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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

Many of the economic risks of climate change are already crystal clear, and yet financial markets have yet to take them into account. That dangerous disconnect is the impetus behind a new report out on Monday from the sustainable finance nonprofit Ceres.

“U.S. financial regulators, who are responsible for protecting the stability and competitiveness of the U.S. economy, need to recognize and act on climate change as a systemic risk,” the report says. It calls on financial regulators across seven federal agencies as well as state agencies to do so, offering more than 50 recommendations that the authors believe are under the purview of regulators today, without the need for any additional legislation.

The report highlights three ways climate change is a systemic risk to financial markets. There are the physical risks of a warming planet — droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and intense storms will cause direct economic losses. This reality is already abundantly clear: The 2017 hurricane season caused $58 to $63 billion in damages in Florida alone. In 2018, wildfires in California burned up $12 billion in insured losses and led to the bankruptcy of the state’s largest utility, which took criminal responsibility for starting one of the fires.

Then there are socioeconomic risks, which are manifold. Industries that rely on physical outdoor labor, like agriculture and construction, will see productivity losses as temperatures rise. Economies that rely on tourism could be hurt by not only the physical risks outlined above but also by biodiversity loss. Higher temperatures will come with significant health impacts, including respiratory issues, premature deaths, and the spread of disease as carriers like mosquitos move into new habitats.

The third category is transition risk — the idea that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy is inevitable, and that companies in denial about that are setting themselves up to lose money. Transition risk includes possibilities like a carbon tax, changes in consumer sentiment, or the loss of investments in fossil fuel assets with long lifespans, like pipelines, that could end up out of commission before they are paid off.

The report calls on the Federal Reserve System, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Housing Finance Authority, and insurance regulators, among other financial regulatory bodies, to first and foremost acknowledge that climate change poses a systemic risk to financial market stability. Veena Ramani, Ceres’ senior program director for capital markets systems, said in a press call that once these agencies publicly affirm this fact, that will mean acknowledging that it’s within their mandate to address climate risks in their rulemaking.

So what might that look like? Ceres’ recommendations for regulatory agencies include doing deeper research on how climate change will affect the economic stability of the U.S. Regulators could also require banks and insurance companies to integrate climate change into their “stress tests” — analyses of how well an entity can withstand a financial crisis — and to reflect the costs of climate change in their decision making. The report also recommends that regulators encourage corporate transparency about climate risk — something that the SEC actually issued guidance on a decade ago, but then promptly eased up on enforcing. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance sent 49 comment letters to companies about their climate risk disclosures in 2010, but has sent only six such letters over the last four years.

Finally, the report advocates for financial regulators to require that banks disclose the carbon emissions from their lending and investment activities, and define which activities will make climate change worse and which will help mitigate the systemic risks posed by the crisis — and then reorient capital toward those solutions.

Many of the recommendations made in the report have already been implemented in other countries. For example, late last year, the Bank of England announced it would subject U.K. banks and insurers to climate resilience stress tests. Just this past Friday, the E.U.’s top banking regulator, the European Banking Authority, issued new guidelines that require banks to incorporate climate risks into their credit policies. The guidelines also say that banks should assess whether borrowers could be found responsible for contributing to global warming. They cite a European Commission report from 2018 that found that “close to 50% of the exposure of euro area institutions to risk is directly or indirectly linked to risks stemming from climate change.”

Also on Friday, the International Monetary Fund published a new chapter of its latest global financial stability report calling for climate risk to become a part of international reporting standards. The chapter highlights how little of an impact known risks like extreme weather events have had on markets.

In a press call about the Ceres report, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said that industries are finally awakening to the fact that climate change is not just a public relations issue. “This is something for their risk managers, this is something for their chief executives,” he said. “Whether you’re in agriculture, or insurance, or banking, or investment, these are dire warnings pointing right at the heart of your business.”

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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

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New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits

Three years ago, a first-of-its-kind legal case argued that fossil fuel companies were liable for climate change — and should pay up to help cities adapt. That case, filed in July 2017 by two counties and one city in California against 20 fossil fuel companies, alleged that emissions from those companies will be responsible for an estimated 7.4 feet of sea-level rise in coming years.

