13 August 22
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JThe media vilified her and Hollywood shunned her, but the actress was as much a pioneer for gay rights as her then-girlfriend Ellen DeGeneres
Although the Nineties may not feel that far away (to some of us, anyway), we are worlds removed from that era, culturally. Today when stars come out as gay, they’re as likely to be embraced in the mainstream as they are vilified. At the time of the Volcano premiere, however, gay marriage was still more than a decade from being codified in the Constitution, and when celebrities’ sexualities were discussed, it was more in rumors and whispers than open conversation.
When Heche — who died Friday at age 53 after a car crash that left her in a coma — came out 25 years ago, she was as part of one of the first high-profile gay couples pop culture had ever seen. Many people believed the relationship was a publicity stunt. But by going to events, attending parties, appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show alongside DeGeneres (although Heche later soured on both women), and generally being highly visible in a gay couple, Heche helped pave the way for LGBTQ stars in Hollywood.
In the media, the immediate reaction to Heche’s coming-out was pearl-clutchy, at best. “Problem for Hollywood: DeGeneres’s Companion” read the New York Times headline on an April 1997 article that fretted over whether film executives could accept gay actors being cast in heterosexual movie roles. DeGeneres’ status as a TV star came with consequences — an Alabama ABC affiliate said it would not air the episode of her sitcom at the time, Ellen, where her character came out — but Heche was a movie star. And at that time, movie stars who were gay were expected to keep it quiet, no exceptions.
After all, Heche was starring opposite Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano, as the Times story helpfully underscored. ‘“There has not been a case in time where somebody has been this public about having a lesbian affair and asking us — and the public — to accept them as a female romantic lead,” one powerful Hollywood agent told the paper. “It’s an important test case.” Heche probably would not lose her role starring opposite Harrison Ford in the upcoming Six Days Seven Nights, the article said. But all that publicity surrounding the “lesbian affair” apparently gave Hollywood bigwigs a lot to ponder.
Other outlets at the time suggested women coming out were being trendy, or even opportunistic. “Is show business in the grip of lesbian chic?” asked a Baltimore Sun headline about the couple. “If last season’s must-have was a baby, this season it’s a girlfriend,” said an article in The Independent headlined “Oh, the Lesbian Chic of it All.” The piece outlined what the author described as “the growing acceptance of lesbianism,” citing several examples of celebrity girl-on-girl attraction (Ginger Spice had admitted she fancied Posh Spice, gasp!) and presenting DeGeneres, with her rising-star “lover” Heche, as the leaders of the pack. One New York Post article pegged to the public kerfuffle cited a study suggesting gay women made more money then their hetero counterparts. In a true sign of the times, some outlets even went after Heche’s looks. “Never mind another woman. Ellen is dating a hideously dressed conehead” sniped a 1998 piece in Toronto’s National Post.
Much of the media seemed to think Heche — who always maintained she would fall in love with a person, not their gender, and would later go on to marry and have children with a man — and DeGeneres were “doing it for the publicity.” Though at the time, it was nearly impossible to be in a famous gay couple without drawing a shit-ton of attention. The Washington Post covered the pair’s attendance at the White House Correspondents dinner a few days after the Volcano premiere, and called them “the couple of the evening,” with no small dose of snark. DeGeneres, the author wrote, “made quite the show of strolling about the evening’s pre- and post-dinner parties in various states of attachment to Heche.” The author also observed how the press glommed onto the couple’s every interaction, including when a photographer burst into a room where they were relaxing and shouted, “She’s rubbing her back!” while snapping photo after photo.
Even fellow members of the LGBTQ community questioned DeGeneres and Heche’s motivations in being so publicly gay. In a New York Magazine interview, Sandra Bernhard, who was out and already considered a “reluctant lesbian icon,” according to the article, called Heche’s relationship with DeGeneres “schtick.” “I think they’re targets for every imaginable kind of hatred, and who wants to expose yourself to that?” she said.
Heche and DeGeneres met at the Vanity Fair Oscars party in March 1997. DeGeneres’ Time cover story with the now-iconic headline “Yep, I’m Gay” came out shortly after that — and just days before the Volcano premiere. Yet despite accusations that they were doing nothing more than courting attention, they stayed together for three years.
The relationship soured, as relationships do. In 2021, Heche spoke on her podcast, saying they’d split up because DeGeneres was more interested in making money than finding love. She also accused Oprah of partnering with DeGeneres to cut her out of a talk-show episode commemorating the 20th anniversary of DeGeneres’ coming-out. (After Heche’s death, DeGeneres tweeted, “This is a sad day. I’m sending Anne’s children, family and friends all of my love.”)
Heche suggested on multiple occasions that the backlash to the relationship negatively impacted her career. She did lose her contract with 20th Century Fox after the Volcano premiere, she claimed. “The stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years,” she said in multiple interviews, including on Dancing With the Stars.
Still, in a 2020 interview with Mr. Warburton magazine, Heche stood by her choices. “I am proud that I took a stand early in my life for LGBTQ rights,” she said. “I would do it again, even knowing its consequences on my career.”
Members of the United States Secret Service stand guard as Marine One carrying President Donald Trump lifts off from the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 12, 2019, in Washington. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
13 august 22
Why did it take hours for the National Guard to respond to the violence at the Capitol? And did President Donald Trump want to join insurrectionists at the Capitol so badly that he physically wrestled his Secret Service agent to take him there? And if so, what did the Secret Service do about it?
“I think that’s the biggest remaining mystery,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, recently said of how the Secret Service responded to Trump.
But some possibly valuable evidence is missing: text messages from the Secret Service and top security and military officials in the Trump administration.
We don’t know what’s in these missing text messages — nor do we know why they’re missing. Here’s what we do know about this evolving story.
Okay, whose texts are missing?
Why are they missing?
We don’t know. The agencies involved said there is a simple explanation: a routine agencywide reset of government phones, ahead of the new administration coming in.
But in the case of the Secret Service, agents were supposed to upload texts involving government business to a server before wiping their phones in mid-January 2021. Many didn’t, The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti reported.
