Chicago Public Schools provides "safe passage" maps for school kids...

... to help them deal with new school assignments after the closing of 47 schools and to soothe parental worries about children crossing rival gang territories and vacant buildings and lots.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said... “This is nothing new.... Kids have been crossing gang lines for years to go to school. We have a program in place that’s very clearly worked. We’re doing more of it this year based upon the school closings."...

Because so many schools closed this year, CPS added nearly $8 million to the program and is hiring an additional 600 people to escort students along designated safety routes....

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27-year-old Madison man faces reality and takes action.

So there you are, sitting on your own front porch, working on your laptop, and...

1. A stranger comes up on the porch? What do you do?

2. He sits down next to you? What do you do?

3. He asks you for a cigarette? What do you do?

4. He grabs your laptop and runs? Now what?

In this case, the man did nothing at #1 and #2, and at #3, just said he didn't have any cigarettes. At #4, the man gave chase, tackled the thief, and got the computer back.

Now, next time, don't let a stranger come up on your porch, and whenever you're anywhere in public with your laptop, expect thieves.

I am nostalgic for a culture of front porches, where residents meet the world and chat with passing strangers, but in this vision, no stranger comes up on the porch without invitation. Anyone crossing the sidewalk/porch line has stepped out of The Dream of Yesterday and into They're All Out to Get You. That is, I'm a liberal while you're on the sidewalk, but step onto the porch and I'm a right-winger.

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Why is Madison police chief Nobel Wray retiring?

The report in the Wisconsin State Journal ties the retirement to the shooting of Paul Heenan:

Wray and the department have taken much criticism following the shooting of Heenan, who was intoxicated when he entered a neighbor’s home, then struggled with the homeowner and an officer responding to a reported burglary in process. The department and Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne cleared Officer Stephen Heimsness of wrongdoing in the shooting, but Heimsness later agreed to resign from the department after Wray sought to fire him for unrelated allegations.

The U.S. Justice Department is now reviewing the shooting, and Heenan’s roommates are pursuing a complaint against Heimsness with the Police and Fire Commission.

This is connected to union problems:

Wray has disputed claims by the police union that the department suffers from a lack of communication and leadership and a deteriorated working environment. Those tensions came to light after Wray filed a complaint against Heimsness with the Police and Fire Commission alleging 118 counts of violating departmental policies, many having to do with comments Heimsness made about citizens, dispatchers, supervisors and fellow officers on his squad car computer.

In a July 2 letter to Mayor Paul Soglin, Officer Dan Frei, president of the Madison Professional Police Officers Association, asked Soglin to work with the union and Wray to improve the climate and working culture.

Here's the discussion in the forum at Isthmus (which was on fire over the Heenan shooting). Crockett wrote:

You don't touch the blue line without getting zapped. The article makes it sound like the union didn't like Wray airing dirty laundry.

Green union terrace chair said:

As soon as the story broke about the chief and the police union boss going to the mayor to ask for help in implementing institutional change, I knew this would be the result.

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"This is the inspiring story of Hafid from Dubai, the douchebag who stole my phone."

"He forgot to switch off the camera upload function, that's why we will enjoy a deep insight into his life. Start below."

(More here.)

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"A luxury toilet controlled by a smartphone app is vulnerable to attack, according to security experts."

"An attacker could simply download the My Satis application and use it to cause the toilet to repeatedly flush, raising the water usage and therefore utility cost to its owner.... Attackers could [also] cause the unit to unexpectedly open/close the lid, activate bidet or air-dry functions, causing discomfort or distress to [the] user."

So the toilet is not just vulnerable to attack. The toilet can itself attack.

The article, at BBC.com quotes a security expert named Graham Cluley saying "it's hard to imagine how serious hardened cybercriminals would be interested in this security hole." Cluley is a sly one with the double entendre. BBC needs to get a clue(ly).

Anyway, I'm picturing a future where all the things in the house come alive, seemingly with a mind of their own. I'm picturing Tommy Toilet.

It's hard to imagine anyone coming after you through your toilet, but that only amplifies the creepiness of anyone who would.

And what's "Satis" supposed to mean? Short for "satisfaction"? A reference to the cult of deification of the floods of the Nile River in Egyptian mythology? A reference to the home of Miss Havisham, the extremely disappointed rich lady in "Great Expectations"? Oddly, all 3 of those things seem to make sense with respect to the fancy schmancy toilet.

Pip: 'Is Manor House the name of this house, miss?'
Est.: 'One of its names, boy.'
Pip.: 'It has more than one, then, miss?'
Est.: 'One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three—or all one to me—for enough.'
Pip: 'Enough House,' said I; 'that's a curious name, miss.'
Est.: 'Yes,' she replied; 'but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. [...]'

 Tommy Toilet sez, "Had enough?"

