 a.m., a stolen black Dodge Charger believed to have been involved in the robbery of a GameStop ran a red light on the intersection of Midway Plaisance and South Woodlawn Avenue, supposedly while chased by police. In the process, it ran into two additional cars, damaging both significantly. The driver of one of the vehicles escaped without injury but the status of the other driver is unknown.

The suspects fled their Dodge Charger, and police pursued. One of the suspects was arrested immediately after the crash, according to an e-mail sent by the University after the events at around 4:25 p.m. Around 30 police officers cornered multiple suspects in the Saieh Hall of Economics, though it is unclear whether all the remaining suspects fled inside the building.

The suspects in Saieh were later apprehended at around 12:40 p.m. Police on scene said no one was hurt inside Saieh and there was no substantial property damage.

There were five suspects, all apprehended by the University of Chicago police without a shot being fired (our campus cops are armed, which the students generally object to).

Kudos for the cops for a prompt and nonviolent response, and to the University for keeping us informed (I’m generally in my office behind a locked outer door, so I wasn’t too scared).

Isn’t this over until the trial, then? Well, no, as there’s community outrage on two counts. If you read the Maroon article above, you’ll see a picture of a UC police officer walking one of the handcuffed suspects out of the economics building. I don’t know his age, but he may be underaged (I didn’t show the photo, but it’s right below the headline above). That has caused a fight to erupt in the comments, with a lot of people demanding that the photo be taken down because the accused robber is too young to show.  There are 131 comments—unheard of for this newspaper.

The pictured suspect is also black, which I suppose is one reason why people want the photo down. I didn’t think of that at first, but there’s a petition to the paper to remove the photo that explicitly mentions how the photo could reflect poorly on African-Americans (click on screenshot):

678 people have signed the petition, which includes this language:

As many University of Chicago students, faculty, staff, and residents of Hyde Park have pointed out, the publication of such a photo can cause incredible harm to the accused individual and their loved ones. It has the potential to infringe upon their right to a fair and unbiased criminal-legal process and negates the presumption of innocence.

It also cannot go unmentioned that the young man in the photograph is Black and the publication of this image perpetuates the Myth of Black Criminality and the racist, distorted view of Black youth as less innocent, more adult-like and dangerous than their White peers. Furthermore, if the young man in the photograph is under 18, their records of arrest and court processes are automatically sealed. Illinois law recognizes that children grow and change, and as a result, provides special protections to prevent collateral consequences from youthful arrests. This photo undermines those protections.

We demand that the photo of this young man be taken down immediately.

Now I’m not sure what rules, if any, obtain in journalism about publishing the photo of underage accused perps. The accused in the photo looks about 16 or 17 to me.  I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other, but if that’s old enough so that mainstream newspapers would have published such a photo, so be it. The Maroon editors obviously aren’t bowing to public pressure, as they haven’t removed the photo. I’m not sure whether it’s illegal or unethical to publish pictures of the accused even if they are under 18 and have their records sealed.

What bothers me more is that because the suspect is black, to many that’s even more of a reason to take down the photo since it would “perpetuate the Myth of Black Criminality” and so on. If it’s unethical to publish a picture of someone under 18—and, as I said, I’m not sure it is—then it doesn’t matter what race the person is. Publish or don’t, but don’t put ethnicity into the equation.

The other consequence, reported by the right-wing site The College Fix, is that students began going after the campus police on Twitter. They have blocked their Twitter accounts, so the tweets aren’t shown, but the CF reproduces some of them:

. . . a flurry of tweets arose among students who condemned the university for not providing alerts in a timely fashion and the actions of several professors who attempted to meet for class despite the shelter in place code.

“You shouldn’t have a midterm right after a lockdown,” one student tweeted. [JAC: Midterms were, I believe, scheduled the day of the incident]

Criticism was also leveled at the Maroon, for not only advising students that it was “safe to go outside” while the police was still searching for the last suspect, but also for plastering his photo on their front page, despite clearly appearing to be a minor.

A petition has been launched demanding the paper’s editors take the photo down.

What’s more, even though no students were harmed and the suspects were arrested without a single shot being fired, some students began calling for the abolition of police.

“there were militarized cops (literally carrying assault rifles) crawling all over campus looking for armed, african-american men. a black student could’ve worn a striped shirt (like one of the robbers)… reached for a phone at the wrong time… etc. and could have been shot,” one student tweeted. “Anywho … disarm/abolish the police.:

“UCPD is absolutely worthless thank you for coming to my ted talk,” tweeted another student.

