24 June 21
Thirty Donations in a Day, Who Thinks That’s Too Much?
On average we see roughly 20,000 visitors to RSN per day. If we get 30 donations we’re usually ok, the fundraising is on-track to cover our expenses. If we get 10-15 donations a day, or half of what we need it throws the process into chaos. For the past 7 weeks we have been in the 10-15 range. Predictably chaos now ensues.
Is there anyone who thinks 30 donations in a day is an unreasonable standard?
Respectfully,
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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24 June 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Tom Harkin | Here's Another Option for Filibuster Reform That Could Achieve Compromise
Tom Harkin, The Washington Post
Harkin writes: "In November 1994, Republicans won control of the U.S. House and Senate. In January 1995, I introduced a bill, along with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), to revise the filibuster even though Democrats were in the minority."
Many of my Democratic colleagues were incredulous, thinking that we Democrats could use the filibuster to stop the Republican agenda in the Senate.
I addressed the issue on the Senate floor and warned of an arms-race scenario. If Democrats use the filibuster 20 times during a session, I said, then when roles were reversed Republicans would use it 30 times, and so on.
During my 30 years in the Senate, majority control changed five times. The number of filibusters increased each time, as I had warned.
So what does this history mean for the current situation in the Senate? If you believe that the minority should absolutely have the right to stop a bill or measure from being debated and voted on, then there is little more to say, except please don’t call this democracy. It is, quite simply, minority rule. But if you believe that the majority party has the right to advance an agenda with guarantees that the minority will be able to debate and offer amendments, and have them voted on, then there is a path forward.
The proposal I put forth 26 years ago was this: After getting the signatures needed to file cloture on a measure, 60 votes would be needed to invoke cloture and bring the measure to a vote, the same hurdle that must be cleared today. But if the 60 votes were not obtained, then a new cloture petition on the same measure could be filed, and after a certain number of days the second cloture vote would require 57 votes to bring the debate to a close.
If 57 votes are not obtained, then another cloture petition could be filed and this time 54 votes would be required to end debate. If 54 votes were not obtained, then another cloture petition could be filed and this time 51 votes would be enough to end debate.
Does the fact that 51 votes would finally move a bill or amendment mean that the filibuster is being done away with? Quite the opposite. This process would actually enhance the filibuster as a means of slowing down proposed legislation and forcing the majority and minority to negotiate and reach a compromise. Why? Because for the Senate majority leader, the most important thing is time — time to get committee bills to the floor and passed, time to debate and pass appropriations bills, time to bring a fellow senator’s bill to the floor for passage.
If the majority leader is from the same party as the president, the majority leader needs time to try to enact the president’s agenda.
For the Senate minority leader, the most important things are to protect minority members’ right to offer amendments; to have them debated and voted on; and to stop the filling of the “amendment tree” by the majority leader, which prevents senators from offering amendments. More broadly, the minority leader proposes on behalf of his or her party a different agenda for the nation.
During my 40 years in Congress, I chaired two major committees in the Senate but also spent much of my time as the ranking minority member. I found that compromise is the result of negotiations, and negotiations happen when there is a mutuality of interests — not an absolute “yes” or “no” but a more nuanced “maybe.”
This mutuality of interests between the majority and minority leaders would lead to negotiations. Members of the minority party would put pressure on the minority leader to compromise so amendments could be offered by a minority senator, who, with support from a few majority-party senators, could win acceptance of an important amendment.
This kind of legislative victory would be duly noted in future campaigns by both the minority senator and the majority co-sponsors.
Again, for the majority leader, time is of the essence. I estimate that reaching 51 votes under this plan would take close to three or four weeks. If the majority leader is unwilling to negotiate and compromise on amendments, only one bill per month would reach the Senate floor. That would be unacceptable to any majority leader.
If the minority leader is unwilling to negotiate and compromise, the minority loses rights to have effective input through the amendment process.
The Senate was uniquely devised as a place for comity, deliberation and compromise. Over the years, it has lost its foundation. This proposal for filibuster reform would move it in the right direction to reclaim those principles.
Sen. Alex Padilla. (photo: AP)
Democrats 'Another Step Closer' to Reforming Filibuster, Sen. Padilla Says
PBS News Hour
Excerpt: "With the passage of S.1, what we're hoping to establish is a baseline of voter protections and access to the ballot for all eligible voters in America."
Judy Woodruff discusses Tuesday's Senate vote on a voting rights bill with California Sen. Alex Padilla. He was also California's secretary of state for the 2020 presidential election.
udy Woodruff:
And now, for a Democrat's point of view. I'm joined by California Senator Alex Padilla. He served as California's secretary of state during the 2020 presidential election.
Senator Padilla, welcome back to the "NewsHour."
So, what do you say to the main Republican argument that this voting rights bill would be a federal takeover of elections?
