Cheh, who was a Washington D.C. City Council member at the time, says a tour she took of the D.C. Jail that summer that led her to introduce the Inmate Segregation Reduction Act of 2015, which attempted to limit solitary confinement throughout the District’s correctional facilities. 

In December of that year, advocates with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture erected a full-size replica of a solitary confinement cell in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest D.C. to raise awareness for Cheh’s bill ahead of a council vote. Cheh, who visited the church one Sunday that month to speak about the proposed reforms, says the image of the cell’s cramped confines has stuck with her ever since.

“It really took the activism of groups to point out to me the ills—the absolute horror, even—of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts. 

But Cheh’s bill never made it to a vote. In fact it never made it out of the judiciary committee where it was first referred. Cheh tried twice more to pass laws reducing solitary confinement before leaving the council in 2022, but those proposals died as well. 

Then in September 2023, D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau took up the baton by introducing the ERASE (Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosure) Solitary Confinement Act. Nadeau’s office worked with the local chapter of Unlock the Box, a coalitional advocacy campaign seeking to end solitary confinement nationwide, in drafting the language of the bill. It aims to comprehensively ban solitary practices in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ facilities, but it remains to be seen whether Nadeau and her co-sponsors on the Council will be able to generate the political will to get it passed this time. 

Despite calls to end it over the intervening years, solitary confinement has remained a regular practice in the D.C. Jail, which holds between 900 and 1,300 residents at any given time. Most are pretrial defendants or people serving short sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

In fact, D.C.’s Department of Corrections has been shown to use solitary confinement more than many other correctional systems around the country. An agency memo reported that eight percent of its population were held in solitary confinement in 2018, and nine percent in 2017—three times the national average, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2015. And at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency reportedly held 1,500 people in prolonged isolation for nearly 400 days.

Solitary confinement—defined as prolonged isolation with little to no human contact—has been decried by governments and activists the world over for exacerbating the harmful behaviors that often land people in solitary in the first place. In 2015, the United Nations classified solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture for the damage it does to inmates’ physical and mental health. Studies have shown that some residents held in solitary confinement become “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”

“It creates a situation where if somebody is already suffering from a mental illness, it exacerbates those conditions,” Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box, told Bolts. 

“All of the research out there and all of the personal experience we hear people share shows that putting someone in solitary is likely to make them more violent, not less,” said Emily Cassometus, former director of government and external affairs at DC Justice Lab, part of the Unlock the Box D.C. coalition. “Towards themselves, towards other people in the facility, staff and residents included, and more likely to be victims of violence, to be victims of self-harm, and to commit violence once they’re released.”

The D.C. Jail has leaned on isolation as a strategy to deal with inmates experiencing mental health crises in particular, yet publicly contends that it doesn’t put people in “solitary confinement.” In 2022, then-DOC spokesperson Keena Blackmon told a local outlet that the D.C. Jail “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and only uses “restrictive housing” for suicide prevention. 

These are known as “safe cells,” designed to keep suicidal inmates from environments that could endanger their safety. But advocates have argued that these restrictive housing units are just isolation by another name, and say these units more closely resemble punishment than medical care. 

“Jail authorities are very clever and they give different names to solitary confinement, but it’s still solitary confinement,” Cheh told Bolts. “They could call it whatever they want.”

A lawyer representing people formerly incarcerated in the D.C. Jail told Bolts of numerous complaints emanating from the restrictive housing cells over the past decade. People incarcerated in these units have complained of being held for 23 hours of each day isolated inside their cell; that they had no access to showers or running water; that they slept on plastic blocks due to a lack of mattresses; that bright fluorescent lighting blazing all day inside their cell made them lose track of time; that they were stripped of all their clothes and personal belongings, including religious material, and even thrown in cells with feces on the walls—likely from past residents who’d covered themselves in it trying to force officers to let them shower. 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, four residents of the facility committed suicide, which jail officials at the time said was three times the national average. So the department commissioned suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes to survey the area in order to prevent further self-inflicted harm.

In his report published September 2013, Hayes found the conditions “overly restrictive” and “seemingly punitive,” and suggested that the agency avoid isolating at-risk residents to prevent further self-harm.

“Confining a suicidal inmate to their cell for 24 hours a day only enhances isolation and is anti-therapeutic,” he wrote.

While the jail has updated their practices based on Hayes’ suggestions, residents are still reportedly held for up to 22 hours a day in severe conditions. And the suicides haven’t stopped.

Nadeau’s bill makes note of the “deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units—including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more.”

The bill seeks to prohibit “segregated confinement” outright within the D.C. Jail. But it still makes an exception for safe cells; it would “strictly limit” their use for suicide prevention, allowing for people on suicide watch to be put in “safe cells” only if “immediately necessary”, and sets a 48-hour maximum limit for holding a person there continuously. It also puts in place other guardrails, such as frequent checks by a medical professional. 

This stripped back version, which didn’t include juvenile detention facilities the way Cheh’s bill did, was introduced in an attempt to ease its way to passage.

But even if the bill is passed, the reforms would need to be regularly enforced by an independent oversight body or risk becoming toothless. The D.C. Corrections Information Council was created for such oversight, but in recent years it has received sharp criticism for its inattention to conditions in the D.C. Jail.

“Sixteen years on the Council taught me a few things,” Cheh told Bolts, “and one of them is that you can pass all the laws you want, but if people aren’t enforcing them, then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

The legislation hasn’t progressed much in the new year. In fact, the city council seems to have moved in the opposite direction on criminal justice, passing an omnibus anti-crime bill in early February that would among other things create harsher penalties for gun crimes and theft, with a focus on retail theft in particular. The ERASE Solitary Confinement Act was referred to the judiciary and public safety committee back in November, but there hasn’t been any movement on the legislation since.

Cassometus says she fears that to many D.C. leaders, the invisible nature of solitary confinement is a feature, not a bug. “It’s really hard to draw attention to an issue that no one can see, hear or smell,” she told Bolts. “Solitary confinement has been talked about as a solution to problems but it’s not. It’s locking our problems in a smaller box inside the jail and wishing that they would go away without actually proposing any solutions.”

The post “An Issue No One Can See”: Watchdogs Fault D.C. for Ongoing Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Landry faces 15 opponents in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race this fall, but at times, it seems like the Republican attorney general is really running against the state’s Democratic, majority-Black major cities. 

In his announcement video, the candidate blasted Louisiana’s “incompetent mayors and woke District Attorneys” for what he sees as their role in allowing crime to proliferate. He doubled down in a series of campaign videos that called out the DAs of Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans for the three parishes’ crime rates, highlighting images of the two Black prosecutors but omitting any footage of East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore, who is white. “When DAs fail to prosecute—when judges fail to act – when police are handcuffed instead of the criminals—enough is enough,” he announces. 

