Police Director Sues AOL For Critical Blogger's Name

Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and, interestingly, the complaint is sealed".

Comments

Larry Godwin is an African-American.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Not with tax money. The city council has a fiduciary duty to the people of Memphis to keep this asshole from wasting their money litigating over his hurt feelings.

I know this won't go down well with the libs at Slashdot, but Godwin is an African-American:
.

http://images.google.com/images?safe=off&q=larry+godwin

And, again, to infuriate the libs at Slashdot even further, if the sentences are grammatically correct and if the spelling is correct at the blogsite, then the blogger is almost certainly Caucasian.

So, in reality, this is probably a racial matter which is being disguised a privacy/right-to-know controversy.

And if you want to read about the disastrous state of racial affairs in the town of Memphis, then check out this lengthy expose from the Atlantic:

American Murder Mystery
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.
by Hanna Rosin
July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/memphis-crime

...Janikowski began working with the police department in 1997, the same year that Barnes saw the car with the bullet holes. He initially consulted on a program to reduce sexual assaults citywide and quickly made himself useful. He mapped all the incidents and noticed a pattern: many assaults happened outside convenience stores, to women using pay phones that were hidden from view. The police asked store owners to move the phones inside, and the number of assaults fell significantly.

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He'd built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. "These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing," he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit's ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government's most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city's public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal "Section8" rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents' privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski

Race and CRIME.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

What's even more interesting to me is that you then post a story that has less to do with race and more to do with poverty.

No - what the article has to do with is race and CRIME.

Memphis is a hoodlum town, run by a bunch of hoodlum families like the Fords.

In re the original story which prompted this thread at Slashdot, the whistle-blowing blogger is trying to "blow the whistle" on these hoodlums, and Godwin is responding by leveraging the courts to deny the blogger his 1st Amendment rights [both freedom of speech and freedom of the press].

If you were a real "liberal", then you'd be all over these violations of the 1st Amendment like, ah - may I say it? - white on rice.

PS: You also said I think you should be modded flamebait instead of interesting, which is exactly how leftists always respond to speech that they don't like it: Deny it, suppress it, extinguish it, eradicate it, and pretend that it never existed in the first place.