The situation is actually more complicated than your post suggests, neb. Oh, wait, no it's not.
The second link is good but I keep thinking each paragraph is trying to artfully fade out with a poignant detail because of the little green circles.
I had a really frustrating conversation with a Davis professor recently who was trying to explain to me why the faculty voted 5-4 (IIRC?) not to get rid of Chancellor Katehi. "She did a lot of good things for the school before the protests," he said. So I asked "That outweighs pepper-spraying students?" and he changed the subject.
I don't know, twice over, what your friend is talking about: she's done almost nothing for the school, and there was no such vote. There was, however, a no-confidence resolution that failed. But that was a long time ago, well before the various inquiries handed down their findings. And, more recently, the Executive Council of the Faculty Senate rejected one of the inquiry's recommendations that the chancellor be asked for her resignation and instead censured her. Having said all of that, the physics dept. (among others) has asked that she be fired.
Hey, look over there, D-1 football! Yea!
If that sounded pissy, essear, I'm sorry. I really didn't mean it that way.
6: that proposal seems to be dead, at least for the moment.
5: Yeah, I'm muddling things, because he mentioned both the no-confidence vote (which he somehow gave me the impression had just happened, but I guess it was my misunderstanding) and that they couldn't get a large fraction of the physics department to sign the letter asking that she resign.
Anyway, you probably shouldn't have brought it up during your on-campus interview.
If the point is that UC Davis faculty are craven or cowardly, we can declare comity now.
Anyway, you probably shouldn't have brought it up during your on-campus interview.
Right, you save that sort of thing for after they've made you an offer.
"This Guinea Pig is dead! It is an ex-Guinea Pig!"
7: It's like he was just sitting there and you doused him with a caustic substance.
I know at least one non-cowardly UCD prof, too.
15: And Von Wafer works there as well!
20: I think he's talking about Eric Rauchway, who at our blog brags about his recumbent.
That seems like an odd thing to brag about.
You know recumbents with full farings are the fastest kind of bike. Fact.
This better not turn into a bike thread.
When I was a teenager I planned to have at least one recumbent when I grew up. That recumbents are now very low on my personal list of bikes I would consider buying shows I've genuinely become much less dorky than I was as a teenager.
Yes, let's return the thread to the topic of the insanity of the UC system.
You could plow right into a row of riot cops in a fully-faired 'bent. Pepper spray'd just slough off the fairing like so much orange julius. Take that, Wall St.!
If Eric really admires FDR, he'll do exactly that the next time there's a protest and the cops are called in.
Either that or lock-up a bunch of people whose ancestors came from Japan.
Paint the fairing up like the nose of a B-52 and just charge in there. FDR would have done the same if somebody'd thought to put a fairing on his wheelchair.
I suppose with FDR it would have been a B-17.
FDR would have shown that it's very difficult to unseat a recumbent, especially during wartime.
My uncle flew B-17s. I don't think he enjoyed it much.
I bet it was chilly. Also, the whole probably-going-to-die thing.
34: I think Truman gets dibs on the B-29.
The bike stops here, says Truman, clear 10 foot past the riot cops.
Fully-faired recumbent done up like a B-29, including the remote controlled gun turrets? Mock these tevas-and-socks combo at your peril, onlookers!
37: He mostly complained about the weather in England and then tried to get me to enroll in the New Mexico Military Institute.
36: Probably enjoyed it more than the tail gunner.
Bike-related shenanigans to the side, if VW (or Eric! Or anyone!) can provide some informations regarding, for instance, the likelihood that the faculty will get involved as Nathan Brown (who's posted similar stuff before) suggests, or in any other way, that would be much appreciated, I'm sure.
UC Davis and Penn State should switch leadership, giving them each a new problem.
Probably enjoyed it more than the tail ball turret gunner.
Making balls explicit is always good.
I think the UM leadership might happily exchange places with either just now.
46: I actually researched that extensively (by my standards), not remembering which position was considered the death warrant. But I guess I did not look hard enough.
43: the Executive Council of the Faculty Senate is deliberating about this issue as we speak. I'm sure that a very strongly worded memo will be released soon enough. Just you wait, wrongdoers, the Faculty Senate is on the case!
Well, not the whole Faculty Senate so much as its Executive Council.
My school has a university senate, which represents those of us too half-assed to be faculty.
We also have a bridge that is completely buried underground. They wanted to fill in a valley, but they just left the bridge because it was already there and seemed to big to move.
the New Mexico Military Institute
My grandfather went there. He did not enjoy it.
