Unchecked urban sprawl is weakening Greater Cleveland, causing disinvestment and abandonment of inner-city neighborhoods and threatening the character of rural communities in the surrounding counties, said a panel of local government officials Wednesday.
“Greater Cleveland’s population stopped growing in 1970,” said Northern Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) Chief Executive Grace Gallucci. “But we have continued to develop formerly open land, build new infrastructure, and expand the footprint of our community with dire consequences for environmental sustainability, economic efficiency, and racial equity.”
Gallucci spoke as a panelist on a Cleveland City Club virtual forum titled “Sprawl Versus Smart Growth: Building an Equitable and Thriving Region.” Joining Gallucci on the panel were Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell and Solon Mayor Eddy Krause.
Since 1970, when the population of the five-county Greater Cleveland metropolitan area peaked at 2.3 million, the region’s population has declined by more than 5 percent. But during the same period the amount of developed land has increased by 20 percent. As a result, fewer Greater Clevelanders are now paying to build and maintain significantly more neighborhoods, roads, bridges, schools, commercial buildings, fire stations, and other costly services. A less efficient use of dwindling resources could scarcely be imagined.
Worse, unchecked sprawl is inexorably hollowing out the core of the urban area, causing large-scale disinvestment and abandonment and contributing to higher levels of poverty, crime, racial segregation, and economic inequality. In a region with no population growth, every house or business constructed on undeveloped land on the region’s periphery means one more vacant housing unit or commercial building in the center of the city.
None of this is news, of course.
Greater Cleveland has been expanding outward for more than one hundred years. The first ‘streetcar suburbs’ in Cuyahoga County – East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood – were developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century in areas immediately adjacent to the City of Cleveland. Through the 1920’s, a second ring of transit-dependent suburbs formed, including Maple Heights, Rocky River, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, and Euclid. Today we refer to these communities as ‘inner ring suburbs,’ and they are struggling with declining population, job losses, and increasing poverty as economic growth moves farther away from the central city.
Developed areas of Cuyahoga County in 1948 when the population was 1.38 million and in 2002 when the population was 1.37 million.
During the 1930’s and 1940’s, the depression and World War II slowed growth in suburban areas, but once the war was over the combination of pent-up demand for new housing and federal transportation and housing policies led to the rapid development of a ring of auto-centric suburbs beyond the earlier suburbs, including Parma, Bay Village, Lyndhurst, and Fairview Park. Growth of these suburbs was widely celebrated, and the steady flow of job-seekers into the region maintained population growth.
By the 1960’s though, Greater Cleveland and other urban areas across the Great Lakes region saw their economies savaged by massive losses of manufacturing jobs which led to a reduction of in-migration and an end to decades of population growth. Yet construction of new homes and businesses continued in an outer ring of suburbs, including Westlake, Solon, Strongsville, North Royalton, North Olmsted, and Brecksville. Today, development has shifted into surrounding counties, where it continues. The result is that our region is now comprised of a declining core of poor – and getting poorer – communities surrounded by a ring of threatened suburbs surrounded by a ring of stable communities surrounded by a final ring of ongoing development.
While sprawl has been historically driven by the desire of residents and businesses to move away from the urban core for open space, larger homes, less expensive land; to escape pollution, crime, and poverty; and to avoid racial integration; government policies have played an outsized role.
As late as the 1960’s, said Gallucci, regional planners believed that Greater Cleveland’s population – which had been growing steadily for 150 years – would continue to grow and the region would gain a million new residents by 2010. Highway projects and other forms of public infrastructure were designed to accommodate this larger population. But the unexpected loss of manufacturing jobs reduced in-migration to the region and halted population growth. Yet the drivers of sprawl remained in place.
As a result, sprawl has continued to bleed residents, jobs, and money from Cleveland and its inner ring suburbs and transfer entire neighborhoods and associated economic activity to outer suburbs and surrounding counties, even as the devastating consequences are well-understood.
“Continuing our pattern of ever-expanding sprawl will increase disinvestment and abandonment in neighborhoods in the center of the region,” said Gallucci, “exacerbating racial and economic segregation and inequality – making all of our problems worse and undercutting our efforts to redevelop the city.”
The distressing reality is that with a stagnant population, every new home or commercial building constructed in the outer reaches of Greater Cleveland means an abandoned home or structure in the urban core and a corresponding loss of economic activity and tax revenues.
Growth in one part of the region should not result in disinvestment in other parts, Gallucci said. What we need is smart growth. Rather than continually developing open land on the region’s periphery, we should find ways to encourage redevelopment in areas where infrastructure already exists.
But that has been a message that communities on the periphery of the region have been happy to ignore. Instead, suburbs across Greater Cleveland have engaged in decades of self-defeating efforts to poach businesses and residents from each other – fighting over economic scraps rather than working together as fellow members of an integrated economic unit that is facing serious challenges from other regions throughout the nation and the world.
It is past time for that region-wide infighting to stop, said Solon mayor Eddy Krause. Located on Cuyahoga County’s southeastern edge, Solon has emerged as one of the big winners in the sprawl sweepstakes. The city is now home to the second largest concentration of jobs in the region, trailing only downtown Cleveland. But Krause realizes that his suburb’s continued success depends on finding a way to share Solon’s good fortune with the city and its inner ring suburbs.
“Our competition isn’t each other,” he said. “Our competition is Dublin, Ohio; Indianapolis; Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas.”
Greater Cleveland communities need to work together, he said.
That’s an attitude that Maple Heights mayor Annette Blackwell welcomes. Her city has been sledgehammered by sprawl-induced disinvestment. Once a tidy middle-class suburb, Maple Heights has suffered enormously from the closure of local businesses, declining population, dwindling property values and rising poverty.
Blackwell agrees that cities across the region need to work together, and she believes it is happening more and more. “But that wasn’t always the case,” she pointed out. “I didn’t feel that way six years ago. There is still work to do.”
Sprawl is not just a threat to areas in the urban core, said Gallucci. Rural communities on the outskirts of the region and farmers have expressed concern that development will destroy productive agricultural land, reduce wildlife habitat, cause flooding, and permanently alter the character of smaller communities.
“We have to do better,” said Blackwell. “We are forced to do better.”
When the Japanese Navy’s powerful aircraft carrier striking force approached Midway Atoll on the morning of June 4, 1942, three U.S. Navy carriers were already waiting. The American fleet’s presence that morning was no accident. The role of Navy codebreakers in intercepting and reading Japanese messages, which enabled Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz to surprise the Japanese at Midway, is well-known.
Though details of U.S. communications intelligence during World War II remained classified for many years, the work of codebreakers in uncovering Japanese plans at Midway was initially hinted at in a newspaper article by reporter Stanley Johnston within days of the battle. While hundreds – and by war’s end, many thousands – of military and civilian personnel participated in America’s radio intelligence effort, a mere handful performed the extraordinary intellectual feat of manually deciphering the enemy’s coded messages. Although decoding machines were in use throughout the war, the navy’s critical codebreaking work in the first months of 1942 was performed almost entirely by hand.
