Hartzman's mean potshots

GREENSBORO, NC -- Local blogger, Yes!Weekly contributor and former mayoral candidate George Hartzman is a prolific writer. Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, post after post of what appear to be meaningful data and information, often seeming to explain some dire accusation of wrong-doing or malfeasance.

It's all really just so much camouflage, though — textual cover for the unfair and mean-spirited potshots Hartzman launches from behind his deliberately constructed blind of inexactness and misdirection. As local blogger Jeff Martin has rightly said, it's McCarthyism; only the targets are not Communists, but rather anybody simply unlucky enough to find themselves in Hartzman's cross-eyed cross hairs.

Here's how it works. Hartzman beings with some unflattering innuendo or incriminating accusation. Then he sets about creating an illusion that his attacks are founded in reason and supported by facts when, in reality, they are built on rhetorical slights of hand and intentional confusion. Here are some of his common techniques:

Interpretive Grammar : The basics matter. Subject, verb, object. Punctuation. Who did what to whom? The basics are requisite for a reasonable evaluation of the soundness of an assertion. Hartzman will often avoid grammatical precision precisely where it is needed the most, where his attacks meet the facts, in order to slither away from accountability. It is enough for Hartzman that it sounds like he could be saying what you think he might be saying. Clarity, however, means accountability, and that is to be avoided.  

Hartzman Example: "I believe Yvonne voted to enrich Skip Alston and Earl Jones, who she has a financial interest via the Simkins Pac, and Skip and Earl stand to profit from the museum after the debt is paid off via the City of Greensboro's bailout, which Yvonne voted for;"

The Mirage: Instead of a statement of fact, he paints an accusation as an appearance. He often deploys this technique with the words "looks like," — an illusion; an unsubstantiated impression as solid as any fact.

Hartzman Example: "Zack Matheny doing what Roy Carroll told him to on economic incentives after what looks like selling taxpayer money to fund his Congressional campaign?" 

The Ghost: To professionals, this is known as the passive voice, a sentence with no subject, where something happens on its own, unattributed to any earthly actor. "The economic benefits were estimated at $12 million," or "Pollution was released into the river," are examples. Who made the estimate? Who released the pollution? A ghost. This is a journalistic no-no for a reason: It's sneaky. It's a linguistic magic trick;  a misdirection. Without knowing to whom we can  attribute the action we cannot evaluate motives or expertise or know where to look for verification or responsibility. Nobody is accountable. With the passive voice, actions are made by invisible ghosts. Hartzman is fond of ghosts.

Hartzman Example: "City staff and council were informed before the vote that some money the museum was to receive did not look like it was merely meant to pay off loans tied to saving the facility..." [This is actually a two-for-one: the passive voice (who informed?) and another "looks like."]

Befuddle: Like Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny, Hartzman's readers will find themselves just as befuddled wondering "Which way did he go?" when confronted with Hartzman's intentionally confusing formatting. His inconsistent use of quotations marks, sprinkled with ellipses and a mix of right and left justified paragraphs leave one wondering if one is reading Hartzman's words or something written by someone else. The jumbled mess may make sense to Hartzman, but it's cryptic to the rest of us, which is is part and parcel of Hartzmans intentional obfuscation. The harder for us to follow, the better. No need for full comprehension, he'd rather we just get the gist of his innuendo.

Hartzman Example: Here's a good one.

The Sesame Street Game: Do you remember "One of these things doesn't belong here," the Sesame Street song challenging children to identify a thing that did not belong with the others? It is a good song to keep in your head when reading Hartzman, as you will find him slipping in unrelated items to his lists of particulars to bulk up an assertion light on facts. Here he is explaining how former Mayor Robbie Perkins worked to "enrich" Skip Alston:

Harztman Example: "Robbie Perkins, reported to have personally identified and advocated for Mujeeb Shah-Khan to be hired as Greensboro’s City Attorney, was an honorary Chair of the ICRCM/Simkins 2013 golf tournament. Perkins advocated for the museum bailout, employed Alston’s former campaign manager, voted for what appears to have been an unnecessary police settlement, a television show and Skip Alston’s $150,000 commission via the Bessemer Shopping Center deal." 

Can you guess which does not belong? Here's a hint, they all relate to Skip Alston, however tangentially, except for one — unless Hartzman was just associating it with Alston because it also involved black people. (Answer below.)

