Why rules exist--The Central Park Jogger Case
Where I work there are upper level people who chafe constantly at purchasing and hiring rules. It restricts us, they say. And sometimes the rules do. Sometimes we don't get to hire perfectly good people because they don't have the right piece of paper. Sometimes we spend extra money buying from a more expensive source when a cheaper one's available. But sometimes, more often than we like to admit, the rules keep some, particularly ambitious, high-level 'somes,' from giving contracts to their friends, from setting up projects that can't be completed because the people brought in for the project are friends and favor-payoffs, and cronies, from giving this contract in return for that contract or adding this 'sweet' deal into the pot. Rules exist because people forget what they've signed on for and particularly because they forget that the world isn't All About Them.
Found via TalkLeft, Sydney Schaumberg has an excellent article in the Village Voice about the Central Park Jogger case, how it came about and where it stands now.
Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see--before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down--is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal, and through it all inevitably influenced by issues of race and class and economic status. In short, it's a lot like other big, unwieldy institutions. Such a moment of clear sight emerges from the mess we know as the case of the Central Park jogger.
I hope this doesn't turn into a 'blame this on a scapegoat and then it goes away' incident. Because it isn't about one person who 'did wrong,' although it is partly about the specific and individual wrongs that people who were involved in the case may have done.
But it is also very much about who we are and what we value and how we pay attention. There's alot going on right now that requires this kind of attention from all of us. It's a time for reading the Constitution and remembering that it even applies to people we don't like, consider insignificant, and wish were invisible.