Editor’s Letter

CEO and Executive Editor of the Montecito Journal Media Group

The Right to Be Imper M y kids don’t appreciate when I publish what I write about them. Let me clarify, they hate it. We live in a small, one-degree-of-separation town. And they’re kids, which is hard enough without your mother writing about your travails in the local paper. I get it. fect

So, we made a deal: as long as I leave no breadcrumbs leading directly to either of them or divulge any sensitive info about them or their relationships, we’re good.

So what I’m about to say is not about either of them personally. It’s merely parental advice I dispense periodically, and also occasionally give to myself: If we are only willing to accept perfection from our friends, and nothing less… if we have a zero-tolerance policy for flawed or occasionally annoying people in our lives, then we will have no friends. Or role models. Or heroes. And no one will have us.

I explain this to my kids by way of my Moldy Cheese Metaphor. That is to say, just because a block of cheese has some mold on it doesn’t mean you throw out the whole block. Now how much mold is too much is a matter of personal tolerance. Some cheeses have a very high mold content, as we all know, and yet we still enjoy them. In fact, if you reject outright the concept of mold you’ll miss out on some of the world’s best cheeses. Read on if you want to know what this has to do with JFK, Gandhi and George Floyd.

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Building Peace of Mind.

After weeks of protests over the police killing of George Floyd and the tearing down of statues, the latest statue being torn down is George Floyd himself. Anyone who has been glued to the news is beginning to hear rumblings that Mr. Floyd had “run-ins with the law.” “Did time in jail.” May have “had drugs on him at the time of his arrest.” And to all of that I say: So what?

I don’t care if George Floyd was a good person. The point is he was a person. Regardless of his record of goodness, and whether or not he was always on the right side of the law, he deserved to be treated with fairness and dignity and justice and certainly not killed while in police custody. Or killed period. The minute we judge the victim’s character whatsoever we’re detracting from the facts of the crime.

I dread the trial of the Minneapolis Four. I already lived through the trial of the LAPD Four, so I feel like I’ve seen a preview. There’s a well-established playbook for the defense in these excessive force cases which is to discredit the victim in order to try to justify the unjustifiable. But the fact is, it doesn’t really matter what kind of person George Floyd was.

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Devaluing the Target

The Floyd incident has been compared to lynchings (like that of Emmett Till). But in fact, in some ways I find the killing of Floyd more similar to the Rodney King incident, even though Mr. King survived, because of the over-zealous arrest component as well as an apparently incriminating video. Because there’s so much commonality with the King incident, that earlier incident may also provide a vade mecum to where things are going next. Consider the LAPD Four:

As with Mr. Floyd, Mr. King had an arrest and prison record. As with Mr. Floyd’s arresting officer Chauvin, King’s arresting officer, Stacey Koon, was both proud of the arrest and even initially pleased, as Mr. Chauvin appeared to be, that the entire incident had been videotaped. Mr. Chauvin certainly wasn’t camera shy. Meanwhile Mr. Koon said at the time, “I was proud of my officers, and proud of the professionalism they’d shown in subduing a really monster guy.”

In both incidents, there was bystander video that seemed to incriminate cops. So before their trial, lawyers (and publicists) for the LAPD Four engaged in a time tested smear campaign against their victim known as “devaluing the target.” Just as Mr. Floyd’s failings are starting to emerge, so too were Mr. King’s failings paraded as if the victim could have possibly