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    Six ex-Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ officers get 15 to 45 years for torture of Black men

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    Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers – prosecutors said the group called themselves the “Goon Squad” – who tortured and abused two Black men in a racist attack were sentenced to between 15 and 45 years in prison on Wednesday.Brett Morris McAlpin, formerly the fourth highest ranking deputy in the Rankin county sheriff’s department, was sentenced to 20 years. Christian Dedmon was sentenced to 25 years. Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke were both sentenced to 20 years, while Hunter Elward was sentenced to 45 years and Joshua Hartfield was sentenced to 15 years.The Rankin county circuit judge Steve Ratcliff gave the men state sentences shorter than the amount of time in federal prison that they already received last month. Their sentences will run concurrently with their federal prison sentences. The men were all ordered to pay $6,431 within two years of release, and to permanently surrender their law enforcement certificates.In March, the former Rankin county sheriff’s deputies each received federal sentences of at least one decade: McAlpin, 53, was sentenced to serve about 27 years; Dedmon, 29, was sentenced to serve 40 years; Middleton, 46, and Opdyke, 28, both were sentenced to 17.5 years; Elward, 31, was sentenced to about 27 years; while the former Richland, Mississippi police officer Hartfield, 32, was sentenced to serve 10 years in federal penitentiaries.During the federal hearing, US district judge Tom Lee sentenced Dedmon for both his role in the group attack and for an incident the month before the attack. The six men pleaded guilty to state charges last year. He also noted that he viewed Hartfield, who was neither a member of the Rankin county sheriff’s department, nor a member of the “Goon Squad”, in a different light, saying that he was “not there by accident” because he made some “bad choices”.After the federal sentencing hearings, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said: “The depravity of the crimes committed by these defendants cannot be overstated, and they will now spend between 10 and 40 years in prison for their heinous attack on citizens they had sworn to protect.”The Mississippi attorney general’s office brought state charges of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice against each officer in August. Dedmon, who kicked in a door, was charged with home invasion. Elward was charged with both home invasion and aggravated assault. Hartfield was off-duty when he took part in the attack.The attackThe six white officers called themselves the “Goon Squad”, a celebratory nickname that referenced their use of excessive force and their cover-up of the racist attack on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January of 2023.The attack came after a white neighbor complained to McAlpin that Black people were staying with a white woman who owned the home in Braxton in which the assault took place. McAlpin texted other members of the “Goon Squad”, and the group went to the home without a warrant.Parker lived there while helping to care for the owner of the home. Inside, the officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker, poured liquids over their faces while verbally assaulting them with racial slurs. They also forced the men to strip naked and shower together.The officers kicked, waterboarded and used Tasers on the two men, while attempting to sexually assault them during the ordeal. Prosecutors said McAlpin urinated in a closet during the attack; Hartfield used a Taser on the two victims while they were handcuffed and tried to dispose of evidence of the assault.Opdyke and Dedmon also assaulted the two men with a sex object during the more than 90-minute assault, according to court documents.Elward removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun and forced the gun into Jenkin’s mouth before pulling the trigger in a “mock execution”. After no bullet was fired the first time, he pulled the trigger a second time. Jenkins eventually landed in the hospital with a lacerated tongue and broken jaw.Officers did not give Jenkins medical attention, but instead began discussing “false cover story to cover up their misconduct”, and planting and tampering with evidence, according to court documents. They agreed to plant drugs on the two men, prompting false charges that would stand for months.Prosecutors said McAlpin and Middleton threatened to kill other officers if they reported the assault. Still, Opdyke was first to admit to what they did, showing investigators a WhatsApp thread in which they discussed their plans.In his victim statement, Jenkins shared that he can no longer sing or play drums for his church.“I wake up at night covered in sweat because of the nightmares of my attack. Loud noises, police lights, sirens, all give me extreme fear and anxiety. I am broken inside and I don’t ever think I’ll be the person I was,” his statement read.Parker, too, said in his statement that he now lives in constant fear.“My life was not perfect. But it was mine. I doubt if I’ll ever experience it again … They should be given what they gave me and Michael Jenkins – which was no mercy and I pray for the maximum sentence,” he said.Some of the officers apologized for their participation in the attack, but an investigation by the Associated Press found that some of the officers were linked to at least four violent, racist attacks going back at least until 2019 that left two Black men dead. More

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      Ex-Mississippi officer gets 20 years for ‘Goon Squad’ torture of two Black men

