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I love what you do, “but…” It’s what follows the “but” that kills us. People provide a vast array of reasons not to accept even minimal financial responsibility for this thing they say they love.
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17 April 21
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Jelani Cobb | Daunte Wright's Shooting and the Meaning of George Floyd's Death
Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
Cobb writes: "George Floyd Square, the intersection in Minneapolis where Floyd died, last May, features a mural that says 'You Changed the World, George.'"
How much has changed since the events of last spring?
eorge Floyd Square, the intersection in Minneapolis where Floyd died, last May, features a mural that says “You Changed the World, George.” And, in the eleven months since Floyd’s agonizing death, captured on video, we have seen changes ranging from mercenary corporate endorsements of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to personal reckonings with the role of race in American society as well as substantial legislative and policy changes regarding policing. But for Floyd’s death, New York City would likely not have unsealed the disciplinary records of more than eighty thousand police officers earlier this year. The biggest question surrounding this raft of changes has been whether it will translate into a decreased likelihood of Black people dying during routine interactions with law enforcement. In Minneapolis, a city already on edge because the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer accused of killing Floyd, is now in its third week there, the answer to that question, at least from the vantage point of the hundreds of people who have gathered outside the Brooklyn Center police station for the past two nights, is no.
On Sunday, a twenty-year-old named Daunte Wright was stopped near the intersection of Sixty-third and Lee Avenues in Brooklyn Center, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The reasons for the stop are in dispute: Wright’s mother, Katie, told a rally on Sunday evening that Daunte had called her when he was pulled over and said that it was because he had an air-freshener hanging from his rearview mirror (which is prohibited in Minnesota). On Monday, the police department suggested that there had been an issue with his registration tags. (On Tuesday, Benjamin Crump, a lawyer now representing the Wright family, noted a pandemic-related backlog in processing paperwork for license plates.) A young woman sat in the front passenger seat. During the stop, the police reportedly found that there was a warrant against Wright for two misdemeanors—involving a weapons-possession charge—which were issued after he had missed a court date. What is not in dispute is that Kim Potter, a twenty-six-year veteran of the police force, shouted “Taser!” as Wright struggled with an officer who was trying to remove him from his car, but she was actually holding a gun instead of a Taser, and fired a single bullet. (The police department later said that she had drawn the gun in error.) Wright drove off before losing consciousness and crashing several blocks away. He died at the scene. The young woman in the car was treated for non-life-threatening injuries at a hospital. Officer Potter resigned on Tuesday, as did Tim Gannon, the city’s chief of police.
On Sunday, at the rally, Joanie Shafer, a local photographer, highlighting the connections between Floyd and Wright, pointed out that Wright had called his mother on the phone when the officers pulled him over, and that Floyd had called out to his deceased mother as he himself was dying. The implication was that interactions with the police had become so fraught that grown men were enlisting the aid of their mothers, on earth or in the hereafter.
Among the various perspectives in the Twin Cities regarding the Chauvin trial, the police, and the significance of all that happened last spring and summer after Floyd’s death, there seems to be only one conclusion shared by residents across race, class, and social boundaries: that a failure to convict Derek Chauvin will lead to another eruption of violence in the area. On Sunday night, those predictions were turned on their heads, when it became clear that more violence was not contingent on a Chauvin acquittal.
About four hundred people, most but far from all of them Black, gathered to protest Wright’s death in front of the Humboldt Avenue police station, in Brooklyn Center. About sixty officers stood in formation outside the building, in riot gear. Around 11 P.M., some people in the crowd began throwing bricks, rocks, and garbage in the direction of the officers, who responded with tear gas. The winds shifted, though, and the gas blew away from the demonstration and back toward the police station. The crowd, which had begun to scatter, realized this, and surged forward. More rocks were thrown, followed by flash grenades and more tear gas, in a cycle that repeated until the police began firing rubber bullets into the crowd.
“They couldn’t even wait until the trial was over to kill somebody else,” one man told me. Wright’s death was not the only indictment of facile ideas of change. A video of Caron Nazario, a Black and Latino second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, showing him being pulled over by two police officers in Windsor, Virginia, last December, had surfaced a few days earlier. (There were no license plates on the new S.U.V. that Nazario was driving, but temporary ones were reportedly taped inside the rear window.) Nazario, who had placed his hands outside the window, to indicate that he had no weapon, told the officers, who had drawn their guns, that he was “honestly afraid to get out of the car.” In response, Nazario, who was in uniform, was pepper-sprayed and removed from his vehicle. (One of the officers involved, Joe Gutierrez, was fired on Sunday.) For all the anxiety about the Chauvin trial, it had almost become ambient noise in a tide of events that seemed to be a more accurate barometer of where things stand on matters of race and policing.
On Monday, the Twin Cities area imposed a curfew, from 7 P.M. to 6 A.M. A candlelight vigil for Wright, which had been scheduled for 7 P.M., was pushed up an hour, so as to not be in conflict with the order. Hundreds gathered at Sixty-third and Lee, many of them carrying electric votive candles, because a cold rain had drizzled all evening. A shrine of flowers was created down the street, where Wright died. The Twin Cities Relief Initiative, which provides food and services to people in need—and which began as the group Twin Cities Stand Together, established after Floyd’s death, to feed protesters and local families—set up a table and offered free hot dogs and bottled water. That gathering dispersed not long after the curfew took effect, but a young, more intransigent, portion of it reconvened at the Humboldt Avenue station house, where, about an hour later, clashes with the police erupted again. As this was happening, Crump, who now represents both the Wrights and the Floyds, was maneuvering to put the grieving families in contact. An emotional press conference with members of the two families—and of others, including Emmett Till’s—was held outside the Hennepin County Government Center, on Tuesday afternoon. Katie Wright, wrapped in a blanket but shivering in thirty-four-degree weather and snow flurries, stared at the ground. At one point, Philonise Floyd, George’s brother, leaned over and wrapped his arm around her, but the connections between their stories had already been secured in the public’s mind: they represented two installments in a serial American tragedy that no one wishes to see but is set to be replayed for the foreseeable future.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
A Worldwide Workers' Revolt Against Amazon Has Begun
Luis Feliz Leon, In These Times
Leon writes: "The union drive at Amazon's 885,000-square-foot warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed. But the historic campaign nabbed global headlines and added fuel to ongoing workers' revolts across the world."
Bessemer was just the beginning. Amazon workers from Italy to India are uniting to form a global movement that may have found Jeff Bezos’s Achilles heel.
he union drive at Amazon’s 885,000-square-foot warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed. But the historic campaign nabbed global headlines and added fuel to ongoing workers’ revolts across the world.
Strikes by Amazon workers in Italy, Germany and India are coalescing into an international struggle against the world’s fourth-most valuable company and its grueling working conditions and intensive surveillance.