The Link Dump: Make a post seem well researched and substantiated with a bunch of links to seemingly supporting sources. Hartzman offers no explanation of why the links matter. Click through and one becomes bewildered as to their relevance but, to the uninitiated, the pile of links looks like solid substantiation.

Hartzman Example: This one will do.

Channel Rube Goldberg: Like the convoluted Rube Golderg contraptions where mechanical events cascade crazily from one to another ultimately to perform some incredibly simple task, Hartzman will send his readers down a chute of incomprehensible logorrhoea  instead of just  being concise and clear. Why? Because to be direct and concise would rob Hartzman of the opportunity to deploy his deplorable rhetorical techniques. There is no room for grammatical obfuscation, mirages, ghosts and irrelevancies in directness.

Example at the end of this post.

All of this would not matter if Hartzman were just amusing himself, but Hartzman deploys these techniques in unscrupulous attacks on people. It's malice in a thin disguise.

Sure, many of Hartzman's targets are public officials (but not always) and they are vulnerable to the slings and arrows of any opinion, but that doesn't make what Hartzman does any less malicious. In fact, under the guise of, as he says about himself, wanting to "leave others better off for his having existed," his practices are especially insidious. To the extent they enter the public discourse (and thanks to Yes!Weekly, that is more frequent now) they impede, convolute and distract. They foment fear, mistrust and inspire suspicion. Yes, once in a while, he digs up some nugget of importance, but far too often he is the wolf who cried boy. He's not leaving others better off. He's tearing us down with his malevolent snarling.

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Answer to the Sesame Street Game: The police settlement. It had nothing to do with Skip Alston. (The television show may also be an acceptable answer. I thought I remembered an association between it and one of Alston's children, but I cannot find anything on the web to substantiate that memory.) Bonus points if you also noticed that the example included a mirage: " voted for what appears to have been..."

Channel Rube Goldberg example: Hartzman writes this as an "explanation" for his claim that Greensboro City Council representative Yvonne Johnson has a financial conflict of interest in the International Civil Rights Center and Museum:

My understanding is if the property pays off the tax credits and debt with the bailout money, the for profit entities go away and the owners of the Sit in Movement non profit own the property, and the exhibits, and won't have property tax obligations.

If the project goes cash flow positive, Skip and Earl can start taking salaries.

The non-profit could sell the property.

The non-profit could become a for profit.

It will be theirs to do what they want with it, after mismanaging the museum.

City Council will have bailed out members of the Simkins PAC, and the Simkins PAC helped put some of the Council in their seats.

Yvonne is in the Simkins PAC. Skip is the Treasurer of the PAC.

Both look like have paid family members from the PAC's assets.

If money changed hands to their kin while the PAC was under their control, Yvonne and Skip have a financial interest in each other.

Yvonne untied herself to the museum to advocate and vote for the museum bailout, which could enrich Skip.

Yvonne was endorsed by the Simkins PAC, whose Treasurer is Skip.

Skip stands to benefit from the museum via Yvonne's actions.

Yvonne stands to benefit from Skip's actions via the Simpkins PAC.

It's a conflict of interest.

According to the city charter, the vote/contract should be nullified by a Council vote.

Yes! Weekly publisher resorts to plagiarism

UPDATE: Yes!Weekly's publisher, from the comments:

"Obviously, it was not intentional on my part to confuse you or anyone as a reader of our blog as in no way did I try to claim it as my original work. I just posted it. My goal was to get the information "released" to me...the "press" out to our readers as timely as possible."

GREENSBORO, NC -- The publisher of Yes! Weekly recently dismissed its editor. The reporting staff soon left too, leaving Yes! publisher Charles Womack in a tough spot. Still, desperation is no reason to resort to publishing press releases word-for-word under the publisher's name even though he did not write them.

That's plagiarism.

Here is the post on Yes! Weekly's blog attributed to publisher Charles.

Here is the press release from the City of Greensboro. They are identical.

Yes!Weekly's push-back back against City secrecy

GREENSBORO, NC -- As the City of Greensboro sets down new policies for access to public records, including a good going over by the police of records requests and police sign-off before documents are released, a Yes! Weekly editorial tells a cautionary tale of the time a city tried to keep documents from the view of Yes! sister publication, The Outer Banks Sentinel. The city lost.

