Because the GOP is dead set on fighting a losing battle
Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who became a target of conservatives after officiating a same-sex wedding last year, was ousted Saturday by GOP voters in a drive-thru district convention.
Convention-goers picked Bob Good, a former county supervisor who ran to Riggleman’s right, especially on social issues, to be the party’s nominee in the general election. Good won the support of 58 percent of delegates who voted on Saturday, the district GOP chairman, Melvin Adams, said.
Good’s victory came after a day-long convention held in the parking lot of a central Virginia church. He ran as a staunch social conservative, campaigning on a traditional view of marriage, his support to make English the official language of the U.S. and to end birthright citizenship.
Riggleman decried the convention, which was delayed from earlier this spring because of the coronavirus, as a corrupt process that disenfranchised GOP voters in the district. As a safety precaution, some 3,500 delegates were asked to drive outside the church in Lynchburg to cast votes between 8:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.
After the convention concluded but before results were announced, Riggleman said his campaign had received unspecific reports of “voting irregularities” and “ballot stuffing.”
“We are evaluating all our options at this time,” Riggleman tweeted late Saturday night.
Virginia allows district party committees to decide whether to choose their nominees in primary elections or at conventions, which are open to a much smaller number of voters.
The district, which spans from the Washington, D.C., exurbs down to the North Carolina border, leans Republican. President Donald Trump won it by 11 points in 2016, and Riggleman beat his Democratic opponent by 7 points in the midterms.
House Democrats plan to contest the seat and will hold their own primary on June 23.
Riggleman is the third House incumbent to be denied renomination in 2020, joining Reps. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) and Steve King (R-Iowa), who lost primaries earlier this year.
oh god lol. I remember hearing about this, but eek
This fall saw the release of an autobiography by former Disney CEO Bob Iger (2005 to 2020) titled The Ride of a Lifetime.
And Friday Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner shared an interesting excerpt (spotted by blogger John Gruber) in which Iger reveals he saw Twitter as "a potentially powerful platform for us, but I couldn't get past the challenges that would come with it."
The challenges and controversies were almost too much to list, but they included how to manage hate speech, and making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech, what to do about fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political "messaging" to influence elections, and the general rage and lack of civility that was sometimes evident on the platform. Those would become our problems. They were so unlike any we'd encountered, and I felt they would be corrosive to the Disney brand. On the Sunday after the board had just given me the go-ahead to pursue the acquisition of Twitter, I sent a note to all of the members telling them I had "cold feet", and explaining my reasoning for withdrawing. Then I called Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, who was also a member of the Disney board. Jack was stunned, but very polite. I wished Jack luck, and I hung up feeling relieved.
Blogger John Gruber speculates that a Twitter owned by Disney "would be a very different Twitter today."
Because cops just can't help themselves. Everything is a death penalty offense with these fuckers
Atlanta police shot a black man, who later died, after a struggle in a Wendy’s drive-thru on Friday night. The deceased man, who was reportedly shot in the back while fleeing on foot, has been identified as 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, reports: “Preliminary information indicates that at approximately 10:33 pm, APD was dispatched to the Wendy’s located at 125 University Ave, Atlanta, GA. Officers were responding to a complaint of a male in a vehicle parked in the drive thru asleep, causing other customers to drive around the vehicle. A field sobriety test was performed on the male subject. After failing the test, the officers attempted to place the male subject into custody. During the arrest, the male subject resisted and a struggle ensued. The officer deployed a Taser. Witnesses report that during the struggle the male subject grabbed and was in possession of the Taser. It has also been reported that the male subject was shot by an officer in the struggle over the Taser. The male subject was transported to a local hospital where he died after surgery.”
The GBI released additional surveillance video of the incident. Fast forward to 28:32 minutes to view the exchange between Atlanta Police Officers and Rayshard Brooks.
Former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams denounced the use of deadly force, tweeting, “Sleeping in a drive-thru must not end in death.”
The killing of #RayshardBrooks in Atlanta last night demands we severely restrict the use of deadly force. Yes, investigations must be called for – but so too should accountability.
Wrote the Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard, Jr.: “Members of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office were on scene shortly after the shooting, and we have been in investigative sessions ever since to identify all of the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident. … Our thoughts and our sympathies are extended to the family of Rayshard Brooks as we must not forget that this investigation is centered upon a loss of life. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office is working diligently to gather all of the necessary information to proceed with this investigation.”
What if the people in the drive thru woke #RayshardBrooks up, got him some water, moved his car, and called him a ride? No cops needed. Rayshard should be alive. We don’t need to invest in policing, we need to invest in health and community #AtlantaShootingpic.twitter.com/Qvjxshymaz
On Saturday morning, a group of protesters demonstrated at the Wendy’s where Brooks was killed.
John Wade, a leader of the demonstration here at the Wendy’s on University Avenue, where Rayshard Brooks was killed overnight in an officer-involved shooting:
A San Francisco “Karen” was filmed calling the police on a man of color after she saw him stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on a neighborhood wall. Turns out that wall was part of the man’s own home.
Wrote Jaimetoons on Twitter: “A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. ‘Karen’ lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here. #blacklivesmatter”
In the video shared by Jaimetoons, the “Karen,” who was later identified as Lisa C. Alexander, the founder and CEO of Laface Skincare, and another man are seen questioning Jaimetoons about whether it’s his property, telling him that he’s free to express his opinion but that he can’t do what he’s doing.
“It’s private property,” insisted Alexander.
“But if I did live here and this was my property this would be absolutely fine,” Jaimetoons responded. “And you don’t know if I live here or if this is my property.”
“We actually do know,” Alexander snapped back. “We know the person who does.”
Watch the exchange:
A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. “Karen” lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here. #blacklivesmatterpic.twitter.com/rOpHvKVwgP
She was also dumped by the subscription beauty service Birchbox, which tweeted: “We condemn the actions of Lisa Alexander. We have not worked with LAFACE for several years & as a result of the CEO’s actions today have officially cut ties with them. We’ve removed their products from our website & will not be working with them in the future. #blacklivesmatter”
We condemn the actions of Lisa Alexander. We have not worked with LAFACE for several years & as a result of the CEO’s actions today have officially cut ties with them. We’ve removed their products from our website & will not be working with them in the future. #blacklivesmatter
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Jay Pharoah shared footage on Saturday of a recent incident in which he was stopped by police on the streets of Los Angeles. A week prior to the release of the Ahmaud Arbery footage, Pharaoh said he was detained by police, forced to the ground, and pinned by an officer’s knee.
“I was exercising,” said Pharoah in a video posted to Instagram. “As I’m walking across the street, I see an officer to the left of me. I’m not thinking anything of it because I’m a law-abiding citizen.”
Pharoah said he was also wearing noise-canceling headphones, so it came to him as a shock that an officer was approaching him “guns blazing” telling him to get on the ground and spread his arms like an airplane.
“As he’s looking at me I’m thinking he’s making a mistake so I’m looking past where he’s looking. … No he’s coming to get me. Four officers got their guns blazing they tell me to get on the ground, spread my arms out, they put me in cuffs. The officer took his knee, put it on my neck. It wasn’t as long as George Floyd, but I know how that feels.”
When Pharoah asked why they had cuffed him, officers told him he fit the description of a suspect they were looking for. Pharoah told them to Google his name and he was released a short time later.
Added Pharoah: “I could easily have been an Ahmaud Arbery or a George Floyd. And I’m not and I can tell my story so I will tell you all. This is what you need to do. Educate yourselves. Educate yourselves on the laws. … Be in the know. I’m Jay Pharoah and I’m a black man in America and my life matters. Black lives always matter. They always matter.”
get cops out of school. How is that even a debate????
NEW YORK — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has softened his stance on a variety of police reforms in recent days, amid open revolt from former and current allies, but when it comes to cops in schools he’s standing fast — for now.
“I personally believe that the better approach is to continue what we have but improve it, reform it,” de Blasio said this week when asked about removing police from schools.
Hours after he made that declaration Wednesday, reports emerged of 16-year-old Jahmel Leach being beaten by police during the recent stretch of protests over police brutalizing black people.