What happened next is reminiscent of what occurred in the 1990s, when states filed lawsuits against tobacco companies in droves and the public rapidly soured on the industry. More California cities filed climate liability lawsuits against Big Oil, seeking reparations for climate change and its effects. Then other cities and counties from across the country filed their own suits. Oil companies went to court over claims that they lied to investors and the public about climate change, damaged fisheries, and impinged on young people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

At every turn, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell fought tooth and nail against the wave of lawsuits, arguing that the plaintiffs should look to the federal government, not the private sector, for financial assistance related to climate change. Now, a new investigation from InsideClimate News has revealed that the federal government has been working with some of those oil companies to oppose the wave of lawsuits.

Some 178 pages of emails between U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and industry lawyers — obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council — show the government has been planning to come to the aid of these lawsuit-afflicted companies since early 2018. Not only did the DOJ work on an amicus — “friend of the court” — brief in support of major oil companies shortly after the San Francisco and Oakland lawsuits were filed, but the department was also working with Republican attorneys generals from 15 states to come up with a plan to help those companies. Department of Justice attorneys had several phone calls with lawyers defending BP, Chevron, Exxon, and other oil companies, and even met some of them in person.

Curiously, the Department of Justice did not reach out to the plaintiffs in the cases, like the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, to collaborate. The department’s environmental division, which bills itself as “the nation’s environmental lawyer,” opted to covertly work with industry groups rather than the communities it’s supposed to represent.

“The Trump administration’s position is ‘We’re going to side with the fossil fuel interests in the nuisance cases over these cities,’” Phillip Gregory, co-council for the young people’s climate case, Juliana v. United States, told Grist.

“It’s very unusual for the federal government to be so aligned with industry on a damages case,” he said, particularly when the government isn’t implicated in the case. If the lawsuits were successful, oil companies, not the federal government, would be compelled to pay the damages.

Still, it’s unclear whether the DOJ crossed a line. “It wouldn’t pass the sniff test if the DOJ was trying to address substantive issues,” Justin Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told InsideClimate News. “If the meetings were about the logistics, there’s nothing improper.”

To Gregory, the DOJ’s actions appear nothing if not political. “The Trump administration wants to control all dealings concerning fossil fuels, even though the fossil fuels are harming the youth of America,” he said. “It’s very capable of looking out for the fossil fuel industry — capable and willing.”

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New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits

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911 Is Practically Useless for Millions of People. Here’s Why.

Mother Jones

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When Julian Singleton called 911 about two years ago, it didn’t go well. It was the middle of the night and his 83-year-old wife, Bernice, had fallen and lay unconscious on the kitchen floor. The retired graphics art instructor wanted to call 911, but because Julian has been deaf his entire life, he knew that he first had to call a video relay service. Once connected, he would sign with an interpreter and the interpreter would then speak to the emergency call center in Maricopa County, Arizona. The responses then would be signed back to Singleton in a laborious process that could rob his wife of crucial minutes of care.

But Singleton still went through it. He had no other options. Once connected with 911, he remembers the operator peppering him with questions. “My wife is laying here on the floor,” he tells Mother Jones through an interpreter. “I can’t be answering these questions…So I gave up and hung up. I picked up my wife and took her to the hospital myself.”

Singleton is one of about 1 million people over the age of five who are functionally deaf. There are also 37.5 million adults who have some trouble hearing, according to the National Institutes of Health, and in the first nationally representative study, Johns Hopkins University estimates that 1 in 5 Americans who are at least 12 years old suffer from hearing loss so severe it could make communication difficult.

Those who cannot easily communicate over the phone—and this includes some people with autism, speech disabilities, cerebral palsy, and other conditions—face sometimes life-threatening barriers when trying to call emergency services at 911. The 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act guaranteed direct and equal access to emergency services, and a year later the Department of Justice established rules requiring call centers to be accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing. But this all occurred before cellphones became widely used and relies on an outdated technology known as TTY, or text telephone, in which two people who each have a keyboard communicate through phone lines.

“The old US Department of Justice regulations say all 911 centers must be accessible to use by TTY and voice-over,” Claude Stout, executive director of Telecommunications for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing, explains through an interpreter. “But the problem is, not many of us use TTYs anymore.”

That’s why disability rights lawyers have joined with deaf advocates in New York and Arizona—where Singleton is a plaintiff—to sue localities charging that emergency services are out of compliance with the ADA by not providing equal access to 911. In Arizona, two other residents and the National Association of the Deaf, a group that advocates on behalf of the deaf and hard of hearing, are suing the state, some cities, local governments, and government agencies. In New York, New York City is being sued as well as emergency service agencies in Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island. Both lawsuits are calling on the courts to require call centers to adopt text-to-911 technologies. In a statement to Mother Jones, the National Association for the Deaf says it has “determined that litigation is necessary to effectuate a nationwide solution.”