Since the dawn of capitalism, bosses have found innovations to oversee and extract more work from the overstressed bodies of their labor force. But Amazon’s minute surveillance of workers — who, at the Bessemer facility, are mostly Black and women — would make the Stasi blush. At the company’s warehouses, workers use hand-held devices that track their every move and assess their speed and accuracy. What is particularly novel about Amazon, as Joe DeManuelle-Hall writes in the movement publication Labor Notes, is how it brings together productivity innovations to create a régime of terror on the shop floor, with pressures that infamously force workers to pee in bottles rather than take breaks.
Amazon, along with Walmart, its fiercest competitor, is the 21st century’s quintessential factory floor.
Blue-collar Amazon workers keep the cascade of goods around the world flowing; they are the muscle that fulfills consumer desire as it barrels down the arterial lanes of Ama zon .com. These ground logistics leave behind more than just pixel dust, wreaking devastating environmental havoc: a carbon footprint in the millions of metric tons, rivaling roughly the annual emissions of Norway.
Through the alchemy of supply chain management, the goods sold through Amazon — everything from PlayStations to yoga pants — travel via cargo vans, airplanes and ships across a global infrastructure of roads, skies and oceans on their voyage to customers’ doorsteps.
Like the 19th-century workers forging steel for Andrew Carnegie, refining oil for John D. Rockefeller or building cars for Henry Ford, Amazon workers are up against a titan of industry: Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world. Bezos took advantage of the new and unregulated terrain of e‑commerce to behave as ruthlessly as those titans of yore.
“Jeff Bezos and his crew of techies and quants simply did what robber barons have always done: Raise, spend and sometimes lose other people’s money, dodge taxes, swindle suppliers and avoid unions,” Kim Moody writes in the essay collection, The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy.
Now, understanding how critical they are to fulfilling Amazon’s promise of just-in-time delivery, Amazon workers are organizing for control of their workplaces. Their indispensability is their leverage to negotiate safer working conditions, dignity on the job and pay commensurate with the value they’ve produced: $21.33 billion in net income for Amazon in 2020 (a $9.7 billion increase during the pandemic) and $67.9 billion more for Bezos’ already obscene oodles of wealth.
And the spark ignited in Alabama is catching on. Perry Connelly, a 58-year-old Bessemer worker, says the union campaign received an outpouring of support from around the world. He realized that, by challenging Amazon in the South — a regional stronghold of anti-union fortification — “we’ll be making a huge difference not only in Alabama, but globally.”
A Global Resistance
Workers around the world — from Colombia to Nigeria to Myanmar — have expressed solidarity with Amazon’s workers in Alabama. When Italy’s largest labor federation, Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), went on strike March 22 at 15 Amazon warehouses (alongside other unions), workers carried a banner that read, “From Piacenza to Alabama — One Big Union.”
“Amazon workers in Europe understand that an organized workforce in the United States would be a gamechanger,” says Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, which has coordinated international Amazon worker actions.
Of Amazon’s estimated 1,538 facilities of all types worldwide, 290 are in Europe, 294 are in India, and 887 are in North America. The bulk of those are in the United States — with more on the way as Amazon expands into urban areas. (Amazon also has a smaller presence in Brazil, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.)
“The campaign in Bessemer has grabbed the globe’s imagination,” Hoffman says. “It is an inspiration to see workers in Amazon’s home country, in a hostile environment, stand up for change.”
In the United States, labor law largely favors employers, with rampant illegal infractions against collective bargaining rights common and punished by a slap on the wrist. Amazon has aggressively exploited this advantage to shut out unions, demanding nothing short of complete surrender from workers: “If workers became anything less than docile, managers were told, it was a sign there could be union activity,” according to a story in the New York Times. It doesn’t stop at union-busting. There’s also wage theft: Amazon was fined $61.7 million by the Federal Trade Commission for stealing tips from its drivers.
In Europe, Hoffman says, workers are covered by collective-bargaining agreements as part of sectoral bargaining, which enables unions to set standards for all employers in an industry, regardless of union membership at any one individual employer. But even with these safeguards in Europe, sectoral bargaining isn’t a panacea.
The Italian strike, for example, was mainly motivated to “[improve] the general working conditions of the subcontractors,” according to an email statement from Leopoldo Tartaglia, a representative of CGIL’s international department. Most subcontractors in Italy have union representation as part of national collective-bargaining agreements, but Amazon can still exploit loopholes, and self-employed drivers enter contractual relationships directly with Amazon.
“Amazon has always refused to discuss with unions the conditions of the subcontractors,” Tartaglia wrote.
The strike’s demands included a reduction in drivers’ workloads and hours, bargaining over shifts and scheduling, and compliance with pandemic-related health and safety regulations. The unions say 75% of Amazon’s 40,000 delivery workers in Italy participated (Amazon claims that figure was only 10%).
The strike snarled Amazon’s logistics operations, delayed deliveries for days and prompted the head of Italy’s Ministry of Labor and Social Policies to compel the company and the trade unions to negotiate.
Like Hoffman from the UNI Global Union, Tartaglia views organizing in the United States as critical to worker power at Amazon internationally. “International solidarity is in our DNA,” he wrote of Italy’s trade federations.
International efforts against Amazon have been building for some time. The UNI Global Union helped mobilize thousands of Amazon workers in four European countries to strike on Black Friday 2018. Like the workers in Alabama, their rallying cry was, “We are not robots!”
The grassroots organizing group Amazon Workers International, formed in 2015 in Germany, has brought workers together from six European Union countries. In 2020, under the banner of Make Amazon Pay, trade unions, warehouse workers and activists came together in an international coalition to coordinate strikes, work stoppages and protests in Bangladesh, India, Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, the U.K. and the United States.
“Amazon is able to build power by operating on a global level without opposition,” Casper Gelderblom, a Dutch trade unionist with Make Amazon Pay, told The Intercept in the fall of 2020. “We have to match the transnational scope of its organization with an internationalist strategy.”
Organizing at Amazon’s 233 U.S. fulfillment, supplemental and return centers and 404 delivery stations was long nascent at best, giving Amazon an enormous buffer against international coordination. But the union drive in Bessemer, the first at an Amazon facility since 2014, may signal a tipping point.
Pandemic Pandemonium
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has begun conversations with Amazon delivery drivers around the country, as it considers Amazon a drastic threat to the union jobs of its 1.4 million members. In Iowa, Teamsters are organizing hundreds of warehouse workers and drivers at Amazon distribution centers in Grimes and Iowa City. To avoid a drawn-out union election, they are threatening strikes to gain recognition.
More than 1,000 Amazon workers reached out to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) seeking to organize in early 2021 — galvanized by Bessemer — from Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland, Ore., Denver, Southern California and other localities. On Easter Sunday, 30 Amazon drivers in Rochester, N.Y., walked off the job.
