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18 November 20
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Shane Bauer | How a Deadly Police Force Ruled a City
Shane Bauer, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "After years of impunity, the police in Vallejo, California, took over the city's politics and threatened its people."
hree police officers in an unmarked pickup truck pulled into the parking lot of a Walgreens in Vallejo, California, responding to a call of looting in progress. It was just after midnight on June 2nd, and a group of people who had gathered around a smashed drive-through window quickly fled in two cars. Sean Monterrosa, a twenty-two-year-old from San Francisco, was left behind. As the police truck closed in on Monterrosa, Jarrett Tonn, a detective who had been with the Vallejo police force for six years, was in the back seat, aiming a rifle. No one told Monterrosa to freeze or to put his hands up, but he fell to his knees anyway. As the truck came to a stop, Tonn fired five rounds at Monterrosa through the windshield.
A week earlier, a police officer in Minneapolis had killed George Floyd. Now the Bay Area was in the throes of an anti-police uprising. People marched, drove in caravans, and painted tributes to Floyd on walls and boarded-up windows. Police in Oakland, about thirty miles from Vallejo, launched tear gas at protesters, who gathered in intersections, blocked traffic on the freeway, looted stores, and lit fires in two banks. A man linked to the far-right Boogaloo movement was charged with killing a security officer outside a federal building. People ransacked malls in San Francisco, San Leandro, and the wealthy suburb of Walnut Creek, stealing from Best Buys, Home Depots, video-game stores, small businesses, and marijuana dispensaries. More than seventy cars were taken from a dealership; a gun shop was robbed of twenty-nine firearms. A curfew was instituted in Vallejo, but many people defied it. When Monterrosa got to the Walgreens, the store had already been looted.
Forty-seven minutes before Monterrosa was killed, he sent a text message to his two sisters, asking them to sign a petition calling for justice for Floyd. Monterrosa, whose parents emigrated from Argentina, had been critical of the police since, at the age of thirteen, he received citations for selling hot dogs outside night clubs. As teen-agers, Monterrosa and his sisters went to protests for people killed by cops in San Francisco: Jessica Williams, Alex Nieto, Mario Woods. In 2017, Monterrosa was arrested on weapons charges, for allegedly shooting into a building; he returned from jail covered in bruises. (The case was dismissed after his death.) He told his family that the police had smacked his head against the concrete in his cell.
When Monterrosa was young, the neighborhood where he grew up, Bernal Heights, was largely Black and brown, but as tech companies moved in San Francisco became richer and whiter. Now, Monterrosa’s mother says, their family are the only Latinos on the block. Sean encouraged her to know her rights as a documented immigrant. His mother generally thought that the police were a force for good, but Sean disagreed, saying that they were out to get Black and brown people.
Monterrosa loved San Francisco, but he couldn’t afford to live there. Since the age of eighteen, he’d moved back and forth between the suburbs and his parents’ place, working a variety of jobs. He got a carpentry position two months before the Bay Area issued shelter-in-place orders in response to the coronavirus, then he was laid off. He moved in with a new girlfriend. A couple of days later, he came to the Walgreens.
After Tonn shot Monterrosa, he got out of the truck and turned his body camera on.
“What did he point at us?” Tonn asked.
“I don’t know, man,” an officer said.
“He pointed a gun at us!” Tonn shouted.
“Do not move!” the officers yelled, training their weapons on Monterrosa, who lay limp on the pavement in a pool of blood. Two of them reached down and rolled him over, revealing a hammer sticking out of his pocket.
“Oh, fuck,” Tonn exclaimed.
“You’re good, man,” an officer said.
The officers cuffed Monterrosa.
“Fucking stupid!” Tonn shouted. He kicked the truck. “This is not what I fucking needed tonight,” he told a captain. “I thought that fucking axe was a gun.”
“Calm down,” the captain said. “Take some deep breaths.”
Tonn inhaled deep and slow.
“You’re going to be all right,” the captain said. “We’ve been through this before.”
Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, protest movements have pushed big cities to reform their policies on when a police officer can use force. According to the database Mapping Police Violence, homicides by police in America’s thirty largest cities have declined by about thirty per cent since the year before the Ferguson protests. Yet they have not decreased nationwide. In rural and suburban areas, police killings have been on the rise for years, and roughly three-quarters of police homicides now occur in those areas. The killing of Monterrosa received some national media attention, because of the moment in which it occurred. But in Vallejo it was one more in an ongoing litany of police killings.
Vallejo, a postindustrial city of a hundred and twenty-two thousand people, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park and for its musicians: E-40, Mac Dre, H.E.R. Its per-capita income is less than half that of San Francisco, and its population is more diverse, split among whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Its police force, however, consists largely of white men who live elsewhere. Since 2010, members of the Vallejo Police Department have killed nineteen people—a higher rate than that of any of America’s hundred largest police forces except St. Louis’s. According to data collected by the anti-police-brutality group Campaign Zero, the V.P.D. uses more force per arrest than any other department in California does. Vallejo cops have shot at people running away, fired dozens of rounds at unarmed men, used guns in off-duty arguments, and beaten apparently mentally ill people. The city’s police records show that officers who shoot unarmed men aren’t punished—in fact, some of the force’s most lethal cops have been promoted.
The failure to hold police officers accountable has been an issue in Vallejo for as long as anyone can remember. According to confidential city documents, twenty-five years ago one officer shot another while drinking in a bar, and wasn’t fired. A cop with a drug problem kept his job even after he was caught stealing from evidence lockers and was arrested for prescription fraud. Twenty years ago, a lieutenant told a new officer named Joseph Iacono that, when a suspect runs away, the officer should use enough force to put the man in the emergency room. To see if Iacono could fight, he was placed in a holding cell with an uncoöperative suspect. Iacono is now the department’s Lead Force Options Instructor and, according to the documents, likes to say, “It can’t be awful if it’s lawful.”
In the past ten years, Vallejo has paid nearly sixteen million dollars in legal settlements involving the police, many thousands of dollars more per officer than America’s largest police departments. None of that money has come from officers; it is paid by Vallejo and its insurers. Police violence has cost the city so much money that, in 2018, the statewide insurance pool that helped pay its legal fees took the unprecedented step of raising Vallejo’s annual deductible, from five hundred thousand dollars to $2.5 million, prompting the city to find another insurer. Vallejo is currently facing at least twenty-four use-of-force cases, which it estimates could cost some fifty million dollars.
“Vallejo police have been acting as if they own Vallejo for a long time,” Stephanie Gomes, a former city-council member, told me. In 1969, two weeks after the Zodiac killer shot a couple in Vallejo, officers staged the first-ever strike by law enforcement in California. They had been receiving “top salary,” one newspaper wrote, but, after refusing to work for five days, they won a seven-per-cent wage increase.
At the time, Vallejo was a relatively prosperous city. A naval shipyard provided thousands of jobs, and the median income was on a par with San Francisco’s. But, in the mid-nineties, the shipyard closed, and Vallejo lost its main source of revenue. In the following years, the city became less white, and poverty increased. Fearing cuts, the police union, the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association, identified city-council candidates who were friendly to its interests. The V.P.O.A. contributed money to their campaigns and launched attacks against those who opposed them.
The V.P.O.A.’s strategy, Gomes told me, was to try to “elect a majority of people who will vote for lucrative contracts and pretty much whatever they want.” When Gomes ran for city council in 2005, she met with representatives of Vallejo’s unions, including police and firefighters. She said that one of them asked her, “If you win, will you stay bought?” The V.P.O.A.’s approach seemed successful. Between 2000 and 2007, the police received a fifty-five-per-cent wage increase. Vallejo had one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the Bay Area but the best-paid police force.
After the housing bubble burst in the mid-two-thousands, the city’s finances deteriorated further. In 2007, it had an eight-million-dollar deficit, which was projected to double within a year. In the hope of avoiding collapse, Vallejo hired a new city manager, Joe Tanner. To Tanner, the source of Vallejo’s financial problems was clear: three-quarters of its general fund was going to police and firefighters. Gomes led an effort to reduce their pay, but the unions defeated the city in arbitration, forcing it to limit street repairs and to eliminate funding for the senior center and the library. “Every citizen of Vallejo works to pay the salaries of the police and fire unions,” a resident wrote to the local paper. “All we talk about is cutting services to feed the greed and avarice of the public safety unions.”
