07 June 22
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It’s not crime.
Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco D.A., is facing near-certain defeat in an up-or-down recall vote. Mall man Rick Caruso—a former Republican who became a Democrat for this campaign—has spent $34 million blanketing Angelenos’ phones, computers, and televisions with his face, and is polling at 32 percent in a wide field.
If these results play out, the voting will be seen as part of the same backlash against progressive urban policy—and in particular, the “Defund the Police” slogan—that began with last year’s election of the ex-cop Eric Adams in New York City. Fair enough. In all three cities, the race was run on a single issue, urban disorder, its two components so closely linked in the public imagination they are often part of the same breath: crime and homelessness.
“Can you imagine running a small business and you’re worried about crime, and you also have an encampment in front of your business?” Caruso said in an interview with the Associated Press.
“How do we fix this crime and homeless problem?” a Wall Street Journal opinion column asks of San Francisco, beneath an image of a homeless man on a bench. (The answer, according to the columnist: Replacing the district attorney.)
Crime and homelessness are not, in fact, the same issue at all. They are not meaningfully correlated; they do not share causes; they do not share solutions. But in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, Democrats’ inability to address the homelessness crisis is going to cost them generational progress on criminal justice, as the forces for reforming the police go into retreat.
It’s tough to watch. Reformers like Boudin (and the left wing of the Democratic Party generally) are right on principle and in practice to dismantle the system of unaccountable police, cash bail, and long prison terms for petty offenses. But they’re going to lose their chance to make it happen, because Democratic leaders have proved themselves so inept in confronting an issue that can easily be conflated with crime.
The elision between crime and homelessness is a clever trick for pro-cop politicians, but progressives brought the confusion upon themselves. Mayors like Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles and Bill de Blasio in New York used their power to make big but toothless proclamations on national progressive issues, while throwing their hands up at thorny local problems well within their means to solve, like building more shelter beds and getting homeless residents to use them.
Boudin has tried to distinguish one issue from the other in several interviews: “It’s not wrong or unfair for people to feel [unsafe around homeless people],” he told the New York Times Magazine, “but the connection with me is an explicitly political one driven by the recall.” And to New York Magazine: “Homelessness is another issue of frustration… There are lots of city departments, some overseen by the mayor, some by the Board of Supervisors, that deal with housing and housing policy. My office is not one of them.”
As the San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen told the San Francisco Chronicle recently, “Chesa Boudin is the scapegoat in The City for anything that happens that isn’t positive.”
To put it more bluntly: Boudin prosecutes criminals. But homelessness, which is not a crime, is the most serious concern for San Francisco voters, according to a recent San Francisco Examiner poll. His critics have done their best to muddy the distinction. Writing about Boudin, the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens used a typical sleight of hand to blame the state of the city on the prosecutor. “Click this link and take a brief stroll through a local train station to see how these sorts of policies work out,” he wrote, in 2021. The link is to a video from 2018, before Boudin had even run for office. Of course, many of Boudin’s opponents aren’t confused about homelessness and crime at all: They want a DA who will use prosecutorial powers to cull the homeless population by imprisoning people for the misdemeanors associated with living on the street.
The United States is in the midst of a gun-violence epidemic that has put policing at the top of the Democratic agenda. But contrary to popular perception, rising crime rates are not the exclusive purview of cities run by Democrats. Jacksonville, Florida, the largest GOP-run city in the country, has a murder rate three times higher than New York; GOP-run Oklahoma City has a murder rate twice as high as Los Angeles. Jacksonville, by the way, spends a third of its budget on policing, and yet the murder rate has risen in nine of the last 11 years.
In some of America’s biggest cities, moreover, crime isn’t the issue it’s been made out to be.
In San Francisco, violent crime is lower than at any point since 1985, according to the Chronicle. Property crime is elevated, though Boudin says that is more the police’s problem than his: Just 2 percent of reported thefts in San Francisco result in arrest.
Nor can the apocalyptic political rhetoric in New York and Los Angeles be justified by crime rates. In L.A., Caruso has been favorably compared to the city’s last GOP mayor, Richard Riordan, who was elected after the L.A. riots—hardly an analog to storefronts smashed last year at the Grove, Caruso’s flagship town-center mall. L.A. had more than twice as many murders in 1992 as it does now, despite growing by 10 percent since then. In New York, Mayor Adams said last month, “I have never in my professional career, have never witnessed crime at this level.” Short memory: at the time Adams served on the force, the city counted five times as many murders each year as it does today, despite the arrival of more than a million additional New Yorkers in the interim.
