The Sam Adams Alliance’s Paul Jacobs devotes the latest edition of Common Sense to the Jefferson 1 case.

Common Sense

Jacobs: “Tom Jefferson once said, ‘Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise.’ And he didn’t even own an Ipod.

Would you believe…taking photos of Park Police slacking off on the job?

That’s according to a February 2008 report from the Department of the Interior’s Office of the Inspector General, which found “the USPP continues to struggle with fulfilling its responsibility to protect the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial to the degree necessary given the national significance of the icons.” In addition, the Park Police “failed to adequately manage its financial affairs” and the agency is “suffering from low morale and lacking confidence in its command staff,” the report found.

In March 2007, the department’s Office of Law Enforcement, Security and Emergency Management started conducting unannounced site inspections to see how the USPP were handling the task of icon management. Among their findings was an officer at the Jefferson who appeared to be sleeping in a parked squad car (page 13 offers a snapshot) even though the Memorial was ALREADY short-staffed that day and even though “the visitor centers located in both the Lincoln and Jefferson were continually left unmonitored and unprotected.”

Then, on page 14 of the report, you find this gem:

On two occasions, USPP detected assessment team members while conducting covert site visits at the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. During the first incident, a contract security guard confronted assessment team members while they were opening an unsecured utility access door at the Lincoln Memorial. The second occasion occurred at the Jefferson Memorial after an assessment team member was detained after attempting to photograph a USPP officer completing a crossword puzzle for a period of time inside the Memorial’s information office.

Such is the state of an agency whose chief was canned last month; where six of the top 13 police positions are open; and where, according to the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the number of sworn officers on the force shrank to just 576 at the end of January, down from 625 in 2001.

And yet, they still have time to arrest people for dancing.

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who was among the first to break the story, offers an update and two theories as to why the Park Police have yet to drop the specious charges:

There are two theories of why this is going forward. It may be that the agency is simply reluctant to admit that it erred and back down, which would be embarassing, particularly since they are still recovering from their recent failures at crime control in the national monuments, which culminated in the rape of a young girl near the Smithsonian. (So much for the commenters who derided me for pointing out that the police might have something better to do than prevent mall dancing.

The other possibility is that they’re trying to head off a civil suit; the only way they can be sure of this is to get a criminal conviction, so they’re going for it, however unlikely this may be. There’s a large downside to this strategy, of course. I can’t speak for Brooke, but if the police forced me to spend large amounts of money defending a spurious criminal charge, there would be a civil suit, no matter what the personal inconvenience involved.

There certainly should be one. The purpose of the justice system is to protect the public, not to keep them in line.

D-Magazine covers the Jefferson 1 story for the cool people in Dallas. Uh oh, the U.S. Park Police thought they were messing with a lone dancer. Nope, now they’ve gone and messed with Texas now:

Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, as everybody knows, is on April 13. To celebrate the occasion, Brooke Oberwetter, daughter of former Ambassador Jim Oberwetter of Dallas, decided to do a little dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. So off she went with nineteen or so of her friends. Their spontaneous patriotic effusion, however, was interrupted by a security guard, who proceeded to arrest young Brooke. This being 2008, the incident was recorded. This being Brooke, it was reported in the Washington Post. And this being America, friends have created a web site to proclaim the injustice of the thing and to raise money for her defense. Knowing the FrontBurner Nation to be friends of freedom, I hope you will make a small contribution to the cause. One generation proclaimed, “Don’t tread on me!” Now another generation proclaims, “Bopping is not a crime!”

Perez Hilton, the “Queen of all Media,” took a break from celebrity gossip to discuss the plight of the Jefferson 1. Actually, thanks to all of the publicity this has been receiving, Brooke is the latest cause celeb while the park police continues to look like a bunch of big meanies. a snippet from Perez:

You’d think that the people who helped run the city that symbolizes ‘democracy’ would be a little more tolerant! Sheesh!

Can’t they groove alone to their headphones in peace????

Oh, and the irony is….

All of this happened at the Jefferson Memorial, in observance of Jefferson’s birthday who was the most hardcore and anti-authoritarian of the Founding Fathers.

We wanted to thank the Washington Post for correcting the record regarding the incident. The Post had earlier reported that Ms. Oberwetter “was arrested after she kept returning to the chamber,” which was patently untrue. She never left the chamber until her arrest, a fact they conceded in the April 19 edition:

An April 16 Metro article mischaracterized the actions of a woman who was arrested while celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. She did not return to the memorial chamber after authorities ushered her out.

See also, Radley Balko on the Post story.