In 2022, he assisted a Republican lawmaker in unveiling a bill, House Bill 321, that would have made public the criminal records of young people between ages 13 and 18 who are accused of a violent crime—but only in Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans, all parishes with some of the highest concentrations of Black residents in the state. Landry made news appearances advocating for the bill and spoke at the press conference announcing it, later using portions of his speech for campaign ads attacking those three parishes’ DAs. 

Bruce Reilly, a formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform advocate who testified against the bill at the Capitol, sat behind Landry as he spoke in favor of HB321. “If you think this is a good thing, why wouldn’t you do it in your own town?” he wondered.

It’s not uncommon for Republican candidates to blame Democrats for crime rates in the cities they control as a way of establishing conservative bona fides. But Landry’s campaign rhetoric isn’t just bluster. During his seven-plus years as attorney general, he has used the power of his office in standard, unorthodox, and at times highly controversial ways to single out New Orleans and the state’s other big cities. 

Landry’s actions have ranged from creating a short-lived anti-crime task force that made arrests in New Orleans without clear jurisdiction to to spearheading punitive legislation that only applied to Louisiana’s three major cities. He also tried to strike down a federal consent decree ensuring a majority-Black state supreme court district in Orleans Parish. And he even recently tried to withhold flood protection funds after city officials suggested they wouldn’t prioritize enforcing abortion crimes. 

Landry, whose campaign did not respond to interview requests from Bolts, will face off against his actual opponents in the primary on Oct. 14. If no one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two, regardless of party, will compete in a runoff on Nov. 18. The incumbent, Democrat John Bel Edwards, cannot seek re-election due to term limits, and Landry has so far been the front-runner in public polling. 

A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.

“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”

“But we will.”

After an early stint as both a police officer and sheriff’s deputy, followed by law school, Landry was elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the ascendant Tea Party, the proto-MAGA movement that crusaded against taxation and federal government overreach. During his lone term representing Louisiana at the national level, Landry posed with a chainsaw in his office, meant to symbolize his willingness to make sawdust of the national budget. His time in Congress would be short lived—ironically, his congressional seat was eliminated during redistricting after New Orleanians left the city in droves in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—but he brought the chainsaw approach to his new role as attorney general, especially when it came to opposing Obama-era federal policy and executive orders.

Since he took office in January 2016, Landry has waged a rhetorical war on crime in New Orleans filled with racist dog whistles implying that the majority-Black city is lawless and out of control. “He definitely appeals to race,” said Bruce Reilly, the Deputy Director of Voice of The Experienced (VOTE), a group of formerly incarcerated Louisianans and their allies that advocates for criminal legal reform. “You pile on the Black mayor, the Black DA, the Black sheriff, right—it’s known as a Black city.” 

“I think it’s obvious,” Caddo Parish DA James Stewart, who is Black, said in an interview about the campaign videos in which he and New Orleans DA Jason Williams are depicted but their white counterpart in East Baton Rouge is not. 

Landry’s belief that New Orleans and other major cities are being poorly run is inextricably tied to his desire to police them more heavily and without restraint. In Landry’s interview with Carlson last October, he made it clear what he believes to be the solution to New Orleans’s woes. “That’s the way you start to take back control of these cities: by instituting state and local control—in law enforcement,” the attorney general said. He has also argued that New Orleans police should be allowed to use stop-and-frisk practices, which a decade-old consent decree, which grants federal oversight of the city’s police department in order to institute reforms, prohibits. 

“I think he genuinely is completely unwilling to entertain the idea that there are solutions to crises that we have in our state that are not driven by criminalization,” Mercedes Montagnes, a local civil rights lawyer, said of Landry. 

In July 2016, citing rising crime rates in the Big Easy, Landry created a Violent Crimes Task Force consisting of five state agents from the Louisiana State Police Bureau of Investigation who would patrol and make arrests within New Orleans city limits. His announcement was met with statements of support from some local officials, but within months, the New Orleans chief of police had signaled to Landry that his office had no authority to engage in law enforcement in the city, and a spokesman chided Landry for using the department, and the city itself, as a “prop in political agendas.” 

Landry ultimately disbanded his task force amidst criticism from local officials and a federal judge, who said she believed that Landry lacked the authority to direct agents to make arrests in New Orleans and stressed the importance of police operating only where they have the authority to do so in order to ensure that arrests were valid. Its actual impact was far thinner than the controversy it fomented: In nearly a year of operations, the task force had made only 16 documented arrests, leading to at least one case where a public defender argued the arrest was illegal (it was upheld).

Landry has also heaped scorn on the consent decree governing the New Orleans Police Department, consistently implying that it is a misuse of federal authority (he recently called it a “pernicious threat to federalism”) and said that it “handcuffs cops instead of criminals,” a pet phrase of his. 

The decree, which Landry also likes to refer to as an example of what he calls “hug a thug” policies popular with Democrats, was put into place in 2013 after a U.S.Department of Justice investigation—itself sparked by an incident just six days after Hurricane Katrina in which a group of New Orleans police officers in street clothes toting AK-47s shot at a Black family and their friend as they were walking to the grocery store. Two of them were killed, including a 17-year-old; four others were severely wounded, including one woman whose arm later had to be amputated. The department then tried to cover up the shooting. Federal investigators found “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law,” which they stressed went far beyond the incident itself. 

The subtext to Landry’s crusade is not merely opposition to federal power or a desire to assert state-wide control—it’s a distaste for any checks on police power. In 2017, he penned an editorial heralding the news that the end of the consent decree was near (it wasn’t). “As expected when police priorities are subject to the approval of activist judges and Washington lawyers, the community suffers and criminals benefit,” the AG wrote.

In recent years, Landry’s campaign against the consent decree has aligned with the efforts of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, otherwise a frequent sparring partner of Landry’s, to put an end to the decree. (Still, as of April, more than half of the city council opposed the mayor’s stance as of April and said the consent decree should stay.)

But Montagnes, the civil rights lawyer, stressed that Landry’s actions were more about politics than his assessment of how far the New Orleans police department has progressed since the implementation of the consent decree. “[Jeff Landry] is not talking to people in New Orleans,” Montagnes said. “He’s not holding community meetings. This is just based on his unilateral position that we should not trust the federal government, and we should get them out of our business.”

Landry has used his office to retaliate against city leaders who disagree with him on abortion criminalization and immigration enforcement, at times withholding key funding and jeopardizing important city functions with his political gamesmanship. 

In 2016, after New Orleans police adopted a policy preventing officers from inquiring about people’s immigration status, Landry helped craft a bill that would prevent so-called sanctuary cities from accessing state bond money for construction projects. The bill would have also granted him, as attorney general, sole authority to define what a “sanctuary city” actually was—under his definition, New Orleans was the only municipality that qualified. 

