Julia Dahl

Currently, the only sexual assault the UCR collects data on is “forcible rape,” which it defines as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.”  Because “carnal knowledge” is defined as penetration of the penis into the vagina, the definition excludes oral and anal rape, as well as assaults with foreign objects. It also excludes male rape.

When Tracy spoke with The Crime Report last summer about the difficulties involved in prosecuting sex crimes, she was frustrated and disheartened at the lack of progress on changing the 80-year-old definition.

In the wake of bombshell reports about thousands of unexamined rape kits languishing in police storage and several recent investigative series, including ones by the Baltimore Sun and the New Orleans Times-Picayune that indicated police often downgrade reports of sexual assault, Tracy said she believed that part of the reason departments weren’t taking these crimes seriously was because national bodies like PERF and the FBI were not showing proper leadership on the subject.

“I actually think we’re losing ground,” she said.

But the future now looks a little brighter.

“There was a clear consensus at the meeting that the UCR definition had to change,” says Tracy, who attended the closed meeting at the invitation of PERF.

Though the proposed change must still go through a working group in October and an advisory group in December, Tracy is hopeful that the momentum is finally on her side.

Scott Berkowitz, the president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, agrees:  ”I feel pretty good that it’s actually going to get changed this time.”

Changing Police Paradigms

According to Gregory Scarbro, unit chief of the FBI UCR program, the impetus to reexamine the rape definition came in early 2010 when the agency received a letter from Tracy requesting they look at the issue.

Since then, Scarbro says his office has been discussing the “antiquated” definition with the Department of Justice, the Office on Violence Against Women, and the Office of the Vice President, and working on ways to change local reporting systems to collect the data differently.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” Scarbro told The Crime Report. “We’ll need new forms, people will need to be trained, and there’s no money for it. We know we need to do it — it’s just about getting everything in place to get it done right.”

Scarbro says he hopes to walk out of next month’s working group meeting with a new mechanism that will allow the agency to collect a wider range of data on sexual assault.

Part of the reason this can happen is that police agencies, who the FBI relies on to report to the UCR, are coming aboard. A recent PERF survey found that 80 percent of the more than 300 responding police agencies did not believe the FBI definition of rape was adequate.

According to PERF’s director of communications, Craig Fischer, the push within PERF to change the definition was spearheaded by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who testified with Tracy in September 2010 before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs about underreporting of rape.

Ramsey was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Statistics on the crime of “forcible rape” collected by the UCR have historically been significantly lower than other counts, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. For example, in 2009 the UCR reported just over 88,000 rapes, while the NCVS counted more than 200,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults.

Part of the reason for the disparate numbers is that UCR records only crimes reported to police (and most experts believe fewer than 50 percent of sexual assaults are actually reported) and voluntarily reported to the FBI. The NCVS, on the other hand, collects data on victimization, regardless of whether the crime was reported.

But the difference also lies in the theory and attitude behind the NCVS survey, which collects data on several kinds of sexual assault, including attempted rape (of a man or woman) and unwanted sexual contact that may nor may not include force.

“We look at the broader scope of victimization,” explains Jennifer Truman, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

And this, says Carol Tracy, is exactly the point.

Police, she believes, should be investigating more seriously all sexual assaults, including those involving intoxicated victims and victims who work as prostitutes, because “there are serial offenders out there” and information gleaned from these crimes that police “don’t always take seriously” can help get these people off the streets. Tracy points to a case in Cleveland where police failed to properly test a rape kit that could have led them to Anthony Sowell — who was recently convicted of killing 11 women and burying them around his home.

This police attitude toward certain kinds of sexual assaults may contribute to low reporting rates. Although the reasons for not reporting an assault or attempted assault are manifold — from shame, to fear, to trauma-induced memory loss — many believe that part of the problem is law enforcement’s focus on investigating the victim’s behavior prior to and during the assault — instead of the perpetrator’s.

Some departments have even been found to routinely downgrade and re-classify rapes as non-crimes. This attitude can scare off already traumatized victims who know that they will have to endure an invasive rape kit as well as questions about their sexual past as part of an investigation.

All these issues, says Tracy, were discussed last Friday. And although the process is far from over, she believes a shift in police paradigm is on the horizon.

“I really feel like police are getting it,” she says. “We may have been preaching to the choir [at the Friday meeting] because everyone there chose to come to a meeting on this subject — but there were a lot of them.”

To get upstairs, a non-employee must have an escort, and on a cold day last spring, mine was Lauren McCollough. McCullough works for Brown Lloyd James, the public relations firm that represents the Qatar-based channel in what has proven — and might have been expected — to be the hostile territory of the United States.

McCullough and I stepped into the elevator and she swiped a keycard through a security pad. Only those with electronic access can get off on the Al Jazeera English floors. Upstairs, the elevator opened revealing a glass door in which the channel’s logo, Arabic script in the shape of a flame, was etched. Al Jazeera means “the island” or “the peninsula” and refers to the shape of the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the channel was founded. Behind the glass was a small desk where Dora, the receptionist, sat beneath two flat-screen televisions, one showing Al Jazeera English, the other showing Al Jazeera Arabic.

Dora and I had never met in person, but we’d spoken over the phone several times. When I told her my name she said, “You’ve been calling.”

I had been trying to arrange an interview with members of AJE’s editorial board and American marketing and distribution departments for nearly three months. A few weeks earlier, after weeks of unreturned phone calls — to the D.C. bureau, the channel’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and to Brown Lloyd James — I decided to show up at the office. The security guard stopped me and called Dora from his phone in the lobby.

“I’d like to set up an interview,” I said. “Can I come up and make an appointment?”

“No,” said Dora. “You have to have an appointment to come up. Call Brown Lloyd James.”

“But I’m right downstairs,” I pleaded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to have an appointment.”

Three weeks later, McCullough called and said she’d set up an interview with William Stebbins, the D.C. bureau chief.

“Great,” I said. “Can I get a tour after the interview?”

“Oh, I think it’s better you do it on the phone,” she said.

I took what I could get, and when I got Stebbins on the phone, I asked about whether the reporters and producers, many of whom have left jobs at places like CNN and the BBC to come work for the fledgling station, are disappointed that not a single major cable or satellite network in the United States has agreed to carry the channel. Comcast, Charter, Time Warner, Dish Network and DirecTV all passed.

“We’re fairly sure our programming is of interest,” said Stebbins, side-stepping a bit. “We knew that we’d be forced to look for non-traditional means of distribution.”

Indeed. Though approximately 120 million homes from Jerusalem to Jakarta to Germany tune in to AJE every day, the station has been all but shut out of the U.S. market. Unless you live in Burlington, Vt., or Northeast Ohio, where two local cable networks defied the industry by adding the channel to their line-ups, the only way to see the channel’s programming is on YouTube, or by paying for either a subscription broadband service or a satellite dish from French company GlobeCast. In Washington, D.C., a tiny satellite company called Washington Cable has the channel available, but so far, its customers — several government agencies, as well as a small number of apartment complexes, including the famed Watergate — don’t want it.