Crime is a phenomenon that most voters experience through the media, rather than firsthand, which is one reason there’s a huge spread between the share of Americans who say crime is a national issue and those who say it’s an issue for them personally. The emerging tough-on-crime urban Democratic coalition is multiethnic, and some of those voters obviously have felt the impact of the surge in shootings or a wave of hate crimes. For the rest, big-city homelessness bridges that gap, operating as a visible, personal manifestation of all that danger you hear about on the nightly news.
In New York, centrist Democrats like Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo have often talked about homelessness and crime in the same breath. They’ve managed to use homelessness as an excuse to ratchet up police spending, though the police do not build houses, as other city services suffer cuts. Of more than 9,200 residents removed from the subway during a recent 12-month period, fewer than one in 10 were to be found in shelters afterward.
Reducing crime is always a worthy goal, but it’s a complicated one. How much emphasis should be put on root causes like bad schools, poor access to jobs, and untreated mental health? How can police departments be reformed to boost their clearance rates from a 50-year low? What kind of policing strategy can prevent crime and build trust in minority communities? How do you balance harsh punishments for illegal gun possession with the drive to end mass incarceration?
Homelessness, by contrast, is simple: Its incidence has little to do with poverty, mental health services, or illegal drug use. It’s a product of high housing costs, which is why the cities with the most people living on the street are also the country’s most expensive: New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Boston. The cities with higher crime rates, meanwhile, typically do not have serious affordability and homelessness problems—Cook County, which includes Chicago, has about 80 percent fewer homeless people per capita than King County, which includes Seattle. Crime and homelessness do not have the same causes.
They definitely don’t have the same solutions. Compared to their 20th century predecessors who fought vicious battles over public housing, today’s big-city mayors have it easy. In fact, you could argue that one reason cities have become such Democratic monocultures is that Democrats with local power have given up on ambitious social ideas that divide their electorate.
Homelessness, unfortunately, is an issue that demands a bit of political courage. It is associated with disturbing misdemeanor offenses like public urination and open drug use that are natural consequences of living on the street, but it is not primarily a policing problem. Housing the homeless may require clearing encampments in vital public spaces like parks or subways, risking the ire of progressive activists. It may require forced medical treatment for gravely disabled residents who won’t accept help, a concept that civil libertarians reject outright. Most of all, it requires standing up to angry neighbors in order to build places for people to sleep, and fast. No city has been up to the task. New York spends a fortune to guarantee a court-ordered “right to shelter,” placing families in hotels and crowding existing facilities. But leaders seem incapable of establishing new ones.
In Los Angeles, the situation is no less depressing: Voters have opted twice in recent years to allocate billions of dollars to housing their homeless neighbors. But the results have been meager—after five years, just 1,000 of a promised 10,000 units had materialized. Audits slammed the program for being too slow and too expensive. Council members resisted construction in their own districts. Under a wishy-washy settlement, the city pledged this spring to house 60 percent of its homeless population within five years—but with a freeway-sized loophole omitting residents with serious mental illness, substance abuse disorder, or physical disability.
Obviously, that inaction is primarily a problem for homeless people themselves. But it is also dogging the campaign of Rep. Karen Bass, the establishment Dem candidate to Caruso’s left. Bass understands why voters are frustrated on the homelessness issue and has put it at the center of her campaign. “It’s an exasperation with leadership,” Bass told the Washington Post last week. “People tax themselves and have seen nothing in return.” She is counting on her long record in the city and connections in Washington, and promises to house 15,000 homeless Angelenos in her first year in office.
Bass is running neck-and-neck with Caruso, who says he will build 30,000 beds in his first 300 days, perhaps on Skid Row, the city’s homeless ghetto south of downtown, and force the homeless to accept temporary housing or face arrest. “You have to do temporary housing,” he told ABC7 recently. “So, you’re going to offer the bed once. You’re going to offer the bed, maybe twice. The third time, you’re going to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve now broken the law.’”
