Looking before we leap: How to think about surveillance cameras

GREENSBORO, NC -- The city of Greensboro has rejected, for now, a plan to put police surveillance cameras downtown and beyond but those in favor haven't lost their fervor, however impulsive their motivations may be.

Here is how we—our elected officials, decision makers and citizens—should evaluate surveillance cameras:

Need and Effectiveness: An evaluation of the need for surveillance cameras, specifically: the impact they are expected to have on crime and how their effectiveness in meeting those expectations would be evaluated.

Data Collection and Use: Evaluation of the types, storage, public accessibility and use of data that such systems might collect on law abiding citizens, including, for example, license plate numbers, facial recognition information and wireless device (phone, tablet) tracking*, and the purpose of collecting such data on law abiding citizens.

Deployment Criteria: An evaluation of the criteria for deciding when and where to deploy these cameras; considerations of how to avoid arbitrary use; how to avoid unfair or unwarranted monitoring or targeting of certain populations; the circumstances under which a camera would be installed in any given location and under what circumstances would groups or individuals within range be subjected to additional inspection (zoom, tracking, recording) and data collection (facial recognition, wireless device ID capture, locations visited.)

Civil Impact: Evaluation of the social, civic and economic impact of the indiscriminate monitoring, tracking, collecting and storing of data broadly collected on law abiding citizens.

Were we to make these evaluations honestly and unemotionally, we would have a clear understanding of why we should or should not deploy these kinds of systems.

* The system proposed—and thus far rejected—would have had cameras operating with wireless connections, a system whereby they could ping passing phones, tablets and other wireless devices for their identification.

On Greensboro's next police chief

GREENSBORO, NC -- The City of Greensboro is searching for a new police chief and is soliciting public comments about the traits and qualities they should look for. You can offer your two cents worth with this online form.

Here are parts of my suggestions:

A chief who is sensitive to the problems of technological encroachment on citizens. One who is not enamored with the capabilities of technology to identify, track, monitor and store information about law abiding citizens as they go about their business. One who is confident he or she can provide a high level of public safety while letting law abiding citizens live their lives in obscurity, if that's what they choose. 

and

Transparent. A better understanding of public records law than the previous chief and a sincere willingness to default towards openness on matters where police have discretion on whether or not to make information public. A willingness to be forthcoming with citizens about how they are being policed. 

Not for the police to decide; city council needs to act

GREENSBORO, NC -- The News & Record is right about video footage captured by the cameras now worn by all Greensboro police officers and for which police policy dictates that every interaction with a citizen is to be recorded: They are the people's property, not the police's.

First, to state the obvious: Based on what police are willing to tell us so far (which isn’t much), the Aug. 4 arrests of two Greensboro men seems petty and excessive.

Less than a block from his home, Rufus Scales, 27, was pinned to the ground and handcuffed for resisting arrest, walking in the middle of a street and “impeding traffic” where there seemed to be none.

Scales’ brother Devin, 22, captured a portion of the incident on camcorder footage that has been posted on the Internet. He pans the camera to show streets with no sidewalks or traffic, then two more police cars arriving.

The camera shakes as a hand suddenly appears in front of the lens and the filming suddenly stops. The officer, T.B. Cole, appears to confirm while on camera why he is arresting Scales: “You cannot just sit there and run your mouth and start cursing in the middle of the street.”

The incident has been seized by police critics as evidence of the mistreatment of some citizens, especially African Americans. It also adds another arrow to the quiver of the mounting argument against the Greensboro Police Department’s insistence on keeping footage shot by officers’ cameras shielded from public view as “a personnel record.”

In a meeting last week with News & Record editors and reporters, Police Chief Ken Miller, interim Chief Anita Holder and the interim city attorney, Tom Carruthers, stood by that interpretation, arguing that to do otherwise would be to break state law. But the footage’s value as a public record should hold greater weight. After all, these are taxpayer-funded recordings of officers’ interaction with the public in public places. Also, we’re talking about a tool that was advertised as a chance to build community trust in police and improve accountability. The city accomplishes neither by keeping such a stubborn grip on the footage, and may, in fact, erode trust in the process.