“We’re trying to interest the government agencies,” says CEO Perry Klein. “On a trial basis, they like what they see, but they don’t want to sign up for it.”

According to Stebbins, AJE reached out to “key media people” and politicians in the run-up to the November 2006 launch, but met with a “reserved response.”

Though spokespeople from TimeWarner, Comcast, and News Corp (which owns DirecTV) refused to speak in any detail about their decision not to carry the channel, those with knowledge of the industry say AJE never had a chance on U.S. soil.

The channel was founded in 1996 by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, a small, oil-rich American ally on the Persian Gulf. Though sponsored by the Qatari government, in its early years the channel was considered by some western observers to be a beacon for democracy in the highly censored world of state-controlled Arabic media. In 1999, John Burns of the New York Times called Al Jazeera “hard-hitting” and “revolutionary.” In his book “Al Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel that is Challenging the West,” journalist Hugh Miles writes that Al Jazeera drew ire from across the Middle East for, among other things, allowing Israelis to appear on-air.

“This was a major departure from anything done before and was truly shocking for the Arab public,” wrote Miles. “Many Arabs had never seen an Israeli speak before.”

Miles also points to provocative talk show topics such as “Are Hezbollah resistance or terrorists?” and guests ranging from Hamas members to Syrian feminists to Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi.

But any American love for the channel was lost on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, Al Jazeera was accused of being a mouthpiece for the enemy for airing video of Osama bin Laden and showing graphic images of injured and dead American servicemen. (Ironically, when Burns wrote about Al Jazeera two years earlier he noted that the channel had been accused by some in the Arab world of being “a mouthpiece for American ideas.”)

“Al Jazeera airs Osama bin Laden’s videos,” says John Dunbar, a former fellow at the Center for Public Integrity who studied media. “It is seen, fairly or not, as an outlet for terrorists.”

Donald Rumsfeld called the channel “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.” On November 13, 2001, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, a U.S. missile destroyed Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul. And in November 2005, Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper reported that in an April 2004 meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush floated the possibility of bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. The Bush administration has denied such a conversation took place.

When, in 2005, word spread that the channel was planning an English-language version that it hoped to air in the U.S., opponents sprung into action. Chris Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., led the charge. He launched www.stopaljazeera.com and produced a 20-minute documentary called “Terror Television: The Rise of Al Jazeera and the Hate America Media.”

“The case could be made that Al Jazeera could be functioning as a global terrorist entity,” said Kincaid. As evidence, on his website and on various televised interviews, Kincaid brought up the cases of Taysir Allouni, a former Al Jazeera Arabic reporter who was convicted by a Spanish court of aiding Al Qaeda, and of Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, a former Al Jazeera managing editor who was replaced in the wake of a report saying Iraqi agents were working for the channel.

Kincaid also takes issue with the fact that AJE is primarily funded not through advertising dollars, but by the Emir of Qatar.

“I’d like to see more international coverage on American news stations,” he said. “But you can’t fix that problem by relying on a foreign government and its TV channel.”

Kincaid said he doesn’t think Al Jazeera English should be banned from American airways, but his campaign against the channel was aggressive and far-reaching — though not completely successful.

TURNING ON

The word came from on high. In late November 2006, Patrick Deville, the general manager of Ohio’s Buckeye Cable System, got a call from the parent company’s chairman, Allan Block, asking him to look into the English-language version of Al Jazeera.

“The feeling was that it’s a good thing to expand your knowledge,” said Deville. So Deville did a Google search, looking for a number to call for Al Jazeera English’s distribution department. He couldn’t find any contact information in the U.S. so he called the main number in Qatar. A few weeks later, Catherine Rasenberger, of Rasenberger Media in New York, called on behalf of the company. Deville asked if Buckeye could aim their satellite to Al Jazeera’s receiving dishes and put the station on a private network so staff and officials could watch it and decide whether they’d like to add the channel.

Deville admits that he had preconceived notions about the channel, but that they were mostly wiped away after several hours of viewing.

“It was pretty harmless,” said Deville. In fact, the first program he saw when he turned it on was an hour-long documentary about golfer Colin Montgomerie. “The look and feel is very British. The pieces are longer and it doesn’t move as fast as CNN or Fox. There are religious discussions, but you don’t get the sense that it’s tilted toward Islam. Some people think American news channels like CNN are tilted toward a Christianity and Jewish perspective.”

“Honestly,” admitted Deville, “It was somewhat boring.”

Buckeye serves approximately 150,000 people in northwest Ohio, which Block spokesman Tom Dawson says is home to a “sizeable” Middle Eastern population. The company’s headquarters are fifty miles from Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest concentrations of people of Middle Eastern descent in the country.

“We try to provide as much news and information as we can to the widest possible audience,” Dawson said, pointing out that Buckeye carries several Hispanic and Chinese channels. “We try to give viewers diversity.”

Asked if the company did any market research, polling customers about whether they’d like to see the channel or would be opposed to it, Deville laughs.

“No, we just did it.”

On March 9, 2007, two days before AJE launched on Buckeye, the Sandusky Register ran a front page article about the addition: “Al Jazeera to broadcast on Buckeye Cable.”

Within minutes, the paper’s online bulletin board came alive with readers weighing in on the decision. At first, most of the posts were passionate disavowals:

“The fact that Buckeye Cable would even consider adding a Middle East network to American TV is disgusting. I don’t want it in my house. It will be blocked.” — All American

“I’m canceling if these assholes…run Al Jazeera” — Zipperhead

“Al Jazeera is the major mouthpiece for terrorists. Al Jazeera has not only lent material support to the terrorists organizations but financial backing as well.” — Tony55

But after a while, cooler heads appeared.

“I’ve served in the Middle East twice and watched the Al Jazeera broadcasts. The network is not evil, it’s actually similar to CNN. Al Jazeera provides freedom of the press to the Middle East.” — Nick

Unlike Buckeye Cable, which made its decision to carry AJE based on the whim of its owner, Burlington Telecom, a small, publicly owned fiber optic network that launched as an alternative to Comcast in February 2005, came to the channel from a purely business perspective.

Richard Donnelly, sales and marketing manager of Burlington Telecom, said that company officials read that Al Jazeera was launching an English language channel in some of the “industry rags,” but what caught their attention was an article that reported that negotiations between Comcast and AJE had broken down.

“We thought, here’s an opportunity to differentiate ourselves from our main competitor,” said Donnelly. Like Deville, Donnelly called the channel’s distribution department in Qatar and asked if they’d be interested in showing on “a small network in Burlington, Vermont.” They previewed the channel for a few weeks in the office, then negotiated a contract.

