Author Archives: BessMEIF

The Feds Are Finally Investigating the San Francisco Police, But Here’s the Catch

by BessMEIF Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Nearly two months after San Francisco police officers shot and killed a 26-year-old black man named Mario Woods, officials at the US Department of Justice have announced that they will launch a comprehensive review of the department’s policies and practices.

The federal review will “help identify key areas for improvement” in the department’s operational policies, training practices, and accountability procedures, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement released Monday.

The announcement comes amid a public outcry over Woods’s death last month, which sparked protests and prompted city officials to call for an independent investigation into the incident. On December 2, officers surrounded Woods on a sidewalk in the Bayview district neighborhood after identifying him as a possible suspect in a stabbing that took place earlier that day. The incident was recorded by several onlookers who uploaded cell phone footage to social media, attracting widespread attention.

Push for review

One video showed Woods standing with his back against a wall, facing at least six officers pointing their guns at him. They ordered him to drop the knife. When Woods did not comply, officers fired bean bag pellets and pepper-sprayed him. At one point, Woods appeared to walk away from the officers, and seconds later multiple shots rang out. A total of five officers opened fire, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr later told reporters. Woods was pronounced dead at the scene. The officers who fired their guns were placed on leave after the shooting, but have since returned to desk duty. Woods’ family and supporters have demanded the firing of Suhr, who formerly headed the Bayview police station. Family members, who say Woods had struggled with mental health issues, have also filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the city.

Several members of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, community leaders, and civil rights advocates have called for an independent investigation into Woods’s death and the department’s use of force policies. Suhr and San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee also jointly requested the federal review, according to the DOJ statement, and “have publicly committed to providing the resources necessary for its successful completion.”

Protesters march toward Super Bowl City in San Francisco, Jan. 29, 2016. Jaeah Lee

The Justice Department’s review into SFPD, however, differs significantly from the “pattern and practice” investigations into police departments such as Ferguson and Cleveland. Pattern-and-practice investigations, handled by the Civil Rights Division and meant to identify department-wide civil rights violations, typically result in court-ordered reforms that are monitored by a judge or a third party, and sometimes last more than a decade. The SFPD review, led by the Office of Community Oriented Policing, will result in a report laying out recommended reforms as well as progress reports on their implementation. But those reviews tend to take place in a shorter time period, and the reforms are not legally binding.

Other cases

Woods’s death is the latest in a long line of controversies involving the San Francisco police and their use of force against citizens, particularly those suffering from mental health issues, and communities of color.

More than 60 percent of all fatal police shootings by SFPD cops since 2010 involved people who had a history of mental health problems, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Last February, 20-year-old Amilcar Perez-Lopez was shot to death by two plain-clothed SFPD officers in the Mission District neighborhood. Officials said he was carrying a knife.
A month later, a judge cleared four other cops for their involvement in the March 2014 death of 28-year-old Alex Nieto, who allegedly pointed a Taser at police officers. District Attorney George Gascon said the officers, who fired a total of 59 shots, reasonably mistook the Taser for a pistol.
SFPD also came under heightened scrutiny last April, when Suhr moved to fire 8 officers over their 2012 exchange of racist and homophobic text messages. In December, a judge ruled that the officers could not be fired or otherwise disciplined because the department waited too long to address the case, allowing a one-year statute of limitations for any personnel investigations—set by the Peace Officer Bill of Rights—to lapse.

Some experts have already expressed concern that the DOJ’s current review of SFPD does not go far enough.

“It doesn’t have the teeth that the Civil Rights’ Division investigation does,” Aaron Zisser, a former attorney for the division told the San Francisco Examiner on Monday. The current review, Zisser said, was a strong indicator that there will not be a broader civil rights investigation.

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The Feds Are Finally Investigating the San Francisco Police, But Here’s the Catch

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Watch John Oliver Explain the Insanity of Our Prison System With Puppets

by BessMEIF Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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The United States imprisons too many people for too long for too many things. As John Oliver summed it up last night, “We are doing a terrible job taking care of people that it is very easy for all of us not to care about.”

Oliver outlines a few of the prison system’s flagrant injustices:

African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of white people, despite similar levels of drug use.
Solitary confinement, which Mother Jones has covered extensively, is “one of the most mentally excruciating things prisoners can be subjected to.” Yet when a senator asked the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons about the size of the average isolation cell during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this past February, the prison official had no idea, stalling awkwardly before making a wildly incorrect guess.
One in 25 prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in the past year, yet prison rape is culturally-acceptable joke material that crops up in pop culture regularly: from SpongeBob to Friends to Puss in Boots.
In an effort to cut costs, many states outsource food, health care, and even prison operations to private contractors. These cost-saving techniques have lead to maggot-infested food in Michigan prisons and 50 inmates dying in one 8-month stretch in Arizona.
Prisoner rehabilitation isn’t exactly the system’s focal point: Publicly-traded private prison giant Corporate Corrections of America (CCA) actually touted “high recidivism” as a reason private prisons are a “unique investment opportunity.”

