Roundup: New Jersey paid to train cops in racism, abuse; another state bans excited delirium; FBI neglects white supremacist and eventual mass shooter to investigate George Floyd protesters
Here’s your roundup of the latest in the world of policing, criminal justice, and civil liberties.
Policing
The A.P. goes deep on in-custody police deaths that involved “non-lethal” or “less lethal” force.
Republican politicians are demanding that prosecutors be removed from office for prosecuting police who use excessive force.
A lawsuit claims that NYPD officials ran a smear campaign against a police critic — by using details of her rape that were supposed to be confidential.
In Minnesota alone, 54 people were killed in police chases over a five-year period. About half were innocent bystanders. Of all the police chases in the state over that period, only 6 percent involved someone suspected of a felony.
Over the last several years, LAPD officers have shot people who were “armed” with a plastic fork, a wooden board, a cell phone (twice), a lighter (also twice), part of a bicycle, and a car part.
Police department apologizes for recruiting ad likening law enforcement work to the Call of Duty video game.
Minister describes aftermath of a DUI arrest. The officer “smelled alcohol” on his breath and claimed he failed two sobriety tests. Lab tests showed he had nothing in his system.
Video appears to show a Tallahassee police officer planting a liquor bottle during a DUI arrest.
When police encounter people with autism
After Tyre Nichols death, Memphis passed a series of reforms, including barring police from making pretextual traffic stops. Republicans in the legislature and our Republican governor just repealed those reforms, and prohibited any other city in the state from enacting similar policies. This of course comes on the heels of the state legislature disbanding civilian oversight boards like the one voters overwhelmingly approved here in Nashville.
Speaking of which, Florida Republicans are about to strip oversight boards of their powers, too.
Nearly two years later, the San Bernardino County, California sheriff’s office finally released video footage of an incident in which its deputies killed a teen girl who had been kidnapped by her father. You’ll be surprised to learn that the footage contradicts police accounts of the incident.
Raleigh police tell a judge that it would be “dangerous” to release body camera footage of a mistaken raid that terrorized an innocent woman and her infant child. Why would it be dangerous? Because it might damage the police officers’ reputation. North Carolina Special Superior Court Judge Matthew Houston agreed with the police, ruling that there is "no compelling public interest" to release the footage. Related: A study published last year found that police agencies in North Carolina are routinely violating the knock-and-announce requirement. (Note: Houston appears to have obtained his position after Republicans in the state legislature created new judicial positions speficially to dilute the appointing powers of the state’s Democratic governor.)
For years, the state of New Jersey paid tens of thousands of dollars to a police training company run by an ex-cop who argued that citizens who record police on their cell phones should be “pepper sprayed, fucking tased, windows broken out, motherfucker.” (The grammar alone!) A state audit found that the company’s seminar “included over 100 discriminatory and harassing remarks by speakers and instructors, with repeated references to speakers’ genitalia, lewd gestures, and demeaning quips about women and minorities.” You can watch portions of the seminar here.
ATF agents in Arkansas shot and killed a man (who happened to be the director of a local airport) during a pre-dawn raid. The man’s wife, who was also home at the time, says they did not know the men raiding their home were police. The deceased was a gun collector, and was suspected of multiple gun sales and purchases that violated federal gun laws. Sure, there’s no history of violence, and we know where this guy works. But let's go ahead with the pre-dawn, door-busting tactics on a guy with a house full of guns in a residential area, anyway. What could go wrong?
Here’s more on the self-named “goon squad” of sheriff’s deputies who terrorized residents of Rankin County, Mississippi.
I don’t mean to sound partisan, but I think it’s probably bad when police officials stand behind Donald Trump as he makes bigoted, dehumanizing remarks about immigrants.
Here’s a look at the some of the successful programs that send mental health professionals instead of police when people call 911 to report someone in crisis.
The drug war
Don’t blame decriminalization for Oregon’s rise in overdose deaths.
Ron DeSantis just signed a bill — and lawmakers in at least two other states are considering bills — to make “fentanyl exposure” a felony. These laws are based on the myth that merely touching the drug can cause an overdose.
In better news, more states are (finally) moving to legalize fentanyl test strips, so illicit drug users can ensure the substances they purchase on the black market are safe. Except for Indiana, where a legalization bill failed.
