On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” contractor, shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement. “I don’t want to have to be doing this today, but direct action and civil disobedience are the only options we have left.” Both activists were arrested and jailed.

In a way, the movement was returning to its roots. In 2021, the fight to stop Cop City began with direct action. After two years of protest, organizers extended their effort to the ballot box. Some felt it was critical to let Atlantans weigh in directly on the construction of a vast new law enforcement training center—and they were betting that the will of the people would ultimately come down on their side. On a more practical level, a referendum campaign struck Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the Cop City vote coalition, as a straightforward process with delineated steps and rules: a signature collection phase, a break while the city verified them, then on to a massive voter turnout effort. “We were like, ‘This seems very clear in terms of the path that we need to be walking on,’” she recalled. 

As it turns out, the path has been anything but clear. The Atlanta city government has thrown up barriers at every turn, miring the petition gathering and signature approval process in bureaucratic and legal delays. The city has even drawn the ire of mainstream Democratic politicians and voting rights groups in its attempts to deploy classic forms of voter restriction. 

These roadblocks were made possible by the fact that the organizers are essentially starting from zero. Atlanta has never hosted a citizen-led referendum before, and therefore has few established structures in place to govern the process. “So much of what happened over the course of the past two years was entirely preventable, had we had a codified process that allowed everyone to know what the rules of the game were,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder and executive director of Atlanta’s Center for Civic Innovation.

Since last September, Malhotra and others have sought to address this conundrum by drafting local legislation that would clarify the referendum process, now and for the future. That, too, has been met with interference from the mayor’s office. On Monday, the Atlanta city council finally passed legislation codifying rules and regulations for a referendum. But not before an 11th hour substitution that reintroduced signature matching, a form of verification that national voting rights groups have decried as burdensome and discriminatory. “Our ask was simple—we just wanted you to protect democracy.” Malhotra said during public comment this week. “This body has continued to break its word and to break our hearts.”

Now, as the Stop Cop City movement continues to wait for a federal appeals court to hand down a decision about the legality of the petition gathering process, there are still 16 boxes of five month-old signatures sitting untouched in City Hall. But, amidst this uncertainty, external deadlines are fast approaching. The referendum was originally supposed to appear on last November’s ballot, and it’s already too late for this year’s March presidential primary election, too. Organizers are now debating whether to aim for the ballot in May, when local primaries happen, or wait until November, when the presidential election might force Democrats nationally to weigh in on the fight, given Georgia’s battleground status. If the decision comes late enough, and city officials keep stalling, the choice may be made for them.

“If the city of Atlanta was really invested in elevating the voices of its residents, they would at least be ready,” said Analilia Mejia, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a national network of 50 organizations, three of which are local to Atlanta, that is supporting the referendum effort “They wouldn’t be running a clock.” 

From the beginning, Cop City has revealed the fault lines present in Atlanta’s system of representative democracy. Organizers started talking about the possibility of a popular referendum as early as September 2021. That was the month the city council first decided, over strenuous public opposition, to turn hundreds of acres of land in Atlanta’s South River Forest over to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which planned to build a massive training center for law enforcement and first responders—replete with a mock city to practice quelling street protests, an explosives test site, and multiple gun ranges. “By September (2021) it is clear that there’s organized money and organized special interests pushing this,” said Mejia. “It then becomes clear to us that we need organized people and some organized money to counter it.”

After almost two years of protest, the push to bring Cop City to a public vote came to fruition. In June 2023, in an echo of the 2021 meeting, the council voted to allocate tens of millions in public funds toward the training center—again, after hours of public comment, most of it against the measure. The coalition announced the referendum campaign the following day. 

Atlanta’s city charter gave Stop Cop City organizers 60 days to collect more than 58,000 signatures from city voters in order to get on the November ballot, a challenge in itself. But, almost immediately, the city started to stonewall. The city clerk delayed the beginning of the petition process by quibbling over the petition’s formatting, and in August, city officials announced that Atlanta would implement “signature matching”—the process of comparing a person’s signature on the petition to the one on file for them in state voter records. 

Signature matching has been used in many states for other voting practices, like authenticating absentee ballots. But it is widely considered to be an unnecessarily onerous form of verification that disproportionately excludes votes from people of color, English language learners, and the elderly and disabled. Atlanta’s decision to implement signature matching drew wide condemnation, including from Democratic leaders like Senator Raphael Warnock and voting rights groups founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.