Some lawmakers worried that the bill would give Landry too much power, and could place the city in conflict with its own consent decree. New Orleans, meanwhile, maintained that its police force’s anti-discrimination policies, including its best practices around immigration status, came at the behest of the federal government itself. Versions of the bill died in 2016, 2017 and 2023. 

In late 2022, Landry used his position on the Louisiana State Bond Commission to try and hold up $39 million dollars in flood prevention funding for New Orleans after the city council passed a non-binding resolution related to Louisiana’s harsh new abortion law, which lacks rape or incest exceptions. The city resolution requested that police and prosecutors make investigation and enforcement of the law “the lowest priority.” 

Landry responded by urging the commission to “use the tools at our disposal to bring them to heel.” Initially, his fellow commissioners seemed to agree, voting twice to stop the funding from moving forward. But their support crumbled, culminating in a tense, at times openly hostile meeting in September in which the board ultimately voted to approve the funding. “To use this commission as a political maneuver is not our position—shouldn’t be our position, I feel,” said Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, claiming he hadn’t realized how the representative he had sent to previous meetings had voted.

“We’re talking about someone whose job it is to sit on the bond commission withholding vital infrastructure funds to punish any democratically elected local government,” said Monika Gerhart, an energy consultant and the former director of intergovernmental relations for the city of New Orleans. Gerhart is currently consulting on policy for Shawn Wilson, one of Landry’s chief opponents.

Gerhart believes that Landry’s ultimate goal wasn’t even to punish New Orleans, but rather to force his fellow commissioners, several of whom were also considering a run for governor, to vote to signal their anti-abortion bona fides, inevitably angering a large municipality whose residents would soon go to the polls to choose whether to elect them as governor. He has since announced that he will not run, but at the time, Nungesser was considered Landry’s most viable Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race; another commissioner, State Treasurer John Schroeder, is a more centrist Republican whom Gerhart believes will likely seek to court New Orleans Voters, especially if the race were to come down to a run-off between him and Landry.

“It was a completely manufactured crisis,” she added. “I think it’s a really dangerous way to prioritize politics over governance.” 

Landry is, of course, running to be governor of the entire state. But Reilly believes Landry sees it as more advantageous to scapegoat New Orleans in order to rally his base than he does to seek out its residents’ votes. In Louisiana, he said, “you can win an election on all rural votes. You can win an election on all white votes.” 

And so far, those are the very voters Landry seems to be courting with his campaign. He aligned himself with Trump early on and received his endorsement, and he has woven his critiques of New Orleans into a larger “tough on crime” platform. His main Democratic opponent, Wilson, meanwhile, is charting a moderate approach, emphasizing his statewide leadership experience and credentials; his slogan is “We need leaders who will build bridges, not burn them.” 

If Landry wins control of Louisiana’s executive branch, he would have the power to staff many of Louisiana’s more than 500 boards and commissions, including a number with direct power over the state’s criminal legal system, such as the Committee on Parole, the State Police Commission, the Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) council, and the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. Landry would also have ultimate say over the state’s budget;. the office’s line-item-veto power means that Landry would have the ability to, with the stroke of a pen, edit the state’s budget in order to divert resources away from New Orleans and other cities when they adopt policies he doesn’t like. 

Critics of Laundry’s who spoke to Bolts fear he would go even further in inserting the state into New Orleans politics on issues like crime, homelessness, and social and cultural issues—much like Governor Ron DeSantis has done in Florida. 

“There’s this incredibly complicated relationship between the remainder of our state and New Orleans,” said Montagnes. New Orleans is the center of business and tourism in Louisiana, she said, “but I think it becomes a bogeyman on cultural, social issues, and I think that Jeff Landry is really particularly interested in dividing people of Louisiana based along those issues. And so we’d be an easy target.” 

The post Jeff Landry’s Bid for Louisiana Governor Has Been a Crusade Against Its Cities appeared first on Bolts.

“People know that our shower list fills up quickly,” Beddis said. She says the drop in center is one of only two places unhoused people in Kensington can consistently take a shower. Visitors can also pick up safer use supplies like drug testing strips, get clean clothes and snacks, or simply hang out—lounging and chatting under the center’s neon purple lights and framed posters of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

“It really is a community,” Beddis said. “If somebody spills their coffee, we have our regulars that will jump up and be like, ‘Just give me the mop. I’ll take care of it,’ you know what I mean?”

Kensington and the people who live, work, and use drugs in this small neighborhood on the city’s northeast side have drawn scrutiny in the run up to Philadelphia’s May 16 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the city’s next mayor.

In a tightly-run race animated by issues of crime and public safety, debates on substance use have honed in on Kensington’s opioid crisis and significant unhoused population. All five of the leading candidates say the city needs to end what’s widely described as an “open-air drug market” and increase policing in the neighborhood. At least two of these candidates also propose raising the police budget. 

But local critics of a law enforcement-first approach to substance use worry that it may elevate overdose risks and perpetuate harm against people who use drugs, especially in Black and Latinx communities that already experience more policing. Instead, they hope the city’s next mayor will embrace harm reduction—a set of public health and social justice strategies aimed at protecting the dignity, autonomy, and rights of people who use drugs.

The city government’s response to substance use and the overdose crisis has thus far involved a complex patchwork of departments including police, public health, behavioral health, and homelessness services, and dozens of others, with guidance from the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, grassroots organizers in the city are locked in a years-long battle with state and federal officials to create a space for safer drug consumption. The proposal, championed by a nonprofit called Safehouse, has enjoyed some support from city officials since 2018 but has been delayed by lawsuits and now state legislation, even as similar sites have appeared in New York City. 

The next mayor will oversee the city’s response to the ongoing overdose crisis and shape its policies, wielding powers like its budget proposals, executive orders, or appointing the police commissioner. The mayor’s position on an overdose prevention site may also make or break the proposal in light of some state politicians’ ongoing efforts to preempt the sites. 

“The next mayor must take research about the effectiveness of harm reduction techniques seriously,” said Shoshana Aronowitz, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing who studies racial equity in substance use treatment and works with several harm reduction organizations across the city. 

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

Over 1,200 Philadelphians died of accidental overdoses in 2021—the highest number ever recorded. The potent opioid fentanyl has found its way into stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and an increasingly unpredictable drug supply, plus a lack of adequate prevention resources are driving up overdose rates citywide, especially in its Black and Latinx communities. A 2021 city report recommended using the phrase “overdose crisis” rather than “opioid crisis” to more adequately capture this impact. 

Much of Philadelphia’s current response infrastructure dates to 2017, when Mayor Jim Kenney convened a task force to determine how to “combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.” The task force’s final report called for easier access to medication assisted treatment, in which doctors prescribe drugs called methadone and buprenorphine to relieve withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of overdose. It also advocated increasing access to naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, expanding drug treatment court, and providing additional resources for housing and jobs training. 

