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“We are the people who approve the police budget. We say, ‘yes put your
money toward yet another gun,’ or we could say we would like to scale
back on that funding and put some social workers in here.”
Councilwoman Van Wirt

Gadfly has earlier noted this “what the hell” moment by Councilman Callahan, hoping it doesn’t presage petty conflict on Council that impedes the serious discussion about public safety that needs to take place. Gadfly would also repeat that, while an unfortunate term, what is meant by “defunding the police” is not scary. It means reallocating resources with a concomitant reallocation of duty in order to better carry out the mission of public safety. It is a proposed solution to a problem. Defunding/reallocation has honorably happened in various model cities around the country, as previously detailed in these pages. No Councilmember here has yet publicly advocated defunding/reallocating as far as Gadfly knows, but two Councilmembers have already announced firm positions against it before any public discussion has taken place and without reasons to substantiate their positions. That can smell of “politics.” Gadfly expects that all Councilmembers have an open mind and avoid prematurely foreclosing discussion.

selections from Douglas Graves, “Defunding police issue continues.” Bethlehem Press, September 8, 2020.

Councilman Bryan Callahan tried to get a political hot potato on the table for discussion during the city council virtual meeting Aug. 25, but was overruled by the Council President Adam Waldron. At the end of the meeting and during the new business portion of the agenda, Callahan asked Councilwoman Dr. Paige Van Wirt if she is “in favor of defunding the police.”

Callahan did not ask other council members for their opinions, but focused his interrogatory on Van Wirt. He insisted, to no avail against Waldron’s objection, that his question was within the purview of Robert’s Rules of Order, but Waldron refused to let him continue.

Callahan had reduced a much more nuanced statement previously made by Van Wirt to a shorthand suitable for pointed sound-bytes, and has insinuated the subject during recent meetings.

Council has struggled with Callahan’s confrontational style before, as he has attempted to get specific issues discussed publicly.

Van Wirt declined to respond to Callahan’s question, but Callahan’s effort highlighted one of most contentious demands being pushed by the local Black Lives Matter activists who came before the council July 7.

An inflated or mischaracterized call for defunding the Bethlehem Police Department seems to be creating a fissure in the solidly Democratic city council.

While discussing the proposed community Engagement Committee, when Jonathon Irons of West Market Street spoke in person (most members were attending virtually), saying he supports what he described as the people who recently marched through Bethlehem calling for “defunding of the police.”

“We need to freeze the budget for the police department, including any new training initiatives coming out from this conversation must come from existing funding,” said Irons, as recorded in the official minutes of the meeting. “We need a hiring freeze with no new officers. We need to end the use of paid administrative leave, all these things to defund police.”

Councilwoman Van Wirt declined to elaborate further in a recent request by the Press.

As reported in the approved minutes of the July 7 meeting; “It was such a profound thing for her [Councilwoman Van Wirt] and she has to say until she really started listening throughout this whole engagement with Black Lives Matter and understanding what people of color go through, she did not understand what defund the police means. Of course, we all know it does not mean exactly that but it means looking at where we are spending our money and how can we do things better.”

As reported in council’s minutes, Van Wirt said, “Our power of the budget is huge here. We start our budget talks in the fall … to have any impact to what happens. We are the people who approve the police budget. We say, ‘yes put your money toward yet another gun’ or we could say we would like to scale back on that funding and put some social workers in here.”

While clearly there is no desire by any council members or administrators to actually defund the Bethlehem police department, that hasn’t stopped the idea from becoming a rallying point for citizens who have been led to believe that it is an issue being considered.

City council has passed a resolution calling for the community to be engaged in dialog with residents, police, schools and others seeking, as the Pledge of Allegiance says, “justice for all.”

A recent “Back the Blue” rally organized by Lehigh Valley Tea Party chairman and local attorney Thomas Carroll focused on a perceived threat to defund the Bethlehem Police. In a recent interview, Carroll conceded that no Bethlehem council member nor the mayor have called for defunding the police, but said he found the response by the council to demands of activists who attended the July 7 meeting to be “shocking and deceptive.”

