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Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns Use Black Lives Matter Language to Boost Turnout

by SharronMahoney Posted on November 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the election one day away, it’s already clear that black voter turnout won’t reach the historic highs it set when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Early voting numbers show that fewer African Americans have cast ballots in key battleground states like North Carolina than in the past two presidential elections. Recent incidents of police violence against African Americans have done little to help, deepening the distrust of the state and disillusionment with political leaders among some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. And while Donald Trump has actively alienated black voters with his rhetoric, black activists have also criticized Hillary Clinton for backing the tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s that contributed to mass incarceration.

But several initiatives are trying to get African Americans to the polls by using the very language of this movement—despite its skepticism of politicians—arguing that even if some voters are unenthusiastic about the presidential race, the vote is a necessary part of building black political power and holding elected officials accountable at every level of government.

Taylor Campbell, campaign manager of #WeBuiltThis, a digital get-out-the-vote initiative focused on boosting black millennial turnout, says the campaign has tried to spread the message that voting is “an important part of our toolbox of organizing towards black liberation.” #WeBuiltThis, launched last month, has worked to reach young black voters through social media, visual messaging campaigns, and op-eds written by young black organizers on websites like the Huffington Post and The Root.

“A lot of times when folks want to engage black millennials, the way they engage is around the presidential election,” Campbell says. “We’re not talking about Hillary or Trump. We’re talking about the work that can be done, specifically at the state and local level, to effect change and to improve the material conditions of black life.”

Predicting the voting behavior of black millennials this year has been a challenge. Although Clinton is expected to win the overwhelming majority of the black vote, younger African Americans have been wary of her candidacy. That skepticism has fueled concerns that black turnout will be significantly lower than in 2008 or 2012—perhaps an unfair benchmark, given the enthusiasm Obama engendered. But at the same time, racial justice has moved into the spotlight as Black Lives Matter has created new outlets for black political engagement by sparking a national conversation about the role the government should play in matters of race and policing.

Those are the very issues that #WeBuiltThis and similar campaigns have highlighted, noting that voting is a way to hold politicians accountable on a wide array of issues important to black voters, from criminal justice reform to political negligence in the Flint water crisis. “There may not be excitement about politics and offices, but they understand that they have to be in the streets and the voting booth in numbers,” says Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that assisted with the development of the #WeBuiltThis campaign.

Black activists have become a particularly powerful force in local politics. Earlier this year, frustration over the delayed indictment of the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald in Chicago led to the activist-driven #ByeAnita campaign, helping to oust Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, black organizers successfully denied re-election to the district attorney who failed to bring charges against the officer responsible for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

That’s the type of change Color of Change PAC Director Arisha Hatch wants to see on Election Day. In September, Color of Change PAC, the political arm of a prominent online racial justice group, began organizing Black Battleground Text-a-Thons in cities across the country, culminating in the launch of its #VotingWhileBlack voter mobilization effort last month. “We’re trying to prove that if engaged, black voters will turn out to vote regardless of if Barack Obama is on the ballot, or regardless of whether there is a presidential race,” Hatch says. Volunteers with the initiative have sent more than one million text messages to voters in battleground states. In the final weekend before Election Day, the campaign hopes to reach an additional one million people.

Whereas Color of Change PAC has emphasized the importance of local and state races, the nation’s first black president has focused largely on the presidential contest. During a Thursday speech in Florida, Obama aimed much of his message at young black voters, telling them that by going to the polls they “can bend the arc of history in a better direction.” Older black organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus have framed voting as a necessary responsibility for black youth, often referring to the battle for the vote during the Civil Rights Movement as proof of their obligation.

But that approach might be limited in its effectiveness. “The classic argument that ‘our ancestors fought and died for the right to vote’ isn’t enough and doesn’t wash with millennials,” says Dominique Apollon, research director of RaceForward, a group focused on finding innovative methods of advancing racial justice. He says that older civil rights groups would be wise to acknowledge the disillusionment young black voters feel. After the shootings of many unarmed black men and women, he says, some young people “feel that they are in a state of emergency.” Over the summer, RaceForward conducted focus groups with young black activists in an effort to understand their perspective on voting. They found that while black millennials lacked enthusiasm about the presidential election, they were interested in local races, and it was easier to engage them with local politics.

The activists of the movement surrounding Black Lives Matter have frequently accused politicians of contributing to the recent crises and of being incapable of producing real change. But in the final weeks before the election, several well-known black activists, including DeRay Mckesson and Brittany Packnett of Campaign Zero, issued endorsements of Clinton, arguing that she would be better than Trump in protecting black lives. The get-out-the-vote campaigns have not endorsed a presidential candidate, but they similarly make the case that voting can be a path to achieving the movement’s goals.