Tanner and Gomes saw no choice for the city but to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate the unions’ contracts. The problem, Tanner told me, was that “the cops owned the council.” The majority of city-council members were endorsed by the public-safety unions, and they refused to vote in favor of bankruptcy. One day, Tanner said, a Vallejo cop approached him in a restaurant in a nearby town and told him, “You’re gonna get yours.” An anonymous caller threatened to burn his house down. His Jeep was keyed several times and its tires were slashed. Eventually, Tanner threatened to declare a state of emergency and lay off the entire police and fire departments. The council gave in, and, in May, 2008, Vallejo became the largest city in California ever to declare bankruptcy.
By 2011, owing to retirements and a hiring freeze, the police force had shrunk to ninety officers, around sixty per cent of its pre-bankruptcy size, and the police budget had been cut by about a third. The union had warned that the cuts would lead to an increase in crime—a billboard in the city read “public safety is disappearing”—but, in the two years following Vallejo’s bankruptcy, violent crime decreased by a quarter.
Police in other parts of the country worried that Vallejo’s approach could spread. In 2008, the magazine American Police Beat published an article, titled “time to circle the wagons,” which warned police departments that, as the country fell into a recession, “highly compensated law enforcement agencies” should be worried. Police unions should be prepared to “identify the vocal critics and make them feel your pain. Somehow this seems to be where the unions get queasy and weak-kneed.” The article went on, “It is often difficult to convince yourself or the members to picket some councilman’s business, put their home telephone numbers up on billboards, and in general make their lives a living hell. . . . Get dirty and fight to win.”
As Vallejo was arguing for bankruptcy in court, Gomes told me, police cars and motorcycles drove by her house multiple times a day, and officers revved their engines and looked into her front window. One officer, Steve Darden, wrote a rap song about Gomes and posted it online. It included these lines:
I’m plain sick and tired of all the trash you’re talkin’
When the truth comes out we gonna send you walkin’ . . .
You’re the worst kind causing all these problems
When it starts heating up you run and hide in your closet . . .
Be careful what you wish for it could come true
As we all watch the plan backfire on you
Darden has produced a number of albums about being a cop in Vallejo. A common theme is the unfair treatment of police. Yet Darden has a long history of disturbing behavior. In 2010, he told a defendant in court that if he didn’t stop glaring at him he would knock him out and make him “leave on a gurney.” In 2011, Darden responded to a 911 call from a man who said he’d been beaten and robbed by his housemates. The man identified himself as a U.S. soldier and scolded Darden for taking forty-five minutes to arrive. Darden hit him in the face and took him to the ground, shouting, “You are talking to a United States marine!” According to an investigation by Open Vallejo, a nonprofit news Web site, Darden is one of a group of officers who have bent the tips of their badges to commemorate fatal shootings—an accusation that Darden has denied. He has been the primary shooter in two killings, and a recent photograph appears to show two bent tips on his badge. This year, he was promoted to lieutenant.
When Gomes arrived home one day, her neighbor told her, “Something really dirty just happened.” The alarm on Gomes’s house had been tripped, and two police officers had responded. The neighbor had seen them pry open a window and spend at least twenty minutes inside. Hours later, on the blog of a local newspaper, anonymous accounts posted about her personal items, including a satirical collage made by a friend that depicted Gomes as the mastermind behind the city’s bankruptcy and police cuts. Gomes complained to the city, and the police chief ordered the cops to stop driving by her house.
If the police were willing to harass Gomes so persistently, she wondered what they did to people who had no power. After she was reëlected, in 2009, she proposed forming a citizens’ advisory committee to review complaints against the police. When she presented her proposal at City Hall, cops filled the chamber and booed. One said that Gomes was “scapegoating” the police. Another said that the force was being “subjected to hate and tyranny.”
Although the committee was ultimately approved by the city council, its duties were watered down to producing a report of nonbinding recommendations. Its seven voting members were white, and three of them were former police officers.
Shortly after Sean Monterrosa was killed, the V.P.O.A. issued a statement saying that, before he was shot, he “abruptly pivoted back around toward the officers, crouched into a tactical shooting position, and grabbed an object in his waistband that appeared to be the butt of a handgun.” The statement, which neglected to say that Monterrosa had not been armed, asserted that “the officer used deadly force as a last resort because he had no other reasonable option to prevent getting shot.” Each week, people marched from City Hall to protest Monterrosa’s killing. The V.P.O.A., on its Facebook page, condemned the “screaming angry mob mentality and profound anger directed at the police.”
Nationwide, more than eighty per cent of police officers are represented by unions, and a 2006 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that unionized police departments received complaints about their members’ use of force at a rate thirty-six per cent higher than that of non-unionized departments. In 2019, a University of Chicago study of sheriff’s deputies in Florida found that, when the deputies unionized, their violent misconduct increased by forty per cent.
Strong police unions also make it harder for cops to be punished. Officers can appeal sanctions through multiple reviews, and most departments allow appeals to be heard by an arbiter selected in part by the police union. According to a 2017 examination by the Washington Post, among departments that coöperated with its survey, roughly a quarter of cops fired for misconduct since 2006 were reinstated after an appeal. (In San Antonio, the share was seventy per cent.)
Five months before Monterrosa was killed, the V.P.O.A. had replaced its president, Detective Mat Mustard, who had run the union for ten years. Mustard was notorious in Vallejo for the investigation he led into the kidnapping of a woman named Denise Huskins, in 2015. Someone broke into the house where she and her boyfriend were sleeping, blindfolded and drugged them, and put her in the trunk of a car. When the boyfriend reported the crime, Mustard suspected that he had killed Huskins and invented the kidnapping story. At the police station, the boyfriend said, officers dressed him in jail clothes, then Mustard and others interrogated him for eighteen hours, calling him a murderer. Huskins, who was being held a hundred and sixty miles away, was raped repeatedly. After she was released, the Vallejo police publicly accused her and her boyfriend of faking the kidnapping, comparing the situation to the movie “Gone Girl.” The police threatened to press charges against the couple, and after the rapist e-mailed the San Francisco Chronicle, confessing to the kidnapping, the police accused Huskins and her boyfriend of writing the e-mail. Soon, the rapist was arrested in South Lake Tahoe, after trying to repeat the crime. Even then, the Vallejo police insisted that Huskins and her boyfriend were lying. The couple sued Mustard and the city, eventually winning a $2.5-million settlement. In a show of defiance, the police department named Mustard officer of the year.
The new president of the V.P.O.A., Michael Nichelini, had been on the police force in Oakland before he joined the Vallejo P.D., in 2006. In 2003, he participated in the suppression of an antiwar demonstration, in which police shot wooden dowels and rubber bullets at people who were blocking traffic in the city’s industrial port. Nichelini, along with other traffic officers, used his motorcycle to push back the protesters, striking at least one person.
According to an article in the Berkeley Daily Planet, youth of color in Oakland called Nichelini “Mussolini,” because of his reputation for racism. At least four civil-rights complaints were filed against him to the Oakland Citizens’ Police Review Board. In 2004, the board found that he had used excessive force after stopping a seventeen-year-old boy driving a truck on a suspended license. The boy claimed that Nichelini asked, “Are you a nigga or ese?,” and the board found that he used his knees to hit the back of the teen-ager’s head against the pavement.
Nichelini’s father, Robert, was Vallejo’s chief of police when his son joined the force. Robert Nichelini, who had also come from the Oakland Police Department, assured the Vallejo Times-Herald that his son had a “perfect record.” Vallejo is “such a family oriented city,” he told the paper. “What is wrong with a son following a father’s footsteps in the Vallejo Police Department?”
In 2019, eighteen-year-old Carlos Yescas and his twelve-year-old brother drove to a food market in a car with no license plate. According to a complaint that Yescas filed with the city, Michael Nichelini, who was in plain clothes, approached them and told Yescas, “You know you fucked up, right?” Yescas said that Nichelini didn’t identify himself as a police officer but insisted on seeing Yescas’s I.D. Nichelini then told him that “he was going to take his car and keep it.” He reached into the car, grabbed the keys, and cuffed Yescas. As Yescas’s brother filmed, Nichelini pulled Yescas from the vehicle, even though he was wearing a seat belt. Yescas called Nichelini a “white piece of shit,” and Nichelini threw him to the ground and knelt on his back as Yescas repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” Yescas’s car was confiscated, and the police department told his family that it couldn’t be located. Then the department auctioned it off.
