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      LA sheriff Alex Villanueva appears headed for runoff election amid series of scandals

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      LA sheriff Alex Villanueva appears headed for runoff election amid series of scandalsLaw enforcement officer, derided by critics as the ‘Donald Trump of LA’, did not win enough votes for re-election, early results show Alex Villanueva, the Los Angeles county sheriff embroiled in multiple scandals, appears headed for a runoff election in November as early results suggest he failed to win enough votes to secure re-election.Villanueva, who has been derided by critics as the “Donald Trump of LA”, is likely to face off with Robert Luna, the former police chief of Long Beach. Luna was endorsed by the LA Times and LA Daily News editorial boards, which argued that the embattled agency needed an outsider to take over, though Luna’s police department also faced controversies.As of late Tuesday night, Villanueva held a slight lead, with 32% of the vote to Luna’s 26% and 35% of votes counted.Despite national scrutiny of Villanueva surrounding a series of misconduct, abuse and obstruction cases, his critics did not unite behind one candidate.Villanueva has become a favorite law enforcement figure among some far-right pundits, and is known for aggressively opposing efforts to bring accountability to the department. In recent years, he has publicly lashed out at critics and the media and launched criminal investigations into the officials who have sought to reform his agency, earning him comparisons to the former president.San Francisco recalls DA Chesa Boudin in blow to criminal justice reformRead moreThe sheriff was a little-known lieutenant when he was elected in 2018 and became the first candidate to beat an incumbent for LA sheriff in more than 100 years. He was backed by Democrats and progressive groups during his campaign after pledging to reform an agency with a long history of scandal. But over the last four years, he has lost the support of Democratic groups, civil rights activists and a wide range of LA county leaders, who say he broke his promises and allows officers to engage in violence and misconduct without consequence.The Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) is the largest county sheriff’s office in the US, with thousands of officers who patrol nearly 200 southern California towns and cities. The sheriff also oversees one of the world’s largest jail systems. A former head of the department was sent to prison in 2020 after he was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation into systemic abuse of incarcerated people in the county jail system.LASD has faced growing outrage over reports of “deputy gangs” within the department – cliques of officers with names like the Banditos and Executioners, who allegedly have matching tattoos and promote brutality and racist policing. Despite increasing testimony from whistleblowers and LA county officials about the presence and threats posed by these internal groups, Villanueva has repeatedly denied their existence.The county inspector general, the top watchdog for LASD, has identified more than 40 such groups within the department, but Villanueva has defined subpoenas by the IG and demanded the county’s board of supervisors cease using the phrase “deputy gangs”. Villanueva has aggressively attacked the IG, accusing him, without any evidence, of being a “Holocaust denier”, a claim the IG said was “deeply offensive” and false. Villanueva also has a “civil rights and public integrity” unit, reportedly known internally as his “secret police”, that has launched investigations into his political opponents.In a separate controversy, a whistleblower recently claimed that Villanueva personally directed a cover-up of an incident, captured on film, in which jail guards knelt on the head of a handcuffed man for three minutes. Several high-profile killings by his deputies have also sparked national headlines in recent years, and families of victims have accused his department of harassing them.Villanueva campaigned on a platform of hiring more police, cracking down on homelessness and opposing “woke” reform efforts. In a recent interview with the Guardian, he dismissed the whistleblower and other claims against him and his department, saying they were “driven by trial attorneys and opportunistic politicians” and a “cabal of people” creating a “false narrative”.Luna campaigned on a platform of restoring trust in the department and “reforming and modernizing” the LA jails, though as Long Beach chief, a position he held from 2014 through 2021, he also battled scandals; there have been claims of racism in the department and concerns about excessive force and killings by officers. Luna grew up in East LA, in an area heavily patrolled by the sheriff’s department, and he has talked about witnessing bad policing tactics in the neighborhood.Long Beach is the second-largest city in LA county, and if he wins, Luna would be the second police chief from the city to take over the sheriff’s office.TopicsLos AngelesUS policingUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022CalifornianewsReuse this content More

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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall

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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall Analysts watch to see if voters in America’s more liberal cities will address police reform, homelessness and mass incarceration High-stakes primary races taking place on Tuesday in California are expected to have major consequences for police reform, incarceration and the state’s growing homelessness crisis.The most closely watched race is the mayor’s contest in Los Angeles, where voters are deciding between a tough-on-crime real estate developer, Rick Caruso, who has already poured nearly $40m of his own fortune into his primary campaign, and the former community organizer and Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass.Street activist, congresswoman – mayor? Karen Bass reaches for LA’s top jobRead moreIn San Francisco, the city’s progressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall election that could have a major impact on movements for criminal justice reform across the US.Midway through a tense midterm elections year, the races are likely to serve as a litmus test for Democrats and progressives. Analysts are watching to see if the majority of voters in some of America’s most ostensibly liberal cities decide to reject attempts to reduce mass incarceration and address the stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system.But one of the starkest takeaways so far is that voters simply are not very engaged in California’s primary election, despite multiple measures designed to make it easier for them to participate. Early turnout so far has been abysmal, even though every registered voter in California was mailed a ballot.“Even if you make it extremely easy to vote, like in California, but the political culture, candidates and issues aren’t there, you aren’t going to increase the turnout,” political scientist Fernando Guerra said. “We have extreme generational issues, with homelessness and crime and the cost of housing, and I think we have the candidates. There’s a lack of political culture.”Lower turnout is likely to be a particular challenge for “a lot of the young progressive candidates”, who might end up losing to an incumbent by a small margin of votes, Guerra said.Voters in California and nationwide are concerned about gas prices and the cost of living. A recent poll found that only a third of Los Angeles voters approved of the city’s police department, a lower approval rating than in 1991, after the police beating of Rodney King, but that nearly half of voters surveyed wanted to increase the size of the force.The role of the police in public safety is one of the key issues up and down the ballot, with younger progressive candidates who support defunding the police challenging older centrist Democrats in several Los Angeles city council races.Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, supports police reform and a modest increase in Los Angeles police department staffing; Caruso has pledged to put an additional 1,500 officers on the street.Both Bass and Caruso have promised to put an end to people sleeping on the street in Los Angeles. Caruso has expressed willingness to arrest unhoused people who refuse to move to a city-provided shelter bed, and has also praised an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border as a good model for how to deal with the city’s homelessness crisis.For some Los Angeles progressives, Bass’s more centrist positions on policing and homelessness have been a disappointment. Two years after George Floyd’s murder by police sparked worldwide protests, some activists see Bass’s endorsement of putting more police on the street as a step backwards.“She’s losing the enthusiasm of folks on the left, and I think that is a miscalculation,” said Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles, who endorsed Gina Viola, a local activist running to Bass’s left, for mayor.Progressive groups in LA have also organized to oust the incumbent LA county sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who has been at the center of multiple scandals related to abuse and misconduct cases within the department. His critics, however, have not rallied behind one opponent among his eight challengers.The role of massive personal fortunes in public elections has also become a central issue in California’s primary campaigns. The attempt to recall Boudin, a central figure in the movement to elect prosecutors who want to make the legal system less punitive and racist, is reportedly being funded by ultra-wealthy donors, many of them in the tech industry, including: Ron Conway, an early DoorDash investor; Garry Tan, an Instacart investor; and David Sacks, a former PayPal executive.The result of the attempt to recall Boudin in San Francisco will “affect whether prosecutors elsewhere feel emboldened to take new approaches or whether they will perceive that as a political risk”, said Sandra Mayson, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.Political spending on the Los Angeles mayoral primary has already topped $50m, with Caruso’s campaign spending more than $40m of that. Bass’s campaign has spent $3m, in contrast, and a local police union has spent a similar amount on advertisement opposing her candidacy.On Friday, Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, tweeted his public endorsement of Caruso, who himself is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans. “He’s awesome,” Musk wrote. “Executive competence is super-underrated in politics – we should care about that a lot more!”Caruso, a real estate developer with an estimated net worth of $4bn, has used at least $38m of his own money to move to the front of a crowded non-partisan primary field, a number that has already broken every previous record for mayor’s races in Los Angeles, local experts said. The billionaire’s personal fortune has funded a barrage of attractive television ads and mailers touting his candidacy, even as Caruso has skipped some mayoral debates, and largely avoided engaging with the press or holding open public events.Bass and then Caruso took an early lead in mayoral polls, leading other mayoral primary contenders to drop out of the race, though some, such as Kevin de Leon, a current city council member, fight on.Heading into Tuesday, polls showed Bass and Caruso closely matched in terms of voter support, setting up the possibility that neither would surpass the 50% vote threshold needed to win outright. In that case, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in November, a result that is expected to generate millions more in political spending from Caruso and from Bass’s progressive backers in Hollywood.TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsLos AngelesSan FranciscoUS policingUS justice systemnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden to sign police reform executive order on George Floyd anniversary

