12 June 22
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Does the district attorney’s recall reveal the limitations of progressive criminal-justice reform?
Last summer, I travelled to San Francisco to interview Boudin and write about his project. Public safety in the city was caught in a paradox. Having taken office just before the pandemic, Boudin had instituted some immediate progressive reforms: liberalizing bail, charging a police officer for murder for the first time in the city’s history, enacting diversion programs to reduce jail populations, and emptying the jails during the pandemic as a public-health measure. The scenario that Boudin’s allies might have worried about—a spike in violence, which can doom even the most tough-on-crime prosecutors—did not happen. There was no outsized increase in murders. But, even a few months after Boudin took office, it became obvious that San Francisco was experiencing an epidemic of disorder. Burglaries and motor-vehicle theft spiked, though larceny levels plummeted. The homeless were everywhere, encamped or not. Addicts were overdosing on streets in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood almost daily. Smeared everywhere was—it was hard to ignore—a phenomenal quantity of human shit. The paradox was that, in many ways, the city was still as safe as it had been. But it was also becoming much more chaotic, and a little gross.
Here is what I remember from my conversations with Boudin: explaining, explaining, explaining. A natural student, Boudin had amassed an admirable amount of knowledge about crime in San Francisco, its details and cadences. People had started breaking into businesses and homes, he said, after they could no longer break into tourist cars by the water, because the pandemic had killed tourism. Certain viral videos of young people racing out of department stores with armloads of stolen goods were not scenes of chaos but actually of organization, he said; heist rings with ties overseas organized the raids and gave instructions for what to steal. To support these claims, the prosecutor had maps, statistics, charging documents—receipts. Even so, it seemed as if the news kept inviting him to do an ordinary political thing—to evolve, in order to meet voters’ concerns—and he kept refusing. Six months ago, San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, London Breed, announced that she was deploying more cops to deal with drugs in the Tenderloin. Boudin told a press conference, “We can’t arrest and prosecute our way out of problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin.” Fair enough. But if not that—what? Was Boudin’s academic approach—to see crime as a product of structural contingency, rather than as bad guys acting with malice—all wrong?
On Tuesday, Boudin faced a recall from San Francisco voters. That morning, Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, argued on Twitter that some of progressive prosecutors’ favored interventions (bail reform, reclassifying more crimes as misdemeanors) have been studied mostly as pilot programs, and that their effects when implemented at scale might not be so clear-cut. (“If people saw offenders getting off with a slap on the wrist, would that really act as a deterrent?” he tweeted.) The real lesson of San Francisco may be narrower: given that enthusiasm for progressive policies is still untested, and that public resistance to them is reflexive and stiff, it will take a pretty savvy politician to successfully implement them. Notably, the most high-profile progressive prosecutor in the country, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner—a somewhat grouchy longtime public defender now in his sixties—was reëlected last year, despite a surge in homicides in that city. When I visited Boudin’s office in 2021, a video had just surfaced of a group of ten thieves sprinting out of the city’s Neiman Marcus department store lugging huge handbags. Boudin’s staff was being asked to come up with a response to reassure the public, but I sensed a sotto-voce disbelief among them. It was like asking Allen Iverson about practice. Incarceration rates and murders were down. We’re talkin’ about handbags?
San Francisco was talking about handbags. It was talking about car windows, and cell phones, and whatever seemed so enticing to the thieves. It was talking about needles and fecal smear. Soon these complaints mushroomed into a recall campaign that, on Tuesday, removed Boudin as the district attorney, with approximately sixty per cent of the vote. A year ago, I met with an operative of a recall campaign. He told me that he set up a table each weekend at a farmers’ market in San Francisco’s Richmond District to collect signatures for a paper petition under a sign that read “Recall Chesa Boudin.” The people who came up to him, he said, don’t need convincing: “They say, ‘Give me the fucking pen.’ ”
The politics of crime aren’t just about justice. They’re also about cities, and about whether middle-class people feel safe, comfortable, able to thrive. To the end, Boudin argued that the recall campaign had asked voters to blame him for things that weren’t really within his ability to control as district attorney: homelessness, addiction, the state of the city. He blamed the billionaires who had helped fund the recall effort, telling his supporters, “Voters were not asked to choose between criminal-justice reform and something else. They were given an opportunity to voice their frustration and their outrage, and they took that opportunity.” Maybe so, but that’s the new pattern in urban politics—we’re not in the Joan of Arc moment anymore—and the liberal politicians who run cities need to react to it. The same night Boudin was recalled, a conservative property developer took the lead in the first round of voting for mayor of Los Angeles; last fall, Gracie Mansion went to Eric Adams, a longtime cop whose campaign message focussed on stopping crime.
