The Year of Col. McCraw's Discontent, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Counterterrorism

This has not been a good year for Texas’s top cop. We’re not talking about Attorney General Ken Paxton who may soon face trial for securities fraud, instead it’s a reference to the head of the gun-toting arm of state government, Colonel Steve McCraw of the Department of Public Safety. For the colonel it’s hard to imagine a more problematic short span of time. In fact it’s hard to imagine a worse run of a few months for any bureaucrat, much less one who’s supposed to be enforcing the laws of this Lone Star State. The hot seat has been so hot that Steve McCraw’s pants are literally on fire—as in liar, liar. 

The colonel’s troubles hit in a wave. There was the Sandra Bland suicide in Waller County, a tragedy which gained worldwide attention and that, in all fairness to the colonel, is related to the Department’s longstanding race and gender issues which pre-date Steve McCraw’s arrival on the scene. Of the two prior colonels running DPS, one white male and one black, both left after gender issues: one for inappropriate behavior with a subordinate and the second colonel, who called out the first in an “intervention” in the DPS headquarters suite, for retaliating against a secretary in a field office who complained that a Highway Patrol sergeant showed his penis to her, unprompted, at work. The State of Texas had to pay the lady off ($80,000 sticks in mind) after courts ruled that the original accusation of whipping out Mr. Johnson was un-provable but the retaliation by the colonel was not. It was at that point more or less that Steve McCraw, former state trooper and FBI agent, from Marathon in far fucking West Texas, rode to the Department’s rescue. He is the new colonel in town, literally. And recently under his leadership the Department has gone from bad to worse. Let's see.

There have been the well-documented complaints by legal Texas residents in South Texas that they have been stopped multiple times by DPS troopers as part of the “surge”—a policy of increased immigration enforcement brought to you by state leadership and directed by Col. McCraw, for bad or for good. More serious is the recent revelation by television station KXAN that state troopers have been doctoring their racial profiling data by describing, in their reports, Latinos whom they have stopped as white, which technically, apparently, is true but not general usage. The effect is to make it seem that the Department is pulling over fewer minorities than the higher factual number. “I can assure you this is a leadership issue, not a trooper issue,” McCraw recently told Texas lawmakers, taking the hit and falling back on contrition—and then proceeding to blame patrol car computers. Software defects now serve as the bureaucratic scapegoat of choice throughout government, not that there's anything wrong with that, but are computer glitches the real issue? The Dallas Morning News which is no bleeding-heart liberal rag recently noted that DPS has had to destroy 2 million full sets of fingerprints of individuals seeking driver’s licenses—complete sets which were taken instead of the legislatively-permitted mere thumbprint—it’s unclear that this kind of information, once collected, can ever really be “destroyed.” Now another issue has arisen at DPS headquarters in the Live Music Capital of the World. On the surface it may appear good for the Department of Public Safety, and for the colonel, that Steve McCraw has shown restraint, an uncommon virtue at the Department, and, in that respect, shown good stewardship of our civil liberties as well. But if you look a little deeper it's clear that the puercos are in the shit again.

Among DPS’s various tools of enforcement, state troopers (not completely unlike storm troopers) can club you, cuff you, shoot you, shock you or merely take you to jail. In the State of Texas they can also eavesdrop on you although the difference between wiretapping and other interventions is that this wiretapping has to be approved and signed off by the commanding colonel of DPS, Steve McCraw himself. To set the scene. The Texas state wiretapping statute unlike its federal counterpart and unlike the law in some other states, is very limited. It does not permit eavesdropping in political corruption cases for example—and must be requested by a district attorney, somewhere among the 254 counties of the Lone Star State, approved by the colonel and the wire hung and administered by DPS. To set the scene again. What’s interesting is that just a couple of years ago the state’s total of wires requested by local D.A.s was about a dozen yearly and growing. For the last two years DPS reports there have only been three or four approved, depending on how you do the count. It’s not because there’s less drug trafficking in Texas, mind you, meth is still an epidemic here as elsewhere. The notion that any law enforcement agency is actually wiretapping less in this day and age is exceptional, and especially in Texas where cops like their tools to fight crime and have so much to deal with. In the last yearly summary by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which reports on state and federal wiretapping activity, the single most active area of the country for wiretapping by the feds was the single federal district that comprises the state of Arizona. But if you look at the four federal districts that make up Texas the amount of activity in total outstrips any other state and especially for the crime which leads to most government eavesdropping in the first place, narcotics. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio alone—one of four in the state—has hung more wire than AT&T. 

Why the sudden reluctance to follow suit by DPS, which was increasing its interceptions until just recently? The reason may be the colonel’s signature. Steve McCraw can’t claim he’s out of the loop on this one. He can’t blame the software. He has to sign off on those D.A. requests and the last time the state figures were made public, two years ago, it was clear that some of the D.A.’s offices asking for wires (that McCraw approved) did not know what they were doing. Harris County bugged somebody’s house in a case that went south. The Tarrant County D.A. did 2000 intercepts of 100 people for a single conspiracy to commit murder, which in this state is a common crime. Travis County D.A. Rosemary Lehmberg was the frequent flyer of state wiretaps with the most approved by Colonel McCraw. But that was before her after-hours exploits led to the indictment of Governor Perry. Texas D.A.s seemed to like murder investigations for eavesdropping almost as much as for narcotics, which shows a misunderstanding of the intended use of the technology.