As fatal overdose rates continued to increase, however, Kenney declared an “opioid emergency” in Kensington and directed law enforcement to reduce “open-air drug use and sales.” Since then, the police have increased foot patrols in the neighborhood, seizing cash and drugs and making over 2,500 arrests in 2022 alone.

Since 2020, a harm reduction program within the city’s department of public health has been distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips through street-based outreach and training Philadelphians on how to spot and reverse overdoses. The city also funds some of the work of a Kensington-based harm reduction nonprofit offering syringe exchanges. And the department of health has committed to reducing overdoses that involve stimulants 20 percent by the end of 2023, according to its strategic plan. 

All five leading mayoral candidates have expressed some vision of treatment for people who use drugs, but Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s proposals most resemble this existing plan. Both have expressed support for medication assisted treatment. 

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate would “improve prevention, [drug] testing, and treatment outreach,” especially in “underserved Black communities in North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, where overdose rates are rising.”

Candidate Jeff Brown has advocated for drug treatment through the criminal legal system. 

“Drug court [is] a very effective way to have a good outcome, because you monitor their substance use. If they fall off the wagon, they have a choice. Do you want to go to jail for your crimes, or do you want to go back to treatment?” he said at a recent candidate forum about public health.

But Aronowitz warns that not all treatment options are created equal. “We know what doesn’t work,” Aronowitz said, “And that is expecting people to just quit cold turkey and be fine, because we know that that’s associated with extreme overdose risk.” 

“When a politician says we need more access to treatment, that’s not enough,”she continued. “We need to know if they’re going to fund the things that work and defund the things that not only don’t work but are potentially harmful.” 

The battle over Safehouse

Advocates doing harm reduction work in Philadelphia are pushing the city government to expand its focus on keeping people alive, beyond offering treatment, and they have fought to establish an overdose prevention site in Philadelphia, an effort the city government nominally supports. Such sites, also known as safe drug consumption sites, are places people can use pre-obtained drugs more safely, in the presence of staff trained to spot and reverse overdoses. 

As of July 2022, more than 120 overdose prevention sites existed in ten countries across the world, and no fatal overdoses had ever taken place in one. But they remain controversial in the United States. So far, only two such sites exist in the country, both in New York City, where staff have reversed more than 700 overdoses in the less than two years since they were created. Rhode Island legalized the creation of a pilot site in summer 2021 and is set to open one in early 2024. California governor Gavin Newsom last year killed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to establish their own sites. 

In Philadelphia, efforts to open such a site have been caught for years in a protracted battle pitting harm reduction advocates and some city officials like DA Larry Krasner against the U.S. Justice Department, some state politicians, and opponents in law enforcement, business, and residential communities across the city. 

The struggle dates to a recommendation from Mayor Kenney’s 2017 opioid crisis task force to explore creating a space for safe consumption. In 2018, a nonprofit called Safehouse launched with the aim of opening a site in the city. But soon after, a U.S. Attorney appointed by President Donald Trump sued Safehouse invoking a federal law which prohibits “maintaining drug-involved premises” where criminalized drugs are manufactured, distributed, or used. 

In February 2020, the federal judge’s ruling in Safehouse’s favor led the group’s leaders to announce the site’s imminent opening in South Philadelphia. But after vehement opposition from neighbors, the plans folded in just two days. In 2021, a federal appeals court reversed the ruling that had cleared the way for Safehouse to open, relaunching the legal battle.

The plan remains uncertain at this time. Settlement talks between Safehouse and the U.S. Justice Department have been ongoing for over a year. Local opposition exploded last month, when a group including the police union and business associations filed a petition to step in as party plaintiffs in the lawsuit, fearing that the Biden Administration would reverse its position. 

Opponents to the site scored a decisive win earlier this month when Pennsylvania’s state Senate voted to ban overdose prevention sites anywhere in the state on a bipartisan 41-9 vote.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Christine Tartaglione, whose district includes parts of Kensington. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she opposes “prolonging and allowing a system of state-sponsored addiction in Pennsylvania.” 

The bill now sits in the state House’s Judiciary Committee. If it passed the chamber, it would move on to Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has indicated he opposes safe consumption sites.

Meanwhile, five Philadelphia city council members introduced a local bill on May 11 that would prevent an overdose prevention site from being created anywhere in their districts, an area amounting to about half the city. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, led the effort, saying that such a site would only worsen the neighborhood’s struggles with drug consumption. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to find ways where they can continue to remain in the same cycle,” she told Inquirer. The bill would still need to get a committee hearing and be voted on by the entire city council—a process that may not happen before the council’s summer recess beginning in July—before going to the mayor to be signed. 

In public statements and court filings, Kenney’s administration has supported efforts to open an overdose prevention site, and remains supportive even in light of the new city and statewide bills. Whether the next mayor supports Safehouse would likely be critical to its chances given that the proposal is assailed from many quarters.

Among mayoral candidates, Helen Gym, a former teacher and city council member embraced by activists on the left, is the only one to have directly stated support for an overdose prevention site, though she did so before the protracted legal battle over Safehouse. 

“[Safe injection sites] are among the most promising new approaches to come forward while we work to end the opioid crisis. I support establishing one in Philadelphia,” Gym said in 2017. Her statement at the time added momentum for the proposal by giving it a prominent supporter on the city council. Gym has recently offered more circumspect answers in public comments, and did not respond to Bolts’ question about whether she currently supports opening a site in the city.

Another leading candidate, former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, expressed measured support for the proposal. “I won’t take a tool that experts say saves lives off the table,” she told Bolts. “But I would not put a safe injection site in any neighborhood that does not want one.”

“I think that the debate over safe injection sites in Philadelphia has clouded the bigger issue which is what is the comprehensive plan for dealing with the opioid crisis in our city,” she added. 

Three other major contenders—real estate mogul and former councilor Allan Domb, grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, and former councilor Cherelle Parker—all oppose the sites. Parker has been a strident opponent since Safehouse’s efforts to open a site in early 2020, when she participated in the city council’s mobilization against the opening. 

“We should not be participating in a ‘I know what’s best for you’ decision making where we use safe injection sites as solutions,” Parker said in a debate on April 18.

Policing a public health crisis

The role of policing has proved broadly divisive in the mayoral primary, and yet the five leading candidates support increasing police presence on the ground in Kensington, distancing themselves from advocates who worry it would exacerbate criminalization. 

Gym and Rhynhart each said they would do so by reallocating existing police funds to prioritize Kensington, while increasing the police budget overall is a central component of both Domb and Parker’s platforms.

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate will take a “public health and resident-focused, community-led response,” mentioning a focus on neighborhood improvements, trauma support, and mobile crisis units, but did not detail how increased policing will fit in. 

Rhynhart’s campaign website states that she will attempt to disrupt public drug use by focusing on dealers, with a mix of warnings for “non-violent dealers” and arrests for “those committing violent acts.”

