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A new book looks back at the long-serving FBI director’s devotion to keeping America a white Christian republic and the devastating effect he had
“Sunday school was boot camp, the training ground in the battle for the soul of the nation, and Hoover dressed the part,” writes Lerone Martin, academic and author. “It was 1912, and J Edgar Hoover was his own man: a soldier and a minister fighting the good fight with military precision. It was a lifelong commitment, an unceasing crusade to keep America a white Christian republic.”
Hoover would serve as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972, spanning eight presidents (four Democrats, four Republicans) over nearly half a century. He took on mob bosses and organised crime, established a centralised fingerprint database and implemented scientific techniques such as forensic analysis.
Hoover was a workaholic who devoted his life to the agency. The FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington is named after him, his desk has pride of place at the National Law Enforcement Museum and Leonardo DiCaprio played him in a biopic directed by Clint Eastwood.
But Hoover’s legacy has aged about as well as Gone With the Wind’s. He was notorious for strong-arm tactics, political manipulation and disregard for civil liberties. He used the FBI’s extensive intelligence-gathering capabilities to monitor political dissidents, civil rights leaders and other groups he deemed a threat to national security.
President Harry Truman, alarmed by Hoover nosing into Americans’ sex lives, warned: “We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction.” Biographer Beverly Gage has called him “the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left”.
Martin now delivers a fresh perspective. In an elegantly written book, The Gospel of J Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, he makes a persuasive case that Hoover was a white Christian nationalist and convenient ally for evangelicals, embedding race and religion in the foundations of the national security state – and allowing white supremacy to fester to this day.
Previous studies of Hoover and the FBI have rarely considered his faith or its influence on the nation, Martin argues. “We imagine the FBI – I did when I began – as spying on [journalist] Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hamer and all these religious communities,” the 43-year-old says by phone from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
“But we never really considered: what about the other expressions of Christianity in America that saw the FBI as a saving grace? Because of the emphasis on surveillance in the FBI, we’ve been slow to recognise that there’s also a form of cooperation and partnership, that the FBI wasn’t doing everything cloak and dagger behind the scenes. There were a number of things the FBI did out in front and they were heavily supported by the American public.”
Martin outlines how the FBI sent agents to services of worship that established religious identity as synonymous with American citizenship; the FBI worked with white evangelicals to promote Christian nationalism as the only form of religion that would protect the US during the cold war; and the FBI policed other forms of religion, for example by persecuting King and aiming to discredit the civil rights movement.
Hoover was the ideal enforcer. He had been raised in the Presbyterian church and taught Sunday school as a teenager. It was an assignment he took earnestly and seriously: his diary was filled with Sunday school lesson plans.
Martin says: “When he became head of the FBI in 1924, he made his agents sign a law enforcement pledge which explicitly said they would conduct themselves as ministers seeking to give aid and advice to those who need it, and as soldiers waging warfare against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
“Hoover saw himself throughout his life as this minister and soldier. In fact, he claimed that he had planned to go to seminary and become a minister but his father had fallen ill, was labelled as melancholy at the time – what we know now today as more likely depression or mental illness – so Hoover felt compelled to go and make money.
“He worked during the day and went to law school at night and took over the FBI and tried to baptise the FBI in his own image and make it a place where folks saw themselves as not just working for the federal government but actually working for God.”
Hoover grew up in racially segregated Washington DC and was more than ready to uphold white supremacy in the US. “Hoover did believe that white people were superior and that African Americans were innately inferior. He refused to hire African American agents.
“He did all that he could to put up the charade that he wasn’t racist, including having Ebony magazine in the 40s do a story called Negroes in the FBI but in reality all the gentlemen featured in that story were not doing any crime fighting, any investigation; they were all valets for when he came to the city.”
The author adds: “He never saw African Americans as being full citizens. It was something that Hoover believed African Americans needed to work towards in a collective sense, that they needed to show themselves worthy of citizenship, whereas for white Americans, native-born white Americans in particular, that just ‘came naturally’ for them.
“For him, that was innate, whereas he never considered the sociological factors that kept African Americans at a distance in many ways from economic security, housing security, educational access. Hoover saw these things as sort of natural as opposed to created and so, in that sense, he was certainly a white supremacist and a racist.”
Hoover and the white evangelical movement made a marriage of convenience. The FBI gained ministers it believed would be useful in its crusade against a Protestant establishment that was critiquing capitalism and advocating for civil rights. The evangelicals, still considered outsiders, sensed an opportunity.
