16 December 20
Why We Fear Very Bad Fundraising Days
It doesn’t take many good days of fundraising to pay all of RSN’s bills for the entire month. But a really bad day of fundraising just frays everyone’s nerves and kicks the can down the road towards the end of the month.
Today is starting out looking like a very bad day of fundraising.
Why?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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15 December 20
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Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, Others Ordered to Explain What They Do With User Data
Jaclyn Diaz, NPR
Diaz writes: "The Federal Trade Commission is demanding that nine social media and tech companies share details on how they harness users' data and what they do with the information."
Amazon.com, TikTok owner ByteDance, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook), and YouTube were sent orders by the FTC on Monday to provide the commission with details on their data collection and advertising practices. The companies have 45 days to respond to the order.
Representatives for these companies didn't immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.
The inquiry is the latest move by federal regulators to crack the whip on big tech in an attempt to monitor their activities. Increased scrutiny by federal and state officials this year has pushed major social media websites and apps to answer for perceived improper uses of consumer data and violations of federal anti-monopoly law.
This order comes just a week after the FTC and 48 attorneys general across the country filed lawsuits against Facebook, accusing the social media giant of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly. The company has denied this claim.
The FTC's request for information covers a wide scope in order "to understand how business models influence what Americans hear and see, with whom they talk, and what information they share." The agency is using its authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which allows it to undertake broad studies separate from law enforcement.
"Critical questions about business models, algorithms, and data collection and use have gone unanswered. Policymakers and the public are in the dark about what social media and video streaming services do to capture and sell users' data and attention," FTC Commissioners Rohit Chopra, Rebecca Slaughter, and Christine Wilson said in a statement. "It is alarming that we still know so little about companies that know so much about us."
The commission wants the tech companies to detail how many users each company has, how active they are, and what else is known about them. The inquiry also asks the social media and video streaming companies to hand over information on how they process the data collected and how advertising and engagement practices impact young, underage users.
The commissioners voted to issue Monday's orders in a 4-1 vote. Republican Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips dissented.
In a statement, Phillips wrote, "The breadth of the inquiry, the tangential relationship of its parts, and the dissimilarity of the recipients combine to render these orders unlikely to produce the kind of information the public needs, and certain to divert scarce Commission resources better directed elsewhere."
Big tech scrutiny
Lawmakers and civil and consumer rights groups have placed big tech under the microscope this year in particular, following revelations showing questionable practices by major websites and apps.
The Wall Street Journal has reported on how apps share user information with Facebook. The newspaper also recently revealed that Amazon was scooping up data from independent sellers and using it to create its own competing products. Amazon executives have denied this.
This summer, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook testified virtually before Congress over Silicon Valley's perceived monopoly power.
During this hearing, Bezos acknowledged the $1 trillion company may be misusing data to push out independent sellers. He said the company is undergoing an internal investigation into the matter.
This year alone has brought major lawsuits against tech companies. In addition to the blockbuster lawsuit filed against Facebook last week, the U.S. Justice Department and 11 states sued Google, alleging the company violated competition law.
How these companies interact with underage users and what information gleaned from their activity has also been the subject of litigation.
In August, the parents of dozens of minors sued TikTok in federal court, alleging that the popular video-sharing app collects information about their users' facial characteristics, locations and close contacts. The company then sends that data to servers in China without users knowing and potentially shares it with the Chinese Communist Party, the lawsuit alleges.
The Trump administration considers TikTok a national security threat because the parent company is based in China and it shares concerns that information from U.S.-based users is being collected by Beijing. TikTok denies these allegations, but says it can share user information to its servers, if it chooses to, without breaking U.S. law.
Civil rights groups and consumer groups are urging regulators to go further and examine popular dating apps, Grindr, Tinder and OKCupid.
The Norwegian Consumer Council published a report in January showing 10 apps collected sensitive information including a user's exact location, sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs, drug use and other information in a practice called "data harvesting." The apps then transmitted the personal data to at least 135 different third-party companies.
A congressional redistricting plan is presented at the General Assembly Building in Richmond, Virginia, June 2011. (photo: Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch)
As Biden Won the Presidency, Republicans Cemented Their Grip on Power for the Next Decade
Alvin Chang and Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "While the world focused on the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in November, some of the most consequential contests were in state legislative races between candidates many have never heard of."
Democrats lost big in state elections which could cost them when new political maps are drawn
State lawmakers have the authority to redraw electoral districts in most US states every 10 years. In 2010, Republicans undertook an unprecedented effort – called Project Redmap – to win control of state legislatures across the country and drew congressional and state legislative districts that gave them a significant advantage for the next decade. In 2020, Democrats sought to avoid a repeat of 2010 and poured millions of dollars and other resources into winning key races.
It didn’t go well.
Democrats failed to flip any of the legislative chambers they targeted and Republicans came out of election night in nearly the best possible position for drawing districts, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, and will have the opportunity to draw 188 congressional seats, 43% of the House of Representatives. Democrats will have a chance to draw at most just 73 seats. Republicans will probably also be able to draw districts that will make it more difficult for Democrats to hold their majority in the US House in 2022.
“It was really bad. It was devastating to the project of building long-term power,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a group focused on local races.
There isn’t a single explanation for why Democrats performed so poorly in down-ballot races. The decision not to canvass in person may have had a more severe impact on local races. Democratic candidates were also trying to win in districts that Republicans had already gerrymandered to their own advantage. “The loss in down-ballot races was a loss by a thousand paper cuts,” Litman said.
Democrats are quick to point out that their position isn’t as bad as it was after 2010. There are Democrats in the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who can veto excessively gerrymandered maps. An independent commission will draw districts in Michigan for the first time, thanks to a 2018 referendum grassroots by activists. Voters in Colorado, Utah, and Virginia have also all passed recent measures to limit partisan influence.