He closes the segment by recapping the horrors of the US prison system with mock Sesame Street puppets: The PBS show has recently made efforts to reach out to the 1 in 28 US children growing up with a parent behind bars.

The segment’s bottom line: Prisoners are not treated humanely in the United States. They’re viewed as a nuisance, a problem to be tucked away in a cell and never thought of again. But when nearly 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars, our broken system of mass incarceration is a human rights abuse that should not be ignored.

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Watch John Oliver Explain the Insanity of Our Prison System With Puppets

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Map: Is There a Risky Chemical Plant Near You?

by BessMEIF Posted on April 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last April 17, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people, injured at least 200, and destroyed dozens of homes, schools, and a nursing home. In the wake of the disaster, we wondered: Can we locate the industrial sites in your community where similar incidents might occur?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is not so simple. Even basic information about sites where hazardous chemicals are kept and what kinds of accidents can be anticipated is tucked away in official documents. Much of that data is not easily accessible due to post-9/11 security measures, making it nearly impossible to get a clear sense of whether you live, work, or go to school near the next potential West, Texas.

Here’s what we do know: Millions of Americans live near a site that could put them in harm’s way if hazardous chemicals leak or catch fire. The Environmental Protection Agency monitors roughly 12,000 facilities that store one or more of 140 toxic or flammable chemicals that are potentially hazardous to nearby communities. In late 2012, a Congressional Research Service report found that more than 2,500 of these sites estimate that their worst-case scenarios could affect between 10,000 and 1 million people; more than 4,400 estimated that their worst-case scenarios could affect between 1,000 and 9,999 people.

The interactive map below, based on data from the EPA’s Risk Management Program, shows at least 9,000 facilities where a “catastrophic chemical release” or what the EPA calls a “worst-case scenario” could harm nearby residents. Hover over any site to see its exact location, the chemicals it stores, and how many accidents it documented in its most recent 5-year reporting period.

According to chemical safety experts, this is the most comprehensive national-level chemical safety data out there. But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us.

First, don’t let the facilities with no accidents fool you. Before its explosion last year, West Fertilizer’s EPA records showed that it had no mishaps. “A lot of facilities, even though they haven’t had any accidents, it doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of one, and that the damage can’t be similar to what we’ve seen in West, Texas,” explains Sofia Plagakis, a policy analyst with the Center for Effective Government‘s environmental right-to-know program. “It only takes one accident,” says John Deans, a former toxics campaigner at Greenpeace.

And if you click on the West Fertilizer Co. plant in West, Texas, you won’t see any record of ammonium nitrate, the prime suspect in last year’s explosion. (The other suspect was anhydrous ammonia, which the EPA does monitor.) That’s because the chemical is not monitored under the EPA’s Risk Management Program. Basically, the data used to make this map can’t be used to predict the next West, Texas-style accident; it couldn’t even predict the first West, Texas, accident.

More data is out there, however. To find out more about where ammonium nitrate is stored, try the Department of Homeland Security, which monitors facilities that keep the chemical under its Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program. Yet DHS never knew about West Fertilizer, even though the plant told state agencies in 2012 that it stored 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, about 1,350 times the amount that triggers the reporting requirement. While West Fertilizer didn’t report to DHS, it did disclose its ammonium nitrate storage to Texas’ emergency planning committee in a federally required report that’s meant to help firefighters, hospitals, and other first responders prepare for an accident. Almost every facility on the map above also stores a chemical whose name has been redacted. That information is only accessible if you visit one of 15 EPA Federal Reading Rooms scattered across the country.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Disparate government data sets and patchy oversight have raised more questions about chemical risks than regulators or citizens can answer. In the wake of the West, Texas, tragedy, the Obama administration promised to address these knowledge gaps and issued an executive order, calling for agencies such as DHS and the EPA to improve their info sharing with state agencies and local responders.

Other organizations have tried to determine which chemical plants pose the greatest risks to nearby residents. In 2011, Greenpeace’s Deans and his team set out to find some answers in the EPA data. But publicly accessible risk data doesn’t say exactly how close facilities are located to communities, how many people live in those communities, or what kinds of damage an accident might cause. The West Fertilizer explosion destroyed or irreparably damaged three of the town’s four schools. Had the accident happened during the day, Plagakis asks, “Did the school know how to get the students out of harm’s way?”

