29 January 23
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A 1992 study claims that officers who show weakness are more likely to be killed. Law-enforcement culture has never recovered.
At the top of an inventory of “behavioral descriptors” linked to officers who ended up dead, the study listed traits that some citizens might prize: “friendly,” “well-liked by community and department,” “tends to use less force than other officers felt they would use in similar circumstances,” and “used force only as last resort.” The cop killers, the agents concluded from their prison conversations, had attacked officers with a “good-natured demeanor.” An officer’s failure to dominate—to immediately enforce full control over the suspect—proved fatal. “A miscue in assessing the need for control in particular situations can have grave consequences,” the authors warned.
Although few patrolmen today explicitly cite the study, some of its findings survive as police folklore, like the commonplace that unshined shoes can make an officer a target. Most significant, the study’s core lesson about the imperative to dominate dovetailed with a nineties-era turn in law-enforcement culture toward what was known as a “warrior mind-set,” teaching officers to see almost any civilian as a potentially lethal assassin—an approach that many police trainers still advertise, even as the cops-vs.-citizens mentality has fallen out of favor among many police chiefs.
The killing, this month, of Tyre Nichols by police in Memphis is the latest reminder that the dominate-or-die impulse persists among some rank-and-file officers. Body-camera and surveillance videos released on Friday by the the city of Memphis show that a cluster of officers appear to have beaten Nichols to death merely for defying their orders: commands like “Get on the ground,” “Lie flat, goddammit,” and “Give me your fucking hands.”
No evidence has yet emerged showing any justification for the police to have stopped Nichols, a twenty-nine-year-old FedEx worker and aspiring photographer with a four-year-old son. Nor does it appear that the officers gave him much reason for pulling him over. “Any charges on him?,” a police operator asked over a radio in one video. There was no answer from the officers in the field. The police reports described his offense as “reckless driving.”
A battle to dominate Nichols appears to have propelled the encounter to its deadly conclusion. Police are taught never to reach into an open car door because a driver might hit the gas, dragging the officer. But after unmarked police cars had boxed Nichols in at a stoplight and he apparently refused to step out, one of the officers leaned deep inside the vehicle in order to force the driver out and hurl him to the ground.
As four officers grabbed at his arms, legs, and torso, Nichols’s words were mild. “I didn’t do anything! . . . All right, all right, all right, O.K. . . . I am on the ground, yes, sir, yes, sir. . . . All right, you guys are really doing a lot right now, I am just trying to go home.” The officers, though, shouted orders and expletives as if they were locked in a life-or-death struggle. “Get the fuck out of the fucking car. . . . Turn your ass around. . . . I am going to taze your shit. . . . I am going to knock your ass the fuck out.” Under a torrent of contradictory commands, Nichols appeared confused about how to comply.
Nichols was unarmed and physically unimposing. He suffered from Crohn’s disease, which had left him rail thin—six feet three and a hundred and forty-five pounds, according to his mother. The officers—all, like Nichols, were Black—each looked nearly twice his size. Later, in an exchange recorded after the beating, the officers suggested to one another that he had reached for their handguns. But the video footage makes that claim highly implausible, Seth W. Stoughton, an expert on the use of force and a former patrolman, told me.
In fact, several signs indicated that the officers never feared Nichols. Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, who testified at the 2021 trial of a Minneapolis officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, noted that an officer typically shouts it out immediately if he sees a suspect reach for a weapon, and none did anything like that in the videos of their struggles with Nichols. When police threatened Nichols with a Taser at one point and a baton at another, the other officers loosened their grip on him to get out of the way. That self-protective flinching, in fact, is what allowed Nichols to escape on foot and flee toward the nearby home of his mother. And when Nichols was later captured and in handcuffs the officers turned their backs on him and bragged about their exertions like football players in a locker room after a hard-won victory. They would have kept a closer eye on someone they saw as dangerous.
Police are trained to weigh several factors before pursuing a suspect, including the potential danger to bystanders and the likelihood that the chase will end in a physical struggle. “The first factor is, why are we chasing him? What are we trying to get him for?,” Stoughton said. After Nichols fled, the Memphis officers talked only of retaliating against him for his defiance. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one officer said, waving a fourth and fifth police vehicle to join in the hunt. If their goal was only to apprehend Nichols, the officers did not need to use a Taser, pepper spray, or baton. “Just dogpile him—the least technical thing possible,” Stoughton said. “Just get on top of him.”
The officers’ wild, punishing violence was what elevated Nichols’s arrest beyond countless other incidents of police aggression that never made the headlines. After catching Nichols again, the officers kicked him in the ribs and skull as he flailed on his back. They rained punches down on his face at a time when the pavement underneath him left no room for his head to recoil, potentially injuring his brain. Then one pulled out a nightstick. “I am going to baton the fuck out of you,” the officer yelled.
Most startling, three officers grappling from opposite sides seemed for a time to prop Nichols up on his feet as another swung a fist through the air at his head, like goons holding up a snitch for a Mafia boss in a movie. “I counted five strikes—big, heavy strikes, what looked like haymakers,” Stoughton said. Police academies often teach that blows to the face are not only potentially lethal but also virtually useless if the goal is compliance. “Very few people in the history of policing have been punched in the face and then decided to do what the officer was asking. Your instinctive reaction is ‘I need to get my hands up,’ or ‘I need to fight back,’ ” he said. “There is a difference between defensive force and assertive force,” Stoughton added. “The officers here were trying to assert control over Mr. Nichols, not defending themselves, and they were using applications of force that were gratuitous and egregiously unjustified—far above the amount that would have been appropriate or proportional to someone who was resisting the way he was resisting.” When Nichols leaned against a car in handcuffs, drifting out of consciousness, one officer even mocked his desperate calls for his mother during the beating. “He has a mother,” the officer said, dismissively. Nichols died three days later in a hospital.
The officers belonged to a unit of forty police called Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION—an acronym that does little to invite community trust. Memphis created the unit in November, 2021, to address a spike in murders and gun violence during the pandemic. Since then, the mayor has touted the unit’s success by citing statistics about the sheer volume of its activity—the amount of money, guns, and cars seized, or the number of suspects arrested. By disregarding whether the arrests end in convictions—or even reduce crime—such metrics encourage aggression, Stoughton said. “You are incentivizing quantity over legality. Thirty years of research tells us that is a bad idea.”