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      Biden to sign police reform executive order on George Floyd anniversaryPresident to take action regulating federal law enforcement agencies after failure of attempts to legislate Joe Biden will on Wednesday sign an executive order meant to improve police accountability.White House officials said the signing would mark the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, who died when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.Minneapolis police engaged in pattern of racial discrimination, inquiry findsRead moreThe order, drafted in the absence of legislative action, directs federal agencies to revise use-of-force policies, banning tactics such as chokeholds and restricting practices like no-knock warrants.It also calls for the creation of a new national standard for accrediting police departments; establishes a national database to track police misconduct; further restricts the transfer of military equipment to police departments; and requires agencies to implement new tools to screen for inherent bias among officers as well as recruits, including those who promote unlawful violence or harbor white supremacist views.The order, which will apply to more than 100,000 federal law enforcement officers, is a reflection of a delicate balance Biden is attempting to strike on policing, as advocates and progressives push him to fulfill a campaign promise to hold police accountable and Republicans seize on such calls to paint Democrats as anti-law enforcement.Officials said the order was written after more than 100 hours’ work and as many meetings with stakeholders including law enforcement officials, lawmakers, civil rights and civil liberties groups and families of victims of police violence. After outcry over a draft version, some major policing organizations have endorsed the order.Pressure has been building on the White House since the collapse of negotiations over a police reform bill named in Floyd’s honor. His death, on 25 May 2020, ignited a national movement against racial injustice and dramatically shifted long-held views on racism and policing.Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22-and-a-half years in prison. Three other former officers were convicted in federal court of violating Floyd’s civil rights.Family members of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed when police executed a no-knock warrant at her apartment in 2020, will join Biden at the White House on Wednesday afternoon for a ceremony in which the president will speak and sign the order. Police officers and civil rights leaders will also be in attendance.“We know full well that an executive order cannot address America’s policing crisis the same way Congress has the ability to but we’ve got to do everything we can,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who will attend Wednesday’s signing ceremony, said in a statement.“There’s no better way to honor George Floyd’s legacy than for President Biden to take action by signing a police reform executive order.”The order applies only to federal agencies. Biden does not have direct authority over state and local agencies. But White House officials said the order incentivizes all law enforcement agencies to participate in the police registry and to adopt the new accountability standards and de-escalation policies.Less than six months before the midterm elections, Democrats are navigating a complicated political landscape. Republicans have sought to blame Democrats for rises in violent crime in some cities, attributing it to calls from activists after Floyd’s death to slash police funding.As a candidate and as president, Biden has denounced efforts to “defund the police”, repeating, to the frustration of some in his party, that departments need more funding, not less.On a call with reporters on Tuesday night, White House officials said the order was no substitute for legislative action.“We started with the backbone of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act,” a senior White House official said. “In some places, we went beyond what was in the act based on feedback we heard from stakeholders. In other aspects we were constrained by the inherent limits of executive authority.”When a draft version of the order was leaked earlier this year, some law enforcement groups found some of the language objectionable. Particularly offensive to them, according to a February report in the New York Times, was a reference to “systemic racism” within US criminal justice.A White House official said the text had been revised and improved based on input from stakeholders but would not say if the document made explicit reference to systemic racism.The official said the order “does not hide from the truth that we need reform in policing and in our larger criminal justice system, and that includes addressing systemic racism”.TopicsUS policingJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?Rick Caruso’s campaign is tapping into fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration with the homelessness emergency A billionaire real estate developer has spent more than $23m on his campaign to become Los Angeles’s next tough-on-crime mayor, and experts say his record-breaking investment is buying him a real chance at victory.Rick Caruso, a real estate magnate who is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans, entered the crowded race to run America’s second largest city in February with single-digit support and little name recognition.Two months and nearly $10m in advertising spending later, he jumped to first place, polling alongside the previous mayoral frontrunner, congresswoman Karen Bass.‘A metastasizing crisis’: can Karen Bass end street encampments in LA?Read moreCaruso has focused his campaign ahead of the 7 June primary on fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration at an ever-growing homelessness emergency, arguing that the city’s political establishment has been putting residents at risk: “I see my city being torn apart because of bad decisions by leaders,” he said in November.He has pledged, if elected, to hire 1,500 more police officers, and has suggested he would arrest unhoused people who refuse to move into city-run homeless shelters. “You don’t get a choice to stay on the street any more. The minute we have a bed for you, you move into the bed, or otherwise there’s a consequence,” he said in anearly Fox News interview.Caruso is “catching the wave” of some voters’ anxieties about homelessness and crime, but “there’s no way he would be where he was if it wasn’t for the money,” said Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who has studied Los Angeles’ electoral dynamics for decades.The billionaire has spent more in the first months of the race than the city’s current mayor spent during his entire campaign, Guerra said. Caruso’s millions have translated into a flood of campaign ads, mailers and text messages targeted at different groups across the city.“If you watch TV in Los Angeles, you’ll see [his ads] three times an hour,” said Adam Conover, a Los Angeles-based comedian who has become a prominent critic. The ads are very effective, Conover added, “gorgeously shot”, “glossy”, and “completely inescapable”. In them, a sun-tanned Caruso makes a simple pitch: he loves Los Angeles, and he wants to clean it up.