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Hamilton Nolan | The Deep Downward Spiral of Police Violence and Rebellion, Explained
Hamilton Nolan, In These Times
Nolan writes: "No scholar in America understands the roots of the past year's anti-police protests better than Yale professor and historian Elizabeth Hinton."
A conversation with Elizabeth Hinton, author of “America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.”
o scholar in America understands the roots of the past year’s anti-police protests better than Yale professor and historian Elizabeth Hinton. Her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, explored the political and policy roots that led to our era of mass incarceration. Her new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, examines the underlying causes of police brutality and the rebellions against it by Black Americans over the past 50 years.
In These Times spoke to Hinton about racist power structures, government indifference, and how to break out of cycles that our nation has been trapped in for decades.
Your book discusses a fundamental cycle that drives rebellions against police violence. Tell our readers what that cycle is.
Elizabeth Hinton: It is the cycle of police violence and community responses to that violence. We see a recurring pattern of these political protests, which are of course rooted in socioeconomic conditions, but which are nearly always precipitated by police contact or exceptional moments of police violence. In the ’60s and ’70s in particular, as police forces are expanding and militarizing, officers would frequently interact with residents and interrupt people as they went about their daily lives. From the perspective of many residents, these kind of frequent incursions over time, and arrests for minor things that would never be enforced in middle class or white communities, were experienced as violence.
There’s the cycle of rebellion itself, and then there’s the larger cycle of how, in response to this community violence or political violence, the solution for prevention becomes not investing in other institutions in the community, but continuing to support and expand the policing and surveillance of the community. It’s a cycle of interaction, but it’s also a policy cycle that we’ve been stuck in since the civil rights period and its immediate aftermath.
The time frame of this book overlaps with the time frame of your first book, which detailed the roots of America’s “War on Crime,” beginning during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Are the two things related?
Hinton: Yes. This moment during the Johnson administration and during the mid to late 1960s is really important. Initially, the “Great Society” carrot and the stick approach of liberal social policy to dealing with the impact of racial discrimination and inequality was the War on Poverty — that was the carrot — and then the stick, the policing and surveillance programs that were part of the War on Crime. The war on poverty, importantly, did not represent a major structural transformation in American society, because of the pathological understanding that policymakers had about Black poverty and crime, deeply influenced by social scientists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who recognized the socioeconomic factors that led to disparate rates of Black poverty, but ultimately argued that Black poverty was a problem of Black behavior. So this pathological understanding gave policy makers a kind of out, to fight poverty on the cheap. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers said, “if poverty is a pathological problem and not a structural problem, then what we need to do is help the disadvantaged help themselves,” in their words.
In the absence of the necessary socioeconomic changes that both the mainstream civil rights movement, radical militant organizations, and people that participated in the rebellions were calling for, the problems of poverty, inequality, and crime worsened. And increasingly, police became the only solution.
You have an entire section on the many decades worth of “commissions” which are always formed to investigate each rebellion, which seem to constitute their own cycle of failure. Why have all of these governmental commissions failed to really accomplish anything?
Hinton: After many of the rebellions, the state or local human relations commission would hold hearings and investigate what happened and recommend solutions. They always pointed to the larger structural issues at play. But for many commissions, they explained the violence as being tied to this Moynihan-ian concept of “alienation” — the alienation of Black youth compelled them to embrace these violent tactics. That analysis then depoliticizes the rebellions. It makes them about behavior. That pathological interpretation not only feeds into the links between rebellion and criminality, or rioting and criminality, but also is how the public and scholars have understood the rebellions since.
The other piece of it is that there’s been an ongoing resistance to really making the structural changes that are necessary for solving these problems at their root. Again and again, you see policy makers, even conservative ones, recognizing that “we need a jobs program, we have to improve our school system, but right now we need law and order.” There’s an acknowledgment that the long term solution is actually investing in a different way into the communities that are overpoliced. They’ll pay lip service to it, but they’re unwilling to enact the policies that are necessary. And absent that different investment, the cycle of police violence, and the cycle of liberal responses and inaction will continue.
