Last week, men’s lifestyle magazine GQ published this photo of Silicon Valley executives including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston from their pilgrimage to a small village in Italy to visit Brunello Cucinelli, a luxury designer famous for his $1,000 sweatpants.
But if you think something looks a little off in this photo, you’re right: A BuzzFeed News “investigation” reveals that two women CEOs, Lynn Jurich and Ruzwana Bashir, were photoshopped into what was originally a photo featuring 15 men.
Obviously not a big deal by itself, but a reminder not to believe everything we’re shown, whether it’s in GQ, on CBS, in a documentary, or shared by your Facebook friends.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) made his case for democratic socialism yesterday in a speech at George Washington University and an interview on CNN’s Anderson 360. Among other things, he called for a “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights” that guarantees “a decent job that pays a living wage,” “quality health care,” “a complete education,” “affordable housing,” “a clean environment,” and “a secure retirement.”
Sanders, who is vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, pitched his policies as the only means to “achieving political and economic freedom in every community.”
Many Democrats fear the party’s swing leftward will fail to resonate with large swaths of Americans. Sanders wants to change that. With an homage to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the senator said that he intends to pick up the mantle from the Depression-era New Deal. “Economic rights are human rights,” he told CNN.
Sanders isn’t the only socialist in the 2020 race, he added, calling President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians “corporate socialists.” He pointed to the benefits bestowed upon big business by the feds, such as the Wall Street bailouts of 2008. This, he concluded, is “socialism for the very rich and unfettered individualism for the very poor,” he said.
Mammoth companies do, indeed, get all sorts of subsidies and other benefits from the government. And they shouldn’t. But Sanders wants to reverse the equation entirely, replacing those handouts to the rich with new handouts for the masses. Higher education, for example, would be entirely free in Sanders’ America. “In many countries in Europe, Germany for one, you go to college and the cost of college is zero,” he told CNN. Sanders’ education goals match those of his closest rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who recently released a detailed proposal to cancel college debt. Billed as a boon for the little guy, that would mostly help…the well-off and well-connected.
When CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed Sanders on how he would pay for free college—along with the remainder of his expensive policy prescriptions—the candidate pivoted to tax reform.
“I suspect that a lot of people in this country would be delighted to pay more in taxes if they had comprehensive health care as a human right,” Sanders told Cooper. “There is a tradeoff, but at the end of the day, I think most people will believe they’re going to be better off when their kids have educational opportunities without out-of-pocket expenses, when they have health care as a human right, when they have affordable housing, when they have decent retirement security. I think most Americans will understand that that is a good deal.”
That deal, Sanders claimed, will provide the appropriate foil to “the forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism,” which he says are furthered by “corporatist economics.” But as Yascha Mounk, who is friendly toward certain factions of socialism, points out in The Atlantic, Sanders’ comments fail to grapple with “a different kind of oppression”—one where a smothered free market blocks its citizens from engaging in private enterprise.
A San Francisco developer appears to have won a battle but lost a war. The city granted the company permission to start building an apartment building, but only after it agreed to conditions so onerous that the project has become totally uneconomical. Now the city will take over the project. Eventually.
Lennar Multifamiely Properties (LMP) spent years trying to get permission to build a 157-unit mixed-use apartment building at 1515 South Van Ness Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, with 12 percent of these units being rented out at a discount to low-income renters.
These plans, first floated in 2014, sparked protests from neighborhood activists in the Mission, many of whom oppose the construction of any new market-rate housing in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
With the aid of friendly city politicians and a byzantine approval process, these activists were able to delay approval of the project until the developer agreed to a number of concessions.
In March 2017, LMP agreed to double the number of affordable units in the building, to rent out commercial space in the building at below-market rates, to pay $1 million to a neighborhood community group, and to allow the Van Ness site to be used as a temporary homeless shelter for nine months before construction started.
The homeless shelter had come and gone by June 2018—and then the site sat vacant for more than a year while the costs of labor and materials continued to rise.
Finally, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced this week that the city would be purchasing the site to build a 150-unit affordable housing complex instead.
Reports in the San Francisco Chronicle and Mission Local suggest that the city will pay $18 million for the land and that the project will cost another $45 million to develop. Provided a new housing bond is approved by voters in November, construction will start in about three years.
Should that bond fail, things could take longer.
That a building first proposed in 2014 might begin construction in 2022 is, we’re told, a victory for housing affordability. By stopping a market-rate development and replacing it with public housing, low-income residents will purportedly have more housing options.
“On this land, we fought Lennar—and this is a happy ending,” said Roberto Hernadez, a prominent anti-development activist, to Mission Local.
“For too long we have not built enough housing, especially affordable housing, and we are working to change that with investments like this one,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told the Chronicle.
It may sound plausible, but it’s probably wrong. Indeed, this is an excellent example of why San Francisco’s housing affordability problems keep getting worse. As the city waits another half decade or so for affordable housing to be completed at the South Van Ness site, the wealthier residents who would have moved into that building will instead compete with lower-income renters for existing units, bidding up their price.
Had LMP’s project been allowed to go forward when it was first proposed, those same renters would have vacated their existing units, opening up more housing for those who are unlikely to be able to afford to rent a new, market-rate apartment.
This is not just speculation. A March working paper by the economist Evan Mast suggests that new luxury developments increase supply while reducing demand in poorer neighborhoods throughout the city, which can have an immediate, depressing effect on rents in those areas.
Mast looked at 802 new luxury market-rate developments across 12 cities, identifying the individual residents moving into these buildings and where they were moving from. He found that 30 percent of the residents of new luxury developments were coming from neighborhoods that had below-median incomes. When he looked at who was moving into the units these people were vacating, he found that even more of this second cohort were coming from below-median income neighborhoods.
By following these moves back six rounds, Mast found that some 48 percent of movers were coming from below-median income neighborhoods, and that 20 percent of these movers were coming from the poorest fifth of neighborhoods.
“These findings suggest that housing markets aren’t nearly as segregated as some might fear, if you work your way down the migration chain far enough,” writes Nolan Gray in CityLab. “This suggests that even pricey new units could free up a lot of existing housing.”