“He’s pure Ronald Reagan,” Conover said.A fortune in shopping mallsThe scion of a wealthy family, Caruso made his fortune in real estate. He owns a luxury beach hotel in Montecito, California, where rooms start at $2,000 a night. But he’s perhaps most famous for his outdoor malls, one of which is called the Americana, and which all feature quaint trolleys, giant fountains and speakers playing a rotation of old-fashioned tunes. Caruso’s company likes to tout that the flagship mall in Los Angeles, the Grove, gets more daily visitors than Disneyland.Caruso has never held public office, but over the years he has served on a series of high-profile public boards, from the department of water and power commission to the Los Angeles police commission and the University of Southern California’s board of trustees, which he chaired in the midst of a sprawling campus sexual abuse scandal.He has received glowing, high-profile endorsements – from Gwyneth Paltrow, his neighbour in the posh neighbourhood of Brentwood; Bill Bratton, the former police chief and champion of “broken windows” policing; and the rapper Snoop Dogg, who endorsed Caruso via a Zoom call.His campaign has highlighted photos of smiling Black and Latino youth who benefited from what it says is a total of $130m in charitable giving, though his opponents instead like to put the spotlight on what they say is his “$100m yacht”, which reportedly has nine bedrooms, a gym, a pool and an elevator. (Influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was on that same yacht when her mother, actor Lori Laughlin, was charged for paying $500,000 in bribes to get her daughters admitted to USC.)Campaign spokesperson Peter Rangone would not confirm the value of the candidate’s yacht, saying in an email: “It’s too bad that our opponents spend so much time on personal attacks.” The Caruso campaign declined to make Caruso available for an interview, or share any information about in-person campaign events a reporter could attend.Tough-on-crime DemocratAs a real estate billionaire running for office on a law-and-order platform, Caruso has drawn plenty of critical comparisons to Donald Trump. It doesn’t help that Caruso has refused to release his tax returns, providing instead a summary of his finances “so sketchy that it’s insulting”, as one Los Angeles Times columnist put it.The comparison has its limits. Caruso is a lifelong Catholic, lauded by Pope Francis for his service to the church. He is by all accounts a profitable and detail-oriented developer, who continues to operate and fine-tune the properties he builds.“Trump doesn’t remotely know the real estate business like Rick Caruso knows the real estate business,” said Don Luis Camacho, a Caruso supporter and the owner of El Paseo Inn restaurant, a longtime family business based in downtown Los Angeles.What is clear, however, is that his policies lean more conservative than those of the other Democrats running in the race. (Caruso announced he had registered as a Democrat this January, after decades as an independent, and, previously, a Republican.)His campaign says he has “always been pro-choice” and that, with abortion rights under threat nationwide, he plans to spend $1m to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion in California. But Planned Parenthood called on him this month to apologize for previously donating “nearly $1m to policymakers who put forth legislation that criminalized abortion”. The Caruso Catholic Center at the University of Southern California, which the Caruso family donated at least $6m to build, helped lead the March for Life through the streets of Los Angeles earlier this year.At a time when LA’s homelessness emergency has taken on staggering proportions, with at least 41,000 people unhoused, he has pledged to rid the city’s streets of encampments. He has even suggested that an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border that has been the subject of multiple whistleblower reports alleging “gross mismanagement, chaos and substandard conditions” is a good model for sheltering the unhoused.“Fort Bliss is very well done. It has its own medical facilities, recreational facilities, its own cafeteria facilities. It has arts and crafts. It’s really an amazing place,” Caruso said in late April, noting the camp was built in “about a month and a half”.Caruso has also been a champion of the Los Angeles police department, once working with LAPD to build a miniature station for “community-based policing” at the heart of his flagship mall. (It was set on fire during the George Floyd protests in 2020.) Police outpost at #TheGrove set on fire…. pic.twitter.com/GdN9OZClX8— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Paul) May 31, 2020
      And he’s been a critic of some criminal justice reforms designed to reverse mass incarceration. When the Nordstrom store at the Grove was targeted last November as part of a series of smash-and-grab robberies of high-end stores across LA, Caruso called the robbery “a manifestation of ‘We’re going to defund the cops’”. He has blamed a measure that reduced the criminal penalty for certain thefts under $950 for driving the recent string of California luxury store thefts.“We can all agree that stealing a $900 handbag or watch shouldn’t be an offense for which someone is released from custody within hours of being arrested without consequence,” his campaign website notes.He has also claimed that residents are now experiencing “some of the worst crime we’ve had in the history of Los Angeles” and “the most violent crime”. Compared with 1992, when Los Angeles saw 1,094 homicides, the city is substantially safer, according to police department data. The city’s homicide increase over the past two years, part of a troubling national rise in killings nationwide, pushed the number of homicide victims from under 300 a year to 397. Property crimes ticked up in 2021, but were actually down compared with most of the five previous years.“People in LA do not feel safe, that is not fearmongering, it is stating reality,” Rangone, a campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email.Any increases in crime and violence can have a big impact on people’s sense of safety. Among last year’s homicide victims was a beloved, well-known 81-year-old philanthropist, Jacqueline Avant, who was shot to death during a burglary of her house in Beverly Hills. Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix and Avant’s son-in-law, has become a prominent Caruso supporter.‘Unthinkable’Liberal Democrats have dominated Los Angeles’ politics for so long that it would have been “unthinkable” a year or two ago to have someone like Caruso, “who is not from that progressive coalition, on the brink of winning”, Guerra said.But Caruso’s arguments have definitely struck a chord with a much broader swath of voters. Polls this year have found that many residents are deeply concerned about homelessness and public safety and feel the city is going in the wrong direction.Twice in the city’s past, after uprisings against police violence towards Black residents in Watts in 1965 and in South Central and across the city in 1992, majorities of Los Angeles voters rejected a liberal Democrat to elect a Republican, pro-police mayoral candidate, Guerra said.In the wake of intense protests in Los Angeles over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Caruso may be the latest conservative police department champion to ride a reactionary wave to the mayor’s office.Some of the traits that Caruso’s more progressive opponents are attacking may actually make him seem more relatable to many Angelenos, Guerra said.The city has the highest total number of Catholics of any US city besides New York, Guerra said, and it’s the center of the largest Catholic diocese in the US, boasting a total of 4.3 million members across the southern California region.For many Catholic voters, watching Caruso struggle with his stance on abortion, saying he’s pro-choice and does not want Roe v Wade overturned but also funding politicians and a Catholic student center that are actively anti-abortion, may feel very familiar, Guerra said.And while the city’s global fame is focused on its film and TV industry, “the number one industry in Los Angeles today, 20 years ago, 50 years, ago, 100 years ago, is land development. Always has been, always will be,” Guerra said.Caruso “captures the aspirations of every single Angeleno who bought that second property and thinks they’re going to be the next monopoly tycoon”, he added.TopicsLos AngelesUS political financingUS policingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day