A third offered this on social media: “dear god we’re gonna have to listen to c*llege r*publicans talk about how this proves we need more cops.”

This reporter reached out to several of the commenters regarding what kind of solution they would support instead of the police, but only received the following answer from one student: “We should arm the working class, disarm the pigs.”

These are students, not thugs. Arm the working class? And I wonder whether they would have been in favor of unarmed police if the suspects had started shooting, or had taken hostages.

Thank Ceiling Cat none of that happened.  I don’t expect anybody here will align with the reaction of condemning the cops, but do weigh in on the photo, especially if you have expertise about these matters.

Package thief owned by tech geek

December 19, 2018 • 11:30 am

UPDATE (2019): Reader Bryan writes me that at least 2 of the 5 packages may not represent real thefts, but favors done by friends of the people who left the packages on their porch. This tweet tells the tale:

___________________

From C|Net and other sources, we hear of the cleverness of Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer who devised a clever (and diabolical) way to foil package thieves. In America, at least, this is the time of year when people steal packages left by delivery services on people’s porches: these thefts are almost a fixture of the nightly news. The thieves are hard to catch, even with porch camera video, as they often cover their heads.

Well, Rober developed a way to foil them by making fake packages that explode with glitter, emit fart smells and noises, and have phones in them to not only photograph the perpetrators, but send the video to a cloud. The phones also have GPS sensor that enabled Rober to recover the discarded packages and the phones.

Here’s what he did, and it’s way cool. Sadly, there’s no information about whether any of these thieves were caught; I suspect not.

A misguided execution of a cognitively disabled prisoner

October 5, 2018 • 2:46 pm

This report, from the science journal Nature (click on screenshot) shows what happens when punishment is purely retributive.

The story: Vernon Madison killed a police officer in Alabama in 1985. He was sentenced to death.  In the ensuing 33 years on death row, Madison has had multiple strokes that have left him without any memory of the crime. He is, psychologists say, no different from someone born with severe enough intellectual impairment to be deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. But of course Madison was “sane” when he did the crime.

Madison is still scheduled to die. Why? Let Alabama explain:

[Madison’s] lawyers say that, in terms of his intellectual function, there is no difference between his current condition and that of a person born with an intellectual disability. The latter group is protected from execution, thanks to a 2002 Supreme Court decision.

Madison’s case differs because he did not have a severe cognitive impairment at the time he committed the murder, and presumably knew it was wrong. The state of Alabama argues that once the situation is explained to him, Madison also understands that he was tried and will be executed. Alabama says it doesn’t matter whether he remembers it, because he can still rationally conceptualize it.

But psychologists and psychiatrists say that this is very different from a deep understanding of one’s own guilt.

Well, I oppose the death penalty in general, as it doesn’t serve as a deterrent for others, it doesn’t allow those wrongfully convicted to be freed, it’s more expensive than giving life without parole, and it offers no chance of rehabilitation. I understand that if there’s a death penalty that is waived when the murderer is cognitively impaired, then someone who becomes impaired after doing the crime poses a problem for that system.

But it wouldn’t pose a problem to a humane justice system. Madison might be kept in custody for the rest of his life; but he shouldn’t be in prison rather than in a facility for psychiatric cases, or just in a hospital. What is gained by killing him? It’s not a deterrent, and if he’s still a danger he can be sequestered. There’s something especially sickening about killing someone who doesn’t know why he’s being killed, but of course there’s something sickening about executions in general.

Nature takes the humane stance in its op-ed, but the counterarguments show what happens when you dispense retributive justice on the grounds that someone deserves to be killed because they made the wrong choice (my emphasis below):

The case highlights the illogic of capital punishment. Death-penalty proponents argue that it is necessary for justice to be served, as well as to deter others from crime. Yet neither of these conditions applies here. Madison cannot see his execution as justice because he cannot recall his crime. And executing a person with an intellectual disability hardly serves as an example or deterrent.

Regardless of the decision, Madison is not going unpunished. If he escapes execution, he will spend the rest of his life in prison alone, disabled and confused by the world around him. He is no longer a threat. The court should set an example and grant mercy.