“This is lighting a fuse, which I believe is going to spark an explosion of union organizing across the country, regardless of the results,” RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum told the Associated Press.
Pandemic-motivated concerns also accelerated efforts to form worker committees, with organizing in Chicago and New York serving as two prominent examples of bottom-up resistance.
Amazonians United, an autonomous, worker-led collective, formed in Chicago during a struggle for access to drinking water and air conditioning at Amazon’s delivery station DCH1 in April 2019. Amazonians United then used the leverage created by the pandemic to win paid time off for part-time warehouse workers.
They won these victories through shop floor action. Workers occupied managers’ offices, walked off the job and coordinated a blockade in which a caravan of community supporters prevented delivery vans from leaving the warehouse.
“When I say victories,” says a Chicano organizer with Amazonians United who goes by the nickname Zama, “Amazon never acknowledges our organizing as the reason for why it is that they made any change.” The company’s usual response, according to Zama, is that it was a problem management already had planned to change. “But we know it’s due to our actions,” Zama says.
These worker actions, even if small and isolated for now at least, are threatening because they are ultimately about workers seizing control. Amazon’s model of maximizing profits at all costs depends on the total submission of its workforce, cheap labor and complete domination of the workplace.
“That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon enterprise. The idea of surrendering it is the company’s greatest horror,” according to New York Times technology reporter David Streitfeld.
“We need more control over our work,” Zama says. “We need more say over how we do our work.”
He believes other Amazon warehouses can learn from the Chicago playbook of building up capacity to fight through small-issue campaigns, flexing their muscles to exert greater shop floor control. Through a sort of “propaganda of the deed,” workers across facilities in the United States have reached out for guidance, finding common cause with the workers in Chicago, and a shared experience of grueling working conditions.
“We’re sharing with fellow workers what we’re experiencing and how we’re resisting,” Zama says. These conversations, in turn, lead to organizing, or “guiding fellow workers [on] how to create basically their own Amazonians United at their own facility, through issue fights.”
In Queens, New York, Amazon worker Ira Pollock read news stories of Amazonians United in Chicago and Sacramento “fighting the boss to make changes in their warehouses.” Pollock and other workers formed an organizing committee and started using similar tactics, launching petitions for improvements on the job, marching on the boss to demand immediate changes, and building community to bind workers together as a fighting union. They staged two safety walkouts during the height of the pandemic and continue to organize new members.
The Queens workers were so effective that a former FBI agent attempted to intimidate and interrogate Amazon worker Jonathan Bailey, who led the walkouts.
Amazonians United has largely been focused on delivery centers — the last layover on a product’s trip from fulfillment center to customer delivery and the linchpin in Amazon’s last-mile logistics chain. Packages that arrive at a delivery station must be turned around the same day. Many are “cross-docked,” a model Amazon borrowed from Walmart, in which “goods move in one door and out another without being racked or stored,” as Kim Moody explains in The Cost of Free Shipping.
That last mile in the logistics chain represents a key site of disruption. Worker slowdowns and sabotage could throw the whole just-in-time delivery service into disarray.
“We are crucial to Amazon’s ability to deliver on its promises to its consumers,” Pollock says. “We have a decent amount of power in terms of whether or not it can fulfill those operations. So our goal is to use that power as workers to bring Amazon to the table and negotiate over our working conditions.
“We also recognize we can’t do it at just one warehouse. So we need to grow.”
The Power of a Click
Amazon has addicted its consumers to speedy fulfillment. More than 150 million people subscribe to Amazon Prime, jonesing for the convenience of one-day delivery.
One of them is former New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. In a 2008 panegyric, “Put Buyers First? What a Concept,” Nocera swoons over Amazon’s ability to deliver on-time packages Christmas Day. In a good set piece for workers to read aloud at picket lines, Nocera effusively reports on the company’s rush to replace a PlayStation 3, his son’s Christmas present, that went missing from his doorstep after delivery. He called Amazon customer service December 21, and workers delivered a “little Christmas miracle” Christmas Eve.
Let’s use Nocera’s order to illustrate how Amazon’s delivery network operates. We can follow the likely path of the PlayStation by drawing from the essays in The Cost of Free Shipping, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, which describes Amazon’s delivery process in detail.
After Nocera placed his Amazon Prime order, the delivery process kicked off at an Amazon fulfillment center, one of three basic categories of Amazon warehouses. At the fulfillment center, a worker picked the PlayStation and packed it into a box with a shipping label.
Then the box went to the next type of Amazon warehouse — a sortation center — where it was sorted. It was then transported to the third kind of Amazon warehouse, an Amazon delivery center, where the U.S. Postal Service took it the last mile to Nocera’s doorstep. Today, the package would more likely be delivered by Amazon Flex (independent contractors) or Amazon Delivery Service Partners (a third-party contractor that hires its own workers).
This delivery process relies on seamless, interlocking networks of warehouses and logistic operations.
“They’ve got to be able to fulfill these package orders to different parts of the country,” Joshua Brewer, RWDSU’s lead organizer, says about Amazon’s model. “It’s very similar to the automotive supply chains of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Those [plants] couldn’t afford to have kinks.”
Back in 1936, workers at General Motors recognized the leverage they had in Flint, Mich., and Cleveland, with a sit-down strike against the world’s largest company. GM, with 250,000 workers, was “not big but colossal,” according to Fortune magazine, which described the company as “the world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.”
GM plants, like Amazon warehouses, were sites of dismal working conditions. “Where you used to be a man … now you are less than their cheapest tool,” one Chevrolet worker said.
“We didn’t even have time to go to the toilet … if there wasn’t anybody to relieve you,” one Buick worker complained.
Like Amazon, GM’s power seemed supreme. But organizers with the United Auto Workers (UAW) identified a key point of leverage: a vulnerability in the supply chain in Flint and Cleveland, where GM stamped out auto bodies and parts for Chevy, Buick, Pontiac and Oldsmobile.
“We knew that if we could tie up these two shops, then General Motors would come to a halt,” said Wyndham Mortimer, a leading UAW organizer.
The six-week sit-down concluded February 11, 1937, and brought GM to the bargaining table, setting the stage for the UAW to become one of the most powerful unions in the country.
The key, then, to defeating Amazon’s oppressive work system may very well rest on chokepoints like the delivery stations, where workers are as indispensable now as the autoworkers in Flint and Cleveland were 84 years ago.
But no single delivery station has the power to bring Amazon to a halt. Coordination across the United States and globally would be necessary. Some labor experts and organizers see a more recent precedent for this kind of coordination in the solidarity actions of dock workers’ unions.