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      A former Mississippi sheriff’s deputy was sentenced on Tuesday to about 20 years in prison for his part in torturing two Black men last year.Hunter Elward was sentenced by US district judge Tom Lee, who handed down a 241-month sentence. Lee is also due to sentence five other former law enforcement officers who admitted to subjecting Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker to numerous acts of racist torture.Before sentencing, Lee called Elward’s crimes “egregious and despicable”, and said a “sentence at the top of the guidelines range is justified – is more than justified”. He continued: “It’s what the defendant deserves. It’s what the community and the defendant’s victims deserve.”In January 2023, the group of six burst into a Rankin county home without a warrant and assaulted Jenkins and Parker with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. Elward admitted to shoving a gun into Jenkins’ mouth and firing in a “mock execution” that went awry.The terror began on 24 January 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence.A white person phoned Rankin county deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman at a house in Braxton, Mississippi. McAlpin told Deputy Christian Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies so willing to use excessive force they called themselves “The Goon Squad”.Once inside, they handcuffed Jenkins and his friend Parker and poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup over their faces. They forced them to strip naked and shower together to conceal the mess. They mocked the victims with racial slurs and shocked them with stun guns.After a mock execution went awry when Jenkins was shot in the mouth, they devised a coverup that included planting drugs and a gun. False charges stood against Jenkins and Parker for months.Malik Shabazz, an attorney representing both victims, said the result of the sentencing hearings could have national implications.“Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker continue to suffer emotionally and physically since this horrific and bloody attack by Rankin county deputies,” Shabazz said. “A message must be sent to police in Mississippi and all over America, that level of criminal conduct will be met with the harshest of consequences.”Months before federal prosecutors announced charges in August 2023, an investigation by the Associated Press linked some of the deputies to at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019 that left two dead and another with lasting injuries.The officers charged include McAlpin, Dedmon, Elward, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke of the Rankin county sheriff’s department and Joshua Hartfield, a Richland police officer.They pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy against rights, obstructions of justice, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm under a crime of violence, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Court papers identified Elward as one of the Goon Squad members. The others identified as part of the squad were Middleton and Opdyke.The majority-white Rankin county is just east of the state capital, Jackson, home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major US city.The officers warned Jenkins and Parker to “stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River”, court documents say, referencing an area with higher concentrations of Black residents.In the gruesome crimes committed by men tasked with enforcing the law, federal prosecutors saw echoes of Mississippi’s dark history, including the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers after a deputy handed them off to the Ku Klux Klan.For months, the Rankin county sheriff, Bryan Bailey, whose deputies committed the crimes, said little about the episode. After the officers pleaded guilty in August, Bailey said the officers had gone rogue and promised to change the department. Jenkins and Parker have called for his resignation, and they have filed a $400m civil lawsuit against the department. More

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      Inside tech billionaires’ push to reshape San Francisco politics: ‘a hostile takeover’

