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Presently, voters can approve a proposed amendment to the Ohio constitution with a simple majority vote. If Issue 1 is approved, future amendments would fail unless they received a 60 percent supermajority. Anyone trying to get a proposed amendment on the ballot would also have to gather more signatures and generally jump through more hoops.
If that sounds yawn-inducing, wake up. The real intent of Issue 1 is to allow an antiabortion minority of Ohioans to defeat a proposed amendment — set to appear on the ballot in November — that would expand Article I of the Ohio constitution to guarantee every individual’s “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including the choice to have an abortion.
A USA Today poll last month found that 58 percent of Ohioans said they favor the amendment guaranteeing abortion rights, compared with 32 percent who said they opposed it. That amounts to a landslide in favor of protecting choice. But if Issue 1 were approved, and the November vote reflected those poll numbers, reproductive freedom would fail.
The Republicans behind Issue 1 tried for a while to pretend the measure was about good government or some such, but Ohioans understood what was going on: an attempt by a fervent antiabortion minority to impose its views on a pro-choice majority.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024, said the quiet part out loud in June. Issue 1, he said, “is 100 percent about keeping a radical, pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”
Let’s be clear about who is being “radical.” Since the Supreme Court’s unwise 2022 decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, it has become clear: If the U.S. Constitution no longer protects reproductive freedom, voters want their state constitutions to step in and guarantee choice.
That has been the message of referendums not just in blue states such as Vermont and California but also in purple Michigan — and in bright-red Kansas and Kentucky. In all these jurisdictions, voters have either enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions or turned back attempts to strip out such rights. And in Montana, another red state, voters rejected a proposed law that would have subjected doctors to possible criminal penalties, in certain rare cases, for not taking heroic measures to “save” a fetus after an attempted abortion.
The problem for antiabortion zealots is that most Americans disagree with them. The closest thing to a consensus view would be a legal framework much like the one that existed under Roe v. Wade — the basic right to abortion is guaranteed, but reasonable restrictions can be imposed if they do not unduly infringe upon that right.
Someone should have educated Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. before he wrote the smug and arrogant majority opinion striking down Roe. Actually, scratch that; Alito and his fellow antiabortion ideologues on the high court probably wouldn’t have cared.
So now the people giveth back what Alito taketh away. The outrageous Issue 1 referendum in Ohio is cynical, but it cannot be described as cold-eyed. Rather, it represents five-alarm panic by anti-choice crusaders who see they are badly outnumbered — and who seek to impose their minoritarian views by changing the rules.
Issue 1 could also make it harder for Ohio voters to seek constitutional protections on other issues, such as gun violence and voting rights. At present, however, the fight is clearly over abortion. And it illustrates a problem the Republican Party will have to deal with sooner or later.
GOP dogma is against abortion, period, as are most of the party’s primary voters. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in his attempt to win the party’s presidential nomination, decided that the 15-week abortion ban he had already signed into law was insufficiently draconian. He demanded from state legislators, and signed into law, a six-week ban — one of the strictest in the nation.
But most Democrats and independents disagree. The abortion issue played a big part in turning what should have been a red wave in the 2022 midterms into the merest ripple. Wherever Democrats can get abortion rights on the ballot next year, Republicans will be in trouble.
First things first, though. On Tuesday, Ohio voters should reject Issue 1. Don’t let the GOP put its big fat thumb on the scale of democracy.
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A Russian soldier stands in front of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in territory under Russian military control. (photo: AP)
Source: Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of the Tavriia operative strategic grouping of forces, on Telegram
Quote: "The Russians continue to use chemical projectiles in violation of all conventions.
Yesterday (on 6 August – ed.), they launched two artillery attacks from multiple-launch rocket systems in the proximity of the settlement of Novodanylivka, usint the projectiles filled with a chemical substance (likely chloropicrin). This attack has not resulted in any victims."
Background:
- One person was killed and 12 more were injured in a Russian strike on Kherson on 6 August. A residential building was hit.
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A member of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit participates in a gun shoot aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan. (photo: US Navy)
The deployment adds to a growing US military buildup in tense Gulf waterways vital to the global oil trade and led Tehran on Monday to accuse the US of inflaming regional instability.
The US military says Iran has either seized or attempted to take control of nearly 20 internationally flagged ships in the region over the past two years.