San Francisco’s politicians and many of its neighborhood activists reject this view of housing, instead reflexively opposing new market-rate construction. The likely result of this that more and more people in the city will continue to compete over a stagnating supply of units while waiting years for new public housing to come online.
None of this, of course, even touches on the costs to the taxpayer who will now foot the bill for a development that was going to be funded by private capital.
Meanwhile, the city’s housing crisis continues unabated.
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One of Donald Trump’s redeeming (and entertaining) qualities is that he tends to say exactly what he thinks, without regard to appearances. Yesterday, for instance, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asked the president what his re-election campaign should do “if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent—should they accept it, or should they call the FBI?” Trump responded candidly: “I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country—Norway—[and said], ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
That response provoked predictably over-the-top criticism from Trump’s opponents. “It’s a very sad thing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters today. “That’s an assault on our democracy.” Yet Trump’s take is a lot closer to the legal, moral, and practical reality of the situation.
Trump allowed that “if I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI,” but he was generally dismissive of the notion that the mere offer of information would qualify. “You’re a congressman,” he said. “Somebody comes up and says, ‘Hey, I have information on your opponent. Do you call the FBI?…You don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do….You go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it. They always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called ‘oppo research.'”
The context of this discussion, of course, is Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer claiming to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The elder Trump was emphasizing that, in his view, his son did nothing illegal or wrong when he agreed to the meeting (during which no useful information materialized, according to Trump Jr.) or by failing to notify the FBI about it.
Some of the president’s critics have argued that the Trump Tower meeting violated a federal law that prohibits foreign nationals from contributing “anything of value” to a political campaign. But that interpretation is controversial. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller noted in his report on Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, “No judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law.” Given that uncertainty, it would be hard to make the case that Trump Jr. knowingly violated the law, which is required for a conviction.
Furthermore, if the law were understood to cover situations like this, it would effectively criminalize constitutionally protected speech. Mueller noted that “such an interpretation could have implications beyond the foreign-source ban,” such as limits on campaign contributions by Americans, and “raise First Amendment questions.”
Trump, in other words, is on solid ground in arguing that such contacts are legal. Whether you also agree that “there’s nothing wrong with listening” will depend on whether you share Pelosi’s hysterical view that accepting or using information about a political opponent amounts to “an assault on our democracy” when the source is not a U.S. citizen.
Although Trump obviously does not share that view, he is intermittently aware that other people do. He clearly was worried that the Trump Tower meeting would make him look bad, which is why he tried to conceal the real motivation for it after The New York Times broke the story in July 2017.
From an ethical perspective, however, the relevant question is not the nationality of a source offering “oppo research” but the accuracy and relevance of the information. Another consideration is whether the information was obtained illegally—by hacking emails, for example. While the Supreme Court has said people have a First Amendment right to share illegally obtained information if they were not involved in the lawbreaking (something that news organizations frequently do), you might reasonably argue that they should also report such crimes when they become aware of them, which may be what Trump had in mind when he said he might contact the FBI “if I thought there was something wrong.”
When politicians or their minions spread information about their opponents that is irrelevant, misleading, or false, Pelosi seems to think, that is just democracy in action, as long as no foreigners were involved. But when they use information from a foreign source, no matter how accurate or germane it is, our political system is in grave danger. To be fair to Pelosi, that view seems to be widely shared within Congress, the intelligence community, and the mainstream press. That doesn’t mean it makes sense.
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A federal judge is demanding changes to a criminal justice system in St. Louis that can leave people stuck in jail for weeks when they don’t have money for bail.
The plaintiffs, four inmates in St. Louis’ City Workhouse medium security prison, had found themselves stuck behind bars not because they were flight risks or dangers to the community but because they could not afford bail. The judges wouldn’t consider their financial situations or reconsider their bail amounts unless they were represented by counsel. For poor defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers, it can take weeks before they were assigned a public defender.
Represented by several civil rights organizations, the inmates sued in January, arguing that their constitutional rights were violated by a pretrial detention system that cared more about extracting defendants’ money than keeping the public safe. The lawsuit sought class-action status and an injunction ordering judges to stop detaining people purely on the basis of whether they could afford bail.
About 85 percent of people locked up in St. Louis are there because they found bail unaffordable. The data show that this wasn’t really protecting public safety. According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, a random sample of St. Louis cases found that when defendants did eventually receive a bail reduction hearing (after an average of 47 days in detention), 69 percent of them received a reduction in bail demands or were released on their own recognizance. In other words, once a judge finally got around to actually considering whether these defendants were dangers, he or she realized they probably were not—or at least not such dangers as to justify such high bail demands.
On Tuesday, Judge Audrey Fleissig of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. Her preliminary injunction forbids the St. Louis jail system from detaining people for weeks on the sole basis of an inability to afford bail. Instead, defendants must be granted a hearing within 48 hours to give the accused an opportunity to request release. If the court wants to institute financial conditions, the court must determine the defendant’s ability to pay bail and must show that no other release conditions would “reasonably assure the arrestee’s future court appearance or the safety of others.” For those who are currently in pretrial detention, the court has a week to give them new hearings.
Fleissig also ruled in favor of the request for class certification, meaning other people being held in jail in St. Louis can now join this lawsuit as it moves forward.
“At this very moment, there are hundreds of people detained in the City of St. Louis merely because of their poverty,” responded Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, in a statement issued Tuesday. “Today’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction is a critical first step in ending the current status quo of wealth-based detention.”
The ruling is one of many recent wins over the past two years for a movement pushing for bail reforms. Bail is supposed to be a mechanism to guarantee that defendants return to court, not a reason to leave them stuck behind bars. But St. Louis is hardly alone: Many court systems blindly adhere to set bail schedules as a time-saver. People who get arrested are given flat bail amounts based on the severity of the crime. If they cannot pay, they just end up sitting in jail until they can convince a judge to let them out or show them mercy, and that can take weeks. As a result, hundreds of thousands of poor people across the country are in jail merely because they have been charged with crimes and not because they have been convicted.
