The Republican of Springfield (Mass.), Dec. 18:
The biggest roadblock to a safer game of football might be the players themselves.
Chicago Bears safety Chris Conte said he would accept a significantly shorter life if it was the price for playing in the NFL. Conte has suffered two concussions in a sport where brain damage to past and current players has provoked a fierce debate about the NFL’s responsibility to the long-term health of its players.
Conte is not alone. In an ESPN survey of 320 NFL players, 85 percent said they would play with a concussion in the Super Bowl, rather than sitting out.
Stories of early dementia and other brain-related injuries, some leading to suicide, have dramatized the damage done to players by an inherently violent game. Since 2011, more than 5,000 former players and their families have sued the NFL, which reached a settlement through negotiation, only to have some plaintiffs pursue further legal avenues.
The most famous case involves Dave Duerson, who, like Conte, was a Chicago Bears defensive back. Before shooting himself to death at age 50 in 2011, Duerson arranged to have his brain preserved for study, igniting a debate over cognitive degeneration and other concussion-related effects on NFL players.
Objections about NFL irresponsibility have come from former players (some of whom played decades ago) who were unaware of the long-term risks when they played. The lawsuits have generally accused the NFL of covering up or denying those risks.
Conte’s case indicates a different twist. Like adults who smoke cigarettes after decades of warnings, hundreds of players are competing with full knowledge of the indisputable and documented risks and consequences.
Can a league be held responsible if its players know the damage they are doing to themselves and choose to play, anyway?
Conte said he would accept losing 10 or 15 years off his life to play in the NFL. He has no way of knowing whether he might instead perish in his 40s, as other former players have done ”“ or succumb to the mental or physical damage that would make pure survival a tragic existence.
NFL players today accept the price of their occupation. They do it for the pay, the glamour and the realization of childhood dreams.
A huge fan base laments the tragedies when they occur, but they accept it, too, every time they watch their favorite team’s stars hurl their bodies into a brutal, violent sport.
The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, Dec. 16:
Tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the recent deaths of several unarmed black men at the hands of law enforcement officers. Carrying signs such as “Black Lives Matter,” the protesters sought to raise awareness of what they see as malignant anti-Black racism saturating American society.
The sparks for the demonstrations came from two cases where black men who were not indicted for any crimes died at the hands of police: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. Brown was shot to death resisting arrest under suspicion of robbery, and Garner died after being placed in a choke hold while being apprehended for selling untaxed cigarettes.
Family members of several others killed by police or vigilantes turned out as well: The family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy killed in Ohio as he played with a pellet gun in a park; the mother of Amadou Diallo, who in 1999 was shot and killed in the Bronx by four New York City police officers; and the family of Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, in Sanford, Florida, in 2012.
The nationwide protests were mostly peaceful, with only a handful of minor arrests. In Washington, D.C., where more than 20,000 people gathered, there were no arrests over the weekend as speakers urged the need for constructive dialogue to bring a greater appreciation of the inequalities in the American justice system.
But to combat a problem, you need to understand it, and you can’t understand something if your perceptions and opinions are based on anecdotes and emotions. You can’t craft solutions without sound evidence. To do so is to foment distrust from those who are singled out to alter their behavior.
And that’s part of the problem with the recent string of high profile incidents of black men unnecessarily dying. There is no hard evidence about how many times police shoot suspects, under what conditions these shooting occur, who gets shot and how many people die.
The Washington Post reported in September that the Justice Department does not keep a comprehensive database or record of police shootings. Instead, the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides.”
With data from just 750 law enforcement agencies, the Justice Department pegs the annual number of “justifiable” uses of deadly force at 400. Some independent analysts put the number at 1,000. Nobody knows for sure, though we do keep close track of how many law enforcement officers are killed in the line of duty each year.
We can and should do both, because without adequate data, it’s difficult to establish programs that might reduce the number of unnecessary shootings.
“The way we improve practices is to take information about what’s happening in the field to make those improvements,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonpartisan think tank in D.C., told The Post. “The more we know about (the number of officer-involved shootings) the better off we’ll be.”
Skeptics suggest the reason for the lack of information on police shootings is because law enforcement officials don’t want it to be made public out of concern it may create a public backlash. Well, it’s too late to worry about that now.
Whether it can be accomplished administratively ”“ or if Congress needs to approve legislation to get it done ”“ the country needs to begin the thorough tracking and analysis of all lethal and nonlethal police shootings so that the tragic incidents that have brought Americans into the streets can be avoided at all costs.
The Caledonian Record of St. Johnsbury (Vt.), Dec. 17:
According to a story in the Washington Post, NASA is shutting down a $350 million laboratory tower in Gulfport, Mississippi. The facility will cost $700,000 a year to maintain in mothball mode.
Construction of the state-of-the-art facility just barely finished up, in June of this year. It will never be used because “the rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010,” the Post reports.
After Congress killed the program for which the tower was built, the feds kept building because “bureaucrats didn’t want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress ”“ at the urging of a senator from Mississippi ”“ swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what.”
The shuttered tower, promised as a next-gen wunder-facility from which trips to Mars would launch, is now an expensive metaphor for bureaucratic waste, abuse, confusion, inefficiency, and incompetence.
For starters, NASA sold the project with an estimated price tag of $119 million and a completion date of 2010. Its dramatic cost overruns are in keeping, as the Post notes, with past galactic spending ventures ”“ a $100 billion space station that was supposed to cost $8 billion, for instance, or the $8 billion Webb telescope promised for $1 billion.
Then there’s the loathsome grift. When asked by Post reporter David Fahrenthold how he got the Senate to agree to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a project it knew would never fly, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., “burst out laughing.”
“Just talented legislating,” he told Fahrenthold, before walking away.
David Forshee, general foreman for the pipefitters who helped construct the tower, doesn’t get the Senator’s joke. “What the hell are they doing? I mean, that’s a lot of people’s hard-earned money,” he told the Post. “It’s heartbreaking to know that, you know, you thought you’d done something good … and all you’ve done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail.”
To Forshee, us, and everyone outside the beltway, this is an appalling waste. To members of Congress, it’s a hilarious punchline.
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