Caruso’s impossible ambition to build the beds is attractive, even if the details are sketchy and the reality might not be different from Bass’s commitment or the city’s aforementioned settlement promise. What is new with him is his approach to the police: Caruso says he’ll hire 1,500 new officers, step up the prosecution of misdemeanor offenses, and roll out a no-tolerance, broken-windows strategy that emphasizes small, quality-of-life issues.
If that’s the policing revolution Los Angeles gets two years after George Floyd, it will be because leaders spent so much time dithering on housing the homeless.
Elsewhere in the state, politicians are hashing out compromises out to stave off radical ballot initiatives, where Californians have a habit of circumventing their legislators with extreme solutions. In Sacramento, for example, mayor Darrell Steinberg has agreed to a “right to housing”—and, if housing is available, an obligation to accept it. As long as the city has available shelter beds, camped-out residents will be forced to sleep in them.
“We are over a barrel here,” Steinberg said in April. The ballot issue would have required the city devote 15 percent of its budget to building shelter beds, and permit 6,400 beds in 60 days—a virtual impossibility, the city says, which would just result in them being sued for failure to comply.
But those are the sorts of choices you face if you do nothing for long enough. You end up with an ex-cop mayor, a recalled progressive prosecutor, and a mayoral frontrunner like Rick Caruso. And whatever long-awaited police reforms were expected two years ago look further and further away.
Martha and John Mitchell in 1971. (photo: Bettmann Archive)
‘Please nail him’: The untold story of how Martha Mitchell took revenge against her husband
Bob Woodward had heard this voice before. So when he answered his desk phone in the Washington Post newsroom that Sunday in the spring of 1974 he didn’t have to strain to realize he was talking to Martha Mitchell, the mercurial wife of President Richard Nixon’s former attorney general, the corrupt, pipe-smoking John Mitchell.
Portrayed by Julia Roberts in a Starz miniseries that started airing this spring, Martha Mitchell was something of a star in those days in Washington. She had style. She laughed loudest. She piled that marvelous thick blond hair higher and higher. In an era when the men ran most everything, she said what she wanted — and did what she wanted. She may have been married to one of the most famous men in Washington, but she refused to be defined as a “wife of” someone.
She considered herself to be someone. She was, as the papers sometimes put it, “Washington’s other Martha.” The capital crowd called her “The Mouth of the South.” She was almost impossible to control — though her husband and his thuggish crew tried.
On this particular Sunday, Martha was calling Woodward with an invitation. Her husband, recently indicted for a second time in the cascading Watergate scandal, had left her, moving out of their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Would Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein — she always pronounced it, incorrectly, as “bern-STINE” ― like to come up and look through her husband’s home office?
Woodward, discussing the episode at length publicly for the first time in an interview at his Georgetown home, said he did not want to miss such a rare opportunity. The sequence of events shows Mitchell at her most swaggering but also offers a glimpse at the reportorial techniques that made Woodward and Bernstein two of the most celebrated journalists of the 20th century.
Woodward — this methodical former Navy man who speaks in the measured, flat affect of his Midwestern roots — is at his core a grinder, a journalistic machine who thinks through all the angles. First, he had to consider his source. Martha Mitchell had a well-earned reputation as a Washingtonian who liked to talk to reporters. He’d first encountered her three years earlier when, as a young reporter, he published an article about her complaints regarding black smoke polluting the air near the home where they lived at the time, in a building that had yet to become synonymous with political scandal: the Watergate.
She was undeterred when she was informed that the grime emanated from a heating plant that serviced the White House and the Department of Justice, where her husband reigned as attorney general. When the Watergate break-in drama was in full flower, she initially was an ardent supporter of her husband’s, fretting to the New York Times that sinister forces were trying to make him “the goat” of the scandal. But her mood darkened as time went along. She complained to the media about “dirty things” happening in Washington and threatened to leave her husband if he did not get out of politics.
She’d spend hours on the phone with reporters, including describing a bizarre scene where she says she was drugged and held against her will for three days by a staffer who worked for her husband, who was chairman of Nixon’s reelection campaign at the time. She certainly didn’t mind seeing her name in print. And what she said tended to check out.
