5/05/2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2015

Police Mass Murder Fact
As of today, May 1, 2015, 387 people have been killed by police since January 1, 2015 (that's a total of 120 days.) That's 3.225 people per day, on average.

http://killedbypolice.net/

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition
 
Amn3.pngMayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families


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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015


UNAC is the major national antiwar coalition in the U.S. today.  The existence of a United National Antiwar Coalition is vital and we need your financial support to continue our work and to expand.

With U.S. wars today accelerating and expanding globally in various forms – from drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support to neo-fascists in Ukraine, and proliferating Africom forces to threats of war for regime change in Syria – we have an obligation to do whatever is possible to educate the public and to take action to stop the carnage.

The wars abroad are connected to global warming with most wars fought over energy resources with the U.S. war machine as the largest polluter.

At home, we see hugely growing income inequality, a militarized and racist police force, mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, and a massive police state apparatus that includes global surveillance and laws to quell dissent.

In spite of the trillions spent by the U.S. corporate war government and its controlled media propaganda machine to keep us in check, the people are fighting back.  We’ve been inspired and strengthened by the hundreds of thousands of new activists taking to the streets of this country to stop police brutality, to build Occupy encampments, to fight for decent wages, to demand full rights for immigrants, to win marriage equality, to end global warming, to demonstrate solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, and to protest unending U.S. wars.

UNAC has played an active, often leadership role, in all of the antiwar and social justice movements of our time.  While most activists are focused on their particular issues, the most vital role we can play is to connect the issues to their source.  All of the injustices and crimes we protest, stem from the imperialist insatiable drive for expanding profit and control – and the U.S. is the largest imperialist power militarily and economically.  When there should be plenty for all, only the obscenely wealthy benefit while the rest of the 99% struggle just to survive.

Some of our recent major accomplishments:

·       Initiated protest against NATO and 15,000 marched in Chicago in 2012.

·        Called for immediate actions against threats of war and coups directed at Libya, Iran, No. Korea, Africa, Latin America,    Ukraine, and maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

·        Organized a national tour for Afghan leader Malalai Joya.

·        Sent representatives to international NATO protests and conferences.

·        Serve on the Board of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms to act against Islamophobia , racist attacks on Muslims, and attacks on our civil liberties.

·        Participated in national efforts to organize anti-drone actions.

·        Campaigned to defend victims of government repression who speak out and expose Washington’s crimes, including Rasmea Odeh, Mumia abu Jamal, Lynne Stewart, Chelsea Manning, and the Midwest activists targeted by the FBI.

·        Produced national educational conference calls featuring experts on topics such as U.S. intervention in Africa, the destruction of Libya, the developing wars in Syria, and others.

·        Built an antiwar contingent in the massive New York City Climate Change march and built Climate Change action in other cities around the country.

·        Helped organize protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza

·        Helped organize protests against the murder of Blacks by white police and the militarization of the police forces in the U.S.


UNAC has a history of bringing hundreds of activists together at large national conferences to learn about the issues of the day, to discuss the way forward and to vote on an Action Program for the coming period.

The UNAC conference next May will bring activists from all the movements in motion to cross-fertilize these struggles.  We are particularly dedicated to bringing young activists together to support and learn from each other.  For this, we need your help to offer subsidies to leaders from Ferguson, from the border wars in the southwest, from the Native Americans who are fighting against the pipelines ruining their lands, from the Students for Justice in Palestine, and many others.

Please give generously so that we can continue our work to bring harmony and justice to the peoples of this earth.

You can send a check to UNAC at PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the button below to contribute on-line with your credit or debit card.

 https://www.unacpeace.org/

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Prison refuses Mumia Medical Care

Dear friend,

Mumia is still in medical danger. He is weak, in the infirmary, and still needs a wheelchair to come out to visits. In a phone call on Monday his voice was hesitant and lacked its usual vibrancy.  
 
Yesterday, the PA Department of Corrections notified Mumia’s Attorney Bret Grote (of the Abolitionist Law Center) that it would:
Not allow Mumia to be examined by his own doctor;
Not allow Mumia to be examined by a endocrinologist (diabetes specialist); And they denied access for the doctor to communicate with prison medical staff to assist or direct Mumia’s care; and the Prison has refused to provide for regular phone calls between Mumia and his doctor. Currently, Mumia can only use the phone every other day for only 15 minutes, as the infirmary does not have phone access.

Mumia is being held in the very infirmary that caused his chronic conditions of eczema and late-onset diabetes to become life-threatening. The medical personnel on site were prevented from ordering tests when he was ill in mid-March, and are under the same prison/corporate restrictions today. One postive note, at this time Mumia is being allowed to monitor his own blood sugar multiple times a day, and he is receiving insulin. Since Mumia was hospitalized in ICU on March 30th with life threatening complications from chronic conditions we have been advocating for his treatment. We have to step up our efforts.

Take Action Now!
Demand that the Department of Corrections permit Mumia to have an examination by his doctor! Click here to call and fax the Prison and State officials and state our demands.

http://www.prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/letters/pdf/Eyes%20on%20Mumia_1.pdf

Mumia needs his own physician specialists!  Please donate now to help make this possible.  Please got to the web site below and give as generously as you can.

Donate at:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mumia-abu-jamal-needs-medical-care-now

and…
Sign the petition
to help save—and free—Mumia.
Go to:

https://www.change.org/p/john-e-wetzel-pa-secretary-of-corrections-tom-wolf-pa-governor-stop-the-medical-execution-of-mumia-abu-jamal-by-neglect-and-malpractice-3

Also,
We need to keep up the pressure
with phone calls:

Let SCI Mahanoy Superintendent John Kerestes and Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel know we insist that Mumia have medical specialists of his own choosing, and that they have daily access rights to examine and treat him. Also let them know that Mumia’s family needs regular and frequent visitation rights.

SCI Mahanoy
Superintendent John Kerestes
(570) 773-2158

SCI Mahanoy
Chief Health Care Administrator Steinhardt
(570) 773-2158

Christopher Oppman
Director, PA Department of Corrections Health Care Services
(717) 728-5309

John Wetzel
Secretary, PA Department of Corrections
(717) 728-4109

NO EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
SAVE MUMIA'S LIFE!

Mumia is Innocent! Free Mumia Now!

This message by:
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
20 April 2015

Call now to demand freedom and medical care for Mumia:

Often when we call in, prison and state officials have taken their lines off the hook. Know that every action matters, even when they don't pick up. If they don't answer, please leave a voicemail:

John Wetzel, PA Secretary of Corrections: 717-728-4109

Governor Tom Wolf: 717-787-2500

SCI Mahanoy: 570-787-2500

For a full list of addresses and faxes, visit prisonradio.org
Support Prison Radio

$35 to become a member.

$50 to become a member and receive a beautiful tote bag. Or call us to special order a yoga mat bag.

$100 to become a member and receive the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary."

$300 to become a member and bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1,000 (or $88 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Thank you!


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Prison Radio has recorded Mumia and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out all the stops to keep these voices on the air. 

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:

     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech


Copyright © Prison Radio

www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Our mailing address is:

Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=247585f092e945ff55b9a1bb2&id=e113d0b6d0&e=0107d76ccd

Donate Now

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222


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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:

JANUARY 1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were “defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers, people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But, guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay, he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office. If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged! How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.

Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious

and social organizations.

SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the-petition.html

CONTRIBUTE TO LORENZO'S CAMPAIGN FOR FREEDOM!

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/how-can-i-help.html

Write: Lorenzo Johnson, DF 1036

            SCI Mahanoy

            301 Morea Rd.

            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:

              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC


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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
   

On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge’s approval, repeatedly told the jury “you don’t need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney.” And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE ‘ALTERED’ PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney’s appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search “Pinkney”).

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist." 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an “Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers’ Association of America]” demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney’s defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.