“Folks like Billy Graham and others saw themselves on the outside. At a time when we’re going through an existential crisis, if you will, and battle with communism, having the endorsement of the FBI director provided them with an inside track to broader American acceptance and institutional and social power.”
Drawing on newly declassified FBI documents and memos, Martin tells how FBI agents attended spiritual retreats and services while prominent figures such as Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen incorporated Hoover’s words and perspectives into their sermons.
The author says: “Ministers hosted a special FBI worship service in which ministers and church members valorised the FBI as God’s protective force, protecting the country from communism, protecting the country from subversion and crime.”
Meanwhile, Hoover wrote essays for Christianity Today magazine. “Americans wrote to the FBI in droves requesting copies of the essays and ministers wrote in to the FBI, bragging about not preaching their own sermons, but taking Hoover’s essays into their pulpits and just preaching these essays from their pulpits. We can see the large support Hoover received.”
Martin finds a neat metaphor at the Capitol Hill United Methodist church, where in 1966 a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to Hoover – their chosen vehicle for leading the country towards God and away from godless communism.
Yet for all his piety, Hoover was not an evangelical himself. He never married or had children. He did have a long relationship – never acknowledged as romantic or sexual – with his deputy Clyde Tolson. They dined together, went on holidays together and are buried a few yards apart. Hoover was a notorious homophobe who backed the “Lavender scare”, which saw dozens of gay men and women fired from government jobs.
Martin comments: “I don’t know if Hoover and Clyde Tolson ever were sexually active, but what we do know points to a beautiful domestic partnership. It does seem it’s very possible. Psychology and history tells us that it’s often those who are protesting extremely loudly as it relates to queerness are battling something inside beyond just concerns about other folks being queer. Oftentimes it’s something that’s going on inwardly. As we think about white evangelicals in our country and our history, that has been the case.”
Hoover’s unconventional domestic arrangements were hardly in sync with the conservative family values preached by Graham and others. But it would not be the last time that evangelicals proved willing to embrace an imperfect messenger, compromising their stated morality and theology in return for power.
Martin writes in the book: “Every generation turns to an ascendant white male politico of the era – Reagan, Trump, and so on – and, like John the Baptist, they ask, ‘Are you the one, or should we expect someone else?’ Evangelical political ingenuity constantly searches and finds its political champion, by any means necessary. This pragmatic ‘ends justify the means’ ethos … remains a robust tradition within the movement.”
Hoover has been dead for more than half a century. Yet the building that bears his name is still a bastion of whiteness; in 2021, just 4% of special agents were Black. On 8 March, Congressman Jamie Raskin, making the case for a new FBI headquarters in his home state of Maryland, said: “A Maryland FBI headquarters in the national capital region’s only majority-Black jurisdiction would mark a defining new start for an agency whose history in the last century was defined by Hoover-era racism.”
Martin, who is director of the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute and associate professor of religious studies at Stanford, says: “If they’re serious about making the FBI an agent of forming a more perfect union, they’ve got to take into account how the bureau and its culture has been riddled with white Christian nationalism in the past. There needs to be an intervention or this perhaps can continue unabated within the FBI.”
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Former president Donald Trump faces federal and state investigations in New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C. (photo: Meridith Kohut/The New York Times)
ALSO SEE: Trump Campaign Prepares for 'New Normal':
Running Under Indictment
The Manhattan district attorney’s office appears to be nearing a potential indictment of the former president, as federal and state prosecutors bear down on Mr. Trump in a number of inquiries.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Mr. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in a hush-money payment to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
The district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, impaneled a grand jury in January to hear evidence in the longest-running criminal inquiry facing the former president. Since then, his prosecutors have questioned at least nine witnesses before the panel, though it is unclear whether they have completed their presentation of evidence.
Any case would mark the first indictment of a former American president. Yet Mr. Bragg might not be the last prosecutor to seek charges against Mr. Trump. Several federal and state prosecutors are scrutinizing him as well.
Here is where the notable inquiries involving the former president stand.
Manhattan Criminal Case
Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office have signaled to Mr. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges.
They did this by offering Mr. Trump the chance to testify last week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, people with knowledge of the matter said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for prosecutors to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.
In New York, potential defendants have the right to answer questions in front of the grand jury before they are indicted, but they rarely testify, and Mr. Trump is likely to decline the offer.
The office’s investigation into Mr. Trump once appeared to be at a dead end.
Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun to present evidence to an earlier grand jury about Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate to secure favorable loans and other financial benefits. (Mr. Vance’s prosecutors were also investigating the hush money).