The city has also fought organizers on who can collect signatures. After residents in unincorporated areas of Dekalb County sued the city—arguing they were unfairly excluded from the petition drive despite living near the proposed training center site—a federal judge ruled in their favor. The judge’s order immediately expanded residency requirements for canvassers and restarted the 60-day timeline to gather signatures. The coalition says it delivered some 116,000 signatures in September (nearly double what they need to get on the ballot), but the city appealed and has refused to tally them and move forward with the referendum process until a federal appeals court issues its opinion. 

As they wait for the court’s decision, Stop Cop City Vote organizers have found themselves in limbo. “There’s a lot that I want to do and would like to be doing versus going back and forth with the city with something that should be so simple,” said Hooks. “We’re here for the long game struggle,” she went on, but acknowledged that the delays have taken a toll on some: “I know it’s been very disappointing and demoralizing in a lot of ways.” 

One antidote to this frustration was to start work on the proposal to codify a referendum procedure—a parallel track that doesn’t affect the court’s decision, but would jumpstart the process if the court rules in the organizers’ favor. 

The draft ordinance, crafted with the help of national voting rights lawyer Marc Elias and first introduced by Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari in January, laid out procedures for reviewing the referendum petitions. Crucially, it aimed to preclude signature matching, which Malhotra called “non-negotiable.” Instead, the ordinance proposed a “curing” process to resolve inconsistencies, like the accidental omission of a middle name, that can trigger a signature invalidation.

But on Monday, two council members—including one who represents the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, which has in the past sought to secede from the rest of Atlanta and where many residents firmly support the construction of Cop City—forced language into the legislation that outlines a process for a version of signature matching. After Malhotra spoke for 10 minutes, imploring the city council to amend the legislation to remove signature matching, the body approved the ordinance anyway by a 10-5 vote. By then, the legislation had changed so much that Bakhtiari voted against it. 

Chaos ensued, with organizers, including Mary Hooks, occupying the dais to protest the last-minute change. “We see continuously the city betraying everyday people and our right to vote on issues that matter to us,” she told the room.

A federal appeals court ruling in the city’s favor could derail the referendum process even further. The city could argue that since the lower court’s earlier decision expanding the timeframe for people to collect signatures was overturned, the circumstances of their collection are now simply invalid—though Malhotra says such a decision would make the city look even worse. “I don’t think the mayor or the council, or the city in general, benefits from winning on a technicality,” Malhotra said. “For them to be like: ‘Well, I know we have these hundred and whatever thousand signatures but now we’re going to burn them’—I think that that’s just a politically silly thing for them to do.”
“But I don’t hold it beyond them,” he added. 

If the court rules in favor of the coalition, an entirely new scramble will ensue. Per its charter, the city has 50 days to stand up a referendum process. That’s where the new ordinance comes in. With more than 100,000 signatures collected, coalition members say they’re confident that they will cross the threshold even if some signatures are thrown out. But the verification process could still present issues. An analysis by the Associated Press and several local news outlets found a high number of seemingly invalid signatures. If the petition is approved despite these challenges, the question will then be whether to vote on it in May or November.

Many onlookers have struggled to understand why the city has invested so much energy and risked so much bad press in continuing to block a vote. “I cannot understand how the home of King and Lewis has the audacity to fight basic democratic process for any other reason than they are scared to lose,” said Malhotra. “From day one, this has been a process and procedure failure—and rather than addressing that underlying challenge, I think they underestimated the public’s appetite for transparency on process and procedure, and overestimated and overplayed their hand on trying to turn this into a binary conversation about policing and public safety.”

While legislation codifying a referendum process has passed, albeit with signature-matching included, there’s still no telling when the federal appeals court decision may come. In the meantime, there will be more direct actions. “Folks have said, like, ‘Hey, while we’re waiting and the referendum’s in limbo, and we still gonna give our elected officials the smoke—these corporations are also not going to be let off the hook,’” Hooks said. “We’re not going to lay the direct action component of this fight down just because the state repression is coming.” 

Sixty-one Cop City activists have been indicted for violating Georgia’s RICO act, and some 42 of them also have pending domestic terrorism charges. This week, state and federal law enforcement officers raided several Cop City opponents’ homes, taking at least two people into custody and reportedly refusing to show arrest warrants. 

