24 thoughts on “Morning Ed: Law & Order {2018.05.09.W}

  1. LO5:

    The alleged victim once attempted to flee but was discovered in a park by a police officer and returned to the family, CNN reports.

    Eventually, the girl escaped from the couple’s home with the help of several neighbors in August 2016, according to the release.

    These two sentences carry a heavy load of implications. Is there a reason we aren’t told more, apart from lazy journalism?Report

    1. No kidding. When those two sentences are put together, they actually indicate something various horrific about the police.

      I mean, first of all, if the girl can’t speak English, it seems unlikely she indicated where she lived. So..how did the police officer know where to return her? Did they bother to bring in a translator that somehow managed to get the location of the place she had run away from _without_ bothering to find out she had run away? What the heck?

      Second, what is this about ‘neighbors helped her escape’? Since when do we need people to help slaves escape slavery? Can’t we just _call the police_?

      …well, no, apparently not, because the local police seem to be in the habit of returning slaves to their owners?!Report

      1. I mean, first of all, if the girl can’t speak English, it seems unlikely she indicated where she lived. So..how did the police officer know where to return her? Did they bother to bring in a translator that somehow managed to get the location of the place she had run away from _without_ bothering to find out she had run away?

        The guy is the former President of Guinea’s son. From wiki, Guinea’s “official” language is French. Other significant languages spoken are Pular (Fulfulde or Fulani), Maninka (Malinke), Susu, Kissi, Kpelle, and Loma.

        French the police might be able to handle but any of those others are going to be a problem, even if they can figure out which one it is.Report

    2. The CNN story seems to have more info:
      https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/politics/guinea-president-labor/index.html

      They were actually “former neighbors”.

      It looks like the argument is over whether she was a daughter of the family or a slave of the family. Remember she showed up at age *5*, so it’s hard to know what neighbors did or didn’t know, same with local police, especially if the allegations are true *and* the defendants presented her as their daughter in public. If they were pretty good at the whole coercive control, folks may have seen this as a domestic issue.

      Which is IN NO WAY an excuse.

      Just, if that’s how it was being handled, it’s no surprise that it was handled this poorly.Report

  2. Lo3 – smh, everyone wants leaders in our public schools who give a crap, but when they do, people still complain.Report

  3. LO5: There are probably more slaves in the United States and developed world than we would like to admit.Report

    1. Every now and then a human trafficking story will pop up in the media, but this new age slavery of vulnerable peoples-often minorities, immigrants, those with mental health issues, drug dependencies, etc-is grossly underreported.Report

      1. Yup. there have been a couple kind of unpleasant stories locally. One of which involved an “Asian” salon/”spa”.

        I was also a bit startled, on my last Amtrak trip, to see big posters essentially saying “if you see something, say something” in regards human trafficking. Though I’m not sure how easy it is for an average citizen to recognize it, and I’m not sure that false-positives wouldn’t lead to bad situations too.Report

        1. The European Union has been training taxi drivers to spot human trafficking since taxis seem to be used to transport trafficking victims. I’ve also read that European bankers are using banking data to combat trafficking.Report

          1. That makes more sense, but just asking random citizens? Haven’t there been a couple cases lately of white-folk calling the cops on black-folk that apparently the white-folk thought weren’t entitled to be in the neighborhood? (When it turned out everything was 100% above board, and in one case it was the people were renting an Air BnB property?)

            Around here, the most likely trafficking victims are young women who are Asian immigrants or Hispanic folk who came in looking for work and winding up fundamentally in slavery.Report

      2. The Atlantic published a very long and moving article by a journalist who realized that the house-maid who immigrated with his parents from the Philippines was a slave in all but legal status.Report

  4. Is Brooklyn 99’s cancellation somewhat “law and order” adjacent?

    If so, the conspiracy theory is floating out there that it’s tied to Terry Crews’ lawsuit against Adam Venit.

    Hey! That lawsuit is kind of under the “law and order” umbrella!

    The lawsuit was outside of the statue of limitations so it got dismissed.Report

    1. I don’t watch this show. From what I gather reading it the two drivers where A) it had a “cult following” which is polite code for not enough people watched it B) it was the only remaining show on Fox that was produced by an outside studio (universal) so there were business concerns now that this series was in syndication with TBS and others.Report

          1. Getting one’s show cancelled after suing a powerful Hollywood agent for sexual assault and the case being thrown out for Statue of Limitations reasons and the two events being unrelated would be, yes, a coincidence.

            But, as coincidences go… it’s not one of the shiny and happy ones.Report

      1. I don’t believe big-money decisions happen because of “fan backlash”, especially not that quickly. NBC picked it up because they think it makes financial sense, and they either figured that out awful damn quick or (more likely IMHO) they’d already run the numbers just in case.Report

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