Alongside a resolution expressing solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri, the Baltimore City Council will see a bill "requiring all polices officers . . . to be personally equipped with digital audio-and-video recording devices," according to the text of the bill, introduced by 13th District City Councilman Warren Branch and Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young. As Luke Broadwater reports in The Sun, last November a consultant recommended the cameras be introduced on a trial basis: "Such a trial in Rialto, California, found that use of the cameras 'drastically reduced' officers' use of force and complaints against police, according to the report. But the cameras also received complaints from citizens and officers over 'privacy concerns,' the report said." Police Commissioner Anthony Batts introduced the technology to his former department in Oakland, California. (Edward Ericson Jr.)
Matt Bai wrote a piece in this week's New York Times Magazine about how and why political reporting turned tabloid in the midst of Gary Hart's 1988 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Much of the ground was already covered, spectacularly, in former Sun reporter Richard Ben Cramer's massive and magisterial "What It Takes." But Bai's piece comes another two decades after Cramer's book, and as a result is able to show the ways in which the Hart scandal still resonates in our internet age. The final scene alone, with Hart and his wife talking about his disappointment, is worth the time it takes to read the piece. Instead of Cramer's "What It Takes," it is more reminiscent of his "How Do You Like Me Now," an essay about the post-career of Ted Williams—it is full of defiance, sadness, and the difficult passage of time. (Baynard Woods)
Business Insider's The Wire columnist Adam Chandler, noting that it costs 1.6 cents for the U.S. Mint to make a penny, has asked experts why we haven't gotten rid of the sucker, as Canada, Israel, and Australia have done. The answers reveal that there's no good reason, just "very real old school defiance" coupled with supposed concern about the need to round transactions to the nearest nickel or dime. The piece is reminiscent City Paper's own Mr. Wrong railing against the coppers in a piece called "Stop Making Cents," published in 1999, when the nation had a penny shortage. A proper solution was proposed therein: "I don't want the penny back from my dollar when I buy the Doritos Big Grab" for 99 cents, Mr. Wrong explained. "Keep your nasty, filthy, copper-clad portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Put that penny in a cup inside the Lincoln Memorial, and that's the National Penny. That's the penny that rounds everything up and down to even dollar amounts so that no one ever has to spend another 1-cent piece. E pluribus unum, baby." An excellent idea. (Van Smith)
What if you had a frustrating government job in an enormous, cobbled-together bureaucracy with a mission so amorphous as to be functionally meaningless? And what if—just blue-skying here—merely writing that dysfunctional bureaucracy's three-letter acronym on your résumé opened the door to triple the pay and double the fun in the exciting world of government contracting? Well, The Washington Post has the surprising answer this morning in a long and alarmist story about "top-level turnover" in the Department of Homeland Security. "Over the past four years, employees have left DHS at a rate nearly twice as fast as in the federal government overall, and the trend is accelerating, according to a review of a federal database," the newspaper reports. And this, it claims, is "undercutting the agency's ability to stay ahead of a range of emerging threats, including potential terrorist strikes and cyberattacks." Hmmm. Putting aside, for a moment, the obvious fact that jamming 22 separate agencies in a blender and calling it a new agency (DHS's actual origin story) was always guaranteed to make nothing but an unmanageable mess, consider DHS' model: At the Department of Defense, revolving-door riches, contract fraud, duplication, and perpetual dysfuction are a feature, not a bug. Why else do you think the U.S.A. has never lost a war? (Edward Ericson Jr.)