Matthew Richmond

ARRESTS MADE IN SILVER LAKE ROBBERIES

2009-02-12T17:15:06Z

Police and city officials announced Tuesday the arrest of two male juveniles in connection with the recent string of armed robberies in Silver Lake and Echo Park. The suspects, 15 and 16-year-old residents of East Hollywood, may be involved in the cluster of four robberies that occurred near the corner of Rowena and Hyperion Blvd., said Capt. Bill Murphy, commanding officer of the Northeast Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

]]> Murphy added that there is no evidence that the robberies were hate crimes, targeted at gay men, as some local residents suspect.

"The only commonality is that [the victims] were single males," said Murphy.

Tuesday's news conference came after a month of heightened concerns among residents in Silver Lake and Echo Park. There were ten robberies, four near the corner of Rowena and Hyperion in Silver Lake and six near the corner of Alvarado and Sunset in Echo Park, since Dec. 31. Each incident included bodily force, with one victim going to the hospital with a broken jaw.

Undercover police officers were able to figure out the identities of the suspects in two of the robberies before making Saturday's arrest, said Murphy. Officers familiar with the suspects' gang searched for them on Saturday night, arresting six men in the street that night, said Murphy during the press conference.

Two of the men arrested were booked on weapons charges, two were released and two are the Silver Lake suspects. Police also connected the suspects to a recent robbery in Rampart Division.

"They were mobile, they were out looking for victims," said Murphy.

After the arrest, the officers obtained a search warrant for the suspects' residence. There they found guns, knives, stolen Ipods and cell phones. The confiscated items were displayed during Tuesday's press conference. The cell phones were used by police to trace the suspects back to the Silver Lake robberies, said Murphy.

Murphy added that the six robberies in Echo Park are most likely the work of a different gang. All ten of the robbery cases are considered open, said Murphy.

Also at the press conference were L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge and City Council President Eric Garcetti. Both commended the work of the police and both encouraged residents to refrain from listening to their Ipods or talking on their cell phones when out late at night.

LaBonge added that an LAPD detective once said there are only two kinds of people out after midnight: cops and criminals.

The councilman went on the say that he thought minors should be off the street late at night. "A curfew should be enforced in Los Angeles," said LaBonge.

All but one of the ten robberies occurred after midnight.

Did he really say that?

2008-11-16T18:08:09Z

George Bush sat down at the G20 Summit and expressed his confidence in unfettered

markets, Tony Blair has been hanging out in Rwanda and summed up the way development

in Africa should be done and there's an ongoing, nasty argument between a "new media guru"

named Jeff Jarvis and Slate's Ron Rosenbaum, that has spilled over into a general discussion

about the new media vs old media and the failings of representatives of each side.

These things probably don't have much to do with each other, but they are each examples of

the way some people are looking forward to a new way of doing things and some are dragging

their heels....

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This picture, with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, listening to George Bush with what appears to be more than a hint of disbelief, sums up well the new order growing tired of the old order's claims to authority.

While I don't know what President Bush was saying at the moment this picture was taken, chances are it was along the lines of this quote, "History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market --- but too much."

Lula might have been thinking about the kinds of details that an article on Christian Science Monitor's web site about Brazil's oil company Petrobas, which is controlled by the government but includes private investment, highlights.

Details like how Brazil announced "oil independence" two years ago, how they recently discovered offshore oil fields that could yield 80 billion barrels of oil (the largest discovery in this hemisphere in a generation, according to the CSM article) and the technology used to extract it will be manufactured entirely within Brazil may have produced a feeling in him along the lines of:

Why are we even listening to you anymore?

One of the topics that I'm most interested in is development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Tony Blair, who has offered himself as an adviser to Rwandan president Paul Kigame, said recently during a visit to the country:

"There must be capacity built in the country to sustain itself. Development today is not about multiple negotiations between aid recipient executives and their donor counterparts talking big figures of funds."

Of course, "sustainablity" has always been the buzzword of development, but it's always been a goal, something, for decades now, to write into applications for aid. To hear a leader say that "development today" is moving past direct foreign aid is an overdue change.

Not too long ago, we heard so much about an end to poverty, as envisioned by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia. His plan was based, in part, on the assumption that "people are poor because they lack productivity." So, give some technology to farmers to increase their yields, they make more money at market, then they re-invest it in their farms.

An article in the Wahington Post looked at Sachs' grand plan for poverty, which involved huge amounts of foreign aid, and asked the very simple and very important question: How would your plan work if the $2.3 trillion in foreign aid that has gone to the continent in the last five decades has not worked?