On February 6, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill mandating cash bail for offenses like racketeering, domestic terrorism, criminal trespass, and “unlawful assembly.” It would also drastically limit bail funds’ ability to bond out protestors like Hooks and others who affixed themselves to construction vehicles on January 29. “On Monday when I left home,” Hooks recalled, “my wife was like, ‘Please come back. Please come back.’”

The post Faced with ‘Cop City’ Referendum Push, Atlanta Changes Up Its Election Rules appeared first on Bolts.

It had been a year since a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to overhaul its police department. The requirement was to address discriminatory policing and misconduct that had decimated public faith in law enforcement, and progress was slow. But in summer 2020, the recently appointed Superintendent David Brown announced a new direction in public safety that promised to strengthen the bond between police and the communities they serve.

At the core of this community-centric policing strategy was a newly minted unit, the Community Safety Team. Brown said their mission would be getting to know neighbors, partnering with local churches, block clubs and businesses, and empowering residents to guide law enforcement’s crime priorities and solutions to neighborhood safety issues.

“The only way to create safer communities is one neighborhood at a time,” Brown said at the July 2020 announcement of the new team. 

But rather than police encounters aimed at building community trust, data show the Community Safety Team, which quickly grew to over 800 officers in less than a year, focused instead on interactions known to harm community relations: hundreds of thousands of traffic stops. 

The Community Safety Team was responsible for nearly a third of all traffic stops citywide by 2021, more than any other police team. Community Safety officers overwhelmingly stopped drivers in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, contributing to massive racial disparities in traffic enforcement, data show.

Police accountability watchdogs say the Community Safety Team’s conduct reveals a pattern of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hiding aggressive tactics beneath a veneer of community policing. In the past, CPD’s most aggressive units made heavy use of stop-and-frisk encounters to search people for drugs and weapons. But since a 2015 lawsuit led to major reforms of the practice, CPD replaced stop-and-frisk with stopping exponentially more motorists.

Now, despite a new progressive mayor’s outspoken stances against such notoriously harmful policing practices, and a newly confirmed police superintendent signaling a decisive shift in public safety strategy, many doubt whether the department can course-correct to an earnest community policing model. 

“The city has a horrific history of these roving, violent citywide teams…that racially profile people and terrorize and physically brutalize people,” said Alexandra Block, Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Community Safety Team is just an outcrop of that pattern.”

When drivers believe they are stopped and searched by police without reason, the feeling of harassment only deepens the divide between police and the communities they patrol, said Joseph Williams, member of the Englewood Police District Council, one of the civilian oversight bodies recently created to enhance community partnership and accountability. 

“There’s no way you can do community policing while you’re doing all those stops,” Williams said. “You make them feel like less than a human being. They leave feeling worthless, like they’ve been targeted. I know what I felt like when I went through that.”

When Williams, 34, was pulled over most recently in July, the stop was relatively uneventful, and officers let him go without a search. But each of the countless traffic stops he endured still reminds him of a traumatic incident when he and a group of friends were pulled over as teens.

As the officers searched the group without their consent looking for illegal guns, they violated and humiliated the teenagers, Williams said.

“I’ll never forget them pulling me and my friends right out of the car and searching us,” Williams said. “They reached down into my private parts, went into our boxers, and they didn’t find anything. …We were young and glad we were let go, but ultimately that was a traumatic experience.”

The Community Safety Team

As the department poured resources into the Community Safety Team, Brown pledged their work would be driven by long-term relationships with residents, businesses, religious organizations and neighborhood groups.

By the end of 2020, the Community Safety Teams logged over 200 of those community interactions, according to a Bolts analysis of data from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications’ dispatch system, which generates a unique record each time officers radio headquarters to document civilian interactions or routine activities. Those community interactions included food drives, youth sports events and community input meetings, according to a Chicago police spokesperson. 

But those interactions were dwarfed by the 48,000 traffic stops the team conducted in 2020—nearly all of that unit’s documented activity that year. In 2021, when the Community Safety Team was at its largest, its officers logged over 150,000 traffic stops—more than twice the number of community engagement activities, the data show.

Although the Community Safety Team was called a “first-of-its-kind approach designed for officers to get to know the people and places within each of the unique neighborhoods," Brown’s promises were reminiscent of a different community policing initiative launched in the 1990s, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.