USS Hornet air group on the morning of June 4, 1942
No Machine Could do This
Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese Imperial Navy used a series of manual book-based codes for operational message traffic. While Japanese diplomats used a machine-derived code – the famous ‘Purple’ machines – the navy, with many thousands of units sending radio messages, preferred their manual system.
Japanese Navy radio messages were transmitted using a modified version of Morse code. Messages that were intercepted by the allies were recorded as a series of digits, and it was up to codebreakers to turn the rows and rows of numbers into words and phrases. There was no machine that could do this. Though rudimentary tabulating machines might help detect patterns in the seemingly random digits, it was up to individual cryptanalysts to deduce the meaning of each enciphered word by studying thousands of messages, finding sequences of numbers that appeared in previous messages, recognizing patterns in the structure and formatting of the messages, and using their knowledge of Japanese naval procedures, strategy, and the Japanese language itself to make educated guesses.
The work required painstaking concentration, faultless attention to minute details, the ability to recognize nearly invisible patterns, careful review of thousands of messages, meticulous recording of message details, outstanding memory, and unbreakable concentration. Historian David Khan, in his 1996 book The Codebreakers, wrote, “This work was the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known to man.”
Progress was incremental. Each tiny success in uncovering the meaning of a code group – as the numbers that represented words or phrases were called – was carefully recorded and shared with other cryptanalysts as they struggled to read other messages. It was a slog. There was no cinematic moment where a flash of inspiration suddenly revealed the hidden secrets of a particular message. The daily experience of cryptanalysts was frustration and a gloomy sense of failure.
Ultimately, though, their efforts paid off. U.S. Navy successes at Coral Sea and Midway in early 1942 – a time when the Imperial Japanese Navy outclassed the U.S. Pacific Fleet in numbers of ships, training, tactics, and combat experience – were made possible by information gained through American radio intelligence, comprised of codebreaking, traffic analysis, direction finding, and intelligence analysis.
Felonious Beginning
That the U.S. Navy’s pre-war radio intelligence effort – in typical American fashion, undermanned, underequipped, under-resourced, and underappreciated – should have evolved into an organization that would change the direction of the Pacific War was something of a miracle.
The United States was one of several nations that conducted communications intelligence activities during World War I – the first war in which radio was widely used. Before the war, America had no organization that could intercept another nation’s radio signals. In 1917, as the U.S. entered the conflict, the U.S. Army established America’s first code-breaking office. The Navy did not follow suit, relying on the British Royal Navy for code-breaking support. During the final days of the war, however, the Navy set aside $100,000 in a secret Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) account to fund future code-breaking efforts.
It wasn’t the Navy or even the Army that scored America’s first big code-breaking victory. Instead, it was the U.S. Cipher Bureau, established in 1919 by the State and War Departments and capably headed by cryptologist Hebert O. Yardley. After a year’s effort, the Bureau broke Japan’s primary diplomatic code, giving the U.S. a priceless advantage during the 1921-1922 naval disarmament talks.
Although the Navy benefitted greatly from the Bureau’s success, the service was in no special hurry to develop their own code-breaking capability, especially since there were quicker ways to penetrate an adversary’s communications. By 1920 the secret ONI fund had financed a series of break-ins at the Japanese consulate in New York City. Later, in 1923, a similar operation struck codebreaking gold when Navy agents managed to steal a Japanese code book from the luggage of a visiting Japanese naval officer. The Navy responded by establishing a small code-breaking section to exploit the find and mount additional attacks on foreign codes and ciphers.
From that felonious beginning, the Navy’s code-breaking capability slowly grew. During the 1920’s and 30’s, many of the people who would later lead the Navy’s wartime effort entered the field. Notable among them were the indomitable Agnes Meyer Driscoll – who trained most of the Navy’s key wartime cryptanalysts during the interwar period – and the brilliant Joseph J. Rochefort – who would lead the organization that uncovered Japanese plans at Midway.
During this period, under the leadership of Laurence F. Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a network of radio intercept stations, devised methods of deciphering intercepted messages, and built a small staff of trained cryptanalysts and linguists. Depression-era spending limits and the fact that intercepting another nation’s radio communications was actually illegal during those years constrained the Navy’s efforts. Still, by the mid 1930’s the Navy had created the largest cryptological branch within the American military.
Joseph Rochefort
Building the Foundation
Under Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a three-pronged cryptologic program comprised of direction finding, traffic analysis, and cryptanalysis, or code-breaking. The program was managed from Navy headquarters in Washington DC and included radio intelligence stations at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Promising young officers were sent to Japan on three-year assignments to learn Japanese language, customs, and culture. This knowledge would be invaluable later as these officers attempted to glean Japanese intentions from the fragmentary information available through radio intelligence.
As cryptanalysis was not considered career-enhancing in the service, the Navy had some difficulty attracting and keeping talented officers in the field. While Rochefort spent most of the 1930’s studying Japanese and learning cryptanalysis, making him one of the most, if not the most, qualified cryptanalysts in the U.S. military, the service, made sure he remained a well-rounded officer by periodically taking him away from communications intelligence work and assigning him to sea duty. This was the pattern for other cryptanalysts, as well.
Still, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Navy succeeded in building a foundation that would support a vastly expanded and spectacularly successful communications intelligence effort during the Pacific War. That expansion began in earnest in the late 1930’s, as war with Japan became ever more likely, and accelerated after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.
By the time the December, 1941 Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor ignited war between the United States and Japan, the Navy’s communications intelligence infrastructure in the Pacific included listening stations at Guam, the Philippines, Oahu, and Washington state; a network of high-frequency direction-finding stations at numerous sites throughout the region; and radio intelligence centers at Pearl Harbor and Cavite in the Philippines. A third radio intelligence center at Washington DC directed radio intelligence activities in the Pacific while a British radio intelligence group in Singapore shared information with the Americans.
During this period, the three stations – Cavite, Pearl Harbor, and Washington DC – worked well together. Later, personality clashes and a struggle for supremacy within the Navy would hinder cooperation and result in Rochefort spending a year in command of a self-propelled floating drydock, but in the months between Pearl Harbor and Midway, cooperation was excellent.
It Wasn’t All Codebreaking
The Cavite unit, located in Manila, had grown to nearly 70 officers and men by the end of 1941. At Pearl Harbor, Rochefort led an organization that included 100 officers and enlisted men. Nearly all were assigned to direction-finding and traffic analysis, with only a handful available for codebreaking work.
As the United States and Japan edged closer to war in 1940 and 1941, the Navy relied primarily on radio direction finding and traffic analysis to monitor Japan’s war preparations.
Traffic analysis was the core of radio intelligence and it involved learning everything possible about an intercepted message without actually decoding it. By analyzing the identities of senders and receivers, the volume of radio activity, command relationships between senders and receivers, traffic patterns that matched previous operations, types of units being messaged, and other information, traffic analysts could uncover significant details of an adversary’s operations.
Sensitive direction-finding (DF) antennas located throughout the Pacific could receive radio signals from extremely long distances and identify the precise bearing of, or direction to, the radio transmitter. If a signal was received at two or more DF sites, technicians could plot the bearings from the sites and accurately locate the transmitter.