Two weeks of often chaotic demonstrations in the wake of police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis have already accelerated police reforms in Albany and sparked a national reckoning with police brutality. But city students, along with other activists, elected officials and some de Blasio allies are demanding school safety agents — another name for cops in schools — be removed or seriously curtailed as part of that push.
Students say the conflict between police and communities of color starts early.
“You’ve been criminalizing them since they first entered schools with metal detectors and constant policing and all these rules, and you made them feel like criminals” said Eliana Martinez, a junior at Talent Unlimited High School in Manhattan.
She added that if protests became violent at times, it was a natural outgrowth of decades of frustration from black and Latino communities over being harassed by police and the slow pace of reform — a dynamic exacerbated by police in schools.
“It’s not just people being violent because they’re born violent,” Martinez said. “You’re not born violent. You’re taught different things and this is just a result of all those things at one time.”
But de Blasio insisted this week there were ways to change how the city’s roughly 5,500 school safety agents approach their duties, without removing them from schools.
“The safety issue is not resolved in schools at this point,” the mayor said. “School safety is necessary in its current form to keep ensuring the safety of our kids.”
De Blasio’s stance on police in schools has not altered even as he’s allowed for other changes to policing under pressure from his own allies and staffers to live up to the promise of reform he first ran on in 2013.
He’s backed legislation in the City Council to illegalize chokeholds, supported more transparency for police records, and even suggested he’d shift funding from the department to youth services.
Last June, the city announced that it would restrict the number of circumstances in which police can arrest or give students summonses for low-level offenses. The mayor has also backed policies to reduce suspensions.
But he rejected a recommendation by the city’s School Diversity Advisory Group to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of shifting supervision of school safety agents from the NYPD to DOE.
Maya Wiley, co-chair of the School Diversity Advisory Group (also a former counsel to de Blasio and former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board) said there are plenty of functions police serve in schools that could be transferred away from the department.
"A lot of what they do every day is sign people out of the building, a lot of what they do is administrative in that sense," Wiley said in an interview. "The question is why do those types of employees have to be employed by the police department for those functions and trained by the police for those functions?"
Advocates say there are issues that should be handled by social workers, school psychologists and others instead of police and school safety officers.
Wiley said the protests have shown that New Yorkers of all colors are "really, really angry about our failure to make big transformational change."
Nia Morgan, interim organizing coordinator for the Urban Youth Collaborative, said the presence of cops in certain schools almost guarantees disproportionate enforcement.
"Even as we see a decline in arrests and summonses, the racial disparities haven't changed and it speaks a lot to just how reform to this point isn't enough,” they said. “If the police are in schools, they're gonna just disproportionately police black and brown students."
They, like many others, are skeptical when de Blasio speaks of police reform.
"The very institution of police is harmful and reforms aren't gonna cut it,” Morgansaid after the mayor’s comments Wednesday. “They haven't cut it so far and our youth are tired of waiting."
Morgan said last quarter, more than 63 percent of the students under 21 who were arrested were black even though they only represent 25.5 percent of the population.
The New York City Council is examining ways to cut the NYPD budget and Speaker Corey Johnson specifically cited pulling cops from schools as one measure he’d support.
“We can start by delivering budget justice and making significant cuts to the NYPD budget and reinvesting that money in communities,” he said at Council hearing this week. “By getting police out of our schools, out of traffic enforcement, out of homeless services, out of mental health.”
“I feel like something we should do is follow in Minneapolis’ steps,” said Jessica Garcia, a 17-year-old student at Curtis High School on Staten Island.
She was among hundreds of students, parents and teachers who marched from the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers to Tweed Courthouse, the DOE headquarters, to call for police-free schools over the weekend.
“We make the city run so therefore I feel like we have every right to have something to say about what happens with the funding, what goes where,” Rayne Hawkins, 17, a student at the James Baldwin School in Manhattan, told POLITICO during the march. “At the end of the day, this is not affecting the people that are in office, these are affecting real life people, day to day people, regular people.”
Former Deputy Mayor Richard Buery has been among the prominent allies of the mayor to criticize the NYPD’s behavior amid the protests. He heads the Achievement First charter network and told POLITICO he has been watching student groups like Teens Take Charge "fundamentally transform the conversation."
"If anything gives me hope, it is young people and I am happy to follow behind and march behind," Buery said.
"The question of do I believe that we should defund the police and divert those resources to other social goods, I think, absolutely," Buery said. "I think if nothing else, this moment has made clear that it's not that we didn't know it before but thanks to the people in the street, we have the opportunity to actually do it."
He said it doesn't mean "that you don't have police," but that it's time for the city to reexamine the role of the NYPD in schools and in other institutions, though he acknowledged it's "a complicated conversation."
Teens Take Charge recently held a meeting for students to discuss policing issues.
Lorraie Forbes, 17, a student with the group who attends Clara Barton High School, said students have different opinions on engaging officers and the merits of violent versus peaceful protest.
“Different people might feel strongly about one thing and not be as passionate about the other but we can still use both of those things to our advantage,” she said.
Ultimately, she believes the city should limit the number of school safety agents rather than remove them completely. She said her school has only six guidance counselors for more than 1,000 students. It has roughly 50 police officers and school safety agents.
The city announced it would hold youth town halls in each borough in areas with high police and youth interactions. NYPD officers will partner with Cure Violence providers and meet with local teens to explore interactions between youth and police.
The DOE said it’s expansion of social-emotional learning, restorative practices and mental health care in schools has brought a decline in traditional disciplinary measures. From July to December 2019 suspensions are down by more than 50 percent from the same time frame in the 2013-14 school year, the department said. Student arrests dropped 60 percent from 2013-14 to 2018-19 — from 2,202 arrests to 882.
“Our goal is to build trust and respect between all students and all staff in our schools to keep students safe," schools spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said, though he did not specifically address the question of removing police from schools.
Yeah, it's fine. The people have decided that they don't need the police, and so far, so good
For days, Donald Trump has been tweeting about the “anarchist take over” of Seattle. According to Trump, the city is being “pillaged” by “terrorists” who are murder-burning their way across the city. These “armed lunatics” have “taken over a major American city,” and what frustrates Trump most is that the mayor and governor don’t even seem to know that their city is missing. In addition, the media is conducting a “total blackout on the insanity” in Seattle. Trump has ordered Mayor Jenny Durkan to “take back the city fast” and promised that if they don’t do something, he will!
The “autonomous zone,” formed by peaceful protesters in a small area of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, has been described by Durkan as an example of free speech and genuine patriotism; and by The New York Times as “part street festival, part commune.” But what viewers of Fox News and other conservative media are seeing is something very, very different. Across conservative media, Seattle is being portrayed as a city in chaos, under siege, and simply burning. Where are conservative outlets getting this? Easy … they’re making it up.
The Seattle Autonomous Zone grew up in the wake of the protests over the police murder of George Floyd, and also in response to aggressive actions taken by the Seattle police (both in the the last two weeks and in previous protests) and has largely been in place since Monday. The reaction of city officials has varied from tolerance to cooperation, and even encouragement. City officials have helped to make sure that services within the area are continuing, and that sanitation supplies are secure. Seattle’s police chief has continued to express frustration, particularly after police deserted and boarded up a precinct house, but the perimeter of the “zone” has largely remained open for people to come and go, and is free of the lines of heavily armored forces seen around protests nationwide. For the most part, local officials seem content to simply wait, so long as the area stays peaceful.
But peaceful is not what Fox News or OAN viewers are seeing, what visitors to right-wing blogs are reading, or what listeners to the vast array of right-wing radio stations are hearing. On those sources, the zone is not a small area where people are distributing free pizza and constructing a somewhat pitiful community garden—it’s a hotbed of violence where buildings are burning and people are dying.
To support that position, Fox News hasn’t just been making up stories—it’s been manufacturing images and video. As the Seattle Times reports, Fox has “digitally altered” images to make the situation in the area seem dire. That includes putting together elements from multiple images to create a misleading collage, lifting signs and symbols from one area to impose them on another, and it means that many of the images Fox is using to present the image of chaos in Seattle … aren’t even from Seattle.
