The Jefferson High School Handcuffing Incident
What a battle waged in the edit history of a Wikipedia article can tell us about the freedom of information.
It was August 2020. I had been following the protests unfolding in Portland for a few weeks, and was doing a cursory google to find more information on why Jami Resch stepped down as Portland City Police Chief in June 2020. Through that, just in checking references, I came across the wikipedia article for Chuck Lovell, Portland’s current acting Chief of police ever since.
It detailed an incident in 2006 in which Lovell, at the time a School Resource Officer (SRO) for Jefferson High, was responding to a dress code violation by two black girls.
The timeline of events as logged in a court case 3 years later included Lovell dragging them to an office, at which point one of the girls started crying profusely and having a mental breakdown. In response, Lovell commanded her to stop crying, and when she refused to comply, handcuffed her and placed his hands around her neck.
At least, that’s the best I can I remember it.
In reading this, I thought it was so egregious, and so obviously related to the ongoing protests, that I could not believe I hadn’t learned of it before.
So I tweeted out trying to raise awareness, and a little voice in my head kept telling me to screenshot the court documents.
I refrained, thinking “Why would I need to provide documentation, if people want to fact-check me, they can just go to the wikipedia article themselves. And why would I need to screenshot the documents in the first place? The site I got it from is an entire online database, connected to multiple libraries and colleges, it’s not going away — and again, it’s linked in the wikipedia article.”
Sixteen months later, I returned to Chuck Lovell’s Wikipedia page to find all reference to the incident erased.
Not to worry, I know that Wikipedia has public edit history, I’ll just go back and find the link!
Well. That’s. Incredibly unfortunate.
No issue, I’ll just search “Chuck Lovell neck hold” and variations upon and find a good article that way. It won’t have the actual court documents, but it’ll be good enough.
The court filing shows that in March 2006, the student and her cousin came to school late and inappropriately dressed, according to the city. The cousin screamed a vulgarity at the school’s dean of students and the two ignored a campus security officer’s request to stop and sit down, according to the city.
When the student refused to sit down, Lovell and another Portland police officer were alleged to have grabbed the student in a neck hold before handcuffing her and placing her in a chair in a detention room at the school.
Her mother was called and the student was released to her, according to court records. A jury found in 2009 that Lovell and the other officer hadn’t violated the student’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unlawful seizure or detention.
Oh. The only actual article that even has the phrase “[neck hold/neckhold/chokehold/choke hold] has it just in a 4 paragraph aside about a budget hearing.
Wait, hold on just a second, that wasn’t the only source listed in the wikipedia article, let’s see here. Perry Zirkel? Oh, googling his name, he looks to be a professor. This “Handcuffing Discipline” will likely also only be partially related to the Jefferson High School incident, but still, it’s a law professor, it’s probably still better than my current alternative!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27755676?refreqid=excelsior%3A35ff7ebb4d4fdae7918b4d990b67457d
Oh, it’s only available on JSTOR. I… still do not have a library card. Oh well.
Hang on — I’m just looking for court documents, right? That might be available just on the Oregon government website.
Wait, maybe I could contact Dr. Zirkel for a copy of the article.
Now, there are a lot of things that would have lead me to what I was looking for.
Access to information now relies more and more on knowing the exact keywords, or more often, just happening to use the right ones. It relies on hoping that if anybody tried to hide it, they didn’t succeed. On hoping that there isn’t any linkrot. Hoping that thousands of strangers continue to donate to sites like Wikipedia and Internet Archive. That if anybody did take the time to blog about it, their sites are still up. That if their sites are still up, that they aren’t buried beneath too many keyword-trolling sites.
It’s Where those who want to find the truth will, albeit with a harder time than they used to, and those who do not go out of their way are given a skewed and sanitized version of events.
sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27755676?refreqid=excelsior%3A35ff7ebb4d4fdae7918b4d990b67457d
https://publicaccess.courts.oregon.gov/PublicAccess/default.aspx