Would it be possible to build a commission like this that would actually work, if it had enforcement power to enact its own recommendations? Or is it just time to admit that the commissions have been done already, and move on?
Hinton: I think the commissions often become a stalling tactic. They make it appear as though presidents are taking action, particularly on racial issues. So it takes a couple years for these commissions to do their work, and then they produce recommendations, and afterwards it’s very easy to ignore. We know what the solutions are. We don’t need another commission.
What role did you see police unions playing in this entire dynamic?
Hinton: The other thing that’s happening in this post-civil rights period that’s so crucial is, alongside the increasing professionalization of police that is part of the war on crime, we also see the [growing] power of police unions, which is part of the reason why it’s so difficult to hold officers accountable, but also to challenge the power and the budgetary allocations police receive. I think police administrators often end up leaning on the police union as a way to explain why they can’t implement certain changes or reforms within the department. They say, “I support this, but the union is the union.” I think it’s kind of a crutch, even among progressive police chiefs, that ends up preventing change.
But as we just saw in Ithaca, I don’t think these unions are monolithic, or that they can’t understand why embracing a new approach to public safety will improve their own lives and jobs. Because of the disinvestment from social welfare programs, many officers will tell you “We have to handle all this stuff that we don’t want to handle.” If we were creative about how we’re defining public safety, and treating it as a public health issue, and involving community groups in fostering public safety, as Ithaca shows us, it’s possible that we could get police unions on board.
You write about the history of white vigilantes working hand in hand with law enforcement. When you see the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers today, do you see that as a continuation of that history?
Hinton: Certainly. It’s a continuation of a history that’s been part of this country since its founding. It’s also the way in which the violence of the Proud Boys and similar groups gets treated, in relation to protesters for racial justice. It reflects, from the white establishment, what kind of violence is legitimate, and what kind of protest is legitimate. And we see that all the way down to January 6. For much of the history of white vigilante or supremacist terrorism, police departments have either been actively involved, or deeply complacent. We’re just beginning to understand with respect to the attack on the Capitol how many law enforcement officers and military personnel were involved.
You also note that more white people are participating in the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests than has been the case in previous waves of protests and rebellions. Why do you think that’s happening?
Hinton: I think there’s a rising generation who are fed up with the policy choices in general that have been made in the post-civil rights period. They want to see and bring about a different kind of governance, because they know that the system is not working. One of the things that we saw last summer is really interesting coalitions between LGBTQ+ activists, Black Lives Matter activists, climate change activists, coming together to say, “All of our struggles are linked, and we want and deserve better than this continued investment in policing and prisons at the direct expense of programs that would foster a far greater public good.”
When you look at the mainstream national politics of today, we can see that we’re already deep into the backlash cycle against BLM, which started very soon after the initial protests. Is there any way for us to break out of this political cycle?
Hinton: This is the longer, protracted struggle. If we’re going to realize the structural transformation that the Kerner Commission recommended more than 50 years ago, that are necessary, that’s going to be a hearts-and-minds and political education struggle. It’s not necessarily impossible. When our true history, one that emphasizes the racial and class oppression that has shaped the institutions of this country historically — when that’s under attack the way that it has been, we have a very long way to go. But that doesn’t mean we stop fighting. As last summer demonstrated, the majority or a near majority of Americans recognize the harms of racial inequality and exploitation historically. They want to live in a different kind of country.
What keeps me hopeful in these dark moments when it feels like democracy is on the brink of complete collapse in this country is my students. Most of the protests this summer were really fueled by Generation Z, and young people who came of age during the Trump administration and Covid, and they don’t want to live in this kind of society. I’m hopeful that they will continue to keep the pressure on, to bring about the different society that so many of us want — and that is necessary.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was given the first opportunity to form a coalition but was unable to secure a majority with his traditional religious and nationalist allies. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
ALSO SEE: Who Is Yair Lapid,
the Opposition Leader Challenging Netanyahu?
Israeli Opposition Parties Reach Agreement to Oust Benjamin Netanyahu
Shira Rubin, The Washington Post
Rubin writes: "A diverse coalition of Israeli opposition parties said Sunday that they have the votes to form a unity government to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving leader and its dominant political figure for more than a decade."
