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13 April 21
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What the Supreme Court Got Wrong About Homicides Committed by Cops
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "On Wednesday, more than one week into the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin's lawyer read an excerpt from the department's manual governing the use of force."
Rogue officers like Derek Chauvin probably won’t be deterred by good law, but excessively vague law encourages bad behavior.
n Wednesday, more than one week into the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin’s lawyer read an excerpt from the department’s manual governing the use of force.
“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force,” the manual stated, “must be judged from the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”
Minneapolis revised its manual after Floyd’s death to place clearer and tighter constraints on officers engaged in the use of force. But the vague rule laid out in the version of the manual that was in effect during Floyd’s fatal encounter with Chauvin is fairly typical of the guidance provided to officers in the field.
As Sgt. Jody Stiger, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department called by prosecutors in the Chauvin trial, testified, most police departments derive their policies governing the use of force from Graham v. Connor. Graham is a 1989 Supreme Court case that, in the words of scholars Osagie Obasogie and Zachary Newman, “established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims.”
The language Chauvin’s lawyer read from the police manual was lifted, word for word, from the Court’s decision in Graham.
Authored by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, one of the primary proponents of a tough-on-crime approach that often animated the Court’s decisions during his tenure, the Graham opinion warns that police accused of using excessive force often have to make difficult decisions in highly stressful situations. In determining whether an officer acted reasonably, Rehnquist wrote for his Court, “the calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”
Perhaps even more significantly, Graham left cops with little guidance on just what limits the Constitution places on use of force by police. As then-University of Virginia law professor William Stuntz wrote six years after Graham was handed down, “one searches in vain for any body of case law that gives” Graham’s vague reasonableness standard “some content.”
Yet, while some academics did criticize Graham’s approach early on, many prominent commentators outside of the academy only recently have started to think of Graham as a major wrong turn by the Supreme Court. Though three justices joined a partial dissent by Justice Harry Blackmun that criticized some parts of Rehnquist’s decision, all nine justices agreed with most of Rehnquist’s reasoning. That includes Justice Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer.
But with the benefit of hindsight — and with the benefit of empirical evidence showing that clear legal rules lead to better policing — Graham now looks like a serious error by the Court. As Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Law of the Police, told me in an email, “Graham offers a standard focused on judging the use of force after it has happened,” and it “offers very little guidance to officers and departments about how to use force.”
It does little, in other words, to advise police on how they can avoid conduct that might needlessly injure or kill a criminal suspect.
It’s unlikely that clearer rules would have saved George Floyd’s life. As Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified at Chauvin’s trial, Chauvin “absolutely” violated department policy when he knelt on Floyd’s neck after Floyd was already subdued and handcuffed.
But clear rules can ensure that cops tossed into a dangerous and uncertain situation can fall back on those rules, rather than making a potentially deadly decision with only their fear to guide them. As law professors Brandon Garrett and Seth Stoughton wrote in a 2017 article, Graham’s “‘split-second’ approach presents obvious problems from the perspective of law enforcement supervisors, who cannot provide meaningful guidance about or oversight of how officers react in the moment in an objectively reasonable way.”
Graham was correct about one thing. Officers do sometimes find themselves in “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” encounters where they have to make quick decisions about how to use force. But if we want these officers to make the right decision in these fraught moments, police departments need to provide them with clear guidance on how they should react.
And the Supreme Court’s vague “reasonableness” standard does nothing of the sort.
How clear rules can save lives
On a fall night in 1974, Officer Elton Hymon arrived at the scene of an alleged home break-in. He soon found Edward Garner, an eighth-grade boy weighing about 110 pounds, in the backyard of the home. Hymon later admitted that he was “reasonably sure” that Garner was unarmed. Yet, as Garner attempted to climb a fence at the edge of the yard, Hymon shot him in the back of the head and killed him.
Police later found a stolen purse and $10 in Garner’s possession.
The stunning thing about Garner’s death, which formed the basis of the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), is that Officer Hymon had every reason to believe that he acted lawfully when he killed an unarmed 15-year-old boy who’d committed a fairly minor act of theft.
A Tennessee state law provided that, after an officer notifies a suspect of their intention to arrest the suspect, if “he either flee or forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest.” In other words, state law clearly permitted police to use deadly force against fleeing felony suspects.
Nor was Tennessee particularly unusual in this regard. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her dissenting opinion in Garner, in 1985 “nearly half the States” still followed a “venerable common law rule authorizing the use of deadly force if necessary to apprehend a fleeing felon.” As a 1736 treatise described that common law rule, “it is no felony” for a law enforcement officer to slay a suspect who “shall either resist or fly before they are apprehended.”
Garner, which abandoned that common law rule in a 6-3 decision, represents a “high-water mark” in the Court’s decisions governing use of force by police, according to Garrett and Stoughton. Unlike future decisions like Graham, Garner laid down a fairly clear rule that police could follow when determining whether to use deadly force against a fleeing suspect.
Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. Thus, if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given.
Under Garner, in other words, police would no longer use their own judgment to decide whether to fire on a fleeing suspect. The Court told police when they could use deadly force — if the suspect “poses a threat of serious physical harm,” if they “threaten[] the officer with a weapon,” or when the suspect “committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm” — and thus informed police that they could not use deadly force against other fleeing suspects.