The Department of Public Safety is not a hard agency to understand. It's operations are governed by an old white boys club, historically, and includes both the Texas Rangers and the Texas Highway Patrol. A few years ago a president of the Austin police union, deflecting criticism of the white male culture of his own force, described DPS as “the ultimate old boys club” and in many ways he's right. Bubba has lived and prospered at DPS through decades—since the inception of the agency, circa Bonnie & Clyde. At DPS, the Old White Boys culture has successfully fought any attempt to dislodge the white rural male ethos. Although even Bubba may soon have trouble resisting demographic changes in the state and the empowerment of women. Still he tries. Two legislative sessions ago an aide to a powerful female Texas House of Representatives member mentioned that his boss was offended by a Highway Patrol supervisor carrying on an open affair with a married employee in a county courthouse, in the legislator’s district, in a small-town in East Texas. The legislator contacted DPS to complain and was told, basically, to piss off. Bubba has his perks, apparently. Left to its own devices the Texas Department of Public Safety divides up power between the old boys just like a damn cake. 

If you look at all the gun-carrying certified law enforcement officers side of the agency (some 4,000 strong) and divide the badges between those who wear uniforms, like the Highway Patrol, and those who wear suits, like criminal investigation or criminal intelligence or the fabled Texas Rangers. The top slot—the colonel’s position—historically rotates between the two halves, one colonel coming from the suits, the next one from uniforms, with the Rangers, who are also part of DPS, out of the mix, presumably because they are already powerful enough. The status quo is maintained through a very neat administrative trick. When a DPS officer retires, whether he is a Ranger or a trooper, he or she can appear before the Public Safety Commission to be declared a “Special Ranger” or “Special Texas Ranger,” a retirement status that allows the former officer to continue to carry a gun and a badge and to tap into the lucrative private security industry, as a second retirement income. The Public Safety Commission members usually do not know the retiring officers, whom they must vote upon, and rely almost exclusively on recommendations by the colonels. Any trooper or investigator or Ranger who has rocked the boat during his or her tenure is blackballed from Special Ranger status. All police agencies are military in structure, basically—which means there’s little dissent tolerated in the first place—but DPS goes a step farther to insure orthodoxy. And silence.

Interestingly, a former Democratic candidate for governor mentioned once that the single most important appointments for any new Texas governor are the members of the Public Safety Commission that runs DPS. The reason is easy to rationalize politically, making sure that state investigators, especially the Rangers, don’t stick their noses into areas that Capitol leadership prefers unexamined. The Department is almost wholly-occupied with violent crime and the occasional political corruption case, usually involving a rural county commissioner’s court, while white collar crime, which might involve big donors, and big corruption cases—which might involve state officeholders—are usually forced on the Rangers but are not something they go looking for. Control of DPS and of the Texas Rangers officially has been exercised by means the five-member Public Safety Commission, which chooses the colonel, and who he answers to, but the governor has tapped his guy more or less directly in recent years, for example in 1979 when new Republican governor Bill Clements ignored the uniform-suit rotation/promoting-from-within routine, and instead chose the FBI’s former number two guy, a Texan, Jim Adams as colonel. 

Rick Perry did something similar thirty years later, although in the case of Gov. Perry—“Mr. Opportunity” as he is known for his ability to exploit any opening—disarray at the Department was justification to put Governor Perry's man in the top slot. But Perry's first colonel took a fall chasing his secretary around the office. Literally. Perry's next choice was Steve McCraw and that’s where things already stood two legislative sessions ago when SB 162 was signed into law by Gov. Perry. 

The so-called "Chris Kyle bill," named after the "American Sniper," was a step that will completely change DPS as we know it, but without going through the five-member Public Safety Commission. By influencing who works at the agency instead. The House sponsor was Rep. Dan Flynn who also serves as commander of Texas’s maritime forces, whatever those are, but the Senate sponsor was Democrat Leticia Van de Putte, a Democrat, who represented San Antonio and its large military community. The paramilitarization of DPS is already clear from the comments of the Legislative Budget Board analyst responsible for presenting the DPS budget to the House Appropriations Committee, earlier this year. “The agency’s self-ranking of programs in several cases,” the LBB analyst told legislators, “did not clearly correlate with the centrality of the agency’s mission. For example the agency ranked counterterrorism and polygraph higher [in importance] than traffic enforcement.”

In an age of terror, it’s clear that even police forces must have a counterterrorism capability. NYPD for example has hundreds of officers so assigned and is said even to post intelligence people abroad. DPS has never been lacking in SWAT or rapid response abilities. If Col. McCraw is de-emphasizing standard traffic enforcement, which still kills far more Texans than terrorism, maybe he needs to tell the public first. But the only way the Department can achieve its new self-selected mission is by traffic stops, which already showing bias against minorities. 

Hispanics being categorized as whites may be supplemented by Muslims being categorized as Hispanics. The profiling can get worse, not better. Whatever the plan, one thing is certain, we need to get McCraw’s signature on something describing exactly what the Department is doing, because even in an age of terror there's no substitute for accountability. 