“Black voters see the struggle, and we understand what currently is at stake in our lives and our communities,” says Dianis. “We can use the ballot box as the next way to build power.”

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Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns Use Black Lives Matter Language to Boost Turnout

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This Abortion Clinic Had to Shut Down Because It’s Expensive to Protect Against Violence

by AnaFinlayczw Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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A Planned Parenthood clinic in Appleton, Wisconsin, is closing down. But not because of the state’s staunchly anti-abortion Legislature.

After two civilians and one police officer were killed at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last November, the women’s health care provider reworked its security plans for each affiliate. The Appleton clinic, which provides a range of reproductive health services beyond abortion to Wisconsin women, is unable to fulfill the new requirements. The closure of this clinic means Wisconsin is down to two Planned Parenthood clinics, 80 miles apart, that provide abortions—one in Milwaukee and one in Madison.

In 2015, anti-abortion activist David Daleiden released undercover videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials involved in selling fetal tissue—a federal crime. This led to a string of 12 state and four congressional investigations, but none revealed any evidence of wrongdoing by the provider. The videos did reinvigorate the anti-abortion movement, and threats of violence against abortion providers surged, culminating in the Colorado Springs clinic shooting.

For local affiliates, this has meant providing more security and, as Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin Chief Operating Officer Chris Williams told the Capitol Times, the Appleton facility was unable to meet the “more stringent and scrutinized approach.” The Appleton clinic has experienced violence in the past. In 2012, anti-abortion activist Francis Grady threw a homemade explosive device through a window and damaged a small exam room. The facility was closed when the incident occurred, so no one was injured, and it reopened less than a week later.

The biggest concern was the state of the clinic building, Williams told the Capitol Times, and retrofitting it to make it secure would have cost nearly $300,000. He did not specify what precisely needed to be done. The clinic performed about 600 abortions per year, according to Williams. Collectively, the Madison and Milwaukee Planned Parenthoods provide about 3,400 abortions annually.

It’s no secret that Wisconsin has a history of passing stringent anti-abortion restrictions, and its governor, Scott Walker, has been quoted saying that choosing the life of a pregnant women or her fetus is a “false choice.” Planned Parenthood is currently suing the state for $1.8 million to reimburse the legal costs of fighting restrictions such as those from Texas that were recently struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

The closure means women will now have to drive 200 or 300 miles to one of the other Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinics, or go as far as Chicago or Minneapolis. Another option would be in Marquette, Michigan, where a single Planned Parenthood-affiliated physician provides abortions, but the scheduling is infrequent and can be unpredictable.

“While this decision is extremely disappointing and difficult to make, we believe our staff and patients deserve the best health care environment,” said Teri Huyuck, CEO of Planned Parenthood Wisconsin, in a statement. “We remain committed to finding other opportunities to enhance abortion access. We also call on elected officials and community leaders to create a dialogue that prioritizes women’s health and stop the hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers that breed acts of violence.”

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This Abortion Clinic Had to Shut Down Because It’s Expensive to Protect Against Violence

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US Justice Department Blasts Baltimore PD for Rampant Racism

by DominicScanlan Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two weeks after a Baltimore prosecutor dropped charges against the remaining officers awaiting trial in the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the US Department of Justice on Wednesday released a scathing 163-page report on its investigation into the policies and practices of the Baltimore Police Department.

The DOJ interviewed hundreds of Baltimore residents, as well as officers and other police officials. It also reviewed training materials, data on pedestrian and vehicle stops, data on arrests between 2010 and 2015, and use-of-force reports going back more than five years. It found that Baltimore officers routinely engaged in unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests—overwhelmingly involving African Americans—and that the department’s policies encourage officers to have “unnecessary, adversarial interactions with community members.” The report calls on the department to address “racism” within its ranks. The investigation’s key findings include:

Baltimore police officers disproportionately targeted black residents for stops, searches, and arrests. Baltimore police recorded 300,000 pedestrians stops from January 2010 to June 2015. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were black, though blacks comprise 63 percent of Baltimore’s total population. Even though officers found contraband 50 percent more often on white pedestrians and twice as often during vehicle stops of white residents, blacks pedestrians were 37 percent more likely to be stopped than white ones, and black drivers were 23 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Blacks had a higher rate of arrest than any other group.
Baltimore cops conducted nearly half of their stops in two predominantly black areas. Fourty-four percent of all stops were made in two of the city’s police districts—both predominantly black. These areas contain just 11 percent of the city’s total population. More than 400 people were stopped more than 10 times in a five-and-a-half-year period—95 percent of whom were black. Seven people—all of them black—were stopped more than 30 times. One African American man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times, yet none of the stops resulted in citations or criminal charges. And less than four percent of all stops made by Baltimore officers resulted in a citation or criminal charges.
Baltimore officers arrest black residents for “highly discretionary offenses” at disproportionate rates. Black people accounted for 91 percent of all those charged solely with trespassing or failure to obey; 89 percent of people charged for making false statements to an officer; and 84 person of those charged with disorderly conduct. Blacks were also five times as likely to be arrested for drug charges as white people despite comparable rates of drug use. Officers often arrest people who are standing in front of private businesses or public housing projects, the report notes, unless they are able to satisfactorily “justify” their presence there. Moreover, from 2010-2015, BPD supervisors and local prosecutors rejected charges that cops made against black people at significantly higher rates than they did charges made against people of other races, “indicating that officers’ standard for making arrests differed for African Americans,” the report said. Baltimore supervisors and prosecutors dismissed 11,000 charges during that time period.

The DOJ also found that Baltimore cops are inadequately trained, supervised, and disciplined. In one incident reviewed, a BPD shift supervisor instructed officers to arrest “all the black hoodies” in a neighborhood. The DOJ found 60 incidents where a black complainant alleged an officer had used a racial slur, but which was then classified as a lesser offense by Baltimore police supervisors. The DOJ also determined that Baltimore cops regularly failed to appropriately secure arrestees when transporting them in police vehicles, and that the department needs to update its vehicle equipment to ensure passengers’ safety. (Freddie Gray died after his spinal chord was partially severed when he was place in the back of a police vehicle and handcuffed and shackled at the legs, but without a seatbelt.)

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake announced that the police department would implement 26 policies toward reform, and that the department was actively looking to build “constructive citizen inclusion” into the department’s process for reviewing police misconduct. Department transport vehicles have also been outfitted with new safety equipment, including cameras, she said, and the department started a new body camera program. Rawlins-Blake added that all Baltimore police officers would have body cameras within two years.

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US Justice Department Blasts Baltimore PD for Rampant Racism

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How Unpopular Is Trump? Clinton Is Courting Mormon Voters in Utah Now.

by PhilKidd1712096 Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump promised to expand the electoral map this spring, he didn’t mean he’d put Utah in play for his Democratic rival. But on Tuesday we got a little bit more evidence of how shaky the GOP nominee is looking in one of the most consistently Republican states in the country. With polls showing a close race in Utah and two third-party candidates looking to siphon off votes from Trump—former CIA officer and Brigham Young University alumnus Evan McMullin entered the race this week—Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton published an op-ed slamming Trump in the Deseret News, the Salt Lake City newspaper published by the Mormon Church.

Trump has struggled to win over some Mormon voters in large part because of his extreme positions on immigrants and his proposal to crack down on adherents of a specific religion, Islam. (Mormons have endured a history of religious persecution.) In her op-ed, Clinton zeroed in on these policies. “I’ve been fighting to defend religious freedom for years,” she wrote, touting her work with former Utah Republican governor (and 2012 presidential candidate) Jon Huntsman, scion of one of the state’s most powerful families, in protecting Christians in China.

Then she twisted the knife, comparing Trump’s proposals to previous instances of state-sponsored discrimination and violence against Mormons:

But you don’t have to take it from me. Listen to Mitt Romney, who said Trump “fired before aiming” when he decided a blanket religious ban was a solution to the threat of terrorism.

Listen to former Sen. Larry Pressler, who said Trump’s plan reminded him of when Missouri Gov. Lilburn Boggs singled out Mormons in his infamous extermination order of 1838.

Or listen to your governor, who saw Trump’s statement as a reminder of President Rutherford B. Hayes’ attempt to limit Mormon immigration to America in 1879.

The Clinton op-ed gets at just how unusual the 2016 campaign has been. Four years after Romney, the first Mormon presidential nominee, won an astounding 72.6 percent of the vote there, the Democratic nominee is invoking Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in a pitch for Utah votes. And it doesn’t even sound that far-fetched at this point.

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How Unpopular Is Trump? Clinton Is Courting Mormon Voters in Utah Now.