But Republicans have two additional advantages this year. In 2019, the US supreme court said that federal courts could not strike down districts on the grounds that they were too partisan, giving lawmakers a green light to virtually guarantee their own re-election. 2021 will also be the first time that places with a history of voting discrimination will also be able to draw districts without first submitting them to the justice department for approval because of a 2013 supreme court decision, Shelby County v Holder, that struck down a pre-clearance provision at the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Here’s a look at who will draw the districts in several key states:
1 Texas
Texas offered Democrats one of their best chances to prevent Republican gerrymandering. Going into the November elections, Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, the bodies involved in redistricting. Democrats, however, believed they could flip control of the state House of Representatives, giving them a seat at the table. Democrats needed to flip nine seats in the state legislature to take control of the House, a move that seemed well within grasp after the party flipped 12 seats just two years ago.
But Democrats fell far short, flipping just one seat and losing another.
Republicans will once again have total control to draw all of Texas’ 40 congressional districts – the state is projected to gain two to three seats in Congress because of population growth – as well as nearly 200 districts that make up the state legislature. Those districts will probably cement Republican control in a state where Democrats have made political gains in recent years.
Democrat Akilah Bacy, a lawyer and community activist, was running to flip a House district in the north-west Houston area. She lost her race by just under 2,100 votes. Bacy said she thought a last-minute decision by the governor, Greg Abbott, to only allow a single ballot drop-off location for the 2.4m voters in her county affected the race. But, she added that Democrats needed to more carefully calibrate their messaging.
“I knew we were fighting an uphill battle,” Bacy said in an interview with the Guardian. “There is definitely some introspective work we need to do in the Democratic party and make sure that we are speaking to everyone in our base. Not only that, but making sure that our messages are local to the communities and making sure that they’re messages that matter to the community.”
Ten years ago, Republicans gerrymandered their way to clear majorities.
After the 2010 census, Texas had gained about 4 million residents – mostly Black and Hispanic people – which gave them four more congressional seats.
The Republican-controlled legislature drew new maps so that three of the four new districts would skew Republican. A federal court blocked the state from using those maps in 2012 because they discriminated against people of color, and the court drew new interim maps to be used that year. These maps, though, were still based on the partisan maps and had a lot of the same problems.
After that election, the Republicans permanently adopted these maps with only minor changes and argued they should be allowed because the courts themselves had drawn them. Critics filed a lawsuit saying the maps still discriminated against people of color. In 2018, the US supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that the new districts were not racially discriminatory, except for one state house district in Fort Worth. The decision allowed Texas to get away with serious discrimination without real consequences.
One shape that was allowed to stay was the 35th congressional district, which encompasses parts of San Antonio in the south and Austin in the north – a district that packs various clusters of Hispanic voters into the same district.
“I am very clear and sober-minded as to what will happen and what is most likely to happen as far as gerrymandering goes and with there being no Voting Rights Act as well,” Bacy said. “You might be able to quiet the people for a moment, but you cannot silence a state that is growing in the way that Texas is growing.”
2 North Carolina
Democrats had a chance to mitigate Republican gerrymandering in North Carolina, which has recently seen some of the most egregious examples of the practice. Republicans had complete control over the state legislature heading into the 2020 election, and Democrats needed to gain five seats in the state senate to have a voice in redistricting.
But Democrats failed to flip either the state senate or the state house of representatives, meaning a Republican-controlled legislature will draw the new districts and keep their majorities in the state legislature. Under state law, North Carolina’s governor, currently Democrat Roy Cooper, does not have a veto over redistricting maps, so Republicans have complete control of the process.
That’s a huge win for Republicans in North Carolina, which is projected to gain an additional congressional seat because of population growth.
Democrat JD Wooten, who was running to represent a state senate seat in a district west of state’s famed research triangle, told the Guardian his campaign had plenty of volunteers and funding. But in the end, Republicans were able to just turn out more voters.
“At the end of the day, the old thinking that the more voters, the more likely it is that Democrats will win, that didn’t hold,” he said. “We needed a perfect storm going into 2020 to do what we were hopeful we could do.”
Over the last decade, North Carolina Republicans have displayed some of the most brazen attempts at political gerrymandering.
In 2011, lawmakers drew state legislative maps that allowed them to maintain a supermajority in the state legislature, even though they only won about half of the statewide vote. That advantage allowed them to pass controversial laws, like an anti-transgender bathroom law in 2016.
Republicans were just as brutal at the congressional level. They drew districts that gave Republicans a 10-3 advantage in the congressional delegation, packing Democratic voters into only a handful of districts. This meant Democrats had wide margins in two congressional districts – the first and 12th – but lost competitive races nearly everywhere else.
The 12th district, for example, groups black voters in Greensboro to the north and Charlotte in the south, even though they aren’t geographically close to each other.
The supreme court eventually ruled that those two districts were a racial gerrymander because it packed black voters into fewer districts to dilute their voting power. When Republicans were forced to redraw the congressional map, they made it openly clear they wanted to maximize their partisan advantage.
Republicans kept their clear advantage in the redrawn map, producing precisely drawn gerrymandered districts. North Carolina A&T University – the largest historically black college in America – was split into two congressional districts.
Democrats have reason for some hope in North Carolina, however. Last year, a state court struck down North Carolina’s legislative map, saying it was so egregiously gerrymandered that it violated the state constitution. Democrats still control a narrow majority in the North Carolina supreme court, offering state courts as one possible avenue for voting advocates to check Republican gerrymandering in the state.
3 Florida
Republicans control the legislature and governor’s mansion and have all the power in drawing the new districts. Florida is projected to gain at least one more congressional seat in addition to the 29 it already has.
Florida passed a law to stop gerrymandering. Republicans gerrymandered anyway.
In 2010, Florida voters passed two constitutional amendments to ban racial and partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-led legislature still tried to gerrymander maps by packing Democratic voters into a handful of districts.
For example, here’s the fifth congressional district, which twists and turns to include Jacksonville, Gainesville and Orlando.
The courts ordered the legislature to draw new maps in 2014 – but those maps were again struck down because they were drawn with an “unconstitutional intent to favor the Republican party and incumbents”. Eventually the Florida supreme court approved a new map drawn by voting rights groups. The courts also ordered the legislature to redraw the state senate map in 2012 and in 2015.
The original maps did exactly what Republicans wanted: They won just 54% of votes but nearly two-third of the congressional seats. After the new maps were drawn, the proportion of votes to seats evened out.
