More than a dozen police unions nationwide, including those in New York, Los Angeles, San Jose and Chicago, are throwing their support behind a national push for federal funding and other resources to help officers better prepare for interactions with people who are mentally ill, reports the Los Angeles Times. The unions want the federal government to pay for crisis-intervention training, less-lethal devices and officers who team up with mental health professionals to respond to emergency calls. Their agenda, dubbed “Compassionate and Accountable Responses for Everyone,” is being unveiled today. Teaching police how to appropriately respond to someone who has mental health issues is nothing new, but those interactions have drawn renewed attention in recent years, particularly after several high-profile police shootings of people who were diagnosed with mental illnesses. Mental health advocates and police said that officers are often first responders in situations involving people who could be better helped with treatment or other services. Officers frequently describe feeling pressured to act not just as a police officer, but also as a therapist or social worker when responding to such calls — a difficult task, they say, if the encounter is volatile. “This is an issue that’s not going away. We have to deal with it,” said Jamie McBride, one of the Los Angeles Police Department union’s directors. “Enough is enough.” The coalition hopes that federal involvement will standardize mental health training for officers across the country and help departments create teams pairing police and mental health clinicians that respond to people who are in crisis. The International Association of Chiefs of Police launched its own effort last year to get agencies to craft policies and train officers to better handle situations involving mentally ill people. So far, only 140 of about 18,000 agencies have signed on. Federal prisons keep some mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement for at least 22 hours a day, sometimes for years, says a new report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, the Wall Street Journal reports. The study was issued 18 months after the Obama administration hailed new restrictions on the use of solitary confinement for federal inmates, including the mentally ill, as a model for state correctional facilities. Former President Obama barred solitary confinement for the handful of juveniles in federal prison and called the excessive or unnecessary isolation of adult inmates “an affront to our common humanity.” Federal investigators found a wide disconnect between policy and practice, supporting longstanding complaints by civil-rights activists that some prisons amount to human warehouses. Cumulative time in solitary confinement isn’t tracked, and many mentally ill inmates are receiving insufficient treatment or none at all, the report said. One prison psychologist described solitary confinement this way: “You have no contact, you don’t speak to anybody and it’s a form of torture, on some level.” Federal prison officials agreed with all 15 of the audit’s recommendations, which included clear policies for solitary confinement, tracking of cumulative time in single cells, and careful monitoring of the mentally ill. Amid a national debate over the economic and social costs of incarceration, a number of states have reduced their use of solitary confinement. Colorado, Maine and Pennsylvania, for example, have barred the practice for inmates with serious mental illness in state prisons. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vetoed legislation last year that would have allowed solitary confinement only as a last resort and not at all for the mentally ill. In one of the audit’s notable findings about federal inmates, only three percent receive regular treatment for mental illness, though a recent study said the proportion with a history of mental health problems is about 19 percent. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh defended her administration’s approach to addressing crime, saying her office has developed a formal violence reduction plan in conjunction with police, the Baltimore Sun reports. The mayor said she has the plan in writing, but did not commit to making it available for public review. One of her top critics, City Councilman Brandon Scott, ended a hearing abruptly after saying the administration did not appear prepared to provide a collaborative crime plan. The mayor offered no specifics about her plan. Her spokesman said the mayor and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis will decide whether to release it publicly. The Rev. Andrew Foster Connors, co-chairman of the advocacy group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, said Pugh should make her crime plan available for the public to review.”This is a crisis,” he said. “Let’s all come together and develop a plan. If she has a crime-reduction plan, the public doesn’t know about it.” The mayor said she is meeting with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan talk about how to address the city’s surging violence. More than 180 people have been killed in Baltimore so far this year, about 30 percent more than at the same point last year. Pugh is seeking state help to address technology shortcomings in the city, such as expanding gunshot detection devices and equipping police cars with computers. She said that two consultants affiliated with the U.S. Department of Justice will be coming to Baltimore in early August after helping police in Los Angeles reduce crime. Hundreds of college students who have been accused of rape or sexual assault have written to the Department of Education protesting the handling of their cases, the New York Times reports. Some had lost scholarships. Some had been expelled. A mother stumbled upon her son trying to take his own life, recalled Candice Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education. On campus after campus, from the University of Virginia to Columbia University, from Duke to Stanford, higher education has been roiled by high-profile cases of sexual assault accusations. Today, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is meeting in private with women who say they were assaulted, accused students and their families, advocates for both sides and higher education officials. It is the first step in a contentious effort to re-examine policies of President Obama, who made expansive use of his powers to investigate the way universities and colleges handle sexual violence. How university and college administrations have dealt with campus sexual misconduct charges has become one of the most volatile issues in higher education. Many women say higher education leaders have not taken their trauma seriously. The Obama administration’s response prompted a backlash, not just from the accused and their families but from well-regarded law professors who say new rules went too far. Jackson, who organized today’s sessions, believes investigations under the 1972 law known as Title IX have gone deeply awry. A sexual assault survivor herself, she sees “a red flag that something’s not quite right” — and that the rights of accused students have too often been ignored. Hundreds of cases are still pending, some for years, she said, because investigators were “specifically told to keep looking until you find the violation” on college campuses even after they found none. Her critics deny the charge. As of Monday, the office had 496 open sexual assault cases, and the average length of a case is 703 days. Documenting Hate, a collaborative journalism project launched this year, is an attempt to overcome the inadequate data collection on hate crimes and bias incidents in the U.S., ProPublica reports. The project compiles incident reports from civil-rights groups, as well as news reports, social media and law enforcement records. It also collects personal stories of witnessing or being the victim of hate. In six months, ProPublica has been joined by more than 100 newsrooms around the country. Thousands of reports have been received, with more coming every day. They come from states blue and red. People have reported hate incidents from every part of their communities: in schools, on the road, at private businesses, in the workplace. ProPublica and its partners have produced more than 50 stories using the tips from the database. Several stories focused on racial harassment on public transportation, using tips to illustrate something officials were also seeing. BuzzFeed discovered dozens of reported incident in K-12 schools in which students cited President Trump’s name or slogans to harass minority classmates. The FBI, which is required to track hate crimes, counts between 5,000 and 6,000 annually. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates the total is closer to 250,000. One explanation for the gap is that many more than half of victims don’t report to police what happened to them. A federal appeals court today overturned the 2015 corruption conviction of Sheldon Silver, the once-powerful New York State Assembly speaker who obtained nearly $4 million in illicit payments in return for taking official actions that benefited others, according to evidence presented at his trial, the New York Times reports. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year in the case of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell that narrowed the definition of the kind of official conduct that can serve as the basis of a corruption prosecution. The appeals court said the jury instructions given by the judge in Silver’s trial were erroneous and that a properly instructed jury might not have convicted him.“We recognize that many would view the facts adduced at Silver’s trial with distaste,” Judge José Cabranes wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. “The question presented to us, however, is not how a jury would likely view the evidence presented by the government. Rather, it is whether it is clear, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a rational jury, properly instructed, would have found Silver guilty.” Prosecutors still could retry Mr. Silver, a 73-year-old Democrat who served for more than two decades as Assembly speaker. He was convicted of honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering. Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison but he was allowed to remain free pending his appeal. Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety is claiming another round of success in new firearms restrictions passed on the state level, Politico reports. Much of that came with the support of Republicans and signatures of Republican governors. Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah all passed new restrictions on firearms for domestic abusers. Only Louisiana has a Democratic governor. According to a new “report card” from Everytown, that brings the total to 23 of states that have enhanced the laws around domestic abusers since 2013. Everytown also declares victory in gun lobby losses, noting that 17 out of 18 states rejected bills to allow guns in schools and 14 of 16 states rejected bills to allow guns on college campuses. The report card tracks 20 of 22 states that didn’t pass bills that would have eliminated requirements for permits to carry guns, a top priority for the National Rifle Association. “The NRA counts as ‘wins’ bills that lower permitting fees for veterans, allow people to hunt on Sundays and create an official NRA license plate,” says the report card. “Don’t be misled into thinking these bills are losses for the gun safety movement; they aren’t.” Florida is one of three states that permanently revokes the civil rights of anyone convicted of a felony, a system that has disenfranchised an estimated 1.5 million people. Even after felons complete their sentences, pay their fines and serve probation, they must wait at least five years to ask the state to restore their rights, and that can take a decade or more, the Miami Herald reports. Most people don’t bother. Many who try will die before their cases are heard. Four times a year, Gov. Rick Scott and his cabinet considers requests by fewer than 100 people at a time to restore their right to vote, run for office, or own a gun. With more than 20,000 people trapped in the clemency pipeline, and with a governor and legislature unwilling to hire more people to review cases, the backlog will last forever. Former Gov. Charlie Crist led an effort in 2007 to give amnesty to many felons, who regained their civil rights without hearings. Scott and his fellow Republicans changed the law in 2011 to make it harder for felons to regain their rights.The backlog is growing once again, and the struggle is harder than ever. Seven people were indicted accused of conspiring to defraud Medicare out of almost $132 million yesterday as a team of FBI agents raided their offices, reports the Detroit News. The indictment alleges that the defendants participated in a nearly decade-long conspiracy that defrauded Medicare through a series of kickbacks and bribes. The case appears to be part of a nationwide crackdown on health care fraud. Two years ago, federal agents charged 243 people nationwide with participating in fraudulent schemes that involved $712 million in false billings. This year’s health care fraud crackdown and the Detroit indictment is expected to be outlined today by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In 2015, the enforcement sweep led to 16 arrests on charges relating to schemes that involved more than $122 million. The new indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges the seven defendants conspired in a scheme involving $131.8 million. The alleged scheme involved paying kickbacks and bribes for services billed to Medicare. The conspiracy has continued for nearly a decade and involved sending false and fraudulent materials to Medicare, the indictment alleges. The defendants are accused of billing Medicare for false treatments, entering into sham agreements and making misrepresentations and omissions in the enrollment applications and claims submitted to Medicare. A Boston police officer fired five years ago for nearly choking an unarmed man into unconsciousness and then dismissing it to investigators as a “bear hug” can return to work with full back pay, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled, the Boston Herald reports. The court affirmed an arbitrator’s 2013 ruling that officer David Williams did not use excessive force when he placed an off-duty Middlesex deputy sheriff in a chokehold. Williams, the arbitrator found, was wrongfully terminated in 2012 by then-Police Commissioner Edward Davis. The court faulted the city for not spelling out in its own rules that chokeholds are a prohibited use of excessive force, saying that if they had, “an arbitrator who found a choke hold reasonable would have exceeded his authority.” Williams, 54, joined the department in 1991. He has not returned to the job since his termination, as the dispute between the city and the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association ran its legal course. This is the second time he’s been off the job for allegations that he used excessive force. The last time, he returned to work with a reported $500,000 in back pay after a 1995 near-fatal beating of a plainclothes officer mistaken for a murder suspect. The city settled a federal lawsuit brought by Williams’ accuser, Michael O’Brien, for $1.4 million. |
