Tag: hit&run

A Detroit family is distraught after a police officer shot their 15-month-old dog on Friday. A 9-year-old had been walking the dogs when they got loose and took off. The boy flagged a police officer down for help retrieving the animals, but local news outlets report that the officer instead shot the dog.

Nine-year-old Elijah Hughs, the nephew of Sonya Davis, was preparing to take the Davis’ two dogs for a walk when they got loose and ran down the street. There are conflicting stories about what happened next, but a Detroit police officer shot Stormy, a 15-month-old pit bull mix, in the face. The family is now facing approximately $8,000 in medical bills to fix the dog’s completely shattered lower jaw.

“I was devastated,” Davis told The Detroit News. “She’s not a vicious dog at all. … She’s a sweetheart.”

Detroit TV news outlet Fox 2 reports:

Elijah tells Fox 2 he was walking Stormy and their other dog Bandit Friday afternoon on Detroit’s East Side.

They got loose and ran Elijah flagged down a Detroit Police car telling them his dogs got loose.

“One of the police officers jumped out the car and they shot stormy and then she ran,” he said.

Detroit Police say they had gotten a 911 call about vicious dogs in the area, when they got on scene they say Stormy charged at them.

“We don’t know if the dog is friendly or not its running toward the officer and the officer have to make a split decision at that time,” Captain Keeth Williams with Detroit Police said.

According to Detroit Dog Rescue (DDR), a local no-kill shelter, police left the family to deal with their grievously injured pet. The family contacted a local news station, which put them in touch with the DDR. The group is fundraising to cover the Davis’ veterinary bills.

The Davis family is filing a complaint with the Detroit Police Department, which said it is investigating the incident. If the Davis’ pursue legal action, they’ll join a string of civil rights lawsuits against the city for wantonly shooting dogs.

The shooting happened to occur on the same day Reason reported that Detroit agreed to pay out $60,000 in another dog shooting lawsuit brought by Nikita Smith, whose three dogs were shot by a Detroit narcotics unit during a marijuana raid in 2016.

Last year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard.

In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.

Last year, Reason reported that Detroit police shot 54 dogs in 2017—twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people. About a third of those shootings were by the Detroit Police’s Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids throughout the city. A previous Reason investigation found the Major Violators Unit had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake and generating lawsuits.

While violent drug raids are responsible for many of the dog shootings, Detroit also has a large number of stray dogs and little in the way of help for police who have to deal with them. In many of the cases reviewed by Reason, officers struggled to corral aggressive dogs running loose on the street while waiting in vain for animal control to arrive.

But in other instances, Detroit residents said their dogs were shot with little hesitation. For example, in May 2015, local country singer Alison Lewis was playing with her cattle-dog mix Millie in the open field where the old Tigers Stadium used to stand when the dog ran up to a police officer. The officer shot Lewis’ dog in the face. Police described it as a jumping, barking pit bull that charged the officer, according to the Detroit Free Press. “That’s absolutely not true,” Lewis told local news channel WXYZ. Detroit settled with Lewis for $8,000.

“What we do know is Detroit Police are asked to do too much and they’re not trained to work with all dogs,” Detroit Dog Rescue wrote on Facebook. “The city STILL needs adequate animal control officers, vehicles, extended hours, and a facility.”

Detroit is a particularly notable example of a national problem. Exactly how many dogs are shot by police every year is unknown, but there have been so many that there are databases and Facebook groups dedicated to tracking the phenomenon. In January, an Arkansas cop was fired after video showed him casually shooting a nine-pound dog. Reason has a whole category for “puppycide” stories. Last year, I reported on a new pilot program to train police officers how to read dog behavior, a tacit acknowledgment that police have a dog problem.

Until such training is more widespread, stories like this, and expensive lawsuits, will continue to play out.

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A new legal challenge filed this week seeks to overturn an awful ban in Houston, Texas, on sharing food with the homeless and others in need.

The lawsuit was filed by the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs (FNB)—a loose-knit advocacy coalition dedicated to “sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty”—and three FNB volunteers. The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Houston.

The suit (which you can access here) alleges that the Houston law violates elements of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, including constitutional protections of free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, due process, and equal protection. It asks the court to strike down the law and to award damages to the plaintiffs.

Opponents of the Houston law also filed an earlier challenge in Texas state court.