Targeted police units like SCORPION, which concentrate on certain high-crime neighborhoods, have a checkered history. There were scandals at the Rampart unit, in Los Angeles, and the Gun Trace Task Force, in Baltimore, among others, and the Memphis Police Department said Saturday that it was disbanding the SCORPION unit. “What is supposed to be targeted enforcement becomes ‘We run the streets around here,’ ” Stoughton said.
A growing number of police chiefs and district attorneys, though, argue that there is a way to prevent at least some needless killings like Tyre Nichols’s, by focussing on why the police pulled him over. Along with the shibboleth that a failure to dominate encourages cop killing, the nineties study helped implant a second myth in police culture as well—that stopping cars is exceptionally dangerous to officers. That notion rests on the misuse of a statistic: a large percentage of police killed on the job die at roadside pullovers. In reality, such encounters are so numerous that the odds of death at any given stop are no higher than in other police work.
Yet units like SCORPION—created to go after gangs, guns, and drugs, not issue tickets for speeding and other traffic violations—often use such trivial infractions as a pretext to justify pulling over a car and looking inside it. Convinced that they risk their life each time they stop such a driver, many officers approach each encounter prepared for a life-or-death struggle. Few may be as hyperaggressive as the officers who killed Nichols, but their fear and belligerence can still evoke a reciprocal urge in a driver to talk back or flee, sparking a deadly cycle.
Stopping cars on little more than a hunch is also hopelessly inefficient. Five or more patrol cars and eight or more officers spent as much as an hour detaining Nichols on a night when they could have been targeting dangerous crime. Multiple studies have concluded that such a dragnet approach is ultimately an ineffective strategy for confiscating the guns, drugs, or other contraband that police seek in cars. Pretextual stops may even be counterproductive: they alienate law-abiding citizens in the high-crime neighborhoods where their coöperation is most essential. “We are talking about using a hammer on a problem that really requires a scalpel,” Stoughton said.
In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, police and prosecutors in jurisdictions from Philadelphia to Los Angeles are attempting to end pretextual stops altogether. The city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was one of the first to try the experiment, a decade ago. Civilian complaints about the Fayetteville police plunged, and so did traffic fatalities, with no notable increase in gun violence or drug crime. Eliminating pretextual stops, in other words, may reduce crime more effectively than units like SCORPION do. Tyre Nichols, of course, would still be alive if the police had never pulled him over.
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The statehouse in Columbia, S.C. The state’s Supreme Court found that the State Constitution protected the right to abortion, overturning a ban there. (photo: Sean Rayford/NYT)
Many of the legal arguments seeking to overturn abortion bans rely on rights provided by the states, and how they are interpreted by state supreme courts.
On a single day this month, South Carolina’s highest court handed down its ruling that the right to privacy in the State Constitution includes a right to abortion, a decision that overturned the state’s six-week abortion ban. Within hours, Idaho’s highest court ruled in the opposite direction, saying that state’s Constitution did not protect abortion rights; the ban there would stand.
Those divergent decisions displayed how volatile and patchwork the fight over abortion rights will be over the next months, as abortion rights advocates and opponents push and pull over state constitutions.
For abortion rights groups, state constitutions are a critical part of a strategy to overturn bans that have cut off access to abortion in a wide swath of the country. Those documents provide much longer and more generous enumerations of rights than the United States Constitution, and history is full of examples of state courts using them to lead the way to establish broad rights — as well as to strike down restrictions on abortion. They offer a way around gerrymandered state legislatures that are pushing stricter laws.
The Supreme Court’s decision has left abortion rights groups with few other options. In their most hopeful scenario, state courts and ballot initiatives to establish constitutional protections would establish a firmer guarantee for abortion rights than the one in Roe, which rested on a protection of privacy that was not explicit in the U.S. Constitution.
But just as abortion rights groups are trying to identify protections in state constitutions, anti-abortion groups are trying to amend those same documents to say they provide no guarantee of abortion rights.
And while the courts may appear to be the last word because their decisions are not subject to appeal, judges in 38 states have to face the voters. A change on the bench has sometimes meant that the same document found to include a right to abortion suddenly is declared not to include that right, in the space of a few years.
“You’re going to see a lot of give and take in the years to come, in ways that may be unpredictable,” said Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which maintains a tracker of the cases filed to challenge abortion bans that have been enacted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. “I don’t think it’s a dynamic where a court will issue a ruling and that’s the end of the conversation.”
Lawyers working to restore abortion rights promise more litigation as legislatures in conservative states reconvene for the first time since the Supreme Court’s decision, vowing to pass stricter bans. Both sides of the abortion debate will also devote new energy to seat and unseat judges, and into efforts to explicitly protect or restrict abortion protections in state constitutions, which are far easier to amend than their federal counterpart.
“The terrain has shifted, and it’s not just a matter of we’re turning our attention from federal to state courts, it’s that we’re turning our attention to a whole other range of institutions and opportunities which present their own possibilities but also pitfalls,” said John Dinan, a politics professor at Wake Forest and the author of a forthcoming Montana Law Review article on the role of state courts and constitutions in the future of abortion laws.
During the half-century that Roe protected a federal right to abortion, opponents of abortion rights argued that regulation of the issue should be returned to the states, which could set their own laws according to public opinion.
They have objected to state court decisions finding a constitutional right to abortion, saying that laws should be made by the legislatures, not justices. Murrell Smith, the Republican speaker of the House in South Carolina, wrote on Twitter that the state court’s decision “fails to respect the concept of separation of powers and strips the people of this state from having a say in a decision that was meant to reflect their voices.”
But abortion opponents have tried to turn state constitutions to their advantage, as well. Even before Roe was overturned, ballot amendments in Tennessee, Louisiana, West Virginia and Alabama changed those states’ constitutions to say that nothing in them protected a right to abortion. Lawmakers in Montana and Alaska are attempting similar amendments.
Some opponents of abortion have argued that the rights to liberty in state constitutions should extend not only to women, but also to fetuses. Thomas Fisher, the solicitor general of Indiana, said during oral arguments on the case there earlier this month, “There’s a failure to recognize that there is something else on the other side of the equation, and that is the unborn life.”
