The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that about half of the land in Oklahoma is within a Native American reservation, a decision that will have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases.
The court's decision hinged on the question of whether the Creek reservation continued to exist after Oklahoma became a state. "Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. The decision was 5-4, with Justices Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer in the majority, while Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. The ruling will have significant legal implications for eastern Oklahoma. Much of Tulsa, the state's second-largest city, is located on Muscogee (Creek) land. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation cheered the court's decision. "The Supreme Court today kept the United States' sacred promise to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of a protected reservation," the tribe said in a statement. "Today's decision will allow the Nation to honor our ancestors by maintaining our established sovereignty and territorial boundaries." In a dissenting opinion, Roberts, the chief justice, wrote that the decision "will undermine numerous convictions obtained by the State, as well as the State's ability to prosecute serious crimes committed in the future," and "may destabilize the governance of vast swathes of Oklahoma." Kevin Washburn is dean of the law school at the University of Iowa, where he teaches a course on federal Indian law — "It's basically 15 weeks of how the law in the United States has failed my people," he said. He served as assistant secretary of Indian affairs from 2012 to 2016, and he's a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. He called the court's ruling "a great decision." "For Indian people, their land is really important, and treaties are really important. They're sacred. And this reaffirms the sacredness of those promises and those treaties." "Now and then there's a great case that helps you keep the faith about the rule of law," he said. "And this is one of those." The ruling has a number of significant consequences for criminal law in the relevant portion of Oklahoma. The first is that going forward, certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court rather than state court, if a Native American is involved. So if a Native American is accused of a major crime in downtown Tulsa, the federal government rather than the state government will prosecute it. Less serious crimes involving Native Americans on American Indian land will be handled in tribal courts. This arrangement is already common in Western states like Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, said Washburn. Then there's the issue of past decisions — many of them are now considered wrongful convictions because the state lacked jurisdiction. A number of criminal defendants who have been convicted in the past will now have grounds to challenge their convictions, arguing that the state never had jurisdiction to try them. The case before the court, McGirt v. Oklahoma, concerned Jimcy McGirt, an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma who was convicted of sex crimes against a child on Creek land. In post-conviction proceedings, McGirt argued that the state lacked jurisdiction in the case and that he must be retried in federal court. The high court agreed. The ruling will affect lands of the Muscogee and four other Oklahoma tribes with identical treaties. Civil court issues are also affected. It's important to note that the case concerned jurisdiction, not land ownership. Ruling that these lands are in fact reservations "doesn't mean the tribe owns all the land within the reservation, just like the county doesn't own all the land within the county. In fact, it probably doesn't own very much of that land," Washburn explained. "That's not what a reservation is these days." Washburn compares a reservation to a county — terms that describe jurisdictional boundaries. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter released a joint statement with the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations on Thursday, indicating that they "have made substantial progress toward an agreement to present to Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice addressing and resolving any significant jurisdictional issues." Ian Heath Gershengorn, an attorney at Jenner & Block, argued McGirt's case before the Supreme Court. He said his team was thrilled with the result and had felt optimistic knowing that Gorsuch could prove to be the deciding vote. Gorsuch joined with the court's more liberal members in the decision. Prior to his appointment to the high court, Gorsuch was a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which frequently sees cases involving Native American lands. "Justice Gorsuch has made very clear in his short time on the bench that he takes the text deeply seriously," Gershengorn said. "And I think you saw that the core of his analysis today was a textual one. We felt like we had the right argument at the right time for the right justice."
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By Jeffrey Miron and Erin Partin
In response to the police killing of George Floyd, and to a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, protesters across the country have recently removed or vandalized statues celebrating Confederate soldiers, founding fathers, and explorers. Some cities and states have preemptively removed or covered such statues to reduce the likelihood of conflict. Those advocating for statue removal argue that honoring problematic historical figures is offensive to significant fractions of the citizenry, especially Blacks and other minorities. And many of the Confederate monuments being attacked were erected during the Jim Crow era, at moments of civil rights unrest. Those opposing statue removal argue that these statues preserve history and should therefore remain. Opponents also raise questions about where to draw the line regarding which statues should come down, or not. To resolve this debate, we should recognize that the statues in question were constructed by governments, at taxpayer expense, and typically reside on government land. No good argument exists, however, for why governments should be in the “statue” or “history” business. Government interventions in the economy and society can sometimes make sense as responses to monopoly, or externalities (e.g., pollution), or insufficient provision of public goods (e.g., national defense). Even in such cases, governments often overreach, but at least advocates of intervention can suggest that private mechanisms, on their own, might not produce a good outcome. None of the standard “market failures”, however, explains why governments need to build statues or any other kind of monument. Governments do so as a method of thought control, to nudge their citizens toward a particular view of the state. This is NOT a legitimate function of government. Books, movies, television, universities, private museums, and other private institutions, moreover, are more than adequate mechanisms to preserve and teach history. So while vandalism aimed at statues is ill advised, the lawful removal of government statues and monuments is good policy because governments should never have erected them in the first place. These expensive public works projects have no legitimate public benefit but do have a major negative: offending or even oppressing the citizenry, minorities in particular.
The pandemic has left Black and Hispanic households much worse off than white families
Nearly four in 10 Black and Hispanic households with children are struggling to feed their families during the coronavirus pandemic — a dramatic spike that is exacerbating racial inequities and potentially threatening the health of millions of young Americans.
The percentage of families who are considered food insecure has surged across all groups and is already much higher than during the depths of the Great Recession, according to new research by economists at Northwestern University based on Census Bureau data. But Black and Hispanic households with children are now nearly twice as likely to be struggling with food as similar white families. The wide racial gaps have persisted week to week throughout the pandemic, according to the analysis, first shared with POLITICO. The gap between Hispanic and white households now also appears to be worsening.
The figures are based on weekly surveys conducted by the Census Bureau — a little-noticed data tool that’s giving a near real-time look at the economic fallout of the pandemic as well as the stark racial disparities emerging.
Economists who closely track the numbers have been deeply concerned by the rise in rates. They are particularly dismayed that the figures are so high even after Washington has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on additional unemployment insurance and other forms of aid. “This is uncharted territory,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist and director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. “We’ve never seen food insecurity rates double, or nearly triple — and the persistent race gaps are just appalling.” The high levels of food insecurity do not appear to be improving even as some states reopen. The report comes as Democrats on Capitol Hill are again trying to get a 15 percent increase in food stamp benefits into the next coronavirus aid package. Republicans, however, have repeatedly refused to include it. When it comes to food insecurity, policymakers tend to pay special attention to households with children. Hunger among children can cause behavioral problems and lowered academic performance, which can lead to lifelong setbacks. The government defines food insecurity as a household that’s either uncertain about or unable to get enough food to feed everyone under their roof at some point during the year because of a lack of money. During the pandemic, the Census Bureau has been asking households about their ability to access food and feed their households during the past seven days. Economists at Northwestern have been analyzing the government’s weekly survey data and translating the figures so the findings can be compared to historical trends.
The last time the government formally measured food insecurity nationally was in 2018. At that time, about 25 percent of Black households with children were food insecure. Today, the rate is about 39 percent, according to the latest analysis by the Northwestern economists, which is set to be published this week. For Hispanic households with kids, the rate was nearly 17 percent in 2018. Today, it is nearly 37 percent.The rate for white households with children is significantly lower at 22 percent. Still, that is more than double what it was before the pandemic and much higher than it's been since the government began measuring food insecurity two decades ago.