Mixed news on drug testing after delivery front: Hospitals in Boston and Colorado are moving away from testing mothers and infants without consent. But in Oklahoma, women are increasingly being charged with neglect for using medicinal marijuana while pregnant.
Free speech/First Amendment
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to hear Deray McKesson’s appeal of a Louisiana Supreme Court ruling holding him liable for injuries suffered by a police officer during a Black Lives Matter protest. McKesson organized the protest, but had nothing to do with the officer’s injuries. If the court fails to hear the case, the lower court decisions could significantly chill the First Amendment rights of organizers, particularly in states already passing laws restricting the right to protest.
FBI agents visit a woman’s home to question her about anti-Israel (but not at all violent of threatening) posts to Facebook. In a recording, the agent told the woman that Facebook preemptively sent her posts to the bureau, and that the agency spends "every day, all day long" questioning people about social media posts.
Rep. Jim Jordan is threatening companies who have yet to purchase advertising on Trump’s crappy social media site. This is orders of magnitude more coercive and dangerous than anything revealed in the “Twitter files.”
Vanderbilt University had police arrest a journalist who was covering a student protest.
A Republican-sponsored Louisiana bill would make it a crime for state libraries to join the National Library Association.
In other library news, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ appointment to head the state library is a fire-and-brimstone evangelical minister who once said that “librarians who let children access books with LGBTQ+ themes would be better off outfitted with millstones around their necks and sunk to the bottom of the Arkansas River.” new culture warring chair of an Alabama town’s library board . . . cannot read or write.
Last month the state of Missouri told the Supreme Court that the government should never interfere with political speech. A week later, the state of Missouri sued Media Matters for publishing an investigation that was critical of Elon Musk.
Alabama’s legislature passed a bill that would not only “ban state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities, local boards of education and government agencies” and “limit the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ surrounding race, gender and identity,” it would bar state schools from inviting guest speakers on such topics.
There was a time when the political right (correctly) criticized the cultural left for glamorizing or valorizing Mao’s cultural revolution, a purge that killed 1-2 million people. Now it’s the right making a mockery of the carnage, comparing “wokeness” and DEI programs to the Red Guards.
Louisiana’s new governor wants to strip scholarships from student athletes who don’t pay deference to the national anthem.
Jails and prisons
More than 700 women have sued Rikers Island, alleging widespread sexual abuse.
Claremont, New Hampshire police officer Jon Stone was forced to resign after threatening to “kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children.” He as apparently upset because at the time he was under investigation for an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old girl. After resigning, he was hired as a prison guard. He currently serves as a Republican representative in the state legislature.
“No Showers, No Calls, Nothing but Cornflakes: What Prison Lockdown Is Like”
Here’s an in-depth investigation of how incarcerated people in New Jersey prisons are dying of treatable conditions.
An interesting look at what Texas prisons do — and don’t — allow women prisoners to read.
New York City will pay $28 million to the family of a man who suffered brain damage after trying to hang himself while prison staff stood around and watched.
In February, two separate reports found continuing abuse and neglect in the federal prison system, including “hundreds of preventable deaths of people in federal custody, and the persistent overuse of solitary confinement.”
The courts
An important roundup of state supreme court elections coming later this year.
Right-wing fearmongering and cowardice from a few Democratic senators appear to have tanked Biden’s nomination of Adeel Mangi to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Mangi would have been the first Muslim judge on any U.S. court of appeals.
A Marshall Project review found that in 2022, just 20 percent of defendants in two Mississippi criminal courts were given a lawyer before indictment. Nationally, about 80 percent of criminal defendants can’t afford attorney.
Forensics
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune looks at a longtime county medical examiner with a history of questionable testimony and death determinations.
Your latest forensics scandal comes courtesy of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, where a crime lab analyst was found to have intentionally manipulated DNA evidence. Thus far, authorities are re-examining more than 650 cases she may have tainted.
Colorado becomes the second state (after California) to ban “excited delirium” as a cause of death.
Immigration
Did President Biden commit “treason” by flying plane loads of migrants to various cities while surreptitiously encouraging to vote illegally in order to steal elections for Democrats — as Elon Musk has claimed? No. He did not do those things.