Under their agreement, reached after weeks of negotiations spearheaded by centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, former Netanyahu defense minister and ally Naftali Bennett will lead a power-sharing government. Bennett, 49, would serve as Israel’s next prime minister, according to terms of the deal reported by Israeli media, to be succeeded in that role by Lapid, 57, at a later date.
“We could go to fifth elections, sixth elections, until our home falls upon us, or we could stop the madness and take responsibility,” Bennett said in a televised statement Sunday evening. “Today, I would like to announce that I intend to join my friend Yair Lapid in forming a unity government.”
Netanyahu called the plan “the fraud of the century.”
“There is not a single person in Israel who would have voted for Naftali Bennett if they had known what he would do,” he tweeted.
Lapid is expected on Monday to inform President Reuven Rivlin of his ability to form a government with the support of Bennett and will have a week to finalize coalition deals. At the end of the week, the government will be put to a vote of confidence in the Knesset.
Netanyahu, 71, has struggled to hold on to power after four inconclusive elections in the past two years while facing an ongoing corruption trial. Bennett is one of several former loyalists who have flirted with joining the so-called change coalition, a collection of parties that span the political spectrum but share a desire to end Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure.
With few moves left, political observers say, Netanyahu will probably spend the coming week applying pressure to lawmakers from Yamina and other right-wing parties in the coalition in the hope of chipping away at its parliamentary majority and triggering a fifth election.
The announcement Sunday follows the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip this month, which some analysts speculated would help bolster the embattled Netanyahu. At the outset of the fighting, Bennett, a former Netanyahu protege who had been poised to join a unity government with Lapid, said the military operation, which killed more than 250 Palestinians in Gaza and 12 people in Israel, had ended his interest in joining with the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which has the support of left-leaning and Arab parties.
But after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire took hold May 21, criticism of Netanyahu surged again. Some 47 percent of Israelis said they opposed the cease-fire, and 67 percent said they expected another round of fighting with Hamas within the next three years, according to opinion polls published last week by Israel’s Channel 12.
Netanyahu’s rivals said that the operation lacked a coherent or long-term strategy, and that Netanyahu’s failure to stop Hamas rocket fire from raining down on Israel or secure the remains of Israeli soldiers was further proof of his need to leave office.
“With the best intelligence and air force in the world, Netanyahu managed to extract from Hamas an ‘unconditional cease-fire.’ Embarrassing,” tweeted Gideon Saar, another former Netanyahu protege now with the change coalition.
As the negotiations to oust him progressed, Netanyahu responded with fury.
“What’s changed since [the conflict?] A few days have passed? Has something changed? Of course not,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. “We just got out of a war, from a military operation, and it was clear, amid the battle, that it’s not possible to fight with Hamas from a left-wing government.”
He urged Bennett to join his bloc of ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties to form a right-wing government. “It’s still not too late,” he said.
On Sunday, Netanyahu offered a last-ditch three-way rotation agreement to Saar and Bennett. Saar immediately refused.
“Our position and commitment was and remains: to change the Netanyahu regime,” he said on Twitter. “We will continue to act accordingly.”
Israeli media outlets have described Saar as likely the next justice minister — a position that would put him in greater conflict with his former mentor. Netanyahu is accused in separate cases of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He has denied wrongdoing.
Saar has criticized Netanyahu’s calls to end the legal proceedings against him, saying the process should move forward free of politicization. After Saar left Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2020, he said it had become a “tool for the personal interests of the person in charge, including matters relating to his criminal trial.”
Netanyahu’s pitch to Saar and Bennett on Sunday was the latest in a string of offers aimed at keeping him in power. He has also tried to lure defectors from Bennett’s party to join his own group. Political observers say Netanyahu, who failed to cobble together a governing coalition during his own four-week window, has little chance of forming his own government. Instead, they say, he hopes to derail the opposition agreement and force yet another election in coming months, buying time and another chance at the ballot box.
The change coalition, in which Bennett would deliver the 61 seats needed to form a parliamentary majority, draws on support from Israel’s right, center, left and, indirectly, the Arab-Islamist Ra’am party.