Chimps Are People Too

              Advances in science can be a little like politics and sausage-making: You don’t want to know the details. This is particularly true in medicine where progress has been made by invasive tests on animals, including primates like ourselves. The federal government has just taken a step back from that decades-old paradigm and as with just about everything else in national debate—whatever the subject—the result of the policy change whether it’s abortion or gun control, or medical research, will be best highlighted by an example in Texas.

Last week National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins announced that his agency is phasing out support of use of chimpanzee in research. This was not a surprise. The government took steps two years ago to retire 310 chimps from the lab but left 50 in reserve for so-called emergencies. The animals have been used in AIDS and ebola research and development of other disease treatments. (Chimpanzees are for example the only other species in addition to man that suffers from Hepatitis C.) Collins’ most recent edict sends those last monkeys to Chimp Haven, a government run rest home in Louisiana where they can live out their final days licking their wounds in peace. Pressure for this decision had been building recently with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granting research chimpanzees endangered species status, earlier this year, and requests to use chimps for any kind of scientific endeavor practically non-existent recently, per the feds.

According to Nature the big losers in this policy change will be a facility in Bastrop, a few miles outside Austin, owned by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center which houses 139 chimps owned by the federal government, and the private Southwest National Primate Research Center outside San Antonio which has 20 of the government’s animals. Next, the NIH must decide what to do with yet another 82 of the primates also at Southwest whose room and board is paid by Uncle Sam. Christian Abee, director of MD Anderson’s Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research in Bastrop told Nature that the NIH ruling will for all intents and purposes end research in Bastrop since all the animals used are owned by the federal government. NIH Director Collins went out of his way to praise the Bastrop center which is said to do only behavioral and observational research. The approach in San Antonio apparently involves a more invasive touch.

The federal decision also casts an unaccustomed light on one of the most secretive non-governmental organizations in a state known for secretive non-governmental organizations: the Southwest Research Center aka the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research aka the Southwest National Primate Research Center whose origins date back to 1941, founded by polymath Tom Slick—cattleman, wildcatter, explorer and presumed spy. Slick’s career is too varied to do justice here but suffice it to say he was a successful energy entrepreneur who also dabbled in the occult. The center he founded has also done serious science, its methods being more of an issue, particularly animal experimentation. This privately-owned San Antonio center does research for both the federal government and industry. It was once also said to have the only private Level 4 Biosafety Lab in the country. As regards animal health and safety Southwest has been repeatedly dinged by the federal government for poor treatment of primates. People for Ethical Treatment of Animals has previously placed former Southwest director Dr. John VandeBerg on its “Vivsector of the Month” list, because of the treatment of chimps under his care.

The federal decision sends the chimpanzees into retirement but does little to assuage the lot of baboons of which, once again, the Slick center outside San Antonio is said to be the biggest player in terms of medical research. More than 1400 of these animals were reported residing there in February of this year. According to provisions of the Animal Welfare Act, labs must report a census of lab animals to the Department of Agriculture each year. According to last year's figures almost 1800 non-human primates were being held but not experimented upon at Southwest's campuses, while almost 1300 were the subject of experiments. In fact, the good Dr. VandeBerg has written a book about the subject of baboons in the lab. 

“The baboon is a relative newcomer to the repertoire of nonhuman primates used in biomedical research,” he wrote in the appropriately-titled The Baboon in Biomedical Research. “However, in less than 50 years since its first use in the U. S., it has become one of the most popular laboratory primate species. It is larger than the other widely used monkey species, making it advantageous for many types of experiments and technological developments. It is extraordinarily hardy and highly fecund in captivity. It closely resembles humans in a variety of physiological and disease processes, such as cholesterol metabolism, early stages of atherosclerosis, and alcoholic liver disease. Its chromosomes closely resemble those of humans, and many genes of the two species lie in the same chromosomal order.

“Among all primates, baboons are the most widely used models for the genetics of susceptibility to complex diseases and they are the first nonhuman primate for which a framework genetic linkage map was established. In addition, the baboon genome is currently being sequenced, and as a result the utility of this species for biomedical research will be dramatically increased.” In response to the federal decision VandeBerg wrote in reply to an email asking for comment: "I am no longer director of the SNPRC, although I can assure you that the cessation of research with chimpanzees does not mean the end of the primate center. The research done with chimpanzees was only a small fraction of the research conducted at the SNPRC." Contrary to what you may think, the decision to give chimps a reprieve from the scalpel, needle and electrode had nothing to do with an outbreak of humanity on the part of the scientific establishment in Washington. Instead, chimp research is just no longer deemed necessary. Hallelujah. Hepatitis C now has a cure.  The Institute of Medicine reached the conclusion a couple of years ago that other means exist to get what scientists require, including computer modeling, mice, and, God forbid, human volunteers. One of the modalities that was not mentioned but apparently also applies is increased use of our DNA for modeling.