The mere phrase “justice must be served” is purely retributive, at least in this case. Killing a cognitively impaired prisoner is not a dispensation of justice to anybody with a drop of humanity in their veins.

Nature implies that a better scientific understanding of brain function could help with this case, which is being appealed to the Supreme Court, but I think they’re wrong. Someone shouldn’t be executed simply because they remember their crime and understand that it’s wrong. Neither of those are a matter of free choice.

If science does have a role here, it’s to help us realize that every criminal can be treated like a broken machine, but each should be treated uniquely because each criminal is broken in a different way. Nobody could have chosen not to murder at the moment of a killing. Because of that, because of the failure of execution to be a deterrent, and because of the impossibility of resurrecting executed people later found to be innocent, nobody should be executed.

Ever.

American professor: “White crime dramas” are a sign of racism. So are black and Hispanic crime dramas

October 2, 2018 • 9:30 am

I really should stop looking at HuffPo, as it’s simply the Left’s version of Breitbart: a tendentious and often ridiculously slanted look at politics. Both sites anger me. If you know what subject a HuffPo article is about, you already know what it’s going to say. Or, at least, you know what line they’re going to take, as the article below surprised even me with its stupid thesis. Click on the screenshot if you must see the carnage:

This article is not written by a gung-ho Leftist college student but—and I guess it’s no surprise—by a gung-ho Leftist academic: Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York.

Her thesis is clear, and amounts to a lot of virtue signaling by the good professor, as she simply has no solution for the “problematic” issue she raises. Her claim is that our fascination with “white crime dramas” like “Ozark”, “Weeds,” or “Breaking Bad” reflects racism. How? Because, as racists, we don’t expect white families to be engaged in crime, so our attention to these kinds of television shows reflects the overturning of our expectations. Of course, black and Hispanic “crime dramas” are also racist, as they fulfill our expectations of the criminality of people of color. In other words, you can’t win, for every crime drama is racist, no matter who it portrays.

Her thesis:

a.) White crime dramas are popular because they overturn racist expectations of how white people should behave. I quote:

In all of these shows, part of the drama and the comedy and the surprise depends on these families being white. Their whiteness is largely not discussed. But the juxtaposition between what audiences expect from these moms and dads and kids ― innocence and stability ― and what we see characters doing ― committing crimes and trying not to fall apart ― is intrinsic to the programs’ appeal.

White crime family dramas actually rest on the subversion of two expectations. The first is the widely held belief (at least among white people) about the inherent wholesomeness of white families, and the second is the false notion (again most popular among white people) that criminals are almost always individuals of some color other than white. [JAC: That last sentence is pure bullshit, I must say.]

Is there any truth in this? Well, I’ll admit that, for some, part of the suspense of a show could be the juxtaposition of a “normal” family with their life of crime. But that might not have anything to do with the families being white; it might have more to do with their middle-class status jarring with what they do on the side. It would also startle us if there was a “double” television show (à la Hannah Montana) in which Bill Cosby’s television family did the comedy show on one side but then dealt drugs on the other. (Bill Cosby isn’t white, of course.) Or perhaps 5% of our interest could come from the expectation that Daniels notes. But what is the evidence? There is none, just anecdote and assertion. I don’t watch much t.v., but I’m sure readers can produce counter-anecdotes.

After all, there’s a whole history of crime dramas that I find it impossible to characterize as subverting expectations that white people shouldn’t do crime. Take The Godfather trilogy, for example. Did anybody like it, or watch it, partly because they thought, “Jesus, the Corleone family is white! How odd that they’re in the Mafia.”?

I’m somewhat handicapped here because I don’t watch television except for the nightly news and “60 Minutes”, and don’t get cable. But I remember plenty of crime dramas in the old days, like Hill Street Blues, in which whites and nonwhites both committed crimes, and my absorption was with the story, not with the race of the criminal. And, of course, although racism was more pervasive before the Sixties, the crime dramas before then, like Dragnet, were popular not because they subverted expectations, but because of the story. There were almost no black people on television then, and I can’t imagine that Dragnet was popular because it overturned our expectations about whites. (One can also think of the popularity of the Bogart crime dramas, which had white offenders.)

I’m sure I have a lot of readers with cable who watch crime dramas, so please weigh in below.

b.) Some of the racism that motivates our watching these dramas is their concern with the family. I quote Dr. Daniels:

Together, Wendy and Marty are clear about what motivates their life of crime: It is always “for the family.” When Wendy tells Marty she bought a house so they can launder money through construction costs, she says she feels good about it because she “did it for our family.”