The agreement comes two and a half years into a political stalemate during which Netanyahu has presided over a caretaker government that, as it transitioned from the covid crisis to the conflict in Gaza, made no ministerial appointments, passed no budgets, and left the health, education and other institutional sectors in a prolonged state of limbo.
Lapid, who won the second-largest number of seats in the latest round of elections in March, assumed the 28-day mandate for forming a government May 5 after Netanyahu failed.
In the coming week, the change coalition’s right-wing members are likely to face pressure to abandon the effort from Netanhayu supporters and from their bases, which have expressed discomfort with a government in which the centrist Lapid will play a prominent leadership role.
After Israeli media outlets reported Saturday that Bennett was preparing to sign a coalition deal with Lapid, right-wing groups began circulating an image of Bennett in a black and white checkered kaffiyeh, under the caption “liar.” A similar picture circulated of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the months before his assassination in 1995 by a Jewish ultranationalist who equated his Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative to treason. Israeli police are investigating online threats against Bennett and have assigned him additional security, according to Israeli media.
Netanyahu’s 12 years in power have brought deeper division to Israel’s already fractious society. Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said she expects he will continue to foment turmoil in the Israeli political landscape.
“Netanyahu is the champion of incitement, and once he’s out of office, we’re not just going to return to normal times,” she said. “Netanyahu will give this government hell.”
Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier of Fort Worth, the chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, speaks at a news conference at the Capitol on Sunday, against Senate Bill 7, known as the Election Integrity Protection Act. (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
Texas Democrats Walk Out, Stop Republican's Sweeping Voting Restrictions
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Democrats pulled off a dramatic, last-ditch walkout in the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday night to block one of the most restrictive voting laws in the U.S. from passing before a midnight deadline."
The sudden revolt torpedoed the sweeping measure known as Senate Bill 7, which would have reduced polling hours, empowered poll watchers and scaled back ways to vote in Texas, which already has some of the nation's strictest voting laws.
For Democrats, the victory may be fleeting: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who had declared new voting laws in Texas a priority, quickly announced that he would order lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session. He did not, however, say when that would happen.
"We've said for so many years that we want more people to participate in our democracy. And it just seems that's not the case," Democratic state Rep. Carl Sherman said.
Less than 24 hours earlier, the bill seemed all but guaranteed to reach Abbott's desk. The Texas Senate had approved the measure in a vote before sunrise, after Republicans used a bare-knuckle procedural move to suspend the rules and take up the measure in the middle of the night during the Memorial Holiday weekend.
But as the night wore on in the House, the GOP's chances wobbled. About two hours before the midnight deadline, Democrats began filing out of the chamber in greater and greater numbers, denying Republicans the quorum necessary to hold a final vote. The walkout handed Republicans a rare defeat in the Texas Capitol where they control every lever of power and wield overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate.
State Rep. Chris Turner, the Democratic House leader, said he sent a text message to members of his caucus at 10:35 p.m. telling them to leave the chamber.
"We killed that bill," Turner said.
Republicans showed restraint in criticizing Democrats for the move.
"I am disappointed that some members decided to break quorum," said Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain, who carried the bill in the House. "We all know what that meant. I understand why they were dong it, but we all took an oath to Texans that we would be here to do our jobs."
The move was reminiscent of 2003 when outnumbered Democrats twice broke quorum to stop Republican efforts to redraw voting maps. House Democrats first left the state en masse for Ardmore, Oklahoma only to return several days later. Senate Democrats delayed a special session that summer by going as a group to Albuquerque, New Mexico for several weeks.
Ultimately, neither effort worked as the Democrats eventually returned to the Capitol and Republicans passed the bill.
Under revisions during closed-door negotiations, Republicans added language that could make it easier for a judge to overturn an election and pushed back the start of Sunday voting, when many Black churchgoers head to the polls. The 67-page measure would also eliminate drive-thru voting and 24-hour polling centers, both of which Harris County, the state's largest Democratic stronghold, introduced last year.
Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Joe Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."