Carroll, who is also the chairman of the Bethlehem City Republican Committee, said he didn’t want to see council make a “knee-jerk reaction” in responding to activists and start defunding the police department. Carroll said he supports the idea of council and the mayor funding social councelors to support the police.

Latest in a series of posts about the Bethlehem Police

“Lust lays another good man low!”
John Irving, The World According to Garp

Psycho-babble alert!

Gadfly just has to talk this out.

See if you haven’t been thinking along the same lines.

In a previous post your philosophical Gadfly tried to answer the question Why do they run?

The “they” was George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake.

And “run” was metaphorical. Only Brooks ran. Floyd inched along like a running back dragging a swarm of defensive linemen toward the goal line. Blake walked with firm, determined stride, like he was leading a group of unbelieving officers to where the body was hidden.

Maybe the question should have been better phrased as “Why did they resist?” And so irrationally. Against such odds. But the point is that they were moving away. Let’s call it running.

Gadfly gave you some psycho-babble as answer.

Not to be deterred, Gadfly ventures into psycho-babble territory again.

This time he asks the question “Why did they shoot?”

And the “they” this time is Derek Chauvin, Garrett Rolfe, Rusten Sheskey — and Mark DiLuzio.

Well, Chauvin didn’t shoot. And we’ll get to DiLuzio in a moment. Just play along.

Gadfly is willing to bet that when all is said and done we will find out that “they” all had all the kind of good de-escalation and other kinds of training we would hope for.

But look at the blank stare on Chauvin knowing he’s being filmed and even hearing bystanders detail the horror he is in slow, deliberate motion enacting.

Listen to Rolfe chatting with Brooks for 20-30 minutes as casually as he might with a Wendy’s clerk before he sheds blood in the Wendy’s parking lot in such a reckless manner that hitting “innocent” people was a reasonable possibility.

Count the steps as Blake walks away from Sheskey around the front of the car to the driver’s door while Sheskey impotently follows — seven steps? Would that then be seven shots for seven steps?

You have to wonder, don’t you, how after the inter-galactic furor over the treatment of Floyd — a din even the deaf could not escape hearing — that Rolfe and Sheskey did what they did? They were real knuckie-heads, weren’t they? — to use a favorite phrase in the Gadfly house.

Critics of the critics of the police, critics like our Individual-1, for instance, claim that this furor, this din is “making law enforcement officers hesitate and second guess.” Which would be logical. But we sure didn’t see that here. Just the opposite, in fact. It’s as if they haven’t heard anything, as if they didn’t get the Floyd memo to be careful because the world is watching.

How do we explain what happened in these three cases? How will we know what to do now to lessen the possibility of such future happenings in our town? How will we know what to propose when our discussion of how we do public safety commences?

The question draws Gadfly like a giant magnet. Why did they shoot?

Which brings us to Mark DiLuzio and perhaps to an even more perplexing question. Why did Chief DiLuzio shoot himself in the foot? For that he did.

Until Last Friday Mark Diluzio was our Chief of Police, the head of a department he called the best in the state.

Chief DiLuzio said good things during the opening City conversations in the post-GeorgeFloyd reckoning with race that Bethlehem has been engaged in like the rest of the country. Listen to his “George Floyd’s Death & Policing in America” statement at the June 3 City Council meeting, the first meeting after Floyd’s murder. And Gadfly can’t put his finger on the audio right this minute, but he remembers in a subsequent meeting the Chief memorably agreeing with Councilman Reynolds about the reality of systemic racism, specifically about how many Black people lack the early life advantages that he and Reynolds enjoyed.

Many liked Chief DiLuzio and supported him in this recent situation. Gadfly published praise from a typical supporter yesterday.

But not everybody liked and supported the Chief. Gadfly would sometimes hear negative stories about him whispered or shouted in confidence. And, in fact, Gadfly recently found in his Facebook news feed mention of a case pending in Federal court involving him and troublesome activities under his watch.