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      ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persistPolice officers in America continue to kill people at an alarming rate, according to a data analysis that has raised concerns about the Biden administration’s push to expand police investments amid growing concerns about crime.Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths a day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short.In a rare move, Los Angeles ex-deputy is charged in 2019 fatal shootingRead morePolice have killed roughly 1,100 people each year since 2013. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people – one of the deadliest years on record, Mapping Police Violence reported. The organization tracks deaths recorded by police, governments and the media, including cases where people were fatally shot, beaten, restrained, and Tasered. The Washington Post has reported similar trends, and found that 2021 broke the record for fatal shootings by officers since the newspaper started its database tracking in 2015.“The shocking regularity of killings suggests that nothing substantive has really changed to disrupt the nationwide dynamic of police violence,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, which evaluates departments. “It demonstrates that we’re not doing enough, and if anything, it appears to be getting slightly worse year over year.”Advocates argue that the persistent rate of killings was a critical reason the US should not be expanding its police forces.Police killings are proceeding at almost exactly the same pace as previous years. No progress has been made in reducing deadly police violence nationwide. Another ~870 people will be killed by police by year’s end unless there are massive systemic changes. https://t.co/G3YiCYZoEi pic.twitter.com/bvhQvZJKWV— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) March 26, 2022
      Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said to “fund the police”, released a budget proposal earlier this week for $30bn in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”. The proposal, which called for the expansion of “accountable, community policing”, sparked immediate criticisms from racial justice groups. The Movement for Black Lives noted that the White House was proposing only $367m to support police reform and said Biden’s budget “shows a blatant disregard for his promises to Black people, masked as an effort to decrease crime”.Michael Gwin, a White House spokesperson, said in an email that Biden had been “consistent in his opposition to defunding the police and in his support for additional funding for community policing”, and “remains committed to advancing long-overdue police reforms”.“The president, along with the overwhelming majority of Americans, knows that we can and must have a criminal justice system that both protects public safety and upholds our founding ideals of equal treatment under the law. In fact, those two goals go hand-in-hand. That approach is at the core of the president’s comprehensive plan to combat crime by getting guns off the streets, and by investing in community-oriented policing and proven community anti-violence programs,” he added.During the national uprisings after Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” became a central rallying cry, with advocates arguing reform efforts had failed to prevent killings and misconduct. Cities could save lives by reducing police budgets, limiting potentially deadly encounters with civilians, and reinvesting funds into community programs that address root causes of crime, activists have said.Some cities initially responded with modest cuts to police budgets, in some cases removing officers from schools, traffic enforcement and other divisions, and investing in alternatives. But over the last year, an uptick in gun violence and homicides has prompted a backlash to the idea of defunding (even as the current crime rate remains significantly lower than decades prior). With intense media coverage of crime, officials have been pressured to abandon reforms, prioritize harsh punishments and invest more in police. Cities that made small cuts have largely restored and expanded law enforcement budgets.“To invest more into a system that we all know is broken is really a slap in the face to everyone who marched in summer 2020,” said Chris Harris, director of policy at the Austin Justice Coalition in Texas. “It reflects just a real lack of solutions to the problems that we face. It’s just more of the same – even if it’s exactly the thing that we know continues to hurt and kill people.”Graphic on killings by police in the US each year, showing 249 people have been killed so far in 2022, and 1,136 people were killed in 2021.Harris said it was disappointing to see calls for police expansion at the federal level, given the George Floyd Act, the national reform measure proposed after the protests, did not succeed. He said he was not surprised that the killings by police continue apace: “We fail to deal with the underlying issues that often drive police interactions in our communities, partly because we’re funding this law enforcement response rather than the upfront supports and services that could help people.”Gwin noted that the White House was exploring possible executive action to pass reforms after Republicans blocked negotiations over legislation.Sinyangwe pointed to a data analysis in Los Angeles, which showed that in recent years, one-third of incidents in which Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers used force involved an unhoused person: “Instead of using force against homeless people, we should be investing in services and creating unarmed civilian responses to these issues.”But in LA, where housing and outreach efforts have fallen short, there has been an escalating law enforcement crackdown on street encampments. And LAPD is on track to get a large budget boost, despite a sharp increase in killings by officers in 2021.Proponents of police budget increases argue that law enforcement is the solution to violence, but Sinyangwe noted that fewer than 5% of arrests nationally are for serious violent crimes. And research has shown that when police forces expand, there are more arrests for low-level offenses, he said. And many high-profile killings by police have involved stops for alleged low-level crimes.Kaitlyn Dey, an organizer in Portland, Oregon, said it was frustrating to see officials push a narrative that cities need to “re-fund the police” when municipalities have largely failed to defund law enforcement in the first place.“We have to start chipping away at how many officers there are, what kind of equipment they have – that is going to reduce [police] violence, because they’re not going to be able to enact it if you take away their resources,” she said.There are documented solutions that could reduce killings, said Alex S Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on policing. He noted estimates suggesting that 25% to 50% of people killed by police were having a mental health crisis.“If we would develop non-police mental health crisis teams, and improve community-based mental health services, we could save hundreds of lives a year,” he said.Vitale, author of The End of Policing, pointed to a program in Denver that sends mental health clinicians and paramedics to respond to certain 911 calls, which is now dramatically expanding after a successful pilot. Health experts have responded to thousands of emergency calls since 2020, and have never had to call police for backup, the Denver Post reported.“While the media has mobilized crime panics to try and shut down talk of reducing our reliance on policing, organizations across the country are doing grassroots work in communities to demand these alternatives,” he said.TopicsUS policingUS politicsJoe BidenGeorge FloydnewsReuse this content More

