Tag: news

Detroit police officers shot 54 dogs last year, according to public records obtained by Reason. That’s a marked increase over the number reported by the department in 2016 and 2015, and more than twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people.

The rise occurred at the same time Detroit is trying to fend off lawsuits from residents who say police wantonly killed their dogs during drug raids. Such incidents, given the grim moniker “puppycide,” regularly make local and national headlines across the country, and in recent years they’ve cost cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements.

In response, several states have passed laws mandating new training, and police departments have begun teaching officers how to properly read canine behavior. Chicago police, for instance, shot 24 dogs last year, according to the Chicago Tribune. The number of dogs shot by Chicago police has been steadily falling—67 percent over the past three years, the city says—and officials attribute it to better training.

Detroit, meanwhile, went from 25 dog shootings in 2015 to more than twice that in 2017, although several reports were missing from previous records provided by the city.

There are, of course, vast differences between cash-strapped Detroit and other major U.S. cities. In 23 of those shootings, Detroit police were responding to reports of aggressive dogs running loose on the street, sometimes menacing and attacking residents. According to city data, Detroit’s 911 service received 5,999 animal complaints and vicious animal reports in 2017. In one case, a police officer saved a child who was being mauled by two pit bulls. Officers sometimes tried to lure dogs with food and treats or use a control stick, according to police reports. In others, they waited in vain for animal control before taking the situation into their own hands.

But more than one-third of those dog shootings involved a Detroit narcotics unit that has been at the center of numerous media reports and costly lawsuits.

A 2016 Reason investigation found that the Detroit Police Department’s Major Violators Unit, which conducts hundreds of drug raids a year in the city, had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake.

One officer had killed 69 dogs over the course of his career, public records showed. That officer has now shot 80 dogs, according to “destruction of animal” reports filed by Detroit police officers in 2017 and obtained by Reason.

Of the 54 dogs destroyed by the department in 2017, 19 were killed during drug raids conducted by the Major Violators Unit. That’s more animal shootings than the entire Los Angeles Police Department performed—14 total—in 2016, the latest year for which summary statistics of LAPD use-of-force incidents are available.

The Major Violators Unit was responsible for an April 26, 2017, narcotics raid on Detroit resident Renee Attles’ house that ended with her pit bull being shot dead. Speaking to a local television news channel, Attles said the police stormed into her home and killed her dog during a wrong-house drug raid:

“I am so hurt,” said Renee Attles. “You all you don’t understand, I am so freaking hurt. That was my dog.”

Renee Attles says she ran out to her sister’s car to decide where they were going to celebrate their deceased mother’s birthday. All of a sudden Detroit police stormed her Ryan Street home.

“I said what do you want,” she said. “They handcuffed me and her sister at her car before we even got right there. All I heard was pop, pop, pow. Just like that. I told them let me get my dog.”

The only drug confiscated from the scene was a small bottle of Attles’ medical marijuana.

Another destruction of animal report shows that several hours earlier that same day, the same Major Violators Unit crew executed another narcotics search warrant on a house a mile and a half away and shot another pitbull. Again, the only drug recovered was marijuana.

This February, the Detroit City Council approved a $225,000 settlement to Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin. The couple filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last July against the city and several Detroit police officers, alleging the officers shot Savage and Franklin’s 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 of Detroit approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.

Two other federal civil rights lawsuits stemming from Detroit drug raids are currently being considered by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In one, Detroit resident Nikita Smith alleges that narcotics officers shot her three pitbulls, including one that was secured behind a bathroom door. Smith was initially charged with a marijuana offense, but the charges were dismissed when police failed to appear at her court hearing.

In the second lawsuit, Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro 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.

“I don’t want anything to do with the Detroit police anymore,” Motyka told Reason in an interview. “You grow up being taught these are the people you’re supposed to trust, and then they come in and kill your family. I have no love for them. None. They probably sleep well at night. We don’t.”

To try and combat these lawsuits, the city of Detroit has adopted the novel legal argument that, if a dog is unlicensed, as in Smith’s case, it is considered “contraband” and not protected from unreasonable police seizure—read: killing—under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

Two lower federal judges have come to opposite conclusions on the issue. One dismissed Smith’s case, ruling that her unlicensed dogs amounted to contraband. The other federal judge rejected Detroit’s argument in Motyka’s lawsuit and ruled that the couple’s unlicensed dog was still legitimate property.

