UPDATE--What are voters in New Orleans supposed to do on October 14?

WHAT ARE VOTERS IN NEW ORLEANS SUPPOSED TO DO ON OCTOBER 14?

Vote, of course.  Nevertheless, voting intelligently is no easy matter.  We have ideological convictions of some kind, and we want to support candidates who share our prejudices.  The candidates for mayor and city council seats express ideas about their intentions and priorities at forums.  What the candidates for State Treasurer,  Orleans Parish Coroner, and two judgeships --- Court of Appeal, 4th Circuit, 1st District, Division B and Civil District Court-- truly think is voiced only on their websites, in the campaign literature they and their supports distribute.  Although the Coroner need only have skill in forensic medicine and good vision and the Treasurer should assume financial policy is a sacred trust, judges must employ complex legal reasoning to make decisions.  It might be argued that there is less gravity in the duties assigned to a treasure or a coroner than in the duties we entrust to judges.  If we are to make good decisions in electing  candidates for judgeships, it would be helpful to have forums at which they reveal in greater depth what they believe a theory of justice to be and how they employ belief in rendering decisions.  And those forums ought not take the form of donation parties!  Perhaps in some future, voters will demand more accountability of those who wish to be guardians of justice.  I suspect a significant number of voters are mesmerized by subjective endorsements, some of which can actually be "purchased" by candidates.  When I see an endorsement named AGNOR (does an elephant wearing a fleur-de-lis = A?), I smell a rat named presumption of voter ignorance.

Back in June, I wrote a blog relevant to our task at hand:

Meditating on Wretchedness under a Strawberry Moon

Whether we are trying to make sense of vice or holiness, innocence or guilt, stupidity or intelligence, we are condemned to think with rather than against the tides of media.  Our contemporary fascination with social networking positions us to be complicit.  We resist, then discover resistance does not suffice.  The labels or ideological stances we adopt ----independent, conservative, liberal ---eventually collapse under what both David Walker and Frantz Fanon understood wretchedness to be.  Our souls may escape to elsewhere, but our minds cannot.

Given this scenario, Adam Benforado's Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (New York: Crown, 2015) should be required reading for the temporary relief it offers.  The book should be required reading in our nation for President Donald J. Trump and his tribe, for members of Congress (especially for those who pretend to be Democrats), for public school and university students and teachers, for all of us inclined to resist from diverse angles.

Benforado pricks consciousness.  Is he selling a fake post-truth or an undeniable fact in the following paragraph?

The news media further distorts our perceptions because our threat-detection system tends to rely heavily on whatever is within easy reach.  Incidents that are prominent in our memories end up taking on an outsize role.  And how easily we can recall an event influences not only our sense of how frequently that event occurs but also our sense of how important it is.  It makes a difference, then, that there is far more coverage of serial rapists and child kidnappings than of diabetes deaths.  Likewise, the disproportionate number of stories on the local news about crimes committed by young African American men increases people's fear of black men and leads to an overvaluation of the threat they pose, which may in turn affect how police officers, prosecutors, judges, and jurors treat them. (xvi)

Is Benforado providing a description of why deliberate suppression of stories about crimes committed by white women and men cultivates fears among non-whites of the collective threat so-called white people present to humanity?

In this instance, it is prudent to use the standard of reasonable doubt in any engagement with Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice, because Benforado backs his claims with testable evidence from research in psychology and neuroscience.  Science does have reasonable credibility, does it not?

The importance of his book pivots on the credibility of "Benigne faciendae sunt interpretationes, propter simplicitatem laicorum, ut res magis valeat quam pereat; et verba intentioni, non e contra, debent inservire" ((trans. Constructions [ of written instruments ]are to be made liberally, on account of the simplicity of the laity [or common people], in order that the thing [or subject matter] may rather have effect than perish [of become void]; and words must be subject to the intention, not the intention to the words.))  There is a reason that the American legal system buries its treasures in Latin. See Black's Law Dictionary.  Benforado's book is a tool for meditating on wretchedness under a strawberry moon.  It is not a solution.  It is guide for action, for bending the arc of history toward elusive justice (286). It tells us what many African Americans know from historical experience, what non-African Americans have yet to learn.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            June 9, 2017