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      The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexican border. Seriously? | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      The US government is deploying robot dogs to the Mexico border. Seriously?Moustafa BayoumiAs if the border isn’t surveilled and militarized enough, the Department of Homeland Security wants to go full Black Mirror Are we all doomed to live in Charlie Brooker’s techno-dystopia? In Metalhead, an episode from season four of his famed Netflix show Black Mirror, a woman navigates an austere post-apocalyptic landscape while running for her life from a murderous robot dog. What makes the mechanized beast in the show particularly frightening is the lethal combination of the single-mindedness of a computer program with the extreme ferocity of an angry, feral dog.But it’s just TV, right? Not exactly. The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.The latest example came on 1 February, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled “Robot Dogs Take Another Step Towards Deployment at the Border”. DHS dressed up their statement with the kind of adorable language made to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. “The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is offering US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a helping hand (or ‘paw’),” read the release. Isn’t that cute? A picture of the “four-legged ground drone” accompanied the release, and the “Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicle”, as it’s called, looked remarkably (and scarily) similar to the monstrous quadrupeds seen in the Black Mirror episode. But let’s not judge based on appearance. The real issue is that we keep rushing to militarized and technological solutions to what ultimately are human and political questions, creating more problems along the way.These particular robot dogs are made by Ghost Robotics, which claims that its 100lb machine was “bred” to scale “all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs”. Each robot dog is outfitted with a bevy of sensors and able to transmit real-time video and information feeds. The devices are not yet in operation on the US-Mexico border, but a testing and evaluation program is under way in El Paso, Texas.To listen to DHS, it all sounds so utterly charming and so very next-gen – until you realize that what we’re talking about is the further encroachment of government surveillance on our daily lives. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “people who live along the border are some of the most heavily surveilled people in the United States. A massive amalgamation of federal, state and local law enforcement and national security agencies are flying drones, putting up cameras and just generally attempting to negate civil liberties – capturing the general goings-on of people who live and work in proximity to the border.”Then there’s the question of lethal force. These specific ground drones may not be armed, but Ghost Robotics is already infamous for the combination of robot dog and robot rifle. In 2021, small arms manufacturer Sword International (must these companies choose such dystopian names?) outfitted a robot dog from Ghost Robotics with a custom-made weapon, called a “special purpose unmanned rifle” or Spur. This darling invention was unveiled at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army.Incidentally, US policy not only does not “prohibit the development or employment” of killer robots (officially known as “lethal autonomous weapon systems,” or Laws) but also opposes any international preemptive ban. Meanwhile, as the Congressional Research Service notes, Israel has already exported what many consider a lethal autonomous weapon system to Chile, China, India, South Korea and Turkey. We’re fast running out of time for robust international dialogue on this issue.Domestically, the short history of the use of the robot dogs in our cities is also troubling. The Honolulu police department used about $150,000 of pandemic funding to buy their robot dog, which they then used to scan the eyes and take the temperatures of unhoused people to check for symptoms of Covid. The practice raised the alarms of advocates who said the practice was fundamentally dehumanizing. Needless to say, no housed person was treated that way.And after public outcry in 2021, the New York police department returned its $94,200 robot dog, Digidog. That robot was deployed to a home invasion in the Bronx and to a tense situation in a public housing building in Manhattan, attracting the angry notice of New Yorkers. Once again, many Black and brown New Yorkers felt over-policed, over-surveilled and under-resourced.“You can’t give me a living wage, you can’t raise a minimum wage, you can’t give me affordable housing; I’m working hard and I can’t get paid leave, I can’t get affordable childcare,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman in a video he posted to Twitter. “Instead we got money, taxpayer money, going to robot dogs?”Bowman is hardly alone. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized both the NYPD’s robot dog in 2021 and the recent news of robot dogs at the border. “It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization,” she recently tweeted. “From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS.”She’s right, of course, as is Bowman. Where exactly are our priorities?The Biden administration has a chance to stop this program in its tracks before the border becomes even more of a militarized, technological dystopia. We’re so easily mesmerized by the massive capabilities of technology, but the fact is that techno-military solutions to human problems too often create more problems than they solve. Just ask the unhoused populations in Honolulu, the urban poor in New York, and – if the program’s not cancelled – asylum seekers on the border. These are the people whose daily realities are increasingly being militarized by this technology. And because they are vulnerable and without political clout, they’re the ones closest to living in a Black Mirror episode. Meanwhile, the rest of us are sold a hi-tech bill of goods that unites everything that Americans love – technology, dogs and guns – and told to believe it’s all for the best.Look, I love my tech and all it can do as much as the next person, but when our embrace of technology reduces rather than enhances our dignity, then we have a problem. Humans deserve better. And frankly, so do dogs – even robot ones.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS-Mexico borderUS militaryUS policingcommentReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden on crime: ‘The answer is not to defund the police’ – live