Sheila Vakharia, who helps lead research at the Drug Policy Alliance, warns that the line between people using drugs and people selling drugs is much more fluid. 

“There’s this idea that there is this big bad demon-ish seller and this poor victim user and oftentimes the seller is racialized. The victim is also racialized, but differently,” Vakharia said. “And oftentimes all of this can create heroes and villains.”

To both Aronowitz and Beddis of Savage Sisters, ending the overdose crisis requires a solution beyond what has been proposed by any candidate in the Philadelphia mayor’s race: addressing the toxicity of the criminalized drug market. They argue instead for access to a safe supply of criminalized drugs in a way that clinical and community-led programs have modeled across Europe and Canada, but which has not been piloted in the U.S.

“The way we regulate alcohol is safe supply,” Aronowitz said. “We make sure it’s not poison, and that when you take a drink, you can reliably know how much alcohol is in it.” 

But even if those goals are still far off, at the very least, they say, the city government should meet communities impacted by the overdose crisis with resources and care—not criminalization.

“Our friends have necrotic limbs. Can’t access treatment. Can’t access housing. Can’t access compassionate pain management. Can’t even get a shower,” Savage Sisters’ founder and executive director Sarah Laurel wrote on LinkedIn last month.

“It’s time we respond to this public health crisis accordingly.”

The post How Will Philadelphia’s Next Mayor Tackle the Overdose Crisis? appeared first on Bolts.

The conservative politicians in charge of Tennessee’s state government have relentlessly aimed in the last year to diminish the political power of the state’s most populous and liberal-leaning city by curtailing Nashville’s representation in Congress, shrinking the size of its Metro Council, investigating the operations of its district attorney, and now attempting to interfere in its electoral processes.   

Most recently, Republican state Representative Jason Zachary and Senator Brent Taylor proposed a bill that would, if passed, ban runoffs in all municipal elections within the state. 

For solidly-liberal Nashville, the bill’s passage could have meant an upheaval for the upcoming mayoral election this August. The city’s elections are nominally nonpartisan, but Democrats have consistently won the mayor’s office for decades. Runoffs are common in the city’s mayoral elections, where the vote is often split between several Democrats and a few Republicans. Traditionally, after a consolidated voting bloc emerges following eliminations in a first round, a Democrat carries the mayoral election handily. The elimination of runoffs in Nashville’s mayoral elections would have opened the door for a Republican to win the position based on a plurality, even if the majority of votes go to Democrats.

Senate Bill 1527 was initially filed with placeholder language, but just before a hearing in the Senate’s State and Local Government Committee on March 14, Taylor brought two amendments explicitly banning local runoff elections. The entire bill was tabled before the amendments were approved and it has been deferred to the committee’s first 2024 convening, where it’s likely to resurface.  

But even though this year’s election remains unaffected by this proposed change, candidates for mayor, Democratic legislators, and local activists within Nashville have been loud in their opposition to the measure, and remain wary of similar moves being made in the 2024 session and beyond.

They point to the proposal as part of an alarming trend of conservative legislative attacks that threaten Nashville’s ability to be represented earnestly, and demonstrate a new approach for red states to skirt the voting rights of resistant communities in blue localities. They warn that this pattern, which has begun to reverberate throughout the region, signals a new era for voter suppression in the Deep South.

“This is not an isolated incident. This is an abuse of power,” said Senator Charlane Oliver, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Nashville. “This is about control.”

Before it was delayed, SB 1527 had amassed significant support among Tennessee Republicans, including vocal backing from state party chair Scott Golden, who claimed that the bill’s passage would “get local races in line with the rest of the state.” Taylor, one of the bill’s sponsors, had pointed to the state’s troubled history as a reason for advancing the legislation. “Runoffs are a relic of the Jim Crow South. They were designed to prevent minorities from winning elections,” Taylor told the Nashville Banner.

Taylor is right in pointing out this history—runoffs were initially introduced in Southern states as a way to prevent Black voters from winning elections based upon pluralities, with the runoff stage therefore allowing white majorities to consolidate behind a single, often anti-civil rights, candidate. However, scholars have pointed to Black voters’ integration into the political system to argue that the era’s context matters, and that in most contemporary elections—and in Tennessee’s in particular—this runoff disadvantage no longer seems to occur. Runoffs today are common in local elections throughout the state, especially in its three largest cities of Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. All three cities currently have Democratic mayors.

Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat who represents Nashville in the legislature—and who recently announced his candidacy for mayor—sees this bill as undermining the city’s elections, especially considering that Nashville is Tennessee’s most racially diverse city. “The problem with this bill, like so many election bills in recent years, is that there’s an attempt to change the outcomes of local elections, as opposed to changing the process,” he told Bolts. “This bill seems aimed at achieving partisan ends more so than democracy.”

“Any bill that is designed to eliminate an entire election procedure, by design, is voter suppression,” said Oliver. She recently won her seat in the state senate after a notable career as a voting rights and racial justice activist, co-leading The Equity Alliance. In the legislature, her experience as an organizer has shaped her perspective. “These efforts to stifle opposition and silence voices are an attack on democracy.”

SB 1527 comes on the heels of a number of legislative measures that would increase the state government’s authority over Nashville’s local proceedings and hamstring the city’s ability to elect officials that align with the city’s political makeup. 

In the 2020 presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden got nearly twice as many votes as Republican Donald Trump in Davidson County, which contains Nashville. Shortly after, in the 2020 redistricting cycle, Tennessee Republicans eliminated Nashville’s congressional seat, splintering the city into three new congressional districts, all favoring the more conservative rural communities outside of the city. The 5th District, which contains the largest chunk of the city, is currently represented by U.S. Representative Andy Ogles, who is the first Republican to represent Nashville in Congress since 1875. 

In early March, Governor Bill Lee signed into law a reduction of Nashville’s city council size, cutting the council in half from 40 members, to 20. The measure, which sped through the legislature, does not name Nashville explicitly, but was still designed to target the city, which is the only one that currently has more than 20 members. It also overrides a 2015 referendum in which Nashville residents voted overwhelmingly to maintain the size of the Metro Council. The city government immediately sued to have it blocked, but if it is allowed to stand, it will impact the upcoming city council elections, also taking place this August. 

Additional bills currently moving through the legislature would eliminate funding for Nashville’s convention center and offer authority to state officials to oversee the Nashville airport. 

At the same time, state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Glenn Funk, the Democratic District Attorney of Davidson County over whether his team violated state wiretapping laws with cameras that were placed around the office. This investigation comes months after Funk said that he would not prosecute abortion after Tennessee’s abortion ban took effect in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

“This is a coordinated attack,” said Oliver. “We have to sound the alarm. And this isn’t just an attack on Nashville—if you can do it to Nashville, who’s next? Memphis?” 