Stout explains the failure to update the regulations from the early 1990s have left the deaf and those who cannot communicate easily over the phone dependent on others to access emergency care. He knows from personal experience. When Stout thought he was having a heart attack in 2011, he says he’s lucky he wasn’t alone. His colleagues in the office were around to drive him to the hospital.

Even though deaf people can reach emergency services through relay services, the many steps required in the process makes equal access impossible. “The average time is anywhere from three to eight minutes before we’re connected to the 911 center,” Richard Ray, an expert on the issue who works on improving accessibility and ADA compliance for the city of Los Angeles, explains through an interpreter. “Each second counts in those emergency situations.” This wait time is far from “functionally equivalent” to that of a hearing person as required by the ADA, Ray notes. The national standard established by the National Emergency Number Association requires 90 percent of 911 calls to be picked up within 10 seconds.

This isn’t a new problem, but disability advocates argue there is a simple solution: 911 call centers should be able to transmit and receive texts. “Texting to 911 should have been set up yesterday,” Ray explains. “We’re not in a situation where we can wait any longer.” Additionally, texting would provide another option for everyone to reach emergency services when calling might be unsafe, like during an ongoing break in.

One problem with adopting text-to-911 technology is structural. According to Kevin Murray, CEO of Mission Critical Partners, a public safety consulting company, and the former chair of the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies, every new technology requires a workaround because the infrastructure at emergency call centers was developed in the 1970s and 1980s. While text-to911 can be added, it’s a complicated process. “Imagine you buy the latest 3-D TVs and LED TVs and you bought your home automation systems and you purchased all these advanced technologies,” Murray says, “but then you hooked them up to a pair of outside analogue antennas.” He notes that this is comparable to what is happening with 911 today because “there are no broadband connections that really tie these systems together.”

Call centers are regulated and funded differently depending on the state and jurisdiction, which means access to 911 depends a lot on where one lives. In some states, text-to-911 is available everywhere, but in other states it doesn’t exist at all or access can vary from county to county. Out of the nearly 6,000 call centers nationwide, fewer than 1,000 accept text messages. To ensure universal access, the federal government would have to start enforcing the ADA. Murray says the industry is out of compliance with the law and the current state of access is “an embarrassment to the industry and to the US as a whole.”

Some call centers are using workarounds to integrate text-to-911 into the outdated infrastructure, but there’s also another option: Next Generation 911, a new system that allows people to communicate with 911 digitally. Eventually the technology will allow people to send images to or even video-call emergency services. Some places, such as Vermont, have upgraded already, and public safety leaders are pushing for Next Generation 911 to be available throughout the country by 2020, but Murray says there’s no federal commitment or funding to implement the service and meet that deadline. Even without it, the jurisdictions that have adopted Next Gen have call centers that are funded locally.

Back in 2010, the Department of Justice announced plans to propose new rules to make emergency services accessible with modern technology and accepted comments on the matter for about six months. Disability advocates are hopeful the new administration will continue to move forward with the process and update the rules later this year, as previously scheduled by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under the Obama administration. The division declined a request for comment from Mother Jones about next steps.

Real change may be forced by the courts. Both of the lawsuits seeking equal access to 911 are in their early stages, but Vargas, an attorney for the plaintiffs in Arizona, doesn’t believe arguments against the lawsuit will hold up. The judge has denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit, in which they argued call centers already provide adequate access and follow federal guidelines. “If I were a 911 provider that was not providing text-to-911 access, I would be calling a meeting tomorrow to make it happen because this is not a negotiable issue,” she says. “You cannot choose not to provide 911 access to people because of disability. It’s simply the most profound kind of discrimination.”

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911 Is Practically Useless for Millions of People. Here’s Why.

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The First Big Fight Over Sanctuary Cities Pits a Latina Sheriff Against Texas’ Governor

Mother Jones

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In the Democratic hotbed of Austin, Texas, newly elected Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez announced last Friday that her department would join hundreds of counties around the country in reducing its cooperation with federal immigration officials. Unless presented with a warrant or court order, the sheriff’s department would no longer comply with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to hold inmates suspected of being undocumented or notify the agency ahead of their release.

Hernandez’s decision, which goes into effect February 1 and makes the county Texas’ first designated sanctuary, has prompted considerable backlash from Texas Republicans. And now, perhaps inspired by President Donald Trump’s threats to strip federal funding from “sanctuary jurisdictions,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has demanded that Hernandez reverse course—or risk millions of dollars in state funding.