“There’s just appalling levels of food insecurity and it’s clear there’s a disproportionate impact,” said Geri Henchy, director of nutrition policy and early childhood programs, at the Food Research & Action Center, an advocacy group based in Washington. “It’s infuriating.” When the earliest food insecurity estimates for children came out, about six weeks into the pandemic, the numbers were so high that anti-hunger advocates and some economists thought they had to be wrong. But the early numbers have since been backed up by other national surveys. In late April, one large national survey found that more than 17 percent of mothers reported that their children under the age of 12 were not getting enough to eat because the family couldn’t afford enough food — a 400 percent increase from the government’s last estimate in 2018. Asking specifically whether children in the household are getting enough to eat, rather than asking generally about access to food for the household, is an important distinction. Even in food insecure households, adults tend to shield children from going without food by skipping meals themselves or making other sacrifices. That can make it difficult to suss out the direct effects of economic woes on young people. But a few weeks ago, the Census Bureau added a specific question to its weekly survey to ask whether children in the household were “not eating enough” because the family couldn’t afford enough food in the past week. As the results have been released, the numbers are alarmingly consistent: About 16 percent of households with kids were reporting that children were not eating enough in the previous week, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project to be released this week. The racial disparities are stark, with 29 percent of Black households and 24 percent of Hispanic households reporting that children were not eating enough, compared with 9 percent of white households, according to the forthcoming report. For all groups, those levels are extremely high compared with before the pandemic. Before Covid-19 hit, food insecurity rates had been falling across all groups over the past several years, although major racial disparities have persisted for decades. Black households with children have about double the rate of food insecurity compared to white households with children. Rates for Hispanic households have varied somewhat. At some points in the wake of the Great Recession, for example, Hispanic families with children had higher rates of food insecurity than Black households with kids. But as the economy improved, the picture improved much faster for Hispanic families than for Black ones.Across the board, the rates are now higher than the worst period in the aftermath of the previous economic downturn. Even then, it took the better part of a decade for food insecurity rates to fall again. “The disparities are long-standing, but what Covid has uncovered is that disparities can widen rapidly,” said Sara Bleich, a policy professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “And like we saw in the Great Recession, it takes much longer for lower-income, harder-hit communities to recover.” Bleich contends that the statistics show that current Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — still known to many as food stamps — are not adequate. In previous coronavirus aid packages, Congress has approved additional emergency SNAP payments for millions of families and also launched a new program called Pandemic EBT, giving families with school-aged children a one-time payment to help make up for school meals they qualified for but missed during widespread shutdowns this spring. The boost targeted provides $5.70 more per child per every day of school missed. It’s not yet clear whether Congress will consider extending that program. Democrats are calling for SNAP benefits to be increased by 15 percent across the board until unemployment levels come down, an ask that’s so far been met with stiff resistance by Republicans who see it as a backdoor way to expand a social program they have long sought to shrink. Last week, however, one Republican, Rep. John Katko, who represents a New York district that leans Democrat, joined with Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to lead a letter to House and Senate leadership, backing the SNAP increase. A third of the House signed on. “We believe Congress must take up provisions to strengthen SNAP, bolster vulnerable communities across the country, and give a hand up to millions of people facing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic,” they wrote Setting a dangerous precedent, nation’s highest court allows bosses to discriminate against employees’ health care coverage based solely on personal, religious views
Primary Content In a 5-to-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling today allowing private companies to deny their employees insurance coverage for birth control under the Affordable Care Act’s preventive health provisions designed to greatly expand affordable health care services for all women in the U.S. Today’s decision holds that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ requirement that employers cover all FDA-approved forms of contraception violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) because, according to Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, the requirement violates “the sincerely held religious beliefs of the companies’ owners.” In a dissent that flatly refutes the majority’s reading of RFRA as “not plausible” and questions whether the precedent set in the decision can really be confined to either the issue of contraceptive coverage or specific contraceptives cited in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood’s complaints, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “I fear the Court has ventured into a minefield by its immoderate reading of RFRA.” Justice Ginsburg spells out the direct harm that this decision will cause women. As she notes, “the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage,” and “almost one-third of women would change their contraceptive method if costs were not a factor.” Ginsburg notes that the owners of Hobby Lobby “and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question. But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs. Working for Hobby Lobby or Conestoga, in other words, should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door.” Said Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights: “This astonishingly backward-looking decision makes one troubling pronouncement after another, turning back the clock on what should have been an historic measure of progress for women’s health and empowerment. “The court has given bosses the power to dictate how their employees can and cannot use their health insurance—allowing them to intrude into their employees’ private decisions based on whatever personal beliefs their employers happen to hold. “Especially disturbing is the majority’s acceptance of the business owners’ objection to certain common forms of contraception based on the patently false characterization that they are tantamount to abortion. This decision gives employers license to withhold insurance benefits for safe, effective contraceptive methods, such as IUDs, based on unscientific beliefs. “The facts are clear: 99 percent of women will rely on contraception in their lives to avoid unintended pregnancy and plan their families and future. This promotes the health and well-being of millions of women and their families, and our society as a whole. “We now look to Congress and the Obama administration to act swiftly to ensure that only women, not their bosses, have the authority to decide what health care choices are appropriate for them and their families. “ The cases decided today, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Burwell, are two of more than 40 similar lawsuits that have been filed by for-profit, private companies in courts across the country. The Affordable Care Act—which was signed into law more than three years ago and upheld in 2012 by the U.S. Supreme Court—vastly expands women’s access to preventive health care without copayments, including contraception, cancer screenings, HIV and STI testing, well-woman visits, breastfeeding support, and prenatal and post-partum care and counseling. After decades of inconsistent and often discriminatory coverage of contraception by insurance plans, the health care law requires all insurance policies to cover birth control with no out-of-pocket cost to women. According to respected medical authorities—including the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, and the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics—emergency contraception prevents unintended pregnancies by delaying or preventing ovulation. It does not cause or induce abortion. Intrauterine devices (IUDs) are a form of safe, effective long-acting reversible contraception that is more than 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. Some IUDs can also be used as an effective form of emergency contraception when inserted within five days of unprotected sex. Ninty-nine percent of all sexually active women in the U.S. use birth control at some point during their reproductive years. The Affordable Care Act’s expanded coverage for contraception vastly increases the accessibility of birth control for women who need it, especially those interested in using long-acting reversible contraception like IUDs, which often had a high upfront cost and co-pay. The Center for Reproductive Rights, along with co-counsel Morrison &, Foerster and Prof. Noah Novogrodsky of the University of Wyoming School of Law, filed an amicus brief on behalf of professors specializing in international and foreign law with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that in a global context, women’s access to affordable contraception has been consistently recognized as key to furthering a woman’s liberty, dignity, and equality. And in balancing those rights against the right to conscientious objection in the health care context, the world community gives priority to women’s right to access health care and limits any objection right to those who are directly involved in providing the medical service at issue. Furthermore, the United States has rightfully cited the benefits of the Affordable Care Act as evidence of the nation’s compliance with its human rights treaty obligations and other global agreements on sustainable development. The brief also demonstrated that courts and statutes around the globe have recognized that individual religious or conscience rights only apply to those directly providing care, and not to institutions or businesses.