The framers of the Constitution earlier wrote constitutions for the 13 colonies that became the first states. They borrowed heavily from those documents, and left states free to add rights to their constitutions that don’t exist in the federal one. Wyoming’s Constitution, for example, protects the opportunity to hunt, fish and trap; New Jersey’s includes a minimum wage that increases annually.
State constitutions are easier to change, through ballot measures proposed by citizens or legislatures (allowed in every state but Delaware.) And they have been revised far more often than the federal constitution.
“If you went back to the origins of our nation, federal courts were not irrelevant, but there weren’t many cases there,” said Margaret Marshall, the former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. “Everything happened in the states.”
As the U.S. Supreme Court became more conservative in its approach in the 1970s, Justice William Brennan, himself a former justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, wrote an influential article urging activists to rely more on state constitutions to expand civil liberties, noting that state courts had relied on them to establish rights, including those to housing and to jury trials, beyond what federal courts had done.
A more recent example is same-sex marriage. Even when Congress refused to recognize same-sex marriages, the high court in Massachusetts ruled that under its Constitution, the state could not deny a marriage license on the basis of sex. The opinion, written by Justice Marshall, declared that the State Constitution protected personal liberty “often more so” than the federal Constitution.
“The genius of our federal system is that each state’s Constitution has vitality specific to its own traditions,” she wrote.
The lawsuits now rely on a range of rights — and sometimes multiple rights — in state constitutions, reflecting the differences in these documents, as well as the bets that abortion rights supporters are making about which arguments are likely to succeed.
While 11 state constitutions explicitly mention privacy — the basis of the argument for Roe — only two of those are in states that ban abortion. One is South Carolina, where earlier this month a divided court found that the right to privacy extended to a right to abortion. That decision was a happy surprise to abortion rights groups, not least because the justices, while nonpartisan, were appointed by the Republican-controlled State Legislature.
In the other state with an explicit right to privacy, Arizona, abortion rights groups chose to argue their case instead on a state constitutional right to due process, strategizing that the members of the state’s Supreme Court would be unsympathetic to the privacy argument.
Other lawsuits argue that a right to abortion falls under state constitutional protections for liberty, for free exercise of religion, or for inherent, natural or fundamental rights — provisions that are included in every state constitution and typically go well beyond what the Bill of Rights established.
Roughly half the state constitutions also have equal rights amendments protecting the rights of women, and several cases that have been filed since Roe was overturned rely on those provisions.
And lawsuits in two states, Wyoming and Ohio, argue for a right to abortion based on constitutional amendments the states’ voters passed in protest to President Barack Obama’s broad overhaul of health care, protecting citizens’ rights to make their own health care decisions.
Most of the cases are awaiting trial. Only the state supreme courts in North Dakota, Kentucky and Indiana have already heard arguments.
Preliminary rulings have given some indication of what arguments might establish a right to abortion, even in conservative states. In North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and Indiana, the courts blocked abortion restrictions temporarily, saying that the abortion rights cases had a likelihood of success at trial.
The North Dakota court said the state’s near-total ban most likely violated a constitutional provision establishing “certain inalienable rights,” including “those of enjoying and defending life and liberty” because of its burdens on doctors and pregnant women. The Utah court said the lawsuit from the abortion rights groups raised “serious issues” about whether the abortion ban violated a constitutional provision granting rights equally to “both male and female citizens.”
The court also noted that it had previously recognized a constitutional right to privacy protecting matters “of no proper concern to others,” including “things which might result in shame or humiliation, or merely violate one’s pride in keeping private affairs to [one]self.” That includes a right to determine “family composition.”
Because some state constitutions were written more than a century ago, courts are deciding whether to view them through the eyes of their framers, or in a present-day context. That helps explain why the courts in South Carolina and Idaho diverged.
In South Carolina, lawyers for the attorney general and the Legislature had argued that the justices had to interpret the Constitution based on the exact language in the document. They noted that a committee that revised the Constitution in the mid-1960s made no specific reference to a right to abortion. But the justices in the majority opinion said that the committee had no women, and the state’s high court had since ruled in another decision that the constitutional right to privacy extended to “bodily autonomy.”
“We cannot relegate our role of declaring whether a legislative act is constitutional by blinding ourselves to everything that has transpired since,” the justices wrote.
In Idaho, where there is no explicit right to privacy, a similarly split court rejected arguments that a right to abortion was fundamental in constitutional guarantees of the “inalienable rights” to life, liberty and property.
The court chose to interpret the state’s Constitution “based on the plain and ordinary meaning of its text, as intended by those who framed and adopted the provision at issue.” There was no evidence, the justices wrote, that a right to abortion was “deeply rooted” in the state in 1889, when the clause on inalienable rights was adopted. If the people of Idaho do not like the state’s new bans, the justices wrote, “they can elect new legislators.”
High court decisions, however, have been reversed by courts themselves, as in Iowa. There, the highest court ruled in 2018 that the State Constitution protected a right to abortion, only to reverse itself four years later, after Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, named four new justices.
Eyes are now on Florida, where the state’s Supreme Court in 1989 established a right to abortion in state constitutional protections for privacy, going beyond what the Roe court had done, and voters in 2012 rejected a ballot measure that would have reversed that decision.
In the last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has taken advantage of retirements on the court to seat a majority that opposes abortion. Abortion rights advocates have filed suit against the state’s 15-week ban on abortion; last week, the new court agreed to hear the case.
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Many generic medications cost just pennies to manufacture. (photo: Stan Honda/Getty Images)
And about Mark Cuban’s cheap generics, too.
Because the average American spends around $1,300 a year for prescription drugs, more than people in any other country, and millions of Americans are underinsured, the announcements have generated lots of interest. Given that this is Mark Cuban, the larger-than-life investor extraordinaire of Shark Tank fame, and Amazon, the society-altering guilty addiction, it’s natural to expect that both endeavors will disrupt and deliver.
I reached out to a bunch of specialists in drug pricing to see what they thought. Most were quite tempered about just how revolutionary either project is. Here’s a look at why that is, how it’s possible for Cuban and Amazon to still make millions while charging so little, and some guidance on how to actually find the cheapest generics.