"It applies in the here and now as Greensboro officials attempt to revamp the city’s process for public-information requests. Let it serve as a warning to the crafters of the new policy that the law is on the side of the people when it comes to public records, that denying them can be costly and embarrassing, and that newspaper like ours are relentless in our pursuit of the truth."

— Yes! Weekly

Hammer's big lie

"Last week we reported that Greensboro had given out confidential police reports to Yes! Weekly." -- John Hammer, Rhinoceros Times 

"Information that falls under the criminal investigation or criminal intelligence exception to the public records law is not public record, but it is not confidential." Frayda S. Bluestein, North Carolina School of Government, to Ben Holder.

As he is so very good at, Rhino Times editor and publisher John Hammer has begun constructing a narrative through his tried and true tactic of the firm and steady repetition of a claim he never bothered to explain or substantiate in the first place.

This time, Hammer is attempting to implant the notion in the public conciousness that the emails released by the City of Greensboro to his competitor Yes!Weekly were "confidential." (From here, it's an easy slide into Hammer's favorite past time of berating city staff as incompetent, which seems to be his real objective.)

One problem: The records are not "confidential." (They are not "reports" either, as Hammer says. They were emails. "Confidential police reports," sounds more sinister, I suppose, but it was emails that were released, not reports and Hammer surely knows that.)

As Frayda Bluestein of the North Carolina School of Government explains, courtesy of Ben Holder, "confidential" has a specific meaning in regard to government records and the documents to which Hammer is referring don't meet the test.

City employees, even police, cannot simply slap the word "confidential" on an email and make it off limits. These records fall into the area where cities have some discretion about their release. The records the City released are of the kind that Bluestein explains:

"[T]he statute leaves it to the public agency to decide whether and when to release this type of material."

The city legally released this information. It offered a glimpse of the way local police conduct surveillance on law-abiding citizens and revealed that at least one police lieutenant considered a city council person to be a "confidential informant."

I would argue that it's good for civilians to have this kind of insight into their police force and elected representatives. Others may disagree, but it's a big lie to express that disagreement by pretending that that such records are "confidential." They are not and Hammer should stop saying they are. He's misleading his readers.

Yes!Weekly: Emails appear to contradict Council representative, city leadership

GREENSBORO, NC -- Yes!Weekly has made available some of the emails that were the foundation for their story Under surveillance which led to a  failed attempt by the City of Greensboro to get an injunction to stop publication of that story and a subsequent attempt to justify that action in an opinion piece co-authored by the City's manager, police chief and attorney.

Yes!'s Eric Ginsberg writes:

"Read the files on Abuzuaiter here, including the e-mails Abuzuaiter claimed she did not send. The councilwoman denied all correspondence with Detective Rob Finch, and also said she never communicated with Capt. John Wolfe about the Beloved Community Center or Latin Kings."

Ginsberg also says the emails call into question whether the city's explanation of its attempts to stop the publication of the article were for the reasons they gave to the public or if the attempt at an injunction was to protect the councilwoman.

Speaking to city council on censorship

GREENSBORO, NC -- Last night, I was not joined by Yes!Weekly publisher Charles Womack to speak out against the City of Greensboro's preposterous attempts to censor his newspaper and we did not address the city council during speakers from the floor. I did though.

Here is the text of my remarks (hyperlinks added):

Honorable Mr. Mayor and City Council,

My name is Roch Smith, Jr. I built and operate Greensboro101.com, a website that collects and links to the latest news, blogs, tweets and videos from the people of Greensboro.

Last week the City of Greensboro attempted to censor local newspaper Yes!Weekly. Police attorney Jim Clark and Police Chief Ken Miller secretly filed a lawsuit, without notifying Yes!Weekly, that attempted to get a judge to stop Yes!Weekly from publishing a story about police surveillance.

I find this action shocking. Not only was this stunt an affront to the the legal principles against prior restraint well established for decades since the Supreme Court ruled on the Pentagon Papers, it was a brutal assault on government transparency in its underlying purpose which was to hide from the public information about the police spying on law-abiding citizens. This is not the Greensboro I thought I knew. Nor is it the one in which I think we want to live.

Doug Clark, editorial writer for the News & Record described this stunt as “bizarre and disturbing.” He's right. He also said “City Council must demand a full accounting of police surveillance policies and activities." He's right about that too but this is just the latest and most disgraceful episode of a larger problem, an ongoing adversarial and overly secretive approach by the City's legal departments towards the public's right to know what our government is up to.