 Not just in Texas. PETA maintains a kind of rogue’s gallery of worst labs in the country for animal abuse and a frequent flyer in the rankings is the University of California San Francisco, an exclusively health-related research institution. UCSF has also been cited by the federal government for animal abuse, the last time in 2010 resulting in severe fines for behavior like failing to give pain medication to animals that have undergone surgical procedures. UCSF scientists invented the Hepatitis B vaccine used worldwide, by the way, required of all healthcare workers in the U.S. and developed by animal studies. At the University of California scientists are already increasing research on humans. Just last year UCSF took a step in that direction, taking over Oakland Children’s Hospital in San Francisco’s East Bay in order, the university said, to have more African-American kids for study, especially their DNA (due to wider variability in African ancestry individuals’ genetic makeup.) The NIH decision may reflect a trend in which we as a society are moving back to humans as primary study subjects, with the only difference being less invasive procedures than what has been done to monkeys. What this all means for the Southwest center is unclear but the chance that it may no longer be cutting edge is the hope of animal rights’ activists. But don't hold your breadth.

 In a letter to the New York Times two years ago Dr. VandeBerg argued that chimpanzee science should continue if only to aid ape health in the wild, an argument that did not strike the federal regulators as particularly persuasive. Per a published report, Dr. VandeBerg was recently relegated to performing an experiment in which opossums had sun block applied and microwave radiation shined on their skin in order to see if the sun block worked to prevent cancer. You’ll be happy to know it did. Overall, animal studies may be falling on hard times except in places like the military (again in San Antonio, at the base that includes Brooke Army Medical Center) where training often includes use of animals for practice in surgical procedures and wound care—causing the injury and then treating it, although the subjects are said not to be primates, whatever difference that makes. However it's done it’s an ugly business that has, up until now, been deemed in humanity’s best interests. "The primate center directors as a group were not happy with the decision," Dr. Warner C. Greene director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at UCSF, who served on the original Institute of Medicine committee that decided to move away from chimps, wrote in an email yesterday. "However it garnered wide support throughout the scientific and lay communities. Previously only two countries in the world had essentially no limitations on biomedical research with chimpanzees: Gabon and the United States."

“We successfully trained 12 male marmosets [a South American monkey] for treadmill running,” according to a paper detailing another recent Southwest-related primate experiment. “The entire process – from training subjects to enter a clear plastic capture container to running at speeds of 1.2 mph for 30min duration – was accomplished with daily sessions (including weekends) in 4 weeks. Furthermore, marmosets were able to maintain this rate of exercise for 3 days per week for 3 months. Our use of positive reinforcement techniques to train the marmosets to this procedure provided a safe environment for both marmoset and experimenter. Alternative procedures, such as putting a harness on the marmoset and tethering him to the treadmill for exercise, could potentially be unsafe particularly when putting the marmoset in a harness which increases handling time and increases biting risk.” Is this science? It sounds like torture.

 

A Lynching in Austin

            There will be a lynching in Austin in November with jury selection to begin next week. That’s when Rashad Owens, age 22, goes on trial for capital murder in the deaths of four people during the South By Southwest festival almost two years ago. To say that this is a trial that no one wants to hold, with the exception of Mr. Owens—that the police and SXSW backers in the Live Music Capital of the World want Owens to go away, to the state prison in Huntsville, never to be heard from again—is an understatement. 

             Owens who evidence will doubtless show was intoxicated led police on a chase that in addition to four deaths also resulted in 20-odd injuries. In no way is his behavior excused or excusable. He committed murder. But with a nod towards circumstances, that will be unlikely to prove extenuating, but nonetheless should be mentioned before trial, he was being chased by the police under unsafe conditions: for him, for the cops and ultimately for the public, in the mardi gras-like atmosphere of SXSW, at midnight, despite the police manual’s warnings to avoid chases in unsafe conditions. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s not the first time. Because APD likes a good chase, if there’s gunfire, even better.

The L.A. Times ran an interesting story last weekend about how often LAPD takes out civilians in chases under even good conditions. In Austin there’s been a particular racial dynamic as well. In the last three years there have been three high-profile instances of police pursuits of African-American men for non-violent offenses that, as much due to the chases themselves as the behavior of the suspects, led to deaths: Ahmede Bradley, in 2012, hunted down and killed in a struggle by white Officer Eric Copeland after Copeland attempted to arrest Bradley for “loud music” and marijuana use, white Detective Charles Kleinert’s pursuit and “accidental” shooting (point blank and, lest we forget, from behind) of Larry Jackson Jr. a year later, and now Rashad Owens. After much soul-searching on the part of the district attorney and grand jury, Kleinert was charged with manslaughter, a case that he may now beat on a technicality in federal court. These chases in the city fit nicely into a pattern of inappropriate pursuits of black men for non-violent offenses across the country. If Owens was trying to escape, we have learned post-Ferguson, he may have had a reason. “Accelerating into a crowd” and “accelerating away from the police” are not the same thing, although the district attorney will say they are. One is capital murder while the other may mean self-preservation for black men. Not to make excuses for the inexcusable. Not to go all psycho-social on you.