In the decision, Fleissig took special note of the consequences when people end up detained in jail simply because they couldn’t afford the money asked of them to make bail. “The threat of irreparable harm to the [defendants] is obvious,” she wrote, “not only in the form of prolonged incarceration itself, but also in the form of its severe collateral consequences such as physical illness and injury, mental trauma, loss of employment, loss of benefits, and family crisis.”
Read more about the bail reform push here. If you’re in the San Francisco area this weekend and care about bail and other criminal justice reform issues, I’ll be participating in a panel hosted by the city’s Libertarian Party on Saturday evening. More details on that can be found here. Admission is free.
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Prof. Walter Effross points out that there’s an English adjective (still in use today) that has been variously used to indicate that something is reddish, or whitish, or bluish. What is that?
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U.S. veterans are being denied certain GI Bill benefits for working cannabis industry jobs in states that have legalized marijuana.
The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) does not consider working in the cannabis industry to be “stable and reliable” employment, Roll Call reported last week. As a result, the department is denying home loans to veterans who work cannabis industry jobs.
“The idea that people who served this country are being denied home loans for finding employment in a rapidly growing industry is preposterous,” says Laila Makled, advocacy committee chair for the National Cannabis Festival. “After all our service members have sacrificed, how can we penalize them for working in their state’s legal economy?”
Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) learned of the VA policy after reading a letter sent to her office by a constituent. Upon looking into it, she found that the reason for the denialsis that the VA would risk prosecution under federal anti-money laundering statutes if they approved the loans, Clark’s office told Roll Call.
In a letter to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie, Clark and 20 more members of Congress said they were writing to express concern with the VA’s “denial of loan guarantees to veterans who derive their income from state-legalized cannabis activities” and asked for clarification on the department’s policy by June 22.
“A substantial number of veterans earn their livelihoods in this industry, and in coming years that number is likely to further rise,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “The VA must acknowledge this reality and ensure veterans who work in this sector are able to clearly understand and can equitably access the benefits they’ve earned.”
“We fully understand the VA’s resulting aversion to legal and financial risk,” the letter states. “Denying veterans the benefits they’ve earned, however, is contrary to the intent Congress separately demonstrated in its creation of VA benefit programs.”
Barron’s recently reported on a veteran losing military pension benefits over his work in the cannabis industry. After 11 years of active duty service and combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, retired U.S. Army Major Tye Reedy has “been stripped of his U.S. Army pension,” Barron’s reported. “The reason? After retiring from active duty, the father of two went to work for… a cannabis company.”
The Army told Reedy that his employment “bring[s] discredit upon the U.S. Military Academy and the Army” and that “a military officer working in the cannabis industry runs contrary to Army values.”
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The cell phone video starts at approximately the moment Vallejo Police Department officer David McLaughlin draws his gun from its holster.
Adrian Burrell, a former Marine and documentary filmmaker is holding the phone and standing on his porch on January 22, watching the traffic stop of his cousin, Michael Walton, happening in Burrell’s driveway.
“You have a gun, and I have one, but it’s in the form of a camera,” Burrell recalls thinking. “This is the only thing I can bring to the fight.”
When McLaughlin turns and notices he’s being filmed, he orders Burrell to “get back.”
“Nope,” Burrell responds from his porch about 20 to 30 feet away.
Filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, as long as it doesn’t interfere with police duties. But McLaughlin strides onto the porch—holstering his gun and turning his back on Walton, a man he just moments ago appeared to consider a possible deadly threat—and starts to handcuff Burrell. “You’re interfering, so you’re going in the back of the car,” he says.
What happens next isn’t caught on camera, but McLaughlin tells Burrell to stop resisting. “I’m not resisting,” Burrell insists.
According to Burrell, McLaughlin then swept him to the ground and slammed his head against a wooden pole, giving him a concussion. McLaughlin detained Burrell before eventually releasing him, Burrell says,after finding out he was a veteran.
“I spend my whole life trying to avoid this, and it came to my house,” Burrell thought as he sat in the back of the squad car.
Like many recorded instances of police misconduct over the past five years, Burrell’s cell phone footage, uploaded to Facebook, went viral, sparking national media coverage. But it was only one of a string of high-profile police incidents in recent months that have inflamed long-running tensions in Vallejo—a diverse, blue-collar city north of Oakland, California—between the city’s police department and its citizens. Almost all of the recent incidents have been caught on cell phones or police-worn body cameras. Local activists say they finally show what lawsuits and protesters have complained of for years.
Vallejo has paid out millions of dollars to settle civil lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, brutality, and misconduct over the past decade. According to Claudia Quintana, Vallejo city attorney, there are currently 35 pending claims and lawsuits in connection with the Vallejo Police Department, 16 of which allege excessive force. There have been accusations of police retaliation against victims who have come forward, the police chief resigned in April, and the mayor has asked that the Justice Department come to town to try to mend the frayed relationship between police and the community.
The Vallejo Police Department says it is underfunded and dealing with high crime and high unemployment; the city never really recovered from the 2008 recession.
But Vallejo has one of the highest per capita rates of fatal police shootings in the state, higher than neighboring cities with similar crime problems, and one of the highest amounts of lawsuit payouts in the Bay Area. And while the number of police use-of-force injuries may be small compared to the overall number of arrests, for the first time, many of them are being caught on tape.
“Vallejo’s been problematic for a long time,” says Melissa Nold, Burrell’s attorney. “I’m from here, I’ve lived here my whole life, and the police department’s always been problematic. I think a lot of the increase for us recently has been the videotapes.”
Showdown at a pizza parlor
Santiago Hutchins being treated after a violent arrest.
The Burrell incident wasn’t the first time mobile phone recordings revealed what looks like abusive behavior on the part of McLaughlin.
Roughly six months before, on August 11, 2018, McLaughlin was walking into a pizzeria while off-duty and out of uniform when he locked eyes with Vallejo resident Santiago Hutchins. Hutchins claimed McLaughlin asked him what he was looking at. The two started jawing at each other, but instead of shrugging it off, McLaughlin drew his gun and pointed it at Hutchins.