During the Scales arrests, Cole, a training officer, was not wearing a body camera that is now standard issue for patrol officers. The officers who later arrived on the scene were, but their footage won’t be released to the public or media, either.

State law does allow the city to release such video if city leaders believe doing so is essential to maintaining public confidence in local government. Certainly, in the wake of national tensions following the fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., this seems like such an instance.

Miller did say last week that Rufus and Devin Scales may see the available footage, but no one else. Meanwhile, to her credit, Mayor Nancy Vaughan has expressed concern that the city invokes the personnel-records defense too often. As for the rest of the council, it remains conspicuously silent.

It had nothing to say when an officer fatally shot a knife-wielding woman in March and refused to release that video. And it has said not one syllable so far in the case of the Scales brothers.

Miller insists, “We have nothing to hide in the Scales case.”

Then, by all means, let’s go to the tape.

From beyond the grave: Dead people accessing city surveillance network

GREENSBORO, NC -- I spoke at last night's Greensboro City Council meeting about city records that appear to show large numbers of unauthorized accesses to city surveillance cameras, including by a couple of people identified by the City as former employees long retired and now deceased.

Here is the text of my remarks and the video, which includes commentary by city council and the City Manager.

Tonight, I am here to bring to your attention an example of the harmful consequences of the city of Greensboro's climate of obfuscation and hostility towards transparency.

In July of last year, I requested all records documenting access by anybody to city surveillance cameras for a one-week period. 

Rather than receiving copies of any kind of contemporaneous original records, I received a document obviously created in response to my request. A fake.

Although my request was officially closed, I reminded city staff that I had requested all records of anybody accessing surveillance cameras and requesting an explanation for why I had been provided a manufactured record. I had to ask three times. After my third request, I received a reply.

"The information listed is the names of the security guards who have access to view live and archive video from surveillance cameras thru out the city facilities."

For the sake of time, I must quickly summarize what happened over the next several months. My pursuit of the records I had originally requested was stonewalled at every turn. At various times, I was mislead, intimidated and ignored.

It became very frustrating.

For months on end, the City stood by their story, insisting that only security guards were authorized to access surveillance cameras and that I had been provided an accurate record of surveillance camera access.

I was even given this list, presented to me as those people authorized to access surveillance cameras. As you can see, it is a list of fourteen people. 

After seven months of city stonewalling, six months after my request was officially closed, I finally received a copy of an original record recording access to surveillance cameras.

It did not match the manufactured record I originally received, the one that was described as recording access by security guards because only security guards had access to surveillance cameras, supposedly. Instead, the real record showed people other than security guards accessing surveillance cameras.

So I asked for the log files for a longer period of time for a better idea of the extent to which City staff were watching surveillance cameras. What I found was shockingly different from what the City had said for month about who was accessing surveillance cameras.

Instead of the fourteen authorized users, log files showed well over fifty people accessing city surveillance cameras. Who?

According to the City's human resources department, those included not only security guards, but laborers, mechanics, and tax collectors -- over 50 people with various positions other than security guards.

It gets worse:

The City could not identify 21 of the people who the log files showed accessing surveillance cameras.

That's bad. But incredibly...

Two of the people recorded as having accessed city surveillance cameras are identified by the City's Human Resources as having long since retired and being deceased.

Questions:

- Why was I provided a manufactured record instead of a copy of an actual record?

- Why are people not authorized to do so, logging into surveillance cameras?

- Who are the people logging in that the city could not identify?

- Who was logging in using the names of deceased city employees?

- When is city council going to get serious about changing the culture of secrecy and hostility towards transparency that exists in city government?

Greensboro City Council's unequal treatment

GREENSBORO, NC -- Billy Jones on Mayor Robbie Perkins insisting that speakers from the floor at city council meeting provide their home addresses:

"To add insult to injury, Mayor Perkins often exempts friends, high rollers and connected elites from having to state their home addresses. Others openly use their office addresses."