And in the case of the Defense Department, days after the attack, a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking it to preserve its records. “Even at that point, it was apparent that those messages could have been important,” said Clark Pettig, spokesperson for the group American Oversight.
The Pentagon deleted texts of top military leaders — including ones deciding whether and when to send troops to the Capitol — days after that request was filed. Meaning, these messages were wiped even while there was a pending legal request to preserve them. (A defense official told The Post that these deletions were standard and, “Nobody was trying to hide or conceal anything.”)
The watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, is investigating the missing Secret Service and Homeland security texts. But he’s a Trump appointee who has blocked previous investigations of the Trump administration, and now Democrats on the congressional Jan. 6 committee say he knew about the missing Secret Service texts for months and didn’t tell them. Cuffari is now being investigated himself for his alleged partisan conduct, and Republican senators are backing him, reports The Post’s Lisa Rein.
Why is this suspicious?
The fact the texts are missing from multiple defense and law-enforcement agencies after a political event as unprecedented as Jan. 6 — one that directly involved all these agencies — raises suspicions.
“The fact this appears to have been a wider problem is concerning. We don’t know what happened or why,” Pettig said. “But it’s a significant number of potentially important records from Jan. 6 that apparently don’t exist anymore. And it should have been apparent to anyone that records from that day would be important.”
Outside cybersecurity experts and former government officials told The Post’s Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn that these agencies never should have lost the text messages when they reset government phones; it’s a simple process, and it should have been relatively easy and a no-brainer to preserve messages from the day of the attack.
“It’s like we have a 9/11 attack and air traffic control wipes its records,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland security official under George W. Bush, told them.
“There is plenty of smoke,” said Meredith McGehee, an ethics expert who led the bipartisan watchdog group Issue One. “And when there is smoke like that, and you have this historic moment in which a former president seemed to be conspiring to prevent the duly elected president from taking office, then you got a problem.”
What information is missing?
We don’t know, because it’s gone. The Secret Service in particular has said it can’t recover the missing texts. And with it goes any corroborating evidence about what happened that day. For example, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in the Jan. 6 congressional investigation that Trump tried to physically push his Secret Service agent to help him join protesters at the Capitol. But she said she was told about this afterward, and didn’t see it firsthand; others denied this occurred. So it’s possible that texts from agents on the ground that day, responding to what was happening in real time, could shed light on moments like that.
Separately, over at the Pentagon, it’s still murky why it took so long for the military to organize a response — National Guard troops weren’t sent until the attack had been underway for hours. It’s not clear if military leaders disagreed about how to respond, or hesitated to respond with force or what their reasons were. Either way, it’s possible that the missing text messages could fill in our understanding of why the response unfolded so slowly.
We might never know whether this was something malicious or an innocent tech issue.
Other investigations into Jan. 6 have underscored how important documents, even seemingly minor ones, can be. In particular, the Jan. 6 committee revealed in its hearings a previously-unknown draft tweet from Trump, which indicated that the former president had seen it (though ultimately didn’t send it). It encouraged people to march to the Capitol, suggesting that urging protesters to do so in that Jan. 6 speech may not have been spontaneous on Trump’s part.
“As we’ve seen from the past year-and-a-half of investigations,” Pettig said, the minute-by-minute timeline matters. It’s the classic question of: Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Victoria, a Ukrainian woman who described her ordeal under Russian occupation, pours tea in her home. (photo: ABC)
Two women agreed to share their devastating ordeal with ABC News.
Victoria, a 42-year-old Ukrainian woman, told ABC News she and another woman, a neighbor, were raped by two of the Russian soldiers occupying her village near Kyiv in March.
ABC News spoke to the two women who agreed to talk about what they say happened to them, on condition that their location and last names not be revealed.
Another soldier, a commanding officer who was not involved in the assault, threatened Victoria, she says.
"He looked at me and said, 'You see, our boys have had a drink and want to have fun,'" Victoria recounts. "I understood that something terrible would happen."
Two of the soldiers took the women to a house converted into headquarters for the Russian occupiers and raped them, they say.
That neighbor, 44-year-old Natalya, recounted the events to ABC News.
"He says, 'do you want everything to be fine with your son? So get upstairs and do as I tell you,'" Natalya recalled, describing her encounter with one of the Russian soldiers she says raped her. "He was like an animal…And that rifle was hanging around and swinging."
Natalya says she later learned the soldiers killed her husband after she was taken away. Its unclear how many soldiers or which ones were involved in the killing. The family buried her husband the next day.
The two Russian soldiers the women say raped them have not yet been identified but face international arrest warrants, according to Kateryna Duchenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor in charge of sexual violence cases committed by Russian soldiers. Both cases are being investigated with slim chances of the suspects being taken under custody or doing any prison time, she said.
Stories of rape and other atrocities at the hands of Russian troops are not unheard of in small towns and suburbs of Kyiv. Residents of Bucha and Borodyanka have reported human rights violations including rape, murder and torture by Russian forces during the invasion.
Russian authorities have not responded to ABC News' requests for comment on the cases.
"The last case [we identified] was in occupied territory of Zaporizhzhia region, where allegedly 10 Russian soldiers raped a woman," Duchenko said.
Communication with residents inside Russian-occupied territories is extremely difficult, making the investigation and prosecution of these cases nearly impossible, Duchenko said.
"We know she is alive and that she had medical treatment and those details are all we've got," Duchenko said on the limited information in the case in Zaporizhzhia.
The United Nations reported in June it had collected 124 reports of alleged acts of conflict-related sexual violence but qualified that number as "the tip of the iceberg" and added that it did "not reflect the scale of sexual violence in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine."
Victoria and Natalya say they are now undergoing counseling with a psychologist about their trauma.
"I wanted to take off my skin and throw it away," Victoria says. "The person I was before the war is no longer there. I became more aggressive. I began to fight more for my own."
Natalya says she is still coming to terms with the assault.