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      In a way, it’s a story as old as time: ultra-wealthy figures pouring a flood of money into city politics in an effort to shape the way it is run.Still, the political-influence machine that tech billionaires and venture capitalists have recently built in San Francisco stands out for its size and ambition. A new analysis of campaign filings, non-profit records and political contributions by the Guardian and Mission Local reveals the extent of this network, which is using its financial and organizational muscle to push the famously progressive city into adopting policies that are tougher on crime and homelessness, and more favorable to business and housing construction.In the past six years, prominent tech and venture capital leaders – including the hedge fund manager William Oberndorf, the billionaire investor Michael Moritz, the cryptocurrency booster Chris Larsen, the PayPal co-founder David Sacks, the Y Combinator CEO, Garry Tan, and the Pantheon CEO, Zachary Rosen – have invested at least $5.7m into reshaping San Francisco’s policies, according to the analysis of public data. Because not all of their donations are publicly disclosed, the sum of their contributions may be far higher.In a solidly Democratic city, they have joined forces with traditional business and real estate elites in an effort to oust some of its most progressive leaders and undo its most progressive policies.To achieve those goals, they have created a loose network of interlocking non-profits, dark money groups and political action committees – a framework colloquially known as a “grey money” network – that allows them to obscure the true scale of their involvement in San Francisco’s municipal politics.View image in fullscreenThe three major groups in this network – NeighborsSF, TogetherSF and GrowSF – have pulled in more than $26m in contributions since 2020, according to campaign finance and tax records, more than $21m of which they have spent on various political issues.“They’re using multiple layers of organizations to hide the sources of their money, and to hide how much they’re spending,” said Jim Stearns, a political consultant with decades of experience in San Francisco politics and a critic of the groups.“This is a $20bn hostile takeover of San Francisco by people with vested real estate and tech interests, and who don’t want anyone else deciding how the city is run,” he said, referring to the combined wealth of the most prolific new donors.Billionaires’ increasing involvementIn its storied history, San Francisco has always seen tycoons seek influence over city business. In the 2010s, the tech investor Ron Conway played a crucial role in the election of the mayor Ed Lee and was a major factor in the ascent of the current mayor, London Breed, after Lee died in office in 2017 . But the entry of a libertarian billionaire class into local politics is new, said political operatives and people who have been targeted by them. So are the vast amounts of wealth created in the most recent tech boom that these figures can tap into.View image in fullscreenPolitical observers trace the newcomers’ involvement to 2018, when a special election brought Breed to power. Their engagement grew as progressive candidates won a number of narrow but surprising victories in 2019, including the district attorney office and several seats in San Francisco’s legislative body, the board of supervisors. But, those observers say, their political participation really intensified during the pandemic, when frustrations over rising visible homelessness, a sharp increase in petty crime and fentanyl-related overdose deaths, and an economic downturn in the city boiled over.“There is a growing sense … that the city’s progressive political class has failed its citizens,” Moritz, the billionaire investor and a former journalist, wrote in a May 2023 feature for the Financial Times. “Online discourse about San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’, a downward economic and social spiral that becomes irreversible, feels less like hyperbole by the day. Even for a city that has always managed to rebuild after flattening financial and geological shocks, San Francisco – emptier, deadlier, more politically dysfunctional – seems closer to the brink than ever.”The priorities of these deep-pocketed figures have varied. Oberndorf, the hedge fund manager, had been a long-time charter school advocate and major Republican party donor. Larsen, the crypto investor, has been a strong backer of expanding police ranks and surveillance capabilities. Tan, the Y Combinator CEO, has pushed for business policies favorable to crypto, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars.Broadly, though, they maintain that San Francisco needs a tougher approach to homelessness and drug problems, a more punitive approach to crime, and a climate more friendly to business and housing construction. Some have called for centralizing more power in the office of the mayor.In past years, several of these operatives have set up organizations to advance policy on those issues – non-profit organizations, so-called dark money groups, political action committees and even media outlets.View image in fullscreenDogged reporting by Bay Area outlets has previously exposed some of the money flowing into these groups. But their structure makes it difficult to easily uncover all sources of donations. Political action committees, or Pacs, are required to name their major donors. But the so-called dark money groups, which are technically civic leagues or social welfare groups, were formed under the 501(c)4 section of the tax code, and do not have to disclose donors or political contributions. Since the 2010 supreme court ruling Citizens United v Federal Election Commission relaxed regulation around political donations, 501(c)4 groups have exponentially increased their involvement in political donations, to the tune of at least $1bn by 2019 nationwide, according to ProPublica reporting.However, the Guardian and Mission Local’s analysis of financial records shows several of the organisations donating money to one another, and several groups sharing personnel, addresses and donors. And it reveals the sheer financial deluge they are spending ahead of the 2024 elections.Complicated contributionsAmong the most prominent and resourced groups in this network is Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, which was founded by Oberndorf, and an affiliated 501(c)4 started by the longtime San Francisco real estate lobbyist Mary Jung, among others. Oberndorf sits on the board of directors of the dark money group.NeighborsSF says it is committed to improving public safety, public education and quality of life in the city, backing what it calls “pragmatic” and “responsible” groups and candidates. The group has funded publicity campaigns for moderate candidates and bankrolled other 501(c)4s working to advance related issues.NeighborsSF has been primarily funded by a handful of extremely wealthy donors from the tech and real estate worlds. Campaign contribution data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission and state election disclosures show that Oberndorf has poured more than $900,000 over the years into the 501(c)4s. The group’s biggest donor, Kilroy Realty, a southern California-based firm with major holdings in downtown office property and highly desired parcels in the South of Market district, has given $1.2m since 2020. The dynastic real estate investor Brandon Shorenstein has contributed $899,000 through his family’s real estate firm. Larsen has donated at least $300,000. Moritz donated $300,000 in 2020 alone.View image in fullscreenMoritz is one of the most prominent players in reshaping San Francisco. Since 