Grandfathers just have a limited capacity for joy.
58: My uncle probably wasn't entirely serious.
He enjoyed other things, as I understand it.
Was there a better military academy in Santa Fe?
I'm quite sure NMMI is the best military academy in the state.
||
Speaking of the Northern Realms of the Golden State, The Coroner of Light shockingly attributes Thomas Kinkade's death to "acute ethanol and Diazepam intoxication".
|>
I refuse to believe that. Thomas Kinkade, like the King himself, was a pure man.
In the manner of your kind, I suggest a strongly-worded letter to the Medical Examiner explaining to him the error of his ways.
64:First comments
"Linda Fresquez · Works at Domestic Engineer
But his art lives on, inspite what anyone thinks. There was beautiful pictures in his mind he shared. Sorry to his family, this did not ruin his legacy.
Reply · 1 ·
· about an hour ago
Brian Omv
not on my walls, that is for sure. Claude Monet it is.
Reply ·
· about an hour ago
Linda Fresquez · Works at Domestic Engineer
Brian Omv I'll look him up."
"I'll look him up."
That's pretty good. Made me smile, anyway.
There might be something to the fed investigation there but we sure don't know it from that article, which is written by idiots.
Police Chief Mark Muir told a number of assaulted women that prosecuting rape cases was "challenging" and that research showed a high incidence of false reports in sexual assault cases.
I'm not sure what the "research" aspect is here but yes, sexual assaults suffer from the same issue as domestic violence cases in that crazies fuck it up for everyone else. Seriously, it's depressing as hell. For example, a, uh, totally hypothetical report was basically (I'm going to paraphrase a bit) the husband coming home from work and "I called for my wife and didn't get a response so I went downstairs and found a friend of ours was fucking her on the bed. He heard me come in, jumped up and pulled on his pants and ran out.". The wife's version was "So yeah, this family friend, who by the way has sexually assaulted me in the past...have I reported it? No. Anyways, he came over while my husband was at work and naturally I opened the door...why did I open the door for him? It's been a while since he last raped me and you know, bygones and shit. So, I go to the bedroom to get something and he follows me in there and puts a knife to my throat and forced me to have sex with him." Husband: "I didn't see a knife but he might have put something in his pocket as he was putting his pants on." Wife: "Yes, that was totally a knife.".
Other women who claimed to be drugged and raped were told that there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute; we guess the cops didn't want to deal with the "challenges" that would ensue.
Or maybe it is in fact difficult to prosecute crimes without physical evidence or corroborating witnesses. It sucks but it's true. GHB has a very short biological half life and if someone bangs you while you're passed out and doesn't injure you or leave other physical evidence behind, now what?
69: Is there a lot more going on here than is being reported? If I've got the numbers right, we're talking about an incidence of forcible rape in the neighborhood of 119/100,000 in Missoula, which is certainly high. As we've discussed before, while Minneapolis has a relatively low rate of violent crime, forcible rape here is actually really high -- 113/100,000. (I suspect there's some kind of reporting difference here, as I've said before, as it is hard for me to believe that there is really 3 or 4 times as much rape in Mpls. as in other major cities.) But in any case, if we're talking about just one or two years, couldn't this be a statistical blip that doesn't really say anything about the overall question of investigating and prosecuting rape in Missoula? Certainly, it bears looking into, but I am also somewhat incredulous that the Justice Dept. would move on something like this without far more evidence of actual negligence on the part of the police.
That's 80 allegations over 3 years, so I'm not sure the math is right. Pop is 70k in city limits, 110 k in county. U is about 15k students, a much bigger percentage here than in Mpls, I'd imagine. But maybe the relevant denominator isn't people in the city, but members of the football team. Plus Saudi exchange students. (The Saudi thing was particularly galling: two victims of attempted (at least) assault on the same night, U administrator called student in to tell him he was a suspect, and he promptly left the country before the city police could arrest him -- big problem being delay by victims in reporting to police, rather than to U).
And new stories are rolling in every day. Which suggests the extent to which reporting behavior is a big factor anywhere.
71
So based on your experience what fractions of rape allegations to the police are BS, iffy and solid?
Oh, so it's more like 40/100K reported? That's even more in line with other cities (perhaps not of that size). I was thinking that the campus must have a lot to do with it, although Mpls has a lot of students too -- U of M, plus the community college and several smaller private colleges. I guess what I'm asking is if there's public allegations that the city and the school colluded to intentionally suppress investigations? It still just seems weird to me that the Justice Dept. would move on this without a really gigantic public outcry.