Melissa Nold, an attorney who specializes in police use-of-force cases, filed the complaint. Two months later, she and Nichelini were at a city-council meeting in which the police were requesting a change to their contract. They wanted a clause deleted that allowed the city to order an officer to be drug-tested after firing his weapon. The clause had not been enforced for years, but Vallejo’s first Black police chief, Shawny Williams, was about to take office, and there was a presumption that he would be a reformer. Nichelini stood at the back of the room and filmed Nold. The clause was deleted and, two months later, Nichelini became the president of the V.P.O.A.
A few days after Monterrosa was killed, police replaced the windshield that Tonn had fired through. For possible involvement in the destruction of evidence, Nichelini was suspended by Williams. He maintains that he had nothing to do with the windshield replacement.
One spate of killings by police in Vallejo can be traced back to 2011, when an officer named Jim Capoot was shot and killed while chasing a suspected bank robber. He was the first cop to be killed in Vallejo in eleven years. The following year, police killed six people, accounting for nearly a third of the homicides in the city. Half the killings were committed by an officer named Sean Kenney
Early on the morning of May 28, 2012, a forty-one-year-old Black man named Anton Barrett, Sr., whose nineteen-year-old son was also in the car, pulled out of a parking lot with his headlights off and ran a red light. He was drunk, and when cops tried to stop him he drove off. Then his car got a flat tire, and he and his son jumped out and ran in different directions through an apartment complex. Kenney began chasing Barrett, and, though he was carrying pepper spray and a Taser, he chose to draw his gun. Seconds later, he saw Barrett running toward him and fired five times. Kenney claimed that Barrett had started to pull a black object out of his pocket—it turned out to be a wallet. As Barrett lay on the ground dying, another officer Tased him. Barrett’s family sued, and the city eventually paid a settlement of two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars.
Three months later, Kenney shot Mario Romero, a twenty-three-year-old Black man, who was returning home after a night out with his sister’s boyfriend, Joseph Johnson. When the men pulled up to the house, Johnson called Romero’s sister and asked her to let him in. Kenney and Dustin Joseph, who were responding to a call about a burglary in the neighborhood, shone a spotlight on the men.
Kenney said that Romero got out of the car and reached for his waistband. Then, he said, when the officers yelled for the men to put their hands up Romero crouched “into a firing position,” prompting Kenney and his partner to begin shooting. Johnson, however, said that the cops began firing at him and Romero while they sat in the car.
Romero’s sisters were watching from their living-room window, and said that they saw Kenney jump onto the hood of the car and unload his clip through the windshield into Romero, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. Johnson corroborated this account. Kenney admitted that he’d stood on the hood but insisted that he hadn’t fired from there. Romero was shot thirty times. After his body was removed, Kenney searched the car. He said that he found an airsoft gun on the floor, wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.
Seven weeks later, an autistic man named Jeremiah Moore and his boyfriend were smashing car windows and trying to set their home on fire during a psychotic episode. When the police arrived, Moore grabbed an antique rifle and Kenney shot and killed him. Moore’s family sued, and won a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar settlement.
The Romero family, along with other community members, attended sessions of the newly created citizens’ advisory committee, which met for several hours every couple of weeks. But the issues the committee debated were modest: a small reduction in wages, requiring cops to use body cameras, creating a position for a civilian auditor who would respond to complaints of police misconduct. The former officers who sat on the committee regularly objected to these proposals, raising the spectre of lawsuits by the V.P.O.A. should the city try to interfere with police work.
In the end, the committee’s recommendations included installing more surveillance cameras, establishing a daytime curfew for youths, increasing enforcement of parking violations, and using money from a new public-services tax to hire more cops.
Three years after the death of Romero, his family won a two-million-dollar settlement. Later that year, the police department completed its review of the case and declared that the shooting was justified. Officers told Open Vallejo that Kenney was initiated into the badge-bending group. In 2011, he was made a detective. One of his new duties was to investigate officer-involved shootings.
Reformers who have succeeded in getting rogue cops censured or fired often come up against a frustrating reality: because there are no national and few statewide indexes that track police terminations and disciplinary infractions, tainted officers often find new jobs in different jurisdictions. A recent study published in the Yale Law Journal found that about three per cent of officers serving in Florida had been fired from other state agencies. These cops, who typically moved to smaller forces that were desperate for experienced officers, were more likely than others to be charged with misconduct in their new departments. Sometimes a cop will resign before he is fired, thus avoiding any consequences. Before Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, in Cleveland, joined the city’s police force, he had resigned from his previous job, in Independence, Ohio, where supervisors noted his insubordination, lying, and emotional immaturity.
Officers can also transfer in order to escape reforms. In the past year, large numbers of cops in Seattle, Buffalo, Atlanta, and San Francisco have left. After four cops were charged with killing George Floyd, about two hundred officers in Minneapolis filed to quit the department, citing “post-traumatic stress.” Law Enforcement Move, a company founded in the wake of the recent protests, says that it helps officers “escape anti-police cities, and live in America, again!” Since June, its founder told me, the company has been contacted by more than a thousand cops, or their spouses, who are interested in relocating to more “police-friendly” communities.
Some of Vallejo’s most notorious officers transferred from Oakland, where a lawsuit brought on behalf of a hundred and nineteen plaintiffs claimed that police had routinely kidnapped, beaten, and planted evidence on people. In 2014, a court-appointed overseer announced that he would be tightening oversight on uses of force, and punishing officers who didn’t report misconduct by their colleagues. Within four months, six officers had left for Vallejo. Three of them were eventually involved in lethal shootings. All six were sued for excessive use of force.
Two of the former Oakland officers were the twin brothers Ryan and David McLaughlin, who often searched men of color in Vallejo on the ground that they smelled marijuana, even after it had been legalized. The brothers justified these searches as “compliance checks,” meant to make sure that people weren’t carrying more than the legal limit. “That’s maybe how they roll in certain other nations,” a judge later said in court. “But that is not probable cause.”
In 2018, David McLaughlin, while off duty, got into a heated confrontation with a man celebrating his son’s birthday at a pizzeria in Walnut Creek. He pointed his service gun at the man, then tackled him and punched and elbowed him until his face was bloody. (McLaughlin maintains that he acted within professional boundaries.) Five months later, McLaughlin pulled over a man on a motorcycle for speeding, then drew his gun on him. The man’s cousin, an African-American marine veteran named Adrian Burrell, filmed the encounter from his front porch. McLaughlin ordered Burrell to retreat. Burrell refused, resulting in a struggle that, he alleges, gave him a concussion. McLaughlin faces lawsuits in both cases.
Jarrett Tonn, Monterrosa’s shooter, joined the Vallejo force the same year as the Oakland cops. Tonn had been an officer in Galt, California, where he worked with his cousin, Kevin Tonn. One day in 2013, Kevin confronted a man who he thought, incorrectly, was a suspect in a robbery. The man pulled out a gun and shot Kevin, then shot himself. Jarrett rushed to the scene, but his cousin was dying.
Transferring to Vallejo might have seemed like an unlikely career move. Crime was high, the city was just a few years out of bankruptcy, and the school system had recently emerged from state receivership. But Tonn wasn’t going to live there. Even after the bankruptcy, Vallejo officers were some of the highest paid in California. Tonn’s base pay during his first full year in Vallejo was a hundred thousand dollars—thirty-six thousand dollars more than he made in Galt. This didn’t account for overtime and benefits. In 2018, he made twenty-seven thousand dollars in overtime and thirty-one thousand dollars in “other pay,” and received twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of benefits. In addition, his pension was funded with fifty-eight thousand dollars.
The year after Tonn started working in Vallejo, he chased an unarmed man who was driving a stolen car. The man crashed into someone’s front yard, then reversed into Tonn’s car. Tonn doesn’t remember feeling the impact, but in two seconds he shot eighteen rounds from his Glock into the car, injuring the man.