4 Pennsylvania
Republicans came away from the 2020 election controlling both chambers of the Pennsylvania legislature, giving them the authority to draw congressional districts. But Democrats control the governor’s mansion, which will allow the party to have a significant check on any maps that severely benefit the GOP.
That’s a significant break from 2011, when Republicans had complete control over state government.
They took advantage, packing Democrats into just five of the state’s 18 congressional districts.
The maps produced some bizarre shapes, such as the seventh district.
The 2012 election showed that Republican partisan gerrymandering had worked. The congressional map allowed Republicans to win just half the votes but hold on to 13 of the 18 seats, and this was the case for the following two elections in 2014 and 2016.
In 2018 the state supreme court struck down the congressional map, saying it was so egregiously gerrymandered that it violated the state constitution. The state supreme court eventually struck down the congressional maps for being a partisan gerrymander and drew a new map for use in 2018. With the new maps, Republicans won about half the votes and half the seats. Democrats still hold a majority on the state supreme court, which could offer another important check on GOP efforts to gerrymander over the next decade.
5 Wisconsin
Democrats don’t control either chamber of the Wisconsin legislature, but the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, can veto any electoral maps. Democrats ensured that veto power will hold by breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the state legislature in November.
It’s a modest change with huge consequences.
There are few places in America where gerrymandering has been more consequential than in Wisconsin.
A Project Redmap target, Scott Walker, a conservative Republican, was elected governor and Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010. Shortly thereafter, Republicans drew maps that made it nearly impossible for them to lose state control of state government. They were able to control 60 of the state’s 99 assembly seats, even while winning around half of the statewide vote. The gerrymandering was so egregious that it made it possible for Republicans to win a supermajority in the state assembly while winning a minority of the statewide vote, Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote earlier this year.
In 2018, Democrats won every statewide race, but Republicans held control of 63 of 99 seats in the state assembly. This entrenched power has supported a litany of Republican goals in the state, including weakening public sector unions and passing measures like voter ID.
The congressional maps packed Democrats more tightly into their districts, but the makeup of the delegation stayed the same over the last 10 years.
For example, Milwaukee and a few blue-collar suburbs were packed tightly into the fourth district, allowing Republicans to hold on to three seats in the areas.
Two more states to watch: Ohio and Georgia
In Georgia, Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature, giving them complete control over the drawing of the state’s 14 congressional districts as well as state house districts. That power will probably allow Republican lawmakers to draw districts that diminish an electorate in Georgia that is increasingly diverse and Democratic-leaning after Joe Biden was the first Democrat in nearly 30 years to carry the state.
Ohio, another Redmap target, has also seen some of the most severe partisan gerrymandering. Last year, a federal court struck down the state’s congressional map, where Republicans consistently held a 12-4 advantage, saying: “This partisan gerrymander was intentional and effective and that no legitimate justification accounts for its extremity.” The US supreme court later reversed the ruling, leaving the map in place.
This redistricting cycle, Republicans will control the legislature and governor’s mansion in Ohio, but in 2018 voters approved a ballot measure designed to rein in excessive partisan gerrymandering. The measure blocks lawmakers from passing a permanent map without getting meaningful support from the minority party, which should give Democrats some of a say in the process.
A scientist works in the Moderna lab in Cambridge, Mass., in February. (photo: David L. Ryan/Getty)
Moderna's Vaccine Is Highly Effective, FDA Says, Clearing Way for Second Vaccine
Erika Edwards, NBC News
Edwards writes: "Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine is 94 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness and appears to prevent the spread of the virus as well, according to documents released Tuesday."
READ MORE
Police in riot gear after in Minneapolis. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty)
Why You Really Can't Fight City Hall, at Least Over the Police
Jim Schober, POLITICO
Schober writes: "The Monell Rule is the most important racial justice issue you’ve never heard of."
n the early morning hours of January 28, 2000, a Black police officer named Cornel Young Jr. —“Jai” to those who knew him—was off duty, dressed in plain clothes, and waiting on a steak sandwich from an all-night diner in a rough section of Providence, Rhode Island. A fight broke out at the front of the restaurant and quickly spilled outside. Someone brandished a gun. Young jumped into action, shouting “Police!” as he rushed through the diner and drew his weapon. Within seconds, he would be bleeding in the snow outside the restaurant, shot multiple times by two white, uniformed officers from his own department. Within hours, he would be dead.
Those are the basic facts, and the sadness of them transcends politics. If Black lives matter and blue lives matter, as they all most assuredly do, the killing of patrolman Cornel “Jai” Young was doubly tragic.
But the tragedy does not end there. As an attorney who has litigated civil rights cases, I can tell you that the tragedy of Jai Young’s story actually ends in a courtroom, some six years after his death, when the city of Providence slipped through a gaping chasm in federal civil rights law—one that has largely escaped scrutiny in the current national push for racial justice reform. It’s called the Monell Rule, and it’s why cities and police departments are rarely held accountable for the actions of police officers.
To learn more about her case, I recently reached out to Leisa Young, Jai’s mother, who fought the city of Providence in court for the better part of five years. She is an impressive woman: a bright, successful, former single mother who lifted herself out of poverty while raising an exceptional son. The pain of his death has hardened with time, the way scar tissue fills a wound that once might have been fatal. When she speaks of Jai now, Leisa’s voice does not crack, though she tends to change the subject.
The story she tells is awash in irony. Jai had entered the police force to change it, and he died, Leisa believes, because of the very problems he wanted to fix. Growing up, Jai had not been immune to the racial profiling so often experienced by young Black males. But his father—from whom Leisa had long since been divorced—was a police officer, and through him Jai developed an interest in community-based police reforms. By joining the force, Jai hoped to change what he saw as a militaristic approach to policing, especially in low-income neighborhoods like the one where he eventually died.
Leisa tells me that one of the cops who shot her son had been his classmate at the police academy and might have recognized him if he had only paused an instant before shooting: “Out of uniform, in that neighborhood, Jai was just another target.”
When asked about the city’s handling of her son’s case, Leisa responds with exasperation—the type of chronic emotional fatigue known only to those unfortunate souls who have spent years fighting a more powerful and highly motivated enemy. You can’t fight city hall, they say. Most people know the phrase; Leisa Young has lived it.