2020, he has donated more than $336m towards various causes in the city, both social and political, according to a recent Bloomberg report.In addition to his contributions to NeighborsSF, Moritz seeded $3m for TogetherSF Action, a 501(c)4 that is most famously known for a flashy, sarcastic poster campaign decrying the city’s fentanyl crisis and campaigns for expanding the power of the mayor. The group has an affiliated non-profit, TogetherSF, that serves as a volunteering hub. According to incorporation filings with the state of California, Moritz occupies key positions with both organizations, which also share personnel with NeighborsSF. Moritz has also sunk $10m into the San Francisco Standard, a startup news publication in the city run by Griffin Gaffney, a co-founder of TogetherSF.The third big player is GrowSF, a dark money group run by Sachin Agarwal, an alum of Apple, Twitter and Lyft, and Steven Buss, formerly of Google and Amazon. Tan is a member of its board. GrowSF has several affiliated Pacs and says it endorses “common sense” candidates as an alternative to “far-left” elected officials.Campaign contribution filings show that major donors include Agarwal’s father, Aditya Agarwal, as well as Larsen ($100,000), Tan ($25,000) and Pantheon’s Rosen, a tech investor who launched the controversial pro-market-rate development group YIMBY California. GrowSF has received tens of thousands of dollars from NeighborsSF over the years, according to federal tax filings.Follow the moneyThrough varying alliances, the groups have exerted their influence on debates that go to the heart of San Francisco policy. Among the first was the February 2022 recall of three members of the San Francisco school board, whom voters ousted from office over frustrations with the slow reopening of district schools during the pandemic, a controversial proposal to rename school sites, racially charged tweets by one of the members, and changes to the testing requirements for admission to the city’s only selective academic public high school, Lowell.The campaign to unseat the members raised more than $2m, more than 20 times the $86,000 the school board members gathered to fight off the challenge, according to campaign contribution filings.The billionaire charter school backer Arthur Rock was the single largest donor to the SFUSD recalls, giving $500,000. But NeighborsSF Advocacy came in a close second, directing $488,800 into political action committees supporting the recall effort.Separate from NeighborsSF, state disclosures show, Sacks gave $75,000 to Pacs supporting the school board recall, and the Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston donated $45,000. Tan, Agarwal and Buss respectively gave $25,000, $10,000 and $5,000 to a cluster of political action committees bankrolling the school board recall efforts for each specific board member.NeighborsSF was also key to the successful recall of the progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. A former deputy public defender and the son of convicted “new left” militants, Boudin was elected DA in 2019 on a promise to reduce mass incarceration and police misconduct. The pushback against his policies was immediate.Over 15 months, Boudin’s opponents raised $7.2m for the campaign supporting his ouster, more than twice the $2.7m collected by the anti-recall effort, campaign finance data compiled by Mission Local has shown.View image in fullscreenMost of these donations were channelled through NeighborsSF. The group contributed $4m of the $7.2m raised by the campaign, Mission Local reporting established, with the California Association of Realtors coming in a distant second at $458,000 in donations.State campaign finance records also show a $68,000 contribution to the recall campaign by GrowSF’s political action committee.There have been other victories. In 2022, GrowSF backed the successful candidacy of Joel Engardio, a former SF Weekly staff writer and former GrowSF leadership member, for supervisor through its Pac. GrowSF contributed more than $92,000 in support of Engardio’s campaign, per state campaign finance data. Since being elected, Engardio has promoted policies including increased police staffing, harsh penalties for narcotics offenses, building market-rate housing and sweeps of homeless camps.The Pac also spent at least $15,400 supporting the campaign of Matt Dorsey, a former head of communications at the San Francisco police department, for a full term as supervisor. And it spent at least $15,569 supporting Brooke Jenkins, Boudin’s successor and a supporter of the recall campaign, when she ran for re-election.It’s a “longer-term, widespread, deliberate strategy”, said Aaron Peskin, the progressive president of San Francisco’s board of supervisors. “They’re propping up innumerable 501(c)4s that are doing everything from mounting political attack campaigns to infiltrating dozens of long-term neighborhood groups … Why would you say no if someone knocked on your door to organize Saturday neighborhood cleanups?”Towards 2024With key successes under its belt, this network is gearing up to play a major role in the 2024 elections, which will determine control of the San Francisco board of supervisors and the Democratic county central committee.GrowSF is among the main drivers behind aggressive efforts to oust two progressive supervisors: Dean Preston, who represents the Haight, Hayes Valley and the Tenderloin districts, and Connie Chan, whose district includes the Inner and Outer Richmond neighborhoods.The group has set up separate “Dump Dean” and “Clear Out Connie” Pacs targeting the supervisors. GrowSF has raised at least $300,000 for its anti-Preston campaign, which has run attack ads falsely accusing him of opposing affordable housing. Larsen, Tan and a number of Y Combinator partners all have donated to GrowSF’s effort, according to San Francisco ethics commission campaign finance data.View image in fullscreenTan, who is known for his massive Twitter blocklist and recently faced ire for wishing a slow death upon progressive supervisors on the platform, has personally pledged $50,000 to oust Preston. He is publicly soliciting more donations.In addition to the board of supervisors races, GrowSF is backing a slate of moderate Democrats running to replace progressives on the Democratic county central committee, which makes endorsements for the Democratic party. Several of these moderate candidates are also running for supervisor, and while contributions to the supervisorial race are capped, there’s no limit to donations for the DCCC.The moderates have collectively raised about $1.16m, about four times as much as the progressive candidates.In light of the bruising national political landscape in 2024, San Francisco’s proverbial “knife fight in a telephone booth” may seem inconsequential. But the political network erected with the aid of libertarian tech money has already demonstrated its power to chill San Francisco’s progressive politics. So far, not one progressive candidate has thrown their hat in the ring to challenge London Breed.Peskin, who has long been eyed as a potential mayoral candidate, told Politico in January that the tech money backing moderate candidates has made it hard for progressives to fight back. It was one reason, he said, why he is leaning against getting into the race.The success of these political campaigns in one of the US’s most progressive cities could inspire similar efforts in cities around the country, Peskin warned.“There’s a sense by these guys that they are the tip of the spear,” he said. “If you can take on liberal/progressive thought in politics in San Francisco, you can do it anywhere.”This story was published in collaboration with Mission Local, an independent San Francisco non-profit news site More

