Like the Rest of Us, Jeff Flake Is Frustrated and Confused About the Kavanaugh Confirmation Process

Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) is earning the ire of partisans on both the right and the left for remarks he made on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon. Flake blasted his fellow senators and President Donald Trump for the handling of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, but also declined to take a firm position on any of the increasingly fraught questions swirling around the Supreme Court nominee.

Some of that criticism is warranted. After all, Flake is one of only 100 people in America with the power to approve or block Kavanaugh’s nomination. Even that calculation understates Flake’s potential influence over the outcome of this process: given the current hyper-partisan environment and the narrow 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate, Flake is a swing vote in both the crucial Senate Judiciary Committee and the chamber as a whole.

But it’s also difficult not to sympathize with Flake’s assessment of the situation. He is retiring at the end of the current term, and therefore has little to gain from playing politics or trying to appear above the partisan fray. He’s free to be the voice of the people—or perhaps the Senate’s conscious, if you prefer—and the vox populi is frustrated, confused, and a little angry.

Flake said he’s unwilling to believe that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of attempted to rape her at a high school party in 1983, is “is part of some kind of vast conspiracy from start to finish to smear Judge Kavanaugh,” but that she should be heard (and she will be, Thursday, by the Senate Judiciary Committee). Flake also said that he refuses to believe that her claims of sexual assault are invalid because she did not report the assault immediately after it happened—something Trump tweeted earlier this week.

“How uninformed and uncaring do you have to be to say things like that, much less believe them?” asked Flake. “Do we have any idea what kind of message that sends, especially to young women? How many times do we have to marginalize and ignore women before we learn that important lesson?”

On the other hand, Flake said he does not believe that Kavanaugh “is some kind of serial sexual predator, as has been alleged by some on the left.” (Flake did not comment on the most recent allegations against Kavanaugh, and told a reporter that he did not have time to review those new allegations before his floor speech Wednesday)

Flake lamented that tather than trying to get to the truth, both sides have rushed to strip both Kavanaugh and Ford of their humanity, turning both into “grotesque caricatures” of who they really are.

“We think that our ideological struggle is more important than their humanity,” he said, “because we are so practiced at dehumanizing people that we have also dehumanized ourselves.”

Flake’s assessment of the circus that surrounds Kavanaugh’s confirmation process seems pretty reasonable. Even by modern political standards, and even with the ideological composition of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, the vitriol shown by both right and left in the past two weeks has been stunning.

There has been almost no consideration of whether Kavanaugh would make a good justice; no consideration of his judicial record or his legal views. His confirmation now seems to hinge on whether you believe Ford’s accusations (and now the accusations brought by two other women) or Kavanaugh’s denials—and “believe” is indeed the right word here, because the frustrating lack of concrete evidence has turned that question into an article of partisan faith.

It’s also right, I think, to feel disappointed that Flake did not take the opportunity to change the process he’s decrying, or even attempt to do so.

He need not take a position on Kavanaugh’s nomination—indeed, he’s right to say he wants to hear the testimony of both Ford and Kavanaugh with an open mind on Thursday—but he could have said that he would not support the decision to vote on Kavanaugh as soon as Friday. He could have said he wanted additional time to allow Kavanaugh’s other accusers to come forward and have their claims properly vetted.

It is unlikely that Thursday’s hearing will definitively prove Ford or Kavanagh to be a liar. And the Supreme Court confirmation process is a political process, not a court of law where due process matters and accusations must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Together, those two facts leave all of us with another frustrating reality: there’s likely no outcome of the Kavanaugh confirmation process that will be accepted as the “right” one.

“However this vote goes, I’m confident in saying that it will forever be steeped in doubt,” Flake said. “This doubt is the only thing of which I am confident.”

The burden of sorting all this out falls to Flake and his fellow senators. It is important to call out the “toxic political culture” that’s only been worsened by the past two weeks of Kavanaugh drama, as Flake did Wednesday. What he does on Thursday and Friday will matter even more.

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Cracked Beam Compels San Francisco Officials to Close Brand New $2.2 Billion Transit Hub

The Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco cost more than $2.2 billion and took about eight years to construct. Yesterday the city had to shut it down because of a cracked steel support beam.

The center will stay closed through the end of next week.

