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11 September 20
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Trump Bragged About 'Saving' Saudi Crown Prince's 'Ass' After Khashoggi Murder
Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone
Excerpt: "The president is proud of helping an autocrat escape accountability for his role in the murder of a Washington Post journalist."
resident Trump openly bragged about protecting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman from scrutiny after the royal was accused of orchestrating the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist, Bob Woodward reports in his new book. Trump told Woodward in January that he “saved” the prince’s “ass,” justifying his efforts by noting that the Saudis bought arms from the United States, and explaining the country has oil and “religious monuments” that bestow “real power.”Asked repeatedly if he believed bin Salman ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Trump answered “He says he didn’t do it.” The CIA has concluded Salman did order the murder. Intelligence reports indicate that 15 Saudi agents flew to Istanbul in October 2018, where they murdered Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate, sawed his body into pieces, and removed it in several plastic trash bags.
Acting on that assessment, members of both parties advanced measures to hold bin Salman accountable, including a resolution labeling him complicit in Khashoggi’s murder. The Senate unanimously voted to approve that measure in December of 2018, and every member of the House — save for seven Republicans — voted for the resolution as well.
But Trump and members of his administration have openly and consistently expressed doubt about bin Salman’s involvement, contradicting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said there was no “direct reporting” of MBS’s guilt, while former Secretary of Defense James Mattis maintained there was no “smoking gun.”
Trump’s refusal to hold bin Salman accountable has had major consequences for the region. A majority of lawmakers have voted to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s military efforts in Yemen — a war that has perpetuated a horrific humanitarian crisis in the region. In 2019, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate passed legislation to block or limit U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The votes came after the Trump administration used an emergency declaration to ink a deal that would sell $8.1 billion in armaments to the three countries without Congress’ approval.
But the bills to limit arms sales never became law. Trump blocked them with a veto that lawmakers were unable to override.
Here is Bob Woodward’s account of his January 22 conversation with Trump about Khashoggi’s murder and bin Salman’s role. The passage appears in Woodward’s book, Rage, on bookstore shelves September 15.
“That is one of the most gruesome things,” I said. “You yourself have said.”
“Yeah, but Iran is killing 36 people a day, so —” Trump said.
I pressed him on MBS’s role in the Khashoggi killing. My reporting showed that Trump had told others about the crown prince. “I saved his ass,” Trump said after the U.S. outcry over Khasshogi’s murder. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to stop them.” He’d sarcastically told members of Congress “Let them trade with Russia instead. Let them buy a thousand planes from Russia instead of the United States. Fellas, you’ve got to be smart.”
In May 2019, Trump used his emergency authority to bypass the objections of Congress and sell the Saudis $8 billion in arms.
Now, Trump said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying, and I’ve gotten involved very much. I know everything about the whole situation.” He said Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of billions in the United Statesand was responsible for millions of jobs. Of MBS, Trump said, “He will always say that he didn’t do it. He says that to everybody, and frankly I’m happy that he says that. But he will say that to you, he will say that to Congress, and he will say that to everybody. He’s never said he did do it.”
“Do you believe that he did it?” I asked.
“No, he says that he didn’t do it.”
“I know, but do you really believe —”
“He says very strongly that he didn’t do it,” Trump said. “Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time.”
Trump was referring, as he often did, to the deals struck in advance of his trip to Saudi Arabia in 2017. In a fact-check, the Associated Press wrote, “Actual orders under the arms deal are far smaller, and neither country has announced nor substantiated Trump’s repeated assertion that the Saudis are poised to inject $450 billion overall into the U.S. economy.”
“And you know, they’re in the Middle East,” Trump went on. Saudi Arabia was an important ally. “You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have real power. They have oil, but they also have great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion.”
Health care workers at Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital. (photo: AP)
Dhruv Khullar | It Will Take More Than a Vaccine to Beat COVID-19
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "Vaccines are making progress, but they may not defeat the virus completely. Luckily, other therapies are on the way, too."
READ MORE
A firefighter walks through the rubble of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (photo: Todd Maisel/New York Daily News)
Trump Administration Secretly Withheld Millions From Program to Treat First Responders Suffering 9/11 Related Illnesses
Michael McAuliff, New York Daily News
McAuliff writes: "The Trump administration has secretly siphoned nearly million away from a program that tracks and treats FDNY firefighters and medics suffering from 9/11 related illnesses."
The Treasury Department mysteriously started withholding parts of payments — nearly four years ago — meant to cover medical services for firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics treated by the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, documents obtained by The News reveal.
The payments were authorized and made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees the program. But instead of sending the funds to the city, the Treasury started keeping some of the money.
“This was just disappearing,” the program’s director, Dr. David Prezant, told The News. “This is the most amazing thing. This was disappearing — without any notification.”
Prezant said he was docked about half a million dollars each year in 2016 and 2017. Then it crept up to about $630,000 in 2018 and 2019. This year, Treasury has nearly tripled its extractions, diverting $1.447 million through late August, according to Prezant.
“Here we have sick World Trade Center-exposed firefighters and EMS workers, at a time when the city is having difficult financial circumstances due to COVID-19, and we’re not getting the money we need to be able to treat these heroes,” said Prezant, the FDNY’s Chief Medical Officer.
“And for years, they wouldn’t even tell us — we never ever received a letter telling us this,” he explained.
Prezant was never able to get an explanation from NIOSH or the mammoth Department of Health and Human Services which has the agency under its umbrella.
After years of complaining, Prezant did get a partial answer when Long Island Republican Rep. Pete King put his political weight behind the inquiry. That answer was that some other agency in the city has been in an unrelated feud with the feds over Medicare bills.
For some reason, Treasury decided to stiff the FDNY. Neither the Treasury Department nor the White House answered requests for comment.
King said whatever the circumstance is that forces a premier program for sick 9/11 first responders to go begging for help on the eve on the 19th anniversary of the attack — it has to end.
“It’s disgraceful,” King said.
“I don’t even care what the details of this thing is. That fund has to be fully compensated, fully reimbursed. I mean, this is absurd,” he said. “If anyone were true American heroes, it was the cops and firemen on 9/11, especially the firemen, and for even $1 to be being held back is absolutely indefensible.”
King wrote to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin over the summer asking what the problem was and for a solution. He got no response and has fired off another letter.