Yet in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and decided to abandon the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.
But last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the hush-money case, seeking to jump-start the inquiry after the departures of the senior prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne.
Mr. Bragg’s office is also continuing to examine the way in which the former president valued his assets, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, as a “racist” and to the criminal investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt.” He has called on his supporters to protest on his behalf, in a social post reminiscent of those that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The first visible sign of progress in the hush-money case for Mr. Bragg came in January, when Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, met with prosecutors at the district attorney’s Lower Manhattan office — the first such meeting in nearly a year. Mr. Cohen has since returned for several additional interviews with the prosecutors and testified before the grand jury.
Since Mr. Bragg impaneled the grand jury in January, it has heard testimony from Mr. Cohen, as well as two former National Enquirer executives, who had helped broker the hush-money deal. Ms. Daniels’s former lawyer also testified, as did two senior officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway. The grand jury has also heard testimony from two employees of the Trump Organization, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff.
And most recently, the grand jurors heard from a witness, Robert J. Costello, who sought to undermine Mr. Cohen’s credibility. Mr. Costello, a former legal adviser to Mr. Cohen who had a falling out with him, testified at the request of Mr. Trump’s lawyers.
In late 2022, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors won a conviction of the company, the Trump Organization, when a jury found the business guilty of multiple felonies related to a long-running tax fraud scheme. The company’s veteran chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty in the scheme and is serving time at the Rikers Island jail complex.
New York State Civil Inquiry
In a September lawsuit, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, accused Mr. Trump in a September lawsuit of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.
Ms. James is seeking to bar the Trumps, including his sons Donald Jr. and Eric and his older daughter, Ivanka, from running a business in New York again. She has already successfully requested that a judge appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization’s use of its annual financial statements — in which, the attorney general says in her suit, the company overvalued its assets.
In January, a New York judge declined to dismiss the attorney general’s suit against Mr. Trump, increasing the likelihood that he will face a trial in the matter this fall.
Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she can sue Mr. Trump but she cannot file criminal charges. She could opt to pursue settlement negotiations in hopes of obtaining a swifter financial payout. But if she were to prevail at trial, a judge could impose steep financial penalties on Mr. Trump and restrict his business operations in New York.
Georgia Criminal Inquiry
Mr. Trump is also under scrutiny in Georgia, where a special grand jury recently concluded its investigation into whether the former president and his allies criminally interfered with the 2020 presidential election.
For now, the grand jury’s report on its findings remains largely secret, but its forewoman, Emily Kohrs, has said that indictments were recommended against more than a dozen people. Asked in an interview if those included Mr. Trump, she declined to answer directly, but said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”
Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who has led the investigation, will ultimately decide what charges to seek and then bring them before a regular grand jury. Her decision is expected by May.
Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the criminal investigation, as well as others, could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the leader of the Georgia Republican Party.
Mr. Trump and his associates had numerous interactions with Georgia officials after the election, including a call in which he urged the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he would have needed to overcome President Biden’s lead in the state.
Mr. Trump has assailed the proceedings in Georgia, and his lawyers recently referred to them as a “clown show.”
A few excerpts from the special grand jury report that a judge allowed to be released revealed that jurors unanimously rejected claims by Mr. Trump of widespread fraud in Georgia. “We wanted to make sure we put that in, because somehow that’s still a question,” Ms. Kohrs said.
Classified Documents Inquiry
A special counsel, Jack Smith, appointed by the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents after he left office.
For more than a year, Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted the federal government’s efforts — including a subpoena — to retrieve classified and sensitive documents still in his possession, according to government documents.
In August, acting on a court-approved search warrant, the F.B.I. descended on his Mar-a-Lago residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla., and discovered about 100 documents bearing classification markings.
The warrant used to justify the search detailed three criminal laws: the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized retention of national security secrets; obstruction; and concealing or destroying government documents.
The search was prompted by the discovery that Mr. Trump had kept classified material related to the use of “clandestine human sources,” according to a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the warrant. There was also “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found” at Mr. Trump’s house, prosecutors wrote.
The Justice Department has suggested that the classified materials stored at Mr. Trump’s residence were most likely concealed and moved as the government sought to recover them. It also disclosed that it had obtained evidence that Mr. Trump’s representatives falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned.
Jan. 6 Inquiries
A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol spent a year and a half examining the role that Mr. Trump and his allies played in his efforts to hold onto power after his electoral defeat in November 2020.
