Word: judgments
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Among the many gray areas and judgment calls in law enforcement, disorderly conduct is one of the fuzziest. Just ask Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., arrested July 16 after yelling accusations of racism at an officer responding to a reported break-in at his home. Statutes outlining the misdemeanor are designed to help police maintain authority, and they are broadly worded; deciding what constitutes disorderly conduct is typically at an officer's discretion...
...still need experts. But we can no longer abdicate judgment to them or to the system they've cobbled together. This country, after all, was created by passionately engaged amateurs. The American spirit really is the amateur spirit. The great mass of European settlers were amateur explorers, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who created the U.S. were amateur politicians. "I see democracy," the late historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, as "government by amateurs, as a way of confessing the limits of our knowledge." In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville approvingly noted the absence of "public careers" in America...
...call for sweeping reform is nothing new. In 2006, a landmark Supreme Court judgment laid down a set of seven directives aimed at providing the police freedom from political interference, and mandated the government to create dedicated agencies to handle public complaints against the police and to regularly evaluate their performance. But the federal government and most of the state governments have either completely disregarded the court's order, or significantly diluted it. "The police [are] definitely a major stakeholder in change," says Patil of CHRI, "But they're not the only ones. The media has abdicated their responsibility...
...Quotes By: On the dangers of operating in Iraq: "Obviously, you can see the business risk that goes with it - being sued, being maligned in the press, a very significant rush to judgment. It can jeopardize all the rest of the work that we've done in the rest of the world without any controversy." - October 2007, in congressional testimony...
...them sold me out? Who could I trust? It was a path of suspicion that led unexpectedly to myself. I began to understand Rubashov in his cell, in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a man driven by his own logic to accept and even defend the judgment of his tormentors. Maybe I deserved it, maybe I had it coming. Not yet accused, I was already guilty. I had convicted myself...