New Orleans police are investigating a mass shooting that wounded 10 people early Sunday near the French Quarter, the Associated Press reports. Two of the 10 were in critical condition in local hospitals, Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said. “What happened in our city overnight was a cowardly and senseless act that we cannot and will not tolerate,” Ferguson said. The shooting happened about 3:20 a.m. on a busy commercial block of Canal Street that has streetcar tracks and is near many hotels. Police quickly responded to the scene as patrols were heightened for the Bayou Classic, the Thanksgiving weekend rivalry football game between Grambling State and Southern University. Mayor Latoya Cantrell pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice. “We will do everything we can to wrap the victims and their families in our love and support, and to bring the criminals responsible to justice,”she said. Kenneth Culbreth told The New Orleans Advocate/The Times-Picayune that he had gone into a CVS pharmacy in the early morning to make a quick purchase. Moments later, he walked out to a crime scene. “On my way out of the CVS, I heard pops,” Culbreth said. “It was so many, I couldn’t keep count.” Supreme Court justices on Monday grappled with whether to dismiss a challenge to a New York City handgun ordinance and sidestep a ruling that could lead to an expansion of gun rights, Reuters reports. The justices heard arguments in the first major gun case to come before the high court since 2010. The four liberal justices indicated they believe the case is moot because New York has amended the law. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch were most vocal in advocating for the court to issue a ruling; other justices gave little indication of their views. The legal challenge, backed by the National Rifle Association, takes aim at a regulation that had prevented licensed owners from taking their handguns outside the confines of the most-populous U.S. city. Outside the courthouse, hundreds of gun control supporters held a demonstration and carried signs, including some reading, “Why are guns easier to buy than a college education?” “Gun laws save lives” and “2nd Amendment written before assault weapons were invented,” Reuters reports. They described gun violence as a public health crisis. Maryland resident Christina Young said laws need to reflect modern society, including mass shootings. “I have an 11-year-old daughter. I never had to worry about guns in my school when I was a kid,” she said. Marco Vargas, a student at Dartmouth College, added, “I fear that gun violence in the United States has become normalized.” Amid the crowd, one gun rights supporter held high a large sign demanding Second Amendment rights. A Chinese online pharmacy advertising itself as a seller of “high purity, real pure” fentanyl responds right away to potential customers. “Which products do you want to buy,” a salesperson replied within a minute to an inquiry in English on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service. When contacted from a U.S. telephone number and asked about the availability of fentanyl, the seller said, “I don’t sell any more,” reports the New York Times. Until recently, much of the illicit fentanyl that found its way to the U.S. was easily ordered online from a source in China and seamlessly shipped by international delivery companies, including the U.S. Postal Service. Fentanyl sourced from China accounted for 97 percent of the drug seized from international mail services by U.S. law enforcement in both the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. China’s government is taking steps to stop the flood, as leader Xi Jinping promised President Donald Trump he would. After two leaders met in Buenos Aires at the Group of 20 summit last year, the White House said, “President Xi, in a wonderful humanitarian gesture, has agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance.” As a result, the large, freewheeling and mostly unregulated fentanyl industry that had operated in a gray area of Chinese law appears to have stopped selling the drug for export, at least as openly as hundreds of suppliers once did. Some distributors, who still can be easily found in online searches, claimed to be complying with the new rules banning the overseas sale of synthetic opioids. Others appear to have shut down operations. China’s new focus on shutting down the trade has meant shipments of fentanyl to the U.S. have declined significantly in the last year, say data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. Mexican authorities detained more suspects in the November slayings of nine women and children, a case that attracted attention and thrust previously isolated fundamentalist communities of northern Mexico into a political firestorm, reports USA Today. Mexico’s federal prosecutor’s office said judicial and intelligence officials, along with soldiers and national guard troops, carried out a raid Sunday. The newspaper el Universal said three suspects were arrested south of the Arizona border