“Just as the labor movement has been successful in organizing on the waterfront by employing internationalist strategies to slow the flow of marine cargo, similar strategies can block or delay the flow of Amazon deliveries,” according to Peter Olney, retired organizing director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and union organizer Rand Wilson in The Cost of Free Shipping.
A 2000 strike by longshore workers in Charleston, S.C., offers an example. International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 organized a picket in protest of a shipping line at the docks using non-union labor. The largely Black workforce faced off against state troopers who had helicopters and armored personnel. That battle drew support from longshore workers on the West Coast, who fundraised to free the jailed Charleston workers. And “that kind of solidarity effort caught the eyes of Spanish dockworkers,” recalls longshore worker Leonard Riley, now 68. “They said, ‘If their ships were [using] non-union labor in South Carolina, they weren’t going to unload them in Spain.’ ”
The solidarity action in Spain was decisive in the dock workers’ victory. They brought the rogue non-union shipping line back to the negotiating table.
“Charleston, South Carolina, was one of the major places that imported slaves,” Riley says, reflecting on the win. “We were once the cargo on those ships. But now we control the shipping on those ships — thanks to workers’ organizing.”
Internationalism and the disruption of delivery stations are complementary strategies. When German workers went on strike in 2013, for instance, Amazon opened three fulfillment centers across the border in Poland. To combat Amazon’s union-busting tactics, workers must leave Amazon no safe harbor to divide and exploit workers.
Delivering the Future
Sometimes, internationalism is built into the composition of the labor force itself. Just as Amazon moves around the world — threatening to conquer every node in the global supply chain and drive rivals out of business — so, too, have displaced workers moved with it. That highly mobile workforce Amazon helped create may very well lend strategic leverage for workers to unite and fight the hegemon.
Julián Andrés Marval Arrue, a native of Venezuela, began working for Amazon in 2012 in Germany as a “picker,” Amazon’s term for a warehouse worker who picks items from coded shelves and places them in a bin for shipping preparations. Marval Arrue worked alongside immigrants from Turkey, Russia, Pakistan and Poland. In Germany, he says, the workplace protections were strong and managers were forbidden from stringently enforcing productivity quotas.
But when Marval Arrue began working for Amazon in Spain in 2016, he encountered crushing workloads and abusive supervisors. One manager would “smash boxes if they weren’t prepared to his taste,” he says.
These experiences led Marval Arrue to become a union representative with Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras, or Workers’ Commissions, the largest trade union in Spain. He got involved in international solidarity forums with Amazon workers across Europe and the United States.
“To hear all those stories,” Marval Arrue says, reflecting on the struggles of his U.S. counterparts. “That there were double shifts, people weren’t given masks, no temperature checks, no disinfectant gel” — these gruesome realities drove home a unifying consensus, from Spain to the United States, that “one of the most profitable companies wouldn’t care about its workers.”
“[As long] as not all Amazon warehouses are unionized … the company takes advantage of that and does whatever they want with overtime, working schedules and over-demanding productivity rates,” Marval Arrue says.
“We never have to lose sight of what we can manage if we unite.”
A police officer. (photo: iStock)
Justice Department Rolls Back Restrictions on Forcing Local Police Reforms
David Nakamura, The Washington Post
Nakamura writes: "Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday rescinded a Trump-era near-ban on the Justice Department's use of consent decrees to force the restructuring of local law enforcement agencies, signaling a push from the Biden administration to resume use of the tactic amid a continued outcry from liberal groups about abusive policing."
In a four-page memo to Justice Department staffers, Garland said he would rescind the 2018 order from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that aimed to drastically limit the use of the settlement agreements with local police agencies.
Under Garland’s memo, Justice Department lawyers who are leading the litigation, including the assistant attorneys general or U.S. attorneys, will be authorized to approve the consent decrees.
“It is done so because they are the Department officials most familiar with and best able to assess each particular case,” Garland wrote.
The move comes amid the high-profile trial of Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who is facing charges of murder and manslaughter in the case of George Floyd, a Black man who died while being arrested in May 2020. Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground for more than nine minutes with a knee to his neck.
Mass protests ensued in cities across the country, led by the Black Lives Matter movement, which has pushed to “defund the police.” Garland and several of his potential deputies, who await Senate approval of their nominations, have promised to renew the focus on curbing abusive policing, although they have stopped short of supporting the idea of defunding police departments.
The Justice Department can use consent decrees with local jurisdictions to avoid litigation on matters including policing, education, fair housing, sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, and voting rights. In some cases, a monitor is appointed to oversee compliance, and the agreements typically allow for federal enforcement if the terms are breached by localities.
During the Obama administration, the Justice Department entered into consent decrees 15 times with local police agencies, including in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans. The George W. Bush administration used consent decrees three times.
But Sessions sought to severely restrict their use, saying they harm morale in police departments. He issued his order in one of his final acts in office before being fired by President Donald Trump.The Trump administration did not enter into a single consent decree in its four years, and it moved to undermine existing agreements, including pulling out of a pact the Justice Department had been on the verge of signing with Chicago police in 2017.
“It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage nonfederal law enforcement agencies,” Sessions wrote.
Jonathan Smith, who oversaw the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in the Obama administration, called Garland’s action a “tremendous step forward” and said consent decrees helped improve troubled police departments.
Yet he acknowledged limits to the department’s powers to force sweeping cultural reforms.
“In order to fix these departments, you don’t just need a few new policies. You need sustained compliance over a long period of time, and consent decrees are the only thing that can do that,” said Smith, now executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
“But the one thing you have to remember is that a consent decree is designed for a very specific purpose: to make police departments comply with the Constitution and the law,” Smith said. “There are a lot of things the Constitution permits the police to do that the community might not want them to do. Consent decrees do not get to that.”
Critics of consent decrees, including some police union leaders, have cited a rise in crimes in some cities. But studies have shown that such increases are temporary. A review of such agreements by researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas found that the number of civil rights lawsuits decreased in some jurisdictions operating under such agreements.
Community activists have expressed frustration over what they say is the agreements’ failure to do more to rein in abusive officers.
In Seattle, the police department entered into a consent agreement with the Justice Department in 2012 after a federal investigation determined that Seattle officers had frequently used excessive force with few consequences. More than eight years later, the department is still operating under federal oversight, despite initially having been found to be in compliance with the agreement in 2018.
Community activist Kevin Schofield wrote last summer that the Seattle Police Department has made significant progress in reducing its officers’ use of force. But he said that force continues to be used at disproportionately higher levels against racial minorities, particularly African Americans.
“While a lot of good came out of the reforms driven by the consent decree, the underlying problems have not been exorcised; many have simply been papered over with bureaucracy,” he wrote. “The consent decree didn’t do what we had hoped it would do. The structural racism, biased policing practices, and overpolicing continue; we’ve just made them harder to see.”