He also intends to confront Vice President Mike Pence on Friday, when both attend the Tunnel to Towers event honoring the anniversary.
“I gotta tell him,” King said. “Forget the politics. I don’t want to sound naive, but this is terrible, absolutely inexcusable.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is equally as disgusted.
“The Trump Treasury Department siphoning ongressionally appropriated funds meant to pay for 9/11 workers' healthcare is an outrageous finger in the eye to the firefighters, cops and other first responders who risked their lives for us," Schumer said. This needs to stop forthwith and payments to the workers' health program must be made whole — and now.”
Congress created a temporary health program in 2010, with the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. The program was extended by 75 years in Dec. 2015, after sick and dying 9/11 workers made hundreds of trips to the Capitol pleading their cause.
“I’m not sure what quite what to make of this other than it’s despicable,” said Jake Lemonda, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. “We’ve fought very hard for many years for these funds to provide proper medical treatment for our sick and injured. The withholding of these funds without a legitimate explanation is inexcusable.”
Prezant said he’s been able to keep functioning because the Fire Department fronts the program the money, with the understanding that the feds will reimburse it under the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.
The program was designed by Congress and the government to be self-sufficient. The lack of reimbursement means Prezant may have to do less to support the sick, even though the program is extremely cost-efficient, since its staff only draw city government salaries.
“The money that we don’t get means that physicians, nurses and support staff are not hired. We have not had to lay off anyone, yet, but we are at that brink,” he explained. “This just isn’t fair. It’s not fair to our patients.”
“The city has been covering some of our shortfall. But in this time of COVID crisis, that cannot continue,” he said.
Many families have been harassed by the Pasco County Sheriff's program. (photo: Tampa Bay Times)
A Florida Sheriff Created a Program Claiming to Stop Crime Before It Happens. It Harasses Families Across the County.
Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, Tampa Bay Times
Excerpt: "Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened. What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents."
First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.
Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.
They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.
One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
At least 1 in 10 were younger than 18, the Times found.
Some of the young people were labeled targets despite having only one or two arrests.
Rio Wojtecki, 15, became a target in September 2019, almost a year after he was arrested for sneaking into carports with a friend and stealing motorized bicycles.
Those were the only charges against Rio, and he already had a state-issued juvenile probation officer checking on him. Yet from September 2019 to January 2020, Pasco Sheriff’s deputies went to his home at least 21 times, dispatch logs show.
They showed up at the car dealership where his mom worked, looked for him at a friend’s house and checked his gym to see if he had signed in.
More than once, the deputies acknowledged that Rio wasn’t getting into trouble. They mostly grilled him about his friends, according to body-camera video of the interactions. But he had been identified as a target, they said, so they had to keep checking on him.
Since September 2015, the Sheriff’s Office has sent deputies on checks like those more than 12,500 times, dispatch logs show.
[Click to watch body-camera footage of the deputies’ interactions]
Deputies gave the mother of one teenage target a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target’s father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son smoking a cigarette.
As they make checks, deputies feed information back into the system, not just on the people they target, but on family members, friends and anyone else in the target’s orbit.
In the past two years alone, two of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies have scrapped similar programs following public outcries and reports documenting serious flaws.
In Pasco, however, the initiative has expanded. Last summer, the Sheriff’s Office announced plans to begin keeping tabs on people who have been repeatedly committed to psychiatric hospitals.
The Times shared its findings with the Sheriff’s Office six weeks before this story published. Nocco declined multiple interview requests.
In statements that spanned more than 30 pages, the agency said it stands behind its program — part of a larger initiative it calls intelligence-led policing. It said other local departments use similar techniques and accused the Times of cherry-picking examples and painting “basic law enforcement functions” as harassment.
[Click to read the Sheriff’s Office response to the Times]
The Sheriff’s Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011.
“This reduction in property crime has a direct, positive impact on the lives of the citizens of Pasco County and, for that, we will not apologize,” one of the statements said. “Our first and primary mission is to serve and protect our community and the Intelligence Led Policing philosophy assists us in achieving that mission.”
But Pasco’s drop in property crimes was similar to the decline in the seven-largest nearby police jurisdictions. Over the same time period, violent crime increased only in Pasco.
Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.
“Morally repugnant,” said Matthew Barge, an expert in police practices and civil rights who oversaw court-ordered agreements to address police misconduct in Cleveland and Baltimore.
“One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing — and an absolute absence of common sense and humanity — that I have seen in my career," said David Kennedy, a renowned criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose research on crime prevention is referenced in Pasco’s policies.
The Times’ examination of Pasco’s intelligence program comes amid a national debate over the role of police in society and calls to reduce funding for law enforcement or replace entire departments.
For years, the program’s inner workings have remained largely out of public view, even as Nocco has touted its merits during debates and community forums. Times reporters combed through thousands of pages of documents, watched hours of body-camera footage and spent months obtaining and analyzing the target list, which had not been previously released.
Pasco is an overwhelmingly white county, and the program did not appear to disproportionately target people based on race.
But juvenile offenders, regardless of race, were an outsized priority for the intelligence program, according to former deputies and a Times data analysis.
Of the 20 addresses visited most by its dedicated enforcement teams, more than half were home to middle- or high-schoolers who were identified as targets.
Building the machine
Nocco took over the Pasco Sheriff’s Office in 2011 when his predecessor retired early and then-Gov. Rick Scott appointed him to finish the term.
Nocco was 35 and a newly promoted major who had joined the Sheriff’s Office two years earlier. He had deep ties to Republican politics but far less experience in law enforcement than the outgoing sheriff.
He quickly rolled out a plan to remake the department that sounded like a pitch for a Hollywood blockbuster: Moneyball meets Minority Report.
The intent was to reduce property crime. The agency, which has 650 sworn law enforcement officers and covers a county of roughly 500,000 residents, would use data to predict where future crimes were likely to take place and who was likely to commit them, Nocco told reporters. Then deputies would find those people and “take them out” — thwarting criminal activity before it happened.
“Instead of being reactive,” he said, “we are going to be proactive.”
He later said the approach was not unlike the way the federal government goes after terrorists.
The Pasco Sheriff’s Office wasn’t the only local law enforcement agency trying to predict crime. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office had already started using crime statistics to pinpoint high-crime areas and identify repeat offenders. The two departments discussed techniques, the Pasco agency said in one of its statements.
