THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Stanford University is known for many accolades. Until Brock Turner put the Palo Alto University on the media radar, Stanford was primarily known as a breeding ground for Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and as one of the nation’s most competitive universities. Now, Stanford ranks high on a list that isn’t quite as impressive. 

Using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s campus safety and security website, a San Diego law firm assembled a ranking of the crime rate at four-year colleges in California and Stanford came out on top. According to criminal defense attorney George Gedulin, Stanford’s rate of crime is more than double the closest California university. 

The attorney’s office notes, “While the vast majority of schools comply with the law that requires them to report crimes on campus, some schools have underreported campus crimes…Other schools have made honest mistakes in their reporting. Schools that are honest and accurate with their reporting may have higher numbers than other institutions that are not.” 

The office also reminds that crimes that are never reported to the institution aren’t included in the data and that the statistics provided by the U.S. Dept. of Education website represent alleged criminal offenses reported to campus security authorities and/or local law enforcement agencies, which does not necessarily reflect prosecutions or convictions. 

Limiting the ranking to a higher volume of crime may not be a fair evaluation, as larger schools typically have more overall crimes, the law office looked at crimes per capita or in this case, per 1,000 students, based on reported crimes from 2012-2014. 

Stanford University (Student Population, 16,963) had an effective crime rate of 7.94 per 1,000 student during the reported period. The next closest campuses are UC Berkeley (Student Population, 37,565) with an effective rate of 3.2 per 1,000 and UCLA (Student Population, 41,845) with an effective rate of 2.84 per 1,000. Most California universities had an effective rate between 1 and 2.5 per 1,000. 

Other Southern California schools and rankings include USC with an effective rate of 1.25 per 1,000; UC Santa Barbara (2.26 per 1,000); California State University Northridge (1.13 per 1,000); and California State University Los Angeles (1.08 per 1,000.) 

An effective crime rate does not need to set off alarms and fears, especially since the reporting rates of schools may impact rankings. While many schools have relatively low effective rates of crime, the reporting is still an eye-opener. As parents prepare for their kids to leave for (or return to) campus later this summer or fall, it’s important to remind students to be aware of their surroundings and to take safety precautions.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a successful Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--With Bernie Sanders now dispatched by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party machine, Donald Trump has emerged as the unlikely populist standard-bearer. Not since the patrician Julius Caesar rallied the Roman plebeians, or the aristocratic Franklin Roosevelt spoke for the “forgotten man,” has someone so detached from everyday struggles won over such a large part of the working and middle classes.

Crass, superficial and materialistic to a fault, Trump, sadly, shares little of the virtues of either Caesar or Roosevelt, more resembling another creepy billionaire, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Yet, like his wealthy political counterparts, Trump has crafted a message, however crude, that has demolished the Republican corporate establishment and turned conservative intellectuals into virtual irrelevancies.

The great tragedy for Trump is that the basis for a grass-roots-led Republican victory lay within his grasp. He could have been, like Ronald Reagan in 1980, the instrument of populist revolt had he shown the same wit, self-control and positive eloquence. Instead, his crudity, his barely disguised racial stereotyping and his obsession with himself has taken from the GOP, at least for this election cycle, the possibility of reaping an enormous windfall from the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class.

Racially tinged issues, notably immigration, propelled Trump’s rise. This reflects the sad reality that race relations in this country have been headed in the wrong direction the past several years. His opposition to illegal immigration – including his absurd, shock-jock-style advocacy of a southern border wall – resonates with a large part of the Anglo population, some African Americans and even some Latinos, a group whose mass desertion from the party may now seal its demise.

If negotiated with grace and some sensitivity, illegal immigration could have proven a winning issue this fall, as it was in the spring. The killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant felon, who was protected by that city’s “sanctuary” status, followed by terrorist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, all played into this theme. Recent revelations about higher-than-reported criminal recidivism among undocumented felons aid the Trump cause.