Gadfly himself, in the “Hayes St. traffic stop” case, the only specific example on which he could judge, did not form a particularly good opinion of how the Chief acted to support an officer who was possibly racially insensitive.

So the Chief knew he and his department were in the spotlight, on the hot seat, under the microscope — calling for rigorously circumspect behavior.

And yet he’s not only on the “Keep America Great” Facebook page (which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean he subscribes to the political and racial sentiments expressed there in abundance), but he re-posts a racially charged post he finds there.

What was he thinking? What was he not thinking? Did the instinct for self-preservation just evaporate?

And the rationale for his action, the rationale for the re-posting, rings hollow. Gadfly will grant the however unlikely and remote possibility of missing the explicit text above the Facebook image when spontaneously clicking the share button below the image. But, as Councilwoman Negron pointed out, the image on its own is offensive. The Chief’s racial radar doesn’t seem to have recognized that even days later and even after intense public scrutiny of the image.

How explain shooting himself in the foot? Chief DiLuzio is a knuckie-head like the others.

So why do they shoot?

• outright racism
• implicit bias, the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner
• the indelibility of the deep-seated default character of the “Warrior” rather than “Guardian” style of policing
• original sin (Gadfly was Jesuit trained), “In Adam’s fall, we sinn-ed all”
• the “Imp of the Perverse,” from the Edgar Allan Poe horror story, the inner urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation for the sole reason that it is possible for wrong to be done
• “a Jungian shadow-self rearing its head to get out and reveal his true feelings,” per a chatterer around Gadfly’s water cooler
• Facebook disease

When it comes to Chief DiLuzio, Gadfly’s first thought was from a scene in John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, in which a wrestling coach dies from over-excitement watching porn and his peers render the verdict “Lust lays another good man low!”

Facebook lays another good man low.

But, seriously, if we don’t know the cause of the problem, how can we solve it?

Where did the training go, where did commonsense go at these moments of engagement? Doesn’t give you much faith, much confidence in “more training” as the answer to mitigating such tragedies in the future, does it?

Training is no panacea, but maybe it’s all we got.

Unless we subscribe to the nihilism of the Black lady in the video we watched a while back who said, “You know, there’s really nothing at this point that they could do that would make me feel any safer with them without them just point blank clearing them all out and starting all over from scratch.”

Sigh.

Latest in a series of posts about the Bethlehem Police

ref: “The study does not help us to understand the experiences of people of color” (plus, Gadfly adds his two-cents)”

Gadfly:

It would be appropriate for NAACP to pay more attention to the modern meaning of ‘colored people’. The case of Mendez v. Westminster School District in 1945 laid the foundation for later civil rights decisions that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. When César Chavez & Dolores Huerta organized the United Farmworkers Union in the late 60s, they not only benefited the primarily Latinx farmworkers, they benefited all who were exploited on the basis of race or skin color.

We all need to remember that the term ‘White’ is a construct for uniting people against BIPOC. It is used to unite people who are mostly of European descent against others, and even manages to include those who were formerly excluded (such as Jews & Italians) to create a dominant majority.

Peter Crownfield

Latest in a series of posts about the Bethlehem Police

one direction

another direction

different directions

“Kind of like life: traveling that same road, in our different directions.”
Dana Grubb

Latest in a series of posts about the Bethlehem Police

from Sarah M. Wojcik and Jennifer Sheehan, “Pennsylvania police chief steps down after reposting offensive Facebook meme.” Morning Call, September 4, 2020.

Bethlehem police Chief Mark DiLuzio abruptly retired Friday, five days after reposting an offensive Facebook meme that prompted a public scolding by the mayor.

“I do agree that it compromised my position. I figured, the hell with it — I’ll just retire now,” DiLuzio said, noting he had planned to retire at the end of the year. “I served honorably, and the people that truly know me know that I have no regrets about my career and no regrets about my retirement.” DiLuzio reposted a meme that mocked NBA players protesting police violence against African Americans. He then deleted it and apologized, saying he didn’t realize the offensive nature of its message.

