Pasadena 911 caller may face charges for police shooting. A new study shows conservatives don’t trust science…do they have a point? The Science of Children’s Religious Belief, plus the latest news.
Pasadena 911 caller may face charges for police shooting
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office is weighing manslaughter charges against 911 caller, Oscar Carrillo. On the night of March 24, Carrillo called Pasadena Police to report he'd been robbed at gunpoint. He told the dispatcher repeatedly that the two alleged thieves had guns. Police responded immediately to the high-priority call.
They found a young black man who matched the suspects' descriptions. According to police accounts, 19-year old Kendrec McDade reached for his waistband near the squad car. In response, the two officers fired multiple shots, killing McDade. It turned out the young man neither had weapons nor any stolen goods. Since then, Carrillo has admitted he lied about seeing weapons so the police would respond sooner. "His brazen lie triggered a series of events that caused my client's son to be killed on the street like a dog, and we want justice," McDade family lawyer, Caree Harper, told the Pasadena Sun.
Carrillo was arrested for involuntary manslaughter last Wednesday, but formal charges are under review by the D.A. The two officers involved have been placed on paid administrative leave. Over the weekend, Pasadena Police Chief Phillip Sanchez held a community meeting to allay concerns around the case.
Where does accountability lie in this case? 911 callers are known to exaggerate – how much should police officers rely on information from those calls? Have you ever cried wolf in a 911 call to get priority attention from first responders?
GUESTS:
Erika Aguilar, Crime & Safety Reporter, KPCC
Laurie Levenson, Professor of Law, Loyola Law School
David Klinger, former Los Angeles Police Department officer, associate professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St.Louis and author of “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force”
RV residents living illegally on Venice streets being pushed to valleys
It’s a trend on the rise, though it’s illegal in Los Angeles County: people living in RVs on public streets.
Some RV dwellers don’t consider themselves homeless since they have shelter, and they see motor homes as a viable fiscal alternative to buying property or paying rent. Most, according to UCLA Professor of Law Gary Blasi, have no choice after losing their homes.
“They tend to be people who were working class folks, who in many cases may have had an RV when they also had a job. Some people have taken their last savings and moved out of their last apartment into an RV,” he explained. “There is sort of a standard trajectory of migrating down the housing ladder, and then being without stable housing, and then staying with friends and relatives as much as you can. And then for people who have a little bit of capital – access to an RV or a car.”
Blasi said RV-living has been increasing dramatically for the last 4 or 5 years, pushed along by unemployment rates.
“To read the newspaper and look at the stock market, you would think the economy is pretty much recovered or recovering, but we’re still in a real depression for great swaths of the population,” he said. “The unemployment rate for African Americans in L.A. County went from six percent to 22 percent in four years. For people under 25, it went from under 10 percent to 21 percent, and those statistics got reflected in what you see and often don’t see on the street.”
According to Blasi, RVs are easy to spot, but people often miss the homeless population that live in cars. Still, Venice police have been equally strict about getting RV and car dwellers out of their neighborhood, due to outcry from angry housed residents.
“Venice has responded pretty aggressively, both forcing people out of Venice and also impounding vehicles of people who don’t really have the means to retrieve them from impound,” he added.
That’s caused a significant dispersal of people living in RVs and cars out of Venice into other places. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, there’s been a 66 percent increase in the number of homeless people living in motor vehicles in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.
From the phones:
Noah in North Hollywood called about people living in a large, “very expensive” RV in his neighborhood.
“I don’t think they have a financial problem ... they just chose to live in a large RV and they leave garbage on our street and they’ve blocked up five parking spaces every day.”
He said he understand that people unable to afford static housing seek shelter in cars, but those who live in mobile homes by choice are disrespectful.
“I’ve seen them occasionally and they’ll quickly hurry inside. They’ll try to avoid my gaze. They know that they’re not welcome there, that they’re staying somewhere that’s aggravating people, but they don’t make any effort to be very respectful,” he said.
Ramon from the Crenshaw district, 28, has been living in his car for nine months now. He said he recently paid off car loans, but he’s still tending to other financial responsibilities.