Here’s some righteous fire from Will Bunch, contrasting the immigrants killed in the Baltimore bridge collapse with the racist bile about immigrants we’re hearing from Republican politicians and the MAGA right.
Republican politicians and right-wing social media accounts posted a photo of a man after the shooting at the Kansas City Super Bowl celebration, accusing him of being an “illegal alien” who carried out the shooting. He’s now suing. It isn’t the first time this has happened. A couple months ago, the right went nuts over a photo of a migrant flipping off cameras as police arrested him for assaulting law enforcement. One sitting congressman, Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins, posted on X that the man should be thrown from a helicopter. Turns out, the man had good reason to be angry. He had nothing to do with the assault. He’d been falsely arrested, and the charges against him were later dropped.
Headline: “After initial outcry, neighbors say overflow shelters housing migrants hardly affect community life.” Imagine that!
If migrants are as dangerous and prone to criminality as Trump and the MAGA right claim, we’d expect to see a surge in crime in cities that take them in. Republican governors of border states make this precise in claim in justifying why they’re chartering buses and planes to ship migrants to blue cities. Here’s the thing: There’s no evidence that this is true. Crime has fallen in cities that have taken in large migrant populations — and more than in the cities that haven’t.
The death penalty
Former Pennsylvania death row prisoner Daniel Gwynn has been exonerated. Prosecutors claimed two eyewitnesses identified him in a photo lineup. It took decades for Gwynn’s attorneys to locate the lineup. It turns out that the witnesses couldn’t have identified Gwynn, because photo hadn’t been included in the lineup.
Georgia executed Willie Pye, a man whose trial attorney “was openly racist toward his own clients,” openly slept through his client’s trials, and called no witnesses during the guilt phase of Pye’s trial. Pye also had an IQ of 68.
Missouri is about to execute a man whose attorneys on average made $3.37 per hour to work on his case.
A California DA — who does not associated with the progressive prosecutor movement — is asking courts to reverse death sentences in his county.
Other stuff
There’s an emerging consensus that we need more automated traffic enforcement. Here’s a report arguing why we ought to rethink that consensus. Personally, I’d like to see more calming and engineering-based solution (think speed bumps, roundabouts, narrower roads in residential areas, etc.) But those can be expensive and politically difficult. What we do know is that when municipalities become reliant on fines and fees, there’s a temptation to prioritize revenue over public safety.
Virginia’s governor vetoed nearly two dozen criminal justice reform bills passed by the state legislature.
Meanwhile, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are rolling back criminal justice reforms.
Here’s an optimistic take on the state of criminal justice reform in the U.S. Not sure I fully buy it. But I’m glad someone has some hope.
The political right continues to mainstream and legitimize unapologetic white supremacists.
More from Tennessee Republicans: The legislature and governor terminated the entire board of directors of the state’s only publicly-funded historically black college. Republican Gov. Bill Lee will now get to appoint an entirely new board.
A Texas appeals court has thrown out the conviction and five-year prison sentence of a woman for voting without realizing that she wasn’t eligible.
Jean Maria Arrigo, RIP. Arrigo risked her career to expose how her fellow psychiatrists had participated in and helped cover up CIA torture after the September 11 attacks.
Some good news: After a record drop in the murder rate in 2023, murders seem to be down again so far this year — and at an even steeper rate. It’s increasingly looking like the 2020-2021 spike was an anomaly, probably related to the once-in-a-generation event that took a million lives and caused massive social upheaval.
This week in dog history
A beautiful story in the NY Times
Photo:
Paris, 2019
I read the story from the woman incarcerated in solitary in Texas, and the criminal censorship of her reading material has me enraged. I was one of those kids who didn't fit in well at school, but thanks to my teachers who slipped me adultish books in elementary school (like reading Sherlock Holmes), I survived. But oh, reading will help everyone, and to censor it mainly because of cruelty demonstrates how curdled we are as a nation.
I want to shine a little light on this Photo Requests From Solitary project that gets a mention in the excerpt on Texas prison censorship.
https://photorequestsfromsolitary.org/
Just a beautiful project all around.
(The Texas censorship is totally bonkers, by the way. Banning an entire issue of Good Housekeeping because it has a ad with a person wearing an adult diaper is beyond satire.)