Garland’s incoming leadership team appears poised to quickly resume the use of the agreements. Vanita Gupta, whom President Biden nominated to oversee the civil division as associate attorney general, sharply criticized the Trump administration as having “completely gutted” police reform efforts. Gupta, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, helped negotiate several consent decrees while serving as acting director of the department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration.
In an interview last year, Gupta said: “The consent decrees are not perfect, because there is no perfect mechanism for the kind of change that’s required. But they’re the best thing that exists.”
Similarly, Kristen Clarke, who is awaiting a Senate vote to run the department’s civil rights division, slammed Sessions for seeking to ban consent decrees. At the time of his order, she was serving as president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and issued a statement arguing that such agreements “serve as an important tool for resolving conflicts without subjecting the parties to long, protracted and costly litigation.”
A demonstrator holds a sign with the image of Breonna Taylor. (photo: Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images)
Simon & Schuster Reverses, Won't Distribute Book by Officer in Breonna Taylor Raid
Rachel Treisman, NPR
Treisman writes: "Simon & Schuster has scrapped its plans to distribute a book written by one of the Louisville police officers who shot Breonna Taylor, after news of its publication ignited widespread criticism."
Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was not charged over his involvement in the botched narcotics raid that killed the 26-year-old Black woman last March. His plans to publish a book about the case were revealed Thursday by the Louisville Courier-Journal, which it said learned of them after he contacted a staff photographer seeking to use a photo from last year's protests.
The book will be titled "The Fight For Truth: The Inside Story Behind the Breonna Taylor Tragedy" and is set to be released in the fall, the Courier-Journal reported.
It will be edited and published by Post Hill Press, a Tennessee-based company that says it focuses on "pop culture, business, self-help, health, current events, Christian, and conservative political books." Some of its high-profile clients include conservative commentator Dan Bongino, far-right activist Laura Loomer and embattled congressman Matt Gaetz.
A publicist for Post Hill Press told the Associated Press in a statement that the publishing house supports its authors' free speech rights and that Mattingly "deserves to have his account of the tragic events heard publicly."
But news of the book deal angered scores of critics, who said they viewed it as an attempt to seek fame and profit off of Taylor's name.
"People love to profit off of Black pain and tragedy. It sells," tweeted Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott.
Many took to social media to call out Simon & Schuster, and an online petition urging the company to cancel its distribution deal has garnered more than 34,000 signatures.
The company had suggested earlier on Thursday that it could not refuse Post Hill titles, according to the AP, but reversed course that night.
"Like much of the American public, earlier today Simon & Schuster learned of plans by distribution client Post Hill Press to publish a book by Jonathan Mattingly," it said in a statement. "We have subsequently decided not to be involved in the distribution of this book."
Post Hill Press is moving forward with its plans to publish the book, a publicist confirmed to NPR over email on Friday morning.
"His story is important and it deserves to be heard by the public at large," she wrote. "We feel strongly that an open dialogue is essential to shining a light on the challenging issues our country is facing."
Mattingly's role in the raid
Mattingly was one of two officers that fired into Taylor's apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020. Taylor — whose name has since become a rallying cry at protests against police brutality and racial injustice — was not a target of the fatal raid, and the suspect police were searching for was not present. None of the officers involved have been directly charged over Taylor's death.
Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a warning shot after mistaking the entering officers for intruders. It struck Mattingly in the leg, at which point he and then-detective Myles Cosgrove returned fire.
The FBI later determined that Mattingly had fired six times. Cosgrove fired 16, they said, including the shot that killed Taylor. A grand jury declined to bring charges against the two last fall, with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron saying they were "justified in their return of deadly fire."
A third officer, Brett Hankison, was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment over shooting into neighboring apartments. He was terminated from the force in June, and Cosgrove — along with another detective who sought the warrant on Taylor's apartment — was officially fired in January.
Taylor's boyfriend, Walker — against whom all charges over the night of the raid have been dropped — filed a civil lawsuit against the city and police department last fall. Mattingly filed a countersuit one month later, accusing Walker of committing battery, assault and intentional emotional distress.
Mattingly remains on the force, which has cleared him of any wrongdoing. The AP reports he was reprimanded last month for violating the department's email policy by sending an email critical of leadership to all officers in September, in which he reportedly wrote that those involved in the raid "did the legal, moral and ethical thing."
He is also the only officer involved in the raid to speak publicly about it in the year since.
In an October interview with ABC News and the Courier-Journal, Mattingly said his family had received death threats and had to go into hiding. He also described the raid as "not a race thing like people try to make it to be."
Across the country, protesters took to the streets last summer to demand justice and accountability for Taylor and other Black Americans killed and injured by law enforcement, including George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and Jacob Blake. A fresh wave of demonstrations is unfolding now over the police killings of Daunte Wright in Minnesota and Adam Toledo in Illinois.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/AP/Shutterstock)
The Supreme Court Hears a Case Next Week That Could Make Citizens United Even Worse
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court will hear a major case on April 26 that could fundamentally alter the Court's approach to laws requiring political organizations to disclose their donors - a change that could make it much easier for big spenders to hide the ways they seek to influence policy and elections."
The Court’s new majority could make it much easier for big spenders to influence American politics in secret.
he Supreme Court will hear a major case on April 26 that could fundamentally alter the Court’s approach to laws requiring political organizations to disclose their donors — a change that could make it much easier for big spenders to hide the ways they seek to influence policy and elections.
That case is Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Rodriquez. But to fully understand it, it’s important to keep in mind the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010).
Citizens United is best known for its anti-canonical holding that corporations may spend unlimited money to influence elections. While five of the justices who heard Citizens United voted to dismantle much of the nation’s campaign finance laws, eight justices also voted that the government has fairly broad authority to require advocacy groups to disclose major funders of their political activity.
Disclosure requirements should be upheld, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court, so long as there is “a ‘substantial relation’ between the disclosure requirement and a ‘sufficiently important’ governmental interest.”
A lot has changed since Citizens United tucked this pro-disclosure ruling into its broader ruling against campaign finance limits, however. Four of the eight justices who supported disclosure rules have since left the Court, and three of them were replaced by judges who are significantly more conservative than the person they replaced.
Which brings us to Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The plaintiffs in the case — which include a conservative advocacy group closely associated with the billionaire Koch brothers, and the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative law firm that claims it was formed to promote “America’s Judeo-Christian heritage” — seek to undercut pro-disclosure decisions such as Citizens United. And, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, they have a very good chance of prevailing.
The specific issue in Americans for Prosperity is fairly far afield of the foundational questions about money in politics that animated Citizens United. The plaintiffs challenge a California regulation that requires charities that wish to raise tax-deductible funds in California to disclose their largest contributors to the state attorney general’s office. State regulations require the attorney general to keep this information confidential from the public, but the attorney general’s office may use it to investigate allegations of fraud by nonprofits.