Let’s begin with Amazon. The company has maintained an online pharmacy for more than two years. What’s different about this new offering is that for a flat fee, you can obtain all the eligible generic prescriptions you need. Get your Lisinopril, a widely prescribed high-blood-pressure medication; your Estradiol, an estrogen hormone drug; and depression-treating Bupropion, the generic version of Wellbutrin, for just 5 dollars, including shipping! In order to participate, you must first have an Amazon prime account, something that currently costs $139 per year. Still, given that more than 200 million people are already Prime members this seems huge.
It’s not, said Karen Van Nuys, the executive director of the Value of Life Sciences Innovation Program at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, who called the announcement “less exciting than it maybe could have been.” Lots of generic drugs only cost pennies a pill, said Van Nuys who published an illuminating report on generic drug pricing last year. Plus Amazon’s list only includes 50 or so generic drugs. Therefore she feels that $5 for 30 days’ worth isn’t actually that impressive. Though you’ll never go above $5, it’s unlikely that someone who takes multiple medications would find them all covered. Others noted that though focusing on generics is helpful—since they account for the majority of prescriptions—often the most expensive medications are brand name drugs. The pass is also off-limits to customers in a handful of states, including California, and individuals with Medicare and Medicaid.
Still, it’s no mystery why this is a smart move for Amazon. First of all, because most of the generics they are including are so cheap—and they already have shipping infrastructure set up —it likely won’t be hard for them to break even. And once they start delivering medications in a few hours, this will boost their appeal further. “Amazon’s real goal is probably to be the king of online pharmacies, replacing many retail, in-person pharmacies over time,” said John Lu, a health economist, who is the director of UCLA Seminar on Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy, over email. He offered the helpful context that the average retail cost for a generic is somewhere between $20 and $30.
Now let’s look at Mark Cuban’s effort. Cuban’s CostPlus Drug Company is offering hundreds of generic medications. The pitch is that Cuban negotiates directly with wholesalers and bypasses price-inflating middlemen. Then, in an unusually transparent move, he marks up all prices by just 15 percent, tacks on a $3 pharmacy fee and $5 shipping fee. Unlike with Amazon, there are no major restrictions on who can use it and no membership is required. Let’s revisit those same drugs from before:
• Lisinopril: Starting at $8.60 for 30 pills from Cuban including shipping.
• Estradiol: Starting at $10.10 including shipping.
• Bupropion: Starting at $9.80 including shipping.
Where Cuban’s effort really stands out is with many drugs not offered through Amazon. One example Cuban likes to tout: Imatinib, a generic leukemia treatment. He charges around $47 per month, while other retailers charge $9,657, he declared in a press release last year.
Still, this could exaggerate the novelty of what he’s offering. Craig Garthwaite, a professor who studies pricing and innovation in the biopharmaceutical sector at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management noted that cheaper options have long been available if you knew where to look.
Since Imatinib appears in many news articles about CostPlus, let’s use 60 100 mg tablets as an example:
• Cost to manufacture, according to CostPlus site: $19.80
• Cost to purchase from CostPlus: $25.80 plus $5 shipping, so $30.80
• Costco: around $130.
• GeniusRx: $120.
• GoodRx’s prescription-comparison tool (very useful for comparing options!) shows that while CVS charges $10,624 and RiteAid charges $5,460, you can also get a coupon to bring it down to $547 at CVS and $51 at RiteAid.
• Amazon and Walmart: not available.
Yes, Cuban beats them all. And even if the vouchers came closer to Cuban’s prices, there are many reasons why forcing people to become coupon experts is not the optimal way to counter inflated drug costs. But the savings aren’t quite as dramatic as some framings of his endeavor have made it seem. Still his project, along with Amazon’s, offers an important reminder: generic drug prices are far from standard across the board, and so we should be shopping around.
They offer a second lesson as well: Insurance is not always as helpful as many of us assume it is. Both Amazon and Cuban are offering these excellent prices without insurance. How is that possible?! Largely because “generic medicines are often exploited by middlemen that seize significant profits at the expense of patients and the companies that make the medicines,” explained Allen Goldberg, a spokesman for the Association for Accessible Medicines, a trade organization representing manufacturers and distributors of generic prescription drugs. Sometimes that means that despite all that effort you go through to dig up your insurance card number, you’d pay the same amount without it.
Occasionally, as Van Nuys at USC has found, that means that you’d pay more. Yes, more! The good news for uninsured and underinsured people: if a generic is available, with careful sourcing, you may be able to avoid any cost disadvantage.
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Police stops. (photo: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Officers don’t wait for legitimate reasons to stop drivers; they stop drivers to find a reason.
Mario signaled and turned left on green. He did not speed, litter, swerve out of his lane or drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He had done nothing illegal.
Neither had his girlfriend, Gracie Lasyone, who was in the passenger seat.
The Mustang was equally clean. It had current tags, working equipment and was not linked to any criminal investigation. The only thing conspicuous about the car was its red color and out-of-state plates, from New Mexico.
Officers had no good reason to initiate a traffic stop. Yet they flashed their emergency lights before the Mustang cleared the intersection. Dash-camera and body-camera video shows that Mario pulled over promptly, spoke in a respectful tone and obeyed all police orders. So did Gracie.
Nothing helped. Claiming that Mario had failed to activate his blinker, despite clear video evidence to the contrary, the officers ordered Mario and Gracie out of the car. Then the officers frisked Mario, took his phone, put it in the cab of the police vehicle, forced him to empty his pockets, and grilled him for 20 minutes about his personal life.
They also interrogated Gracie. When she asked—twice—if she could record the encounter on her phone, they refused to allow it. Ultimately, they cited Mario for three alleged infractions that the city eventually dropped.
The entire encounter was bogus, despite police assurances that everything they did was by the book. One officer actually called himself a “constitutionalist,” while violating the Constitution in multiple ways.
Rather than accept the abuse, Mario and Gracie fought back with a civil rights lawsuit. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represents them.
The litigation highlights a nationwide problem. Cases in Georgia, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, and elsewhere show a similar pattern. Officers use pretexts to conduct traffic stops, then show cavalier disregard for motorists’ constitutional rights.