Though valuable, traffic analysis and direction finding could not match the potential of codebreaking, which promised to reveal far more information about Japanese activities and intentions.
Red, Blue, and Purple
Thanks to the theft of a Japanese code book in 1923, by the mid-1930’s the Navy had already made considerable progress against the Japanese Red Code – so named because the Navy bound copies of the purloined codebook in red.
When the Japanese replaced the Red Code with a similar code – the Blue Code – the Americans were able to use their knowledge of the earlier code’s structure to break into the Blue Code. By 1939, the Americans had penetrated the Blue Code and several minor codes used for weather messages, shipping information, and harbormaster operations.
In late 1940, a cooperative effort by US Navy and Army codebreakers also succeeded in solving the primary Japanese diplomatic code. Unlike the manual Red and Blue codes, the diplomatic code – known as Purple – was a machine code, in that messages comprised of code groups were further enciphered by an electro-mechanical coding machine. Somehow, American cryptanalysts, despite never having seen the original machine, managed to deduce the operation of the coding machine through mathematical analysis of intercepted messages and build a working copy of the device that could strip away the encipherment of the code groups. Once the encipherment was removed, the Americans could attack the code groups manually using standard cryptanalysis techniques.
An Assembly-Line Process
So, how did manual code-breaking really work? How did collaboration, pattern recognition, record-keeping, trial and error, and perseverance lead to victory at Midway?
Beginning in June, 1939, Japan was using a new naval operations code, which the Americans called JN-25. Though based on the earlier Red and Blue Codes, JN-25 was more complex, providing three distinct layers of protection.
First, each word or numeral in the message was replaced by a five-digit number, called a code group. There were more than 33,000 individual code groups, each representing a word, phrase, letter, or number. Earlier codes had used four-character code groups.
Second, the code groups, were further enciphered, or superenciphered, by adding random numbers to each group. These numbers were called ‘additives’ and 30,000 of them were provided in a separate book. The additive values were added to the code groups, changing the numbers and disguising the underlying code groups. The message drafter randomly selected a starting point in the additive book and then used the additives in sequence. A different additive value was applied to each code group.
Finally, the message contained the starting point in the additive book where the sequence of additives began, so the message recipient knew where to find the string of additives. The receiver of the message subtracted the additives to reveal the underlying code groups, and then looked up the code groups in the code book to uncover the message content.
The task for the Navy’s radio intelligence team was to intercept the message, convert the Morse code to numbers, remove the additives to reveal the code groups, and figure out what the code groups meant. It was an assembly-line process where intercepted messages were catalogued, assessed, evaluated, and deciphered in turn by radiomen at the intercept stations and DF sites, and cryptanalysts, translators, linguists, data processing assistants, and intelligence analysts at the radio intelligencer centers.
Intercepted messages were first examined for information that could be used in traffic analysis, including the message sender, recipients, call signs used, length of the message, time of day it was sent, circuit used, message format, radio direction-finding information and other external cues. After traffic analysis, the intercepts were sorted, duplicated, and provided to cryptanalysts who had the seemingly impossible task of identifying the additives, stripping them off to reveal the code groups, and deciphering the underlying code groups.
I.S. Navy Radio Intelligence unit at Hawaii (Station Hypo)
The Staring Process
Because details of America’s codebreaking effort remained classified for decades after the war, few published sources have discussed the actions cryptanalysts took to decipher the additives and code groups. But even in the few accounts that are available, codebreakers struggled to describe the process, although they all agree that it was grueling.
Rochefort said he would begin with “the staring process.”
“You look at all the messages that you have,” he said. “You line them up in various ways; you write them one below the other; you write them in various forms and you stare at them. Pretty soon you’d notice a pattern; you’d notice a definite pattern between these messages. That is the first clue.”
Some codebreakers would uncover additives by making up potential additives and subtracting them from a column of enciphered numbers pulled from messages. If the results were divisible by three – as all code groups were, as a check the Japanese used to guard against coding or transmission errors – then the codebreaker would know that they had discovered an additive.
Codebreakers arranged new messages on large sheets filled with numbers pulled from earlier messages to look for patterns. If they found a repeated sequence, they would pull the earlier messages and examine them for information that could help uncover the new message.
Sometimes codebreakers would make educated guesses about the meaning of words or phrases and replace code groups with those guesses – a process called ‘cribbing.’
Having searchable records of thousands of earlier messages was critical to the process. So was the careful preparation of charts, graphs, and tables to identify repeated sequences or patterns. But in the end, it sometimes came down to a flash of insight where the codebreaker suddenly saw what they had been looking for.
That insight, of course, would mean that a single additive, or – if additives had already been stripped off – a single code group might be identified. But there were more than 30,000 additives and more than 33,000 code groups, so reading a single word was usually a very small step forward. Plus, the Japanese periodically replaced their code groups and additive books with updated versions, sending American codebreakers back to square one.
Still, the American cryptanalysts carried on. Codebreakers at all of the radio intelligence centers worked together to create and share lists of the additives and code groups they had identified. Any flash of brilliance or inspiration occurred as part of a large-scale cooperative process.
“Codes are broken not by solitary individuals,” wrote Liza Mundy in her 2017 bestselling book Code Girls, “but by groups of people trading pieces of things they have learned and noticed and collected; little glittering bits of numbers and other useful items they have stored up in their heads like magpies, things they remember while looking over one another’s shoulders, pointing out patterns that that turn out to be the key that unlocks the code.”
As more and more additives and code groups were identified, that knowledge helped uncover additional additives and code groups. The work was cumulative, and it was greatly assisted by painstaking maintenance of voluminous files of intercepted messages, identified additives, and deciphered code groups. The use of electro-mechanical sorting machines – rudimentary data processing devices – including punchers, sorters, and tabulators, also helped speed up the process. When additives were stripped from an intercepted message, the uncovered code groups were hand-punched on I.B.M cards, recorded, and the cards were hand-sorted. The meaning of deciphered code groups was also stored.
Decrypted messages were recorded by hand on index cards, with key information underlined. Multiple copies of the cards were made and the copies filed by in separate batches according to the underlined information. Later, when cryptanalysts were working a message, they might recall a similar message and they would have a way to find it.
The greater the number of messages intercepted and worked, the more information became available, and the easier the task became. But the idea that at some point these codes were “broken,” and the Americans could read entire messages is false.
One Word Out of Five
The Japanese introduced the original version of their JN-25 operational code in June of 1939. As the version was significantly more complex than the code it replaced, it took the Americans more than a year to decrypt any significant information, but by November 1940 they were beginning to produce intelligible text from JN-25 intercepts. In December of 1940, however, the Japanese introduced a revised version (JN-25a), which set U.S. cryptanalysts back again. The Americans were not able to read anything in the revised code until late 1941.
By December, 1941, American cryptanalysts could read less than 10 percent of the Japanese code groups. Messages that did not contain any of the recovered code groups would remain a total blank. So, in the critical months before Pearl Harbor, Navy radio intelligence was restricted to traffic analysis and direction finding. On December 4, 1941, as the Japanese carrier striking force bore down on the Hawaiian Islands, the Japanese introduced another revised version of JN-25.
Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy reorganized its codebreaking operations, and assigned Rochefort’s Pearl Harbor unit to lead the JN-25b effort. Before that, Rochefort’s station had been assigned to different Japanese codes, while stations in Washington DC and the Philippines worked on JN-25. At that point, Washington DC and the Philippines had made only minor inroads into JN-25, and though they had determined the structure of the code and uncovered several thousand code groups, they were not yet able to read Japanese intercepts.
Shocked by the scale and speed of Japanese victories in the first weeks of the war, Rochefort and his unit, assisted by Washington and Cavite, redoubled their efforts against JN-25. By April 1942 – a month before the Battle of the Coral Sea and two months before the Battle of Midway – Rochefort’s cryptanalysts were able to read approximately one fifth of the code groups in the JN-25b code.
It was enough.
By combining information gained through traffic analysis, direction-finding, fragments of decrypted message traffic, and their understanding of Japanese language, military culture, capabilities and strategic intentions, the Americans were able to identify critical details of Japan’s Port Moresby operation and, more importantly, discover the existence of a larger operation being planned that would eventually be revealed as an invasion of Midway.
Traffic analysis and direction finding helped identify and locate units that were preparing for the operation, while cryptanalysis uncovered tantalizing shards of movement orders, requests for supplies, casualty reports, and other operational messages. Linguists and intelligence analysts pored over the partial decrypts, connecting the dots and filling in as many blanks as they could. Rochefort, especially, was adept at deriving Japanese intentions from the fragmentary clues available.
Pacific Fleet Intelligence chief Edwin Layton later wrote that “Rochefort’s sixth sense in assembling seemingly unrelated information in partially decrypted enemy messages and turning the puzzle into an accurate picture of enemy intentions” was the key to the American success at the Battle of the Coral Sea.
The battle also boosted Pacific Fleet Commander Chester Nimitz’s trust in radio intelligence.
The Next Big Thing
Even as the Coral Sea fight was raging, Rochefort was pushing his unit to uncover details of the next big operation. By the middle of May they were solving as many as forty percent of JN-25 code groups. Since the groups that were solved tended to be the code groups used most frequently, cryptanalysts were able to determine the meaning of – or at least, make a reasonably informed guess at the meaning of – a high percentage of intercepted messages.
Of course, only a fraction of Japanese radio traffic was intercepted. The number of messages being transmitted was far too high at that stage of the war for the Americans to intercept enough to provide a complete picture of Japanese plans. During the month before Midway, when the Americans were desperate to uncover additional details of Japanese plans, Navy radiomen intercepted no more than 60 percent of Japanese traffic and cryptanalysts decoded parts of just 40 percent of the messages copied.
Through the month of May, Rochefort’s team slowly discerned the outline of the Japanese Midway operation. Indications flowed to the intelligence analysts in seemingly unremarkable bits.
The volume of message traffic was extremely high, and traffic analysis placed key Japanese fleet units in home waters. Partially decrypted messages described the merging of several Japanese carrier groups into a single striking force. Other messages arranged refueling rendezvous, ordered destroyers to meet up with a carrier striking force, curtailed shipyard periods, mentioned a landing force and an occupation force, and requested charts for the Aleutians and the area around Midway.
Each scrap of information filled in another piece of the enormous puzzle that Rochefort and his team were struggling over. No message was completely understood. But words or phrases from many hundreds of messages, information from traffic analysis, and knowledge of previous Japanese operations were laboriously knitted together to create a recognizable picture of Japanese intentions.
By mid-May Rochefort could say with certainty that the Japanese Navy’s mighty Second Fleet was assembling an invasion force at Saipan. Meanwhile, at least four large carriers – the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – were to rendezvous in Japan’s Inland Sea, then head toward an unknown destination after 21 May.
Based on the use of a geographic designator that they knew had been used in previous message traffic to identify Midway, the Americans were virtually certain that the intended target was Midway. Nimitz and Admiral King in Washington agreed. While there was always a chance that some of the information that codebreakers had deduced was transmitted as part of a Japanese deception campaign, Nimitz would act based on Rochefort’s assessment.
Okay, But When?
But so far, Rochefort had not been able to uncover the planned dates of the Japanese attack. Without knowing when the Japanese force intended to strike Midway, Nimitz would be unable to place his three carriers in the proper position.
So, during the last week of May, Rochefort’s team began a meticulous review of all messages that had been intercepted in the period 19-20 May. While these messages had already been decoded, portions remained unbroken. Somewhere in the still-coded fragments was the date and time of the attack.
On 25 May, the Americans discovered a partially decrypted message that included the code groups for ‘Midway’ and ‘attack’ and also included a time-date group that had been separately enciphered in a highly complex and rarely used process that Navy cryptanalysts had not been able to solve.
Miraculously, two of Rochefort’s cryptanalysts, Joseph Finnegan and Wesley Wright, working through the night, were able to deduce the structure of the table that the Japanese had used to encipher the date/time group. The date of the planned strike at Midway was 4 June, while the Aleutians would be struck on 3 June.
This was the key. The U.S. Navy would be able to place its available striking power – the undamaged carriers Enterprise and Hornet and the damaged but still operational Yorktown – northwest of Midway, in position to launch a surprise air attack against Yamamoto’s carriers as soon as they could be located.
By the evening of June 4, American carrier airstrikes had destroyed all four of the Japanese carriers. The American victory would not have been possible without the contributions of the radio intelligence organizations.
Rochefort, in one of the great understatements of the war, explained simply, “We felt that we had earned our pay.”
February 4, 2021
Image credit: Painting: The Famous Four Minutes by R. G. Smith
Sources:
Layton, Edward; And I Was There; William Morrow and Company; NY; 1985.
Carlson, Elliot; Joe Rochefort’s War; Naval Institute Press; Annapolis, MD; 2011.
Rutherford, Heather: Codebreakers: From the Civil War to Midway to Virtual Reality; Chips, The Department of the Navy’s Information Technology Magazine; October-December 2014; https://www.doncio.navy.mil/Chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=5628 Retrieved 5.22.2020.
This article is also posted on the Military History Now website. https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/02/03/u-s-navy-codebreakers-americas-cryptanalysis-coup-at-the-battle-of-midway-was-20-years-in-the-making/
We are slowly counting down the days until Impeachment Two – The Sequel. Not everyone, of course, is onboard with the idea of another Senate trial.
As a former law enforcement officer, I understand the concerns. On the one hand: holding people accountable for their actions; upholding personal responsibility, law and order, and the rule of law; and making a clear statement about the importance of protecting our democracy. On the other hand: not embarrassing friends, relatives, and accomplices of the accused.
This is quite a conundrum.
We used to have discussions like this all the time back in the old stationhouse.
We’d arrest a guy for some pretty serious offense. People had been hurt, property had been destroyed, the orderly workings of our society had been disturbed. We’d have statements from multiple witnesses, tape recordings, and videos showing the crime in actual progress. We’d have prior admissions from the suspect himself talking about how he was planning to commit the crime. We’d have sworn statements from the victims describing the damage that had been caused, and statements from experts about the likely long-term consequences of the criminal act.
