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    Ohio Officer Won’t Be Charged in Fatal Shooting of Teenager

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    The teenager, Ryan Hinton, was shot by a police officer responding to a stolen vehicle report on May 1. The youth’s father is accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy with his car.A police officer in Cincinnati will not be charged in the fatal shooting of a teenager whose father is accused of intentionally striking and killing a sheriff’s deputy with his car the day after his son’s death, prosecutors said.Connie Pillich, the prosecuting attorney for Hamilton County, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the officer, whom she did not identify, was “legally justified in his use of force” and declined to send the case to a grand jury.The teenager, Ryan Hinton, was fatally shot by a police officer who was responding to a report of a stolen vehicle on May 1. Mr. Hinton had a fully loaded gun that he pointed at officers when they confronted him, Ms. Pillich said.“I’m confident that my decision was based on every fact available and was made with due diligence and the utmost care,” the prosecutor said.Fanon A. Rucker, a lawyer for Mr. Hinton’s family, said in remarks after the news conference that the family planned to file a lawsuit.The police were investigating a report of a stolen vehicle when they found Mr. Hinton and three other people in the stolen car. When officers approached the vehicle, the four men ran. One of the officers saw Mr. Hinton fall as he ran away and heard the sound of metal hitting the pavement, Ms. Pillich said.In audio from police dash camera footage played at the news conference, another responding officer can be heard yelling, “He’s got a gun,” before shots are fired.Ms. Pillich said the officer who had fired the fatal shots told investigators that he had heard the warning about the gun and saw Mr. Hinton point a gun at him, after which the officer fired his weapon.The father, Rodney L. Hinton, 38, is accused of intentionally driving his car into a Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy who was directing traffic outside a University of Cincinnati graduation event on May 2, a day after the son’s death, according to the prosecutor’s office, which filed charges last month.A lawyer who had been representing the family said that they had gone to the Cincinnati police chief’s office earlier that day to see the body-camera footage of the confrontation and that Mr. Hinton had become visibly upset and left before the video was over.The elder Mr. Hinton pleaded not guilty last month to two counts of aggravated murder, one count of murder and two counts of felonious assault. He faces the death penalty if he is convicted of aggravated murder.Clyde Bennett, Mr. Hinton’s lawyer, said that he was being held without bond at the Clermont County jail. More

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      As Energy Costs Surge, Eastern Governors Blame a Grid Manager

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      For decades, a little-known nonprofit organization has played a central role in keeping the lights on for 65 million people in the Eastern United States.Even some governors and lawmakers acknowledge that they were not fully aware of how much influence the organization, PJM, has on the cost and reliability of energy in 13 states. The electrical grid it manages is the largest in the United States.But now some elected leaders have concluded that decisions made by PJM are one of the main reasons utility bills have soared in recent years. They said the organization had been slow to add new solar, wind and battery projects that could help lower the cost of electricity. And they say the grid manager is paying existing power plants too much to supply electricity to their states.Some governors have been so incensed that they have sued PJM, drafted or signed laws to force changes at the organization, or threatened to pull their states out of the regional electric grid.The Democratic governors of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania sharply criticized the organization in recent interviews with The New York Times and in written statements. And the Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, called on the organization to fire its chief executive in a letter obtained by The Times.“PJM has lost the plot,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said in an interview. In another interview, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said about PJM, “I am angry.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Jackson Just Helped Reset the D.E.I. Debate

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      At the heart of the debate over diversity, equity and inclusion is a question: How much should the law treat a person as an individual rather than as a member of a group?For a very long time, American law and American institutions answered that question unequivocally. People were defined primarily by the group they belonged to, and if they happened to be Black or Native American or a woman, they were going to enjoy fewer rights, fewer privileges and fewer opportunities than the people who belonged to the categories white and male.That was — and remains — a grievous injustice. At a minimum, justice demands that a nation and its institutions cease and desist from malicious discrimination. But doesn’t justice demand more? Doesn’t it also require that a nation and its institutions actually try to provide assistance to targeted groups to help increase diversity in employment and education and help targeted groups overcome the systemic effects of centuries of discrimination?On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously decided a case that was directly relevant to the latter question, and while the outcome wasn’t surprising, the court’s unanimity — and the identity of the author of the court’s opinion — certainly was.The facts of the case, Ames v. Ohio, are simple. In 2004, the Ohio Department of Youth Services hired a heterosexual woman named Marlean Ames to work as an executive secretary. By 2019, she’d worked her way up to program administrator and set her sights higher — applying for a management position in the agency’s Office of Quality and Improvement.The department interviewed Ames for the job but decided to hire someone else, a lesbian. The department then demoted Ames and replaced her with a gay man. Believing she’d been discriminated against on the basis of her sexual orientation, she filed suit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Unanimously Rules for Straight Woman in Workplace Discrimination Suit