"Many people have asked me, why aren't you crying, why haven't you gone crazy?" she said.
In June, Ukrainian authorities said they opened the first trial on sexual violence committed by a Russian soldier, according to the Kyiv Post. The suspect will be tried in absentia.
Duchenko's office says it is working on prosecuting two other cases of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers in addition to the case opened in June. The suspects will also be tried in absentia, since they are not in Ukrainian custody.
FBI agents document evidence outside a bureau field office in Kenwood, Ohio, on Aug. 11, after an armed man tried to breach the building. He fled and was later killed by law enforcement, authorities said. (photo: WKEF/WRGT/AP)
By Thursday, an attempted attack on an FBI field office in Cincinnati appeared to underscore the real danger behind those threats, particularly given a digital trail of ominous posts that were left under the name of the suspect.
The FBI said an armed man attempted to breach the building, but fled after an alarm went off and special agents responded. After a car chase, a nearly six-hour standoff, and unsuccessful attempts at negotiation, police shot and killed that suspect, according to an account from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Law enforcement identified the man as 42-year-old Ricky Walter Shiffer, Jr. Shiffer is a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq. He deployed to Iraq between 2010 and 2011 during his service as an infantryman with the Florida Army National Guard, before leaving the Guard in May 2011, the Guard confirmed to NPR. Shiffer also served in the U.S. Navy from 1998 to 2003, the Navy stated. During his service, he worked as a fire control technician on the USS Columbia, a Navy submarine. News of Shiffer's military service was first reported by Military.com.
Many details of the standoff are still unknown, including an official account of Shiffer's motive.
But on the Trump-backed social media site Truth Social, an account under Shiffer's name posted increasingly violent threats in response to the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.
The account was deactivated shortly after Shiffer's identity became public. NPR was unable to independently confirm that it belonged to the man who attempted the attack on the FBI field office.
On Twitter, a post from another account under Shiffer's name indicated that he was at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, though he does not appear to have been criminally charged in connection with the U.S. Capitol breach.
In the days prior to Thursday's attack, the Truth Social account described leading an "insurrection against the people who usurped our government," and made a "call to arms" to other Trump supporters. "I am proposing war," read one post. "Kill the FBI on sight."
In addition to the search of Mar-a-Lago, the account listed a series of supposed grievances as motivation.
"Steve Bannon might go to jail," the account wrote, referring to the former Trump White House adviser's recent conviction for contempt of congress. The account also referenced the recent verdict in the defamation case against the conspiracy theorist and far-right media personality Alex Jones. The post ended by stating, "1776 was for far less."
The Truth Social posts indicated a complete loss of faith in government institutions.
"We see the courts are unfair and unconstitutional, all that is left is force," stated one post. The account also compared the FBI to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police and a key perpetrator of the Holocaust.
Despite the explicit calls to violence, the posts remained available on Truth Social until Thursday evening. One user replied that they were forwarding the messages to the FBI, to which the Shiffer account replied, "bring them on."
Shortly after the Cincinnati attack began on Thursday morning, the account left one final post:
"Well, I thought I had a way through the bullet proof glass, and I didn't. If you don't hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the FBI."
The posts from the accounts under Shiffer's name generally include more explicit and specific calls for violent action than what's been seen on extremist forums this week. Still, experts say the rhetoric has noticeably intensified. After a court unsealed documents related to the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago, popular posts on an online pro-Trump forum suggested committing violence against the agents involved in the search, and described those agents as "traitors."
"There's almost a hysteria of violence coming out of these far-right circles in reaction to the search at Mar-a-Lago," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
"We're seeing message boards just flooded with talk of violence, and the next 'civil war,' and this idea that they need to retaliate against the left," said Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League.
Both Beirich and Friedfeld compared the level of online violent rhetoric to the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Court documents filed in the more than 800 criminal cases show that many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot discussed their violent plans in public posts on social media. Law enforcement authorities failed to take those threats seriously, which contributed to the lack of preparation for that day's chaos.
Both Beirich and Friedfeld said that Thursday's attack was exactly the kind of action they feared.
The Jan. 6 assault featured a unique confluence of volatile factors that contributed to a major violent event: There was a specific time and place, a goal of keeping Trump in power, and support from top political figures. Right now, researchers on extremism say they are more concerned about one-off incidents similar to what appeared to unfold in Cincinnati.
They said one contributing factor has been the intensifying rhetoric from major right-wing media personalities.
In many cases, those personalities have employed a kind of rhetorical two-step, where they simultaneously say they oppose violence, while describing their political opponents in apocalyptic terms and making calls for "war," though they insist those statements are metaphoric.
"I think they're playing a very dangerous game," said Friedfeld.
Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon appeared on the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' show earlier this week and said the FBI was "a new American Gestapo." His show "War Room" continued to compare the FBI to the "Gestapo" on Friday. Republican members of Congress, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, have also compared the FBI search to Nazi Germany.
Without any apparent basis or evidence, Bannon also suggested that the federal government might be taking steps to kill Trump.
"I do not think it's beyond this administrative state and their deep state apparatus to actually try to work on the assassination of President Trump," said Bannon.
Bannon went on to call Jones' audience to action, comparing the present moment to the American Revolution, while adding, "I'm not talking about violence."
In a statement to NPR, Bannon said, "Those who watch War Room know our mantra is Investigate, Litigate, Incarcerate. There is no reason or place for violence, as we have the votes and the political muscle to win elections."
Even with those disclaimers, Friedfeld characterized that kind of rhetoric as reckless.
"When you tell a story of good versus evil, of the other side being willing to go to any lengths to harm you, to harm your community, to harm the country, they're essentially laying the dots out there for their listeners to connect," said Friedfeld. "And when you connect those dots, it becomes far more plausible to use violence."
A police officer. (photo: Adobe Stock)
After Chicago police killed Harith Augustus, the question was not: What happened? It was: How do we justify what happened?
Moments later, his body lay motionless in the middle of 71st Street, having been shot five times by Officer Dillan Halley.