Facilities are supposed to report this information to the EPA, but these Offsite Consequence Analyses are not included in the agency’s response to public records requests for risk management data. You can access this information at an EPA Federal Reading Room. But you’re allowed one visit per month and can only bring a pen and paper. Greenpeace dispatched about a dozen researchers to the reading rooms for this project, Deans says.

When it was done, Deans’s team had identified 473 chemical facilities that could put 100,000 people or more at risk. “Of those,” they found, “89 put one million or more people at risk up to 25 miles downwind from a plant.” In all, Greenpeace concluded, one out of every three Americans was at some risk of being affected by a toxic chemical release from a nearby facility.

Chemical Sites That Put 100,000 or More People at Risk

Source: Greenpeace

Still, the West Fertilizer plant, which is in a town of 2,800 people, does not show up on this map. As mounting evidence pointed to ammonium nitrate as the likely culprit in the West Fertilizer explosion, a team of Reuters reporters started looking for other ammonium nitrate facilities across the country to see if they could pinpoint other potentially risky locations. It found hundreds of thousands of homes, hundreds of schools, and 20 hospitals within a mile of sites that store or use the chemical.

Ammonium Nitrate Sites

Source: Reuters

According to news reports, there are roughly 6,000 facilities that store ammonium nitrate at levels that should report to Homeland Security. DHS never returned calls to verify this number, and it does not publicize the ammonium nitrate facilities it tracks under its Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program. Federal law mandates that any facility storing at least 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate disclose it to local emergency planning authorities. To track down these reports, you have to ask your state for it. Some states, like Illinois, make the information easily accessible online. Others, like Arizona, have denied public requests to see the the documents. Reuters requested these Tier II reports from environmental, public safety, and emergency response agencies in all 50 states: 29 states released the information, 10 states did not respond or did not have electronic data, and 11 refused altogether.

“The states that declined often wanted us to request information about a specific site,” says Ryan McNeill, one of the Reuters reporters who worked on mapping the ammonium nitrate facilities. “They claim that’s what the law intended. Our counter was that this is a silly position because it requires a citizen to know about the existence of a site with dangerous chemicals before they can request information. How is the public supposed to know whether a warehouse houses dangerous chemicals?”

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Map: Is There a Risky Chemical Plant Near You?

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Today Brings Us Three Rays of Economic Sunshine

by BessMEIF Posted on September 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Would you like some good news? Well, here you go. Manufacturing orders are way up:

The Institute for Supply Management’s survey of manufacturers showed its new orders index increased to 63.2 in August from 58.3 in July. It was the third consecutive monthly gain in demand and the highest reading since April 2011.

Auto sales are near record highs:

With numbers due out Wednesday, analysts have predicted that August will prove to be the best month for auto sales since before the recession….Automakers are ramping up production and hiring workers to keep pace with demand, which analysts project will result in as many as 16 million new-vehicle sales in 2013 — not far off the record 17 million sales achieved before the downturn.

And the housing market is coming back:

Private residential construction spending rose 0.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $334.58 billion, the Commerce Department said Tuesday….A rebounding housing market has boosted the economy–making homeowners feel more confident, driving spending on building materials and creating construction jobs.

The bad news is that this is all good news, but not great news. What’s more, thanks to the drag of federal spending cuts, broader economic measures remain stuck in OK range, not in the “catching up from a horrible recession” range. Still, it’s all modestly promising stuff. And the car story includes this:

Boosted by the robust sales and healthy profits, automakers are planning to move long-discussed innovation from the test track to the road. General Motors has said it will develop a car by the end of the decade that will be able to drive itself in most circumstances. Nissan, meanwhile, has said it will introduce a driverless car by 2020.

Really? I’m usually the most rah-rah guy in the room when it comes to advances in AI, but even I wouldn’t have guessed that truly autonomous cars would be ready before 2025 or so. I wonder just how autonomous these Nissan and GM cars will be by 2020? Really, truly able to acccept a destination and just drive you there with no help? Or kinda sorta autonomous in most situations, but they still can’t navigate in parking lots or in the fog? I guess we’ll all find out in seven years.

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Today Brings Us Three Rays of Economic Sunshine

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How Wireless Carriers Make You Trash Your Phone Before It’s Really Broken

by BessMEIF Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Years ago, someone stole my very first cellphone (a flip model with—get this—an antenna) out of my bag on the New York City subway. I despaired. As a grad student, I was chronically broke and couldn’t afford a replacement. Luckily, a generous friend gave me an old phone unearthed from his desk drawer. I got a new SIM card, switched it into my friend’s handset, and added my contacts. Problem solved.