The Americans for Prosperity plaintiffs claim that this disclosure regulation is unconstitutional, and they rely largely on doctrines created to prevent civil rights organizations from having to disclose their donors to Jim Crow government officials in the 1950s and ’60s.
There are difficult questions underlying Americans for Prosperity. If you are inclined to be unsympathetic to a Koch-aligned group that wants to keep its donors secret, imagine a very similar case where Texas required Planned Parenthood to disclose its donors to the state attorney general’s office. Would you have confidence that no one in that office would leak the names of those donors to Tucker Carlson?
But the Court has also spent the past 60 years striking a careful balance between the public’s interest in requiring charities and advocacy groups to disclose where they get their money, and the groups’ interest in making sure that their donors are not harassed, intimidated, or attacked by people who loathe a particular group and what it stands for.
Americans for Prosperity gives the Court’s very conservative majority an opportunity to rework this balance. And those justices could allow political groups to operate with far more secrecy, allowing wealthy donors to shape American politics in the shadows.
Why the First Amendment imposes some limits on mandatory disclosure laws
In the mid-1950s, an Alabama court ordered the NAACP, which was then the preeminent organization fighting segregation in the Jim Crow South, to turn over a full list of its members to the state attorney general — and then imposed a $100,000 fine on the NAACP if it did not comply.
Had the NAACP complied, it could have placed those members in grave danger. State officials could have turned over the list of members to the Ku Klux Klan. Or they may have disclosed them to racist employers who could have fired the NAACP’s members and blacklisted them from obtaining future employment.
The Alabama court’s order, in other words, was a fairly transparent effort to shut down the NAACP’s operations in Alabama, either by terrorizing the organization’s members or by imposing crippling fines on the NAACP. The $100,000 fine imposed by the state court was roughly the equivalent of a $1 million fine in today’s dollars.
Ultimately, however, this scheme did not succeed. In NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958), a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that Alabama could not force the NAACP to disclose its members, given the obvious danger to those members if their names were disclosed.
“We think that the production order, in the respects here drawn in question, must be regarded as entailing the likelihood of a substantial restraint upon the exercise by petitioner’s members of their right to freedom of association,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for his Court. He added that the NAACP had made “an uncontroverted showing” that “revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.”
NAACP was an extreme case, and the plaintiffs in Americans for Prosperity do not allege anything that even vaguely resembles the kind of abuse and intimidation that NAACP members faced in the Jim Crow South. As a lower court that upheld California’s disclosure law explained, an executive with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation “described two individuals who, she believed, stopped supporting the Foundation in light of actual or feared retaliation by the IRS,” and another donor who “did business with the Government” said that he and his associates “did not feel like they could take on the risk of continuing to give to us.”
Similarly, the Thomas More Law Center “introduced a letter from a contributor who chose to make a $25 contribution anonymously out of fear that ISIS would break into the Law Center’s office, obtain a list of contributors and target them.”
Unlike the NAACP in the 1950s, in other words, the Americans for Prosperity plaintiffs largely raise speculative fears that, by disclosing their major donors to one government agency, that information may somehow — in violation of California state regulations — wind up in the hands of another agency, which might target those donors. (Or, in the case of the law center, that the donor information might wind up being discovered by a terrorist organization located on the other side of the globe, which will then target American donors to the law center.)
That said, the plaintiffs do have some basis to fear that some of their donor information might accidentally be disclosed to the public. An expert witness hired by Americans for Prosperity was able to hack the state’s website and uncover confidential donor information — although this security hole has since been plugged — and clerical workers in the California attorney general’s office once accidentally made a small fraction of the office’s confidential records public.
The plaintiffs fear that, had their donor information become widely available to the public through a similar error, then those donors might be harassed or their businesses might be boycotted.
The core question in Americans for Prosperity is whether this fear that an inadvertent disclosure might happen and that such a disclosure might lead to consequences for donors is sufficient reason to invoke constitutional protections intended to shield organizations like the NAACP in the Jim Crow era.
How the Court currently approaches mandatory disclosure laws
Under current precedents, the Supreme Court uses two sorting mechanisms to help it identify which disclosure laws should be struck down.
The first is a balancing test described in Citizens United. Under that test, a disclosure law should be upheld if there is “a ‘substantial relation’ between the disclosure requirement and a ‘sufficiently important’ governmental interest.” Thus, Alabama’s attempt to obtain the NAACP’s members list was invalid, because the only “interest” that Alabama sought to advance when it sought this list was undermining the NAACP.
By contrast, a federal appeals court upheld California’s disclosure rule because, by obtaining information about major donors to nonprofit organizations, the state advanced its important interest in determining “whether a charity is actually engaged in a charitable purpose, or is instead violating California law by engaging in self-dealing, improper loans, or other unfair business practices.”
As California explains in its brief to the Supreme Court, the state’s disclosure rule “helps state regulators detect whether a charity is misusing charitable assets, such as by diverting funds for a donor’s personal enrichment.” A businessman might, for example, make a tax-deductible “donation” to a nonprofit organization, which immediately turns around and hires that businessman’s company as a “consultant” — thus allowing the businessman to take a fraudulent tax deduction without actually contributing anything to charity.
The second mechanism that the Court uses to sort through challenges to disclosure laws is that it ordinarily requires such challenges to be brought on an “as applied” basis, a mechanism that allows courts to pay special attention to the specific facts of an individual case.
Courts distinguish between “facial” challenges, which allege that a law is invalid in all circumstances and must cease to operate altogether, and “as applied” challenges, which allege that the law is only unconstitutional when applied to a particular plaintiff. Thus, if a plaintiff prevails in a facial challenge, the challenged law can no longer be enforced against anyone. But if a plaintiff prevails in an as-applied challenge, the government may still be able to enforce the challenged law against other parties.
As-applied challenges are the preferred mechanism to challenge a disclosure law because such a challenge typically hinges on the particular impact of that law on a particular plaintiff. In Americans for Prosperity, for example, the plaintiffs allege that they engage in unpopular political work that makes their donors unusually vulnerable to harassment and intimidation. But the same cannot be said about most nonprofits — it is highly unlikely, for example, that donors to the March of Dimes would be harassed if their donations became public knowledge.
Thus, when a party challenges a particular disclosure law, courts will often ask whether that individual party should be exempted from the law, rather than striking down the law on its face. In Citizens United, for example, the Court explained that a facial challenge to certain campaign finance disclosure laws was inappropriate, but “as-applied challenges would be available if a group could show a ‘reasonable probability’ that disclosure of its contributors’ names ‘will subject them to threats, harassment, or reprisals from either Government officials or private parties.’”