Most American cities are among the wealthiest places in the wealthiest country in the world, and yet there is too much garbage and not enough housing, public transit is a mess, stores and garages are being broken into, and public schools, during the pandemic, were often closed. The message from Democratic voters to the politicians who run these cities is pretty straightforward and a matter of policy: these places need fixing. Boudin began his tenure as the protagonist of a story about the criminal-justice system. He ended it as a character in a story about cities.
Idaho police arrested more than two dozen people on June 11 and charged them with planning to riot near an LGBTQ Pride event. (photo: Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Key Trump Allies Were Talking to
Proud Boys Before Jan. 6, Committee Says
Authorities received a tip about a “little army” loading into a U-Haul truck at a hotel Saturday afternoon, said Lee White, the police chief in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a city of about 50,000 near the border with Washington. Local and state law enforcement pulled over the truck about 10 minutes later, White said at a news conference.
Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.
The group’s founder, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, was among those arrested, according to jail records. Like the others, Rousseau was arrested on a charge of criminal conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor. The arrestees were held on $300 bail. Some of the other men arrested also have been linked to the group.
In photos and videos posted on social media, a group of men dressed in hats, sunglasses, white balaclavas and Patriot Front’s signature khaki pants were seen kneeling on the ground with their hands zip-tied behind their backs as police officers kept watch. An onlooker taunted the group, yelling, “Losers!”
White said the people were headed to City Park, which was hosting Pride in the Park, an event advertised as a “family-friendly, community event celebrating diversity and building a stronger and more unified community for ALL.” Organizers did not immediately respond to telephone and email requests for comment from The Washington Post on Saturday evening, but they wrote in a post to the group’s Facebook page that it was a “successful” event.
The group, North Idaho Pride Alliance, urged people to “stay aware of your surroundings this afternoon and evening” in the city.
Authorities had been aware of online threats leading up to the weekend, White said, so police had increased their presence in the city’s downtown. Two SWAT teams and officers from the city, county and state assisted in the arrests.
The Panhandle Patriots, a local motorcycle club, had planned a “Gun d’Alene” event on the same day as Pride in the Park to “go head to head with these people,” an organizer said in April during an appearance with state Rep. Heather Scott (R).
The organizer was not identified by name in a video but wore a vest bearing the alias “Maddog” and the insignia of the Panhandle Patriots group. He lamented that the Pride gathering would be “allowed to parade through all of Coeur d’Alene,” saying that “a line must be drawn in the sand” against such LGBTQ displays. Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post late Saturday.
In a news release posted on the group’s website, the Panhandle Patriots encouraged the community to “take a stand” against the LGBTQ “agenda.” It also suggested without evidence that “extremist groups” were trying to hijack the event to provoke violence and said the group would change its event name to “North Idaho Day of Prayer” in response.
Reached by phone late Saturday, a representative for the Panhandle Patriots declined to comment on the day’s events, telling The Post, “We are not answering questions right now.”
White did not mention a connection between the Panhandle Patriots event and the arrests. He said those arrested had come from several states “to riot downtown,” with riot gear, at least one smoke grenade and documents “similar to an operations plan that a police or military group would put together for an event.”
He did not see firearms at the scene of the arrest, he said, but emphasized the situation was “very fresh.”