The four-story transit center, which opened to the public on August 12, serves as hub for many of the city’s bus lines. Hailed the “Grand Central of the West,” it’s supposed to serve as many as 45 million people each year, the Associated Press reports. In addition to its bus services, the transit center features restaurants, shops, and even a rooftop public park.

But Tuesday morning, workers installing ceiling panels discovered a crack in a 6 ½-foot steel beam on the third floor. Officials had no choice but to close down the center. “The beam is cracked, so the behavior of the beam is unpredictable,” Transbay Joint Powers Authority Executive Director Mark Zabaneh said at a news conference. Zabaneh called it a “safety issue,” adding that “we can’t take any chances.”

It wasn’t clear what caused the crack, but it meant chaos for commuters. Buses were redirected, and several of the streets surrounding the structure were closed to traffic. In a press release, officials asked motorists to “avoid driving downtown,” while warning transit riders “to allow extra time for their commute.” This afternoon, Zabaneh said a second cracked beam had been discovered as well.

So what caused the issue? Joe Maffei of the San Francisco–based firm Maffei Structural Engineering tells the San Francisco Chronicle that he sees two potential culprits for the first crack: It could be “a fabrication problem—something went wrong when the beam was manufactured—or the beam is supporting more weight than it’s designed to bear.”

The cracked beams aren’t the only problem to plagued the new transit center. When construction finally ended, the structure was more than $500 million over budget. And earlier this month, the rooftop park’s walkway started crumbling.

As San Francisco spends resources on public transportation, it has made life harder for companies trying to give commuters more choices. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in April requiring dockless electric scooter services to be licensed and instructing the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency to draft regulations for these scooters. The city eventually granted permits to just two companies, and each was only allowed to deploy 625 vehicles.

It’s not just scooters. For months, San Francisco City Supervisor Aaron Peskin has pushed a plan that would tax Uber and Lyft’s net rider fares. Last week Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill allowing San Francisco voters to have the final say on that proposal. Peskin hopes to have the measure on the ballot in 2019.

The San Francisco government clearly values public transportation over private alternatives. In a better world, the city would take its ability to spend billions on transit without getting it right as a sign it should rethink those priorities.

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Libertarian Postmodernism – A Reply to Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web: New at Reason

People of many political persuasions have identified postmodernism as a major threat to civilization. The most notable recent attacks have come from Jordan Peterson and other members of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.”

Reason Editor-at-Large Nick Gillespie has a problem with that. He sat down with Zach Weissmueller, video journalist for Reason TV, to discuss and defend postmodernism—a term he says has been widely mischaracterized by its most vociferous critics—from a libertarian perspective.

Watch the full interview above.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Lorenz Lo.

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The Marine Le Pen Case Shows That Supposedly Enlightened France Treats Political Speech As a Crime and a Symptom of Mental Illness

France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.

It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.

This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.

That decision also left Le Pen open to a court-ordered psychiatric assessment, which she says she will resist. The BBC describes the order as “standard procedure,” citing Le Parisen, which reports that prosecutors said “Article 706-47-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure” provides the statutory authority for requiring an examination of Le Pen. Yet that provision applies only to people accused of “procuring concerning a minor,” “forcing a minor into prostitution,” and violent crimes such as sexual assault, “torture or acts of barbarity,” and murder of a child “accompanied by acts of rape.” It’s telling that Le Parisien saw nothing amiss about putting Le Pen’s “crime”—expressing her political views on Twitter—in the same category as rape, torture, and murder.

The notice that Le Pen received from Carole Bochter, the investigating judge handling the case, actually cites Article 161-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a more general provision that authorizes judges to seek guidance from “experts” when they deem it “useful.” Ordering a psychiatric examination was a matter of discretion, in other words, notwithstanding the claim by Le Parisen, the BBC, and other media outlets that it was standard procedure or even required by law. That legal leeway lends plausibility to Le Pen’s complaint that the French government is taking a page from the Soviet playbook by treating political dissent as a mental illness.

The BBC says Bochter “wants the tests to determine if [Le Pen] suffers mental illness or is ‘capable of understanding remarks and answering questions.'” Le Parisien says “the expert in charge of this psychiatric examination is supposed to check whether Marine Le Pen was or was not ‘suffering from a psychic or neuropsychic disorder that impaired her discernment’ when she posted the photos.” The implication does seem to be, as Le Pen’s allies claim, that Bochter sees her political speech as a evidence of a mental disorder.