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      The justices rejected an appeals court’s requirement that members of majority groups meet a heightened standard to win employment discrimination cases.The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost positions to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.The decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education and amid the Trump administration’s fierce efforts to root out programs that promote diversity and could make it easier for white people, men and other members of majority groups to pursue claims of employment discrimination.The standards for proving workplace discrimination under a federal civil rights law, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court, “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”The case was brought by Marlean A. Ames, who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which oversees parts of the state’s juvenile corrections system. After a decade there, in 2014 she became the administrator of a program addressing prison rape. Five years later, she applied for a promotion.Her supervisors turned her down, saying she lacked vision and leadership skills. They eventually gave the position to a gay woman who had been at the department for a shorter time and, unlike Ms. Ames, lacked a college degree.Not long after denying her the new position, her supervisors removed her from her existing job, telling her that they had concerns about her leadership and offering her a demotion that came with a substantial pay cut. She was replaced by a gay man with less seniority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Thumbprint on Cigarette Carton Cracks a 48-Year-Old Murder Case

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      A young mother told friends that she’d be “back in 10 minutes.” She never returned, and the police in San Jose have now charged a man in her death.Jeannette Ralston was at the Lion’s Den bar in San Jose, Calif., when she told her friends that she would be “back in 10 minutes.”She never returned.The next morning, on Feb. 1, 1977, police officers found the 24-year-old woman strangled with the long sleeve of a red women’s dress shirt and squeezed into the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in a parking lot a few minutes away from the bar.Almost 50 years later, the authorities believe that they know who strangled her.Willie Eugene Sims, 69, of Jefferson, Ohio, was arraigned on Friday on a charge of murder in San Jose, Calif., and held without bail, after his extradition from Ohio.He did not enter a plea and his next court date was set for August. It was unclear if Mr. Sims had a lawyer.The investigation into the killing of Ms. Ralston, a mother and resident of San Mateo, Calif., went cold after no credible leads were initially developed.The police found a carton of Eve cigarettes, a popular brand for women in the 1970s, and the shirt that she was strangled with. They also had a sketch drawn of an unidentified man that her friends saw her leave the bar with the night before she was found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      How Ohio became a hotbed of white supremacism, spreading its tentacles globally | Stephen Starr