The vote in the Texas Senate came just a short time after a final version of the bill had been made public Saturday. Around midnight, Republicans wielded their majority to suspend rules that would normally prohibit taking a vote on a bill that had not been posted for 24 hours, which Democrats protested as a breach of protocol that denied them and the public time to review the language first.
Michael Flynn. (photo: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Michael Flynn Tells QAnon Conference the US Should Have a Coup Like Myanmar
Kelsey Vlamis, Business Insider
Vlamis writes: "Michael Flynn, who served as President Donald Trump's national security adviser, told a crowd at a QAnon conference in Dallas, Texas, this weekend that the US should have a coup like the one in Myanmar."
On February 1, Myanmar's military overthrew its democratically elected government and arrested its leaders. The coup immediately sparked protests across the country, prompting the junta to launch a campaign against its own citizens.
Upwards of 800 Burmese people, including at least 40 children, have been killed, according to Myanmar's Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. More than 4,000 people have been arrested.
Flynn, who has become a prominent figure in the QAnon conspiracy theory, was a main attraction at the event, held at the Omni Hotel in Dallas.
In a video shared on Twitter, an attendee asks Flynn: "I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can't happen here."
The crowd immediately cheers, followed by Flynn's response: "No reason. I mean, it should happen here."
QAnon communities have praised the Myanmar coup and endorsed the idea that it should happen in the US, according to Media Matters for America.
In 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia. He later accused the Justice Department of entrapment and moved to withdraw his guilty plea. In November, Trump pardoned him.
Mississippi's Pink House. (photo: Corey L. Burke/The Daily Beast)
Amy Davidson Sorkin | The Unique Dangers of the Supreme Court's Decision to Hear a Mississippi Abortion Case
Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "The most pressing question now may be not whether Roe and Casey can survive but how reproductive rights can be sustained without them."
ne of the most striking facts in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that the Supreme Court has now agreed to hear, concerns the identity of one of the parties. Jackson Women’s Health is the only licensed abortion clinic in Mississippi. Women seeking its services often have to travel hundreds of miles to the pink building on North State Street, in Jackson, and to either make the trip twice or find somewhere to stay—Mississippi imposes a twenty-four-hour waiting period after mandatory in-person counselling. Girls younger than eighteen need a parent’s permission or a waiver from a court. And when a woman arrives she is usually subjected to people shouting through megaphones that she is murdering her child. The city tried to limit the noise, which reportedly can be heard inside businesses down the street, but the ordinance was revoked after a challenge. “If there are protesters outside on the day of your procedure, please ignore them and come directly into the clinic,” the clinic’s Web site advises. “You don’t have to stop.”
Jackson Women’s Health has another distinction. There is every possibility that the case bearing its name—along with that of Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer of Mississippi—will be the one that either overturns Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the two Supreme Court rulings that are the bedrocks of reproductive rights, or renders them powerless. This case began as a challenge to a Mississippi law forbidding abortions after fifteen weeks (counting from a woman’s last menstrual period), except in very narrow circumstances. A woman would have to be facing a medical emergency that could cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function”—or threaten her life. The only other exception would be if doctors determined that the fetus, even if carried to full term, could not survive. Rape and incest would not be taken into account.
Crucially, fifteen weeks is well before the point at which a fetus would be viable outside the womb, and that is also the point at which the Supreme Court has said that a woman’s interest in controlling her own body outweighs any other interests the state has. The Mississippi law is so clearly contrary to the Court’s precedents that Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in an opinion in 2019 that it was his “duty” to strike it down, even as he railed about pain being inflicted on “innocent babies.” Similar state laws are regularly batted down. Why, then, did the Court take this one?
The obvious, depressing answer is that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health will be argued in the term that begins in October, with Amy Coney Barrett seated in place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last September. It’s a good bet that Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—the Trump trio—along with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, will try to severely limit reproductive rights. They wouldn’t even need John Roberts. Groups working to restrict those rights plainly see this as a moment of opportunity. In the past few months, there has been a frenzy of anti-choice legislation at the state level; the Guttmacher Institute tallied twenty-eight new restrictions signed into law in the four days between April 26th and April 29th alone. The most pressing question now may be not whether Roe and Casey can survive but how reproductive rights can be sustained without them.
