The Steal by Rachel Shteir Page A

stigma to him that nothing could erase. Far from seeking to steal to make a political point, what happened that day is barely known. But that this man was victimized by the event shows the reality of shoplifting in the lives of those who have been accused of committing the crime. What Hoffman treated as a joke is grim and earnest. The shame and burden of being exposed as a shoplifter cannot be erased.
    In Louisville, Kentucky, the same year Hoffman was promoting Steal This Book , a young black photojournalist, Edward Charles Davis, was launching a legal battle over whether a police flyer showing photos of people who had been accused—but not convicted of—shoplifting violated their civil rights. The battle would eventually reach the Supreme Court.
    Born in Louisville, Davis began shooting pictures at an early age. His father was an army photographer, and his mother, a social worker, “took pictures as a hobby.” The family lived in West End, an African American neighborhood scorched by looting in the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Davis attended a local community college and then took to the street to document street protests and young people all over his city.
    On June 14, 1971, Davis was detained for allegedly shoplifting several eight-track tapes from Consolidated Sales, a five-and-dime store in the neighborhood. Years later, he said, “I don’t remember what happened.” Nineteen years old at the time of the alleged shoplifting, Davis was the only black photographer working for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times . Consolidated Sales declined to prosecute, and the police dismissed the charge. Eighteen months after Davis was detained, though, in November 1972, the police in Louisville and the Tri-Cities, which also comprises Bloomfield and Lafayette, Indiana, printed a flyer with the names and photos of ninety people identified as “subjects known to be active in the criminal field of shoplifting.” There was nothing unusual about this. Both police departments had been distributing such flyers for years. Edgar Paul, the police chief in Louisville, and his colleague in the nearby Tri-Cities distributed over a thousand copies of the flyer to local merchants. It did not distinguish between those who had been convicted of shoplifting and those merely detained by stores.
    The “active shoplifters” on the flyer are all races, ages; there are slightly more women than men. On every page the logo “active shoplifters” brands them even though their “activeness” did not necessarily lead to a conviction.
    When the flyer was circulated, Davis recalled, “my supervisor called me into my office and basically said, ‘You need to do something about this.’ ” Davis hired Daniel T. Taylor III, a lawyer whose specialty was—as an action against him brought before the Kentucky State Bar a few years earlier described it—“civil liberties, civil rights activists, the poor, the disadvantaged.”
    By the time Eddie Davis appeared in his office, Taylor had defended a number of civil rights cases and sixty-eight capital ones. He had become a pariah to some of the local judges, who tried to disbar him, in part for his connection to radicals like the man he called “the great William Kunstler” and in part for his contrarian temperament. In 1969, one such judge, a conservative who wore a pistol in court, tried to force Taylor’s disbarment for his theatrical outbursts. (Taylor admitted that “it was possible” that he was “antagonistic,” reciting Spoon River Anthology in his closing remarks, or staging an associate’s entrance with a briefcase with the word “Antics” written on it. He denied, however calling the judge “a dirty son of a bitch.”)
    In October 1971, a second conservative judge, hearing a case in which Taylor was defending a black man accused of murdering a white police officer, reprimanded the lawyer nine times for contempt. The judge eventually