B4 THE BULLETIN • SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Fee increases for
Lower Deschutes
do make sense
B
oating on the Lower Deschutes River has plenty of fans.
The fees charged for it? Not so much.
But the Bureau of Land Man-
agement’s rationale for new fees for
boating and camping is simple. Its
costs for upkeep are rising. Its reve-
nues aren’t keeping up.
The BLM’s annual costs are
$730,000-$760,0000. With the cur-
rent fee structure, the BLM estimates
it would bring in just shy of $500,000
in 2022. With the new fee proposal,
it would bring in about $650,000.
Right now a boater pass costs
$2 per person per night for most
days plus another $6 transaction
fee for recreation.gov. On Saturdays
and Sundays from Memorial Day
through Labor Day, the fee is $8 per
person plus the $6 transaction fee.
You can get them on recreation.gov.
The new fee: $5 per person per
day every day plus the $6 transac-
tion fee.
The switch to a $5 fee is not a
brand new idea. The BLM had
planned to move forward on imple-
menting it last year. The pandemic
brought that to a halt. Jeff Kitchens,
the Deschutes field manager for the
BLM, said the BLM did not believe
it would be fair to do when so many
people were struggling. He told the
John Day-Snake Resource Advi-
sory Council on Thursday that the
BLM wanted to give people plenty of
time to comment. That was a smart
move.
There is also a proposed brand
new fee for campers. Boater use
levels on the Lower Deschutes have
not changed dramatically. Hiking
and biking has. Many of them use
the river camping sites. Kitchens
said 10 to 15 years ago you might
see five to 10 visitors hike or bike
through Segment 4, which is Macks
Canyon to Heritage Landing. Now
that many people hike or bike
through in a few hours on some
weekends.
The proposal is for a new $5 per
person per night camping fee. Peo-
ple who have a boater pass or who
are already paying a fee for a devel-
oped camping site would not have
to pay.
Neither of these fee changes are fi-
nal, yet. The BLM plans on opening
them up to public comments begin-
ning in March, Kitchens said. The
target implementation would not be
until 2022.
Caring for public lands costs
money. As much as we don’t like
to pay user fees to access them,
fees charged to the users of the
land make sense. You may also
want to send a note to Oregon
Sens. Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley
and Rep. Cliff Bentz asking them
to ensure the BLM has adequate
funding, so it doesn’t need to rely
on user fees.
Historical editorials:
Unbreakable Bend jail
e e
Editor’s note: The following editorials originally
appeared in the Feb. 3, 1905 edition of what
was then called The Bend Bulletin.
“O
f course Bend will have a
jail that it will be impos-
sible to break,” remarks
the acute Salem Statesman.
…
In considering the statement of
the Bend post office, which appears
in another column, it should be a re-
membered that a year ago Bend was
too insignificant to have a post office
at all. Now its business is next to the
largest in Central Oregon.
…
If Oregon must have a conven-
tion to revise its Constitution, this
year is as good as any for it. If it
is to be the device for eliminat-
ing the initiative and referendum,
amendment, however, it is ill-
timed, for that feature of the con-
stitution has not yet proved a fail-
ure in the estimation of the people
who voted for it and they would
not adopt a new constitution in
which it should not be found. A
few years later all might be willing
to drop that novelty. And again
they might not.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
NASA/Bill Ingalls
NASA’s Perseverance team cheers the landing. We cheer with them.
Neither AI nor humans can properly
moderate content on Facebook, Twitter
BY CATHY O’NEIL
Bloomberg
I
wouldn’t want to work at a social
media company right now. With
the spotlight on insurrection plan-
ning, conspiracy theories and oth-
erwise harmful content, Facebook,
Twitter and the rest will face renewed
pressure to clean up their act. Yet no
matter what they try, all I can see are
obstacles.