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

by KatlynKaufmann Posted on July 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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As a string of gun rampages continues in America and beyond, more evidence is emerging that copycat mass shooters are on the rise—a danger amplified and accelerated by social media. Two mass shootings this month build on disturbing patterns seen in other recent cases: an attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another on mallgoers in Munich, Germany, whose perpetrator displayed a host of behaviors underscoring this troubling phenomenon.

The attacker in Baton Rouge, a 29-year-old black Army veteran who killed three cops and wounded three others before a SWAT officer took him out, was prolific on social media before he struck. Among the many YouTube videos Gavin Long made of himself and shared via Twitter and Facebook are ones where he expressed his admiration for the mass killer who gunned down officers in Dallas just 10 days before Long’s own attack. “With a brother killing the police you get what I’m saying—it’s justice,” Long declared about the Dallas attacker—himself a young black Army veteran who had served in a war zone.

The gun rampage carried out in Munich last Friday by 18-year-old Ali Sonboly threw that city into chaos over fears of a multipronged terrorist attack. (Early reports of active shootings these days invariably are fraught with misinformation—a similar unfounded panic hit Dallas—though Munich had plenty of reason to overreact, with Germany increasingly targeted by ISIS.) But Sonboly, the lone perpetrator who killed nine people and injured numerous others before committing suicide as law enforcement closed in, appears to have had no connection to Islamist terrorism.

Instead, investigators have uncovered a range of evidence suggesting Sonboly was a textbook copycat attacker. The many parallels with past cases are striking:

Obsession with prior mass shooters
One such piece of evidence was literally a textbook: In the apartment where Sonboly lived, investigators found a German-language edition of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. The book’s author, American psychologist and school shootings expert Peter Langman, told me that his “heart sank” when he learned of that discovery. It was not the first time an attacker displayed an interest in Langman’s case studies. The 18-year-old who went on a rampage at Arapahoe High School in Colorado in December 2013 also had a copy of the book. Investigators in Munich also learned that Sonboly had collected news coverage and other information on past attacks, a behavior familiar from the Newtown killer and many other mass shooters.

Such content helps fulfill the need of aspiring killers to find people they can identify with, says Langman. “Having a role model or an ideology that supports their violent intentions may serve the purpose of transforming what is otherwise aberrant and abhorrent into something admirable,” he says. “It validates their urge toward violence.”

Targeting an anniversary
Sonboly went on his rampage precisely five years after one of Europe’s worst massacres in modern history, the attack carried out in July 2011 in Norway by a lone killer who took the lives of 77 people and injured hundreds of others. As with the Norway massacre, which took place primarily at a youth summer camp, most of Sonboly’s victims were teenagers.

A game the Munich perpetrator reportedly was “obsessed” with

The desire to strike on the anniversary of a high-profile mass killing is not uncommon among would-be copycats, as I documented last year in my investigation of the “Columbine effect.” Since 1999, at least 14 perpetrators who emulated the Columbine killers have plotted to attack schools around the United States on that same date in April.

“Pseudocommando” ambitions
Forensic psychologists specializing in threat assessment have documented numerous mass shooters who cultivated a “pseudocommando” image—those who were obsessed with military weapons and paraphernalia and aspired to a “warrior mentality.” In Sonboly’s case, he may have nurtured such tendencies in part through first-person shooter games, including Counter-Strike: Source, a game that German investigators said he was obsessed with.

Weaponizing social media
Particularly chilling is how Sonboly apparently used Facebook to try to lure young victims to a McDonald’s restaurant across from Munich’s Olympia shopping mall, where he shot seven of his victims. (According to investigators, he may either have hacked a teenage girl’s account or created a phony Facebook page where he promised free food at the restaurant.)

Other recent rampage shooters have used social media as a tool in their attacks: In August 2015, an enraged ex-TV journalist gunned down two former colleagues in Virginia during a live broadcast and then posted his own footage of the killing on Facebook and Twitter, in what was dubbed the first “social-media murder.” And in June, the mass killer who struck inside an Orlando nightclub logged onto Facebook while he was in the process of killing, to see if news of his attack had gone viral. Threat assessment experts warn of more of this behavior to come.

A pre-attack pilgrimage
Another disturbing facet of Sonboly’s attack planning connects to a previous case: Investigators found evidence that he began preparing for the rampage about a year ago, after he visited the site of a 2009 school massacre in Winnenden, Germany. “We found a manifesto of his, in which he considers such attacks,” said Robert Heimberger, the chief of the Bavarian State Criminal Police. “From photos we found on a digital camera, we know that he visited the site and took pictures there.” Heimberger added that Sonboly was “obsessed” with the school shooting in Winnenden.