“We made eye contact,” Hutchins told local news outlets. “He asked me what I was looking at, and I asked him what he wanted. We got into a verbal altercation. At that point, he pulled out his gun.”
Witnesses, unaware McLaughlin was a cop, pulled out their cell phones, called 911, and started recording. Hutchins’ family, sitting inside the pizzeria, watched as several Walnut Creek police officers arrived and tackled Hutchins.
Cell phone footage obtained by local news station KTVU shows McLaughlin then punching and elbowing Hutchins while two other officers hold him down. The beating bloodied Hutchins’ face, and he required stitches above one of his eyes. Hutchins was arrested on suspicion of disturbing the peace, according to the East Bay Times, but the charges were later dropped.
Sanjay Schmidt, Hutchins’ attorney, filed an internal affairs complaint with the Vallejo Police Department on Hutchins’ behalf in October. The response? “Crickets chirping,” he says.
Schmidt says no one from the department followed up to interview Hutchins, or even acknowledged it had received the complaint.
McLaughlin was put on leave on Feb. 4, three days after local news obtained the footage and reported he was the same officer from the Burrell incident. Hutchins filed an excessive force claim, a precursor to a civil rights lawsuit, against Vallejo several days later.
Without the cell phone video, the public wouldn’t have had the opportunity to witness McLaughlin’s actions for themselves, and he might never have been put on leave. “To me it was interesting that there were now two incidents in which Mclaughlin was caught—two incidents in which individuals had the presence of mind to get out their cell phones and record,” Schmidt says.
Shot to death for blocking a Taco Bell drive-thru
On Feb. 9, five days after McLaughlin was put on leave, Vallejo police made national headlines again when several officers shot 20-year-old Bay Area rapper Willie McCoy to death after he fell asleep in a Taco Bell drive-thru in a running car with a gun in his lap. The Vallejo police were called after McCoy didn’t respond to horn honks or people rapping on his window.
The Vallejo police arrived and found McCoy’s doors locked. McCoy began to wake up, and police said he moved for the gun. The officers, fearing for their lives, opened fire and killed him.
The Vallejo Police Department first refused to release body cam footage of the shooting to news outlets or the public, citing the ongoing investigation. However, it did arrange for some of McCoy’s family and a Vallejo City Council member to see the videos. When Nold and Open Vallejo, a local independent newsroom, found out, they demanded the tapes be released. Under California law, agencies can’t selectively disclose public records.
The Vallejo Police Department soon released the footage, which shows six officers standing by McCoy’s car for several minutes, formulating a plan while McCoy dozes inside. Although they shine lights on him, they make no attempt to wake McCoy. “If he reaches for it …” one officer says, nodding to the others.
McCoy then reaches up to scratch his shoulder and appears to slump forward. The officers start screaming at him, and seconds later open fire, hitting McCoy around 25 times, according to the law firm representing McCoy’s family.
The officers claimed they feared for their safety when they opened fire. Yet the way they handled their approach amounted to a preemptive death sentence. As David French argued in National Review after the video was released, even if their fears were legitimate at that moment, the officers’ decisions leading up the shooting nearly guaranteed McCoy had no chance of surviving the encounter.
It’s a point the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agrees on. “Willie McCoy’s murder is a textbook example of police killing someone as a predictable result of their risky tactics, which created the very danger they then used to justify the use of lethal force,” staffers for the civil rights group wrote in a blog post on the shooting.
McCoy’s family is now planning to sue.
“What we saw was a sleeping man,” David Harrison, a cousin of McCoy, told NBC News after seeing the video. “He reaches with his right arm to his left shoulder, scratching. He wasn’t awake. There wasn’t enough time for him to wake up.”
“What I see in that video is him beating my son and murdering him.”
The Vallejo Police Department released body cam footage earlier this month of another fatal police shooting in the case of Ronell Foster.
On the night of February 13, 2018, Vallejo police officer Ryan McMahon tried to stop Foster for riding his bike in traffic without a light. Foster fled into an alley, where the two ended up in a struggle. McMahon tried to tase Foster, and then started hitting him with his flashlight. The police said Foster grabbed McMahon’s flashlight and wielded it in a “threatening manner,” at which point McMahon shot him.
Vallejo repeatedly refused to release McMahon’s body camera footage, but finally did in response to a public records request by Open Vallejo. The video footage is blurry and dark, but Michael Haddad, one of the attorneys for Foster’s family, says that, despite the department’s attempts to parse the video frame by frame, it totally disproves the police narrative. The footage, Haddad says, shows that “at no time did Ronell take a fighting stance or make any sort of aggressive movement with that flashlight towards the officer.”
“Although you can tell that Ronell appears to grab the flashlight, he immediately turns away from the officer, and he’s trying to get away,” he says. “As he’s moving away, the officer shoots him about seven times. Every single shot goes into either his side, back, or the back of his head.”
A wrongful death lawsuit against Vallejo for Foster’s death is pending. McMahon was also one of the six officers who also shot Willie McCoy. The suit contends that McMahon “simply chased, cornered and shot Mr. Foster,” who didn’t present a serious threat, violating Foster’s constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment.
“The story they put out about my son was not true. … The public can now really see what happened,” Paula McGowan, Foster’s mother, toldThe Guardian. “What I see in that video is him beating my son and murdering him.…I want the public to know what these police officers are capable of.”
“Why are you guys doing this?”
Carl Edwards being arrested by Vallejo Police officers in 2018. He has filed an excessive force lawsuit against the department.
In addition to the shooting lawsuits, multiple excessive force lawsuits are either pending or forthcoming against the city of Vallejo, such as one excessive force suit filed by resident Carl Edwards in October of last year.
According to the suit, Edwards, 49, was working on a fence outside of his woodworking shop in July 2017 when several Vallejo Police officers approached him, looking for someone who had allegedly shot a slingshot or thrown rocks at some kids.
“Come over here, I want to talk to you,” Vallejo police officer Spencer Muniz-Bottomley said, according to the suit.