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA):
Well, nothing could be further from the truth.
So, the first thing I would say is, let's speak the truth. With the passage of S.1, what we're hoping to establish is a baseline of voter protections and access to the ballot for all eligible voters in America.
What the Republicans are trying to suggest, that this is a federal takeover of elections, it's not true. It'll still be state and local governments that are responsible for administering the elections.
But here's the big question. What are they afraid of? Today's vote is simply a procedural vote to allow for discussion, for debate about voting rights and people's participation in our democracy. And they can't even bring themselves to support that.
Judy Woodruff:
Well, the argument, as you know, they make repeatedly, as we just heard from Senator Thune, the argument they make is that this would be a federal takeover, which they say is traditionally not the way elections are run.
But the other argument we hear them making is that there was the biggest turnout ever for this last presidential election. Why are Democrats trying to make it possible for so many more people to vote, when so many have already voted, as we saw last November?
Sen. Alex Padilla:
Yes.
Well, again, plenty of precedent for Congress to step in to protect our right to vote, the integrity of elections from the federal Voting Rights Act, to the Help America Vote Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and more.
And as far as, compared to 2020, which was, by and large, a successful election, they're right. But they can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they will say, things worked well in 2020, we don't need to change the laws, yet they stand by while state legislatures across the country are changing the rules to make it harder for eligible voters to register to vote, to stay registered to vote, or to actually cast their ballot.
That's why we need these reforms.
Judy Woodruff:
And, Senator, we heard, not just Senator Thune, but other Republicans saying this is all about Democrats trying to make a partisan move, that Democrats know that what you're trying to do by getting — by making it easier for some people to vote who may be marginally qualified or not, that you believe this will help Democrats and that, in other words, you're driven by politics.
Sen. Alex Padilla:
No, the fact of the matter is, this is not about Democrat vs. Republican. This is about voting rights.
Any eligible voter in America should be able to easily register, stay registered to vote, not be purged, and be able to cast their ballot. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about this is because, for the prior six years, as you mentioned, I served as California secretary of state.
The reforms we're asking for, online voter registration, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, more vote by mail, more interest in early voting, are reforms that I helped champion and implement in California.
And what did it lead to? Record voter registration. Record turnout in 2012, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and minimal, minimal administrative issues, and, frankly, let's go one step further, zero evidence of massive voter fraud.
This voter fraud concern is a pretext for Republicans to want to make it harder for marginalized communities to be able to participate in our democracy. Let the people vote. Let us have a debate. And stop favoring multinational corporations and the wealthiest families in America.
That's what the Republican Party — that's what they're going to bat for.
Judy Woodruff:
Well, Senator, let's talk in practical terms here.
Even if you get every single Democrat on board for this vote, you have 50 votes. It looks as if all 50 Republicans are against that. That means you don't pass it. You need 60 votes, according to the Senate rules. You don't have that.
What do Democrats do once this goes down, which it is expected to do?
Sen. Alex Padilla:
So, well, again, we have got to call it out for what it is. What are Republicans afraid of?
The American people deserve to know which party it is that is going to bat for their fundamental right to vote, and which one is trying to suppress the vote?
In terms of advancing these policies, we will continue to press. The fight does not end today. We will continue to try to discuss, try to negotiate, find other ways to advance these proposals, because our right to vote is that important.
And in the meantime, thank the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland for already committing additional resources to litigate, if necessary, to defend our right to vote and access to the ballot.
Judy Woodruff:
And speaking of Senate rules, though, it's — of course, it's known as the filibuster.
And in order to change that, Democrats would have to come together. Even Democrats don't have enough votes right now to change that rule. So, my question, again, is, where do Democrats go? Are you looking — if you can't get this done in Washington, are you looking at going state by state, or what?
Sen. Alex Padilla:
We may well be another step closer to either eliminating or at least reforming the filibuster for the sake of our democracy.
Let's look what's happened this year alone. Earlier in the year, after the deadly insurrection of January 6, Republicans would not stand up to the very important notion of a peaceful transition of power. And now they're ducking the discussion and debate about supporting our fundamental rights to vote.
So, too much is at stake. We're going to keep pressing on.
Judy Woodruff:
Senator Alex Padilla of California, thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it.
Sen. Alex Padilla:
Thank you.
The Supreme Court found that a law that allowed farmworkers union organizers onto farm property during nonworking hours unconstitutionally appropriates private land. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty)
Nina Totenberg | In a Narrow Ruling, Supreme Court Hands Farmworkers Union a Loss
Nina Totenberg and Eric Singerman, NPR
Excerpt: "By a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled that the law - enacted nearly 50 years ago after a campaign by famed union organizer Cesar Chavez - unconstitutionally appropriates private land by allowing organizers to go on farm property to drum up union support."
he Supreme Court on Wednesday tightened the leash on union representatives and their ability to organize farmworkers in California and elsewhere.