And the response that the problem was just waiting for Jeffrey Sachs to come along doesn't cut it.

While working in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, I heard about his plan and I considered the increased productivity leads to increased prosperity part of it kind of ludicrous. Every market day, I walked with middle-aged women and children, five kilometers down a dirt road to market, with baskets full of corn or potatoes or yams sitting on their heads, hoping that it would be a good day and someone would give them a decent price for what they had. A higher yield was not what they needed.

They needed a government that built decent roads and didn't export all the domestically produced oil so getting to markets in far-off cities is feasible, a government that didn't waste its surplus from the days when Cameroonian coffee was worth something on mansions in Switzerland; it needed a government that didn't siphon aid funds to members of its tribe in the south and center provinces, it needed a government that wasn't constantly bailed out by rich foreign governments.

So, Tony Blair, and a columnist writing for the Times of London know that the days of lavish foreign aid are numbered, as well they should be.

And in my final, and the most entertaining, bit of new vs old news is an online exchange (with an even more lively discussion on the relevant articles' comment sections) between Jeff Jarvis and Ron Rosenbaum.

It starts with Rosenbaum ripping into Jarvis for an article blaming journalists for their demise in the new media age and making fun of him a bit, portraying Jarvis as a huckster and opportunist as he tries to present himself as a new media guru.

Jarvis piles on the umbrage in his initial response, tellingly seeking the counsel of public relations executive Richard Edelman, and then follows it with a more pointed rebuttal of Rosenbaum's article.

Then it moves into the "conversation" part of the online world, eliciting comments from journalists, entrepeneurs and media consumers and this, of course, is the most interesting part. In general, people seem to find Jarvis a bit pompous, but useful, and question Jarvis' assertions that the MSM need to embrace newsroom cuts and become more like tech companies (he has a deep and abiding love for Google) and that Ron Rosenbaum really has no idea what's going on in the online world and should not have made the issue into a personal thing.

It's worth a read.

I wish that Lula and Bush would start posting snippy little jabs about one another on their blogs. Maybe Obama and Sarkozy will get into online tiffs in the coming years.

November 4, 2008

2008-11-09T07:48:33Z

I've got a slide show for you, but the sound's not very good. I think it's worth hearing, maybe you have speakers or headphones, because it's audio from a quick interview I did after Barack Obama was projected as the winner of the election.

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It was a great night to be on Crenshaw Boulevard.

Even though Parks lost, and badly, people at his headquarters were thrilled because of Obama's win. They were mostly middle-aged, politically active African-Americans. Most people I asked said they never thought they would see a black man elected president.

There were guys running through the parking lot of the strip mall chanting "Obama", people were driving down Crenshaw honking their horns and screaming like a party was about to start.

There was roasted pig served in the back lot, a band played and almost everyone cried at some point in the night.

The results of the County Supervisor race weren't in when I left at 10:30 that night. And the results that had come in weren't shared with Parks' supporters before I left. Driving home I heard on the radio that, with 30 percent of the vote counted, Parks was trailing the race against Mark Ridley-Thomas 60 percent to 40.

But that was something of a foregone conclusion. Parks' campaign couldn't compete with the campaign offices, television ads, fliers and workers that Ridley-Thomas brought to the race. The irony of the night and that race was that Parks and his campaign resembled Hillary Clinton's campaign for president and Ridley-Thomas ran a campaign much more like Obama's.

Parks relied on the traditional sources of political power in South Los Angeles. He represented the old political establishment. Ridley-Thomas, in going after new voters and in spending an unprecedented amount of money, ran a modern campaign that proved to be unstoppable.

And Jaime Regalado of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, an expert on South Los Angeles politics, told me that Parks' political lustre was seriously tarnished by the loss he suffered, much more so than after running for mayor.

McCain and the Town Hall

2008-10-12T03:36:08Z

The second presidential debate, held on Tuesday, October 7th, was more of the same. Barack Obama is a calm, logical alternative to disastrous Republican economic and foreign policy. John McCain is a fiery, experienced foreign policy heavyweight who is sure about American exceptionalism.

The one new thing that I came away with is a better understanding of why so many people say that McCain is at his best in the town hall format. He performed much better this time around, didn't come across as so much of an angry little man (could hardly have been worse than the first time) and he was able to counter Obama's reason with a fist-pumping, cheerleading simplicity that, I guess, goes over great among certain voters that I won't pretend to understand.

So, I wonder, why does he bring his A-game to the town hall and not to a regular debate?

