Mayor Feinen's weak tea on immigration

Three weeks ago, Champaign mayor Deborah Feinen released a disappointingly tepid statement about immigration. Clearly driven by Trump's Muslim ban (the first iteration, since struck down), his promise to crack down on undocumented immigrants, and Urbana's designation as a sanctuary city, she said in part:

I want to reassure our residents that the City of Champaign remains committed to fostering a friendly and welcoming community for all who choose to live here.  We are proud of our strong, diverse, and inclusive community – one that works together to improve the quality of life and promote equal opportunities for all.

OK, that's good and all, but missing from her statement is any discussion of actual city policy, especially as it pertains to undocumented immigrants. She does reference the City's Human Rights Ordinance, which does prohibit discrimination based on national origin, but doesn't mention immigration status.

This is most relevant when it comes to law enforcement. Trump is reactivating the ICE 287(g) program that deputized local law enforcement to act as immigration officers. It's not clear what Feinen's statement means for police interactions with Champaign residents. Champaign Chief of Police Anthony Cobb has placed the department's entire policy and procedure manual online, but it makes no real mention of immigration. (Let me note that I think it's great he has taken this step of transparency in local government.) Feinen's statement leaves me with even more questions than it answers.

• Are City agencies free to ask residents about their immigration status?
• Can they report that status to authorities?
• Can they use it as the basis to refuse City services to residents?
• Can Champaign police officers detain people solely because they think are undocumented?
• Can Champaign police question crime victims and witnesses, let alone suspects, about their immigration status?
• Will Champaign police refuse to partner with ICE in a 287(g) program? (Unlikely, as they didn't before.)

I can find no documented City policy regarding these matters.

Chicago also claims sanctuary city status and makes it very clear what this means and what they will not do. Personally, I don't want to see Champaign police resources taken away from dealing with local crimes to do federal immigration enforcement.

I encourage Mayor Feinen and the Champaign City Council to claim sanctuary city status like Urbana has done. Hell, just use the Chicago ordinance as a template.

Unless Mayor Feinen is willing to put official City policy behind her statement, this is very weak tea, indeed.

Exactly who does Deb Feinen intend to work for?

I've been a lazy blogger and haven't pontificated about the upcoming mayoral election much. (On Twitter, now that's a different story.)

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, Deb Feinen got the endorsement of the Business Empowered PAC, which is basically the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce. One thing in the PAC's endorsement really stood out to me like a sore thumb:

we believe Mrs. Feinen to have the most solid record of being a pro-business advocate and has been the most active candidate to embrace the business community for their expertise in forming policy for city government for the past several years.

 So in other words, this "pro-business" group is endorsing Feinen because they think she is going to let them determine government policy for Champaign. That doesn't sit right with me.

Don Gerard: Vindicated

There's been a lot of speculation online about this whole kerfluffle between Mayor Don Gerard and Jim "Jammin" Bean, what caused it, who started the argument at Boneyard Creek Community Day a few weeks ago, etc. I can now say I have seen one of the social media postings involved and that, yes, Bean was talking smack about Mayor Gerard's underage daughter.

I also want to say that Mayor Gerard is under no obligation to make the details about this whole affair public. He's been taking some heat in the News-Gazette and elsewhere about it. If he is doing so because his daughter doesn't want to make a big deal about it or is just embarrassed by the attention, I commend him for putting her interests above his own defense.

Again, in this matter, I'm 110% behind Mayor Gerard.

Screenshots are forever, bitches.

My thoughts on the police investigation report

A few weeks ago, the City released the report on the investigation into last summer's pepper-spraying and accused roughing-up of a guy* on Green Street. This incident was unusual primarily in (a) that it was a video- and audio-taped by a squad car camera and microphone and (b) that the tape was anonymously leaked and posted online. Probably without this leak, no one would have given a damn about this. Here's a WILL article written after the leak, if you want the background.


Now, I've never had any law enforcement training or even contact with the police, good or bad, but I'm a blogger and am therefore an Expert on Everything™. One of the three findings from this report is that an unjustified amount of force was used to remove the guy from the squad car (i.e., grabbing the guy by the neck and pushing him out of the car onto the ground). But the concerns that I have are related to what happened earlier that evening. So here's my take on this. Numbers are timestamps from the video.