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      Crime in the US is once again falling. Can we rethink policing? | Simon Balto

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      Reports on 2023 in the United States are in, and a banner one is this: crime plummeted last year.According to the New York Times, citing FBI data, Detroit recorded its lowest murder figures in roughly half a century; homicides and shootings in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and most other major cities dropped precipitously; and car thefts were the only “serious” criminal category that didn’t see notable drop-offs over the course of the calendar year. In Minneapolis – which, after the police murder of George Floyd, became the epicenter in 2020 of the largest wave against racial injustice since the civil rights movement – homicides reportedly fell by 9% last year, gun violence by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by half.This is, of course, good news.To be frank, I’m skeptical (all of us should be) about the utility of crime statistics. They over-rely on police activity (what police reacted to) rather than victimization (what actually happened to people), meaning that those statistics often don’t reflect harms people experienced that they didn’t report to police (which is the majority of harms).And, for decades, scholars have convincingly questioned the legitimacy of police-reported crime statistics, for many reasons. I’ve seen this in my own research: as I wrote about in my first book, changes to how police in Chicago catalogued crime in the early 1960s provoked an illusory but powerful panic about supposedly spiking crime.Nevertheless, while crime statistics often lie, body counts usually do not, and at the minimum it’s pretty clear that fewer people were murdered in 2023 than in preceding years. Again, that’s a good thing.The question is: why? In a nation overrun with weapons that for years has been lurching evermore toward violence, why did violence decline in 2023?If you were to believe the Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, the drop in crime in that city was singularly a product of the police force he commands. The same of the New York City mayor and former NYPD officer, Eric Adams, who at a press conference last week touted the NYPD as the “finest police department on the globe” in announcing that crime in New York was down year-over-year.Similarly, a press release from the Chicago police department gave some credit for that city’s declining crime to community partnerships, but the majority of its praise on the subject went to, well, itself.Such claims are interesting. Were police just magically better at their job in 2023 than they were in other years? If police do a “good job” and are the sole reason why crime goes down in the years that it goes down, are they doing a “bad job” and are the reason why crime goes up in the years that it goes up?The insanity of trying to discuss policing in this country is that most policymakers, and many citizens, refuse to accept that those two questions are intractably related. It is intellectually incongruent to answer the first in the affirmative and the second in the negative. Year after year, for more than half a century, the United States has poured more and more money into policing and argued that it does so to keep people safe.Even in times of austerity, when funding for pretty much everything else gets slashed, funding for police generally rises. In times of plenty, funding for police rises. It rises when crime is high, and it rises when crime is low. When cities find that they need to trim budgets, the one thing that they almost always won’t meaningfully touch is their police department.While as part of his austerity measures last year, Adams did threaten to delay the induction of new NYPD officers, he also authorized $150m (yes, million) more on overtime in 2023 for police to patrol New York’s subway system than in 2022. That investment paid off with an almost non-noticeable increase in arrests for serious crimes and about $100,000 in fines for fare evasion, largely grifted from poor people, at the same time that Adams divested from other city services while blaming it all on the costs of housing incoming migrants to the city.No one can provide compelling evidence that this makes any sense. For decades, year-over-year crime rates have experienced peaks and valleys. The same is not true for spending on police, which moves ever-upward. Expressed visually, the two lines would look like a series of waves on the one hand (crime), and a straight line upward on the other (police spending).I’m not sure what conclusion people could muster from that besides to say that how much we spend on policing doesn’t actually matter, at least in the socially positive sense. If we spend X billion of dollars on policing when crime is high (or perceived to be high), and if crime rates don’t decline as a result of said investment, then why do we consider that to have been a good investment?And, in the opposite direction, why do we not question our investments when funding for police is at all-time highs and at the same time, said investments don’t precipitate a drop in crime statistics? Even the most ill-informed financial planner would advise against this based on the evidence.Maybe it’s not entirely our fault. On this matter, and as Americans, we are conditioned by blinkered political visions and blinded understandings of history to accept that the way things are are the way that they must be. And perhaps that’s a universal human condition; grasping for what we don’t know (what could be) is much harder than holding on to what we do (what is). But there is a uniqueness, I think, to the political wizardry of US-style policing: it has instantiated itself so firmly as the answer to societal issues that we are left with few obvious off-ramps from it when we witness or experience such societal problems.“Call the police” is what we are taught to do when we sense that we’re in danger, across all the enormous spectrum that “being in danger” entails, from the very real to the very racist. “Call the police” is what we are told to do if we get in a fender-bender because insurance won’t take your call without a police report. “The police” have become the social default if someone has a mental health episode or doesn’t use a turn signal or uses the wrong kind of drug in public or panhandles for loose change in the wrong location or sleeps on the wrong bench when they have nowhere else to go. Ad infinitum.In contrast, the key lesson of recent decades is that how we approach public safety is utterly nonsensical. If investing billions into police every year doesn’t meaningfully influence whether or not people are safer as they go about their lives, would not our investments be better made elsewhere?Chicago, for instance, recently began a guaranteed income pilot program, allotting an unconditional $500 per month to people living in economic precarity, versions of which have been adopted in other cities, too. Why do we not at least try new modes of operating to give people the things they need and that will better ensure they’re shielded from harm: access to both mental and physical health resources, to housing, to domestic abuse protection, and so on?My hope for 2024 is that we start asking better questions about these systems, so that we can find better answers.
      Simon Balto is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power More