The Pasco Sheriff’s Office won a $95,000 federal grant to upgrade its computer systems and hired a small team of civilian analysts. At first, the analysts focused on identifying geographic crime trends and gathering information from people in jail, said former Lt. Brian Prescott, who oversaw the team and retired in 2014.
But Nocco wanted to make proactive strategies and intelligence gathering his agency’s central philosophy. All employees were required to take a two-hour course on intelligence-led policing, Prescott said. Supervisors got additional training.
Nocco referenced the program often as he ran for election for the first time in 2012. Some residents appreciated it so much, he boasted in one campaign appearance, they threw deputies a block party.
He won the race and continued building his intelligence machine.
Today, the Sheriff’s Office has a 30-person intelligence-led policing section with a $2.8 million budget, run by a former senior counterterrorism analyst who was assigned to the National Counterterrorism Center. The No. 2 is a former Army intelligence officer.
Twenty analysts scour police reports, property records, Facebook pages, bank statements and surveillance photos to help deputies across the agency investigate crimes, according to the agency’s latest intelligence-led policing manual.
Since September 2015, they have also decided who goes on the list of people deemed likely to break the law.
The people on the list are what the department calls “prolific offenders.” The manual describes them as individuals who have “taken to a career of crime” and are “not likely to reform.”
Potential prolific offenders are first identified using an algorithm the department invented that gives people scores based on their criminal records. People get points each time they’re arrested, even when the charges are dropped. They get points for merely being a suspect.
The manual says people’s scores are “enhanced” — it does not say by how much — if they miss court dates, violate their probation or appear in five or more police reports, even if they were listed as a witness or the victim.
The Sheriff’s Office told the Times that a computer generates the scores and creates an initial pool of offenders every three months. But the analysts go through the list by hand and make a determination about which 100 people should be on the list.
The analysts also work with the command staff to pick “Top 5” offenders, who are thought to be key players in criminal networks, and “district targets,” who the department has enough evidence to charge with a crime. The manual does not say what criteria they use.
Deputies visit the prolific offenders and the other targets as part of their daily responsibilities.
Nocco described the practice as “bothering criminals” to the Council of Neighborhood Associations in 2012.
The manual describes the goal in aggressive terms.
“If the offender does not feel the pressure, if the offender is not arrested when they commit their next crime, or if the offender is left to feel their punishment is menial,” the manual says, “the strategy will have no impact.”
‘One way or another’
Inside the agency, keeping the machine humming was a top priority, six former deputies and department leaders told the Times.
“At the end of every shift, they’d want to know how many prolific-offender checks your squad did,” said Chris Starnes, a former lieutenant who oversaw patrol and narcotics units.
Former Capt. James Steffens, who was previously chief of the New Port Richey Police Department, said deputies who didn’t visit enough targets could be removed from special assignments or sent to work in districts far from their homes. Their supervisors could too.
Both Starnes and Steffens resigned from the Sheriff’s Office. Starnes is a plaintiff in an ongoing federal lawsuit that accuses the agency of pushing out employees who criticized specific policies, including the intelligence program. Steffens is also suing the agency, alleging racial discrimination, retaliation and defamation. The Sheriff’s Office denies the claims.
Some deputies — those on Strategic Targeted Area Response teams, or STAR teams — were dedicated to the program’s objectives. Among their assignments: to “hunt down” the targets, according to a post the Sheriff’s Office made on its Facebook page in 2017.
Later in the post, then-STAR team Deputy John Riyad described the allure of being on the team: “I want to go out and find people to arrest so we can prevent those crimes from happening.”
The job included “intensive monitoring,” as the agency’s strategic plan described it. Email reports recount STAR deputies driving by targets’ homes, hunting for intel. They spotted an orange mountain bike outside one young offender’s house and checked to see if any bicycles matching that description had been reported stolen. (None had.) They found another young offender riding his scooter in front of his residence on the county’s east side.
“He has cut his hair, which is now short,” a deputy wrote in an undated report. “He advised after the summer break he will be going to 9th grade at Schwettman (Education Center). He claimed not to be associating with any of his old friends.”
It also involved “directed harassment,” former STAR team Cpl. Royce Rodgers said in an interview with the Times.
Rodgers, who also resigned from the Sheriff’s Office and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit with Starnes, said his captain ordered him to make the contacts aggressive enough that targets would want to move.
Rodgers and his team would show up at people’s homes just to make them uncomfortable, he said. They didn’t always log the contacts in the agency’s official records. He recalled parking five patrol cars outside one target’s home all night and visiting some as many as six times in a single day.
They would do the same to targets’ friends, relatives and other “associates,” he said.
“Those associates might have nothing to do with the offender,” Rodgers said. But as long as the analysts listed them in the system, “we’d harass them too,” he said.
If the targets, their family members or associates wouldn’t speak to deputies or answer questions, STAR team deputies were told to look for code enforcement violations like faded mailbox numbers, a forgotten bag of trash or overgrown grass, Rodgers said.
“We would literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us,” he said.
Rodgers said people sometimes would fail to pay the fine, which would result in a warrant being issued for their arrest.
“We’d get them one way or another,” he said.
Rodgers said the tactics made him and many of his colleagues uneasy. He thought the strategy was both ineffective and unethical, he said. But when he raised concerns, he said, a supervisor threatened to strip him of his rank and send him back to patrol.
Late-night visits and code citations
In interviews with the Times, 21 families targeted by the program described deputies pounding on their doors at all hours of the day and night.
Nearly half said deputies sometimes surrounded their homes, lined their streets with patrol cars or shined flashlights into their windows.
Nine said they were threatened with or received code enforcement citations.
Four said they seriously considered moving. One did.
Two adults whose teenage children were targeted had no complaints about how the Sheriff’s Office had treated their families. Both said they were having trouble with their children and appreciated deputies stepping in. Another father said he was surprised but not bothered that deputies checked on his teenage daughter.
All of the others called the tactics unhelpful or unbearable.
Sheila Smith was among them. Deputies showed up at her home in Land O’ Lakes over and over in 2017 and 2018 looking for her teenage son, even though he was under court-ordered house arrest at his grandmother’s home in Hillsborough County, she said.
