To the loved ones of those devastated by opioids, President Trump’s declaration Thursday of a public health care emergency is too little, too late, says USA Today. It’s “like trying to put a Band Aid on a fatal wound,” says Charlotte Wethington of northern Kentucky, who lost her son to a heroin overdose 15 years ago. “It is absolutely ridiculous that we have not done more in the time that this epidemic — pandemic — has been going on.” Trump’s directive does not release any additional funds to deal with a drug crisis that claimed more than 59,000 lives in 2016, says the New York Times. And he made little mention of the need for the rapid and costly expansion of medical treatment that public health specialists argue is crucial to addressing the epidemic. In an editorial, the Times said the president “demonstrated that he has not grasped what’s needed to combat the opioid problem and, more important, the ways in which his own policies impede recovery for millions of Americans.” The editorial said Trump “repeated old promises to stop drug trafficking from Mexico by building the wall.” It continued, “He announced tough-sounding but vague plans to ban one prescription opioid he did not name but called ‘evil,’ to train federally employed prescribers in safe prescribing practices and to develop nonaddictive painkillers. He said the administration would produce ‘really big, really great advertising’ aimed at young people because, ‘If we can teach young people not to take drugs, it’s really, really easy not to take them.’ This is sloganeering reminiscent of the ineffective, Reagan-era ‘Just Say No’ programs, when the ravages of drug abuse in black and Hispanic communities were treated with harsh punishment, rather than the empathy and care that is being called for today.” President Trump is promising a “massive advertising campaign” as part of his administration’s response to the worst drug crisis in U.S. history, but past marketing efforts have shown few results, and experts say other measures could be far more effective in curbing the current epidemic, says the Associated Press. In a speech Thursday about his opioid strategy, Trump said “our most important thing” will be “really tough, really big, really great advertising, so we get to people before they start.” But government and academic assessments of “Just Say No”-style messages have shown they don’t work. Between 1998 and 2004 the U.S. government spent nearly $1 billion on a national campaign designed to discourage use of illegal drugs among young people, particularly marijuana. A 2008 follow-up study funded by the National Institutes of Health found the campaign “had no favorable effects on youths’ behavior” and may have actually prompted some to experiment with drugs, an unintended “boomerang” effect. A 2011 study of the government’s “Above the Influence” campaign suggested eighth-graders who had seen the campaign were only slightly less likely to have tried marijuana than those who had not. Other drug prevention campaigns from the 1980s and 1990s have also fared poorly under scientific review. A 2009 review of 20 studies of school-based D.A.R.E. programs showed students who underwent training were about as likely to try drugs as those who didn’t. The program, founded in the early 1980s, sent local police officers into thousands of U.S. schools to warn about the dangers of drug use. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and mayoral candidate Pat Harris called on the leadership of the Minnesota city’s police union to resign Thursday evening, decrying as racist the group’s recent criticism of Harris’ opponent Melvin Carter III, reports the Pioneer Press. The St. Paul Police Federation accused Carter, who is black, of doing too little to secure two handguns that were stolen from his home in an August burglary. The Police Federation has endorsed Harris in the race for mayor. The criticism was first aired Tuesday in a statement from the union and reiterated Thursday in a campaign mailer that suggested a link between the stolen guns and recent gun violence in St. Paul. Echoing earlier statements from Carter’s campaign, Coleman and Harris separately criticized the “attacks” as racially motivated — a charge rejected by Police Federation President Dave Titus. “David Titus and the board of the Saint Paul Police Federation have embarrassed the good men and women of the Saint Paul Police Department for too long,” Coleman wrote on Facebook. “The racist attacks and hollow apologies of the last two days may have been aimed at one candidate, but they affect all people of color, and all people of character. They are not worthy of Saint Paul.” Later, Harris said in an emailed statement that “there is absolutely no place in Saint Paul for the type of dirty, political tactics and dog whistle racism that have come from the Saint Paul Police Federation’s leadership over the past few days.” Journalists are poring over more than 2,800 records related to the John F. Kennedy assassination that were released Thursday evening. Federal authorities bowed to pressure from the CIA, FBI and other agencies to delay disclosing some of the most sensitive documents for another six months. Even so, says the Washington Post, the thousands of pages published online by the National Archives describe decades of spies and surveillance, informants and assassination plots. The paper offered thumbnails of “some of the wildest things” its journalists found. Among them: A 1964 FBI memo describes a meeting in which Cuban exiles tried to set a price on the heads of Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “It was felt that the $150,000.00 to assassinate Fidel Castro…was too high,” the memo noted. At a subsequent meeting, they settled on more modest sums: $100,000 for Fidel, $20,000 for Raul and $20,000 for Che. A 1960 FBI memo described a “high-priced Hollywood call girl” who was approached by Fred Otash, a well known Los Angeles private investigator, seeking information about sex parties involving then Sen. John F. Kennedy, his brother-in-law actor Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. “She told the agents that she was unaware of any indiscretions,” the memo said. An FBI file contains information on the bureau’s attempt to locate a stripper known as “Kitty.” According to the file, a stripper known as Candy Cane said Kitty had been an associate of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963. In an internal FBI report from May 1964, an informant told the FBI that the Ku Klux Klan said it “had documented proof that President Johnson was formerly a member of the Klan in Texas during the early days of his political career.” The “documented proof” was not provided. Authorities in Tennessee are preparing for “White Lives Matter” rallies scheduled Saturday in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro, both south of Nashville. A range of avowed white-nationalist groups plan to descend on the cities, and many fear the rallies could turn violent like the demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., in August, reports The Trace. In preparation, Shelbyville (pop. 26,000) announced Wednesday evening that it would implement extensive security measures for the event there, which lacks a permit. Attendees will have to enter a designated protest area through checkpoints. Police will screen them for prohibited items, including guns, masks, bottles, torches and laser pointers. Murfreesboro (pop. 132,000) announced similar precautions for its rally, which does have a permit. Mayor Shane McFarland condemned the demonstration. Mike Browning, a spokesman for the Murfreesboro police, said, “We’ll have sufficient security to prevent weapons from getting into the safe zone,” but declined to offer specifics. To ban guns from the rallies, Shelbyville and Murfreesboro officials had to go further than issuing a public notice. State law requires municipalities in Tennessee to set up cordons and screen with a metal detector everyone who enters the designated demonstration area. Organizers of the rallies noted that guns were banned, though they originally encouraged followers to familiarize themselves with local firearms law and to come equipped with helmets and shields in anticipation of any possible fighting. An updated event page later eliminated mention of firearms law and helmets or shields. In a year when the government has bolstered enforcement, backed curbing legal immigration and rescinded a program that protects undocumented youth from deportation, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are applying for citizenship to protect themselves from removal and gain the right to vote, reports the New York Times. Naturalization applications generally spike during presidential cycles and fall after an election. But this year, the volume of applications is on track to surpass that of 2016–the first time in 20 years that applications have not slipped after a presidential election. “The draw of U.S. citizenship becomes more powerful when you have the political and policy environment that you have right now,” said Rosalind Gold, senior policy director at the Naleo Educational Fund, a national bipartisan Latino group. About 8.8 million people are eligible to become American citizens, meaning they have been lawful permanent residents, or had a green card, for at least five years. In the first three quarters of the 2017 fiscal year, 783,330 people filed applications, compared with the 725,925 who filed during the same months a year earlier. The current figure is well on pace to surpass the 971,242 who applied in the 2016 fiscal year. With the surge of applications, the processing backlog has ballooned. There were 708,638 pending applications at the end of June, a steady rise from 522,565 at the end of the 2016 fiscal year and 291,833 in 2010. The average wait time has doubled, to 8.6 months from four months a few years ago, with applicants in cities like Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas and Miami waiting a year or longer. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross made two points clear during 90 minutes of testimony Thursday: The city’s police department is not an arm of federal immigration enforcement, and it does not intend to start behaving that way. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Ross was the first witness called in U.S. District Court in the city’s lawsuit against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, lodged over the Trump administration’s attempt to withhold grant money from “sanctuary cities.” The commissioner testified that Philadelphia police arrest people who commit crimes without regard for their citizenship status. A criminal is a criminal, he said. At the same time, the department depends on information and help from law-abiding citizens, he said, and part of that trust is built on the fact that police do not routinely collect and store data on whether individuals are in this country illegally. “There’s no way in the world you’d want to come forward as a source of information or criminal activity if you learned you would be deported,” Ross said. President Trump and Sessions have argued that sanctuary city policies allow dangerous criminals to be released when they should be returned to their homelands. Philadelphia filed its suit in August. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and California also are going to court over the new restrictions on a federal grant that supports police training and overtime. The lawsuits accuse the president and attorney general of withholding the money as a cudgel to make cities enforce federal immigration laws. Last year, Philadelphia received $1.67 million. No immediate ruling was expected in the case, with further testimony scheduled for next week. A federal jury awarded a record-breaking $44.7 million Thursday to a man after finding that a Chicago police officer shot him in the head following a night of heavy drinking and that the city’s troubled police department enabled the off-duty patrolman’s violent behavior, reports the Chicago Tribune. The 10-member jury deliberated for two days before reaching its decision after a four-week civil trial that repeatedly hit upon accountability issues that have dogged the city for decades. Jurors said it took them less than 20 minutes to determine Officer Patrick Kelly fired a bullet into his best friend Michael LaPorta’s skull in January 2010 and then misled investigators by insisting LaPorta tried to kill himself. Most of the deliberations focused on determining damages. LaPorta survived the shooting but suffers from a host of medical conditions. Now 37, he can no longer walk or read and depends on his aging parents for round-the-clock care. “I feel whole again,” LaPorta said in a soft, halting voice after the verdict. The city of Chicago is responsible for the $44.7 million award and LaPorta’s legal fees because the jury found that the police department has a widespread problem with disciplining officers and failed to maintain an early warning system. Juror Andrea Diven said the massive award was intended to send a message to the city. “They can’t get away with this,” she said. “It’s something that’s embedded and it needs to change.” Kelly, 36, was stripped of his police powers, meaning he can no longer carry a gun or make arrests, after he exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions during the civil trial. Virginia’s top public safety official said Thursday that leaders in Charlottesville are hindering the state’s review of the deadly Aug. 12 white nationalist rally by refusing to provide basic records and make city officials available for interviews, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Unfortunately we have been denied access repeatedly,” said Brian J. Moran, the state’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, at a meeting of a public safety task force assembled by Gov. Terry McAuliffe in the aftermath of the rally. The complaint comes a week after city officials leveled a similar charge against the state, saying the lawyer they’ve hired to conduct their own local review of the rally response has been denied access to necessary records by state officials. A Charlottesville spokeswoman, Miriam Dickler, said the city would change its position if the state provides the records it has requested. While the state deployed more than 600 Virginia State Police personnel and over 100 members of the National Guard to the city, local officials directed, planned and oversaw the overall response to the rally. “The city of Charlottesville has conveyed its willingness to provide the information requested by the governor’s task force, if the commonwealth simply agrees to provide the city with similar information that is crucial to our evaluation,” Dickler wrote in an email. “It is our understanding that they have declined to do so, but we hope they will reconsider and see the mutual benefits of sharing information that will benefit both the city’s and the commonwealth’s evaluations.” In an editorial, the New Orleans Times-Picayune takes Attorney General Jeff Sessions to task for his attempts to reverse the sorts of sentencing reforms scheduled to go into effect in November in Louisiana. That would be a mistake, the paper says. “The measure isn’t how many people we put in jail,” Ronal Serpas, former New Orleans police superintendent, said last week in a Washington Post article. “The measure is whether the right people are put in jail.” Serpas is the founder of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime, whose 200 members are concerned about Sessions’ shift back toward the more punitive approach of the 1980s and ’90s. The group recently sent a letter to President Trump and Sessions asking for the federal government to stick with “modern strategies, innovative solutions, and a reliance on confirmed data. The Times-Picayune continued, “These are sensible suggestions from a group made up of experienced police officers and prosecutors…Louisiana has for decades tried to solve its crime problem by locking people up for long stints, even if they never committed a violent crime. That approach hasn’t lowered the crime rate. All it has done is make the state the world’s leader in incarceration. By comparison, Texas’ crime rate is down 30 percent since it passed sentencing reforms in 2007 and started reducing its prison population, according to research by a legislative task force. South Carolina passed prison reforms in 2010 and has closed six prisons. Both its rate of incarceration and its crime rate have dropped 16 percent, the task force said. Sessions is taking the wrong approach. He ought to listen to these experts.” |