However, firearms were present in the vicinity of the park, White said. Police had been in contact with the FBI “all day,” he said.
White noted that the authorities’ understanding of the situation was still developing and said at the news conference that law enforcement had not yet interviewed those arrested. Representatives for Patriot Front were unable to be reached for comment.
More charges are possible, White said. The first court appearances for those arrested will probably be on Monday, Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris said.
Patrick Lyoya. (photo: Grand Rapids Police Department)
At a press conference on April 13, Grand Rapids city manager Mark Washington released four videos offering different angles on the shooting. “When I saw the video, it was painful to watch, and I immediately asked, ‘What caused this to happen?’” he said. “And ‘What more could have been done to prevent this from occurring?’” Following an investigation and two months of protests, Schurr surrendered on Thursday and will likely be arraigned on Friday, according to a prosecutor in Kent County, Michigan. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison.
Below, everything we know about Lyoya and his death.
Who is Patrick Lyoya?
According to his father, Lyoya emigrated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo with his family in 2014. He was the eldest of six children and had two young kids of his own, ages 2 and 3. “We came from Africa, and I knew that here in America we came for peace; we came for protection. (But) there was no safety here for Patrick,” Peter Lyoya told MLive through an interpreter, saying his son had a “big heart,” worked hard, and should have “had a long life ahead of him.” Peter criticized the police department’s initial decision to keep Schurr’s name private. (They eventually identified him three weeks later.) Peter said his son was having car trouble and had already pulled over when Schurr arrived on the scene, refuting the idea that Patrick failed to cooperate.
“Me personally, I want, first, justice to be done for Patrick,” Peter told MLive. “I am the parent. What has happened to me because Patrick has been killed, I don’t want another parent to go through what I went through.”
What happened when police stopped him?
Lyoya died just after 8 a.m. on April 4, after an approximately two-and-a-half-minute scuffle with Schurr, who pulled him over. A passenger was riding with Lyoya at the time and filmed part of the incident that followed. Police said his plates weren’t registered to his car and that a struggle ensued when he ran away from Schurr. During the course of their fight, the department said, Schurr shot Lyoya. But footage of the encounter tells a more complicated story.
What does footage of the stop show?
On April 13, the City of Grand Rapids released a series of four videos that, taken together, provide a complete timeline of the shooting. Footage from the cop car’s camera shows a man — Lyoya — exiting his driver’s-side door after he pulls over on a residential street; Schurr shouts at Lyoya to “Stay in the car” as he approaches. Their exchange isn’t audible, though the pair appear to have had a discussion, and the situation escalates quickly: Lyoya closes the door and walks toward the vehicle’s hood, at which point Schurr grabs at his arms in an attempt to pin them behind his back. Lyoya shrugs off Schurr, who chases him around the vehicle. Schurr wrestles Lyoya to the ground, then maneuvers him across the lawn. They exit the frame, and around the video’s 32:24 mark, a pop sounds offscreen. A breathless Schurr can then be heard over the car’s radio, informing the dispatcher of a shooting.
In body-cam footage, Lyoya appears confused as Schurr shouts at him to produce his driver’s license, not seeming to understand the reason for the stop. Schurr asks him whether he speaks English, and Lyoya says that he does, asking, “What did I do wrong?” When Lyoya moves toward the front of the car, Schurr begins yelling at him and tries to physically restrain him, prompting Lyoya to run. Schurr then tackles him, forcing his face into the grass while screaming “Stop!” As the pair struggle, the scene becomes difficult to discern — the camera often pressed into Lyoya’s sweater — but as Schurr commands Lyoya to “Stop resisting,” Lyoya responds, “Okay.” At this point, Schurr has him upright, hands behind his back. When the two men find themselves face-to-face, Schurr removes his Taser; Lyoya grabs it and shunts it away from his body, then falls onto the grass. That’s where the body-worn camera goes dark — “deactivated,” according to police.