Their fifth visit was on Jan. 11, 2018, at 10:32 p.m. Smith stepped outside in a bathrobe and explained the situation. “He’s already under supervision,” she told the deputies politely, according to body-camera video of the encounter. “It’s not necessary for y’all to come here anymore.”
Deputies came by looking for her son at least three more times after that, the dispatch log shows. Another time, they put her husband, Vaughn Sr., in handcuffs and loaded him into the back of a cruiser, she said. They later said they had mistaken him for his brother and let him go.
In one of its statements to the Times, the Sheriff’s Office said that the incident had nothing to do with intelligence-led policing and the deputy had apologized for the confusion. But Vaughn Smith Sr. said the visit had started as so many others had: with the deputy asking about his son.
The Smiths said it was obviously harassment. They called a lawyer and considered moving out of the county, they said. They stayed only because they own their home.
The deputies didn’t only go looking for the targets themselves.
They grilled a 25-year-old woman at the Dunkin’ Donuts where she worked in September 2019 and watched her as she sat outside the building two days later, Sheriff’s Office records show.
The woman had no criminal history beyond traffic offenses. But her boyfriend was a target, and the deputies were trying to find him.
When deputies returned a third time that week, the woman said she and her boyfriend had broken up and complained that the deputies were harassing her, according to their notes. The deputies later confirmed the man they were looking for had left the state with a different woman.
People who were targeted said the checks lasted for months.
Dalanea Taylor was arrested 14 times before turning 17, mostly for burglaries and stealing cars. She went to prison, was released and stopped breaking the law, she said. But deputies kept showing up at her home. They’d ask who she was hanging out with, what she knew about certain people, if she was in a relationship.
Taylor, now 20, wouldn’t answer, she said. It felt inappropriate.
Once, after Taylor posted a photo with a male friend on Facebook, deputies asked about the friend. Later, she said, a deputy followed her in a patrol car as she walked down her street.
When deputies knocked on her door at 7:32 a.m. on New Year’s Day 2018, a family friend implored them to ease up. By then, Taylor had been out of prison for nine months and had not been re-arrested. The deputies said they would not stop monitoring her for a “couple of years,” according to their notes on the conversation.
“She advised she’s staying out of trouble,” they wrote. “She is pregnant and is expecting in June.”
Rio Wojtecki, the 15-year-old who deputies checked on 21 times, said the constant visits made him anxious. One night in January, a few hours after deputies had visited, Rio had trouble breathing and collapsed on the bathroom floor. His mother called an ambulance. Later, an emergency room doctor said anxiety was likely to blame.
In one of its statements to the Times, the Sheriff’s Office said Rio had been named a “Top 5” offender because of his “criminal network and associations.” The agency also said he is in a gang, citing criminal intelligence, but would not elaborate. He and his mother denied the allegation.
Rio wasn’t the only person in the family who felt harassed.
One night, deputies showed up at the house when Rio’s older sisters were home alone. His 19-year-old sister, KayLee, explained that Rio was with their mother at her office and went back inside.
Deputy Thomas Garmon knocked on the window and pounded on the door.
“KayLee!” he yelled, according to his body-camera video. “You’re about to have some issues.”
When she opened the door, Garmon threatened to write her a code enforcement citation for not having numbers posted on the house or mailbox unless she let them search the home for Rio. She insisted there were numbers on the mailbox but ultimately let a deputy in.
A few months later, deputies gave Rio’s mother two tickets: one for not having numbers on her house and one for a broken-down car in the driveway. She had to go to court and pay $100 in fines.
‘How can we get this dude?’
Many of the visits were polite, according to interviews with the program’s targets and body-camera footage of the interactions. But as deputies came back repeatedly, some of the interactions turned combative — and had serious consequences.
Rodgers, the former STAR team corporal, said he and his team would look for reasons to make arrests. Once, they spotted a teenage target through the window of his home. Another teenager was there, too, smoking a cigarette. Both refused to come outside, and the target’s father, Robert A. Jones III, wouldn’t make them.
“We couldn’t get the kids,” Rodgers recalled. “So we arrested the dad.”
Deputies charged Jones with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and resisting an officer.
The charges were dropped. But nine days later, deputies arrested Jones again, this time for missing a court hearing for a code enforcement citation he said he never received. Deputies arrested Jones a third time less than three months later, saying they found a small amount of marijuana in his house and truck.
“It was like a gang,” Jones told the Times. “They were like, ‘How can we get this dude?’ ”
The new charges against Jones — marijuana possession and child neglect — were also dropped, but not before the Sheriff’s Office posted the details of the arrest on its Facebook page.
Jones moved his family to a motel to get away from the harassment, he said. They later moved to Pinellas County.
Other families had similar experiences.
Deputies went to 14-year-old target Da’Marion Allen’s house before school one day last October to ask about a car theft they thought he was involved in. While they were there, they arrested his 53-year-old grandmother, his 28-year-old uncle and a 20-year-old female relative.
The grandmother, Michelle Dotson, was standing outside when the deputies first arrived. She said she asked them to call Da’Marion’s lawyer. But when Da’Marion came out, she said, one of the deputies tried taking him into custody.
A police report says Dotson grabbed the deputy by his wrist and refused to let go. Dotson denies the allegations. She said the only person she touched was her grandson, who has developmental disabilities and functions at the level of a young child.
Deputies said the 20-year-old relative tried to hit one of them in the head with a decorative vase. Dotson said that when deputies started crowding the foyer, she asked the relative to move the vase so it wouldn’t break.
None of the adults had been arrested before, they said. They all denied touching or threatening any deputies. Their cases are pending.
Tammy Heilman had the Sheriff’s Office policy explained bluntly to her in September 2016.
Earlier in the day, STAR team Deputy Andrew Denbo had stopped by her house asking questions about a dirt bike he thought her 16-year-old son — a Sheriff’s Office target — bought with stolen money. Heilman was taking her 7-year-old daughter to Girl Scouts. She told Denbo she wouldn’t speak without an attorney present and drove off.
Denbo noticed Heilman and her daughter were not wearing seat belts, according to the police report. He told her to stop, then followed her down the street and pulled her over.
In the report, Denbo wrote that he opened Heilman’s car door and ordered her to get out. She stayed put and called 9-1-1, saying a deputy had hurt her and she needed help, body-camera video shows.
Heilman told the Times she was scared and confused. She said her daughter had been wearing a seat belt until Denbo opened the door and the two adults began yelling at each other.