It wouldn’t be so simple these days. In the mid-’90s, wireless companies began to place digital locks on their phones so that consumers couldn’t transfer them to a new carrier. It’s relatively easy to unlock a phone—you can download the necessary code for a few bucks. But as of January 26, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you can no longer do this legally. The 1998 law, aimed mostly at curbing digital piracy, also outlawed cellphone unlocking, but the US Copyright Office had always granted an exemption since unlocking phones really has little to do with copyright. The wireless industry didn’t like that—it argued that because carriers often subsidize the cost of phones, it’s not fair to let customers take their device to a competitor.

The Copyright Office has apparently embraced that argument: This year, for the first time, it denied the usual requests by organizations and individuals to extend the exemption. Consumer advocates are now fuming over what Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, calls “a huge and expensive inconvenience.”

But there’s another reason the unlocking ban is a bad idea: It stifles the secondary phone market—which, of course, is just what phone companies want. “If a person purchases a used handset, they will not be purchasing a subsidized handset from the carrier and signing a two-year contract,” explains James Mosieur, director of a reuse charity called the 911 Cell Phone Bank.

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How Wireless Carriers Make You Trash Your Phone Before It’s Really Broken

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Alaska’s heat wave breaking records, killing salmon

by BessMEIF Posted on August 1, 2013

Alaska’s heat wave breaking records, killing salmon

By John Upton

Douglas Brown

A grizzly bear basks in the Alaskan sun.

Something smells fishy about a record-breaking heat wave in Alaska.

It might be the piles of dead salmon.

The Land of the Midnight Sun has been sweating, relatively speaking, through a hot and sun-soaked summer. From the AP:

Anchorage has set a record for the most consecutive days over 70 degrees during this unusually warm summer, while Fairbanks is closing in on its own seasonal heat record.

The National Weather Service said Alaska’s largest city topped out at 70 degrees at 4 p.m. Tuesday, making it the 14th straight day the thermometer read 70 or higher. That breaks a record of 13 straight days set in 2004.

In Fairbanks, temperatures Monday reached 80 or higher for the 29th day this summer.

While most of the world is getting warmer, the 49th state appeared recently to be getting colder – the temporary effect of a long-term oceanic weather pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Now the unusually toasty summer is raising questions about whether climate change is heating up the state, though some are arguing the heat wave could just be an anomaly.

What isn’t being questioned is the link between the hot weather and a die-off of 1,100 king salmon. The fish were returning to a hatchery south of Petersburg to spawn when they succumbed to hot water and low oxygen levels, perhaps worsened by low tides. From a weekend report by the AP:

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sportfish biologist Doug Fleming said he found the dead fish July 18 after last week’s warm weather, when temperatures were in the 80s.

He began monitoring water levels earlier in the week when it appeared temperatures were reaching dangerous levels.

“And so, getting through till Wednesday which appeared to be the hottest day, then on Thursday I was conducting an aerial survey just to get a grip on how many fish may have been killed by the warm water, not expecting to see a large die-off but some, and I was shocked to see the numbers of fish that we lost,” he said.

So hold your nose when you enjoy your paddle in that balmy river, Alaskans.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Shell to drill world’s deepest offshore oil well in Gulf of Mexico

by BessMEIF Posted on May 10, 2013

Shell to drill world’s deepest offshore oil well in Gulf of Mexico

By John Upton

Shutterstock /

Tupungato

It’s getting harder to find the oil to fill ‘er up.

Royal Dutch Shell plans to stick its oil-extracting tentacles deeper under the Gulf of Mexico than any oil company ever has.

Shell is preparing to drill 9,500 feet — nearly two miles — beneath the surface of the sea to suck oil out of a reserve that was discovered eight years ago, 200 miles southeast of New Orleans. The deepest oil well currently in operation, at 8,000 feet deep, is operated nearby in the Gulf, also by Shell.

The quest for deeper wells reflects advancing technology and increasing desperation as shallower reserves dry up. From Reuters:

[T]he project … is estimated to have 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent in place.

The lure of offshore development is a strong one, despite the expense and risk.

“Ultra-deep” wells, drilled in water at least 1.5 km (4,500 feet) deep, and often into several more kilometres of rock to the reservoir below, accounted for around half of all the world’s new discoveries in the first half of last year.

NPR’s Debbie Elliot puts the news in some perspective:

The Shell facility will be further offshore and about twice as deep as BP’s disastrous well that blew three years ago. It took months to quell that undersea gusher, in part because of the inherent difficulties and risks associated with drilling for oil so deep under the sea.

Still, deepwater exploration has picked up since the Obama administration lifted a moratorium imposed in the wake of the BP disaster.

[Analyst Lauren] Payne says there are about three dozen deepwater rigs operating in the Gulf right now, and she expects even more.

If we all were driving electric vehicles powered by renewables, there would be no need for this risky behavior by Big Oil.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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