Roundtable: Guard in N.O.; Parolee Searches; No Cristal

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This is NEWS AND NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon.

On today's Roundtable, the National Guard heads to New Orleans and gang leaders move to the suburbs. Joining us today to discuss these topics and more, from our member station WRLN in Miami, Florida, Republican strategist Tara Setmayer. From the Pointer Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Eric Deggans. He's a media critic for The St. Petersburg Times. And Roland Martin joins us. He's Executive Editor of the Chicago Defender and he joins us from out Chicago bureau.

All right, folks, welcome. We want to talk about first about what we're hearing out of the city of New Orleans. And that is Mayor Ray Nagin has asked the governor to send National Guard troops to patrol the city after a very violent weekend. Five teenagers shot to death; a man fatally stabbed.

Roland Martin, when we hear this and see this, what we're really looking at is the continued dire straits this city finds itself in.

Mr. ROLAND MARTIN (Executive Editor, Chicago Defender): I mean, absolutely. It's has not fully rebounded; it is still a city in shambles. And so therefore, Nagin also - nice guy - but he also must accept some of this blame. Because remember, early on, there were these calls to come back to New Orleans, to come back to New Orleans. Well, you don't tell people to come back to a city unless you have the infrastructure in place to be able to deal with the people.

And so that was a critical issue. They've lost about 200 police officers who left the force in the middle of the hurricane and so it is still a very unstable place. And so this call for residents to return, people are not going to return if they're not safe.

GORDON: Here's the interesting part, Eric, is we should not lose sight of the fact that New Orleans had a tremendous crime problem prior to Hurricane Katrina. Obviously, this has exacerbated all of what was there before.

Mr. ERIC DEGGANS (Media Critic, The St. Petersburg Times): Yeah. You know, I was in New Orleans a few months ago doing a story about the Times-Picayune. And at that point, residents were sort of surprised that they had had a bit of a reprieve from the kind of crime that they had, quite frankly, grown used to hearing about and seeing.

And I think in some ways we're seeing some of the hardest hit neighborhoods, some of the poorest neighborhoods, are just now starting to get their populations back. Along with those populations are coming some of the criminal infrastructure that was already in place there.

They're still at half their population. So even with the loss of 200 police officers, they have half the people that they were policing before Katrina and they're still struggling. There's obviously some very serious problems there.

GORDON: Tara, here's the catch-22 in all of this. We spoke with, a couple of weeks ago, an FBI agent who is down assisting in trying to bring back the infrastructure for New Orleans and surrounding areas, in terms of locales between the FBI and local police officers and branching out and bringing all of them together. But you don't want the people that live there now to feel that they're in an occupied state.

Ms. TARA SETMAYER (Republican Strategist): Yeah. That's been an issue before. New Orleans, actually prior to Katrina, was the sixth - had the sixth highest ratio of law enforcement to residents in the country. At one point, in Orleans Parish, they had the state police headquarters there, they had the New York State police in - they would bring them in. They had the Military Police patrolling. They have two different sheriffs. They've got the levee police, the harbor police.

I mean, there is a heavy police presence there, but yet it doesn't translate into lower crime, which is something that has puzzled many in New Orleans as to why it hasn't translated into lower crime. Even though in the mid-90s, under Marc Morial, they did have a drastic reduction in the murder rate because they began to modernize and apply different reforms to the police department there that seemed to be working.

But now we can see that that has unraveled post-Katrina, given the circumstances and what's going on there in the city. Their SWAT team has to borrow body armor from local police departments in order to respond properly to different emergency situations.

So - actually, even last month, there was a man there that they - there was a shootout between an individual who was wearing a house arrest bracelet that got into a shootout with the local police because no one was there to monitor the fact that he broke his house arrest conditions.

So it's still a situation there in New Orleans that they really need to get together. The mayor has asked for 300 troops. This request was actually put in about six weeks ago in response to an up-tick in violence. So the request was already in the works, they're just expediting it now because of the violence over the weekend.

GORDON: Yeah. We all want to find a sense of normalcy for that city. But it's important, Roland, to note that we are nowhere near a normal life for people in New Orleans.

Mr. MARTIN: And I think that is the critical point. You made the statement in your question; people don't want to feel that they are in an occupied state. But the reality is you have to look at New Orleans within the same context, I would say, as an Iraq.

What I mean by that is it is a city, it is a region that is under massive reconstruction. So, therefore, it is very unstable, and this is one of the things that you get in an unstable environment. You see significant transfer of population. People moving in, individuals who are not from there. So you have the friction between locals and those who are from the outside.

Also, keep in mind that New Orleans was the number one port in the United States. And so that's also a critical issue, so you have to deal with that.

But, again, the call for people to return to New Orleans without it being a stable place, to me, simply does not make any sense whatsoever.