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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action- write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

 November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) Mayor de Blasio Defends Police Response to Freddie Gray Protests in New York
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and AL BAKER 
APRIL 30, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/nyregion/new-york-officials-defend-aggressive-response-to-freddie-gray-protests.html?ref=nyregion





2) Baltimore Prosecutor Faces National History of Police Acquittals
By MICHAEL WINES 
MAY 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/baltimore-prosecutor-faces-national-history-of-police-acquittals.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0





3) Baltimore Braces for More Protests Over Freddie Gray Death
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG 
MAY 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/baltimore-braces-for-more-protests.html?ref=us





4) Hundreds Protest in Manhattan Against Police Brutality and Income Inequality
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS 
MAY 1, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/nyregion/hundreds-protest-in-manhattan-against-police-brutality-and-income-inequality.html?ref=nyregion





5)  Thug’s the New ‘N’-Word
By Michal Ortner
Your Black World
May 3, 2015
http://yourblackworld.net/2015/05/03/where-did-the-word-thug-come-from-and-why-do-politicians-use-it-toward-black-people/




6) Restoring Faith in Justice
By Charles M. Blow




7) Stand Your Ground Makes No Sense
By ROBERT J. SPITZER





8) An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty
By




9) The Uphill Battle to Better Regulate Formaldehyde
By and





10) Runaway Drug Prices
By




11) Lawsuit Leads to New Limits on Solitary Confinement at Juvenile Prisons in Illinois
By




12) Tamir Rice’s Mother Asks Ohio Authorities to Finish Inquiry
By RICHARD FAUSSET




13) Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds
By




14) For Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers, a Difficult 2014 Still Paid Well
By









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1) Mayor de Blasio Defends Police Response to Freddie Gray Protests in New York
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and AL BAKER 
APRIL 30, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/nyregion/new-york-officials-defend-aggressive-response-to-freddie-gray-protests.html?ref=nyregion


Mayor Bill de Blasio, facing an uproar over arrests at a Manhattan rally to protest strong-armed policing, offered a spirited defense of law enforcement on Thursday, brushing off concerns that demonstrators had been mistreated even as he insisted on his own commitment to reform.

Invoking his own past as a liberal organizer, Mr. de Blasio urged reporters “not to exaggerate what happened” at the Union Square rally on Wednesday night, saying the Police Department had acted appropriately in arresting 143 people marching to protest the death of a Baltimore black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody.

Two of those protesters were arrested after assaulting officers, one of whom was struck on the chin with a stick and injured, police officials said.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton acknowledged that his department had staged an “assertive” response to keep demonstrators from blocking traffic in busy parts of Manhattan.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, convened a news conference after hearing complaints about the police response from allies like the Rev. Al Sharpton. “I’ve participated in plenty of protests, on plenty of issues,” the mayor said. “I believe deeply in how nonviolent protest has achieved social change.”

But, he added: “When the police give you instruction, you follow the instruction. It’s not debatable.”

The arrests on Wednesday, which prompted a protest from liberal groups outside Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan, came amid a renewed debate in New York over aggressive police tactics, including an effort by the City Council to decriminalize low-level offenses, like public urination.

But Mr. de Blasio’s attitude was a far cry from late last year, when he allowed similar demonstrations to spill into the city’s highways and avenues. That episode, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer in the death of a Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, contributed to an open law enforcement rebellion against the mayor.

On Thursday, as in the past on police issues, Mr. de Blasio seemed to struggle to walk a tightrope. Even as Mr. Bratton, in a separate news conference, acknowledged a “much more assertive” approach to handling street protests, the mayor insisted that “the strategic approach is exactly the same.”

But the mayor eventually allowed that some “tactical adjustments” had been made in response to past cases in which officers had been injured, including a march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The result was a strained, and at times testy display by a mayor trying to balance liberal sympathies with the burdens of overseeing a police force whose tactics he once criticized.

Mr. de Blasio grew visibly frustrated at the notion that the police in Union Square had been too aggressive with protesters, telling reporters, “If you guys want to sensationalize, if you think that’s your contribution to society, feel free.”

He lamented that the news media did not focus on what he cited as his accomplishments in police reform, like a drop in civilian complaints against the Police Department.

In a telling shift, Mr. de Blasio rebuked his interlocutors for suggesting that some of the protesters arrested on Wednesday had done little to provoke a tough police response. In December, after the Garner protests, he lashed out at a journalist who suggested that some protesters had acted violently.

To the city’s liberal advocates — some of whom had marched alongside Mr. de Blasio during his candidate days — the mayor’s response was disappointing.

“All I heard was, ‘Listen to the police, do what the police say,’ ” said Gideon Oliver, a civil rights lawyer who represents a group that organized the rally. “If the mayor’s answer to problems of abuse of police discretion is ‘just listen to what police say,’ that’s obviously a very big problem.”

Still, Mr. Bratton and police officials were adamant that they had acted appropriately to rein in a demonstration that was threatening to become unruly and disrupt the city’s evening rush.

“Throughout the night we were extremely flexible,” Chief James P. O’Neill said at the Police Academy in Queens. “If the protests continue, we will continue to be flexible. It’s not just one strategy.”

Chief O’Neill added that one precinct captain, the commander of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan, had been struck in the head with a stick. “He’s got a nice cut on his jaw,” he said.

One veteran city supervisor, who was at Union Square on Wednesday, said he had been told at the onset that the police might take a more assertive approach than in past protests.

“They were free to protest on the sidewalk, and follow the law, and we would certainly let them express their rights,” said the supervisor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to detail department policies. “But if they broke the law, went into the street and stuff like that, we weren’t going to give them much and were going to start locking people up.”

Aside from the arrests, the supervisor said, the night went smoothly. “No major fights,” he said. “No major assaults on cops, or cops doing anything crazy to anyone else.”

Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday that the city would not take an “ironclad” approach to future protests, and would consider each demonstration case by case.

“It’s a big, complicated city,” the mayor said. “I have confidence, having been a public servant, having been a protester, that the N.Y.P.D. knows how to work out every situation.”

A reporter pointed out that Mr. de Blasio himself had been arrested during his run for mayor, as a show of civil disobedience to protest the closing of a public hospital in Brooklyn.

The mayor scoffed and said there was no comparison to what transpired on Wednesday night.

His own arrest, Mr. de Blasio said, “was the most choreographed thing on earth.”



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2) Baltimore Prosecutor Faces National History of Police Acquittals
By MICHAEL WINES 
MAY 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/baltimore-prosecutor-faces-national-history-of-police-acquittals.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

With an unexpectedly speedy and sweeping announcement on Friday of homicide and abuse-of-power charges against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore’s chief prosecutor sent an unmistakable signal that the days when police misconduct drew a wrist slap are over.

It was a bold gesture, experts say — and a risky one. For the pledge may be an empty gesture unless prosecutors secure convictions in Mr. Gray’s death.

Both history and the circumstances of the case unveiled on Friday hint that it will be anything but easy. Brutality cases against police officers are notoriously difficult to win, and much about the case, including the evidence against the officers and their defense, remains unknown.

The state’s attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn J. Mosby, is expected to seek an indictment, the next step toward a trial. Her chronology of Mr. Gray’s arrest on April 12 argued that he had been wrongly arrested, was placed inside a police van without being properly restrained by a seatbelt and, after suffering a severe spinal injury during transport, was repeatedly ignored despite pleading for medical help.

The six Baltimore Police Department officers face charges ranging from second-degree murder to manslaughter, assault, false imprisonment and misconduct in office. Ms. Mosby’s inquiry — “comprehensive, thorough and independent,” she said Friday — was completed in 18 days, less than a fourth of the time that Missouri prosecutors spent investigating the death of Michael Brown, which triggered riots and protests in Ferguson, Mo., last year.

That speed and confidence belie the difficulty that prosecutors may encounter in convincing a jury or juries that the six officers broke the law.

The bar for a manslaughter conviction is comparatively low; a jury must find that a defendant knew his or her actions could lead to a death, but recklessly disregarded that risk.

“The prosecution would simply have to demonstrate that the police were aware that someone might die because they didn’t properly transport him,” said Jens D. Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School. “They don’t have to show that they wanted him to die.”

Second-degree murder is more serious, implying that a defendant either wanted to cause a death or intentionally caused an injury that he or she knew could lead to death. Only one officer — the driver of the van, Officer Caesar Goodson — was accused of murder. While Ms. Mosby has not explained the charge, some have speculated that prosecutors will say Mr. Gray was deliberately given a so-called rough ride that slammed him against the van’s metal walls.

In Mr. Gray’s case, a Police Department general order required officers to restrain prisoners with seatbelts during transport to prevent injuries. But that order, in effect at least since 1997 and updated nine days before Mr. Gray’s death, appears to have been loosely followed by Baltimore officers.

While Ms. Mosby offered a detailed timeline of the events surrounding Mr. Gray’s death, she did not reveal any of the evidence supporting it. Nor did she say any of the officers personally caused the spinal injury that killed him.

But whatever case prosecutors make will have to overcome the inherent deference to police officers that most jurors take with them to the courtroom, experts said.