That's true. The Mayor cut the mic and had city council candidate Ben Holder escorted  from the chambers for giving his address as "blah, blah, blah lane" (to make the same point) yet, as Billy rightly notes, certain insiders and city staff are allowed to speak without giving their addresses.

This kind of preferential treatment extends to the City's practice of reporting the public records requests of certain individuals while giving an unspoken exemption to insiders, the connected and former employees. Oh, yeah, the exemption extends to city council people too, who, of all people—with their obligation to public accountability—should have their interactions with city government transparent and open and, instead, get a comfy cloak of secrecy bestowed by city staff who never, ever include their records requests with the regularly published list of requests. Never.

This is not just the mayor's doing though, none of the incumbent councilors have lifted a finger to make any changes. It's going to be really hard to vote to re-elect any of them.

Zombies or Naive?

"For an agency like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an intelligence agency: social contacts, details about the user's behavior and location, interests (through search terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card numbers and passwords." -- Der Spiegel 

On the heels of public revelations that the United States National Security Agency has the capabilities of collecting "a broad spectrum of user data from smart phones," comes Apple's announcement that its new phone will now also collect fingerprints.

 "Who knew in 1984... that [Steve Jobs] would be big brother... and the zombies would be paying customers?" -- NSA presentation 

Was the N.S.A. right, are smartphone users zombies or just confident in the perpetual good intentions of government?

The fantastical imaginings of the Triad Conservative

GREENSBORO, NC -- If one has an interest in influencing local elections, as Conservatives for Guilford County's Dr. Joe Guarino does, it helps to know the electorate. That's best done by leaving behind ideological assumptions and getting in touch with, well, the facts.

In arguing against allowing college students to vote where they reside, Dr. Guarino writes on his blog Triad Conservative:

"Here in Greensboro, for instance, students attending local colleges and universities can be extremely disruptive of local elections because they can skew the results against the interests of taxpayers."

Not just "disruptive," Guarino says, but "extremely disruptive;" and by disruptive, one assumes that means that, but for those meddling kids, local elections would have different results.

As is frequently Guarino's pitfall though, he has substituted some phobic assumption for an examination of the facts. Using a voter intelligence web application I'm developing, I took a look at the participation of college-aged voters in the last local election (2011 general).

Here are the facts to which Guarino attributes extreme disruption:

36,387 voters total voted in Greensboro's 2011 municipal election.
135 ( 0.37%) voted on-campus at NCA&T
36 (0.09%) voted on-campus at UNCG

What about off-campus students? That's a little harder to pin down, exactly, but let's use as a proxy voters 18 to 22 years old. Some college students will be older, but not all people 18 to 22 are college students either. How many 18 to 22 year-olds voted in the last local election?

598 (1.6%) voters city-wide ages 18 to 22.

In fact, only one age group voted less than 18 to 22 year-olds in the last local election, those 93 years-old and up.

The interest and passion Conservatives for Guilford County have for local elections is admirable. Representatives like Guarino would better serve the group by engaging the facts rather than attacking a group of people without reason.

Right on!

From the Huffington Post:

"In the video above, Dax Ewbank of Oklahoma City accuses [Rep. James] Lankford (R-Okla) of misleading people in a recent letter in which he attempted to tamp down fears that NSA programs were being used to target normal U.S. citizens."

No objections from Council as City bestows special secrecy on candidates

GREENSBORO, NC -- The City of Greensboro has a public records request tracking system, PIRT, they call it: Public Information Request Tracking. It is supposedly for the purpose of tracking requests for city records.

It's a sham. A costly, time wasting, frustrating sham that has been perverted into a means of delay, bullying and intimidation imposed on a select few members of the public.

Only a small number of certain individuals' requests are entered into the tracking system, those mostly being some local bloggers, labor representatives and reporters from Yes!Weekly—whom the City previously tried to stop from publishing with a secret lawsuit (the City lost).

People who escape the tracking of the PIRT system and have their requests answered without being monitored include:

1. Elected representatives, including members of city council
2. Professional media (excluding Yes!Weekly)
3. Lawyers
4. Engineers and architects  
5. Real estate and business people
6. Former city employees

City Manager Denise Turner-Roth goes one step further and heaps extra scrutiny on the few people entered into the PIRT system by publishing their names and the information they requested in a memo that she sends to city council, city staff, community bigwigs and local media every Friday.