The impact of Garner on police behavior was swift and dramatic. According to a 1994 study by criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum, homicides committed by police dropped about 16 percent in the nation as a whole after Garner was decided. In states that previously followed the unconstitutional common law rule, “the reduction was approximately twenty-four percent (23.80%).”
A more recent appeals court decision bolsters the proposition that clear legal rules are effective in reducing police violence.
In Estate of Armstrong v. Village of Pinehurst (2016), the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard an allegation that police used excessive force when they repeatedly used a taser to subdue a mentally ill man, who died during his encounter with the police. Though the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the cops, on the theory that the officers were protected under a doctrine known as “qualified immunity,” the court also laid down several limits on the use of tasers by police.
“A police officer may only use serious injurious force, like a taser, when an objectively reasonable officer would conclude that the circumstances present a risk of immediate danger that could be mitigated by the use of force,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for her court. She added that “‘physical resistance’ is not synonymous with ‘risk of immediate danger.’”
The Fourth Circuit oversees federal litigation in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and a 2017 report by Reuters found that eight major cities in those states adopted stricter policies governing the use of tasers by police in the immediate wake of the Armstrong decision. These policies proved very successful in reducing the use of tasers.
In Baltimore, police used Tasers 47 percent fewer times last year than in 2015, according to records reviewed by Reuters. Deployments fell 65 percent in Virginia Beach; 60 percent in Greensboro, North Carolina; 55 percent in Charleston, South Carolina; and 52 percent in Huntington, West Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia, saw deployments plunge 95 percent.
As Professor Harmon told me, cases like Garner and Armstrong demonstrate that “when courts provide clearer guidance, it can make a difference.” Regarding the Armstrong case, Harmon told me that she “would want to know more about what officers used instead of tasers before throwing a victory parade, but it does illustrate the power of the law, when courts actually provide specific and meaningful guidance to the police.”
The Supreme Court moved away from giving clear guidance to police after Garner
The facts of Graham v. Connor are as shocking as the facts are in Garner, even though they did not result in anyone’s death.
Dethorne Graham was a Black man and a diabetic living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984, when he felt the beginning of an insulin reaction. Because such a reaction is treated with sugar, Graham asked a friend to drive him to a convenience store so he could buy some orange juice. But when they arrived at the store, there was a long line. Fearing he would not be able to buy the juice fast enough, Graham immediately left and asked his friend to take him to a friend’s house instead.
A police officer witnessed Graham’s very brief visit to the store and deemed it suspicious, because the cop pulled Graham and his friend over and would not let the two men go even after Graham’s friend explained Graham’s medical condition to the cop.
At one point, while Graham was waiting for the officer to let him go, he got out of the car, ran around it twice, and then passed out on the curb. Erratic behavior can be a symptom of a diabetic emergency, but the police apparently took Graham’s behavior as a sign of something sinister. After more officers arrived on the scene, Graham was handcuffed and forced face-down onto the car’s hood. When Graham told the police to check his wallet for a decal indicating that he is diabetic, an officer told him to “shut up.”
They eventually let him go after they received a report that Graham hadn’t done anything wrong at the convenience store.
And yet, despite these disturbing facts, the Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police must deal with “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations when they encounter someone like Dethorne Graham.
Graham didn’t say that there are no limits on police conduct. In addition to holding that police must behave as a “reasonable officer” would behave, the Court also listed several factors that lower courts could consider when an officer is accused of excessive force, “including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
But these were simply factors that could be considered, not bright-line rules that gave clear guidance to police about what kind of conduct is permitted. And the Graham case itself suggests that these factors offer little protection for many victims of excessive force.
After all, Graham himself committed no crime. He posed no threat to anyone, and he neither resisted arrest nor attempted to flee. But the Supreme Court sent his case back down to a trial court for a second hearing, and Graham ultimately lost his case.
One possible explanation for the lopsided vote in the Graham case — again, much of the decision was unanimous — is that the Supreme Court hands down decisions that are intended to be read and applied by lawyers and judges, not by police officers.
Despite Graham’s admonition that judges should evaluate an officer’s conduct without “the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” courts are in the business of hindsight. Lawsuits, by their very nature, do not arise until after an alleged legal violation has occurred. So, when an officer is hauled into Court due to allegations of excessive force, Graham reminds judges that they will probably know more about the circumstances that led to that allegation than the officer reasonably could have known at the time.
Yet, while Graham’s holding may offer a useful reminder to judges, we also know that police departments use decisions like Graham to shape their own policies and training manuals. And the sort of open-ended legal standards that judges are accustomed to applying to individual cases do not provide adequate guidance to police officers. A vague standard may be useful for a judge with a law degree, years of legal experience, and months to study the facts of a particular case. But such standards are inadequate for a cop who, often for the first and only time in their career, is caught in a dangerous situation with their gun drawn.
Nevertheless, since Graham, the Court has only doubled down on its preference for vague, flexible standards over clear legal rules governing police. In Scott v. Harris (2007), for example, the Court ruled in favor of police officers who, during a high-speed chase, rammed a suspect’s car off the road and caused him serious injury.
