Recap of last night's North Nashville town hall meeting on concerns about police after Ferguson

Last night I left my daughter's school orientation events early to attend the "town hall" meeting at Mount Zion Baptist Church on Jeff St. I arrived 30 minutes before it was supposed to start. That was a good thing because the pews of the sanctuary were nearly full by 7:15. They had an overflow crowd in their fellowship hall in the basement to watch a video feed.

There was a panel of African American community leaders and Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson. Those are the folks who did most of the speaking. Police commanders and other cops filled the choir loft while the candidates for mayor and other elected officials not on the program sat in audience at the front.

Meeting organizer, Bishop Joseph Walker, told the audience that the Mt. Zion meeting is the first time in the US that the protests over Michael Brown's death have moved out of the street and into a building for discussion with police and other leaders.

I sat next to a woman from South Nashville who told me that the event had been announced in church at Mt. Zion last Sunday. As far as I know, the mainstream news media did not announce it until Wednesday. What kind of crowds would have shown up if the announcement had gone out across the city over the weekend?

The predominantly white mainstream print and broadcast media looked like it was in full force, so you can probably read or listen to major details and talking points any place today. I'll stick with my own impressions here.

The first thing I have to say about the meeting was that it was a bona fide town hall complete with comments and questions from the audience. It was not a faux community meeting along the lines of the Mayor's bus rapid transit plan or a planning meeting where the only way you can have your questions answered is if you write them down on a permission slip. It was not a NashvilleNext "lounge" designed to lure hipsters and Millennials. It was unadorned, free-style, old-school town hall, which was fine with me. Democracy is messy business.

Beyond meeting logistics the takeaway for me is that Chief Steve Anderson was the main focus of the meeting. I was there until about 8:45 and Chief Anderson took the brunt of questions from the panelists and from the audience on what Metro cops would do if faced with the same events as they unfolded in Ferguson and on how Metro Police are working internally and with the community to prevent racism and brutality.

His department received praise, criticism, questions and notes of caution.

He handled himself serviceably. And I got the impression from audience and panelist responses that people were satisfied with his answers. Chief Anderson opened his comments with a list of mistakes he thought Ferguson police made, the most important one: failing to diffuse the situation two weeks ago when Mike Brown was shot dead (to be specific, he was shot six times, twice to the head) by a cop and kept in the street for hours afterward. The chief also said that not releasing shooting officer Darren Wilson's name immediately was a lapse. "Within the hour there should have been a statement," he told the audience. He described the way that the police handled the aftermath as appearing to be a conspiracy. He argued that they should have been more transparent from the beginning.

However, his ostensible list of mistakes did not include any mention of use of military equipment by police in protest situations. I was troubled by that.

In his comments on how the police would handle protests after police shootings, Chief Anderson told the audience that his department would meet with community leaders before the protests in order to cover organizing and coordination. He said something about "wanting to be with" peaceful protesters. He said that he would allow protesters to break "some of the law" by marching in the streets as long as community leaders understood that the police would maintain order at the end of the day.

Again he had the opportunity to address the use of military weapons on innocent protesters, but did not.

Finally, after a representative from Pacify Nashville read off a list of military weapons that Metro Police could use on the community, Chief Anderson spoke to the problem; but only after he read a list of the ways that military equipment had been used in the 2010 flood and in other emergency situations to help people in distress. It came across to me as dancing around the problem. The real issue here is that the weapons are designed for the battlefield. The possibility of using them against strikes and marches flips social protest to war. They were not designed for less grisly pursuits.

The police chief said that he would not use military equipment in the community "unless absolutely necessary." He only elaborated by saying that police would use it to protect property and life. Then again, the St. Louis County cops would probably argue that they only used it because it was absolutely necessary to protect Ferguson property and life last week as they were gassing residential areas from armored vehicles. The Pacify Nashville rep asked him point blank and the police chief seemed to be reserving the right to use them. Can you imagine a natural disaster where sound cannons like the ones used to drive away Ferguson protesters would be needed by the Metro Police? I cannot.

You can jump to a list, culled by the New York Times a few months ago, of the $4 million in military toys Metro Police has to play with. It is one thing to have an armored truck for use in authentic hostage situations; it is quite another to own a $600,000 "mine-resistant vehicle" and to reserve the right to use it to protect property during social protests. When was the last time Metro Police had to deal with mines?

In the end, I was left with the impression that we are just supposed to trust that the police won't viciously use the military weapons according to the purpose for which they were made. Is trusting the police good enough for the North Nashville community?