From the very beginning, the city circled the wagons. Just two days after Jai’s death, the mayor of Providence declared in the local press that race had not been a factor in the shooting. In a televised interview, a high-ranking officer predicted the two shooters would be exonerated by the department’s internal investigation, which was just barely underway. Meanwhile, Leisa says, city officials worked privately to convince her that Jai was somehow at fault in his own death because he had been pointing his firearm sideways, “like a thug.” Recalling the accusation now, Leisa dismisses it with a laugh that is somehow charming and bitter at the same time: “Where would he have learned that? In thug school?”
Leisa was convinced the shooting was wrongful. To vindicate her son, she filed suit against the city of Providence and in late 2003 she and the city each had their day in court. Over the course of three weeks, a federal jury heard evidence about the night of the shooting: how Jai had been holding his gun; whether he had identified himself as an officer on exiting the diner; whether he had been given any warning before the fatal shots were fired. In the end, the verdict was unanimous, and Leisa had essentially won: the jury found that Jai’s constitutional rights had been violated in the shooting that ended his life.
The 2003 verdict has never been overturned, and in the eyes of the law, the violation of Jai Young’s civil rights is an unassailable fact. That verdict almost certainly would have ended the case if Leisa had been suing a trucking company over a traffic accident, or a chemical company over a cancer-causing pesticide. But hers was a civil rights lawsuit against a city government, and though she still does not understand what it means or why, she would spend the next two years trying to overcome something called the Monell Rule.
I first learned about the Monell Rule in 2013, shortly after I accepted my first civil rights case. I had been practicing business law in Texas for 15 years when a friend asked for my help in a case involving threats and extortion by a small-time city government. It was not my area of the law, so I immersed myself in legal research, and it wasn’t long before I encountered this little-known legal rule that, despite its obscurity, plays a massive role in virtually every federal civil rights lawsuit against a city or county government. One case led to another, and I have been fighting the Monell Rule ever since.
To understand it, one must go back briefly to the end of the Civil War, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had just been ratified, promising civil rights to emancipated slaves and other citizens. The 1871 law—also known as the Third Enforcement Act—was designed to provide a mechanism for enforcing these constitutional guarantees and it authorizes individual citizens to bring private lawsuits for civil rights violations committed by police and other persons cloaked in the authority of state or local governments. Today, among lawyers, this law is known simply as “Section 1983,” and it remains one of the most important civil rights statutes in the country.
In 1961, in a case called Monroe v. Pape, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that city governments were exempt under Section 1983. The Monroe case involved horrific allegations of racial abuse at the hands of 13 Chicago police officers who had allegedly broken into a Black couple’s apartment and forced them to stand naked in front of their children as they beat the father with a flashlight, degraded him with racial slurs and ransacked the apartment. The Supreme Court ruled that the officers could be sued under Section 1983, but the city of Chicago could not.
Unsurprisingly, the Monroe decision was met with heavy criticism, and the Supreme Court eventually reversed itself—sort of. In Monell v. Department of Social Services of the City of New York, the high court ruled that cities are accountable under Section 1983, but only if the civil rights violation was caused by “official policy” of the city government. The court’s reasoning was based on a strained reading of the 1871 law, and has been often criticized ever since, but the rule established in Monell has nonetheless survived and evolved.
Today, “official policy” can be proven in multiple ways, but the gist is always the same: the civil rights violation must have been caused by a deliberate policy choice made at the highest levels of a city government, or by a pattern of institutional neglect so pervasive and consistent that it constitutes “deliberate indifference” by city policymakers. It is a very high bar, and clearing it often depends on facts and concepts that are inherently elusive.
The Monell Rule is unique to civil rights litigation and exists nowhere else in the legal world. If, for example, an Amazon delivery driver were to negligently cause a traffic accident while on the job, Amazon would ordinarily be liable for the victim’s injuries; there would be no need for the victim to prove that Jeff Bezos or Amazon’s board of directors had caused the accident through their corporate policies or their “deliberate indifference” to the rights of potential accident victims. In the civil rights context, however, that is essentially what the Monell Rule requires. In simplest terms, the Monell Rule is a barrier to government accountability. It puts legal distance between city governments and their employees, allowing cities to avoid responsibility for the on-the- job conduct of their own police officers.
As a practical matter, the Monell Rule blocks the only pathway by which civil rights victims can hold police departments accountable. Victims of police violence have three basic avenues to justice: criminal prosecution of the individual officers involved; a civil lawsuit against the same officers; or a civil lawsuit against the municipality that employs them. The first two avenues have their own unique challenges, such as the high burden of proof in criminal cases, or the qualified immunity standard that protects individual police officers from liability in civil suits. But the first two avenues—even where successful—punish only the individual officers. It is only the third avenue that has the potential to impact municipal police departments as a whole, and the Monell Rule blocks that avenue like a barricade.
Leisa Young’s 2003 civil rights verdict was followed by a complicated series of motions, rulings, appeals and cross-appeals, mostly concerning the Monell Rule. Eventually, the case would return to court for a second trial. This time, however, the only issue would be the Monell Rule, and the evidence would have almost nothing to do with what happened the night Jai Young was killed.
At the close of the trial, the judge instructed the jurors that they were required to accept the 2003 verdict: there was no question Jai’s civil rights had been violated by a Providence police officer. And then, in a perfect summation of the Monell Rule, he continued: “The fact that an employee or employees of the City deprived Cornel of his federally protected rights is not itself a sufficient basis for imposing Section 1983 liability against the City.” To win her case for the second time, Leisa Young would have to prove that Jai’s death had been caused by the “deliberate indifference” of a few high-ranking city officials, none of whom were present that night outside the diner.
This time, the jury verdict did not go Leisa’s way.
After the trial, Leisa’s attorneys urged her to fight on through an appeal, but the emotional toll had been too much. Like many civil rights plaintiffs, she had filed the lawsuit to bring about change and, perhaps, give meaning to a tragedy. Now, the litigation had consumed her, and she no longer felt she was honoring her son’s memory: “I just imagined him looking at me and asking, ‘Mom, what’s happened to you?’”
