With tensions running high over police violence, Detroit Police Chief James Craig went in front of TV cameras shortly after a police shooting in July, explaining that the suspect had pulled a gun and fired at an officer before police killed him. When an angry crowd continued to grow based on social media reports that police had assassinated a young Black man, Craig held a second news conference with body-camera footage. “The video told the story, and it just refuted this false narrative,” he said of releasing the video, which he never had done. As police have issued more body cameras, they hesitate to share the video with the public. Police and prosecutors say that the more information they release—especially video—the greater they risk damaging cases by allowing suspects or officers to align their stories or taint a potential jury pool, the Wall Street Journal reports. Protesters have accused police of holding back footage to protect themselves. After a summer of unrest over police killings, police in Lancaster, Pa., Minneapolis and Detroit moved quickly to provide video footage to battle false claims on social media and tamp down protests. Police should stick to a single policy on releasing video in which someone is shot or seriously injured by an officer, whether or not police are at fault, said criminologist Michael White of Arizona State University. “Some departments have just decided that the value of releasing the video outweighs those traditional concerns about the investigation,” he said. There is a danger of releasing video on a case-by-case basis, say police accountability advocates. “If the police themselves are the arbiters of what video the public sees, body cameras can go from being an accountability tool to a police propaganda tool,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chad Marlow. Relatives and friends will be permitted once again to begin visiting federal inmates as of Saturday, six months after visits were ended over concerns about the coronavirus, reports the New York Times. Officials said they were resuming family visits based on “the importance for inmates to maintain relationships with friends and family.” Some relatives lauded the decision. “Their miserable circumstances need some relief,” said Christy Balsiger, whose husband is in a Texas federal prison, adding that family visits are vital for the psychological well-being of inmates. COVID-19 has hit prisons particularly hard, and some prison workers and families questioned whether outside visits — and the risk of further spread — were wise. “I lost my mind when they said that,” said Aaron McGlothin, a warehouse foreman and union official at a federal prison in California. He fears that the resumption of visits will lead to more illness and death. “I was just like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” There have been nearly 20,000 virus infections and 134 deaths among federal inmates and guards since the start of the pandemic. The federal system has 1,813 active cases among inmates and 733 active cases among staff members. Among all federal, state and local lockups, at least 226,320 inmates and guards have been infected and 1,321 have died. Most state prison systems and local jails are continuing to bar family visits. McGlothin, said that when he went to officials with concerns about the risks of renewed visits, he was told that the new partitions would help and that the plan would be safe. “I said, ‘Safe for who?’” he said. A law enforcement study panel created at the direction of President Donald Trump broke a federal open meeting law and must halt its work until it comes into compliance with the statute, ruled a federal judge, Politico reports. U.S. District Judge John Bates said the administration violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by placing only current and former law-enforcement personnel on the 18-member commission and by holding closed meetings without advance public notice. The commission’s report was set to go to Attorney General William Barr this month. Bates said no recommendations can be submitted until the panel remedies the legal violations. Much of Bates’ ruling focuses on a requirement in the 1972 law that federal advisory committees be “fairly balanced” in their make-up. Bates appointee said a commission consisting entirely of law enforcement could not meet that standard. “The Court is hard pressed to think of a starker example of non-compliance with FACA’s fair balance requirement than a commission charged with examining broad issues of policing in today’s America that is composed entirely of past and present law enforcement officials,” wrote Bates on a lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF). “The Commission includes no members from civil rights groups like LDF. Nor does it include any criminal defense attorney, academic, civic leader, or representative of a community organization or social service organization. Instead, all 18 Commissioners are current or former law enforcement,” Bates added. “This is precisely the type of imbalance that FACA sought to prevent.” Bates rejected the Justice Department’s arguments that the panel could claim an exemption in 1995 for committees dealing solely with issues of joint responsibility between the federal government and state, local or tribal governments. Many of the panel’s meetings have been held by teleconference since the coronavirus pandemic began to spread. The U.S. Marshals Service described “Operation Not Forgotten” as a two-week law enforcement effort that located 39 missing and endangered children, ages 3 to 17, and involved the arrest of nine “criminal associates.” Announcements about the operation, vague on details but full of loaded terms, led to weeks of social media misinformation about the breakup of a massive child sex trafficking ring in Georgia. “39 kids were just recovered from traffickers in Georgia,” went a common Twitter trope. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examined the criminal charges stemming from the operation and found that, by combining a variety of cases, federal authorities fostered a false perception that confused the public. Some experts say oversimplifications hurt the effort to combat sex trafficking and question whether the presidential election factored into the announcement. While the operation was described as a two-week effort, more than half of those arrested had been in jail for months before the announcement. The charges involved six unrelated cases. Of the nine people charged, five are accused of sex trafficking or sexual crimes against children. The circumstances of the located children call into question information from the Marshals Service that stressed the sex trafficking angle. “These missing children were considered to be some of the most at-risk and challenging recovery cases in the area,” a news release said, “based on indications of high-risk factors such as victimization of child sex trafficking, child exploitation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and medical or mental health conditions.” The state Attorney General’s Office says 15 children were suspected to be victims of sex trafficking. Dave Oney, the U.S. Marshals public affairs specialist who wrote the release, said the language about child sex trafficking might have contributed to the story being misconstrued, but it’s an accurate description of some factors that put children at risk. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio shot back Friday at Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s criticism of the city’s lack of progress on police reform, insisting the governor “doesn’t have his facts straight” and is engaging in “personal attacks,” Politico reports. Cuomo has demanded that every New York city and town submit a plan to overhaul their police department. He tore into de Blasio for not starting work on the plan as as shootings surge in the city. Cuomo said 146 other jurisdictions have initiated their plans, which must be implemented by April or the locality will lose funding. “He doesn’t have his facts straight. It’s just quite clear,” de Blasio said Friday on WNYC. “If he wants to make personal attacks, he can do that. But he does not have his facts straight. Seven years of non-stop reform, and it’s time we have an honest conversation about this and stop these games.” Cuomo’s order, signed amid protests over the killing of George Floyd, requires every local police agency to develop a plan that “reinvents and modernizes police strategies” and implement it by April 1. “Step up and lead. 146 jurisdictions are doing it,” Cuomo said Thursday. “Why isn’t New York City doing it?” Asked about Cuomo’s criticism, de Blasio cited a series of NYPD reform initiatives during his two terms in office. The city had 180,000 fewer arrests last year than in the final year of the Bloomberg administration, he said. The jail population has fallen to levels not seen since the 1940s. “We created a strategy to reduce unnecessary arrests while driving down crime. We created a strategy to end mass incarceration. The governor didn’t do that. The state didn’t do that. We did that,” de Blasio said. The Trump administration said it would cut its rock-bottom refugee admissions still deeper into record territory for the coming year, as President Donald Trump returned to anti-immigrant themes in the closing month of his re-election campaign, the New York Times reports. The change in the number of refugees that Trump plans to admit is not drastic: no more than 15,000 in the year that began Thursday, down from 18,000 in the 2020 fiscal year, which was a record low. President Barack Obama approved 110,000 slots in 2016. The new cut signaled that Trump is willing to take his exclusionary immigration policies further. It was delivered as the president unleashed a xenophobic tirade against one of the nation’s most prominent refugees, Rep. Ilhan Omar, at a rally in her home state, Minnesota. The president must tell Congress at the end of September the maximum number of refugees that will be allowed entry into the U.S. for the following year. The president and his political advisers believe that the largely successful effort to seal off the U.S. from asylum seekers and refugees fleeing persecution, war and violence is a winning campaign issue. Trump has tried to link Omar’s liberal politics to Joe Biden, who has said he would reset the refugee cap at 125,000 if elected. “Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp,” Trump said. The 15,000 cap is the latest step in one of Trump’s central aims: to close the U.S. to immigrants. A for-sale ad in an underground internet bazaar that specializes in selling stolen accounts and data was for access to a filched unemployment insurance claim in California that had been approved and offered benefits worth $17,550. The black-market sale of jobless benefits shows how the unemployment insurance system — the main method of delivering financial assistance to laid-off workers — has been besieged during the coronavirus crisis by criminal networks intent on bilking the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars, reports the New York Times. In California, fraud was so pervasive that officials suspended processing jobless claims for two weeks to put new controls in place and reduce a bulging backlog. The U.S. Labor Department has made fraud detection a priority, dedicating $100 million to combat the problem. Some state officials and cybersecurity experts say some efforts have been misdirected, designed to uncover workers misrepresenting their eligibility instead of large-scale identity theft. “The focus continues to be on lying instead of stealing,” said Suzi LeVine, Employment Security Department