Although most Americans don’t favor Trump’s cruel talk of mass deportations, the vast majority, around 60 percent, favor tighter border controls as an immigration priority. Most are not likely to look favorably on “sanctuary cities” and the essentially open-borders approach that now dominates progressive thinking.

But rather than assault the political correctness of open borders and sanctuary cities, Trump’s approach to immigration policy has been both shortsighted and mean-spirited. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant or incomprehensible, or could not resurface again. There is a future in challenging a progressive mindset that regards the majority of the country as fighting, as Salon recently put it, “white America’s sad last stand.” There also is something ironic in that much of the anti-Trump fever comes from such increasingly white bastions as Portland, Seattle and San Francisco.

In fact, the increasingly strident progressive multicultural agenda could have bolstered the GOP, if that opposition was not championed by someone who at times seems a buffoonish lout.

The recent resurgence in crime could have been another gift to The Donald and the GOP. Crime has always been a racially charged issue, and it propelled the rise of both Richard Nixon and George Wallace, who, between them, won close to 60 percent of the presidential vote in 1968. In contrast, Barack Obama’s presidency was aided by what had been a decades-long reduction in crime that undermined this classic conservative campaign issue.

Now the drop in violent crime seems over. The homicide rate is ticking up, in cities as diverse as Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Fla., Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Memphis, Tenn. The impact of the “Ferguson effect” on policing and the often violent, anti-police rhetoric of some Black Lives Matter activists is putting law enforcement on the defensive, with arguably disastrous results.

Another potential gift to Trump and the GOP – the left-wing violence aimed at Trump events, often spilling over to attacks on police – will likely be squandered. Some left-wing journalists, such as a since-suspended editor at Vox, actually have urged readers to riot against the Trumpites. Rising crime and scenes of public disorder, notably at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, proved critical to Nixon’s success, but Nixon, for all his faults, knew how to package his message so that moderates could embrace him. Not so with the GOP’s crass Captain Ahab.

The Democratic Party has evolved primarily into an organ of core cities, a shift that increasingly defines its politics. Although core cities are home to, at most, 20 percent of the population, they have become so overwhelmingly Democratic that they represent the party’s largest electoral base. This slant, however, could have provided Trump, himself a luxury urbanite, an opening to win over the suburbs. These unheralded areas remain the nation’s dominant geography and the likely “decider” of who wins in November.

Democrats, who once supported suburban aspirations, now often regard suburbia as a giant mistake, while consigning the countryside, except for vacation locales, as the regressive abodes of what President Obama labeled as “clingers.” Measures now being pushed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to transfer large numbers of poor people, including felons, into middle-class communities, could prove a political time bomb for Democrats. Trump, however, a longtime beneficiary of government largesse through expropriation of homes and businesses, is ill-suited to even comprehend the issue and grasp this opportunity to win over the vast majority of Americans who don’t live in core sites.

When Trump took on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama energy agenda while campaigning in North Dakota recently, he touched a potentially rich vein of support. As the Democrats have locked up most of the software, design, entertainment, media and financial oligarchy, they have become increasingly opposed to all fossil fuels – including natural gas – that drive much of the industrial economy.

The assault on coal has already cost the Democrats virtually all of Appalachia, and could also begin to weaken Democrats even among union members. Nationally, this can be seen in a growing rift between greens, and their oligarchic and public sector allies, and traditional construction and industrial unions, who are furious about the party’s close coordination with environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer’s For Our Future super PAC.

The conflicts here are based around those policies – for example, on energy and roads – that directly impact middle- and working-class voters on the periphery. Trump could have made hay by pointing out that green San Francisco elites and Hollywood stars enjoy lives of almost absurdly conspicuous consumption, while urging everyone else to cut back their carbon footprints.

The real-versus-ephemeral split could still work to Trump’s favor in areas, like Ohio and western Pennsylvania, where the energy revolution promised real economic gains. Voters in these regions, even if they don’t work in factories or oilfields, are aware of how critical these industries are for their economies. Trump’s alienation of large parts of this political base – which also includes many minorities – will limit his electoral harvest.