Images that appear to show masked and armed men inside the zone are in fact composites taken on different dates and in different places. Burning buildings are actually from shots taken in St. Paul during the first days of the protests there. Some of the pictures Fox has merged together in their “coverage” of the current Seattle are actually two weeks old—or elements from two-week old pictures have been inserted into current scenes to make the situation appear worse than it is.
Fox has also continued to report, and other sources have repeated, claims that businesses inside the zone are being extorted for protection payments, even after the police chief in Seattle investigated these claims and found nothing to them.
The protesters within the zone are anarchists in the sense that there is no formal leadership, which has led to numerous voices claiming to speak for the group and issue various lists of demands (some of which have appeared on Daily Kos). But the most prominent demands of those in the zone are a defunding of the Seattle police, charges against police involved in violence toward Black people, reparations for past victims of police violence, and a dismissal of charges against protesters. In the last few days, representatives from the police have met with some of those inside the zone in hopes of finding points of agreement.
The decades, the Seattle police have been involved in repeated acts of violence—from an assault on peaceful protesters during a 2019 protest, to a brutal, unnecessary arrest captured on video, to even suing to be able to use more violence. The department has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for using unnecessary levels of force. That’s why, under the Obama administration, the department was investigated for Civil Rights violations and required to take steps to address systemic problems. Against that background, many in Seattle, including many Seattle officials, seem open to the idea of making the Capitol Hill area an ongoing experiment in operating without police, and for how shared community resources can be mixed with ordinary shops and businesses.
Conservatives aren’t upset because Seattle is burning. They’re terrified because it is not.
A QAnon conspiracy theory promoter who’s been described as a “[g]ood friend to have” by a notorious white supremacist came in first in a Georgia congressional primary, and top House Republicans do not want to talk about it. Marjorie Taylor Greene is headed to a runoff, but she got 41% of the vote in Tuesday’s primary, with the second-place finisher 20 points behind. Apparently affiliation with a group considered a potential domestic terrorist threat by the FBI is not a problem for northwest Georgia voters.
“None of the top three House Republicans, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) or Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (Wyo.), responded to questions about Greene’s candidacy and possible place within their ranks,” The Washington Post reports.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, wrote: “The NRCC does not get involved in primaries. In general elections, we focus on districts that will deliver us the majority, not R+27 safe seats,” which is to say, the seat Greene is running for.
For her part, Greene was happy to respond to the Post, though not necessarily on topic. She did show herself to be an apt student of Trumpian politics, emailing a statement saying: “The Chinese propagandists at the Washington Post are attacking me the same way they attack Donald Trump, and other conservatives,” blah blah blah Stacey Abrams blah blah Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blah blah Nancy Pelosi.
While Greene is an extremist who the Very Serious Republican Leadership doesn’t want to talk about, it’s important to understand that she is very much a part of today’s Republican Party. Another QAnon backer is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Oregon this year, but more importantly, Trump has repeatedly winked at his QAnon supporters. There’s no way Republicans can seriously disavow this, which is one more reason they don’t want to say anything.
“I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene said in a 2017 QAnon-flavored video. Now she’s close to the chance to do that in Congress—though it’s looking like it might not be with the president she had in mind.
A new ad from ‘Republican Voters Against Trump’ features Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) one of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters, denouncing the president in his own words in 2015, and declaring his love for Joe Biden.
Says Graham in the spot, titled Lindsey Graham Loves Joe Biden: “I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. What is Donald Trump’s campaign about? He’s a race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. And you know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to Hell.“
“If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem,” Graham continues. “You need to do some self-evaluation, ‘cause, what’s not to like? He is as good a man as God ever created. He’s said some of the most incredibly heartfelt things that anybody could ever say to me. He’s the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics.”
“This is a defining moment in the future of the Republican party,” adds Graham. “We have to reject this demagoguery and if we don’t reject Donald Trump we’ve lost the moral authority in my view to govern this great nation.”
The Trump administration on Friday finalized a regulation that removes Obama-era transgender nondiscrimination protections in healthcare.
Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the New York Times the timing of the regulation — on the fourth anniversary of the Pulse massacre and in the middle of LGBT Pride month — was “purely coincidental.” Severino also falsely claimed the change was “equivalent to housekeeping.”
From the NYT: The rule, which does not differ much from a proposed version released last year, is part of a broad Trump administration effort across multiple areas of policy — including education, housing, and employment, as well as health care — to narrow the legal definition of sex discrimination so that it does not include protections for transgender people. … Transgender rights advocates criticized the timing for another reason: the coronavirus. “It’s really, really horrendous to not only gut nondiscrimination protections, but to gut nondiscrimination protections in the middle of a pandemic,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “This rule opens a door for a medical provider to turn someone away for a Covid-19 test just because they happen to be transgender.”
“We cannot and will not allow Donald Trump to continue attacking us,” said HRC President Alphonso David. “LGBTQ people get sick. LGBTQ people need health care. LGBTQ people should not live in fear that they cannot get the care they need simply because of who they are. It is clear that this administration does not believe that LGBTQ people, or other marginalized communities, deserve equality under the law. But we have a reality check for them: we will not let this attack on our basic right to be free from discrimination in health care go unchallenged. We will see them in court, and continue to challenge all of our elected officials to rise up against this blatant attempt to erode critical protections people need and sanction discrimination.”
The regulation also sparked outrage on social media, and by Friday night “transgender” was trending on Twitter.
How cruel do you have to be to announce a roll back of health protections for transgender Americans in the middle of a global pandemic, in the middle of #PrideMonth, and on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting?!https://t.co/Y78yHofYGe
Trump’s decision to overturn Section 1557 is unconscionable. Doctors, especially at Catholic hospitals where 1 in 6 patients receive care, can now discriminate against #transgender patients by denying HPV testing, Truvada for HIV prophylaxis, and treatments for ectopic pregnancy.
If you don't quite understand what horror the Trump administration inflicted today on transgender and non-binary people seeking medical care and why we're scared, let me tell you a quick story.
impressive, yet terrifying. Another reason to avoid light bulbs generally. LED strips are easier too for many applications
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers from Israeli's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science today revealed a new technique for long-distance eavesdropping they call "lamphone." They say it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment -- just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor -- to listen in on any sounds in a room that's hundreds of feet away in real-time, simply by observing the minuscule vibrations those sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside. By measuring the tiny changes in light output from the bulb that those vibrations cause, the researchers show that a spy can pick up sound clearly enough to discern the contents of conversations or even recognize a piece of music.
In their experiments, the researchers placed a series of telescopes around 80 feet away from a target office's light bulb, and put each telescope's eyepiece in front of a Thorlabs PDA100A2 electro-optical sensor. They then used an analog-to-digital converter to convert the electrical signals from that sensor to digital information. While they played music and speech recordings in the faraway room, they fed the information picked up by their set-up to a laptop, which analyzed the readings. The researchers found that the tiny vibrations of the light bulb in response to sound -- movements that they measured at as little as a few hundred microns -- registered as a measurable changes in the light their sensor picked up through each telescope. After processing the signal through software to filter out noise, they were able to reconstruct recordings of the sounds inside the room with remarkable fidelity: They showed, for instance, that they could reproduce an audible snippet of a speech from President Donald Trump well enough for it to be transcribed by Google's Cloud Speech API. They also generated a recording of the Beatles' "Let It Be" clear enough that the name-that-tune app Shazam could instantly recognize it. There are some limitations. "In their tests, the researchers used a hanging bulb, and it's not clear if a bulb mounted in a fixed lamp or a ceiling fixture would vibrate enough to derive the same sort of audio signal," the report adds. "The voice and music recordings they used in their demonstrations were also louder than the average human conversation, with speakers turned to their maximum volume."
With that said, the teams says that "they also used a relatively cheap electro-optical sensor and analog-to-digital converter, and could have upgraded to a more expensive one to pick up quieter conversations," reports Wired. "LED bulbs also offer a signal-to-noise ratio that's about 6.3 times that of an incandescent bulb and 70 times a fluorescent one."
A sheriff’s deputy in Clarksville, Tennessee, has been fired over racist and anti-LGBT Facebook posts.