in Sonora state near the site of the Nov. 4 attack, which killed three women and six children. The arrests followed the detention and arraignment of a suspect in November. Mexican media outlets reported the detentions followed the arrest of “Mario H,” alias “El Mayo,” a local leader of criminal organization known as “La Linea.” Family members responded skeptically to the news, which came less than 24 hours before a scheduled meeting Monday with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City. “I would imagine these are low-level people,” said Julián LeBaron, a relative of the victims and family spokesman. “We want to know who gave the order and who is responsible.” He added, “There’s a video that the FBI has of 12 guys dressed in black with helmets, like special forces, coming down the hill, opening fire on my cousin’s vehicle … I don’t think anyone questions the fact that it was targeted.” Families of the victims continue demanding justice for their slain kin and a stop to the bloodshed south of the border, which has claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Mexicans in the past year and shows few signs of slowing. Alex Friedmann was transferred to a Tennessee public prison in 1998 after spending six years in a private facility. Everything was different: There were more blankets, the toilet paper wasn’t as cheap, and correctional officers were everywhere. After his release in 1999, Friedmann at the Human Rights Defense Center began fighting to abolish private prisons. He says the for-profit model encourages the business to cut corners, affecting inmates’ safety and quality of living. Increasingly, criticisms of private, for-profit facilities have been reflected in policy and spending. Lawmaker in states like California and Nevada have banned private prisons from operating. Businesses are increasingly cutting ties with the industry following pushback from their customers, reports Vox.com. The number of inmates in these facilities is declining. After a peak in 2012 of about 136,220, the private prison population has decreased about 12 percent in the past five years as more facilities close. Some in the industry have begun to accept that private prisons may not exist in the future. CoreCivic, the nation’s largest and oldest private prison firm, has begun to plan for another federal private prison ban if a Democratic candidate wins the 2020 presidential election. In an attempt to avoid having to rely on contingency plans, the for-profit prison industry has established an advocacy group called Day 1 Alliance (D1A). The group launched on October 25 and is backed by the largest companies in the industry: CoreCivic will provide initial funding while GEO Group and Management & Training Corporation — the second and third largest companies in the marketplace — will take on leadership roles. D1A will focus on changing public opinion that has soured on the industry. Spokeswoman Alexandra Wilkes said it will focus on spreading its message by engaging with the media. Soon after Jeffrey Epstein died in August, a mysterious man met with two prominent lawyers. A prodigious drinker who often wore flip-flops, he went by a pseudonym, Patrick Kessler. He told the lawyers he had a vast archive of Epstein’s data, stored on encrypted servers overseas. He said he had years of the financier’s communications and financial records and thousands of hours of footage from hidden cameras in the bedrooms of Epstein’s properties. The videos, Kessler said, captured some of the world’s richest, most powerful men in compromising sexual situations, even in the act of rape, the New York Times reports. If he was telling the truth, his trove could answer one of the Epstein saga’s most baffling questions: How did a college dropout and high school math teacher amass a nine-figure fortune? One persistent theory was that he ran a sprawling blackmail operation. Kessler’s tale hooked famed litigator David Boies and his friend John Stanley Pottinger. If Kessler was authentic, his videos would arm them with immense leverage over important people. Pottinger referred to a roster of potential targets as the “hot list.” He described hypothetical plans in which the lawyers would pocket 40 percent of the settlements and could extract money from wealthy men. In the end, there would be no damning videos. Boies and Pottinger would go from toasting Kessler as their “whistle-blower” and “informant” to torching him as a “fraudster” and a “spy.” Kessler was a liar, and he wouldn’t expose sexual abuse. What he revealed, the Times says, were “the extraordinary, at times deceitful measures elite lawyers deployed in an effort to get evidence that could be used to win lucrative settlements and keep misconduct hidden, allowing perpetrators to abuse again.” Boies has decried such secret deals as “rich man’s justice.” The high school class of 2000 in rural Minford, Oh., began its freshman year as a typical class, with jocks, cheerleaders, slackers and overachievers. By the time the group entered its final year, painkillers were nearly ubiquitous, found in classrooms, school