The officer who wrote the police review of the shooting was Kent Tribble, who once, when responding to a domestic dispute, went to the house of a Black man by mistake, Tased him through his bedroom window after the man shouted profanities at him, and later charged him with resisting arrest. On another occasion, when he was off duty, he pulled a gun on two men in Bend, Oregon, during a drunken confrontation after leaving a bar. (Tribble did not respond to a request for comment.) A couple of years later, Tribble was promoted to lieutenant. When he reviewed Tonn’s shooting, he wrote that Tonn had acted in accordance with his training.
In 2017, Tonn was paired with Sean Kenney, the officer who killed three people in 2012. One day, Tonn and Kenney were pursuing Kevin DeCarlo, a suspect in a pawnshop robbery that had ended in a homicide. (He was never charged in connection with the crime.) When DeCarlo stopped at a stop sign, Kenney rammed his car. DeCarlo rammed Kenney back, then got stuck in a ditch. Tonn fired at least eight rounds with a rifle at DeCarlo; other officers, including Kenney, fired at him as well. A witness told police that the scene resembled an execution. DeCarlo suffered four broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and the loss of two fingers. Tonn told investigators that he thought DeCarlo was reaching for a firearm, but DeCarlo had no weapon. (Tonn did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to the Pew Research Center, only a quarter of cops ever fire their weapon on duty, but this was Kenney’s fifth shooting in five years. A year and a half later, he retired. He started a consulting firm called Line Driven Strategies, which conducts training courses for police departments on the use of force and on how to investigate shootings by the police. Kenney declined an interview, saying that there was “too much negativity and hate in this climate.”
Five weeks after shooting DeCarlo with Kenney, Tonn chased a carjacking suspect down an alley, then fired at him from half a block away. Tonn claimed that the man was carrying a gun, but no weapon was found. The policeman who wrote the internal report of the shooting, Jared Jaksch, was one of the officers who had shot at DeCarlo. Jaksch is also on the board of the V.P.O.A. He wrote that Tonn had done nothing wrong, but recommended that adjustments be made to training “to ensure officers know that they must react in self defense without consideration for potential future civil unrest.”
I wanted to learn how Vallejo police officers viewed the perception that they act with impunity. Though no one on the police force agreed to talk to me on the record, I did find a body-camera recording in which an officer revealed his thoughts. On July 7, 2016, Josh Coleman and a partner were on patrol in Vallejo when they saw some twenty Black people standing in an intersection. For a documentary about Bay Area hip-hop, a Viceland reporter was interviewing Nef the Pharaoh, a protégé of E-40. Coleman assumed that they were shooting a rap video. He later told a court that, since he had seen guns used in rap videos, he thought this was sufficient cause to detain and search as many of the men as he could.
As an officer began to arrest a man with a handgun, Coleman ordered a group of onlookers to move across the street. (A judge later dismissed the charges, saying that there was no probable cause for a search.) A twenty-one-year-old woman, whom I’ll call Aliya, ignored him, so Coleman threw her against his car and arrested her.
Coleman spotted a rapper known as Cousin Fik, with whom he went to high school. Coleman believes that the main reason for street violence is “the music, plain and simple.” He admonished Cousin Fik for delivering a detrimental message. “Until men like you and people like I start delivering the same exact message, we are not going to be able to do anything,” Coleman said. “People are still going to get killed.”
At the police station, Coleman put Aliya in an interrogation room and asked her why she had refused to cross the street.
“Because that’s my baby daddy, and I don’t want nothing to happen to him,” she said. “All these police officers want to shoot a Black person. If you’re going to shoot him, I’m going to be right with him.”
“In the political climate today, do you think any police officer really wants to shoot a Black person?” Coleman asked.
“So why do they?”
“We’re protecting our lives.”
“O.K., you’re cool today, but another officer would have had his gun out and automatically just shot him.”
“No, that doesn’t happen. Seriously, think about it logically. You think a police officer is willing to risk his one-hundred-thousand-a-year job, all of his medical benefits, because he wants to shoot somebody who’s Black and be on the news, and be accused of being a murderer, and now he has to live the rest of his life being a UPS driver because he can’t be a cop anymore?”
“I’m not saying you do, but you never know what these—”
“You’re not processing,” Coleman said.
“I’m just telling you I’m scared for him.”
“You’re processing this emotion out of an unrealistic fear.”
Coleman once shot a man at a bar when he mistook a can of Steel Reserve 211 beer tucked into the man’s waistband for a gun. On another occasion, he wrote in a police report that he had stopped a Black man when the man turned to look at his patrol car after Coleman drove past. “In some circumstances,” Coleman wrote, he found such behavior “to be an indicator of wrong doing.” “You’ve got to stop swallowing dope,” Coleman said he shouted after the man appeared to put something in his mouth. “It’s going to give you a tummy ache.” The man yelled back at him. Coleman then pulled across several lanes of traffic, got out of the patrol car, and tackled the man. Coleman noted in the report that, although the man was not carrying drugs, he had cash denominations “consistent with street level sales.” The man was carrying forty-eight dollars.
“I understand what you think,” Coleman said to Aliya. “I went to college. I remember being in my twenties and thinking that all these things are examples of police brutality, ’cause I didn’t understand what it’s like to be a police officer.”
“The fact that you just pull your guns out scares people,” she said.
“I wish we didn’t have to have firearms,” Coleman responded. He said that he wished there were an iPhone app that enabled him to make people freeze without endangering their lives.
“Ain’t that what y’all have the Tasers for?” Aliya asked.
“Tasers don’t work.”
Months earlier, Coleman had been dispatched to a post office to deal with a homeless man who had threatened to harm himself. Coleman wrote in a police report that, as he was approaching, he wondered if the man might have a “more sinister purpose,” such as launching a terrorist attack. In order to disrupt the man’s ability to “secure the location” or take hostages, Coleman rushed in and Tased him.
“The crux of the issue is that there is a lack of respect for law now in this young culture,” Coleman told Aliya. “The young culture believes that they can do whatever they want. . . . Martin Luther King wasn’t smoking weed. Martin Luther King wasn’t hanging out at a rap-video shoot with a bunch of people with guns talking about how the police are killing Black people. . . . What happened to Malcolm X? What happened to Marcus Garvey? What happened to real men who stood for real values? What happened to Oprah Winfrey? I would say Bill Cosby, but he messed that up.”
Soon, Coleman said, “Do you want to go home today?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to apologize to me,” he said.
“Sorry,” Aliya said, sounding surprised.
“That is a bad apology. I want you to really apologize.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s the best you have? One word?”
“Sorry for being in your scene.”
Willie McCoy, a twenty-year-old rapper, was the last person to be killed by Vallejo police before Sean Monterrosa. In February, 2019, the police got a call from a Taco Bell, saying that a man was unconscious in his car. A group of officers arrived and saw McCoy asleep in the driver’s seat. One officer noticed that he had a gun in his lap, with the magazine removed. Another officer said that he was going to open the door and grab the gun. “If he reaches for it, you know what to do,” he said. But the door was locked. The police had been standing around the car for more than four minutes when McCoy scratched his shoulder and leaned forward, seeming dazed. Suddenly, six cops fired fifty-five bullets at him.
One of the officers, Ryan McMahon, had stopped a Black man a year earlier for bicycling without lights. McMahon beat the man, Ronell Foster, with his flashlight until Foster wrested it from him and attempted to run. McMahon shot him in the head and the back from several feet away, killing him. The V.P.O.A. posted on its Facebook page that killings like this could be avoided “if those that come into contact with the police follow their commands.” McMahon was cleared of wrongdoing by prosecutors, but Foster’s family sued the city and won a $5.7-million settlement, the largest that Vallejo has paid.
Since June, activists in Vallejo have been calling for the city to “fire the fatal fourteen,” referring to officers on the force who have been involved in multiple shootings. In September, Williams, the department chief, broke with precedent and fired McMahon. Williams didn’t claim that the shooting of McCoy was unjustified; instead, he said that McMahon had violated “safety norms” by shooting while his partner was standing near the line of fire.
In a closed city-council meeting in October, Williams said that he is also pursuing disciplinary action against officers who recently kicked in the door of a house and Tased a man who they wrongly believed was suspected of domestic violence. In addition, Williams vowed to punish an officer who held his foot on a man’s head for at least a minute and a half while the man was handcuffed. Recent confidential city documents suggest that Williams is unpopular within the department. Officers have accused him of getting the job because he’s Black. “He thinks he is Black Jesus,” one said. Nichelini, the head of the V.P.O.A., has said that Williams “can’t speak English,” and that he won’t follow the chief’s orders if he doesn’t like them, according to the documents. “Chiefs come and go,” Nick Filloy, a public defender for fourteen years who works in Vallejo, told me. “It’s the sergeants and the shift lieutenants and the captains that really control the tenor of the department and that resist change.”