Yet, rather than evaluating this case under the fairly clear rule laid out in Garner — Garner, after all, was a case about when police can use potentially deadly force against a fleeing suspect — Scott arguably abandoned Garner’s approach altogether. While the fleeing motorist’s “attempt to craft an easy-to-apply legal test in the Fourth Amendment context is admirable,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court, “in the end we must still slosh our way through the factbound morass of ‘reasonableness.’”
“Whether or not Scott’s actions constituted application of ‘deadly force,’” Scalia added, “all that matters is whether Scott’s actions were reasonable.”
As one federal judge wrote just a few months after Scott was decided, under the Scott decision, “there is no Garner bright-line test.” There is only a vague “reasonableness” test.
One major problem with this approach is that it gives virtually no guidance to police departments when they draft their own policies guiding the use of force, and it can lead individual officers to guess what kind of behavior is acceptable if they are in a situation that might require force. As Harmon, the UVA professor, writes, the Supreme Court’s current framework “does not answer adequately the most basic questions about police uses of force: when a police officer may use force against a citizen, how much force he may use, and what kinds of force are permissible.”
Again, it’s unlikely that a more rules-based approach, like the one the Court took in Garner, could have saved George Floyd’s life. Chauvin appears to have shown such extraordinary disregard for his department’s policies that even his own police chief testified against him at his murder trial.
But clear rules can and do save lives. According to Tennenbaum’s study of Garner, that decision “reduced the total number of police homicides by approximately sixty homicides a year.”
That’s 60 people a year who would have died if the Court hadn’t given clear guidance to police officers.
Joe Biden at a campaign event. (photo: Phil Roeder/Flickr)
Biden Will Pull All US Forces From Afghanistan by September 11
Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, people familiar with the plans said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that first drew the United States into its longest war."
resident Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, people familiar with the plans said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that first drew the United States into its longest war.
The decision, which Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday, will keep thousands of U.S. forces in the country beyond the May 1 exit deadline that the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban, according to one person familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.
While the Taliban has vowed to renew attacks on U.S. and NATO personnel if foreign troops are not out by the deadline, it is not clear if the militants will follow through with those threats given Biden’s plan for a phased withdrawal between now and September.
Officially, there are 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, although the number fluctuates and is currently about 1,000 more than that. There are also up to an additional 7,000 foreign forces in the coalition there, the majority of them NATO troops.
Biden’s decision comes after an administration review of U.S. options in Afghanistan, where U.S.-midwived peace talks have failed to advance as hoped and the Taliban remains a potent force despite two decades of effort by the United States to defeat the militants and establish stable, democratic governance. The war has cost trillions of dollars in addition to the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. service members and at least 100,000 Afghan civilians.
“This is the immediate, practical reality that our policy review discovered,” the person familiar with the deliberations said. “If we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear plan to exit, we will be back at war with the Taliban, and that was not something President Biden believed was in the national interest.”
“We’re going to zero troops by September.”
The decision highlights the trade-offs the Biden administration is willing to make to shift the U.S. global focus away from the counterinsurgency campaigns that dominated the post-9/11 world to current priorities, including increasing military competition with China.
In addition to major domestic challenges, “the reality is that the United States has big strategic interests in the world,” the person said, “like nonproliferation, like an increasingly aggressive and assertive Russia, like North Korea and Iran, whose nuclear programs pose a threat to the United States,” as well as China. “The main threats to the American homeland are actually from other places: from Africa, from parts of the Middle East — Syria and Yemen.”
“Afghanistan just does not rise to the level of those other threats at this point,” the person said. “That does not mean we’re turning away from Afghanistan. We are going to remain committed to the government, remain committed diplomatically. But in terms of where we will be investing force posture, our blood and treasure, we believe that other priorities merit that investment.”
Some officials have warned that a U.S. exit will lead to the collapse of the Kabul government while jeopardizing gains made over the past two decades in health, education and women’s rights.
Biden administration officials say the United States intends to remain closely involved in the peace process and will continue to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to the Afghan government and security forces, which remains almost totally dependent on foreign support.
“What we won’t do is use our troops as a bargaining chip in that process,” the person familiar with the plans said.
The White House declined to comment on withdrawal plans.
The person familiar with the plans said the United States had gone to Afghanistan in 2001 “for a particular purpose: to deliver justice to those who attacked us on September 11th and to disrupt terrorists seeking to use Afghanistan as a safe haven to attack the United States. We achieved that objective some years ago.”
“For that reason the president made the determination … that the best path forward to advance American interests is ending this war after 20 years so we can address the global threat picture as it exists today,” the person added.
Biden, who argued unsuccessfully during the Obama administration for a small, counterterrorism-focused presence, had already hinted that the United States would remain for only a limited time beyond the May 1 deadline.
Late last month, he said he did not expect U.S. troops to be deployed there next year. “We will leave,” he said at a White House news conference. “But the question is when we leave.”
Administration officials were in the process of notifying officials in NATO nations as well as Afghan officials and the Taliban on Tuesday. In an early morning tweet, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani appeared still to be uninformed. He said he had spoken with Secretary of State Antony Blinken about “the ongoing peace process,” and about “an upcoming call” with Biden.
