The purpose of the County Legislature's Public Safety Committee meeting last week was to establish a process for interviewing public defender applicants and to distribute resumes. Television footage shows, however, that the evening dissolved into chaos and confrontation.

The video shows law-enforcement officers attempting to clear the room, but many audience members refuse to leave. Democratic State Assembly member David Gantt, with a small contingent, charges forward and is nearly handcuffed until another audience member intervenes, pushing the cuffs away. The dispute erupted after Republicans attempted to take the meeting behind closed doors. Democrats objected to the move, and walked out.

Observations:

• Although of mixed race, the audience at the meeting was predominately African-American.
• The Public Safety Committee is led by a white Republican majority, all representing suburban districts. There are two African-Americans on the panel: Democrats Willie Lightfoot and Calvin Lee Jr. Both represent city districts.
• The next public defender will be in charge of an office that defends the poorest among us, many of them members of a minority group.
• A major criticism of the public defender search is there isn't enough minority representation.

What does that all mean? Does it mean anything? Is race the issue no one wants to talk about in the public defender search?

"Nobody wants to be viewed as throwing the race card. Nobody wants to be looked at as being a radical," Lightfoot says. "No one, especially leaders of the black community, wants to be looked at as, every time we get in a jam, we want to throw out the racial card. In 2008, should we really have to do that?"

Many legislators, Lightfoot says, don't care about the propriety of the public defender search because the outcome won't affect their constituency. Lightfoot calls it an insensitivity similar to that displayed when the county cut funeral and burial funding for the indigent.

"It's the same population," he says.

While most of what has been said and written about the public defender search concerns the role of politics, Lightfoot says two factors are really driving this game.

"It's not just race, but economic status - which might look like race," he says. "It's really the poor against the rich. That's what I believe is under this."