75 -- Yeah, everyone and her brother is speculating exactly how this came about. Lots of us have theories: only the nutballs are putting them on the internet.
We'll see what the investigation turns up. I think there's a pretty broad sense that (a) women have been reluctant to report assaults by football players -- and I suppose others because (b) the system has been (perceived to be) reluctant to prosecute.
I'm not unsympathetic to the police side of this. The news story I linked in 73 is, what, a date rape from 2 or 3 weeks before the report. Might not be easy to prosecute. But then again, you can't separate reporting behavior from perceptions of prosecution behavior.
The football coach and the athletic director were summarily fired, without public explanation, a few weeks ago. I don't know anyone who doesn't think it was related to this situation.
The whole "university police" thing is very odd from a foreigner's POV. I don't think we really have that in the UK - absent some vestigial Proctors at Oxford who really only handle very minor disciplinary and public order offences. But if an Oxford student commits a proper crime, he gets the Thames Valley police coming after him, just like any other Oxford resident. Having a university running its own police force seems likely to create all kinds of hideous conflicts of interest.
Are any unfogged members academics in development economics or otherwise involved in international development?
he gets the Thames Valley police coming after him
In fact we have an entire TV drama genre dedicated to pretty much this one idea.
77.last: You don't say.
Seriously, there are a lot of ways in which university culture is different in the US and Western Europe, or maybe US and the rest of the world in general, I'm not sure. The huge cost, for one thing, and I gather that undergraduates are expected to live in campus-owned housing longer and more often in the US than in other countries. And not all the differences are bad, but I suspect the colleges-with-their-own-quasi-legal-system thing is bad more often than not.
I think the U.S. just has a tradition of more local law enforcement agencies than the U.K.
There have been many problems with small town police forces, of course. But, I don't see how a university with tens of thousands of students is any less able to run a police force than a town of a couple of thousand.
re: 82
UK police authorities are much larger than the single town level. My hometown had a population of about 10,000* and one small police station. The idea that the town would have an autonomous police service seems ... daft. My hometown police were part of Central Scotland police, who cover an area of 1000 square mile or so, and about a quarter-million people.
* really a cluster of much smaller villages that sort of bled into each other.
Often the town has its own police force and the county a separate one.
I don't see how a university with tens of thousands of students is any less able to run a police force than a town of a couple of thousand.
Well, not really a question of scale, more of accountability. Boeing employs tens of thousands of people in Seattle, but I don't think a Boeing Police Department reporting to Jim Albaugh would be a very good idea either.
The question of whether Teeny Weeny Police Forces are a good idea is a different matter.
I think part of the conceit is that University police forces will be able to concentrate more on that beat, and not have to worry about all their manpower being pulled away from the University in order to patrol the black section of town. Also the idea that the University police are mainly there to enforce minor ordinances (underage drinking being preeminent) and don't really have a serious felony investigation mandate. In the case of the University of Minnesota -- Twin Cities, you have the unusual situation of a University campus spread over two cities, as well as two counties. So presumably that does make some coordination easier. Admittedly, this does just highlight the ridiculousness of Mpls & St Paul having separate city services at all. If ever there was a metropolitan area that could benefit from true metropolitan government, it's this one. (We do have a Met Council, as well as the County Boards, but their authority is fairly circumscribed, and winds up being a lot more about planning and transit than police/fire/dog catcher etc.)
Saudi exchange student story. I had forgotten that the second woman said she was raped. It doesn't look like there was any police report from her for a week or so after the rape.
The dean involved will be retiring at the end of the school year. Probably not the timing he'd have chosen . . .
And that story certainly shows a problem: the police find out about allegations of rape from an email the university sent to all students and faculty telling them to watch out because there seems to be a rapist on the loose.
81: it wasn't always so. there used to be quite a lot of small police jurisdictions in the UK*, as well as weirdness about city vs. borough. The history is, in many ways, about exporting Peel's model of the Met Police from London where it was created to the rest of the UK and the empire.
The French police structure used to be *really* strange - any substantial town had its own municipal police, there were a couple of different national police forces, the Paris police had some special responsibilities outside Paris, the gendarmes covered the countryside (but answered to the ministry of defence), and the CRS reported to the president of the republic, personally. And only some of them (the police judiciaire) could actually investigate crimes.