In an interview on Fox & Friends on Wednesday, Abbott called Hernandez’s actions “outrageous” and vowed to ban sanctuary cities in Texas. He promised to cut off state grants to cities, pursue legislation that would remove officials that promote the practice, and impose criminal and financial penalties. The Texas Tribune reported on Friday that Abbott’s office had requested a list of federal and state funding to Travis County from the state’s budget office.

In a letter to Hernandez, the governor noted that the county sheriff department received $1.8 million in grant money from the state’s Criminal Justice Division in 2015. Still, Hernandez—who promised during her campaign to cut cooperation with ICE—has so far refused to stand down, telling the Texas Tribune that she would not let “fear and misinformation” dictate her actions.

This isn’t the first time the state government has had a rift with a county sheriff over immigration enforcement. In 2015, Abbott vowed to withhold state funds from Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez when she said she would assess ICE hold requests on a case-by-case basis. (She later said her remarks were taken out of context and promised to comply with federal immigration officials.) In November, state Sen. Charles Perry introduced a bill that required county jails to comply with federal immigration officials and effectively banned sanctuary cities in Texas. The bill is currently in the Senate Committee on State Affairs and slated for a public hearing on February 2; a similar attempt at enacting a ban faltered in 2015.) And in December, when students at several Texas universities called on administrators to establish safe havens for undocumented immigrants on campus, Abbott promised on Twitter that he would slash funding for state universities that became sanctuary campuses.

Just this week, Trump signed an executive order that would slash federal funding to cities and counties that opted not to cooperate with federal deportation efforts. In Austin’s case, that would amount to $43 million in federal grants. It’s unclear to what extent the White House will be able to carry out the order, which will likely face stiff challenges in court.

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The First Big Fight Over Sanctuary Cities Pits a Latina Sheriff Against Texas’ Governor

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The Next Keystone? Protesters Try to Stop Another Huge Oil Pipeline.

Mother Jones

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Tensions continue to rise over the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (known also as the Bakken Pipeline), a proposed 1,172-mile project currently under construction. Demonstrations over the pipeline, which will travel from North Dakota’s northwest Bakken region to southern Illinois, have grown steadily over the last few weeks. As many as 4,000 people have reportedly joined the Standing Rock Sioux in protesting the pipeline, which is slated to travel beneath sacred Native lands and cross under the Missouri River, the region’s main source of drinking water. The protesters have gathered along the border of the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, blocking the construction site. (Read Mother Jones‘ report on the pipeline here.)

RELATED: The government quietly just approved this enormous oil pipeline

On Monday, according to the Bismarck Tribune, Greg Wilz, Division Director of Homeland Security, ordered the removal of the state-owned water tanks and trailers that had been providing the protesters with drinking water. Wilz attributed the decision to alleged criminal activity—specifically two complaints of laser pointers being shined in the eyes of pilots of surveillance aircraft monitoring the protest. “Based on the scenario down there, we don’t believe that equipment is secure,” he said. The supplies were provided last week by the North Dakota Department of Health at the request of the tribe.

Authorities in North Dakota have now arrested 29 protesters in the last two weeks, including the tribal chairman. A federal judge will rule by September 9 on the injunction filed by the Standing Rock Sioux to prevent construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Pipeline protesters—including actors Shailene Woodley and Susan Sarandon—have also gathered in New York and Washington, DC. Woodley has been protesting the pipeline for weeks, documenting the peaceful nature of the Standing Rock demonstration in North Dakota on her Twitter page before returning to DC for the rally, which took place Wednesday outside a federal court building where challenges to the permits were being heard.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben also weighed in on the pipeline with an article published Monday. Indigenous populations like the Standing Rock Sioux “have been the vanguard of the movement to slow down climate change,” wrote McKibben.

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a press release of his own on Thursday, condemning the pipeline and upholding the grassroots efforts to stop it. “Regardless of the court’s decision, the Dakota Access pipeline must be stopped,” he wrote. “As a nation, our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on oil. I join with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many tribal nations fighting this dangerous pipeline.”

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The Next Keystone? Protesters Try to Stop Another Huge Oil Pipeline.

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

Mother Jones

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Just before President Barack Obama announced his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, making her the first Latina justice, he said he wanted to choose someone with life experience that provided “a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” On Monday, she put that perspective to work in a fiery dissent in a case involving a potentially illegal police stop, excoriating her colleagues for misunderstanding the police harassment to which people of color are regularly subjected.

“Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language,” Sotomayor, the child of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in the Bronx, wrote to readers of her dissent, to which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also signed on. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”

The case being decided, Utah v. Strieff, has spanned a decade since an anonymous tip in 2006 about alleged drug activity in a South Salt Lake City residence led officer Douglas Fackrell to spend a week surveilling people entering and exiting the house. One day, after watching Edward Strieff visit the house, Fackrell followed him to a convenience store across the street and demanded to know what he’d been doing there. He also asked Strieff for his ID; after running a check on it, learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic violation, so he arrested him. During his search, Fackrell found meth and drug paraphernalia on Strieff, who was ultimately charged with illegal possession.

At trial, even the prosecutor conceded that Fackrell’s stop of Strieff was illegal, because he had no reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity to justify requesting his ID. But the state asked the judge to allow the drug evidence anyway, arguing that the outstanding arrest warrant merited the search. The trial court allowed the drug evidence to be introduced, and as a result Strieff pleaded guilty to lesser charges, but reserved his right to challenge the search in court. That was a smart move, as the Utah Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor and found that the drug evidence, tainted by the illegal stop, should never have been admitted into court.

But on Monday, the US Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision, overturned the Utah high court on the grounds that Fackrell’s conduct was a mistake, “negligent” behavior that shouldn’t lead to the exclusion of the drug evidence. “There is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. (The decision came on a day when the court was buzzing with erroneous rumors that Thomas was considering retiring.) The majority found Fackrell’s conduct mostly harmless and inconsequential, justified by the existence of the outstanding traffic warrant and hardly part of a larger pattern of misconduct.

Sotomayor disagreed vehemently, arguing that the majority, which included liberal Justice Stephen Breyer alongside the court’s conservatives, had stripped Strieff’s case of its context. “Respectfully,” she writes in her dissent, “nothing about this case is isolated.”

Sotomayor cited a list of sources that Black Lives Matter activists would cheer: Michelle Alexander and her book The New Jim Crow; Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me; and the Justice Department Civil Rights Division’s report on the problems with excessive warrants in Ferguson, Missouri, a city of 21,000 where 16,000 people (including non-residents) had outstanding warrants.

Her point was to show that outstanding warrants are so common, and so widely abused, that they should never be used to justify illegal stops by police. At the time of Strieff’s arrest, she noted, Salt Lake City had a backlog of 180,000 outstanding misdemeanor warrants, so many that it was at risk of getting in trouble with the Justice Department. She cited statistics showing law enforcement’s frequent use of warrants to stop all sorts of people for no good reason, writing, “Surely we would not allow officers to warrant-check random joggers, dog walkers, and lemonade vendors just to ensure they pose no threat to anyone else.”

Sotomayor argued that Fackrell stopped Strieff illegally as part of a drug investigation, knowing that the odds were decent that his target would have an outstanding warrant for something. The Fourth Amendment and decades of Supreme Court precedent, she said, should have caused the fruits of that illegal stop to been thrown out. She reminded her colleagues of the real-world consequences of such “good-faith mistakes,” as the majority called Fackrell’s actions, describing the indignities inflicted upon people arrested after these sorts of stops: body cavity searches, handcuffing, public humiliation, and a permanent arrest record, among others.

Monday was not the first time Sotomayor has reminded her colleagues about how the real word works. In oral arguments in a death penalty case last fall, she referred to her own jailed relatives to highlight racism in jury selection.

Sotomayor concluded with a reference to Eric Garner, the New York man who was choked to death by police who were harassing him on suspicion of selling single cigarettes. “We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,'” she wrote. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere… They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

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

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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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

Mother Jones

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Since I happened to mention the famous Case/Deaton mortality study in the previous post, here’s the latest from Andrew Gelman. As you may recall, Case and Deaton concluded that mortality among middle-aged whites from suicide, alcohol, and drug poisoning had skyrocketed over the past two decades. This set pundits afire with theories about what was going on, but Gelman has done some age adjustment to the cohorts that Case and Deaton used, and then broken up the data by gender, and then by geographic area. Here’s what he gets:

After 2005, there’s no effect on middle-aged men at all. It’s all women. And if you break it down further, nearly the entire effect is concentrated among women in the South. But why? Gelman punts:

I don’t have any explanations for this. As I told a reporter the other day, I believe in the division of labor: I try to figure out what’s happening, and I’ll let other people explain why.