If Vallejo is an example of what can happen in a small city with a strong police union, it may also prove to be a test case of a city attempting to break the union’s power. In another closed city-council meeting in October, the mayor, Bob Sampayan, a former police officer, said, “I’m just absolutely done with the V.P.O.A. running the show. We need to show V.P.O.A. that they are not in control.” The city has created a position for a civilian auditor to review police investigations and complaints against officers. The council, including its union-endorsed members, unanimously approved a proposal by the mayor, the chief, and the city manager to declare a public-safety emergency. This will allow them to implement police reforms without consulting the V.P.O.A., and to create non-union positions for assistant chiefs, who they hope will help rein in the police department. In response, the union said that the city was trying to “create a dictatorship . . . to circumvent state and local laws and regulations.”
The fight to break the union could go on for years, or it could fade away. In the meantime, the Monterrosa and McCoy families have sued the city. If these cases end in large payouts, insurance providers could refuse to continue the city’s coverage, which would force it to disband its police department, as has happened in a few other small cities, including Lincoln Heights, Ohio, and Maywood, California.
Monterrosa’s sisters and local activists recently put up a billboard facing the police station, where Jarrett Tonn is back at work. It shows Monterrosa, a slight smile on his lips. “We wanted to remind the police that Sean can’t be forgotten,” Ashley, one of Monterrosa’s sisters, told me. “We want to make sure Jarrett Tonn sees the person he killed every single day.”
Trump Campaign Officials Started Pressuring Georgia's Secretary of State Long Before the Election
Jessica Huseman and Mike Spies, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection."
READ MORE
Jill Biden speaks during a drive-in rally at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 2 November 2020. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty)
'Dr B': The Low-Profile College Educator Set to Break Barriers as First Lady
Miranda Bryant, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "When Jill Biden, 69, heads to the White House in January, she will be the first to continue her career while in the role."
READ MORE
Nurses and healthcare workers don personal protective equipment before beginning their shifts at a drive-thru testing site inside the Bismarck Event Center in Bismarck, N.D., on Oct. 26, 2020. (photo: Bing Guan/Reuters)
As North Dakota Faces World's Deadliest Outbreak, Native Communities Condemn States' COVID Response
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As COVID-19 rampages through the U.S., we look at how the rapid spread of the disease is affecting Native American communities, which have already faced disproportionate infection and death rates throughout the pandemic."
EXCERPT:
MY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. This is The Quarantine Report, as we go to North Dakota, which currently has the highest COVID-19 death rate of any state or country in the world, with one in every thousand residents dead from the virus. South Dakota’s death rate is nearly as bad, after both state governments spent months downplaying the crisis, the Republican governors refusing to issue mask mandates, until just recently in North Dakota.
Over the weekend, facing rapidly spiking numbers, North Dakota’s Governor Doug Burgum finally declared a statewide mask mandate, limited indoor restaurant capacity, and shut down high school sports. The move came just a week after he said infected but asymptomatic healthcare workers should still work and treat COVID-19 patients at hospitals.
Meanwhile, the right-wing South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem, a close Trump ally, who welcomed him to Mount Rushmore, continues to deny the crisis, will not issue a mask mandate. A South Dakota emergency room nurse told CNN she’s treated many patients who deny COVID-19 is making them ill, even as they’re hospitalized and die of the disease.
As COVID-19 ravages the Dakotas, we turn to look at how the rapid spread of COVID-19 is affecting Native American communities, which have already faced disproportionate infection and death rates throughout the pandemic. We’re joined by Jodi Archambault. She’s a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the former special assistant to President Obama for Native American affairs for the White House Domestic Policy Council. She is in the capital of North Dakota; she’s in Bismarck. She’s also the sister of the former chair of the Standing Rock Sioux, Dave Archambault. And in Farmington, New Mexico, we’re joined by Allie Young, a citizen of Navajo Nation, founder of Protect the Sacred.
Donald Trump supporters protest outside Clark County Election Department where ballots are counted on November 6, in North Las Vegas. The Trump campaign is suing Nevada presidential electors. (photo: Ronda Churchill/Getty)
Trump Campaign Sues Homeless Vet Who Worked as Presidential Elector in Attempt to Challenge Nevada Results
Darragh Roche, Newsweek
Roche writes: "President Donald Trump's campaign is mounting a fresh legal bid to prevent the certification of votes in Nevada. A new lawsuit names the state's Democratic presidential electors as defendants."
One of those named is Gabrielle d'Ayr, a former chair of the Clark County Democratic Party who says she is currently homeless. Clark County has been the focus of a previous election-related case.
The lawsuit, which was jointly filed by the Trump campaign and the Nevada Republican Party, seeks to award the state's six electoral college votes to the president or annul the election result there.
If successful, the suit would invalidate tens of thousands of votes, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
D'Ayr was chosen as a Democratic presidential elector at convention elections earlier in 2020. She said she only found out she was named as a defendant when she was contacted by the Review-Journal.
"I'm a homeless veteran, and the Trump campaign is suing me for doing my civic duty," she told the newspaper on Tuesday.
D'Ayr said she had lost her job when the U.S. census ended and was currently living with a friend. She is expected to cast her vote in the Electoral College after the election is certified on November 24.
The other electors chosen by the Nevada Democratic Party are Judith Whitmer, Sarah Mahler, Joseph Throneberry, Artemesia Blanco and Yvanna Cancela, a state senator. Nevada state law requires electors to vote for the presidential candidate who won the popular vote.
"My vote belongs to the people of Nevada, and I made a pledge to the people of Nevada," d'Ayr said. "[Nevada Secretary of State] Barbara Cegavske and [Clark County Registrar of Votes] Joe Gloria are people of great integrity, and if those results have been certified, then the will of the people has been made clear and I will cast my vote for Joe Biden."
Writing on Twitter on Tuesday, d'Ayr added: "I have just been informed that the Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit against me as an elector for the state of Nevada. Me a homeless veteran who is nonetheless continuing to do her duty to the American people."
Attorneys for the Trump campaign claimed 15,000 people voted in Nevada while also voting in another state, that 1,000 voters didn't meet residency requirements and 500 were dead. They have not yet provided proof of these claims, but their complaint alleges that there were "40,000 or more" fraudulent votes in the state.
"They are repeating allegations the courts have already rejected, misstating and misrepresenting evidence provided in those proceedings, and parroting erroneous allegations made by partisans without first-hand knowledge of the facts," a Clark County spokesperson said in a statement.
"For example, they mentioned observation of the process, and the use of a machine to assist with signature verification, which they continue to inaccurately explain. On both of these issues, state and federal courts have already rejected their allegations," the statement said.
The Trump campaign's attempts to challenge election outcomes through the courts have so far met with limited success as the deadlines for certifying results are fast approaching.
A female worker sprays herbicide in a palm oil plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. (photo: Binsar Bakkara/AP)
Rape, Abuses in Indonesian Palm Oil Fields Linked to Top Beauty Brands
Margie Mason and Robin McDowell, Associated Press
Excerpt: "With his hand clamped tightly over her mouth, she could not scream, the 16-year-old girl recalls - and no one was around to hear her anyway. She describes how her boss raped her amid the tall trees on an Indonesian palm oil plantation."
He then put an ax to her throat and warned her: Do not tell.
At another plantation, a woman named Ola complains of fevers, coughing and nose bleeds after years of spraying dangerous pesticides with no protective gear. Making just $2 a day, with no health benefits, she can’t afford to see a doctor.
Hundreds of miles away, Ita, a young wife, mourns the two babies she lost in the third trimester. She regularly lugged loads several times her weight throughout both pregnancies, fearing she would be fired if she did not.
These are the invisible women of the palm oil industry, among the millions of daughters, mothers and grandmothers who toil on vast plantations across Indonesia and neighboring Malaysia, which together produce 85 percent of the world’s most versatile vegetable oil.
