The number of people wounded by gunfire in Boston is up nearly 30 percent this year, prompting an urgent City Hall meeting today to brainstorm solutions ahead of the sweltering, often violent summer months, the Boston Herald reports. Police already have deployed most of the class of 53 newly graduated officers to Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan to combat gang-fueled gunplay. Mayor Martin Walsh has called police brass, community leaders, clergy and department heads to today’s meeting. “It’s a strategy meeting, changing the strategy of what we’ve done so far,” Walsh said. “My concern is that there are people shooting each other. My concern is one loss of life is too many. My concern is that there will be potentially innocent people that get caught in a drive-by.” Boston police say that 123 people were injured by gunshots as of July 4 this year. During that same period last year, 95 people were shot. Gun murders are roughly even — 21 this year, compared to 22 through July 4 last year. “If you have a high number of shootings before the summer begins, they will retaliate throughout the summer. Police need to be more vigilant because the summer has just begun,” said state Rep. Russell Holmes. “My biggest concern is we seem to show up after the shootings. We do peace walks after it happens,” Holmes said. “We really need to be addressing the tip of the spear, addressing gang members in advance.” Crime in Los Angeles has nearly leveled off at the midyear mark, says Police Chief Charlie Beck, calling 2017’s numbers a sign that police are making progress against the city’s stubborn uptick in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports. As of July 1, overall crime was up less than 1 percent compared with the first six months of 2016, notably lower than the 6.6 percent increase halfway through 2016 and the 12.7 percent jump the year before. Beck credited the progress to a variety of factors: shifting department resources to target violent crime, improving predictive policing to help stem property crime, adapting to changes in legislation, and a “relentless focus” on crime from police department brass. Beck also said he hoped that by the end of the year, the city would see crime drop. If overall crime ultimately falls this year, it will mark the first such decrease since 2014. “I am cautiously optimistic,” Beck said. “But we’ll see.” The most significant change this year has been in violent crime, which Beck said has risen about 1 percent. In both 2016 and 2015, the police reported double-digit increases in violent crime at the midyear mark. Still, homicides increased about 2 percent in the first six months of this year, Beck said, which he attributed in part to a 2.4 percent jump in gang-related killings. The number of gunshot victims across the city rose by roughly 4 percent. In the highest ranking known visit by a Trump administration official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, were visiting Guantanamo Bay Naval Base today to get “an up-to-date understanding” of current war on terror operations, the Justice Department said. The Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, was also expected on the visit, according to an official at Guantánamo, the Miami Herald reports. “Keeping this country safe from terrorists is the highest priority of the Trump administration,” said Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior. Other attorneys general have visited the site, including Michael Mukasey for the Bush administration in 2008 and Eric Holder for the Obama administration in 2009. Today’s visit comes more than five months into the Trump administration — even as the White House has yet to officially rescind Barack Obama’s 2009 closure order — and may be seen as a signal of support for the detention operation now holding 41 detainees and the war court where six men are in pretrial, death-penalty proceedings for the Sept. 11 and USS Cole attacks. The one-day visit was announced hours before a Saudi man was due at the war court for a pre-sentencing hearing. Ahmed al Darbi pleaded guilty to war crimes in 2014, in exchange for a commitment to let him serve out his sentence of up to 15 years in his homeland starting next year. Too many people still take pain pills for too long, despite a nationwide decline in prescriptions for the addictive drugs, say federal health officials, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Prescribing rates for highly addictive painkillers such as oxycodone dropped from 81 to 71 prescriptions per 100 people between 2012 and 2015, says a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s acting director, expressed tempered optimism about the first national decline in opioid prescriptions that the CDC has reported since the crisis began in the late 1990s. Even at the reduced prescribing rate, enough opioids were ordered in 2015 to keep every American medicated around-the-clock for three weeks, she said. The report shows opioid prescribing rates as much as six times higher in some counties than in others. “The findings suggest that we need more consistency among health care providers for prescribing. Too many opioid prescriptions are being written,” Schuchat said. “There are very few towns, cities or even families that don’t have some connection to the opioid problem.” The amount of opioids prescribed nationally peaked at the equivalent of 782 milligrams of morphine per person in 2010 and fell to 640 in 2015. The rate is still three times higher than it was in 1999 and four times as high as in some European countries, Schuchat said. Virginia executed William Morva last night for the murders of an unarmed security guard and a deputy sheriff during an escape in in 2006, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. Morva, 35, whose lawyers said suffered from a chronic psychotic disorder, was pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. In 2006, while in jail awaiting trial on attempted robbery and other charges, Morva was taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries. He assaulted a deputy who was escorting him, knocking him unconscious and taking his handgun. Morva encountered Derrick McFarland, 32, a hospital security guard, and shot him in the face. The next day Morva shot Eric Sutphin, 40, a