Article 227-24 is not the only way in which French law deviates from the Enlightenment values to which French officials pay lip service. In addition to Twitter posts about terrorism, French legislators have criminalized Holocaust denial, public display of Nazi symbols, and insults or incitement of hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or disability. All of these bans would be non-starters under U.S. constitutional law. Shouldn’t actual legal restrictions on speech carry more weight in a ranking of press freedom than Donald Trump’s dreams of silencing people who offend him?

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Texas Attorney General Ignores 75 Years of Supreme Court Rulings Trying to Force a Student to Stand for the Pledge

A.G. Ken PaxtonTexas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s website says “Liberty and Justice for Texas” in big letters at the top. He seems to have a funny idea of what “liberty” means, though. He thinks the State of Texas can force students to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

India Landry, 18, was expelled from a high school in Katy, Texas, because she has repeatedly refused to stand for the Pledge. Landry is suing the school district in federal court, arguing violations of her civil rights. Now Paxton, as the state’s top prosecutor, is asking to intervene in the federal case.

To say that court precedent is on Landry’s side may understate things. A Supreme Court decision from all the way back in 1943 makes it very clear that public schools cannot force students to salute the flag or recite the pledge.

You might expect that as the state’s attorney general, Paxton would be defending Landry’s free speech rights here. Nope: He wants to argue that Landry cannot refuse to stand for the flag without her parent’s permission. It seems that Texas schools have opt-out forms that parents are expected to sign to give children “permission” to not stand. In a press release, he claims, quite incorrectly, “School children cannot unilaterally refuse to participate in the pledge.”

Landry’s mother is supporting her lawsuit, which makes Paxton’s approach more than a little strange. Even stranger is the Supreme Court precedents he’s attempting to use in his motion to justify his position. He quotes Texas v. Johnson and Spence v. Washington, in which the Court said, “there is a special place reserved for the flag in this Nation, and thus we do not doubt that the government has a legitimate interest in making efforts to ‘preserv[e] the national flag as an unalloyed symbol of our country.'” But this quote comes from a Supreme Court case affirming the right to desecrate the flag as a form of protected speech! The decision specifically forbids the government from punishing citizens for disrespecting the flag.

This unconstitutional wankery can be explained by election-year politics and by the fact that Landry is reportedly refusing to stand for the pledge to show her support for kneeling NFL players. In other words, Paxton is supporting the school district punishing a black student for participating in a protest that is fundamentally about how people in authority abuse their power to punish black people.

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Francis Fukuyama Says Identity Politics Are Killing America and Empowering Donald Trump: Podcast

Since the publication of his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” no political scientist has been more influential in discussions of global democracy than Francis Fukuyama. In the years since then, the Stanford professor has authored a shelf full of prescient and commanding texts, including The End of History and the Last Man, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creaton of Prosperity, and Our Post-Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. (In 2002, he debated biophysicist Gregory Stock in the pages at Reason on the advisability of human cloning; read their exchange here and here.)

Once a neoconservative who staunchly believed in military intervention and nation building, Fukuyama has been chastened by the failure of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 and has renounced his early support for the invasion and occupation in Iraq. In his new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, he argues that the rise of populism, nationalism, and grievance cultures based on racial, ethnic, and gender identity both here and abroad are undermining the basis of liberal democracy and threaten economic prosperity and peace. “Every single one of these struggles is justified,” Fukuyama told The Chronicle of Higher Education recently. “The problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society.”

I spoke with Fukuyama about Identity, whether it’s possible to create a national identity that is capable of bringing Americans of all sorts together without becoming oppressive and stultifying, and why he believes that a Democratic win in the midterm elections is essential to checking what he sees as the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump.

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Can California Conservatives Kill the High-Speed Rail Boondoggle?

Train constructionThe same folks trying to scale back California’s massive gas taxes are now taking aim at the state’s budget-busting, behind-schedule high-speed rail project.

Carl DeMaio, a former member of the San Diego City Council (and a former contractor for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website), announced this week that he’s introducing a brand new ballot initiative that would force the governor to stop all activity on the proposed bullet train (currently under construction in the Fresno area) and spend any remaining money on other transportation projects.

When we last took note of the bullet train, everything was spiraling out of control. Costs had ballooned up to at least $77 billion (three times what citizens were told when they approved a bond for the project a decade ago) and delays have pushed the opening all the way back to 2033. It’s a disaster that Gov. Jerry Brown insists on defending as some sort of legacy.

