PAYING ATTENTION! with Tom Duggan
By: Tom Duggan -Monday, May 7, 2007
Last week Siglo 21, (a partially bilingual newspaper) printed the following paragraphs about the ACLU and our website posting about the meeting: (Siglo21)
“Tommy Duggan, the director of The Valley Patriot, the only member of the Anglo-American press present at the gathering with the ACLU, reported the event on his web page with the following words: “And all the criminals, cop haters and social malcontents came out of the woodwork to tell their sad and sordid tales of victimization at the hands of the evil, white, racists at the Lawrence Police Department.” With those remarks, Duggan dismissed the complaints as claims coming from Latino delinquents taking advantage of the racial conflict to justify their antisocial behavior. To validate his point of view, the director of The Valley Patriot forgot to mention that there were “white Americans” at the meeting who gave their testimony regarding police violence. Mr. Duggan also failed to mention in his initial report that some of the victims pointed to Latino policemen as part of the abusive officers.”
The only problem here is, this is a blatant falsehood (lie?).
There was only one “white American” who spoke at the ACLU meeting among all the cop bashing that went on and it was Kurt Charenza (who didn’t bash anybody).
Charenza, a decorated military man, did not speak one word about police abuse, racism or police brutality. His beef (the only one who seemed to have a legitimate complaint that night) was that he was stabbed and beaten by civilians to the point of having permanent nerve damage to his face and, according to Charenza, the Lawrence police refused to investigate the crime.
This is a far cry from what Siglo21 described as: “white Americans at the meeting who gave their testimony regarding police violence.”
It is sad, yet predictable that the Spanish language media cannot give an accurate portrayal of what happens at meetings like this because they are so beholden to an agenda of promoting fear and distrust among Latinos towards the police.
The only “Latino policeman” mentioned at that meeting was by Mr. Charenza who mentioned a “Latino” police officer he spoke with while trying to get his case resolved.
Mr. Charenza did not ever make an allegation that he was abused by Lawrence cops and the fact that Siglo21 would promote such a lie only goes to show what lengths people will go to promote hate.