Palm oil is found in everything from potato chips and pills to pet food, and also ends up in the supply chains of some of the biggest names in the $530 billion beauty business, including L’Oréal, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Avon and Johnson & Johnson, helping women around the world feel pampered and beautiful.
The Associated Press conducted the first comprehensive investigation focusing on the brutal treatment of women in the production of palm oil, including the hidden scourge of sexual abuse, ranging from verbal harassment and threats to rape. It’s part of a larger in-depth look at the industry that exposed widespread abuses in the two countries, including human trafficking, child labor and outright slavery.
Women are burdened with some of the industry’s most difficult and dangerous jobs, spending hours waist-deep in water tainted by chemical runoff and carrying loads so heavy that, over time, their wombs can collapse and protrude. Many are hired by subcontractors on a day-to-day basis without benefits, performing the same jobs for the same companies for years – even decades. They often work without pay to help their husbands meet otherwise impossible daily quotas.
“Almost every plantation has problems related to labor,” said Hotler Parsaoran of the Indonesian nonprofit group Sawit Watch, which has conducted extensive investigations into abuses in the palm oil sector. “But the conditions of female workers are far worse than men.”
Parsaoran said it’s the responsibility of governments, growers, big multinational buyers and banks that help finance plantation expansion to tackle issues related to palm oil, which is listed under more than 200 ingredient names and contained in nearly three out of four personal-care products – everything from mascara and bubble bath to anti-wrinkle creams.
The AP interviewed more than three dozen women and girls from at least 12 companies across Indonesia and Malaysia. Because previous reports have resulted in retaliation against workers, they are being identified only by partial names or nicknames. They met with female AP reporters secretly within their barracks or at hotels, coffee shops or churches, sometimes late at night, usually with no men present so they could speak openly.
The Malaysian government said it had received no reports about rapes on plantations, but Indonesia acknowledged physical and sexual abuse appears to be a growing problem, with most victims afraid to speak out. Still, the AP was able to corroborate a number of the women’s stories by reviewing police reports, legal documents, complaints filed with union representatives and local media accounts.
Reporters also interviewed nearly 200 other workers, activists, government officials and lawyers, including some who helped trapped girls and women escape, who confirmed that abuses regularly occur.
Indonesia is the world’s biggest palm oil producer, with an estimated 7.6 million women working in its fields, about half the total workforce, according to the female empowerment ministry. In much-smaller Malaysia, the figures are harder to nail down due to the large number of foreign migrants working off the books.
In both countries, the AP found generations of women from the same families who have served as part of the industry’s backbone. Some started working as children alongside their parents, gathering loose kernels and clearing brush from the trees with machetes, never learning to read or write.
And others, like a woman who gave the name Indra, dropped out of school as teenagers. She took a job at Malaysia’s Sime Darby Plantations, one of the world’s biggest palm oil companies. Years later, she says her boss started harassing her, saying things like “Come sleep with me. I will give you a baby.” He would lurk behind her in the fields, even when she went to the bathroom.
Now 27, Indra dreams of leaving, but it’s hard to build another life with no education and no other skills. Women in her family have worked on the same Malaysian plantation since her great-grandmother left India as a baby in the early 1900s. Like many laborers in both countries, they can’t afford to give up the company’s basic subsidized housing, which often consists of rows of dilapidated shacks without running water.
That ensures the generational cycle endures, maintaining a cheap, built-in workforce.
“I feel it’s already normal,” Indra said. “From birth until now, I am still on a plantation.”
Out of sight, hidden by a sea of palms, women have worked on plantations since European colonizers brought the first trees from West Africa more than a century ago. As punishment in Indonesia back then, some so-called female “coolies” were bound to posts outside the boss’ house with finely ground chili pepper rubbed into their vaginas.
As the decades passed, palm oil became an essential ingredient for the food industry, which saw it as a substitute for unhealthy trans fats. And cosmetic companies, which were shifting away from animal- or petroleum-based ingredients, were captivated by its miracle properties: It foams in toothpaste and shaving gel, moisturizes soaps and lathers in shampoo.
New workers are constantly needed to meet the relentless demand, which has quadrupled in the last 20 years alone. Women in Indonesia are often “casual” workers – hired day to day, with their jobs and pay never guaranteed. Men receive nearly all the full-time permanent positions, harvesting the heavy, spiky fruit bunches and working in processing mills.
On almost every plantation, men also are the supervisors, opening the door for sexual harassment and abuse.
The 16-year-old girl who described being raped by her boss – a man old enough to be her grandfather – started working on the plantation at age 6 to help her family make ends meet.
The day she was attacked in 2017, she said the boss took her to a remote part of the estate, where her job was to ferry wheelbarrows laden with the bright orange palm oil fruits he hacked from the trees. Suddenly, she said, he grabbed her arm and started pawing her breasts, throwing her to the jungle floor. Afterward, she said, he held the ax to her throat.
“He threatened to kill me,” she said softly. “He threatened to kill my whole family.”
Then, she said, he stood up and spit on her.
Nine months later, after she says he raped her four more times, she sat by a wrinkled 2-week-old boy. She made no effort to comfort him when he cried, struggling to even look at his face.
The family filed a report with police, but the complaint was dropped, citing lack of evidence.
“I want him to be punished,” the girl said after a long silence. “I want him to be arrested and punished because he didn’t care about the baby … he didn’t take any responsibility.”
The AP heard about similar incidents on plantations big and small in both countries. Union representatives, health workers, government officials and lawyers said some of the worst examples they encountered involved gang rapes and children as young as 12 being taken into the fields and sexually assaulted by plantation foremen.
One example involved an Indonesian teen who was trafficked to Malaysia as a sex slave, where she was passed between drunk palm oil workers living under plastic tarps in the jungle, eventually escaping ravaged by chlamydia. And in a rare high-profile case that sparked outrage last year, a female preacher working at a Christian church inside an Indonesian estate was tied up among the trees, sexually assaulted by two workers and then strangled. The men were sentenced to life in prison.
While Indonesia has laws in place to protect women from abuse and discrimination, Rafail Walangitan of the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection said he was aware of many problems identified by the AP on palm oil plantations, including child labor and sexual harassment.
“We have to work hard on this,” he said, noting the government still has a long way to go.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development said it hadn’t received complaints about the treatment of women laborers so had no comment. And Nageeb Wahab, head of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association, said workers are covered by the country’s labor laws, with the ability to file grievances.
Those familiar with the complexities of plantation life say the subject of sexual abuse has never drawn much attention and that female workers often believe little can be done about it.
“They are thinking it happens everywhere, so there’s nothing to complain about,” said Saurlin Siagan, an Indonesian activist and researcher.
Many families living on plantations struggle to earn enough to cover basic costs, like electricity and rice. Desperate women are sometimes coerced into using their bodies to pay back loans from supervisors or other workers. And younger females, especially those considered attractive, occasionally are given less demanding jobs like cleaning the boss’ house, with sex expected in exchange.
In the few cases where victims do speak out, companies often don’t take action or police charges are either dropped or not filed because it usually comes down to the accuser’s word against the man’s.
“The location of palm oil plantations makes them an ideal crime scene for rape,” said Aini Fitri, an Indonesian official from the government’s women and children’s office in West Kalimantan province. “It could be dangerous in the darkness for people, especially for women, but also because it is so quiet and remote. So even in the middle of the day, the crime can happen.”
Many beauty and personal goods companies have largely remained silent when it comes to the plight of female workers, but it’s not due to lack of knowledge.
A powerful global industry group, the Consumer Goods Forum, published a 2018 report alerting the network’s 400 CEOs that women on plantations were exposed to dangerous chemicals and “subject to the worst conditions among all palm oil workers.” It also noted that a few local groups had cited examples of women being forced to provide sex to secure or keep jobs, but said few workers were willing to discuss the sensitive issue.
Even so, almost all of the pressure aimed at palm oil companies has focused on land grabs, the destruction of rainforests and the killing of endangered species such as orangutans.
Those concerns led to the 2004 formation of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an association that promotes and certifies ethical production, including provisions to safeguard laborers. Its members include growers, buyers, traders and environmental watchdogs. But of the nearly 100 grievances lodged in Indonesia and Malaysia in the last decade, most have not focused on labor until recently. And women are almost never mentioned.