“It was a market-based decision,” said Donnelly. “But I’m not naïve. I knew there would be controversy.”

In an effort to educate their customer base about the news product, Burlington Telecom invited people to come into their offices in groups to watch the channel and discuss their reactions.

“Personally,” said Donnelly, “I don’t think it’s such a big deal. It’s intense news, but my God, we’re heavily involved in that part of the world. It’s part of our future.”

Buckeye’s Block says he saw Al Jazeera English as the perfect opportunity to spur dialogue.

Donnelly agrees: “I think they’re doing a service to the western world. And really, what are we afraid of?”

Donnelly poses an interesting question. Since when are Americans fearful of the marketplace of ideas?

“Right now, CNN gives us world news from a U.S. perspective and the BBC gives us world news from an English perspective,” says Rasenberger, who worked on American distribution deals for AJE. “This channel gives us world news from a truly global perspective.”

Rasenberger says that she has helped distribute several potentially incendiary projects, including two gay channels, but AJE was by far the most controversial network she’s ever taken on. When she pitched the channel to the major cable providers, she says the decision-makers reacted positively to the content, but refused to, as they saw it, go out on a limb for the channel. They’d been contacted by Kincaid’s group, and were worried about backlash.

“They’d say, ‘We personally might watch it, but we can’t risk picketers,’” recalls Rasenberger. “Shame on us for being so parochial and afraid of controversy.”

But prejudice wasn’t the only problem. Rasenberger says that the management of AJE didn’t seem to understand the complexity of the American cable market, and underestimated the effort and expense of getting on the air.

Rasenberger says her pleas for more people and resources to market the channel “fell on deaf ears.”

Nigel Parsons, AJE’s managing director, disagrees. “We never thought the USA would be an easy market, nor do we think the answer to breaking into it is to throw money at it unnecessarily,” Parsons wrote in an email from Doha. “All foreign news channels find this market difficult.”

Parsons also points out that even if they can’t see the channel on their televisions, almost half of the visitors to AJE’s website are American, and almost half the YouTube downloads of the channel’s programming come from the U.S.

“The mood towards us in the USA has changed immeasurably in the last 3 years, from one of hostility to a willingness to engage,” wrote Parsons. “We remain confident that the patient approach is the right one. We are in this for the long haul.”

But setbacks abound. On March 21, the channel’s only American anchor, former Nightline reporter Dave Marash, quit. Marash discussed his departure from AJE in Newsweek. He praised the network’s wide-ranging and thoughtful international coverage, but said he felt that while great energy was expended to have reporting from abroad be done by those intimately familiar with the area they were reporting on, “that standard was breached and condescended to uniquely when it came to North America, and specifically the United States.”

Still, in an editorial titled “TV news creates ignorant Americans” published in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on April 12, Marash hailed his former employer for its comprehensive coverage of the ongoing conflicts in Somalia.

Marash wrote: “If it’s been ‘market forces’ that have kept Al Jazeera/English from an American audience-fears that it would have no audience, or that it would be ‘terror TV’—it is time to readjust to reality. If it’s been political pressure that has kept Al Jazeera/English off America’s cable and satellite servers, it’s time to reject such literal ‘know-nothing-ism.’”

Marash’s departure, not surprisingly, was a boon to naysayers like AIM’s Kincaid, who issued a press release hailing the move as having “vindicated” the group’s anti-AJE stance.

For all the hoopla surrounding the launch, one year later, Buckeye Cable’s Dawson says the community response to the channel has been overwhelmingly positive.

“I literally get stopped in the street by people who tell me they really like ‘that Al Jazeera,’” says Dawson. “They say it’s nice to have a fresh perspective on world news.”

Indeed, it’s nice to have world news at all. Since 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun have all closed their foreign bureaus. When news organizations do send reporters abroad, they are rarely able to move about freely. On December 19, 2007, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a survey of reporters working in Iraq that illustrated how removed our press corps is from the lives of the people they report on. Eighty-two percent of the reporters surveyed have minimal to no knowledge of Arabic, and 86 percent work within about three miles of the Green Zone. Perhaps because of these constraints, 62 percent of the surveyed reporters rated coverage of the lives of ordinary Iraqis as only fair to poor. In addition, though a major aspect of the “story” that is the Iraq war is the story of Iraqi terrorists and insurgents, 63 percent of journalists reported that access to insurgents was “nearly impossible.”

American government employees and diplomats are among the select few with access to AJE on their televisions. According to spokesman Lt. Col. Todd M. Vician, the channel is available on the Pentagon’s closed-circuit cable system to senior Department of Defense leadership and “select public affairs offices.”

“AJE is one of several networks we view to better understand the media environment regarding issues important to DoD and its leaders,” Vician wrote in an email.

TUNING IN

A few days after chatting with Stebbins, McCullough called and asked if I’d like a tour of the D.C. bureau. Though she didn’t say it, I assumed my interview with Stebbins revealed me to be somehow “safe.” Media attention from U.S. journalists has been scarce since the launch, and though there was organized conservative opposition to the channel, left-leaning groups, such as Fairness and Accuracy in Media, who often complain about the shallow, entertainment-focused news coverage on cable, have been all but silent, making no push to highlight the potential benefits of AJE’s international coverage and non-Western perspective.

And so AJE has hunkered down in D.C. The protesters who picketed outside the offices at the launch are long gone, as are the excoriations on Fox News. Occasionally, an editorial will appear praising the channel – in July 2007, the Kansas City Star columnist Aaron Barnhart called AJE “global, meaty, consequential and compelling.” But so far, there have been no new carriage agreements, though Stebbins says discussions with major cable companies are ongoing.

My tour began on the 11th floor where a few of the D.C. bureau’s approximately 200 staff members sat in cubicles, clicking away on computers. Just like in any other newsroom, family photos and cut out cartoons were tacked to the cloth cubicle walls. Brendan Conner, the sports correspondent, had a soccer ball balanced on the top of his cubicle wall and a sign that read, “Seize the Day.”

Conner spent 20 years as a sports broadcaster and news anchor in Toronto, working for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. In the summer of 2006, while he was out on a grueling labor dispute, Conner sent a resume and some copies of his work to Doha. The new job meant he’d be leaving his “wonderful home and native land,” but Conner says he was excited to be involved in an upstart.

“There’s a frontier, pioneering aspect to it,” said Conner, who co-hosts the channel’s twice-weekly half-hour sports program, Sportworld. His colleagues are based in London, Doha, and Kuala Lumpur. Conner said he comes up with the ideas for the pieces he’ll do — from the world series of cricket in the Caribbean, to a snapshot of ice hockey in Edmonton — then pitches them to “the British bosses in Doha,” who usually approve.

“I always ask myself, ‘Does it play in Kuala Lumpur?’” he said. According to Conner, so far, the Al Jazeera English audience is heavily Muslim, but in the West, it’s an audience that’s “intellectually inquiring enough to seek a non-Western perspective.”