When thinking about John McCain, I have only one frame of reference: my nannah.

]]> My grandmother suffers from full-blown dementia. She spends her waking hours doing one of two things.

She can be found either sitting in a chair or going for short walks around the house and down the block and back. When she sits in her chair, she is grumpy, silent and unsure of where she is or the indentities of the people in the room with her (her family and a nurse). When she is walking, she comes to life. She will tell whoever is with her all about the plants in the yard, the members of her family, her goals (which usually include advancement in the Navy and going off to college) and the parties she's planning to throw.

Now, my grandmother is 90-years old, 19 more than John McCain, and McCain obviously does not suffer from full-blown dementia. However, it has been mentioned by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic and other sources that mild cognitive impairment, a potential precursor to Alzheimer's or dementia, is a possible explanation for the many gaffes made by McCain during his campaign. According to a study by the Annals of Internal Medicine, about 22% of Americans over the age of 71 suffer from mild cognitive impairment.

McCain fares so well in town hall meetings because, like my grandmother, if you get him moving he'll come to life. The clip from the debate below (at about the one minute mark, McCain wanders across the stage behind Obama as Obama is speaking) shows McCain's need to keep moving, even while not speaking, and improved responses over the first debate.

Compare McCain's energy in the second debate to his pained, dull and grouchy demeanor in the first debate.

It's all a matter of circulation.

My town

2008-10-05T04:15:30Z

I think Los Angeles looks more like Lagos, Douala or Mexico City than San Francisco, New York or Seattle. It's hard for me to explain to someone who hasn't been to Douala just how much this city is more like one in the developing world or southern hemisphere or whatever term besides third world (societies are not in a race; what we have in this country is not what other countries are working toward; first world and third world are stupid categories) you want to use.

But I'll try.

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Before coming to Los Angeles, I lived in Cameroon for two years. I've lived for three months in Santiago and Temuco, Chile and traveled through Patagonia. I've visited Mexico City and Oaxaca. I've traveled from one end of Gabon to the other. The cities of the developing world were, to me, places to be avoided. Noisy, dirty, full of rude people, poorly planned, dangerous, ugly, sad testaments to the ways the modern world has gone wrong and places that people usually come to out of necessity or circumstance instead of by choice. I've always thought of Los Angeles in the same way.

While collecting the pictures for my slide show, there were two pictures that I saw but couldn't get. The first was coming up from South Los Angeles. I drove up to the Coliseum on game day, after getting pictures I had hoped would convey an American version of tribalism, and crossing the street in front of me was a group of white, black, hispanic and asian people, all dressed in Trojan colors, all walking together to the game. The picture I didn't get. It could have only happened at a sporting event. At least a dozen times, while living in Cameroon, people told me that the only thing holding their country together is soccer.

The other picture that I missed, this time because I couldn't get the camera back out of my bag quickly enough, was a man burning a bit of trash in the gutter in front of his store on Beverly Blvd. Burning trash in the gutter is standard practice in Cameroon, and there it was, right in front of me in Los Angeles.

I know I shouldn't talk about the pictures I didn't get. But I just couldn't resist including those two.

Better than a thousand words

2008-09-28T04:07:35Z

Sunday's debate, despite the bizzare drama leading up to it, was widely described as a tie, as lacking a knockout punch, and free of surprises. Both candidates were themselves, or the candidates they want the people to think they are.

So why such little mention of the behavior of John McCain? Aren't debates mostly a chance to measure the the demeanor, bearing and cool-under-pressure of the candidates?

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What the media, particularly the mainstream media, did not bring up much was how John McCain refused to make eye contact with his opponent (or in the case below, his opponent's wife).

Even when Obama directed his comments to Sen. McCain, he couldn't get even a glance in return.

And, in the analysis, it was the positions and how they contrast (information that has largely been available for a long time) that got all the attention.

An article on Politico sums up the analysis of the men on display. McCain succeeded in presenting himself as an "emphatic, impassioned, even indignant leader" and Obama was "cool and dispassionate".

Andrew Sullivan, writer for The Atlantic, picked it up in his blog, calling McCain's behavior a sign of insecurity.

An article on Newsweek's website, saying that McCain was the victor, mentions his "air of condescension that could turn off some undecideds". So maybe a real conversation about McCain's personality is beneath a sophisticated pundit, it's more for "undecideds" to worry about who else McCain may treat as beneath him and what that says about the man.