How the media inspires copycat mass shooters—and six ways it could stop doing so

Other mass shooters have engaged in these types of pilgrimages, seeking inspiration, tactical information, or both. As my investigation last year also showed, there are three publicly known cases in which perpetrators traveled to Columbine High School from other states as they plotted lethal attacks, two of which were ultimately carried out. (One took place in Washington state and another in North Carolina; an attack planned for a school in Utah was thwarted.) And those are just the cases that have been reported in the media—there have been more. In the course of my research on mass shootings, several veteran law enforcement officials have told me about other cases—involving Columbine as well as other sites of high-profile attacks—that have drawn these kinds of visits. (The officials, from regional and federal law enforcement agencies, shared this information under the condition that the details remain private.)

The rise of ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the United States has only further complicated the question of what motivates individuals to carry out mass shootings. A complex set of factors plays into this, from mental health to the role of social media. In the aftermath of Orlando, popular wisdom quickly settled on “ISIS terrorist”—but as I reported then, some threat assessment experts suggest that explanation, favoring the ideological over the clinical, may have been too simple or possibly even wrong.

Over the last few months, as I’ve spoken with threat assessment and security experts who work in a wide range of settings around the country, I’ve been struck by a similar theme from many of them: Threat caseloads have been growing, and their “op tempo” has been rising. A bitterly contentious political climate, the threat of terrorism, and global instability undoubtedly are factors. But with mass shootings heavily in the air these days—perhaps in part because of unwarranted hype from the media—some top security experts are concerned that we’ve entered “a new normal.”

During and immediately after the Baton Rouge attack earlier this month, I happened to be attending a conference with numerous law enforcement officials and security experts; unsurprisingly, the atmosphere among this typically stoic group of professionals included some palpable emotion and concern. One veteran school security leader from Colorado spoke of dealing with a record threat caseload over the past year. A leader of a SWAT unit from a Northeastern state described to me the added security contingencies he was now tasked with putting in place for any public events drawing crowds—now there is the added layer of protecting the police as they protect the public.

There is a troubling sense of streams converging, of thresholds being crossed.

“I think that the more the taboo against mass murder is broken, the easier it becomes for the next perpetrator. Thus, it seems to me that this phenomenon is feeding on itself, growing with each new incident,” says Langman. “For those who feel like they are nobody, the path to becoming somebody is very simple—get a gun and shoot a lot of people.”

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

by RIATerrenc Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On July 8, three days after Alton Sterling was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police outside a convenience store, Montrell Jackson reflected on the challenge of being a black man and a police officer in the city he loved.

“These are trying times,” he wrote in a Facebook post, confirmed by the Associated Press and NPR. “Please don’t let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better.”

More than a week later, Jackson, 32, became one of at least three police officers killed in an altercation with a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At least four other officers were injured. The suspected shooter, identified as 29-year-old ex-Marine Gavin Eugene Long, attacked authorities just 10 days after a shooting near a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas left five officers dead and nine other people injured. Jackson’s half-brother Kedrick Pitts told NPR on Sunday that the post came in light of the recent Sterling’s death and described Montrell as a well-known officer who “loved the thrill and loved being there for others.”

“He felt hurt. He wants justice for their family also. But he just asked every to respect everyone, to continue to love everyone, and he just wanted everyone to get through this together. He didn’t want any hatred going on, especially killing,” Pitts said. “He was a police officer. He wanted peace.”

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

by denesefetherston Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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One morning in April 2015, Rayid Ghani was sitting among more than a dozen big-city police chiefs and officials in a fourth-floor conference room across the street from the White House. It was the latest in a series of meetings about curbing police abuses that the Obama administration had urgently called. The day before, a cellphone video had emerged showing a white South Carolina cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back, sparking another wave of Black Lives Matter protests and eventually prompting an FBI investigation. Ghani didn’t know much about law enforcement, having spent most of his career studying human behavior—things like grocery shopping, learning, and voting. But the Pakistani-born data scientist and University of Chicago professor had an idea for how to stop the next police shooting.

Back when he worked for the consulting company Accenture, Ghani had figured out how to guess the final price of an eBay auction with 96 percent accuracy. In 2012, he served on Obama’s reelection campaign, pinpointing supporters who were most likely to shell out donations. Ghani now believed he could teach machines to predict the likelihood that cops would abuse their power or break the law. It was, he thought, “low-hanging fruit.”