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      US threatens to sue Texas over law allowing state police to arrest migrants

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      The US Department of Justice has threatened to sue the state of Texas if it implements a law that would allow state police to arrest any person deemed suspicious of crossing the border illegally.The law, called Senate Bill 4, is scheduled to go into effect on 5 March. One of the strictest immigration laws ever passed in American history, SB4 seeks to “prohibit ‘sanctuary city’ policies, that prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about a person’s immigration status and complying with detainer requests”.The law would include “improper border entry” as a new criminal offense, placing undocumented Texas residents and migrants within the grips of the state’s criminal justice system.Immigration and border enforcement is a function of the federal government, the justice department argues: since the US supreme court ruled so in the landmark United States v Arizona case in 2012, immigration policy has long been under the purview of the US federal government – not individual states.In a letter addressed to the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, the Biden administration has given the Lone Star state a deadline of 3 January to reverse course.The letter says, in part: “SB 4 is preempted and violates the United States constitution. Accordingly, the United States intends to file suit to enjoin the enforcement of SB 4 unless Texas agrees to refrain from enforcing the law. The United States is committed to both securing the border and ensuring the processing of noncitizens consistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). SB 4 is contrary to those goals.”On X, Abbott wrote: “The Biden Admin. not only refuses to enforce current U.S. immigration laws, they now want to stop Texas from enforcing laws against illegal immigration. I’ve never seen such hostility to the rule of law in America.”He added: “Biden is destroying America. Texas is trying to save it.”The move is one of several attempts by Texas at enforcing border security, all a part of Operation Lone Star, a joint operation between the Texas department of public safety and the Texas military department with the mission of countering illegal immigration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEarlier this year, in July, Abbott and his administration were condemned as inhumane by immigrant and civil rights groups for deploying razor wire and a large floating buoy in the Rio Grande to deter illegal migration – another issue on which the US Department of Justice pursued legal action against Texas.In May, shortly after the Biden administration ended the pandemic-era policy Title 42, which had given US officials authority to turn away people who had come to the US-Mexico border claiming asylum in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Abbott deployed a security unit called the Texas tactical border force to the US-Mexico border. The force is equipped with aircrafts, boats, night vision devices and riot gear.In recent years, Texas has also joined Republican-led Florida in bussing undocumented immigrants from their states to “sanctuary” cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston. More

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      Florida senator Rick Scott’s house ‘swatted’ by police