Until recently, the Manager's weekly memo included the requests of challenger city council candidates, people like George Hartzman (mayor), Ben Holder (at-large) and Sal Leone (district 5), but not the requests made by incumbent candidates.

Now, in a mind-numbing exhibition of just how rudderless the City's management is in their approach to transparency, the City Manager has decided that, rather than level the playing field by including the requests made by sitting city council people in her weekly memo along with those made by challenging candidates, no candidate requests—challengers' or incumbents'—will be included in her weekly memo.

Think about that:

People elected to represent us and those seeking to represent us, the very people of whom we should expect the greatest transparency and accountability, are being given special privileges by the City Manager so that they may avoid scrutiny. She is wrapping a special cloak of secrecy around their interactions with city government while continuing to subject a small group of other citizens to extra attention.

As astonishing as all of that is, the real kicker is that all of our elected representatives on city council, every single one of them, is aware of and has voiced no public objection to this practice. Remember that the next time you hear a city council person talk about how important government transparency is to them.

I asked to be afforded the same courtesy the City Manager has provided to candidates: to have my records requests excluded from the Manager's weekly memo, I was told that privilege is only for candidates. Yes, I was specifically told that the special cloak of secrecy is only for those who do or may represent us.

Worth noting is that mayoral candidate George Hartzman expressed his objection to the policy quite vociferously. As he wrote in an email to City Council about his requests being removed from the Manager's weekly memo:

"I most certainly did not ask to have candidate requests hidden, as it would contradict the transparency theme of my campaign. I advocated for all requests, including those from incumbents, be included."

Changing diapers

GREENSBORO, NC -- Ben Holder, candidate for city council at-large, and I were discussing the situation regarding the Greensboro City Manager's boneheaded decision to unequally and unfairly put the records requests and questions asked by non-incumbent city council candidates on a special webpage—publicity and scrutiny from which incumbent candidates are exempted, as the Manager has explicitly said—and of her request of city staff to notify her office whenever a candidate asks for information.

Ben and I were both bothered by the fact that, while we each have some important matters of public interest, health and safety we want to discuss during the public speakers' portion of the next City Council meeting, we find ourselves compelled to address this most recent mess instead -- again. (For me, the last detour was to address Mayor Robbie Perkins' refusal to stand up for Greensboro against WGHP's and WFMY's sensationalized fabrications of "hundreds of teens fighting" in downtown Greensboro.)

It's hard to move forward, to get any momentum, when you are constantly having to pit to fix a flat tire. It's like we have drivers who keep intentionally running over debris or, to use a golf analogy, we are constantly having to help our team captain find her ball in the woods.

Ben put it best: We have to keep changing diapers. Everything else has to wait when there is a poopie mess.

That's the Greensboro we have now. Mendacious, small and too often distracted by avoidable messes.

Instead of an inspiring effort to involve the community at-large in raising funds for a downtown performing arts center, we had to pull over to fix the flat caused by the Mayor, the News & Record and others who said there was already $20 million raised for the project when that wasn't true.

"Bring her in here, boys, we got a tire down."

Instead of reaching the green in two with a chance for birdie, City Attorney Mujeeb Shah-Khan shanked one hard into the woods with his lawsuit attempting to stop the publication of Yes!Weekly newspaper. Access to public records, already woefully bad, ground to a halt, money was spent and the cause and extent of the reasons for the suit remain, to this day, unclear.

"Keep looking, ya'll, it's got to be around here somewhere."

Now, instead of heading into election season with everybody on a level playing field, The City Manager has inappropriately inserted herself into the process, tainting what should be sacrosanct fairness and creating another unnecessary diversion.

"Just a minute, kids, the little one has made a mess."

But here's the thing: Mistakes happen. People make bad decisions on occasion. Heck, I've had my share, no doubt. It's how one responds that matters and that's where Greensboro stumbles—a lot.