“It’s always difficult to get a guilty verdict against a police officer except in the worst and strongest cases,” said David A. Harris, a University of Pittsburgh professor who is a leading expert on racial profiling in law enforcement. “A police officer comes into a courtroom not just presumed to be innocent, but presumed to be the good guy.”

Behavior that might land some defendants in jail, such as beating or even shooting another person, are not just permitted for police officers but are assumed to be part of their work. Jurors are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Harris and others said, particularly if officers can show that they were merely doing their jobs as they always had.

The prosecutors face other hurdles. The witnesses and cellphone videos that have clarified a number of recent police-brutality incidents are absent in Mr. Gray’s case. Much of what happened to Mr. Gray occurred either in the presence of the officers who have been charged, or while he was alone in the back of the police wagon.

The prosecutors’ case would be strengthened should one or more of the six defendants decide to cooperate, or should they try to shift blame for the death. In practice, that happens only infrequently. Mr. Harris said it was even less likely with the police because of the loyalty among fellow police officers.

And even prosecutors with seemingly strong cases frequently lose. In 2010, jurors acquitted a Baltimore officer who had stopped a man he thought looked suspicious, searched him, then shot him twice in the back after he broke way and fled. The officer’s lawyer argued, and jurors agreed, that he had feared for his life because he thought the man was reaching for a gun as he ran away.

A year later a Baltimore judge acquitted three officers charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment after they picked up two teenagers, drove them miles from their homes and abandoned them, leaving one in another county after taking his shoes and socks. The judge, who convicted two officers on lesser misconduct charges, said that even legal police work involves detaining and threatening suspects.

Both the swiftness and the scope of the charges brought on Friday carry weight in a city where, critics say, poor, mostly black neighborhoods have boiled for years with resentment over police officers’ tactics.

“The larger message, if there is one, is that ‘we’re moving on these things,’ ” Mr. Harris said. “ ‘We’re taking them seriously, and there’s no longer going to be any kind of slowing down and taking it to the point where people wonder, whatever happened to that?’ ”



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3) Baltimore Braces for More Protests Over Freddie Gray Death
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG 
MAY 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/baltimore-braces-for-more-protests.html?ref=us

BALTIMORE — The city is bracing for more protests this weekend, following a tumultuous week that included looting and arson, the arrival of National Guard troops and the filing of criminal charges against six police officers in the case of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose death in police custody set off the unrest.

Thousands of people are expected here Saturday for a march organized by Malik Shabazz, president of the Washington-based Black Lawyers for Justice and a former chairman of the New Black Panther Party. For nearly two weeks, ever since Mr. Gray died, city leaders have been warning against “outside agitators,” an oblique reference to Mr. Shabazz, who is clearly making them nervous.

“They should be nervous,” Mr. Shabazz said in an interview Friday night. “The youth went off and had a rebellion because the established leadership has not represented them well.”

Protesters are expected to gather late Saturday morning in two spots: at the Gilmor Homes in northwest Baltimore where Mr. Gray was arrested, and also at City Hall, where Mr. Shabazz said he would give a “keynote address” at 3 p.m., as part of a mass rally that will begin at 2 p.m. and is scheduled to end at 6 p.m.

Mr. Shabazz, 46, who has led similar protests in cities like Ferguson, Mo., and Charleston, S.C., has been labeled “an extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which calls him a “racist black nationalist” with a “well-documented history of violently anti-Semitic remarks and accusations about the inherent evil of white people” who is “particularly skilled at orchestrating provocative protests.”

A march he led here last Saturday turned briefly violent after he urged protesters at a City Hall rally to “shut it down!” Mr. Shabazz said afterward that he was calling only for civil disobedience, not violence, but added that he was not surprised by the riots that tore through Baltimore earlier this week.

“The rebellion was brewing before I got here, and the rebellion was going to happen whether I got here or not,” he said.

Community activists and black religious leaders, including the Rev. Jamal Bryant, pastor of the Empowerment Temple, have said they will stay away from Saturday’s march; Mr. Bryant is planning his own rally at City Hall on Sunday. Melech Thomas, a divinity student and youth pastor, also said he would not attend.

Mr. Thomas said he had no objection to Mr. Shabazz, though he added, “It would be nice to actually see him at some of the community meetings we’ve had this week, and I can’t say that I have.”

With the National Guard still patrolling the streets, and a 10 p.m. citywide curfew in place, officials expect that this Saturday will be more peaceful than last. And the city’s mood shifted dramatically on Friday after Marilyn J. Mosby, the prosecutor for the city of Baltimore, announced that six police officers would face charges, including murder and manslaughter.

Ms. Mosby’s announcement set off a wave of jubilation in some black neighborhoods, prompting some to predict that Saturday’s events would be more celebration than protest. “She probably saved the city from a lot of stress that it didn’t need to go through,” said A. Dwight Pettit, a lawyer, who represents people accusing the police of misconduct.




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4) Hundreds Protest in Manhattan Against Police Brutality and Income Inequality
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS 
MAY 1, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/nyregion/hundreds-protest-in-manhattan-against-police-brutality-and-income-inequality.html?ref=nyregion

Protesters marched in the streets of New York City on Friday night to bring attention to police brutality and income inequality, two days after dozens of demonstrators were arrested.

Hundreds of protesters assembled in Union Square in Manhattan, planning to march east and then south to Foley Square; another group marched along the southern edge of Central Park. The protests came the same day that prosecutors in Baltimore charged six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died after being injured while in police custody.

On Wednesday night, the police arrested 143 people in Manhattan during protests over Mr. Gray’s death. Some criticized the aggressive police response, but Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton defended the arrests.Mr. Bratton said on Friday that the police would work with demonstrators at the two permitted marches in the city and give them space to rally. But he cautioned that protesters had to follow the rules.

“It’s when they seek to create their own rules,” he said. “Then I’m sorry, they’re breaking the law. And we will deal with that appropriately and authoritatively.”

The protests were organized as part of May Day, an international workers’ holiday. One rally by union groups against income inequality began outside the home of Alice Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, near 60th Street and Park Avenue. Another group planned to march from Union Square to Foley Square, near City Hall.

Earlier in the day, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan closed for the day after protesters dropped thousands of leaflets from the museum’s spiral rotunda.

Edna Ishayik and Al Baker contributed reporting.


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5)  Thug’s the New ‘N’-Word
By Michal Ortner
Your Black World
May 3, 2015
http://yourblackworld.net/2015/05/03/where-did-the-word-thug-come-from-and-why-do-politicians-use-it-toward-black-people/

Following the protests and riots in Baltimore, the use of the word “thug” seemed to find its way into the mouths of leadership across the country. This has left many African-Americans angry and offended, believing that the employment of the word was degrading and racist.

The death of Freddie Gray that involved Baltimore policemen led hundreds into the streets for peaceful protesting. But along with these came rioters who began to loot and vandalize the city.

On April 25, in a press conference, Mayor Stefanie Rawlings-Blake labeled the rioters “thugs, who only want to incite violence and destroy our city.” She also Tweeted, “Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down.”

After the outcry over her use of the word “thug,” the mayor recanted in another Tweet, “I want to clarify my comment on ‘thugs.’ When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a way that you don’t mean.”

Larry Hogan, governor of Maryland, also incited the word, calling those involved “a lawless gangs of thugs roaming the streets, causing damage to property and injuring innocent people.”

The following day, during President Barack Obama’s address concerning the riots, he called the rioters “a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place.”

On April 28, The Roots bandmate Questlove tweeted, “Thugs= N*ggers #KnowTheCode.”

Historically, the earliest record of the word “thug” was when it was a 19th century Hindi word used to describe a cheater or a swindler. Some documented “thugs,” or those who practiced “thuggee,” as being murderous bandits who would steal from travelers.

An 1852 article written in The New York Times called the thugs of India “a terrible sect of religionists, whose worship is the most hideous in the whole record of false ideologies.”

According to Kim Wagner, a lecturer at Queen Mary University, the British use of the word “thug” in the 19th century “allowed them to criminalize any kind of indigenous activity as being something that was inherently irrational and politically illegitimate, not different from the way it’s used today. You’re effectively describing them as having no legitimate grievances and just being hoodlums.”

Michael Jeffries, author of Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop, refers to the popularization of the word after it was used in lyrics by rapper Tupac.

“The label was attached to Black and Brown people, impoverished people, living in urban communities, regardless of their behavior,” Jeffries said. “They adopted the word for subversive and oppositional reasons, and it found its way into the music.”

