ST. LOUIS BLUES
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 5, 2019

ST. LOUIS POLICE HAVE HAD SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH THEIR OFFICERS, SEVERAL TIMES IN THE LAST TWO OR THREE YEARS AT LEAST, SINCE I’VE BEEN PRESENTING NEWS STORIES AND TRENDS. DOES THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE NEED TO INTERVENE AND FORCE THEM TO IDENTIFY THEIR PROBLEMS AND MAKE CHANGES? OF COURSE, ERIC HOLDER DID AN EXEMPLARY JOB WITH THAT IN MY VIEW, BUT HE IS GONE, GONE, GONE. I DON’T HAVE THAT FAITH IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LEADERS.

THE SECOND STORY IS FROM MCALLEN TEXAS, THOUGH IT IS ALL TOO SIMILAR TO ST LOUIS PROBLEMS, AND THERE’S A LOONEY TUNES TOUCH TO BOTH STORIES.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/russian-roulette-st-louis-police-shooting-bizarre-tragic.html
The Fatal “Russian Roulette” Shooting of a St. Louis Police Officer Keeps Getting More Bizarre
The “Russian Roulette” Shooting of One St. Louis Police Officer By Another Keeps Getting More Bizarre
By AARON MAK
FEB 01, 2019 2:51 PM

PHOTOGRAPH -- An St. [sic] Louis officer died during an alleged game of Russian Roulette.
Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images

At about 1:00 a.m. on Jan. 24, two on-duty officers from the St. Louis Police Department rushed a third, off-duty officer named Katlyn Alix to a hospital. Alix, a 24-year-old military veteran who had worked at the department for two years, soon died from the gunshot wound in her chest.

“What’s going on is that two on-duty officers went by one of their homes,” police chief John Hayden said at a press conference a few hours later. “They were on duty. While they were at that particular home, an off-duty female officer came to that home. While they were there at that home there was, what we understand to be, an accidental discharge. The female off-duty officer was shot in the chest and she was brought to the hospital by those officers. Upon arrival shortly thereafter, she was pronounced deceased.”

The unusual nature of Alix’s death immediately attracted media attention, and subsequent developments have only heightened the scrutiny on the case. Initial reports indicated that the firearm was not a service weapon, and that the on-duty officers were miles away from the district they were supposed to be patrolling. Over the past week, the details that have emerged underscored the senselessness of the incident and raised new questions about exactly what happened that day.

A day after the shooting, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office charged 29-year-old Nathaniel Hendren with involuntary manslaughter. The office released a probable cause statement from the police department, which revealed that the three officers had congregated at Hendren’s apartment. At some point, Alix and Hendren had reportedly been playing with guns, and Hendren produced a revolver. “The defendant emptied the cylinder of the revolver and then put one cartridge back into the cylinder.”

Hendren allegedly spun the cylinder, a routine often associated with Russian Roulette, and aimed the gun away. The gun did not fire when he pulled the trigger. According to the police statement, Alix allegedly then took the gun and aimed it at Hendren. It again did not fire when she pulled the trigger. Hendren allegedly took the gun back, aimed it at Alix, and accidentally shot her in the chest. The third officer, Patrick Riordan, told investigators that he admonished Alix and Hendren for fooling around with the revolver and was about to leave when it was discharged.

Hendren was booked on Monday and held on a $50,000 cash-only bond, which was subsequently raised to $100,000. In his mugshot, his left eye and forehead appeared to be bruised. Sources familiar with the situation later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he had headbutted the back window of a police vehicle while at the hospital and sustained minor injuries.

On Thursday, local outlet KMOV4 published an internal police misconduct report indicating that the three officers had been consuming alcohol on the night of the shooting. A lieutenant with the police department filed the complaint about 20 minutes after Alix’s death suggesting that Hendren and Riordan had violated an administrative regulation that dictates, “No employee shall report for duty or remain on duty with an alcohol concentration of 0.04 or greater. Moreover, no employee shall consume alcohol while on duty and/or engaged in City business.” Riordan’s attorney claims that his client only had a few sips of beer and poured the rest down the sink and that he blew a 0.0 on a breathalyzer test.

However, the breathalyzer has ignited further controversy in this case. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office sent a letter to the police department questioning why blood tests had not been performed on the two officers, which would give a more accurate reading of their level of intoxication. The letter indicated that the St. Louis University Hospital did not honor a search warrant for a blood test. The attorney’s office wrote that the fact that only urine and breathalyzer tests were performed “appears as an obstructionist tactic to prevent us from understanding the state of the officers during the commission of this alleged crime.” The police department’s public safety director, Jimmie Edwards, said in a press conference, “Our officers are not obstructionist.”

Medical examiners have performed an autopsy on Alix, but they will not release the report until the results of a toxicology test are complete. Hendren has been suspended without pay, while Riordan is on paid leave. Hayden, the police chief, told reporters that the department’s laptops are currently being upgraded so that supervisors can use GPS and radio to ensure that officers remain in their assigned patrol locations.


WHEN POLICE BEHAVIOR IS EXPOSED, LOOK AT THE EXCUSES SOME OF THE “GOOD PEOPLE” MADE FOR THEIR ACTIONS. SOME OTHERS, THOUGH, ARE ON THE RIGHT TRACK. THE FICTION THAT POLICE VIOLENCE IS OKAY, JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE THE POLICE IS A SICKNESS THAT OUR SOCIETY CARRIES IN IT FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. I HAVE A LITTLE HOPE THESE LAST TEN YEARS OR SO THAT WE MAY BE MAKING PROGRESS. THE MCKINNEY STORY, THOUGH, IS REGRESSIVE. ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/after-the-police-brutality-video-goes-viral/564863/
After the Police Brutality Video Goes Viral
Three years after a pool-party video made McKinney, Texas, infamous, I returned to find suburbanites who feel threatened, a mayor and activists at odds, and socioeconomic divisions that persist.
OLGA KHAZAN
JUL 23, 2018

PHOTO ENSEMBLE -- YOUTUBE / PHOTKA / FOCUSSTOCKER / SHUTTERSTOCK / BY KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC

McKINNEY, Texas—When I approached a small house in the Craig Ranch neighborhood here on a steamy day in early June, an angry, white man stormed out. He only grew more irate throughout our conversation. Three years ago, he was getting death threats, he said: messages saying his daughter would be raped or his son hanged. Texas Rangers were opening suspicious packages on his lawn. Friends of his said they saw pictures of his kids with targets on their faces posted online. He didn’t want it to happen again. He refused to give me his name, citing the fear of more threats, as did almost all the town residents I spoke with for this story.

I’m from McKinney, a Dallas suburb that a 2015 viral video made temporarily famous, because it showed a white police officer manhandling an unarmed black teenager in a swimsuit in front of a Craig Ranch neighborhood pool. Before I began knocking on doors, I was worried about how residents would react to my desire to revisit the ordeal. My fears were justified.

The man’s wife emerged from the house too, then burst into tears when I began asking questions. The couple told me there is an organized movement by groups like Black Lives Matter and the hacker collective Anonymous to paint the community as racist. That couldn’t be more wrong, the man said.