bathrooms and at weekend parties. Over the next decade, Minford’s Scioto County would become ground zero in the state’s fight against opioids. It would lead Ohio with rates of fatal drug overdoses, drug-related incarcerations and babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. The New York Times interviewed dozens of members of the Class of 2000. Many opened up about struggles with addiction, whether their own or their relatives’. They discussed years lost to getting high and in cycling in and out of jail, prison and rehab. They mourned the three classmates whose addictions killed them. Opioids spared relatively no one in Scioto County; everyone appears to know someone whose life has been affected by addiction. Purdue Pharma introduced its opioid painkiller, OxyContin, in 1996, when the Class of 2000 entered high school. Some students began experimenting, often combining prescription opiates with alcohol at parties. What began for many as a weekend dalliance morphed into an all-consuming dependence. They swallowed opiates before school, snorted painkillers in bathrooms and crushed pills with a baseball on desks at the back of classrooms. Many members of the Class of 2000 spent their 20s getting college degrees and starting families. Others did anything they could to avoid withdrawal. Friends and relatives began overdosing, getting arrested, or both. Some went to prison. Some became drug dealers and are plagued with guilt at having fueled countless addictions. In 2010, Scioto County led Ohio in the number of opioid prescriptions, with enough to give 123 pills to each resident. The number of methamphetamine-related fatal overdoses in Utah more than doubled in the past five years, as law enforcement has seen a stunning increase in large meth busts statewide, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Drug overdose deaths involving meth rose from 31 in 2010 to 217 in 2018, says the state Department of Public Health. That’s far more meth-related deaths than the previous high of 52 in 2006. “We keep hearing that meth is coming back, but it didn’t leave,” said Meghan Balough, a state epidemiologist. Public attention to meth, which led to new laws and widespread public awareness campaigns in the early- and mid-2000s, shifted to the deadlier opioid epidemic, said Brian Redd, chief of the State Bureau of Investigation for the Utah Department of Public Safety. “About 2015, we started seeing these larger quantities of meth coming back, like we hadn’t seen since the late ′90s and early 2000s,” Redd said. “But the opioid epidemic was really surging at that point, and it really was overshadowing this growing meth issue.” Today, “the Mexican transnational criminal organizations are just flooding our market with methamphetamine,” he said. Prescription opioids have killed more Utahns than meth has each year. In 2007, there were 326 opioid-related overdose deaths, and 302 in 2014. In many overdose deaths, multiple drugs are involved. Opioid deaths have declined since then. In 2018, the state counted 274 prescription opioid fatalities, compared with the 217 meth fatalities. Market factors may explain meth’s rapid rise in Utah. A pound of meth costs $1,000 to $1,500, with a single hit going for $20. That’s about a tenth of the cost in the early 2000s. Meth use has been rising rapidly nationwide, but especially in the West, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An Oklahoma judge waived $44,000 in fines, fees and court costs for Delaine Wilson, 49, after 15 years of payments that wouldn’t have achieved a zero balance until she reached age 195. Amid fear of re-incarceration, Wilson paid $6,100 despite minimum-wage work, three children, health problems and eventual guardianship of two grandkids. State legislators will discuss a broken justice system overly reliant on collections from poverty-stricken people, the Tulsa World reports. A Tulsa County group advocating reform believes treating court debt as a civil rather than criminal matter would do more than anything else to prevent Oklahoma from being a debtors’ prison system. “You aren’t going to go to jail for a civil judgment,” said James Hinds, a Tulsa defense attorney and member of the working group. “It’s simply the only surefire way to keep people from going to jail simply because they aren’t coming up with the money.” Court costs were the fourth most common reason for admission to the Tulsa County jail in 2016, with five days being the average length of stay, says a Vera Institute of Justice study. There were 1,163 admissions for court costs and, on any given day, 16 inmates were held for that reason. There was a 57 percent drop in arrests on only failure-to-pay warrants from 2016 (1,079) through 2018 (465). The county judiciary in September launched a seven-day-a-week bond docket to provide individualized bail hearings within 24 hours for most arrestees. The protocol is to release people held on a failure-to-pay warrant on their own recognizance with a summons date to address the debt. The new protocol prevents defendants from sitting in jail for days simply