“It’s not a coincidence that the rise of this word in the public sphere coincided with the uptick in the punishment and hyper-incarceration of Black and Brown people living in late 20th century urban America,” Jeffries added.




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6) Restoring Faith in Justice
By Charles M. Blow

Last week, Baltimore’s chief prosecutor, Marilyn J. Mosby, charged six officers in the death of Freddie Gray. The charges included second-degree murder, manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.

(These were only charges. There will be a defense and a trial. The officers remain innocent until and unless proven guilty.)

Mosby said at a news conference on Friday as she laid out the case and announced the charges: “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace.’ ” She continued: “Last but certainly not least, to the youth of the city. I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause and as young people, our time is now.”

Mosby seemed to recognize in that moment that this case and others like it are now about more than individual deaths and individual incidents, but about restoration — or a formation — of faith for all of America’s citizens in the American justice system itself.

Faith in the system is the bedrock of the system. Without it, the system is drained of its inviolable authority. This is the danger America now faces.

After George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin through the chest and walked free. After there was no indictment of the officer who choked the life out of Eric Garner on video. After an officer shot and killed John Crawford in an Ohio Walmart as he walked around the store with an air rifle he’d picked up off the store’s own shelves, and another officer grilled his girlfriend until she cried, “accusing her of lying, threatening her with jail time and suggesting she could be on drugs,” according to CNN.

After the city of Cleveland claimed — then apologized for claiming — that Tamir Rice was responsible for his own death when officers shot him in the stomach — an injury he would later die from — in a park as he played with a toy gun.

According to The Washington Post:

“In the court filing, which was a formal response from the city to a federal lawsuit by the Rice family, city attorneys declare that Tamir and his family ‘were directly and proximately caused by their own acts...’ and added that Tamir caused his own death ‘by the failure... to exercise due care to avoid injury.’”

And after Anthony Ray Hinton sat on Alabama’s death row for 30 years — “one of the longest serving death row prisoners in Alabama history,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative, which won his release last month — for murders he didn’t commit. He was arrested and charged based on the assertion that a revolver taken from his mother’s home was used in two capital murders and a third uncharged crime. Even after experts found in 2002 that the gun didn’t match the crime evidence, prosecutors refused to revisit the case.It took more than a decade of addition litigation before a judge threw out the case. Prosecutors finally conceded that the crime bullets couldn’t be matched to the Hinton weapon. “For all of us that say that we believe in justice, this is the case to start showing, because I shouldn’t have (sat) on death row for 30 years, Hinton told the press. “All they had to do was test the gun.”

Last year Glenn Ford, Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner, was also set free after nearly 30 years facing execution for a murder that he also did not commit. According to The New York Daily News: “A judge freed Ford from the Louisiana State Penitentiary a year ago when evidence, believed to have been suppressed during the trial, surfaced exonerating him from the all-white jury’s decision in the murder of a nearly blind Shreveport watchmaker, Isadore Rozeman.”

The lead prosecutor in the Ford case, A.M. Stroud III, apologized in a column published by The Shreveport Times, saying: “In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. To borrow a phrase from Al Pacino in the movie ‘And Justice for All,’ ‘Winning became everything.’ ” He concluded: “How totally wrong was I.”

After last month N.P.R. reported that Mayor Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago was supporting a $5.5 million reparations package for victims of a former police commander and his officers in that city. As MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee put it, they “for decades ran a torture ring that used electrical shock, burning and beatings on more than 100 black men.”

All of this and more eats away at public confidence in equal justice under the law and reaffirms people’s worst fears: that the eyes of justice aren’t blind but jaundiced. As Langston Hughes once wrote:

“That Justice is a blind goddess / Is a thing to which we black are wise: / Her bandage hides two festering sores / That once perhaps were eyes.”



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7) Stand Your Ground Makes No Sense
By ROBERT J. SPITZER

IT’S been 10 years since Florida enacted a beefed-up Stand Your Ground law. Since 2005, roughly half the states have passed this law, or one like it. The National Rifle Association led the charge, arguing that Stand Your Ground laws would improve public safety and protect honest citizens. Similar laws have existed elsewhere for over a century, but Florida’s law substantially altered the legal equation.

Under the new breed of laws, a person who has harmed or killed another in a public place can presumptively claim self-defense. The police must accept the claim’s validity. In other words, the individual need only assert the belief that the use of force was necessary to prevent serious harm or death. Coupled with that is special legal protection that makes the person (as the Florida law says) “immune from criminal prosecution and civil action.” Prosecution is still possible, but it is much more difficult.

A result, according to the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, is hamstrung investigations and legal protections greater than those afforded to police officers. Not only have these laws failed to increase public safety, they have also turned the clock back to the mythologized mayhem of the Wild West.

The Tampa Bay Times examined the effects of Florida’s 2005 law in more than 200 cases (about half of them fatal) through mid-2012. It reported that the law’s chief beneficiaries were “those with records of crime and violence.” Nearly 60 percent of those making self-defense claims when a person was killed had been arrested at least once before; a third of those had been accused of violent crimes in the past; over a third had illegally carried guns in the past or had threatened others with them.

Stand Your Ground claims succeeded 67 percent of the time, but in 79 percent of the cases, the assailant could have retreated to avoid the confrontation. In 68 percent, the person killed was unarmed.

The Wall Street Journal studied “justifiable homicides” nationwide from 2000 to 2010. It reported that these killings increased 85 percent in states with Florida-style laws (some states’ versions of the law were more limited), while overall killings, adjusted for population growth, declined during this period.

Researchers at Texas A&M University studied F.B.I. data to analyze the same 10-year period, and found no evidence that Stand Your Ground laws deterred crimes like burglary, robbery or aggravated assault. But they did find a homicide rate increase of 8 percent (that’s about 600 additional homicides annually) in states with newly buttressed Stand Your Ground laws. A 2012 National Bureau of Economic Research study drew on different data, but also found Florida-type laws associated with a 6.8 percent increase in homicide.

These laws encourage a “shoot first and ask questions later” mentality, which may help explain why, in supposedly justifiable killings, the victim is more likely to be black when the shooter is white.An Urban Institute study found significant racial disparities in the adjudication of Stand Your Ground laws from 2005 to 2010. Based on F.B.I. data, the study reported that for gun homicides in non-Stand Your Ground states, the cases were ruled justified in 3 to 8 percent of white-on-white, black-on-white and black-on-black killings. But when the shooter was white and the victim black, the rate was 29 percent. In Stand Your Ground states, justifiable shooting results ranged from 3 to 15 percent in the first three categories. When the shooter was white and the victim black, 36 percent were ruled justified.

Since the beginning of 2015, 10 states, including Florida, have introduced measures to roll back or repeal their laws. But 13 states still have bills pending to enact or fortify Stand Your Ground. A February American Bar Association report urges states to restore the “safe retreat” standard in public places — meaning that people are obligated to avoid confrontation if they can do so safely — and the scaling back of legal immunity.

The marriage of expanded Stand Your Ground laws with escalating civilian gun toting increases unnecessary violent confrontations and deaths. We need policies that defuse confrontations in public places, especially since more than 11 million Americans now have licenses to carry concealed firearms. The police and prosecutors need to be able to conduct full, unencumbered investigations. And gun owners need to admit what most of them already know: that firearms’ lethality and ease of use make fatal miscalculation more likely.

We’ve learned this lesson before, in our own violent past, when strict regulation of concealed gun carrying was the near-universal and successful response to gun violence. As early as 1686, New Jersey enacted a law against wearing weapons because they induced “great Fear and Quarrels.” Massachusetts followed in 1750. In the late 1700s, North Carolina and Virginia passed similar laws. In the 1800s, as interpersonal violence and gun carrying spread, 37 states joined the list. Tennessee’s 1821 law fined “each and every person so degrading himself” by carrying weapons in public. Alabama’s 1839 law was titled “An Act to Suppress the Evil Practice of Carrying Weapons Secretly.”

Why must we relearn a lesson we codified centuries ago? How dumb are we?

Robert J. Spitzer is a political scientist at SUNY Cortland and the author, most recently, of “Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights.”


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8) An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty
By

In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects.

The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.

Now, however, a large new study is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.The feelings heard across Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the study found.

The city is especially harsh for boys: Low-income boys who grew up there in recent decades make roughly 25 percent less as adults than similar low-income boys who were born in the city and moved as small children to an average place.