The video shows a group of deputies yanking Heilman from the car.
Heilman was arrested on charges of resisting an officer, battery on a law enforcement officer and providing false information in a prior conversation about the dirt bike. The police report says she scratched and kicked the deputies who arrested her.
Before she was taken to jail, during a conversation captured on the tape, Heilman asked why she had been arrested. “Because I told you to stop back there and you drove away,” Denbo replied.
On the way to jail, he continued: “Here’s the policy of the agency. I’ll explain it to you so it makes sense. If people themselves or people that live at a house are committing crimes and victimizing the community, then the direction we receive from our Sheriff’s Office, from the top down, is to go out there and for every single violation that person commits, to come down and enforce it upon them.”
Two years later, deputies arrested Heilman a second time, after she opened her screen door into a deputy’s chest. Heilman said it wasn’t intentional. She had a child in her arms and said the door sometimes jams. Video shows her angrily shoving the door open, but then holding it open and telling the deputies they could come inside.
Because Heilman was on probation, she wasn’t offered bail. She spent 76 days in jail. When she was offered a plea deal that sentenced her to one-year probation plus time served, she took it.
She wanted to spend Christmas with her children, she said. But the decision had lasting consequences. She is now a convicted felon. In the two years since, she said, she has been unable to find work.
‘Everything that’s wrong about policing’
Fifteen experts on policing reviewed aspects of Pasco’s program for the Times. Five of them reviewed versions of the program’s manual.
They identified some portions of the program that are based on well-established law enforcement philosophies, including problem-oriented and community policing.
But they also pointed to what they described as serious flaws.
They noted that Pasco’s scoring system awards points based on arrests, which can reflect racially biased policing practices and doesn’t take into account whether charges were dropped or the person was acquitted.
Some experts were concerned that people can get points for having been suspected of a crime. There are no rules for what makes someone a suspect. It can boil down to who they know or how an individual detective investigates, said Sarah Brayne, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of a new book on big-data policing.
Ana Muñiz, a University of California, Irvine criminologist who studies gang databases, noted that the manuals don’t include a way for residents to check if they’ve been targeted or to file an appeal.
The system also lets the Sheriff’s Office collect an extraordinary amount of information on people who may not have committed a crime, said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at American University and national expert in predictive policing.
After reviewing the most recent manual, Ferguson said: “It feels like everything that’s wrong about policing in one document.”
Other experts said the agency’s tactics were unlikely to deter people from breaking the law and added that the program provides little extra help or social services to the people it targets.
The closest it comes is a palm-sized card with a list of 20 local health care providers, nonprofits and government agencies that deputies are supposed to hand out. The cards contain names, addresses, phone numbers and nothing else.
Initially, a half-dozen of the program’s targets said deputies never gave them even that much information. That changed last month. After the Times presented its findings to the Sheriff’s Office, both Rio’s mother and Heilman said deputies came to their houses with printouts of a community resource guide from the local office of the Florida Department of Health.
Ferguson said programs like Pasco’s were popular a decade or so ago. But in recent years, he said, the concept had been largely discredited.
The Los Angeles Police Department used to have a scoring system to identify violent offenders. But critics attacked the program as biased and invasive, and the department’s Inspector General found that half of the 637 people in the database had one or no violent-crime arrests. The department discontinued the program in August 2018.
The Chicago Police Department had its own system that sought to identify people who were likely to be involved in shootings, either as the perpetrator or victim. But the program was unfair and based on outdated and inaccurate data. The agency quietly ended the program in November 2019.
The Pasco Sheriff’s Office said it developed its scoring system with the help of a top expert. The agency said it created the rubric “in concert with the recommendations of Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe, who we continue to partner with on this program.”
Ratcliffe, a national expert on intelligence-led policing, told the Times he hadn’t spoken with anyone at the Pasco Sheriff’s Office “in years and years.” He said his involvement in the program was limited to a two- or three-day training he provided in 2013.
Told this by the Times, the Sheriff’s Office responded that Ratcliffe’s books are required reading, that a Pasco captain contributed to Ratcliffe’s most recent book and that several members of the agency attended a training Ratcliffe conducted this year in St. Petersburg.
Teenagers as targets
Young people were a major focus of the program, according to records and interviews.
Rodgers, the former STAR team corporal, said his squad “chased almost exclusively juveniles.” Denbo told Heilman, the mother who was arrested twice, that he spent most of his time dealing with kids and their families, according to body-camera footage.
The number of teenagers who were targeted is likely larger than the Times was able to identify.
The agency wouldn’t provide a list that specified when people were added, so the Times started out by excluding anyone who had been arrested after turning 18. That left 88 people. Through interviews, the reporters identified another seven who were targeted as minors and later arrested, raising the total to 10 percent of the list.
About 7.5 percent of people arrested in Pasco County are 17 or younger.
In its statements to the Times, the Sheriff’s Office said the program was designed to address types of property crimes that teenagers often commit. It pointed specifically to a number of auto thefts by young people in neighboring Pinellas County that the Times has reported on extensively.
The statements included an extensive recounting of the criminal records of the juveniles featured in this story. “Just because an individual is 12 does not make him or her incapable of committing crime,” it said of one of the program’s youngest targets.
Kennedy, the John Jay criminologist, called the agency’s tactics “child abuse.”
“There is nothing that justifies terrorizing school kids,” he said.
Other experts pointed to studies showing aggressive policing makes juvenile offenders more likely to reoffend, not less. They said the criminal justice system treats young people more leniently than adults because their brains are not fully developed and they are more likely to be rehabilitated.
The Sheriff’s Office uses juvenile records the same as adult records in its score calculation. Its latest manual encourages deputies to make sure young prolific offenders don’t get the benefits of the juvenile justice system: It recommends they be charged as adults instead of children.
Pasco isn’t the only local law enforcement agency that pays extra attention to young offenders. Several Pinellas County agencies have a joint program to monitor teenagers on court-ordered home detention or probation. But teens must have at least five felony arrests in one year to qualify. It is run in partnership with the state Department of Juvenile Justice and brings social workers and counselors on visits to the teenagers’ homes, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told the Times.
State Department of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman Amanda Slama said her agency had limited knowledge of Pasco’s program and was not involved. She declined to comment further.