That was 2005. In the years since, the Monell Rule has lost none of its potency, and remains a major obstacle in every Section 1983 lawsuit against a city government. A more recent case in point: Darrius Stewart, a 19-year old unarmed Black man who was shot at close range (once in the chest, once in the back) by a Memphis police officer during a botched arrest. In 2019, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals assumed that Stewart’s civil rights had been violated in the shooting, but summarily dismissed his parents’ lawsuit against the city of Memphis under the Monell Rule. Never mind that Memphis had failed to investigate a prior similar incident, said the court. To hold the city of Memphis liable under the Monell Rule, Stewart’s parents were required to show a “clear and persistent pattern” and “a pattern requires more than one incident.” The first one, as they say, is free.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed on the streets of Minneapolis, sparking worldwide protests and surging support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Demands for reform are now urgent and everywhere, but the Monell Rule has been strangely absent from the discussion. For example, the Movement for Black Lives—an activist organization associated with the BLM movement—published a 13-page legislative pamphlet proposing extensive criminal justice reforms ranging from removing metal detectors in schools to abolishing minimum sentencing guidelines; nowhere, however, does it mention the far more attainable goal of abolishing the Monell Rule. Politicians have likewise sidestepped the issue: in the 2020 presidential election, for example, both campaigns published detailed platforms for racial justice reform, but neither mentioned the Monell Rule.
The silence is not easy to explain. The main policy justification for the Monell Rule is that cities are funded by taxpayers, and taxpayers should not be responsible for “rogue” employees who are not acting pursuant to established municipal policy. Setting aside the fact that cities can (and often do) purchase insurance to protect themselves from civil rights lawsuits, activists and political leaders are now openly (and often persuasively) endorsing more expensive reforms that would have a far greater impact on the common taxpayer. If we are willing to consider costly measures—and if the real goal is to protect the life and dignity of the next George Floyd—doesn’t it make sense to start by fixing the things that are most obviously broken? Doesn’t it make sense to start by simply declaring, as a nation, that our cities should be accountable for atrocities committed by the very police officers they recruit, hire, train and employ?
The Monell Rule has become an absurdity; to see why, one need look no further than the George Floyd case itself. Floyd died because a Minneapolis police officer—a hand sometimes tucked casually in pocket—knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes as three other uniformed police officers stood by. It is, to most who have seen the video, the most egregious civil rights violation they have ever witnessed. Perhaps worse, this atrocity was carried out not by anonymous vigilantes in white hoods, but by uniformed officers seemingly confident in the lawfulness of their behavior.
It is absolutely correct to say that Floyd was publicly lynched in broad daylight in the name of the city of Minneapolis; and yet, under the Monell Rule, the city of Minneapolis is not necessarily responsible.
I don’t practice law in Minnesota, but I suspect the city of Minneapolis does not have an official policy that endorses police officers kneeling on a handcuffed citizen’s neck for minutes on end. I also suspect that nothing quite like it had ever happened before. But it happened anyway, and multiple officers were involved. These things happen not because municipal policy makes them happen; they happen because municipal policy allows them to happen.
During his tenure on the Supreme Court, the late Justice John Paul Stevens occasionally voiced his disagreement with the Monell Rule. His reasoning was based in part on a long-standing principle of the law: when a harm occurs, the legal responsibility should fall on the shoulders of those who are in the best position to prevent it. This is how the law encourages corporations to take a proactive role in ensuring safe and appropriate workplace conduct: simple, old-fashioned fear of liability. As Justice Stevens understood, the Monell Rule removes that fear—and the powerful incentives that it creates—for cities and other local governments.
Without fear of municipal liability, corrosive and racist elements within a police force tend to be ignored; inevitably, they fester and grow. When they finally explode, as they did in the George Floyd case, city leaders point the finger at their own subordinates, often vowing to defund or even disband police units under their own control.
Such abdications of responsibility should offend every single one of us, just as they would in a commercial context. Imagine, for an instant, learning that a waiter spat in your soup at a restaurant. The manager comes by your table, but he does not offer to compensate you in any way; instead, he simply blames the waiter, promises to cut his pay or fire him, and then walks back to the kitchen. In this scenario, you have suffered everything, and the owner of the restaurant has suffered nothing. Why would anything change?
The good news, for civil rights advocates, is that the Monell Rule can be changed without Supreme Court intervention. Under the Supreme Court’s rationale, the rule is not a constitutional requirement; it is simply part of what Congress intended when it enacted Section 1983 a century and a half ago. This means the Monell Rule can be modified—or abolished entirely—without changing the Constitution or the composition of the court. All that is required is to amend Section 1983, which can be achieved through ordinary legislation.
Several legislators, including former Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have proposed amending Section 1983, but their proposed legislation focuses on the doctrine of qualified immunity. As mentioned above, qualified immunity protects individual police officers; it has no application to the cities that employ them. Abolishing qualified immunity, but not the Monell Rule, would put no added pressure on police departments to enact meaningful police reforms. Such proposals may even be counterproductive: they put more legal distance (not less) between police officers and city governments, and thus they will likely only embolden city officials eager to wash their hands of ugly incidents instead of accepting responsibility for them.
If government accountability is the goal, abolishing qualified immunity is at best a half-measure. The Monell Rule is the place where bad government hides, and it needs to be reformed.
Employees work in the lobby of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. headquarters in New York, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 8, 2014. (photo: Ron Antonelli/Getty)
JPMorgan Chase Bank Wrongly Charged 170,000 Customers Overdraft Fees. Federal Regulators Refused to Penalize It.
Patrick Rucker, ProPublica
Rucker writes: "Documents and records show that bank examiners have avoided penalizing at least six banks that incorrectly charged overdraft and related fees to hundreds of thousands of customers."
ederal bank examiners considered levying fines and sanctions when JPMorgan Chase informed them last year that faulty overdraft charges caused by a software glitch had impacted roughly 170,000 customers.
But the bank urged the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, its chief regulator, to take less severe action, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.
Rather than openly penalizing Chase, the nation’s largest bank, OCC officials decided to issue a quiet reprimand — a supervisory letter — that would go into the bank’s file and stay out of public view, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.
The agency’s deputy chief counsel, Bao Nguyen, approved the supervisory letter in June and accepted Chase’s explanation of the incident and its promise to repay its customers, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.