Josh Wilson, 26, made the posts between 2010-16, before he joined the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. Among other things, Wilson expressed his disdain for gay people, questioned why it’s OK to fly a rainbow-colored American flag but not a confederate flag, and wondered whom Black Lives Matter activists would call if they were run over during a protest.
After the posts were uncovered by Scoop: Clarksville, a local news site, the sheriff’s department investigated before terminating Wilson effective immediately.
“It is my job to protect our citizens and enforce the law impartially and without prejudice. In order to accomplish this, I have to have confidence that our deputies share those same values,” Sheriff John Fuson said. “The posts made on social media, do not reflect the character or values of this office.”
More from Scoop Clarksville: Social media background checks were not part of the pre-employment screening process in 2016. Starting in 2018, a more detailed background check became part of the pre-employment screening process. “Had these posts been noticed then, the deputy would not have been considered for employment. In light of this incident, more resources will be added to ensure deeper social media background checks,” said Sheriff Fuson. “Hopefully together we can move forward from this incident.”
Because people are fucking stupid and states substituted GOP talking points for scientific advice.
A nurse and patient at a Covid-19 testing center at the Navajo Nation town of Monument Valley, Arizona, on May 21. | Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
Some states are seeing Covid-19 spikes. Here’s what we know.
In many parts of the United States, Covid-19 appears to be surging.
It is a grim reminder that the country has not beaten the coronavirus pandemic that has taken more than 110,000 American lives and locked down the country for much of the year. The number of confirmed cases in the US has now exceeded 2 million, and while new cases nationwide appear to be flat, they’re not dropping. Moreover, the national numbers obscure the state and local trends that have public health experts worried.
Christina Animashaun/Vox
The original pandemic epicenters — namely, the New York City area and a couple neighboring states like New Jersey — have seen a steady decline in cases and deaths since a mid-April peak. But new hot spots are emerging.
Arizona, for one, is seeing increased hospitalizations, more tests are coming back positive for Covid-19, and the rate of new infections as a share of the state’s population is quite high. Outbreaks are picking up in parts of the country that were spared the worst of the pandemic initially because, first, they were lucky the virus did not arrive there early and, second, they instituted social distancing policies before their outbreaks could grow out of control.
But even if lockdowns slowed the coronavirus, they could not stop it completely, and the virus continued to seep into more and more of the country. Some states are starting to see a worrying combination of trends in their Covid-19 data: Not only are case numbers rising, but hospitalizations are increasing and the share of tests that come back positive has gone up, all of which suggest the coronavirus is spreading in the community.
Yet at the same time, states are relaxing their stay-at-home orders, businesses are opening, and people are socializing. The protests against police violence could also have been vectors for Covid-19 spread, though it is still too early to be sure how significant their effect will be.
Renewed spread, in a country that seems committed to reopening its economy to alleviate the financial pain of the lockdowns, could put the US on a dangerous path.
“In the face of increasing numbers of case counts, the continued relaxation will only provide more opportunity for community transmission,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, told me. “The virus is getting highways along which to transmit.”
There is not one coronavirus pandemic in the US but many. Some places are finally seeing relief after the virus took a catastrophic toll. But elsewhere, the situation appears to be getting worse.
Where coronavirus spread is getting worse
Public health experts are worried about the trend lines in some areas because the coronavirus is perfectly built to cause a health care crisis, even if local health systems are not yet in crisis mode. Once people are infected with Covid-19, it takes about a week for them to show symptoms. But they are still contagious before then, unwittingly exposing more people to the virus. And once the symptoms start — they get a fever or they develop a dry cough — it can take another week or so for them to be sick enough to be hospitalized.
Hospitalizations are, in other words, a lagging indicator. But once hospitals exceed capacity, it’s already too late; they are effectively guaranteed to endure several difficult weeks after that point. People arriving in hospitals were infected two weeks or so earlier. The virus continued spreading in the interim, infecting more people. It takes time for a case to become serious enough that the patient must be hospitalized. So the next wave of those newly infected won’t show up at a hospital for a couple more weeks.
It’s a vicious cycle. That’s why the public health community was so alarmed when a major Arizona hospital system warned this week their ICU units were filling up and ventilator use had quadrupled since mid-May.
Arizona looks like the likeliest candidate to become a new Covid-19 hot spot. The state’s new Covid-19 cases are up more than 200 percent over the last two weeks, according to the Covid Exit Strategy dashboard.
Some of that spike is probably the result of more testing. But what’s so concerning is that the positive test rate is also increasing at the same time, up from less than 8 percent at the end of May to nearly 14 percent now. As I wrote earlier this week, that trend “suggests the virus is actually spreading, not just that more tests happen to be finding more cases.” In new cases per million residents, another means of measuring whether spread is getting worse, Arizona has the highest rate in the country.
And hospitalizations are up. On May 10, 713 people were in the hospital in Arizona with Covid-19, according to the University of Minnesota’s hospitalization tracking project. On June 10, nearly 1,300 people were. The number of people currently on a ventilator is also higher; it was less than 200 a month ago but today is approaching 300.
Arizona might be the most extreme case in terms of worrying trends, but at least six other states share a similar profile:
Arkansas (cases up 113 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, current hospitalizations up from 64 on May 10 to 181 on June 10)
Florida (cases up 87 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, the state does not report current hospitalizations)
North Carolina (cases up 62 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, current hospitalizations up from 442 on May 10 to 780 on June 10)
South Carolina (cases up 93 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, the state does not routinely report current hospitalizations but there was a reported recent spike)
Texas (cases up 53 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, current hospitalizations up from 1,626 on May 10 to 2,153 on June 10)
Utah (cases up 126 percent in two weeks, positive test rate increasing, current hospitalizations up from 93 on May 10 to 130 on June 10)
This is not a second wave. These places are experiencing their first significant upswing in Covid-19 cases because they had constrained the virus by adopting stay-at-home orders and other distancing measures before their outbreaks grew out of control. Early research suggests that lockdowns have significantly suppressed Covid-19’s spread.
Other states — California, Kentucky, and Oregon, to name a few — also have trends worth watching, but their signals are more mixed. California, for example, has seen cases rise by 20 percent in two weeks, but the positive test rate is little changed and hospitalizations are actually flat from a month ago. Oregon has seen a much steeper increase in cases, up 146 percent in 14 days, but its rate of new cases per million people is quite low (22) compared to Arizona (150). Kentucky’s positive test rate is flat, and new cases per million people is mild despite a 62 percent jump in cases over the last two weeks.
While these places are seeing their cases climb, the national Covid-19 curve looks like a plateau, with 21,894 new cases on June 1 and 20,839 new cases on June 10. That’s because other parts of the country — particularly the Northeast, which endured the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the early weeks of the pandemic — are seeing their numbers drop.
States reported ~20k new cases again today.
The 7-day average of new cases has been between 20-23k cases for nearly a month. But the outbreak has shifted south and west. pic.twitter.com/Rk6zPi1mV0
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 11, 2020
But nobody should rest easy yet because even as cases rise in some places, most of the country is relaxing social distancing and reopening the economy.
Reopening the economy too quickly could worsen the coronavirus’s spread
It is difficult to ignore that the places seeing surges in Covid-19 cases began to reopen businesses and other public spaces a few weeks ago. Because of those reporting lags that are innate to the virus, any changes in spread would only become evident now.
“The early opening with insufficient public concern for behavior change will undoubtedly lead to more problems ahead,” David Celentano, who leads the Johns Hopkins University’s epidemiology department, told me.
Arizona rolled back its stay-at-home order on May 16. North Carolina relaxed its order on May 22. Some of the other emerging hot spots — Texas, Arkansas, etc. — have been open for business since the beginning of May. Experts point out we are now a few weeks out from Memorial Day, which may have served as an unofficial end to self-quarantine for many people in the states where shelter-in-place is no longer in effect.
We should be cautious about interpreting the surges as a clear sign that reopening is increasing spread. Correlation is not causation. There are acute outbreaks in prisons and meat-packing plants that explain part of the spike.
And not every state that’s eased its distancing policies has seen a dramatic deterioration in its Covid-19 numbers. Georgia, for example, seems to be holding up okay after allowing businesses to reopen; cases and positive test rates are up slightly but not to the degree of Arizona or Utah.