deputy sheriff who was searching for him, in the back of the head. In a clemency petition to Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Morva’s lawyers argued that the jury did not know of his serious mental illness, diagnosed by a forensic psychiatrist years after his trial. McAuliffe said Morva’s pre-trial diagnoses by experts were valid, and that the jury considered them and nevertheless sentenced Morva to death. “These experts thoroughly evaluated Mr. Morva and testified to the jury that, while he may have personality disorders, he did not suffer from any condition that would have prevented him from committing these acts consciously and fully understanding their consequences,” said the governor. He added, “We also consulted with the Department of Corrections, whose mental health staff have monitored him weekly and assessed him quarterly for the past nine years and have never reported any evidence of delusional disorder or severe mental illness.” Only hours after the ambush that killed five Dallas law enforcement officers one year ago, mental health experts began thinking ahead, searching for ways to ease the long-term effects of the attack on the men and women who patrol the nation’s ninth-largest city, the Associated Press reports. Police psychologists in Dallas were quickly joined by counselors from the Houston and Los Angeles police departments, the FBI and the federal air marshals service. As she watched the July 7, 2016, assault unfold on the news, Dallas philanthropist Lyda Hill thought of research she had funded to help returning combat veterans. Maybe it could help police too. A year later, Dallas officers are still grieving, but scores of them have received or are on track to get specialized training in “mindfulness” and other stress-management techniques that aim to teach police how to better understand and control their emotions, both on and off the job. “One of the most powerful things you can do is teach people that it’s OK to be human. It’s not possible to walk through this profession and come out unscarred. It’s a difficult, difficult walk to be a police officer,” said Richard Goerling, a police lieutenant in Hillsboro, Or., who teaches the mindfulness training. The late-night ambush happened during a protest against police brutality. A black Army veteran seeking revenge for police shootings elsewhere that killed or wounded black men opened fire on the officers, killing four from the Dallas Police Department and another from a transit agency. Hill provided money to pay for instruction in mindfulness and in a system known as cognitive training for 500 Dallas officers. The Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas plans to study the effects of the training on their mental and physical health and their job performance. More than 1,400 law enforcement officers in the U.S. Marshals Service are wearing expired body armor, despite months of internal warnings, according to documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Washington Post reports. Ballistic vests have become a staple of law enforcement work, but the equipment can wear out or age so much that it becomes less effective at stopping bullets. A senior employee of the U.S. Marshals provided documents to the committee showing that many of the agency’s 3,900 operational employees have body armor with expiration dates in 2016 and 2017. The employee told committee staff he had been pressing the marshals for months to update the vests without much response. Committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is pressing David Harlow, the head of the agency, to explain why so many of his employees have outdated body armor, and why he had previously testified to Congress that he was not aware of such problems. The Marshals Service guards courthouses, judges and witnesses, but it is best known as a fugitive-hunting agency. Apprehending fugitives, which often involve knocking down doors and searching houses, is dangerous, and ballistic vests are essential gear for that work. “Body armor” is something of a misnomer, because Kevlar and other products are tightly woven fiber panels designed to stop bullets from handguns. But those panels — made to go inside cloth vests — come with expiration dates, typically five years. How a vest is worn and stored can also change the effective life of a ballistic vest. Texas will close more prisons this year than it has in any single year in history, a response to the state’s tight budget and shrinking inmate population, reports the Dallas Morning News. In the state’s two-year budget, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was ordered to close four prison facilities by Sept. 1. When all four are closed, tough-on-crime Texas will have shuttered eight prisons in just six years. Justice reform advocates, agency officials and lawmakers say the closings are possible because of a combination of factors, including falling crime rates and legislative efforts to reduce the number of people who spend time behind bars. “This is something we have done incrementally over the last decade,” said Derek Cohen of the Center for Effective Justice at the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We’re not any less safe publicly for that.” The drop in Texas’ prison population began around 2007, when lawmakers were faced with an expensive decision. The state had spent millions of dollars building hulking prison edifices across rural Texas. Without changing the way Texas operated its criminal justice system, the state would soon be forced to spend millions more to house a rising inmate population. A state known for its lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach to crime began to shift its approach. Instead of erecting more prisons, lawmakers invested in diversion programs to help troubled Texans get back on track and avoid incarceration. Crime rates have fallen each year since at least 2012. Inmate population has dropped from 156,000 in 2011 to about 146,000 today. The Legislative Budget Board anticipates the closures will save the state $49.5 million. It’s unclear whether the shuttering trend will continue. Lawmakers this year did not approve any changes that criminal justice reform advocates said would keep the prison population on the decline. The Justice Department