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      By many accounts, Hilliard, a leafy suburb west of downtown Columbus, is a midwestern success story: its progressive school district gives a vacation day for all students to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr – the first in Ohio to do so – and its homes are highly sought-after by a growing number of diverse families where locals enjoy shopping at the oldest Asian grocery in the state.But it is also where Christopher Brenner Cook, a convicted terrorist, grew up. In April 2023, Cook and two others were sentenced for conspiring to attack America’s electrical grid, and he was given a 92-month prison term.Cook, who was 21 at the time of his sentencing for conspiring to blow up electricity stations, was previously a devout white supremacist who tried to recruit people to the neo-Nazi cause. He focused specifically on children in an effort to avoid detection by law enforcement.More than 3,780 miles away in Derbyshire, England, 14-year-old Rhianan Rudd encountered Cook on WhatsApp and Discord, the online chat app. As of September 2020, the BBC noted she had been in contact with Cook “for some time”. By early 2021, Rudd – who was autistic and had a history of self-harm – was spending up to 15 hours a day speaking to Cook online.Cook had been grooming, sexually abusing and radicalizing Rudd. The last time she had contact with Cook, he told her he loved her, and she felt a “gaping hole” and “very sad for a long time”.In May 2022, aged 16, Rhianan killed herself.American extremists are going globalAs prominent supporters and members of the current administration such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have taken to Nazi-style salutes in front of large audiences, the tentacles of a resurgent American white supremacism are stretching around the globe, often with deadly consequences.Members of American white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front and the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), have traveled across Europe to take part in public marches and distribute propaganda while the Base, a group of American neo-Nazis, reportedly has Russian links.A founding member of RAM was extradited from Romania in August 2023 to the US on charges of inciting violence. A Slovakian teenager who killed two people outside a bar popular with members of Bratislava’s LGBTQ+ community in October 2022 was radicalized in part by California- and Idaho-based leaders of the so-called “Terrorgram Collective”; those individuals last September were charged by the Department of Justice for soliciting hate crimes and other offences.View image in fullscreenBut not all of America’s far right’s global endeavors are confined to the dark corners of the internet or violent extremists. Trump’s closest allies have also courted a resurgent far-right across Europe where such parties are gaining mainstream support and power.Bannon, whose War Room podcast has more than 15,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts, has traveled to France, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere to meet with and advise far-right political leaders. Musk, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, was criticized for appearing online at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right AfD party in January.“The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream,” says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader and author of White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement and other books.“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back.”Ohio’s fall into extremismFor decades, Ohio was a national political bellwether that reflected America’s wider socioeconomic milieu. Its three large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland – provided a solid backbone of support for progressive politics.In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won more votes in Ohio than any Democrat in history, repeating the feat four years later when he was elected to a second term in the White House. Until 2011, Democratic party governors were not uncommon.However, in recent years, Ohio has seen a marked shift to the right.The perpetrator of the 2017 Charlottesville car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the founder of the Daily Stormer, an influential neo-Nazi website, are both from Ohio. The plot to kill the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was formulated in Dublin, the same well-to-do Columbus suburb where Cook spent part of his childhood.Eighty-three Ohioans were charged for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that was prompted by President Trump. After Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania – all states geographically closer to the capital – Ohio had the highest per capita number of arrested rioters. The same year, Columbus experienced a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes than all but three other US cities.In 2023, a Nazi homeschooling effort with more than 3,000 online subscribers run by residents of Upper Sandusky in the state’s north-west was unearthed. Ohio’s department of education found that no law had been broken.Ku Klux Klan white supremacist flyers and marches by neo-Nazis are also now happening with growing frequency in places such as Springfield, Ohio, after Trump’s false claims in September that immigrants there were eating pets.Neo-Nazi publicity efforts in Cincinnati, Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio – a defined effort, experts say, to desensitize communities to their imagery and normalize their presence – are on the rise.View image in fullscreenAt the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, politics has been overrun by far-right Republicans. Increasingly, Ohio Republicans have voiced extremist views or passed laws that disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants – groups regularly targeted by white supremacists.“The far right has long been working to engage in local and state politics. They recognize that change is more likely when like-minded persons are designing policy and making decisions,” said Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University.