People I spoke with in these states said some increase in spread was expected; it might even be considered an acceptable trade-off for getting people back to work. Hospital capacity may be down, but that partly reflects an increase in non-Covid-19 patients now that elective surgeries have resumed.
Experts are still concerned. Texas has been seen as a leader in reopening; it never had a statewide stay-at-home order and businesses began reopening on May 1. But whatever the exact cause, the new trends in the state are troublesome.
“There is little doubt in my mind that the recent increase is also a result of more community spread,” Thomas Giordano, who leads the infectious disease program at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. “We need to get this right, and currently the numbers aren’t looking so good.”
And to repeat one more time for good measure, Covid-19 data is always a week or more behind whatever the situation on the ground is. Spread is increasing and social distancing is easing, which could accelerate spread even more before we realize the full extent of the problem. That is the danger experts worry about right now.
“If cases are increasing under current conditions, you are not going to slow things down by giving the virus more opportunities,” Hanage said.
It’s too soon to know how much the George Floyd protests spread Covid-19
The nationwide protests over George Floyd’s death, police violence, and structural racism have also been met with concerns that they would become superspreading events.
At the protests, thousands of people congregated in close quarters and, though mask-wearing was common, it was not universal. Many public health experts lent their support to the protests, citing the toll taken on black Americans’ health across US history because of slavery and racism, but there seemed to be a real risk that these protests organized and attended by black activists would simply deepen the racial disparities in the coronavirus pandemic. Black Americans are already getting sick and dying from Covid-19 at higher rates than white Americans.
According to the experts I spoke with, however, it is simply too early to know whether the coronavirus will spread widely because of the protests. And it is worth remembering the differences between outdoor and indoor exposure, the latter being much more dangerous; it could end up being the case that people got infected because they were arrested and put into a police van or jail cell with other people, not because they were outside protesting in a big crowd.
Regardless, it’s only been about two weeks since the protests in Minneapolis grew into a national movement; new cases and any other worrying trends in the data would just now be starting to surface and may not be perceptible. For now, the trend lines in Minnesota show new cases dropping and the positive test rate is down, according to the Covid Exit Strategy dashboard.
Even if some of the places with large protests see a spike in Covid-19 cases, it will be difficult to separate the effects of the demonstrations from the effects of reopening. Minnesota, for example, relaxed its stay-at-home order on May 18 and started allowing restaurants to open again on June 1, coinciding almost exactly with the protests.
“Given that it took about a month after opening to start to see a clear increase in cases, we probably expect that any uptick coming from the protests wouldn’t be visible for a few more weeks,” Ellie Murray, an epidemiology professor at Boston University, told me. “But it’s also going to be difficult to tease out how much of any uptick is related to protesting versus other opening-related changes in behaviors.”
And as a matter of scale, widespread changes in social distancing policies or people’s behavior are likely to have a larger effect than the acute impact of a few days of protests.
“As states open up, the total number of risky contacts that are made in the population as a whole will outnumber those made at the protests,” Hanage said. “I expect there will be some retrofitting of disease in the future to the presence of a protest, but that’s not really responsible.”
The trend lines are real enough and worrying enough, in other words, without apportioning blame on the protesters. All kinds of risky behaviors are becoming more common.
The more people take precautions — wearing masks, washing hands, avoiding contact when possible — the more difficult it will be for the coronavirus to spread. But it should be clear by now: The pandemic is not over.
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How long before we admit the obvious: policing attracts people who have NO BUSINESS exercising authority.
Demonstrations against police brutality have taken place around the US since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
The women were afraid to come forward. Then they saw Brett Hankison’s face on the news.
As the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) reviews the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, the department has new allegations to investigate: Claims of sexual assault have recently been made against Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in Taylor’s death — further calling into question his record as an officer and the latitude afforded to law enforcement.
Since early June, at least two women have said Hankison sexually assaulted them, in nearly identical stories. One of the women, Margot Borders, wrote in a Facebook post that Hankison offered her a ride home in 2018 after she had been drinking at a bar: “He drove me home in uniform, in his unmarked car, invited himself into my apartment and sexually assaulted me while I was unconscious.”
The other woman, Emily Terry, wrote that Hankison pulled up next to her in his vehicle as she walked home intoxicated. He offered her a ride home, she accepted, and in the car he “began making sexual advances towards me; rubbing my thigh, kissing my forehead, and calling me ‘baby.’ Mortified, I did not move,” she wrote.
A spokesperson for LMPD told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the department is aware of the social media posts and is looking into the accusations. Hankison remains on administrative reassignment after he and two other officers entered Taylor’s apartment looking for someone else and fatally shot Taylor in the middle of the night.
That Hankison has a record of sexual assault allegations – LMPD’s Public Integrity Unit previously investigated him in 2008 and 2015 – is not uncommon for officers, agents of a broader policing institution that’s currently being targeted for its violent history and reliance on excessive force.
A Cato Institute review of police misconduct statistics found that sexual misconduct claims accounted for the second-highest category of complaints against law enforcement officers, after use of excessive force.
“In the protests, we often see signs reading, ‘Who will police the police?’” political scientist and UCLA health services researcher Miranda Yaver told Vox. “Given the lack of accountability [in police departments], it is sadly unsurprising that an officer accused of sexual misconduct would be able to stay on the police force, ultimately playing a role in Taylor’s tragic killing.”
Police sexual misconduct is a systemic problem
Various studies show that police sexual violence is widespread and that the incidents often begin with traffic stops. One 2014 report explains “driving while female,” a phenomenon that describes officers who use “the pretext of alleged traffic violations to sexually harass or abuse female drivers.”
The same report looked at nearly 550 cases across the country of officers arrested during a three-year period and found that there were cases of forcible or statutory rape, forcible sodomy, aggravated and simple assaults, and sexual assault with an object. The typical profile of the offending officers: male, patrol or street level, between the ages of 36 and 43, in the service for less than five years, and employed in southern metros in states like Florida, Louisiana, andHankison’s home of Kentucky. Officers tended to be on-duty when they committed sexual violence, but the off-duty officers were found to have wielded their law enforcement positions to coerce victims. The victims were typically girls under the age of 18.
The study did not account for the race of the officers or victims, but Yaver told Vox that because black people are more likely to be stopped by police in the context of traffic stops, this community is more likely to be vulnerable to this form of police abuse of power.
According to Yaver, a lack of regulation to prohibit police sexual violence perpetuates the problem. “In 32 states, police officers can claim that sexual contact with those they are arresting is consensual, despite the clear power dynamic precluding true sexual consent,” she told Vox. “Absent a law that explicitly prohibits sexual contact between police officers and those in their custody, there are opportunities for people to be violated due to these abuses of power.” Consent is not defined under Kentucky law.
Yaver pointed out that it wasn’t until 2017 that Texas formally prohibited roadside cavity searches. Before then, someone could be “forced to undress and submit to an invasive search in public,” she said. The bottom line, Yaver said, is consent: “It is impossible to truly consent to sexual contact when there is such a power imbalance at play. Even if someone says ‘okay,’ it may well be out of fear of consequence by law enforcement. If there is a concern about being put in jail for refusing advances, it is not consensual, and the laws need to reflect that.”
The lack of accountability has enabled recidivist officers, who sometimes averaged four victims in three years, with many still able to hold onto their badges as they shuffled across jurisdictions, according to one study. The former NYPD detectives who admitted to raping then-18-year-old Anna Chambers while she was in their custodyin 2017 were sentenced to five years of probation, no prison time.
Even with what the current scholarship on police sexual misconduct reveals, we still lack a comprehensive picture. Police sexual violence is underreported, as victims fear shame and repercussions. Victims “believe that they will receive a greater penalty if they do not comply in giving sexual favors or if they complain about an invasive search, even if without probable cause,” Yaver said. “With any police brutality, there’s a disinclination to report violence to the very institution from which one experienced abuse in the first place.” The majority of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.
Hankison has a record of sexual assault and other misconduct allegations
Borders, one of Hankison’s accusers wrote, “I never reported him out of fear of retaliation. I had no proof of what happened and he had the upper hand because he was a police officer. Who do you call when the person who assaulted you is a police officer? Who were they going to believe?”