It was not immediately clear when NATO countries would withdraw troops but the person familiar with the plans suggested they would coordinate their withdrawals with the U.S. departure. Many of those governments have said they have no desire or ability to remain without the logistical, security and other support the U.S. forces provide.
Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are in Brussels Tuesday and Wednesday informing their NATO counterparts. Germany has the second largest force in Afghanistan, numbering more than 1,000. Officials there have cautioned that they would need months to organize an orderly departure.
In early March, Blinken launched a last-ditch diplomatic effort to bring the Taliban and the Afghan government together to end the war with an interim power-sharing arrangement. He warned Ghani in a sharply-worded letter that time was growing short.
The hope was to accelerate a negotiating process begun under President Donald Trump in 2019, when White House envoy Zalmay Khalilzad started talks with militant leaders in Doha, the capital of Qatar. That led to a February 2020 agreement signed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo under which the United States pledged to withdraw its forces by May 1, 2021, in exchange for Taliban severance of all ties with al-Qaeda, and agreement to begin negotiations with the Afghan government toward a cease-fire and peace accord.
While the inter-Afghan talks began in September, they have made little progress. At the same time, the Taliban has increased its attacks on Afghan troops and expanded its territorial control. As the new administration launched its review, the Pentagon and the United Nations reported that the militants had not complied with their commitments under the Trump agreement.
Many Afghan experts have concluded that the Taliban are moving closer to a military victory, but that they may be reluctant to take over as a pariah government, which could result in a loss of international support and aid for the country.
Biden’s choice was a stark one. With U.S. public opinion and a significant, bipartisan portion of Congress pressing for withdrawal, staying could lead to political difficulties at home and renewed Taliban attacks on U.S. forces. At the same time, an abrupt American departure could undermine any achievements made in the past two decades, reduce the possibility of a peace deal and lead to a Taliban takeover.
NATO members, and some U.S. lawmakers, warned against an early departure. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in late February that a swift pullout would be “challenging” and “destabilizing.”
John Sopko, the Department of Defense’s special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction, warned Congress last month that U.S. withdrawal without a peace agreement in place would be “a disaster,” and mean government collapse. Others have warned of civil war, as regional warlords have amassed and armed their own forces.
Blinken’s warning to Ghani, along with the interim government proposal, seemed to have little effect. He called for a conference of Taliban and Afghan leaders to take place in Turkey this month, and a U.N.-convened meeting of regional governments, including Iran, along with the United States, to push diplomacy.
So far, none of those initiatives have borne fruit. The meetings have been repeatedly postponed, and Khalilzad’s shuttle diplomacy among the Afghans and with regional leaders have yet to bring the two sides together in agreement.
The person familiar with the administration’s deliberations rejected the suggestion that these apparent failures precipitated Biden’s decision. The United States, the person said, would continue its diplomatic efforts to bring peace. But time had proven that the presence of U.S. troops, even at much higher levels, was not effective leverage at moving the parties beyond where they have been willing to go, he said.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), one of the very few lawmakers who were informed Monday of Biden’s decision, tentatively supported the move, but said Congress would need a full accounting of plans to secure U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan and ensure that global extremists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are unable to gain renewed strength.
The person familiar with the plans said some U.S. counterterrorism assets would be repositioned outside of Afghanistan, and the United States would remain capable of striking extremist groups there.
Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served in senior security positions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said a Taliban takeover of the country was a “distinct possibility.” In that case, she said, the administration had to guarantee the Taliban live up to global standards before recognizing a government and lifting sanctions on them, and ensure that “they don’t, en masse, kick women out of school, and walk us back 20 years in human rights.”
But “I think we have to make decisions based on America’s strategic interests not anybody else’s,” Slotkin said. “While no one wants to feel like the investment we made there was for little or nothing, that doesn’t mean we get to stay there for another 20 years on a wing and a prayer that we can turn it into a viable, healthy state.”
Retired Gen. Colin Powell, former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, said the decision to leave was overdue.
“I wouldn’t say enough is enough,” said Powell, who was in charge of Bush’s State Department during the 9/11 attacks and the beginning of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “I’d say we’ve done all we can do … What are those troops being told they’re there for? It’s time to bring it to an end.”
The Soviet Union, which occupied Afghanistan for a decade until it abruptly withdrew in 1989, “did it the same way,” Powell said. “They got tired, and they marched out and back home. How long did anybody remember that?”
Protesters took to the streets after 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed during a traffic stop by members of the Brooklyn Center police on Sunday. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Daunte Wright Shooting: Officer Kim Potter Resigns From Brooklyn Center Police Department
CBS Minnesota
Excerpt: "As the pressure built to fire the suburban Minneapolis police officer who killed a 20-year-old Black man during an altercation after a traffic stop, the officer Tuesday morning said she would resign from her position effective immediately."
s the pressure built Tuesday to fire the suburban Minneapolis police officer who killed a 20-year-old Black man during an altercation after a traffic stop, the officer Tuesday afternoon said she would resign from her position effective immediately.
Kim Potter’s resignation was announced by Law Enforcement Labor Services, a labor union.