In previous reporting for The Intercept, and in a collaborative project with Forensic Architecture titled “Six Durations of a Split Second,” we used video evidence to show that Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. The police stopped him because he appeared to be carrying a gun, but in a concealed carry state that alone is not a sufficient basis for an investigative stop. Augustus had committed no crime, and at no point did he remove his gun from its holster. It was actions by the police that produced the “split second” of perceived threat to which they responded with lethal force.
Now, by virtue of unedited body camera footage released in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it is possible to examine the sequence of police actions immediately after Halley killed Augustus: the moments when the official narrative of what just happened crystallizes. Viewed together with previously released footage, it deepens our understanding of how a demonstrably official false narrative of a police killing takes shape.
Narrative Construction
As officers cordoned off the crime scene with yellow caution tape, onlookers stopped on the sidewalk and sought to engage with the police. Augustus lay unattended on the ground. His gun was holstered, and his wallet with his Firearm Owners Identification card was in his hand. He had been attempting to show the card to Officer Quincy Jones when three other officers encircled him from behind. Without warning, Officer Megan Fleming grabbed his arm. Startled, Augustus reflexively bolted, stumbled into the street, at which point his hand came near his holstered gun: the “split second” that prompted Halley to shoot.
Halley fires his final shot at 5:30:43 p.m. At 5:30:53 p.m., Jones unfastens Augustus’s holster and removes his gun.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there is a great deal of police activity. At the same time, a crowd of community members — some curious, some outraged — rapidly forms. Footage from body cameras worn by various officers allows us to deconstruct the scene from multiple concurrent perspectives and thereby see more deeply into the reality of what happened.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02 p.m.]
In the instant after Halley fires the fifth and final shot into Augustus’s body, the audio on his body camera activates. “Shots fired,” he shouts. “Shots fired at the police.”
When I first heard this, I was stunned by the brazenness with which Halley misrepresents what happened a moment earlier. Having now listened to it many times, it appears he doesn’t know what to say: He doesn’t know how to name what just happened. His voice dissolves into confusion: “Or police officer shoots.” And then, under his breath, a whispered “Fuck.”
Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54 p.m.]
Having just arrived on the scene as the shooting occurred, James Aimers approaches Augustus laying in the middle of the street. He bends down and handcuffs the immobile Augustus. As he walks away, he takes out a bottle of hand sanitizer and vigorously cleans his hands.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17 p.m.]
Megan Fleming seeks out Dillan Halley, who is on the sidewalk
“You OK? You OK?” Fleming asks, then answers for him. “Come here. You’re good, you’re good.”
“It was a gun?” Halley asks.
“Yes,” she replies.
“You get the gun?”
“Yes.”
Halley paces back and forth on the sidewalk. Fleming follows him. While talking, they are in constant, agitated motion.
“Breathe in,” she instructs him. “Through your nose.”
“Why did he have to pull a gun out on us?”
“Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. I feel like I wasn’t there for you,” Fleming says. “I was trying to grab him.”
“I had to. He was going to shoot us.”
“I know you did. He was going to shoot us. He was about to kill us.”
Halley continues to pace back and forth on the sidewalk.
“Come here.” Fleming says, trying to reel him in. “Look at me. You’re OK, you’re OK.”
“He pulled a gun on us.”
“I know he did,” she confirms. “I know he did. Look at me. You’re OK.”
What we observe here, as the officers contend with their shock and disorientation, is the birth of what will become the official narrative.
What we observe here, as the officers contend with their shock and disorientation, is the birth of what will become the official narrative. It is not initially, as it will soon become, an exercise in institutional damage control. Rather, it is born in a moment of narrative convulsion, as Halley and Fleming seek to manage the existential crisis into which their precipitous actions have plunged them. As if his next breath depends on it, Halley struggles to find the magic words to rationalize the act he has just committed, and Fleming, in a frantic call and response, validates those words.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32 p.m.]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich is the first supervisor to appear on the scene. He arrives less than 30 seconds after the shooting and immediately encounters Halley and Fleming.
“You?” he asks Halley.
“He pulled a gun on me,” Halley replies.
“Was it only one? Just you? Who else shot?”
Fleming, breathing rapidly, interjects, “He grabbed me, and he cut me.”
A woman on the sidewalk questions Aldrich about what happened.
“He pulled a gun on a copper,” he responds impatiently. “If you pull a gun on a police officer, he’s got the right to defend himself, and he shoots back, OK?”
The woman then says something to the effect that Augustus may have had a concealed carry permit.
“Yeah,” Aldrich says in the same overbearing tone, “but if he pulls a gun on a police officer, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have the right to pull a gun.”
Thus the frantic effort by traumatized officers to rationalize the catastrophic event in which they just participated begins to morph — within little more than a minute of the last shot being fired — into the official narrative.
This process of narrative construction requires deafness to dissonant voices. When an eyewitness — a man in a red shirt with a knapsack who was walking a few strides behind the officers as their encounter with Augustus unfolded — vigorously tries to engage with Aldrich, he shoos the man away.
This process of narrative construction requires deafness to dissonant voices.
Community members stream toward the site of the shooting to find out what happened. Some question or challenge the police. Aldrich and other officers respond harshly, barking out commands. We can hear Fleming’s voice. “Get the hell out of here,” she yells. “Shut the fuck up.”
In response to one woman whose words are inaudible on the body camera footage, Aldrich yells, “Lady, everything you’re saying is on camera. If you want to go to jail, keep it up.”
After nightfall, the standoff between the community and the police will give way to a violent melee in the shopping center parking lot across from the site of the incident, as officers charge into the crowd with their batons raised. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, we can see in officers’ hostile, defensive responses to questions from residents the seeds of the disorder that will later ensue.
Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33 p.m.]
When the audio on Fleming’s body camera activates, she is screaming at bystanders on the railroad tracks. “Get off the tracks! Get off the tracks!”
One of them says, “He didn’t do shit.”