Past cases of sexual assault against Hankison were thrown out. In a 2008 case, he was accused of “receiving oral sex in exchange for not arresting a woman with an outstanding warrant” and in a 2015 case, a parolee informed her parole officer that Hankison came onto her and would forgive a ticket if she had sex with him, according to the Courier-Journal.
Hankison is also being sued by Kendrick Wilson, who has accused him of “harassing suspects with unnecessary arrests and planting drugs on them,” according to USA Today. Wilson alleges that Hankison targeted him and arrested him three times in a two-year period.
June 13 marks exactly three months since Taylor was killed in her apartment after Hankison and two other colleagues executed a no-knock search warrant, and resulted in them shooting Taylor at least eight times. This week, LMPD finally released an incident report about the fatal shooting that night — but the document was largely blank. On Thursday, in a unanimous vote, the Louisville Metro Council banned no-knock warrants with new legislation called Breonna’s Law. “While this is not a finish line in the effort toward justice for Breonna, it’s a community-wide victory in the push for fairness and due process,” one council member said.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
A police officer swings a baton at demonstrators near the White House on May 30. | Evan Vucci/AP
“The protesters had to de-escalate the police.”
The police response to protests across the country has been strikingly similar.
In Philadelphia, police cornered peaceful protesters on the side of a highway and tear-gassed them en masse. In Portland, Oregon law enforcement used what’s known as a sound cannon — or a Long Range Acoustic Device — to send a piercing signal through a crowd of demonstrators. And in Washington, DC, National Guard officers flew military helicopters over protesters on the ground, an intimidation tactic aimed at getting them to leave.
At demonstration after demonstration, officers have met peaceful protesters, who are condemning the police killing of George Floyd — and police violence more broadly — with disproportionate and brutal force, often for no reason but to “disperse” a crowd. It’s an approach that’s only illustrated how quick police can be to use violent tactics, particularly against black individuals.
The irony of this dynamic isn’t one that’s lost on protesters: By responding with brutality in demonstrations about police brutality, police are effectively helping activists make their point.
“The continuity across these spaces, the cruelty, the egregious militarized force, it forces you to come to the conclusion that this is systemic,” says Krystal Strong, 35, a member of Black Lives Matter in Philadelphia, who recalled watching a young, black man get rammed with a police bike at a recent demonstration. “It’s not just Minneapolis. It’s not just Chicago or LA.”
Vox spoke with 10 protesters in seven different cities — and nearly all of them had either directly witnessed or been subject to police violence while participating in marches and rallies in recent weeks.
“It’s affirmed that policing is brutal,” says Melina Abdullah, a cofounder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, of her experience. “If I were the police, strategically I would say at a police brutality march, don’t be brutal. It’s just not smart; it’s bad optics.”
Police have escalated the violence at protests
The protesters who spoke with Vox all had a common experience: Regardless of the demonstration they were at — whether it was a peaceful march or a rally that included graffiti and property damage — the police were the ones who escalated the situation. And across the board, that response was seen as entirely disproportionate to the activity that may have prompted it.
During a peaceful protest in Toledo, Ohio, 29-year-old attorney Matthew Ahn saw police shooting wooden bullets directly at people’s bodies, severely injuring at least two individuals. “One of the projectiles hit someone directly in the foot and broke multiple bones in his foot,” he said. “There were several puddles of blood left where he was.” Throughout a day of demonstrations, Ahn — who attended the protests in a personal capacity and not a professional one — says police shot pepper balls, rubber bullets, or wooden bullets at protesters seven different times.
I’m not sure what exactly set it off. But as the massive armored truck drove by toward another group of protestors, the cop perched out of the top of the truck pointed at her, and then adjusted his hand on the trigger and shot this. It hit her square in the shin. 3/ pic.twitter.com/gIL5QqpSpS
In Los Angeles, Abdullah described watching a state highway patrol car plow into a crowd of protesters and knock a man out in the process. “We didn’t know he was alive at the moment,” she says. “He was unconscious.”
Last week, roughly 70 protesters, including Lane, were taken in by a resident named Rahul Dubey, who housed them for an entire night as police waited outside to arrest people for curfew violations. “Police officers were pepper-spraying wildly at people who were trying to get inside the home,” she said. “The scene inside ... is people pouring milk into their eyes, using eyewash bottles.”
I’m at a house in DC after being pepper sprayed and knocked down by the police. There are about 100 of us in a house surrounded by cops. All the neighbors on this street opened their doors and are tending to protesters. The cops corralled us on this street and sprayed us down.
And here on the other side of #SwannStreet, riot police and National Guardsmen close in on an even younger group of protesters as a neighbor decries the absurdity of detaining these kids and correctly predicts the chaos it will bring to the neighborhood. ( ️: @DanielleMisiak) pic.twitter.com/v7EP9sJe58
These incidents are among hundreds that have occurred in the past few weeks as thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women, following Floyd’s death. A Twitter thread that’s since gone viral includes more than 200 video clips that capture police tear-gassing, shoving, and beating protesters with batons — and those are simply the offenses that have been taped.
Such acts of police violence have contributed to a number of injuries — rubber bullets have blinded multiple individuals, while beatings have resulted in broken bones — and one death. In Louisville, Kentucky, where officers still haven’t been charged in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, police shot and killed David McAtee near his business when he was out past curfew in early June.
“The protesters had to de-escalate the police”
Demonstrators emphasize that they now go into marches expecting violence because of how law enforcement has behaved up to this point.
“I didn’t expect anything but violence — that’s all we’re thinking about,” said Lane.
Given the precedent for police behavior, protesters have been told to prepare and steel themselves for such treatment. Organizers encourage protesters to inform friends and family about where they are and set up a phone tree of emergency contacts. Additionally, demonstrators have been urged to dress in long-sleeve shirts and pants and to bring goggles in case of the use of tear gas or pepper spray.
Multiple organizers told Vox they try to protest with medical support directly on hand both to deal with the exhaustion that protesters may experience and potential injuries that could result from police activity. “We now only do marches with medics present and that’s been very helpful,” Abdullah, the Los Angeles BLM organizer, told Vox. As the New York Times reported, there’s been a surge of medical professionals and volunteers getting training to serve as “street medics” following the police violence at many demonstrations.
There have been some changes in how police have responded since the start of the protests more than two weeks ago. Since then, as cities have lifted curfews, and demonstrations have fluctuated in size, the police reaction has become less confrontational, in some instances. Protesters have speculated that this shift was because of the poor optics police had encountered, particularly when it came to high-profile incidents like the tear-gassing of peaceful demonstrators in front of the White House.
At the marches where law enforcement has taken a more aggressive approach, the escalation by police often came with little warning, protesters say. It can be chaotic, frightening, and overwhelming.
John Bazemore/AP
An Atlanta police officer charges toward demonstrators on June 2.
“There were many moments where we grabbed each other, where we pulled each other to safety. It’s a moment to moment re-evaluation of the situation,” says Strong.
In some instances, protesters have called white allies to put “white bodies to the front,” when it appears that police are advancing on a crowd because it’s less likely law enforcement will use fatal force on white activists. “I don’t think I was ready for how scared I felt,” said Steven, 25, a white protester in Washington, DC, who was tear-gassed and shoved by police multiple times on June 1.
Ultimately, many protesters note that they’ve been forced to de-escalate police rather than the other way around — and they warn that activists should be ready to do just that. During a demonstration outside Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s house on June 2, for example, Abdullah says protesters were the ones who actually diffused the tension.
“The protesters had to de-escalate the police,” she said. “The protesters who were in front of the police began to just sit down to create almost a human fencing around the rest of us to prevent the police [from] being able to run in.”
Here's what I saw at Tuesday's top-secret @BLMLA action at Mayor Garcetti's house.
Protesters I talked to were young & sharp on issues like DA policy & city budgets. Heads up: a formidable generation is coming up. They're not satisfied to wait for change https://t.co/rWTuDets2E
The actions they’ve witnessed have further confirmed protester views of police
For many protesters, the treatment they’ve witnessed only further reaffirms the views they held about police.