The actions of Tennessee politicians follow a pattern of other states with conservative legislatures using their authority to exert control over the policies of growing liberal cities and counties. This happens by way of preemption, a doctrine that allows state governments to restrict or overrule the powers of local governments. Preemption has at times been used to maintain equality and uniformity of application of environmental or labor laws, for instance. But states have more recently wielded preemption as a political tool to strip municipalities of their autonomy and representation—blocking local ordinances dealing with everything from housing and minimum wage to immigration and, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion access and reproductive rights.

“Unfortunately, what Nashville is facing is not unique,” said Marissa Roy, the legal team lead at the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization working to strengthen local democracy and combat abuse of preemption. “Increasingly, state preemption has aimed at ideological outcomes without considering the long-term consequences for local governance.” Roy points to a bill being considered in Florida that would allow companies to sue local governments over measures they disagree with, and another in Texas that would wrest away local governments’ regulatory powers over agriculture, labor, and other areas. 

“Preemption is both bad governance and anti-democratic. Laws that reduce the size of the Nashville City Council, for example, impede more community-based representation,” she added. “Ultimately, these laws undermine the will of voters, who should be the ones to choose their representatives and vote for the policy platforms they support, without the risk of state reversal through preemption.”

In southern states in particular, preemptive legislation has taken aim at voting and criminal legal systems. In Mississippi, the legislature is considering a bill to create a separate court system for the city of Jackson, empowering white state officials to oversee criminal proceedings in a city that boasts one of the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. In Missouri, conservative legislators are attempting to strip St. Louis’s control of their metro police force, instead shifting authority to the state’s governor. 

“The playbook has always been there,” said Oliver. “The Southern strategy never left.”

In Nashville, these legislative attacks on enfranchisement and political autonomy go hand in hand with efforts to change local identity, and have tangible impacts within the community. In early March, following the governor’s signature on a bill banning public drag performances and gender-affirming healthcare for minors, white supremacists unfurled a banner in Nashville’s city center displaying a swastika and transphobic slurs, explicitly thanking Lee for “[securing] a future for white children.” 

Sharon Hurt, an at-large council member for the city of Nashville, and current candidate for mayor, traces the city’s current tension in its relationship with the state, back to the Nashville Metro Council’s decision last year to reject state GOP officials’ bid to have Nashville host the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

“They’re using their power because they’re upset that we did not vote to bring the Republican National Convention here,” said Hurt. “They felt like Democrats were denying Republicans from coming [to Nashville]. They’re now attacking us to show the power that they have.”

As Nashville continues to grow both in population and in national profile, the tension surrounding efforts to court the 2024 Republican National Convention highlights both the state’s interest in shaping Nashville’s image as a major conservative urban center, and local leaders’ and activists’ united resistance against this portrayal. Nashville has a history of being a locus of progressive activism in the South—going back to John Lewis and Diane Nash’s infamous 1960 lunch counter sit-ins. 

“Cities develop their own political cultures,” Yarbro said, “and Nashville is conditioned to have these wide-open debates that ultimately turn into coalition-building exercises… That’s really conducive to good politics and the kind of coalition-building that a mayor needs, not just to win a runoff election, but to lead a city. [However], there’s a dangerous national trend to advance minoritarian politics, where a cohesive minority can achieve disproportionate political power and control.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming mayoral election, recently spared from the threat of eliminated runoffs, Hurt sees the time between now and 2024’s legislative session—the period in which SB 1527 could resurface—as an opportunity to convince the legislature to change course. 

“It gives us time to change their perspective,” said Hurt, emphasizing that the change will only occur if the Nashville community puts up a fierce fight between now and then. “One thing that I love about Nashville is that in the most catastrophic and challenging times, is when the best of our city comes out. This bill may be a divisive move, but it is not our destiny. There is hope. I don’t care how bleak it looks.”  

Nashville’s representatives fear that more hits may be coming but say they’ll keep speaking loudly against these moves by the state government, urging organizing efforts, and looking for allies in the court system. 

“When you’re outnumbered [in the legislature], there’s really not much you can do other than speak out in hopes that the courts will step in,” said Oliver, who is one of only six Democrats in the 33-member Senate. Oliver and other Senate Democrats are vocal on social media about these bills—often posting direct clips and videos from committee hearings to emphasize the state of play. 

“We have to begin to really start to talk to one another and strategize together to fight these bills off from a selfless place,” she said, “because if it’s not me tomorrow, it’s you today.”

The post How the Tennessee GOP is Trying to Mute Music City appeared first on Bolts.

Compared to the larger electorate that votes in a presidential or midterm year, off-cycle elections tend to see depressed turnout and draw a wealthier and whiter electorate, which can skew whose interests are spoken for in local politics, research shows.

“This reform makes it such that the power of the people is shared among the whole community,” Chelsea Castellano, an organizer who helped champion Ballot Question 2E to move city council elections in Boulder, Colorado, from odd- to even-numbered cycles, told Bolts. She said the status quo was “keeping voter turnout small and low and among certain groups that are typically pretty well represented on our council.” Question 2E passed easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Election data show that turnout in Boulder hasn’t topped 51 percent in any of the odd-numbered years, when its municipal elections were held, between 2013 and 2021. In the even-numbered years of that same span, city turnout averaged 83 percent.

The drop-off is similarly dramatic in jurisdictions around the country that elect local leaders in odd-numbered years. In San Francisco, which also just passed a ballot measure to move its local elections to even-numbered years, turnout averaged 43 percent in off-cycle years but 80 percent in presidential election years.

Voters in nine other localities also approved measures this year to move their elections to even-year cycles, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia. They Include St. Petersburg, Florida; in King County (Seattle), Washington; and in San Jose, Long Beach, and five other California cities. 

This wave of changes came among a series of reforms to election procedures that voters approved last week with an aim of increasing voter participation and turnout. In Connecticut and Michigan, voters codified more days of early voting into state constitutions. Voters in Oakland, California passed two measures enabling noncitizen voting in certain elections and creating a public funding program that allows more voters to financially back candidates of their choice.  

In Boulder, Castellano and her allies hope that moving municipal elections away from off-cycles will engage more people of color, low-income earners, and students (Boulder is home to the University of Colorado), making for an electorate more reflective of the actual populace. Another local progressive organizer, former city council candidate Eric Budd, said he hopes this encourages candidates to run on issues that matter to a larger and more diverse set, as opposed to catering to the narrower group of off-cycle voters.

“Back when I was running,” in 2017, Budd said, “a lot of people were giving me the advice that you need to run a really moderate message, to appeal to homeowners.” Looking back at his own platform from that campaign makes him cringe, he added: “The way I was talking about occupancy limits was very guarded, the way I was talking about duplexes. … I think (2E passing) really shifts not only the people that are running, but the platforms that we’re running on.”

