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      Ilhan Omar condemns US’s failure to act since George Floyd: ‘A broken system’

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      Congresswoman Ilhan Omar condemned the United States’ failure to curb police violence, saying in an interview with the Guardian that brutality against Black Americans had escalated since George Floyd’s murder.“Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies, it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher,” the Democratic representative said on Tuesday. “We are not in a good place.”Omar spoke by phone from Minnesota on Tuesday after a United Nations human rights group visited her district as part of a two-week tour of US cities focused on police killings and racism in the US criminal legal system. The UN experts heard emotional testimony in Minneapolis from families of people killed by police and formerly incarcerated people who were subject to solitary confinement as youth and continue to suffer from the trauma.On Wednesday, Omar is also proposing a House resolution condemning police brutality worldwide, calling for reallocating funding in the US toward mental health programs, counseling and violence prevention; ending the use of militarized equipment and police tactics in the US and abroad; and prohibiting the sales of arms, ammunition and “less-lethal” equipment to countries with documented human rights violations.“The United States has always professed these values of human rights and rarely subjects itself in the scrutiny of these systems that we support internationally,” said Omar, the deputy chair of the congressional progressive caucus, who has championed criminal justice reforms. The representative, a frequent target of Republicans and rightwing media, has previously introduced legislation to criminalize violence against protesters, investigate police misuse of force and to restrict the use of no-knock warrants.Floyd’s murder and the 2021 police killing of Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old who was pulled over for having an expired tag and hanging air freshener, both occurred in Omar’s district. At the State of the Union address this year, the congresswoman brought as her guest the father of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old who was asleep on a couch when Minneapolis police barged into the apartment in a pre-dawn raid and killed him within seconds.As Minneapolis braces for the third anniversary of Floyd’s murder this month, advocates’ data analysis has shown that police in the US continue to kill more than three people a day, and that 2022 was the deadliest year on record since experts first started doing nationwide tracking in 2013.“It’s dangerous to continue to make the same mistakes and invest in systems that are not only broken, but do not serve the needs of the community,” said Omar, criticizing the “tough on crime” rhetoric that has increased in recent years as lawmakers roll back reforms and seek to expand police powers. “We know what will work and what is needed. Research and data points to all these other interventions being much more meaningful in reducing crime than what we see when we continue to invest just in policing.”She said non-policing efforts can be more effective, pointing toward a $500,000 US justice department grant for a Minnesota gun violence prevention program that provides trauma recovery services to victims through hospitals, in an effort to break cycles of shootings. “We’ve seen the drastic changes that are experienced by the few people served by the gun violence prevention programs that are funded.”Mothers whose sons were killed by police in Minnesota testified on Tuesday about the horrors of law enforcement instantly using deadly force on their loved ones in crisis, then aggressively defending the killings.The formerly incarcerated witnesses talked to the UN about being locked alone in small cells for hours or days on end, their cries for help ignored. A recent new investigation found that solitary confinement of children continued to be a widespread practice in Minnesota.“The inhumanity of the human rights violations … is baffling,” Omar said. “We have staggering numbers of people who are dying in our prisons and who are living in the most inhumane conditions. We have staggering levels of people struggling with mental health who are being denied access to healthcare that they deserve. We’re seeing people who are being driven to insanity because we seem to lack the compassion of understanding that human beings need interaction.”She noted that some in solitary are deprived of all human contact, blankets and a proper place to sleep, amounting to “torture”. In recent weeks, there have been reports of deaths in US jails, including a man in Indiana with schizophrenia who was left naked in solitary for weeks, and a man with mental illness who was found covered in bedbugs.“The fact we’re allowing young, developing brains with so much potential … to be confined in solitary is just horrendous,” Omar said, adding that the US prison system remained focused on punishment and not on preparing people to return home: “These are things that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, and certainly shouldn’t be happening in the United States.”The UN experts, part of a human rights panel formed after Floyd’s murder, are also visiting Washington DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In LA, the group toured the county jail system, which has been condemned for its squalid and “barbaric” conditions. The panel will present a report on its findings to the UN later this year. More

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      Jayland Walker shooting: officers won’t face charges in death of Black motorist