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I ask Glenn Loury if he thinks it was a mistake to select the George Zimmerman case to be a racial cause célèbre?

It takes a while to get to the point here, but that's part of what makes it so fascinating. Take a look:



ADDED: Here's a pithy minute of response to the question:

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A much-criticized WaPo headline: "What motivates a lawyer to defend a Tsarnaev, a Castro or a Zimmerman?"

That still runs atop an article by lawprof Abbe Smith which explains the role of the defense lawyer within the criminal justice system. The explanation is familiar to anyone who's considered the topic beyond the shallowest level, but the article appears in the Washington Post because of all the attention to the Zimmerman trial, which explains the presence of the acquitted neighborhood watchman alongside the names of the evil Castro and the accused terrorist Tsarnaev.

The headline drew fire. At Breitbart.com: "the Washington Post outlandishly sought to equate the acquitted Robert [sic] Zimmerman to accused serial rapist Ariel Castro and Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." At Instapundit: "Which one of these things is not like the others?... 'Tsarnaez = Castro = Zimmerman? Why not just throw in a Hitler? That’s usually how the question is posed at cocktail parties.'"

So look at how this article is teased on the front page at WaPo right now:



Quick! Roll out the Kaczynski!

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"I’m just asking you to wrap your mind around that, wrap your mind around: No prom for Trayvon."

"No high school graduation for Trayvon. No college for Trayvon. No grandkids coming from Trayvon, all because of a law, a law that has prevented the person who shot and killed my son to be held accountable and to pay for his awful crime."

That's terribly sad, but what law? George Zimmerman was acquitted because of the due process law that requires the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and I don't think Trayvon Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton means to attack that law. There's something sickening about seeing this poor woman wheeled about in her tragedy to mouth words of attack on the Stand Your Ground law that had nothing to do with Zimmerman's acquittal. Subjectively, perhaps Ms. Fulton gets satisfaction, but those who are using her should be identified, shamed, and denounced.

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"A crowbar, a candle, stale bread, dried beans, an iron spike, a drill, a stick with a cloth on the end of it, a bag of sand – and crucially, a tortoise."

The toolkit of a "secretive and highly organised group of medieval burglars" called The Banu Sasan.

"The tortoise is employed thus. The burglar has with him a flint-stone and a candle about as big as a little finger. He lights the candle and sticks it on the tortoise’s back. The tortoise is then introduced through the breach into the house, and it crawls slowly around, thereby illuminating the house and its contents."

Once the tortoise had been set up, the burglar employed his bag of sand to check for sleeping inhabitants elsewhere in the house. He would throw out handfuls of sand at intervals, and if no one stirred he entered the house.... [T]he burglar might chew noisily on some stale bread and beans to impersonate a cat eating a rat or mouse so as not alarm any sleeping people in the house.

That worked in the Middle Ages, apparently, when people practiced the art of sleeping through the maraudings of mice.

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"Harassment with a Dead Squirrel."

"A Priem Road resident complained July 15 about an ongoing dispute with her neighbor that escalated into dead squirrel-throwing. The woman said she saw a dead squirrel -- decomposing and covered in maggots -- in the neighbor's yard. The next day, she found in under her kids' swingset. She flung it back over into the neighbor's yard, then called police to document the situation."

Police news, from Strongsville (Ohio).

ADDED: I forgot to check the "no comments" button, and a bunch of comments flowed into the moderation bag. Who knew so many people, so quickly, would want to talk about a dead squirrel? Yes, it's a very exciting dead squirrel, what with all the maggots and the irate neighborliness. The longtime high-quality good-faith commenter Madison Man said:

The soon-to-be-famous Dead Squirrel Exception to the no-comment policy? Non-human animals are known to carry carcasses. The only person in this story known to have moved the corpse is the complainant.

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Biking in Madison.

I walked downtown to meet Meade at Graze for brunch, where I had what I'd had yesterday as well, the corned beef hash. Outside the restaurant, some dumb/inconsiderate bikers U-locked their bikes to a struggling sapling. How hard would it be for a thief to saw through that tree (or even to break it off)?



Meade had his mountain bike from a long morning ride, and I got a B-Cycle for the ride along the lake path and back home



Meade stowed his bike, then rode the B-Cycle back to the nearest kiosk — at the Natatorium —  and I got in the car and drove over to pick him up, so we could go to Whole Foods and load up on supplies so we could get back to making breakfast at home.

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Up on the roof.

1. Male on female.

2. Female on male.

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The Romanian woman who burned a Monet, a Matisse, a Gauguin, and a Picasso.

It's possible that those bits of cinnabar, chromium green, lazurite, and tin-lead yellow found in Olga Dogaru's wood-burning stove are not what's left of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paintings for which her son was arrested for stealing from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. But why lie and say you burned them? And yet, why burn them and not lie?