“She’s the angry wife,” Woodward thought before heading to New York at Mitchell’s invitation. “But she’s a reliable angry wife.” Mitchell didn’t have a grasp of the specifics of her husband’s involvement in Watergate, Bernstein told me, “but what she was so right about from the beginning was the coverup.”
Woodward also was confronted with the not-so-small matter of entering a man’s private office and going through his things without his permission — even though he’d been invited by the man’s estranged wife. This, Woodward decided, merited a phone call to Edward Bennett Williams, The Post’s famed attorney.
Williams settled on a legal concept called “constructive abandonment,” Woodward told me. Since the former attorney general had moved out of the apartment, the papers he’d left in his office were no different than papers he might have thrown in the garbage. In other words, they were fair game. (After more than half a century as a journalist and having written 21 books, Woodward tells me he’s never rooted around in a garbage can for reporting material.)
Satisfied that they were working with a solid source and were on firm legal ground, Woodward and Bernstein headed for the airport and caught the Eastern Air Lines shuttle to New York. When they arrived midafternoon, Martha Mitchell greeted them at the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment. She held a martini in her hand. She was “gracious” and “a little drunk,” Bernstein recalled. Mitchell gave the reporters a tour of the well-appointed space with its floral print sofas. Then, she pointed down a long hallway. John Mitchell’s office.
“Have at it, boys,” she told them. “Please nail him. I hope you get the bastard.”
Bernstein hopped on a chair and hoisted himself into a large crawl space at the top of the office closet. He pulled out boxes, binders and leatherette bank folders, then passed them to Woodward below.
They were there for hours. Mitchell ordered Chinese food. Finally, they’d accumulated a stack of potentially useful papers. For all these years, Woodward, who is an Olympic-level hoarder of his reporting finds, has kept a file of the documents he gathered that afternoon and evening. He shared them with me one recent afternoon.
The most intriguing are 14 pages of John Mitchell’s handwritten notes, some of which include references to a grand jury appearance. (It’s not clear which one. He appeared at least twice, once in September 1972 as a fact witness and again in April 1973 when he’d been told by prosecutors that he was a target of their probe.)
The notes offer a peek into Mitchell’s perception of the case against him. Mitchell wrote that a prosecutor, whom he did not name, said, “I’m very, very sorry” after Mitchell testified. Mitchell speculated that the prosecutor could have been apologizing for the way he questioned the former attorney general.
Prosecutors pressed “very hard,” Mitchell wrote, “on moral issues,” including his failure to tell the grand jury about his meetings with G. Gordon Liddy, the Nixon campaign operative who was later convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping in the Watergate break-in. Mitchell wrote that he also faced questions about why he hadn’t warned his “good friend” Fred LaRue — a bagman who delivered hush money to Watergate conspirators — not to accept money from the “W.H.,” presumably a reference to the Nixon White House.
The documents provided material that informed The Post’s coverage of Watergate, but Woodward can only remember the trip producing one big scoop. The story landed on The Post’s front page in June 1974, revealing that Elmer Bobst, whom Nixon sometimes described as his “honorary father,” wrote a letter in 1971 to Mitchell promising that a friend would donate $100,000 to Nixon’s campaign in return for help on a case pending before the Federal Trade Commission. (Mitchell was Nixon’s attorney general when the Bobst letter was sent. He later headed the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, for several months in 1972.)
By then, John Mitchell’s smash-mouth attorney, Bill Hundley, had figured out that Martha Mitchell had provided documents to Woodward and Bernstein. “I know the b---- gave them to you,” Hundley told Woodward.
Woodward refused to confirm the lawyer’s suspicions, citing the newspaper’s policy of protecting its sources. Still, Hundley threatened to ask the judge in John Mitchell’s case to hold Woodward and Bernstein in contempt of court if they did not return the material, which included documents related to his client’s preparation for an upcoming criminal trial.
Now Woodward had a choice to make. And he knew he had to move fast. Hundley was not a man with whom to trifle — he did not make empty threats.
Woodward made a very Woodwardian calculation: He would play the long game.
Hundley was making a stern demand to return the documents, yet he had not specifically said Woodward could not copy the material. It might have been an oversight. It might have been intentional. It didn’t matter.
