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Today In Criminal Justice
Why Can’t We Learn from Our Opioid Mistakes?
Report: Death Row Population Declined Slightly to 2,881 in '15 MI Lawsuit Targets License Suspensions Over Traffic Debts
FBI Report Cites Trend of 'De-Policing' by Besieged Cops Web Firm Cloudfare Gives Internet Voice to Racist Groups Black Lives Matter Turns Away from Protests and Toward Policy After UT Campus Stabbing, TX Lawmakers to Legalize Knives Texas Pols Ready to Act on 'Show-Me-Your-Papers' Bill Texas Child Welfare Workers Accused of Lying on Reports Family of NE Inmate Killed in Riot Sues for Lack of Protection Nashville Roiled by Judge's Intrusion in Cop's Traffic Stop Top Story
Why Can’t We Learn from Our Opioid Mistakes?Few policymakers consider the roots of America’s drug problem when they pass legislation aimed at curbing substance abuse and addiction. The Trump administration seems headed down the same road, write George Mason University students James Alexander McAdoo II and Jessica Fuentes-Diaz. The Crime Report Report: Death Row Population Declined Slightly to 2,881 in ’15A new statistical brief reports that 33 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons held a total of 2,881 inmates under sentence of death at the end of 2015, 61 fewer than at year’s end in 2014. It was the 15th consecutive year in which the number of condemned inmates decreased, according to “Capital Punishment, 2014-2015,” by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Fourteen states and the federal system received a total of 49 inmates under sentence of death in 2015. Read other key findings at The Crime Report MI Lawsuit Targets License Suspensions Over Traffic DebtsA class-action lawsuit filed Thursday in Michigan accuses the state of suspending the driver’s licenses of people with safe driving records simply because they are too poor to pay traffic violation fines and fees. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against Ruth Johnson, Michigan secretary of state, by Equal Justice Under Law, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. “This lawsuit is the beginning of the process to end the state’s unjust system and restore driving rights to tens of thousands of residents,” said a spokeswoman for the group. The Crime Report FBI Report Cites Trend of 'De-Policing' by Besieged CopsA confidential FBI study concluded that U.S. law enforcement officers are “de-policing” amid concerns that anti-police defiance fueled in part by movements like Black Lives Matter has become the “new norm,” reports the Washington Times. “Departments — and individual officers — have increasingly made the decision to stop engaging in proactive policing,” said the April 2016 report by the FBI Office of Partner Engagement.
The report, “Assailant Study — Mindsets and Behaviors,” said the social-justice movement sparked by the 2014 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by an officer in Ferguson, Mo., “made it socially acceptable to challenge and discredit the actions of law enforcement.” The report said, “Nearly every police official interviewed agreed that for the first time, law enforcement not only felt that their national political leaders [publicly] stood against them, but also that the politicians’ words and actions signified that disrespect to law enforcement was acceptable in the aftermath of the Brown shooting.” As a result, “Law enforcement officials believe that defiance and hostility displayed by assailants toward law enforcement appears to be the new norm.” Washington Times Web Firm Cloudfare Gives Internet Voice to Racist GroupsSince its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet, says ProPublica. Traffic is up lately at other white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront. The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by Cloudfare, an otherwise very mainstream internet company. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.
The widespread use of Cloudflare’s services by racist groups is not an accident. Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate. “A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in 2013. He said “no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.” Cloudflare has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer: It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. This has led to campaigns of harassment against those people. ProPublica Black Lives Matter Turns Away from Protests and Toward PolicyThe Black Lives Movement is evolving away from street protests in the Trump era, reports the Washington Post. News about controversial police encounters with black Americans has been met with relatively subdued responses in recent weeks. Activists say the movement’s efforts have entered a new phase — one more focused on policy than protest — prompted by the election of President Trump. “What people are seeing is that there are less demonstrations,” said Alicia Garza, who helped coin the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in 2012. “A lot of that is that people are channeling their energy into organizing locally, recognizing that in Trump’s America, our communities are under direct attack.”
The issue that galvanized the movement hasn’t subsided. So far in 2017, police have shot and killed 23 unarmed people, a higher rate than in 2016, when 48 unarmed people were killed all year. But like most of the political left, Black Lives Matter leaders were stunned by Trump’s electoral victory in November. They’ve grappled with the role of an anti-racism movement at a time when political threats to other groups — immigrants, Muslims and women — have gained urgency and pushed more progressives into the streets in protest. In interviews, more than half a dozen leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement said the election prompted renewed focus on supporting other minority groups as well as amassing electoral power to fight the new administration. Washington Post After UT Campus Stabbing, TX Lawmakers to Legalize KnivesFour days after a student was stabbed to death and three others were injured at the University of Texas, the Texas House is set Friday to debate and vote on a bill that would remove knives from the list of illegal weapons in state law, reports the Austin American-Statesman. The timing is unfortunate, but it is not expected to delay consideration of House Bill 1935, said the bill’s author, Rep. John Frullo, R-Lubbock. “It is definitely unfortunate what happened at UT, and our hearts go out to those folks at the university,” Frullo said. He expects the bill to be amended to extend additional protections to college campuses and other areas.