In December, the committee issued an 845-page report concluding that Mr. Trump and some of his associates had devised “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and disclosing in exhaustive detail the events that led to the attack on the Capitol.
The panel also accused Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other federal crimes, and referred him and some of his allies to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
The referrals were largely symbolic, but they sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believed the former president had committed crimes.
Since November, Mr. Smith’s office has been conducting its own investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, building on months of work by other federal prosecutors in Washington who have also filed charges against nearly 1,000 people who took part in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The special counsel’s office has focused its attention on a wide array of schemes that Mr. Trump and his allies used to try to stave off defeat, among them a plan to create false slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were actually won by Mr. Biden. Prosecutors under Mr. Smith have also sought information about Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising operation after the election.
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LAUSD employees rally on the first day of a three-day strike in front of LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
ALSO SEE: Los Angeles Education Strike
Cancels School for 420,000 Students
Unions are protesting low wages and “unfair” working conditions during the three-day strike.
Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents some 30,000 of the workers going on strike, has been negotiating with the Los Angeles Unified School District for nearly a year, seeking significant raises and improved health care benefits, as well as more full-time work to address staffing shortages.
In December, after the district rejected their proposals, the state was brought in to help mediate in a confidential process. The union has accused the district of subjecting workers to “surveillance, intimidation, and harassment” over the course of the negotiation process and during the strike vote. It has also claimed that the district broke its commitment to confidentiality during the mediation process by sharing details with the media. In February, 96 percent of the union voted in support of a strike.
According to the union, the average staffer’s salary is $25,000, which qualifies as “extremely low income” under federal guidelines for a single-person household and under the poverty line for a family of four. That average includes full- and part-time workers; many union members are only part-time workers due to the lack of full-time positions.
“We shouldn’t be paying them poverty wages ... how can you possibly live in LA on $25,000 a year?” US Senate candidate and current Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told Fox11, adding that he would be joining school staff on the picket line.
The district tried to stop the unions from going on strike by filing a legal challenge Friday with the Public Employment Relations Board, the state agency that oversees public employee relations, which denied the district’s petition on the basis that it did not find that the “extraordinary remedy” of an injunction was warranted at that point.
To limit the burden on families, students will be provided with three days worth of meals at locations throughout the district, and student supervision is available at some schools between 8 am and 6 pm. But superintendent Alberto Carvalho has framed the strike as a disruption that will put students who fell behind during the pandemic at a further disadvantage.
Union representatives have argued that striking is necessary to get the district to answer for its “misleading statements in the media and threats against workers who are exercising their right to take action.”
What Los Angeles school workers want
The district said that it offered a 23 percent increase and a 3 percent “cash-in-hand” bonus in a last-minute bid to avert the Monday strike. The district has framed that offer as “historically generous” and as exceeding local, state, and national comparisons, with further room for negotiation. That’s still significantly less than what the union has been asking for. The district has nevertheless accused the union of refusing to come to the negotiating table, and Carvalho said in a statement that it’s “deeply surprising and disappointing that there is an unwillingness to do so.”
Workers are seeking a 30 percent wage increase and at least a $2 hourly equity wage adjustment. The district offered an average of less than 4 percent annual raises and did not provide any raises in 2020, according to the union.
They’re also claiming that the district overly relies on part-time employees, in part because workers cannot survive on the wages they’re being paid at schools alone and have to take multiple jobs. They want the district to staff up, increase the number of full-time hours available, and pay them for “unassigned days” when the district closes schools due to a high level of absenteeism, usually on religious holidays. Additionally, they’re asking for paid days for training and professional development and the ability to cash out on vacation pay. The union says the district wants to be able to “cut our hours at any time or not pay us for all hours we work.”
And they’re asking for access to health care benefits for community reps, teacher assistants, and other workers who work less than four hours a day, which includes more than 5,000 employees. They are not currently covered and would not be under the district’s latest proposal.
It’s not clear how much more the district can offer, especially given declining registration numbers and the fact that the teacher’s union is also in the middle of contract negotiations with the district. The district is sitting on a $5 billion surplus, which Carvalho has hailed as evidence of fiscal prudence, but he’s also argued raising wages too much could put the district “into a bankruptcy position.”
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Aquatic plants and debris are exposed by the falling water levels at the Kakhovka Reservoir. Researchers say that the draining of the reservoir by Russian forces are but one example of the war's effect on Ukraine's water supply. (photo: Dmytro Smoliyenko/Ukrinform)
But this spring, water levels at Kakhovka remain far below normal. The cause is a Russian-controlled hydroelectric power plant at the lower end of the reservoir. Since November, sluice gates at the plant have been left open, and water levels at Kakhovka have plunged to lows not seen in decades.