“Really?” responds Fleming. She is standing over Augustus’s body. “That’s why I fucking got scratch marks all over me.” She is addressing not the onlookers but other officers standing nearby. She holds up her right forearm to show a reddish area. “He fucking tried to get away. Fuck. He fucking scratched the shit out of me. The fucker pulled a gun right at us.”
It will be a recurring theme for Fleming that Augustus assaulted her. It’s possible she was scratched as he sought to pull away after she grabbed him from behind. It is also possible the injury occurred when Halley grabbed her arm and pushed it out of the way in order to clear his line of fire. In any case, the detective’s supplemental report notes that the “abrasions” on her arm did not require medical treatment.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19 p.m.]
Less than five minutes after the incident, Aldrich responds to the growing crowd of onlookers by taking what appears to be an M4 carbine from the trunk of his vehicle and slinging it over his shoulder.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01 p.m.]
Halley is wandering around the crime scene without any obvious purpose, as if disoriented.
A moment earlier, the man in the red shirt wearing a knapsack had vigorously pointed at him and Fleming and then at his own eyes as if to say, I saw what you did.
Fleming approaches Halley.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says.
“I know you do,” she responds. “Come here.”
They rush over to a supervisor who has just arrived on the scene, Lt. Davina Ward.
“Lieutenant,” Fleming says, “my partner needs to get out of here now.”
“I’m a target,” says Halley.
“We’ve got to go,” Fleming insists. “He’s got to go.”
As if pursued, the two officers and the lieutenant run to Ward’s vehicle on the other side of the red tape.
“Get in the car,” Fleming instructs Halley, then says to Ward, “I’m going with him.”
As she drives away, Ward explains, “I can’t take you completely away, but I’ll take you away from here.”
“He pointed a gun at us,” Halley blurts out. “I had to.”
One of the officers — it is not clear who — releases a shudder of distress.
“Calm down, OK?” says Ward.
Having been unable to reach her commander on the radio, Ward uses her cellphone. “I’ve got the officers who did the shooting,” she reports. “I had to get away from the scene. They were coming after him.”
The panic of Halley and Fleming in the aftermath of the shooting has now entered the police narrative as something akin to a mob “coming after” the two officers.
Ward is unsure how far away from the scene she should go — neither Halley nor Fleming gave official statements about the shooting before fleeing the scene — so she pulls to a stop about half a mile away on a quiet residential street. There is a large vacant lot nearby. No one is visible on the sidewalk.
In a reassuring tone such as one might use with frightened children, Ward seeks to soothe the two officers in the backseat.
“It’s OK,” she says. “Listen. Listen. Listen. It’s OK. It’s OK. OK? I just need you to relax. You OK? … Listen. Listen. Listen. You are OK. You are OK. You did nothing wrong. OK? I want to make sure you know that.”
They get out of the car. Fleming and Halley put their arms around each other’s shoulders. He is largely silent, while she resumes her breathless monologue.
“You’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK,” Fleming says. “Dude, he had a fucking gun. He was gonna kill us. I thought I was gonna die. You did the right thing. You’re OK. I’m here, I’m not leaving you. You’re OK. You did the right thing. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was not going home to my kids. I’m fucking pissed that I didn’t — Look at this.” She holds out her forearm. “I should have fucking had him. I fucking should have had him.”
At this point, Halley’s body camera catches Fleming’s anguished face. She can’t stop talking.
“You’re OK. Dude, he fucking — Look at this,” she says, showing him a reddish spot on her right forearm again. “Dude, I went behind that car and I thought I was gonna — You did the fucking — You saved everyone. You saved my fucking life. You know that, right? You did the right thing. I’m telling you right now, I thought we were going to die. Soon as Jones asked him if he had concealed carry —”
The story Fleming is frantically piecing together has several telling details, all of them false:
- Augustus took flight because Jones asked him whether he had a concealed carry permit, not because Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning.
- In his effort to escape, Augustus assaulted Fleming.
- When several of the officers dropped to the ground and took cover behind a police vehicle, they were responding to Augustus drawing his gun and preparing to shoot at them, not to the sound of gunfire from Halley’s weapon.
In the video footage from Halley’s body camera, none of these things actually happened. Yet on the basis of Halley and Fleming’s initial utterances, the Chicago Police Department released a statement later that day under Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s letterhead that described the incident as “an armed confrontation.”
Ward instructs Halley and Fleming to get back inside the car. Halley suggests that maybe they should relocate to “an alley or something. This is a lot of traffic right here.”
“The thing is,” Ward reassures him, “they don’t know you’re in this car.”
The officers’ fear is palpable. It’s as if they are in a war zone where they could at any moment and from any direction come under attack. How much did this fearful mindset, so vividly apparent after the shooting, contribute to the sequence of actions leading up to it?
Now back inside the vehicle, Halley says, “I couldn’t let him shoot around here.”
“Right, right,” replies Ward. “I’ve got you.”
As she pulls away from the curb, she asks, “He just walked up on you guys?”
“He walked right past us,” Fleming replies. “I said, ‘He’s got a gun.’ And then Jones, he tried to stop him. … That’s when he scratched the shit out of me. I had him but fucking didn’t get him.”
“That’s OK, that’s OK.”
Halley sobs.
“You all didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ward. “I want you all to know that.”
Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31 p.m.]
Back at the site of the shooting, Aimers, having handcuffed Augustus and thoroughly cleaned his hands, is engaged in securing the crime scene with red tape. This operation is complicated by the fact that community members have gathered within the area he and other officers are trying to cordon off.
“He didn’t do shit,” says a man standing in the railroad tracks directly across from the crime scene. “He’s the fucking barber. He don’t gangbang. He don’t do nothing.”
Aimers and other officers are intent on herding community members behind the cordon they are in the process of establishing. As they install the tape, they yell at onlookers for being on the wrong side of it. They make no effort to identify civilian witnesses. The man in the red shirt with a knapsack again tries to engage with the police and again is shooed away.
By the time Aimers has finished securing the area with tape, the medics are on the scene. They are standing around Augustus’s body. From other camera perspectives, it’s apparent they arrived five minutes earlier, checked Augustus’ pulse, did some tests, and determined he had died.