McKinney, Texas, and the Racial History of American Swimming Pools
YONI APPELBAUM

His wife went inside, weeping. “Stay strong!” the man yelled after her.

The events depicted in the McKinney video are reminiscent of similar episodes in the past few years, in which white people have called police on black people engaged in relatively minor infractions—or no infraction at all—as well as incidents in which encounters between people of color and police officers have deteriorated into violence. Last month, for example, a white woman was filmed calling the police on a black girl who was “illegally” selling water on a San Francisco sidewalk. In another case, in San Francisco, a white woman called the police on two black men using a charcoal grill in a technically non-charcoal-grill-area of a park. A black student at Yale was awoken by police after another student called the campus cops on her for taking a nap in a common room. Many officers who use force excessively don’t face consequences: A former South Carolina sheriff’s deputy faced no charges in 2016 for grabbing a black student and dragging her across the floor.

The McKinney incident represents a common quandary in parsing these viral racial flashpoints: When does something hint at a broader societal problem, and when is it just the malicious action of one individual? What I found is that some people here see the incident as an isolated moment of police brutality that had nothing to do with race, while others see it as a symptom of a community riven by deep divides along racial and economic lines.

My parents moved to McKinney, which is about an hour north of Dallas, in the early 2000s in search of cheap real estate, good schools, and proximity to well-paying jobs. McKinney is the kind of place that aggressively believes in the American dream: “Faith is the postage stamp on our prayers!” proclaimed one of the many church signs near my parents’ house on a recent weekend. That vision apparently resonated even with my jaded immigrant father.

We bought the biggest house we’d ever lived in for $139,000. Our neighborhood, like Craig Ranch, was on the west side of Highway 75, which bisects McKinney. The west has long been referred to as the “new” side, the “good” side, and sometimes the “white” side.

Builders have carved up the west side into sylvan subdivisions with names like Hidden Creek and Eldorado Lakes. The west-side neighborhoods are full of tidy lawns and brick homes. To combat the triple-digit heat that engulfs North Texas for much of the summer, they have swimming pools that are accessible only to residents.

On the east side, some homes are new or remodeled, but others are patched with plywood and corrugated metal. Eighty-six percent of the west side was white in 2009, when the city was forced to settle an affordable-housing lawsuit, compared with 49 percent of the east. The lawsuit claimed that all of the town’s public housing and most of the landlords willing to take Section 8 vouchers were on the east side. The east side has vape-supply stores, payday lenders, and bail bondsmen. The west side has a store called Nothing Bundt Cakes.

In 2014, Money magazine named McKinney the No. 1 place to live in America, topping the article with a picture of mothers strolling around Towne Lake, the local park.

The following year brought “the incident,” as it’s known on Wikipedia. A summer-Friday teen party was, according to reports from conservative media, advertised on Twitter as a “Dime Piece Cookout,” in a park across from a pool in Craig Ranch. The “dime piece” descriptor—slang for a woman who is a “perfect 10”—has, among some here, contributed to the sense that the teens were up to no good.

Tatyana Rhodes, the young woman who reportedly organized the party, and her mother, lived in Craig Ranch. (Rhodes did not respond to requests for comment.) It’s not clear how many of the teens involved in the incident lived on the east side, but some of the attendees did not live in Craig Ranch. Residents told me that the partygoers played loud rap music with lewd lyrics.

Several teenagers said at the time that someone in the neighborhood told the group of mostly black kids to “go back to your Section 8 housing,” and Rhodes said that she was slapped by an adult woman. (The woman later denied this.)

Before long, the teens roamed over to the nearby pool, which has a guarded gate and limits residents to a maximum of two guests—and absolutely no blowout parties. Finding themselves thus limited, the teens began hopping a fence to get to the pool. Several people called the police, first saying the teens were simply trespassing, then complaining that some were “throwing stuff at cars” and fighting.

When one of the police officers, Eric Casebolt, arrived at the scene, he detained several black boys and drew his gun on one man. He then wrestled a black girl to the ground, shoved her face into the grass, and sat on her back as she wailed for help.

An image of Casebolt pointing into a phone camera soon shot around the globe. A large white man atop a crying black girl: A more perfect snapshot of racial oppression would be hard to dream up. (Casebolt declined interview requests, as did Shashona Becton, the guardian of Dajerria Becton, the girl who was tackled by Casebolt.) The video was viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube. Katy Perry tweeted about it and Jon Stewart mocked it.

Casebolt resigned soon after, and a few weeks ago Dajerria Becton received $148,850 in a settlement. Now Craig Ranch residents just want the incident to go away, while some local activists intend to keep it—and the rifts it exposed—in the spotlight.

When I lived in McKinney 15 years ago, I encountered some of the kindest people I’ve ever met and some of the most prejudiced attitudes I’ve ever heard. In my yearbook, which had been graciously subsidized by my journalism teachers, a student wrote, “If you can ever make it on the ballot to run for president, I’ll vote for you. Unless it’s against Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a man.” At a high-school job, a co-worker of mine liked to show me pictures of her family’s cows, the black one of which was named the N-word. She served as a foster mom to several needy children.

Since then, McKinney has doubled in size, to 170,000 people, and the growing population has infused the town with new ideas. In 2014, my old high school had a lesbian homecoming queen. Hillary Clinton won 39 percent of the vote here in 2016, compared with the 24 percent Al Gore won in 2000. Like so many other booming towns, it contains both victories and sorrows. In the week I spent here recently, one McKinney boy won the National Spelling Bee and another shot himself to death in an empty high-school classroom. As Dominique Alexander, a leader of the Next Generation Action Network, a civil-rights group in the Dallas area, put it to me, “It’s a beautiful city, but it has its pains.”

In the aftermath of the incident, home values in the neighborhood dropped for a time. Craig Ranch residents felt that they were unfairly portrayed as racists living in an overwhelmingly white, affluent community. (According to census data, the median household income of the tract containing Craig Ranch is $105,000—higher than that of the county as a whole—and the tract is majority white.) Three days after the incident, Alexander and his group led a peaceful march through Craig Ranch, which some white residents interpreted as a sign that he was blaming them, rather than Casebolt alone. Several people I spoke with were incensed that activists were planning an upcoming pool party—at a public pool, this time—to mark the anniversary of the incident.

Most of the Craig Ranch residents who answered their doors either closed them when I introduced myself or politely declined to talk. “It’s in the past; I don’t want to reopen old wounds,” one man said. Another called it a “nonstory.” One couple gleefully told me that they’d gotten their house because all the other offers pulled out after the incident. One woman opened the door just to say that a real injustice had been done that day—to the police department.

Among those who did talk, the thinking seemed to be that Casebolt had lashed out at the kids not because they were black or poor but because the homeowners’ association forbade what they were doing. “I’m not saying I condone what occurred,” one Hispanic resident said. “But [Dajerria Becton] was told numerous times to leave the area. The teens were being disrespectful, and creating chaos when there didn’t need to be chaos.”

A man who identified himself only as Chris said that there was blame on both sides. “The cop overreacted, but the party was illegal,” he said. “They provoked him, and he got provoked.”