Since last July, I have been trying to obtain records from the city about the extent to which the City of Greensboro surveils and monitors the public at-large – those of us not suspected of any crime or evoking suspicion, but just going about our daily business. How, when, why and for whom is the City watching us? The city has successfully kept that information secret largely by citing laws intended to stop terrorism.

The citizens of Greensboro need to assert themselves, through our elected representatives, as the overseers of our local government, not its subjects or its children, and change the city's posture towards one of genuine openness and transparency and away from the kind of overreaching secrecy that has earned us the rare and appalling distinction of being a City that tried to censor a newspaper.

[The mayor interrupted here and told me to "wrap it up." I skipped the following paragraph and jumped to the last.]

The city's approach to public records is broken, more than I can describe in a mere three minutes, but I have kept city council apprised by email. So, I'm asking you, as an accompaniment to examining police surveillance policies to also take control of the City's broken approach to public records requests. Which is what got us here.

I leave it up to you to decide how best to get there, but I am asking specifically for city council to take some type of concrete action that will expeditiously result in a public, city-council approved set of directives that instruct city employees how to approach public records requests. One that reorients our city away from secrecy and confrontation and towards cooperative and real transparency. Will you please begin this undertaking as soon as possible?

Question for Yes!Weekly: City Councilor set up?

GREENSBORO, NC -- [Please see Yes!Weekly editor Brian Clarey's response below.]

There are murmurs, rumors and grumblings that Greensboro City Councilor Marikay Abuzuatier was somehow "set up" with the release by the City of Greensboro of an email from a police sergeant that identifies her as a confidential informant.

It is hard to consider these theories without quickly finding oneself wading into the most improbable of conspiracies. Nonetheless, with the release of the complaint the City filed in a failed attempt to get Yes!Weekly to stop publication of a story based, in part, on those emails, there is a bit of information that raises a legitimate question.

The complaint lists the search terms Yes! submitted for their records requests. Among them is an email address for Abuzuaiter. No other city council members' email addresses were among the search requests submitted by Yes! Just Abuzuaiter's.

Why is that?
-----------------------

Yes!'s response: Yes!Weekly editor Brian Clarey says that the search terms listed in the City's complaint were from requests made subsequent to Yes!'s receipt of documents from prior records requests in which Abuzuaiter's association with the police was first noticed. Those previous documents prompted the additional requested search specifically for Abuzuaiter's email address says Clarey.

Pulitzer worthy

The News & Record writes a report of Yes!Weekly's report.

The surveillance story: The rest of us

Please provide me all records of any communications in any form from January 23, 2013 through today, inclusive, regarding Yes!Weekly, including but not limited to any records documenting discussing options for or attempts to restrain the paper's distribution. 
-- Records request made of the City of Greensboro yesterday by this blogger

Last September, I met with Yes!Weekly publisher Brian Clarey and reporter Eric Ginsburg to discuss my interest in writing a story about the extent and means by which the City of Greensboro conducts surveillance on its citizens. My interest in writing about the subject was inspired by the slow walk and outright denials that met my requests for records about the subject from the City last summer. It is documented that the City responds to records requests faster for employees of the media than for other citizens and I thought Yes!'s additional resources might add some muscle to my efforts. While we couldn't work out a suitable arrangement, I'm glad that Yes! decided to pursue the story on their own.

Reporter Eric Ginsburg has discovered some important and disturbing information about how the police monitor certain groups, including a rather astonishing email in which a police sergeant identifies City Councilor Marikay Abujuatier as a confidential informant. Ginsburg's story is a must read, deploying the kind of fearless skepticism Greensboro counts on from its alternate weeklies and opening our eyes to the unseen activities of our local government.

The Rest of Us

There is another question, however, that remains unanswered: To what extent are rest of us—the public at large—being monitored while we go about our business under the impression that we are doing so in obscurity.

Since July of last year, I have been trying to get an answer to that question through public records requests. It began simply enough, with a request for records documenting the number and location of surveillance cameras. Some cameras are in public view, on streets and in parking decks, but what, I wondered, is the full extent of this watching?

How many cameras does the City deploy that are less obvious than those you'll see at some intersections, if you look; cameras like those in and pointing out from City buses? What about cameras intentionally hidden? (Ginsburg reports of a cop in disguise, riding on a float in the Fourth of July Parade and recording video from a camera hidden in the horn of a trumpet.) Does the city deploy cameras that track and pan to follow people? Are they also recording sound? Who is watching what they record?