The question of charges in the Rashad Owens case is particularly interesting. In the last twenty years two Austin police officers have been killed on duty by drunk drivers, at least one who was trying to avoid arrest. The suspects (one male and one female, both white) were charged with intoxication offenses, one sentenced to five years and one to life. Owens was charged with capital murder (the D.A. says the death penalty is off the table as if that is an act of compassion) for a crime that differs in degree but not in nature. Anyone can parse the decision to file capital murder but two obvious possibilities stick out. City Hall and SXSW promoters are trying to fade heat directed towards themselves regarding police actions, and pushback against the narrative that SXSW, worth some $300 million at last count, is still being run in an unsafe (read cheap) manner. Attempts earlier this year by the SXSW promoters to have the crash-related civil suits against them dismissed because the deaths and injuries were “solely” related to criminal behavior were denied by the judge. How hard a fall Owens takes in court may greatly influence the success of the civil actions. (An attorney involved said recently that SXSW is playing a slow-down defense with discovery in the civil case, until the Owens criminal case is disposed of. SXSW attorney Pete Kennedy refuses comment.) The second reason is that by filing a strong charge at the outset the hope may have been that Owens would fold and cop a plea, which he did not. The American-Statesman’s courts reporter, the very thorough Jazmine Ulloa noted in a recent story that use of capital charges in similar circumstances is unprecedented. 

The case for possible police bad judgment just got a boost from, of all people, Chief Art Acevedo, who has been trying recently to crack the whip at the pig pen. Yesterday the chief suspended for 90 days (together with enough extra conditions to make a continuing police career unlikely when/if the officer finishes his suspension) Eric Copeland, of the Ahmede Bradley killing. A year after shooting Bradley, Officer Copeland and another cochino were found liable in a civil case involving inappropriate conduct with another minority suspect. In the most recent case, just disciplined by the chief, Copeland lied, Tasered a suspect while kneeling on him, and then Tasered again, all after starting an argument with the cuffed (minority) prisoner and without allowing the suspect time to actually comply with any commands. That’s a mouthful—a mouthful that, one might argue, should be pronounced “You're fired.” With yesterday’s discipline decision Copeland officially received “Rogue Cop” status (although many African-Americans had already come to that conclusion, after the Bradley killing, which was viewed as an unnecessary death because the chase was unnecessary) to go along with Sgt. Kleinert who would have had the same dubious honor if he hadn’t resigned. The political dynamic of policing in the city is actually changing for the better, if slowly. The Austin Police Association, once the most powerful lobby in town, next to real estate interests of course, is in decline because of recent revelations of what cop behavior towards minorities is really like—and because as the city has grown, power has become more diffused, the upside, if you will, of uncontrolled growth. Chief Acevedo may also have finally come into his own. He no longer seems on the defensive dealing with the union.

The question in the upcoming Owens trial is about the officer(s) who initiated the chase, in crowded conditions, in darkness, with inebriated festival-goers in the streets. Hello! The argument can be made that the outcome might have been worse had the police not become involved but to test that idea requires a single simple question. Ask yourself, if the police had it to do over again, would they have chased Mr. Owens? Another good one to ask: Had the chief actually gamed or planned for the possibility of a drunk driver in similarly crowded, alcohol-friendly circumstances? If not, the Police Department has to take responsibility. Austin has one event after another and drinking is usually a big part of the environment, to say nothing of marijuana which you usually smell downtown, just walking along Congress Avenue, even if it's not an event. At some point during the trial the prosecutor will inevitably tell the jury that “the police are not on trial.” Actually they are. And have been since Ferguson. 

You may think that “lynching” is a tad strong. But if you look at the history of lynching in the South, not all of the people who were strung up were innocent. 

In some cases the individuals were guilty but for whatever reason—and not just the cost of a trial, or “hot heads” or crackers taking the law into their own hands. The community involved just didn't want the case properly handled in a courtroom. Others involved for example were white, or the crime was something whites had gotten away with in the past or there was some community secret that would be revealed in an open courtroom. Is that possible? Rashad Owens is not innocent but neither are the people trying to convict him of capital murder. That’s what needs to be explored in court but will not be. 

Two big issues in State of Texas vs. Rashad Owens actually have nothing much to do with his guilt per se which, as lawyers say—failing an act of God—can be stipulated. Did the police involved have a history of pursuits in unsafe circumstances, or with minority suspects, and what is their explanation for why the chase was begun in the first place? Was there a supervisor present to tell them to shut it down? One might also ask if African-American men are still the favorite prey of APD officers? And what were the conditions at SXSW regarding security and barriers? A white paper has already been produced on SXSW conditions but that may need to be gone over one more time, under oath. 

Another comment on race in the trial also seems fair. The district attorney will attempt to convince the public that the fact the judge is black (former police monitor Cliff Brown) means that Owens will receive a fair trial. One does not necessarily follow the other. Judge Brown is still part of a Travis County judiciary that has traditionally imprisoned more minorities compared to whites than do other jurisdictions in the state. (See prior posting, "The Designated Negro") Presumably, also, Assistant District Attorney Gary Cobb, who has positioned himself as successor to the departing Rosemary Lehmberg, in the top job, and is black, will make an appearance, at least in the gallery, as part of his efforts towards election. 

