Roundtable: On ISIS Strategy, Death In Jail, Violence Among Pro Athletes

MARK SAUER: I am Mark Sauer, and the KPBS Roundtable starts now. Joining me today on the Roundtable are Tony Perry, Kelly Davis, and Brent Schrotenboer. Reports of savagery including the beheadings of two American journalists by the Islamic terror group ISIS have inflamed public opinion. Pressure mounted on President Obama to again expand military action in Iraq. He presented his plan in a clear and concise address to the nation on Wednesday night. Tony Perry, San Diego troops and marines going back in, boots on the ground? TONY PERRY: It does not appear so, he seems to have ruled that out. There will be some Marines, they know Iraq pretty well, and one of the things the president wants us to get the Sunni tribes back into the fold, have them form what are now being called the National Guard and join the fight. Marines know a lot about that area, they will be there in small numbers. MARK SAUER: We have 1600 folks there now, right? TONY PERRY: Indeed, most of them are devising plans and information reports for the commander-in-chief, or supporting and protecting the embassy in the Greene zone. Folks from San Diego who are going to be there are Navy. Carrier Vincent is in the area now, in the Indian Ocean area near Japan. It could easily move into the Persian Gulf and take over the air strike mission from Carrier Bush. So far, in terms of San Diego, this is going to be a Navy show, not the Marines, according to the commander-in-chief. MARK SAUER: And Obama has not been enthusiastic about going back in. He has made that clear. He has not been enthusiastic about expanding it in any way. TONY PERRY: No, and his critics point out he defines his military views on what he will not do, even when he expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan, he added we will have them all out by a certain date. He has always been distressful of the Iraq mission. MARK SAUER: The dumb war. TONY PERRY: As he said. And he ran in 2008 on the idea that I will bring an end to that war, and he trumpeted the fact he had done so. Now, we're back in, but not all the way back in. This is a war that he inherited from his predecessor, and it looks like you were passed on to his successor. Every president since Jerry Ford has found himself in the thick of the Middle East. Whoever succeeds Barack Obama will have to make those decisions. MARK SAUER: The president was explaining about ISIS and why there is a threat. Let's hear a clip: [AUDIO FILE PLAYING] BARACK OBAMA: ISIL poses a threat to Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, including American citizens, personnel, and facilities. Left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat that region, including the United States. [ END AUDIO FILE ] MARK SAUER: So he is saying it could be a threat to the US, and a big threat to the region. He is trying to build a coalition, because these folks are savage. They are going for Muslims first. Really, the Western threat is an afterthought, it would appear, at this point. TONY PERRY: They have little things to Shia, Christians, Islam, and smaller religious groups like the Turkmen, Yazidis, that they support. These are savage people. How strong they are as a fighting force is hard to determine. We do not have a lot of on the ground journalism reporting about this. It is hard to assess. They are very good at these scary, brutal videos, but people are cautioning do not be spooked by these videos. Dreadful as they are, this is necessarily not a first rate fighting force. When they took over parts of Rawadi, Anbar, and Falluja. The Iraqi government down their guns, and ran away, with the Iraqi incompetent, cowardly leadership. All of the Iraqi battalions that cowardly? We hope not. The US has been trying to get that army that the US spent $1 billion and a decade putting together. Can you put Humpty Dumpty back together? I don't know. MARK SAUER: Let's talk about the media for a second. We had the shocking beheading videos, ostensibly the terrorists said we're going to intimidate America, and we were not intimidated by 9/11, and we occupied in the invaded two countries. The point it seems, and a lot of critics have made this point, that they had a purpose with that, they want to get Americans back involved, and get the heat off of them from other Muslims and make us a target again. What was your impression in terms of how media savvy they were with those? BRENT SCHROTENBOER: I think there are very media savvy. One of the themes of the show is the power of video. I wonder if the videos of the beheadings did not happen, would the president go on primetime television and make a case to the American public? The American public was very impacted by it, and the public opinion favored intervention after the videos. TONY PERRY: The images are so powerful, but they can be very misleading. In the first battle in Falluja, in April 2004, there was CNN coverage of bombing, and the bombing had been going on, but CNN had not been there. And the president, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of England saw it on TV and called for a halt on the assault. The Marines, from Camp Pendleton were ordered to pull out and go back in six months later. MARK SAUER: I want to hear from present Obama again, he is talking about the importance of building this coalition over there: [AUDIO FILE