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      Key events

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      3.48pm EST

      15:48

      Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

      3.28pm EST

      15:28

      Trump Israel ambassador spills beans on embarrassing meeting

      1.48pm EST

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      ‘The answer is not to defund the police’ – Biden

      1.39pm EST

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      Joe Biden considering executive order to implement police reform – White House

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      Today so far

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      Russia plans staged attack to justify invasion of Ukraine – reports

      10.40am EST

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      Isis leader detonated bomb to avoid US capture, Biden says

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      16:37

      The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, became similarly defensive earlier today when a reporter pressed for more details about the deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family members.
      Joe Biden said that Qurayshi detonated a bomb to avoid capture by the US troops who carried out a special forces raid last night, and the explosion killed the Islamic State leader and several of his family members.
      NPR reporter Ayesha Rascoe asked Psaki whether the White House would present evidence to substantiate Biden’s claims that a suicide bomb killed Qurayshi and his family.
      “Obviously, these events just happened overnight. And so, I’m going to let the Department of Defense do a final assessment, which I’m certain they will provide additional detail on once it’s finalized,” Psaki said.
      Rascoe continued to press the issue, telling Psaki, “The US has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians. And, I mean, that is a fact.”
      The US military initially described a Kabul drone attack carried out last year as a “righteous strike,” but Pentagon leaders were later forced to admit that the attack had actually killed 10 civilians and no Islamic State combatants.
      “The president made clear from the beginning, at every point in this process, that doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties was his priority and his preference,” Psaki said.
      “Given these events just happened less than 24 hours ago, we’re going to give [the Pentagon] time to make a final assessment. And they’ll provide every detail they can.”

      4.14pm EST

      16:14

      The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, clashed with a reporter at his press briefing after the journalist demanded evidence to substantiate US claims of Russia’s plans to stage an attack to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
      “You’ve made an allegation that they might do that. Have they actually done it?” AP reporter Matt Lee asked Price.
      “What we know, Matt, is what I just said, that they have engaged in this activity,” Price said. “We told you a few weeks ago that we have information indicating Russia also has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine. So that, Matt, to your question is an action that Russia has already taken.”

      The Hill
      (@thehill)
      Reporter: “It’s an action that you say they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. […] This is like – crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”Must-watch exchange between @APDiploWriter Matt Lee and @StateDeptSpox. pic.twitter.com/RPIPb2zwf5

      February 3, 2022

      Lee pointed out that the administration has not presented evidence to support the allegation of a planned false-flag operation either, and he pressed for concrete proof of Russia’s schemes in Ukraine.
      Specifically on the allegation of a planned fake video to justify an invasion, Lee said, “This is like – crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”
      Pointing to his decades of experience covering US foreign policy, Lee noted that the Pentagon has previously made wrong assertions about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the potential of Kabul falling to the Taliban.
      Price became defensive, telling Lee, “If you doubt the credibility of the US government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

      3.48pm EST

      15:48

      Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

      The Guardian’s Julian Borger and Shaun Walker report:
      US officials claim they have evidence of a Russian plan to make a “very graphic” fake video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for an invasion.
      The alleged plot would involve using corpses, footage of blown-up buildings, fake Ukrainian military hardware, Turkish-made drones and actors playing the part of Russian-speaking mourners.
      “We don’t know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration,” the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, told MSNBC, adding that the video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they would have created themselves”.
      Finer added: “That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this.”
      The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the video would have purported to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine and would be “very graphic”. He added that the US believed that the plan had the backing of the Kremlin.
      “Our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government,” Kirby said.

