Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins has a question for us.  In “Name That Candidate” she asks how well we have been paying attention to the stars of Campaign 2010.  Take the pre-Election Day quiz.  Mr. Blow, in “Private School Civility Gap,” says while education reform is getting plenty of attention, the trouble with tolerance among the private school set is being ignored.  Mr. Herbert addresses “The Shame of New York,” and says an extensive report filed with a class-action lawsuit asserts that many of New York City’s police stops are unconstitutional.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The end of an election season is always thick with regrets. Do you think Meg Whitman is contemplating all the other things she could have done with $141 million? Does the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in West Virginia kick himself for allowing his wife to establish a voting residence in Florida?

Personally, I am sorry about something I wrote about Dan Maes, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado and possibly the worst candidate for anything in the entire country this year. Among many, many other things, Maes was accused of making up a story about being an undercover operative for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in the city of Liberal, Kan.

I regret very much that when I wrote about this incident I pointed out that Liberal is “best known as the home of a ‘Wizard of Oz’ Museum.” While Liberal does, indeed, have such a museum, a number of readers pointed out that it is much better known for being the home of a Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race, in which contestants vie to see who can run the fastest while flipping pancakes in the air.

This is the sort of information we really like to acquire during a hard-fought campaign, but, alas, most of what we’ve learned this year is about the candidates. See how you score:

I: Who said it?

A) “Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls.”

B) “When is it ever a good idea to tie a woman up and ask her to kneel before a false idol, your god, which you call Aqua Buddha?”

C) “I made money the old-fashioned way. I inherited it.”

D) “Equality is the prime rib of America.”

E) “Jan, I call upon you today to say there are no beheadings.”

1) John Raese (West Virginia, Senate)

2) Alvin Greene (South Carolina, Senate)

3) Lady Gaga on the campaign trail

4) Terry Goddard (Arizona, governor)

5) Jack Conway (Kentucky, Senate)

*****

II. Match the excuses:

A) “I’ll put it up on my Web site, I promise you.”

B) “I had read that in one place.”

C) “This is four years ago.”

D) “You know, I’m a mom. … My daughter’s in Europe.”

1) Sharron Angle, the U.S. Senate candidate in Nevada on her claim that Dearborn, Mich., and the nonexistent town of Frankford, Tex., are governed by Sharia law.

2) Alex Sink, a gubernatorial candidate in Florida, explaining why she looked at a debate tip, texted onstage via a makeup artist’s cellphone.

3) Ben Quayle, a Congressional candidate in Arizona, on charges by the owner of the Dirty Scottsdale Web site that Quayle once ran a section aimed at finding “the hottest chick in Scottsdale.”

4) Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware on her failure to come up with a Supreme Court ruling she disagreed with.

*****

III. Who fired whom for what?

A) Press secretary, for marrying a Lebanese national for a fee.

B) Media firm for sending out a casting call for actors with a “hicky” look to appear in West Virginia campaign commercial.

C) Aide for Twitter message: “What’s the difference between selling out your party’s values and the oldest profession?” (To be perfectly accurate, the aide was actually kept on staff but stripped of all twittering privileges.)

D) Volunteer coordinator for stomping on a MoveOn.org protester.

1) Rand Paul (Kentucky, Senate)

2) National Republican Senatorial Committee

3) Joe Miller (Alaska, Senate)

4) Harry Reid (Nevada, Senate)

*****

IV. Strange behavior:

A) Sent his mother to the final primary debate as his stand-in.

B) Told an interviewer that upon arriving home, she has her staff check the shrubbery in front of her house to make sure no enemies are hiding in the bushes.

C) Failed to make sure the phone was really hung up before engaging in a conversation that included the name of his female opponent and the word “whore.”

D) Has never satisfactorily explained why the family yacht is named “Sexy Bitch.”

E) Raced off the stage just before his final statement in the one and only governor’s debate in order to use the bathroom.

F) Ran an endorsement ad starring a dead senator.

1) Jerry Brown (California, governor)

2) Christine O’Donnell (Delaware, Senate)

3) Rick Scott (Florida, governor)

4) Lisa Murkowski (Alaska, Senate)

5) Carl Paladino (New York, governor)

6) Linda McMahon (Connecticut, Senate)

*****

Answers: I: A-2; B-5; C-1; D-3; E-4. II: A-4; B-1; C-3; D-2. III: A-4; B-2; C-3; D-1. IV: A-3; B-2; C-1; D-6; E-5; F-4.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Education reform is all the rage these days.