At issue in the case was a California law that allows union organizers to enter farms to speak to workers during nonworking hours — before and after work, as well as during lunch — for a set a number of days each year.
By a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled that the law — enacted nearly 50 years ago after a campaign by famed union organizer Cesar Chavez — unconstitutionally appropriates private land by allowing organizers to go on farm property to drum up union support.
"The regulation appropriates a right to physically invade the growers' property," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's conservative majority. He said that allowing union organizers on private land amounts to an unconstitutional taking of their property without just compensation.
Federal protections for union access to the worksite were first enacted in the 1930s, but farmworkers were excluded from the law, an exclusion that California sought to make up for nearly a half century ago. But after the Supreme Court's decision on Wednesday, California's regulation is, for all practical purposes, gone.
Mario Martinez, general counsel for the United Farmworkers Union, contends that in the 1930s race was the motivating factor in excluding farmworkers from the original federal law protecting union access to the workplace, and now, he says, migrant workers, some of the poorest laborers in the country, are gain being left out.
"You double down on that exclusion and discrimination by saying that a state law that's been in existence for almost 50 years is not respectful of the growers' rights," he said. "But there was no discussion of the workers who are essential workers to feed America. There was no discussion of their rights at all."
Other union leaders echoed that sentiment. Nicole Berner, general counsel for the Service Employees International Union, says if workers learned anything during the pandemic, it was that they needed a union to defend their rights.
"Farmworkers kept working to keep food on all our tables," she observes, adding that now, because of Wednesday's Supreme Court decision, these workers "face even greater obstacles in their efforts to improve their working conditions."
But Joshua Thompson, of the Pacific Legal foundation, which represented the growers, was elated by the court's ruling. "When property rights are infringed by denying farmers the right to choose who can come and cannot come onto their property, the constitution demands that the government pay for that right," he said.
Thompson noted, accurately, that some of the protections for union organizers' access enacted into federal law in the 1930s have been eroded by the Supreme Court over time.
But court's decision on Wednesday was only the latest in a series of decisions over the past 16 years that have aimed directly at the heart of organized labor in the United States. In 2018, for instance, the court hamstrung public-sector unions' efforts to raise money for collective bargaining. In that decision, the court by a 5-4 vote overturned a 40-year precedent that had allowed unions to collect limited "fair share" fees from workers not in the union but who benefited from the terms of the contract that the union negotiated.
The case decided by the court on Wednesday began in 2015 at Cedar Point Nursery, near the Oregon border. The nursery's owner, Mike Fahner, said union organizers entered the farm at 5 one morning, without the required notice, and began harassing his workers with bullhorns. The union countered that the people with bullhorns were striking workers, not union organizers.
When Cedar Point filed a complaint with the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the board found no illegal behavior and dismissed the complaint. Cedar Point, joined by another California grower, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing they should be able to exclude organizers from their farms. On Wednesday, they won in the Supreme Court.
Katherine Stone, a law professor at UCLA who studies labor law, says she is concerned about what will replace union organizing in California after Wednesday's decision. "Whether we're going to have a whole new era of labor warfare is an open question," she noted. "If you don't have orderly mechanisms to deal with worker organizing and to deal with collection action of workers, then you get disorderly mechanisms."
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent in Wednesday's case for the court's three liberals, He said the access in the case was "temporary" and so did not constitute a "taking" under the law.
The California regulation, he wrote, is "not functionally equivalent to the classic taking in which government directly appropriates private property or ousts the owner from his domain."
The court's decision could be extremely problematic for unions in general, but especially those that represent low-income workers. The growers asserted that unions should have no problem organizing workers in the era of the internet. But the union maintains that many of the workers at Cedar Point don't own smartphones and don't have internet access. What's more, many don't speak English or are illiterate and live scattered throughout the area, in motels, in labor camps or with friends and family, often moving after just a few weeks when the seasonal harvest is over.
According to Matt Ginsburg, associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO, "the court failed to appreciate the specific circumstances that farmworkers face." "They're seasonal workers," he said, "who move from place to place, and that's specifically what this regulation was tailored to address."
"The agricultural industry has one of the nation's highest percentages of hired child labor, undocumented work, human trafficking, and workplace injury and fatality, including deaths from COVID-19," said law professor Beth Lyon, who directs Cornell's Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic. The court placed "another obstacle in the way of an extremely vulnerable American workforce," she said.
Data from San Jose offers a glimpse of what the national scale of police violence might be. (photo: Mark Makela/Getty)
ALSO SEE: NYC's Police Chokehold Ban Is Struck Down by Court
Violent Encounters With Police Send Thousands of People to the ER Every Year
Simone Wichhselbaum, Lisa Riordan Seville, Emily Siegel, Joseph Neff and Abbie Vansickle, The Marshall Project
Excerpt: "Eliel Paulino was less than a block from his apartment complex late one night in 2015 when red police lights flashed in his SUV's rearview mirror. After he pulled into his parking lot, police told him the light on his license plate was out."