Upstairs is the bureau’s television studio. There is a single sound stage divided into two small sets, both with sleek glass desks and elegant backdrops. The main set, where co-anchors (formerly Marash and Ghida Fakhry, now Fakhry and former CNN International host Shihab Rattansi) deliver three half-hour newscasts each evening, features a floor-to ceiling image of the U.S. Capitol at night. Barely fifteen feet away is Riz Khan’s desk. Kahn, formerly of the BBC and CNN, hosts a daily half-hour talk show. On the wall are black and white abstractions of Kahn’s face.

Beside the sound stage is a production room where aids monitor other news channels — CNN, the AP Direct, Reuters — and producers prepare for the upcoming show. A bumper sticker on a mid-room pillar reads: “I’m fed up with the liberal media.”

Khan was on vacation on this particular day, so Anand Naidoo, a former CNN International anchor, was filling in. About fifteen minutes before air, James Wright, the show’s executive producer, plopped down in the second row of monitors. Wright, an Englishman, was a producer at CNN and moved to Washington in the summer of 2006 to work for the fledgling Al Jazeera English station. He told me he was happy in his new job, and took pride in the diversity of the staff, pointing out that on the Riz Khan staff alone there are an Israeli, two Palestinians, two South Asians, and one Chinese-American. The people who milled around the control room were an undeniably diverse bunch. At any given time, in just about any given area of the five floors of offices, someone seemed to be having a conversation in a language other than English. Accents—Australian, English, Lebanese, American South — abound.

This day’s show was on a play about Rachel Corrie, an American who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 when she tried to protect the home of a Palestinian family. The play, “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” was staged in London and had been scheduled to open at the New York Theatre Workshop until the theatre “indefinitely postponed” the run. The play was shut out of a theatre in Miami, as well. Corrie’s parents, Craig and Cindy, and the play’s director, Braden Abraham, were to be interviewed via satellite from Seattle, where the Corries live and where the play was currently running.

After a couple quick run-throughs, someone counted down from 10, and then we were live.

“Hello, I’m Amand Naidoo, sitting in for Riz Khan…”

Naidoo asked a few questions of the Corries and the director, and then went to the phones. The first call was from Casablanca, the second from Israel, the third from London.

Down the hall from the control room is Ghida Fakhry’s office. Fakhry co-anchors the channel’s nightly Washington broadcasts—there are three: at seven, nine and 10P.M. each weeknight—and was logging off her computer when I poked my head through the door.

“Did you see the story in the Washington Post online?” she asked, smiling, clearly thrilled at the rare publicity. “Let me print it out for you.”

Fakhry was born in Lebanon and has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and the U.S. for ten years. Her small office was tastefully decorated—a tapestry, small, colorful, African masks, a collection of cacti and candles along the windowsill. As she pulled up the news story, she chatted about an event she planned to attend later in the week with Queen Noor of Jordan.

“She’s a nice lady,” said Fakhry, taking the article out of the printer. The headline read, “Al Jazeera Big in English, Not in U.S.”

Wright was equally eager to show off a media mention.

“Did you see the piece in the Times?” he asked, swiveling around to pick up the C section. Indeed, near the bottom of the page, was the headline: “Now on YouTube: The latest news from Al Jazeera, in English.”

After nearly three months of reporting I’d only seen the channel on YouTube. And so I took my opportunity to sit at one of the cubicles and watch uninterrupted — something that only a fraction of a percentage of Americans can do.

Compared to American news channels, AJE is remarkably staid. With bureaus on four continents, and reporters based in places such as the Cote d’Ivoire, Caracas, and Gaza, AJE’s news format tends to feature long-form, on-the-ground reporting, often by area natives. Aesthetically, the channel looks nothing like the sensory assault of Fox News or MSNBC, with their constantly updated tickers, red, white and blue graphics, and endless talking-head chatter. AJE runs one headline at a time on the bottom of the screen, and the font is small, so as not to distract from the newscast. Most images are from the field, and reporters tend to use voiceovers instead of stand-ups, so that the pieces end up being about the people and places that are being reported on, as opposed to the personality and appearance of the reporter or anchor.

On the day after the Pennsylvania primary, when U.S. cable news ran nearly nonstop coverage of the democratic race for president, AJE had reports on post-election violence in Zimbabwe and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s calls for an arms embargo on the south African nation, the resumption of fuel shipments from Israel to Palestine, General David Petraeus’s promotion, an elephant rampage in India, bombings in Mosul, Iraq, and a documentary program on the veterans of the Falklands War.

At a little before 5P.M., McCullough began gathering her things. I assumed this was my cue to leave.

“Oh, you don’t have to go with me,” she said. “We make it hard to get in, but once you’re in, you can stay.”

Julia Dahl is a freelance writer and contributing editor to The Crime Report. She lives in Brooklyn and still can’t get AJE.

The testimony of the arresting officer was just as intriguing. He told the court that, while sitting in an unmarked police vehicle early on the morning of May 21, he observed the defendant “engaging in conversation” with two men and “attempting to stop” another on the west side of midtown Manhattan, an area he testified is “frequented by prostitution.”

And that was pretty much it. The officer didn’t hear her say anything; nor did he ask any of the men he saw her talking to what she had said. That didn’t faze the assistant district attorney, who attempted to get condoms found in the defendant’s purse admitted as evidence. Judge Richard Weinberg rejected the request, and six weeks later, he rendered his verdict. I was there to witness the judgment.

“The people did not prove their case,” he said from the bench. “I find the defendant not guilty.”

The 25-year-old defendant — who, according to her Legal Aid attorney, Kate Mogulescu, had never before been arrested for prostitution — was visibly relieved.

Mogulescu, who has been assigned to most of midtown Manhattan’s prostitution cases since February, calls loitering for prostitution arrests both “arbitrary” and “discriminatory.” Still, although approximately 70 percent of her prostitution-related cases are actually loitering charges, she notes that in the past six months only four of almost 100 clients have chosen to fight the charge in court.

“A lot of my clients are really confused as to what they were actually arrested for,” says Mogulescu.

The problem seems to be recognized, at least, by the judges and D.A.s at the Midtown Community Court. During the three mornings I spent at MCC, the D.A.’s office allowed loitering-for-prostitution defendants with no prior prostitution arrests to plead to a disorderly conduct violation instead of a misdemeanor, and the judge then sentenced them to counseling, not incarceration. So, for many, it’s easier to just take the violation, pay a court fee, and put the embarrassing arrest behind them. But of course it remains on their record.

Mogulescu has made it her mission to fight what she calls such “suspicious” arrests, one by one. And she’s making headway.