In the end, he said, “it made everyone look bad.”

The incident was perhaps especially incendiary because it involved a swimming pool: Pools have historically been the sites of major feuds over race, income, and access. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote in the wake of the McKinney incident, in the early 20th century, public pools were plentiful—but segregated. As civil-rights activists pushed to desegregate them, many cities privatized the facilities rather than be forced to integrate them. Private and exclusive pools became more common; public ones, less so. “Suburbanites organized private club pools rather than fund public pools because club pools enabled them to control the class and racial composition of swimmers, whereas public pools did not,” the historian Jeff Wiltse noted in his 2007 book, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.

Many of the homes on McKinney’s east side were built before homeowners’ associations began incorporating gated pools into their developments. People in McKinney who don’t belong to homeowners’ associations can use the city’s public swimming pools. There are four, and rather than operating on homeowners’-association dues, they charge a fee for admission. The newest pool, at a facility called the Apex Center, features water slides and costs $10 a person for a day pass. (It’s on the west side.) If Rhodes had wanted to host her party legally, she would have had to rent one of these pools. For up to 200 guests, the cost is $110 to $800 for two hours, depending on the pool.

“Craig Ranch is a multimillion-dollar development,” said Henry Moore, a pastor at Saint Mark Baptist Church, an old black church on the east side, whom I spoke with one Sunday last month before services began. “On the east side, there is no Craig Ranch multimillion-dollar development. So there will be nicer things on the west side than there are on the east side.”

When the socioeconomic divide in a town is so stark, the line between feeling unwanted because you’re not from the neighborhood and feeling unwanted because of your race can start to blur. “Are you saying I'm not supposed to be here because I don't live here?” Moore continued, speculating on the mind-set of some of the teens that day. “But I was invited.”

Those tensions might be exacerbated by residential segregation. The Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas-based housing nonprofit, approached McKinney a decade ago to discuss building housing for lower-income families on the west side. It was only after McKinney settled a lawsuit with the Inclusive Communities Project that two low-income apartment complexes were built west of Highway 75, something west-side residents vocally opposed.

“I’ve seen what Section 8 housing does to property values, and I’ve also seen what Section 8 housing does to the schools,” said one man during a city-council meeting in 2014. “Section 8 housing … brings with it the history of drugs, gangs, and lawlessness, and a lot of police activity,” another man said. (Roslyn Miller, the director of the McKinney Housing Authority, said at the time that in her 10 years with the agency, there had been just one homicide in a public-housing or affordable-housing unit. How low-income housing is incorporated into a community is a factor, but such a program generally doesn’t appear to affect crime rates or property values.)

Demetria McCain, the president of the Inclusive Communities Project, told me McKinney is not unique in resisting affordable housing. Income segregation has increased around the country in recent decades: Nationally, in 1970 just 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods considered either “affluent” or “poor,” but by 2007, 31 percent of families did. All around the Dallas area, homeowners’ associations have prevented homeowners from renting to holders of affordable-housing vouchers, and they have questioned renters’ right to use a homeowners’-association pool, McCain told me. She sent me a webpage from a council candidate in Wylie, which is not far from McKinney, who promised not to approve affordable-housing developments in the city. In a survey of 1,901 market-rate* properties in Collin County, which contains McKinney, and neighboring counties last year, Inclusive Communities found that only 12 percent were willing to rent to families with a Housing Choice Voucher, which is part of a program aimed at the very poor. In McKinney, more than 90 percent of the properties refused to rent to voucher holders, according to the survey. In the greater Dallas area, the voucher recipients are predominantly black.

“I didn’t expect the [pool-party] incident to create any big, positive change,” McCain told me recently. “And I don’t think it has.”

Opening up west McKinney to lower-income families, who are often people of color, might improve racial relations in town, McCain offered. Usually, she noted, opposition to affordable housing dies down after the renters move in. “Maybe if we live together more,” she said, “people who are afraid of us might get to know us as people.”

“I'm not going to say the mayor is racist, but he is certainly singing the tune,” Kim T. Cole, Dajerria Becton’s lawyer, told The Dallas Morning News in May.

This was after Cole and Dominique Alexander, the activist, got into a heated exchange at a press conference with McKinney’s mayor, a local builder named George Fuller. In an email to Alexander covered by the News, Fuller called Eric Casebolt "a reckless, overly stimulated, excessive force wielding cop,” but also referred to "a verbally abusive, disobedient girl" at the pool party.

"For this mayor to come out today and say that this girl was verbally abusive to this officer as if this justifies his behavior is ridiculous," Cole said at the time.

Fuller, though, stuck by that description of Becton and the other teens in an interview in his office recently. “The officer used force that was not necessary in that situation. Absolutely,” he told me. “But [police] were called not because there were black people in the pool. They came ... because there were people trespassing, destroying property, and smoking dope.” (Fuller said the residents who called the police saw the teens smoking pot. The teens have denied that they were using drugs or alcohol, and neither the 911 calls from the pool itself nor the police reports make mention of drugs.)

A few weeks ago, Cole held a pool party at the Apex Center to mark the third anniversary of the incident, telling reporters that she wanted to give McKinney kids “the pool party they didn’t have.” According to the News, Becton and the other teens involved in the settlement did not attend.

“I'm not a fan of this anniversary celebration,” Fuller told me. “What are we celebrating? Are we celebrating the trespassing of the pool? Are we celebrating the excessive force of a police officer? Are we celebrating the accusation of this racial bias and discrimination on McKinney, Texas, that was not the case?”

Fuller also said he thought the incident wasn’t racial—and wasn’t reflective of the city. Fuller, who is white and has an adopted black daughter, said he doesn’t see much racial tension in the city. A black city-council member recently alleged that police treated him unfairly during a traffic stop, but after a review of body-cam footage, the council member said he had been partly at fault and apologized. Of course racial discrimination exists, Fuller said, but it exists in the world, not only in McKinney.

Fuller said the city has made progress on policing since the incident. The police department has body cameras now, and officers have been patrolling neighborhoods on the east side by bike and on foot in order to build rapport with the community. The police meet with community members at events like Tacos With Cops and Coffee With Cops.

The mayor is done engaging with Alexander, the activist, who Fuller says threatened him inappropriately during a council hearing. He and other critics of Alexander point out his checkered legal past. Alexander, to him, is a “fame junkie looking to stay relevant” and “a clown that belongs in the circus.”

Alexander admits that he threatened to release information about council members’ conflicts of interest to the media, but says he doesn’t feel that was inappropriate. He told me that he has learned from his legal troubles, and he denied that he seeks fame.

He said the city hasn’t done nearly enough to address residential segregation and discriminatory policing. He’d like to see even more community meetings, along with an equity study of McKinney. “Back in 2015, I made an oath that I will continue to fight to address this issue,” he told me, “so that McKinney can live up to what it always brags about, which is that it’s the best place to live in America.”

Before I left McKinney, I went through the guarded gates of the pool from the video to talk with families as they watched their kids splash around.

“Why are you even here?” a white man in a baseball cap said when I introduced myself. He said he doesn’t trust the media much and feels that these days, people are hated just for voting for Trump.