Conservative sites like Newsmax and Washington Examiner have published Middle East hot takes from “experts” who are actually fake personas pushing propaganda.
If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man.
As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and an “international relations senior analyst” for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He’s printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National Interest. Unfortunately for the outlets who published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist. His profile photos are stolen from the blog of an unwitting San Diego startup founder. His LinkedIn profile, which described him as a graduate of George Washington and Georgetown, is equally fictitious (and was deleted following publication of this article).
Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon.
Following this article’s publication, the Washington Examiner deleted its article written by “Badani,” replacing it with an editor’s note: “This op-ed has been removed after an investigation into its provenance and authorship.” Spiked, a British libertarian site, added a note atop both its articles by a fake persona, saying the outlet “takes seriously any claim of questionable authorship,” but left the text up in the interest of “transparency.” Human Events, meanwhile, also affixed an editor’s note atop their article written by a fake persona, but outright defended its publication, writing: “We have reviewed the substance of this piece, and have not found any factual errors—and we still agree with the thesis of the piece. As such, we are keeping the piece up, and adopting its arguments as a publication.” Newsmax deleted all articles by “Badani” and scrubbed his profile page listing him as an “insider”—all without any editor’s notes. The Post Millennial, The Jerusalem Post, and The National Interest also deleted their articles without any statement. (Yahoo News, which shared the National Interest’s story as part of a content share, said on Tuesday that they’ve deleted their iteration of the article and “are investigating and will take the necessary action with our partner to prevent this from happening in the future.”) On Monday, Twitter suspended Badani’s account along with 15 others after The Daily Beast shared the results of its investigation into the network for violating the company’s “policies on platform manipulation and spam.” “Using technology, human review, and partnerships with researchers and other independent organizations studying these issues, we work to identify platform manipulation on our service and take action,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast in a statement. “As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence to attribute any activity to a state-backed information operation, we’ll disclose them—following thorough investigation—to our public archive.” “This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.” The network’s spree of hot takes targeted a range of publications and placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and The Post Millennial, founded by conservative writer Andy Ngo, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post. Tying the network together is a series of shared behavioral patterns. The personas identified by The Daily Beast were generally contributors to two linked sites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now (which, following this article’s publication, have both been entirely deleted); had Twitter accounts created in March or April 2020; presented themselves as political consultants and freelance journalists mostly based in European capitals; lied about their academic or professional credentials in phony LinkedIn accounts; used fake or stolen avatars manipulated to defeat reverse image searches; and linked to or amplified each others’ work. The earliest posts from personas in the network date back to July 2019 and were authored by Lin Nguyen, a fake “analyst in South Asian regional security,” according to her author biography. Nguyen and another persona, Cindy Xi, wrote mostly on East Asian issues, particularly how Hong Kong’s economy was faring under the coronavirus pandemic. But the network soon grew and expanded its focus towards the Middle East. In February, two websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now, were registered on the same day and began to acquire a host of contributors. The Arab Eye describes itself, ironically enough, as a bulwark against “‘Fake News’ and biased narrative” with a mission that “now more than ever it is crucial to hear opinions from the other side of the aisle on matters pertaining to the Middle East.” The sites may not appear to be linked to the outside observer but a search of the RiskIQ database shows both sites share the same Google Analytics account, are hosted at the same IP address, and are linked through a series of shared encryption certificates. Like the majority of their contributors, the sites themselves appear to be fake.
Persia Now lists a non-existent London mailing address and an unanswered phone number on its contact form. The apparent editors of the outlets, Sharif O’Neill and Taimur Hall, have virtually no online footprints or records in journalism.
At Persia Now, The Arab Eye, and across dozens of other publications, the fake contributors have adopted similar themes in their opinion pieces. They’re critical of Qatar and, in particular, its state-funded news outlet Al Jazeera. They’re no big fans of Turkey’s role backing one of the factions in Libya’s civil war and have called it “bad news,” aimed at “constricting the flow of vital energy resources” to Europe, and “driving a wedge between and “dividing NATO.” There are constant editorial lines like arguing for more sanctions on Iran or using international leverage to weaken Iran’s proxy groups in Lebanon and Iraq. The personas are also big fans of the United Arab Emirates and have heaped praise on the Gulf nation for its “exemplary resilience” to the COVID-19 pandemic, its “strong diplomatic ties” to the European Union, and supposedly supporting gender equality through the Expo 2020 in Dubai. More recently, the personas have taken up the cause of criticizing Facebook for its decision to appoint Tawakkol Karman, a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to its oversight board. Media outlets in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates have criticized the appointment of Karman, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islah Party in Yemen, for her association with the group. In pieces for the Jewish News Syndicate (which has since been deleted without explanation), Asia Times, Politcalite, and Middle East Online, the network cast Karman as a “nefarious political actor with a questionable past” who will make Facebook the “platform of choice for extreme Islamist ideology.”
None of the Twitter accounts associated with the network ever passed more than a few dozen followers, but a few still managed to garner high profile endorsements for their work. An article by “Joyce Toledano” in Human Events about how Qatar is “destabilizing the Middle East” got a shout-out from Students for Trump co-founder Ryan Fournier’s nearly million-follower Twitter account. French senator Nathalie Goulet high-fived Lin Nguyen’s broadside about Facebook and Tawakkol Karman (when informed of The Daily Beast’s reporting, the lawmaker replied: “Easy to tell after but thanks I will be careful.”
False Backstories
The personas in the network used a mixture of stolen or AI-generated avatars and fake biographies to make them seem more plausible.
The “Raphael Badani” Twitter account used Barry Dadon, a real San Diego businessman and startup founder, as a source for its profile photos. Without his knowledge or consent, the account owner took a photo from Dadon’s blog for a Twitter profile photo and stole a picture from the Facebook page of Dadon’s wife for the Badani Newsmax columnist page. “Mikael Virtanen,” a fake Finnish businessman who wrote about the Middle East for the Jewish News Service, stole his avatar from a free image database. Other avatars were stolen from a Vietnam analyst at a Singapore financial consulting firm and a California insurance agent. All of the stolen avatars were mirror image reversed and cropped from their originals, making them difficult to find through common Google reverse image searches.
The fake contributors also appear to have used AI-generated avatars for a handful of their personas. A high-resolution profile photo of the Joseph Labba persona, posted for an article at The Post Millennial, shows some of the telltale glitches commonly found in AI-generated faces. The left ear is oddly smooth without any ear lobe creases. Middlebury Institute of International Studies research associate Sam Meyer reviewed the photo of Labba using imagery analysis software and also noticed he appears to have three misfit teeth in his mouth where there should be four.
