The incident of the dog in the night-time

The Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson Police Department is full of eye-catching numbers that reveal a culture plagued by significant racism. Statistically significant. For instance, nearly ninety per cent of the people who prompted a “use of force” by the F.P.D. were black. Even among such skewed percentages, there are some standouts. Among cases in which a suspect was bitten by an attack dog and the suspect’s race was recorded, what percentage were black?
 

A hundred per cent.
 

There is little nuance in the incidents described in the report; the police simply sicced their dogs on unarmed black males. According to the F.P.D’s own guidelines, handlers should not release the hounds “if a lower level of force could reasonably be expected to control the suspect or allow for the apprehension.” But the report reveals that the F.P.D. is quick to set loose its trained attack dogs—often on black children.
 

The damning DOJ report on Ferguson is a great example of data as an objective racism detector. This might be an example of dogs revealing the racism of their owners.

A 2011 study published in the journal Animal Cognition found that even expertly trained dogs and the most professional handlers cannot evade what is called the Clever Hans effect. In tests, dogs trained to detect explosives and drugs were sent, with their handlers, into a series of rooms to find non-existent contraband. In one room, there was a decoy that had been scented with sausage; in another, there was an unscented decoy accompanied by a sign telling the handler, falsely, that it smelled of contraband; a control room had no decoys. The investigators found, overall, that “human more than dog influences affected alert locations”: the meat decoy attracted more false alarms than anything in the control room, but the decoy with the sign prompted nearly twice as many false alerts as the one with the tempting scent. In other words, the dogs found their handlers’ unconscious cues significantly more compelling than the sausage. Trained animals, it turns out, are arguably better at reading our cues than we are at suppressing them.
 

Remember, there are no racist dogs, only racist owners.

The stunning grand jury decision in Ferguson

A St. Louis County grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police Officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. The decision wasn’t a surprise — leaks from the grand jury had led most observers to conclude an indictment was unlikely — but it was unusual. Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.

Or at least, they nearly always do so in cases that don’t involve police officers.

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

That's via FiveThirtyEight. Those are federal numbers, and this case was heard in state, so it's not a perfect comp, but speaking to my sister and other lawyers, failure to get an indictment is still extremely rare.

Despite the grand jury leaks, somehow I held out hope, perhaps naively, that they'd still decide to indict.

The prosecutor had long said that he'd release evidence if the grand jury failed to reach an indictment, but the judge has not agreed to it yet. 

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCullough has repeatedly stated that he would obtain a court order to unseal grand jury evidence, an unusual step that was seen as an attempt to defuse potential anger over the decision. In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Nov. 23, St. Louis County Court Administrator Paul Fox said Judge Carolyn Whittington had agreed to grant the request.

But Fox described the paraphrased quote attributed to him as “not accurate,” in a letter released after the story, and said Whittington had not made an agreement to release grand jury evidence and that any requests “will require the Court to analyze the need for maintaining secrecy of the records with the need for public disclosure of the records.”

It's perhaps self-serving on the part of the prosecutor, a way to show he did everything possible to secure an indictment, but let's hope the judge agrees to release the evidence. Even without that, given the grand jury transcripts that have already been released and the full sum of reporting that has already been donee, I'd love to see a Serial-like podcast from a lawyer or criminal law expert walking through the events on the night of the shooting and the subsequent investigation and court case.

Twitter is somewhat of a comfort now, a way to feel connected to the collective anguish of much of the country, but in a few months, maybe sooner, some will start tweeting "Remember Ferguson?" as some collective reprimand of our short term memory. Very soon, 140 character outbursts won't be enough, and that's where a longer form medium like a serial podcast would feel more appropriate.