Sometimes the goal is fines and fees. Dozens of Louisiana municipalities receive more than half their revenue from citations. One village near Alexandria relies on traffic enforcement for 93 percent of its budget.
Other times the goal is revenue through a process called civil forfeiture, which allows the government to take and keep assets without proving wrongdoing in criminal court. Many law enforcement agencies cash in without arresting or prosecuting anyone. The process works with factory-like efficiency in Detroit.
With Mario and Gracie, the officers seemed to hope the couple were big-time criminals. “There’s more to this than meets the eye,” one officer said. He later expressed disappointment when dispatch informed the officers that Mario and Gracie do not have criminal records.
Regardless of the motive, the practice is the same from coast to coast. Officers don’t wait for legitimate reasons to stop drivers; they stop drivers to find a reason.
The Constitution forbids this mode of policing. The Fourth Amendment requires officers to have reasonable suspicion that motorists did something wrong before detaining them. Officers cannot detain someone to find a crime.
Even if officers have legitimate reasons to make a stop, they cannot unnecessarily prolong the interaction while hunting for additional violations. Yet all too often in Alexandria and elsewhere, officers and their departments escape consequences when they disregard the Constitution.
One reason is simple economics. Holding the government accountable for violating rights is expensive. It does not make financial sense to sue an agency unless its officers inflict serious harm. Yet two problems emerge when casual violations go unpunished.
First, officers can grow accustomed to ignoring the Constitution. Without fear of reprisal, individual liberties disappear. Second, if rights are enforceable only when the government commits gross violations, then no one is secure from unreasonable searches and seizures—which often start as minor inconveniences.
Mario and Gracie drove away from their police encounter, but others leave in the back of a squad car, ambulance or hearse. No one should have to wait for the worst to happen before insisting on accountability.
If motorists must follow traffic laws, then the police must follow the Constitution.
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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation on Saturday that bans youth from receiving gender-affirming health care. (photo: Rick Bowmer/AP)
Gov. Spencer Cox, who had not taken a public position on the transgender care measure, signed it a day after the Legislature sent it to his desk. Utah's measure prohibits transgender surgery for youth and disallows hormone treatments for minors who have not yet been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The state's Republican-dominated Legislature prioritized the ban and considered a first draft of the measure less than 10 days ago, two days after the Legislature opened this year's session Jan. 17.
Cox's approval of the bill comes as lawmakers in at least 18 states consider similar bills targeting health care for young transgender people.
Cox explained in a statement that his decision was based on his belief that it was prudent to pause "these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences."
"While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures," he said.
Among the critics is the ACLU of Utah, which on Friday urged Cox to veto the bill.
In its letter to Cox, the civil rights organization said it was deeply concerned about "the damaging and potentially catastrophic effects this law will have on people's lives and medical care and the grave violations of people's constitutional rights it will cause.
"By cutting off medical treatment supported by every major medical association in the United States, the bill compromises the health and well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria. It ties the hands of doctors and parents by restricting access to the only evidence-based treatment available for this serious medical condition and impedes their ability to fulfill their professional obligations," the letter said.
The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Mike Kennedy, a Republican family doctor has said government oversight is necessary for vital health care policy related to gender and youth.
Cox also signed another measure that would give students school-choice style scholarships to attend schools outside the public education system. The bill also increased teacher pay and benefits in an effort to ease the state's teacher shortage.
At least a dozen other states are considering similar legislation in what has emerged as a landmark year for school choice battles. The debates have inflamed teachers' unions and resurfaced concerns about efforts to gradually privatize public education. If enacted, they could transform the nature of state government's relationship with the education system and deepen contrasts between how going to school looks in many red versus blue states.
The Utah measure allocates $42 million in taxpayer funds to pay for scholarships so students can attend private schools. Roughly 5,000 students would receive $8,000 scholarships, which is roughly double the state's "weighted pupil unit" funding that follows students to their schools. In an attempt to appease staunch opposition from the state's teachers' union, the bill also includes $6,000 in salary and benefits for Utah teachers.
Cox' statement explaining his decision focused mainly on the increased teacher pay while portraying the measure as "striking a good balance."
"School choice works best when we adequately fund public education and we remove unnecessary regulations that burden our public schools and make it difficult for them to succeed," Cox said.
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COVID patients fill a hospital ward in Fuyang, China, earlier this month. (photo: Sheldon Cooper/Sopa Images/Shutterstock)
After three years of lockdowns, the country was ill prepared for its abrupt ‘freedom’. Now, with some estimating 1m deaths, public anger is growing
It was the beginning of the chaos of 2022, as local Chinese authorities desperately tried to follow President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid decree while facing the most virulent strain of the virus yet: Omicron. “Everyone was panicking, no one was ready,” she tells the Observer.
By the end of the year, zero-Covid was gone. Sunny says she felt instantly “relieved” that lockdowns were over but her feelings soon turned to anger as it became clear China’s government had opened up the country, knowing it wasn’t ready. “I felt it was all for nothing,” Sunny says.
Over the last two months, the virus has rapidly spread through the country. Up to 10,000 critical cases were registered in hospitals every day. Morgues were overwhelmed, pharmacies reported shortages of basic medications, and supply of antiviral drugs was held up by protracted negotiations with foreign suppliers. Online and in the streets, people spoke of almost everyone they knew having caught Covid, and of elderly relatives dying.
Sunny’s grandfather was among those who died in that wave. “It was the morning, and my mum walked into my room and said: your grandpa is in the emergency room,” she recalls. “A few hours later, he passed away. My grandmother was in tears, saying he had left her behind.”
Xi’s extraordinary backflip left analysts alarmed and confused. China was not the only country to choose a zero-Covid strategy, and certainly not the only one to “let it rip” once it dropped it. But it was the last, and global health experts say there were plenty of lessons it could have heeded – primarily, making sure vaccinations and health resources were high before the tsunami of cases hit.
“All governments had to decide to open up at some stage or risk the consequences of lockdowns far outweighing the problems of Covid,” says Professor Emma McBryde, an epidemiologist at James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
“Most models suggest that it would be better for the health system to open up slowly. Although there would be little change in how many people get infected, it could mean some lives are saved if the health system can function well.”