In a prepared statement Friday, Mayor Robert Donchez — who elevated DiLuzio from lieutenant to chief in 2014 — called credibility in leadership paramount in government, adding, “these are times when those qualities are critical to managing the numerous challenges we are facing.” Donchez noted that the city, including DiLuzio, has been engaged with citizen groups to deal with complex issues of systemic racism, police conduct and social justice that cities across the country are addressing. “This has happened at a time when the citizens of Bethlehem justly expect the effectiveness of their chief of police to be beyond reproach,” the statement said. When news of DiLuzio’s social media post made headlines this week, Donchez was unequivocal in his rebuke. He vowed that should DiLuzio break his promise to avoid a repeat incident, it would be met with a consequence “of the most severe nature.”

Bethlehem Councilman J. William Reynolds called the day a “painful” one for the city, since he believes DiLuzio “cares deeply about the city.” But Reynolds believes the departure is necessary to help the city move forward with conversations about racial inequity and police reform that “many in the community desperately want to have.” Never before has police chief been such an important and justly scrutinized role, he said.

Councilwoman Paige Van Wirt was more critical, saying she felt DiLuzio has shown a lack of understanding ever since the discussions about police reform and institutional racism began in the city in earnest this summer. “He took on the bad apple philosophy, that this was all about bad cops. I never heard him say the word ’racism’ or even acknowledge that there was a structural problem,” Van Wirt said.

Councilwoman Olga Negron said she doesn’t think DiLuzio meant anything malicious by sharing the post on social media, but said his apology, which focused on text that accompanied the photo and not the image itself, showed a disconnect with what people found offensive. She hopes the moment serves as a lesson for other city employees, officials and police officers. “We have to do better,” she said.

Activist organizations in the Valley, such as Lehigh Valley Stands Up and Black Lives Matter Lehigh Valley, also took to social media to react to the news of DiLuzio’s retirement. The groups say his announcement demonstrates a new level accountability for leaders and police when it comes to “racism and bigotry.”

When there’s a cloud over you, there’s a risk, said Esther Lee, president of the Bethlehem’s NAACP. “In times like these as we assess our police departments and their activities, we always have to be very careful about who is handling the information,” Lee said. “You want to make sure there is no doubt and that we have no doubt as a people about the information we get from the police.”

When asked about DiLuzio’s sharing of the meme, Lee said she doesn’t believe DiLuzio is racist. “I don’t put that on him and not on the department,” Lee said.

In looking back at his near four decades in law enforcement, DiLuzio, 60, said he has no regrets about his choice in career and his time in Bethlehem. “I was interested in law enforcement because I wanted to be involved in my community,” DiLuzio said. “I wanted to help people out when they were in the worst conditions of their life.” “The focus was always to get closure for [the victim’s] family,” DiLuzio said. “It didn’t matter if the victim was white, black, green or orange. It didn’t matter if they were a normal guy or a criminal. This was someone who was killed and that person and his family needed to see someone brought to justice. That’s the way I worked my cases and that’s the way I trained my detectives.”

But the last few months have been exhausting and frustrating for those in law enforcement, he said. Advocates for police reform have encouraged people to get rid of prejudiced views against people of color, which DiLuzio said he agrees with, but the criticism has painted all police officers negatively. “I’ve always told new officers that you work for the citizens of Bethlehem. Don’t ever forget that,” DiLuzio said. “But now when you put that uniform on you’re immediately labeled a racist, a thug or someone who will use police brutality at any point.” He said it was his highest privilege to work with people committed to bettering the community, and has developed long-lasting connections with residents he was sworn to protect. But he worries if the current climate will result in fewer people seeking careers in law enforcement. Police, he believes, are “fighting an uphill battle” with fires being stoked by the extreme left and right. With fewer recruits, his greatest fear is that departments will lower standards and make matters worse. “I still believe this is an honorable profession,” DiLuzio said. “I still think those who do the job are the finest people around.”