“Shit,” Aimers says to Jones, who is standing nearby holding Augustus’s gun. “Who got him?”
Jones gestures toward his chest and says, “Camera running.”
“That’s right,” Aimers acknowledges. “No talking.”
Commander Gloria Hanna, the senior police official on the scene, approaches them. She is not in uniform. She asks Jones and Aimers what their beat numbers are. She is trying to figure out who to assign as the “paper car,” the reporting officers tasked with filling out the initial incident report. The paper car cannot have been involved in or witnessed the incident.
Aimers cautions her not to step on evidence scattered on the ground. This includes a pistol magazine and shell casings. Officers walk back and forth heedlessly through the area.
Jones stands beside the magazine laying on the ground. He has been told to stay there until someone relieves him of Augustus’s gun.
“Hey, do you have any hand sanitizer?” Aimers asks Jones. He has lost track of his own bottle. Jones does not.
Aimers offers Jones a bag to put the gun in. It’s not an evidence bag but a plastic bag in which he had some papers. Jones puts the gun in the bag and places it on the ground beside the magazine.
Discovering a new piece of evidence on the ground, Aimers observes, “There’s a credit card over here.” Then he immediately refocuses, “Oh, here it is.” He has found his hand sanitizer. He shares it with Jones. His search continues, though. “I don’t know where my gloves went. That’s what I was looking for.”
Aimers resumes vigorously cleaning his hands with sanitizer.
A supervisor is giving instructions to the officer who “has the paper.” Aimers joins the conversation.
“The handcuffs,” he interjects, “are mine.”
He and the reporting officer have a confused, increasingly testy exchange. Fully 15 minutes after the shooting, the reporting officer asks, “We shot him or we got shot?”
“I don’t think he got a round off,” replies Aimers.
“But I’m just saying,” the officer persists, “did we shoot him? Did the police shoot him?”
“Yeah, we were right here. Everybody was lined up right there. They went to stop him, and he went through the car.”
“Just calm down. I’ll ask your partner,” says the reporting officer, referring to Jones.
“I’m all right,” says Aimers sharply. “That’s not my partner.”
“I’m just trying to say, ’cause we got the paper: Which officer shot?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know either,” says Aimers, adding, “We’re on camera, by the way.”
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38 p.m.]
As Aldrich is helping rearrange the red tape so the ambulance can back in to remove Augustus’s body, a man from the barber shop approaches him.
“He works with me,” the man says.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Aldrich. “You’re beyond the red tape.”
“The sergeant told me to come talk with you.”
“OK, but you can’t come through the red crime scene tape. You can come talk to me, but you can’t come through the red tape. You gotta stay in the red tape.”
Aldrich then walks away without talking to the man.
Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22 p.m.]
“Hey, Sarge,” Aimers calls out to Aldrich. He wants to know whether he should interview people in the stores on 71st Street near the site of the shooting. “We don’t want any of these people leaving, right?”
Aldrich, having just driven away an eyewitness to the shooting and a colleague of Augustus’s without taking statements or getting their contact information, appears uninterested.
Standing with the M4 across his chest, he asks Aimers, “Did you see it? I saw you come out of the spot.”
“I pulled up because I was gonna get ahead of him. Then he ran behind the car, and that’s when everything went off.”
Looking down at his own body camera, Aldrich asks, “Are you still on?”
“Yeah, I’m still on. I have to be on right now, right?”
Aldrich says he couldn’t see what happened from where he was parked. “I was wondering what you saw, because you pulled off.”
“I saw a bulge on the side, and then I saw them say, ‘Hey,” and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to try to stop him,’ and so I went ahead. He dipped out and started freaking out. Then he dipped away, and then I saw him drop, with the gun in his hand.” He then says something to the effect that he thought Augustus had fired his gun, “but he didn’t. Luckily.”
Aimers then briefly enters three stores on 71st Street. Unlike the witnesses on the sidewalk who were shooed away by the police, it’s highly unlikely anyone inside the shops saw anything, but it’s not impossible. Someone might have been looking out the window or stepping out the door at the moment of the shooting.
In each store, Aimers asks whether anyone saw anything, whether there is surveillance video that might have captured the incident, and he collects people’s names. His questioning is perfunctory. At one point, he sums up the point of the exercise, “I have to get everybody’s name down to tell the detectives you didn’t see anything.”
One of the shopkeepers asks, “Did he make it?” Although Aimers was present when the medics indicated Augustus had died, he replies curtly, “I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.”
Talking with several men in a sandwich shop, he appears to assume they are reluctant to speak with him, as if it were a gang shooting rather than a police shooting and they fear retribution.
“So, none of you guys saw anything?” he says. “Want to talk to me in the back individually? I know nobody wants to, you know, narc on anybody. I got that.”
No one takes him up on his offer.
Among those present is Darren Coleman, a security guard who was standing beside Jones as the incident unfolded and later gave me a detailed description of how Augustus’s civil interaction with Jones was disrupted when Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning. He also described Halley as having been, in his view, “pumped, ready. It seemed like he had a point to prove.”
On the tape, Coleman begins to describe to Aimers what he witnessed. Aimers has only one question for him: Did he “see anything” in Augustus’s hands? No, says Coleman, his view was obscured by a car. Aimers shows no interest in anything else Coleman might be able to tell him about what happened.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50 p.m.]
Just before Aldrich turns off his body camera — some 14 minutes after the incident, and more than 10 minutes after Halley and Fleming fled the scene — he has an exchange with the two most senior police officials on the scene, Commander Hanna and a lieutenant.
“I guess Halley’s the only one who shot,” says Aldrich, “but he drew a gun out on Halley.”
“The guy did?” the commander asks.
“The guy drew the gun what?” asks the lieutenant.
“He drew a gun out on Halley. That’s what they’re saying.”
“On who?” the lieutenant asks.