The Sixth Circuit Court now has the unenviable task of determining whether a pet’s property status lies in its owner’s compliance with city regulations, and if that means a police officer can shoot it with impunity.

The Detroit Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in an interview last March with a local news channel, Detroit Police Assistant Chief James White defended the department from charges that it is needlessly shooting dogs.

“This isn’t Fluffy the family pet in many instances,” White told the news station. “Door comes off the hinges. There’s pandemonium. People are running. Perpetrator, in many instances, has a weapon himself, can start shooting. Sometimes the dog is used as a tactic to get the advantage over the officers, and I just don’t think it would be acceptable to an officer to put their life at risk to try to stop a dog from attacking them during a drug raid.”

Officers were found in compliance with department regulations in every single destruction of animal report reviewed by Reason.

As I’ve written several times, better police training on how to read dogs’ body language would help in some cases, but these stories will inevitably continue as long as the Detroit police continue to perform aggressive drug raids on a daily basis.

The lawsuits will inevitably continue, too.

Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, and lumber are hiking home construction costs by as much as 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the White House’s next move on trade might only make things worse.

In Utah, home construction costs have jumped 60 percent since the end of last year, Michael Parker tells The Salt Lake Tribune. Parker is a vice president and senior economist for Ivory Homes, the largest homebuilder in Utah; he says average home prices have gone up by as much as $9,000 to compensate for the higher construction costs. On a percentage basis, no state has grown faster than Utah during the past decade, but trade barriers now threaten to combine with surging demand to drive home prices in Utah higher.

Other fast-growing parts of the country are feeling the same squeeze. In the Dallas suburbs, homebuilders are also reporting 60 percent increases in construction costs due to higher tariffs.

“Even if you are walking into a hardware store looking for a 2×4 for a weekend remodeling project, you’re paying a lot more, and it’s all a result of these tariffs,” Phil Crone, executive officer of the Dallas Builders Association, tells a Dallas–Fort Worth NBC affiliate. Average home prices are up nearly $10,000 since last year in the North Texas market.

By the end of the week, the White House may announce another round of tariffs aimed at Chinese-made goods including home furnishings and appliances. While those tariffs won’t directly effect the cost of building new homes, they will likely increase prices for would-be homeowners and those looking to upgrade existing homes.

It’s hard to find the potential upside to the White House’s tariff policy. Homebuyers stuck paying higher prices are not helping boost domestic industries that Trump is supposedly trying to protect. If prices rise enough to slow demand for new homes, some potential buyers will be shut-out of the market, and construction jobs—always among the first to be affected by a shifting economy, both for good and ill—will likely be lost. A slowdown in the housing market can easily have spillover effects into other parts of the economy too.

Homebuilders remain generally optimistic about their industry, but doubts are creeping in. A monthly index of industry confidence, published by the National Association of Homebuilders, fell to its lowest point all year in August—seven points down from a recent high in December 2017. The sharpest drop, and lowest score, amoung several metrics included in the index was for “buyer traffic,” a measurement of consumer interest in new homes. That metric slipped into negative territory in the August survey. Sales of newly built homes have fallen 5 percent in recent months, the trade association reported.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that he will not be running for a third term next year—a surprising statement, given that he had already raised millions for another run.

In a news conference, he declared: “This has been a job of a lifetime, but it is not a job for a lifetime.”

Certainly not for Emanuel. Over the past few years Chicago has seen a significant jump in violent crime, though that has finally begun to decline. Meanwhile, Chicago’s reputation for police misconduct has continued under his administration.

Many Chicagoans will remember Emanuel for City Hall’s attempt to block the release of dashcam footage showing police officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting teenaged Laquan McDonald seconds after arriving at a call. Officers on the scene insisted that McDonald had lunged at them with a knife, but the video footage showed that nothing of the sort had happened. A judge had to order the city to release the footage, and Van Dyke was subsequently charged with murder. Probably by sheer coincidence, jury selection for Van Dyke’s trial is scheduled to start this week.

Chicago has tried to improve the relationship between officers and the public, implementing body cameras and giving more officers Tasers (though those themselves are a tool that can lead to death and are frequently misused to force compliance).

But mostly it seemed that under Emanuel, Chicago was focused on trying to rake in more money to deal with the growing debt caused by expensive bureaucracies and underfunded pensions. As Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella reported earlier this year, Chicago is impounding motorists’ cars and collectively fining the owners millions, often for petty crimes—burying them in debt in the hopes of digging the city out of its own debts. Emanuel has also jacked up property taxes even further. Small wonder that the greater Chicago area has been losing citizens for the past two years, including its millionaires.