      3.28pm EST

      15:28

      Trump Israel ambassador spills beans on embarrassing meeting

      Martin Pengelly

      Meeting then-Israeli president Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem in May 2017, Donald Trump stunned advisers by criticising the then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for being unwilling to seek peace while Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was “desperate” for a deal. More

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      Progressives concerned as Eric Adams takes helm as New York mayor

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      Progressives concerned as Eric Adams takes helm as New York mayorHomelessness, safe housing, police brutality and racial injustice – does Bill de Blasio’s replacement have the policies to fix them? For many New Yorkers, the inauguration of Eric Adams as the 110th mayor of New York City – and only the second Black person to serve in the position – has evoked a range of feelings, from excitement at the possibility of change to confusion and concern.‘Generals don’t lead from the back’: New York mayor Eric Adams seeks bold start Read moreAdams’ rise through city and state politics was fairly typical. In addition to serving as a New York police captain, he was the Brooklyn borough president and a state senator. But he remains an unconventional, even enigmatic figure. There are questions surrounding his home address and curiosity about his plant-based diet, but information about his actual policies remain scarce.“Where Eric Adams has thrived, in many ways, is in really failing to lay out a vision,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, director of the New York Working Families party. “His transition has been defined by personality, less [by] an agenda for the city.”Progressives and advocates working across multiple sectors have voiced concerns at the slow emergence of Adams’ plans and priorities, and worry about positions he has taken including increasing the use of the heavily criticized “stop-and-frisk” policy and resurrecting plainclothes policemen units.Adams’ ascent comes at a crucial time in New York history, as the city seeks to emerge from the pandemic and the economic and social chaos that has come with it.New York’s ballooning homelessness crisis, primarily caused by a lack of affordable housing, is one of the largest issues Adam must contend with. In 2020, more than 120,000 people, including children, slept in the New York municipal shelter system, with homelessness reaching the highest levels since the Great Depression.Covid presented additional challenges, spreading rapidly among homeless populations.Advocates have widely supported Adams’ priority of increasing permanent, affordable housing in a city which has some of America’s most expensive rents. But many have raised concerns about Adams’ main plan: converting 25,000 hotel rooms into permanent apartments, noting zoning and conversion requirements many hotels do not meet.Public housing, managed by the New York Public Housing Association, is another area where Adams has faced pushback. Adams supports privatizing public housing units as well as selling air rights above public housing units. Activists have said such actions, presented as an opportunity to raise capital for blighted buildings, are ineffective and that oversight for private landlords when it comes to addressing housing issues like mold and lead paint would become even more difficult.“His focus is going to be on his big-money donors. That’s been his track record all along. That’s not a secret,” said Fight for NYCHA core member Louis Flores.“We expect him to continue down that road, and for public housing that he’s going to support policies that benefit the real estate development industry at the expense of the public housing residents.”Slice of life: New York’s famed $1 street pizza under threat from rising costsRead moreDespite ambiguities around some of Adams’ plans for addressing homelessness, some experts are hopeful delays in appointments – and Adams’ reputation for flexibility – could be an opportunity for his administration to receive input from community leaders on how to address the crisis, including through the creation of a deputy to oversee homelessness and affordable housing.”Having a bit more of a deliberative process is ultimately going to be more impactful than coming out on day one with an ambitious target for the number of units of affordable housing that should be created that might not actually have the impact of reducing homelessness and housing insecurity,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless.Proposed changes to policing are another point of tension.Adams, who has described assault at the hands of an NYPD officer as inspiration for joining public service, has faced criticism for his plans to resurrect controversial plainclothes units, an anti-crime department in the NYPD involved in a number of shootings, and increase use of stop-and-frisk, a policy critics have condemned as racially discriminatory.While Adams and his newly appointed NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell, the first Black woman to lead the department, have supported these policies and vowed to use properly trained, “emotionally intelligent” officers, progressive have argued that previous training attempts have failed, with many officers continually excused for misconduct.“What does the emotional intelligence of an officer matter if he’s got you up against the wall, patting you down,” said Kesi Foster, a lead organizer with the nonprofit Make the Road New York and a steering committee member with Communities United for Police Reform.Simone said: “The ways to solve unsheltered homelessness is not through policing and pushing people from one corner to another.”Other policing initiatives Adams has sponsored have met criticism, specifically when it comes to New York’s troubled jail system.While Adams has publicly supported closing down Rikers Island, a jail with notoriously poor conditions where several people have died in pre-trial custody, he has also promised to bring back solitary confinement to Rikers, reversing a previous ban on a practice several experts have called “inhumane”.Eric Adams sworn in as mayor of New York CityRead moreAdams has publicly opposed bail reform measures, meant to curtail pre-trial detention but rolled back, citing debunked claims that releases have spurred increases in crime.“Changing the bail bill is not going to achieve the outcome the mayor wants. We’re hoping that we can convince him of that during his tenure,” said Marie Ndiaye, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at the Legal Aid Society.“Getting wishy-washy on bail reform is pretty scary because there’s a pretty linear correlation between the rollbacks and the jail population increasing,” said Sara Rahimi of the nonprofit Emergency Release Fund.In general, advocates contend there is more to be learned about Adams as more appointments are made, but given his comments so far, many are approaching the mayor-elect with caution and timid hope of being able to advance progressive policy.“Cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic all at once would be the way to go there,” said Ndiaye.TopicsNew YorkUS politicsUS policingUS crimeUS domestic policyHomelessnessHousingnewsReuse this content More