Experts have long understood that only a small fraction of cops are responsible for the bulk of police misconduct. In 1981, when research showed that 41 percent of Houston’s citizen complaints could be traced to 12 percent of the city’s cops, the US Civil Rights Commission encouraged every police department to find their “violence-prone officers.” Ever since, most major departments have set up a system to identify so-called bad apples. These systems typically use software to flag officers who have received a lot of citizen complaints or have frequently used force. But each department’s model is different and no one really knows how well any of them work. Some may overlook officers with many red flags, while others may target cops who haven’t broken any rules. What’s more, the police chiefs at the White House meeting had a hunch that the bad apples were gaming their systems.

Ghani saw a different problem: The departments simply weren’t using enough data. So he made the top cops gathered in Room 430 an offer. If they handed over all the data they’d collected on their officers, he’d find a better way to identify the bad cops.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina signed up, agreeing to give Ghani and his team 15 years’ worth of personnel records and other data, provided that its officers’ identities remained anonymous. Charlotte was a good test lab for Ghani’s project. It had also had two recent police shootings; the case against one officer ended in a mistrial, and the other officer was never charged.

Since 2001, Charlotte had flagged officers for review based on certain criteria, like if the cop had used physical force against a suspect three or more times over the past 90 days. Once an officer was flagged, an internal affairs team would decide whether to issue a warning or to notify his supervisor. But the criteria were built on “a gut feeling,” explains Chief Kerr Putney. “It was an educated guess, but it was a guess nonetheless. We didn’t have any science behind it.” When Ghani’s team interviewed cops and supervisors, almost everyone said the system failed to account for factors like what neighborhoods the officers patrolled or which shifts they worked.

The system also created a lot of false positives, dinging more than 1,100 cops out of a 2,000-person force. “The officers felt like we were accusing them when they didn’t do anything wrong,” Putney says. Out on the street, cops were concerned accidents or even justified uses of force might be seen as foul play. When Ghani’s team dove into the data, they discovered that nearly 90 percent of the officers who had been flagged were false positives. “It was a huge eureka moment,” Putney says.

Identifying who was truly a problem cop was an obvious priority, but Ghani also wanted to predict who was most likely to misbehave in the future. So his team started to mine more data—any available information on the stops, searches, and arrests made by every Charlotte officer since 2000. In the end they analyzed 300 data points, trying to find which ones could best predict an officer’s chances of acting badly.

Ghani’s first set of predictions was shaky; it still incorrectly flagged about 875 officers, though it did correctly identify 157 officers who wound up facing a complaint or internal investigation within the following year—making it 30 percent more accurate than Charlotte’s previous model.

It came as no surprise that Ghani’s team eventually found that one of the best predictors of future problems was a history of past problems—like using unjustified force or getting into car accidents, for example. But the team also confirmed something many experts and officers had long suspected but could never demonstrate: Officers subjected to concentrated bouts of on-the-job stress—handling multiple domestic-violence or suicide calls, or cases involving young children in danger, for example—were much more likely to have complaints lodged against them by community members. “That’s something we’ve known anecdotally, but we’ve never seen empirical evidence before,” explains Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

Ghani’s research is already spurring changes in Charlotte. His team found that when three or more officers responded to a domestic-violence call, they were much less likely to use force than when only two officers were called to the scene. Putney says that realization has led his department to rethink how it handles emotionally charged incidents. He is eager to see what Ghani’s research says about shift rotations as well. Often, the youngest and least experienced cops get stuck on night shifts, which tend to be the most stressful and violent, and “where they can become desensitized and calloused,” he says. Putney also hopes to use Ghani’s research as a guide for traits to look for when hiring new officers. He is circumspect, though, about the ability to accurately foresee a police officer’s behavior. Some variables will always be unpredictable, he says, like when things go wrong at 3 a.m. But with 300 data points, he adds, “maybe there’s some science behind this after all.”

Ghani agrees there are limitations to his big-data approach. Even the most accurate predictions won’t eliminate bad cops. Preventing abuses may require a wider look at how officers are recruited, trained, counseled, and disciplined—as well as addressing personal and systemic biases. Without that layer of human intervention and analysis, personnel decisions based on predictive data alone could ricochet through a police department, harming morale and possibly making things worse.

“This is the first step,” Alpert says. “It may not be a panacea, but we’ve got to start thinking differently.” Eventually, Ghani says, data from dashboard and body cameras will factor into his calculations, and his system will help dispatchers quickly decide which officer is best suited to respond to a certain type of call at any given moment. He hopes most large police departments will adopt prediction models in the next five years. Most of the police officials at that White House meeting have said they’d like to work with him, and his team is negotiating with the Los Angeles County sheriff and the police chief of Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t know if this will work at every department,” he says. “But it’s going to be better than what it is now.”