Since 2017, when President Donald Trump took office, the OCC has found at least six banks wrongly charged overdrafts and related fees, but in each case, the agency quietly rebuked the bank rather than pushing for fines and public penalties, the investigation by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum shows.
In several instances, front-line examiners who wanted the bank to be fined were overruled by OCC officials. The previously unreported cases show how the OCC under Trump quietly held back from punishing banks for abuses, while the administration sought more broadly to loosen banking rules and other consumer financial protections.
Brian Brooks, a former bank executive, has led the OCC on a temporary basis since May; last month, the president nominated Brooks to a full, five-year term.
Brooks and his predecessor at the OCC, Joseph Otting, both helped run OneWest Bank, a lender that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin founded in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis.
Banks found to have charged excessive overdraft fees and other faulty charges include Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chase, American Express and U.S. Bank and large regional lenders such as Zions Bank, Union Bank and First Horizon.
An OCC spokesman said the agency would not comment on the specific instances cited in this story because such matters are confidential. The OCC has a range of tools to police bank misconduct, the spokesman said.
“It is frequently the case that deficiencies can be corrected much more quickly — including correcting harm to customers — by using supervisory tools,” said spokesman Bryan Hubbard, referring to confidential sanctions. “Most importantly, the absence of a public penalty does not indicate a lack of action.”
A bank might be cited first with a confidential sanction and later punished openly, Hubbard said. “Our actions may or may not be complete.”
Big banks collect over $11 billion in overdraft-related fees each year, according to a report from the Center for Responsible Lending, which found in a study that punitive bank fees often hit vulnerable customers the hardest.
Overdraft policies vary by bank but the typical fee is $35, and a customer can accrue additional penalties multiple times a day, CRL reported. Banks could simply decline a charge if a customer lacked the funds, but instead lenders promote “overdraft protection” as a convenience that comes at a cost. For customers whose accounts often hover near zero, that convenience is just another snare in a financial trap, said Rebecca Borné, a CRL lawyer who worked on the study.
“Imagine you struggled to buy groceries over the weekend and you wake up Monday to $100 in overdraft fees,” Borné said. “That happens to people who can least afford to pay.”
Chase had promised some online customers that they would get an alert before their accounts went negative, but the bank told the OCC that did not happen as roughly 170,000 accounts dwindled to zero, according to industry and regulatory officials. Chase charges $34 for an overdraft and allows three such charges a day on an account with insufficient funds. A customer could be charged as much as $102 per day.
Chase, which operates nearly 5,000 locations nationwide, reported the faulty auto alerts to the OCC as required, but the problem had stayed out of public view until now.
“We found that some customers were not receiving some account alerts due to a systems issue in 2018,” Chase spokesman Michael Fusco said. “We have fixed the issue, proactively notified and reimbursed affected customers.”
Chase had roughly 52 million active digital customers at the end of last year, according to securities filings, and that figure has grown by millions each year over the last several years.
In interviews, several bank branch employees working in different parts of the country said Chase could have easily underestimated the number of customers who were impacted, based on the number of complaints they heard.
Chase insists its remediation work was reliable. “We completed a thorough review of all accounts and identified the impacted customers,” said Fusco.
Under the agreement between Chase and the OCC, the bank agreed to refund customers that it believes were wrongly charged, but with no outside, independent check on the work, officials said.
The Chase matter shows how faulty overdraft policies can take hold at a bank and weigh on customers.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has in recent years pushed the bank’s online presence and a corporate mantra “Mobile first, digital everything.” Chase encourages consumers to find a screen and open their own Total Checking accounts.
With a few clicks, a new Chase customer can choose to receive an account alert for everything from low balances to suspicious transactions. Customers who rely on online banking might rarely have cause to visit a Chase branch.
But customers did come knocking when their auto alerts failed and they were hit with surprise overdrafts and other penalties, said current and former employees interviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.
Chase customers had complained about faulty auto alerts for more than 12 months when the bank brought the issue to the OCC late last year, according to regulatory officials and agency paperwork.
Chase insisted that the error was just a coding hiccup and that the fix was manageable, but some OCC officials believed the bank still deserved punishment since so many customers were hurt.
To some front-line examiners, the faulty alert program amounted to an “unfair and deceptive” practice that could draw a public penalty under the law.
The question of what to do next fell to Nguyen.
Nguyen joined the OCC in June 2018 as a deputy to Otting, then Trump’s OCC chief, and Nguyen had a large role in managing one of Otting’s top priorities: rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend in poor neighborhoods.
Otting presented the new CRA in May and stepped down a day later. The CRA rewrite will make it easier for banks to pull back from serving poor neighborhoods, according to several consumer-advocacy groups that are challenging the move in court.
When the Chase matter reached Nguyen’s desk, he agreed that the bank had been deceptive, but he ruled that no penalty was warranted, according to regulatory paperwork.
For one thing, Chase had stepped forward to admit the problem. Regulators can give banks credit for policing themselves, and Nguyen decided that would hold true in the Chase matter, regulatory officials said.
Nguyen did agree to record the incident in the supervisory letter added to the bank’s confidential file. Nguyen declined to comment and referred questions to the OCC.
Supervisory letters are one of the mildest rebukes that the OCC can issue, and critics say the letters have negligible impact.
After Wells Fargo admitted in 2016 that its employees created fake accounts to hit skyhigh sales goals, the OCC found that it had been issuing supervisory letters for seven years warning the bank about its sales practices.
Lawyers from the OCC and Chase worked together to write the final language of the supervisory letter in which the bank insisted that it did nothing wrong, according to regulatory officials.
Notably, said the officials, the OCC handled the matter itself and without help from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency created to ensure that financial firms do not mistreat ordinary customers.
“It would not have gone down well if the OCC did not involve us in a consumer matter,” said Richard Cordray, the first CFPB director who served President Barack Obama.
Cordray said that he would not second-guess any regulator’s decision about sanctions without knowing the facts, but that the Trump administration had clearly shown it was not eager to sanction bank wrongdoing.
“These are different times and different leaders,” he said, “but the OCC and CFPB used to take aggressive action together when we saw consumers being hurt.”
The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.