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      Eight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit.Officers chased the car on a freeway and city streets until Walker bailed from the still-moving vehicle, ignored officers’ commands and ran into a parking lot where he was killed while wearing a ski mask, body cam video showed. Authorities said he represented a “deadly threat”. A handgun, a loaded magazine and a wedding ring were found on the driver’s seat of his car.Walker took at least one shot from his vehicle at police and then after jumping out of his car he ignored commands to stop and show his hands, Yost said. “There is no doubt he did in fact shoot at police officers,” Attorney General Dave Yost of Ohio said.Walker reached for his waistband as officers were chasing and raised his hand, Yost said. The officers, not knowing he left his gun in the car, believed he was firing again at them, Yost said.Yost said it is critical to remember that Walker had fired at police, and that he “shot first”.Walker’s family called it a brutal and senseless shooting of a man who was unarmed at the time and whose fiancee recently died. Police union officials said the officers thought there was an immediate threat of serious harm and that their actions were in line with their training and protocols.The blurry body camera footage did not clearly show what authorities say was a threatening gesture Walker made before he was shot. Police chased him for about 10 seconds before officers fired from multiple directions, a burst of shots that lasts 6 or 7 seconds.The eight officers, whose names have been withheld from the public, initially were placed on leave, but they returned to administrative duties three and a half months after the shooting.A county medical examiner said Walker was shot at least 40 times. The autopsy also said no illegal drugs or alcohol were detected in his body.City leaders have been meeting with community leaders, church groups, activists and business owners ahead of the grand jury meeting while also preparing for potential protests.Walker’s death received widespread attention from activists, including from the family of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. The NAACP and an attorney for Walker’s family called on the justice department to open a federal civil rights investigation.President Joe Biden responded during a trip to Ohio last summer by saying the DoJ was monitoring the case.Separately, another grand jury has refused to indict a former northern Virginia police officer after he fatally shot an unarmed shoplifting suspect outside a busy shopping mall in February.Authorities presented the case to a grand jury for an indictment against Wesley Shifflett, who shot and killed Timothy McCree Johnson outside Tysons Corner Center on 22 February.The shooting occurred after Shifflett and another Fairfax county police officer chased Johnson on foot from the mall after receiving a report from security guards that Johnson had stolen sunglasses from a Nordstrom department store.Dimly lit body camera video shows the chase and the shooting. The officer is heard saying “Get on the ground” and later saying “stop reaching” as shots are fired. After the shooting, Shifflett tells another officer that he saw Johnson “continually reaching in his waistband”.A search of the grounds after the shooting turned up no weapons.Shifflett was fired last month for what Fairfax county police chief Kevin Davis called “a failure to live up to the expectations of our agency, in particular use of force policies”.A lawyer for Johnson’s family likened the shooting to an execution. Johnson’s mother, Melissa Johnson, said officers shot her son when all they knew at the time was “that he was Black and male and had allegedly triggered an alarm from a store for some sunglasses”. More

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      ‘Black labor v white wealth’: can a progressive win Chicago’s mayoral election?

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      Brandon Johnson was in his element at Kenwood Academy high school.The bespectacled former social studies teacher and candidate for Chicago mayor sat at a table next to his opponent, former Chicago public schools CEO Paul Vallas, during a recent afternoon debate. In an exhausting series of mayoral debates, Johnson had a home field advantage at Kenwood, where his son attends school.Johnson is a member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its former deputy political director. The CTU has thrown its support behind Johnson while Chicago’s cop union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has endorsed the tough-on-crime Vallas. The moderators at Kenwood opened with a question about whether the mayoral race was a proxy war between the Fraternal Order of Police and CTU.Johnson, who now serves as a Cook county commissioner, has joked in the past that he didn’t become a pastor like his father or sister because they weren’t unionized. But it’s clear that his family’s work in the church has shaped his commanding presence in secular spaces – as it did that day.“This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Johnson responded. “This is about providing community access to the very public accommodations which Black people fought for, especially after emancipation. It’s what the descendants of slaves in this room are fighting for: public education, public transportation, affordable housing, healthcare and access to jobs.”The Chicago mayoral election is one of the most heated city battles in the country and could serve as a litmus test for police reform policies at a time when the topic of crime and public safety is central to both voters and politicians. Recent mayoral races in the liberal strongholds of New York City and Los Angeles have produced mixed results. In New York, ex-cop Eric Adams claimed victory with a centrist message while the reform-minded former congresswoman Karen Bass won the Los Angeles mayoral race on a progressive platform, though some Black Lives Matter activists criticized her recent decision to reappoint a controversial chief of police.In 2019, Chicagoans had elected Lori Lightfoot based on her message of transparency and reform. Instead, her tenure was marred by a botched police raid as well as drawn-out battles with both the CTU and the FOP.Turnout for the February primary was sluggish, with less than 33% of Chicago voters casting a ballot. Much of the recent mayoral primary map in February broke down along racial barriers: in the primaries García took Hispanic voters on the West Side, Black voters on the South and West sides remained loyal to the sitting mayor, Lori Lightfoot, while Vallas won over white voters in north-west Chicago. Johnson, meanwhile, commanded white progressives on the North Side.But Johnson’s progressive policies on dealing with crime, which fired up his base in the primary, could leave him vulnerable in the general election. Vallas has seized upon Johnson’s past support of the defund the police movement and Democrats across the country are closely watching to see if that could prove Johnson’s undoing.A finely tuned machineJohnson likes to boast that he started his campaign polling at just 2.3%. But he carries himself like a veteran politician, not an underdog. Johnson is charming, if guarded, and his affable middle school teacher demeanor turns pugnacious in debates and in spin rooms with reporters.With the help of progressive campaign operatives with Bernie Sanders on their résumés, Johnson is now a finely tuned machine picking up support from both leftist and moderate Democrats. He has been anointed by kingmakers like the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, who memorably turned around the prospects of Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and Congressman Danny Davis, the Illinois representative whose protege and former chief of staff lost his county commissioner seat to Johnson in 2018.He also nabbed the endorsement of the renowned political activist the Rev Jesse Jackson, who delivered a speech with Johnson from his Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood earlier this month. It’s clear that Johnson would like to model himself after Jackson. He’s taken pains to characterize his campaign as a continuation of the civil rights movement, repeatedly noting that the 4 April runoff election marks the date of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.When asked by the Guardian which historical or political figure Johnson might liken himself to behind the scenes at the event, Jackson threw up his arms gesturing at himself.“I’m just saying,” Johnson said with a laugh, looking at Jackson. “There is no President Barack Obama without Reverend Jesse Jackson. He changed the rules of the game. There’s a lot of history of progressive ideology and liberation from the city of Chicago.”Johnson also regularly hosted a radio show in Chicago helmed by Santita Jackson, the reverend’s daughter. It’s on that show that one can find a more honest expression of Johnson’s progressive views than on the campaign trail. It was where he made remarks about the defund police movement as an “actual, real political goal”.Johnson has since walked back that statement, saying: “It was a political goal. I never said it was mine.” He recently reversed plans to reduce the city’s nearly $2bn police budget, telling an audience of Chicago business leaders he wouldn’t “reduce the CPD budget by one penny”.‘Turning stress into action’Several prominent figures, including Jackson and late Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis have used the phrase “educational apartheid” to describe the dearth of resources and school closures in Chicago’s Black and brown neighborhoods. Johnson also shared those beliefs with his mentor and colleague, Tara Stamps, who shaped his early career as an educator.Stamps said she met Johnson in 2007 when she interviewed him for his first job in education as a middle school social studies teacher at Jenner elementary, a school serving mostly Black students from the embattled Cabrini-Green housing projects. She described the then 31-year-old Johnson as chubbier with long dreadlocks, a warm personality and a great smile.The apartheid message was not lost on Johnson’s students either, who connected their experiences in CPS with the history of Soweto, Johnson said in a July episode of the Santita Jackson Show. After reading an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, they wrote a play called Black to the Future and collaborated with their art teacher to transform their classroom’s doorway into Mandela’s prison.Johnson and Stamps felt that charter schools were exacerbating segregation. Now, that philosophy underpins his campaign against Vallas, whom he has attacked for promoting charter schools.“These are ideas that Brandon and I shared early,” Stamps said. “We understood the history of Chicago public schools and at the time when we were working together, it did feel like it was an apartheid system because you have a school system that was just separating children based on who was able to receive the best public education, who would not receive the best public education and who then would go to charters.”A conversation with a civil rights-era organizer led Johnson further. During an October 2012 forum with the socialist organization Solidarity, Johnson spoke about meeting Grady Jordan, a former CPS teacher and founder of the Teacher’s Union Black Caucus who marched in the October 1963 “Freedom Day” protests against segregation in CPS. Over greens and soul food one day at a West Side diner, Jordan called on Johnson to take up his fight.“Black teachers fought hard, this is a direct retaliation to what we built in the 60s and the 70s,” Johnson recalled Jordan saying. “They’re trying to kill you. What are you going to do about it, son?”Chicago’s mayor had taken over the public school system in 1995, giving the administration power over school construction and union negotiations. In 2000, Black teachers made up 40% of CPS educators. By 2018, that number declined by nearly half to 21% of teachers, while Black students made up 37% of the student population, Chalkbeat Chicago reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It shook me, like being awakened from a nightmare,” Johnson said during the 2012 forum. “Towards the end of the summer, after having dealt with that conversation, I began to pay attention to these leftists left in charge of this union, and I mean that as a compliment.”Johnson in turn helped form the activist mindset of other young teachers like Asif Wilson. The two met around 2009 when Wilson, now an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a new teacher in CPS. They protested against school closures in 2013 and participated in a hunger strike to reopen Dyett high school.“That brought us together not only to think about what does it mean to be a teacher in the context of school closure and to protect myself, protect my students, protect my families, and be there for each other, but then what does it also mean to organize and understand the contours and the context of school closure, as well as neoliberal assaults on Black and brown families?” Wilson said.“He was helping me to understand as a union representative, but also then turning the anger, the frustration, the stress into action.”That activism morphed into political power with the Chicago Teachers Union, whose endorsement helped vault Johnson ahead of Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, a progressive rival who was once considered a frontrunner in the primaries.‘They want to feel safe’While education has shaped much of Johnson’s career, it’s the city’s urgent desire for public safety that could decide this election.Residents in Little Village, a Mexican enclave on the West Side where Johnson held a recent rally, are concerned about gentrification and rising property taxes, but crime remains top of mind, said Enrique Mendoza, a Johnson supporter. Local street vendors have called for more police patrols after repeated attacks from armed robbers. That could give Vallas, who has claimed that hundreds of police officers will return to Chicago’s depleted force under his watch, an advantage. García still won Hispanic voters on the West Side during the primary, but the runner-up in many of those wards was Vallas, not Johnson.“The older generations, it doesn’t matter if they’re Latino, what race they are, they want to feel safe,” said Mendoza. “Their immediate go-to is always police, right? They want the person with the plan who’s catering to those needs.”Public safety is also front and center in Johnson’s own neighborhood. Originally from Elgin, a town just west of Chicago, Johnson has made the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side his home with his wife and three children. His son attends Kenwood, 14 miles from Austin, since he plays the violin and there are no high schools on the West Side offering orchestra, according to Johnson.Austin represents a microcosm of the issues facing many Black Chicagoans. The exodus of Black residents from Chicago is evident in the neighborhood, which has seen a 32% drop over the last 20 years. Despite being the second most populous community in the city, the area is a food desert with little access to grocery stores selling fresh produce. The life expectancy of residents living just over the border in the suburb of Oak Park is 10 years longer. As Johnson himself has noted throughout the mayoral race, Austin is also plagued by community violence.“It seems like, especially for Blacks in Austin, that it’s only a matter of time before we’re ‘extinct’,” said Vernon Cole, owner of the Austin shoe shine and repair shop, Shine King. Cole supported Lightfoot in the primaries but now has a sign for Johnson, one of his loyal customers, in his window.When asked whether he could see a Chicago where police and teachers come together, Johnson rattled off a list of his supporters. They included childcare workers, crossing guards, teachers, county government workers and transportation operators.“Do we know if there are police officers not voting for me?” he asked when questioned about support from police officers.“Working people have surrounded this candidacy because they know that I express and represent their values because they are our values,” Johnson said. “I’m not here if we’re not united.”‘There’s enough for everyone’At Shine King, customer the Rev Michael Stinson said he was just hoping for a unified Chicago. A pastor on the West Side, Stinson sees the city’s divisions as a major challenge for the next mayor.“I don’t know how far we’re going to make it with the police being against the teachers, it’s just not a world-class city,” Stinson said. “We need more programs and jobs to occupy our youth and children. I’m a preacher, so just getting back to God in my sense.”Whether or not Johnson can use his own religious zeal and charisma to motivate voters to get to the polls will become the deciding factor on 4 April.“Let me tell you what’s going to happen: we’re going to a place that is full of milk and honey,” he said at a March event. “The Black labor that has built the wealth of white folks, we get to distribute that any way we please.“And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to make sure whether you live in Jefferson Park or Morgan Park, whether you live in Garfield Park or whether you live in Humboldt Park, there’s enough for everyone in the city of Chicago.” More

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      The politics of crime: what Chicago’s mayoral race reveals about the US

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      The politics of crime: what Chicago’s mayoral race reveals about the USElection could serve as a bellwether for how voters think about public safety as they choose between duelling approachesThere are few issues besides keeping a clean alley that most Chicagoans agree on. Yet, last week, a majority of the city’s voters ousted the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, in the city’s mayoral primary.With just under 17% of the vote, Lightfoot became the first mayor to fail to advance to the runoff election since Jane Byrne lost the 1983 primary. But the recent election was not a stunning rebuke of Lightfoot, who commanded third place with a loyal base of mostly Black voters on the city’s South and West Sides, but a demand for a radically different approach toward combating crime amid pandemic recovery, with one candidate focused on law and order and the other hoping to boost the social safety net.In Wisconsin’s supreme court race, a super-rich beer family calls the shotsRead moreIn one month, the general election could serve as a bellwether for how Democratic voters across the nation think about crime – a topic that became deeply politicized during an uptick in violence after the onset of Covid-19 and the widespread call for police reform after George Floyd’s murder. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and its nearly 3 million residents are deeply segregated and break down into almost equal thirds white, Black and Hispanic. What may appear on the surface to be a reliable Democratic stronghold actually encompasses a wide spectrum of moderate liberals, progressives and even some Trump supporters, the latter concentrated among cops, firefighters and other public workers living on the far Northwest Side.At a time when places like New York City and Washington DC are reassessing their approach to public safety issues and rebuilding their communities, Chicago’s election in April could inform how some of the biggest cities move forward.When Lightfoot ascended to power in 2019, the political outsider made history as the first Black, openly gay mayor of Chicago and dominated all 50 of the city’s wards with the optimistic message that she would “bring in the light”.But Lightfoot’s campaign promises of transparency foundered once she took office, particularly when it came to public safety. After Chicago police wrongfully raided the home of a Black woman, Anjanette Young, in 2019 and forced her to stand naked until a female officer arrived, Lightfoot claimed she knew nothing about the incident until local news broke the story. Her own lawyers tried to prevent the local TV station from airing the video of the botched raid and Lightfoot herself later admitted that she was aware of the raid before the news broke. When five alderwomen introduced an ordinance in 2021 banning no-knock raids – building on the momentum of the Breonna Taylor case – Lightfoot opposed the bill and argued it could hamper the police’s ability to respond quickly.At the same time, Lightfoot engaged in a legal battle with the city’s cop union, the Fraternal Order of Police, over a vaccine mandate for public workers. Police expressed their frustration over burnout and multiple canceled days off by literally turning their backs on Lightfoot in 2021.In February’s primary, Lightfoot attempted to thread the needle by marketing herself as a moderate candidate. But many voters bolted in one of two other directions: to the most progressive and conservative options. Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, the Cook county commissioner, going head-to-head on 4 April represent dueling philosophies of criminal justice.Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago public schools who came in ninth place in his last run for mayor in 2019, ripped a page from the Republican playbook with a law-and-order message. On election night, he placed crime at the forefront of his campaign, declaring public safety a “civil right”. He also received an endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, along with its Trump-supporting president, John Catanzara, and has pledged to fill Chicago’s 1,700 police vacancies.Johnson’s résumé as a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union deputy political director puts him at immediate odds with Vallas, whom critics say set the stage for the closure of 50 Chicago public schools predominantly in Black and Brown neighborhoods under former mayor Rahm Emanuel. Johnson’s progressive approach toward criminal justice would include a mental health hotline and eliminating no-knock warrants. He also committed to ending the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, which the city’s own inspector general found “rarely leads to evidence of a gun-related crime”. In a televised debate, both Lightfoot and Vallas supported keeping the acoustic gunshot detection tool used by police.Johnson and Vallas agree on some policy issues including changing the Chicago police department’s patrol plan to allocate more police officers during high crime hours. Both have vouched for boosting the number of detectives so that CPD can solve more murders, though Johnson has dodged the question of whether he would reduce CPD’s nearly $2bn budget. But on most issues they represent very different directions for the city.“What we have in this runoff is the tale of two cities in Chicago,” said Constance Mixon, a political science professor and director of the urban studies program at Elmhurst University. “It is a tale of progressives and Brandon Johnson, but it’s also a tale of more conservative voters, particularly in white ethnic neighborhoods on the far north-west and south-west sides of the city … Paul Vallas’s message of crime resonated with them.”Like other cities across the US, violent crime escalated during the pandemic in Chicago. While homicides had been on a steady decline since 2016, they shot up from 500 in 2019 to 776 in 2020. Homicides dropped in 2022, but still rival the rate Chicago saw in the 1990s.“Things like theft and burglary have been trending down for the last two or three decades and the last couple of years is no different. Even overall violence hasn’t increased that much,” said David Olson, a criminal justice professor and co-director of Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice Research. “The challenge politically are the crimes that have increased are the ones that are the most serious and the most visible in terms of coverage by the media and attention by people. And rightfully so, given the fact that homicide is the most serious offense.”For years, crime had disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities on the South and West Sides of the city. But since the pandemic started it has increased in those areas, as well as predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods – spurring fresh outrage and new attention to the issue. Carjackings in Lincoln Square, robberies on the Gold Coast, and kidnappings in Wrigleyville have rattled residents and dominated local headlines.“Wealthier, whiter parts of the city have been safer for many, many years and the violence has persisted on the South and West sides in plain sight without the kind of attention and response that the issue is getting now,” said Roseanna Ander, founding executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Chicago Education Lab. Leaders should recognize that public safety strategies should look at persistent problems throughout the entire city, rather than making one part of Chicago safer at the expense of other parts of the city, Ander added.While the post-pandemic rise in crime has frustrated white Chicagoans, Black Chicagoans who have long dealt with the city’s crime problems have left in droves over the past decade. Recent census data showed Chicago’s Black population has dropped by nearly 10% since 2010. Political strategist Delmarie Cobb attributes that exodus to two factors: crime and schools.She asked the police to help her husband. They killed him insteadRead more“Those two issues are front and center for Black people, whereas white people may just be experiencing crime for the first time, but they’re OK with the schools,” Cobb said. “With the tough-on-crime candidates, they’re often who get all the attention and support because those people who are experiencing crime for the first time at this level, they want somebody who can do it quickly.”How the two mayoral candidates communicate their message on crime to Black voters will prove crucial. In the primary, Johnson garnered support from white progressives on the North Side but in order to beat Vallas, he’ll have to court Hispanics on the West Side who voted for his progressive rival, Congressman Jesús G “Chuy” García, and Black voters who backed Lightfoot on the South Side. Vallas is already trying to shore up support from Black politicians, racking up key endorsements from the former Illinois secretary of state Jesse White and Lightfoot’s ally Alderman Walter Burnett. Toni Preckwinkle, Lightfoot’s rival in the 2019 election, and US congressman Danny Davis, who represents much of the South and West Sides, endorsed Johnson.Johnson may have trouble taking the middle road in the general election. Though his policies on criminal justice reform fired up a progressive base in the primary, Johnson has tried to distance himself from past comments on defunding the police. When it comes to filling police vacancies, Johnson told Block Club Chicago that hiring more officers wouldn’t solve the city’s crime problem, instead saying that funding could be reallocated by shifting officers’ roles and hiring additional emergency service responders.During one primary debate, Lightfoot questioned how Johnson would boost the number of detectives without increasing the police budget.“He says he wants to promote detectives,” Lightfoot said. “When you promote detectives then you’ve got to backfill the patrol officers and if he’s not willing to commit to not defunding the police, he’s gonna have less officers on the street and our communities are gonna be less safe.”It is possible that Johnson could reallocate funding rather than increasing CPD’s budget, counters Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and director of the school’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.“Within a fixed budget, you can put less of your officers in the kind of stop-and-frisk mode, street policing mode and more in investigating mode,” he said. “That’s not necessarily going to cost you more money.”For Vallas, the endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police will either become his winning advantage or his achilles heel. The group welcomed Florida’s conservative governor Ron DeSantis for a speech in February while its president, Catanzara, has landed in the news for defending January 6 rioters and comparing Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate to the Nazi Germany.More than the endorsements, however, voters may choose based on their visceral feelings about what’s needed to reduce crime, Olson said.“For a lot of people, their gut feeling is, well, if we just had more police, that would address the problem, and it’s more complicated than that,” he said.“So if one candidate presents this blunt: ‘We just need more police’, that may swing some folks. If another approaches with: ‘We’ve got to address the root causes, this is a long-term problem that needs a long-term solution’, that might resonate because they see that as perhaps being a more realistic understanding.”TopicsChicagoUS crimeUS policingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation’

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation’They are both Democrats, but what subjects – from Ukraine to defunding the police – would leave them at odds?Jordan, 30, Providence, Rhode IslandOccupation Works at the progressive Jewish Liberation Fund, which aims to make Jewish philanthropy more effective. Captain of the US cross-country running championship teamVoting Record Progressive Democratic – about “as far left as you can go, but stopping short of radical or revolution”Amuse bouche Regularly meets up with a couple of Japanese housewives to practise his JapaneseJudith, 65, Branford, ConnecticutOccupation Retired professor of contemporary literature at Yale. PoetVoting record DemocratAmuse bouche Designs pocket parks in her home townFor starters Jordan I had duck confit, lobster pasta, chocolate cake, chamomile tea. We found a lot of common ground on teaching more about slavery in schools. Judith thinks we should focus on how humans have been cruel to each other over time, but for me it’s more important to focus on the history in America and how that helps us understand the world we live in now. In a lot of places slavery wasn’t so racially codified as it was here.Judith I had nougat de foie gras, bass, Grand Marnier souffle for dessert. It was delicious. He was more focused on contemporary discussions of the American experience that I was. The longer, worldwide historical context was more important to me.Jordan It’s important to teach about chattel slavery. I’m not saying it was worse for us than, say, the Japanese enslaving Koreans, but the racial codification of slavery in America still affects what our world looks like and the narratives that equate people of a certain race to negative habits and stereotypes.The big beef Judith Jordan believes we should take money from the police and give it to other types of social workers to help deal with crime. I don’t. If you want a society based in law that has arisen out of constitutional democracy, you need some way of enforcing the law. The combination of underfunding and lack of respect for the law has exacerbated tendencies we don’t like in the police.Jordan It doesn’t feel like lack of resources is the issue. I’m from St Louis. Look at Ferguson. Look at Milwaukee. The police that killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis were part of one of these highly trained units. The police should be in a public safety department so they aren’t self-supervised.Judith We should increase police funding, but it should be based on more stringent training and education, to make it a profession with salaries to match. I would have national regulation of local police. The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black, so there’s something else going on. Those officers were totally unqualified for a job that puts the power of life and death in their hands. That’s not a racial issue.Jordan We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation. Judith was saying we live in a violent society and there are cultural differences between groups. Judith grew up in a more working-class background; mine is more bourgeois. But I don’t think she experienced a reckoning of concentrated poverty and trauma, and how that affects and drives people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSharing plateJudith My grandparents fled Ukraine during the pogroms. We need to look at Ukraine as fighting for the ideals we have now and give them support.Jordan It’s complicated. I don’t think we should be diverting funds, and Russia is clearly a bad actor. But I find the lack of dissent a little surprising. The left-wing progressive space is generally anti-war, so we should be thinking about this.For aftersJudith We got into some interesting things, like do you want a national police force so you don’t have these little islands of police where the culture is leaning toward violence? That makes me uncomfortable because wherever there is a national police force, there is a potential for danger.Jordan Whatever our public safety force looks like, it shouldn’t be the free-for-all it is now. As Jewish people, we agreed a national public force could be a scary thing. It doesn’t feel like police forces have a lack of resources. I don’t qualify as a police abolitionist but I have serious questions about police departments and what they look like right now.TakeawaysJordan Judith reminded me of my grandma, which I loved. But I disagreed with this idea of cultural differences being one of the causes of crime.Judith Jordan is a very delightful person. These questions are complex, and we need more context and nuance. We’re always focused on the minute-to-minute catastrophe. Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Jordan and Judith ate at Union League Cafe, New Haven, Connecticut. Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsUS policingDemocratsSlaveryfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘I read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest’

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘I read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest’One is centre-right, the other 100% Democrat. Where do they stand on immigration, defunding the police, and closing Guantánamo?Atam, 74, San Francisco, CaliforniaOccupation Retired nuclear engineerVoting record 100% Democrat for the past 40 yearsAmuse bouche Atam is a lifetime member of both the Sierra Club (a conservation organization) and the American Nuclear SocietyDon, 38, the Bay Area, California, and Reno, NevadaOccupation Freelance journalist and urban studies studentVoting record Mostly centre-right. Was Republican, but now identifies as independentAmuse bouche Voted for Trump in 2020 because he didn’t want him to win – “I have a tendency to vote for the loser, so I hoped that would help”For startersAtam My first impression was that he was 30 minutes late and didn’t say sorry. But I was happy waiting at the restaurant; my daughter-in-law had been the pastry chef there.Don By default, I like to listen to what people have to say. He talked about his family and how he liked to travel. We talked about Reno, where I’m from, and how he used to go there to ski.Atam I had two starters: a crab salad and some trout. Most of the food on the menu I try to avoid for health reasons.Don I had crab salad and fried chicken.The big beefAtam We talked about Guantánamo Bay. He thinks it should remain open and that the detainees shouldn’t be put on trial. He believes that if one of them gets released, they’ll go back and start another war against us.Don These people are enemy combatants. I don’t believe they are due a trial because of their special criminal status. Atam said everyone should be allowed a trial regardless of status.Atam Don’t we have a system where we presume innocence until proven guilty? I said we’re causing more harm in the world than good by holding people without trial. There were 750 detainees and there are 30 or 40 left and we’re spending half a billion a year to hold them.Don He was very knowledgable on the numbers, but I stuck to my position. These are wartime combatants and it’s not a normal situation.Atam There didn’t appear to be any facts behind his position; it seemed to be all based on feeling.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSharing plateAtam A country needs immigrants from all different backgrounds – that’s what’s given the US its strength.Don Immigration is a good thing when it’s done correctly. But our southern border is porous and broken; we need to stop the influx of people from South and Central America. We need more immigration judges and personnel to track those who come across. People from other countries must wait in line.Atam It’s partly our policies in Central America that have given us the drug lords and dictatorships that people are fleeing from. We should be more open to those leaving. There’s also a huge shortage of workers in our country.For aftersAtam I looked Don up before we met, and read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest. I wanted to know more about it and understand how it had affected him. I went to three protests myself. One was in my neighbourhood, which I will say is the whitest neighbourhood in San Francisco, and there was not a single