Amy at Atypical Musings offers an assessment of the Jefferson 1’s *real* crime:

I don’t know how I feel about Libertarians, but these guys are funny. I mean, I love the idea of people just randomly dancing at national monuments, especially at the Thomas Jefferson Monument, in celebration of his birthday. Fine, they probably were dancing not just to celebrate but to make a statement as well. The statement being, “Hey, we’re here to celebrate TJ’s achievements. Want to know about a few?” Perhaps the idea of a run-in with “the man” came to mind, but I doubt they thought anyone would be arrested. Honestly, cuffing the gal in front of everyone…FOR DANCING? Head up the Capitol Hill; that’s where the real criminals are, and we pay them to rip us off. Brooke Obberwetter (sic) is not a criminal. The only crime she committed was not bring a cake to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday! And who forgot the party decorations?

Over at the Attitutor Blog, educational entrepreneur (or “teacherpreneur,” as he calls himself) Don Berg offers a thoughtful assessment of what went wrong at the  TJDP:

The videos of the dancing incident at the Jefferson Memorial seem to indicate that the police reacted in a highly unprofessional manner. They interpreted the actions of a group of people to be a threat of some kind and then acted swiftly and without any meaningful communication about why they were taking the actions they took.

These are the park police failures.
1. They judged the activity of dancing to be a threat to the sanctity of the monument
2. They created a conflict by ordering the dancers to leave without explanation
3. They escalated the conflict by using foul language, engaging with people by physical contact and openly displaying anger.

With the job of keeping the peace, our police are entrusted with an extraordinary responsibility for acting in a manner that ultimately leads to the lessening of conflicts, not the creation of conflicts. Given the videos that I have seen and the account of the organizer, it appears that the police abused their authority, violated the public trust, and may have abrogated the rights of the arrested dancer, if not the rights of all the people who were peacefully gathered to celebrate Tomas Jefferson’s birthday with a late night show of physical exuberance.

Consider this three part series of articles entitled “The Situational Sources Of Evil” by Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He revisits Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience and shows a number of ways that authority can be abused. The question on the flip side is how to create professional codes of conduct for authorities (i.e. uniformed and armed law enforcement officers) in such a way that abuses like this can be prevented.

The fundamental practical problem is that they made a ridiculous judgment of the situation and then simply played out the “Authority” cards they dealt themselves. The exercise of authority needs some way to reign in the tendencies of the officers to act merely according to their role as an “Officer’ without tempering that role with some other more human roles such as “Human Being” or “Exuberant Celebrator of Jefferson’s Birthday.” Engaging a different perspective on a situation like this is where leadership is crucial.

As Brooke would say, “Loves it!”:

Thanks Brian!

If you’ve seen the videos, you know where the title comes from. It was the exclamation Jason yelled when he realized Brooke was being placed under arrest.

Why is that important?

Well, some commenters have suggested that we wanted this to happen and/or staged this. This is patently untrue–Jason’s genuine shock and dismay are testament to that. (And certainly, if this is what we planned all along, you’d think Jason would have stuck around in the room to witness the entire arrest.)

You can believe me or choose not to, but that’s the way it was. We hoped, sincerely, that after she was handcuffed and put in the side room that they would let her go –thinking perhaps they took her in there just to scare her or intimidate us so that we would disperse. Of course, when they put her in the van to take her to jail, we all knew that this was for real and we felt we had to do something.

In our network of friends, a large number of people know Brooke. So, as it was going down, we all got on our phones and started calling our friends with well-read blogs and asked them to get the information out there. Knowing Brooke, and understanding the value of the story, they obliged us with the needed publicity to bring public pressure on the Park Police.

Technology allowed us to get the word out quickly — it had nothing to do with pre-planning anything. There is no way we could have launched this 10– or probably even five — years ago to the effect that we have. Just like “Don’t Tase Me Bro” and other web-based phenomena, this is a result of people with access to new media (and a few sympathetic media contacts, admittedly) spreading the word to get people’s attention.

Was this the most egregious thing to happen in the country that night? No. It probably wasn’t even the most egregious thing to happen in DC. But the incident’s severity is not the point.

To that end, several people have complained that there are larger and more terrible issues which require our attention. While this is certainly true, it does not follow that because there are worse things happening in the country and world that this should just be forgotten about. Our friend’s liberty was taken away– for asking a question. This, while in the grand scheme of things not the worst thing to ever happen, is not remotely acceptable and we are working very hard to correct that.

The Park Police would like nothing better than for this story to go away. They understand that people have short attention spans and something else in the news cycle will invariably eclipse the J-1. But when that happens, the pressure will be off of them and they can go back to business as usual–and that may include treating more people like they treated Brooke.

The Park Police must understand that they must not treat citizens like this. They must be brought to answer for what they did, no matter how slight it may appear to outsiders who didn’t spend five hours in a jail cell. Just as individuals who break the law must endure penalties, so too must the government be held accountable when they abuse the substantial power they wield.

Brooke is fighting this, as well she should, and she needs your help to do so effectively. For information on the Defense Fund, go here. Please give what you can to make sure the Park Police know this will not be tolerated here.