REVISED SEAL IN TEXAS: THE DELETED PART IS IN THE FORM OF A CROSS, FUNNILY ENOUGH

Texas Tech may face a fight from cotton farming alumni after the school announced Wednesday it would pluck the symbolic tufts of the West Texas crop from the school seal. The changes are part of a broader marketing campaign to be launched early next year that Tech officials hope will improve the university's national reputation. Chancellor David Smith refuted rumors Wednesday that the school was abandoning its past for the marketing effort. "It is not undoing tradition, it is not undoing pride," Smith said of the changes. "We need a platform to celebrate what Texas Tech is accomplishing as a system."

But Eddie Smith, chairman of the Plains Cotton Cooperative Association and a Tech alumnus who was honored as an outstanding agriculturist last year by the university, said the omission ignored the major contributions cotton made to Tech. "There's a lot of us that are tied to this university that are not going to let it slide by," Smith said. School and system officials announced the changes Wednesday in an effort to counter an anonymous e-mail and message board campaign rallying opposition to the revisions.

The Internet campaign sparked rumors of school officials abandoning the Double T trademark while retooling school marketing materials. In a hastily organized news conference held in response to e-mails and phone calls from concerned alumni, school officials stressed that the beloved Double T logo stitched onto merchandise, emblazoned on the sides of buildings and printed in the letterhead of the press releases distributed Wednesday would not be retired. "The Double T has an indefinite contract," said Craig Wells, senior associate athletics director. "It's going to be around forever and ever and ever." But it will no longer represent the academic side of the university. A new seal was designed by an Austin firm as part of a broader marketing campaign that has a $450,000 budget this year. The seal will be featured on academic communications, Chancellor Smith said.

Cotton bolls that form a cross in the middle of the school shield and represent the 10 cotton-producing counties around Tech were removed from the new design. Instead, a more general "vine-like" image will represent all of agriculture.

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FAT TAX IN DETROIT

Would you like fries with that? Either way, the Detroit city treasury would like a bite. Faced with a $300 million budget hole, and with traditional revenue-raising options largely exhausted, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hoping people won't mind forking over a few extra cents for their Big Macs and Whoppers.

Kilpatrick is preparing to ask Detroit voters to approve a 2 percent fast-food tax — on top of the 6 percent state sales tax already applied to restaurant meals. The mayor says consumers will barely notice the slight increase at the cash register, but critics say the tax would unfairly burden the poor and hamper economic development in the city.

Other cities and states have special taxes on prepared food, and some have tried "snack taxes" on foods such as cookies and chips. In New York, Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has proposed a 1 percent tax on junk food, video games and TV commercials to fund anti-obesity programs. But the Detroit assessment would be the country's first tax specifically targeting fast-food establishments if approved, the National Restaurant Association said.

Opponents of the Detroit idea have been quick to call it a "fat tax" — a penalty on unhealthy foods. Men's Health Magazine dubbed Detroit the nation's fattest city in 2004, though it slid to No. 3 in the 2005 rankings. However, the tax would apply not only to fat-laden burgers, fries and desserts, but to anything sold at a fast-food establishment, even salads.....

Young people and senior citizens are big consumers of fast food and would bear an unfair share of the tax's burden, some critics contend. "It's really going to fall upon poor people harder," said Robert Wassmer, a professor of public policy and economics at California State University, Sacramento. Not only would the tax be regressive, but a lack of transportation could make it harder for some low-income residents to cross city boundaries to escape the tax, he said.

The restaurant industry says the idea is also unfair to businesses. "We think it's extremely counterproductive to say to those people who have provided jobs, who have provided growth, `We're going to levy on you a special tax that we don't levy on anyone else,'" said Andy Deloney, public affairs director of the Michigan Restaurant Association.

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Cops and Gender P.C. -- an often fatal combination

Take the Rodney King arrest. When an intoxicated King zoomed past California Highway Patrol officer Melanie Singer, she started a high-speed pursuit. By the time he stopped, several LAPD cops had joined the chase and watched as Singer, not a physically prepossessing woman, approached the large, bizarrely acting King with her gun drawn. This dangerous tack was too much for the LAPD cops, who pulled rank, told Singer to "stand back," and took over the arrest. The most experienced officers on the scene became upset when Singer approached King with her gun drawn. They envisioned bad consequences--either an unarmed suspect needlessly shot (as would apparently happen a few months later in a Washington, D.C. case) or (as we just saw in Atlanta) a large criminal taking a small female cop's gun and inflicting mayhem. Or, one other LAPD cop worried, the criminal may lunge at the woman and cause the less experienced officers at the scene to shoot them both in a desperate attempt to save her.

