Look at the Stonecutters

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps as much as a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know that it was not that blow that did it — but all that had gone before." -- Jacob Riis

What we often see as the cause of protests (and, yes, riots) related to police shootings is an inciting incident, whether it's Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Walter Scott in North Charleston. But what we're really seeing is the 101st blow of the rock. What most of us don't see are the 100 blows that came before.

And it's often easy to dismiss that 101st blow, either by confusion of facts or by distraction. Probably only Officer Darren Wilson knows what really happened with Michael Brown in Ferguson, but it's safe to say that it's not a clear-cut case. With Eric Garner on Staten Island and others, it could be argued (poorly) that police are doing what's necessary to bring an unwilling citizen under arrest. That's where much of the media and the public lose their interest.

What gets far less coverage is the follow-up. The follow-up investigations of the police departments in Ferguson and Chicago have revealed that the protesters have had reason to be upset.

In Ferguson, the report by the Justice Department found, to name a few: 1) In a 2-year period, when people were arrested for "resisting arrest" after a traffic stop, they were black 100 percent of the time. 2) When police dogs had biting incidents, the person who was bit was black 100 percent of the time. 3) Black people make up about 2/3 of the population of Ferguson, but accounted for 93 percent of the arrests. 4) The disproportionate number of arrests, tickets and use of force against black people cannot be explained away by the rate in which the races commit crimes except through racist actions of the police department.

In Chicago, the investigation by an independent task force found "The community's lack of trust in CPD is justified." Roughly 3 in 4 people shot in Chicago were black. About 3 in 4 people tasered by police in Chicago were black. Nearly 3 in 4 people pulled over for street stops that didn't lead to arrest were black. In case you're wondering how many people in Chicago are black, it's about 1 in 3.

And while numbers are one thing, stories are just as powerful: One black man in Ferguson, sitting in his car after playing basketball, was blocked in by a police officer, asked to show ID and give his Social Security number (why?). The officer then accused the man of being a pedophile, patted him down, and wrote him eight violations of the city code, including Making a False Declaration — for saying his name was "Mike" when his driver's license said "Michael." The man lost his job because of the violations.

I've heard arguments from people that try to justify the police in these situations, usually with an argument that amounts to "Black people commit more crimes." This is both untrue and

These are the hundred blows that come before protests. These are the stories and figures that don't get the attention from the media and from the public. These investigations and task force reports often don't come out for months or years until after the "101st blow," but they document the 100 that come before. When it comes to major racial incidents, the media and public often answer "why did this happen?" by pointing at the most recent incident. Instead, the real answer was years in the making.

Jacob Riis — Secret Awesome Journalist

That quote by Jacob Riis hangs in the locker room of the San Antonio Spurs and also next to Kobe Bryant's locker. So who was this guy, who is so quoted by athletes? Turns out, he's not talking about basketball.

A Danish immigrant in the late 1800s, Riis did odd jobs until he got hired as a crime reporter for the New York Tribune, covering areas nicknamed "Death's Thoroughfare" and "Bandit's Roost." (Quick lament: We don't have awesome names for areas anymore.) He became a photographer and a writer documenting crime, tenements and poverty in the slums of New York. He wrote about the bad water supply and probably helped prevent a cholera outbreak. He wrote books on the subject throughout the 1890s, including "How the Other Half Lives" and "Children of the Poor," becoming one of the best-known authors and lecturers of his day.

His other claim to fame is that he befriended a New York City police commissioner in the 1890s. This commissioner asked Riis, who knew the town well by then, to show him the city's crime problems. On their first tour of nighttime patrols, they found 9 of 10 patrolmen missing, which Riis wrote about in the paper. That commissioner then issued a series of reforms for the NYPD, and later said he was tempted to call Riis "the best American I ever knew" and praised him. You might have picked up that I haven't mentioned this NYC police commissioner's name. That's because he was police commissioner in 1895, then New York governor in 1899, and vice president in 1901 before succeeding to the Presidency later in 1901. His name was Theodore Roosevelt.

Quick Thoughts on Tuesday's New York primaries

GOP: Watch to see if and where Donald Trump makes 50 percent of the vote in New York. The state and districts award winner-take-all if someone makes 50 percent. If not, it's proportional. I don't think Trump will make 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination before the convention, but New York could help him close the gap and make it harder to deny him the nomination at the convention.

Democrats: Bernie Sanders has "momentum," but it's not as good as you'd think. He still has to beat Hillary Clinton in big states and states with a large minority population. New York is one such state. Sanders has only won one state with a black population greater than 10 percent — Michigan. If he really has momentum, he'll win New York with 60 percent of the vote. But don't expect that. Clinton's winning by double digits in all the polls. She'll clinch the nomination, but won't wrap it up until California votes in June.

Summary Judgments

I've highlighted a lot of good journalism in these parts, but sometimes a story is so over-the-top terrible that it needs to be noted. This story on Adam LaRoche (from Fort Scott) is that story. I really liked the takedown by Deadspin's Drew Magary on it, destroying the false mythology that ESPN tried to create.   •  •  •   This story is a good reason why I hate voter ID laws. "The right to vote... is not defeated by the fact 99 percent of other people can secure the necessary credentials easily," the judge wrote. Voter impersonation (what's stopped by voter ID laws) almost never happens. One study found 31 possible incidents over 14 years, nationwide. Meanwhile, if you say that the laws only impact 1 percent of the voting population, and there are 4.4 million people in your state, then you're affecting 44,000 people (This example is Wisconsin). If you truly care about the "integrity of the vote," focus on absentee voting, which has far more incidents.   •  •  •   Congrats to my Oklahoma Daily colleague Baxter Holmes, who has wrapped up covering Kobe Bryant's final year for ESPN.  •  •  •   Roland crawled under their little kid-sized rocking chair this week. He then got himself stuck. Poor kid.