The ordinance, first adopted in 2012, prohibits “any organization or individual to sponsor or conduct a food service event on public or private property without the advance written consent of the public or private property owner or other individual with lawful control of the property.” It defines a “food service event” as one “in which charitable food services are provided to more than five individuals.” Its alleged purpose is to “assur[e] sanitary, quality foods are delivered to those in need, while protecting the environment and the rights of private property owners.”

The ordinance also establishes a citywide program intended to distinguish between “charitable food services” such as Food Not Bombs and “recognized charitable food service providers,” the latter, favored group including only people or organizations that have “received a certificate from the city designating said individual or organization as being in good standing in the City of Houston Recognized Charitable Food Service Provider Program.”

Violators face fines of up to $2,000.

Houston’s awful law is, well, awful. But it’s not uniquely so. In fact, other cities that have or have had such bans in place over the years include Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, New York City, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Antonio, and many others, as I detail in my recent book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable.

I first wrote about both awful prohibitions on sharing food with those in need and Food Not Bombs in a 2011 blog post for Hit & Run (R.I.P.). In that case, Orlando’s own cruel food-sharing ban had resulted in the arrest of several local Food Not Bombs members. I’ve written about such bans many times since, and described them all as “unconstitutional, discriminatory, and wrongheaded.”

Randall L. Kallinen, a Houston civil rights lawyer who filed the lawsuit this week, shares that assessment. 

“Sharing food is a form of expression protected by the Constitution,” Kallinen wrote to me in an email this week. “Likewise, Jesus taught his followers to feed the poor and others. Why should a few downtown Houston landowners that contribute to Mayor [Sylvester] Turner’s elections campaign dictate the law under which all Houstonians must live[?]”

But many others also oppose the Houston law. In fact, the lawsuit itself notes an incredibly diverse set of local opponents of the measure. These include the local Green Party, Libertarian Party, Democratic Socialists, and Republican Party, along with a pair of local Tea Party and Democratic Party groups. They also include a local Nation of Islam chapter, along with local atheist, Christian, and Hare Krishna groups.

If everyone (save for some powerful developers) hates this law, then why is it still on the books? Because not everyone does. “Houston officials who’ve supported the ordinance say it protects the people receiving food and doesn’t criminalize those providing it,” the Texas Observer reported this week.

That’s not how those sharing food in Houston view the law.

“I want to serve food wherever I feel like without having to worry about [police] officers,” Shere Dore, one of the plaintiffs, told the Observer. “A lot of other people want to serve, but they are literally too scared to come out.”

I hope this lawsuit swings the tide for Dore, Food Not Bombs, and Houston’s hungry.

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The Indecent Screen: Regulating Television in the Twenty-First Century, by Cynthia Chris, Rutgers University Press, 254 pages, $29.95

Like a prehistoric mosquito trapped in amber, the indecency rules enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are an artifact from a distant past loaded with DNA the regulators periodically try to use to engineer new censorship monsters.

Most people have at least some passing familiarity with these rules, which were codified in Section 1464 of the U.S. Criminal Code but immortalized by George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue. The law has been on the books in various forms since Congress took an early crack at regulating the new medium of radio in 1927, but the corresponding FCC regulations didn’t really begin to take shape until the 1970s. That was when Carlin’s satirical commentary on the rules—and the Supreme Court’s 1978 affirmation of an FCC sanction based on it—set the policy in stone, making it the only legal standard ever created by a stand-up comic.

Congress had no specific plan for what speech would be included when it prohibited “obscene, indecent, and profane” broadcasts. Nor did the Commission have any clear notion of what speech might be banned when it adopted a regulation outlawing “patently offensive” descriptions of “sexual or excretory activities and organs, at times of day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.” But Carlin had some idea what this meant, and he boiled it down to seven words that will “curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and…maybe even bring us, God help us, peace without honor.” They are shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

Why is tits on the list, you might ask? Because it serves as a monosyllabic exclamation point, and because it is funny. Carlin changed the number of words from time to time as he honed the bit, but the original seven are remembered best because they were the ones the Supreme Court considered in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.

In that case, the justices narrowly upheld the FCC’s decision to admonish (but not fine) the Pacifica station WBAI for airing a discussion program on language that incorporated the Carlin routine. The Court stressed two points. First, indecent (but not obscene) speech is protected by the First Amendment. Second, indecency could not be restricted in traditional media such as newspapers and magazines—but it could be on radio and television. And even then, the FCC couldn’t ban indecency altogether: It could only relegate such speech to late-night hours.

The theory was that radio and TV, unlike other media, were “uniquely accessible to children” because on-air words and images could come into the home unbidden.