commissioner in Washington, one of the first states to be flooded with fraudulent claims. Most fraud is now being engineered by cybercriminals who have stolen or bought other people’s identities and are using them to raid state unemployment systems. Since March, Washington State has turned up nearly 87,000 impostor cases. From January 2018 to June 2019, there were 184. Traditional fraud-prevention strategies, LeVine said, “will not help us catch these thieves.” Previous cheating came mostly from workers who were in the system and trying to get something they were not entitled to. Now “it’s people outside of the system who are impersonating other people or breaking in,” said Roman Sannikov of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis used a new executive authority to pardon 2,732 low-level marijuana possession convictions effective Thursday, reports Westword. His authority came from a new law allowing Colorado’s governor to pardon convictions for possession of two ounces of marijuana or less. Polis’s move pardoned state convictions dating back as far as 50 years and running through late 2012, when voters approved Amendment 64. Because one person can have multiple marijuana possession convictions, the governor doesn’t know the exact number of people he pardoned, but he estimates it to be “thousands of people.” He said, “It’s off their records. If they have a background check at work or want a concealed-weapons permit or a student loan, this will no longer hold anybody back.” Colorado adults have been legally allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana since late 2012. Before now, former marijuana offenders whose crimes are now legal had to petition courts for a judge’s approval to clear their records. The past convictions will no longer show up on work background checks or those conducted by banks, landlords or other members of the public, but will still appear as a pardoned conviction on law enforcement and state-licensing background checks. Anyone who wants to see if they’ve received a pardon can check a new website, comarijuanapardons.com. The first state to legalize recreational marijuana, Colorado has faced criticism for doing little to repair harms done by the war on drugs. States newer to retail pot, such as Illinois and Massachusetts, included marijuana expungement and socially equitable business licensing in their legal-marijuana language. With the American Civil Liberties Union estimating that 4,700 people were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado in 2018 alone, fewer than 3,000 pardons for marijuana convictions over a span of 50 years may seem like a drop in the bucket. Clark County, Nv., Sheriff Joe Lombardo raised the death toll from the mass shooting in Las Vegas three years ago Thursday to 60. He drew local criticism in recent weeks for refusing to increase the number despite coroners’ rulings that two women died during the past year of wounds received three years ago, reports the Associated Press. “We are all a statistic,” Albert Rivera, father of slain 21-year-old Jordyn Rivera, told a ceremony marking the anniversary of the nation’s deadliest mass shooting. “We are all part of this unwanted fraternity that we didn’t choose to be a part of. But because of this tragedy, a new family was born.” “Three years ago today, a heinous act of violence rained down on our city, our county and our state,” Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak told a modest gathering at an open-air amphitheater. Authorities said more than 850 people were injured in the attack by a lone shooter firing from upper-floor windows of the Mandalay Bay resort into an outdoor crowd of 22,000 attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival. Police said 413 of the injured suffered bullet or shrapnel wounds, others were injured fleeing the concert venue. Two right-wing operatives infamous for inventing outlandish conspiracy theories face felony charges in Michigan of intimidating voters with inaccurate robocalls that discouraged residents in urban areas from casting their ballots by mail, the Washington Post reports. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged with four felonies of intimidating voters, conspiring to violate election law and using a computer to commit a crime, said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Thousands of residents from at least five states received the robocall aimed at discouraging absentee voting at a time when many voters are expected to send mail ballots rather vote in person during the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly 12,000 residents with phone numbers from the 313 area code in Detroit were targeted, Nessel’s office said. Attorneys general in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois reported similar robocalls made to urban residents, amounting to an estimated 85,000 calls nationally. The caller, who claims to work for a civil rights organization founded by Wohl and Burkman, falsely says personal information for those who vote by mail will be shared with police, credit card companies collecting outstanding debt, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, requiring mandatory vaccinations. Officials said the call exploited “racially-charged stereotypes.” Nessel said, “This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election.” When news of the call surfaced in August, Wohl and Burkman denied their involvement, blaming “leftist pranksters.” Famed for conspiracy theories and media briefings in Burkman’s driveway, Wohl and Burkman have been booted from social media sites including Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for outlandish claims, including bogus sexual assault accusations against special counsel Robert Mueller and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.
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