“For them to be so brutal and repressive and terrible at these marches just affirms to me that policing in this country can’t continue to exist in its current form. You can’t tinker around the edges, it’s in the DNA,” says Abdullah.
Activists say the protests have strengthened their resolve both to hold police accountable and to push for policy changes that fundamentally upbraid the current system. A major rallying cry at many of these protests has been a call to not simply reform the police but to defund the institution. The justification for this effort is a straightforward one: States and cities can reduce funding for the police and instead transfer that money to social service programs like food aid and education — to better address the core causes both of inequities and crime.
“If I were the police, strategically I would say at a police brutality march, don’t be brutal. It’s just not smart; it’s bad optics.”
In Los Angeles, for example, activists have urged officials to consider what they’re calling the “people’s budget,” which would reduce the allocation for law enforcement entities from roughly 54 percent of the city’s general fund budget to 6 percent.
The role that the protests have played in further highlighting police abuses has parallels in history: Nonviolent protest as a means to raise awareness of state violence was also a key goal of civil rights protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. and demonstrations against British rule by Mahatma Gandhi in India.
During the protests in the 1960s, the marches themselves drew attention to police violence — and the horrific treatment of protesters by police did so as well. “Aggressive dispersion tactics, such as police dogs and fire hoses, against individuals in peaceful protests and sit-ins, were the most widely publicized examples of police brutality in that era,” Katie Nodjimbadem writes for Smithsonian Magazine.
“Even back in the 1960s, when Dr. King was marching, part of the reason for the march was to expose the brutality,” Abdullah emphasizes.
There are legal actions protesters can take to hold police accountable
There is legal recourse for protesters who have suffered injuries at the hands of police, but there have historically been some pretty big obstacles to getting accountability.
Such barriers are largely due to the protections that police have in the case of civil lawsuits because of a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity: In order to even go to trial with an allegation of police misconduct, an individual needs to show not only that it was a violation of their civil rights, but also that there’s precedent for that same action being considered unlawful in prior cases.
This shield has enabled police officers to avoid liability on many acts of misconduct in the past, including shootings, theft and property damage.
Still, experts tell Vox that protesters have plenty of grounds to pursue legal action — and already, there’s been multiple cases in the last month where the officer involved faces criminal charges.
“Police officers have the right to use force in a number of situations, but they never have the right to use excessive force or brutality. That is always illegal,” says University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, who also founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.
Nam Y. Huh/AP
Chicago police officers prepare to confront protesters with batons and bullet-proof vests on May 30, 2020.
Protesters have three avenues they can take, Futterman notes: They can file a civil lawsuit against a specific officer for violating their constitutional rights, they can register a complaint with the city or police station involved, or they can report the incident to a district attorney, who could then file a criminal lawsuit.
In recent weeks, there have been at least two cases where such legal recourse has been effective: In New York City, the district attorney has charged a police officer with assault for shoving a protester during a demonstration in Brooklyn, and in Buffalo, New York, the district attorney has charged two police officers, who were filmed pushing an elderly man to the ground, with assault.Organizations like the ACLU and Black Lives Matter are among those currently working with protesters to advance legal actions on this front.
Yet, while the outcome of a lawsuit could help increase police accountability, it doesn’t do much in the near term for protesters fielding medical bills and injuries.
“In terms of compensation from the city or the police department, the only way would be to file a lawsuit, which would take time,” University of Memphis law professor Steven Mulroy tells Vox. He notes that legal advocates could put pressure on police departments to more quickly cover these costs without going to court. “A lawyer could send a demand letter — if you provide this amount to defray the medical expenses, we’ll hold off on pursuing a lawsuit,” Mulroy emphasizes.
Such accountability, while important, isn’t enough to fix the systemic nature of these abuses, though. To do that, protesters emphasize that the demonstrations and the civic action must continue.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
Thank goodness there's a tiny upside to his microscopic attention span
Enlarge / World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference on COVID-19 at WHO headquarters in Geneva on March 11, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Fabrice Coffrini )
On May 29, President Trump said his administration would take immediate action to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization.
"Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization, and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving, urgent global public health needs," Trump said at the time, while criticizing the WHO's response to the coronavirus pandemic and claiming that "China has total control" over the United Nations agency.
But now, two weeks later, there's nothing to indicate that Trump has followed through on his plan. In an article yesterday titled "US hasn't taken action to withdraw from WHO despite Trump pledge," The Hill wrote that "no steps toward a formal withdrawal have been taken," and that "a WHO spokesman told The Hill that the agency had received no formal notification that the United States would withdraw."
They just can't help themselves. They go straight to evil.
During an internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack. From a report: On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees. The presentation discussed the "benefits" of "content control." And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word "unionize."
Facebook Workplace is currently used by major employers such as Walmart, which is notorious for its active efforts to suppress labor organizing. The application is also used by the Singapore government, Discovery Communications, Starbucks, and Campbell Soup Corporation. The suggestion that Facebook is actively building tools designed to suppress labor organizing quickly caused a stir at the Menlo Park, California-based company. Facebook employees sparked a flurry of posts denouncing the feature, with several commenting in disbelief that the company would overtly pitch "unionize" as a topic to be blacklisted.
The cops have been helpfully illustrating how irredeemable they are these past few weeks. Defund their departments and start from scratch. Raise taxes on the wealthy, too, and we might just have the beginnings of a functioning society.
A new video from the Biden campaign is hitting Donald Trump where it hurts: in the ego. “Deer in the headlights, Part Two” hits Trump as “Too scared to face the people. Too weak to lead.”
The video focuses on Trump’s response to the protests following the police killing of George Floyd. “The nation marches for justice,” but Trump “doesn’t know what to do, so he hides in his bunker,” a narrator says over images of Trump and the White House. “Then, he’s afraid he looks too weak, so he has tear gas and flash grenades used on peaceful protesters, just for a photo op,” it continues over images of the violent clearing of Lafayette Park and Trump awkwardly holding a Bible outside St. John’s Church.
Hiding and weak—those are two ways Donald Trump never wants to be seen. But he is now, and the Biden campaign is hammering that.
The video also includes some stirring images of the protests with signs like “I can’t breathe” and “Black Lives Matter,” but the focus here is Trump’s failed response. “The cries for justice grow. Where is Donald Trump? Too scared to face the people. Too small to meet the moment. Too weak to lead.”
It may not infuriate Trump quite as much as the ads from the never-Trump Republicans at the Lincoln Project, but you have to figure that if he’s seen it, there’s going to be an angry tweet or six coming.
In early February, all but one Republican senator outright voted to acquit Donald Trump of impeachment charges without so much as hearing from one single witness. But judging by Senate Republican campaign ads four months later, you'd be forgiven if you thought Trump had been convicted and booted from office.
In 15 campaign ads released since March by Senate Republicans in competitive races, pictures of Trump were nowhere to be found in any of them, according to a review by the Daily Beast. Trump managed to get a single mention in a late April ad by North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis bragging that the senator had been appointed to the now irrelevant White House coronavirus task force. That ad has likely already been benched since Trump's all but tweeted “uncle” at the virus.
Tillis, who has voted with Trump more than 93% of the time, has gone through quite the transformation in the last several months. When Senate Republicans voted to save Trump's presidency, Tillis released a Trump-centric ad defending that vote, touting Trump's trade deals, and reminding voters that Trump would indeed be on the ballot in November. Oops.
In a do-over this week, Tillis sympathizes with the economic difficulties many residents in his state are facing while entirely abandoning Trump and his happy talk about jumpstarting the economy and "TRANSITIONING TO GREATNESS."
A similar erasure of Trump is happening in ads from GOP incumbents in Maine, Arizona, Colorado, and Montana. Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who's voted with Trump 89% of the time, skips over Trump completely while hyping his bipartisan work with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis to confront the coronavirus. Maine Sen. Susan Collins appears to have switched parties in one ad featuring her alongside Democratic senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Looks like GOP senators took to heart that memo released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee advising against defending Trump. None of these senators are trying to defend the indefensible, even after they voted to keep his presidency alive. Instead, many have taken the memo's advice to scapegoat China for Trump's failures at every turn.