Footage from an across-the-street neighbor’s doorbell camera shows that, with Lyoya on the ground, Schurr climbed on top of him and shouted repeatedly at him to “Let go of the Taser.” Video recorded by Lyoya’s passenger rounds out the picture: Sprawled on top of Lyoya, Schurr shoots him in the head, seemingly while forcing him down by the neck.
What does Lyoya’s autopsy say?
At a news conference on April 19, attorneys for the Lyoya family released the results of an independent autopsy conducted by former Detroit medical examiner Werner Spitz, a famous forensic pathologist who has consulted on a string of big cases, including the O.J. Simpson trial, the Jon Benet Ramsey investigation, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK. Spitz confirmed what looks clear from the video: That Lyoya died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head, “instantly ending what could have been a long and fruitful life,” according to civil-rights attorney Ben Crump, who is working with Lyoya’s family.
How have the city and police responded?
After the city made the videos public, Governor Gretchen Whitmer released a statement offering condolences to Lyoya’s family and touting “a transparent, independent investigation of the shooting,” asking for “appropriate action on charges” by the prosecutor’s office. The Grand Rapids Police Officers Association defended Schurr, calling the case “tragic” and suggesting he had acted in self-defense. “We feel a thorough review of this entire situation will show that a police officer has the legal right to protect themselves and community in a volatile dangerous situation such as this,” the Association said in a statement.
Crump released his own statement on the shooting. “The video clearly shows that this was an unnecessary, excessive, and fatal use of force against an unarmed Black man who was confused by the encounter and terrified for his life,” it read. “We demand that the officer who killed Patrick not only be terminated for his use of excessive and fatal force, but be arrested and prosecuted for the violent killing of Patrick Lyoya.”
How did Grand Rapids residents react to the shooting?
Protests followed the release of the videos, with crowds numbering in the hundreds gathered outside the Grand Rapids Police Department. Participants called on officials to “Name that killer cop” alongside another urgent demand: “Stop murdering us!”
Protestors marching through the streets of Grand Rapids, Michigan tonight in the name of Patrick Lyoya, who was shot and killed by police. #PatrickLyoya pic.twitter.com/2nEmzf4OSK
— Omar Jimenez (@OmarJimenez) April 13, 2022
HAPPENING NOW: Hundreds gather outside the Grand Rapids Police Department to protest the shooting of 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya. Police released videos of the deadly police shooting earlier today. @wwmtnews pic.twitter.com/tU0Drx3NJo
— Trisha McCauley (@TrishaWWMT) April 13, 2022
According to the Times, activists addressed the City Commission on April 12, describing long-standing patterns of bias and brutality by the local police department that leave many residents of color feeling unsafe. And indeed, a study released in 2017 suggested local police were twice as likely to stop Black drivers than they were non-Black drivers. Across the country — even with escalating pressure on law-enforcement agencies to evaluate and address the systemic, ingrained racism that often drives fatal force — it is still true that police kill Black people at about twice the rate they do white people, often for infractions as minor as improper registration.
Will Schurr be convicted?
It’s rare for American police officers to face criminal charges for on-duty killings. Even now that Schurr has been charged with second-degree murder, it’s unclear whether he’ll be convicted: Cases are notoriously difficult to prove in court, especially when officers claim to have acted out of fear for their own lives. Still, Christopher Becker, the prosecutor who charged Schurr, remains optimistic: “Obviously I wouldn’t charge it if I didn’t think I could prove it,” he said on Thursday, adding, “This death was not justified or excused, for example, by self-defense.” Ven Johnson, a lawyer for the Lyoya family, spoke to their relief over the prosecutor’s decision. “What this family hopes for is that more sooner than later — like now, today — that police officers understand that what they got away with in the past, they can’t get away with anymore,” Johnson said.
A child holding an AR-15 rifle. (photo: Olivier Doultery/AFP/Getty Images)
One family has retained a lawyer who helped Sandy Hook families get a $73 million settlement from Remington Arms.
Some in Uvalde are gearing up to find out.