The US sailors and Marines entered the Red Sea on Sunday after transiting through the Suez Canal in a pre-announced deployment, the US Navy's Fifth Fleet said in a statement.
They arrived on board the USS Bataan and USS Carter Hall warships, providing "greater flexibility and maritime capability" to the Fifth Fleet, the statement from the Bahrain-based command added.
The deployment adds to efforts "to deter destabilising activity and de-escalate regional tensions caused by Iran's harassment and seizures of merchant vessels," Fifth Fleet spokesman Commander Tim Hawkins told AFP.
USS Bataan is an amphibious assault ship which can carry fixed-wing and rotary aircraft as well as landing craft. The USS Carter Hall, a dock landing ship, transports Marines, their gear, and lands them ashore.
In a Monday news conference, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said US deployments are only serving Washington's interests.
"The US government's military presence in the region has never created security. Their interests in this region have always compelled them to fuel instability and insecurity," he told reporters.
"We are deeply convinced that the countries of the Persian Gulf are capable of ensuring their own security."
The spokesman for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Ramazan Sharif, meanwhile said the Islamic republic "has reached a level of strength and power that can reciprocate any vicious act by the US, such as seizing ships", according to state news agency IRNA.
- 'New approach' -
The latest deployment comes after Washington said its forces blocked two attempts by Iran to seize commercial tankers in international waters off Oman on July 5.
The maritime services in Iran said one of the two tankers, the Bahamian-flagged Richmond Voyager, had collided with an Iranian vessel, seriously injuring five crew members, according to IRNA.
In April and early May, Iran seized two oil tankers within a week in regional waters.
Those incidents came after Israel and the United States blamed Iran in November for what they said was a drone strike against a tanker operated by an Israeli-owned firm off the coast of Oman.
The US announced last month that it would deploy a destroyer, F-35 and F-16 warplanes, along with the Amphibious Readiness Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the Middle East to deter Iran from seizing ships in the Gulf.
Last week, a US official told AFP that Washington is also preparing to put Marines and Navy personnel aboard commercial tankers transiting the Gulf as an added layer of defence.
Washington's stepped-up military response comes at a time of deepening engagement between the region and China, which brokered a shock detente between Gulf rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in March.
Tehran's relations with other Gulf Arab states are also growing. The president of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait's foreign minister were both offered invitations to visit the Islamic republic last week.
"Security will remain a friction point in US-Gulf relations even if the threat posed by Iranian attacks against shipping eases in the short term," said Torbjorn Soltvedt of the risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft.
"The perception that the US isn't doing enough to deter Iranian attacks against international shipping will persist," he told AFP.
"The need for a new approach is evident".
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Former FBI agent Charles McGonigal leaves Manhattan Federal Court in New York on Feb. 9, 2023. (photo: Yuki Iwamura/AFP)
Charles McGonigal, who is facing two indictments related to his work with foreign agents, is looking to avoid jury trials
In January, the Department of Justice brought two simultaneous cases against Charles McGonigal, who served as the head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York City field office before his 2018 retirement.
The first case, filed in New York, relates to his relationship with Deripaska, and a second in Washington, D.C., regards his collection of $225,000 in unreported payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer. McGonigal initially pleaded not guilty to both sets of charges — but that may change.
On Monday, Manhattan Federal Judge Jennifer Rearden wrote in a briefing that “the court has been informed that defendant Charles McGonigal may wish to enter a change of plea.”
Last week, McGonigal’s attorney, Seth DuCharme, stated that there was a “decent chance the [Washington, D.C.] case is going to be resolved” without the need for a jury trial.
Authorities allege that McGonigal “acted on behalf of Deripaska and fraudulently used a U.S. entity to obscure their activity in violation of U.S. sanctions.” Deripaska himself was indicted by the Justice Department in 2022 for violating sanctions imposed on him following allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. McGonigal is accused of having aided Deripaska in investigating “a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments.”
As an FBI official, McGonigal participated in investigations related to Russian interference in the 2016 election — including the FBI’s probe into ties between former President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia — as well as an investigation into Deripaska himself.
Some former FBI officials previously expressed to Rolling Stone their belief that McGonigal was motivated by “greed and not espionage.” But his rank and access within the FBI means the long exposure for the bureau could be devastating. “The potential here is that he could be one of the most devastating spies in U.S. history but there’s not enough evidence to make that claim,” retired CIA officer John Sipher told Rolling Stone in February.
