David McElroy

You’ve probably seen this picture or seen video of the same scene. Campus police at the University of California at Davis blasted pepper spray at peaceful student protesters Friday. Many people are outraged. Many are calling for the firing of the officers. I’d like to step back and take a broader perspective with three points.

First, this incident proves again that photography matters. In many places, police arrest people for taking pictures of them doing their jobs. In some places, it’s even specifically against the law. The attempts of police, politicians and prosecutors in some places to stop photography of them are wrong, whether it’s through arrests or intimidation.

If the pictures and video from the UC-Davis incident didn’t exist, this would be a non-story. We wouldn’t be talking about the issue. It would be almost as though it didn’t happen. This is why it’s important to strongly press the case that photography is not a crime. (You’ll find plenty of stories at that site of police and other public officials attempting to stop photography that they don’t like.)

Second, these sorts of incidents — and far worse — go on almost every day, but we don’t know about them because there is such a strong “support the police” culture in this country. The people who are experiencing oppression, threats and intimidation from police are mostly those who are powerless to do anything about it. They tend to be poor, black, brown or undereducated. They tend to be people who either don’t know their rights or know they won’t be believed if they complain.

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A couple of nights ago, I ran into some older neighbors of mine, William and Anna, at Target. We talked for five minutes or so, and William seemed perfectly healthy. Saturday, I watched a very different William as paramedics worked on his body as he lay in the grass — trying to keep him from dying.

I don’t know yet what happened to William. A paramedic told another neighbor that they thought he was dead, but that they’d been able to get a pulse back. I look this picture from my yard as they worked on him at the other end of the street. He was taken to a nearby hospital and that’s all I know so far.

I’d already been thinking earlier in the day about the uncertainty of life. There was a traffic accident in Birmingham Friday morning on one of the major arteries into downtown in which two women were killed. A company truck of some kind swerved from the other side of the road and hit their SUV head-on. Other vehicles were also hit, but the two primary ones ended up in flames.

A 55-year-old woman was driving her 74-year-old mother to work and then heading on to work herself. The younger woman’s husband was at home drinking his morning coffee and watched coverage of the accident (and resulting traffic snarl) on television before heading to his job at the Birmingham Museum of Art. His wife’s boss soon called to ask about her and he started trying to reach her. Then a childhood friend who’s a police officer called and told him he needed to come home — because his wife was dead.

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Four months ago, I watched in fascination as a coal mine operator made a snap decision in a public meeting not to open a mine. It reminded me of a scene out of “Atlas Shrugged.” This week, a hedge broker shut her company down — and left a letter for her clients and friends making it clear that Atlas is shrugging.

Ann Barnhardt has operated an independent futures brokerage just south of Denver for the past six years. On Thursday, though, she posted a letter for “Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management” announcing that her company had shut down, effective immediately. She was very clear about her reasons:

The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.

MF Global is the company run by politically connected former U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine. It filed for bankruptcy last month amid various kinds of serious problems, the most serious of which is $600 million in missing client money. Not only is that money missing — and probably gone forever — but the people with accounts at the firm had their accounts frozen by regulators, who wouldn’t allow them to withdraw their own money. This insider theft of customer money — and regulatory co-operation in keeping customers from getting to the rest of their cash — was more than Barnhardt could take. She had to walk away from a corrupt system.

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