Budd and Castellano advocate for housing density and more flexible zoning as tools to build a larger, more transit-oriented housing stock in the name of climate action and improved socioeconomic and racial diversity, and to address the unaffordability of Boulder, where the median home listing tops $1 million. The other, unofficial political party in Boulder has worked to beat back density and development, prizing so-called “neighborhood character” above affordability strategies and has dominated most of the modern era until recently. The pro-density urbanists previously battled the city council to place a measure on the ballot to relax occupancy limits in Boulder, then lost in the off-cycle 2021 election. Budd said they started organizing for 2E three days after that defeat.

John Tayer, head of the local chamber of commerce, which took a neutral position on Question 2E, believes that progressives are more likely to hold onto power moving forward, with the help of voters more likely to turn out in the city’s new even-year election cycle. “There’s no question that this will—and I think it’s the intended purpose of the initiative—draw out a voter pool that would skew toward the youth, lower-income and renter populations, which would then probably align with candidates of a similar character,” Tayer told Bolts.

Opponents of 2E argued that off-cycle elections mean an electorate that is more involved. “Maintain an informed vote!” argued one longtime council member in the opinion pages of Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper. Similar cries echoed from opponents of various related measures around the country.

For evidence that a larger and more diverse electorate can indeed change political makeup, the pro-2E organizers have looked to cities like Berkeley, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—like Boulder, two wealthy, small cities with major universities, where municipal elections have flipped from odd- to even-numbered years.

In Ann Arbor, this change has had the effect of wiping out all council members who strongly resist housing density and development. That city also requires partisan markers for local candidates which means that, in even-numbered years with higher turnout, conservatives have an even harder time winning in the liberal stronghold. One former Ann Arbor council member, a longtime Republican, said in 2020 that she registered as a Democrat just to have a chance. She lost by 20 percentage points that year. (Boulder’s elections remain non-partisan, though there are so few Republicans in town that one needn’t squint to discern most candidates’ affiliations based on their policy proposals.)

Surveying the nation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego found shifts in power are not surprising, given the “unequivocal” finding that, “Across the nation, turnout in cities with on-cycle elections is dramatically higher than those with off-cycle elections.” Moving municipal elections to presidential years produces an average turnout boost of 29 percent, the researchers wrote, as higher-profile races draw more people to ballot boxes in those years.

Inspired by this data and the passage of 2E, Colorado state Representative Judy Amabile, a Democrat of Boulder, told Bolts she is now working on a bill to lift the state prohibition on school board elections in even-numbered years. 

And just to the east, in the city of Aurora, progressive council member Juan Marcano is pushing for changes that he believes will better align the local government with its broader citizenry. Aurora, with a population of nearly 400,000 people and greater racial and ethnic diversity than any other city in the state, is clearly liberal: Its congressman, U.S. Representative Jason Crow, is a Democrat who just coasted to reelection. Its state legislative delegation is almost entirely Democratic. And yet the city council, elected in non-partisan races in odd-numbered years, is controlled by conservatives. In the most recent municipal election there, turnout was only at 30 percent, city data show. Nearly three times as many registered Aurora voters turned out for the 2020 presidential election, the Sentinel newspaper reported.

Aurora has had some exceptionally close local elections in recent years—most notably, the former Republican U.S. Representative Mike Coffman won the 2019 mayoral race by about 200 votes over Democratic local NAACP chapter president Omar Montgomery—and Marcano believes his side stands a good chance at flipping power in November of 2023. If it does, he said, he’d like to refer to voters amendments to the city charter that would make local elections partisan and place them on even-numbered years. 

“They know that if we had the opportunity to actually have more attention shown to municipal elections, coinciding with when more people are turning out, that they would likely not prevail, to put it politely,” Marcano told Bolts. “They’re relying on low turnout and the disproportionate white, wealthy and conservative voters that turn out for municipal elections.”

The idea, he said, is to meet voters where they’re at. He likened it to designed sidewalks and bike trails.

“You’re going to find the social trails out in the world, and that tells you where the sidewalks should be,” Marcano said. “What we’re seeing from our residents is they want to vote in even years. That’s when they turn out, so it’s our responsibility to allow people to follow the path of least resistance and to be heard when they want to be heard.”

Marcano won his race, in 2019, by 232 votes, or less than 2 percent. The state representative whose district roughly overlaps with his Aurora ward, a Democrat named Iman Jodeh, just won re-election by 28 percentage points.

Those striking numbers aren’t lost on Republican Dustin Zvonek, an Aurora council member who opposes even-numbered and partisan local elections. He said such changes would make municipal politics less personal and more nationalized, and rob city campaigns of the spotlight they presently enjoy during off-cycle elections.

“If you’re just about getting partisan majorities, I understand why you’d want to do this,” he told Bolts. “You can say there are more people that vote overall, so that’s better. But I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.”

Were Aurora to make the moves Marcano seeks, Zvonek added, there is little question that this liberal city with conservative local leaders would elect a more progressive council. “I absolutely believe that,” he said.

The post To Boost Turnout, Some Cities Just Synced Up Their Local Elections With National Cycles appeared first on Bolts.

But when news leaked this spring that the U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, that changed. Abortion is currently legal under Pennsylvania law, but state Republicans have signaled this may change if they come into power. The situation worried Radnor’s majority-female and majority-Democratic board of commissioners. “We, in different conversations, said how scary it was to see the opinion,” Radnor Board of Commissioners President Moira Mulroney told Bolts. “We knew we had the opportunity to have this discussion because of our majority status.”

Those conversations manifested into an ordinance banning local police from intervening in cases related to abortion. The ordinance passed before the Dobbs decision came out on June 24, and now municipalities across the country are following suit.

With reproductive rights now in states’ hands, local governments are challenging state statutes’ power and taking steps to protect abortion. In larger cities like Austin, Texas, where a near-total ban on abortion is already in place, the city government just passed the GRACE Act, which limits local police’s ability to intervene in abortion cases and makes investigating them the lowest priority. In Ohio, Cincinnati is exploring ways to decriminalize abortion, and Toledo is considering banning the use of city funds for prosecution of cases.   

But Radnor is among a group of smaller towns that, away from the spotlight, have begun to introduce similar measures in an effort to shield their residents from the impacts of abortion criminalization. In South Fulton, Georgia, where a 6-week ban is instituted, the mayor proposed a resolution that seeks to limit city funding for the surveillance and investigation of abortion, and also deprioritizes prosecution. Denton, Texas recently passed an ordinance with similar language.   

The efficacy of these measures remains to be seen. Efforts by local governments to decriminalize a behavior may depend on the willingness of local police departments to comply, though police chiefs themselves are often appointed by municipal leaders. In addition, powerful state actors  are already maneuvering to preempt local governments’ authority to regulate law enforcement, though their ability to do so will depend largely on state-specific rules. The future of abortion rights will also depend on the way courts interpret state constitutions, and laws introduced by state legislatures to either protect or prohibit abortion. But many proponents of reproductive rights see these city-level ordinances as a way to do their part, even if it’s through more experimental legislation, in the absence of federally-protected abortion rights. 

