At least no one was shot to death

Dismal Tale of Arrest for Tiniest of Crimes
By JIM DWYER New York Times
The arresting officer came by the cell, Samantha Zucker said, to make snide remarks about finding her with a friend in Riverside Park after its 1 a.m. closing.

For instance:

“He was telling me that I needed to get a new boyfriend, that I should get a guy who takes me out to dinner,” Ms. Zucker said. “He mocked me for being from Westchester.”

Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.

There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.

The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute.

News about the Police Department lately could run under the headline of the daily Dismal Development, starting with a judge declaring Tuesday that an officer was guilty of planting drugs on entirely innocent people and continuing back a few days to gun-smuggling, pepper-spraying and ticket-fixing.

Here, in the pointless arrest of Ms. Zucker, is a crime that is not even on the books: the staggering waste of spirit, the squandering of public resources, the follies disguised as crime-fighting. About 40,000 people a year — the vast majority of them young black and Latino men — are fed like widgets onto a conveyor belt of arrest, booking and court, after being told to empty their pockets and thus commit the misdemeanor of “open display” of marijuana.

Such arrests are a drain on the human economy.

Ms. Zucker said that throughout her stay in police station cells, other officers were shocked that she had not been given a chance to have a friend fetch her ID. “The female officers were gossiping that the officer who arrested me had an incredibly short fuse,” she said.

We are instructed by the mayor that the garish crimes of police gun-running and fake arrests are the work of rogues, not the daily toil of honest police officers. A fair point — but no more than Ms. Zucker’s observations of spiritual corruption.

“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”

After two days of storming design firms around the city with about 80 classmates, Ms. Zucker stopped at the hotel near West 103rd Street where the group was staying so she could drop off the bag she had been schlepping. Then she got Mr. Fischer — a classmate, not a boyfriend, the leering remark of the police officer to the contrary — to walk with her a few blocks to the park, at about 3 a.m. They wanted to see the Hudson River, which runs past her hometown of Ardsley, N.Y.

“We’re there five minutes when a police car came up and told us we had to leave because the park was closed,” Mr. Fischer said. “We said, ‘O.K., we didn’t know,’ and turned around to leave. Almost immediately, a second police car pulls up.”

Its driver said they would get tickets for trespassing and demanded their IDs. Ms. Zucker suggested that someone could bring her papers from the hotel. “He said it was too late for that, I should have thought of it earlier,” she said.

The law does not require people to carry identification, but those who do not have it with them when they are stopped for an offense are held for a court appearance instead of receiving a summons for a later date.

Asked about the policy, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said officers can allow a friend or relative to retrieve ID. He did not say if a supervisor approved the arrest of Ms. Zucker, which was attributed in court papers to a Police Officer Durrell of the 26th Precinct.

Twice, she said, the officer told her not to call him by a specific foul term.

“I said, ‘Sir, I never used that word.’ ”

No doubt he was hearing things: the unspoken truth about his unspeakable actions.

At the same time, we have this:

Democrats For Election Fraud

Posted 07:02 PM ET
Suffrage: We're used to Democrats' trotting out the Republicans-are-racists trope whenever they want to score a political point. But even we can't believe they're doing it to block reasonable protections against election fraud.

This week, Maryland's Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, claimed that "we are witnessing a concerted effort to place new obstacles in front of minorities, low-income families and young people who seek to exercise their right to vote."

Earlier in the month, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous declared that "this is the greatest assault on voting rights, happening right now, that we have seen since the dawn of Jim Crow."

It all sounds so menacing. Except that these liberals are excoriating Republicans for supporting what the vast majority of Americans agree is a perfectly reasonable requirement for voters — that they show a photo ID before casting a ballot.

This year, three states enacted photo ID laws, and three others toughened their existing laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In all, 31 states now require voters to show some sort of ID, with 15 requiring a photo ID.

The requirement is hugely popular with the public — a Rasmussen survey this June found that 75% of likely voters back photo ID laws, including 63% of Democrats — which is hardly surprising given that citizens routinely have to produce a picture ID to board a plane, buy alcohol and any number of other mundane tasks.

Plus, the states offer free photo IDs to those who can't afford them and let people cast provisional ballots if they don't bring their IDs on Election Day.
Well, to liberals intent on politicizing everything under the sun these days, voter ID laws are merely a Republican ploy to suppress turnout among those most likely to vote Democratic — namely blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They point to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice that claims the requirement could disenfranchise 5 million eligible voters.

But a Heritage Foundation analysis of that study found it to be seriously biased and fundamentally flawed. It notes that there's no concrete evidence whatsoever that ID laws discriminate or suppress turnout.

In fact, turnout in Indiana and Georgia — the first two states to enact strict photo ID laws — climbed sharply after that requirement went into effect.

What's more, legal challenges have failed because, as Heritage's election expert and former FEC commissioner Hans von Spakovsky noted, "The plaintiffs were unable to produce a single individual, much less 'millions' of voters, who would be unable to vote because of the requirement to show a photo ID."
Does this strike anyone as unreasonable?
Well, to liberals intent on politicizing everything under the sun these days, voter ID laws are merely a Republican ploy to suppress turnout among those most likely to vote Democratic — namely blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They point to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice that claims the requirement could disenfranchise 5 million eligible voters.

But a Heritage Foundation analysis of that study found it to be seriously biased and fundamentally flawed. It notes that there's no concrete evidence whatsoever that ID laws discriminate or suppress turnout.

In fact, turnout in Indiana and Georgia — the first two states to enact strict photo ID laws — climbed sharply after that requirement went into effect.

What's more, legal challenges have failed because, as Heritage's election expert and former FEC commissioner Hans von Spakovsky noted, "The plaintiffs were unable to produce a single individual, much less 'millions' of voters, who would be unable to vote because of the requirement to show a photo ID."
And when the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID law by a vote of 6-3 in 2008, liberal Justice John Paul Stevens concluded that asking for an ID "does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote."

Liberals also make the curious claim that voter ID laws aren't needed because there isn't any evidence of "widespread" election fraud.

What are these people arguing? That a little voter fraud is perfectly OK? That we don't need to take steps to secure the sanctity of the voting booth until the election process completely breaks down?

Whatever happened to the Democrats' insistence that we had to count every vote and that every vote counted? Surely they understand that even one case of fraud is unacceptable, since it denies another citizen his right to be heard.

In any case, the liberal argument that election fraud is a myth merely ignores the many reports of fraud over the years. Can you spell Acorn?

Keeping elections honest is a fundamental responsibility of our government officials. It's too bad Democrats would rather play crass racial politics than uphold this principle.

So, it's against the law to be in a park after dark without an ID but you can vote without one?