“We can talk right here,” Edwards allegedly responded.
Footage from Muniz-Bottomley’s body cam, uploaded to YouTube, doesn’t capture their initial exchange. The audio starts right after, when the officer orders Edwards to “put your hands on your head, bro.”
“What the fuck?” Edwards says, but the words are barely out of his mouth before he is swarmed by several Vallejo police officers, who wrestle him to the ground.
“Why are you guys doing this?” Edwards yells. By the time police pry his arms behind his back and handcuff Edwards, his face, and the concrete underneath it, is spattered in blood.
Edwards’ lawsuit claims he suffered a broken nose, a black eye, head trauma, a sprained shoulder, and cuts to his face, arms, back, hands, and head, the latter of which required stitches.
Haddad, who also represents Edwards, says the police tried to convince witnesses to press charges against Edwards and, when they failed, filed false reports against him, resulting in 14 months of prosecution for aggravated assault against a child and resisting arrest. The charges were eventually dismissed.
Two days after the VallejoTimes-Heraldpublished a story on Edwards’ lawsuit, as well as the YouTube footage, the Vallejo police announced that Muniz-Bottomley, who was named in two prior excessive force lawsuits, was no longer employed by the department. He has since moved to the Solana County Sheriff’s Office, Haddad says.
“As long as the command staff, the police department, and the city attorney’s office is actively working to enable their misconduct and lawlessness, it’s going to continue,” Haddad says.
One of the other officers named in Edwards lawsuit, Sgt. Steve Darden, hit a man in the face in 2013 who complained that police took too long to respond to his call. Darden’s body cam footage was leaked to a local ABC affiliate by someone inside the Vallejo Police Department.
In Darden’s police report of the incident, also leaked to the news outlet, he wrote that he “conducted a ‘front reap throw,’ exerted forward force with my right palm into the upper portion of his chest while sweeping his legs in the opposite direction.” The video shows him smacking the man upside his head.
The anonymous leaker also wrote to the news channel about the Vallejo Police Department: “Criminal behavior is being allowed and nothing is being done to stop it.”
Vallejo has settled a lot of lawsuits
In total, Vallejo paid out more than $7 million in civil rights lawsuit settlements involving its police department since 2011, local news outlet KTVU reported.
That’s a minuscule number compared to cities like Chicago or New York. In fiscal year 2018 alone, New York City paid $230 million to settle 3,745 lawsuits against their police department, according to the New York City Comptroller’s office. But New York City has more than 35,0000 police officers, whereas Vallejo only has around 100.
Only one law enforcement agency in the Bay Area—the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office—paid out more in civil rights lawsuit settlements per officer than Vallejo between 2015 and 2017, according to an analysis by the local East Bay Express.
However, according to the city of Vallejo, lawsuits against it are actually trending down. Quintana declined to comment on any of the specific lawsuits, but told Reasonthat Vallejo’s lawsuits in all areas of general liability, including excessive force, have dropped from a high of 45 total lawsuits in 2014 to 25 in 2019.
“Our understanding is that no reputable study exists comparing Vallejo’s costs of lawsuits and settlements for excessive force, or in general, as compared to other cities in the Bay Area. One news story compares Vallejo to Richmond, which, while interesting does not constitute a statistically valid sample,” Quintana says. “While everyone in the city of Vallejo believes that there is room for improvement on many fronts, I believe recent media stories may be reflective of a certain investigatory bias seeking to influence judicial and settlement outcomes for pending claimants or lawsuits.”
Vallejo native Geoffrey King, a constitutional lawyer and open government advocate who’s been collecting public records on the issue, said Quintana’s allegation of media bias is “both shocking and unsurprising.”
“The sad reality is that [Quintana’s statement] is, I think, an accurate reflection of the tone from city officials toward any sort of even mild criticism,” King says. “It’s consistent with what I find to be the contempt for democratic norms in Vallejo and the opacity that, by every indication, people are completely fed up with.”
Some of Vallejo’s lawsuits settlements are for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars, but there’s also been a slew of smaller payouts:
In 2016, Vallejo settled an excessive force lawsuit filed on behalf of a woman with stage IV lung cancer for $50,000. According to the suit, the woman was having a partial seizure, and in her confusion started resisting paramedics’ attempts to put her in an ambulance. A Vallejo police officer yanked her arm behind her back, past its normal range of motion, and swept her to the ground. The lawsuit claims her orthopedist later recommended arthroscopic surgery to repair her damaged shoulder.
In 2016, Vallejo paid out $35,000 to settle another excessive force lawsuit by Guillermo Solis, who alleged that he spent a week in a hospital recovering from “a serious brain injury” after a Vallejo cop slammed his head into the ground while he was handcuffed during a wrong-door raid.
Vallejo paid out another $17,500 that year to settle a racial profiling lawsuit against officers Matthew Komoda and Ryan McLaughlin (David McLaughlin’s twin brother, who followed him from the Oakland Police Department to Vallejo in 2014). Vallejo resident Nickolas Pitts claimed he was taking his trash to the curb when Komoda and McLaughlin pulled up and jumped out of their cruiser with their guns drawn. They “proceeded to grab and punch him in the head while pinning his face against the ground,” the lawsuit alleged. “The assault left him with several of his dreadlocks being ripped out of his head.” Pitts was charged with resisting arrest and jaywalking, but the charges were later dropped.
Last year, Vallejo separated from the California Joint Powers Risk Management Authority (CJPRMA), an insurance pool for municipalities. The CJPRMA board of directors noted that Vallejo’s losses were “large and disproportionate compared to the other members.” According to the city’s 2018 end-of-year financial report, it’s estimating $2 million in increased insurance costs over the next five years.
A string of fatal shootings and a lack of video
Willie McCoy’s death was the 16th fatal police shooting by Vallejo police since 2011. A recent data analysis by NBC Bay Area found that “the 16 shooting deaths by Vallejo police officers during the last seven and a half years adds up to one of the highest per capita death rates at the hands of police in the state.” Only two police departments in California, San Bernardino and South Gate, had higher per capita rates of fatal police shootings between 2005 and 2017.