“We have no mechanism to stop this radicalization when it is being reflected in the statehouse.”It was in this environment that Cook grew up. He and his co-conspirators “fanaticized” about “the opportunity for white leaders to take control of this country and its government”, according to his sentencing memorandum.Eight months after Cook was charged with conspiring to give material support to terrorists, the Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed calling out some Hilliard residents for spreading hate. Some have filed lawsuits against the local school district to force staff to stop wearing badges in support of LGBTQ+ communities.“Nothing is happening in the schools, and I think it really needs to because young men especially are being influenced by this culture wars stuff and the manosphere,” said Picciolini.“There really isn’t enough happening to counter that.”Picciolini was recruited by the Chicago-area SkinHeads when he was 14 years old and spent eight years as a member of white nationalist groups. Since leaving the movement, he has been involved in founding or co-founding many deradicalizing programs and has criticized the lack of government support for them.Picciolini said he had seen children as young as nine be recruited online.“The reason that anybody joins these groups is not the extremist ideology. It’s [for] the sense of identity, community and purpose,” he said.“For people who feel marginalized, they have a difficult time with what I call ‘potholes’ – trauma or challenges with mental health; a health issue; physical abuse. It pushes people to the fringes and to the internet. A lot of these kids are being targeted because of their ‘potholes’.”For Rhianan Rudd, who struggled to make friends, the internet proved to be both a release and a trap.Her deepening online relationship with Cook saw her further radicalized, prompting her to make verbal threats to blow up a synagogue and download information on bomb making, for which she was arrested in October 2020. That resulted in her being taken out of Prevent, the deradicalization program her mother had signed her into the month before. Six months later, she became the youngest person ever charged with terrorism in the UK, charges which were dropped when investigators concluded she had been groomed and abused by Cook.View image in fullscreenAn officer for Prevent referred to Rudd as the “most vulnerable individual she’s ever met”, after the teen admitted that Cook had been radicalizing her. She told her social worker that she felt she had “two competing individuals in her head”.Cook wasn’t the only American male with a white supremacist background in Rudd’s life.Rudd’s mother, Emily Carter, had been in contact with Dax Mallaburn, a convicted felon and known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Arizona, through a prison pen pal program. They began a romantic relationship that saw Mallaburn move to the UK and live with Rudd and her mother. Mallaburn is alleged to have sexually groomed Rudd, and information gathered by police found that Cook was in contact with Mallaburn, telling him to teach the child “the right way”.The terrorism charges against Rudd were dropped in December 2021, but the damage had been done.Just weeks before her death, she asked her mother for help contacting a neo-Nazi group in the US and attempted to travel to London to acquire a visa to travel to Texas.“Her being groomed was huge and I saw Rhianan change,” Carter said at an inquest into Rudd’s death and the role antiterrorism and other agencies played. The inquest is ongoing until June.Missed opportunitiesWhile the internet may have facilitated Cook’s abuse of Rudd, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have come in for criticism.On two occasions in early 2020, Cook’s vehicle was stopped by law enforcement officials, in Ohio and Texas. Drugs, Nazi paraphernalia and weapons were found, and yet both times Cook was let go.The FBI shared information with British intelligence about Cook’s activities and grooming of Rudd five months before she took her own life, while several years before her death, an MI5 agent lamented to a senior colleague that Rudd couldn’t be referred to an anti-extremism program while she was under a police investigation.Although Cook’s sentencing memorandum recognized that his “singular” end goal was linked to “the propagation and fruition of white supremacist ideology”, he was not investigated for his exploitation of Rudd or faced potential charges related to her death.Legal experts say there is nothing precluding Cook from being charged for crimes related to the death of Rudd in the future, so long as no relevant statute of limitations has passed and there is probable cause to support specific crimes under US law. He could also be extradited to the UK to face charges, although that would be an unprecedented move.Ohio’s rising hateCook’s sentencing memorandum suggests he has embarrassment and remorse for his terrorism-related actions, pleading guilty to the crimes he was charged with. But given the opportunity to discuss details of his relationship with Rudd, Cook is more circumspect.When the Guardian sought to interview Cook through the federal correctional institute he is being held in South Carolina, he declined. In an interview with Columbus Monthly published last year, he also declined to discuss his interactions with Rudd.While Cook is set to be released well before his 30th birthday, there is little evidence to suggest that Ohio will have solved its problem of white supremacist extremism by then.In November 2023, a 20-year-old man entered a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, and shot four people before turning the gun on himself. Police found Nazi flags and a “SS history book” at his home. The Anti-Defamation League found that Ohio was second only to Texas for the number of white supremacist incidents in 2023.About a dozen neo-Nazis, some armed, unfurled flags and signs bearing extremist material in February 2025 over a highway close to a historically African American community in Cincinnati. In response, there’s been silence from the White House.“They love this administration,” said Picciolini of the extremists. “They love the environment they are in.” More