UPDATE: Pacify Nashville posted a video of the question they posed to Steve Anderson as well as his response. You will see that as Pacify Nashville read the list of military weapons in the question, gasps and shouts from the audience became louder. After Pacify Nashville asked Chief Anderson to define "strikes and riots" as situations that allow military weapons to be used, the audience applauded in response before the Chief's reply.





Clearly there is great concern in the community about weapons that allow police to scale up police brutality with military weapons. Military weapons do nothing to promote community policing and civil contact with neighborhoods. If there is a committee formed between the police and local citizens in the aftermath of Ferguson, it needs to come up with proper guidelines on the acquisition and use of military weapons by police departments. At some level, Metro Police will have to demilitarize if they want to earn the trust of the community.

Preservationist responds to my frustrations with Metro Action Commission's opposition to protecting Fehr School

David Price with Historic Nashville, Inc. comments on a previous post:

Hi Mike, thanks for your attention to the Fehr School. As a board member of Historic Nashville (and chair of our Nashville 9 committee), I can tell you our organization fully supports the landmarking of the school and your efforts to draw attention to it. I spoke with Tim Walker of the Metro Historical Commission and wanted to share some information that I hope you will find reassuring.

Cynthia Croom may be opposed to the proposed landmark ordinance so she can be free to make changes to the building, but the MAC is almost entirely Federally funded. That means that if it were to use Federal money for renovations or additions it would be subject to a review process under Section 106 of the NHPA (http://www.achp.gov/106summary.html). This process aims to find ways for Federal undertakings to avoid adverse effects on historic properties. In plain words, it would not allow the MAC to just go and make any changes it wants to whenever it wants to. Read more at the link above.

On top of this, if I am not mistaken the MAC is planning to relocate at some point in the near future. When that happens, the councilperson and the MHC will likely be able to landmark the property without opposition.

Lastly, it is also my understanding that the surrounding neighborhood is pursuing a conservation zoning overlay, which would include the school building (and regulate exterior changes) despite the MAC's opposition.

HNI is happy that Salemtown and the Fehr school have you watching out for their best interests, and hope that this info helps.

The most most hopeful news is that there is a federal review process in place to protect historic properties like Fehr School. However, what is unclear: what triggers it. Not many people remember the background of Fehr and it has no plaque or nationally recognized designation. I intend to follow up at the federal level and see if the federal government would allow changes without red flags going off.

On a second note, MAC has already relocated. North Nashville Head Start is the sole occupant of Fehr School, and as far as I know there are no announced plans to relocate it. So, to the best of my understanding, MAC will be in control of the building indefinitely.

Finally, I do not believe that conservation zoning necessarily applies to entire neighborhoods, given the somewhat complex consent process. I attended an informational meeting on conservation zoning Monday night in Salemtown. I directly asked the Metro planner speaking at the meeting, yes or no: can a Metro agency occupying a historic building automatically opt out of conservation zoning for their building even if the neighborhood supports it? She really did not answer my question, but said that Metro agencies generally are agreeable to conservation initiatives. In fact, she had already told us that blocks and streets could be cut out of conservation rezoning to facilitate passage of the rezoning legislation. It seems to me that if a Metro agency caused enough of a ruckus it could leverage an opt-out, especially Metro Action, which has intervened to stop Salemtown improvement projects having little to do with the Fehr building in the past. I think it is noteworthy that the planner did not come right out and say, "No. They cannot opt out".

MAC Director Cynthia Croom has expressed opposition to conserving the Fehr building. She has stopped other local improvement projects dead in their tracks without warning. She would not even compromise on Fehr preservation with the district council member. So, why would she not avail herself of future opportunities to exclude Fehr from conservation zoning?

Charter school with 25% turnover rate flips revenues into irresistible capital projects

Despite their funding by the charter-happy Bill Gates Foundation, the PBS News Hour did what actually seemed to me to be a balanced report on a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania last week.

Chunks of the revenue the charter company is generating (in part by means of education tax dollars) are not going back into actual classrooms with teachers for their students but into electrifyingly sexy capital projects at big payouts for developers and politicians:

JOHN TULENKO (reporter): Last year, Nick Trombetta earned $163,000. However, since its founding in 2000, P.A. Cyber has collected a total of $45 million in profit.

And the question is, what is P.A. Cyber doing with leftover money?

NICK TROMBETTA (charter school CEO): Well, we're investing it back into research and development. We're investing it back into our program. We're investing it to multiple centers across the state to serve more children. We're investing that back into P.A. Cyber.