“The cop was rough with a girl, he was amped Up*, it was a ruckus—but that girl went from punk to victim,” he said. He gazed out over the turquoise water, the fountains, the manicured park beyond. Black Lives Matter—a terrorist organization, in his view—was portraying the community in a bad light. Alexander, to him, was a “race baiter.” “I work my ass off to get what I have, and we’re gonna call you racist? That’s a candy-ass* argument,” he muttered.

[HAVING JUST LOOKED THAT TERM CANDY-ASS UP – I HAVE FOUND ANOTHER NEW MEANING. I COULD TELL IT WAS A VULGAR INSULT, BUT NOW I KNOW WHAT IT TRANSLATES INTO: “WUSS, WIMP, OR WORSE, “PUSSY.” SO DON’T EVER CALL ANYBODY THAT!] [AND AS FOR “AMPED UP,” IT MEANS INTENSELY OR OVERLY EXCITED RATHER THAN HIGH ON DRUGS.]

A white woman sitting nearby chimed in to say that if her son’s school were predominantly black, she doubted her family would be accepted.

If unrest comes their way, the man in the baseball cap said, “there are citizens who are armed and are not gonna put up with that.”

I walked around the pool toward another white couple playing with their kids in the water. They gave me fake names because they were worried about their jobs. “This is the most diverse neighborhood we’ve ever lived in,” the man said, paddling away from me slowly. The incident says nothing about the neighborhood, he added.

On this, he, McCain, and almost everyone I talked with seemed to agree: The incident is not unique to McKinney. It could have happened anywhere.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

OLGA KHAZAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


MARKET-RATE* --
https://www.thespruce.com/market-rate-apartment-155986

THIS ESSENTIALLY MEANS THAT THERE ARE NO EXTERNAL RESTRICTIONS ON THE RENTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. IN OTHER WORDS, IT IS NOT “RENT CONTROLLED” TO KEEP THE PRICE DOWN, NOR RESTRICTED TO KEEP SUBSIDIZED HOUSING RECIPIENTS OUT, SUCH AS “VOUCHER HOLDERS.” THE FIRST WOULD ALLOW “THE WORKING POOR” TO LIVE THERE ON THEIR BUDGET, AND THE SECOND WOULD KEEP THE VERY POOR OUT – WHICH OFTEN MEANS A RACIAL OR ETHNICITY BARRIER. IT’S JUST ANOTHER FILTER TO KEEP THE RACES APART, AND TO KEEP THE HOITY TOITY FROM HAVING TO LIVE WITH “HOI POLLOI.” THAT PHRASE MEANS SPECIFICALLY, “THE PEOPLE,” OR “THE MASSES.” GO TO HTTPS://WWW.MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM/DICTIONARY/HOITY-TOITY. HOITY TOITY IS AN INCORRECT SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF “HÔƏDĒˈTOIDĒ,” WHICH WEBSTER DEFINES AS “SNOBBISH,” ELITIST, AND A STRING OF OTHER UNPLEASANT TERMS.

SEE HTTPS://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/HOI_POLLOI FOR TWO MORE DEFINITIONS RELATED TO THAT WORD. IF TAKEN FROM PERICLES WHO WAS A DEMOCRATIC SOUL, IT WAS USED TO IMPLY A POSITIVE CONNOTATION, IT MEANT “THE PEOPLE,” [YES, KARL MARX DIDN’T MAKE THAT UP] HIS PREFERENCE BEING FOR THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY AND NOT THE PRIVILEGED CLASS, OR “HOI OLIGOI,” WHICH TRANSLATES AS "THE FEW." THAT WORD IS RECOGNIZABLE IN THE TERM “OLIGARCHY.”

THIS PROBABLY ACCOUNTS FOR THE FACT THAT I HAVE HEARD PEOPLE USE THE PHRASE HOI POLLOI TO MEAN BOTH INTERPRETATIONS, GOOD AND BAD. SINCE ALMOST NOBODY STUDIES GREEK ANYMORE, IT HAS BECOME AN OFTEN-MISUSED PHRASE, AND A LOGICAL ERROR; ALSO, ANYONE WHO GOES AROUND SPEAKING CLASSICAL GREEK THESE DAYS IN AMERICA IS ALMOST CERTAINLY A SOCIAL CLIMBER, OR INSANE, SO I SUGGEST YOU DON’T DO IT. I PREFER TO USE “THE MASSES” OR “THE PEOPLE” EITHER ONE MAKES ME SOUND LIKE A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, AND THAT’S JUST GREAT. TO ME, WITHOUT A MIXTURE OF PEOPLES AND IDEAS, THINGS TO SEE AND DO, IT ISN’T A REAL “CITY.” MY CITY WAS WASHINGTON, DC., AND MY NEIGHBORHOOD WAS DUPONT CIRCLE.


OTHER ST. LOUIS PD PROBLEMS

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’VE SEEN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM THAT TOO MANY OF THESE COPS HAVE BEING CALLED WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS, EXCEPT BY ME SOMETIMES. WE SAY, DIRTY COPS, POLICE BRUTALITY, RACIST COPS, CORRUPT COPS AND IT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS, BUT THE MENTAL DISEASE IS SADISM. WE, WHO DON’T SEE OURSELVES AS BEING SADISTIC, NEED TO AGITATE AGAINST THE CORRUPT POLICE DEPARTMENT HEADS AND MAYORS AND OTHERS IN AUTHORITY WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO HIRE DECENT PEOPLE TO BEGIN WITH, TRAIN THEM TO DO THEIR JOB WITHOUT ALL OF THAT POINTLESS FEROCITY, SO THAT THEY CAN BE THE HEROIC BEINGS THAT WE CLAIM THEY ARE. AS LONG AS OUR SOCIETY IS CALLOUS AND GREEDY, HOWEVER, WE WON’T DO THAT. WE AS INDIVIDUALS NEED TO MAKE OUR INNER BEING MORE INTELLIGENT AND MERCIFUL. THAT’S THE ONLY WAY OUR CULTURE CAN HAVE THOSE VIRTUES. A GROUP IS A COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS, AND IF WE WORK AT IT FROM THAT ANGLE, WE CAN MAKE CHANGES.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/st-louis-police-brutality-stockley/577174/
IDEAS
Sadism in the St. Louis Police Department
Three cops who expressed an eagerness to brutalize protesters unintentionally targeted the one person likely to get them arrested.
DEC 3, 2018
Conor Friedersdorf
Staff writer at The Atlantic

PHOTOGRAPH -- JIM YOUNG / REUTERS

Last year, former police officer Jason Stockley was on trial in St. Louis, Missouri, for the shooting death of a black motorist named Anthony Smith.

He was acquitted, sparking street protests.

The St. Louis police activated what it calls its Civil Disobedience Team. Among the cops assigned to it were Dustin Boone, Randy Hays, and Christopher Myers, who sent texts to one another expressing their excitement and glee at the prospect of brutalizing protesters, according to federal prosecutors who reviewed their communications.

“Let’s whoop some ass,” Myers allegedly texted.