Some of the minors who were targeted were especially vulnerable.
Twenty of the targets were 15 or younger when the list was provided to the Times. Two are 13 today, including Jahheen Winters, who has autism and post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood abuse, his mother said.
At least three of the targets had developmental disabilities: Jahheen, Da’Marion and Lorenzo Gary, a 17-year-old with autism and mental health conditions, his mother said. Lorenzo was twice found incompetent to stand trial, meaning he couldn’t be prosecuted because a judge found he didn’t understand the gravity of the charges or the potential penalties.
The targeting was sometimes taking place as troubled teenagers worked to get their lives back on track.
Matthew Lott was put on the prolific offender list at 14. He was arrested at least six times in 2016 and 2017, mostly for breaking into unoccupied homes and cars. Deputies checked on him constantly, his mother recalled, sometimes interrupting family movie nights.
But by 2018, after several months at a residential program for at-risk kids outside of Orlando, Matthew started to turn his life around. He returned to Pasco, earned his GED, got a maintenance job at his church and stayed out of trouble, records show.
Still, deputies showed up at his door. They came one evening that September, when he was supposed to be resting after having his tonsils removed. They came again in October.
“He’s still labeled in our system as a prolific offender, which means he’s going to keep getting checked on,” a deputy told his mom, according to video of the encounter.
Three of Matthew’s close friends said he was afraid the department would find a reason to send him back to jail.
Six weeks after the October visit, Matthew’s body was found behind a vacant building on U.S. 19. His death was ruled a suicide by prescription drug overdose. He had left a short note on his laptop, apologizing and thanking his family and friends.
Matthew’s mother said she wasn’t sure why Matthew took his life. Experts say suicide rarely has a single cause. But two psychologists and a social worker who were not involved in Matthew’s case said the way the deputies treated him could put tremendous psychological pressure on any young person and contribute to a feeling of hopelessness.
Officials at the Department of Juvenile Justice knew Matthew was struggling. They noted in his file at least seven times that he had been cutting himself or had suicidal thoughts.
The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged it had access to a portion of the file that labeled Matthew at risk of suicide. But the department said it would be irresponsible to blame Matthew’s death on its program. It said the program is based on crime data alone, and Matthew qualified.
“Despite our best effort with providing resources, Mr. Lott continued to offend,” the agency said.
Asked what resources it provided, the Sheriff’s Office said it gave Matthew a copy of the resource card, listing 20 other organizations he could turn to for help.
Eagle Creek fire. (photo: Tristan Fortsch)
Oregon Fires Force 500,000 to Evacuate as Blazes Across American West Kill 15
Jason Wilson, Maanvi Singh and Sam Levin, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "More than 500,000 people in Oregon have been forced to evacuate as unprecedented wildfires rage across the state, amounting to more than 10% of the population, authorities said Thursday."
Wildfires searing through the American west have killed at least 15 people, leveled entire neighborhoods and forced stretched firefighting crews to make tough decisions about where to deploy.
The situation is especially acute in Oregon where fire conditions not seen in three decades have fueled huge blazes that have killed at least three people, destroyed at least five towns and forced the evacuation of communities from the southern border to the Portland suburbs.
On Thursday night, Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration in the state, enabling federal assistance to bolster local efforts.
Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, said on Thursday that more than 900,000 acres have burned across the state in the last several days – nearly double the amount of land that usually burns in a typical year. “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across the state,” Brown said.
The Oregon Office of Emergency Management said wildfire activity was made even more dangerous in northwestern Oregon as hot, windy conditions continued. Arson investigators have opened a probe into the suspicious origins of a deadly fire that began in the town of Ashland and destroyed hundreds of homes.
In Washington state, a one-year-old boy died after his family was apparently overrun by flames trying to flee a wildfire.
And in northern California’s Butte county, where the town of Paradise was devastated by the deadly Camp fire in 2018, at least 10 people have died and 16 are missing amid the North Complex fire currently burning through the region.
More than 17,000 firefighters are involved in battling the blazes.
Firefighters on the west coast are tackling blazes across three states
Brown said there have been fatalities in Oregon but the exact number is not yet known. There have been at least three reported fire deaths in the state. Two of the deaths occurred in Marion county, where the sheriff late on Wednesday confirmed two people fleeing the uncontained Santiam fire had been found dead in their car. The sheriff’s office later posted a news story to their Facebook page, identifying the pair as a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother.
The deaths occurred 30 miles downstream from Detroit, Oregon, one of five towns in the state that Brown said had been “substantially destroyed” in a series of conflagrations concentrated in the state’s more populous western third. The fires have already consumed “hundreds of homes”.
The Santiam fire forced the evacuation of the whole of the eastern portion of Marion county, and shrouded Salem in thick smoke, which cast an eerie, blood red light on Oregon’s state capital for much of Wednesday.
Another death was confirmed in Jackson county in the state’s far south, where Sheriff Nate Sickler told a press briefing the Almeda fire had claimed at least one life. That fire started in Ashland on Tuesday and moved quickly north, destroying the towns of Talent and Phoenix, and forcing the evacuation of much of the city of Medford.
Sickler said that fire is now the subject of a criminal investigation, which is seeking to determine whether it was deliberately lit.
Two other towns that were destroyed, Blue River and Vida, are located on the banks of the McKenzie River, east of the city of Eugene, and some 60 miles south of the Santiam Canyon.
This week’s fires did not just affect rural areas: Wednesday saw evacuation orders in Clackamas county, including south-eastern suburbs of Portland, and rural parts of Washington county, which also takes in the city’s western suburbs.
By Wednesday evening, that city was blanketed with smoke from fires burning around its forested south-eastern fringe, and in rural areas to the south-west.
The explosion of fires across the region were stoked by dry winds, and a record heatwave – and fueled by widespread drought, which dried out vegetation into kindling.
The early part of the week saw gusts of up to 50mph in western areas, downing trees and power lines in Portland and other cities. The rare weather, more characteristic of winter storms in the region, was accompanied by historically low relative humidity.
The conditions led to an unprecedented “extremely critical” fire weather warning for southern Oregon on Monday, and only the second such warning in state history for north-west Oregon.
A week earlier, on 3 September, parts of the Portland metro area recorded their highest ever temperature for that date. Like much of the rest of the country, Oregon has recorded higher than average temperatures throughout the summer. In addition, much of the state, including Jackson county, is in moderate to severe drought, with Oregon’s climate office pointing to extremely dry soils as a contributing factor to the wildfires.