It's become less weird in the last few years though.
*the joke one is the Royal Gloucester Parks and Gardens Constabulary with its two cops.
*the joke one is the Royal Gloucester Parks and Gardens Constabulary with its two cops.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I recall a time in my life when an evening out with friends involved first driving by a single house to see if the police force was at home.
The idea of a campus police force even partially under the control of the college isn't absurd on the face of it, for the reasons discussed in 86. The problem is that in real life you get situations like this too often. A college has a stronger short-term motive to keep crimes quiet than the government, and it's probably easier.
As for town/county/state/whatever police forces in America, I think all but the smallest towns (
"the joke one is the Royal Gloucester Parks and Gardens Constabulary with its two cops"
This surely is a comedy drama waiting to happen.
92: Aren't there already like six BBC comedies with a very similar set-up? (Plus the Andy Griffith Show, of course) Not that this means you couldn't have another one and find fresh material. There could be a chav character for instance. And a slimy New Labor councilor who was always trying to suborn the cops into his schemes. And two aging anarcho-punks who were always committing extremely minor acts of vandalism.
89: You know, if you include all the different federal agencies with police powers, it's scarcely less ridiculous here.
We've got:
FBI
DEA
ATF
ICE
FPS
TSA
US Marshals
Secret Service
Coast Guard
National Guard
State Police
County Sheriff
Local police
...just to name a few, and not including all of the international security apparatus that now has some claim to jurisdiction in domestic intelligence matters.
Natilo -- you don't have tribal police nearby?
98: For your expertise on the Poisson distribution?
When the fish and game are police, only outlaws can put hooks into the cheeks of trout.
96 & 97: Good points! I forget about the DNR & park rangers, given how much time I spend stuck in the cities. And tribal police! Holy shit, that sounds like the worst of all possible worlds in a lot of cases. Of course, the FBI has jurisdiction there for a lot of relatively minor stuff, as well as the big crimes.
Also, I think here in MN the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is separate from the State Police to some extent. And then there's the MPs and Shore Patrol around bases, right? They have the power to go into civilian areas where service members are hanging out too, don't they?
There was a story in our local alt weekly a while back about a corrupt tribal fish & game officer letting corrupt county deputies hunt on the rez out of season.
That's the county just north of us. In ours, the county deputies brought donuts and hot chocolate to the Occupy encampment when they came to take it down. This is why we have local and locally elected law enforcement.
That's when you want them all to get eaten by corrupt bears.
93: Stupid less-than symbol. That was supposed to be something like "I think all but the smallest towns (of less than 1,500 people) have a police force of some kind, even if it's just one guy and he spends most of his time directing traffic around road accidents, but organization of the jurisdictions above him varies."
I'm wondering if this works: <. It did in preview, at least. Woo hoo.
I lived in a really small town with no police. If you needed law enforcement, you contacted the sheriff. It was fine, there was essentially no crime. They didn't have their own high school either.
Also the idea that the University police are mainly there to enforce minor ordinances (underage drinking being preeminent) and don't really have a serious felony investigation mandate
The primary function of the police at our university seemed to be to make sure that underage drinking and drug laws were not enforced, including those on dealing. No city cops were allowed on campus, and the university cops reported to some dean.
Having just spent scores of hours studying our campus police department (and departments like it around the country), it seems that the oft-cited rationale for having such things is something like, "college campuses are different". But the reality is that campus police departments exist to keep things, particularly the crimes mentioned by teraz, in house.
108/109: There is that aspect. I guess what I mean is, the campus police are around to make sure that underage drinking laws get enforced to the extent that if your party gets too loud or spills into the street, they roust everybody, and as long as no one mouths off, nobody gets ticketed.
One of my radical friends felt that, when there were big protests against the CIA on the U of M campus in the 1980s, leading to some minor rioting, the involvement of the campus police was indeed a method of minimizing the actual charges and disciplinary actions. However, that was before the hockey riots of the mid-2000s, which engendered changes in the school conduct code such that you can now be expelled or otherwise censured for rioting off-campus in venues that have nothing to do with the university. Again, the U of M is a bit of an outlier for a lot of reasons, social and geographical, so my view of campus police actions is probably different from a lot of other people's.
But the reality is that campus police departments exist to keep things, particularly the crimes mentioned by teraz, in house.
Yep, totally. And, you know, I don't think that part is so horrible. The part where they also keep sexual assaults and stuff in house is less delightsome.