The reservoir is critical to southern Ukraine. It supplies water for villages and towns in the region and irrigates around half-a-million acres of farmland that's used to grow grains and vegetables. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant also relies on it for cooling water.
The Ukrainian government has tried to stem the flow by releasing water from other Ukrainian-controlled reservoirs along the Dnipro River to refill Kakhovka, but it's at best a temporary solution.
Experts say that the situation at the reservoir highlights the growing impact of Russia's war on Ukraine's water supply.
"The attacks on electricity systems have been very explicitly covered, because they've been relentless," says Peter Gleick, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif. "But there have also been intentional attacks on water treatment systems and wastewater service systems, and that has cut off safe water for literally millions of Ukrainians."
In a paper out earlier this month, Gleick and his co-authors chart dozens of ways the war has impacted water throughout the country. Wastewater facilities have lost power, fouling their treatment pools, pumping stations have been bombed, cutting off towns from fresh water, and dams demolished, flooding nearby homes.
In the southern city of Mykolaiv, residents lost water last year after fighting severed a crucial pipeline. The water system had to be connected to a brackish source that, while giving people access to water for washing clothes and bathing, has led to further problems, according to Oleksandra Shumilova, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, Germany. "Because of this salty water, the water supply system was damaged by corrosion," she says.
Earlier this year, the United Nations stated that the war had devastated Ukraine's water system. It estimates roughly 16 million people in Ukraine needed water, sanitation and hygiene assistance in 2022. Gleick says he believes that since his team's study was conducted in the early days of the war, which began in late February of 2022, other parts of Ukraine's water supply have been damaged in the war. "We know there have been many, many additional attacks on water infrastructure," he says.
And the ongoing problems at Kakhovka are a high-profile reminder that the war's impact on Ukraine's water supply is far from over. At the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, some of the dam's sluice gates have been damaged in explosions and attacks, while others appear to be deliberately left open, allowing a torrent of water to drain from the reservoir. After dropping to just 46 feet (14 meters), the reservoir's water level has begun rising again, because the Ukrainian government is filling it with water from other reservoirs on the Dnipro River, where the Kakhovka Reservoir is located. But to fill Kakhovka, the government warns, it is necessarily taking water from elsewhere in Ukraine.
"All of this poses a threat of lowering the water level to a critical level throughout the whole cascade of Dnipro reservoirs in Ukraine," Ukraine's Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources told NPR in a statement. "As a result, 70% of the population of Ukraine, who consume water from Dnipro, may be deprived of water."
As the year wears on, things are likely to get even worse. The lowered water levels at Kakhovka have exposed a lot of vegetation along the shore line, Shumilova says. That in turn could lead to eutrophication, the growth of algae and other contaminants, which would further degrade water quality in the reservoir.
According to Shumilova, the Kakhovka reservoir normally supplies irrigation water to a nearly 1,000 mile system of channels that supply fields of fresh vegetables, wheat and millet. That agricultural production is likely to be in peril, as is drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents. "In my opinion, the summer months will be quite tough," she says.
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Police and protesters in the Bronx on June 2, 2020, in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. (photo: Credit: Stephanie Keith/The New York Times)
Decades of costly settlements have prompted some elected officials to question whether the city enables bad policing by aggressively defending against misconduct claims instead of demanding changes to NYPD practices.
The protesters sued, and after years of tense litigation, the city settled what the New York Civil Liberties Union then called the “largest protest settlement in history” — an $18 million payout to resolve claims that the police had violated the civil rights of about 1,800 people.
“While no amount of money can undo the damage inflicted by the NYPD’s actions during the Convention, we hope and expect that this enormous settlement will help assure that what happened in 2004 will not happen again,” Christopher Dunn, lead counsel in the NYCLU cases, said at the time.
But in June 2020, just six years after that settlement, history repeated. Facing mass demonstrations, this time in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, the NYPD again became the focus of intense media scrutiny for its bellicose approach to protests, perhaps most notably for boxing in, or “kettling,” about 300 protesters in the Bronx before violently arresting them. Those protesters also sued, and earlier this month their lawyers announced yet another “historic” settlement, in which each protester would get $21,500. The total payout could cost taxpayers between $4 million and $6 million.