In Washington state, a one-year-old boy died after his family was apparently overrun by flames while trying to flee a wildfire, the Okanogan county sheriff, Tony Hawley, said. Fires in the state have burned nearly 937 sq miles, governor Jay Inslee said on Thursday.
“We’ve had this trauma all over Washington,” Inslee said, KHQ-TV reported. The governor was touring the farm town of Malden, which is 35 miles south of Spokane: “But this is the place where the whole heart of the town was torn out.”
Malden’s mayor, Chris Ferrell, said residents only had minutes to evacuate, but said no one was killed or seriously injured. More than 80% of the homes in Malden were destroyed by the flames.
Inslee said low humidity, high temperatures and winds combined to make the blaze probably one of “the most catastrophic fires we’ve had in the history of the state”.
“California, Oregon, Washington, we are all in the same soup of cataclysmic fire,” the governor said.
California, which has been battling a barrage of fires since August, has within the last few weeks seen the first, third, fourth, ninth, 10th and 18th-largest wildfires in state history, according to the National Weather Service.
By Thursday, the deadly North Complex fire, which has been growing explosively, had displaced about 20,000 and destroyed 2,ooo structures, authorities said. The town of Oroville, which three years ago was evacuated when heavy rains threatened to collapse a major dam, was evacuated once again as the flames charged toward it.
“Time and time again we have seen how dangerous wildfires can be. So I ask that you please, please, please be prepared, maintain situational awareness and heed the warnings,” said the Butte county sheriff, Kory Honea.
In the town of Paradise, Wednesday’s conditions – cherry skies and falling ash – reminded many of the fire that killed 85 people in 2018. “It was extremely frightening and ugly,” said the former mayor Steve “Woody” Culleton. “Everybody has PTSD and whatnot, so it triggered everybody and caused terror and panic.”
Authorities said one person died in Siskiyou county in northern California.
Even in the midst of its dry, hot, windy fire season, California has experienced wildfires advancing with unprecedented speed and ferocity. Since the middle of August, fires in California have killed 12 people, destroyed more than 3,600 buildings, burned old growth redwoods, charred chaparral and forced evacuations in communities near the coast, in wine country north of San Francisco and along the Sierra Nevada. Authorities said the August Complex fire is now officially the largest fire on record in the state’s history, having scorched more than 736 sq miles (1,906 sq km).
In some areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and to the east in the Sacramento Valley, smoke blocked out so much sunlight on Wednesday that it dropped the temperature by 20 to 30 degrees over the previous day, according to the National Weather Service.
The US Forest Service, which had taken the unprecedented measure of closing eight national forests in southern California earlier in the week, ordered all 18 of its forests in the state closed Wednesday for public safety.
Fires burned in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. People in foothill communities east of LA were warned to be ready to flee, but the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds were weaker than predicted.
“We’re encouraged that the wind activity appears to be dying down,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “The rest of the week looks a little more favorable.”
Juan embraces his disabled 12-year-old son Gustavo. (photo: Luis Echeverria/Reuters)
A Migrant Mother Saw Her Disabled Son Walk Into the US. Then He Disappeared
Mimi Dwyer, Kristina Cooke and Sofia Menchu, Reuters
Excerpt: "On Aug. 24, after waiting for five months in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez for a U.S. asylum hearing, Elida, a Guatemalan migrant, decided to send her disabled 12-year-old son Gustavo into the United States alone."
Elida feared for Gustavo’s safety in Mexico, after a stranger tried to take him from her, she said. She had been told by other migrants that as an unaccompanied child Gustavo would be detained by U.S. immigration agents and then released to his grandfather who lives in South Carolina.
She took him to a park near the bridge connecting Ciudad Juarez to the Texan city of El Paso, gave him his birth certificate, tucked scraps of papers with family phone numbers into his clothes, hugged him goodbye and then watched him walk into the United States.
The same day, Gustavo’s family says his grandfather got a call with what they thought was good news - the boy was in the United States and authorities wanted the family’s address.
Then, Gustavo effectively vanished. No further word came about his whereabouts.
Elida, 44, who asked to be identified only by her first name for safety reasons, was already racked by guilt, feeling that she had abandoned her son. Now, she was panic stricken.
She would not learn about his whereabouts for nearly a week, until a Guatemalan news blog posted on Facebook that Gustavo was in Guatemalan government custody and that officials were trying to locate his parents.
The story of how Gustavo disappeared and then reappeared in Guatemala is emblematic of what U.S. immigration rights activists say is an opaque, chaotic new system that President Donald Trump’s administration has implemented to expel migrants, including unaccompanied children, during the pandemic.
Under an emergency health order issued in March, which the Trump administration says is necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the United States has expelled thousands of unaccompanied children under the age of 18 without giving them the chance to claim asylum, bypassing long-standing protections under U.S. law.
As of June, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures indicate some 2,000 minors had been expelled. More recent numbers are not available.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the government over the expulsions, has said the order goes further than anything the Trump administration has done to restrict access to asylum, leaving “almost no avenue open to seek protection.”
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency declined to give information about the circumstances of Gustavo’s case. ICE requested that Elida sign privacy waivers to allow the agency to talk about her and her son’s case. After these were provided, they referred questions to CBP, which declined comment on the specifics of the case.
Matthew Dyman, a CBP spokesman, said the emergency order applies to everyone, “no matter their disability or age.”
While U.S. officials do have discretion, exempting groups of people from the order “defeats the whole purpose and puts everyone at risk,” Dyman said in response to questions from Reuters. Dyman said providing details about exemptions could be exploited by human smugglers.
As it prepares to fly children to their home countries, the government has been holding them in hotels with unlicensed contractors to look after them, for days or sometimes weeks, according to court documents.
Attorneys say the children’s personal information is not recorded in the usual computer systems, making them almost impossible to track.
The nonprofit Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) said it has been able to help about 70 children through a patchwork of private attorneys, family members and advocates.
“A drop in the bucket,” said Jennifer Podkul, KIND’s Vice President for Policy and Advocacy.
The organization said it was aware of some Central American children who had been returned across the border to Mexico alone, and others who had been sent to their home countries without their parents’ knowledge. They said they have also received frantic phone calls from parents looking for their children.