While body camera footage makes it possible to isolate various police interactions, some of them occurring simultaneously, another perspective is required to fully comprehend what is happening in the wake of the shooting. It is provided by a stationary CPD surveillance camera on 71st Street that serves to reconstitute the full incident within a single frame.
From that perspective, what arrests the eye is a fixed point amid all the movement. While Halley and Fleming rehearse their shared narrative in a traumatized duet; while Aimers repeatedly cleans his hands after handcuffing Augustus; while Aldrich responds to community grief and anger by reaching for an assault rifle; and while officers confound the crime scene and drive away civilian witnesses: Augustus lies motionless on the ground.
Four minutes pass before an ambulance arrives. During that interval, no officer is moved to assess Augustus’s condition, to offer a comforting word, or to minister to him in any way. Is he dead or alive? It appears not to matter to the officers flooding the area. To observe the terrible isolation of the human being lying in the middle of the street, while the police are wholly preoccupied with their own welfare, is to confront the question that reverberates through our times and is yet to be answered by meaningful reform: Do Black lives matter?
Official Oversight
The 2021 report on the incident by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency tasked with investigating police shootings, does not provide a fully satisfactory answer to that question. As was widely expected, COPA found “Halley’s use of deadly force was consistent with Chicago Police Department policy.” Although Augustus’s movements were ambiguous and could plausibly be interpreted in different ways (Was he perhaps trying to stabilize his holster while he ran?), COPA concluded that it was reasonable for Halley to have perceived an imminent threat.
We are thus left with the official finding that this gratuitous killing of a Black man by the police, at once tragic and absurd, was lawful and within policy. Given the prevailing paradigm embodied in the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1989 ruling in Graham v. Connor that great deference must be shown to an officer’s perceptions of risk and judgments within the temporal frame of the “split second,” that dispiriting conclusion was perhaps inevitable. It should not, however, be allowed to obscure the several ways in which the COPA report enlarges the analytic frame beyond the narrow focus on the split second.
The agency found that the officers had no legal basis to stop Augustus in the first place. And it found that Fleming had no reason to seek to physically restrain Augustus, who was being cooperative. It recommended that she receive a 60-day suspension.
Of equal importance is its analysis of police actions following the shooting. In order to prevent officers from colluding to construct a common narrative, CPD policy dictates that, following the discharge of a firearm, the officers involved are to refrain from discussing details of the incident with one another, and supervisors are to ensure that involved officers remain separated and do not communicate with one another.
COPA found that Ward, the senior supervisor at the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, failed to separate Halley and Fleming and to restrict their communication with each other. It recommended a 30-day suspension.
By assessing police actions leading up to and following the moment of deadly force, the COPA report begins to shift the paradigm. It demonstrates, in effect, that the Supreme Court’s split-second logic in Graham v. Connor need not dictate the outcome of administrative disciplinary processes.
The report also does something else. The breadth and quality of the COPA investigation makes clear the need to overhaul the video release policy adopted at the height of the political maelstrom provoked by the police murder of Laquan McDonald. In that case, the city withheld video footage of the incident for 13 months, until forced to release it by a judicial order and a surging mass movement.
Among the first reforms adopted in the wake of the McDonald debacle, the current policy — touted at the time as the most progressive in the country — provides that “all video and audio recordings relating to” an incident in which use of force by a police officer results in death or great bodily harm shall be made public no more than 60 days after the incident.
In most instances, COPA implements the policy by posting videos and other materials deemed relevant on its website. Yet much of the video footage described above is, to this day, not available to the public on the COPA site, raising questions about the basis on which the agency is making editorial judgments as to relevance.
The time has now come, in light of experience, to overhaul the policy in two fundamental respects.
First, the 60-day timeline should be shortened to no more than a week, absent a compelling showing of why it is necessary to extend it. Second, COPA should not make editorial decisions as to “relevance.” Rather, all body camera footage of all officers at the scene (not only the officers directly involved in the incident), as well as all video from other sources, should be released in its entirety. As the COPA investigation of the Augustus killing shows, once analysis is no longer limited to a narrow focus on the split second, it is not possible to determine relevance until the full investigation is completed, a process that routinely takes a year and often longer.
At the most fundamental level, the principle — with respect to categories of information acknowledged to be public — should be to release it all, and let the public determine what is in the public interest.
Such an expansion of transparency would operationalize a central insight of the era after Laquan McDonald’s killing: In cases such as these, we are not dealing with discreet “cover-ups.” That is the wrong frame for understanding the phenomenon. What we are dealing with is standard operating procedure.
Conspiracy requires agreement, but there is no need to agree when everyone knows what they are expected to do.
For those acting within this gravitational field, lying is not an isolated act but a state of being. The police account of what happened and why it was justified begins to form instantly. The process by which it then hardens into the official narrative is fluid and dynamic — less a matter of deliberate conspiratorial deception than an expression of the institution’s fundamental orientation.
For the CPD at every level, the question is not: What happened? It is: How do we justify what happened? That orientation affects perception — what one sees and does not see — and it shapes interactions that in turn shape the narrative. At bedrock, the assumption is: It is justified because it happened.
This culture has proved difficult to capture in legal categories. A case in point is the failed prosecution of three officers charged with conspiring to protect Officer Jason Van Dyke after he killed Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder. And there were grave political consequences for a number of officials — including former Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who withheld public information from the public in order to maintain a false narrative. Yet the officers charged with conspiring to cover up the McDonald murder were acquitted on all charges. While the judge in the case has been widely criticized, the paradox remains that the more pervasive the code of silence is as a culture, the more elusive it is as a matter of law. Conspiracy requires agreement, but there is no need to agree when everyone knows what they are expected to do.
Given the nature of the problem, there is no more effective antidote than robust transparency that honors the compelling public interest in access to information about what happens in the seconds and minutes and hours that follow the split second in which the police shoot someone.
Video clips referenced in this article:
Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02]
Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54]
Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32]
Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19]
Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01]
Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38]
Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50]
About 40 women gathered to demand the right to work study, and participate in politics. (photo: Nava Jamshidi/Getty Images)
Shots fired into air and rifle butts used to attack dozens of women protesting outside Afghan education ministry
Since seizing control on 15 August last year, the Taliban have rolled back the marginal gains made by women during two decades of US intervention in Afghanistan.