That's probably an undercount. But data from San Jose offers a glimpse of what the national scale of police violence might be.
liel Paulino was less than a block from his apartment complex late one night in 2015 when red police lights flashed in his SUV’s rearview mirror. After he pulled into his parking lot, police told him the light on his license plate was out.
Within minutes, a routine traffic stop became a beatdown, court records show. An officer yelled at Paulino to stop talking, then pulled him to the ground. A second policeman jabbed his baton into Paulino’s gut; a third struck him more than a dozen times with a baton. An emergency room doctor needed four staples to close the wounds in Paulino’s battered right arm.
This story was published in partnership with NBC News.
In police reports, officers claimed that Paulino fought and resisted arrest; video from a security camera showed he did not. The city paid Paulino $700,000 after a jury found the beating violated his constitutional rights.
“The San Jose Police Department has a problem using excessive force,” the jury forewoman, Jessica Erickson, said in an interview. “It needs to stop.”
In the national conversation about policing over the past year, public attention has focused on those who die at the hands of officers. Americans know the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others killed by cops. Few know that tens of thousands of people like Paulino end up in the ER after run-ins with police.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that since 2015, more than 400,000 people have been treated in emergency rooms because of violent interactions with police or security guards. But there’s almost no nationwide data on the nature or circumstances of their injuries. Many of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies don’t tally or make public the number of people who need medical care after officers break their arms, bruise their faces or shock them with Tasers.
Researchers point out that only a tiny portion of arrests involve force. But when police do use force, more than half the incidents ended with a suspect or bystander getting hurt, according to a 2020 analysis. It’s unclear how serious the harm is. “We need better data on injury severity,” said Matthew Hickman, a professor at Seattle University and one of the study’s authors.
Many experts agree that injuries at the hands of cops remain underreported.
"This data depends on the discretion of police, who get to decide who is worthy or unworthy of an ambulance,” said Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University who has researched the Chicago Police Department. “It is absolutely an undercount.”
But even as the rate of injuries goes unacknowledged in the national conversation about police reform, it has strained the relationship between officers and the people they aim to serve — particularly in Black and brown neighborhoods.
“There is a withering away of community trust,” said Van Cleve. “The police are not seen as enforcing the law, they are seen as outside the law.”
Only in a place like San Jose, which requires officers to report injuries and encourages them to take people they’ve wounded to the hospital, do we have a glimpse of what the national scale of the issue might be. The city, with just over a million residents in the heart of Silicon Valley, took the rare step of tracking injuries and hospitalizations as part of a years-long effort to reduce violent interactions between residents and officers, after long-standing complaints that officers were beating people up during arrests.
Despite those efforts, about 1,300 people ended up in the ER after interacting with city police from 2017 to 2020, an analysis of San Jose’s data by NBC News and The Marshall Project found.
Most of the ER visits involved officers using their hands on people, our analysis found. “Control holds” — twisting arms or holding people down — played a role in 60% of the cases. Almost 20% of people who went to the ER were shot with stun guns, and 10% were hit with an “impact weapon” such as a baton.
In those four years, city data shows, encounters with San Jose police left 72 people “seriously injured,” which includes broken bones, dog bites and internal injuries. Nine more people died, all from gunshot wounds.
Rough arrests have cost the city more than $26 million in lawsuit payouts for civil rights violations since 2010, according to the analysis by NBC News and The Marshall Project.
Chief Anthony Mata, who took over the department in March, said that when it comes to using force, his officers are reacting to the behavior of the people they encounter.
“We try to use the minimal force,” he said. “But sometimes individuals are not compliant or are resistant.”
How typical is San Jose’s track record? Do the same analysis “on any department in the country and you would come up with the same results,” said Bob Scales, a police consultant for the city and many other law enforcement agencies. The most unusual thing about San Jose is that it makes its data public, he said.
Another unusual thing about San Jose is how often a use-of-force incident ends up with a trip to the hospital: about 43%, among the highest of the nine cities we looked at that track when a run-in with police results in an ER visit.
But some police departments may have a low percentage of ER visits because they have loose reporting requirements and don’t make officers seek medical treatment for people who are hurt – creating the possibility of a significant undercount of the true rate of injury.
San Jose officials say their rate reflects the city's policy of taking injuries seriously. Unlike many law enforcement agencies, the San Jose Police Department has rules telling officers to get a “medical clearance” from a hospital when someone “has been struck in the head with an elbow, a knee, or a kick.”
Officers routinely go further, current and former officials say, taking people with even minor wounds or complaints to the ER, in part because the local jail requires it. A spokesman for the Santa Clara County Jail did not respond to requests for comment.
