As valued commenter CMM has reminded us in comments to the previous thread, most law enforcement officers are good people that do a lot of good things that don’t get a lot of press attention. I saw this story earlier this week and had meant to put it up as a late night/early morning feel good open thread, but the events of the past three or four days have overtaken things a bit. So here’s the story:
Police in Barnesville, GA responded to a report of someone sleeping in a tent outside of Barnesville Gordon State College. They found 19 year old Fred Barley who’d come to school early before the start of his sophomore year on his younger brother’s bicycle. From Conyers, GA – a six hour bike ride! He was homeless as the dorms don’t open for another month or so and he was camping out at night while bicycling around looking for a job. While the responding officers couldn’t let him continue to camp out, each of them paid for him to have a night at a local motel. One of the responding officers, Dicky Carreker’s wife posted about Fred on her Facebook post. Donations immediately poured in totaling $70,000 so far, as well as a new, adult sized bike, clothes, shoes, and food. A local restaurant owner created a job for Fred, which he has accepted, and the motel owner is providing lodging for free until Barnesville Gordon State College can get him into the dorms, which they’ve indicated they will do early.
Maybe you heard or saw this story, maybe you didn’t. But given all the negative things we’ve been exposed to over the past two weeks in the news, its important to remember that despite the “it bleeds, it leads” and “controversy creates cash” models of the news media in their pursuit of profit and the fact that with 24/7 news and social media everything negative is amplified and constantly coming at us, that good things, done by good people still happen. Here’s the link to video of Fred Barley thanking everyone in Barnesville for their support.
Trentrunner
Thanks.
But personally I’m grimly glad that White America is now confronted, via smartphone video, with the murder and mayhem LEOs have subjecting POC to for the past century or so. It’s a needed corrective against ongoing pro-police propaganda. Long overdue.
Baud
I assume most people are probably pretty decent. Too many of them just don’t have the stones to tell the not-decent people within their own tribe to bugger off.
Adam L Silverman
@Trentrunner: I’m not arguing against that. But reality is often bigger than what we envision. And as I’ve written before, paraphrasing Tolkien, progress is often the result of lots of just regular people doing small things every day that no one is informed about, rather than well reported grand gestures by elites and notables.
Mark k
most black minorities are upstanding citizens, while there’s a higher percentage total in poverty, they murder, use drugs, and rape at lower rates than their white counterparts, some significantly lower.
what’s your point? doesn’t matter, does it. the poor police
bago
Well, the convention will be something. All eyes are on the spectacle. Whoever wants to make a point will know where the cameras.
RaflW
It is also worth remembering that overall violent crime rates are about half of what they were 20 years ago in the US. We see much more mayhem, live-streamed and tweet-reverberated. But in terms of rates per 100,000 people, they are roughly half of the 1993 rates.
raven
It’s Gordon State College. It was a military school but is now part of the University System of Georgia.
The Ancient Randonneur
Until the thin blue line is erased and we address the issues of racism in law enforcement these cute stories are just puff pieces. Citizens must force our public SERVANTS that they work for ALL of us. Period. The thin blue line is a cancerous lesion on all law enforcement.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: I believe you, but the website said Barnesville College, I’ll update above.
Thoughtful David
Problem is, the good cops (of whom, I agree, there are many) have to stop lying for and defending the bad ones. As do the prosecutors.
I think if you saw some real accountability for Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray, etc., you’d quickly see the tension abate.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: I work with them quite a bit. Barnesville is most certainly too small to have two colleges!
Villago Delenda Est
This is more like what I think the police should be all about. Getting a kid off the street and following up so that he can stay off the street!
/salute
Adam L Silverman
@raven: Fixed. My fault for using an initial linked source in Asbury Park… I spent two years in Oxford/Conyers at Emory’s original campus before going up to the main campus in Atlanta. That is one long bike ride!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I saw that story and thought “what a kid!” and also how the LEOs did totally the right thing. Along with the town. But what a kid! Why isn’t his face – and story – the emblematic image of low income black male youth?
SiubhanDuinne
@bago:
For many reasons: some of them life-and-death, some merely risible.
Tom Levenson
@Adam L Silverman: See also Terry Pratchett, gone, missed, and not forgotten.
Adam L Silverman
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Doesn’t sell advertising revenue.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: That was the first thing I thought.
Major Major Major Major
I saw that! Cool story.
I’ve known cops. All good but one, who was a domestic abuser who got caught on tape brutalizing an innocent handcuffed guy. I believe he resigned.
I don’t hate cops, at all, but it’s high time they were accountable for their actions. The unions (and the other cops) need to stop being enablers.
JanieM
@Adam L Silverman: I’m having a bad day, which is probably why I can’t think what Tolkien passage you’re referring to. But your point does remind me of the lovely ending paragraph of Middlemarch:
gene108
@Baud:
We are all taught from a young age not to be a tattle-tale.
I think there’s a good reason for this, because four year olds need to figure out conflict resolution without running to mommy.
But we carry this over into adulthood.
Most of us work with people, who are bad at their jobs. We do not rat them out to the boss, so they can be fired.
I’m not sure why we expect cops to do this.
What needs to happen is institutional responsibility. The police unions, DA’s, etc. need to stop circling the wagons, when a cop does something bad.
If I fuck up on the job and get someone killed or injured, I will be in trouble. I will not have the guy, who is leading the investigation into wrong-doing (the local DA) basically in my corner trying to get me off.
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: Him too! So what’s the over/under on who bigfoots your post bigfooting my post bigfooting Cole’s post? AL? BettyC? Doug!?