But Xi threw the gates open. Right up until the day of repeal, local governments were still developing and enforcing zero-Covid measures and infrastructure. The city of Chongqing was building a 21,000-bed quarantine centre.
Experts on health and Chinese politics have told the Observer they believe the local authorities were hamstrung. Any preparations for ending zero-Covid would be seen as a vote of no confidence in both the policy and Xi – an act of political suicide.
So when cases spread, there weren’t enough doctors, nurses, intensive care beds, fever medication or antiviral drugs, and vaccination rates and options were inadequate. According to Chinese government data, the first 55,000 deaths recorded in this wave were at an average age of about 80. In China, the vulnerable elderly are also the most likely to be unvaccinated.
“My sense is there is no strategy in this critical area,” says Professor William Hurst, deputy director at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge, about China’s vaccines. “I’m surprised by how quickly they are moving, but more so by the apparent lack of attention to basic measures with vaccines.”
Chinese writer Murong Xuecun, who interviewed Wuhan residents in the first lockdown in 2020, says China’s abrupt U-turn “was a rash, one-man decision” made without consultation. “Within 24 hours we saw a total turnaround – we had no idea what happened in those 24 hours, what changed Xi Jinping’s mind, why there was a 180-degree change from one extreme to another.”
There is a lot of debate about the impact of the November protests against zero-Covid on his decision. Some experts say there were probably so many cases already – the numbers hidden – that Xi just realised the policy had to end. Other theories feature financial considerations, because China’s economy has been battered by zero-Covid.
Chen Daoyin, a former associate political science professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said Xi probably acted when he felt the economic situation was no longer sustainable. “When the leader is acting on a whim, there is no predictability and no certainty.”
One oft-shared suspicion is that Xi wanted to speed up economic recovery by quickly building herd immunity with one massive wave. This theory was bolstered by Chinese health authorities claiming last week that 80% of the population had been infected, and so the possibility of a second wave was “very small”. Some health experts have cautioned against this assumption.
“Herd immunity seemed to be occurring for the original strain and for Delta, but seems to be much less applicable to the Omicron strain,” says McBryde.
Other countries, including the UK, have previously hung hopes on herd immunity, and Professor Chi Chun-huei, director of the centre for global health at Oregon University, says there’s nothing inherently wrong with aiming for herd immunity if you do it right. “Ideally, if you are going to take this 180-degree, you have to be prepared … and the goal should be minimising deaths and severe symptoms.
“This was a common problem of countries that practised zero-Covid - they were overconfident … and underprepared.” In one example, Taiwan took note of Hong Kong’s hospital system collapse and was better prepared than it might have been when Omicron arrived.
Estimates of Covid fatalities in China range from the official count of about 75,000 to more than a million. The picture is clouded by a lack of transparency, rigid definitions in attributing a Covid-related death, and data collection failures.
Often when there are mass deaths, families struggle with their relative being reduced to a statistic. In China, few were even given that courtesy.
Among dozens of Chinese people who contacted the Guardian and Observer about their experience, Ms Chen, a young Shanghai resident, tells of the friend who died of Covid, a teacher in his 30s who she describes as a “treasure of a human”.
Melody, a Chinese woman living abroad, wrote of her “selfless and generous” uncle. After recovering from a stroke last year, he died at home of what she believes was Covid. “I’m astonished that the three years of Covid haven’t been used for a humane exit strategy. It shows me: protecting lives was never the motor behind zero-Covid. Power was. Now the Chinese people also see it.”
Across China, hundreds of thousands of families are in mourning. Many are now questioning their faith in the government. The episode has seemingly not affected Xi’s power but it has dented his reputation. A 32-year-old man in Guangzhou says he was once a patriot but is now disillusioned. “Maybe I should thank Covid for making me clearly see through the whole political and economic system.”
Sunny was already sceptical but says even her grandmother, who always believed the government worked for the people, is now complaining about it. “It’s kind of in our culture that we just endure the hardships that come at us,” she says.
“But we realise how much our lives can change on the whim of policymakers, and we are angry. This fight was about politics and power, but it was always the Chinese people who would pay.”
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Buffalos in the water of the Toos, River, Iraq. (photo: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad)
Rivers and lakes that have nurtured communities since civilisation’s dawn are drying up, as drought leads to hunger, displacement and simmering conflict
With their melancholic eyes, they gazed with defiance at an approaching boat, refusing to budge. Only when the boatman shrieked “heyy, heyy, heyy” did one or two reluctantly raise their haunches. Towering over the boat, they moved a few steps away, giving the boatmen barely enough space to steer between a cluster of large, curved horns.
On the right bank of the river stood a cultural centre built in the traditional style of southern Iraq, with tall arches made of thick bundles of reed tied together. It catered to a large number of Iraqi tourists and a handful of foreigners who have flocked to visit the marshland region since it was named a Unesco world heritage site in 2016.
A couple of hundred metres past the cultural centre, however, the engine of the boat sputtered, and its bottom scrapped against the mud as the river dwindled into a shallow swamp, where small herons and grebes stood in water barely reaching halfway up their stick-like legs.
The foliage on the two banks also disappeared, revealing a devastating scene: what two years earlier was a great expanse of blue water, a lagoon teeming with wildlife, fish, and home to large herds of water buffaloes, had turned into a flat desert where a few thorny shrubs sprouted.
Under the scorching sun, the hot wind kicked tumbleweed across parched yellow earth, scarred with deep cracks and crumbling into thin dust under the feet. Rising above the ground were mounds of dead reed beds upon which the marsh dwellers had built their homes. A few relics of their former life lay scattered around: broken plastic buckets, some rusting metal pipe, and a kettle.
The ruin of nearly 3,000 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of this unique ecosystem is a small example of the unprecedented environmental disaster unfolding in Iraq. Rivers and lakes that had spawned farming communities since the dawn of civilisation are drying up, the country’s water reserves reduced by half, while the Iraqi ministry of water resources estimates that one-quarter of Iraq’s fresh water will be lost in the next decade.
In the province of Mosul and surrounding areas, considered Iraq’s bread basket, two consecutive drought seasons have turned large swaths of wheat and barley fields into arid lands, leading to the loss of nearly 90% of the most recent harvest. Officials believe that will continue to the next season.
