printThe left sees the world through the prism of faction; facts are expected to align themselves accordingly. Thus to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, the central issue in the kidnapping and accidental recovery of “Cleveland’s lost girls” is society’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against women. The state’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against and indifference to its citizens—that doesn’t feature.
True to type, CNN Erin Burnett didn’t push the bureaucrat she interviewed too hard, today, when he insisted conveniently that the perp, Ariel Castro, 52—who had kidnapped and raped Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23 and Michelle Knight, 32, and imprisoned them for about a decade—ought to be the focus of ire, and not the police department.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
By the way, if Castro is on suicide watch for some strange reason, BBC News’ Tara McKelvey should be on loon watch. She is busy breaking down the amount of attention the victims got from authorities and media based on the color of their skin. (The truth: Michelle Knight, whom I believe is white—she vanished in 2002—got almost no attention.)
“Ignoring adult missing persons reports seems to have been a de facto departmental policy [in Cleveland] for many years,” reports Slate’s Justin Peters, who, like most liberals, blames budgetary cuts (no amount of taxpayer money is ever enough for these people), rather than the state’s inability to allocate resources efficiently, and with the aim of pleasing “clients,” as the private sector is forced to do.
Government outfits organize around the optimization of the political needs of union members and other sectional interests. It’s the nature of the bureaucratic beast. The needs of the communities they are supposed to serve come last.
Writes Mark Naymik, of The Plain Dealer:
…the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests.
These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.
On Tuesday, I talked with a couple of community activists with years of perspective on police response to the missing persons: Delores Walton and Ruth Standiford. They hound police and are frequent critics as members of the Task Force for Community Mobilization and Peace in the Hood.
UPDATED I: Michael Maier on Facebook: Yes. Community policing was the way it once was when I was a kid (you knew your local policeman). But as the communities cops must police have become more “diverse” and menacing, and less recognizable, police, understandably, prefer to stay way.
UPDATED II: On Police efforts Via PBS:
RAY SUAREZ: There was a steady drumbeat of stories coming out of that West Cleveland neighborhood talking about attempts to tell the police over the years, attempts to report Ariel Castro for various infractions.
Did the police handle that today in the press conference?
PETER KROUSE: I did not hear the entire press conference, but I believe they did say that they did everything they could.
In fact, yes, I know they did. They said that they investigated every lead that they knew of. And I know we have reported in The Plain Dealer a lot of the efforts that they went to, to try and find these girls. One of the officials said that, in hindsight, you know, they may discover that there was something that they missed, but that it would be hindsight. It was not — it wasn’t anything that they could pinpoint.
These cases — at least in the case of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, the two who were abducted as teenagers, those cases were pretty well publicized. And the efforts by the police to find some answers were pretty well publicized, too.