Victims and family members tied to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, where an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 children and 2 teachers and wounded 17 others, are taking tentative first steps toward launching lawsuits against gunmaker Daniel Defense, the company that made the shooter’s AR-15-style rifle.
The result could easily rank among the most important legal battles over mass-shooting in U.S. history, and become an epic fight over how much responsibility should fall on companies that make weapons used by mass killers.
The parents of a 10-year-old child killed in Uvalde sent a letter last week to Daniel Defense seeking information about how the DDM V7 rifle used in the attack was marketed, and whether the company had any communication with the shooter on social media or elsewhere.
“My purpose for being now is to honor Amerie Jo’s memory,” said Alfred Garza III, the father of Amerie Jo, in a statement. “She would want me to do everything I can so this will never happen again to any other child. I have to fight her fight.”
Emilia Marin, a Robb Elementary School staffer who saw the shooter arrive as she was carrying food into the building for an end-of-school-year party, has filed a pre-lawsuit petition with the company. In Texas, parties can gather evidence before actually filing a suit.
Marin’s lawyer said they want to know whether the company changed its marketing after four Daniel Defense AR-15-style rifles were found in the arsenal of the Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 people and injured 411 more at a music festival in 2017, in the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history.
Marin suffered psychological trauma in the wake of the incident in Uvalde, according to her attorney, Don Flanary.
“She is not well psychologically. She is a wreck,” Flanary told NBC. “She’s been to her doctor and she’s continuing to receive treatment. It’s going to be a long road ahead, as it is for so many other people.”
Daniel Defense posted a statement on its website declaring itself “deeply saddened” by the Uvalde massacre, and promising to cooperate with all federal, state, and local law enforcement investigations.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and community devastated by this evil act,” the statement said. The company didn’t return a request for comment.
Now, the family-owned business based in Georgia is facing increasing scrutiny, in part for what the New York Times dubbed its “aggressive, boundary-pushing style of weapons marketing and sales.” The company’s advertisements have invoked video games like Call of Duty, and have featured Star Wars characters and Santa Claus, with messages likely to appeal to teenagers, according to the Times.
The Uvalde shooter purchased two rifles only days after his 18th birthday.
Examining Daniel Defense’s marketing practices will be a key point of interest for Garza’s legal team as they consider their path forward, said an attorney representing Garza, Josh Koskoff.
“The gun industry is marketing to younger people. If you just see the marketing, you know who they’re trying to reach,” Koskoff told VICE News in an interview. “If you know any teenagers, you know that’s not a reliable demographic for selling the military’s leading combat weapon.”
Any lawsuit against a gunmaker will be an uphill battle. But a recent precedent suggests a multi-million dollar breakthrough is at least possible: In February, nine Sandy Hook families managed to nail down a $73 million settlement from Remington Arms, the maker of the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle used in the school shooting that killed 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, including 20 children.
Koskoff, now working for Garza in Uvalde, was part of the victorious Sandy Hook legal team.
“Daniel Defense has said that they are praying for the Uvalde families. They should back up those prayers with meaningful action,” Koskoff said in a statement, urging the gunmaker to share the requested marketing details and communications. “If they really are sincere in their desire to support these families, they will provide the information.”
Gunmakers are generally protected from civil liability when their customers use their products to commit crimes thanks to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was passed by Congress in 2005. At the time, gunmakers faced a rising tide of lawsuits from activists and local governments accusing them of creating a “public nuisance” by selling guns.
The law is “one of those nifty corporate giveaways Congress is so good at crafting when lots of lobbying dollars and business interests are in play,” according to Tim O’Brien, columnist for Bloomberg News.
There are built-in exceptions to the wide-ranging protections in the law, however—including for improper sales and marketing practices. Gun manufacturers and dealers can be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, or for “negligent entrustment” when they had reason to know the weapon might be used in a crime.
Only two “negligent entrustment” lawsuits had ever made their way to a jury trial as of 2018, however, according to one review of legal records.
Koskoff recalled encountering skepticism before his team secured the $73 million settlement for the Sandy Hook families—in what turned out to be the largest payout ever by a gunmaker over a mass shooting.