TULENKO: Most of the money has been spent within a 12-block area of tiny Midland, Pa., a former steel mill town where P.A. Cyber is based.

Midland now boasts its own performing arts center, also designed to house the company's offices, for which P.A. Cyber paid $10 million. A few blocks away, $12 million more built the virtual teachers center in what had been a steelworkers union hall. And close by, the money is also funding construction of new corporate headquarters, in addition to $5 million in other properties recently purchased in Midland.

To critics, hiring more teachers and creating more live courses would have made better use of taxpayers' education dollars, but Trombetta defends his choice.

TROMBETTA: We do need buildings for our employees. I mean, it costs money to lease them. It costs money to build them. And the dollars that we do receive, we were able to squirrel away some dollars over the course of the years and invest in that.

TULENKO: P.A. Cyber also spun off its own not-for-profit business, developing online curriculum to sell across the country.

Together, the nonprofit and the school have grown to employ 694 people in what was a dying steel town.

TROMBETTA: We decided to create a new industry. And it was an industry that replaced the old. And you're right, and it was to create opportunities for children across this commonwealth and across the United States. This has been huge for this area.

TULENKO: The town's comeback even earned it a nickname, the Midland miracle, though not everyone believes.

RON SOFO (public school superintendent): Wait a minute. I didn't know that public schools and the funding of public schools should be an economic development strategy for one small section of one county. I don't think that's the purpose of public education in this commonwealth or in America.

Economic development has become the be-all and end-all. Quality and culture and education are no longer intrinsically good. Instead, their value is only determined by the wealth maximized and the power generated. And charter schools are the latest vehicle of economic development, which is why they ultimately fail in frameworks and lifeworlds where education is inherently good.

Ominous cops: not exactly community policing

Ominous and grim news from Los Angeles for all those concerned about free speech, assembly, and dissent:

The LA Police Department, known for its brutality and corruption over the years, and the U.S. military conducted joint “tactical exercises” in downtown LA this week ....

According to a Department news release on January 23, “Multi-agency tactical exercises are to be conducted during evening hours around the downtown area January 22-26, 2012.”

“The Los Angeles Police Department will be providing support for a joint military training exercise in and around the great Los Angeles area,” the release stated. “This will be routine training conducted by military personnel, designed to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification requirements” ....

“Lastly, safety precautions have been taken to prevent risk to the general public and the military personnel involved. As such, this training is not open to the public,” the Department concluded ....

Joint military exercises have also been conducted over Boston, Massachusetts and Little Rock, Arkansas over the past six months.

These joint military training exercises become very ominous in the wake of the repression of the Occupy movement by police departments throughout the nation.The crackdown on the First Amendment by the cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, Oakland San Francisco and others across the country is apparently part of a nationally coordinated campaign by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement agencies in collaboration with local police departments.

How long before we see troops staging military training with Metro Nashville cops?

Coffee with Coop

Readers:

Congressman Jim Cooper has scheduled a coffee klatch with several Nashville bloggers this weekend and I've been invited. According to Rep. Cooper's spokesperson, this is intended to be "a frank conversation" where "no topics are off-limits" and "everything is on the record". I've got some issues I would like to raise if there is a chance, but if you have questions or comments that you believe should be posed to him, please either comment below or send me an email.

Part of my goal in blogging is to "crowdsource" important issues, so I'm always looking to the brainstormers who read Enclave because of their interest in hyper-local issues to help me out. As always, thanks.

President Obama made history today for all the wrong reasons

Barack Obama went today where no one to the left of Joe McCarthy has ever gone before in refusing to veto the controversial National Defense Authorization Act, which destroys our constitutional protections against being detained indefinitely (even for life) by military forces, and it guarantees that any of us can be apprehended without just cause or guarantee of due process. Once this becomes law none of us is free:

“By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side.”

The far-reaching detainee provisions would codify indefinite detention without trial into US law for the first time since the McCarthy era when Congress in 1950 overrode the veto of then-President Harry Truman and passed the Internal Security Act. The bill would also bar the transfer of detainees currently held at Guantanamo into the US for any reason, including for trial. In addition, it would extend restrictions, imposed last year, on the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to home or third countries – even those cleared for release by the administration.

Truman never caved to McCarthyism. Obama is poised to do so. My sense is that people most likely to be violated by US military forces are not conservative critics of government, whom Obama has courted and appeased, but progressive dissenters of current federal policy. I fear for social movements the likes of Occupy Wall Street.