The Rodney King arrest involves many other issues besides female cops, but in Official Negligence, his definitive history of the case, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon makes clear that the LAPD veterans were legitimately disturbed at Melanie Singer's actions. King's reaction to the fact that it was a female cop barking orders at him was part of the problem. He was disrespectful and sexual: "He grabbed his butt with both hands and began to shake and gyrate his fanny in a sexually suggestive fashion," Stacey Koon of the LAPD stated. The chain of events that followed led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots that raged for six days, leaving 34 people dead, 1,032 injured, and millions of dollars of property stolen and destroyed.

A smaller but also traumatic incident that occurred in Washington, D.C. a couple of months after King's arrest was perhaps a more representative example of the same problem. In the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, whose population includes many poor Latino immigrants, two Hispanic men were drunk and disorderly, according to the initial police report. As they were being arrested by two female police officers, Girsel Del Valle and her rookie partner Angela Jewell, a third man, Daniel Enrique Gomez, became disorderly. As the officers tried to subdue Gomez, a fourth man began to assault the cops, who by now numbered three women and one man. Gomez was not fully handcuffed; he pulled out a knife and thrust it at Jewell. Drawing her revolver while backing away, she ordered him to drop the knife. He lunged at her, and she shot him.

That is not, however, the way other Latinos who were watching the arrest saw things, and they became angry because they thought the shooting unjustified. Some said that they saw no knife and that the man who was shot had both hands behind his back, although they admitted he was walking toward Jewell and using foul language. Within hours, riots broke out in Mount Pleasant and adjoining neighborhoods and continued through the next two nights, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to cars and businesses.

At trial, the police dropped any claim that Gomez had lunged at Jewell with the knife, and the "fourth man" disappeared from the story. Given these discrepancies and the fierce anger of nearby observers, one may suspect that Gomez, who was drunk and probably using foul language, while approaching Jewell, managed both to offend and frighten her, which led to her shooting him, perhaps unnecessarily.

A veteran detective, who asked to remain anonymous, reports having seen similar problems again and again. He points out that very few men measuring five to five-and-a-half feet tall, 100 to 130 pounds, are hired, yet most female officers fit that description and are in danger of being overpowered by big thugs. (A few years ago, the LAPD, in reaction to pressure from feminist groups, even dropped its requirement that officers be at least five feet tall.) "Most bad guys fall into two categories," reports the detective. "Either they show no respect to female cops because they know they can take them, or they fear female cops because they know the women know they can be taken and will shoot quickly."

He also observes that typical men who become cops "have already been exposed to the fist fights, pushing matches, and other physical contact of the job. They also read other men better--the physical stances, clenching of fists, rolling up on the balls of the feet to get ready to fight." Most male cops, but few female ones, have also played contact sports and had some exposure to firearms. They've bloodied and been bloodied by others. He says male cops, in his experience, are also more likely to enjoy gun practice and physical exercise, and more likely to be experienced and competent at the aggressive high-speed driving sometimes required of officers. Conversely, most of the women couldn't carry a wounded officer to safety, though he adds, "Some would try. It isn't a case of bravery or sacrifice. It's a matter of strength."

Policing is fundamentally a helping profession, and the non-violent parts of the job involve talking with people and human relations--things that women are generally better at than men. For some crimes, like domestic violence, women are better at dealing with it in almost all cases. Women also do a better job building cases based on detailed evidence, like solving car break-ins. Male cops are perpetrators in 95 percent of police bribery cases. They're not as good at report writing (the key to getting bad guys locked up). Good departments, therefore, need both male and female officers.

The key, then, is for police forces to respect the reality that male and female officers are not interchangeable. The real-world results of pretending are ugly. They can be seen on the Atlanta videotape showing Brian Nichols smashing a grandmother's head on the courthouse floor, sending her to the hospital in critical condition before he sends four more victims to the morgue.

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