“The more the merrier!!!” Boone allegedly replied. “It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!! But it’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of those shitheads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!” He went on to describe a fellow police officer as “a BIG OL black dude” who is “hands on,” and who is “basically a thug that’s on our side. It’s he and I that just grab fuckers and toss em around.” Later he described cops loading protesters onto prison buses while saying “Our streets,” in unison, mocking their chant. He added, “Did everyone see the protesters getting FUCKED UP in the galleria????? That was awesome.”

Read: In one year, 57,375 years of life were lost to police violence
Read: After the police brutality video goes viral

Hays allegedly explained, “It’s extremely frustrating, but you’ll eat yourself up inside if you don’t just let it go and deal with it when it comes. And this one is easy because we both are good, going rogue does feel good, but I’ve been elected to be the driver of a Tahoe, so if I get involved tonight, shit has hit the fan.” He added, “Remember we are in south city. They support us but also cameras. So make sure you have an old white dude as a witness.”

On September 17, 2017, these men put their sadistic language into practice, according to an indictment filed against them last week.

“The defendants threw L.H. to the ground and then kicked and struck L.H. while he was compliant and not posing a physical threat to anyone,” it states. “This offense resulted in bodily injury to L.H. and included the use of a dangerous weapon, that is: shod feet and a riot baton.”

They most likely would still be on the street, with their badges, their guns, and the ability to inflict lethal force, if not for the fact that L.H. happened to be an undercover police officer. “We’ve had several incidents of protesters and activists being the victims of excessive use of force and police abusing their authority without ever seeing charges like this,” Rev. Darryl Gray, a protest organizer, told The Washington Post.

An attorney who filed brutality lawsuits on behalf of 23 protesters told AP, “The text messages confirm our suspicions that these officers were using the anonymity of their swat uniforms and face masks after removing their name tags so that they could beat citizens with impunity.”

Now four officers await an early December court date, where they are expected to plead not guilty. According to the indictment, Myers “did knowingly destroy and mutilate L.H.’s cellular phone, a tangible object used to record and preserve information.” All three men allegedly conspired to influence the testimony of potential witnesses. One fellow officer, Bailey Colletta, was indicted for lying about the incident.

“St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said that her office has dismissed 91 criminal cases associated with four St. Louis police officers,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, adding this striking detail:

Gardner stopped accepting cases from the four officers in question, “When we learned these officers were under investigation and the reason for the investigation,” spokeswoman Susan Ryan said Friday. “That was in late August, early September,” she said. A source told the Post-Dispatch that those cases had been issued between 2016 and this year.

Several were issued after the alleged assault on Hall took place, and well into the federal investigation into the incident, according to a source. That means the accused officers were on duty, actively making arrests and building cases while they were the subjects of a federal criminal investigation. It is not clear whether they were ever disciplined internally or put on administrative duty during the investigation.

St. Louis prosecutors seem to have all sorts of problems with St. Louis police officers––they keep a list of the ones they won’t work with, but won’t reveal those names to the public and the cops remain on the job.

Additional information about police misconduct during the Stockley protests may emerge as more than a dozen federal lawsuits filed against the police department make their way through the courts.

“The suits claim police violated the arrestees’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to be free from unlawful seizure and their First Amendment rights to assemble in public and express their views free from retaliation,” the Post-Dispatch reports. “The suits also say police conspired to deprive them of their civil rights and that the city failed to properly train officers to avoid violating the rights of protesters or others.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.


OFFICER ERROR

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-police-officers-indicted-accused-of-beating-an-undercover/article_4a82d209-b3cd-565e-9a97-309cf1c2a5af.html
4 St. Louis police officers indicted, accused of beating an undercover colleague during Stockley protests
By Robert Patrick St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dec 1, 2018

ST. LOUIS • Four St. Louis police officers were indicted Thursday on federal charges claiming that three of them beat an undercover colleague during protests last year and all four then covered it up, federal prosecutors say.

The indictment also claims that several of the officers exchanged messages that “expressed disdain” for protesters and “excitement about using unjustified force against them and going undetected while doing so.”

RELATED: Read the indictment against the St. Louis police officers

Prosecutors allege that officers Dustin Boone, Randy Hays and Christopher Myers threw a 22-year police veteran to the ground and kicked and hit him with a police baton on Sept. 17, 2017, amid protests downtown that followed the acquittal of former police Officer Jason Stockley on a murder charge for the fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith. They believed the undercover officer was a protester and assaulted him “while he was compliant and not posing a physical threat to anyone,” the indictment says.

Officer Bailey Colletta is accused of lying to a federal grand jury investigating the incident.

All four of the accused officers are members of the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, which is providing them with legal representation, according to Jeff Roorda, business manager. All four accused officers appeared in court Friday and turned themselves in.

Roorda referred all questions to the officers’ attorneys, saying, in part, “We encourage elected officials, the media and the public to allow them their day in court without speculation about their guilt or innocence.”

Hays’ and Colletta’s lawyers declined to comment. The others did not return messages.

After learning that the person they attacked was an undercover officer, the three male officers lied about the arrest, claiming the man resisted arrest and was not compliant, the indictment says. They also tried to contact the undercover officer to dissuade him from pursuing disciplinary or legal action, the indictment says.

The undercover officer is identified only by the initials “L.H.” The age, gender and initials match only one officer: Luther Hall. Hall was working undercover aiding other officers in identifying criminal activity, sources said.

At the time of the assault, police sources said Hall suffered a bloody lip during his arrest.

But sources close to Hall said Thursday that injuries from the assault were much more extensive. He has not been able to return to work.

Hall was kicked in the face, which inflamed his jaw muscles to the point where he could not eat. He went from about 185 pounds to 165.

The cut above his lip was a 2-centimeter hole that went through his face.

He also sustained an injury to his tailbone, which still causes him pain, the sources said.

And in October, he underwent surgery to repair two herniated discs in his neck and one in his back. He is still wearing a collar to keep his neck immobile.

Myers destroyed Hall’s cellphone with the intent to obstruct any subsequent investigation, sources said, and Boone, Hays and Myers obstructed justice by conspiring to prevent information about the beating from reaching federal investigators. Colletta and Hays were in a romantic relationship at the time of the incident and investigation, the indictment says.

Colletta initially denied knowing Hall and denied that she had ever come into contact with him on the night of his arrest, the indictment says, and lied when saying he was “brought to the ground very gently.”

The indictment says the officers exchanged a series of messages during the days of protest duty.

In one Sept. 15, 2017, message, Myers writes “let’s whoop some ass.”

On Oct. 5, 2017, Hays writes “going rogue does feel good.”

Boone later replies that “it’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these (expletive) once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!” On Sept. 17, he wrote that it was “a blast beating people that deserve it.”

Boone, 35, Hays, 31, and Myers, 27, all face charges of depriving Hall of his constitutional rights and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Myers also faces a charge of destruction of evidence relating to the cellphone, and Colletta, 25, faces a charge of attempting to obstruct grand jury proceedings.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen declined to comment, saying he would not make any statements outside of a news release announcing the charges.

St. Louis Public Safety Director Jimmie Edwards, who called the officers “outliers” in a statement, said the four officers have been suspended without pay from the police force.