No one was more surprised at the decision than the FCC. The Justice Department had refused to defend this frail and untested theory at the Supreme Court, leaving the commission to send one of its own attorneys, Joe Marino, to argue the case. The FCC fully expected to lose (as it had in the court of appeals), and it has been in a total fog as to how to apply its amorphous standard ever since.

At first, FCC Chairman Charles Ferris said the rules would be enforced only against the seven Carlin words (unless their use was fleeting or inadvertent). The commission followed that policy for nearly a decade but abandoned it in the late 1980s in response to political pressure. Instead, it adopted what it called a “generic” indecency standard.

The policy was initially applied almost exclusively to radio, not television. That changed abruptly in the early 21st century in the wake of some unscripted swearing on awards shows and the infamous 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” With Congress breathing down its neck, the FCC altered its policy yet again, eliminating its forbearance for “fleeting” or “inadvertent” material, sanctioning even news programs, and vastly increasing fines.

This lead to eight years of litigation and two trips to the Supreme Court. While the fines the commission had levied were thrown out, the indecency standard survived.

This is where Cynthia Chris, a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island, picks up the story. In The Indecent Screen, Chris provides a useful discussion of the origins and rationales for the FCC indecency rules, but the focus of her analysis is the two decades since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. She describes the foibles and inconsistencies of the FCC’s attempts to apply its indecency rules during a time when the technological assumptions on which they’re based have long since been eclipsed.

Chris reaches the right conclusion: “More than ever, it is urgent for us, as media consumers and as citizens, not only to tolerate free speech when it is uncomfortable, not only to defend protections for free speech, but to demand them and to respond to speech that is hateful, false, abusive, or discriminatory.” But her book adds little to a field already occupied by such works as Marjorie Heins’ far superior Not in Front of the Children. It also sometimes suffers from reliance on academic jargon and on secondary sources, and it describes some key cases inaccurately.

Take her discussion of the wardrobe malfunction case. Chris correctly notes that the court of appeals threw out the $550,000 fine against CBS—but then writes that the Supreme Court declined review in 2009, leaving the lower court’s decision intact. Not quite: The high court in fact granted review, vacated the lower court decision, and remanded it for further proceedings. The case dragged on another three years, and then the appellate court affirmed its original decision. The Supreme Court finally denied review in 2012.

The Indecent Screen also misses the opportunity to examine the constitutional obsolescence of indecency regulation in the age of multichannel delivery systems and streaming video. For example, after the Communications Decency Act tried to impose the indecency standard on all internet communications, the Supreme Court eviscerated it as an obvious First Amendment violation. Yet Chris mentions the landmark Reno v. ACLU decision just twice in 179 pages, and then only in passing.

Other points made in the book seem to come more from the author’s preconceptions than from actual data. Chris claims that “women’s language is more policed, and self-policed, than that of men.” Her evidence for this is drawn mainly from the amount of coverage accorded by US Weekly and People magazine to on-camera gaffes by female vs. male celebrities. This seems to discount the fact that the FCC’s “generic” indecency policy was created to go after “shock jocks” like Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge.

The author’s assumptions overwhelm her research again when she discusses the FCC’s record fine (for a single station) of $325,000, imposed on WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia, for a news story about a former porn actress who had become a volunteer emergency medical technician. The FCC got involved because an editing mishap resulted in a tiny image from the actress’s website appearing in the background of one shot for less than two seconds. Chris observes that station owner Schurz Communications raised strong arguments against the fine but dropped its challenge before a decision was reached after it sold the station to Gray Television Group in 2016.

Chris’ takeaway is that greedy corporations don’t care about free speech. “In WDBJ’s appeal,” she writes, “pursuing First Amendment principles took a back seat to riding a wave of industry-wide consolidation. In this case, it would seem, the old Bush-era lament that indecency fines are just ‘the cost of doing business’ in a hypercompetitive race for ratings seemed to gain new traction, but with a twist. Instead of ratings, the race was now on for deep-pocketed station-owning chains to gobble up smaller station groups and accumulate more vast market shares.”

What actually happened was quite different. Schurz opposed the FCC’s Notice of Apparent Liability and was prepared to appeal the matter through the courts. Then the commission threatened to hold up a pre-existing sale of the company’s stations unless Schurz paid the fine and dropped the appeal. Schurz offered to pay up if it could keep its right to continue challenging the ruling, but the FCC would not budge—the sale was held hostage to the case going away.