Chuck Todd, NBC's chief political director, pulls the same punch. He mentions McCain's "sometimes dismissive treatment of Obama" but his analysis stops at wondering how voters will react.

Some gave it more play, Chris Matthews picked it up immediately and discussed it a bit more. But who takes Chris Matthews seriously anymore? Then there was this from a reader of Talking Points Memo (Josh Marshall checked the reader's university bio, he is who he claims to be):

"I think people really are missing the point about McCain's failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear--look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior--low ranking monkeys don't look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that."

In defense of the rest, maybe it's a requirement of a news professional to focus on what was said (by the way, what about McCain's statement about freezing government spending for everything but the military and veterans or Obama's thoughts on escalating military activities in Pakistan? Those seem to be "newsy" yet didn't get much attention) as opposed to how it was said. And the reactions of voters to the debate as a whole are the news, I suppose.

I'm just glad I have a blog so I can talk about what I thought was most important.

Two Websites

2008-09-21T15:00:00Z

Spinspotter.com and Newstrust.net are intended to help news consumers find their way in an online world with an absurd variety of choices and many examples of shoddy journalism trying to pass itself off as legitimate.

]]> Spinspotter watches the news that you read. The toolbar, watching you everywhere you go, has options for marking spin in the news stories that you read; it tells you if the article includes spin marked by other users; it offers specific criteria for bad reporting. And there is a mention of an algorithm that detects spin. oh my, how futuristic.

The site is new, apparently, and no spin came up (even in the NYT political articles that I looked at) when I visited sites. But it's a clever tool and it could add to a news consumer's ability to interpret the news.

It may try to go too far in its thoroughness. I don't really need to have every adjective in a news article flagged for me. I wouldn't ever want to mark every little bit of less-than rigorous reporting in an article.

The Journalism Advisory Board includes a balanced mix of liberal and conservative. The political beliefs of the journalists involved are prominently displayed. I'm not sure why this matters, spin is spin, the point is that a journalist should adhere to professional standards regardless of political beliefs. But I guess this balance instills trust.

What scares me is the number of people included in the site's group of advisers that have backgrounds in either marketing or at Microsoft. What's the angle with this site? How do they plan to make money off it? And why would I want to give them a toolbar, let their algorithms into my home? Public interest, eh?

The second site, NewsTrust, is a news aggregator that ranks articles based on user reviews. It's organized well, by types of media, news vs. opinion, and by topics and sub-topics. It's a handy tool for browsing the news of the day.

This site is more to the liberal side. Content from AlterNet, Common Dreams and Democracy Now does not appear to be balanced by content from WorldNetDaily, the Media Research Center or CNSNews.com. And, aside from Roland F. Hirsch's voice in the pinko wilderness, the reviewers tend to prefer stories that lean to the left.

One site can't be everything to every body. But wouldn't it be nice to see the way the other side sees things a bit more often.

I thought, when first coming to NewsTrust, that I didn't need to have my hand held as I consumed the news; I knew where to get it and how to evaluate it, thank you very much. After 45 minutes hopping from articles in the Columbia Journalism Review to opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal to stories from the Independent, I found that I do appreciate the help.

Positive Polarization

2008-09-14T15:00:00Z

All these years I have wandered in the darkness, lost and frustrated, and tonight, before my eyes, a light has appeared in the woods. That light is known to us mortals as Patrick J. Buchanan.

He speaks:

The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes--the liberal media elite who savagely "Bork" every true conservative who gets on the path to national power--has been reignited. Positive polarization has been achieved.

]]> I admit my new Papa Bear is a bit behind-the-curve on a few topics, I can't agree with him when he calls Barack Obama's March 18, 2008 speech on race "the same old shakedown" that "black hustlers use". But when it comes to winner-take-all politics, he knows what he's talking about.

Buchanan wrote the famous speech given by Spiro Agnew in 1969; he described television network commentators as biased and an "unelected elite". And so a useful plank was born.

As Michael Brendan Dougherty talks Republican strategy in another enlightening post,this one on the website for The American Conservative, "No candidate is ever going to 'make us feel different about one another'. But one candidate usually reminds us of how we really do feel about one another. And that candidate usually wins".

Positive polarization. The Sarah Palin saga has worked to this end perfectly. Maybe it was a Republican operative who planted the post that ignited all this; the one suggesting that Sarah Palin's baby was actually her daughter's. Why not?

The "attacks" on Palin have allowed her to avoid the media, lest they lead her into the broom closet and rip her limb from limb.

The reaction of Republicans has also, according to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, served to "sort of brush [the press] back, maybe set narrower limits on what we write about."