“When we filed the Sandy Hook case, the best support we got was, ‘Good luck with that!’” Koskoff said.
“That legal victory shattered a perception of invulnerability by the industry,” he said. “And that was important, because if you feel like you can’t be held accountable under the law, you act accordingly.”
Amazon union organizer Pasquale Cioffi, fired on June 9, speaks alongside Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls in front of the LDJ5 warehouse on Staten Island, April 24, 2022. (photo: Calla Kessler/WP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Chris Smalls’s Amazon Uprising
and the Fight for a Second Warehouse
Amazon has fired another key union organizer at JFK8, the Staten Island fulfillment center that voted to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union in April. The company has one goal: destroy the union.
When the union drive began, Cioffi wasn’t immediately on board. A Republican and former longshore worker with the International Longshoremen’s Association, Cioffi felt that the ALU’s organizers were promising too much, particularly on the subject of raises, as they spoke with coworkers about the union. But upon seeing ALU president Chris Smalls arrested in February alongside ALU members Brett Daniels and Jason Anthony — the trio were delivering food to workers, which Amazon considered trespassing given that Smalls no longer worked at the facility — Cioffi changed his mind. “At the end of the day, they were dropping off food,” Cioffi told In These Times.
His decision to back the union was decisive. Cioffi, who sometimes adorns the back of his yellow Amazon vest with the words “Italian G.O.A.T.” on the back, has a following in the warehouse. Once he decided to join ALU’s effort, he estimates that he managed to flip around five hundred workers in the facility to vote yes for the union.
Now Amazon has fired Cioffi. According to the ALU, Amazon fired him on June 9 for “arguing with a manager about mistreatment of workers.” Smalls alleges that the company has been retaliating against Cioffi ever since the union’s April 24 rally before the union vote at LDJ5, the smaller Amazon distribution center in Staten Island, which voted against unionizing. Cioffi spoke at that rally, warning JFK8 management against targeting and intimidating workers.
The ALU is demanding Cioffi’s immediate reinstatement and says that it has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) requesting 10(j) injunctive relief, characterizing the situation at JFK8 as “out of control.”
Cioffi is just the latest union supporter fired by Amazon in the weeks since the JFK8 election. In the first week of May, Amazon fired Mat Cusick and Tristan Dutchin. Cusick had been on a COVID-related leave when the company informed him that he had been terminated for “voluntary resignation due to job abandonment.” Dutchin was told his firing was a result of his falling behind on the company’s stringent productivity quotas. Vocal ALU supporters Alicia Johnson, James O’Donnell, and Gabby Rivera have also been fired.
Both Cusick and Dutchin had been ALU organizers: Cusick was the union’s communications lead. Following his termination, Cusick announced that he had also been expelled from the ALU, alleging a consolidation of power among some of the union’s leaders. Such factional conflict, too, which has a long history in the labor movement, should concern those who hope to see the ALU win a first contract at JFK8 and Amazon workers elsewhere launch successful union campaigns of their own.
In firing union supporters, Amazon is viciously pursuing its goal of destroying the union. The existence of workers such as Cioffi inside JFK8 was intolerable for the company, so they are getting rid of them, hoping to tamp momentum even if the NLRB ultimately orders their reinstatement. The company continues to refuse to recognize the union and is fighting in the courts as well. Amazon filed twenty-five objections to the NLRB vote at JFK8 and is set to argue before a labor board judge on Monday that the union’s victory should be overturned. Amazon sought to restrict attendance at the hearing, which will be held over Zoom — a request the NLRB denied.
“The Board’s hearings are not secret,” Cornele Overstreet, the NLRB regional director overseeing the hearing, wrote in an order on Thursday. “That this case has garnered national and international attention from outside parties only further solidifies the importance of allowing public observation, as employees and members of the public can be better informed of the purposes and policies of the Act.”