A trial, we figured, would be an open and transparent process where evidence would be publicly presented, everyone’s rights would be protected (except, perhaps, for the victims’…), and an impartial decision would be rendered. It would be, in fact, the exact process we have used for hundreds of years to resolve disputes and promote healing. (Not that those results are always achieved, but though it is imperfect, this is still the process we use…)
But then we would hear that the friends and collaborators of the accused were threatening further criminal acts if we didn’t drop the charges. No need for any of that evidence nonsense they’d say. Sure, he did it, but he’s learned his lesson, and besides, no one really needs to know how this all happened, since, of course, it could never happen again. And we don’t think this court is the right one. Time to move on.
Gosh. What would we do?
Well, it was a long time ago and I don’t recall what we did. But it doesn’t really matter, although, somehow, I can’t recall ever having discussions about dropping the charges when a police officer had been killed.
As for impeachment, it is revealing that few, if any, opponents of the process are claiming that Mr. Trump is not guilty of the acts described in the Articles of Impeachment. Rather, they simply want the entire process aborted because – apparently – they believe that revealing additional details of Mr. Trump’s actions or actually holding him accountable might hurt the feelings (or electoral prospects) of people who actively supported a violent attempt to overturn a lawful election.
I do agree with their concern that impeachment is largely political. No doubt about that. If we really believed in accountability, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and democracy, Mr. Trump would be facing indictment on criminal charges, not mere impeachment.
January 26, 2021
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” – Haile Selassie
Recently I was asked why I became a police officer and what advice I would give to a person considering joining a police department. Here’s what I wrote:
Like pretty much everyone else who ever did it, I became a police officer out of a desire to help people. I felt that the most important service that government provided was public safety, and I wanted to participate in that effort.
Nothing that I saw during or after my law enforcement career changed my view.
The first bit of advice I would give to someone planning on entering the field today is to have a Plan B.
Law enforcement is the most difficult, complex, and draining job in America. It is also a young person’s job. Law enforcement is physically demanding, emotionally scarring, and psychologically debilitating. Some people can do it for a career – twenty years or more – but some can’t. The most miserable people I have ever met were middle-aged cops who were financially and emotionally trapped in a job that they had come to despise. It’s a fun job when you are 23, but when you are 43, the foot chases, the wrestling matches, and the endless family fights lose their appeal.
Sadly, too many officers remain on the job, even when they would much rather leave, because they have nowhere else to go. They make decent money as police officers – especially with overtime and part-time opportunities, though those take time away from their families – but they have no skill that’s saleable anywhere else. Private sector police jobs – we call them security guards – don’t pay much better than minimum wage, and movement from department to department is difficult. Agencies will always hire an experienced officer, but they almost always make you start at the bottom of the pay scale. If you’re a sergeant or lieutenant, you will almost certainly have to take a demotion in order to move to another department.
So, you should have an exit plan before you embark on your law enforcement career. Ideally, your plan is another marketable skill or ability that can help you move on if you decide that it’s time to go. You might not need it, but having options is always a good thing.
My personal view is that police departments should recruit more like the military. Officers should join for an initial tour – five or six years – and after that, if it’s working out, the officer can apply to extend their employment. The department can then decide if the officer’s performance warrants continuation. If not, the officer is released with a nice severance package – some combination of cash and educational assistance/job training benefits perhaps – and a sincere thank-you letter.
Second, be aware that the essence of police work is dealing with people. All kinds of people. Not people just like you, and certainly not just people who think you’re great. One of the biggest surprises for me in my law enforcement experience was the number of officers I worked with who didn’t like talking to people. That’s the job. To be good at police work and to find it fulfilling and rewarding, you have to love people – in all their various ages, sizes, shapes, colors, levels of intelligence, personalities, political persuasions, religious affiliations, and economic status. You have to truly want to help them. All of them.
Third, realize going in that you don’t know anything about law enforcement. Despite watching numberless police and detective movies and a million episodes of “Cops,” hardly any Americans know what police work is truly like. And, for the most part, actual cops won’t tell them.
Here’s a quick list of things to keep in mind:
1. You will work without supervision. If that’s a problem – and for a lot of people it is – think twice about a job in law enforcement. You have to be self-motivated and self-disciplined. It is likely that your organization will provide neither.
2. You will be untrained, ill-equipped, and unready for many of the things you will have to do. Police are the go-to government agency to respond to an enormous variety of social, economic, public health, medical, and criminal incidents. Why? Because they are available 24 hours a day and they make house calls. And, of course, in the short-run, from the city’s perspective, it seems cheaper. In the long run it is not cheaper, but that’s not how the city looks at it. Municipal and county budgets have to balance every year, so the city has no interest in hiring the mental health specialists, social workers, youth counselors, mediators, marriage counselors and housing specialists that they really need. They would rather place all those problems on the shoulders of the police. And training, equipping, and preparing the police to handle these issues properly would be very expensive, so they don’t even try.
3. You will be exposed to violence or the threat of violence pretty much every day. Most of the time it won’t be directed at you. but every day you will witness the limitless capacity that humans have for inflicting physical and psychological damage on other humans. Over time, this will affect you in ways that you cannot predict and probably won’t understand. You will almost certainly have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Be ready for it.
4. You are not part of an occupying army. When you are working, the people around you all day are your neighbors. Think of them that way. Hardly any of them really want to hurt you. Most are happy to see you. You have to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean that you need to “dominate” every encounter. Try to treat everybody with respect. The city is not a hellscape of violence and terror when you are not around. Most people are good nearly all of the time. Almost everybody just wants to get along.
January 21, 2021
Photo: Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams joins a prayer circle during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo credit: Cleveland.com
As you know, on January 13, the federal government issued an intelligence bulletin warning of a likely increase in political violence motivated largely by the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
This lie follows years of similar lies by Trump regarding various contests, including the 2012 election of Barack Obama, the 2016 Republican primaries, Emmy award selections, and the number of times Melania Trump appeared on the cover of fashion magazines. In 2016 and again in 2020, before the presidential elections, he declared that if he lost either of those contests, it could only be because the election was “rigged” against him.
While many Democrats and media outlets pushed back against these dangerous falsehoods, virtually no Republicans did. As result, the lies gained traction as any argument could easily be dismissed as partisan hackery or Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Having accepted such blatantly undemocratic and ill-conceived behavior for years, Republicans were content to allow the lies to continue during the months after the 2020 election, despite the fact that neither state election officials nor Trump campaign lawyers could find any evidence that the 2020 election was in any way compromised. At least one Republican official told reporters that there was “no harm” in letting Trump vent his frustration by attacking our democracy itself.
On January 6, we saw the harm.
Now, as armed right wing “militias,” extremists, and many thousands of Trump supporters make plans to disrupt the upcoming inauguration and other lawful government activity in Washington DC and in elsewhere, the US intelligence community is warning that the lie about the election will likely spark violence for many months to come.
We are on the very edge of the precipice.
For five Americans – including a Capitol Police Officer – it is too late now to step back. But we must find a way get off this path before we tumble into the abyss.