is questioning whether so-called sanctuary cities responded honestly when asked whether they follow the law on sharing the citizenship status of people in their custody with federal immigration authorities, the Associated Press reports. In a strongly worded statement yesterday, the department said some of the 10 jurisdictions under scrutiny insist they are compliant with the law while still defiantly refusing to cooperate with efforts to detain and deport immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The Justice Department said it was reviewing policies of the jurisdictions to determine whether they should lose some federal grant money for failing to prove they are adhering to federal immigration law. The cities include New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, which said in its letter to the department that the city was adhering to the law even while refusing to collect information on residents’ immigration statuses. Also on the list are two states — California and Connecticut — along with Miami-Dade County, Fl., Cook County, Il., Milwaukee County, Wi., and Clark County, Nv. The locales were singled out last year by the department’s inspector general for having rules that hinder the ability of local law enforcement to communicate with federal officials about the immigration status of people they have detained. The cities disagreed with that assessment, saying their rules comport with the federal law that bars municipalities from forcing local officials to keep certain information from federal immigration authorities. The move was the latest by the Trump administration after the signing of an executive order that went after federal money going to such locations. A judge later blocked that, saying the president could not set new conditions on spending approved by Congress. Unaccompanied minors in immigration detention are entitled to bail hearings in front of an immigration judge, a federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously, Politico reports. The Justice Department argued that a 2002 law transferring responsibility for unaccompanied immigrant minors to the Department of Health and Human Services and a 2008 law aimed at limiting human trafficking superseded a 1997 settlement under which the government agreed to provide such hearings. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed. “Not a single word in either statute indicates that Congress intended to supersede, terminate, or take away any right enjoyed by unaccompanied minors at the time of the acts’ passage,” said Judge Stephen Reinhardt, joined by Judges Marsha Berzon and Wallace Tashima. Government lawyers argued that meetings HHS officials hold with detained minors are sufficient to protect their interests. Immigration lawyers are not permitted at those sessions, and they lack many of the formal procedural safeguards of immigration court hearings. The decision rejected an emergency appeal filed in February as one of the Justice Department’s first immigration-related actions under President Trump, although the government took a similar stance under President Barack Obama. The Trump administration may not view grandparents, aunts, uncles and others has having close enough family relationships in the U.S. to be excluded from the government’s travel ban, but the U.S. Supreme Court on at least two occasions has recognized the importance of those family bonds, the National Law Journal reports. The justices soon may be asked to weigh just how important those relationships are in the latest dispute over President Trump’s executive order banning some travel into the U.S. The order restricting travel by foreign nationals from six predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days and refugees for 120 days took effect June 29. Government officials said the travel ban would apply to grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-law and sisters-in-law. The administration excluded fiances. Challengers said that, “The government has ordered consulates to exclude aliens who have some of the most elemental relationships known to human society, from grandparents to nephews.” They asked federal judge Derrick Watson to clarify his injunction in light of the high court action. Watson said yesterday, “This court will not upset the Supreme Court’s careful balancing and ‘equitable judgment’. ” Nearly two decades ago, the justices considered Washington state’s child visitation law. Grandparents had petitioned for visitation rights under the state law, but the parents of their grandchildren objected. The grandparents lost in the Supreme Court, which said the state visitation law was so broad that it interfered with the rights of parents to raise their children. A federal judge hinted that she might acquit former Maricopa County, Az., Sheriff Joe Arpaio of criminal contempt, reports the Arizona Republic. The question is whether Arpaio willfully defied a judge’s orders barring him from conducting immigration-enforcement operations. In closing arguments yesterday, federal prosecutors used the sheriff’s words of defiance against him, claiming that he continued the practice for political gain. Defense attorneys maintained that the judge’s order was unclear, and therefore Arpaio couldn’t have violated it intentionally. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton grilled prosecutors about one of the requirements to prove criminal contempt. By law, the violated order must be “clear and definite,” and the defendant must have known about the order and willfully flouted it. “So it had to be clear and definite to a person in the position of the defendant, or is it clear and definite as explained by other people in his office?” she said. “Or does it have to, on its face, be clear and definite, without anyone else explaining it?” Bolton cited an email within the sheriff’s command staff about the order, noting that “clearly” Arpaio’s subordinates didn’t understand it. Keller replied, “When you’re under a court injunction, you don’t get to say, ‘Well, um, no one explained it to me sufficiently.’ The defendant may not avoid criminal contempt by ‘twisted interpretations’ or ‘tortured construction’ of the provisions of the order.” After court, both sides read Bolton’s line of questioning as favorable to the defense. |