This stop was pretty clearly a pretext for hassling this guy. The report says that this guy had been loud and obnoxious earlier in the evening. Two officers are seen following him along Green Street, followed slowly by this squad car (02:24:45-02:25:33). It is only after the two officers turn away that the squad car quickly accelerates to catch up with this guy and this incident occurs.

In fact, the report pretty much comes out and admits this:

...officers and shift supervisors had been directed to focus their efforts on identify suspects and/or possible suspects in the aggravated batteries. Those efforts often involved the use of Terry Stops of problem individuals and the enforcement of ... "minor" offense such as loitering and pedestrian violations. [emphasis mine]

The problem I see with that is that a Terry Stop requires "reasonable suspicion" that the person being stopped has committed or is about to commit a crime.** This report mentions nothing about this guy being suspected of any crime other than the fact that, earlier in the evening, he had been yelling loudly. He was a "problem individual." The male and female companion of this guy, also jaywalking, were ignored.

I mean, arresting a guy for jaywalking? In Campustown? Really, if they start arresting people for jaywalking on campus, it will be empty. Half the population will be in jail and the other half will be bailing them out.

One of the things that really convinces me that it was predetermined that this was not going to go well -- and maybe this isn't fair -- is that you can hear the primary officer start to hum a little tune to himself as soon as he starts to pull his car forward to arrest this guy (02:26:43). It's not like the officer was humming to himself as he drove down the road. It starts as soon as the guy is in the street.

The thing that bothers me most about this incident is the pepper spraying. After seeing this guy jaywalk, the officer pulls his squad car into the middle of Fourth Street, jumps out of his car, crowd-sized can of pepper spray in hand.

After the guy and the officer stop walking (02:27:09), less than two seconds go by before the guy is pepper sprayed in the face (02:27:10).

I'm not suggesting this guy is anything other than an obnoxious drunk jerk. The report specifically draws attention to the fact that this guy moved his arm "to approximately shoulder level." But it's very obvious that he's just gesturing with both his hands in the same way he's been doing ever since the officer grabbed his arm and started marching him back to the squad car, protesting the whole way.

When talking about the unjustified removal of this guy from the squad car later that night, the report says officers are expected to "... use verbal persuasion, dialogue, and courtesy to gain voluntary compliance whenever possible".  So it seems to me that the immediate jump to a pain compliance technique is unwarranted (again, Expert in Everything™, see above). If this had been a different kind of force, but of roughly the same intensity, say a punch in the gut, would it still have been considered reasonable?

Anyway, it's late and I want to wrap this up. This guy was clearly a jerk. He was obnoxious to start with and increasingly obstreperous as the night went on (though who wouldn't be pissed off after having been pepper sprayed in the face, reasonably or not?). I couldn't care less that the secondary officer told him to "shut the fuck up". Hell, just while watching this video, I wanted the guy to shut the fuck up. But it doesn't seem to be that being an obnoxious jerk is enough to get a face full of pepper spray.

[*] For lack of a better term, I'm just going to call the guy that was pepper sprayed and arrested "the guy."

[**] IANAL, but I can read Wikipedia.

A self-defeating tax?

A couple of weeks back, the Champaign City Council supported a resolution to force retailers to charge for disposable plastic bags, about $0.05 per bag. Personally, I think this is a really bad idea in support of a laudable goal.

Sure, it's good to reduce waste and litter in our community. But the only way a tax like this would work is if the fee is large enough to actually cause people to change their behavior. I don't know about you, but five or six bags adding up to an extra $0.25 on my grocery bill isn't going to make me go out of my way. (I do normally use reusable bags, but occasionally forget to bring them.) Anything under a buck, maybe $0.50 isn't going to register on my radar.

But then I noticed this quote from the mayor:

I don't know where we get extra money for education, unless we charge five cents for plastic bags, I guess.

So if the point of this tax is not to change people's behavior, but to raise money, maybe the whole point of placing the per-bag fee so low is so that it doesn't cause people to change their behavior, raising the amount of revenue.

Or am I just being paranoid?

Mayoral race speculation

This may be a bit incoherent, but it's late and I want to get this down.

First, there may be some shennanigans going on in the Champaign mayoral race. I forget who originally pointed this out, possibly on Twitter, but Smile Politely has an article up, "Local officials mum on alleged Schweighart campaign violation" about Schweighart campaign work possibly being done on City time and by City employees. Naughty.