Why did we not see:

• The mayor come forward and say, "I was wrong to tell the people at the East Greensboro Summit that $20 million in private contributions had been procured for a downtown performing arts center. That' wasn't true. We are a long way from that, actually, so let's all pull together and start raising some money."
  
  

• The City Attorney tell City Council and the public, "Our attempt to silence Yes!Weekly newspaper was against Supreme Court precedent prohibiting prior restraint and we erred in trying to stop their publication," instead of buffaloing City Council and the public about what they did and why, as he did.  (Holder still wants a clear public explanation of what transpired that led the City to think it needed to take such extreme action. I do too.)
  
  

• The mayor step up and say, "WFMY and WGHP should not have exaggerated what happened downtown. If they think I said there were up to five hundred teens fighting, they misunderstood. There were a few fights, involving a few people over a period of many hours that sent some crowds running at times."
  
  

• The City Manager say, "I didn't think it through. It's unfair to use city resources to put some candidates under public scrutiny and not others. We'll stop."
  
  

But, no. Instead, the very people who are supposed to be our "leaders"—people paid good money to do a good job—double down on their mistakes or ignore them and allow them to stand, uncorrected, to Greensboro's detriment. Their colleagues and bosses on City Council are no better. What, other than spite or ill intent, causes the kind of intransigence we see repeatedly in response to errors from our civic leaders? I'm at a loss.

Is Greensboro City Manager in violation of the Hatch Act?

GREENSBORO, NC -- In addition to creating a webpage where challenger council candidates—but not incumbents—have their questions and requests made of the city posted for public scrutiny, Greensboro City Manager Denise Turner-Roth has doubled down and sent a letter to candidates in which she says she has asked staff to:

"[N]otify the City Manager's office of all requests made of them by candidates."

It is hard to imagine what legitimate purpose the City Manager may have in requesting this notification. In fact, it appears as if she is improperly inserting herself into an election in what may well be a violation of the Hatch Act, a federal law that makes it illegal for a local public employee whose organization receives federal funds to:

"[U]se official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election or nomination for office."

Still, no public objection by her bosses, the incumbent city council representatives exempted from the Manager's scrutiny. Are they going to let her get in hot water for the sake of having a campaign advantage? That seems short-sighted and irresponsible.

And where is the City Attorney?

Official deception: City takes sides in election

GREENSBORO, NC -- This is a screen shot of the title of a City of Greensboro webpage:

"Candidate requests," it says.

That's a lie.

It is an officially sanctioned lie made with the knowledge and without the objection of our current city council.

The fact is, despite its headline, that webpage only shows the requests made by (and information provided in response to) challenging candidates. Incumbent candidates do not have their requests publicized here. Not only is that treatment unfair, the City is lying about what it is doing, clearly in an attempt to obfuscate its unequal treatment.

Despite me having requested to receive the same information for incumbent candidates, the City has provided me nothing.

What could possibly be the point of publicizing the requests and answers for challenger candidates but not incumbent candidates and misrepresenting the action to boot? Well, it's pretty obvious, don't you think?

Accommodating this deceit are our illustrious incumbent city council representatives. Here they are, followed by the names of their challengers.

INCUMBENTS:
Mayor Robbie Perkins
At-large: Marikay Abuzuaiter, Yvonne Johnson and Nancy Vaughan
District 1: T. Dianne Bellamy-Small
District 2:  Jim Kee
District 3: Zack Matheny
District 4: Nancy Hoffman
District 5: Tony Carmany

NON-INCUMBENT CHALLENGERS:
Mayor: George Hartzman
At-large:  Mike Barber, Jean Brown, Katei Cranford, Ben Holder, Joseph Landis, Chris Lawyer and Marlando Pridgen
District 1: Sharon Hightower and Tigress McDaniel
District 2: Jamal Fox
District 3: Corey Pysher and Wendell Roth
District 4: Bill Knight and John Alexander Underwood
District 5: Sal Leone and Alex Seymor

Parks & Rec anti-campaigning rules lack force of law

GREENSBORO, NC -- The City of Greensboro confirms that the rules of the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department against campaigning in parks and parks facilities were never approved by city council and, thus, lack the force of law.