The legislation, which has three Republicans and three Democrats as co-authors, would remove a section of state law that defines illegal knives as those with a blade longer than 5½ inches, daggers, Bowie knives and knives designed to be thrown, as well as spears and swords. The bill also would remove knives from the list of weapons that are illegal to sell or provide to those younger than age 18 and would give public schools the discretion to expel students who bring a knife to school or a school event. American-Statesman Texas Pols Ready to Act on 'Show-Me-Your-Papers' BillPresident Trump’s plan for a deportation force is meeting resistance in the courts, but Texas is about to pass a bill that will make all of the state’s law enforcement part of it—whether they like it or not, says the Daily Beast. Seven years after Arizona enacted a similar law, Texas is on the verge of passing a bill that would give every police officer in the state the power to say “show me your papers.” The bill, SB4, demands that local police hold people for immigration agents and permits them to investigate a person’s immigration status upon arrest.
In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he was willing to throw law enforcement leaders in prison if they didn’t spend their resources on immigration enforcement. Talking specifically about Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez, Abbott said Texas would pass legislation “that will impose criminal penalties where the sheriff herself can wind up behind bars, and hence be removed from office, fines that could add up to millions of dollars per year, as well as other penalties. We’re gonna make it so costly, so expensive, there’s no way that any city or county can take on sanctuary city policies.” Why do cities opt to become immigrant sanctuaries? Because for many years, ICE would essentially ask local police to do them an unconstitutional favor: hold a person up to 48 hours without probable cause until ICE agents were able to pick them up. Multiple federal courts have determined that this had violated people’s Fourth Amendment rights. Daily Beast Texas Child Welfare Workers Accused of Lying on ReportsSince 2009, at least 50 Texas Child Protective Services caseworkers have been caught placing children at risk by lying to prosecutors, ignoring court orders, falsifying state records or obstructing law enforcement investigations, says the Austin American-Statesman. At least four former CPS employees currently face criminal charges for their alleged misconduct. State officials insist those cases are rare. The employees accused of misconduct represent a fraction of the 3,400 investigators and foster care workers in the agency. But the agency cannot definitively say how often it happens since it does not comprehensively track the number of people who were fired for such offenses.
It also doesn’t count the number of CPS employees who were punished, but not fired, for such misconduct, because that information is stored only in employees’ personnel files, an agency spokesman said. Through a series of open records requests, the American-Statesman identified numerous employees accused of wrongdoing by CPS or the state Health and Human Services Commission’s inspector general who were referred to local law enforcement agencies. The majority of those referrals were for lying on government documents to cover up sloppy casework, with caseworkers often saying they had visited children they had not. In other cases, employees failed to cooperate with law enforcement, lied on their travel reimbursement forms or refused to comply with a judge’s orders. American-Statesman Family of NE Inmate Killed in Riot Sues for Lack of ProtectionThe family of an inmate who died during the Mother’s Day 2015 riot at Nebraska’s Tecumseh State Prison has filed a lawsuit accusing the state of failing to protect him and adequately staff the facility, reports the Omaha World-Herald. Shon Collins, 46, was one of two inmates found dead after inmates took control of two housing units at the prison for several hours, setting fires and ransacking cells. The lawsuit, filed in Lancaster County District Court, says the state failed to keep Collins apart from other inmates.
Collins, a sex offender, was in protective custody, separated from other inmates, at the time of the riot because he previously had been threatened and assaulted by other inmates, the lawsuit says. Yet on the day of the riot, inmates from three housing units, including those in general population and those in protective custody, were all released from their cells to a prison yard to obtain medications. When the riot broke out, corrections officers quickly were overwhelmed and fled to a prison guard tower, leaving Collins unprotected, the suit says. Collins was serving 66 to 80 years for first-degree sexual assault of a child. The other inmate found dead, Donald Peacock, was also a sex offender. The Collins lawsuit is the first filed in connection with five deaths at the Tecumseh prison over the past two years. Omaha World-Herald Nashville Roiled by Judge's Intrusion in Cop's Traffic StopNashville District Attorney General Glenn Funk has pledged to investigate when judges attempt to influence police officers, backing a recent public request from the mayor and possibly exacerbating a rift with Nashville police, reports the Tennessean. “No judge should ever call a Metro officer in the middle of a traffic stop and instruct the officer not to issue a citation or make an arrest,” Funk said in a statement. “Any instances of such conduct which are referred to this office will be fully investigated.” The prosecutor’s words came after local leaders raised concerns about Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson’s decision not to discipline officers who, after receiving a call from then-judge Casey Moreland last year, let one of the judge’s paramours leave a traffic stop though she could have been arrested.
Moreland resigned in April and has since been indicted on five federal counts alleging he tried to interfere with an investigation of his misconduct and attempted to bribe a woman to recant allegations against him. In 2016, police say Moreland called a police sergeant after the woman, Natalie Amos, was pulled over. She was let go even though her driver’s license was revoked. Anderson said this week the officers would not be disciplined. Prosecutor Funk, Mayor Megan Barry, Vice Mayor David Briley and Councilman Bob Mendes have now all spoken out in opposition to judicial interference in police work. Tennessean | |
| | On every business day, The Crime Report (TCR) and Criminal Justice Journalists (CJJ) provide a summary of the nation's top crime and justice news stories with links, commentary, and New & Notable research in the field. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Langeloth Foundation and the Urban Institute. Today's report was prepared by David Krajicek and Victoria Mckenzie. Please send comments or questions to victoria@thecrimereport.org. | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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