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      The Republican Florida senator Rick Scott has said that his home was “swatted” on Wednesday night.While dining with his wife, Ann, local Naples authorities responded to what was revealed to be a prank call intentionally made to lure resources like a Swat team to a location to respond to a false threat of danger, otherwise known as a “swatting call”.Scott responded to the incident on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.He said: “Last night, while at dinner with my wife, cowards ‘swatted’ my home in Naples. These criminals wasted the time & resources of our law enforcement in a sick attempt to terrorize my family.”Naples police called the incident an active and ongoing investigation.In a statement, Naples police said: “On December 27, 2023, at approximately 9:02pm, Naples Police dispatchers received a call on our non-emergency line from an individual stating that a shooting occurred … Within 15 minutes, we were able to confirm that the events did not occur, and the incident was a swatting event.”Other US politicians were also recently targeted by swatting call attempts. On Christmas Day, authorities arrived at the home of the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in Rome, Georgia, in response to a swatting call to a suicide hotline from a man who falsely claimed he shot his girlfriend at Greene’s home and was going to kill himself.That same morning, Greene wrote on X: “I was just swatted. This is like the 8th time. On Christmas with my family here. My local police are the GREATEST and shouldn’t have to deal with this. I appreciate them so much and my family and I are in joyous spirits celebrating the birth of our savior Jesus Christ!”Last year, Greene was targeted by more swatting attempts. In November, a Georgia man was charged with threatening to kill Greene, her family and her staff.In New York, Congressman Brandon Williams was also targeted by swatting calls on Christmas Day.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn X, Williams thanked law enforcement officers who responded to the call.“Our home was swatted this afternoon. Thanks to the Deputies and Troopers who contacted me before arriving. They left with homemade cookies and spiced nuts! Merry Christmas everyone!” he tweeted.Authorities from the Cayuga county sheriff’s office confirmed that they, along with New York state police, responded “to a report of a reported confessed shooting incident” at Williams’s home. More

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      Supreme court rejects Chauvin’s appeal of George Floyd murder conviction

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      The US supreme court rejected on Monday a conviction appeal for the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd.The decision affirms Derek Chauvin’s conviction for second-degree murder and sentence of more than 20 years in prison.In October, Chauvin’s legal defense requested the highest court in their nation take up their client’s case, arguing he was denied a fair trial in 2021 because of prejudice in the pretrial due to publicity.They also argued juror misconduct, alleging that it was in the jurors’ best interest to find Chauvin guilty to avoid threats of violence from the public.The supreme court did not provide comment on its decision to refuse Chauvin’s appeal.Floyd, who was Black, was killed by police on 25 May 2020, igniting global protests calling for his murderers to be brought to justice and an end to police brutality and racism worldwide.Chauvin, a white officer, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes outside the convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill.A video captured by a bystander showed Floyd’s final moments as he called out for his mother and said, “I can’t breathe,” which became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.Three other former officers involved in Floyd’s murder – J Alexander Kueng, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane – received lesser state and federal sentences.Chauvin is separately appealing his conviction on federal civil rights charges. More

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      Standing My Ground review: Capitol cop Harry Dunn on January 6 and the Trumpist threat

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      If you think you’ve read everything you need to know about the violent attempt to overthrow the US government on 6 January 2021, this insider’s book by a 6ft 7in African American Capitol police officer will change your mind.Harry Dunn has written a 237-page cri de coeur for himself and for the US. It is a story that is more important than ever when so many crazed Republicans continue to revere the traitor whom the justice department says is directly responsible for this singularly shameful episode in American history.On that terrible day, Dunn and hundreds of his fellow Capitol cops were in hand-to-hand combat with scores of drunken and drug-addled seditionists. The police officers were attacked with everything from metal bike racks to flagpoles and banisters ripped from the stairs of the building.“You could hear the screaming and hollering as the battle raged on,” Dunn writes. “Blood was streaming down officers’ faces. They were yelling, grunting, and trying to force the rioters back. Many of them were blinded and coughing after being doused with pepper spray, bear spray, and even WD-40.”In the years since then, Dunn has beaten back post-traumatic stress disorder with the help of his family, his friends, professional therapists and sympathetic Congress members like Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Raskin took Dunn to lunch after the officer called the congressman’s office to tell him he was the source of an anonymous quote in a story in BuzzFeed which – to Dunn’s delight – Raskin had tweeted out.Since then, Dunn has made dozens of public appearances and written this book, with a single goal: “I want the people responsible for that day, including Trump … to pay a price, just like we paid a price … I will always be standing my ground to make sure our democracy exists. And I’ll ask that you stand with me so that nothing like this ever happens again.”Dunn reserves his greatest anger for those he and his fellow officers risked their lives for in the face of that furious mob. He was “full of rage” when it became clear that “Republicans were walking away from their earlier condemnation of the attack … Congress members … whom I had guarded and protected through State of the Unions [and] inaugurations … had suddenly turned on me. It angered me that loyalty to a single individual could overwhelm otherwise decent people … who had fallen into the darkness and forgotten their oaths of office.”He writes about how the day was particularly traumatic for Black police officers, because they were repeatedly called the N-word, as well as being beaten and sprayed and kicked and pummeled.He compares their treatment by Trump and others to the notorious assault in 1946 of a decorated Black second world war veteran named Isaac Woodard, who was pulled from a Greyhound bus because “the bus driver hadn’t liked the way Woodard asked to use the restroom” outside Augusta, Georgia. Local police officers beat him savagely and “the police chief used his baton to gouge Woodard’s eye sockets until both eyeballs ruptured beyond repair. Woodward was blind from that day forward.”“Now multiply that betrayal by two thousand times,” Dunn writes, “because that’s how many Capitol and Metropolitan police department officers were viciously assaulted by Americans whose democracy we defend every day.”After that, “we were betrayed by our president, many of our elected officials, and thousands of other Americans we had sworn to protect”.Dunn testified before the January 6 House committee and at trials for some of the terrorists who have been convicted for their crimes. Just like Woodard, “we were wearing our uniforms and badges, signifying our service to our nation”. But also just like Woodard, “to them we were throw-away people to be despised, hated and derided … merely because of the color of our skin … January 6 was never about politics. It wasn’t about election fraud. That was an excuse for people to do some shit they had wanted to do in the first place.”Last week’s election results in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – like the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 – proved once again that a majority of Americans reject the extremist agenda embraced by the Maga movement and its hideous head.Having finally recovered from most of the injuries inflicted on that fateful day in January 2021, Dunn feels he’s “been given a new lease on life, another chance to make a difference and that is what I want to do”. He ends the book with a plea to readers to do exactly what he is trying to do with that second chance: become a tireless foot soldier in the never-ending fight against racism and ignorance and book burning in America.He writes: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
      Standing My Ground is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Controversial police-led recall vote wins key ruling in California