Now, the durability of that narrative is prompting some lawmakers to question not just the NYPD’s actions but whether the city effectively enables expensive payouts by aggressively defending against charges of police misconduct instead of leveraging its legal might to pressure the NYPD to change its behaviors and practices. Indeed, while the city charter requires the Law Department to represent “the city and every agency thereof,” it also says the department should “maintain, defend and establish” the interests of “the people.”
In the Floyd and RNC cases, city lawyers fought tooth and nail in court against misconduct charges, employing a litigation strategy that challenged disclosures and claims at every turn — an approach that critics say can prolong cases and actually drive up costs.
“It’s a bad practice,” said Councilmember Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, who plans on questioning Law Department officials when they appear before the City Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations for a budget hearing on March 22.
“The public may not care about the person getting arrested or the cops, but they do care about the money,” she said of settlements to civil rights lawsuits. “It’s millions and millions of dollars. And there’s always a push — ‘How can you push those settlements to be less?’ Well, that doesn’t answer the question: Why do they keep happening?”
It is a line of inquiry backed by the Council’s speaker, Adrienne Adams, whose spokesperson said in a statement that “city attorneys can play a constructive role in preventing future violations of constitutional rights, and they should.”
“It is a disservice to our city and its taxpayers when an agency tasked with protecting them not only violates their rights, but also passes on the cost back to them,” said Mandela Jones, the spokesperson for the Queens Democrat. “It’s equally bad when that agency is enabled to continue engaging in this problematic conduct that repeats this cycle.”
Spokespeople for the mayor’s office, the NYPD and the Law Department did not respond to requests for comment about the hearing. The NYPD said in a statement earlier this month that the department had “re-envisioned” much of its training and policies around “large-scale demonstrations” after the Floyd protests based on the recommendations of “three outside agencies who carefully investigated that period.” The Law Department has previously told ProPublica it takes its ethical responsibilities seriously and litigates each case with an open mind. “While we work to vigorously protect the interests of the city in every case, we are always mindful that opposing parties are also citizens who should be treated with respect and whose claims should be evaluated fairly,” a department spokesperson said last year.
The public scrutiny follows a December report from ProPublica and New York Magazine that examined the city’s Special Federal Litigation Division, the little-known unit within the Law Department that exclusively handles federal civil rights lawsuits alleging abuses by police officers, jail guards and prosecutors. Former attorneys described a culture within Special Fed that prizes winning, even if it means drawing out cases with merit and negotiating them down to the smallest possible payout. The hard-line approach has sometimes drawn rebukes from the bench. Last year, for example, in the Floyd protest case, a judge dressed down a senior Special Fed lawyer for failing to obey court orders. The city has also been sanctioned multiple times for not turning over records in a timely manner. (That lawyer has since been fired, though she denied any wrongdoing.)
Many within the Law Department see themselves as guardians of the city’s treasury, and argue that aggressively defending police cases weeds out frivolous claims, preventing undeserving plaintiffs from obtaining public monies that could otherwise fund city services. But plaintiffs’ attorneys and advocates for police reform counter that Special Fed actually wastes money and public trust by aggressively, and sometimes expensively, defending cases involving clear police misconduct. The NYPD has previously said that any allegation it has “undue influence” over Special Fed and its defense of officers is “outrageous and inaccurate.”
The purpose of damages in federal civil-rights litigation is “to incentivize the government to change policy so it doesn’t face the same exposure for similar kinds of violations in the future,” said Gideon Oliver, a civil rights attorney who represents protesters. “It doesn’t work if the city and the Law Department view cutting those checks as just the cost of doing business.”
Settlements and payouts for police misconduct cases totaled $121 million last year, up from about $85 million the year before, according to an analysis of city data by the Legal Aid Society, the city’s primary provider of indigent legal services. (The sharp increase was largely attributable to six payouts of $10 million or more stemming from decades-old wrongful conviction cases.) A Washington Post analysis of settlement data last year showed that, between 2010 and 2020, more than 5,000 NYPD officers were named in two or more claims, accounting for 45% of New York City taxpayer dollars spent on misconduct cases.
Meanwhile, the full price tag for lawsuits related to the Floyd protests will likely grow well beyond this month’s multimillion-dollar settlement. As of last July, 565 claims had been filed over the NYPD’s policing of the demonstrations, according to records maintained by the city’s chief financial officer, with 220 of them having cumulatively settled, many pre-litigation, for nearly $7 million. A consolidation of lawsuits that seeks widespread reform of how the police handle protests is also still active in Manhattan federal court.