In his own statement, Police Chief John Hayden said police sought the FBI’s help after learning about the allegations involving Hall.

“I am deeply disappointed in the alleged actions of these individual officers; however, it is in no way reflective of the hard work and dedication exhibited by the men and women of our Department who serve the community on a daily basis with integrity and honor,” his statement says.

Hayden said Hays had eight years with the department, Myers had three, Boone had two and Colletta, 18 months.

The officers could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted, although recommended federal sentencing guidelines will likely call for much less prison time.

Others alleged mistreatment

All four were among the 200 officers assigned to the police “Civil Disobedience Team,” prosecutors say, working protest duty.

They’re also among current and former officers that St. Louis city prosecutors have purportedly excluded from testifying in criminal cases.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, in a statement Thursday, said her office had dismissed 91 cases associated with the officers and would continue to review “cases where these officers’ testimony or involvement is fundamental.”

Following the alleged assault on Hall, then-Acting Chief Lawrence O’Toole asked police union leaders for a donation to cover the cost of a broken camera. Roorda confirmed at the time that the union’s nonprofit foundation, Shield of Hope, donated $500 to Hall to help cover those expenses or any other costs.

It was not immediately clear whether Thursday’s indictment would close out a federal investigation into police activity during the controversial police “kettle” on the night of Hall’s arrest.

St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson and O’Toole were among the officials who asked the U.S. attorney’s office to investigate less than two weeks later.

The mass arrest prompted criticism by a federal judge and a series of federal lawsuits alleging that police violated arrestees’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to be free from unlawful seizure and their First Amendment rights to assemble in public and express their views free from retaliation.

The suits say arrestees were pepper-sprayed and physically injured even when attempting to be compliant with police orders.

Former Post-Dispatch reporter Mike Faulk, who was among the reporters assigned to cover the protests that night, was also arrested and has filed his own lawsuit.

Police supervisors have said that protesters blocking the street and refusing to disperse were given multiple warnings about possible arrest and the use of chemical munitions. They denied seeing any inappropriate use of force, saying pepper spray was used only on those who resisted police orders.

After the indictments were announced, Tony Rothert, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, wrote that “there has still been no real accountability for the individual officers who engaged in the same behavior toward protesters. St. Louis officials must address this rampant lawlessness by its police.”

“We expect professionalism from every City employee,” Krewson said in a statement. “No exceptions. The charges brought against these officers today do not reflect the standards we hold ourselves to as public servants.”

Police have also said multiple officers have been injured by rocks and bottles thrown by protesters on various occasions.

“In a few instances, some officers have fallen short of the professionalism required to work in our Police Department,” Edwards said in a statement. “I take accountability and transparency very seriously. When a public safety employee acts outside the scope of their authority, it is imperative that they be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

Hall was not a member of the Ethical Society of Police, a police association which represents primarily black officers.

But the organization’s community liaison, the Rev. Darryl Gray, said the group has been calling on the department to investigate the assault ever since it happened.

“Anytime we have police officers who are labeled as rogue officers, other officers need to know there is accountability and there are consequences to police officers who think they’re above the law or try to hide their own viciousness and hatred behind the badge and under the cover of darkness,” Gray said.

Christine Byers and Joel Currier of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

A TIMELINE OF EVENTS AND COVERAGE


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THIS ARTICLE IS PROBABLY SUPPOSED TO MAKE ME FEEL PITY FOR THE POOR SUPERTASTERS AND FINICKY FELIX CHARACTERS, SO THAT I WOULD THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE TO FEEL DISGUST TOWARD PEOPLE WHO ARE “FULL OF DISEASES” OR “BROWN.” I SEE THE CONNECTION, BUT TO ME FINICKY PEOPLE ARE MORE OF AN IRRITANT THAN A SUPERIOR BEING.

DONALD TRUMP NOT LONG AGO STATED THAT THE “INVASION” COMING ACROSS THE BORDER WAS MADE UP OF PEOPLE WHO WERE CARRYING DISEASES, RAPISTS, THUGS, AND SOME OTHER SUCH DESCRIPTIVE TERMS, FINALLY FINISHING OFF WITH, “OF COURSE I ASSUME SOME OF THEM ARE FINE PEOPLE.” I HAD BEEN TOLD BEFORE THAT HE WAS A GERMAPHOBE. THAT TO ME IS MORE THAN FINICKINESS; IT IS BORDERLINE PSYCHOTIC. MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER HAD TO DEAL WITH LIFE HEAD ON, WITHOUT THEIR SERVANTS, OR MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER DONE AN HONEST DAY’S WORK IN THEIR LIVES.

WE ALL HAVE OUR CROSS TO BEAR. THEIR CROSS SHOULD BE TO CONFRONT THEIR OWN SMALL-MINDEDNESS WITH NEW INFORMATION AND MUSIC AND FOOD AND PEOPLE UNTIL THEY LOSE THEIR FEAR OF IT. INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT IS STIMULATING AND ENJOYABLE WHEN YOU GET USED TO IT. A GREAT OR IRRATIONAL FEARFULNESS IS DISGUSTING TO ME. WE HAVE TO PULL OURSELVES OUT OF THAT WEAKNESS. SUCH PEOPLE SIMPLY COULDN’T HAVE LIVED IN A PRIOR TIME PERIOD BEFORE WE WERE ALL SO COMFORTABLY HOUSED AND WELL-FED.

THERE ARE MUCH MORE SERIOUS THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT, IF WE ARE GOING TO SET UP AND MAINTAIN CARING AND CIVILIZED SOCIETIES. I WONDER HOW THE TEST SUBJECTS WOULD HAVE ANSWERED THE QUESTIONS IF THEY HAD BEEN BORN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO AND IN A LESS WEALTHY NATION, INSTEAD OF NOW. MY WAY OF DEALING WITH A STICKY TABLETOP OR A YUCKY PUBLIC TOILET SEAT IS TO PULL OUT A PAPER TOWEL, WET IT, ADD SOAP AND WASH THE OFFENDING SURFACE.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/
Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures
To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical revulsion.
KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE
MARCH 2019 ISSUE


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I. “My Jaw Dropped”

Why do we have the political opinions we have? Why do we embrace one outlook toward the world and not another? How and why do our stances change? The answers to questions such as these are of course complex. Most people aren’t reading policy memos to inform every decision. Differences of opinion are shaped by contrasting life experiences: where you live; how you were raised; whether you’re rich or poor, young or old. Emotion comes into the picture, and emotion has a biological basis, at least in part. All of this and more combines into a stew without a fixed recipe, even if many of the ingredients are known.

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On rare occasions, we learn of a new one—a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.

In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images—including ones displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores—to see whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?

FROM OUR MARCH 2019 ISSUE

Montague initially laughed at the idea—for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources—but the team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures—this second category contained both positive and negative images—while undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.

The subjects in the trial were also shown violent imagery (men pointing revolvers directly at the camera, battle scenes, car wrecks) and pleasant pictures (smiling babies, beautiful sunsets, cute bunnies). But it was only the reaction to repulsive things that correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of the results,” Montague says.