GORDON: We'll turn our attention now to a Supreme Court vote. By 6-3, the Court said that the 1996 California law is a legitimate attempt by state officials to deal with the large population of repeat offenders. The law itself says California parolees can routinely be searched by police officers as conditions to their release from prison. This came down yesterday from the Supreme Court.

Eric, when we take a look at this - and last week we talked about another ruling, in terms of knock and enter in a Detroit case. That the police said that you didn't have to wait to say it's okay to come in. You knock, you can bust down the door. Now, we're seeing this.

There are going to be those who suggest that this is a further erosion, a concern that they've made with the makeup of this court to the civil rights of many. Others will say, look, we're in a dangerous world. You need to be careful. Police, specifically.

Mr. DEGGANS: Well, I think there's little doubt that the newly conservative elements of the court have pulled the court a little bit more to the right on some of these decisions expanding police power at the expense of personal freedom. But, you know, particularly with this ruling, you got about the most unsympathetic targets that you could possibly have short of child molesters, maybe.

I mean there are not a lot of people who are going to have sympathy for the privacy rights of parolees. And, you know, to make the case that this is what is needed to adequately supervise these guys and make sure they don't re-offend, that's going to sell with people. And certainly that's going to sell when we get closer to the midterm elections and Republicans want to turn around and say, you know, look how much safer we made the country for you.

So, you know, there may be, you know, free speech advocates or privacy advocates who feel that this is an incursion, but I don't think they're going to find a lot of sympathy out there in the public.

GORDON: Here's the rub in the law, Tara, that many people are going to say, how do you really determine what this is? It says police can conduct such searches as long as they are not arbitrary, capricious, or conducted to harass the parolee.

Ms. SETMAYER: Right. Well, just a couple of points. First of all, the Supreme Court is not in a political body. They're there to interpret the law. And this is specific to California and the Supreme Court says specifically that this is to determine whether the California law violates the Fourth Amendment, and it does not. So this has no bearing as far as whether it's a Republican or a conservative victory across the country, specific to California.

Anyway, but in this case, what they're discussing here is whether the parolee...

GORDON: But we know all rulings from the Supreme Court, Tara, are used as roadmaps down the line, across the board.

Ms. SETMAYER: That's true, but I just wanted to make sure that this was something that - not to give the impression that this was something, an election-year issue that the Republican Party is using and putting forth to point to victories in the war, in crime. Just to make that distinction...

GORDON: But they will use it, Tara. Now, come on.

Ms. SETMAYER: Anyway, this case, what they're saying here is that the privacy violation right can't be arbitrary, capricious or harassing. So the Supreme Court found that parolees and people on probation do not enjoy the absolute liberty of other citizens. And the totality of the circumstances have to be examined to determine the reasonableness of the search.

And in this case in California, one of the condition of parole is that you sign a consent form to being searched at any time by a law enforcement officer or an officer of the court. So the court decided that this is, by no way - by precedent, the United States v. Knights - this is not a violation of the privacy conditions under the Fourth Amendment, because a parolee and a probation - a person on probation, are still in the custody of the Department of Corrections. Therefore, their privacy expectation is severely diminished. That's the essence of this case.

GORDON: Roland, we should note that, as Tara suggested there, in order to get out of prison, you have to sign the consent, which suggests that this is a term of the supervision you will receive.

Mr. MARTIN: Absolutely. Look, anybody that knows me knows that I love golf. And in golf, if you may break a rule, then you call on the rules official. Guess what? You don't have time to call over a rules official when the cops pull you over and say, okay, does this constitute an arbitrary, capricious, or conducted to harass me? No, they're going to search you, and it's going to be decided later.

You're actually right in that people are not going to feel sorry for parolees. They do have to sign this. But, again, it does have an impact, because how do you determine whether or not you're being pulled over for the right reason? Because cops can target you if you are a parolee and what the heck, you know, in terms of, okay, I'll go ahead and search you. And some - it should be cause for concern.

And I will say this, I mean, Tara, that was nice and cute about, you know, the court, but the reality is, you know, we know the court is very much right-leaning, and that's exactly who is impacted by this.

Ms. SETMAYER: Well, but the - what the court did determine in this case is that you have to weigh the interests of the state to protect its citizens from crime elements. California has the highest recidivism rate than any other state in the union; they have a 70 percent recidivism rate. Fifty-five percent violate within 18 months. And they violating...

Mr. MARTIN: Well, maybe also, if you looked at, you got...

Ms. SETMAYER: ...they violate probation. So the court looked at this and said...

Mr. MARTIN: ...well, maybe if you've got people that are sitting in a court with three strikes - sitting in prison with a three strikes law, riding a hot check, maybe they'll look at that, as well. Maybe one of the reasons they have a high recidi - a high rate of recidivism is because they also have some silly laws that are sending people back who are non-violent criminals who are filling up the prison system. That could also be a reason.

Ms. SETMAYER: That could be.

GORDON: All right. Let's take...

Ms. SETMAYER: That's not what the question the Supreme Court was looking at. It was about a Fourth Amendment violation.

