The Washington Post:
It is good that federal authorities are conducting a thorough parallel investigation and that President Obama will dispatch Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to Ferguson this week. Federal officials should conduct their probe as quickly as possible and release as much information as they can, as soon as they can. Not only would that show more respect for the people of Ferguson than their own police have; it would apply pressure to local authorities to conduct themselves more responsibly.
The Denver Post:
President Obama's announcement Monday that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will go to a St. Louis suburb where civil unrest has erupted over a police shooting is a positive step that underscores the seriousness of the situation. […]
The editors at
The St. Louis Post Dispatch reflect on the enormity of the events that have transpired over the last weeks:
Eventually, the television cameras and news reporters...will leave St. Louis, too, along with the visiting civil rights firemen, the outside hell-raisers and the self-anointed experts. The ubiquitous #Ferguson hashtag will fade.
We will be left to work this out on our own, beginning with the judicial process, including a Justice Department investigation. What does it say about St. Louis that the Justice Department doesn’t even trust a medical examiner’s autopsy? […]
This editorial page has proposed a gubernatorial Ferguson Commission to look at the events of last week and those that led up to it. We’ve proposed that St. Louis’s great universities study and make recommendations about a path forward. We believe greater educational opportunity is critical.
A generational event demands a generational response, a fundamental shift in the old way of doing things.
The Detroit Free Press says that with great police power comes great responibility:
There’s no question that a SWAT deployment is sometimes the appropriate response, or that use of military-style equipment keeps officers safe. Large police agencies (such as Detroit’s) conduct the kind of raids and enforcement that require special weapons and equipment and highly trained SWAT personnel. But it’s hard to make the case that small cities or townships need armored vehicles, M16 rifles or grenade launchers (which could be used to fire tear gas).
In the absence of information showing the benefit of such tactics, and how and why they’re used, it’s hard not to feel that departments who have acquired such equipment are answering a question that might not exist.
Eugene Robinson:
The fire this time is about invisibility. Our society expects the police to keep unemployed, poorly educated African American men out of sight and out of mind. When they suddenly take center stage, illuminated by the flash and flicker of Molotov cocktails, we feign surprise.
Have you noticed that you see more about Ferguson on Twitter than on Facebook? The
Washington Post's
Gail Sullivan dives into the details:
Your Twitter feed isn’t controlled by an algorithm. You see the tweets of people you follow in real time. But Facebook uses a complicated algorithm to determine what ends up in your news feed. They won’t reveal exactly how it works, but the company has said it ranks the content based in part on what you’ve liked, clicked or shared in the past.
Ars Technica’s Casey Johnson suggested Facebook’s algorithm also weeds out controversial content — racially charged protests, perhaps? — from users’ news feeds: “There is a reason that the content users see tends to be agreeable to a general audience: sites like [BuzzFeed, Elite Daily, Upworthy, and their ilk] are constantly honing their ability to surface stuff with universal appeal. Content that causes dissension and tension can provide short-term rewards to Facebook in the form of heated debates, but content that creates accord and harmony is what keeps people coming back.”
Meanwhile,
The Detroit Free Press emphasizes that with great power comes great responsibility:
There’s no question that a SWAT deployment is sometimes the appropriate response, or that use of military-style equipment keeps officers safe. Large police agencies (such as Detroit’s) conduct the kind of raids and enforcement that require special weapons and equipment and highly trained SWAT personnel. But it’s hard to make the case that small cities or townships need armored vehicles, M16 rifles or grenade launchers (which could be used to fire tear gas).
In the absence of information showing the benefit of such tactics, and how and why they’re used, it’s hard not to feel that departments who have acquired such equipment are answering a question that might not exist.
Paul Waldman:
[T]here’s another lesson emerging, one that isn’t going to make those libertarians pleased: sometimes, big government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution — to the problem of small government.
What I mean by “big” and “small” in this case isn’t government that does many things versus government that does few things, it’s government at a higher level versus government at a lower level. When government at one level fails, oftentimes the only solution can be found up the ladder, from local to state to ultimately the federal government.
Switching topics,
Pat Garofalo looks at women in sports:
There's no crying in baseball, but you could forgive some Little League hitters from getting a bit misty-eyed at the prospect of facing Mo'ne Davis, the 13 year old who made history Friday as the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series. Davis, one of two girls participating in this year's version of the annual Little League baseball tournament, struck out eight while leading her Taney Dragons, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a 4-0 win over Tennessee. (Oh, she can hit, too.)
Davis' performance has, perhaps inevitably, raised the age-old question of whether a woman could ever succeed in one of America's major male professional sports leagues. But it's also a good reminder of the many benefits that accrue to both men and women – and therefore society as a whole – when women have access to the sports field.
Teresa Tritch at The New York Times highlights another example of Wall Street getting off easy for its bad behavior:
The news last week brought two fresh reminders of the government’s failure to hold Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis. On Tuesday, the Times’s Matthew Goldstein reported that an arbitration panel of three former judges had found no basis for a malpractice claim against Ernst & Young, the auditor of Lehman Brothers.
The ruling is a real stretch, as the Times editorial board noted here. The case itself turned out to be yet another exercise in how not to get to the bottom of anything. Ernst was being sued over accounting tactics that cooked Lehman’s books. The arbitrators said that Ernst was not to blame, and put the onus on Lehman’s management. But the Securities and Exchange Commission had already decided, way back in 2012, not to bring charges against Lehman or its executives over those same accounting tactics.
Can we at least all agree that someone is getting away with something?