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

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First Officer Killed in Dallas Police Ambush Identified as Brent Thompson

by DamianSpivakovs Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Dallas police have identified the first of the five police officers who were killed Thursday night, after gunmen opened fire near an anti-violence protest in Dallas, an event that marks the deadliest attack on American law enforcement since September 11th.

According to James Spiller, chief of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, 43-year-old Brent Thompson was identified as one of the five police officers killed in the ambush. Thompson had gotten married to a fellow officer in the last two weeks, and was the first officer from the transit police ever killed in the line of duty.

“Brent was a great officer,” Spiller said. “We will definitely miss him. But we are also making sure that his family is taken care of.”

Six other officers were wounded in the attack. Read DART’s statement on Thompson’s death here.

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First Officer Killed in Dallas Police Ambush Identified as Brent Thompson

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A Judge Just Slammed San Francisco Cops for Racist Policing

by GinaShephard Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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A federal judge has ruled that there is “substantial evidence of racially selective law enforcement by the San Francisco Police Department.” The holding came on Thursday in a drug-related case, and as several SFPD officers are under investigation for allegedly sending racist and homophobic text messages. That’s the city’s second police texting scandal, and after a record year for fatal police shootings, it serves as more troubling background to the reform efforts following the firing of police chief Greg Suhr.

US District Judge Edward Chen ruled in favor of 12 defendants arrested during Operation Safe Schools, a series of drug stings carried out in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood by the SFPD and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2013 and 2014. All 37 people arrested during the stings were black. The defendants maintained they were the victims of racial policing. Noting that ethnicities of drug dealers in the Tenderloin vary, Chen’s ruling signaled he would dismiss all charges if the defendants could prove civil rights violations, and allowed them to seek further information, presumably on the races of arrestees and the agencies’ profiling policies, from law enforcement for the next steps of the trial, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Trial evidence included video of an undercover informant declining to buy drugs from an Asian dealer and waiting for another one, who was black, before making a purchase, according to the Chronicle. In a second video, an officer involved in the sting could be heard saying “fuck BMs”—a law enforcement term for black men—the officer holding the camera offered a warning: “Shhh, hey, I’m rolling!”

The ruling “sends a clear message to the government that racial discrimination and selective enforcement will not be tolerated,” said San Francisco’s chief public defender Jeff Adachi. Adachi has said that if the information obtained by the defendants shows a pattern of racism, it could be used to seek dismissal in other criminal cases.

Under new interim police chief Tony Chaplin, the SFPD has undertaken several reform efforts. Recently, the city’s Police Commission unanimously approved a new use-of-force policy that mandates officers attempt to deescalate conflicts before using force. The department’s policies and practices are also under review by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing.

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A Judge Just Slammed San Francisco Cops for Racist Policing

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Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

by FrederickWilloug Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The San Francisco Police Department has faced intense criticism and growing scrutiny after two scandals involving racist texts by cops and a string of fatal officer-involved shootings, including that of 26-year-old Mario Woods. Against a backdrop of calls for reform and a hunger strike, the San Francisco Chronicle published a report in May looking at police shootings and use of force more broadly by the SFPD over the past 15 years. The Chronicle reviewed police data, medical examiner’s reports, and district attorney’s reports dating to 2000, revealing some stark findings:

From 2000 to 2015, there were 95 officer-involved shootings, 40 of them fatal. No charges were filed against officers in any of the shootings.
In the majority of the cases, suspects were armed with guns; eighteen cases involved suspects armed with knives, and in 11 cases the suspects were unarmed.
There were six fatal police shootings in 2015—double the year before and the highest count in 15 years. Of the eight people fatally shot by SFPD officers since last January, four were Latino, two were black, and two were white.
More than 60 percent of fatal police shootings since 2010 involved suspects with a history of mental illness.
About 160 officers, or roughly seven percent of the 2,200-strong force, were involved in the shootings. Six officers were involved in more than one.

Mother Jones sat down with San Francisco County district attorney George Gascon to talk about the Chronicle’s findings, ongoing reform efforts, and morale inside the department. Gascon, who served as chief of the SFPD before becoming a prosecutor, has called for the state attorney general’s office to investigate the SFPD for discriminatory policing practices, and has advocated for reform. “When you talk about racism in this country, we’re not exempt from that,” he said, referring to problems plaguing other police departments around the country. “And I think the beginning of a solution to that is to accept that we have the same problems and collectively—we as a nation need to begin to fix this problem.”