Two weeks ago, Mogulescu got a not-guilty verdict for another woman with no record of prostitution who had been picked up for loitering for prostitution. And just a few weeks before that another defendant, this time a 21-year-old transgendered woman who was picked up early one morning in Manhattan’s West Village, was similarly cleared of charges after a trial. According to the woman, she was handcuffed by officers after a taxi driver stopped to ask if she needed a ride, and she leaned into his cab to say she was fine.

“These arrests are in danger of criminalizing constitutionally protected behavior,” says Mogulescu. “They’re set up to be immune from scrutiny and, traditionally, they’ve been unchallenged.”

High-Tech Vice

Before the Internet, vice cops had it relatively easy. Most cities had specific areas known for street prostitution where undercover officers posing as johns could chat up a lady, strike a deal to pay for a sex act, and then pull out the cuffs. But in the last decade, the oldest profession has “gone high-tech,” says Jaime Ayala, deputy chief of police in Arlington, Texas.

Anyone who has perused the adult sections of Craigslist or Backpage knows that men and women (and boys and girls) advertise their sexual services online. What this means for police is a lot more legwork. At the same time, a rise in awareness about the ugly world of human trafficking, where women from abroad — and, in some cases, American children — are held hostage in brothels disguised as massage parlors, has shifted law enforcement focus and resources away from traditional vice work, according to many attorneys.

“These days, prostitution is a very difficult crime to catch and prove,” says Rachel Palmer, an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas. Palmer says she is seeing fewer and fewer traditional prostitution cases come across her desk as budgets dwindle and the profession “goes indoors.”

But sex work on the streets persists, and the failure of scattered efforts to legalize it around the U.S. demonstrates that it continues to carry unsavory associations, especially for people who live in areas frequented by prostitutes. It is often accompanied by drugs and violence.

So how do you address a problem with dwindling resources in the face of mounting neighborhood pressure? You either get really creative, or you cut corners — or both.

One solution has been so-called Prostitution Free Zones (PFZs). Portland, Ore., for example, created PFZs in the late 1990s to clean up certain areas that were notorious for prostitution. According to Elizabeth Wakefield, chief attorney at Metropolitan Public Defenders in Portland, a person with a prior conviction for a prostitution-related offense could be arrested for simply being in the zone.

But almost as soon as the PFZs were created, they were challenged. Wakefield recalls that much of the litigation centered around the constitutional right to travel, along with due process and equal protection issues, since the city wasn’t always allowing exceptions for potentially mitigating excuses like medical appointments or family visits in the zones and “public defenders noticed that African-Americans and Latinos were more likely to be excluded.”

“The ordinances were very amorphous,” says Wakefield. “We would attack one reason and then they’d modify the statute.”

Washington, D.C., also created PFZs in 2006. But, according to professor John Copacino of the Georgetown University Criminal Justice Clinic, the district “gets around the constitutionality” by making the zones temporary: They can be in effect for just 10 days at a time. Portions of the district’s downtown area were declared PFZs during the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009.

In Arlington, Texas, home to the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and site of the 2011 Super Bowl, police have proposed what they called a “Prostitution Exclusion Zone” in the downtown area. The city council’s municipal committee is currently considering the proposal. According to Deputy Chief Ayala, the proposed zone is part of a project called Operation Spotlight, which began in 2006 and includes identifying habitual offenders and creating a public awareness campaign called “You Never Know” — referring to the fact that “you never know” whether the prostitute or john you’re talking to is a cop or not.

The proposed exclusion zone “isn’t going to fix anything,” says Arlington police spokeswoman Tiara Ellis Richard. “It’s just another tool for officers to use when dealing with this problem.”

But opponents of these zones say they make an officer’s job too easy.

“A Prostitution Free Zone allows the loitering standard to be so low that anyone who doesn’t look like they belong in a particular neighborhood — whether they’re a person of color, wearing a short skirt, or transgendered — they are rounded up,” says Cyndee Clay, executive director of Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.

Georgetown’s Copacino also sees problems. Standing around, even propositioning potential (nonpaying) sexual partners while wearing a short skirt and stilettos, is not illegal. “You can’t criminalize normal behavior, ” says Copacino.

The key question for law enforcement, however, is how to distinguish between normal behavior and “loitering for prostitution” or, as it’s called in Arlington, Texas, “manifestation of prostitution,” or in Oregon, “unlawful prostitution procurement activities.” In 1999, the Supreme Court struck down a Chicago anti-gang statute that allowed police to arrest “suspected” gang members for loitering on city streets. In his majority opinion for Chicago v. Morales, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the Illinois law was “impermissibly vague” and that the “freedom to loiter for innocent purposes” was a constitutionally protected liberty.”

Who Defines Innocence?

The operative words are “innocent purposes.” How do police determine what is innocent and what is, in effect, attempted prostitution? It depends on whom you ask. J.R. Ujifusa, an assistant district attorney assigned to a special Portland police unit on prostitution, argues that police are trained to tell the difference.

“The officers who cite these cases aren’t like a normal person,” says Ujifusa. “Their minds are trained. There are very small indications that both men and women look for to decide if that woman is working. The four officers I work with have a great amount of experience and have the ability to recognize those indicators.”

Elizabeth Wakefield, the Portland defense attorney who fought the city’s PFZs, says her office has been encouraging women to fight these charges. Like Mogulescu, she sees the arrests as somewhat arbitrary and subject to abuse. “One person’s prostitute is another person’s homeless hippie kid hanging out,” she says. Or perhaps a community college writing teacher — like 36-year-old Ann Marie Selby, who was reportedly detained last year after she missed the bus and decided to walk home in an area known for prostitution. She sued the city and received $5,000.

The problem, says Wakefield, is that the city is now issuing many of these charges as violations rather than crimes, which under Oregon law means that the defendants don’t qualify for court-appointed counsel who could encourage them to challenge the arrest.

“The more cynical among us would say that’s why they’re doing it,” says Wakefield. “But really, it’s about budget issues. If you have to decide who goes to jail — someone suspected of prostitution or someone arrested for DUI — most people in the community would say the DUI is more dangerous.”

New York City’s Mogulescu says the loitering for prostitution cases she sees are similarly not scrutinized: “For most arrests, officers have to talk to a D.A. who accesses the arrest and decides what charges to prosecute,” she says. “But for these arrests, and other ‘quality of life’ violations like marijuana possession, they just check off boxes so no one is screening to make sure the arrest is actually valid.”

The New York Police Department did not respond to requests for information and comment on loitering for prostitution arrests.

“A Reduction of Freedom”

On July 13, at New York City’s Midtown Community Court, Judge Marc Whiten announced his verdict in the case of the 21-year-old transgendered woman arrested in the West Village. But before he pronounced her not guilty, he took a moment to express concern over the woman’s arrest: “I shudder to think that if we allow such convictions of such individuals that it would lead to a very worrisome concern, a reduction in our freedom.”

For the young woman, who asked that her name not be used, the experience of being arrested for a crime she says she did not commit shook her. As a veteran of group homes and homelessness, she knows what it’s like to be desperate and vulnerable.