“I’m also accepting unemployment. To be honest, it doesn’t give you enough financial balance there so that you can balance a household and other finances, and eating and things of that nature. I’m not on drugs, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m none of that. I’m just young and I’ve made some bad financial moves, and I don’t have a lot of support from family so it’s really hard for me,” he said.
Ramon said he tries not to be a disturbance. “During the night, I might find somewhere that’s pretty clean and pretty quiet, and I’m usually out of here before anyone in the neighborhood would notice that someone is near,” he continued.
Richard in Venice said he’s been living with his wife in the area for 24 years, and the issue of RV dwellers has been the most polarizing issue anyone has had to deal with.
“You don’t want to be uncompassionate, but in our particular experience ... I personally one day counted over 60 [RVs] within a three block area. They were all barely movable,” he recalled. “These were definitely the bottom of the bottom rung as far as barely workable. The most unpleasant was that none of the mechanical systems really worked, so we saw on a regular basis, the inhabitants of these RVs dumping their human waste in the gutters.”
He said the area has been mostly cleared of illegally-parked RVs. “I don’t know how Councilman Rosenthal did it, but probably public outrage and lack of safety — they’re very aggressive people. Even all of the liberals finally said ‘We can’t take this anymore,’” he said.
Do you live in an area with RV dwellers? Should RV dwellers be allowed to park and live in residential areas?
Guest:
Gary Blasi, Professor of Law, UCLA Law School, has been studying homeless issues in Los Angeles area for 35 years.
Conservatives don’t trust science…do they have a point?
A new study coming out in the April issue of The American Sociological Review says that conservatives trust in science is lower now than at any other time in nearly 40 years. According to the study, back in 1974, conservatives and liberals were dead even when it came to confidence in science, but gradually, over a period of years, conservatives' confidence began to erode.
By the 1990s, the two groups became sharply divided with liberals maintaining a high degree of science acceptance and conservatives, not so much. The study author, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill sociology professor, Gordon Gauchet, says science is often used to add weight to political debates or policy decisions which has resulted in the shift in conservative’s opinions.
He also cites Fox News and conservative think tanks as reasons for the divide. It’s easy to dismiss the viewpoint that science is somehow tainted as anti-intellectual or simply wrong-headed, but conservative thinkers say otherwise.
They say peer review journals and those in the scientific community don’t go as hard on papers that uphold the dominant narrative, while subjecting findings that don’t to harsh scrutiny or ignoring them altogether. They say that, all too often, science is used to push agendas and scientists suffer from expectation bias.
Does science and the scientific community lean a little to the left? Looking at it objectively, is science not as objective as many of us would like to think? Do conservatives have a compelling and legitimate reason not to trust science?
GUESTS
Michael Shermer, Founder and Publisher of Skeptic Magazine
Ronald Bailey, Science Correspondent, Reason Magazine
The science of children’s religious beliefs
Though some people are born with natural talents, artistic, athletic, even mathematical, it seems that all people are born with a propensity to become religious.
In his new book “Born Believers” author and researcher Justin Barrett argues that the way our brains naturally develop, make us prone to believe in a complex system of beliefs about God’s omnipotence, about spirits and the afterlife.
From a series of scientific experiments conducted with children throughout the world Barrett has developed his theory of “Natural Religion,” a set of religious beliefs that children are naturally inclined to regardless of culture or ideology. After analyzing these experiments Barrett has concluded that the developing mind of a child is perfectly suited for belief in the divine. When introduced to unexpected events children will, according to the author, automatically see them as caused by a non-human creator or agent.
In other words, children have a natural tendency to see the world as purposefully designed by a grand controller. It was supposed that without religious input from adults, children would become non-believers but Barrett’s work illustrates the contrary, that indoctrination is not the reason people are religious.
So why do some people grow up to be atheists? What implications do these claims have for parents who want to encourage their children to believe in God? Can and should atheist parents try to prevent the “natural” tendency for children to believe in the divine?
GUEST
Justin Barrett, PhD, author of “Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Beliefs” (Free Press)