Mr. MARTIN: Well, I'm just raising a side point.

GORDON: All right. Let me take us to this next topic, which we've been promising over the course of the last couple of days and ran out of time. And I was told by one of our editors that we've received a number of e-mails saying, hey, when are you going to get to this? So here it is.

Jay-Z has been making noise about Cristal in an interesting way. This all came about after the managing director of the company that makes the bubbly was interviewed in The Economist magazine, and asked whether or not the company had any issues with Cristal being associated with so many rappers and that bling-bling lifestyle. He said that they looked at it as - with curiosity and serenity.

He went on to talk about whether or not the company could be hurt by this association; he said - this is the managing director of Cristal - suggests that that's a good question, but what can you do? We can't forbid people from buying it. I'm sure Dom Perignon and Krug would be delighted to have their business.

Jay-Z took offense to that, suggesting that he viewed those comments as racist and will no longer support his product. We should note that in a number of Jay-Z's songs he has mentioned Cristal when talking about partying and having fun, and also in his clubs here in New York City - his club here in New York City he served Cristal, and will suggest now that that will not be the case.

A further explanation of the interview, the company released this statement. They say that the company would not have existed since 1776 without being totally open and tolerant to all forms of culture and art, including the most recent musical and fashion styles, which, like hip-hop, keep us in touch with the modern-day folk. And that's the modern-folk drinking their drink.

So that being said, Eric, here's the big question. There are many companies that have really tried to disassociate themselves with hip-hop and then, later on, embraced it. Is this one of those cases, do you think? And more importantly, do you see the corporate culture changing and understanding that there's a lot of money to be spent here?

Mr. DEGGANS: Well, I think it just gets to the core of this essential question that we often ask ourselves as black folks, even when we excel, is, you know, do they really like us or do they really hate us behind our backs? I mean, you know, there was this rumor about Tommy Hilfiger being on Oprah and saying that he didn't want people - he didn't want black people wearing his clothes, which turned out to be false. Oprah tries to go into a designer store, I think it was in France, and was barred, and that was true.

And so what we find is that we're constantly suspicious; that no matter how much we achieve, these folks will never truly accept us. And sometimes it turns out to be true, and sometimes it turns out not to be. And I guess the thing that sort of, you know, that I find so compelling about this story is that we, the hip-hoppers, are pursuing these symbols of status. And that they even care that Cristal, you know, wants their business or not. But, you know, I guess every company has to decide whether or not they want to accept being a part of this pop culture pantheon; and if they reject it, it makes a lot of sense that the artist would reject them, as well.

Mr. MARTIN: Well, the artists...

GORDON: The interesting point here, Roland, is you've seen a company like DaimlerChrysler engage Snoop and Lee Iacocca in a commercial, yet there were whispers that General Motors did not appreciate, initially, all of the hip-hop artists that bought Escalades and the like, early on.

Mr. MARTIN: Well, and that's part of the reason why Chrysler's been making money and GM has been losing money, slashing folks when it comes to jobs.

The fact of the matter is I don't understand why these rappers have not figured out the enormous power that they have. And that is, why would you sing a sing about or rap about a brand product without cutting a deal beforehand? I was at the Congressional Black Caucus, and one of the music execs was complaining about Escalade. And they said well, all the guys sang about it and their sales went up, and then they came in and said, let's cut a deal.

GORDON: Yeah.

Mr. MARTIN: Cut a advertising deal, and they said, no. I'm going, well, why don't you cut the deal before you even sing about it? Cristal's been around for a couple of hundred years. Do they really care if Jay-Z's drinking? No. They have a very specific clientele. And so, I say, Jay-Z, take your music, take your power, get rid of your drink, and boost somebody else's sales. Or, in fact, cut you a 50/50 joint venture where you guys get paid from it versus simply singing about it and somebody else taking the bucks for it.

Mr. DEGGANS: Yeah, I think, I think need to form - I think we have to form a company, Roland.

GORDON: Right. Roland, I've got to let you, I've got to let Tara get in here very quickly. But I don't think that we need to tell Jay-Z how to make any money. But go ahead, Tara, real quick.

Ms. SETMAYER: Well, no. And, in all fairness, its really unfair and disingenuous to say that these higher-end companies don't want black folks' money when the images that come from hip-hop, when you have Cristal, at $600 a bottle, being poured over half-naked women in videos and people running around pouring Cristal out - that is not the image that the company wants their product to be portrayed in that light. So its that company's prerogative, and just like Roland said, they've been around for hundreds of years, and they're not worrying about the hip-hop industry boycotts them or not. It's their prerogative whether they would like their product promoted that way or not.

GORDON: All right. All right.

Ms. SETMAYER: Jay-Z needs to rethink his boycott.

GORDON: Got to stop us there. All right. Thanks guys, appreciate it.

Next up on NEWS AND NOTES, we'll meet a man trying to get more African-Americans to take up swimming to stay safe this summer.

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