“This mouth looks either fake or has some sad dental story behind it,” said Dr. Leonard Kundel, a dentist who agreed to review the Labba avatar for The Daily Beast. “The third tooth from the center does not look real to me. If you compare it with the canine on the other side it is obvious.” “In addition,” Kundel said, “the two front teeth do not look like they belong in this mouth. They are both narrower than they should and slightly more forward and whiter and chalkier.” Other avatars, like those used by the Lisa Moore and Joyce Toledano personas, show uncannily symmetrical features when overlayed on top of each other, with near perfect alignment of eyes, mouths, and eyebrows. The backstories used to buttress the network’s credibility are similarly phony. Some authors pretended to be journalists, either freelance or former full. On her LinkedIn page, “Salma Mohamed” claimed to be a former reporter for the AP based in London, though no public record of an AP journalist matching Salma Mohamed’s description is available.
Another persona, Amani Shahan, described herself in bios for Global Villages and Persia Now as being a contributor to and “ghostwriting articles” for The Daily Beast. No one by that name has ever written for The Daily Beast and The Daily Beast does not employ ghostwriters. (Shahan also referred to herself with both male and female pronouns in different author bios.)
Others lied about their academic credentials. In articles posted at The ASEAN Post, Malaysian Reserve, and Manila Times, Cindy Xi held herself out as a “Singapore-based research analyst for clients in the private sector” with a PhD from the National University of Singapore. In an email, NUS said it was “unable to retrieve the past records in the Dept’s database” matching Xi’s name. A search of the National Student Clearinghouse database for the Navid Barani persona’s alleged undergraduate degree from James Madison University came up similarly empty. At times, the network’s operators displayed either a mischievous sense of irony or a complete lack of self-awareness. One of its earliest pieces, “How Qatar is using Disinformation Tactics to Attack its Rivals,” complained about the state-funded Al Jazeera’s broadcasts and lamented that ”The landscape highlights a fascinating case study of how fake news can affect regional political discourse.” The piece is also the only public evidence that someone may have gotten wise to the network’s fakery. Editors at the International Policy Digest, where it was posted in September 2019, quickly removed the article with a note saying it was taken down “in response to criticism of the article’s sourcing” and that “We regret its publication.” Not that it caused the network much trouble. “Lin Nguyen” placed a similarly themed piece attacking Qatar about “misinformation becoming the currency of soft power” just a few days later in the Asia Times. By November, another persona from the network, Michel Haddad, was back posting at International Policy Digest. --Andrew Kirell contributed reporting. From roller derby to hockey games to concerts, for decades Roy Wilkins Auditorium has hosted events in downtown St. Paul for years.
However, many don't know the history behind the building's namesake. Roy Wilkins was born in St. Louis in 1901. Wilkins grew up in St. Paul's Rondo Neighborhood. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he became editor of a Black newspaper. Wilkins was hired by the NAACP, eventually becoming its executive director. He called Martin Luther King Jr. a friend and took part in several notable marches of the civil rights movement. "He was all about fighting inequality," Professor Sam Imbo, Department Chair of Philosophy at Hamline University said. "He was part of the march from Selma to Montgomery. He was part of the March on Washington in 63. He witnessed the Civil Rights Act of 64. He witnessed the passing of the Voting Rights Bill in 65." In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson awarded Wilkins the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. "His strategy was one of making change through legal means, going through the process," Imbo said. "Having been raised in Minnesota has a lot to do with it. You talk to people and try to make change that way." WIlkins died in 1981. In 1985, St. Paul Auditorium was renamed Roy Wilkins Auditorium The job of being a police officer comes with significant union protections. Work contracts often prevent municipalities from investigating internal discipline charges without affidavits, and it’s also common for the agreements to restrict access to officers’ employment files if they’re charged with a crime.
Additionally, police unions and municipalities have negotiated to throw out misconduct complaints after a certain time period. And if an officer shoots someone, the contract likely gives him or her what’s known as a “cooling off” period, which prevents management from questioning the individual and witnessing officers about the incident within a certain time period, usually 48 hours. Also, some states give additional layers of protections for officers, with laws generally known as police officers’ bills of rights. In fact, few, if any, unions have as much power in bargaining for discipline, internal investigation stipulations and conditions of employment as police do, say labor lawyers interviewed by the ABA Journal. And although complaints about police union contracts are not new, the criticisms have amplified since May, following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was arrested May 25 after he was accused of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. He died in police custody after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, allegedly held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds despite Floyd’s pleas that he could not breathe. Following massive protests across thecountry amid COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, Chauvin, 44, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder days after Floyd’s death. The 19-year police veteran had had at least 17 misconduct complaints lodged against him, but his only discipline before Floyd’s death was two letters of reprimand, the New York Times reports. Reuters in June analyzed Minneapolis Police Department officer complaints over the past eight years and found that 9 of 10 misconduct investigations were resolved without punishment or intervention with regard to behavior modification. Of 3,000 complaints during the time period examined, only five officers were fired. Janeé Harteau, a former Minneapolis Police Department chief, told Reuters disciplinary decisions that get challenged and reversed via arbitration and union grievances made it difficult to have accountability in the department. Taryn A. Merkl, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, agrees such reversals can handcuff the effectiveness of police management. “When you include those sorts of checks on management authority, it can create a culture in the department where officers think management is adversarial to them, and whatever management decided to do was unfair,” says Merkl, who supervised human trafficking and criminal civil rights cases in the district, including cases involving police officers and prison officials. Now a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program and Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime & Incarceration in New York, Merkl says union contracts that provide protections for internal investigations can interfere with the traditional approach of asking each witness for their independent recollection of what happened. “Some of the agreements I’ve seen have stringent protections, which afford officers in disciplinary proceedings heightened procedural protections, such as notice requirements and a right to counsel,” she adds. Alternatively, Holly E. Oliva-Van Horsten, general counsel of the International Union of Police Associations, AFL-CIO in Sarasota, Florida, says many terms for discipline and investigations in police contracts are fundamental due process rights. Even if municipalities complain about what’s in the contract, she adds, they still agreed to conditions as part of the collective bargaining process. Also, some civilians have strong incentives to file false or misleading complaints against police officers, according to Oliva-Van Horsten, which is one reason some work contracts cover not considering or throwing out the reports out after a certain time period, or restricting who can see the documents. “Law enforcement is a job where you could do everything by the book, and still make somebody angry. Lawyers are the same way. You could do everything you are supposed to do, but you will still make people angry because that’s the nature of work. Not everyone will be happy,” she says. In addition to police, some government lawyers have union protection, along with collective bargaining agreements that allow getting rid of complaints made against them after a certain time period, according to Oliva-Van Horsten. Still, government lawyers tend to have significantly less political power than law enforcement. Collective bargaining for public employees is defined by statute, and if states wanted to, they could remove the ability to bargain over discipline and conditions of employment for law enforcement, says David Johnson, a partner with Franczek P.C. who previously served as the city of Chicago’s chief labor negotiator. Politically, that would be difficult, say lawyers interviewed by the ABA Journal. “It’s different for police unions because they are a politically powerful constituency. I think it’s a historical legacy. Not just the war on crime, but a certain kind of law-and-order politics that has been dominating in the last 50 years. We’re still living with that legacy, all the way down to state and local levels,” says Ruben Garcia, co director of the University of Las Vegas Workplace Law program. A labor law professor, he mentions the 2011 Wisconsin law that, for the most part, eliminated collective bargaining rights for government employees except police and firefighters. Known as Act 10, or the Scott Walker Budget Repair Bill, the law was proposed and signed into law by the former Republican governor, who was a short-lived 2016 presidential candidate. Like in most states, politics has always been part of the police regiment in Wisconsin, says Franklyn Gimbel, a partner with Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown in Milwaukee, who served on the city’s police and fire commission, and has represented police officers accused of misconduct. “[Police union officials} would go to all the fundraisers and stroke the politicians. In Wisconsin, at least in the metropolitan areas, they were always under the cover of Republicans because the Democrats were more oriented toward the minority communities,” says Gimbel. The union also worked with Wisconsin Democrats, he adds, and race has been a significant part of the issue. He mentions Harold Breier, who served as the Milwaukee chief of police from 1964 to 1984. “He’d say, ‘I’m protecting the good people.’ That’s code for white people. He was saying, ‘I’m not going to let the Blacks come into your neighborhoods without confrontation,’ ” Gimbel adds. But following the recent high-profile deaths of Black individuals in police custody, the country may be reaching a time when fewer white people believe all police officers have public protection as a top priority Police feel unsafe, too, says Timothy Davis, chair of Burke, Williams & Sorensen’s labor and employment group. The Silicon Valley lawyer represents cities, including police departments, in collective bargaining, grievance proceedings and internal investigations. He mentions Graham v. Connor, the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that set rules for evaluating law enforcement excessive force claims. In an unanimous decision written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court found use of force allegations should be looked at from an officer at the scene’s perspective and consider the severity of a crime, what sort of threat was posed by the suspect and if he or she attempted to resist or evade arrest. “There’s an expression, ‘It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by six. I don’t subscribe to it, and I think it’s an awful way of looking at it, but that’s part of it. And it’s why the tie goes to the runner way too many times,” Davis says. However, he also thinks the country may soon see voters passing measures to rebuild law enforcement agencies. “I honestly think that shrinking the police’s mission for what they are supposed to be doing in society is a big issue, because too many times we’re asking way too much of our police officers,” Davis says. An example he gives is having social workers take on community tasks normally handled by police, like dealing with the homeless. In terms of public perception, there’s now more resentment for all unions, not just police unions, and that comes from not just political conservatives but liberals, too, says Ahmed White, a University of Colorado Law School professor whose work focuses on labor law. “There’s an active debate on what role unionism played in abetting police violence. There are some significant arguments on both sides, and I don’t know if that issue will ever be answered to anyone’s satisfaction,” he says. And many people who do support unions subordinate that to their belief in police reform, White adds. Like Oliva-Van Horsten, White points out that if municipalities don’t like what’s in a union contract, they don’t have to agree to it. “Touché,” Johnson responds. “You stand by the deal you made, and you have to take responsibility for what you agreed with.” For police reform to work, he adds, management and unions both need ownership in the changes. “You want the rank and file to accept the reforms, and view them as legitimate. My sense is that you could give [management] the right to adopt reforms unilaterally—and I wouldn’t reject that as a management side attorney—but it would be much more difficult to get buy-in from the officers,” Johnson says. He also wonders whether the Minneapolis city council will be successful in carrying out its decision to dismantle the police department there. “You can assume that you probably could dismantle a department, but what are the rules for creating a new office? Are we going to hire a bunch of new officers? Can you change the terms of employment and rip up the collective bargaining agreement? If they’re recreating the police department, Minnesota state law would probably have a lot to say about that,” Johnson says. As protests against police brutality and racism drive policy shifts around the nation, which changes can actually bring sustained long-term improvements?
Protesters against police brutality and racism have gathered to demand systemic change since the end of May, holding events in all 50 U.S. states and around the world. Impelled by the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, the protests amplify a long-standing call by social justice organizations, Black civil rights leaders like Angela Davis and many others for decades: dismantle, defund and/or abolish America’s racist and heavily militarized policing systems—and replace them with community-led safety programs and public health initiatives. The movement’s leadership has made it clear that the protests, many of which have been non-violent due to community participation, are calling for more than updates to existing police training programs or reforms within existing police departments. Rather, they are calling for America to rethink the response to crime and safety overall. They are calling for cities to reallocate funding away from police and begin the steps to gradually dismantle the policing system altogether, as Eric Levitz writes in a recent New York Magazine article. The police response to the protests against police brutality in many cities has been markedly, and ironically, brutal, as is discussed in detail in a recent article by Adam Gabbatt in the Guardian. Many videos and reports from recent protests show police using violent force against peaceful protesters. Dounya Zayer spoke with Democracy Now! about the police officer who violently pushed her to the ground when she was peacefully protesting, which she said resulted in a concussion and a trip to the hospital. Across the U.S., police have arrested more than 10,000 protesters and have repeatedly attacked journalists covering the protests, including Linda Tirado, who has been partially blinded after the police shot her with a foam bullet in the eye. Meanwhile, the protests are successfully pushing officials across the country to respond in some tangible ways. Cities, counties, states and some police precincts across the nation are implementing changes, small and large, and the moment has brought the deep-seated problems of the policing systems into the mainstream conversation. On June 12, amid the mass protests against police killings, police in Atlanta shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man named Rayshard Brooks. Atlanta police chief Erika Shields immediately fired the officer after the fatal shooting of Brooks, and the officer is now facing murder charges. The autopsy report listed Brooks’ manner of death as a homicide. Atlanta’s Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has ordered changes to the police use-of-force policy following the incident. The immediate firing of the officer and response of the mayor—while small steps—both speak to the work of the protests. In the past, many police killings of Black men and boys have gone undisciplined or resulted in a period of paid leave or slight demotion of the officers responsible. Since the death of Brooks, protesters have been filling the streets of Atlanta to demand more far-reaching justice and systemic changes. The protests are beginning to push public dialogue to question long-held assumptions about what the safety of the future can look like. The U.S. is starting to reckon with its systemic racism in an unprecedented way. Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh recently declared racism a public health crisis. Because of the protests, several U.S. cities have also started to defund their police programs and reallocate those funds for other public services. Following public pressure after the wrongful police killing of Breonna Taylor, in which police stormed the house of the 26-year-old medical worker in the middle of the night on March 13 and shot her to death, Louisville has passed Breonna’s Law to ban no-knock police warrants in the city (though the officers responsible have not been charged for Taylor’s murder yet). There is some concern among protest organizers that changes enacted now could be short-lived, and eventually lead back to the same old cycles of oppression and inequity. Alicia Garza, the principal of Black Futures Lab, the director of strategy and partnerships for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a co-founder of the women’s activist group Supermajority, said in a New York Times Q&A discussion recently that “political will over the long term” will be necessary in order for real change. “I think there is a danger now that when protests start to die down, which they always do, when the blue-ribbon panel is dismantled, which it always is, Black communities won’t necessarily be in a more powerful place than where we started,” she said in the New York Times interview. “The country has to deeply invest in the ability of Black communities to shape the laws that govern us.” Which policy changes and actions can actually restructure the U.S.’s problematic policing and justice systems? Here are a few of the concrete changes that leading organizers are calling for, with the potential to shift how policing, safety and justice systems operate in the future. 