As the court hearings proceed, Amazon’s termination of union supporters is, like similar efforts by Starbucks, meant to gut the union, hollowing it out so thoroughly that it cannot function. If the company rids itself of core ALU organizers, the ones so committed to winning more power on the job that they spent countless hours speaking with their coworkers, staying after shifts and coming in on days off, Amazon can neutralize the union threat. The question now: How will the ALU, and its allies in the broader labor movement, respond? As the union tweeted following Cioffi’s firing, “It’s war.”
British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous affairs specialist Bruno Pereira were reported missing on Sunday after they ventured into the middle of the Amazon rainforest. (photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images)
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, missing for more than five days, had failed to show up in Atalaia do Norte at the end of a reporting trip
“Search teams found on the river, near to Atalaia do Norte, apparently human organic material,” Brazil’s federal police said in a statement.
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were reported missing on Sunday morning after they failed to show up in the town of Atalaia do Norte at the end of a reporting trip near Brazil’s border with Peru.
Police also confirmed blood had been found on a boat belonging to Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, a man police arrested earlier this week in connection with their disappearance.
Although police said they had no evidence directly tying da Costa de Oliveira to any crime, nor even if the blood on the boat was human or animal, the announcement was a blow to hopes the two men, now missing for more than five days, would be found alive.
Police said the material was being sent for examination and took DNA from Phillips’ home in Salvador and from the family of Pereira in Recife.
“The genetic material collected will be used in comparative analysis with the blood found on the boat,” they added.
Phillips, 57, had been resident in Brazil for 15 years and was a longtime contributor to the Guardian, the Washington Post and other international publications.
He was in the Amazon reporting for a book on sustainable development and was accompanied by Pereira, an explorer and Indigenous advocate who had years of experience in navigating the rivers and forest in what is one of the remotest parts of the rainforest.
The Vale do Javari region is home to 26 Indigenous tribes, many of whom have had little contact with outsiders.
However, their land, like much of the land in the Amazon, is much coveted by illegal miners, hunters and loggers, as well as drug traffickers.
Pereira had been threatened before for his work in the area, helping indigenous communities protect their traditional lands from invaders.
Da Costa de Oliveira was arrested with arms and ammunition and sources said he threatened Phillips, Pereira and a group of 13 Indigenous people on Saturday morning as they stopped at a community on the Itaquaí river.
Health workers screen passengers arriving from abroad for monkeypox symptoms at Anna International Airport terminal in Chennai on June 03, 2022. (photo: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images)
“We can’t put this one back in the bottle,” said the researcher behind a recent study about the spread of zoonotic diseases.
“We know that species are on the move—we know that probably has relevance to other viruses,” said Carlson, an assistant professor of biology at Georgetown University. “And for a while, we really wanted to get into what does that mean for human health? What does it mean for pandemics?”
What it meant, Carlson and his co-authors found, was that it may already be too late to limit the spread of zoonotic spillover—when diseases move from animals to humans—because of climate change.
Over the next 50 years, the spread of pathogens between humans and animals in the wild will lead to the transmission of about 4,000 new viruses between species, their research found, and increase the risk of global pandemics.
“We can’t put this one back in the bottle,” Carlson said of his team’s findings.
In recent weeks, the epidemiological world has been focused on a global uptick in cases of monkeypox. Discovered in the 1950s, the virus that causes monkeypox—which was first identified in research primates—is in the same epidemiological family as smallpox. The virus is common in parts of Africa, is spread through close contact and it is treated using antiviral medicines. The smallpox vaccine is also effective in treating monkeypox.
While public health officials say that it has little chance of becoming a pandemic, the world will increasingly have to contend with monkeypox and as-yet undiscovered diseases like it as the destruction of natural habitats—a driver of climate change—brings humans and wild animals in closer contact, according to Carlson’s team.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on alert after the emergence of monekypox cases in the United States over the last month. While it may not become the next pandemic — and CDC officials say the risk to the general population is low — public health experts ask that people seek medical attention if they develop a rash, fever or chills. Officials are also asking people to avoid contact with sick people, wear a mask and steer clear of wild animals, dead or alive.