Beyond Baltimore, economists say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility — and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor children achieve the so-called American dream.

How neighborhoods affect children “has been a quandary with which social science has been grappling for decades,” said David B. Grusky, director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This delivers the most compelling evidence yet that neighborhoods matter in a really big way.”

Raj Chetty, one of the study’s authors, has presented the findings to members of the Obama administration, as well as to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom have signaled that mobility will be central themes of their 2016 presidential campaigns. After more than 15 years of mostly mediocre economic growth and rising income inequality, many families say they are frustrated and anxious about trying to get ahead.

“The data shows we can do something about upward mobility,” said Mr. Chetty, a Harvard professor, who conducted the main study along with Nathaniel Hendren, also a Harvard economist. “Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.”

The places where poor children face the worst odds include some — but not all — of the nation’s largest urban areas, like Atlanta; Chicago; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Orlando, West Palm Beach and Tampa in Florida; Austin, Tex.; the Bronx; and the parts of Manhattan with low-income neighborhoods.

All else equal, low-income boys who grow up in such areas earn about 35 percent less on average than otherwise similar low-income children who grow up in the best areas for mobility. For girls, the gap is closer to 25 percent.

Many of these places have large African-American populations, and the findings suggest that race plays an enormous but complex role in upward mobility. The nation’s legacy of racial inequality appears to affect all low-income children who live in heavily black areas: Both black and white children seem to have longer odds of reaching the middle class, and both seem to benefit from moving to better neighborhoods.

The places most conducive to upward mobility include large cities — San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Providence, R.I. — and major suburban counties, such as Fairfax, Va.; Bergen, N.J.; Bucks, Pa.; Macomb, Mich.; Worcester, Mass.; and Contra Costa, Calif.

These places tend to share several traits, Mr. Hendren said. They have elementary schools with higher test scores, a higher share of two-parent families, greater levels of involvement in civic and religious groups and more residential integration of affluent, middle-class and poor families.

For low-income families, a home in places with these characteristics is often a financial stretch. Rachelle Hawkins, a 32-year-old single mother in California, rented an apartment in Contra Costa late last year after moving from a gritty neighborhood near Oakland and being homeless for a time. She makes about $29,000 as a customer-service agent in online banking and faces an annual rent bill of almost $17,000.

But she thinks the burden is worth it for her children, who are 4 and 6. “I don’t think my kids are going to remember what we went through,” Ms. Hawkins said. “They are absolutely better off, just because of the environment.”

In addition to studying the outcomes of more than five million children who moved, Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren also revisited the subjects of the Moving to Opportunity experiment. Working with Lawrence Katz, one of the original researchers to study the program, they analyzed more recent, richer data — and concluded that children who moved before they were teenagers did indeed benefit economically. (The original study had found health benefits for both younger and older children.)

In both studies, the younger children were when they moved, the better they did. Children were less likely to become single parents when they grew up, were more likely to go to college and to earn more. The original research had not been able to follow the economic outcomes of younger children, because not enough time had passed, Mr. Katz said.

Still, the more extensive nationwide data on moving found that older children were also affected by their neighborhood. The effect was what statisticians call linear: Each additional year in a different place had roughly the same average effect on a child’s adult earnings. A teenager’s year in a better neighborhood mattered as much as a 9-year-old’s year — but 9-year olds still had their teenage years in front of them.

Some economists who have seen the new study say that it argues for a new approach to housing policy. Current policy often forces the parents of young children onto waiting lists for housing vouchers. It also gives tax incentives to developers who build in poor neighborhoods, rather than rewarding those who build affordable housing in areas that seem to offer better environments.

In an interview Friday, Julián Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he was excited by the new data. Mr. Castro said his department had been planning to reallocate funding, so that some people moving to more expensive neighborhoods would receive larger vouchers. Currently, the value of vouchers tends to be constant across a metropolitan area.

The large county on the other end of the spectrum from Baltimore, with the best odds of escaping poverty, is DuPage County, Ill., west of Chicago. It contains suburbs where the schools are considered better and where housing costs more than in Chicago and some close-in suburbs.In 2012, Latonya Polk decided to move there with her son and daughter, then 16 and 15. Her husband had been fatally shot on the front lawn of their apartment outside Chicago in 2011, in a crime that remains unsolved, she said.

Briana, her daughter, was hesitant about leaving her friends, but Mrs. Polk insisted, saying they could still visit them. “I knew absolutely it would mean better possibilities for my kids,” she said.

Mrs. Polk earns about $40,000 a year at a company that helps clear goods through customs. She has been able to afford the move by living in a cramped $1,025-a-month, one-bedroom apartment — and with help from a county program that gives them about $2,000 a year toward living expenses.

Her son, Jovan, graduated from high school last year and is now working, while Briana will graduate this spring. Both plan to enroll in community college in the next year.

Although most places with better odds of escaping poverty have higher rent, the researchers did identify some counties as “upward-mobility bargains.” These include Putnam County, N.Y.; parts of the Pittsburgh and Altoona areas in Pennsylvania; and, if only relative to surrounding areas, Contra Costa.

The main innovation of the new paper — part of the Equality of Opportunity Project, involving multiple researchers — is its focus on children who moved. Doing so allows the economists to ask whether the places themselves actually affect outcomes. The alternative is that, say, Baltimore happens to be home to a large number of children who would struggle no matter where they grew up.

The data suggests otherwise. The easiest way to understand the pattern may be the different effects on siblings, who have so much in common. Younger siblings who moved from a bad area to a better one earned more as adults than their older siblings who were part of the same move. The particular environment of a city really does seem to affect its residents.

The data does not answer the question of whether the factors that distinguish higher-mobility places, like better schools and less economic segregation, are causing the differences — or are themselves knock-on effects of other, underlying causes. “We still need clarity on that,” Mr. Grusky, the Stanford professor, said.

From her perspective, Ms. Hawkins, the Contra Costa resident, said that the mixing of people from different social classes did make a difference.

“It’s all spread out here,” she said. In her old home near Oakland, entire neighborhoods had high unemployment and crime, which led people who did have jobs to flee, causing a downward spiral. “You don’t want to put your kid in harm’s way. That’s just extra stress.”

For all the benefits that moves can bring, they are not a solution to poverty, said people who have seen the new paper as well as the researchers themselves. Finding ways to improve those neighborhoods, for people who cannot or do not want to move, is also important, researchers and policy makers said.

“We can’t walk away from them,” Mr. Castro, the housing secretary, said. “We need a two-pronged approach.”

David Leonhardt reported from Washington, Amanda Cox from New York, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Dave McKinney contributed reporting from Wood Dale, Ill.





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9) The Uphill Battle to Better Regulate Formaldehyde
By and

WASHINGTON — A decade after emergency trailers meant to shelter Hurricane Katrina victims instead caused burning eyes, sore throats and other more serious ailments, the Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of regulating the culprit: formaldehyde, a chemical that can be found in commonplace things like clothes and furniture.

But an unusual assortment of players, including furniture makers, the Chinese government, Republicans from states with a large base of furniture manufacturing and even some Democrats who championed early regulatory efforts, have questioned the E.P.A. proposal. The sustained opposition has held sway, as the agency is now preparing to ease key testing requirements before it releases the landmark federal health standard.The E.P.A.’s five-year effort to adopt this rule offers another example of how industry opposition can delay and hamper attempts by the federal government to issue regulations, even to control substances known to be harmful to human health.

Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen that can also cause respiratory ailments like asthma, but the potential of long-term exposure to cause cancers like myeloid leukemia is less well understood.

The E.P.A.’s decision would be the first time that the federal government has regulated formaldehyde inside most American homes.

“The stakes are high for public health,” said Tom Neltner, senior adviser for regulatory affairs at the National Center for Healthy Housing, who has closely monitored the debate over the rules. “What we can’t have here is an outcome that fails to confront the health threat we all know exists.”

The proposal would not ban formaldehyde — commonly used as an ingredient in wood glue in furniture and flooring — but it would impose rules that prevent dangerous levels of the chemical’s vapors from those products, and would set testing standards to ensure that products sold in the United States comply with those limits. The debate has sharpened in the face of growing concern about the safety of formaldehyde-treated flooring imported from Asia, especially China.

What is certain is that a lot of money is at stake: American companies sell billions of dollars’ worth of wood products each year that contain formaldehyde, and some argue that the proposed regulation would impose unfair costs and restrictions.

Determined to block the agency’s rule as proposed, these industry players have turned to the White House, members of Congress and top E.P.A. officials, pressing them to roll back the testing requirements in particular, calling them redundant and too expensive.

“There are potentially over a million manufacturing jobs that will be impacted if the proposed rule is finalized without changes,” wrote Bill Perdue, the chief lobbyist at the American Home Furnishings Alliance, a leading critic of the testing requirements in the proposed regulation, in one letter to the E.P.A.

Industry opposition helped create an odd alignment of forces working to thwart the rule. The White House moved to strike out key aspects of the proposal. Subsequent appeals for more changes were voiced by players as varied as Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, as well as furniture industry lobbyists.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 helped ignite the public debate over formaldehyde, after the deadly storm destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of homes along the Gulf of Mexico, forcing families into temporary trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The displaced storm victims quickly began reporting respiratory problems, burning eyes and other issues, and tests then confirmed high levels of formaldehyde fumes leaking into the air inside the trailers, which in many cases had been hastily constructed.

Public health advocates petitioned the E.P.A. to issue limits on formaldehyde in building materials and furniture used in homes, given that limits already existed for exposure in workplaces. But three years after the storm, only California had issued such limits.

Industry groups like the American Chemistry Council have repeatedly challenged the science linking formaldehyde to cancer, a position championed by David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana, who is a major recipient of chemical industry campaign contributions, and whom environmental groups have mockingly nicknamed “Senator Formaldehyde.”

By 2010, public health advocates and some industry groups secured bipartisan support in Congress for legislation that ordered the E.P.A. to issue federal rules that largely mirrored California’s restrictions. At the time, concerns were rising over the growing number of lower-priced furniture imports from Asia that might include contaminated products, while also hurting sales of American-made products.

Maneuvering began almost immediately after the E.P.A. prepared draft rules to formally enact the new standards.

White House records show at least five meetings in mid-2012 with industry executives — kitchen cabinet makers, chemical manufacturers, furniture trade associations and their lobbyists, like Brock R. Landry, of the Venable law firm. These parties, along with Senator Vitter’s office, appealed to top administration officials, asking them to intervene to roll back the E.P.A. proposal.

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which reviews major federal regulations before they are adopted, apparently agreed. After the White House review, the E.P.A. “redlined” many of the estimates of the monetary benefits that would be gained by reductions in related health ailments, like asthma and fertility issues, documents reviewed by The New York Times show.

As a result, the estimated benefit of the proposed rule dropped to $48 million a year, from as much as $278 million a year. The much-reduced amount deeply weakened the agency’s justification for the sometimes costly new testing that would be required under the new rules, a federal official involved in the effort said.

“It’s a redlining blood bath,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a Georgetown University Law School professor and a former E.P.A. official, using the Washington phrase to describe when language is stricken from a proposed rule. “Almost the entire discussion of these potential benefits was excised.”

Senator Vitter’s staff was pleased.

“That’s a huge difference,” said Luke Bolar, a spokesman for Mr. Vitter, of the reduced estimated financial benefits, saying the change was “clearly highlighting more mismanagement” at the E.P.A.

The review’s outcome galvanized opponents in the furniture industry. They then targeted a provision that mandated new testing of laminated wood, a cheaper alternative to hardwood. (The California standard on which the law was based did not require such testing.)

But E.P.A. scientists had concluded that these laminate products — millions of which are sold annually in the United States — posed a particular risk. They said that when thin layers of wood, also known as laminate or veneer, are added to furniture or flooring in the final stages of manufacturing, the resulting product can generate dangerous levels of fumes from often-used formaldehyde-based glues.

Industry executives, outraged by what they considered an unnecessary and financially burdensome level of testing, turned every lever within reach to get the requirement removed. It would be particularly onerous, they argued, for small manufacturers that would have to repeatedly interrupt their work to do expensive new testing. The E.P.A. estimated that the expanded requirements for laminate products would cost the furniture industry tens of millions of dollars annually, while the industry said that the proposed rule over all would cost its 7,000 American manufacturing facilities over $200 million each year.

“A lot of people don’t seem to appreciate what a lot of these requirements do to a small operation,” said Dick Titus, executive vice president of the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, whose members are predominantly small businesses. “A 10-person shop, for example, just really isn’t equipped to handle that type of thing.”

Big industry players also weighed in. Executives from companies including La-Z-Boy, Hooker Furniture and Ashley Furniture all flew to Washington for a series of meetings with the offices of lawmakers including House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and about a dozen other lawmakers, asking several of them to sign a letter prepared by the industry to press the E.P.A. to back down, according to an industry report describing the lobbying visit.

Within a matter of weeks, two letters — using nearly identical language — were sent by House and Senate lawmakers to the E.P.A. — with the industry group forwarding copies of the letters to the agency as well, and then posting them on its website.

The industry lobbyists also held their own meeting at E.P.A. headquarters, and they urged Jim Jones, who oversaw the rule-making process as the assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, to visit a North Carolina furniture manufacturing plant. According to the trade group, Mr. Jones told them that the visit had “helped the agency shift its thinking” about the rules and how laminated products should be treated.

The resistance was particularly intense from lawmakers like Mr. Wicker of Mississippi, whose state is home to major manufacturing plants owned by Ashley Furniture Industries, the world’s largest furniture maker, and who is one of the biggest recipients in Congress of donations from the industry’s trade association. Asked if the political support played a role, a spokesman for Mr. Wicker replied: “Thousands of Mississippians depend on the furniture manufacturing industry for their livelihoods. Senator Wicker is committed to defending all Mississippians from government overreach.”

Individual companies like Ikea also intervened, as did the Chinese government, which claimed that the new rule would create a “great barrier” to the import of Chinese products because of higher costs.

Perhaps the most surprising objection came from Senator Boxer, of California, a longtime environmental advocate, whose office questioned why the E.P.A.’s rule went further than her home state’s in seeking testing on laminated products. “We did not advocate an outcome, other than safety,” her office said in a statement about why the senator raised concerns. “We said ‘Take a look to see if you have it right.’ ”

Safety advocates say that tighter restrictions — like the ones Ms. Boxer and Mr. Wicker, along with Representative Doris Matsui, a California Democrat, have questioned — are necessary, particularly for products coming from China, where items as varied as toys and Christmas lights have been found to violate American safety standards.

While Mr. Neltner, the environmental advocate who has been most involved in the review process, has been open to compromise, he has pressed the E.P.A. not to back down entirely, and to maintain a requirement that laminators verify that their products are safe.

An episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” in March brought attention to the issue when it accused Lumber Liquidators, the discount flooring retailer, of selling laminate products with dangerous levels of formaldehyde. The company has disputed the show’s findings and test methods, maintaining that its products are safe.

“People think that just because Congress passed the legislation five years ago, the problem has been fixed,” said Becky Gillette, who then lived in coastal Mississippi, in the area hit by Hurricane Katrina, and was among the first to notice a pattern of complaints from people living in the trailers. “Real people’s faces and names come up in front of me when I think of the thousands of people who could get sick if this rule is not done right.”

An aide to Ms. Matsui rejected any suggestion that she was bending to industry pressure.

“From the beginning the public health has been our No. 1 concern,” said Kyle J. Victor, an aide to Ms. Matsui.

But further changes to the rule are likely, agency officials concede, as they say they are searching for a way to reduce the cost of complying with any final rule while maintaining public health goals. The question is just how radically the agency will revamp the testing requirement for laminated products — if it keeps it at all.

“It’s not a secret to anybody that is the most challenging issue,” said Mr. Jones, the E.P.A. official overseeing the process, adding that the health consequences from formaldehyde are real. “We have to reduce those exposures so that people can live healthy lives and not have to worry about being in their homes.”




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10) Runaway Drug Prices
By

A drug to treat abnormal heart rhythms can cost about $200 on one day and more than $1,300 the next. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis can lead to a drug bill of at least $50,000 a year. How companies set prices of specialty drugs for these and other complex diseases, like cancer and AIDS, has been a mystery to the patients who need them. Now the Obama administration and some states are tackling that lack of transparency and the rising costs.

Mr. Obama has asked Congress to let Medicare officials negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, a practice forbidden by current law that may be hard to change with the antiregulatory mood among Republicans. And several states are considering bills that would require drug companies to justify their prices to public agencies. It is the least the states can do to bring costs to levels that patients, hospitals and government programs can afford.