It is known that private foundations have purchased surveillance cameras to be trained on public spaces, such as those purchased by Action Greensboro to surveill the Greenway. Who's monitoring those cameras? Who is watching the video recorded by the cameras in the quasi-public space of Center City Park? When and why?

Greensboro has never had a public discussion, much less implemented any policy directives addressing the extent and means by which government or agents acting on its behalf monitor the public at-large. A good place to start, I thought, would be with an understanding of the degree to which such surveillance is underway. Thus I made my request for this information.

Request Denied

My request was denied by the city attorney who maintained that a state law passed after 9/11 and intended to protect infrastructure from terrorists permits cities to keep records about the number and location of surveillance cameras secret. That law does not mandate that the City must keep such information secret, just that, in the city attorney's opinion, it gives them the option of doing so and he chose to exercise that option, denying me records that would report the location and number of surveillance cameras.

I attempted to get Mayor Robbie Perkins and City Manager Denise Turner to intervene but neither took any action of which I'm aware to reverse or challenge the City Attorney's opinion, acquiescing to it through their inaction.

A Different Approach

Confronted with that refusal, I attempted to ascertain the information through requests for records that would be more clearly mandated as public and subject to disclosure, such as purchase records or recordings of video from these cameras. The ensuing slog resulted in an incomplete picture, the city attorney continued to use the anti-terrorism law to withhold records that would provide clear and definitive information. Some records were released; video from the libraries (after hours to protect patron anonymity) was provided, for example, while video from buses (inside or out) was not.

An important component to my requests was for information about who is watching. The response to my request for records documenting that access was suspiciously thin. I received a single record, clearly not a copy of any original record, described as being a redacted compilation of log files of internet access to unspecified cameras by persons described as "security guards."

Are other people monitoring surveillance cameras? Is the City keeping records of who is watching and why? It has been, thus far, impossible to definitively document an answer to either of those questions but the single record of access by security guards does not inspire confidence.

The Next Step

It is incredibly frustrating for an individual citizen to find themselves in an adversarial role against government workers when attempting to find out what our government is up to. City employees get paid whether they provide records or not. Without loud and clear directives to cooperate with citizens or risk losing their jobs, their cooperation is capricious. A recent change in state law allows for the prevailing party in a records lawsuit to collect the cost of suing for records from a municipality found to have improperly kept records secret, but that is an even more time consuming proposition that relies on either the deep pockets this bloggers does not have or an interested attorney this blogger does not know.

The next best thing is a robust press. It is such a worn out refrain to lament the News & Record's lack of initiative on these kinds of stories that it is almost not worth mentioning and yet... and local TV news has a hard time with these kinds of stories, so not much is expected from them. That leaves the alternative weeklies.

Of course, the real responsibility lies with us. It is our government, after all, and we live in a democracy—a representative democracy. Despite keeping city council apprised of my efforts and of the city's responses, our representatives have been ineffective in getting the city to reveal details of its public surveillance. There is an election this fall, however. Until then, Ginsburg is our best hope.

Boss Carroll and Greensboro's noise ordinance hullabaloo

Yes! Weekly, on the heels of their exposé of the public costs of defending lawsuits alleging discrimination in the Greensboro Police Department, uncovers records documenting the genesis of the recent downtown noise hullabaloo, including this gem from local developer, campaign contributor and downtown residential high-rise owner Roy Carroll to an assistant city manager:

"I would like for officers to be stationed in front of the [Green Street] club and monitor the noise for the next few Sunday nights."

Read all about it in "Carroll says jump, City springs into action." (some of the more interesting emails here.)

This is the kind of investigative reporting Greensboro sorely needs (the local daily, the News & Record, reported on the costs of the discrimination lawsuits yesterday, nearly six weeks after Yes! Weekly). Keep up the good work, guys.

Be verwy verwy quiet, we're redistricting

GREENSBORO, NC -- Yes!Weekly's Jordan Green asks the question I was asking myself when the press release hit my mail box after dinner last night: why is a proposed redistricting of City Council districts being announced on a Friday night?

Jordan:

Here's hoping we can have a forthright and transparent discussion about the relative merits of any proposed changes instead of five council members secretly conferring and then rush-approving a new map before the public even has a chance to weigh in.