“Due to the ongoing investigation being conducted, Law Enforcement Labor Services is unable to provide any additional information or statements,” the statement from LELS said.
Potter sent a resignation letter to Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliot and other city officials Tuesday.
“I am tendering my resignation from the Brooklyn Center Police Department effective immediately. I have loved every minute of being a police officer and serving this community to the best of my ability, but I believe it is in the best interest of the community, the department, and my fellow officers if I resign immediately,” Potter said in the letter.
Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott called the shooting in his city “deeply tragic” and said Potter — a 26-year veteran with the force — should be fired. Elliott, the city’s first Black mayor, announced Monday night that the City Council had fired the city manager and voted to give the mayor’s office “command authority” over the police force.
“We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that justice is done and our communities are made whole,” Elliott said.
The city’s police chief has said he believes Potter mistakenly grabbed her gun when she was going for her Taser. The officer, who is white, can be heard on her body camera video shouting “Taser! Taser!”
Wright’s father, Aubrey Wright, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that he rejects that explanation.
“I lost my son. He’s never coming back. I can’t accept that. A mistake? That doesn’t even sound right. This officer has been on the force for 26 years. I can’t accept that,” he said.
Wright’s family planned to speak again Tuesday alongside the family of George Floyd at the courthouse where the trial is being held for a former Minneapolis police officer charged in his death. Protests erupted for a second night following Sunday’s shooting, heightening anxiety in an area already on edge as the Derek Chauvin trial progresses. Floyd, a Black man, died May 25 after Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck.
Chauvin and three other officers were fired the day after Floyd’s death. Potter was placed on administrative leave while the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigates Wright’s death.
The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, the police union, issued a statement Tuesday saying “no conclusions should be made until the investigation is complete.”
Police Chief Tim Gannon on Monday would not say whether Potter would be fired, saying she was entitled to due process.
“I think we can watch the video and ascertain whether she will be returning,” the chief said.
The advent of social media and body cameras has forced police departments to move much quickly than in the past, said Alex Piquero, chairman of the University of Miami’s sociology department. However, he said that before the Brooklyn Center Police Department fires the officer, it will likely review all evidence, including any other body camera footage and testimony from other officers, so that the dismissal is less vulnerable to any court challenge.
“We don’t know why she reached for her firearm instead of her Taser,” Piquero said.
Body camera footage Gannon released less than 24 hours after the shooting shows three officers around a stopped car, which authorities said was pulled over because it had expired registration tags. When one officer attempts to handcuff Wright, a second officer tells him he’s being arrested on a warrant. That’s when the struggle begins.
Potter can be heard saying: “I’ll Tase you! I’ll Tase you! Taser! Taser! Taser!” She draws her weapon after the man breaks free from police outside his car and gets back behind the wheel. After firing a single shot from her handgun, the car speeds away and the officer is heard saying, “Holy (expletive)! I shot him.”
The car traveled several blocks before hitting another vehicle.
Wright died of a gunshot wound to the chest, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office.
Potter has experience with investigations into police shootings. Potter was one of the first officers to respond after Brooklyn Center police fatally shot a man who allegedly allegedly tried to stab an officer with a knife in August 2019, according to a report from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.
After medics arrived, she told the two officers who shot the man to get into separate squad cars, turn off their body cameras, and not to speak to each other. She was also the police union president for the department and accompanied two other officers involved in the shooting while investigators interviewed them.
Court records show Wright was being sought after failing to appear in court on charges that he fled from officers and possessed a gun without a permit during an encounter with Minneapolis police in June.
Demonstrators began to gather shortly after the shooting, with some jumping atop police cars.
On Monday, hundreds of protesters gathered hours after a dusk-to-dawn curfew was announced by the governor. When protesters wouldn’t disperse, police began firing gas canisters and flash-bang grenades, sending clouds wafting over the crowd and chasing some protesters away. Forty people were arrested, Minnesota State Patrol Col. Matt Langer said at a news conference early Tuesday. In Minneapolis, 13 arrests were made, including for burglaries and curfew violations, police said.
Brooklyn Center is a modest suburb just north of Minneapolis that has seen its demographics shift dramatically in recent years. In 2000, more than 70% of the city was white. Today, a majority of residents are Black, Asian or Latino.
Wright’s death prompted protests in other U.S. cities, including in Portland, Oregon, where police said a demonstration turned into a riot Monday night, with some in the crowd throwing rocks and other projectiles at officers.
Demonstrators stand outside the Georgia Capitol building to oppose the HB 531 bill on March 3, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images)
It's Not Just Georgia: More Than a Dozen Other States Are Trying to Take Power Away From Local Election Officials
Nathaniel Rakich, FiveThirtyEight
Rakich writes: "Georgia's new election restrictions have garnered no shortage of criticism thanks to provisions that directly impose additional burdens on voters, such as an ID requirement for absentee voting or a ban on distributing food or water to people waiting in line to vote."
eorgia’s new election restrictions have garnered no shortage of criticism thanks to provisions that directly impose additional burdens on voters, such as an ID requirement for absentee voting or a ban on distributing food or water to people waiting in line to vote. But equally importantly, the law opens up the possibility for elections to become more nakedly partisan.
