St. Paul police officers who encounter someone who is armed with a knife or bat and acting aggressively have a new way to respond, reports the Twin Cities Pioneer Press. The police department has begun a pilot program of PepperBall. An officer uses a launcher, which looks like a handgun with orange along the top, to shoot a powder with a similar effect as pepper spray. But while a presidential task force on 21st-century policing recently recommended law enforcement agencies use “less than lethal” technology, PepperBall can be controversial. Teresa Nelson, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, said she believes St. Paul should focus instead on using trained crisis responders, such as a program in Eugene, Ore., that provides mobile crisis intervention around the clock. St. Paul police say they’re also working on the mental health front. After researching PepperBall since last February, the first officers began carrying it on Friday. For the next two to three months, about 100 officers in St. Paul’s Central District will have access to PepperBall. The St. Paul Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the police department, provided $50,000 for the project. The police department spent about $25,000 for 50 PepperBall devices and equipment for the pilot program. After a partial power outage on Jan. 27 plunged parts of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn into total darkness, while inmates were locked in their cells for days as temperatures inside dipped to near freezing, outraged community members protested outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Local politicians demanded jail officials take immediate action to fix the electrical system and provide generators and additional blankets to inmates. Power was eventually restored on Feb. 3 ― a week after it went out. But the facility’s lack of urgency and empathy toward inmates is nothing new, the Huffington Post reports. “It’s like a zoo in there ― crazy,” said Abigail Perez, whose fiance detained there is diabetic and has some mental health issues. “It’s very dirty. … Sometimes there’s no heat, no hot water. Sometimes they lock them down and won’t give them breakfast until the afternoon.” A joint congressional inquiry is demanding that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre hand over internal documents showing whether the NRA made “illegal, excessive, and unreported in-kind donations” to the campaigns of Donald Trump and several GOP Senate candidates, The Trace reports. The probe is based on a series of investigative reports published by The Trace laying out evidence that the NRA and its vendors used apparent shell companies to evade rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and the campaigns they support. The probe is being led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The evidence shows the NRA is moving money through a complex web of shell organizations to avoid campaign finance rules and boost candidates willing to carry their water,” Whitehouse told The Trace. “And if the NRA can weave such a web, so can Vladimir Putin and others trying to undermine our democracy. We need the truth about this scheme or else special interests like the gun lobby or foreign interests like Russia can flaunt the law and erode the integrity of our elections.” Law enforcement officials, led by U.S. Attorney James P. Kennedy Jr., announced new protocols Wednesday for police responding to drug overdose scenes in Erie County, The Buffalo News reports. They are specific procedures officers are required to follow while treating the site as a crime scene, with the aim of ensuring that the dealer who sold the drugs is held criminally responsible for fatal and non-fatal drug overdoses that occur in Erie County, Kennedy explained during a news conference at his Delaware Avenue office. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is partnering with the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, the New York-New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, Central Police Services and the Erie County Chiefs Association to ensure that the new protocols are standard procedure in all police departments across the county. In addition to standardizing the information gathered at drug overdose scenes, information gathered by investigating officers will be entered into ODMAP, a real-time, national GPS mapping system that tracks overdoses, fatal overdoses and Narcan use nationwide. The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nomination of William Barr to be President Trump’s second confirmed attorney general on Thursday, as Republicans and Democrats split over his views on executive authority and the special counsel’s ongoing Russia investigation, The New York Times reports. Barr will now go before the full Republican-controlled Senate, where he is expected to be confirmed and sworn into office as soon as next week. If confirmed, he would promptly assume responsibility for the special counsel investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III into possible ties between Trump, his associates and Russia, and whether the president obstructed justice. Barr, who previously served as attorney general in the 1990s, presented himself in his confirmation hearing last month as a set of steady hands who would guard the department’s independence. He said he would permit Mueller to finish his work, and he pledged to allow as much transparency as possible around the investigation’s findings. A Muslim man was executed in Alabama on Thursday, as originally scheduled, after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow the execution, denying his request for an imam’s presence in the execution chamber, Reuters reports. Attorneys for Domineque Ray, 42, had argued that Alabama’s execution policy favored Christian inmates because a chaplain is allowed in the room, often kneeling next to the death row prisoner, and praying with the inmate if requested. Ray’s imam, Yusef Maisonet, watched the execution from an adjoining witness room, multiple media reports said, including the Birmingham News. Twenty years later, Brenda Tracy, a 45-year-old mother of two travels the country to stand before strangers and share her most awful memory, of a gang rape. This crusade, which started years before the #MeToo movement, takes her any place where people will listen, the Los Angeles Times reports. Her schedule is now packed with schools willing to pay a speaking fee plus expenses. In 13 scheduled appearances from last fall to January, she traveled from Minnesota to Louisiana, from Ohio to Virginia. The talks are emotionally taxing and there are people who troll her online, questioning her honesty and motives. Near the end of a talk at Sacramento State, she offers one statistic. Citing studies on rape perpetration, she suggests that roughly 10% of the male population is responsible for the great majority of sexual violence. She tells the men: “I’m not here because I think you’re the problem. I think you’re the solution. In the wake of a midterm election that swept some 20 Republican appellate judges out of office, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht called on the Texas legislature to reform a system he called “among the very worst methods of judicial selection,” the Texas Tribune reports. In recent history, partisan judicial elections have played well for Texas’ majority party. But last year, as turnout surged in urban areas and voters leaned heavily toward the straight-ticket voting option, Democratic judges were swept onto the bench on the coattails of candidates like Beto O’Rourke. All told, Hecht said, in the last election, Texas’ district and appellate courts “lost seven centuries of judicial experience at a single stroke.” It wasn’t the first time Hecht has made such a call. Justices on Texas’ two high courts have been among the most vocal critics of a system that requires justices to run as partisan figures but rule as impartial arbiters. ,But the call took on new significance after a shattering judicial election for Texas Republicans, who lost control of four major state appeals courts based in Austin, Houston and Dallas. Hecht called on lawmakers to consider shifting to a system of merit selection and retention elections — or to at least pass legislative proposals that would increase the qualification requirements for judicial candidates. City Council members in New Orleans unanimously approved a resolution Thursday calling for an end to the jailing of sexual assault or domestic violence victims who resist testifying against their suspected assailants, the Associated Press reports. The vote put the council directly at odds with District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who had opposed the resolution. Nobody spoke against the resolution at Thursday’s council meeting but Cannizzaro’s office issued a statement the night before saying the use of “material witness” warrants for the arrest of uncooperative victims is rare, but sometimes needed to get critical testimony against dangerous offenders. Proponents of the resolution, including the local court system watchdog group Court Watch NOLA and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, rejected Cannizzaro’s argument. They said threatening victims with jail is counterproductive, leading to distrust of police and the criminal justice system by crime victims. A man who shot live video Tuesday outside a North Carolina business that had just been raided by immigration officials has been charged with threatening sheriff’s deputies, The News & Observer reports. Christian Enrique Canales, 27, of Sanford was taken into custody Wednesday and released on bail. He was charged with communicating threats to law enforcement officers and driving with a revoked license, Lee County Sheriff Tracy Carter said in statement on Facebook. Now some immigration advocates are questioning whether Canales was arrested “in retaliation” for bringing attention to the raid. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 27 people Tuesday at the business on McNeill Road in Sanford. An ICE spokeswoman said 25 people face criminal charges and two face civil immigration violations. In a Facebook Live video posted around 9 a.m. Tuesday, Canales can be heard interacting with law enforcement. At one point during the roughly 8-minute video, a man can be heard using expletives to tell people they need bullet-proof vests. It’s not clear from the video who the man was addressing. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. |