Dubious disclosures and lax enforcement are part of many overdraft abuses, said Borné of the CRL, and they were a problem in the incidents handled by the OCC. American Express, the credit card giant, also offers short-term loans that are supposed to be repaid in regular monthly installments. Customers pay interest on the loan, of course, but American Express never explained that customers who missed a payment could also be charged interest on late fees and bounced checks, the OCC concluded. That was unfair and deceptive, OCC examiners determined in recent months, but the agency’s chiefs decided to hand the bank a quiet reprimand rather than a public sanction.
“Due to a technical error, some personal loan customers were incorrectly charged,” American Express said in a statement. The firm said it will now notify customers and issue credits for undue fees. American Express declined to say how many customers were affected but said the charges were generally less than $1 each.
Seven years ago, U.S. Bank unveiled a novel credit card program that the bank said could reduce costs for many customers. FlexControl Essentials promised to let customers first pay off everyday purchases — like gasoline and groceries — which the bank said could lower the monthly bill.
But customers of U.S. Bank, the nation’s fifth-largest lender, were baffled by the Byzantine system used to determine what was an “everyday” purchase and how much money they actually owed, according to several current and former bank employees.
U.S. Bank knew FlexControl Essentials was balky, and the bank spent five years trying to improve it before retiring the offer in 2018, the year the OCC took notice, according to bank and regulatory officials.
Within the OCC, some officials thought FlexControl Essentials was more than just a credit card program gone awry — it was a consumer abuse. For several weeks in early 2018, OCC lawyers debated next steps and whether they should dig deeper into how many customers might have been hurt, according to enforcement paperwork and two officials involved.
By the summer of 2018, though, the OCC decided to let the bank quietly scrap the program without paying a fine or facing a public sanction, according to regulatory sources.
In a statement, U.S. Bank declined to comment on the FlexControl Essentials program except to say it was retired in 2018. “Customers continue to have great flexibility with our products and we appreciate their continued support,” the bank said.
Three years before Chase grappled with errors in the auto alert program, the bank had to face a separate problem that was costing customers.
Banks are expected to clear checks within a “reasonable period of time,” which in many instances means two days. But under the rules, the wait can stretch for a week or more. Ultimately, banks not only decide when to clear a check but whether to clear it at all and how much a check is even worth.
That was the issue in 2017 when bank examiners found flaws in Chase’s handling of checks that had stray markings, sloppy handwriting or were otherwise deemed illegible. Banks can take extra time to examine those checks and ultimately even decide what the checks are worth.
OCC examiners found that Chase customers were sometimes shortchanged and some agency officials wanted to openly sanction the bank, according to regulatory officials. In the end, Chase was allowed to push the issue aside with no penalty by the end of 2017.
In a statement, Chase said that the bank identified the problem itself in 2017 and then “worked quickly to resolve it and have since credited all impacted customers.”
Taken together with the faulty auto alerts program from this year, Chase was twice found to have wrongly charged customers but faced no public penalty.
Banks ultimately control the sequence of deposits and withdrawals in a way that can boost corporate profits. A bank customer who exceeds their balance in the morning and replenishes the account by sundown might still incur an overdrawn account fee.
Another customer who overdraws an account with one costly purchase — a sofa — might be charged a fee for that item plus all the other miscellaneous purchases they made that day from a gas fill-up to a cup of coffee.
Bank regulators allow some maneuvers as long as they are disclosed to the customer, but at least three banks in recent years were deemed to have wrongly snared customers in how they added and subtracted money from an account, according to regulatory and industry officials.
One offender was Zions Bank, the largest lender in Utah, which tucked three separate, fee-generating schemes into murky disclosures, according to OCC officials who tracked the matter for more than a year.
Zions Bank customers who pushed their accounts into negative territory with a single purchase were charged a $32 penalty for that one buy and then the same fee for every other purchase made that day, examiners found.
Zions Bank customers also could get charged many overdraft fees for being just a few bucks short, examiners agreed. The third abuse was that Zions Bank charged a daily overdraft penalty on top of individual purchase penalties, regulatory officials said.
At the heart of every Zions Bank infraction was faulty disclosures and that customers did not know they had a right to opt out of any overdraft program — a step that might mean more rejected charges for the customer but also fewer surprise fees, according to the enforcement officials.
The OCC determined that Zions Bank ran afoul of a 2010 banking rule that explicitly required banks to get customer consent before enrolling them in overdraft protection, according to two regulatory officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
In a statement, Zions Bank said it always abides by the law requiring a customer “opt in” for overdraft protection.
“Zions Bank is committed to maintaining the highest standards of fair and transparent customer services,” the bank said in a statement.
The Zions Bank abuses matched tactics at Union Bank, a leading lender in the west, according to industry and regulatory officials familiar with the matter. Union Bank was charging customers overdraft fees despite the customer having a positive balance at the end of the day, according to the officials. The problem had been going on for years when it came to the attention of bank examiners in 2017, but rather than sanction the bank publicly, the OCC filed a supervisory letter, according to regulatory sources.
A spokesman for Union Bank declined to comment for this story.
First Horizon, a leading lender in the south, came to the OCC last year to report problems with its own overdraft program, according to industry and regulatory officials.
The bank had wrongly charged customers overdraft fees when they went into the red for a few hours but ended the day with a positive balance, according to enforcement officials, and that practice ran contrary to the bank’s marketing and disclosure documents.
By the time the problem was detected, it had gone on for at least two years, although the bank promised to make customers whole, according to regulatory and industry officials.
The OCC opted not to punish the bank publicly and instead issued a private reprimand, regulatory officials said.
In a statement, First Horizon acknowledged the issue and said it tapped an outside consultant to manage customer refunds.
“The issue was corrected and our impacted customers were notified and refunded,” the bank said in a statement.
Protesters demanding the resignation of Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala City, November 22, 2020. (photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP)
Guatemalans Initiate Legal Action Against President Giammattei
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The International Commission of Jurists on Tuesday presented a complaint against Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei, the Interior Minister Gendri Reyes, and the National Police Director Jose Antonio Tzuban for the violent repression against citizens on November 21."
Human rights defenders call for comprehensive investigations into police brutality against people who protested in November.
The complaint was submitted by ICJ Central America Director Ramon Cadena who condemned the excessive use of force by Police officers.