His collaborators—John Hibbing and Kevin Smith at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and John Alford at Rice University, in Houston—were just as surprised, though less by the broad conclusion than by the specificity of the findings and the startling degree of predictability. Their own earlier research had already yielded a suggestive finding, indicating that conservatives tend to have more pronounced bodily responses than liberals when shown stomach-churning imagery. However, the investigators had expected that brain reactions to violent imagery would also be predictive of ideology. Compared with liberals, they’d previously found, conservatives generally pay more attention—and react more strongly—to a broad array of threats. For example, they have a more pronounced startle response to loud noises, and they gaze longer at photos of people displaying angry expressions. And yet even in this research, Hibbing says, “we almost always get clearer results with stimuli that are disgusting than with those that suggest a threat from humans, animals, or violent events. We have an ongoing discussion in our lab about whether this is because disgust is simply a more powerful and more politically relevant emotion or because it is an emotion that is easier to evoke with still images in a lab setting.”

Findings so dramatic, especially in the social sciences, should be viewed with caution until replicated. The axiom that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof clearly applies here. That said, Hibbing, Montague, and their colleagues are scarcely alone in linking disgust and ideology.

At a deep, symbolic level, some researchers speculate, disgust may be bound up with ideas about “them” versus “us,” about whom we instinctively trust and don’t trust.

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust—basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat—numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity, support for authority and hierarchy, sexual conservatism, and distrust of outsiders. According to a 2013 meta-analysis of 24 studies—pretty much all the scientific literature on the topic at that time—the association between a conservative ethos and sensitivity to disgust is modest: Disgust sensitivity explains 4 to 13 percent of the variation in a population’s ideology. That may sound unimpressive, but it is in fact noteworthy, says David Pizarro, a psychology professor at Cornell who specializes in disgust. “These are robust, reliable findings. No matter where we look, we see this relationship”—a rarity in the fuzzy field of psychology. The trend stands out even more, he adds, when you consider all the other things that potentially impinge on “why you might have a particular political view.”

II. The Behavioral Immune System
broadly speaking, studies of possible connections between ideology and susceptibility to disgust fall into two categories. The first involves measuring subjects’ sensitivity to disgust as well as their social or political ideologies and then calculating the correlation between the two. The second category explores whether exposure to disgusting subject matter can actually influence people’s views in the moment. But whatever the type of study, the same general finding keeps turning up. “We are at the point where there is very solid evidence for the association,” says Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, in Denmark. His own research finds that “disgust influences our political views as much as or even more than long-recognized factors such as education and income bracket.”

So many scientists have thrown themselves into this line of research in recent years that it has become an accepted discipline, sometimes jokingly given the aptly unappetizing name “disgustology.” Their conclusions raise a lot of questions, chief among them: Why in the world would your reaction to mutilated animals, vomit, and other unwelcome things somehow be associated with your views on transgender rights, immigration, or anything else stirring debate in the news?


Jeff Brown
Researchers have theories rather than answers. At a deep, symbolic level, some speculate, disgust may be bound up with ideas about “them” versus “us,” about whom we instinctively trust and don’t trust. In short, this research may help illuminate one factor—among many—that underlies why those on the left and the right can so vehemently disagree.


There is nothing inherently political about disgust. It evolved not to guide us at the ballot box but rather, it is widely theorized, to protect us from infection. As we move about in the world, a sizable volume of research shows, our minds are constantly searching our surroundings for contaminants—moldy leftovers, garbage spilling out of trash cans, a leaky sewage pipe—and when the brain detects them, it triggers sudden feelings of revulsion. Confronted, we withdraw from the threat. The mechanism is part of what’s known as the “behavioral immune system,” and it is as vital for survival as the fight-or-flight response. Our pathogen-tracking system does its job largely beneath our conscious awareness—and pays close attention to those walking germ bags we call human beings.

This dynamic was highlighted in a pioneering series of experiments launched in the early 2000s by the psychologist Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia. Like a smoke detector, Schaller discovered, our germ radar operates on a better-safe-than-sorry principle. It is error-prone in flagging danger—it produces a lot of false positives. Any physical oddity displayed by the people around us—contagious or not—can set off an alarm. Just as a pink eye, a hacking cough, or an open wound may activate our behavioral immune system, so too can a birthmark, obesity, deformity, disability, or even liver spots. Furthermore, having germs on our mind can affect how we feel about people we perceive to be of a different race or ethnicity from ourselves.


In one notable experiment, Schaller showed subjects pictures of people coughing, cartoonish-looking germs sprouting from sponges, and other images designed to raise disease concerns. A control group was shown pictures highlighting threats unrelated to germs—for instance, an automobile accident. Both groups were then given a questionnaire that asked them to assess the level of resources the Canadian government should provide to entice people from various parts of the world to settle in Canada. Compared with the control group, the subjects who had seen pictures related to germs wanted to allocate a greater share of a hypothetical government advertising budget to attract people from Poland and Taiwan—familiar immigrant groups in Vancouver, where the study was conducted—rather than people from less familiar countries, such as Nigeria, Mongolia, and Brazil. Familiarity does make a difference. Schaller, whose landmark studies are credited with sparking the initial interest in the relationship between disgust sensitivity and prejudice, says: “If I grow up in an environment where everybody looks pretty much the same, then someone from China, for example, might trigger my behavioral immune system. But if I grow up in New York City, then a person who comes from China is not going to trigger this response.”

If pathogen cues of this kind can indeed intensify prejudice, the explanation could be biological adaptation. Some scientists—notably the psychologist Corey Fincher, at the University of Warwick, in England, and the biologist Randy Thornhill, at the University of New Mexico—theorize that foreigners, at least in the past, would have been more likely to expose local populations to pathogens against which they had no acquired defenses. Other scientists think germ fears piggyback on negative stereotypes about foreigners common throughout history—the notion that they’re dirty, eat bizarre foods, and have looser sexual mores.

Whatever the explanation, an online study launched by Petersen and Lene Aarøe, also at Aarhus University, and Kevin Arceneaux of Temple University suggests that a dread of contagion is not just a personal matter. It can have an impact on society. The investigators began by evaluating the disgust sensitivity of nationally representative samples of 2,000 Danes and 1,300 Americans. The participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their views about foreigners settling in their respective countries. As the researchers reported in 2017, opposition to immigration in both the Danish and American samples increased in direct proportion to a participant’s sensitivity to disgust—an association that held up even after taking into account education level, socioeconomic status, religious background, and numerous other factors.

The team expanded the part of the study that focused on the U.S. It got state-by-state breakdowns of the prevalence of infections, and also analyzed statistics compiled by Google Trends, which tracks internet searches related to contagious illnesses in an effort to spot early signs of outbreaks. Crunching the numbers (the results are as yet unpublished), the researchers found that resistance to immigration is greatest in states with the highest incidence of infectious disease and where worry about this, as reflected by internet activity, has also been high.