I've never worked for the City, but at the later years when I was at the University, we had to go through rather silly, yet mandatory, annual ethics training that made it pretty darn clear that things like this were not appropriate. Is that true of state and city employees as well? Anyway you'd think anyone involved with a political office would be doubly sensitive to it. And then someone involved with a political office and a political campaign would be triply sensitive to it. But, then again, perhaps it's the abuse of the vast purchasing powers and powerful influence grad students and postdocs hold that is the real ethical threat.

Secondly, I've heard speculation that, if elected, Mayor Schweighart may not serve out his entire four-year term, but instead, retire and some other Republican would be appointed to finish his term. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to judge the mayor's suitability for election solely on his age. On the other hand, he is, shall we say, of a certain age and (I hear) has had some fairly serious health problems in the past. And any appointee going into an election as an incumbent would have a pretty significant advantage.

The mayoral debate is Wednesday. I mused about the idea of livetweeting the debate, then someone heard about that, and now I've learned that People Have Been Told I will be doing that, so now there's all this pressure. People, don't get your hopes up. Also, don't assume I have any idea what I'm doing.

Also, the first mayoral debate in how many decades is two days away, and still, no clue about the format, who's going to be asking questions, whether the questions will be coming from the audience, or what. But, hey, at least it's being put together by a legitimate organization, right?

Is the News-Gazette ashamed of its readers?

For those of you reading that aren't local (all three of you), there has been a spate of what appear to be unprovoked attacks on people in the C-U area. It's not clear if they're linked or if they're racially motivated, but they've all been by black teenagers with white victims. Robbery was involved in at least one of the attacks, but not all of them.

That being said, I just noticed that all the News-Gazette articles on the subject have had their comments closed. I can't find this trend on any other N-G topic. Just as examples:

• Attacks reported in Champaign
• Unprovoked attacks in Champaign may be linked
• Two Champaign men charged in attack on man on campus
• Two accused in attacks make first court appearance
• Second teen charged in beating of former weatherman
• Former TV weatherman victim of unprovoked attack

That's not to say that these articles don't bring the crazies out of the woodwork. So far it seems that, on the articles that had open comments at one point, they largely consisted of:

• See how racist black people are?
• This wouldn't have happened if we had concealed carry in Illinois.
• These teenagers should be given the death penalty/put in prison for the rest of their lives/beaten within an inch of their lives.
• This is happening because black children don't have fathers because single motherhood is glorified in black culture.
• If these were white teens beating up black people, there would be riots in the streets! (But I'm not racist.)

Does anyone know if Crazy Mayor Schweigart has weighed in on this? Maybe they're all socialists from Kenya or something.

Champaign County Computer & Electronics Recycling Event

This is short notice, but there will be an electronics recycling event tomorrow, Saturday, April 19, from 9:00 am to 3:30 pm. It looks like they're taking all sort of electronics, with a small charge for televisions. Here's the flyer.

The ultimate Champaign-Urbana blogroll

The local blogging community is fairly small, so I'm making some attempt at a comprehensive list. Below are all the blogs local to Champaign-Urbana I've been able to find. If one is missing or has gone inactive, please let me know.

• Analog Periphery
• Baseball Zealot
• Beth Loves Bollywood
• Burning Oak
• Cat People
• Champaign County Clerk
• The Champaign of Blogs
• Concrete Box
• e pur si muove
• Eric Sink's Weblog
• Exploding Aardvark
• Exploration Through Example
• Frogs and Crowbars
• Gamera Gabs
• Glock21
• Illinipundit
• It's Matt's World
• JavaJunkee
• Jscrilla.com
• little blog on the prairie
• lonetreeontheprarie
• Maladjusted
• mediageek
• My Pet Goat
• Narciblog
• Nerdlusus
• Out of the Forest
• Papa Familias
• Part-Time Pundit
• Pies Men Like But I Prefer Cake
• Racial Pro-File
• Reports from the Edge
• Schreiner's Media Landscape
• Serpent Factory
• Socrates' Academy
• Steam Room Quantum Mechanics
• This Just In
• Urbanagoria
• WILLblog

Update 2007-06-23: Removed a number of blogs that had not been updated in three months.