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      How Trump’s war on DEI is roiling US police: ‘it doesn’t mean work will stop’

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      After the murder of George Floyd, protests pushed some police agencies to bring in a new class of professionals like Colleen Jackson to help make departments more representative of and responsive to the communities they serve.Hired as the first chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 2021, Jackson has assisted in a hiring process that swore in a class of women, Black and Asian American recruits and has surveyed residents on their experiences with the police. She is now organizing an event to bring together young residents and Black officers that she hopes will lead to safer interactions on the street.“I hope what I do touches people’s hearts and that changes their behavior,” she said.Yet, the threat of the Cleveland suburb losing a federal grant because of her work only becomes more palpable as her friends and colleagues in the field of DEI lose their jobs – and the work they’ve dedicated their lives to hemorrhages esteem. “I’m just not the person who’s gonna operate in fear,” she said. “But I am a person who operates in reality.”View image in fullscreenThere is a growing realization among DEI professionals such as Jackson and police officers across the country that a backlash is gaining momentum. Donald Trump, who has called DEI “illegal”, has halted federal programs and encouraged executive branch agencies to investigate and withhold funds from institutions that engage in DEI practices.The new administration has threatened to pull federal funding to compel policy changes in other areas of American life, such as universities, but policing experts are skeptical that a similar tactic would work on the nation’s roughly 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies, particularly because they draw most of their funds from local taxes.Still, Trump’s actions are already having an impact, contributing negatively to the culture in police departments by “encouraging tension within the ranks”, said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy project director of policing. Opposition to diverse perspectives, she said, can breed an insular culture prone to abuse of underrepresented groups.“This is not merely about the threat to diversity in policing,” Borchetta said. “That threat can spill out into the street.”Increasing diversity among the ranks isn’t a panacea for police abuse – think of the case of Tyre Nichols, a Black man in Memphis, Tennessee, who died after being beaten by several Black officers. Still, policing experts say, hiring a more diverse force combined with efforts to change the culture within departments can help.Trump’s anti-DEI push is not the first time efforts to diversify policing have faced a backlash. Black officers hired in the south during Reconstruction lost their jobs in the late 1800s when the federal government relinquished its control over former Confederate states. Later in the 1970s, after the civil rights movement era, federal efforts to force several big-city police departments to diversify faced opposition from white-dominated police unions. By the 1990s, most of these federal efforts were terminated.According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the rise of DEI in policing, the number of Black officers hit its high-water mark in 2022, constituting 17% of the nation’s rank-and-file cops before falling to 14% last year, which is about the number of Black Americans in the country. In 2024, white people made up more than 79% of police officers and women made up more than 14%.Although law enforcement diversity and inclusion experts such as Nicola Smith-Kea maintain that DEI is about more than race – it’s about including people with different abilities, genders, faiths and ages – Smith-Kea thinks Trump has transformed the acronym into a “code word” for Black, creating a framing that DEI is discriminatory against white officers.Smith-Kea said a backlash could mean “removing programs” that serve “the broader population, not just any one race”, such as accessibility ramps for disabled people or equal pay programs for women.In February, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, dismissed Biden-era lawsuits that accused police departments of hiring discrimination. Bondi dropped a case against the Maryland state police (MSP) before an agreement could be signed that would have required MSP to revise a test that Biden’s justice department found disproportionately disqualified Black and female applicants.In her dismissal, Bondi said police officers would now be “chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety – not to meet DEI quotas”.Phillip Atiba Solomon, the chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization that collects and analyzes public safety data to improve policing outcomes, said he wondered whether the Trump administration might try to use the Department of Justice to investigate police departments with DEI programs for “reverse racism”. Although Trump might have the power to quickly transform the executive branch, lawyer James Fett believes that it will take more time for the federal courts to turn against DEI. Fett, who frequently represents white officers who say they have faced employment discrimination, is eagerly awaiting the disposition of a case now with the US supreme court filed by a woman who claims she was denied a promotion with the Ohio department of youth services because she is not gay.If the conservative court rules in her favor, experts believe it could lower the standard that straight, white people will have to meet to prove they have faced employment discrimination. “It’s going to