PLAYING] BARACK OBAMA: This is not our fight alone. American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraq is what they can do for themselves. Nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region. That is why I have insisted that additional US action dependent on Iraqis forming an inclusive government which they have now done in recent days. Tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place, and following consultation with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to rollback this terrorist threat. [END AUDIO FILE] MARK SAUER: His choices are few, none of them good. TONY PERRY: No, Iraq is going to be very difficult to rollback with the advances ISIS has made. Syria will be 100 times worse, even with the enormous airpower we have. Coalition warfare, the people who study these things will tell you, is the most difficult of warfare. Even the good war, World War II, there are all sorts of disputes between America, England, France, and Stalin. Now, we have all sorts of cultural and religious issues. It is going to be like herding cats. MARK SAUER: They are the cats living there. TONY PERRY: They are. They have a lot of skin in the game. The Jordanians are being flooded by refugees from Syria, the Saudis are our worried about their situation with gerontocracy. The Iranians we do not speak to, they have real skin in the game. In theory, they all have reasons to help, whether they will or whether they will do a little bit, that will require us to do most of the fighting, first with air power, and if it comes to it, boots on the ground. That remains to be seen. MARK SAUER: It remains to be seen, and we will watch that closely for a long time, I'm afraid. We will shift to another segment. It is a terrible story, a twenty-eight-year-old black man is taken to San Diego County Jail for violating probation on a drug rap. Deputies knew he swallowed a bag of meth before he was booked, and yet he died from an overdose days later in solitary confinement. His deficits one of sixty in San Diego county jails since 2007. Kelly, give us the high points of this case. KELLY DAVIS: CityBeat has been reporting on jail death, sixty was the number between 2007 and 2012. It has since grown up to eighty-three. There were twelve deaths in 2013, and eleven so far in 2014 that I know of. MARK SAUER: All right, give us the high points of this case, that the citizens review board was so disturbed by. KELLY DAVIS: Bernard, like you said, he had a long rap sheet of drug offenses. He was pulled over in City Heights for a DUI, and it was observed that he swallowed a bag of meth. They took him to the hospital, did not keep him long, and booked him in jail. Over the next seven days, he slowly started exhibiting signs of meth intoxication. Bizarre behavior, screaming that his insides were burning, and instead of putting him in medical observation units, they put them into solitary confinement and gave him anti-psychosis his medication. The day before he died, a sheriff deputy falsified a check and said he checked on him and did not. The next morning, he was found face down, naked in his cell, and two Sheriff's deputies entered his cell, looked at him for forty-one seconds, according to surveillance video, said his name, he gave no response and no sign that he was conscious or could hear them. They walked out of his cell and left him there. There was a shift change, and three hours later, they found him and he had been dead for long enough that rigor mortis had set in. MARK SAUER: So he had been dead for a while. The citizens review board findings were pretty harsh for a board that really does not come up with such things. Tell us about that. KELLY DAVIS: I have looked back at their findings on deaths, and this was the most extensive by far. Usually they will have a little paragraph, they will say everything is fine and we do not have enough information to reach a conclusion. This time it was seven or eight point findings, very strongly worded. This is something new, a new review board we're seeing. MARK SAUER: They recommend the dismissal of a jail employee? KELLY DAVIS: That was terminology for one of the findings. They also recommended policy changes, but they cannot force the Sheriff's Department to anything. The Sheriff's Department says based on their own review, they have made some policy changes about how someone is screened for drugs, and how often there admitted for checks. TONY PERRY: He is picked up for drunk driving, they think he has swallowed something, they take him to El Dorado, and he denies it. KELLY DAVIS: That happens. TONY PERRY: They do x-ray on him, they can't find it, they taken to jail, and he is still denying it. They look in his medical record, he is alcoholic, drug user, mentally ill, still denying he swallowed anything, and then they give him antipsychotic medication, and he starts acting out. He's yelling I am on fire, the kind of things a non-doctor will say that seems like the rantings of someone who is psychotic. He never says I swallowed a bag of methamphetamine. If he said that at any time at any time except his final moments, wouldn't they have grabbed him? Wouldn't he have been alive today if he identified that? KELLY DAVIS: We don't know for sure. He was seen by medical staff three times. A lawsuit was filed today on behalf of his family. Maybe when those medical records are released we may see