The specific question the Court has said it will examine is this: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The wording is important. Casey allows states to regulate abortion in certain ways, even before viability, as long as the rules do not put an “undue burden” on women. The burdens have nonetheless become quite undue in recent years, from mandatory waiting periods to licensing requirements designed to close down clinics. It’s not an accident that there is only one clinic in Mississippi, and just a few in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and other states. About ninety per cent of the counties in the United States lack an abortion clinic. Before the pandemic, the A.P. estimated that, in a five-year period, more than two hundred and seventy thousand women travelled to another state to obtain an abortion. Even now, the reality of abortion access for a woman in the Northeast or California is in stark contrast with that for a woman in the South or the Midwest. The Mississippi case is different and more radical because the state claims, implausibly, that its near-total ban on abortion after fifteen weeks is merely a regulation of the sort envisioned by Casey. Indeed, the state, in its brief for the Court, objects strongly to the use of the word “ban” to describe the law.
A particularly shameless defense of the Mississippi law can be found in an amicus-curiae brief filed by Texas and seventeen other states. It argues that the Court should treat the Mississippi law not as a profound conceptual shift, from regulation to prohibition, but as a small adjustment, because it’s already so difficult to get an abortion in that state. Jackson Women’s Health offers abortions only until the sixteenth week, and the amicus brief insists that the clinic must “explain why these women could not schedule their abortions one week earlier.” This argument is doubly disingenuous because, soon after the Fifth Circuit struck down the post-fifteen-week ban, Mississippi passed an even more extreme one, on abortions after six weeks. That law has been blocked by the courts. There are also pending challenges to near-total bans approved in Arkansas, in March, and in Oklahoma, in April—and to a law that Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, signed on May 19th, banning abortion after the detection of a heartbeat, which can be as soon as six weeks and often before a woman knows that she is pregnant.
And yet, as harsh as the heartbeat law is, it took Texas only a week to outdo it. Last Wednesday, the state legislature approved what is known as a “trigger law,” which would go into effect if Roe is overturned. It would ban abortion almost entirely, as would similar trigger laws that exist in a dozen other states, such as Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah. (Several of those states also have heartbeat legislation.) By comparison, about a dozen states have measures in place to safeguard access to abortion to a certain extent. California, for example, still has a pre-Roe law legalizing abortion on the books. More states need more robust trigger laws that would protect reproductive rights, and they will likely need them soon. Some of the most crucial conflicts in the coming years are likely to be in state legislatures, waged in the spaces between landmark Court cases. The Mississippi case need not be the end.
Mobile Anti-Riot Squad agents hold a demonstrator in Bogota, Colombia, May 28, 2021. (photo: EFE)
Night of Repression Leaves 11 People Injured in Bogota
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD) agents on Sunday cracked down on a peaceful protest at the Portal Resistencia metro station in Bogota, leaving at least 11 people injured."
Colombia's President Duque continues to ignore international calls to stop police brutality.
Witnesses said the officers threw gas grenades and shot at protesters with firearms. In the Chicala neighborhood, police forces also assaulted citizens who were not taking part in the protests.
On Monday morning, human rights defenders denounced that at least four people were detained during the previous night. They added that similar to what has happened in Cali and Popayan, armed men shot at the demonstrators from private vehicles.
The violent incidents occurred a few hours after President Ivan Duque's representatives and protest leaders met without reaching agreements.
During the meeting, the National Strike Committee (CPN) demanded an end to the militarization of the streets while the government insisted on increasing security force deployment as a strategy to contain the protests.
The Duque administration has ignored the call of international human rights organizations for an end to police brutality. So far, authorities have only recognized 2 out of the 43 deaths attributed to police brutality.
"The National Strike continues. We will carry out the largest, most organized, and peaceful mobilizations in our history in the upcoming days. Change must happen today," CPN stated.
The Cross Creek Levee in Corcoran, California was rebuilt in 2017 after having sunk seven feet since 1983. The levee is now at least twice the size of the previous one and protects the town from flood water coming from the south and west. (photo: Ryan Christopher Jones/Grist)
The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking
Lois Henry, High Country News
Henry writes: "The very ground upon which Corcoran was built is steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily by agriculture."
n California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.