After canals and rivers went dry, farmers began digging boreholes, but the unregulated use of underground water is causing a severe drop in the quality and water levels. In the southern region of Samawa, the illegal digging of boreholes has led to the total disappearance of Lake Sawa.
Meanwhile, freak sandstorms battering cities and eroding the soil have become a recurrent event owing to the drought and loss of vegetation coverage – 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) are lost to desertification each year.
The drought is leading to the displacement of tens of thousands of people, pushing farmers to abandon their lands and move into the margins of big cities, settling in shanties on their outskirts, straining an already crumbling infrastructure and causing further destruction of agricultural lands and desertification. And in a country with a fragile security situation, rife with heavily armed militias and awash with an abundance of weapons, the competition over water, and the unregulated digging of boreholes, is creating local feuds that threaten to spill into larger conflicts.
The causes for these environmental disasters are multiple and interlinked: rising temperatures, record low rainfalls due to the climate crisis; the drastic reduction of the amount of water reaching Iraq from upstream countries, with Turkey’s extensive dam networks on the Tigris and Euphrates cutting Iraq’s share by 60%, while nearby Iran has diverted tributaries and other rivers. The temperature rise is also causing an increase in water evaporation, contributing to the depletion of reservoirs.
According to the GEO-6 report issued by the UN Environment Programme, Iraq is classified as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to decreased water and food availability and extreme temperatures. The World Bank estimates that by 2050, average temperatures will increase by 2C and rainfall will decrease by 9%.
Iraq’s population, which is entirely dependent on the Tigris and Euphrates along with other smaller rivers for irrigation, drinking and sanitation, has nearly doubled in the past two decades. Still, in a country where corruption and mismanagement can turn a dire situation into a catastrophic one, archaic irrigation methods and depleted infrastructure that have seen no investment are wasting and polluting whatever water remains.
‘Traditional prejudice’
“It was on the edge of the marshes that human history in Iraq began.” So wrote the British traveller Wilfred Thesiger, who lived among the marsh Arabs, the Ma’dan, in the 1950s. At that time, it was possible to navigate the network of rivers, canals and lagoons across the plains of southern Iraq, connecting the Tigris marshes in the east to the central marshes of the Euphrates delta in the west.
The unique ecosystem functioned as a microclimate absorbing heat, with temperatures in the marshes up to 4C lower than in neighbouring areas, and the area was home to exceptional biodiversity. Then came industrialisation and mass agriculture, followed by wars, culminating in Saddam Hussein’s onslaught against the marshes in the 1990s, and now the drought.
Throughout these decades, government officials – from the British colonial officer to Saddam’s Republican Guard – saw in the dense marshes and dizzying maze of canals a place of refuge for those opposing central authority, from the African slaves who revolted in the ninth century, to communists and Islamist rebels in modern times, along with droves of military deserters who fled conscription.
That view of the marshes as a dangerous place and home to brigands contributed to the way the city people and countryside farmers looked at and despised the marsh Arabs.
“The impact of climate change is working as a threat magnifier,” said Dr Hassan al Janabi, a former minister for water resources and an environmental expert. “But in essence, this is a man-made disaster, in which the marshes are the clear victims, due to misunderstanding of the unique climate and cultural importance of the region.”
He added: “Its destruction is part of the traditional prejudice of the city towards the countryside, and especially against the marsh people who have always been the victims of discrimination and at the receiving end of insults because they raise buffaloes.
“There are hundreds of illegal rivers diverting water towards the lands of influential people who use them for fish farms or irrigating their lands. We have lost 80% of the buffaloes because of mismanagement.”
Just north of the Toos, which is supposed to feed water into the Huwaiza marsh, a local activist pointed out two large fish ponds and an illegally dug canal that siphons water into nearby agricultural lands, all belonging to a powerful local tribal sheikh. In the past month, even the trickle of water in the Toos had dried.
A ministry in Baghdad determines the allocation of water for irrigation to each province, with agriculture consuming the largest share of water – nearly 65%. The severe drought has led to an increase in competition, in which the interests of weaker communities, such as the marsh dwellers, are sacrificed in the interests of more powerful ones.
“This is a crime that is taking place right in front of our eyes,” said Janabi. “The marshes are the true historical lineage of Mesopotamia but these groups which have lived here for thousands of years see their way of life being eradicated for the benefit of rice cultivators, which in reality has zero economical impact as we import 95% of our rice.”
‘Revival has gone’
In the Chibayish, the central marshes in the basin of the Euphrates, the scenes of drought and devastation are repeated. What was once an extensive marshes network has shrunk today to a few isolated ponds of stagnating brackish water, stinking of dead fish and highly polluted, sitting amid large swatches of desert landscape. The long, elegant mashoof boats that once plied these waters now lie on their sides, crusted with salt and dried mud.
On the edge of one of these ponds, Abdul Sattar and his two sons took shelter from the oppressive heat in a small mud room, bare except for two reed mats on the dirt floor. An old air cooler clanked noisily outside the small window, churning in hot air.
The eldest son, a slender young man in his 20s, served tea while Abdul pondered in silence for some time when asked about the impact of drought. When he spoke, the words tumbled fast in a heavy guttural accent. He said that in the past few months dozen of his buffaloes had died, and those that remained were too skinny to be sold. “If I butcher them and sell them as meat, they will fetch more,” he added, pulling at the tattered brim of his stained and muddy dishdasha.
In his 40s, with a gaunt face and bronze-coloured skin, withered and beaten by the harsh Iraqi sun, feet caked in mud and cracked, he looked at anyone coming from the city with suspicion. He said the buffaloes were unable to feed themselves because of the drought and were dependent on whatever fodder he could provide.
“They used to go out and graze for a week or two on the green reeds and other vegetation and only come back when they needed to be milked,” he said. “Now I have to feed them, each needs half a tonne of fodder a week, but I can barely afford half of that. Mothers don’t even produce enough milk to feed their calves.”
He looked at his youngest son across the room, a 12-year-old asleep under a blanket in a feeble attempt to hide from the buzzing flies, and said his family were going hungry so he could feed the buffaloes to keep them alive, barely.
The buffaloes refuse to drink the highly polluted water even when they find small mud pools to wallow in. He pointed towards the jug of brackish yellow water that sat in front of him and said he had to drive to the nearby town to buy the drinking water he shared between his family and his buffaloes.