“Officers are erring on the side of caution” when they take people to the hospital, said Eddie Garcia, who led the San Jose Police Department from 2016 to 2020, and is now the chief in Dallas. “That doesn’t mean that we are breaking arms and causing skull fractures.”
The police in Denver, like San Jose, have strict rules about seeking medical attention when someone complains of injury, though the decision about whether to go to the hospital is made by EMS, not officers. Medics took people to the hospital in 38% of use-of-force cases.
In Chicago, the police department’s handbook requires officers to request medical assistance if they shoot someone with a gun or a Taser, or hit them with a baton. But if there’s no weapon involved and the person doesn’t ask for medical help or have obvious wounds, there's not a mandatory trip to the ER.
“It’s situational,” said Sgt. Rocco Alioto, a Chicago police spokesman. “He's got an injury from that arrest, you're going to have to get that looked at. But if he's not complaining of an injury, and there's no visible sign of injury, then there's nothing that says that we have to call or take them to the hospital for clearance.”
About 34% of use-of-force incidents in Chicago end in a hospital visit, our analysis found. The city’s office of inspector general said it may be an undercount, pointing to a change in the way the police department tallies hospitalizations.
"We have seen gaps in use-of-force reporting," said Deborah Witzburg, the deputy inspector general for public safety. "In an area where there is so much need for transparency and accountability, any lack of clarity is really problematic."
In Mesa, Arizona, a city of a half-million residents near Phoenix, 36% of use-of-force incidents ended with a trip to the hospital between 2017 and 2020. The police department doesn’t require officers to call EMS or take a person to the ER after a rough arrest, a spokesman said.
So people with injuries that would send them to the hospital in San Jose end up in jail in Mesa. For example, surveillance video at an apartment building caught Mesa police beating Robert Johnson during a 2018 arrest, leaving him with a swollen face and injuries on his chest, back, shoulder and arms. Even with the blows to the head, officers took Johnson directly to jail.
A departmental investigation found that the officers did nothing wrong. Charges against Johnson were dropped, and he then filed a federal lawsuit against the police, which is pending. In court papers, city attorneys said the force was justified.
San Jose’s efforts to reduce police abuse go back to the days of Rodney King. After his infamous beating by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, San Jose was among the first big cities to employ an independent police auditor who investigates civilian complaints about officers.
Walter Katz took on the role in 2015, San Jose was a “baton heavy department” where cops injured people and broke bones, he said. He added that police officials weren’t conducting robust investigations of civilian complaints.
“They really had a weak use-of-force accountability system,” Katz said.
In a push for transparency, in 2017 the department hired Scales’ consulting firm, Police Strategies, which created a publicly accessible website that culls use-of-force information from police reports.
As the picture of police behavior became clearer, San Jose officials learned that their officers were using batons and rubber bullets more than other law enforcement agencies.
Department officials say they have encouraged officers to use weapons less often. In 2015, “impact weapons” were involved in 19% of use-of-force incidents, the Police Strategies report shows. By 2019, that had dropped to 11%. But officers were wrestling more often with people they were trying to arrest. Two-thirds of all use-of-force incidents in 2019 led to injuries, a rate the report described as “above average.” The majority of the injured people ended up in the ER.
Critics seeking police reform want more than detailed statistics.
“I don’t think there’s any pats on the back or gold stars given out for chronicling their overuse of force and injuries on civilians,” said Raj Jayadev, founder of the criminal justice watchdog group Silicon Valley De-Bug. “The end of the story isn’t, ‘Here are all the people we’ve killed’ or ‘Here are all the people we’ve maimed.’ The point is to stop it.”
He and other critics complain that San Jose isn’t doing enough to root out problematic cops. Marco Cruz, the officer who tackled Paulino to the ground in 2015, for example, was transferred to the training unit to help teach recruits. The department declined to make him available for comment. Paulino’s lawyer said he moved back to his hometown in Mexico; he could not be reached for comment.
In interviews and reports, police auditors criticized the department’s internal reviews of use of force, saying investigators didn’t fully examine whether people who were injured had actually posed a threat to officers.
Marissa Santa Cruz, whose father is a deputy sheriff, was celebrating her 22nd birthday with her boyfriend, Paea Tukuafu, at a Holiday Inn in 2019. The hotel called the cops because their music was too loud. Tensions escalated as officers ordered the pair to pack up their things and go, court records and body camera video show.
After 20 minutes, an officer told the couple if they didn’t move faster, they could be arrested. Tukuafu, who is 6-foot-3 and Pacific Islander, swore at police as he told them to let him pack. Sgt. Michael Pina, the supervisor on scene, turned to the officer beside him and said, “Push up and tase this guy.”
Santa Cruz tried to block her boyfriend from getting shocked, video shows. Officers used Tasers on the couple, hit them with batons and shot them with projectiles. They were treated at an ER for cuts and deep bruises.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” Santa Cruz said in an interview. “I was ashamed by my own city’s police officers.”