In essence, the law provides a mechanism to transfer power currently vested in bipartisan or nonpartisan county election boards to the majority-Republican1 State Election Board by giving the board the authority to suspend local election officials in up to four counties at a time and appoint a temporary replacement. County boards’ powers include the ability to decide challenges to voters’ eligibility and certify election results, meaning that a state-appointed election czar could theoretically invalidate a fair election by refusing to certify the results and throwing out thousands of supposedly questionable votes (the new law also allows people to challenge an unlimited number of votes). However, the State Election Board can only suspend local election officials after a hearing that must take place at least 30 days after the initial complaint, so in practice there probably would not be enough time after an election for partisan hardliners to coopt these powers and overturn an election.
A more realistic concern that Democrats have, however, is that the proviso could be used to target heavily Democratic, heavily nonwhite jurisdictions such as Fulton County, which includes much of metro Atlanta. A state appointee would have the power to condense polling places in these counties and offer less early voting than locals are accustomed to, disproportionately curtailing voting access in bluer parts of the state. The removal clause could also be used to retaliate against local officials who go further to promote voting than state officials would like, as DeKalb County did in the 2020 general election when it mailed absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters. (Such mass unsolicited mailings of absentee-ballot applications are now prohibited by the law as well.)
And importantly, attempts to diminish local control of elections are not limited to Georgia. As part of the hundreds of election restrictions Republican legislators have proposed so far this year, at least 13 other states have passed or are considering bills that would handcuff local election officials (in some cases, literally).
- In Iowa, a package of recently passed voting restrictions makes it a felony for election officials to fail to perform their duties or disobey guidance from the (currently Republican) secretary of state. County election officials are also now subject to $10,000 fines for “technical infractions” of election law. The law also reins in county election officials’ discretion over how aggressively to promote early and absentee voting: They are barred from mailing absentee-ballot applications to any voter who didn’t ask for one, and they can’t open a satellite early-voting site unless a local voter specifically requests it.
- Similarly, a Texas bill that recently passed committee would make it a felony for election officials to pre-fill absentee-ballot applications, deliver an absentee ballot to anyone other than the person who requested it, alter election rules without the approval of the secretary of state, or even encourage people to apply to vote by mail — even those eligible to. Another bill, which has passed the state Senate, would also ban local election officials from encouraging people to vote by mail in any way, as well as from expanding voting access the way several blue counties did in 2020, such as 24-hour early voting, drive-through voting and, again, the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. The bill would also require the secretary of state’s permission for counties to accept outside funding exceeding $1,000 for election administration, fine county election officials if they don’t purge noncitizens from the voting rolls within 30 days of being notified of a voter’s status and give the secretary of state the authority to purge voters from the rolls if county clerks don’t. A third bill, currently pending in committee, would also transfer the entire responsibility for registering voters and maintaining the voter rolls from county clerks to the secretary of state.
- Four bills appropriating local control of elections have already passed one chamber of the Arkansas legislature. One would make local election officials answerable to partisan county election boards;2 another would refer possible violations of election law to the State Board of Election Commissioners, bypassing county officials. A third takes away county clerks’ power to designate vote centers, while the fourth prohibits the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. A fifth bill, still in committee, would allow the State Board of Election Commissioners to take over local election administration. Though this last one may be the most blatant, the bills’ opponents see all of them as thinly veiled attacks on the sovereignty of Pulaski County, home to Little Rock and one of the few remaining blue counties in the state.
- A voter ID bill recently passed by the Missouri state House would allow the secretary of state to audit a local election authority’s voter rolls and identify names that should be purged; if the local authority doesn’t cooperate, the secretary of state can withhold funding from it. Similarly to its counterparts in other states, the legislation also states, “no use of mail-in ballots shall be authorized by any executive or administrative order.” Another bill would make it a misdemeanor for local election officials not to purge voters from the rolls within 10 days of receiving notice that they have died or become incapacitated.
- Bills have also been proposed to prohibit the mass mailing of absentee-ballot applications in Connecticut, Michigan, South Dakota and Tennessee. (South Dakota’s proposal was, however, voted down.)
- Bills in Arizona, New Jersey and New York would similarly ban mailing absentee ballots to anyone who didn’t request one.
- And legislation in Illinois and Wisconsin would ban the unsolicited mailing of both applications and ballots.3
Most of these bills are not as aggressive as Georgia’s, but they all undermine localities’ ability to self-rule. In this way, Illinois State University political scientist Lori Riverstone-Newell told FiveThirtyEight, they’re part of an increasing trend of states preempting local government in order to retain power for themselves: Conservative legislatures, in particular, have passed several laws in recent years that limit the types of laws municipalities can pass, including sanctuary-city protections, anti-LGBT discrimination ordinances and minimum-wage increases (especially in the South). These laws can often have what Riverstone-Newell calls a “chilling effect,” where the mere threat of having their power taken away makes local officials afraid to govern as they see fit.