More recent investigations by Petersen and Aarøe suggest that those with high disgust sensitivity tend to be leery of any stranger, not just foreigners. They view casual social acquaintances with a certain amount of suspicion—a robust finding replicated across three studies with a total of 4,400 participants. The implication is clear: Disgust and distrust are somehow linked. And maybe, again, the link is defensive in origin: If you shrink your social circle, you’ll reduce your exposure to potential carriers of disease.

III. The Smell Test
interest in disgust sensitivity extends beyond its potential role in fostering xenophobia and prejudice. As the social psychologists Simone Schnall, at the University of Cambridge, and Jonathan Haidt, at NYU, have shown, disgust sensitivity may also help shape beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil. In one experiment, Schnall, Haidt, and other collaborators sat subjects at either a clean desk or one with sticky stains on it as they filled out a form that asked them to judge the offensiveness of various acts, such as lying on a résumé, not returning a wallet found on the street, and resorting to cannibalism in the aftermath of a plane crash. One subgroup of participants seated at the filthy desk—those with high “private body consciousness,” meaning they were particularly sensitive to their own visceral reactions—judged the transgressions more severely than those seated at the pristine desk.

Foul odors can be just as effective as a sticky desk. Another experiment involved two groups of subjects with similar political ideologies. One group was exposed to a vomitlike scent as the subjects filled out an inventory of their social values; the other group filled out the inventory in an odorless setting. Those in the first group expressed more opposition to gay rights, pornography, and premarital sex than those in the second group. The putrid scent even inspired “significantly more agreement with biblical truth.” Variations on these studies using fart spray, foul tastes, and other creative disgust elicitors reveal a consistent pattern: When we experience disgust, we tend to make harsher moral judgments.


Jeff Brown
In thinking about why disgust sensitivity may be associated with conservative moral values, researchers have considered the potential connection between the behavioral immune system and religion. Religious strictures and other traditions may have the hidden function of protecting us from disease, some theorize. Our urge to respect certain culinary practices, sexual prohibitions, and injunctions about washing and hygiene may not be just about achieving spiritual or symbolic purity, but may be the result of an evolutionary drive to avoid contamination.

Could a predilection toward revulsion indicate how we vote? A team led by Cornell’s David Pizarro and Yoel Inbar, at the University of Toronto, set out to answer that question by conducting an online study during the 2008 U.S. presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. In the run-up to the election, the researchers assessed the contagion anxiety of 25,000 “demographically and geographically diverse” Americans and then surveyed the attitudes toward the candidates held by a random subset of the larger group. Those with the highest germ fear reported that they were more likely to vote for McCain, the Republican nominee and the more conservative candidate. Further, the actual proportion of votes that went to him in each state directly scaled with that state’s level of contagion anxiety. The researchers eventually extended studies of this kind to 121 countries and found that disgust sensitivity correlated with a conservative ethos basically everywhere there were sufficient data for analysis. As Pizarro, Inbar, and the other authors of the study write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, this result suggests that disgust sensitivity “is related to conservatism across a wide variety of cultures, geographic regions and political systems.”


IV. “It’s a Little Hack”
disgustology is a young endeavor. Not all the pieces fit together neatly, and some suppositions (as always) may turn out to be wrong. But a few clues have recently surfaced that suggest a useful framework for interpreting this sprawling mass of findings. One of them, in hindsight, is obvious: the etymology of disgust. The English word is derived from the Middle French desgoust, which literally means “distaste.” As it turns out, what tastes foul to us is typically a sour or bitter substance—which can be a marker of contaminants (think of spoiled milk). Several years ago, Pizarro learned that people vary tremendously in the number of bitter receptors they possess on their tongue, and thus in their taste sensitivity. What’s more, the trait is genetically determined. This got him wondering: If conservatives have a greater disgust sensitivity, are they also better at detecting bitter compounds? “It seemed like a really long shot,” Pizarro says. But he, Inbar, and Benjamin Ruisch, a grad student at Cornell, decided to put the idea to the test. They recruited 1,601 subjects from shopping malls and from the Cornell campus and gave them paper strips containing a chemical called Prop and another chemical called PTC, both of which taste bitter to some people. Sure enough, those who had self-identified as being conservative were more sensitive to both compounds; many described them as unpleasant or downright repugnant. Liberals, on the other hand, tended not to be bothered as much by the chemicals or didn’t notice them at all.

The researchers went a step further. Taste receptors, they knew, are concentrated in fungiform papillae—those spongy little bumps on your tongue. The greater the density of papillae, the more acute your taste. So they dyed subjects’ tongues blue (which allows the papillae to be more easily observed), pasted a paper ring on them like those used to prevent pages from tearing out of a metal binder (to create a standard area to be evaluated), and recorded the number of circumscribed papillae. The degree to which subjects’ views tilted to the right was, they found, in direct proportion to the density of papillae on their tongue. This result may have bearing on a puzzling partisan split in food preferences. A 2009 survey of 64,000 Americans revealed that liberals chose bitter-tasting arugula as their favorite salad green more than twice as often as conservatives did. It may also have a bearing on conservative President George H. W. Bush’s famous hatred of broccoli—an unusually bitter vegetable. Of course, sometimes a stalk of broccoli is just a stalk of broccoli.

No doubt your own political allegiances will heavily influence what you extract from the bulk of this research. If you’re liberal, you may be thinking, So this explains some of the other side’s nativism and hostility to immigration. But it’s just as easy to flip the science on its head and conclude, as conservatives might, that the left is composed of clueless naïfs whose rosy-eyed optimism about human nature—and obliviousness to various dangers—will only lead to trouble.

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
How to Cultivate Disgust

The research itself does not speak to the relative merits of a conservative or liberal ethos—how could it? Conservatism and liberalism are not monolithic, and they rest on deep intellectual traditions. In terms of gut reactions, the relative appeal of each philosophy can depend significantly on context—for instance, on whether times are kind or cruel. When tensions are high and groups split into factions, as they inevitably do, we can depend on our family and friends to defend our interests—but the outsider is an unknown quantity and, from an evolutionary perspective, may be seen as a source of contamination or, more generally, a threat.

One defining characteristic of disgust, though, is that it occupies a blind spot in our psyche. As Pizarro notes, “It’s such a low-level, almost noncognitive emotion that you really aren’t thinking that much about it.” Compared with anger, happiness, and sadness, he says, disgust is also “less open to change based on your judgment, your thoughts, your reasoning.” Chocolate in the shape of dog poop, he points out, is still gross. The emotion is more reflexive than reflective. “That is the rhetorical strength of disgust,” Pizarro says. “It’s a little hack. You hack into brains pretty quickly and easily by making them feel disgust,” bypassing logic and reason to sway judgment.

Aristotle may not have found this idea surprising. As he intuited millennia ago, a human being “is by nature a political animal”—uniquely endowed with the capacity for deliberation and speech, but at the same time governed by instincts we share with other living creatures. Like bees, he noted, we have a desire to congregate—to form societies. Aristotle could not have anticipated the germ theory of disease, or the role infection avoidance might unconsciously play, but his fundamental insight about the animal side of our politics remains prescient. Even the most rational among us might not always be as rational as we’d like to think.

This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “The Yuck Factor.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE is a Miami-based science writer and the author, most recently, of This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society.