The idea of the loquacious and status-obsessed Trump leading the ignored “silent majority” provides something of a theater of the absurd. The country was ready for a real GOP populist to run against Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the almost complete capture of the Republic by the oligarchs, their media messengers and the governmental apparat. Desperate to hold onto Obama’s base, she embraces policies that have failed to deliver improved incomes for the middle class and reinforced the deep pessimism felt across the country.

In the end, Trump has mastered the art of the political “deal,” but largely for the benefit of his opponents. Given the deep grass-roots disgust with the power structure, he could conceivably have won over many of the “Bernie Bro’s” this fall. But his resplendent awfulness likely will prevent him from transforming the GOP into the voice of nationalistic populism and expanding its electoral base. Ill-suited as a populist icon, Trump seems destined to leave the country even more in the hands of the oligarchy while leaving his own party, for the near future at least, lurching toward oblivion.

(Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.” This was first posted at newgeography.com.)

-cw

HIJACKING THE ELECTION PROCESS-Most of us ignore the electoral process except when we’re voting. We stand in line and punch the card, carefully sweeping off the chads before we put it in the box. And leave the polls believing in the validity of our vote. 

Then along comes year 2000 and we see a national election in which the guy who got the fewer votes wins. For Gore voters, it was like someone had stolen the new millennium. 

But hey, it only happened once, right? After Bush there was Obama, and that made things all right. The system worked again, didn’t it? Maybe Bush-Gore was just a millennial glitch. It couldn’t happen again. Right? 

If that’s the way you feel, you have to read Andrew Gumbel’s “Down for the Count,” an unstinting account of U.S. election knavery back to the Founding Fathers. Actually, while Gumbel’s Early American History 101 entertains with lurid details of skullduggery among the Founders and their successors, it’s the book’s weakest portion. The author, for instance, assails the Constitution itself as “blunting the revolutionary spirit that had informed the rising against the British” because it didn’t establish universal suffrage and abolish slavery. Of course the Constitution didn’t do that, there being no widespread support throughout the original states for either innovation. It took over 80 years of shifting opinion and struggle—including the Civil War—to include both as amendments. This is the Constitution’s true value—its ability to change for the better. 

Gumbel is far more convincing on his central theme—fair and honest voting practices in America have been at best an orphan stepchild of the American political process. The electoral foot soldiers tend to be unschooled volunteers and minor, underpaid officials, beholden to the elected. 

Accordingly, the occasional crooked election, particularly in big cities, has long been a part of our heritage. The higher state election officials are usually partisan, whether elected (like the states’ individual Secretaries of State) or appointed. They are potentially motivated to make sure the opposing party has as hard a time as possible getting votes. Whether by spoilage or loss of ballots, breakdown of machines, dubious vote counts, early closure of polls, the list goes on: the party in power often has the upper hand at election time. California’s partial solution has been non-partisan local elections. But there seems no way to do this statewide, let alone nationally. Nonetheless, offices do change hands, and nowadays truly egregious election abuse seems to remain the exception rather than the rule. 

The new century, however, has brought new threats to the precarious election process. The first is the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” decision that effectively prohibits limits on campaign spending. While its effect was muted in the 2012 presidential race, it was overwhelming in state elections, as Gumbel demonstrates: as long as two-thirds of America’s wealthy remain conservative, they’re going to pay to help elect Republicans to legislatures, even in Democratic-aligned states like Michigan and West Virginia. And of course Republican legislatures gerrymander districts to elect Republican members of congress. Gumbel has all the details. 

Hand in hand with “Citizens” has been the Republican state-by-state drive to keep as many minority, elderly and youthful voters as possible from the polls by jacking up voter ID qualifications and making registering to vote far more difficult. Again, our Supreme Court came running to the rescue of unfair voter qualifications with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The case was effectively Shelby County v. the Voting Rights Act, as it gutted the 1965 law, leading to a massive attack on minority voting rights from North Carolina to Texas to Arizona that is still being fought in the courts: Gumbel calls this assault “The new Jim Crow.” 

