I agree with you 100%--

KC

On Nov 14, 2007 11:12 AM, Elliott Wolf <elliott.wolf@duke.edu> wrote:

KC,

Thanks a lot for looking into all of that for me -- it helps a lot.
Having been involved in some of the discussions amidst the lacrosse
case, I found the claims suspect. Having read the book and not
remembering them, or even hearing of them from other sources, I was even
more alarmed.  We've all worked extremely hard (you admittedly more than
me)  to scrupulously document what happened, and having something like
that published causes credibility issues for all of us who want
substantive change to come out of lacrosse.

.....Sigh.....

Thanks again,
-E

KC Johnson wrote:
Elliot,

Hmm.

On the latter clause first: On the last sentence, We do reference a
behind-the-scenes request from the administration to Nifong that a
statement be issued saying the other 43 weren't under investigation,
and Nifong agreeing to do so. (I don't have a copy of the book in
front of me--am currently in DC, have traveled back here for two
conference addresses this week, but will get the specific page number
to you later today. Of if you have a copy, it's mentioned just after
the Evans arrest.)

The first sentence of that clause is an issue that the book doesn't
discuss at all, or raise in any way. The second sentence, I suppose,
could refer to items in the book (for instance, we discuss senior
administrators saying they would turn over notes from all discussions
with the players without a warrant, even though both Trask on 3-24 and
Brodhead on 3-28 had assured the players that whatever they said would
be protected). That said, this issue is something of an irrelevancy to
the case as a whole: the players had nothing to hide, and they were
fully aware that these promises were likely to be empty ones. I think
there are far stronger criticisms of Brodhead than can be made than
this sentence (I never raised it in the blog, for instance).

The first sentence--the book presents no evidence that Nifong "went
out of his way" to do anything for the Duke administration. It does
note Nifong's praise of the Duke administration in late March, and his
willingness to issue the statement about the 43, but those matters
don't suggest a policy of going "out of his way" to do anything. It's
clear, of course, that Nifong didn't view the administration as an
obstacle to his plans.

On the second clause: You're absolutely right--the book makes no such
claim. There's no evidence that the administration was simply waiting
for a trigger event to spring all these committees on Duke--i.e., if
it weren't the McFadyen email, it would have been something else. I
suspect that Larrey is probably correct in one respect: it's hard to
believe that the administration came up with the ideas for all of
these committees in the several hours between the publication of the
McFadyen email and the Brodhead letter announcing the committees, and
I'd be amazed if there hadn't been some sort of contingency planning
between 3-27 and 4-5. But that's just a hunch on my part: this isn't
an issue on which I ever did any reporting because (as with the issue
in the 1st item) it didn't strike me as very important. The decision
to place Holloway, Wood, and Allison in leadership committees of the
CCI /was /important; whether the administration conceived of the CCI
on 3-30 or 4-5 strikes me as of little significance.

On the first clause: The last sentence is clearly true. The others are
not.

The policy was conceived and implemented by the DPD (how could the
administration have "implemented" a police policy?). The pressure for
the policy (as you know) came from Trinity Park hard-liners. There's
no evidence that the administration conceived of the policy--although
they clearly did support it once the DPD/Trinity Park coalition
presented it to them. The H-S article (copied below) makes clear there
was an official policy and that Duke had advance knowledge of that
policy. (That its nickname was the GNP Stuart and I discovered in
conversations with off-the-record sources.)

My criticism on this point always has been /not /that the
administration "implemented and maintained" the policy--but that, when
presented by the local police force with an official policy that
treated Duke students and only Duke students more severely than any
other resident of Durham for identical offenses, the administration
had a positive obligation to protest the policy. Separate-but-equal
legal procedures do not work. This failure to stand up for Duke
students' basic due process rights vis-a-vis the DPD would foreshadow
the administration's response, between 3-29 and 12-22, to Nifong's
procedural abuses.

General reaction: In my critiques of the Duke administration and Duke
faculty, I've tried to be very precise in what I say, and always to
have direct corroboration (through documents, if at all possible) for
any claim that I make. This approach is one of the things that I
admire most about your writing, as well--the Bryan series was
absolutely devastating because you always could link, and every link
confirmed what your articles said.

I believe that any serious critic of the administration's handling of
events in the past 18 months must adhere to such a standard.

Let me know if this is OK, or if you want to talk in more detail--

KC

H-S: For reasons that are (to put it mildly) strange, the H-S article
doesn't even appear on Lexis-Nexis. Here's a JinC post that
extensively quoted from it right after it appeared, and a N&O piece
that covered some of the same grounds--

http://johninnorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2006/09/duke-lacrosse-h-s-oks-gottlieb-as-duke.html


The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)


September 18, 2006 Monday
Final Edition


Police OK'd Duke crackdown;
Durham chief says an officer tough on Duke students was part of an
effort to fight rowdy parties

*BYLINE:* Michael Biesecker, Staff Writer

*SECTION: * NEWS; Pg. B1

*LENGTH:* 751 words

DURHAM -- Durham's police chief says one of his officers was just
doing his job last year when he aggressively cracked down on partying
college students in the city's Trinity Park neighborhood.

The record of arrests made by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, who supervised the
investigation that led to the arrest of three Duke University lacrosse
players on rape charges, is being closely scrutinized by defense
attorneys.

About a month before the March 13 team party during which an escort
service dancer says she was attacked, Gottlieb changed jobs from a
position supervising patrol officers in police District 2, an area
that includes Trinity Park.