“We consider this information stale and not indicative of Vallejo’s downward trend in the past five years regarding officer involved shooting deaths,” Quintana says.
However, data on police use-of-force in California published last week by Campaign Zero, a police reform campaign tied to the Black Lives Matter movement, showed that Vallejo police used more force per arrest than 98 percent of other California cities in 2016 and 2017.
In 2008, Vallejo declared bankruptcy, and the number of sworn police officers steadily dwindled, putting more workload on fewer cops. Vallejo’s police force went from a high of 158 sworn police officers in 2005 to 77 officers at its low point in 2013, roughly the same time that fatal police shootings peaked.
“Because we’re among the lowest paid, we can’t compete with the neighboring agencies who are attracting experienced officers” Darden recently told NBC News on a ride along. “The low pay means that our applicant pool consists of inexperienced people.”
Another defining event was the death of Vallejo police officer Jim Capoot. Capoot, a decorated, 19-year veteran, was shot and killed by a bank robbery suspect in 2011. It was the first killing of an on-duty Vallejo police officer in more than a decade, and it rattled the town and its small police department.
The Vallejo Police Department and the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association, a union representing Vallejo police, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Whatever the case, an unusual amount of police shootings soon followed.
One Vallejo police officer, Sean Kenney, fatally shot three people over a five-month period in 2012. It would be a remarkable number for an entire police department in a city the size of Vallejo. For one officer, it’s practically unheard of.
In May 2012, Kenney fatally shot Anton Barrett after Barrett and his son ditched their car and fled from police. Kenney chased Barrett into an alley. According to the police account, Barrett ran toward Kenney, ignoring his commands and holding a dark metallic object that looked like a gun. It turned out to be his wallet.
Five months later, in the early morning hours of September 2, Kenney and another officer, Dustin Joseph, shot Mario Romero, 22, and Joseph Johnson, 21, who were sitting in Romero’s Ford Thunderbird smoking cigarettes. Kenney and Joseph pulled up on the young men and ordered them to show their hands. Instead, they said Romero immediately got out of the car and reached for a gun in his waistband. Romero was shot 30 times. Police recovered a pellet gun from the car.
A month later, Kenney shot Jeremiah Moore, an autistic man who police said pointed a rifle at officers.
A 2015 BuzzFeedinvestigation found several eyewitness accounts that contradicted official police reports. One eyewitness said Moore was never holding a rifle. Another eyewitness of the Romero and Johnson shooting said Romero never got out of the car.
The Solana District Attorney dragged out its investigations of the three shootings for several years but eventually ruled all three were justified. Local newspapers covered the cases, and families and activists held protests, but the momentum behind the protests fizzled.
One crucial difference between that string of shootings and the incidents in Vallejo this year is that there was no video footage to corroborate or disprove the police narrative, no way for the public to independently assess the evidence, and no way to see if the Vallejo Police Department was policing itself.
At the time, the internal police investigations into those shootings were sealed under California’s extensive police secrecy laws, but this year, a new law went into effect making some internal police files subject to the state’s Public Records Act. Reason has pending public records requests with the Vallejo Police Department for shooting investigations and misconduct record involving several officers, including McLaughlin and Kenney.
However, the civil suits stemming from those shootings resulted in some of the largest settlements against Vallejo. A civil rights lawsuit in the Romero and Johnson shooting was settled for $2 million. The Barrett family settled their lawsuit, which also claimed Barrett’s son was mauled by a police K-9 while handcuffed, for $235,000.
Kenney was promoted to detective in 2014 and retired from the department in 2018. He now runs a law enforcement consulting firm, where he says the goal is to “share his own police experiences to help improve the communication between the police department and community.”
Claims of retaliation
There have also been allegations of retaliation against those who have come forward alleging police misconduct.
The afternoon that Burrell uploaded his cell phone footage of McLaughlin to Facebook, he says he was standing in his yard with Nold when two large officers from the Vallejo Police Department’s internal affairs unit pulled up in a cruiser with its lights flashing. It was unnerving to Burrell, who hadn’t given police his address, and he wonders how it would have gone if his lawyer wasn’t there.
About a month after Willie McCoy was killed, one of McCoy’s nieces, 20-year-old Deyana Jenkins, was driving at night with some friends when she was pulled over by Vallejo police officers. Police accused the women of pointing their fingers out the window like guns at the officers, a claim they deny. Jenkins, 5’2″ and 110 pounds, was tased for allegedly resisting arrest for driving without a license, which she says she forgot. Once again, the incident was caught on cell phone. Jenkins can be heard screaming, “I did not resist!”
In March, 18-year-old Carlos Yescas was pulled over by a plain-clothes Vallejo officer while driving a used Mercedes a couple of blocks down the street to a neighborhood market. Yescas had recently purchased the Mercedes and hadn’t registered it yet, and what started as a minor traffic infraction ended with a violent arrest, captured on cell phone by Yescas’ 12-year-old brother, as well as the impound of Yescas’ new car. Yescas’ mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that the day after she posted the video to Facebook, a Vallejo police officer was parked outside of her house and followed her husband as he drove to drop off twoof her children at school.
The Vallejo Police Department would not answer Yescas’ calls or emails about his impounded car, and the towing company denied having it. He eventually found out his “lost” car was put up for sale by the department.
The family of Angel Ramos, another young man fatally shot by a Vallejo police officer in 2017, told the Chronicle that after they started holding protests and candlelight vigils, police began to drive by and shine spotlights in their windows.
“I used to always tell clients that retaliation by the police wasn’t a concern to have,” says Nold, who is also representing Jenkins and Yescas. “I can’t do that for people in Vallejo now.”
“I should be the person who doesn’t shut up.”
The string of 2012 shootings was covered by local news, but the small protests lacked momentum, and there was no video evidence to challenge police narratives. This time, it’s different.