Once it begins, political violence is extraordinary difficult to stop. Intelligence analysts already believe that political violence through 2021 is all but certain.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
If we are to save ourselves from a prolonged and terrible period of political violence, we must act now. We need leaders – Republican officials, in particular – to step up and forcefully reject the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
No one else can do this. The protestations by Democrats, political independents, media commentators, state election officials, and others have all been dismissed by the majority of Republicans who remain convinced – despite the total lack of evidence – that the election was stolen from them.
A handful of prominent Republicans, including Trump’s own attorney general and the Undersecretary of Homeland Security, have already said that the election was not stolen. But far too many Republican officials are remaining silent, content to let the clock run out on the disastrous Trump presidency while mouthing insincere calls for unity.
But while Trump’s presidency will end, his deceitful, dangerous, and unhinged ravings about a stolen election will not. There will be no healing while he continues to tear at the wounds he has inflicted.
Somehow, we must convince millions of Trump supporters of the truth that the 2020 election was free and fair. Many are impervious to reason and will remain locked in their dysfunctional belief system. The small cadre of extremists will continue to agitate for violence. But, hopefully, others – perhaps millions of others – may be persuaded that our elections are fundamentally fair and that violence to overthrow election results is wrong.
Franklin Roosevelt said that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.” Too many Republicans today are committed to following their most fervent voters, even though they know that those they trail are misguided. Even worse, far too many Republicans are content to encourage their deluded base in the hopes of reaping some future political benefit.
As a United States Senator, it is not too late for you to honor your oath of office and take a leadership role in defending our nation’s democratic processes. We need you to state unequivocally that the election was not stolen and we need you to encourage other Republican officials to do the same.
We are far past the point where this fever will burn itself out.
If you have a better idea for quenching these smoldering embers, please take the necessary steps. But inaction is not an option.
Thank you for your attention.
January 15, 2021
See also:
Intelligence report: Capitol riot has emboldened domestic extremists who now pose ‘greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021’
There is no shortage of articles, posts, tweets, and rants regarding the events of the last week. Many are thoughtful, informative, well-researched, and highly accurate. And some are available on Fox News.
So, I am well aware that no one needs to hear from me about the events in Washington. But I have this page, and I feel like I am supposed to write something every now and then, and writing about anything else right now seems disrespectful to the nation and, especially, to the family of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was killed defending Congress.
So here are four observations from the windswept shores of Lake Erie …
1. The Capitol Police were sold out by the incompetence of their own superiors.
While I am no fan of American law enforcement – having served as a police officer for nine years, I know a little about the field – I am especially no fan of American police management. The Capitol Police were unprofessionally deployed, insufficiently equipped, and vastly outnumbered. From comments by officers and from video and audio recordings of the riot, it is obvious that there was no real plan for managing the widely-anticipated protests and no effective arrangements for back-up by other agencies. While incompetent leadership is the norm in American law enforcement, the failures at the Capitol were so egregious that an observer might plausibly wonder if the Capitol Police Department’s effort was intentionally sabotaged. Well, in a year or so we may find out. As for the rank-and-file officers who were abandoned by their so-called leaders, they mostly performed heroically, and though they were forced to surrender the building, they did protect the legislators and staff members trapped inside. Of course, not all officers performed well – ‘selfies, anyone?’ – and a handful of officers are being investigated. But in the total absence of effective leadership, discipline and professionalism will sometimes succumb.
2. We Are Just Getting Started
We are in a terrible place now, and the path back is unclear. While most of the country is aghast at what we have become, a frightening percentage believes that mob action to subvert democracy is OK. Extremists right now are planning a campaign of armed confrontations at statehouses and in Washington DC. There is nothing anyone can do in the short term to discourage these people and prevent further violence. They have been catered to, emboldened, and lied to for years.
In the meantime, we need to look carefully how we got here to understand how we can get out. Every disaster is the culminating point of a chain of errors, misjudgments, malfeasance, incompetence, bad luck, and malign intent. We need to investigate this disaster the way we would investigate a plane crash. It’s not enough to find out what happened that morning, or that week to precipitate the riot. We need a detailed understanding of the root causes of this incident.
3. They Knew
The most discouraging aspect of this entire disaster was the unspeakable cowardice and deep cynicism displayed by 147 legislators who endorsed the action of the mob, validated Trump’s shameless campaign of lies and distortions, and violated their own oaths of office by voting to reject lawful electoral votes with no evidence whatsoever that anything improper had occurred.
Unlike Trump – who is deeply damaged and mentally unfit for any position of responsibility – these legislators are mostly functioning adults. Mere hours after a violent mob had driven them from the floor of the legislative chamber, forced them and their staffs to take shelter in safe rooms behind barricaded doors, and fatally injured a police officer, they voted to reject the electoral votes of several states that Trump had lost, even though they knew that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.
They knew that in early November the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security had determined that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. They knew that DHS Under Secretary Chris Krebs, who had led a review of the election, had called the 2020 election, “the most secure in the nation’s history.”
They knew this and yet, because it was politically expedient, they persisted for months in encouraging the baseless fiction that the election had been “stolen.” Of course, they were careful not to describe in any detail how that theft had been accomplished, since every crackpot conspiracy theory had been debunked and no actual evidence of fraud had been introduced in any of the dozens and dozens of frivolous lawsuits the Trump campaign had filed and lost. Instead, they made fact-free allegations and when people responded to those allegations by wondering if they might be true, they pointed to that response as proof that their allegations were valid. In effect, they entered a crowded theater and yelled “Fire, fire,” and when the crowd surged towards the exits, they pointed to the pandemonium and said, “There must be a problem here if all these people think there is.”
They saw short-term political gain in questioning the results of an election they knew to be free and fair, and ignored the obvious destructive long-term consequences of their actions. Even when short-term political gain was replaced by immediate in-your-face danger – the mob that had surged through the halls of the Capitol had come equipped with flex-cuffs, metal pipes, bombs, and materials to erect a scaffold, complete with noose – they turned their back on their responsibilities to the nation and sided with the rioters.
In a resignation letter from his position on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Jason Schmid wrote:
“The sad, incontrovertible truth is that the people who laid siege to the Capitol were and continue to be domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States. A poisonous lie that the election was illegitimate and should be overturned inspired so called “patriots” to share common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists to attack the seat of American government. Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms. Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.”
4. The Way Back
There isn’t any chance of “healing” or nationwide “unity” until Republican officeholders – and their enablers in the media and elsewhere – come out and publicly refute the unsubstantiated, fraudulent, irresponsible, and highly inflammatory claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and condemn all attempts to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims. (Which is the textbook definition of terrorism.)
Of course, the poison that is now coursing through our political system will not be drawn out by Republicans admitting that they have been lying to people all along. The damage is too deep, the infection too widespread. By this point, hardly any of the hard-core Trump supporters will accept any actual facts or evidence.
Still, it is a necessary start. “Healing” requires that the perpetrators of the injustice or crime acknowledge their responsibility. You can’t ask to be forgiven if you are unwilling to admit that you did anything wrong.