I think that’s wise. For one thing, if you slice the data in a different way, you might get a different result. What’s more, as I’ve mentioned several times, the increased mortality affects the young too, not just the middle aged. So if you spun some brilliant theories about why middle-aged whites are so damn depressed these days, you might want to rethink things. Your new theory needs to explain why the young and the middle-aged are dying in greater numbers, and you also need to explain why it’s affecting primarily women in the South. Good luck.

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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

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The Feds Just Sued Volkswagen Over Its Emissions Scandal

Mother Jones

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The Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against Volkswagen over charges that the company installed illegal software on more than half a million vehicles sold in the United States that allowed them to cheat on emissions tests.

“Car manufacturers that fail to properly certify their cars and that defeat emission control systems breach the public trust, endanger public health and disadvantage competitors,” Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement.

Back in September, the Environmental Protection Agency filed a citation carrying the possibility of billions of dollars in fines against Volkswagen after the agency discovered that 500,000 VW diesel-powered cars sold since 2009 were designed to deliberately emit much lower levels of harmful gases during official testing than during actual on-the-road driving. A month later, the scandal widened to include an additional 10,000 cars. By some estimates, the excess emissions caused by VW’s cars could contribute to thousands of deaths.

For VW, the fallout has been long and damning. The company’s share price fell off a cliff immediately after the first allegations and has only recovered a little bit in the months since. The CEO has been replaced. The episode prompted the EPA to overhaul its emissions testing procedures to better catch similar evasion tactics in the future. And the company now faces lawsuits from pissed-off drivers and car dealers.

The suit today represents the Obama administration’s first steps to follow up on the EPA’s allegations. The suit says VW could be liable for up to $6,500 in fines per vehicle—totaling to more than $3 billion—and adds that recalls or other possible remedies are still being considered. It also says criminal charges haven’t yet been ruled out. In a statement, a Volkswagen spokesperson said the company “will continue to work cooperatively with the EPA on developing remedies to bring the TDI vehicles into full compliance with regulations as soon as possible,” and that it “will continue to cooperate with all government agencies investigating these matters.”

This post has been updated.

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The Feds Just Sued Volkswagen Over Its Emissions Scandal

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The Obama Administration Is (Rather Belatedly) Making Homegrown Terrorism a Priority

Mother Jones

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In the wake of this year’s series of devastating mass shootings on American soil, the Department of Justice is boosting its efforts to fight the loosely defined menace of “domestic terrorism” with the appointment this week of a “domestic terrorism counsel.” The new appointee has not yet been named but will coordinate cases, identify trends, and “analyze legal gaps or enhancements required to ensure we can combat these threats,” Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, head of the agency’s National Security Division, said Wednesday.

“We recognize that, over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups,” Carlin said in a speech at George Washington University.

Mass shootings have struck a number of communities across the United States this year, from this summer’s massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, to the killings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon earlier this month.

The shooting in Charleston set off debates in the media and across society on how the perpetrators of ideologically motivated attacks are to be viewed. Are they disenfranchised, potentially mentally ill young Americans? Or are they “domestic terrorists”? And if the latter, what qualifies as domestic terrorism? FBI Director James Comey drew criticism for saying shortly after the Charleston shooting that the attack did not appear to bear the marks of terrorism, a claim contested by historians and security experts.

Carlin on Wednesday offered an expansive definition of violent extremism and terrorism, terms he used interchangeably, saying, “The threat ranges from individuals motivated by anti-government animus, to eco-radicalism, to racism, as it has for decades.”

Carlin also drew a close parallel between these domestic attacks and the activities of the brutal radical Islamist group ISIS, which has seized broad swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria and is currently under fire from US air strikes.

Both ISIS and domestic extremists have made intensive use of social media to promulgate their messages and attract followers, and both have lately seen a rise in attacks by “lone offenders,” he said.

While there is no definitive evidence proving the role of social media use in the rising tide of mass shootings, a recent Mother Jones investigation found that many law enforcement and forensic psychology experts do believe there is a connection.

In order to combat the menace of homegrown terrorism, Carlin called for the use of all means at investigators’ disposal—including, controversially, the cooperation of internet service providers.

“Service providers must take responsibility for how their services can be abused,” he said. “Responsible providers understand what the threats are and take action to prevent terrorist groups from abusing their services to induce recruits to commit terrorist acts.”

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The Obama Administration Is (Rather Belatedly) Making Homegrown Terrorism a Priority

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