Amid the continuing national media coverage and intensifying community criticism, Vallejo police chief Andrew Bidou announced his retirement in April. The city originally planned for Bidou to serve as interim chief while it searched for his replacement. However, Vallejo officials scrapped the plan after local news outlets reported that Bidou would be double-dipping on his pay, receiving both a regular salary and $19,000 a month in state retirement benefits.
Vallejo public officials have since asked for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service to come to town to try and improve relations between the police and residents.
By all accounts, Vallejo needs it. Local activists are calling for the California Attorney General’s office to investigate the city, and the mayor shut down one of the most recent Vallejo City Council meetings amid shouting between family members of shooting victims, other audience members, and city council members. Police escorted the audience out of City Hall and then surrounded the building.
As for Adrian Burrell, he’s moving out of Vallejo. He says he was recently accepted into Stanford to pursue a graduate degree, and he no longer feels comfortable in his house after it was splashed all over the news. He started receiving trollish, threatening messages on social media.
He has not, however, stopped talking about what happened.
“My mom told me, ‘You have a responsibility to talk every chance you can,'” Burrell says. “I thought about what she said, and I was like, you know what, you’re right. There’s so many people who went through this, and they can’t talk about it, because they’re dead. I went through it, and for whatever reason, I’m not, so I should be the person who doesn’t shut up.”
On May 1, Officer David McLaughlin was taken off administrative leave and returned to desk duty at the Vallejo Police Department, where he will continue to collect a public salary.
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A big concern with President Donald Trump’s attacks on immigration has been that he’ll move the Overton window in a restrictionist direction. Trump, the argument goes, will normalize a blood-and-soil nativism on the right while putting Democrats on the defensive, crippling rational and humane reforms.
That indeed seemed to be happening before the midterms. But since then, Democrats have been lashing back.
As Republicans grow more restrictionist, it was easy to imagine that the Democrats might take the path just followed by the Social Democrats in Denmark, who last week clawed their way back to power after a long hiatus by embracing the hardline immigration agenda of the far-right parties. After all, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been going around warning that we need to rethink generous immigration policies lest they lead to more reactionary right-wing populism. And it was her husband, President Bill Clinton, who repudiated Ronald Reagan’s “amnesty” because unauthorized immigrants, in his telling, were stealing American jobs and mooching off welfare. Indeed, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that Clinton signed paved the way for Trump’s draconian deportation crackdowns.
But the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are moving in the opposite direction with the exception of Joe Biden who hasn’t said much one way or another since he announced his run.
Around the same time that Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t stop the tide of Central American migrants, Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke launched a bid to revive his flagging campaign with an immigration reform plan that is an outright repudiation of Trump’s border policies. Titled “In Our Own Image,” it pledges to immediately end the “needless chaos and confusion at our borders and in our communities” that Trump’s “cruel and cynical policies” have sown. A former congressman from El Paso, a border town, O’Rourke pledged to lift Trump’s travel ban, stop family separations, limit border detentions to criminal aliens, suspend plans to build the Great Wall of Trump, and channel the wall money into boosting border security infrastructure and hiring more judges to speed up asylum claim processing. He’d also give temporary protected status to “Dreamers”—immigrants who’ve grown up in America after they were brought here illegally as children—while he worked to pass laws to create a pathway for permanent legalization for all the 11 million unauthorized aliens.
Much of O’Rourke’s plan is borrowed from a rival, Julian Castro. But one truly inspired stroke in his proposal is that he would create new visas that churches and communities could use to sponsor refugees, ingeniously neutralizing the objection that these people would burden the public fisc. Nonetheless, Castro’s “People First” plan is superior overall, because it makes decriminalization of immigration its centerpiece. To that end, Castro, former mayor of San Antonio, proposes scrapping Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which in 1952 made illegal entry a criminal rather than a civil violation, setting the stage for crackdowns in the name of “enforcing the law.” Castro wouldn’t abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But he would break it into two agencies, then scale back and reassign its enforcement functions to other agencies within the Department of Justice.
Neither of the two plans is perfect. Both focus on scaling back immigration enforcement and say nary a word about expanding visa options for future workers, the only sure-fire way of diminishing future illegal flows. They’d both create a “Marshall Plan” that pumps billions to stabilize the Northern Triangle countries that migrants are fleeing, as though aid to kleptocracies and other dysfunctional regimes wouldn’t just make things worse.
O’Rourke and Castro aren’t exactly frontrunners, but they aren’t outliers on this issue. At a recent forum in Pasadena, California, Sens. Kamala Harris (who is hardly averse to draconian crackdowns) and Bernie Sanders (who once derided open borders as a Koch conspiracy) both took pains to lambast Trump’s harsh enforcement actions. Sanders declared that “America must never be a country where babies are snatched from the arms of their mothers.” Harris lamented what the fear of deportation is doing to children in immigrant families. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, the latest to jump in the Democratic fray, talked up his own plan to rebuild the refugee program that Trump has gutted.
The candidates have also going after those among them who aren’t sufficiently immigrant-friendly. Castro and Harris have been attacking former Vice President Joe Biden for helping shepherd the 1996 Clinton law through the Senate. Biden also voted for the Bush-era 2006 Secure Fence Act, which authorized funding for a 700-mile wall and has yet to back away from punishing employers that hire unauthorized immigrants. Meanwhile, Castro, who was President Barack Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development, has been obliquely criticizing his former boss for prioritizing health care reform over immigration reform in his first term.
What explains this Democratic romance with immigrants? Part of it is that a general revulsion at Trump’s border cruelty—his child separation polices, internment-style camps for Central American asylum seekers, deportations of people who’ve built lives in America—is generating a pendulum swing in a pro-immigration direction. Indeed, 61 percent of the respondents in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last fall said that “immigration helps the United States more than it hurts” and 28 percent said it hurts. In 2005, by contrast, 37 percent said immigration helps more and 53 percent said it hurts. That’s a 49-point swing in immigration’s favor and Democrats are reflecting that.