Six items on the October 14 ballot should be scrutinized before we vote "Yes" or "No."  CA No. 1 (Act 428 SB140) would exempt property tax for construction sites; CA No. 2 (Act 427 HB145) would provide homestead exemption for unmarried surviving spouses of people who have rendered noble public service; CA No. 3 (Act 429 HB 354) would dedicate projected taxes to a construction subfund for transportation infrastructure.  Read the texts for these items carefully.  Read even more carefully the items that ask us to approve or to reject the renewal of millage for PW School Board Propositions A, B, and C-----purchase of textbooks and other supplies; sponsoring programs for improving discipline and decreasing dropouts; funding for salaries, fringe benefits, and productivity incentives for employees.  We need to ask pointed question about these propositions or proposals at Orleans Parish School Board forums that are scheduled during the month of September.  Given the "confederated" rather than "unified" system of education in New Orleans, we need to be vigilant about hidden loopholes.

We harm ourselves if we fail to inform ourselves about the less-than-obvious stakes in the October 14 election.  Vote, of course, but try to do so as intelligently as is possible.  We may not be able to cleanse the new swamp of political ignorance in national affairs for some years, but we are capable of not replicating that swamp in New Orleans when we exercise our civic obligations

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            September 1, 2017

We harm ourselves and the future of governance and quality of life in New Orleans should we minimize the complex challenges offered by the October 14 election.

CONSIDER what is pure gossip.  It has been alleged that a social aid and pleasure club, founded in 1916, informed one candidate that its endorsement might be purchased for the small sum of $25,000.00.

CONSIDER the interview Mike Weinberger conducted with Joe Giarrusso for Crime Safety Reporter 1.5 (September 2017): 1, 3.

Question from Weinberger: "Do you think the police need more flexibility?

Answer from Giarrusso: "Yes.  Individual police officers, and their chief, need the autonomy to be able to do the things they want to do so they can accomplish crime prevention.

If you take Giarrusso's words out of context, the phrasing "autonomy to be able to do the things they want to do" becomes very, very threatening!

Mr. Giarrusso is expected to address the Home Defense Foundation on October 3, 2017 at 7:00 p.m. at the Morning Call Coffee Shop in City Park.

CONSIDER that Saints fans, dead in their halos, may be more enthusiastic about the football and the success of the 2017-18 season than about their election choices.

CONSIDER that as of September 10, 2017, there are only three unconditionally serious candidates for Mayor of New Orleans: Michael Bagneris , LaToya Cantrell, and  Desiree Charbonnet.   All of the mayoral candidates are serious to some degree. But as was the case in George Orwell's Animal Farm, all the candidates are not equally serious.  Anticipate frantic public campaigning between now and October 13. Consider that those who possess real power in the Big Easy may take bets on "C" words ----cash, color, caste, class, Creole, corruption----and the critical "G" word ---gender.

CONSIDER that, as far as I know, the only candidate for City Council who attended the Orleans Parish School Board town hall meeting at McDonough 35 on September 7 was Dr. Joe Bouie.  He contributed vital information about RS 17.3972, the intent and purpose of the legislature's authorizing "experimentation by city and parish school boards by authorizing the creation of  innovative kinds of public schools for pupils."  Dr. Bouie's point was that the legislature authorized an experiment.  It  did not authorize the tragicomedy of choice and emotions that marks discord in New Orleans between the OPSB and Non-Profit Charter Governing Boards, which manage to find tactics to avoid full accountability to the taxpayers for use of public money. Ah, shades of avoidance and the Sewerage and Water Board's alleged "criminal indifference" prior to August 5, 2017. The alumnae and alumni of McDonough 35, who have exceptionally powerful testimony to offer about what has happened to education since Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees, shall probably vote intelligently on October 14.

Vote, please vote. And remember that voting intelligently is no easy matter.  We have ideological convictions of some kind, and we inadvertently  support candidates who share our prejudices. 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 10, 2017