Once before, the marshes where his clan raised their buffaloes had dried; that was in 1994, after Saddam’s campaign to dry the marshes. He was a young man then and accompanied his family as they moved north, finding shelter on the banks of the Tigris south of Baghdad, and he came back after the toppling of the regime, when reviving the marshes became a political priority. “Reviving the marshes was the only thing we got after the [regime] change, and even that is gone now.”
Outside the mud room, three emaciated-looking buffaloes sat in a small muddy pond. A larger herd stood nearby in the shade of a metal canopy. Abdul said generation after generation his tribe had lived with these buffaloes, so dear to them that they had given them individual names.
“These animals, they mean a lot for us, they are like family. We pain when we see them wither and die in front of our eyes,” he said. “I swear if I knew how to do anything else I would, but me and my father, and his father before him, knew nothing but how to raise buffaloes.”
Selling up and moving out
Agriculture, which generates 3% of Iraq’s GDP, employs nearly one-fifth of its workforce, tethering people to their lands and contributing to maintaining the vegetation coverage needed to lessen the impact of sandstorms, soil erosion and global heating.
However, the drought and subsequent crop failures are pushing thousands of families to abandon their lands – 20,000 since 2021, according to International Organization for Migration estimates – heading instead towards the big cities.
In a small neighbourhood tucked under an overpass north of the city of Basra, Karar lives with his family in a small hut built with concrete blocks. Like his neighbours’, his roof is made of corrugated metal and plastic sheets, pinned down with large rocks and blocks. A deep and wide ditch carries the neighbourhood sewage, where trash and plastic bottles float on a grimy metallic green liquid.
As is the case for many of the farmers of Amara and Nassiriya – who at the best of times constituted the poorest people in Iraq – the drought has turned his hardship into destitution.
He said that a few years ago, he came to realise that farming was dying in his village north of the Huwaiza marsh. Water levels were falling, and he had to use a diesel pump to irrigate his fields. “The money we got, we paid on gas for the water pumps. We were going hungry,” he said.
So he sold the few animals he had – sheep and a few buffaloes – and moved to this neighbourhood, trying to scavenge a living from the margins of Basra’s booming oil-fuelled economy, working as a day labourer.
He said he was fortunate to sell his cattle and move out before the worst of the drought hit the area. “Now, my brothers call me and say we wish we left the land and came with you then because now no one wants to buy our buffaloes because they are too skinny.”
Dead palms and buffaloes
In Seeba, in Iraq’s most southern tip, the environmental disaster takes a different shape. Lying on the western banks of Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the meeting of the Euphrates and Tigris, its fertile orchards and fields had been home to dense palm tree plantations for centuries. Water from Shatt al-Arab flows naturally through its canals, regulated by the high and low tide of the nearby Gulf.
During the war with Iran, Seeba became a frontline and battleground. Trenches were dug, fields of barbed wires were stretched, artillery bombardments and tanks destroyed the palm plantations, and thousands of young Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died there. However, after the end of the war, people came back and started reviving their land and eventually restored many of its palm groves.
“If you came here in the 90s, you wouldn’t be able to see Abadan,” said Ridha, a young farmer from the region, as he pointed at the gleaming towers of the Abadan refinery across the waterway.
But things began to change after 2004 when reduced levels of water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates enabled seawater from the Gulf to intrude deeper and deeper into the Shatt al-Arab, eventually reaching Basra itself for the first time in 2018, which led to mass unrest.
“Since 2009, Seeba has been a disaster zone, and most of our farmlands have disappeared because of the catastrophic rise in water salinity,” an official in the town said.
The exact causes of the drought in the north were reflected here, the official said. From the impact of global heating to Turkey’s reduction of the water volume flowing through the Tigris and Euphrates, Iran’s diversion of tributary rivers such as the Karun, and the discharge of raw sewage and oil industry chemicals into Shatt al-Arab. “Even the upstream provinces are taking Basra’s share of fresh water because of the expansion of their population.”
The high salinity in the water flowing naturally through the irrigation canals is now causing the palm trees to die. “All the water pumps on the riverbanks were cancelled, and farmers are blocking their own canals,” said the official. “Now we get some water pumped from upstream through pipes, or we buy it in trucks. In 2012 the state allocated compensations for the farmers that they have yet to receive 10 years later.”
A proposed mega-desalination project for seawater from the Gulf had been stalled for years, with politicians in Baghdad and Basra accusing each other of receiving kickbacks and commissions. “From a million palm trees in the 1970s, now we have less than 10,000. Farming here is living now by the drip.”
Ridha, tall, lean, moustachioed and wearing a black dishdasha with a red checked kufiya wrapped around his head, pointed at the palm trees in his orchard, each named after the variety of its dates: “Khistawi, barhi, braim …” But most of these precious palm trees died due to the polluted water, losing their tops and long branches, with the top of the trunks bent like a wilting stump.
He motioned towards a canal zigzagging between the dead trees. “The water is killing our palms,” he said. “Back in the 1990s we swam in these rivers, used the water for drinking and cooking, but now farmers are blocking their irrigation canals to prevent the poisonous water from entering their fields. Those who still want to farm have to buy trucks of water, but most are just abandoning the lands and getting a government job with the police or the Hashed [Shia paramilitary units].”
Ridha pointed at another scourge in the area’s environmental disaster, a large herd of buffaloes. As the drought destroyed the marsh habitat to the north, the Ma’dan owners moved their herds here, settling them among the fields and in the now dormant irrigation canals. They have become a real menace to the farmers.
Behind the banks of a wide irrigation canal thick with green waters, and lined with rows of decapitated palm trees, a large group of buffaloes sat submerged in a swamp.
Ridha looked at them and said they were worse than the plague. “They are destroying the land,” he said. “Their owners let them roam freely. They are heavy, and they break the earth, flood the area and turn the farms into swamps. Sometimes they break into orchards and feed on the young palm saplings; no fence can stand against them.”
The environmental collapse exacerbates the old tensions between the well-armed Ma’dan and the farmers. “If the farmers shoot at them or kill a buffalo, the owners will come armed and start a fight, and we can’t fight them,” said Ridha, “and now only the army can save us.”
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