If you're hardcore enough to burn these things, why are you not hardcore enough to lie to the police?

Who knows what techniques the police in Romania use to extract confessions? It's one thing to crush fine art into the incinerator one night in a desperate frenzy, quite another to hold up to endless questioning. The impulse to have it over explains the burning and the confessing. It's not hardcore to burn and then not to lie. It's the weak combination. To resist destroying the evidence of your son's crimes because the art is beautiful and then also to resist the demands from the police for confession — that is the strong combination. That is hardcore.

The more mundane combinations are: 1. Burn the paintings and lie about it, and 2. Don't burn the paintings and, when confronted by the police, rat on your son. These 2 options are easiest to understand. #1 is the criminal mind, the sociopath. #2 is the virtuous person. These are the familiar and conventional types.

In her statement to the police, Mrs. Dogaru said she panicked when she realized the works would be used as evidence against her son. With officers combing the village, she told the authorities that she had looked frantically for places to hide the works, which were all in a large plastic bag.

She hid them in various places, including her sister’s home and her garden. Then, she said, she buried them at the village cemetery.... Fearful that the works could still be discovered... Mrs. Dogaru said she lighted a fire in the stove and went to the cemetery to get the works. “I put the whole package with the seven paintings, without even opening it, into the stove, and then placed over them some wood and my plastic slippers and waited for them to fully burn,” she said. “The next day I cleaned the stove, took out the ash and placed it in the garden, in a wheelbarrow.”

Congratulations to the police who extracted this confession? No. The police are to blame for arresting Dogaru the son, unleashing he mother Dogaru.

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"Why are black boys expendable?" is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

But when I click through the link, I just find a column (by Eugene Robinson) that portrays the verdict in the George Zimmerman case to mean: "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent."

Legally, that makes no sense. If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure Robinson knows that, which is why he said "Our society considers" instead of sticking to the confines of court procedure, even as he appropriated the legal lingo of burden of proof.

If the legal doctrine that governed the jury's decision-making precludes the interpretation that the jury found Trayvon Martin to be dangerous, interchangeable, and expendable, what is the basis for the assertion that our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable? Robinson's next sentence is "This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid."

Okay, let me attempt that conversation, Mr. Robinson.

Here's my response to what you just said. I think our society demonstrated great care toward Trayvon Martin, even to the point of putting Zimmerman through a trial that should not have happened. That is, it was an excess of care for Martin, a bending-over-backwards to show that we care about Martin and all the young men he was seen to represent. And now, after an extensive, careful trial, and a jury verdict that clearly hewed to well-honed instructions about evidence and burden of proof, you still want to use it to assert that we don't care. If that's the kind of conversation we get when we try to respond to the invitation to have a conversation, can you see why it's something we avoid?

Now, just there, I did not avoid. I tried to be game about conversation, and I said what I truly think, which is probably what other conversation-about-race avoiders think. If you really mean "conversation," then let's continue, with a fair response to that. If what you really mean by "conversation" is let me lecture you until you humbly accede, then could you please stop calling it a "conversation"?

Reading further into the article, I see I've got to take back my overly optimistic statement "I'm sure Robinson knows that." I'm not sure, because to say I believe that Robinson knows that — "If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent" — is to say that Robinson is deliberately deceiving when he writes:

The assumption underlying [the jury's] ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin — young, male, black — did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin — young, male, black — would not.

That assumption is either ignorant or shamefully deceptive. The accused is the one whose rights are systematically protected in the criminal process. Is that too boring? Ho-hum?! Ho-hum for all the rights of the criminally accused! Even if all Robinson cares about is how young black males are treated, young black males — the ones that still live — need these rights too. If the police — who had already been called — had arrived before Zimmerman saw fit to shoot his gun, if they had caught Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman, pinning him down, and knocking his head into concrete, they would have arrested Martin, and Martin would have benefited from those rights you think are ho-hum when they protect Zimmerman.

So there, I've now said 2 things in the "conversation" Robinson wants to have. And I'll say one more, and it's why I found the front-page teaser "Why are black boys expendable?" heart-wrenching. It's because so many young black males do end up shot dead or in prison. Can we talk about that? Or are must we fixate on the one young black male selected to be the conversation piece?

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"Prediction: the Zimmerman verdict will lead to amendments to penal codes across the country to make it easier for prosecutors to win convictions..."

"... causing even more blacks to be incarcerated."

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"O'Mara, who has no burden of proof says he will prove that his client is 100% innocent."

"Pretty risky tactic," says TalkLeft.

The closing argument is in progress right now, and even though George Zimmerman's lawyer said that, I can safely predict that when he gets to the end of his 3-hour lecture, he will assert that he has proved that his client is 100% innocent and yet your task as jurors is not to determine whether he's absolutely 100% innocent or even probably innocent or even probably guilty but only whether you have a reasonable doubt that he's guilty.