But the other reason is that after losing the 2012 presidential elections, Republicans had a choice between two opposite electoral strategies. One was to stop their immigration trash-talk and court Hispanics and other minorities whose presence is growing in a rapidly diversifying America, as the Republican National Committee’s autopsy report recommended. (“If Hispanic Americans perceive the GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States, they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” it said.) The other was to give up on Hispanics entirely and chase down the white—and some black—voters who Real Clear Politics‘ Sean Trende’s analysis revealed were “missing” in the 2012 election because they were simply not enthused by the choices. But that, he said, would require abandoning “economic libertarianism” and embracing a combination of restrictionism, protectionism, and entitlement spending.
Trump’s GOP has obviously embraced the Trende strategy on steroids. The Atlantic‘s Ron Brownstein points out that Republicans now hold fewer than one in five House seats where the minority population exceeds the national average, and fewer than one in eight seats in districts with more immigrants on average. This leaves the Hispanic terrain wide open for Democrats to pursue by ditching their past flirtations with restrictionism and embracing the cause of immigration whole hog.
Which strategy wins out in the end remains to seen. But the good news for now is that the land of immigrants isn’t turning its back on immigrants—it’s hunkering down to protect them.
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Professional snoops are willing to back off their holy war against encryption—with just a few minor tradeoffs, of course. All we need do is allow them to invisibly join our conversations at will as “ghost” parties to encrypted communications. It would put our governmental overseers in the position of, say, that creepy neighbor who sneaks into the house of the couple next door and hides in the pantry while they lock the doors in the mistaken expectation of spending some quality time by themselves.
If you don’t find that proposal reassuring, you’re not alone. But let’s see what the snoops are up to.
“It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call,” mused Ian Levy, technical director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) National Cyber Security Centre, and Crispin Robinson, GCHQ’s technical director for cryptanalysis, in an article published last November. “This sort of solution seems to be no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips that our democratically elected representatives and judiciary authorise today in traditional voice intercept solutions and certainly doesn’t give any government power they shouldn’t have.”
That Levy and Robinson gloss over a few details is obvious to even non-technical readers. While they evoke old-school wiretaps as featured in Hollywood movies, the “ghost proposal” requires redesigning whole new communications services to defeat attempts to maintain a modicum of privacy.
“This proposal to add a ‘ghost’ user would violate important human rights principles,” an international consortium of civil liberties organizations, tech companies, and security professionals objected in a recent open letter. They went on to specify that the scheme floated by two officials with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) would “pose serious threats to cybersecurity and thereby also threaten fundamental human rights, including privacy and free expression.”
According to the open letter by the consortium, which includes heavy-hitters such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Human Rights Watch, Apple, Microsoft, Bruce Schneier, and Philip Zimmermann:
To achieve this result, their proposal requires two changes to systems that would seriously undermine user security and trust. First, it would require service providers to surreptitiously inject a new public key into a conversation in response to a government demand. This would turn a two-way conversation into a group chat where the government is the additional participant, or add a secret government participant to an existing group chat. Second, in order to ensure the government is added to the conversation in secret, GCHQ’s proposal would require messaging apps, service providers, and operating systems to change their software so that it would 1) change the encryption schemes used, and/or 2) mislead users by suppressing the notifications that routinely appear when a new communicant joins a chat.
Don’t worry, add Levy and Robinson, “almost all users aren’t affected by it.”
That’s true—if they’re referring to the people you’d expect them to want to monitor.
As a 2016 report from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society pointed out, many people and businesses don’t really care to thoroughly conceal their communications. Most of us, despite the existence of powerful encryption, are pretty easy pickings for snoops.
But some people, for reasons good and evil, are more privacy minded. For the likes of terrorists, criminals, journalists, and political activists, the Berkman report concludes, “communication channels resistant to surveillance will always exist…new services and software can be made available without centralized vetting.”
ISIS, the terrorist organization, apparently developed its own encrypted chat app several years ago specifically to evade outside efforts to intercept communications.
Just weeks ago, the Justice Department boasted that an international law enforcement effort had brought down “a criminal enterprise that facilitated the transnational importation and distribution of narcotics through the sale of encrypted communication devices and services.” Adds the press release, “the government conservatively estimates there were at least 7,000 Phantom Secure devices in use.”
Does GCHQ really think ISIS and Phantom Secure are the types of organizations likely to cooperate with the ghost proposal? Of course not. It’s big companies catering to the bulk of the population that will play along. Privacy-minded people, good and bad, will ignore ghost proposal requirements.
But this isn’t the first time government snoops have leveraged fears of terrorists and criminals to sell the public on backdoors into communications systems that would ease mass surveillance of the general public.
“We do not want to do anything that would damage our own national security or public safety by spreading unbreakable encryption, especially given the international nature of terrorism,” warned the Clinton administration in 1996. It touted an ultimately failed effort to peddle limits on encryption exports and promote a “key escrow” scheme that would give the government access to everybody’s communications.
And let’s not forget the FBI’s wild inflation of the number of encrypted phones that have thwarted its search efforts—by a factor of about eight. “The government has long held discredited views about encryption. Now we see the FBI is struggling with basic arithmetic,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) coldly responded.
Governments in the nominally free West have, so far, been largely unsuccessful in their efforts to gain backdoor access to encrypted communications. That’s a good thing given that such deliberate security vulnerabilities would almost certainly be abused.
“Any functioning democracy will ensure that its law enforcement and intelligence methods are overseen independently, and that the public can be assured that any intrusions into people’s lives are necessary and proportionate,” Levy and Robinson promise.
But these ghost proposal authors work for GCHQ which, along with the NSA, FBI, and other agencies, were implicated by Edward Snowden in electronic surveillance that even the intrusive European Union condemned as a violation of privacy rights. Who do they think they’re fooling?
Given their history of spying on whoever they want, whenever they want, that GCHQ and other government snoops still want mandated backdoors into communications systems is convincing testimony as to the continued effectiveness of encryption. The abuses in which they’ve already engaged are good reason to deny them any further formal permission to eavesdrop on conversations.
The consortium is right to push back against the GCHQ ghost proposal as a threat to privacy and free expression. And the rest of us—those who aren’t reassured by lurkers in the pantry—should do our best to keep our encryption current and beyond the reach of nosy ghosts.
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