These laws often have racial undertones, too. For example, in Michigan, the state is allowed to appoint an “emergency manager” to take over the administration of local governments that are in distress — which has been used in recent years to remove local control from majority-Black Detroit and Flint (notably, emergency managers were accused of exacerbating the Flint water crisis). Similarly, because county election officials are chosen at the local level, laws that remove them in majority-minority counties specifically strip nonwhite citizens’ say over how their elections are conducted. And some, like the Texas bills that appear to be a reaction to diverse counties’ voting expansions in 2020, criminalize actions that make it easier for people of color to vote. “The part that I think is so concerning is the retaliation,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Look at who on the ground would actually be impeded [by these laws]. That suggests to me a real opposition to an expanded electorate.”
So no, not all of these laws include an actual mechanism for overturning elections. But the mere act of usurping the powers of local election officials threatens democratic values in and of itself. “That undermines our idea of intergovernmental relations … where we recognize there’s a vital role for local government within the federal system,” said Riverstone-Newell. “It’s such a strange thing that we’d want to put local governments in that position where they can’t respond to local needs and desires.” Pérez agreed: “They are taking away opportunities that election administrators have to go above and beyond the bare minimum requirements … and to consider facts on the ground and local needs when serving their voters.”
A marijuana plant. (photo: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)
New Mexico Just Legalized Marijuana
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Monday signed a marijuana legalization bill into law, making her state the 17th in the country to legalize marijuana."
READ MORE
Juan Orlando Hernández, top center, was re-elected in 2017 in a vote widely regarded as fraudulent. (image: Erre Gálvez/Guardian UK)
Facebook Knew of Honduran President's Manipulation Campaign - and Let It Continue for 11 Months
Julia Carrie Wong and Jeff Ernst, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity."
Juan Orlando Hernández falsely inflated his posts’ popularity for nearly a year after the company was informed about it
acebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity.
The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say.
Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts.
The campaign was uncovered in August 2018 by a Facebook data scientist, Sophie Zhang, whose job involved combatting fake engagement: comments, shares, likes and reactions from inauthentic or compromised accounts.
Zhang began investigating Hernández’s Page because he was the beneficiary of 90% of all the known fake engagement received by civic or political Pages in Honduras. Over one six-week period in 2018, for example, Hernández’s Facebook posts received likes from 59,100 users, of whom 46,500 were fake.
She found that one of the administrators for Hernández’s Page was also the administrator for hundreds of the inauthentic Pages that were being used solely to boost posts on Hernández’s Page. This individual was also an administrator for the Page of Hilda Hernández, the president’s sister, who served as his communications minister until her death in December 2017.
Although the activity violated Facebook’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – the kind of deceptive campaigning used by a Russian influence operation during the 2016 US election – Facebook dragged its feet for nearly a year before taking the campaign down in July 2019.
Despite this, the campaign to boost Hernández on Facebook repeatedly returned, and Facebook showed little appetite for policing the recidivism. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, referred to the return of the Honduras campaign as a “bummer” in an internal discussion in December 2019 but emphasized that the company needed to prioritize influence operations that targeted the US or western Europe, or were carried out by Russia or Iran.
Hernández’s Page administrator also returned to Facebook despite being banned during the July 2019 takedown. His account listed his place of employment as the Honduran presidential palace and included photos taken inside restricted areas of the president’s offices.
The Page administrator did not respond to queries from the Guardian, and his account was removed two days after the Guardian questioned Facebook about it.
A Facebook spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, said: “We fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform.
“We investigated and publicly shared our findings about the takedown of this network in Honduras almost two years ago. These investigations take time to understand the full scope of the deceptive activity so we don’t enforce piecemeal and have confidence in our public attribution ... Like with other CIB takedowns, we continue to monitor and block attempts to rebuild presence on our platform.”
Facebook declined to comment on Hernández’s Page administrator’s return to the platform. It did not dispute Zhang’s factual assertions about the Honduras case.
Hernández did not respond to queries sent to his press officer, attorney and minister of transparency.
Deceptive social media campaigns are used to “deter political participation or to get those who participate to change their opinion”, said Aldo Salgado, co-founder of Citizen Lab Honduras. “They serve to emulate popular support that the government lacks.”
Eugenio Sosa, a professor of sociology at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, said the government’s use of astroturfing to support Hernández “has to do with the deep erosion of legitimacy, the little credibility that he has, and the enormous public mistrust about what he does, what he says and what he promises”. Beyond the president’s loyal supporters, however, Sosa said he believes that it has little effect on public opinion, due to a steady stream of headlines about Hernández’s corruption and ties to the narcotics trade.
Hernández’s brother was convicted of drug trafficking in US federal courts in October 2019, and the president has himself been identified by US prosecutors as a co-conspirator in multiple drug trafficking and corruption cases. Hernández has not been charged with a crime and has denied any wrongdoing. Until recently, he was considered a key US ally in Central America.
Salgado said that the Hernández administration began resorting to social media disinformation campaigns in 2015, when a major corruption scandal involving the theft of $350m from the country’s healthcare and pension system inspired months of torchlit protest marches. “That’s when the need for the government arises and they desperately begin to create an army of bots,” he said.
Facebook, which has about 4.4 million users in Honduras, was a double-edged sword for the non-partisan protest organizers, who used the social network to organize but also found themselves attacked by a disinformation campaign alleging that they were controlled by Manuel Zelaya, a former president who was deposed in a 2009 coup.