Nevertheless, the plaintiffs in Americans for Prosperity bring a facial challenge to California’s disclosure law. They also claim that the balancing test described in Citizens United should be abandoned in favor of something much more skeptical of disclosure laws.
How Americans for Prosperity might change disclosure laws
Though there are some important differences between the argument in the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s brief and the Thomas More Law Center’s brief, both argue that Citizens United’s relatively permissive rule governing disclosure laws should be, in the words of the former brief, “confined to election regulation.” Thus, while the government may be able to require advocacy groups to disclose their donors when those groups attempt to influence an election, disclosure laws enacted in any other context would be treated as more suspect.
Most disclosure laws, the plaintiffs claim, must be “narrowly tailored” to serve the purpose of that law. Thus, they argue, the California law should fall because the state could use less intrusive methods to investigate fraudulent nonprofits, such as only subpoenaing records from charities that are under investigation.
The state, for its part, argues that relying on subpoenas is not enough, in part because subpoenas tip off a fraudulent organization that it is under investigation. But there’s also a much more fundamental problem with the plaintiffs’ attempts to draw a line between election-related disclosure laws and laws that do not touch on elections — the border between “issue” advocacy and election-related advocacy is notoriously porous.
Before Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate sending on elections, for example, lawmakers struggled to draw a sensible line between “issue” ads — ads intended to inform voters about a policy-related matter — and “electioneering communications,” which sought to influence an election. If an advocacy group runs an ad saying “tell Congressman Smith that he was wrong to vote for Obamacare,” for example, is that ad merely educating voters about a policy matter, or does it seek to undermine Smith’s reelection bid? What if the ad also praises Smith’s opponent for opposing Obamacare? What if the ad runs a week before the election?
The plaintiffs’ proposed rule could very easily allow advocacy groups to evade disclosure rules that apply to election ads and similar communications with voters, so long as those communications superficially appear to focus on “issues.”
Conservatives weren’t always so skeptical of disclosure laws
Ultimately, cases like Americans for Prosperity come down to a question of values. Should donors who wish to spend gobs of money influencing public policy be allowed to do so anonymously? And if we think that the answer to this question typically should be no, at what point should we give special protections to donors who face harassment, boycotts, or worse?
In Doe v. Reed (2010), a case about whether the public should be allowed to learn who signed a petition seeking to call a referendum on a state law, Justice Antonin Scalia offered a bracing answer to these questions:
Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . . . and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.
“Harsh criticism, short of unlawful action,” Scalia added, “is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance.”
There do have to be some limits on the government’s power to require advocacy groups to disclose their donors — NAACP presents a particularly stark example of why. And if either of the plaintiffs in Americans for Prosperity has evidence that their donors face a serious risk of illegal reprisals, then they should be allowed to bring an as-applied challenge to disclosure laws that endanger those donors.
But the Americans for Prosperity plaintiffs ask for much more. They ask for a fundamental shift in how the Court approaches disclosure laws. And, while they concede that there may still be campaign disclosure laws in the elections context, it’s far from clear that the Court will draw a sensible line between issue-related advocacy and election advocacy.
The views that Scalia expressed in Doe represent a confident conservatism — a conservatism that believes it can win the hearts and minds of the nation through open debate. But that brand of conservatism has been replaced by something far more insecure, and far more fearful of a frequently overblown “cancel culture” that is ready to pounce on anyone brazen enough to express a conservative viewpoint.
Americans for Prosperity will be an early sign of just how far this new, far more insecure conservatism has penetrated into the Supreme Court.
A man holds a gun in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (photo: Orlando Sierra/Getty Images)
US-Made Guns Are Ripping Central America Apart and Driving Migration North
Ioan Grillo, Guardian UK
Grillo writes: "The stray bullet from the gang fight struck Katery Ramos when she was 12 years old, playing on the dirt street in the poor Planeta neighborhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. 'I was standing up for a moment, afterwards I fell,' she told me, sitting with her mother in a scrubby field near her home."
An iron river of illegal guns flows from the US to Mexico, Central America, and across the hemisphere
he stray bullet from the gang fight struck Katery Ramos when she was 12 years old, playing on the dirt street in the poor Planeta neighbourhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. “I was standing up for a moment, afterwards I fell,” she told me, sitting with her mother in a scrubby field near her home.
The bullet entered just above her waist and didn’t hurt, she said. But when she arrived at the hospital, the doctor announced that it had cut through her spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down and would never walk again. Her school had no wheelchair ramps, so she left and spent her days at home lying down and watching television.
I interviewed Ramos in 2017, two years after she was shot, while researching the wider effect of gun violence in Central America. In April last year, she got ulcers linked to the paralysis, which caused blood poisoning, and she died.
Her tragedy cuts to two polarizing issues in the United States: guns and refugees. These debates are not normally connected, but the Biden administration needs to look at them together to find solutions.
An iron river of illegal guns flows from the US to Mexico, Central America, and across the hemisphere, helping make the Americas the world’s most homicidal region, with 47 of the world’s 50 most murderous cities. Thousands flee violence in the Northern Triangle of Central America - Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – and seek asylum in the US, adding to the pressure of undocumented migrants.
I researched gun trafficking for four years for my book Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. In the process I traveled from the biggest firearms trade show in the world, in Las Vegas, to the open air drug markets of Baltimore, to the mass graves of Mexico. The investigation left me staggered by the scale of the trafficking and by America’s political failure to take basic measures to stop it.
Between 2007 and 2019, more than 179,000 firearms were captured in Mexico and five Central American countries and traced to gun shops and gun factories in the United States. Mexico’s foreign ministry believes this is the tip of the iceberg, and estimates that more than two million guns crossed the Rio Grande over the last decade.
The weapons originate in the legal US gun market – the biggest in the world by far, with 393 million firearms in civilian hands, according to the last count. They then cross into a parallel black market through four main methods: a private sale loophole; straw buyers (people with clean records paid to buy guns); theft from gun shops; and the sale of parts to make un-serialized weapons, or “ghost guns”.
Traffickers take these guns from states with looser laws, such as Virginia and Georgia, to cities with stricter laws, including Washington and New York, which are suffering from sharp increases in gun violence. They also smuggle them south to Mexico, over the 2,000-mile border, hidden in cars and trucks.
In Florida, smugglers stash firearms in cargo ships that sail across the Caribbean and far beyond. “You go to a shipper and you drop off a box and you say what’s in there, ‘household goods.’ They don’t care,” said Steve Barborini, a former agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. For US guns, this is a common route to Honduras.
Various causes drive people from their homes in Central America, including extreme poverty and drought linked to climate change. But violence is a major factor, with asylum claims by Central Americans often citing attacks by gun-toting criminals.