Noting a stepback in the Peace Accords signed in 1996, this civil organization also called for an investigation into the events in order to hold accountable the responsible.
The Ombudsman's Office determined that police forces violated human rights, noting the case of citizens Kenneth Lopez and Carlos Manuel Gonzalez, who lost their eyes as a result of injuries caused by the riot police.
Thousands of people mobilized at Guatemala City's Central Squared to reject the approval of the 2021 Budget Bill which cut funds for COVID-19's response, nutrition, education, and human rights programs.
Although Congress annulled the Bill, demonstrators continued to protest over corruption, while demanding the resignation of Giammattei and Reyes.
In September, Former Interior Ministry Carlos Menocal confirmed the purchase of teargas and other military equipment amid the pandemic, which has killed 4,476 people so far this year.
After the 2018 Camp Fire (pictured), chemicals were found in buried water distribution networks, some at levels comparable to hazardous waste. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Plastic Pipes Are Polluting Drinking Water Systems After Wildfires
Andrew J. Whelton, Amisha Shah and Kristofer P. Isaacson, The Conversation
Excerpt: "When wildfires swept through the hills near Santa Cruz, California, in 2020, they released toxic chemicals into the water supplies of at least two communities. One sample found benzene, a carcinogen, at 40 times the state's drinking water standard."
hen wildfires swept through the hills near Santa Cruz, California, in 2020, they released toxic chemicals into the water supplies of at least two communities. One sample found benzene, a carcinogen, at 40 times the state's drinking water standard.
Our testing has now confirmed a source of these chemicals, and it's clear that wildfires aren't the only blazes that put drinking water systems at risk.
In a new study, we heated plastic water pipes commonly used in buildings and water systems to test how they would respond to nearby fires.
The results, released Dec. 14, show how easily wildfires could trigger widespread drinking water contamination. They also show the risks when only part of a building catches fire and the rest remains in use. In some of our tests, heat exposure caused more than 100 chemicals to leach from the damaged plastics.
As environmental engineers, we advise communities on drinking water safety and disaster recovery. The western U.S.'s extreme wildfire seasons are putting more communities at risk in ways they might not realize. Just this year, more than 52,000 fires destroyed more than 17,000 structures – many of them homes connected to water systems. Heat-damaged plastic pipes can continue to leach chemicals into water over time, and ridding a water system of the contamination can take months and millions of dollars.
A Baffling Source of Contamination
The cause of drinking water contamination after wildfires has baffled authorities since it was discovered in 2017.
After the 2017 Tubbs Fire and 2018 Camp Fire, chemicals were found in buried water distribution networks, some at levels comparable to hazardous waste. Contamination was not in the water treatment plants or drinking water sources. Some homeowners found drinking water contamination in their plumbing.
Tests revealed volatile organic compounds had reached levels that posed immediate health risks in some areas, including benzene levels that exceeded the EPA hazardous waste threshold of 500 parts per billion. Benzene was found at a level 8,000 times the federal drinking water limit and 200 times the level that causes immediate health effects. Those effects can include dizziness, headaches, skin and throat irritation and even unconsciousness, among other risks.
This year, wildfires triggered drinking water contamination in at least two more California drinking water systems, and testing is still underway in other communities.
The Problem With Plastics
Plastics are ubiquitous in drinking water systems. They are often less expensive to install than metal alternatives, which hold up against high heat but are vulnerable to corrosion.
Today, water pipes under the street and those that deliver water to customers' water meters are increasingly made of plastic. Pipes that transport the drinking water from the meter to the building are often plastic. Water meters also sometimes contain plastics. Private wells can have plastic well casings as well as buried plastic pipes that deliver well water to plastic storage tanks and buildings.
Pipes inside buildings that carry hot and cold water to faucets can also be plastic, as can faucet connectors, water heater dip tubes, refrigerator and ice maker tubing.
To determine if plastic pipes could be responsible for drinking water contamination after wildfires, we exposed commonly available plastic pipes to heat. The temperatures were similar to the heat from a wildfire that radiates toward buildings but isn't enough to cause the pipes to catch fire.
We tested several popular plastic drinking water pipes, including high-density polyethylene (HDPE), crosslinked polyethylene (PEX), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and chlorinated polyvinylchloride (CPVC).
Benzene and other chemicals were generated inside the plastic pipes just by heating. After the plastics cooled, these chemicals then leached into the water. It happened at temperatures as low as 392 degrees Fahrenheit. Fires can exceed 1,400 degrees.
While researchers previously discovered that plastics could release benzene and other chemicals into the air during heating, this new study shows heat-damaged plastics can directly leach dozens of toxic chemicals into water.
What to Do About Contamination
A community can stop water contamination from spreading if damaged pipes can be quickly isolated. Without isolation, the contaminated water may move to other parts of the water system, across town or within a building, causing further contamination.
During the CZU Lightning Complex Fire near Santa Cruz, one water utility had water distribution system valves that seemed to have contained the benzene-contaminated water.
Rinsing heat-damaged pipes won't always remove the contamination. While helping Paradise, California, recover from the 2018 Camp Fire disaster, we and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that some plastic pipes would have required more than 100 days of nonstop water rinsing to be safe for use. Instead, officials decided to replace the pipes.
Even if a home is undamaged, we recommend testing the water in private wells and service lines if fire was on the property. If contamination is found, we recommend finding and removing the heat-damaged plastic contamination sources. Some plastics can slowly leach chemicals like benzene over time, and this could go on for months to years, depending on the scale of contamination and water use. Boiling the water doesn't help and can release benzene into the air.
Avoiding Widespread Contamination
Communities can take steps to avoid contaminated drinking water in the event of a fire. Water companies can install network isolation valves and backflow prevention devices, to prevent contaminated water moving from a damaged building into the utility pipe network.
Insurance companies can use pricing to encourage property owners and cities to install fire-resistant metal pipes instead of plastic. Rules for keeping vegetation away from meter boxes and buildings can also lessen the chance heat reaches plastic water system components.
Homeowners and communities rebuilding after fires now have more information about the risks as they consider whether to use plastic pipes. Some, like the town of Paradise, have chosen to rebuild with plastic and accept the risks. In 2020, the city had another wildfire scare and residents were forced to evacuate again.
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