The CAPS approach was a hyper-local, bottom-up strategy that hinged on residents working with officers to identify both the issues in the community as well as potential solutions. The strategy worked to increase trust in police because the same officers had a consistent beat in a particular geographic area where residents could get to know them personally and officers could get familiar with the safety challenges in a small area, proponents said. 

In the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side, CAPS officers have helped by listening to people’s priorities and focusing on problem-solving rather than numbers, Williams said. For instance, when a group of abandoned cars on a city-owned vacant lot became a magnet for drug dealing and other crime, Williams told the local CAPS team that it was a serious problem for neighbors. Officers then quickly dealt with the issue, he said.

"They ticketed those cars and got them towed. The community's been trying to get that done for a year almost," Williams said. "Our CAPS department is phenomenal."

But the Community Safety Team turned out to be a somewhat opposite approach: rather than officers building relationships in consistent beats, it was a roving citywide unit with no direct ties to specific neighborhoods. And they employed the same tactics as the notorious strike forces and saturation teams— squads of officers used to flood areas with police activity.

The legal backlash

After Chicago police shifted away from widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics in 2015 following an ACLU Illinois lawsuit over the practice, the number of traffic stops conducted across the entire department soared. Between 2015 and 2023, officers made over 4.5 million traffic stops, mostly in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, CPD data show. Nearly 900,000 of these stops were made in 2019 alone, and by then the Illinois chapter of the ACLU had again raised the alarm that the stops may be violating drivers’ civil rights. 

This work culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against the city on behalf of Chicagoans claiming the traffic stop strategy routinely violated the rights of Black and Latinx drivers. It singled out the Community Safety Team for the tremendous volume of traffic stops it conducted, amounting to what the suit called Chicago Police's "mass traffic stop program."

The lawsuit claims this program relies on illegal quotas, and flooding Black and Latinx neighborhoods with police encounters to deter unrelated crime, using the pretext of traffic enforcement to search drivers for contraband—often without their consent. This racial profiling of drivers of color resulted in police "harassing hundreds of thousands of Black Chicagoans" annually, Block said. 

Twenty-five-year-old West Side resident Mahari Bell joined the lawsuit after being stopped over 10 times in the past eight years. While some of the stops seemed harmless, others left him fearing for his life, Bell said.

"A lot of us are just tired. People don't want to be harassed by Chicago police," Bell said. "I was profiled, harassed, my rights are violated consistently. Nobody wants to live like that, especially in the city that they're from."

While driving for UberEats in May2022, Bell was pulled over downtown when officers accused him of cutting off another driver—a claim he contests. Just moments into the encounter, officers put Bell in handcuffs without any explanation. When they asked to search his car, Bell felt like he had no choice but to agree.

"It all happened so quick. There wasn't any need for a search or for handcuffs. The officer, he was very accusatory, so it was clear that it wasn't about traffic," Bell said. "I feel like if I would have said no, the stop could have been completely different. I could've spent the night in a holding cell."

But even when police encounters don’t escalate, being constantly pulled over makes Bell feel "belittled, degraded and ultimately disrespected," he said.

"It made me realize, I think a lot of officers in Chicago just don't care to be a part of the community. They don't care to offer their public service," Bell said. "Despite my intentions, despite who I am, I'm still just a statistic to CPD. Just another traffic stop that has to be done for their numbers."

The lawsuit is still in early stages, but its goal is to end citywide units dedicated to traffic stops so Chicago Police can reel in the harm to community trust inflicted by the Community Safety Team and affiliated units, Block said.

"We are hoping CPD will rethink its reliance on the mass traffic stops strategy as its go-to supposed crime fighting technique, because it just doesn't work," Block said.

The ACLU's class action lawsuit builds upon an existing complaint about the Community Safety Team that came from within the unit itself. In 2021, Franklin Paz, a former lieutenant on the Community Safety Team sued the city over illegal traffic stop quotas. Paz, who was also a 20-year department veteran, claims he was demoted and punished for resisting the quotas. 

Police sergeants on the Community Safety Team testified that when they were assigned to the unit, leadership told them their primary mission was to stop masses of drivers and proactively initiate police encounters, court records show. Officers were required to meet stop quotas unrelated to crime levels or traffic safety, according to Paz, who was instructed to demand that each officer in his platoon conduct at least 10 traffic stops daily, the complaint shows.