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      A California state judge dismissed efforts this past week to halt a recall vote led by a local police union who are attempting to oust a progressive city council member.The union, which is upset that the politician voted against officers’ pay raises, has so far spent more than $660,000 on the vote to recall Santa Ana council member Jessie Lopez, with voting happening 14 November.In California, only 10% of signatures from registered voters in jurisdictions with 100,000 or more voters is required for a recall petition to be approved, giving such measures a much higher chance to succeed than in many other parts of the US – which is why the state has seen recall efforts against its governor, Gavin Newsom; the San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin; and the Alameda county district attorney Pamela Price (Newsom remained governor, Boudin was ousted and the effort against Price is ongoing).The city of Santa Ana in southern California – adjacent to Anaheim, home of Disneyland – has a population of more than 300,000, divided into six wards.The recall petition began after Lopez voted against the police union’s demands for pay raises in December 2022. Property and landlord groups have also backed the recall effort in response to Lopez’s support for a 2021 rent-control law. Notable support came in the form of a recent $100,000 donation from the National Association of Realtors Fund.If Lopez loses the recall, she’s out of office and can’t run in a special election to find a replacement for the remainder of her term.The judge’s decision to allow the recall to continue was in response to a request for a temporary order to halt the vote, which was filed by a resident who voted for Lopez in 2020 but would not be eligible to vote in the recall vote because she doesn’t live in the ward’s current boundaries.“This recall effort is corrupt and will cost Santa Ana taxpayers $1.2m if the special interests get their way,” Jessie Lopez said on her campaign website against the recall.Lopez’s website alleges that the recall effort utilized canvassers who were paid per voter signature, and it characterized the recall as an effort by the Santa Ana police association president Gerry Serrano to flip control of the city council in his favor.This prompted the Orange county registrar’s office to rescind its certification of the recall petition signatures. But the Santa Ana city council deadlocked in a 3-3 vote, with Lopez abstaining, on whether to take action to halt the recall.The judge said the court would revisit the signature issue after the recall vote in January 2024.Lopez has received support from local labor unions, including the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324 (UFCW), Unite Here Local 11, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), the National Union of Healthcare Workers, Painters and Allied Trades District Council 36, the Orange county Democratic party, the Working Families Party and congresswoman Katie Porter.UFCW Local 324 has noted Lopez helped Santa Ana residents win hazard pay during the Covid-19 pandemic and led efforts on rent control as well as cannabis tax reform legislation.The Orange County Register newspaper’s editorial board wrote in opposition to the recall, saying: “We certainly have our differences with her on policy. But this recall really is about the lock-grip on power in the city of the Santa Ana police officers association. The police union and its allies have offered a litany of tangential reasons for the recall, but there’s no reason to pretend this is anything other than a power grab.”In 2020, the Santa Ana police association also backed the successful recall of city council member Ceci Iglesias after she voted against police pay raises. The police union also attempted to trigger a recall vote of city council member Thai Viet Phan but did not gather enough signatures by the 7 August deadline. More