DeMaio’s new ballot initiative would kill the train, but it doesn’t stop there. His proposal is essentially a follow-up to Proposition 6, up for vote this fall. Proposition 6 would roll back gas taxes and vehicle fees passed last year and would require a public vote to implement any future gas tax or vehicle fee increases.

The ad blitzes for and against Proposition 6 have already begun. If you’re a Californian, you may already be seeing “No on 6” ads popping up in your social media feeds. (This Angeleno has been seeing them all week on Facebook.) The opposition ads warn that the passage of Proposition 6 threatens funding for roads and bridges. “Crumbling roads and bridges” is the phrase officials defending the gas taxes have been hitting over and over.

The reality, though, is that millions and millions of dollars of revenue collected by the gas taxes are being directed away from those “crumbling roads and bridges.” As Christian Britschgi noted back in April, the revenue from the gas tax increase from last year is being used to fund 28 transit projects that had nothing to do with repairing roads and bridges. This revenue is actually being used for pet rail projects, including a revamp of the rail network here in Los Angeles to prepare for the 2028 Olympics. So in reality, the gas tax was making drivers across the state subsidize pet train and mass transit projects.

DeMaio’s new initiative addresses that problem with a “lockbox” proposal that forbids revenue from gas taxes to be used for any projects other than those involving roads.

But California has lots of taxes, and his plan doesn’t forbid using all of it for other projects. The new initiative would allow car sales taxes to be devoted to all types of transportation projects, including mass transit, bike lanes, and other types of programs.

Read DeMaio’s new ballot initiative here. He submitted the initiative to the attorney general’s office Tuesday to request a title and summary to begin the process of collecting signatures, with a goal of getting it on the 2020 ballot.

Bonus link: The Reason Foundation analyzed all 11 ballot propositions that Californians will be considering on Election Day in November. Read what we have to say about them here.

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New Kavanaugh Accuser Says Nominee Abetted Gang-Rape, Groped Girls, and Spiked Punch With Drugs at High-School Parties

A woman who allegedly partied with Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a teenager has come forward with serious allegations about him and his former classmate Mark Judge. According to the sworn declaration from Julie Swetnick, both Kavanaugh and Judge abetted the drugging and gang-raping of girls at parties in the early 1980s. Swetnick also implies that Kavanaugh and Judge participated in the assaults themselves.

As Georgetown Prep students, both Judge and Kavanaugh were known to “‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties” with “drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No,'” Swetnick says in the declaration, which was released on Twitter this morning by lawyer and recent TV news fixture Michael Avenatti.

Swetnick says she “witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh, and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys” and that she has “a firm recollection of boys being lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.”

Around 1982, Swetnick states, she herself was a victim “of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.” (It is unclear whether she is saying that Kavanaugh or Judge personally assaulted her.) She adds that she believes she was drugged via Quaaludes dropped into her drink.

Swetnick says she told others about the incident at the time and knows of other witnesses who can confirm her statements.

“We demand an immediate FBI investigation into the allegations,” Avenatti tweeted this morning. “Under no circumstances should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed absent a full and complete investigation.”

Swetnick—a graduate of Gaithersburg High School in Maryland and a former employee of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Mint, the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. State Department—says she first met Kavanaugh and Judge in 1980 or 1981 at a house party. She describes the pair as “joined at the hip” and says she “consistently saw them together in many social settings.” She estimates that she attended “well over ten house parties” from 1981 to 1983 where both were present.

“On numerous occasions at the parties, I witnessed Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh drink excessively and engage in highly inappropriate conduct, including being overly aggressive with girls and not taking ‘no’ or an answer” as well as “fondling and grabbing girls without their consent,” Swetnick says in the declaration. She continues:

I observed Brett Kavanaugh drink excessively at many of these parties and engage in abusive and physical aggressive behavior toward girls, including pressing girls against him without their consent, “grinding” against girls, and attempting to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose private body parts. I likewise observed him be verbally abusive toward girls by making crude sexual comments to them that were designed to demean, humiliate, and embarrass them.

After calling Kavanaugh a “mean drunk,” Swetnick says that she not only witnessed this behavior herself but heard about it from other women and that his claims in a recent Fox News interview about being virginal and mostly sober during his high school years are “absolutely false and a lie.”

Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford—the first woman to accuse Kavanaugh of sexually predatory behavior in high school—are both scheduled to be questioned before members of the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow.

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Working for TSA Is Only Thing Worse Than Being Searched by TSA, Report Finds

Millions of travelers hate the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), thanks to its invasive body scans, its pat-downs that border on molestation, and its general ineffectiveness when it comes to evaluating threats.

But it’s not just fliers who are treated terribly. The TSA is also plagued by a “toxic” workplace culture where senior officials’ misconduct goes unpunished and those who threaten to speak out face retaliation, according to a report from Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The committee says its probe started in 2015, when it started receiving “credible allegations” of wrongdoing. The investigators found a host of problems, which the committee believes are directly related to low employee morale. The report, released yesterday, says:

The toxic combination of unchecked misconduct by senior officials and retaliation against rank-and-file whistleblowers undermined employee morale, reflected in the agency’s astronomical attrition rates (as high as 20 percent in some segments of the workforce during the period in question) and abysmal ranking in a government-wide job satisfaction survey (336 out of 339 agencies and components in 2017).

The first part of the committee’s report dealt with alleged misconduct from agency administrators. One official, for example, is accused of sexually harassing more than one worker. Mark Livingston, who supervised one of those employees, says he was threatened when he confronted the alleged harasser. “[H]e told me if I didn’t lie for him that I was going to be on his ‘S’ list,” Livingston told the investigators. “And then when I told him that I would not lie after he sexually harassed her, he told me that if I didn’t, him and the others couldn’t work with me.”

A source tells ABC News that the alleged harasser is Joseph Salvator, who still works at the agency as deputy director of security operations. In 2016, Salvator was accused of harassment in The Washington Post by Alyssa Bermudez, a former TSA worker.

Salvator wasn’t alone, the reports says. In 2015, for instance, a TSA official was arrested for driving while intoxicated. She blamed another TSA employee, who she claimed had driven the car before abandoning her. The official eventually confessed to the DWI, and the TSA’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended she be fired. Instead she got a two-week suspension.

In another case, the report says a senior TSA official at a midwestern airport called Muslims “stupid ragheads” and made “mooing sounds” at a pregnant worker. Despite “numerous” complaints from employees, the official “was allowed to engage in inappropriate behavior for at least seven years,” the report says.

How were TSA officials able to get away such misconduct? According to the report, whistleblowers and other “disfavored employees” were punished with “involuntary directed reassignments,” meaning they often had to move hundreds of miles away. The TSA has since changed its directed reassignment policy the committee says, but was still forced to pay out at least $1 million in settlements to affected workers.

Finally, the report says the agency “obstructed investigations into TSA misconduct and retaliation.” When the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Special Counsel investigated many of the allegations, the TSA either wouldn’t release relevant documents or “produced heavily redacted documents,” the report says.

These accusations are not terribly surprising. Whether it’s the surveillance, the stalking, or the fondling, this isn’t an agency with a great track record when it comes to treating people well. It’s not exactly a shock that it doesn’t respect its employees any more than it respects American fliers.

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Cop Kicks Teen Who Had Already Been Pepper-Sprayed

A fight broke out among a group of teens at a Washington state fair over the weekend. When some officers of the Yakima Police Department arrived, the teens quickly scattered. Those who remained in the area got pepper-sprayed by the police. While one 17-year-old boy held his eyes, presumably in response to the pepper spray, Officer Ian Cole kicked him in the back, causing him to stumble to the ground.

The end of the fight and the subsequent police response were captured on video, and the clip went viral after it was posted to Facebook. The video shows Cole kicking the teen to the ground clear as day:

On Monday, Interim Police Chief Gary Jones released a statement saying that his department had been “made aware” of the video and that an investigation would review Cole’s use of force. Cole has been placed on desk duty in the meantime.

Attorney Bill Pickett, who is representing the teen in a claim against the city, thinks an independent group should do the investigation. “What they need is a citizen review panel put together in this community and hold these people accountable when there’s misconduct instead of the police saying ‘We’ll investigate it ourselves,'” he tells the Yakima Herald.

Jones disagrees, telling the paper that “third-party oversight of every use of force investigation would be problematic.” He does, however, tout a review team “composed of components outside the department.”

On Tuesday, the department tweeted this invitation to apply to work for the department:

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