Spending on all prescription drugs, including commonly used medicines like antibiotics, accounts for a tenth of the nation’s total health spending. Prices have been rising slowly in recent years mainly because many brand-name drugs lost protection and lower-cost generics were prescribed. But there are fewer patent expirations ahead. Specialized medicines already on the market carry huge price tags, as The Times reported recently, and strain the budgets of Medicare, Medicaid and consumers. The list price for a one-year’s supply of Kalydeco to treat cystic fibrosis is $311,000. A standard course of treatment with Blincyto, a leukemia drug, is about $178,000.

Drugs used to treat multiple sclerosis are of particular concern. A recent study by researchers in Oregon found that first-generation drugs that came on the market in the 1990s ranged in price from $8,000 to $11,000 a year. Prices for those drugs rose even though new drugs entered the market, theoretically providing competition. One drug that first cost $8,700 now costs $62,400 a year.

There are no multiple sclerosis drugs available in the United States with a list price below $50,000 a year, the researchers say, which is two to three times more than the list prices in Canada, Australia or Britain.

The drug and biotech companies contend that high prices are justified to cover the large costs of bringing a drug to market and to compensate for the large number of drugs that fail in late stages of costly clinical trials. But it appears that many companies raise prices arbitrarily and charge what public and private insurers will pay.A recent report in The Wall Street Journal described how Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, based in Canada, bought the rights to two lifesaving heart drugs on Feb. 10 and raised their prices the same day. The list price for a one-milliliter vial of Isuprel, used to treat abnormal heart rhythms, rose to $1,347 from $215. The price for a two-milliliter vial of Nitropress, for dangerously high blood pressure and acute heart failure, increased from to $806 from $258. The Journal cites similar increases for Ofirmev pain injections and Vimovo pain tablets after new companies acquired the rights.

Bills have been introduced in several states requiring drug makers to report profits and expenses for costly drugs or sometimes for all drugs, according to The Journal’s pharmaceutical blog. Such disclosures might shame companies into restraining their price increases and provide state officials with information to determine what action to take.

The industry helped defeat such a bill in Oregon and is fighting to head off a bill in California that would impose new reporting requirements on makers of any prescription drug whose wholesale costs are $10,000 or more annually or per course of treatment. They would have to disclose the research, development, marketing and manufacturing costs, as well as the profits, attributable to the drug. The companies complain that some of these costs are hard to quantify and that compiling the data would be burdensome. But surely the public would benefit from increased transparency that might deter the worst abuses.


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11) Lawsuit Leads to New Limits on Solitary Confinement at Juvenile Prisons in Illinois
By

CHICAGO — A settlement to a federal lawsuit will sharply limit the practice of solitary confinement in juvenile correctional facilities run by the state of Illinois, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois announced on Monday.

The settlement, which resolved a lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. of Illinois against the state, requires that the juvenile inmates spend at least eight hours a day outside their cells, said Adam Schwartz, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. of Illinois. The new policy also requires that the inmates in isolation continue to receive education and mental health services.

“What we would say is that if you get to leave your room and be in the company of staff, and have the opportunity to talk to them for eight hours every single day, there’s no longer solitary confinement,” Mr. Schwartz said. “You don’t need to use solitary confinement to keep a prison safe. We think that these new rules are consistent with running a safe and rehabilitative prison system.”The policy makes Illinois the latest state to enact a less restrictive approach to running its juvenile correctional facilities. Advocates for juveniles have long argued that solitary confinement is counterproductive, causing young people to suffer paranoia and depression. A review by the Department of Justice found that more than half of the suicides in juvenile prisons occur during solitary confinement.

Natalie J. Kraner, a lawyer with the Lowenstein Center for the Public Interest, the pro bono arm of the law firm Lowenstein Sandler, said that Illinois had become one of 20 states to prohibit the use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure.

“I think we’re slowly moving away from it,” she said. “The country is recognizing the harms that come from the use of solitary confinement, especially when you’re talking about juveniles.”

The new Illinois rule applies to the six state-run juvenile facilities that house close to 700 youths; the smallest currently holds 24, and the largest 238. Solitary confinement may be used in certain situations if a youth is considered a threat to others, but only for short periods of time. The new confinement rule does not extend to the hundreds of other young people who are in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections. A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, Mike Theodore, said state officials were pleased with the settlement.

"We believe this policy is consistent with prevailing federal rules and national best practices,” Mr. Theodore said. “Department of Juvenile Justice staff have been working diligently over the last year to begin to comply with the new directive.”

Similar lawsuits have challenged juvenile solitary requirements in Mississippi, New York and Ohio. As a result, those states now require inmates to be out of their rooms for at least four hours a day. Some states allow confinement for only a few hours each day, but there are still nine states that place no limit on the amount of time that a juvenile may spend in punitive solitary confinement.

In September, the New York City Correction Department ended solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-old inmates at the Rikers Island complex. In January, the city agreed to extend the ban to all Rikers inmates 21 and younger. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan had issued a report criticizing the department’s policies for teenage inmates, calling the use of solitary confinement “excessive and inappropriate.”

The A.C.L.U. of Illinois filed the lawsuit, R.J. v. Jones, in 2012 to improve conditions at the state’s juvenile facilities. The policy announced on Monday was approved in April by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of Federal District Court.

Elizabeth Calvin, a senior advocate in the children’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, said that solitary confinement was particularly damaging to juveniles. “I think there’s a growing recognition that putting children and youth into isolation is not a way to address the problems that these young people have,” she said. “If we’re talking about teens, we’re talking about individuals who are still developing, neurologically and socially. Those are tasks that require social interaction.”


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12) Tamir Rice’s Mother Asks Ohio Authorities to Finish Inquiry
By RICHARD FAUSSET

The mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer while playing with a fake pistol, pleaded on Monday for the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department to conclude its monthslong criminal investigation into the matter.

At a news conference in front of a Cleveland courthouse, an emotional Samaria Rice and a team of lawyers for the boy’s family expressed frustration that the investigation was continuing more than five months after her son was shot on Nov. 22. John O’Brien, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman, would not comment Monday when asked when the investigation might be finished.

“In less than a second my son is gone,” Ms. Rice said. “And I want to know how long I’ve got to wait for justice.”One of the lawyers for the family, Walter Madison, compared the situation to the recent death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Mr. Gray and Tamir were both young black males who died after being confronted by the police. Marilyn J. Mosby, the Baltimore state’s attorney, filed charges against six police officers in connection with Mr. Gray’s death on Friday, less than two weeks after his death. The surprisingly swift response was praised by many Baltimoreans, but was criticized by the police as a politicized rush to justice.

“All we want is the same here in Cleveland,” Mr. Madison said. The investigation, he said, was “going slower than molasses in the summertime.”

Protesters nationwide have held up the death of Ms. Rice’s son as one of numerous recent examples of the excessive use of police force against African-Americans.

The 12-year-old was shot by Officer Tim Loehmann after he and his partner, Frank Garmback, responded to what they believed to be an urgent situation unfolding in the park where Tamir was playing with a gun, a Colt pistol replica that shoots plastic pellets.

The officers did not know upon arriving on the scene that a caller to Cleveland’s 911 system had reported that the gun Tamir was holding was “probably fake.”

An orange safety tip on the gun meant to distinguish it from a real gun had either been removed or fallen off. Officer Loehmann shot Tamir within two seconds of arriving in his squad car, raising doubts about police assertions that the boy had been warned to raise his hands three times.

Michael P. Maloney, a lawyer for Officer Garmback, and Henry Hilow, a lawyer for Officer Loehmann, wrote jointly in an email that they were “confident that no charges will be filed” after the investigation. “Our clients are entitled to the fair and deliberative process the law requires,” they wrote on Monday. “This process takes place in the courthouse, not on the street.” Both officers remain employed and on “light duty” status.

Upon the completion of the sheriff’s investigation, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office will review the case and present it to a grand jury, which will decide whether or not to indict the officers, said Joseph F. Frolik, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office.

The Rice family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the officers and the city, and lawyers for the officers have asked that it be stayed until the criminal investigation is completed.



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13) Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds
By

Public perceptions of race relations in America have grown substantially more negative in the aftermath of the death of a young black man who was injured while in police custody in Baltimore and the subsequent unrest, far eclipsing the sentiment recorded in the wake of turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

Americans are also increasingly likely to say that the police are more apt to use deadly force against a black person, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

The poll findings highlight the challenges for local leaders and police officials in trying to maintain order while sustaining faith in the criminal justice system in a racially polarized nation.Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in this country are generally bad. That figure is up sharply from 44 percent after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed in Ferguson in August, and 43 percent in December. In a CBS News poll just two months ago, 38 percent said race relations were generally bad. Current views are by far the worst of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The negative sentiment is echoed by broad majorities of blacks and whites alike, a stark change from earlier this year, when 58 percent of blacks thought race relations were bad, but just 35 percent of whites agreed. In August, 48 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said they felt that way.