“His arrest is a sorry day for the FBI,” added a retired senior FBI official. “The bureau has taken a beating the last few years with Trump and others attacking it. His arrest is all we need.”
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President Joe Biden. (photo: NBC)
The president will give remarks at the Historic Red Butte Airfield in Arizona at 11 a.m. local time before visiting the Grand Canyon.
Tuesday's announcement is part of a trip that will include New Mexico and Utah, where Biden is expected to make the case for how he's tackling the climate and economic challenges facing Americans in the West.
The monument follows a years-long effort
In the Grand Canyon, tribal nations and conservationists have been calling for additional protections in the area for years, as KNAU's Ryan Heinsius has reported.
A recent statewide poll showed broad support for the proposal, though local ranchers who have worked the land for generations have concerns. Senior administration officials told reporters that the national monument designation upholds private property rights; it also does not affect existing uranium mining claims.
Still, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, called Biden's move "historic."
"It will help protect lands that many tribes referred to as their eternal home, a place of healing and a source of spiritual sustenance," she said. "It will help ensure that indigenous peoples can continue to use these areas for religious ceremonies, hunting and gathering of plants, medicines and other materials, including some found nowhere else on earth. It will protect objects of historic and scientific importance for the benefit of tribes, the public and for future generations."
Haaland called her own trip to the area in May "one of the most meaningful trips of my life."
The new national monument will be called Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument. According to the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition that drafted a proposal for the monument, "Baaj Nwaavjo" means "where tribes roam" in Havasupai, and "I'tah Kukveni" translates to "our ancestral footprints" in Hopi.
Biden's broader agenda
Biden has created four other national monuments during his presidency — one honors Emmett Till, and the others protect land in Nevada, Texas and Colorado.
But the politics of Biden's Western swing are broader than preservation. It is about emphasizing what the administration has already done to invest in the economy and the climate — because many Americans just don't know about it.
Asked whether this week's trip is about advertising accomplishments, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, "We're going to continue to do our jobs and continue to talk about it ... And the hope is that we'll get our message out."
She said support would continue to build for the president as the legislation is implemented around the country. "We'll see, I think, Americans start to feel and see what it is that we have been able to do in Washington, D.C."
And the Biden reelection campaign is counting on it.
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The Chicago shoreline. (photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP)
As a woman in the passenger seat handed her identification to a uniformed police officer, Christopher Ruff jumped in to advise her on her constitutional rights, holding up a camera to record the scene.
“Did he make it seem like you had to, or did he just ask?” Ruff asked her. “In the future, you don’t got to tell them anything about who you are.” Soon, a sergeant approached, telling Ruff to get back and threatening him with arrest.
By the end of the night, Ruff had recorded a half-dozen interactions between police and civilians, some of which he posted on YouTube. Later that night he encountered the same sergeant and unloaded a barrage of profane insults. It was a typical Friday for the 33-year-old, part of his personal crusade to stop what he sees as overstepping, oath-breaking law enforcement. His encounters with police have been viewed more than 65 million times.
With varying degrees of antagonism and legal expertise, the online movement known as cop-watching or First Amendment auditing has swelled in popularity in recent years, capturing the imaginations of millions of Americans who are examining their relationship with policing after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis in 2020.
Cop-watchers and auditors say they’re waking up an over-policed nation to its plight. They’re forcing police and government agencies to train their workers to respect First Amendment rights and are willing to risk arrest in the process. A few also are cashing in — experts say the most popular auditing channels can generate more than $150,000 a month through ads and subscriptions on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. Individual auditors can earn tens of thousands a month.
“The reason we get pulled over and we get arrested is we are trying to show people that it’s not okay to just let them get away with it, because it’s going to affect the next person,” Ruff said. “They think it’s okay because they’ve been allowed to do it.”
But such encounters also have sparked backlash. Several states have passed laws or taken steps to limit opportunities to record police interactions, restrictions that have affected reporting by news organizations. Some law enforcement leaders accuse cop-watchers of selectively editing videos, misinforming citizens, inspiring vitriol toward police, escalating tensions during police interactions with civilians, and endangering officers and civilians.
Last year, a Mesa judge ordered Ruff to stop filming Mesa police. In July, Gilbert police issued a memo describing Ruff as a potential threat to law enforcement. The department declined an interview request.