U.S. law has long held that children need extra protections from trafficking and exploitation. Before the March order, unaccompanied children would be moved quickly into short-term foster care or shelters overseen by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), until they could be released to vetted sponsors, usually family members.
ORR’s network is operating far below its capacity of 13,600 taxpayer-funded beds. As of Sept. 3, it was housing 1,039 children. Some 159 children in ORR custody had tested positive for the coronavirus as of that date, the agency said in a statement to Reuters.
A FRANTIC SEARCH
Four days after Gustavo’s grandfather received the call from the U.S. official, the family had still heard no further word on Gustavo’s whereabouts.
Lindsay Toczylowski, who runs the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, said she heard about the case from another lawyer and emailed immigration officials to ask where Gustavo was.
She received an email saying ICE was working on placing Gustavo in a U.S. shelter. But minutes later, that message was recalled and a new one arrived from a different deportation officer. Gustavo had already been expelled to Guatemala, alone.
On Aug. 30, six days after she had said goodbye to her son, Elida saw on Facebook that the Guatemalan government was searching for Gustavo’s parents “with great urgency.”
Elida was still in Ciudad Juarez, fearful for her safety but also afraid to return home.
‘WANTED THE BEST FOR HIM’
Elida and Gustavo left Guatemala after she received death threats following a family dispute, she said. Gustavo, who has deformed limbs and learning difficulties, had also been attacked by a child wielding a machete several years ago.
His foot was cut to the bone and the injury still makes it difficult for him to walk, she said. Apart from the physical deformities he was born with, Gustavo struggles to speak to people outside his immediate family.
“God made my child that way,” she said. “I’ve always accepted him as he is.”
Mother and son arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, planning to ask for asylum. They were sent by U.S. authorities to Ciudad Juarez under the Migrant Protection Protocols, a Trump policy which sends some non-Mexican migrants to Mexico to await their U.S. immigration court hearings.
Elida became a fruit seller to earn money to rent a room and buy food. The neighborhood was violent, she said, and she worried about leaving Gustavo during the day. One day when she went to get water, she heard a gunshot and saw a dead body lying in the street.
On Aug. 22, a man tried to grab Gustavo from her in the street, she said. Reuters could not independently verify her account, but advocacy group Human Rights First has documented hundreds of kidnappings and attacks on migrants waiting in Mexico for their U.S. court dates.
Two days later, Elida took Gustavo to the border. “I felt sad because I’d left him,” she said. “But I told myself it was for his good. I’ve always wanted the best for him.”
It was the first time they had been apart since he was born.
On Sept. 5, almost two weeks after he walked across the border alone, Gustavo was reunited with his father Juan in their remote village in the mountains of northeastern Guatemala. The family reunion was organized by government officials.
He stepped off a bus and looked around, disoriented, Reuters witnesses said. At first he did not appear to recognize his father, who said softly to him, “Come here my son.”
Juan hugged him, crying, and said, “Look how they sent him to me, they deported him as if he were grown-up, as if he were a criminal, and he is a child.”
Juan called Elida to tell her that Gustavo had arrived. “Talk to your Mom and say hi to her,” Juan said to his son, trying to hand him the phone.
Gustavo burst into tears and refused to talk to her.
He has not forgiven her for leaving him, Elida said. Then she, alone in Ciudad Juarez, also began to sob.
Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon. (photo: Laura Sullivan/NPR)
How Big Oil Misled the Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
Laura Sullivan, NPR
Sullivan writes: "Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried."
"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."
Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.
But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.
"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."
But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.
NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.
The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.
"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome."
Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.
On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.
All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. But the public has known little about these difficulties.
It could be because that's not what they were told.
Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.
"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."
These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.
It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.
Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.
Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.
Many of the industry's old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.
At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.
Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.
"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.
It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.
"A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives.
Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."
Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.
He's retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.
"I did what the industry wanted me to do, that's for sure," he says. "But my personal views didn't always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job."
Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.
In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.
"The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. "We are approaching a point of no return."
He told the executives they needed to act.
The "viability of the industry and the profitability of your company" are at stake.
Thomas remembers now.
"The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire — we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," he says.
At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.
"The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough — we need to do more," Freeman says. "I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it's been ... and it was what we need to do is ... advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out."
So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.
"Presenting the possibilities of plastic!" one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.
"This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress," Freeman says, "to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream."
At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.
Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.
NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.
None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.
Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.
"There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle," Thomas remembers. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot."
Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people's homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.
The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.
Liesemer's job was to at least try to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.
"I had no staff, but I had money," Liesemer says. "Millions of dollars."
Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.
But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn't making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.
"Yes, it can be done," Liesemer says, "but who's going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle."
Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.
"They were trying to keep their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. "That's what they were focused on. They weren't thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today's problem."
And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.
"I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change," he says. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up."
But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.
In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry's new initiative.
Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.
But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.
"The symbols start showing up on the containers," he explains.
Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.
"All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what's on their soda bottle and they're looking at what's on their yogurt tub, and they say, 'Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,' " he says.
The bins were now full of trash he couldn't sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.
Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.
Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.
"The consumers were confused," Smith says. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C."
But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.
"The code is being misused," it says bluntly. "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool."
The code is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.
Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.
"We don't have manpower to compete with this," Smith says. "We just don't. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they're able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want."
"It's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says.
In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.
Without question, plastic has been critical to the country's success. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel.
It's also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.
And if there was a sign of this future, it's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It's so new that it's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.
This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion investment in new plastic.
"We see a very bright future for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.
"These are products the world needs and continues to need," he says. "We're very optimistic about future growth."
With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.
Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate.
"Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic," he says. "We've got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That's going to be a huge effort."
Fix recycling is the industry's message too, says Steve Russell, the industry's recent spokesman.
"Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we've got to get it right," he says. "I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That's going to exist. But check back in. We're there."
Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.
Russell says this time will be different.
"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."
But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it's cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.
And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.
Russell doesn't dispute that.
"And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today," he says. "We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic."
Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation's largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There's even a new ad.
"We have the people that can change the world," it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.
Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.
"Déjà vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. I don't think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all."
Larry Thomas said the same.
"I don't think anything has changed," Thomas says. "Sounds exactly the same."
These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.
And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.
He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.
"You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that's their business."
And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.
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