Regulatory extortion like this explains how the FCC has managed to preserve speech regulations that are both inconsistent with basic First Amendment principles and ineffective in an age when young people can access virtually all media through their phones. The Indecent Screen would have been a better book if it had explored the abuse of governmental power inherent in such dubious rules.

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The recent passage of state laws imposing new restrictions on abortion has resulted in understandable anger in the pro-choice movement, and reiteration of the classic slogan “my body, my choice.”   Or, as philosopher Daniel Silvermint puts it in a much-retweeted response to one of the new “heartbeat” laws, “if a woman has a heartbeat, you can’t tell her what to do with her goddamn body, ever.”

I very much agree! I fear, however, that many who repeat this and similar slogans don’t embrace its other implications (which, I assume, apply to men as well as women). I hope they reflect further, and come to support more of them. Here are a few examples:

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The City of Detroit will pay out $60,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit by a woman who says police wantonly shot and killed her three dogs during a marijuana raid three years ago.

The plaintiff, Nikita Smith, claimed in a 2016 lawsuit that officers from Detroit’s Major Violators Unit acted as a “dog death squad” when they executed a narcotics search warrant on her house for a suspected marijuana offense, shooting three of her pit bulls, including one that was behind a closed bathroom door. Extremely graphic photos entered into evidence in the case show bullet holes riddling the outside of the door and the dog dead inside the bathroom.

Smith was arrested for marijuana possession, but the charges were later dropped when officers failed to appear in court.

The settlement is the latest in a string of costly payouts for Detroit due to dog shootings during drug raids. It also set new precedent in Fourth Amendment law. Detroit tried to argue that, since Smith’s dogs were unlicensed, in violation of Detroit’s municipal code, she had no legitimate property interest in them under the Fourth Amendment. The court rejected this argument.

Smith’s attorney, Chris Olson, calls the decision “a milestone in police-dog shooting cases that continue to plague the United States.

“The decision was significant because it denies police a ‘get out of jail free card’ if the deceased dog is later discovered to have been unlicensed,” he continues. “The decision is especially significant because the vast majority of dogs are unlicensed. The upshot is that the Fourth Amendment prohibits police officers from shooting dogs where the shooting is more intrusive than necessary, and citizens do not have to pay a dog license fee to enjoy their Fourth Amendment rights.”

A 2016 Reason investigation found that the department’s Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids across the city, has a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake and generating civil rights lawsuits. A follow-up investigation found that Detroit police shot 54 dogs in 2017, twice as many as Chicago.

Last year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in the backyard.

In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.

One officer involved in the Smith raid has shot 80 dogs over the course of his career, according to “destruction of animal” reports filed by Detroit police officers in 2017 and obtained by Reason. Two other officers involved in the Smith raid testified in depositions that they had shot “fewer than 20” and “at least 19” dogs over the course of their careers.

Smith’s case was also an unprecedented test of the Fourth Amendment as it applies to pets. In such cases, police departments typically argue that an officer’s actions were reasonable under the circumstances—and courts give much deference to those arguments. Smith’s case appears to be the first time federal courts had considered the question of whether unlicensed pets are protected by the Fourth Amendment.

A U.S. District Court judge agreed with the city, dismissing Smith’s lawsuit in 2017. “When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property,” the judge ruled. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the lower court’s ruling against Smith last year. The Sixth Circuit declared that not only was Smith entitled to some process under Michigan law before her dogs were “seized” (i.e. killed), but that her dogs, even if unlicensed, were still protected from unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

“Just as the police cannot destroy every unlicensed car or gun on the spot, they cannot kill every unlicensed dog on the spot,” the appeals court writes.

The case was kicked back to the lower court, but instead of continuing to trial, Detroit decided this week to settle.

A similar lawsuit is still pending in federal court in the case of Joel Castro and Nicole Motyka, who say narcotics officers raided their house and shot two of their pitbulls, despite the dogs being behind a barrier in the kitchen. The officers found 26 marijuana plants inside, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Castro was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver.

Marijuana charges against the couple were later dropped.

The Detroit Police Department and the Detroit Law Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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The government failed in its attempt to denaturalize Pakistan-born Afaq Ahmed Malik, and the opinion from the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas is here. The government was unable to prove its accusation that Malik had not divorced his wife in Pakistan before marrying an American woman through whom he obtained permanent residency and later citizenship.