Woodward realized it was a win-win situation. He could have the material by copying it. Mitchell would get his documents back. And The Post would avoid a legal mess.
In The Post’s cluttered newsroom, Woodward put out a call for some of the paper’s least known but generally beloved staffers: the small army of copy aides. It was “emergency Xeroxing,” Woodward recalled with a chuckle.
Woodward also reasoned that Hundley could be useful in the future. Why make an enemy? As the years went along, Woodward was right. Hundley, who also had a good source relationship with Bernstein, remained a helpful contact who quietly provided “guidance” on legal cases and did not put up “the kind of steel shield that lots of attorneys erect,” Woodward told me.
Woodward made these decisions on his own. He initially didn’t tell Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor who had been so intimately involved in Watergate coverage decisions. He didn’t tell Bernstein. He was worried Bradlee and Bernstein would try to fend off Hundley’s request and put The Post into a “defensive crouch.” Even though he thought Bradlee would see the wisdom of the decision, there was no time for persuasion. Hundley was insisting the documents be returned the next day. (Shortly thereafter Woodward filled in Bradlee and Bernstein, both of whom supported his decision.)
While talking with Woodward, who is now 79, I wondered why he would tell this story after all these years of keeping it to himself. His answer was that we are in a new era of even greater “transparency.” He was keeping up with the times.
President Donald Trump arrives at the "Stop The Steal" Rally on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The Post reported that Trump's pledge led to the Secret Service contacting DC police in an effort to have key street intersections blocked off at the last minute. But local police declined the frantic request, saying they were already overwhelmed with protests unfolding throughout the city. The DC police would later assist in the retaking of the US Capitol after rioters delayed the certification for hours.
It was previously known that Trump made efforts to fulfill his promise to march with his supporters, but more details are coming out about the extent to which those around the president tried to accommodate him. Trump made it clear that his goal was to pressure Republican lawmakers who did not support his efforts to object to the certification of a handful of closely contested states.
Politico reporter Betsy Woodruff Swan reported on Tuesday that the committee interviewed multiple Secret Service agents, including Robert Engel, the most senior agent on Trump's detail on January 6.
Trump has previously said the Secret Service squashed his plans to go to the Capitol on January 6.
"Secret Service wouldn't let me," he told the Post in April. "I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly. Secret Service says you can't go. I would have gone there in a minute."
If Trump had arrived at the Capitol, it would have put him near Vice President Mike Pence, who on January 6 made it clear that he would not follow Trump's demands and would not unilaterally object or delay the certification of the results. Instead, Trump stayed at the White House while some of his supporters ransacked the Capitol and shouted that they wanted to "hang" Pence.
Tuesday's news comes just days before the House January 6 committee begins its public hearings. Lawmakers on the bipartisan panel have promised that the hearings will reveal new information about what led to the insurrection.
Law enforcement at the scene of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, May 24, 2022. (photo: Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images)
For years, the ever-increasing militarization of US police forces has been cast by its defenders as an indispensable tool for dealing with large-scale violence and mass-casualty events. Since the Uvalde massacre last month, that rationale lies in tatters.
“A principal function of the police is to respond to the public safety threats that face our communities,” said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation. “Adequate and updated equipment is a necessity to keep both officers and our citizens safe. . . . I urge you to consider the program’s local public safety benefits.”
The executive director of another police association, the National Tactical Officers Association, explicitly cited the 1999 Columbine shooting as the reason the program had to continue.
“Minutes and even seconds count in an active shooter situation,” he said. “Lives are at risk if immediate police actions do not occur quickly and effectively. No longer can police departments wait for specialized units to respond to active shooter incidents.”
The hearings didn’t come to much. Barack Obama signed a landmark but flawed executive order restricting the weapons transfers, which Donald Trump quickly rescinded. “Much of the equipment provided through the 1033 program is entirely defensive in nature . . . that protect officers in active shooter scenarios and other dangerous situations,” read Trump’s proposal.
“Law enforcement authorities need such equipment in order to protect the public — for instance, during terrorist attacks,” explained the Heritage Foundation upon the order’s repeal.
“The police should have the weapons that they need to match criminals who have access to high-powered weapons,” said torture fan John Yoo over at the American Enterprise Institute. “Under-arming the police, who have a difficult job where they must make split-second decisions about life and death, is not going to help reduce violent crime in our inner cities.”