Auditor videos have led to disciplinary actions for hundreds of officers across the country, and a handful of police have lost their jobs. The interactions and resulting legal fights have found their way to a federal appeals court, which affirmed the right of civilians to film police as a result of a lawsuit brought by a Texas-based auditor.
Sean Tindell, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, recently met with his staff to discuss several videos alleging police misconduct, posted since last year by a Facebook watchdog group inspired and amplified by the auditor movement. Twenty years ago, Tindell said, similar complaints from citizens might not have been taken seriously.
“I’m thankful for some of these cases, because it allows us to light the do’s and don’ts,” Tindell said.
At the same time, he worries the videos have poisoned police interactions with members of the public who “got their law degree on Facebook.” Viral online confrontations between auditors and police officers also are making it difficult for agencies to attract recruits, Tindell added. “I think a lot of folks watch these videos and say, ‘I don’t want to put myself in that situation.’”
And there’s no shortage of videos.
Nebraska-based auditor Floyd Wallace recently posted a recording taken outside a sheriff’s station in Jacksonville, Tex., in which police officers stop him and pat him down, and he is told “quit running your dumb mouth” before they let him go.
Once the recording went viral, the police department received hundreds of phone calls and emails, some of them threatening, which overloaded the communications apparatus that also fields 911 calls, Police Chief Joe Williams told The Washington Post. The officers’ actions were lawful, he added, but some of what they said to Wallace may have violated department policy.
“When you encounter someone with a GoPro on their chest, you need to realize something’s up,” Williams said. “We took the bait. It’s demoralizing. ... It’s a gut punch. I think we all have a sense of embarrassment.”
Tactical decisions
Some auditors record police traffic stops, patrols or arrests. Others videotape from inside police station lobbies, post offices and city halls — or from public areas outside military bases, prisons and private businesses.
SeanPaul Reyes, arguably YouTube’s most popular auditor, turned on his camera at Suffolk County, N.Y., police headquarters for the first time in 2021, bored and frustrated, he said, after being furloughed from his job as a logistics director for a warehouse company.
As Reyes aimed his camera at vehicles in the parking lot, three men in plainclothes surrounded him, demanding to know his purpose and see his identification. His recording of the encounter has been viewed more than 400,000 times on YouTube.
Two weeks later, Reyes was a full-time auditor, posting videos of the police under the handle LongIslandAudit. Reyes, who was convicted of attempted robbery in 2013 and served three years in prison, has racked up more than 141 million views on YouTube, collecting an online following that swamps police stations and town halls with angry calls when the YouTuber is detained or arrested. He recently filed suit after being arrested for filming in an NYPD police station lobby.
His chief motive, he said, is serving the public.
“How many officers out there now know our rights better because of what we’re doing?” said Reyes, 32. “We have that video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd because of a citizen journalist recording the police. If an officer went up to one or two them and said, ‘Hey, you can’t record’ and took their phone, he probably would have never been held accountable.”
Reyes sometimes supplements his own video with police body-camera footage of the encounters, obtained through public records requests. An officer in Danbury, Conn. was suspended for nine days because of footage in which he says Reyes would have been “dead” with his teeth knocked out if police had encountered him in an earlier era.
Clips of Reyes’s calm dismissals of police asking for his identification are edited and repurposed across social media, offering easy-to-understand tutorials of when you do and don’t have to show your identification to police.
Among the most popular aggregators of such material is the Lackluster YouTube channel, piloted by Dale Hiller, a former Los Angeles firefighter and Iraq War veteran, who started posting after he was ordered to stop recording a police interaction with his next-door neighbor.
Hiller stands out in the auditor movement, offering analysis of local, state and federal laws, as well as court rulings, to provide context for videos posted or submitted by others. Most material he highlights is not from auditors with hefty followings, but from people publishing their recordings of police encounters for the first time.
Hiller has watched YouTubers expand their followings in recent years by publishing videos of police interactions that others send them, and by finding new ways to encounter the police. He thinks some are beginning to enter murky legal waters — approaching officers in a loud or disruptive manner, or refusing to leave public buildings when asked. Others have outright violated the law, he said.
“It’s a show, and it needs to sell.”
One of the least confrontational auditors is Jeff Gray, who posts under the name “HonorYourOath Civil Rights Investigations.”
He often holds a weathered cardboard sign that reads “God Bless the Homeless Veterans,” positioning himself in shopping districts and at the steps of town halls in states including Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, and using a camera tucked in a shirt pocket to record police who approach.