About 40 women – chanting “bread, work and freedom” – marched in front of the education ministry building in Kabul, before the fighters dispersed them by firing their guns into the air, an AFP correspondent reported.
Some female protesters who took refuge in nearby shops were chased and beaten by Taliban fighters with their rifle butts.
The demonstrators carried a banner which read “15 August is a black day” as they demanded rights to work and political participation.
“Justice! Justice! We’re fed up with ignorance,” they chanted, many not wearing face veils.
“Unfortunately, the Taliban from the intelligence service came and fired in the air,” said Zholia Parsi, one of the organisers of the march.
“They dispersed the girls, tore our banners and confiscated the mobile phones of many girls.”
But Munisa Mubariz vowed to continue fighting for women’s rights.
“If the Taliban want to silence this voice, it’s not possible. We will protest from our homes,” she said.
Some journalists covering the demonstration – the first women’s rally in months – were also beaten by the Taliban fighters, an AFP correspondent reported.
While the Taliban authorities have allowed and promoted some rallies against the US, they have declined permission for any women’s rally since they returned to power.
After seizing control last year, the Taliban promised a softer version of the harsh Islamist rule that characterised their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.
But many restrictions have already been imposed, especially on women, to comply with the movement’s austere vision of Islam.
Tens of thousands of girls have been shut out of secondary schools, while women have been barred from returning to many government jobs.
Women have also been banned from travelling alone on long trips and can only visit public gardens and parks in the capital on days separate from men.
In May, the country’s supreme leader and chief of the Taliban, Hibatullah Akhundzada, ordered women to fully cover themselves in public, including their faces – ideally with a burqa.
Since the secondary school ban was announced in March, many secret schools for these girls have sprung up across several provinces.
The UN and rights groups have repeatedly condemned the Taliban government for imposing the restrictions on women.
These policies show a “pattern of absolute gender segregation and are aimed at making women invisible in the society”, Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, told reporters in Kabul during a visit in May.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch called on the Taliban to “reverse their horrifying and misogynistic” decision to bar women from education.
“This would send a message that the Taliban are willing to reconsider their most egregious actions,” Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghanistan researcher at the rights group, said in a statement.
Some Afghan women initially pushed back against the curbs, holding small protests.
But the Taliban soon rounded up the ringleaders, holding them incommunicado while denying they had been detained.
Dwarf brocket deer have returned to the area surrounding the 'Death Road.' (photo: Niall Corbet/Wikimedia Commons)
However, since the construction of a safer road in 2007, traffic has dropped 90% and wildlife has crept in, according to a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) published in the journal EcologÃa en Bolivia.
Scientists placed 35 camera traps along and nearby a 12-kilometer (7.4 mile) stretch of road as well as in the surrounding Cotapata National Park and Natural Integrated Management Area in 2016. The camera traps recorded 16 species of medium and large mammals including the dwarf brocket deer (Mazama chunyi), mountain paca (Cuniculus taczanowskii), oncilla cat (Leopardus tigrinus) and the spectacled or Andean bear (Tremarctos ornatus).
“The record of the Andean bear and the dwarf brocket deer was what surprised us the most, because these are two very elusive and difficult to observe species that normally avoid places with human presence,” Guido Ayala, WCS Scientific Research Coordinator and the lead author of the study told Mongabay.
The cameras also captured 94 species of birds such as the endemic Bolivian brush finch (Atlapetes rufinucha), light-crowned spinetail (Cranioleuca albiceps), and rufous faced antpitta (Grallaria erythrotis) and vulnerable species including hooded tinamou (Nothocercus nigrocapillus) and Endangered black and chestnut eagle (Spizaetus isidori).
“The data recorded in this study confirms this trend, showing that wildlife has returned to the area, due to the reduction in vehicle traffic and the presence of humans,” Ayala said.
Roads are generally terrible for the forest. As forests dry out along roadways, issues like wildfires and forest degradation along edges can weaken ecosystems, and roads open a pathway for other destructive activities such as logging.
For wildlife, roads increase roadkill, noise, and chemical pollution, and hinder animals’ ability to move safely across the landscape. Frogs, bats, and birds are particularly affected by the noise from roads, which can disrupt the vocalizations they use for courtship, communication and defense.
When the “road of death” was in heavy use, Ayala said, roadkill, noise pollution, and the capture of wild animals as pets were the main threats to wildlife. Park rangers reported to WCS that they had seen little evidence of mammals around the road between 1990 and 2005.
“The fauna, when this road was still functioning, it was being affected by the pollution that vehicles generated, the noise and dust,” Maria Viscarra, a biologist who participated in the study told Reuters.
Now, all of these threats have decreased significantly and the situation for wildlife is much better. For instance, “there are no reports of animals being run over or species being captured for pets,” Ayala said. “The results also demonstrate the resilience of nature in the wild, and the importance of connectivity for protected areas.”
At present, “the greatest threats to wildlife in the region comes from the slash-and-burn linked to coca cultivation,” Ayala adds. Coca leaves, which are used medicinally or processed into cocaine, are a key cash crop in Bolivia. In order to grow the crop, the land must be completely cleared of forest. This is achieved by cutting down all of the vegetation and then, once it dries, setting the brush ablaze. Efforts to stop illegal cultivation, such as the aerial spraying of crops also damage forests and biodiversity.
Coca crops were present in six of Bolivia’s protected areas in 2019, according to a UNODC report. Combined, these illegal plantations spanned 319 hectares (788 acres). More than 37 hectares (91 acres) of illegal coca plantations were reported inside Cotapata National Park, the Park nearest to the old road, with more farms reported outside of the park.
But overall, rangers and researchers are celebrating a win for local wildlife around the old road. “It is so nice,” Ayala told Reuters, “that we have a place close to the (capital) La Paz, some 50 minutes away, where one can come and see nature in a beautiful way.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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