After his hefty 220-page brief against the U.S. electoral system, Gumbel’s four pages of suggested remedies seem a bit sketchy. Obviously, he’d like legislative or legal relief from the “Citizens” and “VRA” decisions. He also suggests weekend elections, abolition of the Electoral College and a national election agency that would have the power to right electoral wrongs. These are all good ideas, but to be effective, they would probably have to become constitutional amendments. 

That’s what the Constitution is for, Mr. Gumbel.

(Marc Haefele is a regular commentator on KPCC. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the 1970s, he was Clerk of the Board of Elections of Pahaquarry, New Jersey. This piece first appeared on Capital and Main.  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GUEST WORDS--The homophobic and transphobic carnage in Orlando was a ‘plane crash’, with the blood and corpses of LGBTQ people splattered across the headlines. However, LGBTQ people are dying of hate, isolation, exclusion, and violence daily, in ‘car crashes’ that do not catch the public eye. Gay children are being bullied to death in our schools, trans women beaten to death on our streets, and the public does not bat an eye. After the Pulse nightclub massacre, there will be the customary vigils, speeches, and rainbow processions, vows of solidarity, and then the predictable return to business as usual.

My heart is exploding with love and grief for those who have died and are dying, and it is also burning with anger at those who perpetrate, encourage, and enable these atrocities. I am left wondering, amid all the prayers and mourning, wherein lies the responsibility and who is to blame?

I blame Ted Cruz, Pat McCrory, and every single politician in America and around the world who has promoted fear and hatred against the LGBTQ community in attempt to garner more votes.

I blame all those legislators who have devoted countless time and resources to concocting homophobic and transphobic laws, while simultaneously thwarting legislative action aimed at protecting the LGBTQ community.

I blame every religious leader who has encouraged his faithful to be intolerant towards LGBTQ people and urged them to fight against our basic rights and dignities as human beings.

I blame every person who feels that their religion entitles them to be biased against LGBTQ people and to exclude us.

I blame every parent who has victimized and bullied transgender children in schools by attempting to deny transgender students their right to access facilities matching their authentic gender identity.

I blame everyone who has threatened transgender people with violence and murder simply for using facilities that match our authentic gender identity.

I blame all parents who have taught their children to be intolerant and unaccepting of LGBTQ people, and all those parents who have rejected and abused their own LGBTQ children.

I blame all those who seek to erase LGBTQ people because our existence makes them uncomfortable.

I blame all those who bully, intimidate, or harass LGBTQ people, and those adults who turn the other way when LGBTQ children are being mistreated.

I blame all those who think it is acceptable to mock and ridicule LGBTQ people, and those who dismiss attempts to end this bullying as ‘political correctness’.

I blame law enforcement in America and around the world that erases LGBTQ people and does not take action to protect us, and in fact is often the worst perpetrator of abuse and violence against us.

I blame every court, judge, and jury that has acquitted or given a token sentence to perpetrators of hate crimes against us, because of the ‘gay panic’ defense or simply because in their eyes our existence is worthy of violence.

I blame hate groups and terror groups like the American Family Association, the Ku Klux Klan, and ISIS.

I blame all those who have amicable dealings with regimes under which being LGBTQ is considered an offense punishable by death.

I blame all those who stand in silence as LGBTQ people are attacked, abused, murdered, and denied our human rights, because they do not think it is their problem or because they are embarrassed to speak up for us.

All of them have blood on their hands, not just in Orlando now, but everywhere every day. Scores of our people were murdered in cold blood in the worst mass shooting in our nation’s history, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are assaulted, raped, and murdered around the world with impunity. Our children are thrown out of their homes and disowned by their families simply for being themselves. Surely, our lives matter enough that those who are destroying us should be named and held accountable. Please spare us your speeches, your candles, and your prayers, and give us our right to breathe. And please do not drown out our right to love and exist authentically with hate.

(Mischa Haider is a trans researcher, mother, writer, and activist. This perspective was posted earlier at Huff Post.) 

