Convention Hospitality and Police Brutality

by Norman Solomon

As thousands of delegates and journalists converge on the City of Brotherly Love in eastern Pennsylvania, the welcome mat is embossed with great riches. The Republican convention beginning Monday is brought to you by movers and shakers of Wall Street.

The Grand Old Party's jamboree will cost in excess of $50 million, mostly supplied via corporate donations. The same sort of financing is in the pipeline for the Democratic convention (estimated price: $35 million) a couple of weeks later. The symmetry of the largess is breathtaking.

US Airways "has contributed $500,000 to the GOP convention, at a time when it is lobbying for support of its merger with United Airlines, which is a $500,000 contributor to the Democratic National Convention," the Center for Responsive Politics explains. The spirit is often bipartisan. "Dozens of the nation's biggest companies, many of which have major issues pending before Congress, are lining up to help foot the bill for this year's conventions, some writing seven-figure checks to each of the events' local host committees."

Several of those checks are from multimedia giants. After using mergers to become a dominant provider of cable and broadband Internet access, AT&T chose to split $2 million evenly between the conventions. The huge firm is eager to keep federal regulators off its back.

Titans of the telephone service biz have been quite generous. The Republican convention received $1 million from Verizon Communications (formerly Bell Atlantic). The Democratic convention got a million bucks from SBC Communications -- which wants Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to let Baby Bells get into the long-distance phone business.

Microsoft gave $1 million to each party's convention. Wonder why.

Delegates and journalists enjoy plenty of perks at the conventions. The parties tend toward the opulent, with lots of catered food and drink. It's a festive atmosphere, with privilege in the air.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the media tracks, 2 million people take their meals inside America's prisons and jails. How they got there, and what happens when they're behind bars, is mostly out of media sight and mind. Occasionally the coverage explores well beyond cliches and stereotypes, but generally it's superficial and fleeting. Maybe, for the most part, we'd rather not know.

Scandals about police brutality and fraud -- plaguing Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other cities -- make headlines from time to time. Yet little seems to change in a criminal justice process filled with systemic racism. The dragnet is extremely skewed. For instance, 15 percent of the nation's drug users are African Americans -- but they account for 33 percent of drug possession arrests. One-third of the young black men in this country are locked up, on probation or on parole.

"We are seeing the media cheerlead for the erasure and the erosion of basic human rights and civil liberties," says Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. "If this were happening in any other country in the world, this incredible militarization of the police, the incredible expansion of police power, the increase in police weaponry, the decrease in defendants' rights, the incredible stockpiling of bodies behind prison walls, we'd be screaming."

But evasion is easier. "Much of America remains in denial about the magnitude of police brutality, reflecting a historical pattern that continued throughout the 20th century," journalist Jill Nelson observes in the introduction to the new anthology "Police Brutality." She writes that "abuse by the police is common in black, Latino, and other minority communities."

After videotape of Philadelphia police officers beating a black suspect appeared on TV screens nationwide in mid-July, Nelson commented: "Clearly, there is a problem when it comes to policing citizens of color and respecting our constitutional rights. ... It is time we look at re-imagining and retraining the police as to what their role is in a democratic society."

And just as clearly, it is also time we look at re-imagining and retraining lawmakers, judges -- and journalists. Whether or not the comfortable have enough comforts, the abused have certainly endured untold abuse. While media conglomerates help to produce the major party conventions, the voices we most need to hear are elsewhere.