Distressingly, some Republicans even now are doubling down on their dishonesty. Republicans in several states have already announced their intent to impose additional restrictions on voting because some voters now doubt the security of our elections. Of course, those voter attitudes are not in response to any actual; election insecurity, but are due entirely to Republican efforts to sow distrust and discord.
Oh, sure. In a few weeks Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. It now seems likely that the inauguration – already reduced in scale by the raging pandemic – will be conducted within an armored security bubble. But it will almost certainly take place.
The zealous and utterly misguided “supporters” of Donald Trump – with their overweening sense of entitlement and their delusions of grandeur – aren’t going to be allowed to stop the lawful transition from one administration to another.
But that doesn’t mean that they will accept reality.
And why should they? They have been coddled and babied for years by self-serving officials, media commentators, and pundits. While Trump’s open pandering to their ignorance and bigotry has been singularly destructive, he didn’t start this fire.
Right wing extremism has been a problem in the United States for more than a century. In the 1870’s, President Ulysses S. Grant mobilized federal law enforcement agencies to beat back the rising terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-war south. Throughout the twentieth century, the FBI and local law enforcement penetrated and dismantled dozens of right-wing terrorist groups. Since 2010, the FBI has identified right-wing groups as the greatest domestic threat America faces. No wonder Trump calls the FBI “corrupt.”
But while some law enforcement agencies have taken the right-wing threat seriously, other powerful people and groups have emboldened them, none more so than Donald Trump.
Throughout his presidency, and especially in the fraught months leading up to the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly praised right-wing groups – his “second amendment people” – including self-styled “militias,” for activities ranging from white supremacist marches, to armed invasions of state capitols, to the killing of unarmed demonstrators by vigilantees.
These groups have quickly learned that there are few – if any – consequences for their use of violence or the threat of violence. America’s gun culture, unprofessional local law enforcement, and the craven pandering of politicians hungry for the contributions and votes of committed, if deranged, “patriots” have combined to legitimize and encourage continued acts of intimidation and low-level violence.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol, intended to disrupt the certification of electoral votes and possibly derail Joseph Biden’s lawful installation as president, was simply the next step down a road we have been on for years.
And like earlier steps, this one has been without serious consequences for the people who occupied the Capitol and for the people that abetted them, even though five deaths have been attributed to the incident, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten to death and a demonstrator who was shot by police. In addition, dozens of police officers were injured and several were hospitalized while two explosive devices and a container of Molotov cocktails were found near the Capitol.
A few arrests have been made, more will certainly follow, and a few folks have lost their jobs. But Trump remains, though there are calls for his resignation, impeachment, or removal under the 25th amendment. None of these things are likely to happen, especially in light of the continued support for his clearly false ‘stolen election’ narrative by a significant number of Republican lawmakers and multiple irresponsible media outlets.
Whatever happens to Trump in the final days of his failing presidency, his malign encouragement of his “patriotic” base is certain to continue far beyond Biden’s inauguration. Trump will continue to inflame his supporters with repeated announcements that he – and they – have been betrayed.
Their responses are certain to escalate.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, more than one hundred Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
Hopefully, the blood of the injured officers and of the protestor who was shot and killed while breaking into the building earlier had been cleaned from the floors by then.
Unsurprisingly, a YouGov snap poll today found that 45 percent of Republicans actively support the occupation of the Capitol and the interference with the work of Congress.
We are on a dark and narrow path that will take us to a place we cannot yet see but that we certainly would prefer to avoid.
Yesterday’s clash wasn’t the beginning of our troubles, and it won’t be the end.
One of the advantages of not having anything useful to do is that I have time to read. Here are a couple of books that I read this past year, or within a year or two, that I found particularly illuminating, informative, or otherwise notable. I highly recommend them.
Death of Expertise – by Tom Nichols
America today is increasingly, “obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance,” writes Naval War College professor Tom Nichols. “Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.”
Nichols notes that there has always been an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American life, but today that undercurrent is a growing flood, sweeping away respect for science and rationality and threatening the relationship between experts and citizens, which is crucial to the health of our democracy.
Good Kids, Bad City – by Kyle Swenson
The criminal justice system is not self-correcting. Errors happen and some people spend many decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
This book tells the story of three young black men, wrongly imprisoned for decades for a murder they didn’t commit. Swenson, who is now a reporter for the Washington Post, was formerly a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Cleveland. During that time, he covered the story of three men who were falsely convicted of the murder of a white man and served more than 30 years in prison before being exonerated and released when a key witness recanted his earlier testimony. Like any other disaster, the wrongful convictions were the result of a chain of errors, accidents, malfeasance, and carelessness on the part of numerous people and organizations – among them in this case, the police, the news media, the prosecutor, the defense attorneys, and the trial judge.
The most chilling aspect of the story is that the three were originally sentenced to death, but only a Supreme Court decision that led Ohio to temporarily halt executions saved their lives.
The Hidden Life of Trees – by Peter Wohlleben
While trees appear silently impassive, they actually communicate and cooperate with other trees and respond to changes in their environment in real time, according to German forester Wohlleben in this best-selling book. Wohlleben relates the findings of numerous researchers who have found evidence that trees are active participants in a dynamic social network that we are only now beginning to understand. While Wohlleben’s book has been criticized by some naturalists for its “oversimplified and emotional” language, his relating of the current science is largely accurate. Readers of this book might think twice before ever again hammering a nail into the living wood of a tree.
Hiding in Plain Sight – by Sarah Kendzior
Kendzior is a researcher who spent years studying dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, where she observed the cooperative efforts of autocratic governments and criminal syndicates intent on looting their countries. Her book describes the Trump administration’s efforts to follow a similar path.
“In 2015,” she writes, “I predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and once installed, he would decimate American democracy.”
In her words, “The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, with operatives all over the world.”
Warriors Don’t Cry – by Melba Patillo
Melba Patillo was one of the nine black students that integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Their story is best known for President Dwight Eisenhower’s deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court-ordered desegregation order. But less well-known are the details of the sustained year-long campaign of harassment and verbal and physical abuse that dozens of white students – actively supported by their parents, community members and some educators and tolerated by nearly everyone else – conducted against the nine beleaguered students. Patillo’s book describes in detail the harrowing year that the nine students endured.
The New World of Police Accountability (Third edition) – by Samuel E. Walker and Carol A. Archbold
It’s not a few bad apples. American law enforcement is structurally, historically, and culturally broken, and real reform will require fundamental changes to police organizations, practices, and culture. That’s the message of Samuel Walker and Carol Archbold, professors who have studied, written about, and consulted with American law enforcement agencies for decades.
Walker and Archbold present a compelling and, frankly, somewhat discouraging perspective on the challenges facing American police agencies today. While not written for a general audience, the book accurately describes the current state of American law enforcement and the need for significant reform.
Social Media
And if you don’t have time to read books, here are a couple of folks whose work on various social media platforms will always be worth your time: Political Historian Heather Cox Richardson and Retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer and political commentator Jim Wright
From Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to reform the New York City Police Department in the late 1890’s, to President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in the 1960’s, to President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in 2014-2015, efforts to improve police professionalism, root out corruption, and improve police performance have been a constant feature of American law enforcement for more than a century.