1. Defund and demilitarize the police and reallocate those funds into community-based programs like safe housing, social care programs and public health. Many police budgets in the U.S. are disproportionately bloated when compared with other tax-supported social services. The nationwide trend over recent decades has been to gradually increase police budgets, while schools, welfare programs and other public services have encountered widespread budget cuts. As the original Black Lives Matter protests that began in Ferguson in 2014 brought to light, police in this country—even in smaller precincts—are heavily militarized. Angela Davis pointed this out in a recent interview, in which she discussed how America’s “police departments are the most dramatic expression of structural racism.” Calls by organizers to defund the police make it clear that defunding is just the first in a multistep movement to dismantle policing as we know it. But it’s an important starting point, as it has the capability to free up needed resources for community-based social services and public health services. Several cities—some of them for the first time—have started to take that first step and reduce their police budgets, to varying degrees. For example, in Austin, the city council on June 11 voted to reinvest police funds and restrict use of force after recent police violence against protesters sent at least 31 people to the hospital. San Francisco’s Mayor London N. Breed also announced a new plan on June 11 under which the city will redirect some of its police funds into organizations that serve communities that have been harmed by systematic racism, and police will no longer respond to non-criminal calls or use military-grade weapons and gear. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised for the first time to cut funding for the NYPD. Portland plans to decrease its police budget by $15 million. It’s notable that many cities are now cutting police funding, especially since prior to the protests many of those same cities were set to increase police budgets this year. That said, defunding is just a small first step to rein in a long-militarized, violent and racist system. Brie McLemore outlines the need to do more than defund the police, in a recent article in which she argues for the abolition of police. A stronger shift that comes closer to the changes protests are calling for is coming out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd’s murder led to the first of the recent protests against police brutality. The Minneapolis City Council has vowed to eliminate its current police department and replace it with a new model of community-led safety programs. The city is also working with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights on an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department over the last decade. The department has received numerous complaints about the racially targeted and brutal treatment of citizens, and has repeatedly failed to hold cops accountable for their actions. Meanwhile, community organizers in the city are already implementing programs led by community members that rethink safety, as outlined in a Truthout op-ed by Jae Hyun Shim. Aqeela Sherrills is an organizer who has been working to shift the conversation around safety and violence in America for more than three decades. He has been working with cities on the ground to replace over-policing with community-led safety programs. He is a senior adviser to the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), which works with several states to replace over-incarceration with crime prevention, community health, rehabilitation and crime survivor support programs. He is also the co-founder of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice (CSSJ), which is a project of ASJ and a national nonprofit network of crime survivors, working to replace criminal justice and prison system waste with community-based initiatives. Sherrills has been working for six years with the city of Newark, New Jersey, to implement many of the systemic changes protesters are currently calling for. The implementation of community-led strategies has meant notable drops in crime rates throughout Newark, which is historically high in crime. Sherrills was at the helm of a groundbreaking peace treaty between the Bloods and the Crips in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1992. He says to successfully bring about crime reduction and safety, it’s essential to rethink the way people view and speak about criminality. What his experience has taught him is that the best approach is to treat violence as a public health issue, and work with actual community leaders on safety programs—and in high-crime areas, those leaders can be ex-convicts or gang members, as he details in a recent interview with the Independent Media Institute. Sherrills says in the interview that urban street gang wars are what many social justice activists call, “the longest-running war in the history of this country.” But, he says, the survivors and victims of that war have been criminalized rather than met with supportive services to heal the traumas and impacts of violence. “We didn’t give ourselves that label [of gang]. That label was meant to dehumanize the person behind it, and desensitize the public to the plight of these youth and young adults who were growing up in these war zones. Instead of providing healing services, they provided a criminal justice solution to what was a public health challenge,” Sherrills said. “My whole adult life, I’ve been committed to shifting narratives around victimization and redefining public safety with the idea that we have to put the public back into public safety… Today, we’re at an inflection point. We have a real opportunity that’s ahead of us. There’s a national campaign to defund police.” While Sherrills is not an advocate of completely getting rid of the police, he has long worked toward reallocating significant portions of police funding into community programs. And the programs he has helped to build offer real-life proof of how community-based safety can be more effective than police in reducing crime. During recent protests, for example, the city of Newark has kept its police to the sidelines, away from people protesting, and it demilitarized the police by prohibiting riot gear and military-grade attire and weapons. The city deployed its organized and trained community groups to help keep things safe and civil. As a result, Newark has not had reports of police brutality seen in many other American cities, and they’ve had weeks of peaceful protests without looting or serious property damage. “We deployed the [Newark Community Street Team], the West Ward Victims Outreach [Services], the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, the mayor’s Brick City Peace Collective—these are all residents of the city,” Sherrills said. “We weaved ourselves through every single portion of the march.” 2. Remove all police from schools. Reinvest in counseling and education instead. In Portland, Oregon, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero recently vowed to remove all school resource officers—police officers deployed to work at schools—from the district’s schools. This is something the city council’s only Black member, Jo Ann Hardesty, has been urging for years, as in-school officers disproportionately arrest Black students. Portland is not alone. Superintendents in Seattle, Minneapolis and Denver have vowed to end their school officer programs for similar reasons, and the disproportionate arrests of Black students in schools is a nationwide issue. Public pressure around the topic continues to build in many cities. Many civil rights groups and organizers—including prominent teachers unions in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere—have been calling throughout the recent protests to remove police from schools. While most programs to bring police into schools were enacted in response to school shootings, there is a lack of evidence to show that they actually increase safety. There is, however, ample evidence that they make life harder for Black kids, as discussed in a recent New York Times article. Many of the teachers’ groups and civil rights groups now calling to remove cops from schools have been doing so for years. The civil rights groups Advancement Project and the Alliance for Educational Justice released a joint report in 2018 that outlines the reasons removing police from schools is a step to improve school safety. As the report authors note in the introduction, the report “centers the voices of young people from around the country who describe the everyday indignities that they experience at the hands of school police. It also, for the first time, catalogues known assaults of young people by school police officers.” The report explores the impacts of school police on students of color and Black communities in particular, and notes that in the two decades following the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, school discipline has grown increasingly punitive and has failed to increase safety in schools, especially for students of color. “Safety does not exist when Black and Brown young people are forced to interact with a system of policing that views them as a threat and not as students,” the report authors write. “The report calls for the removal of police from schools and envisions schools where Black and Brown students are afforded the presumption of childhood that they deserve.” While police budgets have been steadily rising for the last decade across the nation, education budgets have been slashed across the nation. The powerful union United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) has come out vocally in favor of the movement to eliminate police in the city’s schools, as the LA Times reports. Cecily Myart-Cruz, the incoming president of UTLA, reportedly told the Times, “We have to dismantle white supremacy. We must… defund the police and bring in the mental health services that our students need.