The AP reached out to representatives affiliated with every cosmetic and personal goods maker mentioned in this story. Some didn’t comment, but most defended their use of palm oil and its derivatives, with many attempting to show how little they use compared to the roughly 80 million tons produced annually worldwide. Others said they were working with local nonprofits, pointed to pledges on their websites about commitments to sustainability and human rights, or noted efforts to be transparent about the processing mills in their supply chains.
But the AP found that labor abuses regularly occur industrywide, even from mills that source from plantations bearing the RSPO’s green palm stamp.
That includes Indonesian companies like London Sumatra, which withdrew from the RSPO last year after the association cited it for a series of labor abuses. London Sumatra told the AP that it adheres to labor laws and takes “the health of our workers very seriously.”
In some cases, women working at various palm oil companies illegally said they were ordered to hide in the jungle when sustainability auditors arrived, while others were told to smile if they encountered any visitors.
The AP used U.S. Customs records, product ingredient lists and the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers to link the laborers’ palm oil and its derivatives from the mills that process it to the Western brands’ supply chains – including some that source from mills fed by plantations where women said they were raped and young girls toiled in the fields.
Abuses also were linked to product lines sought out by conscientious consumers like Tom’s of Maine and Kiehl’s, through the supply chains of their giant parent companies Colgate-Palmolive and L’Oréal. And Bath & Body Works was connected through its main supplier, Cargill, one of the world’s biggest palm oil traders.
Coty Inc., which owns global staples like CoverGirl and is tapping into partnerships with Gen Z newcomers like Kylie Cosmetics, did not respond to multiple AP calls and emails. And Estee Lauder Companies Inc., owner of Clinique, Lancome and Aveda, acknowledged struggling with traceability issues in its RSPO filing. When asked by AP whether specific products used palm oil or its derivatives, there was no response.
Both companies, along with Shiseido and Clorox, which owns Burt’s Bees Inc., keep the names of their mills and suppliers secret. Clorox said it would raise the allegations of abuses with its suppliers, calling AP’s findings “incredibly disturbing.”
Johnson & Johnson makes its mill list public, but refused to say whether its iconic baby lotion contains palm oil derivatives.
One case uncovered by the AP involved a widow named Maria who said her supervisor began sexually harassing her when she first started working at a Malaysian-owned company in Indonesia. She said she successfully fought off his advances until she returned home one night to find him inside, waiting for her.
“I tried to remind him about his wife and his children in the village, but he hugged me tighter while pulling my pants down. Then he raped me,” she said. “After that, he left me. But almost two hours later, he came back and raped me a second time.”
She said she stayed quiet at first because he threatened her life and her job. But the attacks continued, she said, including once when he jumped her while she was working in the field “crushing me so that I couldn’t move.”
That time, she said, she kept a semen-filled tissue as evidence. She later confronted the man and his wife and also complained to company and union officials. She attempted to file a police report, but instead was directed to seek compensation directly from the man, a union representative said. She was never paid and ended up moving to another plantation to get away from the boss, who has since quit.
Rosita Nengsih, the director of the Women, Children and Family Legal Aid Institution in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, said most victims are reluctant to report rapes to authorities, adding it’s typical to settle complaints through so-called “peace solutions” in which the victim’s family may be paid off. Sometimes parents force their daughter to marry her rapist to lessen the shame, often after pregnancy occurs.
The province where Nengsih works borders Malaysia on the island of Borneo, which is shared by the two countries. It is a porous corridor for Indonesian workers, including women and young girls hoping to earn enough in the wealthier neighboring country to pull themselves out of poverty. Many travel there illegally, sometimes falsifying documents or lying about their ages, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
Nengsih recalled a case involving two Indonesian girls as young as 13 who were working on a Malaysian plantation with their parents and said they were repeatedly raped by the same supervisor until both became pregnant four months apart.
“Nothing happened to the foreman,” she said. “He’s still free.”
The conditions these workers endure stand in stark contrast to female empowerment messages promoted by industry leaders such as L’Oréal, one of the world’s top cosmetic companies, and Unilever, one of the biggest palm oil buyers for consumer goods, which sources from more than 1,500 mills.
As Unilever’s popular soap brand proclaims: “Dove believes that beauty is for everyone.” And L’Oréal says it is working to stamp out sexual harassment “because we are all worth it.”
In a global industry expected to reach $800 billion within the next five years, cosmetic legacy brands – together with fast-growing celebrity and niche startups – proudly tout $300 anti-wrinkle creams or glittery eyeshadows as sustainable and free of labor abuses, with little or no evidence.
In response, L’Oréal said it “has put particular emphasis on supporting and empowering women, who are the first victims of many of the social and environmental challenges our world faces.” Unilever said progress needs to be made more quickly, but that “the safety of women in global agricultural supply chains … including in the palm oil industry, remains a key concern.”
The women in Southeast Asia’s rugged, steamy plantations are a world away. Some haul tanks of toxic chemicals on their backs weighing more than 13 kilograms (30 pounds), dispensing 80 gallons each day – enough to fill a bathtub.
“Our lives are so hard,” said Ola, who has been employed as a day worker in Indonesia for 10 years and wakes each day aching from repeatedly lifting heavy loads. “After spraying, my nose bleeds occasionally. I think it’s connected to the pesticide.”
She doesn’t wear a mask because it’s too hot to breathe. She said the company doesn’t provide medical care to casual workers, and she has no money for a doctor.
Paraquat, one of the chemicals Ola and others spray, has been banned by the European Union and many other countries over possible links to a wide range of health issues, including an increased chance of developing Parkinson’s disease.
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in popular weedkiller Roundup, also is commonly used. Roundup’s parent company, Bayer, agreed earlier this year to pay more than $10 billion to end tens of thousands of lawsuits filed in the U.S. alleging the chemical caused serious illnesses, including cancer.
Some palm oil workers who use agrochemicals daily showed the AP raw webbing between their fingers and toes, along with destroyed nails. Others had milky or red eyes and complained of dizzy spells, trouble breathing and blurry vision. Activists reported that some totally lost their sight.
The workers said pesticides routinely blow back into their faces, splash onto their backs and seep into the sweaty skin on their stomachs.
“If the liquid shakes and spills out, it’s also running into my private area. Almost all women are suffering the same itching and burning,” said Marodot, whose five children also work to help their father meet his daily target. “I have to keep going until I finish working, and then clean it up with water. There’s too many men around.”
She said she has trouble seeing, and her face is dark and cracked from years in the sun.
When handed a $20 lipstick by a journalist, a worker named Defrida was told it contained palm oil. She twisted the silver case and stared at the glistening pink stick – first with intrigue, then with disgust.
Noting she would have to spray pesticide on 30 acres of rough jungle terrain just to afford a single tube, she pleaded with women who buy products containing palm oil: “Oh, my God!” she said. “Please pay attention to our lives.”
She, along with nearly all the women interviewed, complained of pelvic pain and explained how almost every phase of their reproductive health is affected.
Some women are forced to undergo humiliating checks to prove they are bleeding in order to take leave during their periods.
Others suffering from collapsed uteruses – caused by the weakening of the pelvic floor from repeatedly squatting and carrying overweight loads – create makeshift braces by tightly wrapping scarves or old motorbike tire tubes around their mid-sections. Some workers described the pain as so agonizing that they could find relief only by lying on their backs with their legs in the air.
Despite a national health care program launched by the Indonesian government, many palm oil workers still don’t have access to medical services and, even when basic care is available, it typically is not extended to female day workers. The nearest clinics can be more than a day’s drive by motorbike, so most workers just use aspirin, balms or home remedies when they’re sick.
Still, they are better off in many ways than migrant women working without papers in Malaysia, mostly in the bordering states of Sarawak and Sabah on the island of Borneo.
The AP confirmed a horrific story involving a pregnant Indonesian woman who escaped captivity on a Malaysian estate owned by state-run Felda, one of the world’s biggest palm oil companies. She gave birth in the jungle and foraged for food before finally being rescued. In September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection banned all palm oil imports from FGV Holdings Berhad, which is closely affiliated with Felda, after finding indications of child and forced labor and other abuses on its plantations.
Even on a day-to-day basis in Malaysia, migrant women fear arrest and deportation. Many rarely leave their plantations, even to give birth, at times risking their own lives and their babies’. And those who do venture out during emergencies can be held for weeks at the hospital until family members can collect enough money to pay exorbitant rates.