be much easier when people want to attack promotions or hiring or even terminations based on a DEI policy,” Fett said.Charles Billups of the Grand Council of Guardians, the umbrella organization for New York state’s African American policing organizations, said he and many of his members fear that Trump’s anti-DEI orders could roll back the progress they’ve seen in hiring and promotions. “A lot of us are preparing for the fair competition fostered by DEI to be eliminated,” he said.Even before Trump, some DEI professionals said they were facing pushback.Delaware county, Pennsylvania, hired Lauren Footman as its first DEI director in spring 2022. Included in her purview were the park police and law enforcement officials within the local prosecutor’s office. She said she felt tokenized right away in a department that was not interested in cultural change and only supportive of hosting parties for identity celebrations such as Black History Month.“Someone in HR actually thought that I was an event coordinator,” she said. During her time, she never worked with the park police or criminal investigation division because she says that Delaware county did not compel them to participate.Footman was fired in the spring of 2024. She says the termination was retaliation for her attempts to address the county’s culture of discrimination and she is currently pursuing legal action. When asked about Footman’s claims, Delaware county said that after her termination, the county worked with a consultant to evaluate its programs and make recommendations. However, county officials vigorously denied her accusations.Even in departments where DEI appears to have support, it can fall short. Veteran Sgt Charlotte Djossou believes that is the case in the DC Metropolitan police department (MPD).View image in fullscreenDjossou is a whistleblower who has been speaking out since the 2010s against the racial targeting in the MPD’s jump-out tactics, which involve plain clothes units accosting and searching people on the street. The courts have repeatedly found jump-outs to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. When Djossou first talked about them in the news media, she attributed their pervasiveness to the lack of Black officers in positions of power.But while she has seen more Black people hired and promoted due to DEI, she doesn’t believe it has altered the way the Black community is policed. “It’s not a Black or white thing. It’s a blue thing. And no matter what your race is, in policing, you have to conform in order to move up,” Djossou said.Djossou has filed a lawsuit against the MPD claiming it retaliated against her for whistleblowing by denying her promotions during a time when the department has been engaged in a high-profile DEI campaign to recruit and hire women. That DEI effort was shepherded by Chief Pamela A Smith, who initially joined the MPD in 2022 as its chief equity officer in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.“I’m Black. I’m a woman. And all they’ve done is hold my career back,” Djossou said. The MPD did not respond to a request for comment.Smith-Kea understands the frustration some reform-oriented officers might have had with DEI. “Change doesn’t happen overnight,” she said, but there are advances, pointing to the widely used toolkit she helped develop for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which instructs departments on how to implement interventions for dealing with people in a mental health crisis.Tragic killings like that of Daniel Prude have revealed the interplay between race and mental health in fatal police interactions. Prude was apprehended by Rochester, New York, police in the midst of a mental health crisis in 2020 and died of asphyxia after police put a mesh hood over his face and pinned him on the ground. Smith-Kea believes DEI-rooted solutions can prevent deaths like Prude’s. As an example, she points to the BJA toolkit’s potential to make all people, not just Black people, safer.Despite all the worries about DEI’s fate in policing, the ACLU’s Borchetta said departments have incentives to keep DEI because many learned in the 2020s that to solve crimes they “need to gain the trust of the people and that trust is more easily eroded when police departments don’t reflect the people they’re policing”.Borchetta noted that police departments also learned to use diversity to avoid accountability. She was the lead attorney in the case that brought an end to the New York police department’s unconstitutional practice of stop and frisk in 2013. While working on that case, she said, one of the NYPD’s key defenses was simply: “See how diverse our department is.”However, she also credited that diversity with helping to win the case, including the contribution of Latino and Black officers who raised alarms about stop-and-frisk. “That’s a reminder that diversity is important because it brings in perspectives of people who might be affected by your program in different ways,” she said.In Shaker Heights, where the mayor has vowed to continue its DEI initiatives, Jackson was optimistic about the future of DEI in policing. She believed that her work had touched people, and that kind of personal impact couldn’t just be erased with an executive order. She said she was certain she and other DEI professionals would continue the work, regardless of Trump’s efforts.“I recognize these executive orders could bring the end of this particular name for the work – DEI – but it doesn’t mean the work will stop,” Jackson said. When asked how she could be so sure, she said: “The work of DEI has been going on for generations. It’s the only reason why I, as a Black woman, have a job in the public sector, you know what I mean?”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. More