A Sharper image

Click, but it just says the author is hiding the sigs of Sharp's haters

For daring to lead an organization that opposed the Mayor's pet convention center project, Kevin Sharp was targeted by Dean (and Bredesen?) backers who started a petition against his nomination for a federal judgeship. The petition's list of 102 signers are currently hidden. But according to a media blog, signers of the petition included convention center lobbyist and Democratic Party consultant Dave Cooley, Cooley's associate Mark Brown (also well-known in party circles), Convention and Visitors Bureau president Butch Spyridon, and Marc Barclay, husband of convention center lobbyist Krissa Barclay.

What a difference a day makes

Compare and contrast our Mayor one day sounding all GOP-ish campaigning against the federal government, but then conceding the next day that the lion's share of the help of flood recovery did in fact come from the federal government.

It's still the economy, stupid

There continues to be 2 disparate Americas in the national consciousness according to Pew. President Obama's rather weak economic solutions have not curbed popular frustrations with a big government that protects big business first:

The public sees clear winners and losers from the economic policies the government has implemented since the recession of 2008. Most Americans say these policies have helped large banks, large corporations and the wealthy, while providing little or no help for the poor, the middle class or small businesses.

Fully 74% say that government policies over the past two years have done a great deal (53%) or a fair amount (21%) to help large banks and financial institutions. Majorities also say that large corporations (70% great deal/fair amount) and wealthy people (57% great deal/fair amount) have been helped.

By contrast, 68% say government policies have helped small businesses not at all (29%) or not too much (39%); 68% also say middle-class people have received little or no help from these policies. And about the same percentage (64%) says poor people have not been helped.

I believe Americans expected better from Democrats in charge in Washington. The latter have failed to sustain any pretense of champions of common folk.

An eye opener!

I'm getting a little lesson on just how unmonitored and unsupervised municipal bond issues--like those backing the new convention center--are over at CM Emily Evans twitter stream. Jump over and see what a wild, wild west it is. My Twitter stream is available here in the right-hand column in the black box.

UPDATE: The most salient point in CM Evans' twitter stream concerns the governing body that Congress appointed to regulate and protect municipalities on bond issues, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), whose appointees are a small group of finance industry insiders from banks like JPMorgan:

We have to ask at this point, if it is rigged, was it rigged against Metro Nashville when Mayor Karl Dean went to Wall Street last week and lauded the market for "validating" his convention center plan?

Employing workers directly through federal public works programs would be cheaper than shunting tax money to private business

I give you the wisdom of Paul Krugman:

You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work. Think of it as the stimulus equivalent of getting the middlemen out of the student loan program.

So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not the solution, even when it is, you know, the solution, and cheaper than running things through the private sector.

Still, it might be worth discussing whether we shouldn’t try to include an, um, public option in stimulus, too.

We could probably more easily solve local conundrums like what to do with the Nashville fairgrounds with a federally-funded work force of architects, engineers and construction teams that could renovate that public space and build something on the scale of Fair Park in Dallas (which was mostly built by WPA and CCC workers before 1936 and includes one of the most extensive collections of existing historic art deco buildings anywhere) with of course a local and up-to-date posture.

Obama's Recovery Act continues to sell off public services to private companies

Some researchers matched the Recovery.gov list of contractors to the membership list of the Professional Services Council, the trade association for the federal outsourcing industry, to see if the Obama administration continues to promote past tendencies toward privatization. While they didn't find Bush-preferred private contractors Kellogg, Brown, & Root (of Halliburton infamy) or Blackwater (now renamed Xe Services), they did find CACI along with many others. Their latest tally is 470 privatizing contracts worth about $3.5 billion.

I guess change has come and gone.

Council approves continuance of anti-family, pro-criminal, racial-profiling Sheriff's Office program

And 34 council members provide vote coverage for 3 others to symbolically oppose the resolution. I say "symbolically," because I'm pretty sure that the opponents would vote "yea" if their votes had actually been the determining ones to accept free money from the federal government to fund the Sheriff's Office.

Brooksley Born's warnings ignored by Clinton, Bush, & Obama at America's peril

Did you see Frontline tonight on the low level Washington bureaucrat who took on the White House titans to try to regulate the "dark market" derivatives of banking but lost? Her loss in 1998 became America's loss in 2007.

The entire Frontline episode can be seen after the jump.

Do you believe coal ash has safe benefits without neutral oversight?

Federal Action Prompting Metro Action on "Livability"?

Might the Mayor's Office be seeing what's happening in the Obama administration and appointing a local livability task force to be in position for federal money if the national task force makes it available?