Even Arizona Sen. Martha McSally—who has voted with Trump 95% of the time—moved away from ads earlier this year skewering her Democratic challenger for supporting Trump’s impeachment and removal. Now, McSally's busy playing up the business ties of Democrat Mark Kelly, who's trouncing her in the polls, to China.
Sure, Senate Republicans are fundraising off Trump in targeted emails, but they're not touching him with a 10-foot pole in their large-scale ads. Expect to see more of the mysteriously disappearing Trump since more GOP Senate seats are in play by the week, it seems. Trump's simply too toxic to touch—too bad all the Senate Republicans up for reelection this cycle put their personal stamp of approval on Trump with their acquittal votes.
Racism has always been Donald Trump’s go-to electoral move, but suddenly it’s not working so well for him. Being Trump, he’s doubling down on the racism—which has many Republicans, including some of his advisers, worried. “If he was trying to lose, he’d be doing basically what he is doing right now,” a Republican source “in frequent touch with the White House” told The Washington Post.
The issue Trump's advisers face is about public presentation, of course, not about getting Trump to stop being a racist—they sure can’t do that. But they’re not managing to achieve a less racist public presentation, either, from the decision to hold his return to campaign rallies on Juneteenth in Tulsa—the site of a major race massacre 99 years ago—to the decision to have him renominated for president in Jacksonville on the anniversary of that city’s Ax Handle Saturday, to basically every other statement in his Twitter feed.
“Donald Trump is a racist,” Jacksonville civil rights organizer Rodney Hurst said. “I don’t think it requires any real insight to know who and what Donald Trump is.”
But suddenly Trump’s racism is a problem serious enough, electorally speaking, for his advisers to care, and they can’t get him to tamp it down. “He’s talking as if this is a country in the 1950s and not 2020,” Richmond, Virginia, Mayor Levar Stoney told The New York Times. You don’t have to pretend racism is entirely fixed to understand that looking at broad-based protests across the country and sounding like Bull Connor might be a problem, but that thought appears way, way beyond the capacity of Trump’s racist mindset.
Trump needs to win back suburban white women, who abandoned Republicans in significant numbers in 2018 and, polls suggest, are staying away. But, while the Post reports that “Inside Trump’s orbit, several of the president’s aides are frustrated that some of his crafted statements on the recent unrest have been eclipsed by his incendiary tweets or remarks,” Trump’s campaign recently released an ad trying to stoke fears of protesters and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has been enthusiastically backing Trump’s every racist statement, from attacking the Buffalo protester to defending his stance against renaming military bases that currently honor Confederate leaders.
So while advisers may say in anonymous quotes that they’re worried about it, they’re either not as worried as they claim or they don’t have the leverage with Trump to get him to stop. Trump’s advisers, too, are trying to quickly make the transition from racism being a prime electoral weapon for their side to a world in which, as Washington, D.C., Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton told the Times, “So many white people have taken this to heart.”
Republican strategists are used to having traditional media frame Republican racism as “Democrats eager to capitalize on what some say is a racist president revealing his true beliefs.” And they still do get that language—thanks, Post!—but the balance has shifted, leaving the “Democrats eager, some say racism is racist” framing as a minor note in a longer litany of observations about Trump’s racism.
“It seems to me that Trump represents the death rattle of an older America,” Eddie Glaude, chair of the department of African American studies at Princeton University, told the Post. “Everything he’s doubling down on is precisely what we’re trying to leave behind, and so the battle that is now being engaged is precisely a battle surrounding what kind of country will we be moving forward, and he is holding onto with all of his might this idea of America as a white nation.”
Speaking with podcast host Pat Campbell on Monday, a top Tulsa Police Department official gave his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice. Major Travis Yates began by questioning what George Floyd was doing before the 10 minutes captured on video by witnesses. He then attacked statistics showing Black Americans are at considerably higher risk of being killed or hurt by police officers.
Podcast host Pat Campbell then led Major Yates down the crazypants path, saying he thought the police were being set up by the media as some kind of conspiracy to cut the budgets of police departments. Yates continued forward with a refrain heard from many police departments the past couple of days, saying that “over 350 million contacts” show that this “one event” is statistically negligible. As we know from the long list of names and stories, George Floyd’s death at the hands of law enforcement is not simply “one event.” But Yates had a lot more to say.
Yates then put on his tinfoil hat and noted that the last time we had large-scale protests like this was in 2016, based around the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The connective tissue, he said, is that it was also an election year. Yates began talking about organizations receiving money after the protests. He went through how the media is pushing fake news, saying things like Tamir Rice “was robbing people with a fake gun and when the cops showed up he pointed it at them.” If you need a refresher, Tamir Rice was the 12-year-old killed by a racist and cowardly officer, who should never have had a job with a gun, and there is ZERO evidence (and the police have never argued) that Rice was robbing people. Cleveland paid out at least $6 million to Rice’s family.
So, after Yates lied and lied and lied again to support his made-up theory that this is all fake news, he goes for the jugular: It turns out that all of this Black Lives Matter protesting and liberal watchdoggery of law enforcement is making law enforcement soft and less effective at their jobs. In fact, according to Yates, not only are the police not racist, they’re the opposite of racist! Citing research covered in this opinion piece by conservative Heather Mac Donald in the Wall Street Journal on June 2, Yates said, “All of the research says we're shooting African-Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed."
Yates goes on to explain his tiny-minded theory, which is that people began protesting for justice, but once they arrested Chauvin, people began protesting more and changing the goal posts. "This is what they're trying to say, that all these changes need to come from—this is why we're protesting, this is why we're rioting. Because of systematic abuse of power and racism. That just doesn't exist," he declared.
Public Radio Tulsa reports that this interview has gotten Yates into a heap of hot water, though Tulsa Police Department Capt. Richard Meulenberg said he would reserve judgement until he heard the interview. "Everybody's got a right to their opinion. Obviously, he being a major with the Tulsa Police Department, it carries some weight that he has his opinion, and we'll have to just kind of go through this. I mean, I can't speak upon the thing that he talked about here because I don't have the data. I can't refute or substantiate what it is that he said here." Meulenberg did say that Yates had the right to speak for himself, and as long as he wasn’t speaking for the department, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Tulsa Public Radio points out that Yates has written and made similar statements and taken similarly idiotic and racist positions over the past few years. There have been calls for his resignation since 2016. This makes Meulenberg’s statement sound like something he’s had to rehearse a few times already.
After the Public Radio report stirred up controversy Yates, in true Trumpian fashion, said he was misquoted, the claims were libelous, and the news was fake. He told ABC 8 Tulsa that he was talking about hypothetical data. His use of “ought to be,” doesn’t seem to have penetrated for him here.
In a video from 2018 when Yates was promoting some business he was running called “Courageous Leadership,” he explained that police were right and had always been right. That wearing body cameras had proven they were right. There is one mantra that racist right-wingers do stick to, for all of their hypocrisies: Never learn anything new.
On Wednesday, Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast took unprecedented measures to remove racist cards from its game. Seven cards in all, dating back to 1994, are now banned from play. Their images will also being removed from the game's official online database. Polygon reports: "The events of the past weeks and the ongoing conversation about how we can better support people of color have caused us to examine ourselves, our actions, and our inactions," Wizards said in a statement. "We appreciate everyone helping us to recognize when we fall short. We should have been better, we can be better, and we will be better." The list of now-banned cards is: Invoke Prejudice, Cleanse, Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies, Jihad, Imprison, and Crusade.
One card in particular, Invoke Prejudice, was singled out. It shows a hooded executioner with a black axe. "If opponent casts a Summon spell that does not match the color of one of the creatures under your control, that spell is countered," says the card. It effectively kills off creatures that don't look like the creatures already on the table. Gatherer, the official online database of every Magic card ever published, displays the card at a web URL ending in "1488," numbers that are synonymous with white supremacy. All cards will be replaced online with a note that calls out their racist depictions, text, or a combination thereof.
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A nurse and patient at a Covid-19 testing center at the Navajo Nation town of Monument Valley, Arizona, on May 21. | Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
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Demonstrations against police brutality have taken place around the US since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
A police officer swings a baton at demonstrators near the White House on May 30. | Evan Vucci/AP
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