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      in US Politics

      The America I loved is gone

      by

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      in US Politics

      JD Vance’s home town is bouncing back – and it’s largely thanks to immigrants

      by

      When Daniel Cárdenas from Coahuila, Mexico, first arrived in Middletown, a post-industrial city of 50,000 people in south-west Ohio, he was immediately enamored.“It’s a small town with friendly people. You have shops, big stores; there’s no traffic,” he says.“I really fell in love with Middletown. It’s awesome.”A pastor at the First United Methodist church since 2022, Cárdenas is one of a growing number of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Honduras who have moved to the home town of Vice-President JD Vance in recent years. And while Vance has been at the forefront of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US, the story of immigration’s impact on Middletown is one of rebirth and success.Dominated for decades by a huge steel plant on the south side of town, Middletown has felt the effects of the decline of American manufacturing more than most. A 2006 lockout at the steel plant that lasted for more than a year saw AK Steel lay off nearly a thousand workers. The ramifications of the Great Recession that followed in 2008 can still be felt, fueling a population decline of more than 10% between 2010 and 2020.But today, the city is bouncing back, with immigrants such as Cárdenas playing a central role. Nearly all of its population growth since 2010 can be attributed to its foreign-born population, which stands at more than 2,000 people.Its Hispanic communities have helped turn Middletown into one of the few regional cities in the state with a growing population. Homes and commercial spaces on the city’s south side have been revitalized, creating new sources of property and income tax revenue for city authorities. Mexican food trucks dot the city’s street corners and Spanish chatter fills its local chain restaurants.In November, Middletown’s mayor, Elizabeth Slamka, was elected without having any political experience, and is the daughter of an immigrant mother from Colombia.“After the pandemic, everything was closed,” says Cárdenas. “And now we are having a kind of boost in our community, and the Hispanic communities are helping with that.” Many, he says, work in construction and landscaping jobs – industries that have suffered chronic staffing shortages since the pandemic and which represent a wider midwestern trend.The midwest is set to be one of the regions most affected by population decline in the decades ahead. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan currently make up four of the 10 most populous states in the country, but all four are expected to experience population decline by 2050.Shrinking populations for communities in the industrial midwest mean fewer resources for infrastructure, maintenance and other basic needs.Vance, however, has made criticizing immigrants a central theme of his political career.Since before his election win last November, he has claimed immigrants undercut American workers, and in recent weeks has claimed that uncontrolled immigration is the “greatest threat” to the US.And he’s not alone.For decades Middletown’s Butler county sheriff, Richard Jones, who sports a Stetson hat, has been known for taking an anti-immigrant stance. The same week Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Jones installed a sign outside the county jail that reads: “illegal aliens here.” Recently Jones, who has had a grip on the sheriff’s office for more than 20 years, began renting out jail cells to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency at a rate of $68 per person a day and $36 an hour for transportation, or in his own words for “as much as I can get”.This month, the sheriff’s office and a city neighboring Middletown were ordered to pay a $1.2m settlement for the wrongful detention of about 500 people over a two-year period beginning in 2017.The anti-immigrant rhetoric from Vance, Jones and Trump has hit home.After mass, some people have approached Cárdenas expressing fear of Ice raids, following one such incident that saw two people detained 20 miles north of Middletown just days after Trump took office in January.“People are saying they are seeing undercover police cars; people are afraid, they don’t know what to believe; there are a lot of rumors,” he says. “In my sermons, I try to give some hope.”Two years ago, Alexandra Gomez established the Latinos Unidos de Middletown Ohio organization to serve as a venue for Latino immigrants to find education, housing and employment resources. “At our first festival in 2023 we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” she says.But statements from the new administration in recent weeks have fueled concern.“It was real here; people were scared, they did not want to go out. They were afraid to go to work,” she says.“And it isn’t that people were afraid that Ice would show up [at their gatherings] but that someone who felt the right to be rude shows up. The biggest concerns people have are: ‘How do I go to work?’”One of the biggest effects of the recent rise in immigration has been seen in the city’s schools.Over the last 15 years, the number of students taking English language classes has more than doubled. Today, nearly one-in-five students are Hispanic or Latino, their presence helping to keep the wider school system funded and operating. The winner of last year’s Middletown Community Foundation’s volunteer of the year award was a high school teacher originally from Colombia.Gomez and Cárdenas say a source of comfort for immigrants has come from a surprising source: the local police force.Cárdenas says his and other churches recently had a meeting with the city police force and was told that it wouldn’t be working with Ice to request visa documents or detain suspected illegal immigrants. “They said: ‘We are not going to profile anybody; we are just going to do our job.’”That was echoed by Gomez.“They reached out to us and basically said: ‘We’ve got other things to do. It’s not our job to be chasing paperwork.’”Such has been the growth in Middletown – about three-fourths of the city’s foreign-born population are from Latin American countries, according to the US Census Bureau – that Roberto Vargas from Guadalajara, Mexico, saw on opportunity to open the Cancun Mexican restaurant on the city’s eastern edge in December 2023.“I have good people working for me; I haven’t heard anyone have issues with [deportations or Ice activity],” he says.For him, it’s the state of the economy that is the major concern.“Restaurants all over the place are closing down. It’s scary,” he says. Since Trump took office, the US economy has been on unsteady ground, with the stock market losing 7% of its value.“I don’t know what’s going on.” More