Bob CollinsElizabeth Mills has suggested today’s Monday Morning Rouser. She knows her Rousers!
1) FOR THE KIDS
What makes women become strippers in the Fargo-Moorhead area? “The kids,” the Fargo Forum reveals in a profile today of a woman who gives lap dances out of her home. The woman is married, her husband knows what her wife is doing, and the money allows the kids to go to private school. Still, it doesn’t sound like a happy life and the woman seems to still harbor a dream of becoming a cop.
The longer C.C. dances, the harder she finds it to bounce back emotionally. “When I worked in the clubs, I used to drink, just to get the courage to get up there and do what I had to do,” she says.
Now, C.C. adds, she has to take a day or two off if a client acts especially “gross and degrading.”
“Once in a while, I’ll meet the wrong guy, and he’ll make me feel like (expletive), but I’ll bite my tongue and do it because I know the kids need this or that,” she says.
2) THE CRIMINALIZATION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Last Wednesday, a man walked into a courthouse in Keene, New Hampshire and set himself on fire. A day later, the local newspaper received his “last statement.” The newspaper decided to print the letter, which detailed the man’s unhappiness over the amount of child support he was (not) paying and his consternation that slapping his child was considered domestic violence. Minnesota made the letter...
The idea for these arrests came from something called the Minneapolis Police Experiment (MPE) of 1981-82. In the experiment police offices were given pads with one of three words written on them; counsel, send or arrest. Counsel meant the officer was to try to mediate the couple’s spat. Send was to send one of the spouses out of the house for eight hours as a cooling off period. Arrest was arrest one of the two spouses. The officer was to do as the top paper on the pad said to do. The experiment was set up by the Police Foundation and Lawrence W. Sherman was the lead researcher. The results show counseling resulted in a future assault in 24% cases, send was 19%, and the arrest option resulted in a future assault in only 10% of the cases. Perhaps a cheap way of cutting down future domestic violence.
In 1984 The U. S. Attorney General’s Task Force of Domestic Violence recommended arrest as the primary weapon in domestic violence assault. Lawrence W. Sherman recommend not using the arrests because the MPE was just one study and it could be wrong. They ignored him. And by 1992, 93% of the police departments in the nation had adopted some form of mandatory arrest in domestic violence cases.
But by 1992 five more addition studies similar to the MPE became available. Lawrence W. Sherman reviewed all five studies. Then once again he wrote that the police should not use arrest. In two of the five studies, they found the same result as they did in the MPE, that an arrest cut down the odds of a future assault. But in the other three studies an arrest actually increase the odds of a future assault. So arresting someone in a domestic violence situation to cut down on future assaults did not work any better than just flipping a coin. I do not know if Lawrence W. Sherman is still alive. But fortunately he wrote a book call Policing Domestic Violence that was published in 1992.
So we have 800,000 American police officers arresting one in every six adults in the country and throwing 25% of the men, women and children out on the streets in an effort to enforce a policy that they knew did not work back in1992. And I had always assumed that you needed a man to really screw something up. Oh well, there goes another glass ceiling.
Here’s the 1984 article on the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment.
(h/t: Patrick Steele)
3) HOW OTHERS SEE US
The Economist’s Gulliver blog has sampled the light-rail fare of Minneapolis. It — he? — likes us…
And it strikes me that airport links may also have a significant positive externality for American cities struggling to make the case for their own light rail systems–which is to say, a lot of them. This is because they are, by design, highly accessible to travellers. They’re likely to be a traveller’s first experience of a city’s public-transport system. And so a pleasant airport link can be an effective ambassador for light rail systems in general. This is especially true in cities like Minneapolis, where the corralling of visitors into close contact with locals gives the former a quick sense of the virtues of the latter. After one stranger had given me a free ticket, another carried my bag, and a whole cluster held the door so I could disembark after a throng of baseball fans had surged on board. All part of the American axis of niceness: Minnesotans, Mormons and Muppets.
Minnesota, Mormons, and Muppets? I don’t really get it. (h/t: Matt Wells)
4) REVENGE OF THE SUNDAY PUNDIT
Comedian — or is he a journalist? — Jon Stewart was on FoxNews Sunday, taking on Chris Wallace’s assertion that the network is not fair and balanced.
5) DOG V. DOG
It’s quite a controversy in Wadena County they’ve got going. At the the Wadena County Humane Society Pet Expo a week ago Saturday, a woman’s service dog was minding its own service-dog business when a pit bull attacked it. That’s one story. The other story is the service dog was sniffing around the pit bull and the pit bull got fed up and attacked. The pit bull is either going to be destroyed or adopted; it depends on which story ends up being believed more.
A woman is demanding an apology and some help paying a vet’s bill.
Bonus: The true story of the Traveling Wilburys. It’s going to be taken down in a few hours.
Weekend postscript: It’s back to the ’10s after a weekend in the ’50s.
TODAY’S QUESTION
Today’s “Midmorning” looks at a controversy surrounding fiction for young adults. Critics say too much of it is dark, disturbing and violent. Today’s Question: Should books cater to a taste for violence, if that’s what teens want to read?
WHAT WE’RE DOING
Midmorning (9-11 a.m.) – First hour: ADHD and substance abuse: Ten years later
Second hour: A recent Wall Street Journal article that criticized young adult fiction for being rife with violence and depravity has raised hackles among readers, novelists, and the publishing industry. Midmorning speaks with an author and a librarian about the controversy.
Midday (11 a.m. – 1 p.m.) – First hour: Four Minnesota economists discuss whether raising taxes or cutting spending is more harmful to the Minnesota economy.
Second hour: A documentary from the America Abroad series, “The Roots of Arab Spring.”
Talk of the Nation (1-3 p.m.) – First hour: TBA
Second hour: Jorge Castaneda describes his fellow Mexicans as a people of paradox: Avoiding conflict, yet faced with daily violence. Supportive of immigrant’s rights, but often not in Mexico.