Gray tells police he will provide ID if threatened with arrest. But he also politely warns officers that they are violating his civil rights.
Ruff, in contrast, could fairly be called one of the most antagonistic cop-watchers, Hiller said. He’s posted videos in which he shines flashlights at officers from outside a nighttime police perimeter, potentially obscuring their vision.
“They’re really testing the limits,” Hiller said of Ruff and his ilk. “But I think it’s important that the cops know how to deal with that without hurting somebody or taking away freedom.”
Pushing back against auditors
Arizona, where Ruff is based, has become a hot spot for auditing and cop-watching, so much so that some officers across Phoenix’s southeast suburbs have begun using yellow crime scene tape to set perimeters around traffic stops when bystanders with cameras arrive.
It is one example of how the most extreme cop-watchers are inspiring practices and legislation with major First Amendment implications.
In Mesa, Ariz., Assistant Police Chief Ed Wessing said police began seeing individuals recording the station and its gated parking lot entrances about six years ago. The first auditors were not confrontational, but the tone seemed to shift with each well-publicized case of police brutality or other misconduct in the region, he said.
Then came Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, recorded on a bystander’s cellphone for the world to see. Auditors began confronting officers at crime scenes, cursing at them and daring them to take action, Wessing said. Officers who identified themselves were sometimes doxed online, their phone numbers and home addresses shared by viewers seeking to punish them for their conduct on video.
Over the years, officers have sometimes overstepped when recorded, Wessing said, detaining and arresting auditors on charges that did not stick in court. Older officers generally had a harder time adjusting to the new reality than younger ones. “There’s no question that we had a learning curve,” Wessing said.
But auditors also have at times disrupted the situation at hand.
Three years ago, a man holding his father at gunpoint pointed his weapon at Mesa police moments after officers told a cop-watcher to retreat from his perch outside the house and he refused. Officers then shot and killed the gunman. No one else was injured, but the sequence rattled the officers.
Last year, the city spent $23,071 to delay the public police scanner feed by an hour, after realizing that Ruff and other auditors were using it to locate their next targets. The department said it gave access to the live feed to journalism outlets it deemed “legitimate.”
Arizona is one of at least six states that have tried to enact laws to create more distance between police and the public, with mixed results. A coalition of media companies and free press advocates successfully challenged a law that made it illegal in Arizona for bystanders to record police within an eight-foot buffer zone. Other states have focused on the perimeter instead of the act of recording.
“Most jurisdictions understand that if they out-and-out prohibit recording without the permission of a police officer, like Arizona tried to, the federal courts are going to block that very quickly,” said Grayson Clary, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
In Indiana, a law took effect in July barring people from getting within 25 feet of police after being ordered not to approach. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) vetoed a similar bill in June. Similar legislation has been introduced in Michigan.
Support for such legislation has largely fallen along partisan lines, with most Republicans supporting the measures and many Democrats opposing them, citing constitutional concerns. A notable exception: Indiana state representative Mitch Gore, a Democrat who also is a Marion County sheriff’s deputy.
“We have some concern that bad law enforcement officers may attempt to perpetually push the public back further and further,” Gore said. “But these situations are becoming much more tense unnecessarily, and it was important that we give our officers the ability to de-escalate the situation.”
A history of auditor activism
Andrea Prichett started Berkeley Copwatch in Northern California in 1990. Early on, her organization focused primarily on bearing witness, keeping residents safe by observing police interactions in an unobtrusive manner.
“What had weight was the actual human being present at the moment of incident, and the technology was very secondary,” Prichett said.
Berkeley Copwatch eventually used public records and recordings to build a database of allegedly abusive officers in the Berkeley police department, and launched a class on cop-watching at UC-Berkeley.
Its members continue to eschew any dramatic confrontations with police.
“The screaming and hollering and doing all this kind of stuff, in my experience, is not an effective strategy for getting somebody released,” Prichett said. “It often attracts more cops to call for backup and escalate.”
The path from Berkeley Copwatch to YouTube stars was paved via court precedent.
Austin-area native Phillip Turner, 33, began recording outside Texas police stations and posting the results on YouTube in 2014. He says he was motivated by negative interactions with police starting when he was a teenager — traffic stops and other incidents he thought were initiated or escalated by officers because he is Black.