It’s no longer just the weighty obsession of parents with few options scrambling to get a child into a better school. It has also become the “it” topic of the cocktail crowd, including many parents with children who have never seen the inside of a public school. “Waiting for Superman” is the new “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This new discussion centers on the achievement gap in public schools. It’s an intractable issue and needs as much attention as it’s getting. But a study released on Tuesday highlights another subject that’s much less discussed: let’s call it the private school civility gap, particularly at religious private schools and particularly among boys.

This is a not-so-little, not-so-secret, dirty little secret among the upper crust.

I have a girl and two boys who among them have attended two great public schools and two great private schools. As any parent who’s been on both sides of the fence can tell you, the concept of community and how to exist in it vary wildly between these two groups, and one of the biggest issues I’ve noticed is the way these students deal differently with issues of tolerance.

Private schools by their very nature discriminate. Their students are literally the chosen ones — special, better. This sort of thinking has a way of weaving itself into the fibers of a family and into the thinking of the children, particularly young boys in a male culture where even the slightest deviations from the narrowest concepts of normality are heretical.

It is no wonder then that the study, which was conducted by the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics of more than 43,000 high school students, found that:

• Boys who went to private religious schools were most likely to say that they had used racial slurs and insults in the past year as well as mistreated someone because he or she “belonged to a different group.”

• Boys at religious private schools were the most likely to say that they had bullied, teased or taunted someone in the past year.

• While boys at public schools were the most likely to say that it was O.K. to hit or threaten a person who makes them very angry, boys at private religious schools were just as likely to say that they had actually done it.

While some public schools have issues with academic attainment, it appears that some private schools have issues with tolerance. No person is truly better when they lack this basic bit of civility.

(This all assumes that these children told the truth. As it turns out, private school students were also the most likely to lie. According to the study, they were the least likely to say that they had answered all the questions “with complete honesty.”)

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

The whole notion of the rule of law, critical to a democracy, is sabotaged when the guardians of the law — in this case the officers of the New York City Police Department — are permitted to violate the law with impunity.

The police in New York City are not just permitted, they are encouraged to trample on the rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers by relentlessly enforcing the city’s degrading, unlawful and outright racist stop-and-frisk policy. Hundreds of thousands of wholly innocent individuals, most of them young, are routinely humiliated by the police, day in and day out, year after shameful year.

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University and a widely recognized scholar on the subject of police and citizen interactions, has filed a report in support of a federal class-action lawsuit challenging the stop-and-frisk policy as unconstitutional. Based on analyses of the department’s own statistics, he found, as the plaintiffs and other observers have argued all along, that seizures of weapons or contraband as a result of the stops “is extremely rare.”

The rate of gun seizures is near zero — 0.15 guns seized for every 100 stops. “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics,” wrote Professor Fagan, “produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.”

More important, after studying six years’ worth of data, the professor concluded that many of the millions of stops are violations of the Constitution. One of a number of constitutional problems, according to Professor Fagan, is that the police frequently use race or national origin rather than reasonable suspicion as the basis for the stops.

“I provide evidence that the N.Y.P.D. has engaged in patterns of unconstitutional stops of city residents that are more likely to affect black and Latino citizens,” he wrote.

From 2004 through 2009, city police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times. Many were patted down, frisked, made to sprawl face down on the ground, or spread-eagle themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car. Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

An overwhelming majority of the people stopped were black or Hispanic. Blacks were nine times more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, but no more likely than whites to be arrested as a result of the stops.

While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped has been going up. More than 575,000 stops were made last year — a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

If the stops go up when crime goes down, it’s fair to wonder what might happen if there was no crime in the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly might decide that it is necessary to frisk everybody. The use of such stops has more than quintupled on their watch.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the class-action suit, wants the Police Department barred from engaging in what the center describes as race-based and “suspicionless stops and frisks.”

Professor Fagan, in his report filed in connection with the suit, found that nearly 150,000 stops over the six-year period that he studied lacked any legal justification at all. An additional 544,252 stops lacked sufficiently detailed information from the officers involved to determine their legality.

I’ve no doubt that the professor’s findings are, in fact, conservative. But even his figures show the police to be violating the Constitution on a scandalously vast scale. The police use such specious justifications as “furtive movements” or an alleged “bulge” in someone’s pocket as the basis for stopping people. If you believe all those furtive-movement and bulging-pocket stories, I’ve got some antiques spanning the East River that you might be interested in.

It’s important to keep in mind that what we are talking about here, in the overwhelming number of cases, are innocent people, not criminals. No one wants to stop the police from going after the bad guys. But what keeps happening with this lousy policy is that the cops target skin color, not the likelihood that a crime might be in progress, or have taken place. As Professor Fagan found, “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than whites, even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly white.”

It doesn’t matter if innocent black or Hispanic kids are in a high-crime area or low, a minority area or white, they stand a good chance of being harassed by New York City cops.