The supporters of police militarization won out. In a country plagued by terrorist threats and disturbed shooters, it was simply too risky not to have a police force armed to the teeth, ready to subdue whatever heavily armed attacker threatened the lives of Americans. So thousands of pieces of equipment worth millions of dollars continued to flow out from the Pentagon in the years after.
It all starts to look and sound pretty silly, though, in the wake of yet another horrendous mass shooting, this time at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen kids and two teachers dead. As we know all too well now, the Uvalde police not only didn’t stop the eighteen-year-old gunman during the twelve minutes that he was outside the school before he started killing; once he started killing kids inside, officers simply stayed where they were, asked the heavily armed tactical police not to charge in, and even restrained the distraught parents who were begging them to go in and save their kids, or at least let them try and do it themselves. As a local official explained, those officers didn’t go in because “they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.”
In late May, when the mass shooting of the week was the racist rampage in Buffalo, I asked: What’s the point of letting various government agencies snoop through our emails, call records, and other private information if they can’t even use it to detect and prevent one of these mass murders? This week, tragically, a similar question must be asked: What’s the point of loading local police forces up with menacing war-fighting equipment if they’re still going to be fatally intimidated by one teenager with an assault rifle?
The answer, sadly, may be more or less the same. Like the various forms of privacy-shredding mass surveillance we’ve been told to accept as the price of physical security, these military transfers ultimately may not actually be that helpful for stopping what we’re told they exist to stop — namely, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and the like.
What they have proven remarkably useful for, though, is to intimidate and repress protesters and angry local populations, and so help quell and control civil unrest, especially when that unrest takes the form of angry protests demanding an end to the nonstop onslaught of police violence that has especially devastated black communities. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, suggested as much in his speech on the repeal of Obama’s executive order, charging it would “send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal.”
Critics of police militarization have been warning about this for a while: that maybe the most useful thing about all this military equipment isn’t so much to stop terrorism as it is to keep an unruly public under the government’s thumb, as is the case with militarized security forces in other countries. Maybe there was a time when this hypothesis could be easily dismissed. But seeing the fully kitted-out warrior cops of Uvalde standing by as an eighteen-year-old shot little kids to death makes it harder to do so.
Local police showed none of the same reluctance to act when protests erupted in Ferguson eight years ago, facing down unarmed protesters with weapons straight out of a foreign war zone, from tanks and armored vehicles to M4 rifles and shotguns. And I don’t remember any similar hesitancy from the federal police forces I saw when I visited Portland in summer 2020, materializing like space invaders to shoot tear gas canisters and pepper shot into crowds of moms and teachers. But in those cases, they were facing protesters armed with fireworks and leaf blowers, not assault rifles.
It’s also in stark contrast to the long-standing police practice of “no-knock raids,” where officers suddenly kick down a person’s door and terrorize whoever’s inside, guns drawn, killing their pets or the unarmed person inside for the sake of seizing a small amount of drugs — or, as in the case of Breonna Taylor, terrifying the bewildered inhabitants to such an extent that they provoke a deadly gunfight. Perhaps, without the element of surprise, or when you know the person inside is definitely dangerously armed, all that armor and weaponry isn’t quite so effective.
There’s no doubt someone will look at this horror and say that this proves the need to only militarize police and schools further. But that would be a disaster. Not only were police and tactical officers heavily armed and armored as they stood by and let this happen, not only did Uvalde have a SWAT team ostensibly for this very scenario, but the school district had doubled its security budget before the attack.
The way to address this is through the kind of gun control measures that exist in every other country — places that, coincidentally, don’t suffer constant mass shootings — and by attacking the root causes of what drives so many disturbed individuals — in this case a kid, no less — to the point of doing something unspeakable. More militarized police and schools will just mean more brutality and criminalization of students.
And it’ll also mean more brutalization of local communities, which bear the brunt of all this military equipment flowing to law enforcement. The parents of Uvalde may be furious at the police, but they should take care to keep their rage off the streets. After all, like so many other aggrieved communities, then they might really see what the full force of their militarized police can do.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signs 10 gun control measures into law on June 6, 2022. (photo: WXXI News)
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Hochul’s hometown of Buffalo is grieving in the aftermath of the racist shooting at the Tops market that killed 10 African Americans on May 14.