Not to say that the "media bias" is invented. The perception of media bias is real too. According to a study by American Journalism Review in 2004, only 39 percent of respondents thought the news media tried to report without bias.

David Broder described how it happens from a journalist's point-of-view:

"I often thought, as I saw Romney [George Romney, Republican presidential candidate, 1968, father of Mitt Romney] during the presidential campaign, surrounded by our circle [the press] - men a generation younger than he, many of us with cigarettes in our mouths, drinks in our hands, cynicism in our hearts - that he must have felt as helpless with us as I would feel if my fate or future as a journalist were being decided by a committee of Romney's colleagues among the elders of the Mormon Church."

I wonder if Chris Matthews can skin a moose, I know he'd never make it on an oil rig or be able to clean and filet a chinook.

And the Republicans surely knew when they picked her that the press would jump all over Palin, dig up some relatively minor scandals from her past, question her experience and all of it could easily be used to energize their base: "Come out. Fight with us. End the terrible oppression of the eternally suffering Republican Party!"

In the end, I guess I've learned that men who worked for Richard Nixon know how to play this game. And when politicians start talking about "media bias" again, I'll always think of Patrick J. Buchanan, chuckling and saying under his breath, "I taught them that".

Neutrality and Transparency

2008-09-07T15:00:00Z

Disclaimer: The author is a recovering Catholic anarchist who considers Phil Knight (the founder of Nike) his mortal enemy (he personally sabotaged my first foray into social activism) yet the author recently purchased a pair of Nike shoes and four pairs of Nike socks because they're comfortable, affordable and attractive.

]]> Everybody's got their biases. The ideal of neutrality says that news should be produced without "fear or favor"; that viewpoints and opinions should be left out of news production. Fair enough. But everybody's got a viewpoint, and, like handwriting or the way you walk, it comes out even if you try to hide it.

Maybe it's better to be open about your viewpoint. If you're writing for a paper about an issue in which your paper has a stake, make it very clear to your reader where you're coming from. Besides, it's so easy today to find information; trying to hide a conflict of interest is foolish.

The idea, sanctified by the mainstream media, that they are offering you just the facts is only half the story. Anyone who examines the facts they left out, the stories they skipped, the placement of the stories they included, the attention to details and context, their advertisers, their parent companies, etc. can come away feeling bamboozled.

So transparency attempts to rectify the shortcomings of the old ideal. Nobody can get to every story nor can they give what you consider the proper weight to each story. They can be open; they can have a dialogue with their readers. They can say where they're coming from, why they make the decisions they make, what potential conflicts of interest could affect their reporting. A good idea, but is it enough?

Forbes.com recently ran an article about how Politico.com, the website/print publication/video news outlet, is hoping to turn a profit next year. The article explains, in part, how Politico has started to make money. Their print version is their biggest earner, even though it is only distributed in Washington and is "mostly free".

Their website receives more ad revenue from the Obama campaign than anywhere else (second is the Democratic National Committee).

Their CEO was a member of the Reagan Administration (he has some other connections that seem out of place in the news business). The article goes on to explain that their plan is to start selling political coverage to newspapers that can no longer afford to produce their own.

Should the connections of those running a paper and the company sources of revenue matter?

What good does it do if Politico is transparent when their coverage is running in other papers which don't have to admit to Politico's potential biases?

Old News

2008-08-31T13:58:22Z

Senator Barack Obama closed the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night. He should have kept talking all night.

Obama's speech had more than 40 million viewers. Eighty thousand filled a football stadium to hear him. He officially took charge of the Democratic Party. He laid out what his agenda would be as president. He made pointed attacks against his opponent. So what? If you ask the many online news outlets covering the Democratic National Convention, the story was old by the next morning.

]]> There were some who lingered on Obama for few hours longer. Chris Weigant of the Huffington Post analyzed the details of Obama's speech. There was some commentary in the New York Times about what Obama accomplished with his speech. And Carrie Budoff Brown of Politico.com summed it up, "Just 12 hours after delivering a historic speech, Barrack Obama was no longer the story".

The new story, John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, is a big story. I'd feel a bit manipulated, if I were a political reporter. McCain successfully took the attention off the Democrats at the earliest possible moment. Why not look a bit further into what the candidate said about, say, oil dependency or tax reform?

The Huffington Post's homepage on Friday morning expressed it best. At the top was a collage of covers of print dailies, all with banners about Obama's speech. The Huffington Post then went right to the story about McCain's VP choice. As if to say, "that speech is obviously yesterday's news. Just look at today's newspaper".