As was made clear by the recent Baltimore rioting, the interests of African-Americans in power are not necessarily the same as those of African-Americans not in power. While he was in charge of the grand jury Gary Cobb was noticeably reticent to challenge any PD pigs, because his ambitions required Police Association support. As the civil rights movement in this country evolves, the next targets for scrutiny after the police are prosecutors and courts. Rashad Owens needs to watch his own ass, because neither of these men will. Judge Brown and Mr. Cobb have other priorities. And the public needs to watch the trial, because a miscarriage of justice is about to take place. 

A Texas Detour on the Road to a Theory of Blacks in Film

Right now, speaking as a black person in this country, in this time of sorrow and of grief—may Sandra Bland rest in peace. 

My biggest concern is not the police who worry BlackLivesMatter and for good reason—for me, it’s mostly about the movies. This worry is not keeping me awake at night but does concern me as much as the actions of the Texas Highway Patrol. The worst the cops can do is kill you but Hollywood can dehumanize you or stereotype you. And then the real cops shoot you because they’ve seen the same movie. That’s what the screenplay calls for and who is a mere cop-on-the-street to question such a well regarded script? 
             Or the very, very worse, you get a bad actor to portray you or people "like you" or bad actors to portray your tribe, whatever tribe that may be. Mao said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun but it also comes out of a camera lens, a different kind of power certainly but just as un-contestable and final. The issue for me is that the very strength of film, the ability to encapsulate life or something approaching life in a gripping and effortless way, unlike reading where you have to pay attention and turn the page, in a movie theater you can just sit there and have your imagination highjacked. Not to be critical. But that's precisely what makes the medium so dangerous. 

 If you think this is shaping up as some kind of rant about a particular movie or star, it’s not. There are a few candidates out there, it seems to me, a lot of really bad movies being made, practically anything with Adam Sandler for example, but that’s not why we’re here. It’s more the role of critics to tell you which is a bad film or not. My opinion is offered solely as an average viewer and with a sole caveat, a moviegoer who is African American. Nor is this about what’s going on behind the camera, which is an issue of current concern because of the recent ill-chosen comments of a certain Caucasian male Hollywood A-lister, who seems clueless about racism in his own industry. You may say, well, who is behind the camera is intricately tied to who appears in front of it and that’s true. But as scientists write in learned papers, that is beyond the scope of our work here. Besides that’s something that will have to be explained by someone who knows the industry, someone who knows the ins and outs of filmmaking, how to position the casting couch so to speak, as opposed to who lies down on it which is what concerns us here. Again, my cinematic opinions are expressed purely as an average moviegoer, a consumer of the final cut who is African American, the cinematic version of the “man in the street” who we used to talk about before the man in the street got a blog or social media and started speaking for himself. 

Mine is an inexpert opinion coming from someone who doesn’t know film but who knows black people and who has a certain consciousness and is worried by what he sees on the Big Screen. If you’re wondering if this is shaping up as some kind of revolutionary rant, it is.

There have been, it’s my thesis, having seen a lot of movies, old and new, as many of you have too, or more, it's my thesis that there have been only two eras of film for blacks in this country. “Pre-Dooley” and “Post-Dooley,” the former designated “B.D.,” for “Before Dooley” for simplification, because otherwise both will be “P.D.” and confuse the reader. The “D” stands for Dooley Wilson who played Sam the piano player to Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca. Dooley Wilson like everyone else important was actually born in Texas, in some pinewoods pisspot near Tyler, wherever that is, may Allah be pleased never to send me there. It sounds like the kind of place that people are best known for leaving. 

Wilson got out as soon as he could, from Tyler and from Texas, as many black people did at that time, and never looked back. It’s worth mentioning the Lone Star State connection only because so often in modern history there is a connection to something that has happened or is happening south of the Red River and north of the Rio Grande. A link that others have commented on at length and that has been the subject of not a few news articles and screenplays, the worrisome “Texas connection.” Anyway, before Dooley, there were three sub-eras for blacks in American film, loosely speaking, represented by three movies or kinds of movies, the first being the blatantly racist Birth of a Nation and any of the blackface films or anything with Stepin Fetchit or a Stepin Fetchit-like character, and the Mammy portrayals like Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, in which a middle-aged black woman utters folksy wisdom while working in a white woman's kitchen. These films or kinds of films were not accurate but were pretty consistent with the status of blacks in America of the time. GWTW might even have been considered progressive in race relations, at that time. McDaniel won a best supporting Oscar after all, basically for rolling her eyes and warning Miss Scarlet not to commit some kind of foolishness, if memory serves, but an Oscar nonetheless and McDaniel became a role model not for her role in the film but for her successful entrée into “the industry,” which was not automobiles or home furnishings or domestic service but making movies. The credit you have to give to Hattie McDaniel is despite her work in the film.
            The beautiful thing about films even today and especially for white actors and actresses is that bad movies cannot be held against good performers. It’s the Hollywood corollary of the idea that bad things happen to good people. You can be an actor walking down Sunset Boulevard, minding your own business and humming a Shakespearean soliloquy or just humming because many stars see themselves as singers too, when suddenly you get hit with a bad role. It's like lightning—you’re not to blame. Taking a bad role is usually about working in a very competitive industry where everyone wants to be and most actors usually want the work, even the good ones who may not need it, to hone their craft or keep it sharp, and they usually explain that they want to see what they can do with the role. There’s the paycheck that is often supersize. McDaniel got a paycheck and presumably a big one. Playing a maid in a white woman’s house in a film was certainly more lucrative than being a maid in a white woman’s house, which is the best that many black females had to look forward to, again at the time. 