An effort in the early years of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term sought to change the culture within the Law Department, pushing attorneys to think of their primary client as the broader public, not just the named officer in any given lawsuit. But that effort largely withered as the mayor’s relationship with the NYPD and its unions deteriorated. Brewer, citing the story by ProPublica and New York Magazine, said the role of the Law Department and how it represents the city should be subject to public debate. Lawyers for protesters agreed.
“The Council has an important opportunity when it’s approving its budget to demand that the city take a different approach to widespread NYPD legal violations,” said the NYCLU’s Dunn, who is also working on Floyd protest litigation. “When they’re there asking for large sums of public funds, the City Council should be demanding the Law Department be more responsible in the way it's addressing litigation like this.”
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People get drinking water from a water collecting point in a slum area of Karachi, Pakistan, on Tuesday. (photo: Fareed Khan/AP)
More than 5.4 million people, including 2.5 million children, are forced to rely solely on contaminated water from ponds and wells as international funding lags.
The statement from UNICEF underscored the dire situation in impoverished Pakistan, a country with a population of 220 million that months later is still struggling with the consequences of the flooding, as well as a spiraling economic crisis. The floods, which experts attribute in part to climate change, killed 1,739 people, including 647 children and 353 women.
So far, less than half of UNICEF’s funding appeal for Pakistan — 45% of $173.5 million — has been met. According to the agency, before the floods struck last June, water from only 36% of Pakistan’s water system was considered safe for human consumption.
The floods damaged most of the water pipelines systems in affected areas, forcing more than 5.4 million people, including 2.5 million children, to rely solely on contaminated water from ponds and wells, UNICEF said.
“Safe drinking water is not a privilege, it is a basic human right,” said Abdullah Fadil, the UNICEF representative in Pakistan. “Yet, every day, millions of girls and boys in Pakistan are fighting a losing battle against preventable waterborne diseases and the consequential malnutrition.”
“We need the continued support of our donors to provide safe water, build toilets and deliver vital sanitation services to these children and families who need them the most,” Fadil added.
Amid the crisis, Pakistan faces uncertainty about a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Analysts say the revival of the $6 billion IMF bailout, which was signed in 2019, would help Pakistan. If the global lender released a key installment of the package, it would encourage other international financial institutions to help the country, they say.
At a U.N-backed conference in Geneva in January, dozens of countries and international institutions pledged more than $9 billion to help Pakistan recover and rebuild from the floods. But most of the pledges were in form of project loans, and the projects are still in the planning stages.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s government is also facing a surge in militant attacks and political instability as his predecessor, Imran Khan, is campaigning for early elections. Sharif has rejected the demands by Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament last April.
Sharif seeks political and economic stability to ensure speedy reconstruction in the flood-hit areas, where the weakest and the children are paying the price.
“In flood-affected areas, more than 1.5 million boys and girls are already severely malnourished, and the numbers will only rise in the absence of safe water and proper sanitation,” UNICEF said.
The floods caused more than $30 billion in damages as large swaths of the country remained under water for months, forcing millions to live in tents or make-shift homes near stagnant waters that led to the spread of disease.
Sharif’s government is also trying to provide food and cash assistance to flood survivors as the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan starts this week, adding more financial burdens to the poorest of the population.
The UNICEF warning came ahead of World Water Day, which will be observed on Wednesday as part of global efforts to highlight the importance of fresh water and advocate for sustainable management of the vital resource.
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A large plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in 2010. The explosion killed 11 people and is being pointed to by some legal experts who argue that oil companies should be prosecuted for climate-related homicide. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
Authors of paper accepted for publication in Harvard Environmental Law Review argue firms are ‘killing members of the public at an accelerating rate’
The striking and seemingly radical legal theory is laid out in a paper accepted for publication in the Harvard Environmental Law Review. In it, the authors argue fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the public’s attention”.
“What’s on their ledger in terms of harm, there’s nothing like it in human history,” said David Arkush, the director of the climate program at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and one of the paper’s authors.
The paper is rooted in part in the growing body of evidence fossil fuel companies knew of the harm their products caused and misled the public about them.
Attorneys general and cities have used that information to sue oil companies for financial damages caused by rising seas, wildfires and heat. But the new paper argues that oil companies’ climate research and continued fight to delay climate regulations amount to a “culpable mental state” that has inflicted harm on people, including death.
“Once you start using those terms, you come to realize that’s criminal law,” said Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University and Arkush’s co-author. “Culpable mental state causing harm is criminal conduct, and if they kill anybody, that’s homicide.”