It's hard to argue that the Democratic National Convention was anything more than a pep rally. There was little news to be found. Most energy was spent reading the Applause-O-Meter after each of the big speeches.

Some of the most interesting news from the convention had nothing to do with the Democrats. The attention given the on-air drama at MSNBC and what it may or may not say about the health of that cable news network was amusing.

Also, a photographer from ABC News was arrested while taking photographs of Democratic senators and donors as they left a private meeting at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel.

And then there were slavery and kidnapping allegations against Kellogg, Brown & Root.

If Obama is as smart as everybody says he is, he'll make his next speech last from tomorrow until the day of the election.

A bit about Jamiel's Law and Special Order 40.

2008-08-26T04:40:11Z

On August 19, 2008, I went with a small group of my fellow first-year journalism students to learn a bit about the debate over immigration in Los Angeles. Specifically, we were sent to learn about an LAPD policy called Special Order 40 and a proposed amendment to that policy called Jamiel's Law.]]> Special Order 40 was established as official policy of the LAPD by Chief of Police Daryl Gates in 1979. It states that "it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department that undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action". This means that Police Officers in the City of Los Angeles are only allowed to inquire about a person's immigration status when that person has been arrested for "multiple misdemeanor offenses, a high grade misdemeanor or a felony offense, or has been previously arrested for a similar offense".

The March 2, 2008 murder of high school student Jamiel Shaw, allegedly committed by 19-year-old undocumented immigrant and known gang member Pedro Espinoza, has prompted heavy lobbying for an amendment to Special Order 40 to be enacted as law. The proposed amendment, "Jamiel's Law", would allow LAPD officers to inquire about the immigration status of and initiate immigration enforcement action against known gang members.

We began investigating this issue by visiting Doug McIntyre, a talk radio host at KABC 790 in Los Angeles. McIntytre is one of the main organizers of the movement to enact Jamiel's Law. He cited, among other developments in Los Angeles that are exacerbated by illegal immigration, the complete loss of jobs for African Americans in the dry-walling trade, the downfall of many LA County schools because of an influx of non-English-speaking students, the closing of emergency rooms, the theft of miles of copper wiring from city lights and a raise in rents caused by a one-million person increase in the population of Los Angeles County during the last three years as reasons that a change in Special Order 40 is necessary.

McIntyre sees the choice regarding Jamiel's Law as purely moral; as he sees it, a "no" vote is the same as saying, "I support sanctuary for illegal alien gangbangers". The other side of this argument sees the enactment of Jamiel's Law as having more widespread implications than its words convey.

During the afternoon, we visited an immigrant advocacy group in Los Angeles called The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA). We spoke with Anike Tourse, the Communications Director, and with Cynthia Buiza, the Director of Policy and Planning.

CHIRLA's position is that Jamiel's Law would lead to discrimination, fear among huge portions of the population, and is unnecessary because immigration status is already investigated by the Sheriff's Department once a person is arrested for committing a crime. They expressed concern that, since Jamiel's Law would allow immigration investigations of any suspected gang member, people who are not dangerous criminals will be deported because their names somehow ended up on something called the Gang Member Database.

This Gang Member Database deserves further investigation. Also, it seems that these two sides are stuck in a zero-sum battle; any proposal or position offered by either side is unacceptable to the other. I think that politicians have a lousy job; I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck with the job of resolving this issue.

What I Want To Do.

2008-08-26T02:27:43Z

I plan to be an international reporter. I am particularly interested in countries of the Global South; in particular Sub-Saharan and Western Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. I'd like to produce extended radio and print stories from these places, and focus as much as I can on underreported sources.

]]> It would break my heart and threaten my belief in this profession if I spend my career bouncing from war zone to famine to natural disaster and pass the time in between sipping daiquiris at an expats' hotel, waiting for the body counts to reach news-worthy levels. Instead, I intend to report on the nature of life in these misunderstood places, the ways that people in the West are connected to people in the Global South, the everyday events that compound and grow until calamity strikes and what happens after the Event is over and normal life needs to start again.

I intend to learn to think and write like a journalist. I intend to keep my personal political beliefs out of the stories that I write. I intend to not be a lazy reporter, but to search out voices and stories that are difficult to find. I intend to find a job and keep it for as long as it suits me. I intend to write sentences that will break the record for number of commas. I intend to learn how to correctly use the "semi-colon". I intend to write under a byline that uses my first two initials instead of my first name. I intend to find a better head shot.