After launching his YouTube experiment, Turner was arrested multiple times for not identifying himself while recording, even though Texas law requires a person to provide ID only if the person has been lawfully arrested or pulled over while driving.
Turner sued the Fort Worth Police in 2015 for detaining him in a sweltering patrol car after he silently recorded their station from across the street.
The case reached the appeals court in 2017, and the court ruled in his favor, establishing for the first time the right to record police, “subject only to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.”
Turner’s calm, quiet manner while recording was discussed at length in court. He says he acts that way with his online audience in mind.
“I understand that filming the police is already a touchy subject,” Turner said. “People who don’t understand what we’re doing feel like we’re out to get the cops. I tailor my style to not exclude anybody.”
Cop-watcher Christopher Ruff records police
0:24
The Arizona-based YouTuber has become popular for recording police, sometimes prompting officers to use crime scene tape to set perimeters around traffic stops. (Video: Direct D)
‘How can you be nice?’
Ruff said he’s not capable of biting his tongue when his rights are violated.
“I lose the professionalism, the politeness, the moment that they start operating outside of the parameters of their job,” he said. “How can you be nice to somebody who is willing to violate your human rights?”
Ruff goes cop-watching at night, searching for sirens or helicopters. He focuses his attention on parts of the Phoenix suburbs where most people are poor and Black, Latino or Native American.
Those areas have become battlegrounds in the region’s sprawling gentrification struggle, and Ruff sees aggressive policing as another way to clear out the poor and make room for the wealthy. Whenever police try to remove homeless people from bus stops or pull cars over for minor violations, Ruff aims to be there with a camera.
One of his most jaw-dropping recordings is among the first he posted, from a trailer park in Cottonwood, Ariz. It was New Year’s Day 2021. Ruff was working as a landscaper, four years removed from serving five years in prison for a 2011 armed robbery conviction.
A worker for the trailer park community asked what Ruff was doing there, he says, and he declined to answer. The employee called police. Ruff began to record.
“Let’s go into handcuffs,” the responding officer says to Ruff on the footage, after some unrequited questioning.
Ruff backs away, repeating, “Don’t touch me. I don’t have to identify myself.”
Even after a supervisor arrives, Ruff does not relent.
The 10-minute video became a YouTube sensation, with aggregation channels shouting: “BOSS LEVEL ID REFUSAL!!”... “TWO COPS GET OWNED”
But here’s what the video doesn’t show: After Ruff stopped filming, one of the officers found Ruff’s girlfriend and pressured her to reveal his name. He remains angry about it.
“They used her feelings towards me to get what they wanted,” Ruff said. “That really sparked some s--- in me right there.”
Ruff has since posted more than 300 videos. He says he doesn’t own the YouTube channel and is barred from sharing details about the revenue generated by the ads that appear with his recordings.
On that recent night in Gilbert, Ruff kept driving long after he told the woman in the sedan that she had not been required to give her ID to police.
Around 1 a.m., he pulled up to a stoplight, dash cam recording.
Idling next to him was the Gilbert police sergeant who had threatened to arrest him hours earlier.
Ruff leaned out the window of his truck and shouted: “Do the department a favor and eat one of your service rounds!” Then he gunned his engine through the green light.
The sergeant rolled up his window and turned onto another road.
READ MORE The Chicago shoreline. (photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP)
Residents dogged by frequent flooding have finally drawn attention from city and state officials.
But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline.
“Out there where that pillar is,” she said, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.”
Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive sinkholes. It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years.
“All things considered, this is our home,” she said.
Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly variable lake levels and ever more intense storms. What was once a tedious but manageable issue is now a crisis. The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to demand that City Hall support a $5 million plan to hold back the water.
“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” said Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University.
Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.
“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” said Shabica.
Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. Earlier this year, state Representative Curtis Tarver II introduced legislation that secured $5 million to help solve the issue.
“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver said.
After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be — and how fast they can fix it.
Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.
Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city shoreline restoration projects. Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.
“We were watching the news coverage [of] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” said Louis.
The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city and suburbs.
“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he said.
Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood.
Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.
“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do’. And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” said Louis.
Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods.
“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” said Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.”
The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetements, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.
“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore parallel breakwaters,” said Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”
Shabica also mentions that this isn’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before engineers decided to connect it to the shoreline in 1938.
The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic.
One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors.
Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome.
Both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause.
“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”
For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis.
“The philosophy,” she said, “is repair, not prevent.”
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