“I’ll admit, there have been times in the past where I’ve taken money” for sex, she says. “But that life is behind me. For someone like me, it’s hard to find a community. My community is in the Village. But now I’m afraid to go down there. I’m afraid if that cop sees me again, he’ll arrest me.”

It had been a month since Dean had gotten word he’d have to go back to war. He had already served a year in Afghanistan. He’d done and seen things over there he couldn’t talk about, and now they were sending him to Iraq. Like tens of thousands of soldiers fighting the post-9/11 wars, Dean was being treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs for post-traumatic stress disorder — but the Army didn’t know that because the Army and the V.A. don’t typically share medical records.

Before joining the Army, Dean was a merry prankster with a contagious smile. But the terror he felt clearing caves in Afghanistan followed him home to Maryland, and despite having a loving family, a new wife and a good job, when Dean got called back up, he began to crack. On Christmas night, he snapped. The outcome would be tragic. The Maryland State Police would be cited for flawed and overly aggressive military tactics. And the whole sorry state of America’s need for fighters in Iraq would be exposed.

Christmas Day began with a fight between Dean and his wife, Muriel Dean. It was about his drinking again. Ever since he had received the notice he was being shipped to Iraq, it had gotten heavier and heavier. Late in the afternoon, Jamie fled for Toots, the bar in Hollywood, Md., where he and Muriel had met a year before. The outgoing Muriel, who worked in the personnel department of a computer company, adored her husband. But she was frustrated and angry. She called Jamie at the bar and he came storming home.

“If you wanna be at the bar, be at the bar,” she told him. “But if you’re gonna get drunk tonight, don’t come home.” Jamie threw a box of wine onto the kitchen floor and started beating the cupboards with his fists. Glasses shattered and shards fell to the floor. Muriel was scared; she’d never seen him like this before. She went into the bedroom and started putting clothes into a bag to leave for the night. If you leave, Jamie told her, “I’m going to burn the fucking house down.” He went out back and got a gas can and lighter. When he came back, Muriel managed to get the gas away from him. “Why would you wanna burn something down we’ve worked so hard for?” she asked. “You don’t know how much I love you,” Jamie said, standing in the doorway. “The next time you see me I’ll be in a body bag.”

Dean fled the house and drove his Chevy Silverado eight miles to his family farm. His father, Joey, lived there alone — he and Jamie’s mother, Elaine, had separated while Dean was in Afghanistan — but his father wasn’t home. Dean started drinking again. He took a shotgun from one of the gun cabinets in the back of the house, and called his mom’s house. His sister Kelly, an Air Force medic who has served in Germany and Iraq, answered the phone. To her, Dean didn’t sound like himself. He was agitated and then his voice got scarily calm. “I just want to go home,” Dean told her over the phone. “Everything will be easier then.”

He shot off the gun and then there was silence. Kelly screamed but he didn’t answer. Later she would say she thought Dean was dead. “I freaked,” she says. “I couldn’t get him back on the phone. I couldn’t hear any movement on the other end. So I did what any person would do and I called 911.”

Police dispatched a car to the house to check on Dean’s welfare. When he refused to come out, more police cars rolled up, and officers with guns and flashlights surrounded the property.

At 10 p.m., an officer from the St. Mary’s sheriff’s department got on the phone with Dean, who was drunk and clearly depressed. He was slurring his words. The officer prattled on, filling the long silences between Dean’s mostly monosyllabic answers by trying to assure Dean they didn’t want to arrest him, they just needed him to come outside and tell them everything was all right. Dean alternated between despondency and bravado. One minute he whispered that no one understood or respected what he did in the war, and the next, he said that if the police didn’t back off it was “gonna get ugly.”

Over police radios, information began trickling in: He has guns in the house. (Like most area families, the Deans were hunters.) He has had a fight with his wife. He’s a veteran and he’s headed back to war.

Around 11 p.m., Dean’s family came rushing to the house, but police wouldn’t let them up the driveway. “We’ll call you if we need you,” one officer told Dean’s uncle Rob Purdy curtly.

By midnight, two different sheriff’s departments had deployed emergency response teams to the scene, surrounding the farmhouse with police vehicles and more armed men. At just after 4 a.m., those SWAT-like teams began firing tear gas into the house. The canisters smashed through the windows and penetrated the walls. Police fired between 40 and 60 rounds into the house, 10 times the amount needed to incapacitate a person. Dean came out the back door, raised his shotgun and fired. For 15 minutes, he paced around, walking in and out of the house, until he finally retreated inside.

Late the next morning, the Maryland State Police rolled up with an armored vehicle. Five minutes later, one of the Charles County snipers accidentally discharged his weapon. Two minutes after he heard the sniper fire, Dean fired his gun from the back of the house, though the shot did not seem to be aimed at anyone. For the next 30 minutes, negotiators attempted to get Dean back on the phone. When they finally did, he told them, once again, to get out of his family’s yard or he’d shoot. Officers stepped back toward one of the two “Peace Keeper” armored vehicles that was parked just outside the house. Dean fired again, this time at the ground.

At 12:45 p.m., officers cut power to the house. Dean was surrounded. There was an armored vehicle in the back of the house and one just a few feet from the front door. Both were firing tear gas at him. Finally, Dean stepped out of the front door. As he raised his gun and pointed it at the armored vehicle, a sniper located 70 yards away shot him. The bullet entered his side and pierced his ribcage, heart, liver and stomach. Blood spread over his white T-shirt. One expert shot and Dean was dead.

The Maryland state’s attorney’s office launched an investigation into Dean’s death and ruled it a justifiable homicide. But it harshly criticized the actions leading up to it: “The tactics used by the Maryland State Police were overwhelmingly aggressive, and not warranted under the circumstances,” stated its report. “As certainly as [Dean's] death is in part a consequence of his own actions, it is also in large part due to the unfortunate choice of tactics employed by the commanders of the State Police [emergency response team] unit.”

One criminal justice expert who reviewed Dean’s case, Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska, said Dean’s death epitomized the increasing militarization of law enforcement. He said the aggressive tactics used by the Maryland State Police to “pacify” Dean could only end one way: his being “neutralized” by a sniper’s bullet.

The state’s attorney’s ruling is cold comfort to the Deans. Dean’s parents and Muriel have hired a lawyer and plan to sue the agencies involved in the standoff. But the case is moving slowly and has thus far served mostly to erect a wall of silence between the law enforcement officers and the family. St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron said he thought the Deans deserved some explanations, and that he looked forward to sitting down with them, but now that lawyers are involved, he has to hold his tongue. The Maryland State Police declined requests to comment on the case.