Interactions between people and animals were at the heart of the findings of Carlson’s team, which were published in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature in April. It noted the existence of roughly 10,000 viruses with the potential to infect humans—the vast majority of which, researchers said, are already “circulating silently in wild mammals.” Global climate change and evolving land-use patterns will increase the potential for cross-species viral transmission as animals that were once geographically isolated begin to have increased contact with people, the study said.
One of the most surprising findings of the study, Carlson said, is not just that mitigation doesn’t keep this from happening, but that “a lot of this has probably already happened because we live in a world that’s one degree warmer.”
“We are going to just have to deal with the fact that climate change, as a choice that we’ve already made to some degree, means higher pandemic risk,” he said.
In the study, he and his colleagues wrote: “Whereas most studies agree that climate change mitigation through reducing greenhouse gas emissions will prevent extinctions and minimize harmful ecosystem impacts, our results suggest that mitigation alone cannot reduce the likelihood of climate-driven viral sharing. Instead, the mildest scenarios for global warming appear likely to produce at least as much or even more cross-species viral transmission.”
And there may be more than 4,000 viruses that are shared.
Carlson said in the study they counted the number of times two species that have never met shared viruses for the first time. He said “that could be one virus or it could be all of their viruses.”
“So when we’re saying 4,000, what we mean is there are going to be 4,000 pairs of species sharing viruses for the first time, and that could be 4,000 cross-species transmission. It could be 400,000,” he said. “We just don’t know.”
Carlson said a key takeaway from the research is the importance of monitoring diseases in wildlife and tracking early outbreaks so they don’t evolve into pandemics.
“The goal now is not to change what’s happening in these ecosystems—there’s not a ton we can do about that—but rather to learn to live more safely alongside wildlife,” he said.
Carlson and his co-authors cautioned that the results “should not be interpreted as a justification for inaction, or as a possible upside to unmitigated warming, which will be accompanied by mass defaunation, devastating disease emergence, and unprecedented levels of human displacement and global instability.
“Rather, our results highlight the urgency of better wildlife disease surveillance systems and public health infrastructure as a form of climate change adaptation, even if mitigation efforts are successful,” the study said.
That notwithstanding, scientists say, it is important to remain vigilant and to continue to monitor how animals migrate to new areas as their existing habitats warm or are razed for development, conditions that create opportunities for zoonotic spillover.
“It’s not entirely surprising that as habitats shrink and the climate warms, you see greater chances for animals to bump into each other—especially animals that have not historically been in contact with each other—and that creates interfaces where pathogens can move from one species to another,” said Aaron Bernstein, the interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“What it means for us is that we have to really think hard about how we approach emerging infections like Covid-19,” said Bernstein. “And part of that has to take seriously the need to prevent spillover rather than trying to play catch-up.”
Right now the world is focused on what Bernstein says are largely containment strategies for emerging infections—how we can detect them once people have been infected, and how we can deploy vaccines and test drugs quickly, he said. Both are critical because disease emergence is unavoidable, “but we can’t really do as well as we might if we’ve failed to prevent spillover.”
Bernstein said we know that sharing of habitats, the wildlife trade and large livestock operations are engines that drive emerging infections risk. There’s value in protecting forests, he said, because the prevention of spillover doesn’t just matter to humans, it is also good wildlife conservation.
“To me, it’s about acting before diseases start,” he said.
Carlson’s research team found that bats, because of their ability to fly long distances during their lifetimes, will likely account for the majority of the disease spillover in decades to come.
Angela Bosco-Lauth, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Colorado State University who studies infectious disease, noted that roughly two-thirds of the pathogens that infect humans are zoonotic in nature.
“I think we’re going to see this more and more often,” Bosco-Lauth said. “As a species, we’ve grown to a point that this just has to be—I mean, I hate to use the term ‘the new normal’—but I think it’s going to be the new normal between climate change and population growth and encroachment.
“There’s just no way that humans and wildlife can avoid each other.”
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