As the White House plots a long-term sustainability and resource-management course, with a "livable communities" initiative among top presidential priorities in the 2010 FY budget, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will work through a joint task force to involve the public in planning, expand transportation alternatives and transit-oriented development, and provide less costly housing near jobs, while coordinated federal investments in livability will encourage urban regions to create and follow integrated housing, land-use and transportation plans.

"Livability incorporates the concept of collaborative decision-making," said Secretary LaHood in testimony before the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, noting that the new congressional transportation funding act also opens up an opportunity to recast the federal transportation policy and address housing and land-use concerns.

Secretary Donovan, observes E & E Daily reporter Josh Voorhees, said the combined DOT-HUD task force will work out federal housing-affordability measures that will include transportation, energy and other costs, to inform consumers and enable the market to price housing accordingly

We should keep an eye on how pie-in-the-sky intentions about livability start to unfold in real local communities. A little vigilance over whether the local Livability Task Force really listens to neighborhoods or is merely an exercise in pumping federal money into developers' pockets wouldn't be a bad idea either.

The Declining Significance of Change

What we have to show for our misplaced hope in the last presidential election:

Reform of financial practices and regulations [of Wall Street] has not taken place. Federal regulators have been feuding over turf. Big financial houses are still designing and selling risky derivatives .... only a few of the generally unregulated hedge funds have closed. Pay on Wall Street is almost back to normal. (The 30,000 Goldman Sachs employees will each earn an average $700,000 this year; senior executives will reap multi-millions again in salary and bonus.)

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, White House economic czar Larry Summers, and others have cautioned that we should not dampen the initiative (some would call them "animal spirits") of financial leaders by limiting their compensation. I have worked over the years with several of the Wall Streeters involved; mainly I see them as greedy predators unable to see beyond themselves.

There is a sense of entitlement among these highly paid Wall Streeters — one that Geithner, at the New York Fed before becoming Treasury Secretary, came to accept as normal. If you asked the Masters, they would tell you that they deserve every penny of their compensation and that the shattered lives and lost businesses, savings, and jobs of ordinary citizens have nothing to do with them.

Looks like the extension of the Bush White House by other means. No matter how much we wanted Dubya to go away, he just keeps coming back in the form of Barack Obama's Bush-lite economic policies. The big fear before the last election was that John McCain was warmed-over Dubya, and yet, are we in a vastly different spot policy-wise than we would have been had Obama lost?

Obama White House Still Not Proactive on Urban Policy

The Obama Administration continues to react to questions about its commitment to cities, rather than advancing proactive urban policies. As always, DMI Blog is all over the laggardly White House.

In the meantime, transitional urban neighborhoods are bearing the brunt of the economic malaise.

Does This Inspire Your Confidence in Newspapers?

The mainstream media is already deciding who will be at the health care reform table and, according to Bill Moyers, it ain't going to be you or me:

The publisher of THE WASHINGTON POST, Katharine Weymouth — one of the most powerful people in the nation's capital — invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.

But she then invited CEOs and lobbyists from the health care industry to come, too — providing they fork over $25,000 a head, or a quarter of a million if they want to sponsor a whole series of these cozy little get-togethers. And what is the inducement she offers them? Nothing less than — and I'm quoting the invitation verbatim — "An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." The invitation reminds the CEOs and lobbyists that they will be buying access to "those powerful few in business and policy making who are forwarding, legislating, and reporting on the issues."

Remember, the invitation promises this private, intimate, and off-the-record dinner is an extension "of THE WASHINGTON POST brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard."

Let that sink in. The "stakeholders" in health care reform in this case do not include the rabble — the folks across the country who actually need quality health care but can't afford it. If any of them showed up at the kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, a bouncer would drop kick them beyond the beltway.

Is it any wonder that alternative sources of information like blogs are so popularly followed when newspaper publishers tend to show themselves so unreliable? How can we possibly trust the fourth estate when they put themselves in bed with power-brokers and sell their influence to king-makers?

Two of Tennessee's Neighbors Wasted Stimulus by Juicing the Competition

The need for federal oversight and regulation continues. Progressive States Network's Nathan Newman cites the worst examples of states using federal assistance to overpay for jobs and steal them from other states:

• A multi-state bidding war for a battery production consortium ended up with Kentucky offering $200 million to subsidize a 2,000-worker facility at a cost of $100,000 per job.
• Georgia paid $100 million to NCR to move its 1250-person headquarters from Dayton, Ohio - its home for 125 years - down to an Atlanta suburb.

In the absence of fiscal restraint at the state level, it would be nice if federal regulators would step in to stop the carnage. It is federal money, after all.