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been outspoken against police programs in schools for years due to the many racial disparities inherent in those programs. The ACLU’s website shows the negative impacts of these programs on Black and Brown students in particular. The website states: “Though these police are often referred to as ‘school resource officers,’ their legal power and attending actions reveal that this designation only serves to mask that their presence has transformed schools into another site of concentrated policing. Such policing marks the start of the school-to-prison pipeline—the entry point to the criminal justice system for too many kids—and fuels mass incarceration.” 3. Decriminalize people for surviving. In addition to calling for changes to policing itself, many activists seeking to end the problems associated with police brutality are also advocating for other reforms that decriminalize people for surviving. This means legally decriminalizing sex work, drug use and possession, homelessness and asylum-seeking immigrants. Organizers are also calling to change the way survivors of violent crimes are often themselves criminalized because of the way the systems are set up. A report released this year by Nina Luo, a fellow for Data for Progress, details the necessity to decriminalize sex work as a first step toward protecting sex workers, and a “part of effective anti-trafficking policy. … Decriminalization includes amending penal codes and divesting from the criminal legal system (both police and prosecutors).” Sex work is a relevant and mandatory part of the conversation around race and policing because entire police units, special undercover operations and significant resources are dedicated to policing sex work in the U.S. And, as the report notes, most often people who enter the sex trades do so out of economic desperation, in order to pay for their basic needs. Those sex workers are “often undocumented, women of color and/or young LGBTQ+ people who have little to no access to the justice system.” When these people are criminalized for attempting to survive via sex work, the “‘criminality’ as a result of engaging in sex work entirely discredits them as ‘victims’ when they report rape or violence to police.” A national poll conducted by Data for Progress, published in January, found that “an outright majority of… [U.S.] voters support decriminalizing sex work.” In the report, Luo explains how criminalizing sex work forces the trade underground, which ultimately endangers sex workers who might have been coerced into the trade, as they themselves could face charges if they speak about their work. The report also explains that sex workers enter the trade for a number of reasons—from choice to circumstance to coercion. And, again, most of them enter because of circumstance. “Most sex workers trade sex out of circumstance to meet economic needs such as healthcare, housing or childcare,” the report says. “They may experience explicit discrimination in the formal economy because of disability, gender identity or immigration status and rely on sex work to meet basic needs. They may find parts of the sex industry to have low barriers of entry, allowing them to immediately access income for a short period of time in the industry before exiting. They may find that the freelance or independent nature of the work allows them more time flexibility to caretake families or pursue other interests.” The report concludes with a reminder that criminalization has never effectively ended the sex trade, and that decriminalizing sex work is just a first step toward safety for people who do that work—and it’s the “only legal model that immediately reduces the harms of policing, incarceration, deportation, and criminal records in the lives of sex workers and trafficking survivors.” As the U.S. reckons with its long-standing racism and policies that enforce systemic inequalities, sex work and the criminalization of sex workers have to be part of the discussion. As Luo writes: “Sex work is an issue of controversy because it forces us to reckon with the realities of economic, racial, and gender injustice. People trade sex for many reasons, but most often to meet basic needs, and until this economy affords everyone a home, a living wage job, healthcare, and education, many people will continue to trade sex for survival.” As with sex work, the criminalization of drugs has been overtly ineffective and problematic. The four decades of the failed and innately racist U.S. war on drugs are a systemic colossus responsible for over-policing, primarily in non-white neighborhoods, and the mass incarceration that has disproportionately locked up Black and Brown people for decades. As the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) wrote in a 2017 report calling for the decriminalization of drug use and possession: “By any measure and every metric, the U.S. war on drugs—a constellation of laws and policies that seeks to prevent and control the use and sale of drugs primarily through punishment and coercion—has been a colossal failure with tragic results. Indeed, federal and state policies that are designed to be ‘tough’ on people who use and sell drugs have helped over-fill our jails and prisons, permanently branded millions of people as ‘criminals’, and exacerbated drug-related death, disease and suffering—all while failing at their stated goal of reducing problematic drug use.” Drug use is a public health issue, and it should be treated that way, as the DPA and many others have argued for years. Since Portugal, for example, made the groundbreaking decision to decriminalize all drugs in 2001 and turn drug use into a public health issue rather than a criminal one, the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Portugal’s opioid crisis, which was once among the worst in the world, quickly stabilized, and problematic drug use dropped significantly over the next several years. Hepatitis and HIV infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates also plummeted. From the start, the war on drugs has targeted Black people, and other people of color, as author Michelle Alexander details in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In a 2014 interview, with the beginning of state-by-state cannabis legalization, Alexander discussed a trend in the emerging cannabis industry in which white men were getting rich, but many Black men remained in prison—and they still do. Several petitions to free people who are still serving life sentences for minimal cannabis charges have gained steam in recent years. Homeless people are also criminalized in America for trying to survive. As the National Coalition for the Homeless explains, “The criminalization of homelessness refers to measures that prohibit life-sustaining activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and/or asking for money/resources in public spaces. These ordinances include criminal penalties for violations of these acts.” In the U.S., more than half a million people are homeless, and protesters are calling for an end of the criminalization of homelessness, and reallocation of police and justice system funding into safe housing programs to help people living on the streets. And, among the conversations gaining some steam throughout the protests is the call to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Currently, the U.S. is still holding asylum seekers who came to the U.S. hoping to escape dangerous situations, in horrific, overcrowded and illegal detention camps along the U.S.-Mexico border. Children have been separated from their parents, and thousands of them have reportedly been misplaced. Detainees, including children, are living in squalor, treated inhumanely, locked in cages and dying in detention centers. ICE is the policing agency responsible for the operation. Throughout the recent protests, a petition has been circulating to stop reported spraying of ICE detainees with a powerful and toxic disinfectant, which is reportedly a practice being enacted in detention centers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Protests are calling to do away with ICE and decriminalize asylum-seeking immigrants, and all people who come to America looking for work and a better life. In addition to decriminalizing the above sectors, protests are calling for the release of those currently incarcerated for these crimes. Some protesters are calling to take this further and begin to abolish the prison systems along with the police in order to bring about racial justice. The 2016 documentary film 13th by director Ava DuVernay offers an in-depth breakdown of the racial disparities of prison systems, their ties to slavery and the continued oppression of Black Americans. As a Reuters article reports, 40 percent of the almost 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. are Black, while just 13 percent of the U.S. population is Black, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative. University of Ottawa associate professor of criminology Justin Piché told Reuters, “Something feels different this time,” in regard to the general response to recent protesters’ calls for racial justice. “Whether or not that actually translates into police defunding and more gains for prison abolition, that remains to be seen.” As protests against racism continue to march on across the country, conversations have sparked a new dialogue about policing, criminal and racial justice, and even the War on Drugs.