Villago Delenda Est
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Doesn’t fit in with the most marketable narrative the Village is pushing.
Tom Levenson
@Adam L Silverman: ;-) I hold out hope for Sarah Proud and Tall..
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): The Lost Children of Rockdale County.
raven
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Some of them keep changing their names. When I first moved here, I would drive past DeKalb Community College. Later I drove past Georgia Perimeter College North Campus, and later still Georgia Perimeter College Dunwoody Campus. Just last week I drove past Georgia State University Perimeter College. All the same institution and location, of course.
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: It is from Elrond at his Council in Rivendell at the beginning of Book II of The Fellowship of the Ring
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: GPC and Georgia State were merged as were North Georgia and Gainesville Sate, Darton College and Albany State. I suspect the next will be Armstrong and Savannah State. There is too much duplication and this is a move to streamline services.
ETA the most contentious was Augusta State and the ridiculously named “Georgia Health Sciences University” In between Augusta State was renamed “Regents University” and that really sent the people in Augusta over the edge. They have now renamed the whole kit and kaboodle “Augusta University”. This includes the medical college which also has a branch abut 100 yards from my house.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Villago Delenda Est: I know and it pisses me off.
@raven: Thanks for that link. I vaguely recall reports of that shooting.
JanieM
@Adam L Silverman: Doh. Thanks. :-)
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: No worries.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: I like Crass:
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): It wasn’t a shooting, it was an outbreak of VD that led to a wider look at the community.
justawriter
@Baud: I don’t know if it is true, but there is a meme circulating that the Dallas Police Chief fired 70 officers and reduced citizen complaints by 90 percent. Given how the police were interacting with the BLM demonstrators I can believe it. So, in at least one place, someone had the stones (if the meme is accurate, of course).
raven
No active shooter remaining in Baton Rouge.
MattF
Police have to deal with whatever situations reality coughs up, and sometimes it can be a real puzzle. On one of my trips to NYC, I was wandering around the Village (the real one) and passed a young woman in obvious distress. The story was clear– she was blind, and she was lost amid the narrow curvy Village streets. She had a guide dog, but her problem required human intervention. But she didn’t want help– her situation was one she dreaded– it damaged her self-image of independence and ability to overcome her disability.
So, I looked around and found a couple of cops. Pointed her out to them and said ‘There’s a blind woman over there who seems disoriented’. And they dealt with it, which was their job.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
It makes a lot of institutional sense. But I sure would like to own the USG signage concession. Not to mention whoever prints all their stationery and business cards.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: “stationery and business cards”, uh, that’s sooooo old school!
wmd
It occurred to me after reading the Vox “Black Ex-cop” piece that the ratios of bad cops, run of the mill cops and exceptional cops looks familiar – very similar to the ratios used in on-the-job performance measurements for annual reviews.
Most of my time in corporate work these reviews will identify 5% to be laid off, 10% to be told they’re on the bubble, 70% to be encouraged to excel and get a standard pay raise, 10% to get a higher bump in pay/promoted and 5% to definitely get promoted and a larger pay increase.
What metrics are used for performance measurement in our police? How much do civilian complaints and kudos weigh, as opposed to conviction statistics and revenue generated?
It seems to me that by weighting civilian (and internal) feed back appropriately we could remove the biggest problem officers over the course of a few years.
I’ve written both complaint letters and kudos letters to law enforcement management – most recently kudos for a Sheriff’s deputy that refrained from an easy arrest to allow a mentally unstable young woman to be picked up by her parents. About a year later I asked a couple of other deputies about their fellow officer and was pleased that they also see her compassion as exemplary.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: I’m usually crass.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: That explains the vagueness of my recollection, and how reading that let me conflate the STD epidemic with a shooting, since it mentioned Columbine was close in time. I do recall some terrible stuff with adolescents in Conyers that year, and oddly, more forcefully than Columbine. My brain is clearly underpowered today.
Adam L Silverman
I’ve put an embedded video to the President’s forthcoming address in the earlier post on the Baton Rouge shooting so you don’t have to go looking for it.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: Gavin Eugene Long, USMC is the shooter.
raven
They are saying there is a connection:
“Many self-identified sovereigns today are black and apparently completely unaware of the racist origins of their ideology. When they experience some small success at using redemption techniques to battle minor traffic offenses or local licensing issues, they’re hooked. For many, it’s a political issue. They don’t like taxes, traffic laws, child support obligations or banking practices, but they are too impatient to try to change what they dislike through traditional, political means.”
The Lodger
@Adam L Silverman: Asbury Park? That’s a long bike ride to anywhere in Georgia.
NotoriousJRT
I wish I understood my ambivalence about this story. I think it is wonderful that this young man’s determination has inspired kindness and charity. But I feel some sadness that we do not do a better job finding all the worthy / without means folks out there and putting together resources to meet their needs. I suppose my melancholy is causing me to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: Just updated the breaking news post and put a new one up with that info and an embed video for the President’s address. I can only type so fast!!
raven
@Adam L Silverman: Hey, I’m not being critical,
ruemara
Not that I didn’t love this story, I did, but these stories should not be allowed to be used to paper over the combined issues of abusive police & the exclusivity of police culture. Good cops protect bad cops that make their work environment hell.
Cmm
@Adam L Silverman: hey Emory grad! I went to grad school there (working on a PhD in history which I did not finish–one of several careers before my current one). That’s how I ended up in this fine metropolis in the first place way back in the 80s…
Renie
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I read the article raven linked to and it does mention ” shooting at Rockdale’s Heritage High in the spring of 1999″.