No criminal charges were brought against the couple, who are suing the officers and the city in federal court. Lawyers for San Jose argue in filings that the police actions were justified even though the couple was unarmed, in part because of Tukuafu’s “large stature and hostile attitude.”
In a sworn statement, Pina asserted that his order to use a stun gun on Tukuafu was meant to be a warning.
“I wanted to let him know we were serious, but I did not expect any officer to tase him at that time,” Pina said in the court filing. “Each officer is trained that he or she cannot shoot his or her Taser unless there is active resistance. At most, I expected an officer to display his Taser.”
Tensions in the city escalated last year as police protests swept the country after George Floyd’s murder. During demonstrations, San Jose officers shot people with rubber bullets. A man was blinded in one eye. Another, who had served as a volunteer teaching officers how to build community trust, needed emergency surgery to repair his testicle. The city now faces at least two civil rights lawsuits over its handling of the protests.
In court filings, lawyers for the city argued in both cases that the lawsuits should be dismissed and that police were responding to an unlawful assembly.
Mayor Sam Liccardo pledged a year ago to improve police accountability. But civil rights activists say San Jose has made little progress in reforming the department. “When I say nothing has happened, I literally mean nothing has happened,” said William Armaline, director of the Human Rights Institute at San Jose State University. Armaline was one of seven members of the city’s safety advisory committee who quit in April.
The police chief acknowledged that he hasn’t started any major reforms in his first months on the job, but highlighted a new program that sends specially trained officers to calls where people are in a mental health crisis.
“Can we do better? Absolutely,” said Mata, who joined the department as an officer in 1996. “We always look at how we can improve. Because if we're not improving, we're not growing. And you know, we're not doing our jobs.”
As San Jose struggles to change, residents like Anthony Cho have continued to end up battered and bloodied in the ER after encounters with police.
Less than a month after the mayor’s pledge to reform the department, officers spotted Cho driving a black BMW convertible that had been reported stolen. Cho got out of the car and ran. Body camera footage shows four officers chasing Cho, who sat down on the ground with his arms up in surrender. The police reports show that they hit him more than 20 times with batons; one cop kicked him in the face with a boot.
“I just kept getting hit in the head,” recalled Cho, who was unarmed. “I remember an officer putting his knee on my neck.”
At the hospital, doctors stapled Cho’s head wound and treated his cuts and bruises. Then he went to jail on charges of driving a stolen vehicle. Cho is now in a court-ordered treatment program after pleading no contest. He has notified the city that he plans to sue.
San Jose declined to comment on Cho’s case, citing pending litigation.
When Cho eventually read the officers' accounts saying he resisted arrest, he said he began to question his memory. If police swore he’d reached into his waistband, maybe he had. It was only after Cho watched the body camera video and saw no indication that he threatened officers that he felt vindicated.
“If I didn’t speak up, this police report would have been accepted, everything would have been buried,” Cho said. “Case closed.”
There are hundreds of children in some of the tents. (photo: BBC)
Rampant Disease, Dangerous Food and Reports of Sexual Abuse: Inside a Texas Border Patrol Detention Facility
Hilary Andersson, BBC News
Andersson writes: "In recent months, the US has seen a massive rise in migrants and asylum seekers from Central America. Violence, natural disasters and pandemic-related economic strife are some of the reasons behind the influx, experts say."
At a US border detention centre in the Texan desert, migrant children have been living in alarming conditions - where disease is rampant, food can be dangerous and there are reports of sexual abuse, an investigation by the BBC has found through interviews with staff and children.
Some have also suggested the perception of a more lenient administration under Democrat Joe Biden has contributed to the crisis, though the White House has urged migrants against journeying to the US border.
The tented camp in the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, is the temporary home for over 2,000 teenaged children who have crossed the US-Mexico border alone and are now awaiting reunification with family in the US.
Findings from the BBC's investigation include allegations of sexual abuse, Covid and lice outbreaks, a child waiting hours for medical attention, a lack of clean clothes and hungry children being served undercooked meat.
The BBC has spoken to camp employees about these conditions and seen photos and video smuggled out by staff.
What are the camp conditions?
The Fort Bliss camp consists of at least 12 tents, some of which house hundreds of children at a time. The children spend most of their day in the tents, getting out for an hour or two of recreation, or to line up with hundreds of others for a meal.
Staff told the BBC the food was mostly edible, but a 15-year-old who has now been released said he was fed uncooked meat. "Sometimes the chicken had blood, the meat very red. We couldn't stand our hunger and we ate it, but we got sick from it."
A number of tents have also been set up just to accommodate the large numbers of sick children - the children have nicknamed it 'Covid city'.
"Hundreds of children have tested positive for Covid," said one employee who asked to remain anonymous because staff are banned from speaking about the camp.