Today, Muriel Dean, 38, hardly sleeps at night. She is distraught by the legal case and the fact that Jamie was recalled by the military. How could the Army have not known that he suffered from severe psychological stress after returning from Afghanistan? Sitting in her neat little house in Hollywood, Md., Muriel rubs her fingers over her forehead constantly, as if she has a terrible headache and is trying to massage it away. The carpet in her living room is well vacuumed and there is a pretty wallpaper border in her dining room, but the house has a ghost. Whole walls are adorned with photographs of Jamie. The unity candle they lighted at their wedding sits between two champagne glasses on a shelf above the couch, and there are two La-Z-Boy chairs upholstered in “real tree” camouflage facing the big-screen TV Jamie loved to watch.

Muriel, who was eight years older than Jamie when he died, has a daughter, 17, and a son, 13, from a previous marriage. Although she had known Jamie only a year before he was killed, she and Jamie had a lot in common, having both grown up in the rural St. Mary’s County.

Until the mid-1990s, many residents of St. Mary’s made their living working either the land or the water. Dean worked both. Mostly, he helped out on the farm, where every year until 1993, the family harvested 30 acres’ worth of tobacco, plus truckloads of corn and other vegetables. The work was hard but Dean enjoyed it. “He loved to get on that tractor and just plow,” says his mother, Elaine. “He said he loved the smell of the fresh dirt turning over. He was just in his own little world, nobody bothering him.”

Elaine’s father, Jamie’s grandfather, began crabbing in the late 1970s. He pulled several hundred crab pots a season from the Chesapeake Bay and called his one-man outfit Captain Bob’s Seafood. On the weekends, Dean went crawling with him. Dean, his mother says, would rather fish or hunt than just about anything else. And though he was an average student, he was popular, especially with the girls. He had a wide smile and older women giggled to his mother about his “bedroom eyes” and his “cute butt.” He played on the high school football team and by senior year was working part time on a construction crew.

In early 2001, Dean’s younger sister, Kelly, joined the Air Force. “Jamie said, ‘You can have the military,’” says Elaine. “He didn’t want anything to do with it.” But a broken engagement that spring left Dean unmoored. He started partying every night, coming home near sunrise, hanging out with people who did drugs. His mom worried, but before she even got a chance to sit him down, he sat her down.

“Mom, I joined the Army,” she remembers him saying in July 2001. “I leave in two weeks.” Elaine was floored. She didn’t want him to go, but Jamie had made up his mind. “I’ve been partying too much,” he said. “You worked too hard to raise me right. Now I need to get away from here.”

In April 2004, Dean’s unit shipped out for a 12-month tour in Afghanistan. Dean, who’d risen to the level of sergeant, led a team of scouts, clearing caves and houses in remote villages. But service overseas wasn’t what Dean had expected. He told his Uncle Rob that sometimes the Army wouldn’t provide shelter for his team, and they’d have to force villagers to let them sleep in their homes. He also said he routinely got in trouble with his commanders because instead of sending the younger guys into dangerous situations, he’d choose to just go in himself. “It was typical of Jamie to want to take responsibility,” says Rob Purdy, a veteran of the Gulf War.

When Dean returned, he moved into the family farmhouse with his dad. He was distant, says Purdy, and he didn’t want to do the things they’d always loved, like hunt and fish. Meeting and marrying Muriel seemed to be a godsend. Dean could be compassionate and loving and was learning to be a good stepfather, Muriel says. Her daughter, Tanya, had quickly grown fond of him.

There were problems, however. Most nights, Muriel says, Jamie would come home from his job servicing electrical units for a local air-conditioning repair shop and drink the equivalent of a six-pack of beer. “I’d ask him, ‘Why do you need to drink all the time?’” Muriel says. “And he’d say, ‘To forget.’ I’d ask him, ‘Forget what?’ But he wouldn’t talk about what he did over there. All he said was: ‘It takes the pain away.’”

Dean’s drinking wasn’t the only thing that worried Muriel. He didn’t sleep much, and when he did, he had vivid nightmares, and sometimes she’d wake up soaked in his sweat. He had wild mood swings; some days he’d sing “Twinkle, twinkle little star” to her over the telephone at work, and some days he’d tell her that if she ever cheated, he’d kill her. She was never sure what would set him off.

Jamie didn’t say much about the war to Muriel or to his mother — just that they didn’t understand, or that they didn’t want to know. Jamie did admit he had seen his friends die violently. He also told vague stories about kids with bombs strapped to them who would approach the soldiers. Muriel and Elaine don’t know for sure if Jamie ever shot children, but they suspect he may have. “When Jamie did something wrong as a kid,” Elaine says, “his conscience would eat him up.” And whatever he’d done or seen in Afghanistan seemed to be eating him alive.

For weeks in late 2005, Muriel encouraged Jamie to seek help at the V.A. clinic in nearby Charlotte Hall, Md. Finally he relented. At his first appointment, he screened positive for depression, alcohol abuse and PTSD. According to his V.A. medical records, Dean was having “recurrent intrusive thoughts,” as well as pervasive feelings of numbness, anger, anxiety and detachment from others. He told a doctor, “I’m tired of feeling bad.”

About six weeks after his first visit, doctors at the V.A. clinic started Dean on medication: fluoxetine (generic Prozac) and trazodone for the depression. But Dean’s local V.A. clinic didn’t offer counseling; if he wanted talk therapy (an essential part of treatment for PTSD), he’d have to visit the V.A. hospital in Washington, D.C., a 90-minute drive from St. Mary’s. Muriel says he tried once, but got lost and so frustrated he turned around and never went back.

Vincent Tomasino, a V.A. psychiatrist who saw Dean a few times in Charlotte Hall, remembers him as charismatic. Tomasino says that traveling into an urban area like Washington can be a frightening experience for a combat vet, especially one suffering from PTSD. “You look around and you feel like you wanna carry a 9 millimeter,” he says.

In February 2006, Tomasino upped Dean’s antidepressant dose, and added Abilify, an antipsychotic medication sometimes used to treat schizophrenia. To that, he added amantadine, which counters some of the potential side effects of Abilify. In May, the doses went up again, and though the V.A. called and sent letters informing him of counseling options, Jamie never made it to a session. What’s more, he was not disciplined about taking the medication, which made him feel foggy and strange.

In August, Muriel began to worry that Jamie might have to go back to war. He’d been honorably discharged after completing nearly four years of service, but she’d been watching the news, seeing stories about how the Army needed bodies, and was extending tours and calling up Individual Ready Reserve soldiers like Jamie. Jamie worried, too. That month, he and Muriel mailed forms to the V.A. to have Jamie ruled disabled because of his ongoing mental health problems. An official disability label, they hoped, would keep Jamie from getting redeployed. But the process was slow and in the middle of September, the V.A. sent the couple a letter saying they had a backlog of claims and a ruling on Jamie might be delayed.