“I’m speaking to you today as the governor of a state in mourning,” Hochul said. “And the citizen of a nation in crisis.”
The bills are aimed at closing some loopholes that allowed the alleged 18-year-old gunman to evade the state’s red flag laws and purchase a semi-automatic rifle and body armor.
Under the measures, law enforcement will now be required to ask a judge for an order to seize the guns of anyone they think might be a threat to themselves or others. The alleged shooter threatened to commit a murder-suicide at his high school in 2021, but the red flag law was never used.
Hochul said the purchase of body armor will be banned, except for those in law enforcement or in professions that could put them in danger. Also, no one younger than 21 will be allowed to buy semi-automatic rifles in New York.
“So no 18-year-old can walk in on their birthday and walk out with an AR-15,” Hochul said. “Those days are over.”
Other bills signed into law require gun manufacturers to allow for the microstamping of bullets to better trace weapons used in crimes. Another closes a loophole that allowed the category of "any other weapon," which Hochul said are essentially guns that are deliberately designed to evade gun control laws.
Joining Hochul were legislative leaders, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and Attorney General Tish James, who said she would vigorously fight any challenges to the measures.
“To … all those drunk with power who think that they will challenge these laws,” James said. “The Second Amendment is not absolute.”
A California law that raised the age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle to age 21 was struck down by a federal court.
Hochul said while New York responded rapidly to respond to the mass shootings, national action is needed. She said decades ago, car accidents were the No. 1 killer of children in America, and the nation responded with seat belt laws and other safety measures that were unpopular at the time.
“We took away the freedom to ride in a car without a seat belt,” Hochul said. “It was a very big deal when it happened.”
But people adapted, she said.
“And guess what? We saved the lives of thousands of children,” Hochul said. “So it was clearly worth it.”
Now, more children die from gun violence than from any other cause, and she said the nation has to act.
Hochul said it is “a moment of reckoning” for the country, and history will judge our actions.
Journalist Dom Phillips questions Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro during a press conference on July 19, 2019. (photo: Marcos Corrêa/Presidência da República)
Dom Phillips and Bruno Araújo Pereira were last seen traveling by boat on Sunday morning, returning from a reporting trip.
Dom Phillips, a freelance reporter with more than 14 years of experience covering the Amazon, was traveling to the Javari Valley, near the triple border of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, for a book he is writing about environmental issues. He was accompanied by Bruno Araújo Pereira, a veteran Indigenous rights protector who supervised the region for years for FUNAI and who has reportedly received many death threats for his work defending Indigenous groups in the region against illegal mining, fishing, and logging. The area is also known to be an active smuggling route for drug traffickers.
The two men were traveling on the Ituà and Itaqui rivers, returning to the town of Atalaia do Norte, in the state of Amazonas, after a multiday trip to visit with FUNAI agents and Indigenous communities, according to a statement from the Union of Indigenous Organizations of Javari Valley and the Observatory for Human Rights for Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples. The men had received threats during their journey, according to the statement, which did not specify the source of the threats.
“It should be noted that Bruno Pereira is an experienced person with a deep knowledge of the region,” read the statement from the two groups. “The two missing men were traveling with a new boat, a 40 [horsepower engine], 70 liters of gasoline, enough for the trip and 7 empty drums of fuel.”
Their boat was last seen passing the community of São Gabriel, less than two hours from Atalaia do Norte, some time after 6 a.m. Sunday. When the boat did not arrive as expected, local Indigenous groups mobilized search parties that afternoon, but no signs of the men or their boat have yet been found. FUNAI told The Intercept that it was actively following the case and noted that Pereira is on leave from the organization and was not operating in an official capacity on the trip.
Phillips, an award-winning reporter who has written for The Intercept, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and many other outlets, had traveled to the Amazon on four other reporting trips in the last 15 months. He received threats on previous trips over the years while reporting on criminal, environmentally destructive activities. In 2021, he received the prestigious Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write his still unpublished book.
The federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Amazonas told The Intercept that it was aware of the disappearance and had begun investigating and called on police and the navy to begin searching, but it could not confirm if those search efforts were already underway. The Brazilian navy said in a statement that a search-and-rescue team was ordered to begin a search but did not confirm whether it had already been deployed. The Federal Police did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. The spokesperson for the regional army command told The Guardian that it is “ready to carry out this humanitarian search and rescue mission” but has not yet received orders to do so from the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly demonized the press. In 2019, Bolsonaro supporters widely circulated a video of the president aggressively responding to a question from Phillips about the environment with the caption “British journalist tries to put Bolsonaro against the wall and is refuted by the president.”
“I am very worried about the growth of violence against journalists in Brazil, especially in the Amazon region, because it is home to very sensitive issues: irregular burnings, invasions of Indigenous villages by wildcat miners, loggers, and armed people who want to expel Indigenous people from their lands,” said Angelina Nunes, who runs the Tim Lopes Program for the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, which investigates the assassinations of journalists in the country.
“It’s very dangerous for anyone who is going to investigate a story there that will deal with these subjects, and we’re accompanying this case with great concern,” added Nunes, by telephone. Her organization has tracked 173 cases of aggression against journalists in Brazil since January, including 45 physical attacks or threats of physical violence.
“It is urgent that the authorities dedicate all the necessary resources to the immediate realization of the searches in order to guarantee their safety,” wrote Maria Laura Canineu, Brazil director of Human Rights Watch.
Joe Biden provided solar panel companies a two-year exemption from tariffs on imported parts. (photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)
President invokes Defense Production Act to increase production of solar panels, building insulation and other equipment
Biden has triggered the Defense Production Act, a cold war-era law used to compel businesses to ramp up production of certain materials to aid national security, to boost the output of solar panels, building insulation, transformers for power grids and heat pumps, which are used to efficiently heat and cool homes.
The US president has also provided a two-year exemption to solar panel companies from tariffs on imported parts, easing the flow of technology from China and other countries for use in the US, a country where only 2.8% of electricity comes from solar power.
The moves have been applauded by climate activists who have pressed for Biden to use the breadth of his presidential powers to act on the climate crisis. Activists have sharply criticized the president in recent months over the continuing failure to pass major climate legislation through an evenly divided Senate, as well as Biden’s calls for bolstered oil production to offset gasoline prices that have risen amid the war in Ukraine.
“We are in a climate emergency, an emergency we can only confront when our government steps up and launches a second-world-war scale mobilization to justly transition to renewable energy,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director at the youth-led Sunrise Movement. “This is a great step by the administration, and we urgently hope to see even more significant executive actions follow.”
Biden has declined to declare a climate emergency, as has been done in countries such as the UK, or to set a phase-out of fossil fuels. But his administration said use of national security powers to create a “stronger clean energy arsenal” was evidence of “bold action to build an American-made clean energy future”.
The use of the Defense Production Act will allow the US Department of Energy to invest in companies that can build renewable energy facilities and manufacture parts for technology such as solar panels. The administration expects domestic solar manufacturing will now triple by 2024, allowing more than 3.3m homes each year to switch to solar energy.
A shift to cleaner sources of electricity would also help protect against energy bill volatility and provide efficiency to households, say proponents – heat pumps, for example, can save homes $1,000 each year from space heating alone. The administration has also sought to stress the benefits of weaning the US off the supply of fossil fuels from countries such as Russia. “Reducing America’s dependence on gas and oil is critical to US national security,” said Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense.
Jean Su, director of energy justice at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Biden’s latest actions represented a “tremendous sea change” in his approach to tackling the climate crisis.
“Biden’s executive moves give critical momentum to the needed transition to solar energy,” said Su. “We hope this use of the Defense Production Act is a turning point for the president, who must use all his executive powers to confront the climate emergency head on.”
Scientists have said the world must cut planet-heating emissions in half this decade, and zero them out by 2050, to avoid even more disastrous heatwaves, floods, drought and other damaging climate impacts.
Biden, who shares this target, won’t be able to achieve it, however, though executive action alone. The US has never passed major climate change legislation and the president’s attempts to do so have been stymied by Joe Manchin, the pro-coal Democrat who has been a crucial swing vote in the Senate. It’s unclear whether any climate bill will be able to succeed ahead of November’s midterm elections, which are expected to deprive Democrats of control in Congress.
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