Right on Mammy’s heels came Dooley Wilson as Rick’s sidekick, the wise world-weary piano-playing black man who loves and is loyal to Rick, which makes Bogie cool, if he wasn’t before, which he was. Because he can hang with Negroes and he’s not racist. That’s kind of my take on the action in Casablanca but it doesn’t really matter because the plot is incidental. Wilson is there as a totem more than an actor, yeah, a totem you could say, and nascent stereotypes are there too but they’re different from what came before, an improvement so to speak. Wilson’s mere appearance on camera in this kind of film was progress. The conceit of Casablanca which has become immortal, both the film and its motif, is the black guy or black girl who kind of has no life of his or her own but whose center of attention is focused on the white lead character and who serves as soulmate for the star, although they’re not fucking. That’s Sam in a nutshell. He has proved to be immortal. We still see him today by other names in other movies.

He’s spiritual too, that’s a big part of the package. Black people are always spiritual and know things that white people don’t and in Casablanca Sam knows that the sudden appearance of Ingrid Bergman is bad news for Rick and that’s what concerns Sam most, what’s good or bad for Rick. When Bogie is getting ready to split for the desert, or whatever, to join the Foreign Legion or whatever, he makes clear to the club’s new owner that Sam gets a piece of the action which is cool too, and new, groundbreaking, revolutionary in fact. Suddenly we’re making money in film and on film, a percentage of the action hitherto reserved for white people, a step up from Ms. McDaniel whose only apparent reward on screen was her love of that scatterbrained scheming white girl Scarlet O’Hara. But fuck that. Sam is not getting any horizontal rewards that we see or at least not any concrete affection from Ingrid Bergman who is Bogie’s love interest—and that’s where the storyline breaks down a little for me because most brothers of my acquaintance, feeling that a fine chick is not right for their best friend, for whatever reason, would make a move on her themselves. Especially anyone as fine as Ingrid Bergman. But this is Hollywood not the real world and Hollywood is a parallel universe to our own, a virtual world where some rules on Earth apply and others do not. 

That’s how Dooley Wilson changed our world for the better. He was still a stick figure but one who was making good money and getting significant screen time. He rolled his eyes once or twice but that’s cool too. He got to sing and play the piano on camera which many more liberated Negros even today might like to do. My theory is that we've been living in Dooley’s world ever since, certainly on camera but also to some extent on the streets of the U.S.A. Not because his role is so attractive to us still but because whites like it so much and they’re the ones who usually do the casting. They also write the checks. We’re in a Post-Dooley Era only because he’s dead. At best we’re living in a post-Post Dooley Era that sounds like more radical change than it really has been. Things have changed but haven’t changed much. White people still see us as sidekicks and want us to have suffered so that we can be spiritual for them and they want us to be discriminated against so they can show how open-minded and cool they are by hanging out with us. What Bogie did by instinct, today they do by design. Unless it's supposed to happen on film and we’re getting paid for it, in which case the script is a little old but depending on the paycheck we may still be up for the role. To hone our craft. There was a movie a few years ago where Tom Cruise played a hitman and Jamie Foxx played the taxi driver who chauffeurs him to his victims and it occurred to me how much more compelling Foxx’s role as the fearful taxista was than Cruise’s psychopathic killer. Foxx is from the Lone Star State too, another presumed East Texas shithole, called Terrell, Terrell Texas, God-forbid, and he is a talented actor, also an Academy-Award winner: in a state enamored of Matthew McConaughey, almost to exclusion, it has nothing to do with race, you can be sure. Real reason is that McConaughey hangs out in Texas but Foxx split, like Dooley Wilson.

  Mostly as blacks in America and on film we’re still playing Dooley in some shape or form. 

  Even the great Denzel Washington. Not long ago he was in a spy flick (my genre) with Ryan Reynolds, and Denzel did the buddy-thing or a modified buddy thing because they weren’t real buds or anything but the ending was what you would expect in today's cinema, Denzel died for Ryan, so that Reynolds’ character would live, which is a plot twist that white people like in life and in film. And, you know, it seems to me that Reynolds is an okay actor but hardly in Washington’s league and the only thing that Ryan Reynolds has done of any real note is to marry Scarlet Johansson which does give him points in a guy’s world that his acting may not. There’s a parallel here to our parallel universe, actually. Very often white people somehow expect blacks to take a spear for them, metaphorically speaking, the way Denzel took a bullet for Reynolds, or take a lesser position or less pay because “that’s what it means to be black in this country.” While the white guy or white girl gets the girl or the guy and the big paycheck and gets to feel sympathy at our condition as black people in this country. Which makes your white friend empathetic or cool or whatever, on top of the higher salary. Does that sound familiar? If so, my thesis is that it’s because you’ve seen the movie. Probably multiple times. That movie has been made. Several times. We’re trying some fresh material here. And Caucasians always seem a little hurt because that’s the script they are used to. It’s all coming from the Big Screen, that’s my view. 