Malik’s defense attorneys note some of the significant problems in the government’s behavior and case here, while you have to read the decision itself for some of the other gems. A few noteworthy ones:

• The government was sanctioned for its failure to turn over relevant documents after its investigation into Malik’s divorce decree.
• The district court denied expert witness status to two supposed experts that the government brought in. One of them was neither familiar with Pakistani law nor spoke or read Urdu, the language in which the documents were written about which he was testifying.
• Numerous mistakes were made when immigration officers questioned and evaluated Malik, including failures to follow protocols regarding the way that questions were supposed to be asked and answers recorded.

This case highlights the need for skepticism about taking the government’s claims at face value in denaturalization cases and thus also reinforces the crucial need for (effective) defense counsel in these situations. As Cassandra Robertson and I have argued, providing counsel to defendants not just in criminal but also civil denaturalization proceedings should not be optional.

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The U.S. Postal Service lost more than $2 billion during the second quarter of the fiscal year, putting it on track to finish the current year more than $7 billion in the red—way worse than the nearly $4 billion in losses it posted last year.

In its quarterly fiscal report, published today, the Post Office reported small decreases in mail volume and overall revenue compared to the same quarter of 2018. Its big losses are driven by a sharp increase in expenses, primarily workers’ compensation costs, pension liabilities, and payments for retirees’ health benefits.

For the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2018, the Postal Service recorded a then-record loss of $3.9 billion. At the time, Postmaster General Megan Brennan bluntly declared that the agency “cannot generate revenue or cut enough costs to pay our bills” and predicted that the agency would continue to post losses at “an accelerating rate.”

After losing $1.5 billion in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, the Post Office has now lost $3.6 billion in just six months. That comes even after an increase in the cost of sending first-class mail. The cost of a stamp jumped 5 percent on January 1, and other mailing services increased by 2.5 percent. The agency predicted that those changes would increase revenue by $1.7 billion—but expenses have been outpacing revenues by a wide margin.

It’s not exactly news that personnel costs are driving the Postal Service’s financial problems. The agency has $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and “no clear path to profitability,” according to a White House assessment report released last year. The Post Office has lost $69 billion since 2007, and it probably would have gone bankrupt long ago if it were a private entity—FedEx and UPS certainly wouldn’t exist today if they were posting annual losses of $4 billion. And they pay taxes, which the Postal Service does not.

As Reason has been arguing for literally 50 years, the postal service should be privatized. It would probably require significant restructuring and service changes for the privatized service to net a profit, and the federal government would likely need to absorb the current debts. That means it will only become more difficult to free the Post Office from government control as the agency’s debt mount. Still, it could net a windfall to help pay off the service’s massive liabilities—the Cornell economist Richard Geddes has found that a postal IPO could raise $40 billion.

“Privatization would give the [Post Office] the flexibility to save itself, allowing access to debt and equity markets for capital investment—a lifeline for a company that has long been short of cash and deferring the purchase of vital new vehicles and technologies,” Chris Edwards, an economist at the Cato Institute, writes in National Review.

Unfortunately, some members of Congress seem more interested in having the Postal Service expand its losing business into new areas. An overhaul of banking and credit card systems floated this week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) would effectively convert the Post Office into a bank of sorts, offering checking and savings accounts.

In other words, it would take a government agency that’s already failing to compete with private sector alternatives in the shipping industry (despite massive structural advantages) and let it fail in competition against private banks as well—and would force poorer Americans to rely on that floundering institution as their primary provider of banking services. As Reason‘s Peter Suderman wrote yesterday, this is “not a new idea, but it is a bad one.”

Republicans aren’t likely to go for that plan, but fixing the Post Office’s problems don’t seem to be high on their list of priorities either. The Trump administration included the Post Office in a 2017 report highlighting services that could be privatized, but that survey seems to be mostly gathering dust right now.

The Postal Service, meanwhile, continues to gather debt.

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Princeton students have occupied the space in front of Nassau Hall, the campus’s administrative building, and are engaged in a round-the-clock protest until university leadership addresses their demands relating to the prevention of sexual misconduct.

Surprisingly, the demands are not all bad.

“In the service of survivors, fix Title IX,” activists chanted on Wednesday, the first day of the ongoing protest.

Title IX is the federal statute that outlaws sex-based discrimination on campuses, and was cited by the Obama administration as justification for compelling colleges and universities to take stronger action combat sexual harassment and misconduct. The policies recommended by President Obama’s Education Department were unfriendly to the due process rights of accused students, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has revised them.