In the town of Tenosique, Mexico, I met Honduran asylum seeker Francis Gusman, 32, who had also been shot and paralyzed by a stray bullet. Her husband and a friend took turns carrying her along a 36-mile road from the Guatemalan border. In Tijuana, I met another Honduran, David Maldonado, 31, a builder; gang members shot him in each leg for being in the wrong territory and said if they saw him again they would kill him.
In 2019 and 2020, more than 70,000 people arrived at the US’s southern border to apply for asylum, despite the Trump administration forcing them to wait in dangerous Mexican border towns, where they suffered further extortion and kidnapping. Those from Honduras were the highest number.
In February, Joe Biden ended the policy of making asylum seekers remain in Mexico. Thousands have since gone into the US to wait for their court dates. But more asylum seekers keep arriving, alongside a surge in people trying to cross illegally over the river and deserts between the border posts, putting mounting pressure on the president.
Biden has promised to reduce the root causes of immigration with a $4bn aid package for Central America. He should also act against the gun trafficking that drives the bloodshed. He could do this by supporting legislation to stop the private sale loophole, introduce federal rules on security of gun shops to reduce theft, and make it harder for criminals to acquire ghost guns; bills aimed at all of this have already been filed and Biden made a promising start of support for change with his announcement on guns on 8 April. More serious punishments for straw buyers could also have a substantial effect.
Clamping down on gun trafficking would also ameliorate violence in US cities and the relentless cartel warfare in Mexico, which refugees flee from as well. But as long as the US allows an iron river of guns to flood south, a river of refugees will keep pouring north.
A black-tip shark. (photo: SharkSider)
Sharks on a Knife's Edge as Maldives Mulls Lifting 10-Year Fishing Ban
Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay
Claire Alberts writes: "It's not easy to find sharks these days. Just ask Demian Chapman, a marine scientist who leads Global FinPrint, a project that assesses shark populations on reefs worldwide. But he says there is a spot where they're often found: the Maldives, a tiny nation of islands speckled in the Indian Ocean."
t’s not easy to find sharks these days. Just ask Demian Chapman, a marine scientist who leads Global FinPrint, a project that assesses shark populations on reefs worldwide. But he says there is a spot where they’re often found: the Maldives, a tiny nation of islands speckled in the Indian Ocean.
“The Maldives is a place where we drop cameras, and we see sharks frequently, which really is very unusual,” Chapman told Mongabay in an interview. “You know, most places we drop cameras and see nothing [or] one shark or two sharks, but then the Maldives is pretty consistent.”
Sharks are plentiful in the Maldives thanks to a 90,000-square-kilometer (34,750-square-mile) shark sanctuary — that’s about three times as big as Belgium — set up in 2010 with a blanket ban on shark fishing and finning. But conservationists say these advances are now under threat as the Maldivian government considers lifting its 11-year shark-fishing ban.
In a parliamentary committee discussion in late March, fisheries minister Zaha Waheed said talks were underway to open a managed shark fishery, which would help boost the economy.
Shaha Hashim, chairperson of Maldives Resilient Reefs and project manager for the Blue Marine Foundation, said lifting the ban would have “devastating consequences” for local shark populations.
“[Sharks] are easy to overfish due to their biological nature,” Hashim told Mongabay in an email. “[They’re] long-lived, late to mature, [and have] long gestational periods and low productivity. The Maldives has never been successful in managing the shark fishery, so a managed shark fishery is just not feasible because of poor enforcement and monitoring as it is.”
News of the Maldives potentially lifting the shark-fishing ban has garnered local and international attention. More than 200 organizations formed an alliance to show their support for maintaining the country’s shark sanctuary.
“From a conservation standpoint, it’d be much easier for us to put this incredible pressure on the government not to lift this ban now, rather than allow this ban to be lifted, and then have to fight tooth and nail to get a ban reinstated,” Simon Hilbourne, a researcher at the Manta Trust, one of the organizations in the alliance, told Mongabay in an interview.
Chapman, an associate professor in the biology department at Florida International University (FIU), says setting up a sustainable shark fishery would be difficult, requiring a lot of time, effort and financial resources to implement. He added that very few nations have managed to do so.
“The odds are good that you’d experience declines, and these declines could well lead to local extinctions, so that the Maldives would look a lot more like some of these other countries in the western Indian Ocean [where sharks are scarce],” he said. “You could certainly see that happening without any sort of major, major investment to manage those fisheries.”
Tourism is considered the most significant economic sector in the Maldives, accounting for about 30% of its annual gross domestic product. And according to many experts, sharks play a crucial role in attracting visitors.
Chapman says he thinks tourism numbers would drop substantially if shark fishing were allowed to recommence.
“It wouldn’t take much shark fishing to deplete the numbers to the point where divers just wouldn’t really see sharks [in the water], and they might actually be more likely to see sharks dead on a beach or in a market,” he said.
A 2018 study found that protected shark populations in the Maldives increased demand for scuba diving by 15%, and even produced about $6 million in tourism revenue for the Maldivian economy. It also found that declining shark populations and the presence of illegal fishing during dive trips could decrease dive tourism by up to 56%, and result in an economic loss of about $24 million each year.
“The question becomes, if Maldives was to open the shark fishery, could they do that and hit that really, really low target?” Chapman said. “And then the second question is — is it worth it to make all those investments to jeopardize the tourism industry?”
There are about 30 species of sharks in the Maldives, ranging from vulnerable common thresher sharks (Alopias vulpinus) to endangered whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) to critically endangered scalloped hammerheads (Sphyrna lewini). Many of these shark species are still recovering from the overfishing that occurred before the government set up the sanctuary, experts say.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has slowed the stream of tourists who normally visit the Maldives each year, there have been increased calls to reopen the shark fishery as a way “to make a quick buck,” Hashim says.
Illegal shark fishing also seems to be on the rise in the Maldives. For example, in January 2021, customs officials seized 21 boxes marked as “salted fish” that contained 429 kilograms (946 pounds) of shark fins, worth about $190,000, at the nation’s international airport. And in March, authorities detained a group of people after encountering a vessel carrying shark fins, shark meat, and whole sharks at the Southern Ari Atoll.
Following a period of local and international outcry, there have been some unofficial reports that the Maldives will not be lifting the ban, which has raised hopes in the conservation community. In a recent post, the U.K.-based NGO Shark Guardians also wrote that it met with minister Waheed and a senior fisheries officer, Munshidha Ibrahim, who told them the ban would not be lifted.
But there is still room for concern, according to Hashim. She said the fisheries ministry is also discussing a reintroduction of long-line fishing for bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), which could result in a significant amount of shark bycatch, and would, in essence, “abolish the shark sanctuary.”
“There is political pressure to open the shark fishery within the Maldives parliament, and there is huge support from the voter base, so it has unfortunately become a very real threat to the recovering shark populations,” she said. “I fear that some loophole could be introduced which would pave the way for the black market to operate more easily.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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