The town of Denton, Texas, a suburb of just under 150,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth region that has seen Democratic gains in recent local elections, took action days after Dobbs. Alison Maguire, a Denton city council member and leader of their push, said activists reached out to her with the idea shortly after Politico reported on the U.S. Supreme Court’s plans in May. Their resolution bans city funds from being used for investigating abortion cases and makes prosecutions of the lowest priority for police. 

“We have the authority to direct the use of local funds and resources,” Maguire said about why she believed the city council should act. “This is a tool we have at our disposal potentially to protect our residents from being investigated and arrested for things that shouldn’t be crimes.”

Maguire pushed for Denton to consider their resolution quickly, as she wanted it to be in place before a trigger law, which bans nearly all abortions and increases the penalties for abortion providers, could go into effect. It passed on June 28, just months before Texas’ ban is set to kick in on August 25. “We were staring down the barrel of a very large portion of our population being criminalized for seeking healthcare,” Maguire said. “It was an emergency and it had to move fast.”

In Radnor, there is no statewide trigger law to race against. Abortion rights are currently protected in Pennsylvania, though a governor’s race this November will decide the future of abortion. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has vetoed anti-abortion legislation that the Republican legislature has considered, but if Republican nominee Doug Mastriano, a far-right lawmaker, wins that dynamic could change. He has introduced legislation to ban abortions if a heartbeat is detected and called for the general assembly to pass it after Roe was overturned. Radnor’s ordinance, therefore, was proactive, and will only take effect if state law changes. But Mulroney said it was necessary to do this now instead of waiting. “We are in a battle with people who have been doing this for decades,” she said. “It was important to let the state know local jurisdictions are already concerned.” 

In Denton, home to several colleges, the younger population made action more pressing. “We have a disproportionate number of residents who may find themselves in need of abortion,” Maguire said. (Nationally, 57 percent of abortions in 2019 occurred for people aged 20-29.) It’s why Maguire thinks there was also a public outcry in the lead-up to their vote. 1,000 people demonstrated publicly outside the city council as they passed their resolution, and Maguire thinks it’s partially why it survived the narrow 4-3 vote. 

Radnor’s ordinance also passed by a 4-3 margin. One of those objectors was Sean Farhy, a member of the board of commissioners and a self-described pro-choice Democrat. But this isn’t an issue he thinks that local government should be involved in.

“Abortion is not something that’s regulated at a township level,” he said. “It’s state level, federal level. It’s not what we do.” Farhy is particularly concerned with using police standards to protect abortion. “Potentially politicizing our police is terrible.” He said the issue will be decided in the governor’s race this November, an election he fears the potential consequences of if Mastriano wins. 

Local law enforcement and DAs typically have wide discretion to determine their priorities and practices, though their decisions may meet pushback. The chief prosecutor of the county that contains Radnor, Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, has said he would not prosecute abortion cases if abortion were to be banned in Pennsylvania. 

Denton Mayor Gerard Hudspeth also voted no on Denton’s resolution. He believes it contradicts his duty to enforce the law. “We can’t subvert the laws, because what does that communicate to the citizens?” he asked. “You go advocate and change laws, but you don’t ignore the laws.” 

Denton’s city manager, an appointed position that is separate from the mayor, has staked a similar position: She said in a letter that the city council does not have the authority to determine the level of enforcement of crimes for city police, or prohibit city funds from being used for investigating abortion cases.

In a follow-up letter, City Manager Sara Hensley said the the chief of police told her they will not engage in unsolicited investigation, surveillance, or collection of data related to cases involving abortions; but Hensley also said abortion is illegal and violations can be investigated. Denton County DA Paul Johnson has not come out against prosecuting abortion cases that are brought to him, as other Texas DAs have. For his part, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he will aid local DAs in prosecuting abortion cases. 

The Denton city manager’s refusal to implement the resolution leaves the future of the policy uncertain, to the point both Maguire and Hudspeth don’t know for sure how effective it will be at protecting people against investigation and prosecution in the near term.

What Denton and Radnor are doing represents “intense inter-jurisdictional conflict,” according to Rachel Rebouché, dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law. She said municipal codes will determine how much authority cities have to weigh in on abortion criminalization, but the essential question of whether these measures will succeed comes down to an investment of resources: “How much money is the state willing to expend to enforce a law against townships and cities that defy it? How much money and time are places like Radnor willing to invest to try to undermine a statewide law?”

Rebouché also said this situation could change if states decide to pass new measures to preempt local governments’ discretion. She pointed to a proposed law in Texas that allows DAs to pursue abortion-related charges in jurisdictions not their own to get around local DAs saying they won’t prosecute abortion cases. Similar laws could be used to weaken the authority of municipalities in controlling police and city funds on this issue. States, including Texas, have already passed laws to limit city governments’ authority to direct police action, on issues like immigraiton enforcement, for example. 

Jenny Dodson Mistry, an expert in local policy on reproductive health rights and justice at the National Institute for Reproductive Health, echoed this sentiment. She called ordinances and resolutions like these a step in the right direction for cities looking to protect abortion rights, but localities need to be cautious when creating them. “Other actors can step in and intervene. The attorney general, if they’re anti-abortion, could still go ahead and prosecute,” she said. “If a city passes an ordinance or resolution like that, we think they should work with experts in law to understand the risks folks may still face.”

Currently there are no abortion clinics in Radnor, but township commissioners still passed this ordinance with the intent to protect residents from criminalization for any number of pregnancy outcomes. Mulroney believes the fact a Radnor police officer won’t participate in prosecutions against reproductive care is a successful direction of resources they control. “This shows our board is willing to be creative and innovative, and I’m really proud.”

Mulroney is proud that Radnor is encouraging and working with other nearby communities to help them pass similar policies. It’s a move to make their movement stronger, and make a clear signal to the state. In the middle of July, the borough of West Chester, located in the county neighboring Radnor, began exploring preventing police from enforcing anti-abortion laws after engaging in disscussions with Radnor. 

Municipalities can do more, too. Mistry is encouraging using local budgets to fund residents’ travel to seek care, direct funding to abortion funds, and public education campaigns about how to access care. The Atlanta City Council voted unanimously to donate $300,000 to an abortion fund, and St. Louis is using federal funds to help connect residents with help to get access to abortion care. 

Neither Maguire nor Mulroney said they were planning on taking more steps on this issue. But they have already challenged the narrative that only states will determine the future of reproductive rights. Maguire said the resolution will be successful, at least in her mind, if it helps even one person.

“If there is even one Denton resident who needs an abortion and is able to get one safely without being subjected to scrutiny from law enforcement,” she said, “then this resolution is a success.”

The post How Small Towns Are Working to Protect Abortion Rights from State Threats appeared first on Bolts.