Surely, once you accept what the burden of proof is, the case becomes easy. I watched most of the prosecutor's closing argument yesterday, and he was acting like a defense lawyer punching holes in Zimmerman's version of the story. He created — in my mind — a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman acted in self-defense.

O'Mara can say: I've just obliterated any doubt Mr. de la Rionda might have created in your minds, and that would be enough for me to win now if I had the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. There isn't even a reasonable doubt that my client acted in self-defense. And yet the prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not act in self-defense.

All the uproar about race is overwhelmed by the more mundane criminal process matter of burden of proof. I hope the general public understands that to acquit Zimmerman is not to say that Trayvon Martin is guilty — or even that he did anything wrong. It could be that each man misperceived the other and felt that his life was threatened. I understand the feeling that since Martin paid with his life for that mistake that Zimmerman should also pay, just to square it up. But that feeling can't rule the criminal process.

I hope the media help people to understand that and to calm the turmoil that this case has caused.

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Violent crime in Milwaukee up 5% in the first half of 2013 — mostly because of robberies, which are up almost 20%.

But overall crime is down 8%, because of a decrease in property crimes.

This seems to mean the thieves of Milwaukee have decided it's easier to confront people on the street than to break into their homes, but why would such a sudden shift in preference occur? Writing that question, I pictured the classic robber pointing a gun at a guy in a your-money-or-your-life scenario, but, reading further, I see it's all about the smartphones. Folks on the street with their iPhones on display are conspicuous targets, and all the thief needs to do is grab it and run. The solution to this big spike in robberies is for the damned phones to be designed to be utterly unusable if stolen. Or unusual except for one thing: to lead the police to the thief.

But if property crimes are down, maybe the stealable iPhone problem isn't a problem at all. Maybe the good people of Milwaukee and elsewhere are better off having the thieves running around outside, snatching smartphones, instead of breaking into houses. But how long can that go on? At some point, no one will display a phone in public. You may think: Great! Another nonproblem. I'm sick of these idiots who walk around texting and fiddling with apps.

But the police in Milwaukee are acting like they are doing something about the smartphone theft problem, which isn't all mere snatching, and does include armed robbery. One idea is: Teach citizens to use passwords and tracking apps. (If we use tracking apps, will they really expend resources going after the robbers? Or are the tracking apps just supposed to deter robbers?) The other idea:

Investigators also are focusing on local stores that are reselling stolen phones to try to cut off a secondary market....

That sounds so lame: focusing. Show me the prosecutions.

Mayor Tom Barrett [said he] was pleased that the number of crime victims was down. But he said he was concerned about a robbery increase.

Pleased and concerned. Again, lame. (Barrett, by the way, is the Democratic politician who lost to Governor Walker in the 2010 election and then, a year and a half later, lost to him again in the recall election.)

Tony Gibson, a member of the Johnsons Park Neighborhood Association, said the Police Department had informed neighborhood groups of crime trends during monthly meetings.

"It takes a lot of involvement from residents, from everyday folks" to work with police, plan community programs and keep crime down, Gibson said.

So you want people to pitch in with the neighborhood watch type activities that we've seen condemned in the overwhelming assault on George Zimmerman? Good luck eliciting that sort of community service. It's been smeared in the press as the pastime of racist wannabe cops.

What I learned from reading this article:

It's a good thing that Tom Barrett lost the 2010 election to Scott Walker, because Barrett, unlike Walker, would have taken the federal money to build a high speed train line between Madison and Milwaukee, and we the people of Madison are not going to be wanting to go to Milwaukee these days, because you can't toddle around the streets gazing into your iPhone there. 

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"The Zimmerman trial says a lot about race in America — just not what the mainstream media want the story to be."

"Look at the residents of this 'gated community' who lived just in that one spot.  It is more diverse than a Democrat photo-op.  This neighborhood had young and old, Asians and blacks and whites and Hispanics all living next to each other in peace, but needing a gates and a neighborhood watch to protect themselves from outsiders."

A Reader — initials S.C. — emails.

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Prisoners on cellphones blab incriminating statements — even though they know they're being monitored and recorded.

"It’s a bizarre thing.... Most of the time, they’re using code words they don’t think the listener will understand.... But when you listen long enough, you get to know their patterns and understand the code.”

Quotes from the indictment show gang members using slang like “skat” and “toy” on the phone in a bid to hide the fact they’re talking about guns.

How long did they have to listen to figure that out? On the other hand, if that's so stupid, why haven't the authorities crushed these gangs by now?

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"Why Zimmerman’s Motion for Acquittal Should Have Been Granted..."

Andrew Branca explains in detail.

Less detailed is this ABC News piece that is linked in the prime spot at Drudge: "Analysis: George Zimmerman Probably Won't Be Convicted of Murder or Manslaughter -- Here's Why."

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