At one government facility in a border town, a menu of maternity ward prices was posted on a blue bulletin board. A natural birth costs foreign migrants about $630 – several times more than it would cost a Malaysian citizen, an amount that could take some women at least a year to pay back.
And that’s if they’re able to conceive and carry their babies to full term.
Groups of women interviewed by the AP in Indonesia wondered whether their arduous jobs, combined with the chemicals they handle and breathe, caused their infertility, miscarriages and stillbirths.
Ita was among those who said her work affected her ability to deliver healthy babies. She said she hid two pregnancies from her boss, knowing she likely wouldn’t be called for daily work otherwise. With two children already at home to feed, she had no choice but to keep working for $5 a day. In contrast, a permanent full-time female worker is entitled to three months of paid maternity leave.
Every day, as her belly grew, Ita said she continued to carry back-breaking loads over acres of fields, spreading 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of fertilizer – nearly a half-ton – over the course of a day. She lost both babies in her third trimester and, with no health insurance, was left with medical bills she couldn’t pay.
“The first time I miscarried, and the doctor had to pull the baby out,” said Ita, who has worked on the plantation alongside her mother since the age of 15. “The second time, I gave birth at seven months and it was in critical condition, and they put it in an incubator. It died after 30 hours.
“I kept working,” she said. “I never stopped after the baby died.”
Representative Deb Haaland arrives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019. (photo: Zach Gibson/Getty)
A Record 6 Native Americans Were Elected to Congress. Here's Where They Stand on Climate.
Angely Mercado and Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
Excerpt: "Indigenous peoples have a critical role to play in the fight against climate change. Though they make up just 5 percent of the world's population, their lands encompass more than 80 percent of global biodiversity."
Indigenous lands are also at greatest risk from the multiple threats posed by climate change: rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, invasive species, and more severe weather. Indigenous people in the U.S. have been at the forefront of climate planning, using their unique status as sovereign entities to develop ambitious climate change adaptation and mitigation plans for their lands.
Native Americans make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, but they’ve long been underrepresented in Congress. Since the founding of the country, just 23 Native Americans have served in the legislative body. That slow pace is starting to pick up, however. The 2020 election resulted in victories for a record six Native Americans who will serve as voting members of Congress. Four were reelected, and two were elected for the first time, bringing the historical total to 25.
The victors represent Hawaii, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma. An additional three representatives from the territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Mariana Islands are non-voting members. Split between the two parties, the voting members’ views span the ideological spectrum — from Representative-elect Kai Kahele, a Democrat from Hawaii and an ardent supporter of the Green New Deal, to Representative-elect Yvette Herrell, a hard-line conservative and Trump ally who has called the Green New Deal a “radical government takeover.”
“It’s a good thing,” Kahele said of the diversity of opinions within the Native American caucus. “We’re there to work together, and Native American issues and Native Alaskan issues and Native Hawaiian issues are very much the same.”
Indigenous representation in Congress first surged two years ago, after the 2018 midterm elections. Deb Haaland, who is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna and has Jemez Pueblo heritage, was elected to represent New Mexico’s first congressional district. Sharice Davids, an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, was elected to represent Kansas’ third congressional district. Both Democrats were reelected this month.
From rising sea levels and dying coastal ecosystems to drought and crop losses, the six House districts that will be represented by Native Americans next year face a variety of imminent threats from climate change. Here’s how these representatives plan to tackle the unique climate challenges faced by their constituents.
New Mexico
Native Americans make up 30 percent of New Mexico’s population, but they have accounted for about half of the state’s confirmed COVID-19 cases. Representative Deb Haaland was alarmed by this disparity, but it did not surprise her. Native communities suffer disproportionately from bad indoor air quality, and asthma rates in Native American and tribal populations are almost twice the national average, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A deadly pandemic involving a respiratory disease was bound to take an outsize toll on these communities.
“If you’re breathing polluted air every single day and then a respiratory virus comes through, it stands to reason that it’s going to affect the population there,” Haaland told Grist.
Haaland is vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and she wants to push for more renewable energy in her district. During her second term, Haaland said she hopes to stop the leasing of public lands to fossil fuel companies. She’s hopeful that the incoming presidential administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take environmental justice seriously by investing in clean infrastructure and targeting policies to help the most at-risk communities. Haaland praised the Biden-Harris climate plan for promoting greater access to medical care, housing improvements, and green infrastructure in tribal nations.
“The Biden administration has the most progressive platform for our earth and the climate ever,” she said. On Tuesday, The Hill reported that Biden’s transition team was vetting Haaland for a possible cabinet appointment as Secretary of the Interior.
Yvette Herrell, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation who is the representative-elect for New Mexico’s second congressional district, is seemingly Haaland’s polar opposite.
“I will work with President Trump to reduce job killing regulations, cut taxes for our middle class, and rebuild our rural economies by opening the door to logging, mining, and expanded energy production,” the Republican tweeted in May.
Hawaii
From rising seas to dying coral reefs to decreased rainfall, Hawaii is experiencing some of the starkest effects of climate change. Democratic Representative-elect Kai Kahele is sensitive to the ways in which a warming planet threatens Hawaiins in general, and Native Hawaiins in particular.
“The entire Pacific contributes very little to greenhouse gas emissions,” Kahele said. “But they experience the greatest effects of not addressing climate change.”
Hawaii is already a leader in solar energy generation, and in 2015 it passed a law requiring that the state’s grid run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Already, 90 percent of Kauai’s daytime energy needs are met by renewable sources. Kahele said that Hawaii should build on these gains. In particular, he wants to see more investment in innovative new renewable technologies such as ocean thermal energy conversion. Kahele supports the Green New Deal, but he’s not pollyannaish about its chances in Congress, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate.
The Green New Deal “is a big bold idea” and “an aspirational dream,” he said. “As far as bold legislation goes, the American people have spoken and, should they decide that Republicans will maintain hold of the Senate, we need to come back to the drawing board and figure out what we can work with.”
Kansas
Representative Sharice Davids, a Democrat, is the second-ever Native American to represent Kansas in Congress. (Charles Curtis, who served in Congress from 1893 to 1907, was the first.) She believes that federal and local governments should address climate issues by focusing on public health and investing in infrastructure, such as sustainable housing. Davids has not endorsed the Green New Deal, preferring instead to hold out for legislation that might be more likely to receive bipartisan support.
A member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Davids has said that policies like updating building codes to promote better insulation, sustainable materials, and lower energy usage are a big part of building widespread resilience in the face of the climate crisis.
“I wanted to be on that committee because transportation and infrastructure has a huge impact on climate change,” Davids said at a town hall event in March.
Oklahoma
Representatives Markwayne Mullin, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and Tom Cole, an enrolled member of Chickasaw Nation, are two of five congressional representatives from Oklahoma. Both are Republicans who have supported President Trump’s policies. While the two now agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity, they support an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, eliminating environmental regulations that restrict the oil and gas industry, and maintaining Trump’s withdrawal from the 2016 Paris climate agreement.
Oklahoma is home to 39 federally-recognized sovereign tribes, and Mullin’s and Cole’s constituents are already grappling numerous threats posed by climate change. Average temperatures in the Great Plains have already risen by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall levels have swung wildly in recent years, oscillating between drought and flooding. The variability in water availability has hit farmers and ranchers in the state particularly hard. The 2010-2011 drought resulted in $2 billion in losses as farmers, who primarily depend on rainwater for irrigation, saw massive crop losses. According to the EPA, in the coming decades crop yields in Oklahoma are likely to decrease by 50 percent in areas where irrigated water is not available.
Despite its reputation as a major oil producer, Oklahoma has invested heavily in wind energy. The state ranked second in the country in wind energy production last year. (Texas ranked first.) Perhaps as a result, Mullin and Cole have touted the state’s renewable energy record. But the two have slightly different positions on how the industry should be supported. Mullin has said that wind energy’s success in Oklahoma shows that renewable energy can be supported by the free market alone, while Cole has supported additional investments in renewables through tax credits. (Neither Cole nor Mullin responded to Grist’s request for interviews.)
“I actually do believe that climate change is real and that humans are having an impact on it,” Cole said at a town hall event last year. “I’m all for more renewable energy resources.… I just think we need to look at different ways of addressing this problem, and we shouldn’t sacrifice our economy to try to fix it.”
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