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Monday Lazy Linking

The Police Beat: Officer Marc Rios, the Bronx, New York, Nw York

(Via a private correspondent.)

Officer Marc Rios. New York Police Department. The Bronx, New York, New York. A few months ago, a New Yorker named John Roperto was leaving a nightclub in Kingsbridge at about 4:20 in the morning. A speeding car almost ran him down, so he smacked the hood of the car and said some unkind words. Normally that would be about it; civilized people understand that when you almost run someone down, emotions run high, and the best thing to do is just say you’re sorry and let the poor guy cool down. But it turns out that, instead of a civilized person, the driver of the car was Officer Marc Rios, a 12-year veteran of the New York City government’s police force. Rios, who cruises the city heavily-armed and looking for trouble, got out of his car, whipped out a baton, and smashed John Roperto so hard in the face that it broke the baton — and Roperto’s cheekbone. Then Officer Marc Rios, as a public servant supposedly paid and legally privileged to Serve and Protect, jumped back into his car and sped off with his buddy-cop — while his victim was still lying in a gutter. Neither of them thought to call it in; Roperto didn’t get any medical attention until a concerned stranger called 911.

Officer Marc Rios’s explanation is that this brutal, unprovoked hit-and-run assault — committed against a man who had every right to be angry, and who had done nothing more than bang on a car hood and shout at a cop — is justifiable as self-defense. I’m not sure what sort of self-defense is supposed to be involved in leaving a man bleeding in a gutter without even calling in an ambulance, but in any case, Officer Marc Rios figures that the original beating was a righteous beating, because he’s a cop, and he (allegedly) gave an order, and John Roperto (allegedly) didn’t immediately snap to obeying it. That may not seem like self-defense, exactly, to you, but you’ve got to keep in mind that government cops like Officer Marc Rios are trained to believe that disregard for their prerogative is tantamount to an assault on their persons, if not indeed a threat to their very lives. So no matter how little physical threat you may pose, any refusal, or even hesitancy, to immediately obey their arbitrary bellowed commands is, just as such, a justification for maximal uses of force against you.

Meanwhile, Rios’s lawyer is telling the press that Roperto ought to be grateful that experienced Officer Marc Rios didn’t just shoot him in the face.

Gnu’s to me

One of the nice things about my recent journey to Alabama is that I got the chance, along the way, to hang out with my folks in Auburn for a couple days, and, before I left, also managed to drop in at my second favorite used bookstore in the world, The Gnu’s Room. (Now both a used bookstore and a café, apparently; also now enjoying the patronage of the Auburn University Philosophy Department.) Here’s what I scored while I was there; I found all but two of these books sitting together in one stack, apparently recent arrivals. The other two came from the Philosophy shelf. And none of them cost me more than $4.00.

  • Raymond J. McCall (1952/1961), Basic Logic: The Fundamental Principles of Formal Deductive Reasoning, 2nd edition (Barnes & Noble, Inc.). A peculiar and (judging from the Preface) delightfully cranky textbook in logic. The peculiarity comes from the crankiness: McCall is a Catholic Aristotelian who spends the preface railing against the Wolffian perversion of the modern mathematicized logic (which he believes is due to a confusion of material logic and formal logic). He then devotes the entire textbook to a hardcore course in the categorical syllogism with some closing material on the theory of judgment.

  • Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (eds.) (1974), Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women. An anthology with a great title and a pretty good spread of topics from Feminist Studies Inc., published by Harper & Row. The modal topic is, as usual, women in Victorian America and Victorian England, but several other things get covered too.

  • Evelyn Reed (1969/1970), Problems of the Women’s Liberation Movement: A Marxist Approach. From Pathfinder.

  • Hugh Hawkins (ed.) (1970), The Emerging University and Industrial America. A short anthology of essays — some from participants like Josiah Royce, others from historians looking back — from D.C. Heath’s Problems in American Civilization series.

  • Bertrand Russell (1926), Education and the Good Life. A paperback edition from Avon Books, which looks to be a printing from the early 1960s or so, but I can’t find the date of the reprint.

  • E. David Cronon (ed.) (1963/1969), Labor and the New Deal. A documents reader from the Berkeley Series in American History.

  • Albert A. Blum (1963/1972). A History of the American Labor Movement. An alleged survey of American labor history, published as American Historical Association pamphlets #250, which I read on the plane back from Alabama. It’s actually just a recitation of the AFL-CIO party line on the triumph of state unionism, the wisdom of George Meaney and Walter Reuther, and the glory of the NLRB; any mention of the labor radicals (land-redistributionists, money reformers, the IWW) is only to summarily push them aside in a few opening paragraphs about their utopianism, foolishness, or failure. Blum, remarkably, manages to discuss the big drop-off in unionism from 1919-1929 without even once mentioning either the Palmer Raids or the Red Scare more broadly.

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