In addition to Covid, outbreaks of the flu and strep throat have also been reported since the camp opened in late March.
And some children in need of urgent medical attention have been neglected.
In a secret recording of a staff meeting in May given to the BBC, an employee told of a child who was coughing up blood and needed urgent medical care.
"They said 'we are going to send him to lunch'," the employee reported another staff member as saying. "It was a three and a half hour wait to see anybody."
The 15-year-old who spoke to the BBC was released last month after 38 days in detention. He said he caught Covid-19 soon after arriving in the camp, and became severely ill. After he recovered, he was sent back to live in a crowded tent and became ill again.
"When we went to ask for medicine they gave us dirty looks, and they always laughed among themselves," said the boy, who preferred to remain anonymous, of some camp workers.
"Lice has been rampant," an employee told the BBC. "And one of the major shortages has been lice kits." Staff said a tent of around 800 girls was locked down last month because of lice.
Photos and video smuggled out of the facility by staff and given to the BBC, show rows of flimsy bunks, set inches from each other, extending in long lines through the vast tents.
"I think the crowding is the number one reason that illnesses have spread," said an employee.
Wild sandstorms sweep through the Chihuahuan desert where the camp is set.
"The whole tent starts shaking, some of the tents open up and sand rushes in. You literally have to shield your whole body from sand," said a female employee who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"By the end of the day, we are all just covered in dust from head to toe," she added. Staff told the BBC that showers are on offer, but many children don't want to take them because they have no clean clothes to change into.
There is a shortage of underwear, other clothing items and shoes in the camp, according to employees.
"It is heartbreaking to hear their stories and to see them very plainly suffering and to hear the same kinds of complaints over and over again about things that could be corrected so easily," said a staff member.
"After a child has been here for a few days, they say, 'you've got to get me out of here as soon as possible, I just can't stand it anymore,'" he added. "They feel like they are in a prison."
What do the authorities say?
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which employs private contractors to help run the camp, says it is committed to transparency, but the BBC was denied access to the camp.
HHS did not respond to the specific allegations of neglect in Fort Bliss uncovered by the BBC, but says in a public statement that it is "providing required standards of care for children such as clean and comfortable sleeping quarters, meals, toiletries, laundry, educational and recreational activities, and access to medical services".
What are the reports of sexual abuse?
There are reports of staff sexually abusing children at the Fort Bliss camp. At a camp training session, secretly recorded by a staff member and shared with the BBC, an employee voiced concern.
"We have already caught staff with minors inappropriately," she said.
Another employee told the BBC that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had spoken to staff about a rape.
"DHS mentioned there was a rape - they are giving the girls pregnancy tests," she said. "And I heard the other night that another contractor was caught in a boys' tent, you know, doing things with him."
What state are the children in?
Many of the children in Fort Bliss become severely depressed, according to staff, who say there are multiple cases of children self-harming.
"I thought that I was not going to get out of there, that I was not going to see my family again," the 15-year-old who spoke to the BBC said, welling up with emotion.
"Sometimes, and at night, we would cry. During the worst time I was nearly at the point of committing suicide," he said.
Staff took risks to speak about and expose the conditions children are being held in at Fort Bliss.
The state of around 12,000 other children in the HHS emergency facilities scattered around the country remains largely unknown.
Why have so many children crossed the border alone?
Over a million migrants have tried to cross into the US this year, according to US Customs and Border Patrol - almost twice as many as last year.
Many adults are deported due to a public health rule put in place in the Trump era. But most children under President Joe Biden have been allowed to stay. These children are mostly coming from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador.
Around 80% of the migrant children who end up in the US alone have relatives in the country, but the system is failing to unite them quickly.
Earlier this year, HHS set up a system of emergency camps - Fort Bliss is one - to relieve overcrowding in facilities run by US Customs and Border Patrol.
Currently, children spend an average of 31 days in the HHS camps, down from 40 days at the beginning of the Biden administration in January.
Staff members of Apple Daily and its publisher Next Digital pose with the final edition of Apple Daily at its headquarters in Hong Kong, China June 24, 2021. (photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Newspaper Apple Daily Announces It Is Closing After National Security Arrests of Staff
Zen Too and Matthew Cheng, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Hong Kong's pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper will close by this weekend, its parent company said Wednesday, following last week's arrest of five editors and executives and the freezing of $2.3 million in assets under the city's national security law."
The board of directors of Next Media said in a statement that Apple Daily’s print edition and online edition will cease no later than Saturday due to “the current circumstances prevailing in Hong Kong.”
The paper’s closure comes as authorities crack down on dissent following months of anti-government protests in 2019. The announcement also coincided with the start of the first trial under the national security law, imposed by Beijing about a year ago.