Black person in the protest. The message from that was that all of society had woken up and realised something was wrong.Don I was covering a BLM protest for a local news outlet and it turned violent. A pair of hooligans who were ransacking Reno city hall beat me up for filming them. I understood why they were protesting, but I didn’t think it was necessary for them to turn to violence. The incident softened me to both the protesters and the police. It also made me aware of the fact that I’m Black in America. Atam understood why I didn’t support the Defund the Police movement.Atam To me, Defund the Police means we need to spend more money on the root causes of crime rather than putting more people with guns on the street. San Francisco has more than 20 police for every 10,000 people and crime is still high.Don The intentions behind Defund the Police are good, but the follow-through is not. I get what they are trying to do – fund services that help minority communities – but I’m not in favour. It won’t work, it’s too extreme.TakeawaysAtam It was a very civil conversation, but I don’t think we clicked. He suggested we share contact details, but I don’t think we’ll be meeting up.Don We got on very well. We didn’t find common ground, but I got an understanding of where he was coming from on a few issues.Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Atam and Don ate at Nopa in San Francisco.Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsUS policingBlack Lives Matter movementUS immigrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      January 6 rioter who used stun gun on officer Michael Fanone pleads guilty

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      January 6 rioter who used stun gun on officer Michael Fanone pleads guiltyDaniel Rodriguez, 40, from California, admitted his part in violent assault of then Metropolitan police officer A California man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to using a stun gun to attack Michael Fanone, the Washington DC police officer who was seriously injured while trying to defend the US Capitol from Donald Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021.‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyRead moreDaniel Rodriguez, 40, of Fontana, admitted to taking part in the violent assault on Fanone, now a former Metropolitan police officer, after another rioter dragged Fanone into a crowd outside a tunnel where police were trying to beat back the mob.Fanone, who lost consciousness and suffered a heart attack, was heard on camera screaming he had kids, in a desperate appeal for his life, as rioters beat him.Rodriguez’s guilty plea came about two weeks before jury selection in his trial in federal court in Washington. He pleaded guilty to four felony charges including conspiracy and assaulting a law enforcement officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon.An email seeking comment was sent to his lawyers. He was scheduled to be sentenced in May. Federal sentencing guidelines call for about seven to 10 years in prison.Rodriguez admitted in an FBI interview in March 2021 that he drove a stun gun into Fanone’s neck. Rodriguez told agents he believed that he was doing the “right thing” and had been prepared to die to “save the country”. He cried as he spoke, saying he was “stupid” and ashamed of his actions.Rodriguez’s attorneys tried to stop prosecutors using his FBI interview at trial, arguing that the agents used “psychologically coercive tactics”.Authorities say Rodriguez and others were part of a Telegram group chat called “PATRIOTS 45 MAGA Gang” in the run-up to January 6, in which they advocated violence and discussed Trump’s claim of a stolen election.In a post on 29 December 2020, Rodriguez wrote: “Congress can hang. I’ll do it. Please let us get these people dear God.”At the Capitol, Rodriguez was part of the mob that pushed into the tunnel, prosecutors said. Inside, another rioter handed him the stun gun he would apply to Fanone’s neck. After assaulting Fanone, Rodriguez entered the Capitol through a broken window. Later, he texted his friends: “Tased the fuck out of the blue.”Others charged with assaulting Fanone include Albuquerque Cosper Head, who wrapped his arms round Fanone’s neck and dragged him into the crowd. Head restrained Fanone while others attacked him. Head was sentenced in October to more than seven years in prison after pleading guilty to assault.Fanone said at Head’s sentencing he suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury, injuries that cost him his police career. He has written a book about his experience and testified before the House January 6 committee.January 6 rioter with Confederate flag sentenced to three yearsRead moreAnother man, Kyle Young, who helped in the assault, was sentenced in September to seven years and two months in prison. Young grabbed Fanone by the wrist while others yelled “Kill him!” and “Get his gun!”The sentences handed to Fanone’s attackers are among the longest handed down in relation to January 6.Nearly 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes. More than 500 have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. Approximately 400 have been sentenced, with more than half given prison sentences ranging from seven days to 10 years.The House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals to the Department of Justice regarding Trump’s incitement of the attack. Federal investigations continue.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS crimeUS policingnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Congress struggles with police reform: Politics Weekly America podcast

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      While attending the funeral of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old man beaten to death by police in Memphis, Tennessee, this week, Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed in the House in 2021 but failed in the Senate.
      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Dr David Thomas, of Florida Gulf Coast University, about why lawmakers find police reform a difficult issue to legislate on

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