ACORN: What Really Happened

Before we lose track of the facts amid criticism of ACORN's lawsuit against the people who illegally taped ACORN employees - gasp! - trying to help poor people, let's take a closer look at what really happened in those supposed conversations.

Anonymous Liberal has a superb analysis:

As Jack Schafer correctly notes in his otherwise far-too-credulous piece at Slate, this is not a sting; it's the equivalent of a Sasha Baron Cohen sketch.

In a real undercover investigation, you catch people engaged in activity that, based on the circumstances, you can be confident they are inclined to commit on their own volition. In a prostitution sting, for example, an officer poses as a prostitute and arrests those who go out of their way to solicit her. In an undercover drug sting, you pose as a buyer or dealer and arrest those who take the initiative to engage in an illegal transaction with you. In both cases you can be fairly confident that the person you arrested would have attempted to buy sex or drugs from someone else if the police hadn't been there.

But you can't entrap people. You can't present them with unrealistic situations or go out of your way to get someone to do something that they might not otherwise do. You can't, for example, leave a $100 dollar bill on the ground and arrest people who, in a momentary lapse of judgment, take the money.

What O'Keefe and Giles are doing isn't quite entrapment, but it isn't remotely the equivalent of a sting either, unless you assume that ACORN employees are routinely confronted with fake-looking pimp and prostitute duos who come into the office asking for advice on how to set up a prostitution business. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that real pimps and prostitutes don't usually wander into the offices of community services organizations and explicitly ask for help in setting up their illegal businesses. It's a safe bet that none of the employees filmed surreptitiously in these videos have ever encountered a situation like this before. So all these videos really show are people's instant reactions to a situation far removed from their everyday experience and training.

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The people caught in these videos were not engaged in deliberative activity, they were merely reacting to unusual provocation. The real test of their judgment was not what they said on the fly but what they did afterward, when the filmmakers had left the premises and they finally had a moment to process the encounter. Unfortunately, that moment is not on the tapes. We do know, however, that at least one of the employees captured on the video reported the duo to the police after they left the office (he was fired anyway). In another instance, the two were actually asked to leave and a police report was filed. Others undoubtedly concluded that it was a prank, either during the encounter or after having the chance to think about it for a while, and therefore shrugged it off and took no further action.

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The other point that is not being made, but should be, is that these ACORN workers had absolutely nothing to gain from helping out this pimp and prostitute duo. In a typical sting, the subject of the sting has some plausible motive for committing wrongdoing; they want drugs or sex or money, etc. In a sting directed at an company or organization, the goal is typically to catch employees engaged in illegal behavior that benefits that company or organization (such as bribing public officials or deceiving customers). That's not the case here. No conservative has bothered to even offer a theory as to why it would be in ACORN's interest to assist people in setting up prostitution rings. How would ACORN benefit from such activity? How would these individual employees benefit? What's in it for them?

ACORN employees are trained to help poor people (the vast majority of whom are not criminals) deal with common problems. So, at worst, what you have here are examples of employees who, eager to help whomever comes through the door, offered to help people whom they should not have (and without a promise of anything in return). There's no quid pro quo even alleged. And again, what's captured on film are not final decisions, but instant reactions.

But based on these "stings" a number of employees lost their jobs and an entire community service organization has been vilified to the point where its future as an organization is severely threatened. Everyone should find that troubling, because it could happen to any organization or company.

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And until the press realizes that this technique can be used to slime just about any organization or company, and starts ignoring it or exposing it for the nonsense that it is, they'll continue to do it, destroying people's lives and reputations in the process.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE, 9:11 a.m. I missed this Page One post from yesterday on how Trey Grayson thinks the biggest threat facing all true murkins is ACORN.