But such efforts have always faced opposition, and while many police departments today are far more professional, diverse, responsive, and community-focused than in the past, problems remain.
Reform advocates and law enforcement leaders together recognize problem areas where reform is most needed, including accountability and transparency, excessive use of force, discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices, inadequate training, and police militarization. They also agree that significant police reform will require a community-wide effort. Law enforcement agencies will not be able to do it on their own, and community organizations will not be able to force change. Only a cooperative effort will result in sustainable and effective reform.
But today there is no national consensus on the need for reform, let alone for its direction. American law enforcement is highly decentralized – there are more than 18,000 separate police agencies in the United States – and many, if not most Americans believe their local police departments are effective.
Often, of course, this is the case. But many of the ills of modern American policing are hidden from view of most citizens. Americans in general – exposed to many decades of TV and movie cops, but almost totally unfamiliar with real police – have little understanding of how police in this country actually perform their jobs.
Police themselves are not much help. Law enforcement culture highly values secrecy, autonomy, forcefulness, and an us-versus-them worldview, hardly conducive to open discussion of police performance. Individual officers and their departments are loath to discuss the way they actually operate and the underlying beliefs that drive their behavior.
So, while many Americans seem to agree on the necessity for some police reform – The George Floyd video has had an enormous impact – there is much less understanding of what types of reform are really needed.
“I don’t think most people have any sort of fundamental connectedness to law enforcement, and I think we are at a place now where we are talking about making changes, but the average citizen has no clue of the foundation of how law enforcement works and what should be changed,” said Sophia Hall, Supervising Attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights.
Hall was a panelist on a recent WGBH virtual forum on Police Reform, part of that station’s series of discussions on ‘The State of Race.’
A better understanding of law enforcement is necessary for an informed communitywide discussion of police reform, said fellow panelist Dominique Johnson, Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Policing Equity. The conversation we need to have is about how do police departments work, said Johnson. “How do you engage people to understand and educate them around the systems of public safety so that they can make informed decisions.”
Calls for defunding the police are misleading and counter-productive, said panelist Milton Valencia, political reporter for the Boston Globe. “It’s not so much getting rid of police, it’s not so much getting rid of the police budget, its more reimagining what we do with our resources and where they’re devoted to,” said Valencia.
“Instead of 911 calls being automatically diverted to police systems… especially mental health cases, we need to look at other ways to redirect community social service programs so that it’s not always the police responding,” said Valencia.
Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell said that ‘defunding’ the police does not mean abolishing police departments. “But it does involve reallocating a significant amount of resources from our police departments to programs, issues, and initiatives and individuals that are doing the work on the root causes of violence,” she said. “We have to focus on eradicating poverty, mental health, trauma support, jobs, economic opportunity, and there are a lot of programs and individuals doing this work who are struggling right now to find resources to do that work, and that’s just unacceptable when you think about our police department is over $400 million in terms of their budget and an overtime budget that’s over $70 million, and it keeps going up and you ask why?”
Police are called on to replace gaps in the nation’s social services safety net. But they are untrained and ill-equipped to provide the services that people need. The results can be disastrous, for citizens and the police. “Most Americans do not realize that nearly fifty percent of fatal police encounters involve a victim who is living with a mental health issue, with a disability,” said Hall.
It is important to remember that law enforcement problems are structural and systemic, said Hall. The blame for many problems with police performance cannot be laid at the feet of individual officers.
Ronald L. Davis, former Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in the Department of Justice, believes that reform efforts must focus on the operational systems that guide law enforcement. “Rank-and-file officers do not decide organizational policies and practices,” Davis wrote in 2016. “Nor do officers establish hiring standards or have the power to administer discipline. They also do not decide whether an agency embraces crime-reduction strategies that result in racial disparities. Yet when disparities or other systemic problems do occur, rank-and-file officers are quickly demonized and blamed for those outcomes. There is no question that rank-and-file officers must be held accountable for their actions. However, if the systems in which they operate are flawed, even good officers can have bad outcomes.”
“If we are to achieve real and sustainable reform in law enforcement,” continued Davis. “Our focus must shift from the police (those individuals sworn to uphold the law) to policing systems (the policies, practices, and culture of police organizations).”
Despite difficulties, efforts at police reform are continuing. Voters in at least six states approved police reform measures in the election earlier this month.
Sustainable police reform won’t be easy and it won’t happen by cutting funding for police departments, says the former chief of the San Diego Police Department.
“It’s not about defunding the police,” said retired chief Shelley Zimmerman. “It’s about refunding the community.”
Police have become the last resort for handling many social problems that have nothing to do with criminal behavior, said Zimmerman. But society has so far failed to provide the resources to deal with problems like addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. As a result, these problems land on the shoulders of the police.
“It’s not a crime to be homeless,” she said. “But how do we help? Regrettably, jail is sometimes the only provider. That’s wrong.”
“We need to focus on repairing or rebuilding our social safety net,” she said, “to allow for intervention long before a person is in crisis and turns to the police.” This is not a problem that can be solved by law enforcement, she said. “The solution has to come from all parts of society.”
Reform will cost more money, not less money, said Zimmerman. “Don’t take away funding for the police, but provide funding for other critical services.”
Zimmerman delivered her remarks remotely as part of Case Western Reserve University’s Siegal Lifelong Learning program. A former Clevelander, she served as the first woman police chief of a major American city from 2014-2018. Zimmerman had served more than 30 years as a San Diego police officer when she was tapped to become the department’s chief in 2014. Her instructions from the mayor were explicit: ‘Turn the department around.’
At the time, the San Diego department was reeling from a series of sexual misconduct scandals involving officers. Zimmerman immediately pledged to instill a culture of excellence, down from the top and up from the bottom.
One of her first actions was to invite the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an independent assessment of the SDPD to identify critical issues and begin the process of restoring community trust in the department.
Zimmerman knew that real change would take time and would need to be continually refreshed. It would also require the active support of the various factions within the police department – police officers, supervisors, civilian employees, union officials – as well as the community at large. “The more people you bring to the table, the better the outcome,” she said.
She wasted no time getting to work. Within a year she had terminated 11 officers and many others had resigned or retired under threat of termination. It was perhaps a testament to the dire straits the department found itself in that the union did not resist her efforts. “All they insisted was that each officer receive due process,” said Zimmerman.
Enforcing standards of conduct and performance was critical, she said. “It does no good to have high standards if you do not enforce those standards.”
Though police departments everywhere – including San Diego – are facing questions and criticism over their use of force, Zimmerman said the use of force by police is much less common than most people think. In 2016, less than 1 percent of all San Diego police calls (0.9 percent) resulted in police use of force, she said.
She believes that continuous improvement should be the goal of all police departments. Police today must be adaptive, willing and able to learn and re-learn constantly, community-focused and global in their thinking, she said.
Most importantly, police must see themselves as part of the community. At San Diego’s police academy, she said, “We teach community policing philosophy. We are not an occupying force. We need the support and cooperation of our community.”