Nonetheless, making the effort seemed to calm Jamie a bit, and Muriel says that by the fall of 2006, he was getting better. The couple had moved into a new house, which Jamie called his “happy little home.” He cooked — spicy foods like chili were his favorite — and helped out with the grocery shopping. Muriel wasn’t able to have any more children, but the couple started talking about a surrogate. They made an appointment to see a specialist in Baltimore in January.

Then, on Nov. 28, 2006, five days after Thanksgiving, Jamie got the letter they’d both feared. “Pursuant to Presidential Executive Order of 14 September 2001, you are relieved from your present reserve component status and are ordered to report to active duty.”

This time, he was going to Iraq; and he had to report in less than two months. Muriel and the rest of Jamie’s family were devastated, but they tried to stay positive; Muriel called to find out about Jamie’s disability application and was told it was still being processed.

Dean seemed to shut down. He started drinking more. He’d come home at night and tell Muriel they needed to talk, but then he’d sit silently for half an hour, unable to get whatever he had inside him out.

Dean’s boss, Tommy Bowes, who says Dean was a model employee, saw that the couple were struggling to prepare themselves for his deployment. He offered to give Dean the month off with full pay, but Dean declined the offer. “I don’t want time off,” Bowes remembers him saying. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

Dec. 23 was Dean’s 29th birthday, and the family took him out to Olive Garden for dinner. The next night, Christmas Eve, Jamie and Muriel went to his grandpa’s house, as was tradition. Jamie had promised Muriel he wouldn’t drink too much, but on the way he asked her to stop for a six-pack, and once he’d finished that, he started throwing back glasses of wine. Near the end of the night, Purdy, his uncle, found Jamie outside on the deck, crying. He’d been having nightmares about dying in Iraq. “I can’t concentrate on my medicine,” Purdy remembers him saying. “I can’t be like this over there. I gotta be ready to go. I gotta get ready to go.” Purdy tried to calm him down, saying maybe he wouldn’t have to go once the Army found out he was undergoing treatment for PTSD. But Jamie was despondent. “No, I’m going,” said Jamie. “You know once they get me, that’s it.” Jamie hugged his uncle tight — a real hug, Purdy says, not a guy hug — and said, “I love you, man.” It was the last time Purdy saw his nephew.

Muriel doesn’t remember much about the days after Jamie’s death. She says she knew that once he’d holed up in the farmhouse and been surrounded, he probably wouldn’t come out. “He was stubborn,” she says, “and he would have rather stayed in there than come out and have people think he was crazy.”

Eight months later, the Deans continue to grieve, each aiming their anger at a slightly different target. Jamie’s sister Kelly can’t help blaming herself. Calling the police that night, she says, was the biggest mistake of her life. In Purdy’s mind, if the Army had known about Dean’s diagnosis, they might not have sent the letter. Both Purdy and Kelly have tried to get answers from the Army about why it recalled a veteran undergoing treatment for PTSD. Wasn’t there a system in place that flagged veterans with disabling illnesses from being deployed? The Army’s human resources office says that no such system exists; it’s up to the soldier to prove his or her condition after receiving deployment orders.

It’s impossible to know whether Dean would have been spared redeployment had he gotten all his paperwork in order after he received his orders. (There was no guarantee he would be exempted. Reports have shown that soldiers with severe mental illness have been ordered to duty in the post-9/11 wars.) But then, Kelly says, after her brother received the letter, his pride took over and he didn’t want to protest. “He was afraid of looking weak.”

Today, despite the state’s attorney’s ruling that shooting Jamie Dean was “justified,” Muriel Dean and Jamie’s parents still want answers. They want to know why two police vehicles designed for heavy combat were deployed to the isolated farmhouse. They want to know why police found it necessary to launch more than 50 tear gas canisters through the windows and walls of the family’s house. Why the escalation? Why force a man they knew to be a veteran into a combatlike situation? Pacifying the inebriated Jamie could have been so easy. “If they’d just left him alone and let him pass out,” Muriel says, “he’d be alive today.”

Prior to Gingrich’s arrival, the crowd — a mish-mash of polo shirts and pinstriped suits, platform heels and pashmina wraps — had been worked up by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who taught them all about the “far left elitists” and their Chicken Little climate change hysteria. Inhofe’s PowerPoint included slides of polar bears and “environmentalists” like Leonardo DiCaprio and Barbra Streisand (boo!). He referenced Al Gore’s “science fiction movie,” and finished off the hour with some good news about the war: “A miracle is taking place now in Iraq,” he said, and explained that there is now zero anti-American propaganda in the country’s mosques and that American troops, instead of retreating to the Green Zone at night, are now “bedding down” with Iraqi families.

As 9 a.m. drew near, the students started to get restless, turning in their seats to see if Gingrich had come in. Finally, the former speaker of the House — who’d been introduced as “the most articulate communicator of conservative principles alive today” — made his way to the stage amid a standing ovation, thunderous applause and cheers.

He began benignly enough, using an anecdote about going to Disney World with his grandchildren to explain an epiphany he’d had about the value of not “thinking like a Republican.” From there Gingrich moved into waters the students surely did not expect. He cited the Detroit school system, where a black male is more likely to go to prison than graduate from high school.

“How can we tolerate systems more likely to send young Americans to prison than college?” asked Gingrich. “Republicans have this maniacally dumb idea of red versus blue. They say Detroit is a blue place, so we’re not going to go there.”

And he was just getting started.

“Republican political doctrine has been a failure,” Gingrich said. “Look at New Orleans. How can you say that was a success? Look at Baghdad … We’ve been in charge for six years and I don’t think you can look around and say that was a great success.

“We have got to get beyond this political bologna. I’m not allowed to say anything positive about Hillary Clinton because then I’m not a loyal Republican, and she’s not allowed to say anything positive about me because then she’s not a loyal Democrat. What a stupid way to run a country.” This last line he nearly spat out, expressing what seemed like genuine outrage. But the response was muted. Tepid applause bubbled up and then died within seconds.

Inhofe had recommended the students read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” to learn about the global warming hoax, but Gingrich suggested they pick up newly elected French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Testimony.”

And finally, when it seemed he’d been as blasphemous as he could possibly be, Gingrich pulled out a whopper: “None of you should believe we are winning this war,” he said, referring to the so-called war on terror. “We are in a phony war … we have not been taking this seriously.”

When his speech was over, the students stood and applauded politely, but the volume was distinctly lower than it had been just an hour before.

Outside, a group of young women taking a smoking break discussed what they’d just seen.

“There wasn’t a lot of conviction in his voice,” observed one.

“There isn’t a lot of conviction in politics,” answered her friend.

Back inside, the morning’s final speaker, Michelle Easton (founder of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute), was making the crowd laugh and coo with her descriptions of “those angry feminists whose No. 1 issue is how to dispose of their unborn children conveniently.” Whatever bipartisan spirit Gingrich brought into the room had vanished. As, perhaps, he knew it would.