Right. The idea of a force that will maintain order without all the life-ruining possibilities of getting involved with real police over something stupid like minor vandalism or possession of marijuana is reasonable. The problem is when that force defines assault as something stupid that it's not worth ruining the perp's life over.
112 The two problems with the university cops that I remember from my time in college were the rape cases and racial profiling leading to black students getting stopped. My impression was that the first was caused by the administration, and the second by the cops themselves. However, since the cops were genuinely reluctant to use violence, the racial profiling was at least limited to black students getting asked for their id, and not beaten up and arrested. The only violence I heard of was a (white) student thrown to the ground hard and cuffed, but if a cop says to take the drinking inside and your response is to punch him in the face I don't think you get to complain to much about that. The profiling itself was even more idiotic than usual in a town which at least then still had a sizable very poor white urban population with the same sort of crime problems that existed among the smaller poor non-white population. Demonstrators were largely handled reasonably well, with pre-arranged arrests in the civil disobedience situations. The city police force on the other hand was brutal and heavily mobbed up.
NB How great is it that our leading local mob family was called the Patriarcas?
I had a friend in high school who was related to the Patriarcas. I don't think the relationship was particularly close.
A no third-party witness date rape first reported "two or three weeks" after the event isn't something stupid. But you can see the County Attorney not thinking he's going to prove anything everything beyond a reasonable doubt.
116: I'm not secondguessing any particular case without knowing some details, just generalizing about how campus police are likely to go wrong.
118 -- And I'm not arguing with you.
Lurid headlines aside, I think the DOJ investigation is all to the good. The police (U, city, county) are going to get some needed sensitivity training, and if the county attorney is being a bit of a coward about bringing cases, then maybe he'll get bucked up a little. The coach and AD are already out, and if the recruiting apparatus has to spread the message that no matter how good a football player you are, you can't come here unless you're prepared to follow some fairly basic social standards -- again, no harm likely from that. Even if it costs a national championship, we're still net gainers (so long as every game sells out, and they only lose on the road).
The news story announcing the DOJ investigation included a quote from the newest member of the board of regents -- a former 9 term member of Congress, and husband of the state senate Democratic leader: "the Department of Justice is going to move on behalf of assaulted women. ... It continues to seem to me that they get left" in the discussions of how the investigations affect UM.
Ha! I'm surprised I didn't know that before. (Me too, as you probably already knew or had by now realized.)
the campus police are around to make sure that underage drinking laws get enforced to the extent that if your party gets too loud or spills into the street, they roust everybody, and as long as no one mouths off, nobody gets ticketed.
This is how a lot of city cops deal with these things already. The underage drinking tickets I've written in four years could be probably be counted on one hand.
The idea of a force that will maintain order without all the life-ruining possibilities of getting involved with real police over something stupid like minor vandalism or possession of marijuana is reasonable
That it's both life-ruining and stupid would seem to be the problem here, and the idea that campus cops exist to be less dumb about this kind of thing is thus another example of the system being set up to let the more-privileged (college students) get away with something.
124: Yeah, pretty much exactly.
Although, to be kind of a little bit sort of fair to the idea, if you take the existence of life-ruining yet stupid laws as a given, which you shouldn't, being in college sort of makes you fish in a barrel for the police. Someone who might sedately and inconspicuously violate all sorts of stupid laws as a working nineteen-year-old living in a neighborhood with a mixed-age group of friends (innovative!) seems likelier to be identifiable as a lawbreaker on campus. Formalizing the idea that the cops shouldn't actively try to fuck your life over despite how easy it would be isn't only about privilege. Mostly, but there's a vestige of sense to it.
Someone who might sedately and inconspicuously violate all sorts of stupid laws as a working nineteen-year-old living in a neighborhood with a mixed-age group of friends (innovative!) seems likelier to be identifiable as a lawbreaker on campus.
How so?
Because you're in a low-privacy situation crammed together with a herd of other demographically similar people. If you quietly smoke a joint in your apartment, no one needs to know about it. If five people on your dorm floor do the same thing, it's obvious and it's happening in a quasi-public place. Same for underage drinking, same for getting drunk and doing stupid, but not terribly harmful, things.
and the idea that campus cops exist to be less dumb about this kind of thing
Before everyone gets too enamored with this idea, campus cops not doing a lot of official action with regard to booze and weed is more likely just another example of university protection. "We don't have a problem with drugs and underage drinking on this campus. Look, we only had x number of cases last year."