EDITOR’S PICK--Reaction to the death of Muhammad Ali this weekend was reverential, and why not? As obituaries explained at great length, Ali was more than just a great boxer. He was a “civil rights activist,” a “champion of free speech,” a “humanitarian,” a “tireless human rights ambassador and philanthropist” known for “gentle generosity.” 

Reading this, one might imagine that Ali lived the kind of life that made everyone admire him. The truth is quite opposite. During the prime of his life, Ali was widely hated. Politicians and news commentators denounced him as a cowardly, anti-American traitor. The legislature of his home state, Kentucky, passed a resolution declaring that he had brought discredit to the state and to “thousands who gave their lives for this country.” Even other African-American athletes, including Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, criticized him. 

This is a wonderful lesson in the way we whitewash figures who harshly criticize America’s conduct in the world. While they live and speak, we abhor them. Years later, when they are conveniently gone, we forget the ferocity of their words and pretend they were part of America’s happy family. 

If Ali was a gentle giant beloved by all, he symbolizes our goodness and the unity of our society. Yet he was much more than that. Ali sacrificed years at the peak of his career because he hated what his country was doing to nonwhite people far away. As he was about to enter prison for refusing induction into the Army, he explained his motive: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, some poor, hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America.” 

Ali believed it was wrong and even sinful for the United States to bomb faraway lands because their people or leaders do not behave as we wish. His message is every bit as urgent today as it was when he first began preaching it. Yet in the fawning coverage that has followed his death, Ali comes across as a friendly grandpa rather than a passionate critic of American foreign policy. 

His case is hardly unique. Not long before Ali died, much publicity was given to the death of another relentless advocate of peace, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan. Like Ali, Berrigan was jailed for actions that stemmed from his antimilitarist convictions. At one protest, he denounced “the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America, with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.” Obituaries did not ignore his activism — they could not, since it was the center of his life — but many portrayed him as an eccentric oddball and suggested that he would be remembered for his poetry and “wry wit.” 

Martin Luther King Jr. has suffered the same fate. Today he is an icon, universally revered, and even honored with a statue on the Washington Mall. Most of us have come to share his belief that African-Americans deserve civil rights. We congratulate ourselves for having heeded his antiracist message.

That was not, however, King’s only message. He detested what he called “smooth patriotism,” and was horrified by the American compulsion to bomb, invade, and occupy countries on other continents. “We increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support,” he said in one speech. “People read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs.” 

Statements like that led the director of the FBI to call King “the most dangerous man in America,” all but begging some misguided patriot to kill him. We forget this essential part of King’s message because it applies too directly to the foreign policy we follow today. 

Activists of earlier generations have suffered the same fate. Radicals from Thoreau to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X now appear on US postage stamps. Mark Twain is remembered as a folksy humorist partly because his vivid denunciations of American intervention are absent from most anthologies. 

Few today realize that Twain opposed sending “our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit’s work,” that he believed foreign wars had “debauched America’s honor,” or that he proposed a new American flag “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” 

Americans who want our country to change the way it acts in the world often feel that we are blazing a new trail. We are not. The idea that the US harms itself and others, by considering itself “indispensable,” and by trying to “shape” the politics and culture of faraway countries, was not recently invented. It is as American as apple pie. Yet those who have preached this gospel are either forgotten or — even worse — portrayed after death as friendly folks who may have spoken an intemperate word or two but in their hearts loved everything America is and does. Muhammad Ali is the latest to suffer this indignity. We do him, and others who share his antiwar passion, a disservice when we forget crucial aspects of their political identities.

(Stephen Kinzer is a former New York Times reporter and the author of “Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006) and “Reset Middle East: Old Friends and New Alliances: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Iran” (2011). This piece originally appeared on CommonDreams.org.  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky is in the hot seat for his light sentencing of former Stanford student Brock Turner (Photo above left). The now 20-year old Turner was found guilty of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated woman with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious woman with a foreign object; two formal rape charges under California law were dropped during preliminary hearings. The judge had the leeway to sentence Turner for up to 14 years but chose the six month sentence because the judge wrote, a longer sentence might “have a severe impact on him.” Judge Persky’s sentence and sentiments have riled the over 370,000 who have signed at least one online recall petition.