The widely expected move to close Apple Daily followed last week’s arrests of the five editors and executives, who were detained on suspicion of colluding with foreigners to endanger national security. Police cited more than 30 articles published by the paper as evidence of an alleged conspiracy to encourage foreign nations to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and China.
It was the freezing of assets that spelled the paper’s demise. The board of directors had earlier this week written to Hong Kong’s security bureau requesting the release of some of its funds so the company could pay wages.
Police earlier Wednesday arrested a 55-year-old man on suspicion of foreign collusion to endanger national security. According to Apple Daily, which cited unidentified sources, the man writes editorials for the newspaper under the pseudonym Li Ping.
The police operation against Apple Daily drew criticism from the U.S., the E.U. and Britain, which say Hong Kong and Chinese authorities are targeting the freedoms promised to the city when the former British colony was returned to China in 1997.
Chinese and Hong Kong officials have said the media must abide by the law, and that press freedom cannot be used as a “shield” for illegal activities.
The national security law imposed last year criminalizes subversion, secession, terrorism and foreign collusion.
The first person to stand trial under the law, Tong Ying-kit, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of terrorism and inciting secession by driving a motorcycle into police officers during a 2019 rally while carrying a flag with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times.” Several officers were knocked over and three sustained injuries.
His trial will set the tone for how Hong Kong handles national security offenses. So far, more than 100 people have been arrested under the security law, including prominent pro-democracy activists such as media tycoon Jimmy Lai, the publisher of Apple Daily.
The slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” was often chanted during anti-government demonstrations demanding broader democratic freedoms. Protests accuse Beijing of walking back on its promise at the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain that the city could retain its freedoms not seen elsewhere in China for 50 years.
China responded with tough measures silencing opposition voices, including the national security law.
The legislation makes calls for Hong Kong independence illegal, and a government notice last July said the protest slogan connotes a call for independence and subversion of state power.
A court ruled last month that Tong will stand trial without a jury, a departure from Hong Kong’s common law traditions. Under the national security law, a panel of three judges can replace jurors, and the city’s leader has the power to designate judges to hear such cases.
The law carries a maximum penalty of life in prison for serious offenses. Tong is on trial at the High Court, where sentences are not capped.
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford completed the first scheduled explosive event of full ship shock trials in the Atlantic Ocean, on 18 June 2021. (photo: US Navy)
US Navy's Powerful Shock Exercise Harms Marine Mammals, Expert Says
Katharine Gammon, Guardian UK
Gammon writes: "The US navy set off a massive explosion last week, detonating a 40,000lb blast as part of a test to determine whether its newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, is ready for war. The test, known as a full ship shock trial, is just the first of three planned blasts over the coming months."
Recent blast registered as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake off Florida coast and is enough to have outsized effects on marine life in area
But the amount of explosive used – 40,000 lbs – is enough to have outsized effects on any marine life in the area, said Michael Jasny, who directs the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, working on the law and policy of ocean noise pollution.
Ordinarily, the navy uses much smaller detonations in sinking exercises, just a fraction of this size, he says.
“The navy’s own modeling indicates that some smaller species of marine mammals would be expected to die within 1-2km of the blast, and that some marine mammal species would suffer injury including hearing loss out to 10km of the blast. That gives some sense of the power of the explosives we are talking about,” Jasny said.
It’s difficult to monitor marine mammals even in the best of conditions, as they spend most of their lives underwater – but the navy doesn’t use trained biologists to do the monitoring, so it’s hard to say what the true impacts will be.
“This is unfortunately a black box of an exercise,” Jasny said. “We don’t know how conscientiously the blast site was chosen, and we don’t know how effective the monitoring was before the detonation, so it’s hard to put a great deal of faith in the safety of marine life.”
The area is home to populations of dolphin and small whales at this time of year, and Jasny says that’s worrisome because as a general rule, smaller animals are more vulnerable to blast injury.
“A large whale might need to be within a few hundred meters of the blast to die, while a small mammal could be a couple of kilometers away,” he said, adding that even if the animals survive, loss of hearing is a significant problem for mammals who make their living in the ocean, as they use their hearing to find food and find each other.
Images and video footage from the most recent blast showed a gigantic plume of water shoot from the ocean as a result of the test, and the US Geological Survey said the explosion, which took place in the Atlantic Ocean about 100 miles off Palm Coast, Florida, registered as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake on the coastline.
A spokesperson for the USS Gerald Ford, a nuclear-powered carrier, told Defense News that the test took place “within a narrow schedule that complies with environmental mitigation requirements, respecting known migration patterns of marine life in the test area”.
These blasts are just the tip of the iceberg for navy activity – while these are huge explosions, each year the navy will detonate thousands of explosives in its more heavily-used ranges off the south-eastern coast of the US, or off of southern California.
“None of those are of the power used in a shock trial, but many of them, hundreds of them, are of a power sufficient to kill marine mammals,” Jasny said.
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