Then, she asks Marty, “What’d you do today ― for our family?”

“Bought a strip club,” he replies.

In “Ozark,” as in other white crime family dramas, the characters manage to justify every horrendous deed ― even murder ― because it was done “for the family.” These are anti-heroes, to be sure, but their moral and ethical dilemmas are meant to be sympathetic, because who among us wouldn’t do everything possible for our family? If the audience wants to think these felons-in-the-making are not as bad as the “real criminals,” the show gives them some room to do so.

Again, I doubt it is the case—though The Godfather involves “the family” a lot, but not in the way described above—that white crime dramas invariably involve families, and that’s to make them more sympathetic. Perhaps this is true to some degree, but Daniels doesn’t make the case that this involves racism and whiteness. She merely quotes anecdotes because, in the end, this is not about fixing racism (Daniels has no solution), but about the author showing how virtuous she is.

c.) Even showing white families engaged in crime somehow buttresses racism. This part of the article escapes me, but I think what Daniels is saying is that these dramas gives a false picture of crime because they portray the white criminals as more “wholesome” than blacks or Hispanics. That, at least, is what I glean from this bit.

The reality is that white families are no more or less wholesome than any other families. A majority of most violent crimes against white people are committed by other white people, and white people are far more likely to commit white collar crime.

Well, I’ll accept Daniel’s data here, but what she doesn’t point out—surely deliberately—is that blacks commit violent crimes far more often, compared to their proportion in the population, than do whites. This is well known, and I’m not for a minute imputing it to anything inherent in being black. In fact, I think it represents the residuum of racism, with blacks being put into living situations, including dire poverty, that can promote criminal behavior. But it can’t be denied that there’s a disproportionality. As one website notes,

It’s true that around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.

And yes, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white. Homicide is a broader category than “murder” but let’s not split hairs.

. . . What about violent crime more generally? FBI arrest rates are one way into this. Over the last three years of data – 2011 to 2013 – 38.5 per cent of people arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were black.

Clearly, these figures are problematic. We’re talking about arrests not convictions, and high black arrest rates could be taken as evidence that the police are racist.

But academics have noted that the proportion of black suspects arrested by the police tends to match closely the proportion of offenders identified as black by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey.

This doesn’t support the idea that the police are unfairly discriminating against the black population when they make arrests.

I don’t think that this means that black families are less wholesome than any other families. The crime could, for example, reflect the higher proportion of black families that have just one parent. I simply point out that the tendentious Daniels is being very selective in citing her statistics.

What is to be done? If the popularity of white crime dramas reflects racism, and the popularity of black crime dramas also reflects racism, as Daniels suggests below, what can we do? It’s not to show more crime dramas involving people of color:

One could argue that we need racial and ethnic diversity in the representation of crime families. Writing more criminals who are black, Latinx or Asian would only reinforce existing stereotypes about race and crime, and we have plenty of shows doing that already.

The stories we tell ourselves matter, even when they come in the form of middling shows like “Ozark.” When stories about white crime families rest on ideas about the supposed goodness of white people, they reinforce a whole apparatus of assumptions, benefits of the doubt and second chances afforded to white people who cheat, steal, rape or kill someone.

You can’t show more black crime dramas, and you can’t eliminate white crime dramas, as that would suggest that white people don’t do crime. Nor should we show more white crime dramas, as those dramas simply reinforce racism. Are we then supposed to eliminate all crime dramas? Daniels doesn’t say. I suppose one could suggest we show white crime dramas that don’t show seemingly wholesome white people, but I don’t think that would work, either, as The Godfather attests.

In the end, Daniel’s misguided essay does nothing to eliminate the problem of racism. But, as I said, that’s not why she wrote it. She wrote it to signal her virtue by crying that racism is everywhere. Well, fine, but where is her solution?

Oh, and at the end of her essay, Daniels can’t resist taking a wholly gratuitous lick at Donald Trump and his family. This has nothing to do with her essay; it’s just another flag she runs up to show her virtue. I quote:

Those set of assumptions that animate “Ozark” are also the same ones that have enabled the white crime family that’s currently installed in the White House.

I don’t think so. And neither do a lot of commenters on the piece, who say stuff like this:

 

There’s hope for America yet.