My own experience with content
moderation has left me deeply skep-
tical of the companies’ motives. I
once declined to work on an artificial
intelligence project at Google that
was supposed to parse YouTube’s fa-
mously toxic comments: The amount
of money devoted to the effort was so
small, particularly in comparison to
YouTube’s $1.65 billion valuation, that
I concluded it was either unserious or
expected to fail. I had a similar experi-
ence with an anti-harassment project
at Twitter: The person who tried to
hire me quit shortly after we spoke.
Since then, the problem has only
gotten worse, largely by design. At
most social media companies, content
moderation consists of two compo-
nents: a flagging system that depends
on users or AI, and a judging system
in which humans consult established
policies. To be censored, a piece of
problem. More recently, Facebook
content typically needs to be both
introduced its Oversight Board, a
flagged and found in violation. This
purportedly independent group of
leaves three ways that questionable
experts who, at their last meeting,
content can get through: It can be
flagged but not a violation, a violation considered a whopping five cases
questioning the company’s content
but not flagged, and neither flagged
moderation decisions — a pittance
nor considered a violation.
compared with the fire
Plenty falls through
of content that
these cracks. People
AI was covering for hose
Facebook serves its us-
who create and spread
toxic content spend
the inevitable failure ers every day. And last
Twitter intro-
countless hours figuring
of user moderation, month,
duced Birdwatch, which
out how to avoid getting
essentially asks users to
flagged by people and
and now official
write public notes pro-
AI, often by ensuring it
or outsourced
viding context for mis-
reaches only those users
leading content, rather
who don’t see it as prob-
moderation is
lematic. The companies’
than merely flagging it.
policies also miss a lot
So what happens if the
supposed to be
of bad stuff: Only re-
notes are objectionable?
covering for the
cently, for example, did
In short, for a while
Facebook decide to re-
AI
was covering for the
inevitable failure of AI.
move misinformation
inevitable failure of user
about vaccines. And
moderation, and now
sometimes the policies themselves are official or outsourced moderation is
objectionable: TikTok has reportedly
supposed to be covering for the in-
suppressed videos showing poor, fat
evitable failure of AI. None are up to
or ugly people, and has been accused
the task, and events such as the capi-
of removing ads featuring women of
tal riot should put an end to the era of
color.
plausible denial of responsibility. At
Time and again, the companies
some point these companies need to
have vowed to do better. In 2018,
come clean: Moderation isn’t working,
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told
nor will it.
e e Cathy O’Neil is a Bloomberg columnist.
Congress that AI would solve the
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Police aren’t always heroes or villains — but change is needed
BY ROSA BROOKS
Special to The Washington Post
I
n the middle of former Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s impeach-
ment trial, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi took time out to draft legis-
lation giving Congressional Gold
Medals to the U.S. Capitol Police and
the D.C. Metropolitan Police De-
partment. Pelosi, D-Calif., was lavish
in her praise of police actions on Jan.
6, when officers defended the Cap-
itol from an insurrection staged by
far-right Trump supporters. During
the crisis, Pelosi told her colleagues,
officers “risked and gave their lives
to save ours. … The outstanding
heroism and patriotism of our he-
roes deserve and demand our deep-
est appreciation.”
For D.C. police officers — and of-
ficers across the United States — it
was a confounding turn of events.
After the May 25, 2020, killing of
George Floyd by Minneapolis police,
nationwide protests decried Ameri-
can policing as racist and brutal, and
the heavy-handed, militarized police
response to the protests throughout
the summer drew further condem-
nation. Activists called on cities to
abolish or, at least, “defund” the po-
lice, and within weeks, politicians
in numerous cities were pledging to
trim police department budgets. Pe-
losi and other congressional leaders
were calling for “transformational,
structural change to end police bru-
tality.” After the failed insurrection,
however, cops were suddenly heroes:
“martyrs for democracy,” as Pelosi
put it.
When it comes to policing, such
whiplash is par for the course. U.S.
political culture and rhetoric tend
to frame things in terms of binary
oppositions: Either cops are selfless,
underappreciated heroes, or they’re
brutal, racist thugs. Either we should
double their budgets and put more
cops on the streets, or we should de-
fund or abolish the police.
But the failed insurrection simul-
taneously reinforced and challenged
both these diametrically opposed
views — which means that maybe
Americans are finally ready to rec-
ognize that the truth about policing
can’t be reduced to simplistic sound
bites. Policing in America is like a
messy ball of yarn: There’s heroism
and sacrifice, and there’s racism and
brutality, and it’s all tangled up to-
gether.
In 2016, I joined the MPD Reserve
Corps in Washington to find out
what it was like on the other side of
the “thin blue line.” I wanted to un-
derstand how American police of-
ficers explain and justify their roles
to themselves, and how their stories
compare to media and popular nar-
ratives about policing.
As a sworn, armed MPD reserve
officer, I went from six months as a
recruit at the D.C. Metropolitan Po-
lice Academy to several years of pa-
trol shifts in Washington’s 7th Police
District, one of the poorest, most
crime-ridden sections of the nation’s
capital. During parades, protests,
details and special events, such as
the 2017 presidential inauguration,
I worked across the city — and what
I found, of course, was not a single
story, but a thousand messy, over-
lapping and sometimes conflicting
stories.
Police officers, in my experience,
are no more monolithic than any
other group of people. Like the rest
of us, most cops try to be decent
people and make the communi-
ties in which they work safer, better
places. And like the rest of us, even
the best cops don’t always succeed.
Police stop vehicles for broken
taillights and improper right turns
on red because, as a society, we have
decided, through our elected repre-
sentatives, to have armed, uniformed
state agents hand out tickets for civil
traffic infractions, even though most
of us would find it excessive and bi-
zarre to send cops to people’s doors
to enforce IRS filing deadlines or
residential zoning codes. Police deal
— often poorly — with addiction,
homelessness and mental illness be-
cause as a society, we have decided
we’re unwilling to fund adequate so-
cial services.
As a society, we also ask police of-
ficers to take on a dizzying and of-
ten incompatible array of roles: We
want them to be guardians, warriors,
social workers, mediators, mentors
and medics, often all in the course
of a single patrol shift. We want
them to show compassion to victims
and be tough enough to take on vi-
olent criminals; we want them to
treat protesters with courtesy even if
they’re sneered and spat at; we want
them to keep marauding mobs from
invading the Capitol. We want them
to understand mental illness, get
guns off the streets, anticipate and
respond to political violence, solve
homicides and keep old ladies from
getting mugged — all without being
overbearing, rude or using excessive
force, and all while working punish-
ingly long shifts in uncomfortable
and often dangerous conditions, un-
der the constant, unforgiving glare
of the media spotlight.
Few people can consistently do
all these things well. I’ve seen cops
manage to do six impossible things
before breakfast — offering comfort
to crime victims and deftly dees-
calating domestic conflicts — then
completely lose it on the next call,
cursing and yelling and slamming
doors over trivial provocations.
One of my partners, a young of-
ficer, wept when his efforts at CPR
couldn’t save an elderly man whose
heart had given out. Then, two
hours later, he dismissed residents
of a neighborhood we worked in as
“animals.”
The fact that violent crime is real
and sometimes requires a coercive
response, or that cops are every
bit as contradictory and human as
other Americans, doesn’t justify po-
lice abuses, or the racism so deeply
baked into our criminal justice sys-
tem.
If anything, my years as a part-
time cop left me convinced that we
need to change nearly everything
about policing, from how we re-
cruit and train officers to how po-
lice departments are structured and
overseen. We also need to radically
overhaul our criminal justice sys-
tem, which too often reinforces and
amplifies racial and economic ineq-
uities.
e e
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown
and the author of “Tangled Up in Blue: Policing
the American City,” to be published in February.