“The smear campaign was psychologically overwhelming,” said Gabriela Blen, a social activist who was one of the leaders of the torch marches. “It is not easy to endure so much criticism and so many lies. It affects your family and your loved ones. It is the price that is paid in such a corrupt country when one tries to combat corruption.
“In Honduras there are no guarantees for human rights defenders,” she added. “We are at the mercy of the powers that dominate this country. They try to terrorize us and stop our work, either through psychological terror or campaigns on social networks to stir up rejection and hatred.”
The disinformation campaigns are most often employed during periods of social unrest and typically paint protests as violent or partisan, according to Sosa, the sociologist. “It scares people away from participating,” he said.
Hernández won a second term in a 2017 election plagued with irregularities. With the country rocked by protests and a violent government crackdown, researchers in Mexico and the US documented the wide-scale use of Twitter bot accounts to promote Hernández and project a false view of “good news, prosperity, and tranquility in Honduras”.
Fresh protests in 2019 against government efforts to privatize the public education and health systems were again met by a digital smear campaign – this time with the backing of an Israeli political marketing firm that was barred from Facebook in May 2019 for violating its ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.
Archimedes Group set up fake Facebook Pages purporting to represent Honduran news outlets or community organizations that promoted pro-Hernández messages, according to an analysis by the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab. Among them was a Page that ran ads again alleging that Zelaya was the source of the protests, and two Pages that pushed the message that Hernández was dedicated to fighting drug trafficking.
“They said that we were inciting violence and had groups of delinquents,” said Suyapa Figueroa, the president of the Honduran Medical Guild, who rose to prominence as one of the leaders of the 2019 protests. “Some people were afraid to support the [protesters’] platform because they thought that [the ousted president] Mel Zelaya was behind it. There were always fears that the movement was politically manipulated and that stopped it growing.”
Figueroa continues to struggle with Facebook-fueled disinformation. A Facebook Page purporting to represent her has nearly 20,000 followers and has been used to “attack leaders of the opposition and create conflict within it”, she said.
“I’ve reported it and many of my friends have reported it, yet I haven’t been able to get that fake Page taken down,” she said.
Airborne microplastics are turning up in remote regions of the world, including the remote Altai mountains in Siberia. (photo: Kirill Kukhmar/TASS/Getty Images)
New Research Reveals How Airborne Microplastics Travel Around the World
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes: "Scientists consider plastic pollution one of the 'most pressing environmental and social issues of the 21st century,' but so far, microplastic research has mostly focused on the impact on rivers and oceans."
cientists consider plastic pollution one of the "most pressing environmental and social issues of the 21st century," but so far, microplastic research has mostly focused on the impact on rivers and oceans.
However, a new study from researchers at Cornell and Utah State University highlights the increasing threat of airborne microplastics "spiraling around the globe," The Guardian reported.
Plastic waste breaks down into smaller pieces until it becomes microscopic and gets swept up into the atmosphere, where it rides the jet stream and travels across continents, the Cornell Chronicle reported. Researchers discovered this has led to a global plastic cycle as microplastics permeate the environment, according to The Guardian.
"We found a lot of legacy plastic pollution everywhere we looked; it travels in the atmosphere and it deposits all over the world," Janice Brahney, lead author of the study and Utah State University assistant professor of natural resources, told the Cornell Chronicle. "This plastic is not new from this year. It's from what we've already dumped into the environment over several decades."
In the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested the most likely sources of more than 300 samples of airborne microplastics from 11 sites across the western U.S. To their surprise, the researchers found that almost none of the atmospheric microplastics came from plastic waste in cities and towns. "It just didn't work out that way," Professor Natalie Mahowald from Cornell University, who was part of the research team, told The Guardian.
It turns out that 84 percent of atmospheric microplastics came from roads, 11 percent from oceans and five percent from agricultural soil dust, the scientists wrote.
"We did the modeling to find out the sources, not knowing what the sources might be," Mahowald told the Cornell Chronicle. "It's amazing that this much plastic is in the atmosphere at that level, and unfortunately accumulating in the oceans and on land and just recirculating and moving everywhere, including remote places."
The scientists say the level of plastic pollution is expected to increase, raising "questions on the impact of accumulating plastics in the atmosphere on human health. The inhalation of particles can be irritating to lung tissue and lead to serious diseases," The Guardian reported.
The study coincides with other recent reports by researchers, who confirmed the existence of microplastics in New Zealand and Moscow, where airborne plastics are turning up in remote parts of snowy Siberia.
In the most recent study, scientists also learned that plastic particles were more likely to be blown from fields than roads in Africa and Asia, The Guardian reported.
As plastic production increases every year, the scientists stressed that there remains "large uncertainties in the transport, deposition, and source attribution of microplastics," and wrote that further research should be prioritized.
"What we're seeing right now is the accumulation of mismanaged plastics just going up. Some people think it's going to increase by tenfold [per decade]," Mahowald told The Guardian. "But maybe we could solve this before it becomes a huge problem, if we manage our plastics better, before they accumulate in the environment and swirl around everywhere."
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