Corcoran is sinking.
Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and at times making Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.
Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon — the slow-motion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlying sediments to fall in on themselves.
Each year, Corcoran’s entire 7.47 square miles and its 21,960 residents sink just a little bit, as the soil dips anywhere from a few inches to nearly two feet. No homes, buildings or roads crumble. Subsidence is not so dramatic, but its impact on the town’s topography and residents’ pocketbooks has been significant. And while the most recent satellite data showed that Corcoran has sunk only about four feet in some areas since 2015, a water management agency estimates the city will sink another six to 11 feet over the next 19 years.
Already, the casings of drinking-water wells have been crushed. Flood zones have shifted. The town levee had to be rebuilt at a cost of $10 million — residents’ property tax bills increased roughly $200 a year for three years, a steep price in a place where the median income is $40,000.
The main reason Corcoran has been subsiding is not nature. It’s agriculture.
In Corcoran and other parts of the San Joaquin Valley, the land has gradually but steadily dropped primarily because agricultural companies have for decades pumped underground water to irrigate their crops, according to the USGS California Water Science Center.
When farmers fail to get enough surface water from local rivers or from canals that bring Northern California river water into the San Joaquin Valley, they turn to what is known as groundwater — the water beneath the Earth’s surface that must be pumped out. They have done so for generations.
Corcoran’s situation is not unique. In Texas, the Houston-Galveston area has been sinking since the 1800s. Parts of Arizona, Louisiana and New Jersey have dealt with subsidence problems. The foundations of Mexico City churches have famously tilted, and one 2012 study found that Venice was subsiding at a rate of .07 inches per year.
But how Corcoran came to dip nearly 12 feet in more than a decade is a tale not of land but of water, and the ways in which, in ag-dominated Central California, water is power — so much so that many residents and local leaders downplay the town’s sinkage or ignore it entirely. Few in Corcoran are eager to criticize agricultural companies that provide jobs in a struggling region for helping to cause a little-known geological problem no one can see.
“It’s a risk for us,” said Mary Gonzales-Gomez, a lifelong Corcoran resident and chairwoman of the Kings County Board of Education. “We all know that, but what are we going to do? There’s really nothing that we can do. And I don’t want to move.”
An altered landscape
It is known as the Corcoran Bowl — an area amid the agricultural fields in and near Kings County that stretches at times up to 60 miles. The bowl is the region of deep sinkage in the land, with Corcoran at the center — a sinkhole at a snail’s pace.
Jay Famiglietti helped identify the Corcoran Bowl, although for much of his career he worked for an agency focused more on what is in outer space than what is beneath the ground. He is a former senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the research center in Southern California known for aiding planetary exploration missions.
Scientists at the NASA lab have formed an unusual bond with Corcoran, spending years tracking subsidence there and elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley by using radar and satellite technology.
Famiglietti, now the director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, began warning of severe sinking in the valley based on satellite imagery as early as 2009. Years later, one of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Cathleen Jones, documented more than 30 inches of sinking west of Corcoran.
“There’s no way around it,” Famiglietti said. “The scale of the bowl that’s been created from the pumping is large and that may be why people don’t perceive it. But a careful analysis would find there is lots of infrastructure potentially at risk.”
Some of that infrastructure has already been damaged.
The Corcoran Irrigation District had to install three lift stations to pump water through ditches. The water used to run on gravity alone, but the sinking created sags in the ditches and caused the water to pool instead of flow through. The district spent $1.2 million over 10 years on lift stations to help push the water along, costs paid for by farmers.
The sinking land crushed the casings of four drinking-water wells used by the city. Insurance paid for two new wells, but city taxes were used to redrill the other two at a cost of $600,000.
And there was the levee that was rebuilt for $10 million in 2017. The levee had sunk from 195 feet when it was built in 1983 to 188 feet in 2017.
“Our residents got hit hard,” said Dustin Fuller, who is the director of the Cross Creek Flood Control District and who led the levee repairs. In addition to the higher property tax bills, some residents bought flood insurance for the first time.
