That subject line comes from the email that Internal Affairs detective Chris Dunn, who was investigating the shooting of Nathaniel Sanders, sent when he figured out that he could use Sanders’ prior criminal history to justify the fact that APD shot the 18 year old young man while every officer on the scene had apparently forgotten to turn on their dashboard camera.

Which, as Chief Acevedo said, raises a few red flags, as IA’s job isn’t to be scary-smart about “making a causation” that excuses a shooting, it’s to investigate the truth of what happened. If Internal Affairs is on the record as trying to provide justifications when the police, um, shoot young black teenagers with no evidence of wrongdoing, then it surely does a bit of damage to their credibility as an institution.

Luckily, Acevedo agrees, and the detective was fired yesterday. But isn’t it kind of disturbing that we have to consider the facts that A) the memo leaked and B) Acevedo responded correctly to be luck?

Labels: APD, art acevedo, nathaniel sanders II, police violence

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Steven Hirsch is a photographer in New York City. He’s got a blog called Courthouse Confessions where he interviews defendants leaving the courthouse, along with a (really nice, incidentally) photo portrait. It’s a pretty remarkable project for a few reasons, but my favorite thing about it is that it imposes no judgment – he doesn’t inject his own viewpoint or statistics or any of the stuff that you’ll often see with projects like this. The subjects speak for themselves.

I think what I really like about that approach is that it doesn’t treat people like anything other than individual human beings who are fully capable of assessing their own circumstances, and drawing their own conclusions. We talk at Sumpter & Gonzalez often about allowing a client’s integrity to come through, and how we want to represent the good in people. Sometimes it’s the state that doesn’t want to see the client as human, or that wants to deny that they’re all normal people with their own sense of integrity, but that also gets stripped away when you reduce a person to the statistics about incarceration, or a horror story about the conditions in a given facility, or even the way that the state shafted someone. The person becomes incidental, and the system becomes the focus. There’s a place for that, for sure, but it’s good to see a project like Hirsch’s give people the opportunity to stand up for themselves.

Here’s Steven, one of my favorites:

They're definitely a status symbol. Not that that's what I'm going for but they definitely give you the idea that the person was in fact in jail, the person was in fact incarcerated. Definitely. Definitely. As well as the shoes and my lack of a belt also; all of it gives you you know. Someone would see me and it gives you off the jump that I came from jail.

[…]

These are actually jail issued sneakers that you get because when you enter the jail your property is taken and your sneakers are taken. People argue about who has the better sneakers and people are getting hurt and even killed over the issue of sneakers they come in jail with. I might have a $145 pair and you might have a $20 pair and might decide you might want my $145 pair and I might need to fight. The sad thing is as that as time go on I don't want to say it became a fad, it became a style. It became kind of like automatic you might have to fight for your sneakers, which is usually the first thing another inmate might try to take from you. They might ask you nicely first, "let me get those. Let me give you a couple of soups, which only cost 35 cents." Let me give you some of my commissary for your sneakers, you know.Me personally I'm actually happy that you don't have to come in with your own sneakers, that you can have jail issued. It's kind of like a uniform in a way. That's one less thing to argue about. I think it was a good idea.

Labels: public perception, standing up for people

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