And yet, through all of this, Emanuel seemed to think that the problem was not enough government meddling in its citizens’ lives. Under the mayor’s urging, Chicago Public Schools implemented a program requiring high school seniors to submit to a selection of approved post-graduation options in order to actually receive their diploma. “Move as far away from Chicago as I possibly can” was not one of the approved choices.

Emanuel’s legacy is to affirm everyone’s worst perceptions of Chicago’s governance: that it’s utterly corrupt and cares more about keeping the revenue streams that line officials’ pockets and budgets than about holding itself accountable for serving its citizenry.

To read Emanuel’s speech, go here.

Jon Kyl has been tapped to temporarily fill the late John McCain‘s Senate seat.

Kyl previously served in the Senate from 1995 until 2013. At the time of his resignation, he was minority whip, the second-highest ranking Republican in the upper chamber.

In the years since, he has worked as a Washington-based lobbyist. He also acted as the “sherpa” for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, meaning he escorted the judge around Capitol Hill to his meetings with senators. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings began today.

Kyl has agreed to remain in the Senate through the end of year, a representative for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tells the Arizona Republic. But with the special election to fill McCain’s seat more than two years away, Ducey might have to appoint someone else if Kyl steps down early.

In 2007, the National Journal ranked Kyl the fourth most conservative senator in the upper chamber. He has spoken out against abortion and Planned Parenthood, and in 2010 he came out against a state ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana. But he might not share the GOP’s obsession with stopping illegal immigration. In 2007, after McCain started negotiating a bipartisan immigration reform bill, he handed the task over to Kyl so he could focus on appealing to conservatives during his presidential run. (The legislation ended up dying in the Senate.)

Kyl has also shown he’s not afraid to criticize President Donald Trump, saying earlier this year that Trump’s “style…is boorish.” It’s conceivable that he could become a rare anti-Trump Republican voice in the Senate. Since he holds mostly conservative views, it will be hard for Trump to criticize him on policy. And he probably has no intention of seeking reelection, so the president would have less power over him anyway. It’s the lame ducks who tend to quack.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has yet to be asked a single question by the Senate Judiciary Committee and already his confirmation hearings have taken on the characteristics of a brawl.

The opening gavel had barely struck this morning before Judiciary Committee Democrats launched an apparently coordinated effort to derail the proceedings, repeatedly interrupting the opening remarks of Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) with motions to adjourn until tens of thousands of documents from Kavanaugh’s years working in the George W. Bush administration are released. One after another, the Democrats asked the same question to both Grassley and the nominee: “What are you trying to hide?” A visibly irritated Grassley made it clear that he was going to proceed whether they liked it nor not.

At the same time, Capitol police were busily ejecting a series of screaming protesters, roughly two dozen in total. The screamers were somewhat less coordinated in their efforts, as they kept interrupting the Democrats and thereby succeeded in drowning out parts of the anti-Kavanaugh message.

Today’s portion of the confirmation hearings is largely devoted to opening statements, meaning that the senators take turns prattling on and on for the cameras. Perhaps the only real value in these tedious and grandstanding displays is that they reveal the basic partisan battle lines for the coming days.

For the Democrats, the overall approach appears to be combining procedural objections to the hearing itself with strong denunciations of Kavanaugh as a right-wing judicial extremist. Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered a taste of this in her opening statement, which described Kavanaugh’s “pro-gun” stance as “far outside the mainstream of legal thought.” She also questioned whether he would be a threat to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that recognized the constitutionality of abortion rights. Expect to hear lots more about guns and abortion as the hearings get going.

For their part, the Republicans will apparently counter the procedural objections with references to past Democratic “borkings” of various GOP judicial nominees. In other words: It’s payback time. As for Kavanaugh, the Republicans will stress his qualifications, his professed constitutionalism, and the wide respect he enjoys in the broader legal community. “If we could just get politics out of this,” said Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah).

Of course, getting politics out of a modern SCOTUS confirmation fight is a harder ask than Hatch might care to admit. As both sides of the aisle clearly recognize, Kavanaugh, if confirmed, has the potential to cast deciding votes on a number of crucial legal issues that are likely to come before the Supreme Court. The screaming is far from over.

Related: 5 Questions for SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh