Spotlight
Today, I break my constant obsession with energy to say that I am so pleased that
Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture!
It was the best picture! The very best!
An active press is ESSENTIAL to a free society!
Perhaps this is wrong of me, but I am also going to take this opportunity to boast of my daughter, Julia Angwin. She is an investigative reporter, and she won an award earlier this month.
I was thinking of writing a post about her award....then I thought....hey...people don't read your blog to read about your family.....then I heard that: SPOTLIGHT WON!
So I decided to write about our daughter's award.
Julia Angwin Award for Exposing Police Use of Flashbang Grenades.
Julia Angwin and Abbie Nehring of ProPublica investigated the use of "flashbang" grenades by police. The article Hotter than Lava was copublished with the Atlantic Monthly in January 2015.
In too many cases, the police toss these grenades into houses before entering the house themselves. These are not houses where someone is standing at a window, having a shoot-out with the police. These are houses where people are sleeping, and the police think (sometimes they have the wrong house) that someone in the house has committed a crime. Police in Little Rock throw flashbangs routinely. To quote the article:
Police department records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, as part of its nationwide survey of police militarization, showed that between 2011 and 2013, Little Rock police tossed flashbangs into homes on 112 occasions, or 84 percent of raids
About a month ago, Julia won a prize for Crime Reporting: http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/articles/2016-01-2016-top-national-crime-reporting-awards
In another recent development, the baby that was horribly burned by the flashbangs was awarded $3.6 million. I talked to Julia recently, and she said the child has already had close to $2 million in medical expenses.
http://www.11alive.com/story/news/local/2016/02/26/family-baby-bou-bou-awarded-36-million/81000674/
George and I are very proud to have a reporter in the family. We are delighted that Spotlight won the award for Best Picture.
Reporting is an important calling, and sometimes, a sacred duty.
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