An article in the Sept. 9 issue of The News & Observer recounted that
Gottlieb had arrested at least 20 Duke students during his time in
District 2, a number that appears disproportionate compared with three
other patrol sergeants working in the same area at the same time.

Court records show Gottlieb arrested many of those students and took
them to jail on misdemeanor charges, such as possession of an open
container of alcohol and violating the city's noise ordinance.
Meanwhile, some nonstudents intercepted by Gottlieb were not arrested,
but instead were written citations similar to a speeding ticket on
seemingly more serious charges such as possession of marijuana and a
concealed firearm.

Police Chief Steve Chalmers declined to be interviewed about Gottlieb
before publication of the Sept. 9 article, but he said Thursday that
the record must be put in the context of his department's wider
efforts to combat student drinking and partying at rented houses in
Trinity Park.

Fed-up residents in the neighborhood had requested "zero tolerance"
enforcement of alcohol and noise violations by police, and in August
2005 one of Gottlieb's supervisors, Capt. Ed Sarvis, sent a letter to
known party houses warning students they risked arrest if the rowdy
behavior persisted.

The police chief said officers patrolling Trinity Park were
specifically instructed to arrest problem students rather than cite
them. Gottlieb not only was carrying out those directions, Chalmers
said, but was likely to have made more arrests than other officers
because he volunteered to work extra shifts patrolling areas near
Duke's campus.

"Most sergeants don't make many arrests at all, but Mark is a hands-on
supervisor," Chalmers said. "He was doing his job. He was just doing
it more aggressively than some others. That doesn't mean he was wrong."

Before the publication of the Sept. 9 article on Gottlieb, N&O
reporters repeatedly asked city and police officials whether Gottlieb
was following orders in treating Duke students more aggressively than
others. Chalmers said he declined to talk because he has generally
avoided commenting on anything related to the lacrosse case. He said
he discussed the issue with City Manager Patrick Baker and deferred to
him.

In an interview Sept. 8, Baker said cracking down on the partying was
an enforcement priority but that "to his knowledge" Gottlieb was not
under any specific direction to treat Duke students differently. Baker
also made no mention of Sarvis' letter warning the students they might
be arrested.

Baker clarified Friday that he was simply not aware of the additional
information.

On Monday, Duke's campus newspaper, The Chronicle, published an
article that included comments from students and former students about
their treatment when arrested by Gottlieb.

Urosh Tomovich recounted how Gottlieb and officers raided his house at
3 a.m. after a party, pulling him and his roommates out of their beds,
handcuffing them and dragging them downstairs. Charged with violating
the noise ordinance and having an open container of alcohol, Tomovich
said he was taken to a room and questioned by Gottlieb, who then
threatened to have him deported. Tomovich, then 21, is a U.S. citizen.

Andrea Brezing, another Duke student who is 21, recounted how she and
her roommate were arrested for an alcohol violation and locked in a
holding cell until the next morning with a woman whose clothes were
covered in blood.

Tomovich, as well as several other students, were reached by The N&O
over the past month but declined to be interviewed about Gottlieb.
Attempts to reach Brezing were unsuccessful.

Chalmers said Thursday that he had read The Chronicle story but didn't
see any reason to change his opinion that Gottlieb is a good officer.
"If what they say is the truth," the police chief said of the
students, "then they should have filed a complaint."





On Nov 13, 2007 10:24 PM, Elliott Wolf <elliott.wolf@duke.edu

<mailto:elliott.wolf@duke.edu>> wrote:

KC,

Kenny Larrey from Duke Students for an Ethical Duke wrote an
article (in an on-campus journal) that I consider to be a somewhat problematic
and is seeming plagiarized from some of UPI.  In a conversation, he
attributed most of the facts in the article to UPI, I wanted to
see what you made of it. This is for an article that I'm writing for The
Chronicle that is likely running Thursday.

First, he wrote (without a citation) that "it was the Duke
administration that implemented and maintained what Brodhead
termed the "Good Neighbor Policy" in which Duke students are targeted,
arrested and punished by Durham police much more severely than other Durham residents for lesser crimes simply to limit disturbances off-campus...It was this policy that unleashed officers like Sergeant Gottlieb"

This seems paraphrased from the 2nd to last paragraph of page 53.
I saw in your source notes that this seemingly was based on a herald-sun
article, but their archives don't go back that far. Do you happen to
have the article?

He also said that "the Lacrosse Ad Hoc Review Committee, the Campus
Culture Initiative and so on were planned several days before the
McFadyen email became public and coach pressler was fired.
Brodhead was simply waiting for the right opportunity."

There was an academic council statement prior to the McFadyen email
referencing the review panel, but not the CCI or the other committees.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be somewhat of a stretch from
your statement on page 139. He again attributed this to you but I can't
find any explicit statement that all of the committees were conceived
before the McFadyen email. Any ideas, reactions?

He also said that "most are unaware of the degree of intimacy between
the Duke administration, Duram police and Mike Nifong; at times, Nifong
went out of his way to do favors such as his attempted cover of for this
["troves of player's confidential information] illegally leaked

information. Duke went to great lengths to make sure Nifong would not
malign the university or accuse administrators of not cooperating. It
was at Brodhead's request that Nifong left the rest of the team alone
and limited the case to the three indicted students.(see Until Proven
Innocent)"

That was the one part that he actually did cite, but I can't find
anything in the book that even remotely corroborates this.  Do you
know what this could be in reference to and/or whether there is
documentation
of it?

Thanks a lot,

-E