something different, but this is not unusual. Inmates never admit, I shouldn't say never, but they will not admit to it, because they think it will increase their sentence. TONY PERRY: Isn't the phrase I am on fire, I am on fire, the kind of things someone who is psychotic might say? A deputy, not trained in medical terminology might say he is psychotic, he was in a single cell to keep them from other people. Keep them from being heard by other people. He's acting psychotic and they made the wrong determination. KELLY DAVIS: This is not unusual, though. I've come across a lot of cases outside San Diego where this has happened. As methamphetamine increases in their systems, they display signs of psychosis. Sure that jails have seen this before. MARK SAUER: The other question is, with this many deaths, unresponsive and facedown, at this point I'm the cam not a doctor, I'm not a jailer, I'm thinking of getting them over to the medical unit and get him evaluated with an abundance of caution. TONY PERRY: What about these new scanners? Apparently they have put them in all the jails from the same ones that take nude pictures of you at Lindbergh Field. They did that in response to this case, other cases, and your hard-nosed reporting. Do you think it will help? Will they catch the next guy who has swallowed a bag of meth? KELLY DAVIS: The jails have a new Chief Medical Officer Doctor Alfred Joshua, who has instituted impressive changes. I think he was the driving force behind this one. I think this is great. Now I have a question. Does the inmate need to consent to being screened? I have to find that out. TONY PERRY: Call the ACLU, they will give you their view on it. I imagine not, they do not have to consent to taking clothes off and having their anus checked. MARK SAUER: And DNA tests and all of that. In the deaths you are reporting here, houses that compare to other county jails around California? KELLY DAVIS: San Diego is pretty bad. The measure we used to determine the mortality rate is the same measure that the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Justice statistics uses when they release every 3 to 5 years, they release a report on deaths in county jails. San Diego comes out as the highest mortality rate. The Sheriff's Department has an issue with us using that measure, but it is what top researchers use. TONY PERRY: Isn't it hard to compare jail to jail? They do not have all the same populations. In LA county, for example, I would never hold their jail system as a model, but a lot of their prisoners have been to several days at city jail before they come over. They are checked if they will commit suicide immediately, or if they swallowed something. They send them to county jail, and they have a lower number, because they have we did them out. MARK SAUER: So it's a different process? KELLY DAVIS: It would be hard to pin down the process and the impact it has. Maybe the reason the Bureau of Justice uses this measure is to compare jails to jails, and across populations. TONY PERRY: Does anybody care in the Board of Supervisors? The Sheriff is elected, I understand that. But the board this is budget. KELLY DAVIS: And no one is running against him. I would like to see a little reaction to this. The lawsuits are increasing exponentially, prior to putting on this, we knew of two lawsuits. This will make the sixth or seventh lawsuit that has been filed or is pending. Some of those lawsuits are going to look pretty bad for the jails. TONY PERRY: They did internal review, and they found that the guard did do a check, but it was kind of a drive-by. KELLY DAVIS: Right. TONY PERRY: We do not know what the amount of that, the guards may have paid the price with their careers, or not, because that is confidential. It's going up to the Sheriff, in theory. Unless he is somehow smitten with these guards, which would be if you found something wrong, he would bring it back to them. KELLY DAVIS: We would like to know that. MARK SAUER: I'm sure we will be doing more stories on that. By now, most everyone has seen or is aware of the disturbing videos showing pro football player Ray Rice knocking out his then fiancÈe in an elevator at Atlantic City. That has brought the NFL long-standing problem of off field violence into sharp relief. For Rice and his now wife, the video turned his original two-game suspension into the end of their livelihood, as the team fired him, and the NFL banned him indefinitely. For sports crazed Americans, this triggered a hot national debate this week, did it not? BRENT SCHROTENBOER: It did, it bought into question the leadership of the National Football League. Roger makes $40 million a year, at least he did last year. MARK SAUER: Nice work if you can get it. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: The question is a clichÈ, what did he know, and how long did he know it? Did he cover this up? They are having an investigation to find out exactly when the league knew about it. MARK SAUER: They brought in the former head of the FBI to take a look. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: That report will be public. We'll find out in due time. It also brings into focus the issue of domestic violence in pro sports. MARK SAUER: This is not a new story. I think of all kinds of violent incidents of the last century. Ty Cobb, Jim Brown, there are several cases in San Diego, not just in football, but baseball as well. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: I have been tracking NFL arrest since January 2000. There have been eighty-nine domestic violence in incidents since jailer 2000. While those are dropped or thrown out of court because the alleged victim does not want to cooperate for various reasons. It is commonplace for these kinds of things. MARK SAUER: Throughout society, not just celebrities and sports figures? BRENT SCHROTENBOER: Right, the most that usually would happen is a one, or two game suspension, which makes this unusual. What is unusual about this, there was a video. The video sparks outrage, it gets into the echo chamber of social media, and the next thing you know, he is suspended indefinitely. And he was a pretty good player. The thing is, it is not unusual, unfortunately, in professional sports. I do not think there is an epidemic in the NFL or pro sports. MARK SAUER: They are reflecting society. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: Exactly. We've seen the issue here in San Diego with a few players. Brian Giles was a player for the Padres, in 2006 there was an instant, he pleaded no contest, and nothing happened. He was not suspended, the team did not do anything. I'm not even sure the team knew about it until two years later when the woman sued him for palimony. TONY PERRY: In the same thing with the Charger's Eric Weddle of the Chargers, he tweeted that he feels seem to be part of the NFL because of this. Is that the general feeling of NFL players, was that across the board? BRENT SCHROTENBOER: I think there is a lot of handed animosity towards the Commissioner. The Commissioner is the law in order guy. He has taken the issue of player personal conduct. He started in 2007, with a rash of arrests. He has a reputation of not allowing enough due process. That is the line he has to toe, due process versus being on top of these situations and being the Sheriff in the NFL. I think the players aren't doing this just to see Roger squirm, but I do not know what will happen to him. I will be surprised if there is incriminating evidence. TONY PERRY: Is the NFL hierarchy male only? Could that have led to the tone deafness of the series of this? BRENT SCHROTENBOER: It could have been. The Associated Press report that the league was sent the video in April, apparently a woman in the league office received it and saw the video. They responded by voicemail. We do not know who that person is. We'll find out in the report. MARK SAUER: I will get back to the video in a moment, but I want to turn to a woman on the panel, Kelly, women in football, we have the portrayal of sex and violence. It sells in our society. You have the charger girls, the Oakland Raiders and Dallas cowboy cheerleaders, and risquÈ commercials. Do you think there is a culture of women objectified with everything going around the sport, and maybe it tends to blow this up when you get to domestic violence? KELLY DAVIS: It is not just that, the scantly clad cheerleaders, but also, on my way over here, to the point had a great session on this. Steve Almond was talking about his book and the culture of entitlement that these football players grow up in. He grew up in Ohio, where two football players raped a young girl, and the high school. The town rallied around the global players, and the girl became an outcast, and that happened in other cities as well. I think it is too bad, the misogyny and the sense of entitlement coming together. MARK SAUER: Let's get back to the video, everything about the incident was described in the spring. It wasn't print, the details were there, they knew what happened. There was an earlier video, not the one we are talking about. He apologized, his fiancÈe married him. All of this was out there, but Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. This video changed everything. It did not change the event of what we knew about it, but the video had that kind of power. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: Absolutely, we knew he his wife, we knew that he knocked her unconscious. The previous video showed him dragging her out of the elevator. All of a sudden we see the video that shows what happens, and everyone is like oh, my God. And it's like, what did you think when you heard in February that he knocked out his fiancÈe. TONY PERRY: And he supposedly fessed up. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: He did. It really shows the power of video, the emotional reaction that the public has. I think a different part of the equation now, is Twitter, and Facebook, and TMZ paying for this video. We are seeing more of this now. MARK SAUER: Janae Rice has come out and said you re-victimized me and us, you have taken away our livelihood, we paid the penalty earlier on. BRENT SCHROTENBOER: I think she's blaming the messenger with the media. It is common, and not surprising she would have that reaction. The alleged victims in these cases, unfortunately, that is a common reaction. They want this to go away, they have an intimate relation with the alleged aggressor, they do not want to break up the family. MARK SAUER: And it is understandable. I'm sure we will see how that all plays out. There will be much more on this story. That wraps up another week of stories at the KPBS Roundtable. I would like to thank my guests Tony Perry, Kelly Davis, and Brent Schrotenboer.