Morale among the rank and file is mixed, Gascon said. “There’s a sizeable number of people within the police department that believe that reform has to take place…there are other people that feel under siege,” he said, particularly since the firing of chief Greg Suhr, a move which some officers believe was political.

“What is clear to me,” he added, “is that things cannot continue to be the way that they are.”

Here are some of Gascon’s specific thoughts on reform and accountability for the SFPD:

Use of Force
There have been two fatal police shootings in San Francisco thus far in 2016. Luis Gongora was shot several times in the Mission District in April after he lunged at officers with a knife, according to the SFPD. And Jessica Williams, 29, was shot once by an officer in Bayview in May while an officer tried to remove her from a vehicle suspected to be stolen.

The SFPD should adopt a use-of-force policy that requires officers to respond to physical threats with the minimum force necessary, Gascon said. Enforcing a more restrictive policy would both reduce the number of fatal police encounters and put officers at less risk of legal action for running afoul of the “reasonable force” legal standard, he said. Under current interpretations of the law, no particular weapon or level of force is more reasonable than another in responding to threats that pose great bodily harm to officers—but department leadership can draw its own line, Gascon said. “What you do is you’re modifying behavior with this line. And you’re creating a buffer, so that if you make a very restrictive policy, even if the officer violates policy they’re still very far way from violating the law.”

Last Wednesday, the seven-member San Francisco Police Commission unanimously approved a new policy mandating that officers attempt to de-escalate conflict situations before using force against a suspect. The policy has the support of the police union and civil rights groups, but still has to go through negotiations between the union and the city before being adopted.

The Police Commission is also considering outfitting all officers with Tasers as a way to give them less lethal options for responding to threats. The president of the police union said the shooting of Woods, who wielded a knife, could have been avoided if officers had been equipped with Tasers. Gascon called for officers to be equipped with Tasers when he was chief of police in 2010. Now he says that officers should have Tasers at their disposal, but that they shouldn’t get them until they’ve been trained in a more restrictive use of force policy that encourages minimum force across the weapons spectrum. “A Taser can be abused as well,” he noted. “I believe that Tasers are another tool that should be available to officers. But that has to be done in the context of a very strict policy.”

Accountability
Currently, the San Francisco police department leads investigations into officer-involved shootings, while the DA’s office conducts its own investigation into the shooting. Investigators from the DA’s office respond to the scene but rely heavily on the SFPD for information, which doesn’t always get passed along. “The worst case scenario is what we’re doing today,” Gascon said. “Perhaps the only thing that could be worse than that is if we didn’t go to the scene at all.” Earlier this month, a ballot measure was passed requiring the Office of Citizen Complaints to conduct an investigation into every police shooting. Previously it only conducted investigations when a complaint was filed with the office—which rarely happened.

The SFPD can’t continue to investigate itself for shootings involving its own officers, Gascon said. Ideally, the California state attorney general’s office should investigate police shootings, he said, though that agency says it lacks the resources. Gascon has proposed creating a special division within the district attorney’s office that would be exclusively responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings. The division would consist of investigators and prosecutors who were hired and trained specifically to investigate police shootings and would not be involved in the work of the DA’s office on other criminal cases. This would build trust, he said, between the police department and the community in terms of the integrity of police-shooting investigations.

In Gascon’s view, the SFPD should also regularly publish updated information about complaints against officers and use of force incidents on its website every 30 days, including the numbers of each, the race of the victims, and the race, gender, and age of the officer involved.

Skeptics of Gascon’s proposal have noted that his office has never charged a police officer involved in a shooting—there have been 43 cases since he became DA in 2011; 31 are closed and 12 remain open. Gascon told Mother Jones that current legal precedent on “reasonable force” allows officers wide latitude to decide what use of force is necessary, and the bar is high for demonstrating that an officer crossed the line. That’s a key reason why the SFPD’s policy needs to be changed, he said.

But Gascon also said that the public can have unrealistic expectations of how police should use force and how investigations into police conduct should be run. “The public sometimes is very influenced by what they see in movies…where police officers have this incredible marksmanship,” he said, noting that people often ask why officers don’t just shoot suspects in the leg.

The law governing how police can use force is different from that governing how civilians can use force, Gascon also notes. “The law recognizes that during their day to day operations doing their work, they’re going to be confronted with situations where they’re going to have to use force, whereas the average person wouldn’t have to.”

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Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

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