Braman argued that pursuing homicide charges would have a greater impact on fossil fuel companies than the cases currently wending their way through court in part because the penalties would be steeper. Rather than paying a fine, homicide charges could open up an array of other outcomes that could materially alter how companies operate.
Homicide is a catchall term that includes charges ranging from manslaughter to murder. The former is a lesser charge where death was caused without intent, while murder is reserved for cases where the defendant either had knowledge that taking a specific action could kill someone or engaged in a premeditated killing. Arkush said the fact that fossil fuel companies knew that their products worsened the climate crisis and yet continued to extract oil, gas and coal “comes extremely close” to meeting the definition of murder, though the paper lays out the case for multiple types of homicide charges.
The paper also argues that the case for climate homicide has been bolstered by attribution science, which seeks to ascertain how much the climate crisis has worsened individual extreme weather events. Some studies have even been able to attribute a specific number of extreme weather deaths to the climate crisis. The duo argue that this growing body of science is among the most powerful tools to prove that oil companies’ actions have more than met the standard for a prosecutor to bring a homicide case.
Bringing homicide charges against oil companies for deaths caused by the climate crisis would be unprecedented, but corporations have been tried for homicide before. California prosecutors charged the utility PG&E with manslaughter for its role in the deadly Camp Fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018. And federal prosecutors charged BP with manslaughter following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. In both cases, the companies pleaded guilty and paid billions in fines and penalties.
While there may be a theoretical case for climate homicide, the realities are daunting. First, a district attorney or attorney general office that has jurisdiction in a place where climate change has caused deaths would have to be willing to bring charges. And that office would need significant resources to confront influential billion-dollar corporations.
“The morality of what fossil fuel companies have been doing over a few decades has become clearer and clearer,” said Christopher Kutz, a distinguished professor and director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are complicit in the deaths that occur and the article is very persuasive about that. But whether you could make an actual criminal charge stick is tricky because their complicity is mixed with the complicity of everybody else.”
Kutz said another challenge facing any would-be prosecutions is the central role fossil fuels have played in shaping the modern world.
“The central act for which the homicide charges being applied were embraced, subsidized, and a central part of the world economy for the last 150 years,” he said. “This is a different kind of case where the use of fossil fuels is the baseline of normal behavior. That would make it a very unusual kind of homicide case,” he added, likening it to “a black hole of liability”.
Guyora Binder, a distinguished professor of law at the University at Buffalo, said the paper was “exciting, imaginative and insightful in a number of important ways”, but also advised caution.
“An obstacle to finding causal responsibility is when death results from diffuse actions of multiple actors,” said Binder, who has written extensively on homicide and criminal law. “It’s a little reminiscent of the issues with tobacco and opioids where you have multiple manufacturers and you can’t trace which one contributed to which death … It’s not clear that if you remove any one of [the fossil fuel companies], that the deaths resulting from global warming don’t occur.”
Binder hypothesized that multiple companies could be charged collectively, though it would still be a very challenging case to bring about. As an analog, he noted that there have been cases in which multiple street drag racers have been charged with homicide, though only of them was physically responsible for killing someone, because they all competed in a race that resulted in a death.
“If it turns out [fossil fuel companies] were all colluding in suppressing research about climate change and all trying to help each other continue this enterprise, then we may be [able to] hold them responsible for one another’s actions,” he said.
Asked for a response to the study, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute said in an email: “The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to US consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
It’s possible that the broader social shift taking place, including criticism over fossil fuel companies’ role in causing the climate crisis, could make climate homicide a feasible option for the right prosecutor. The growing wave of lawsuits being brought against them is proof, Braman said, that those companies are no longer untouchable.
The authors go so far as to recommend a particular sentence should fossil fuel firms be found guilty of homicide: restructuring them as public benefit corporations, similar to what happened to Purdue Pharma as part of its settlement for contributing to the opioid crisis. Doing so, they argue, would allow for rapidly winding down fossil fuel production to reduce further climate harm while ramping up investments in clean energy and protecting workers and communities tied to fossil fuel companies.
Climate advocates have taken note of the paper’s argument. The Center for Biological Diversity is a US non-profit that focuses on protecting endangered species. It has sued over oil company’s drilling rights, but isn’t directly involved with any of the big oil cases.
“The case is compelling that fossil fuel companies’ actions meet the legal definition of homicide. The paper lays that out clearly,” said Kassie Siegal, the director of the center’s climate law institute.
“I think it’s absolutely brilliant,” she said.
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