On January 17, 2015, two Swedish grad students, Carl-Frederik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, bicycling past the scene, witnessed Turner as he sexually assaulted the partially clothed woman behind a dumpster. When the two men realized the woman wasn’t moving, they stepped in. Turner tried to leave the scene but Arndt and Jonsson tackled him and held him down until the police arrived.

What has shaken me to the core has been the cavalier responses of both Turner and his father, who laments his son won’t be enjoying his favorite ribeye steaks or breaking his swimming records just because of “twenty minutes of action.” Turner himself has focused on the dangers of “intoxication and promiscuity.” In a letter in support of Turner, his friend blamed the conviction on “political correctness,” stealing a page from the Trump playbook.

Turner seems to express no remorse for his actions; he and his father are more concerned about how the sentence impacts his life going forward. I can understand in some part a parent’s instinct to protect their children but we also have an obligation to raise our children to be accountable and empathetic. Turner was 18 at the time of the rape and a drunken stupor is not an excuse to rape an unconscious victim behind a dumpster.

Rape is a pervasive problem on college campuses, despite an overall downturn in rape during the last 20 years. According to Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), “11.2 percent of all students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students.)” Among graduate and professional students, 8.8 percent of females and 2.2 percent of males experience rape or sexual assault. The statistics are even more grim among undergraduates, with 23.1 percent of females and 5.4 percent of males experiencing rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation.

Female students (18-24) are three times as likely as the general population of women to be victims of rape and sexual assault. 18 to 24 year old women who are not students are four times as likely to be victims of rape or sexual assault.

Blaming sexual assaults on “the influence of alcohol and the party culture” is unacceptable but endemic of our societal need to finger point instead of accepting accountability. For many, intoxication muddies the waters. We remind our daughters and students to watch out for each other, avoid being alone with men or accepting a drink; we even warn them not to put down their water bottles. While we want our daughters to be safe, we tend to blame victims who might not have heeded our advice.

As an incoming freshman at Vanderbilt University c. 1980s, we were taught at a dorm meeting how to carry our keys to fend off an attacker and how to use our elbows and knees to temporarily paralyze or knock the wind out of an assailant, who we assumed would lunge at us from the bushes. We called upon campus security to escort us after dark; we carried pepper spray. We never thought we’d be slipped a roofie at a party or that a fellow student might rape us if we had a few too many drinks.

We can advise kids not to binge drink and to avoid becoming so blitzed that you’re not in control but if they don’t regard that advice, that doesn’t leave a rapist free to assault an unconscious or drunk woman or man. If we forget to set the alarm, does that mean a thief should just be able to walk in and take what he wants?

In his letter to the court, Brock Turner references just how much he has lost because of the trial. He blames his actions on alcohol and peer pressure, claiming that college culture is what got him into this “mess.” Never once does he point to the fact that he chose to sexually assault an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. His only crime was being caught.

It’s too easy to blame other people instead of accepting you (or your son) committed rape. When Turner’s childhood friend blames political correctness for the sexual assault charges, she’s buying into the idea that we’re all too thin-skinned and easily offended. Anyone who cares about campus rape of an unconscious woman who cannot give consent is just too “PC.”

Brock Turner will serve his sentence. Hopefully, he will one day acknowledge that he raped an unconscious woman and it wasn’t a case of “promiscuity while under the influence.” Perhaps the victim will create meaning from the tragedy and teach others about her experience.

Turner’s rape of an unconscious woman is a cautionary tale on so many levels. Binge drinking at a frat party is not an admissible defense for rape. We need to be accountable for our actions and to model that accountability for young people. Whether it’s a presidential candidate, a man convicted of felony sexual assault, or his father, blaming someone or something else for his actions is unconditionally unacceptable. That goes double for the uninformed and the ignorant who excuse this kind of redirected blame pointing.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a successful Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)

-cw