Lawmakers and advocates alike say the latter of these dialogues must play “a central part,” seeing that the War on Drugs and policing of marijuana usage has disproportionately targeted Black Americans, and encouraged negative police interactions, Stateline and Brookings report. In light of these discussions, some states are taking active roles in changing the current narrative. To begin, many people have argued for years that “drug policy is a social justice issue” under the umbrella of police reform, citing that if marijuana was legalized, it would significantly lessen “unnecessary confrontations between police and minority residents.” Today, adults can legally use small amounts of marijuana in 11 states and Washington, D.C., while people with specific health conditions are allowed to purchase or grow pot for medical use in 33 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Marijuana Policy Project. However, this still leaves many Americans subject to criminal charges related to marijuana. John Hudak, Deputy Director for the Center for Effective Public Management that studies and helps to solve political and governance issues, points out that the data perfectly illustrates the racial disparity in policing in his Brookings article. Even though cannabis usage rates are similar across all races, Black Americans are arrested for cannabis offenses at a rate of nearly 4:1 when compared to whites, Hudak writes, proving that reforming drug policing is a racial issue. To combat the grim reality of these statistics, Georgia state Sen. Harold Jones II, a Democrat and former prosecutor, has presented a bill that would reduce penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana. “We as legislators are putting [police] in that situation because we’re demanding that they enforce this,” Jones told Stateline. Jones also agrees with the supporting argument that if lawmakers reduced penalties for marijuana usage or possession, it would in turn reduce unwanted law enforcement confrontations, Stateline describes. In New York, Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Democrat and sponsor of a bill to legalize marijuana sales, has said that other lawmakers have toyed with the idea of complete marijuana legalization as a way to improve policing and community relationships. “Many, many of my colleagues are bringing that up as a topic, as have I,” Peoples-Stokes told Stateline. “There’s no question that some of the things that are going on with law enforcement are because they smell marijuana.” See Also: If Police Smell Marijuana, Can They Search My Stuff? Other states have started to make advancements in this area in recent weeks. New Jersey lawmakers are set to debate two decriminalization proposals soon, including one approved by the state Assembly. Moreover, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill this week “that allows people who have committed certain marijuana-related crimes or have a low income to qualify for special marijuana business licenses,” Stateline reports. The Colorado bill also allows the governor to pardon defendants convicted of possessing up to 2 ounces of marijuana. These are all steps that advocates say will move our country forward to stop marijuana policing’s racist history, Bookings explained. In most states, however, there won’t be any further submitted bills on marijuana laws this year since legislative sessions are over. In the meantime though, advocates say they will continue to pressure their representatives and push reform, Stateline detailed. This summary was prepared by TCR staff writer Andrea Cipriano As calls for criminal justice reform sweep the nation, California is taking steps to reverse some effects of the war on drugs, which continues to disproportionately impact people of color.
California’s 58 county district attorneys had a deadline of Wednesday, July 1, to accept or challenge the state’s recommendation to clear the records of some 191,090 past marijuana convictions. The procedure was triggered by Proposition 64, a 2016 measure that legalized cannabis and reduced penalties for related crimes, and by Assembly Bill 1793, which requires justice officials to purge eligible crimes from people’s records. Because local prosecutors agreed with the vast majority of the state’s recommendations, tens of thousands of Californians are now free of criminal records for cannabis charges. In many cases, the charges for the cases in question are no longer crimes, but the criminal records still could have meant lost job or housing opportunities or, for immigrants, led to their deportation. “I think there’s been recognition by a lot of people that we needed to change things,” said Christopher Gardner, public defender for San Bernardino County. Southern California DAs alone moved to dismiss or downgrade more than 100,000 marijuana charges as the July 1 deadline approached. In some cases, they found even more eligible cases than those flagged by the state. Riverside County, for example, recently adjusted 26,424 cannabis convictions — nearly four times more than the number identified by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Prosecutors in Riverside and San Bernardino counties didn’t challenge any of the state-flagged cases, asking the court instead to reduce or dismiss them en masse. “They just wanted to process them and comply,” said Gardner, who praised the San Bernardino County DA’s cooperation in processing roughly 5,400 cases. “I think it’s a good sign that they recognized what’s important to fight.” Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Orange counties didn’t go as far. Together, the two counties challenged more than 2,000 cannabis convictions that Becerra flagged as potentially eligible for resentencing, saying the cases don’t qualify due to each person’s prior convictions. The Los Angeles County DA also says another 2,304 people identified by the state as potentially having their marijuana-related charges cleared also don’t qualify for relief under California’s cannabis laws. So, while defendant and marijuana rights advocates are applauding a process that resulted in tens of thousands of downgraded cases, they say more work remains. “Drug-related offenses have consequences that are sometimes far more severe than other convictions — immigration being one of them,” said Nick Stewart-Oaten, an attorney with the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office. “That’s why it’s incredibly important for everyone who has a chance to get his record cleaned up to get it cleaned up.” New laws spur change The door for clearing marijuana convictions opened in November 2016, when California voters approved Prop. 64. Along with legalizing recreational marijuana, the bill retroactively reduced the penalties for just about every crime involving the drug. Selling marijuana without a license, for example, was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor. And the measure eliminated all cannabis-related criminal penalties for people who were under 18. Since Prop. 64’s passage, people have been allowed to petition the courts to have their old marijuana charges downgraded or cleared. But since the law left that challenging burden up to the convicted, not many cases were put up for review. Last year, the nonprofit Code for America estimated that just 3% of people eligible for relief under Prop. 64 had received it. People of color figure to be hurt the most. Though minorities and whites have used weed at roughly the same rates over the years, Drug Policy Alliance data shows that non-whites have been much more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for marijuana-related crimes. And recent research shows those discriminatory patterns continue even after cannabis legalization. Given those realities, some counties decided to proactively track down and process all marijuana cases eligible for expungement. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón started the trend in January 2018, and prosecutors in San Diego, Alameda, Sonoma, Yolo, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Joaquin counties have since followed suit. That movement spread statewide in September, when the legislature approved Assembly Bill 1793. The law gave the state Attorney General’s office until July 1, 2019 to identify all potentially eligible cases and send those 191,090 cases to counties for review. And AB 1793 then gave local prosecutors until July 1, 2020 to review cases passed down from the state and notify local public defenders if they opposed downgrading any charges. Challenges emergeThe Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is challenging 2,142 convictions flagged by the state. Agency spokesman Greg Risling said Thursday that they believe those cases are ineligible due to prior convictions for sex offender registration, violent or serious felonies, or two or more convictions for the same offense as the case in question. The Orange County DA challenged some 270 cases, citing similar issues. Those people are essentially back to where all Californians were before AB 1793. If they want to fight the DA’s stance on their case, they’ll need to contact their public defender or another attorney and challenge it in court. Same goes for the nearly 10,000 people that Becerra identified as potentially having marijuana-related cases, since they were arrested for marijuana possession, cultivation, sales or transportation but convicted of, say, “accessory after the fact to a felony.” While many of those 10,000 flagged cases may not be eligible for relief under the state’s new marijuana laws, Stewart-Oaten said those who are would perhaps be the most deserving, since historically — and often when the prosecution’s evidence is weakest — defendants who were arrested for marijuana-related crimes sometimes plead guilty to lesser charges that don’t involve cannabis. That’s why the public defender’s office has been pushing the LA County DA to hand over its list of 2,304 potentially eligible cases for review. Stewart-Oaten said he’s confident they’ll get those cases soon. Still, he said it’s up to people with these charges on their record to find out the status of their cases and get help if they need to fight charges. The process isn’t over for all of the people connected to these cases. After DAs approve downgrading or dismissing cannabis convictions, the change can take some time to show up in court records. Stewart-Oaten said they’ve had clients spend time in jail even after cannabis charges had been dropped from their records because the system hadn’t updated and it triggered a bench warrant for failure to appear in court. There aren’t hard deadlines for when challenged cases must be resolved or when courts have to process any changes. The process could be extended because of court closures during the coronavirus pandemic. That’s why some cannabis rights advocates are pushing for more transparency in how the judicial system is handling these cases. If counties aren’t following the letter of the law, advocates might mount a court challenge. “We have always seen marijuana reform as part of the greater social justice movement,” said Ellen Komp, who works with the California chapter of the marijuana advocacy group NORML. “It’s a wonderful time to really address the racial justice issues our whole country is looking at so strongly as we fight for the soul of our country.” |
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March 2024
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