And it’s not just blacks for whom those same old lines are being written. Michael Pena is a very good young actor but he seems to be dying a lot recently so some white guy with less talent can live on. In Fury and in a cop movie with Jake Gyllenhaal, where Michael took a bullet for Jake. The question in many films is which characters live to see the final credits roll and as in other areas of white privilege those characters tend to be white. This is important because Hispanics run the very real risk of having Hollywood handle their narrative the same way Hollywood handled Native Americans. It’s starting to look that way. American Indians have had a rough time since the Plains Wars because people like John Ford, John Wayne and Gary Cooper took an early interest in “their story,” including depictions of alcohol, savagery and mayhem that was actually visited on them as much as they visited same on whites. Until Hollywood screenwriters stepped in and changed the storyline. If blacks are doing better today it’s only because the very conditions of our arrival in this country made us extremely suspicious of subsequent offers of employment from Caucasians, in Hollywood and elsewhere. You can’t be too trusting whether it’s when the state trooper asks you to step out of your car or a movie producer says he’s going to make a film about your experience. The latter may be more dangerous than the former. You hand your narrative to other people only at great risk, that’s my view too. 

A couple of years ago there was the completely forgettable Man on a Ledge with Australian hunk Sam Worthington, the film stands out in my memory only because the very white Kyra Sedwick played TV journalist Suzie Morales. C’mon now, they couldn’t find a Latina to play a Latina? 

How is that any different from blackface?

 Which raised a question that has been troubling me ever since. If Hollywood already has too many white actors, why are they importing more? This may sound mean-spirited but it’s not. We’re not talking about software engineers or nuclear physicists where there’s genuine scarcity, there’s no shortage of actors in this country. The fact of the matter is that most of the British actors are Caucasian and they are presumably not adding anything to the diversity mix on screen. Especially when they’re being hired to play Americans. Isn’t that like bringing coals to Newcastle? Ditto the new wave of Australian actors who seem to be everywhere at once. Margot Robbie and Sam Worthington are, respectively, a hot blond and a white hunk, which America already produces and who are already over-represented in film.

It’s not all bad news. For black stars specifically there have been a few iterations during the Post-Dooley Era, a Post-Dooley 2.0 and 3.0 and now a Post-Dooley 3.5. Starting in the ‘50s and ‘60s there were “good Negro” roles in which earnest young black actors, after great trials, ended up bonding with skeptical Caucasians on screen. It was supposed to show our common humanity, you know? The actor was usually Sidney Poitier or someone like Sidney Poitier. Of recent black actors, the most significant has been Will Smith, the self-described Mr. Box Office who has made a series of movies in which he portrays a black person. 

 As a matinee idol, as a black character conceived by whites, Smith was engineered inside out. He has the moves and mannerism, he has the look, he talks the talk—he has been, in some of his work, a white director’s view of what an edgy black person is like. Smith said once in an interview that he could have been elected president of the United States and he was probably right. For me, being African American does not mean seeking ideological purity in a darkened movie theater, exactly, but you don’t want to be embarrassed either. There’s a big ideological component to the arts that you can’t escape. Nor in this country, where minorities are still living something less than the American Dream, do we want to. 

My most controversial call as a viewer was deciding whether to see the hitman movie with Tom Cruise, in which Jamie Foxx was chauffeuring Cruise to his victims. The decision was justified only because Foxx killed Cruise’s character in the end. Not having seen The Help or Driving Miss Daisy doesn’t prevent me from criticizing these films. Remember this isn’t film criticism, it’s political criticism. Political protest, you could call it, "talking shit to the white man," others might say, ideally. There’s a reason why Stalin and Mao sent a lot of artists and writers to prison, or worse, for the sake of revolutionary change. When the revolution comes, if the revolution comes, you like to think that anyone involved with Driving Miss Daisy, especially whoever wrote the title, will get a blindfold but no last cigarette.

It’s not that art imitates life or life imitates art. It’s that they are one in the same. Life is art and art is life, especially at the movies. We need to pay as much attention to who Hollywood is casting as who the police are chasing. Too few of one and too many of the other still lead us in the wrong direction as a society. But that’s just my opinion as a moviegoer. 

And after all this venting, it’s time to chill: Goina go check out a movie at Redbox, something called Lila & Eve, it’s been described as a kind of Thelma and Louise for colored people, with Jennifer Lopez and Viola Davis, two of my favorite actresses. The ideological police still haven’t cleared the multi-talented Ms. Davis for accepting a role in The Help, a movie which (again, not actually having seen it, only because my high principles won’t allow me to) it’s my belief set back race relations in this country by a century, playing into white women’s wet dreams about their “special" relationships with their maids: the same way Casablanca did for guys, but without the same pretensions to innovative moviemaking. The thing is, Viola Davis’s mom was a maid and Viola was born on a former plantation in South Carolina, which is worse even than Texas, another one of those places black people are known for leaving on the first bus. She’s come a long way, baby, and as an African American you question her street cred only at great risk to your own.

Lila & Eve has a metacritic score of like 12 out of 100 but it’s only $1.62 a viewing. The film may be execrable but the casting is sublime.