Looking ahead, 44 percent of Americans think race relations are worsening, up from 36 percent in December. Forty-one percent of blacks and 46 percent of whites think so. Pessimism among whites has increased 10 points since December.

The poll finds that profound racial divisions in views of how the police use deadly force remain. Blacks are more than twice as likely to say police in most communities are more apt to use deadly force against a black person — 79 percent of blacks say so compared with 37 percent of whites. A slim majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use deadly force.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans say deadly force is more likely to be used against a black person, up from 37 percent in August and 40 percent in December.

Blacks also remain far more likely than whites to say they feel mostly anxious about the police in their community. Forty-two percent say so, while 51 percent feel mostly safe. Among whites, 8 in 10 feel mostly safe.

One proposal to address the matter — having on-duty police officers wear body cameras — receives overwhelming support. More than 9 in 10 whites and blacks alike favor it.

Asked specifically about the situation in Baltimore, most Americans expressed at least some confidence that the investigation by local authorities would be conducted fairly. But while nearly two-thirds of whites think so, fewer than half of blacks agree. Still, more blacks are confident now than were in August regarding the investigation in Ferguson. On Friday, six members of the police force involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray were charged with serious offenses, including manslaughter. The poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday; results from before charges were announced are similar to those from after.Reaction to the recent turmoil in Baltimore, however, is similar among blacks and whites. Most Americans, 61 percent, say the unrest after Mr. Gray’s death was not justified. That includes 64 percent of whites and 57 percent of blacks.

The nationwide poll was conducted from April 30 to May 3 on landlines and cellphones with 1,027 adults, including 793 whites and 128 blacks. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all adults, four percentage points for whites and nine percentage points for blacks. See the full poll here.




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14) For Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers, a Difficult 2014 Still Paid Well
By

For investors in hedge funds, like big pension funds, 2014 was not a lucrative year. But for those who managed their money, the pay was spectacular.

The top 25 hedge fund managers reaped $11.62 billion in compensation in 2014, according to an annual ranking published on Tuesday by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.

That collective payday came even as hedge funds, once high-octane money makers, returned on average low-single digits. In comparison, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index posted a gain of 13.68 percent last year when reinvested dividends were included.

Still, the men (no woman has ever made the cut) at the top of the hedge fund universe now run firms that are bigger than they have ever been. Their influence is growing beyond the industry and even beyond Wall Street. They lobby in Washington, donate to political campaigns nationwide, and can pick their advisers from a pool of former central bankers.

Topping the list is Kenneth C. Griffin, who started by trading convertible bonds out of his dormitory at Harvard. He took home $1.3 billion last year. James H. Simons, a former National Security Agency code breaker who makes billions of dollars every year from his hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, earned $1.2 billion. And Raymond Dalio, who runs the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, with more than $170 billion in assets under management, reaped $1.1 billion.

In close fourth was William A. Ackman, who is known for making large and concentrated bets, and for being outspoken about them. Mr. Ackman earned $950 million in 2014.

The pay estimates are based on the value of each manager’s stake in his firm and the fees charged. Investors in hedge funds generally pay an annual management fee of 2 percent of the total assets under management and 20 percent of any profits.

For the average person, these sums are extraordinary. But the overall pay for top earners was down by hundreds of millions of dollars in 2014. These managers made just over half of the $21.15 billion earned by the top 25 in 2013.

Still, what makes such nine- and 10-figure paychecks remarkable for 2014 is that many of the top earners had mediocre performances at best. Only half of the top 10 earners recorded returns that exceeded that of the S.&.P 500.

For investors, 2014 was the sixth consecutive year that hedge funds have fallen short of stock market performance, returning only 3 percent on average, according to a composite index of 2,200 portfolios collected by HFR, a firm that tracks the industry. Hedge funds are lightly regulated private pools of capital open to institutional investors like pension funds, university endowments and wealthy investors.

Such large investors continue to shovel money into the $2.9 trillion hedge fund industry, desperate to make returns in an environment of near-zero interest rates. So far this year, $95 billion of new capital has flowed in.

In terms of performance, Mr. Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital and Mr. Griffin’s Citadel were standouts. Pershing Square’s two funds gained 36 percent and 40 percent, the best returns in the 2014 ranking. Citadel posted returns of 18 percent to investors in its flagship Kensington and Wellington funds. Both Mr. Ackman and Mr. Griffin declined to comment for this article.

At Renaissance, the best-performing equities fund was up 14.5 percent, and its institutional futures fund gained 7.4 percent. Mr. Simons’s wealth, however, is tied up in the firm’s secretive Medallion fund, which manages only employees’ money and has earned average annual returns of more than 30 percent over two decades.

Elsewhere, returns were more modest.

Mr. Dalio’s Bridgewater started the year strong, with well-placed bets on interest rates in Europe and the United States, but momentum slowed in the second half of the year. He made 3.6 percent and 8.7 percent in his two main Pure Alpha funds. Mr. Dalio’s spokesman declined to comment.

Some notable managers were missing from the Alpha list entirely. The billionaire financier John A. Paulson did not make the cut because his Paulson & Company hedge fund lost money in 2014. Mr. Paulson, an inveterate art collector whose office is lined with Alexander Calder watercolors, was the second-highest earner in 2013, reaping $2.3 billion. He declined to comment.

And some of the most prominent names on past Alpha lists are no longer counted, having converted their hedge funds into family offices, managing chiefly their own money. Among them are George Soros, Steven A. Cohen, Carl C. Icahn and Stanley Druckenmiller.

Computer scientists whose firms use quantitative strategies were among the top earners last year. Mr. Simons employs astronomers and physicists and uses computer programs to scan reams of data in search of patterns to make investments, for example.David E. Shaw, whose $36 billion D. E. Shaw firm hires data scientists to build algorithms for trading, made $530 million in 2014. Mr. Shaw, who has a computer science Ph.D. from Stanford, is no longer involved with the daily management of D. E. Shaw’s investments. A spokesman for D. E. Shaw declined to comment.

In a year when managers complained about unnavigable markets, with the leading central banks keeping interest rates low, hedge funds that employed a variety of strategies fared better.

Israel A. Englander took home $900 million after his firm, Millennium, made returns of 12 percent in 2014. Based in New York, Millennium uses a platform model to invest with 170 individual managers who each use their own trading strategies. Mr. Englander does not charge a management fee. Instead, investors share the costs of running the firm.

The highest-earning managers have also emerged as leading political donors. For example, Mr. Griffin, whose $26 billion firm, Citadel, is based in Chicago, was the single largest backer for Rahm Emanuel’s successful second-term mayoral campaign, donating more than $1 million. (Last month, Citadel hired Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, as a senior adviser.)

Mr. Simons, who stepped down from day-to-day management of his $25 billion firm, Renaissance, in 2010, has been a significant political supporter of the Democrats, donating $8.3 million in 2014 alone. A spokesman for Mr. Simons declined to comment.

Activist investors, once the scourge of corporate America because of their strategy of buying up large stakes in companies and then throwing their weight around with management, came out on top, too.

Larry Robbins, an activist investor who prefers to be called a “suggestivist,” made $570 million in 2014. He made a fortune for himself and his investors in 2013 after winning a proxy contest against Health Management Associates. Mr. Robbins has also made a windfall betting on health care stocks like Humana, Thermo Fischer Scientific, HCA Holdings and VCA. A spokesman declined to comment.

One group of hedge fund managers known as the Tiger Cubs also made the top of list. Protégés of Julian H. Robertson, they are named after his firm, Tiger Management.

One of them was O. Andreas Halvorsen, the founder of Viking Global Investors, who earned $450 million last year. A former Norwegian Navy SEAL, Mr. Halvorsen is fiercely competitive; he came in eighth for his division several years ago in an Ironman race that included swimming, running and cycling.

Chase Coleman made $425 million last year. His firm, Tiger Global Management, reported steady returns for investors. The Tiger Global fund reported gains of 16.9 percent and Tiger Global Long Opportunities of 15.5 percent. The firm also makes venture capital investments in start-ups. A spokeswoman for Mr. Coleman declined to comment.



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