Creepy

GREENSBORO, NC -- Lex Alexander recently wrote a blog post taking Greensboro Police Chief Ken Miller to task for writing to local blogger Billy Jones asking that Jones remove a paragraph from a blog post.

In return, City Attorney Mujeeb Shah-Khan is now following Lex on Twitter.

The Fourth what?

WASHINGTON, DC -- In a close vote, the United States of America's House of Representatives failed to pass an amendment to a bill that would have defunded the National Security Agency's dragnet phone surveillance of American citizens. By a vote of 217 to 205, the House decided to allow the program to continue.

North Carolina representatives, voting to continue the spying program were:

George Butterfield (D)
Renee Elmers (R)
Virginia Foxx (R)
Mike McIntyre (D)
George Holding (R)
Richard Hudson (R)
Robert Pittinger (R) 
David Price (D) 

Voting to cut funding were:

Walter Jones (R)
Patrick McHenry (R)
Mark Meadows (R)
Mel Watt (D)

Representative Howard Coble was recovering from surgery and did not vote.

Records request

GREENSBORO, NC -- I submitted the following records request to the City of Greensboro this morning:

"Conforming with the city's ability and willingness to make public the questions and requests asked of city staff by city council challenger candidates and the responses the city provides to them, I am requesting to receive the same for incumbent candidates from now through November 5, 2013. Please provide me with this information on an ongoing basis with at least the same regularity as the city makes such information available for challenger candidates."

(Hyperlinks added.)

Failure of leadership

GREENSBORO, NC -- The negative fallout for Greensboro continues on the heels of WGHP's and WFMY's fabrications regarding downtown fights and Mayor Robbie Perkins' and his colleagues on council unwillingness to stand up for the truth on behalf of the city they claim to serve.

Local blogger Kristen Jeffers and News & Record reporter Joe Killian discuss the issue on Huff Post Live. Killian, especially, does a superb job of explaining the facts and context. Would that the TV's talking heads or any of our city council people were as informed and articulate.



(Hat tip: Billy Jones)

City Manager confirms unequal treatment for candidates

GREENSBORO, NC -- Greensboro City Manager Denise Turner Roth announced last week that the city will be posting the records requests made by city council challengers, but not incumbents, to a special webpage on the city's website. Today, she confirms that this will apply only to challengers and that incumbents will not have their requests posted:

"Consistent with the way this has been conducted in the past, we will not list incumbent-requested items on the web-site with items requested by candidates unless otherwise directed by Council."
-- Denise Turner Roth, City Manager

The last time something like this was attempted, city council responded by voting not to have  an information sharing policy. It was then-council-person, now-mayor, Robbie Perkins who made a motion that council abandon the scheme. It passed 8-1, with T. Dianne Bellamy Small as the lone no vote.

Watch the video as city council takes action in response to now-candidate, at-large, Ben Holder:



Unless and until this policy is changed, the obvious solution for council challengers is to use an unidentifiable email address to make requests. The law does not demand that one identify oneself when requesting or receiving records.

-----

UPDATE: District 3 representative Zack Matheny, who joined Perkins in rejecting the previous sharing scheme, weighs in:

"We have to continue to do our jobs.  Being a Current Elected Official and being a candidate is not the same. For example, the way you present this would also imply that being a candidate would mean being able to attend Closed session meetings to discuss Personal Employment Issues, and you know that is not the case.

"I understand and support your fight for Public Records and traditionally support your arguments, this one however, is difficult to support."

Of course, whether or not to post the records requests of all candidates online or only the challengers has nothing to do with the limited situations prescribed by law where council may meet in closed session.

"Why, I never." N&R editor dissembles his way to fake indignation

[CORRECTION: Allen Johnson did not write the editorial in question. It was written by John Newsome. The original below remains intact.]

GREENSBORO, NC -- Allen Johnson, opinion editor of the News & Record, is at it again: wagging his scolding finger at the bad manners of a citizen speaker at city council meetings while giving cover to a council unable to tackle hard problems. It's so typical and so tired: this practice so well honed here in Greensboro—and the N&R is a master at it—back of a hand to the head, swooning with the vapors, incensed at some perceived violation of polite manners as an excuse to avoid the inconvenient hard truths about the status quo.

Former Greensboro Police Captain Charles Cherry has been a regular speaker from the floor at Greensboro council meetings for about a year. A few weeks ago he insulted Mayor Robbie Perkins by saying that Perkins' daughter deserved a better father. Instead of taking a real look at the issues Cherry has been hammering on for months, Johnson uses the occasion of Cherry's frustration boiling over to jump on Cherry for not remaining polite in the face of months of council's inaction. Johnson even goes so far as to equate ignoring perturbed speakers with "doing a good job."

Johnson runs interference for an inept council by taking aim at Cherry's coarseness by concealing and ignoring some important facts:

• Charles Cherry had been asking for months what is the procedure for investigating allegations of misconduct by the city manager. There wasn't one. Finally, the city manager came up with one: compaints would go to council. Cherry did just that: filed a complaint with council. To date, council has not given any public indication of whether or not it undertook an investigation of Cherry's complaints against the city manager, much less any finding of the validity of Cherry's accusations. But, for the N&R's Johnson, that is not important, the manifestations of Cherry's frustration are what he'd rather us focus on.

• Johnson's description of Cherry talking "repeatedly about oral sex," is intentionally deceptive. The important detail Johnson keeps from his sheep, I mean, readers, is that Cherry was describing the on-duty misconduct of police personnel. That is a huge difference. Is the speaker just "talking about oral sex," as the dissembling Johnson would have you believe or is he talking about police engaging in oral sex while on duty? Again, Johnson would rather ignore the trouble and focus on the messenger. A writer who creates such a gross distortion is not to be trusted.

• Cherry's attack on the mayor, by referencing the mayor's child, was mean... and not unprecedented. The mayor himself, at a council meeting in April of last year, attempted to shame a civic activist by saying, from the dais, "Please don't do this to your children" (Here, at the 1:01:00 mark)  There was one huge difference between Cherry's comments and Perkins', however: Perkins made his comments in the presence of the speaker's children. The mayor's comments even made the speaker's daughter cry, as can be seen on the video at the 1:02:40 mark as a friend escorts the children from the chambers.
  
  From Johnson's perspective, a citizen long-ignored and outside the bounds of power goes "too far" when he says the mayor is a bad parent but, even though Johnson wrote about the other meeting where the mayor's conduct deserved the same condemnation,* Johnson had nothing to say about the mayor, during a live meeting, with microphone on and cameras rolling, attempting to embarrass a citizen in front of, and by referencing, his children.
  
  Hypocrite, I believe, applies; both to Johnson's selective outrage and to the Mayor who found Cherry's conduct "disgusting" but never apologized or expressed regret for his similar, if not worse, conduct.

• The mayor was not, as Johnson writes, "defending his children." Cherry did not attack the mayor's child. Cherry insinuated that Perkins was a bad father. He said Perkins daughter (he named her) "deserves a better father." This in the context of the mayor having been recently sued for back child support. Johnson deflects that criticism though and recast it as a contemptible, but untrue, attack on the mayor's child.

• What Johnson describes as Cherry "getting into it" with Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Johnson also looks a lot different when the facts are applied. Cherry has taken to asking Yvonne Johnson if all of the police officers, all black, in the infamous "black book" were on duty at the time of the alleged offense for which the black book was created—a fact crucial to the legitimacy of the line-up book as a proper investigative tool. Yvonne Johnson was mayor then. She saw the black book in a closed council session. It's a good question. she should answer it.
  
  This is precisely the kind of clear and concise question Allen Johnson says speakers should ask.Yet, he ignores months upon months of council inaction on Cherry's issues and only pipes up when things get testy—and then only to misassign blame to a possible victim of city employee misconduct.
  