Amec Foster Wheeler Environment and Infrastructure Inc., an engineering company, examined how sinking near Corcoran could affect construction of California’s high-speed rail line, a section of which is being built along the town’s eastern edge. Sinking had altered the topography so much that three flood zones appeared to be merging. The consolidated flood zones could engulf Corcoran and nearby towns in 16 feet of water in a major flood, according to the engineers’ report.
The engineers brought their concerns to state agencies. But no one agency was tracking infrastructure damage from sinking, and no actions were taken in response to their report.
Along Highway 43
The land around Corcoran is tied to agriculture, and so is its economy.
The town is known as the home of a tough state prison that once housed Charles Manson. Corcoran rests alongside Highway 43, roughly 200 miles from both Los Angeles to the south and San Francisco to the north. Nearly 30% of the town’s working-age residents work in the farming industry, and more than 30% of residents live in poverty.
Several large agricultural operations surround Corcoran, including Sandridge Partners, the J.G. Boswell Company, Hansen Ranches, the Vander Eyk Dairies and many others. Collectively, they have hundreds of wells pulling water from beneath the flat, fertile fields around Corcoran.
How much underground water is being pumped by farming companies is nearly impossible to determine. California does not require that information to be disclosed.
Boswell is by far the most prominent agricultural operation in the area. The company started in Corcoran in 1921 and has grown into a $2 billion international enterprise. It has supplied steady work for generations of Kings County families and has been an integral part of the town’s identity, even helping to build the high school football stadium.
Boswell operates more wells in the area than most other ag companies, and far deeper ones. It owns 82 active wells around Corcoran, a majority of which plunge either 1,000 to 1,200 feet deep or 2,000 to 2,500 feet deep. The next largest nearby well owner, Vander Eyk Dairies, has 47 wells, only 10 of which are 1,000 feet deep or deeper.
Boswell’s status as one of the largest and deepest pumpers of groundwater in the Corcoran area — and its decision to sell off portions of its surface water — has raised questions about its role in Corcoran’s subsidence problems.
Some residents and local leaders said they believe that Boswell was leaning more heavily on groundwater for its crops because it had been selling surface water out of the area for substantial profits. In just two sales in 2015 and 2016, one Fresno County water district bought 43,000 acre-feet of Boswell water for $43.6 million.
“If you’re selling off your water, you’ve got no business farming with groundwater,” said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and farmer.
Others in the area say it is impossible to blame any one water user for Corcoran’s complicated and long-running history of sinkage.
“We’re all pumping,” said Gene Kilgore, the general manager of the Corcoran Irrigation District, which installed the lift stations and serves Boswell and other companies. “Every grower is pumping, every city is pumping, and we all play whatever part there is to subsidence.”
Local Boswell representatives said there was not enough data to know which water user had been pumping what amounts. All of the company’s surface water transfers and exchanges have been approved by state water regulators.
Boswell executives at the company’s headquarters in Pasadena did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.
The owners of Sandridge Partners and Vander Eyk Dairies declined to comment. An executive with Hansen Ranches did not respond to requests for comment.
The drought’s effects
California has been gripped, yet again, by severe drought. The situation will very likely make Corcoran sink even more.
In the 1960s, California built the State Water Project, a water storage and delivery system, to move water from the north to parched lands in the Central Valley and farther south.
Much of the water comes from the ecologically sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where concerns over endangered fish have limited how much water can be exported. Amid the current drought, farmers have been told to expect only 5% of their contracted water allotments.
That means farmers may be forced to pump more groundwater to make up for the lack of surface water. That happened during California’s last prolonged drought, from 2012 to 2016, when Central Valley land sank at high rates.
State lawmakers responded by passing a law aimed at stopping water-related land sinkage. The law, known as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, requires that water basins be brought into balance by 2040 — meaning more water cannot be pumped out than goes into the ground.
Karla Nemeth, the director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, said excessive groundwater pumping and its effect on Corcoran were issues that warranted a closer look.
“The plight of Corcoran is the absolute poster child for legacy unmanaged groundwater pumping that is unacceptable in California and that finally gave rise to (the groundwater law),” Nemeth said.
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