because they are unable to afford bail. The collection issue can be boiled down to this: The number and amount of court costs and fees have skyrocketed; and the collection method disproportionately incarcerates poor people. An epidemic of car burglaries in San Francisco over the last few years has led a state legislator to propose plugging a loophole in state law that allows some break-ins to go unpunished, but the legislature has balked at prosecutors’ requests to make obtaining convictions easier, reports the Los Angeles Times. The proposal, which would eliminate a requirement that prosecutors prove a car’s doors were locked at the time of a break-in, has been shelved two years in a row in committees. Lawmakers struggling with prison crowding and public pressure to enact criminal justice reform have been reluctant to do anything to put more people behind bars. Local officials and the bill’s sponsor say the legislation is needed to help chip away at a statewide car burglary problem that they believe has reached crisis levels in some cities. “It’s ridiculous that under current law you can have a video of someone bashing out a car window, but if you can’t prove that the door is locked you may not be able to get an auto burglary conviction,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, who introduced the legislation at the request of the San Francisco district attorney’s office. Across California, there were 243,000 thefts from automobiles last year. Though the number of car break-ins was higher during the peak year of 2017, last year’s total is well above the annual average of 223,000 for the eight previous years. San Francisco saw car burglaries spike by 24 percent from 2016 to 2017. In October, San Francisco interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus announced a car burglary strike team led by her office, the California Highway Patrol and San Francisco Police Department. Operation Tangled Web is using air support and patrols to focus on residential hot spots and small commercial corridors during the holiday season. When it comes to racial profiling in Missouri, every year is like Groundhog Day, writes St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger. The state attorney general releases the annual vehicle stops report, finding that blacks are pulled over at significantly higher rates than whites. Attorney General Eric Schmitt said this year that blacks in Missouri are 91 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites. People of color are searched for contraband at significantly higher numbers than whites, even though police find such contraband at similar or lower levels for minority groups. Police chiefs rail at the report, saying more information is needed. It was like this before Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in 2014 brought national attention to the annual racial profiling numbers in Missouri, and it is thus five years later. Now, some police chiefs seeking more information have a problem. St. Louis activist Phillip Weeks sued several cities and St. Louis County last week because they won’t share information to add clarity to the racial profiling numbers. With the help of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, Weeks sued St. Louis because it refused to provide the database with officer-by-officer data. This would allow researchers to determine if any officer was skewing the numbers, or if there was anything else unusual that raises suspicion. It appears that agencies across the state are trying to cover up policing practices by hiding records that should be made public by state law, Weeks said. “If there wasn’t something to hide, why would they go through all the trouble to hide it?” The point of the vehicle stops report when it began 18 years ago was to bring public accountability to racial profiling. Nearly two decades later, Weeks’ lawsuit offers a path toward that goal, Messenger says. The Kansas City Star won a grant from the national service program Report for America (RFA) to help pay for three full-time reporters covering gun violence in Missouri, the Star reports. Missouri has for years ranked first in the nation for its rate of black homicide victims. The state’s three biggest cities — Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield — have been among the top 12 “most dangerous” cities in the U.S. Starting next year, the three RFA journalists based in the Star’s newsroom will travel across Missouri covering the issue on a statewide level. Reporters will investigate the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to the gun violence problem in Missouri, where black people are killed at a per capita rate nine times the overall national homicide rate. RFA started in 2017 to train young journalists and place them in newsrooms to help cover underserved regions or important issues. The reporters are assigned for one year, with the option to renew for a second year. They have an average of three to six years of experience and often return to their home states. Journalists may apply to join RFA at reportforamerica.org. |