When activists press for Title IX-related changes on campuses, they are typically demanding that authorities adopt a “believe all victims” mentality, which would make it less likely that accused students would receive fair treatment. I’ve been harshly critical of this kind of activism, in the past.

The Princeton students’ demands, though, are not all bad. For one thing, they have asked for the university to devise a restorative justice option for victims who “want to pursue alternative pathways for healing and justice that fall outside the punitive system.” If both the accused and the accuser would prefer to reach some other arrangement regarding their dispute, they should be permitted to do so. (Indeed, one of the many reasons DeVos’s guidance constituted an improvement is that it allows for such an option.)

The activists have also demanded “full access to statistics relaying the racial and socioeconomic makeup of both alleged and convicted perpetrators. We want to ensure, as a community, perpetrators are being held accountable at the same rate—regardless of socioeconomic and racial background.” What they will likely find is that male students of color—and immigrants—are overrepresented among those disciplined under Title IX, consistent with the preliminary evidence gathered at other colleges and universities. It’s important to spread awareness of the fact that young men of color are disproportionately harmed when sexual misconduct adjudicators abandon basic principles of fairness.

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If you were a kid with a lunch debt in Warwick, Rhode Island, the public schools planned to serve you a cold sun butter and jelly sandwich.

Such tactics, often called lunch shaming, aren’t unique to Warwick. Several schools around the country require kids without money for their meals—including those on the free/reduced lunch program—to be publicly marked with special wristbands or otherwise singled out for negative attention.

A Warwick restauranteur, Angelica Penta, raised $4,000 in donations to reduce the kids’ debts, but the school system refused to take the money. Since the check wasn’t enough to cover the entire balance—a whopping $77,000—officials wouldn’t accept it at all, saying they couldn’t choose which students would have their debts erased. They instead suggested that Penta set up a program where students could apply to have their accounts reduced or expunged.

“Every idea I had got shut down,” Penta tells the local NBC affiliate.

Fortunately for the students, the CEO of Chobani announced this week that his yogurt company will donate another $47,460 to the cause. The remainder will come from a GoFundMe started by Cait Clement, who lives down the street from Penta.

“It’s kind of crazy how two moms who just couldn’t fathom kids going hungry just kind of, you know, in two different platforms, are making it happen,” Clement tells Newsweek. “I never ever thought it would go this far.”

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California’s largely incompetent and heavily taxed roll-out of legal recreational marijuana sales continues to not pay dividends.

This week Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration cut $223 million out of the state’s projections of tax revenue from marijuana sales through June 2020.

At this point, that’s not a surprise. Between its extremely high tax rates and its foot-dragging in vendor licensing, California has done such a terrible job implementing marijuana legalization that it made only half the taxes over the first year that the authorities projected—$345 million rather than $643 million. The Golden State has made it such a nightmare for consumers to buy legal recrational marijuana and for vendors to sell it—so much so that the state still has a massive black market. In some communities, according to the Associated Press, half of all marijuana purchases still take place illicitly.

This isn’t entirely due to the state’s huge excise taxes, but Sacramento still deserves a good chunk of the blame. It set high tax rates, then gave cities and counties the authority to charge additional taxes and to control the local licensing. And some cities have done an awful job of actually letting legal marijuana sales happen. Los Angeles, for example, has been so bad about licensing vendors that illegal dispensaries continue to operate, prompting the possibility of an expensive police crackdown that will perpetuate the drug war rather than end it.

And that’s just in the communities that are allowing vendors. The state law also gives municipalities the authority to say no. Those cities’ citizens can still grow their own or buy it elsewhere, but towns can stop marijuana shops from opening entirely.

Newsom is aware of this issue, and he has complained that such cities are depriving the state of tax revenue. Oh, and depriving citizens of the ability to buy marijuana legally. But, really, you know this is all about the money.

There is a bill to cut state-level taxes for a few years, which lawmakers hope will incentivize the development of legal marijuana businesses and reduce the need for black market sales. That legislation, AB 286, passed through the Assembly’s Business and Professions Committee at the end of April and has been referred to the Appropriations Committee.

While cutting pot taxes would be a great idea, Newsom and the California legislature are so hot to find more sources of revenue these days that we should be skeptical about the bill’s future. Newsom has said that he wants harsher enforcement against people selling weed on the black market. Sacramento wants its pay day, even if it means perpetuating the drug war.

Below, ReasonTV explores how California’s mishandling of marijuana legalization has kept a thriving black market intact:

 

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