  [That Johnson would steer clear of the black book question is unsurprising. He has buried his head in the sand on the issue. Although he once insisted in a published editorial that we must get to the bottom of the black book,* when the facts surrounding the black book started to reveal themselves to be in contradiction to the false narrative constructed by his paper, Johnson's oh so sincere concern for the truth disappeared and he never wrote another word about it.]

As his screed on Cherry demonstrates, when it suits him Johnson is perfectly willing to intentionally deceive his readers. He got the central facts wrong on the matter of prayer before Rockingham County School Board meetings, then quietly changed his writings with no acknowledgement or apology. He also, laughably, blamed would-be performing arts center supporters for misleading the public about their fundraising while completely ignoring his own complicity* in spreading the lies. Sometimes, he just makes things up out of thin air.

So when Johnson posits that an "obvious solution" to the Charles Cherry problem is "to ban him from the Melvin Municipal Office Building during City Council meetings," that's the conclusion of a mind avoiding the facts. It not only lets council off the hook for their inability to handle tough questions, it is a dangerous proposition from a newspaper in a democracy.

"Well, I declare, I never..." is the Southerner's way of avoiding a question and the N&R deploys it with mastery: Take offense at the tone of the question as an excuse to avoid answering the question. This city is never going to be better than the backwater of mediocrity it is as long as those with influence over public opinion deploy their mock indignation to marginalize those who dare speak truth to power.

There is a lot that is wrong with Greensboro. It is not a place where the genuine thrives. It is a place where the protection of power cliques is more important than excellence and truth; where fakery and misdirection rule; where incompetents and cheats have each others' backs; where "bad manners" are an excuse to avoid hard questions—and the News & Record, news and editorial, are instrumental in protecting and fertilizing this insidious way of life.

Charles Cherry was rude and shocking. He has become impatient. He is a symptom, though—a symptom of city leadership that is too timid, too insecure, too incompetent or just too unconcerned to take on troublesome complaints. That's the real lesson of Charles Cherry, his bad manners are a but a sideshow.

* Not available online since the N&R has three times obliterated their archives in the past five years.

POST SCRIPT:

Another thing an inquisitive writer might question, if he was not just carrying water for the status quo, is why was Cherry steered by a police officer through the council chambers as he tried to leave the speakers podium? Cherry, like at least one other speaker that night, had made his way to the speaker's podium by crossing the chambers in front of the council dais. When he was finished, he attempted to leave the way he came. He was met midway by a Greensboro police officer. The reason for that is not clear. What followed is even less understandable. Instead of escorting Cherry back to his seat or to the exit, the officer steered Cherry up the central isle of the chambers, through the seats and towards the back of the room where there is no exit.

"Where am I going?" Cherry asked repeatedly. At one point, the officer backed Cherry into an umbrella on the floor, causing Cherry to trip and stumble. From there, the officer continued to escort Cherry on the now circuitous route to the exit, with Cherry loudly asking, "What have I done?"

Why was Cherry intercepted by a police officer when leaving the podium? Why was he steered closer to the city manager he had just criticized, into the heart of the assembled crowd and away from his seat and the exits? Was the officer trying to provoke Cherry into an altercation?

These are the questions the News & Record should be asking instead of the tsk, tsk tsk it aims at Cherry.

Rush is wrong (and Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein too)

I just heard Rush Limbaugh say of the domestic spying revealed to be taking place on all americans (yes, it's lower case now):

"It matters because of who is collecting all this data. It would be one thing if it was Colonel Sanders, but it's not, it's Barack Obama and we know what he's all about."

No Rush, that is wrong and it is the very kind of shallow thinking that got us here.

What matters are the infringements on privacy and the lack of restraint on government NO MATTER WHO is doing it. Those who thought it was okay when Geoetrge W. Bush was in the White House are the very people who laid the foundations upon which the Obama administration is now carrying on. Those who make excuses now for what was objectionable under George W. Bush because they "trust" Barack Obama are no better. Both groups are civic deadbeats. Small, dangerous, petty idiots.

Right is right and wrong is wrong and this country will be sucked into totalitarianism if we continue to object only when we perceive it to be the "others" dragging us down that dark road.