The ACLU lawsuit references emails where CPD’s then second-in-command, Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato, urges commanders to raise traffic enforcement numbers and "utilize traffic stops to address violence."

The lawsuits share common claims that the Community Safety Team was simply a rebrand and reshuffling of CPD's infamously aggressive saturation teams.

Though Brown promised at the launch of the Community Safety Team that "this is not a roving strike force like what CPD had in the past," officers testified that unit was staffed with personnel from tactical teams, gun teams, saturation teams, and other groups trained to aggressively stop residents, often while patrolling in plainclothes and in unmarked cars. 

Bolts’ analysis of CPD attendance and assignment data supports this, showing that at least 45 of the sergeants leading the Community Safety Team in its first year were assigned to the community policing initiative immediately after leaving tactical teams.

A new administration, a new era for policing?

Amid the legal backlash, CPD quietly sunsetted the Community Safety Team by reassigning officers to other units en masse by the start of 2023, leaving fewer than a hundred officers on the team. After becoming police superintendent in September, Larry Snelling said during a police budget hearing that he has since “broken that team down” and reassigned the officers back to local districts. 

But even as the Community Safety Team waned, the unit’s aggressive traffic stop tactics continued to be enforced by other officers, including those assigned to neighborhood districts where Snelling emphasized he would focus police resources, data show. The most recent dispatch data show the units stopping the largest numbers of drivers are now those assigned to local districts, including beat officers, tactical teams, and rapid response officers.

Snelling is one of the first major appointees of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer who ran and won on a historically progressive platform, and has promised to chart a new course for public safety centered on community investment, not solely law enforcement power. Since taking office, Johnson has had to balance expectations from the progressives who put him in power with those of the police union which has been antagonistic from the start. One of Johnson’s first acts as mayor established an Office of Community Safety, charged with “dual responsibilities of leading a full force of government, rapid response to safety issues and developing community-driven strategies for addressing the root causes of harm,” a spokesperson for the mayor told Bolts. 

With a progressive mayor at the helm, mounting pressure from newly created civilian oversight councils, and the weight of the consent decree bearing down, the pressure is also on Snelling to set policing policy that can move the dial on community safety without sacrificing public trust in law enforcement.

Historically, incoming CPD leadership inevitably launches a signature crimefighting initiative, like Brown’s Community Safety Team or former Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s use of the CompStat strategy that resembled broken-windows policing. And Snelling will likely follow the example of his predecessors with a signature community policing initiative, said CPD expert Wes Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.

"My guess is Larry Snelling will invent a new acronym with a promise of a reinvigorated community policing program," Skogan said. 

But like the exchange of officers between tactical teams and the Community Safety Team, a new name doesn’t guarantee any fundamental change in how residents are impacted by the policing tactics. 

Unless new leadership focuses on safety "outcomes" like crime reduction rather than "inputs" like traffic stop numbers, the aggressive policing tactics will likely continue, said former interim Superintendent Charlie Beck, who in 2020 dramatically restructured the department by shifting officers out of citywide units and into neighborhood police districts. 

"You get what you ask for. If you emphasize traffic stops as what you want, then you'll get them. Unfortunately, if you cast too wide a net when you do that, you can make people feel like they're under siege,” Beck said.

There is also broader skepticism over whether Johnson’s administration can effectively steer the department away from the domineering policing tactics that have landed the city in hot water time and again. Johnson has faced continued pressure over his increase of the police budget, his administration’s contract agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that doubles annual pay raises and may weaken accountability processes for disciplinary cases, and his continued funding of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology despite prior vows to drop the controversial surveillance system. 

But Johnson’s budget does offer a preview into the community investments aimed at tackling the root causes of crime, with $209 million going towards efforts like anti-violence programming, restorative justice, re-entry programs and gender-based violence prevention and intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said. The plan vastly expands staffing for public mental health clinics and mobile crisis response teams, which include social workers and addiction specialists who would respond to 911 calls in lieu of police during mental health emergencies. Johnson’s budget would also expand the city’s youth job programs, and includes investments to address the housing and homelessness crisis brought to the forefront by the influx of asylum seekers. 

Johnson and Snelling have both touted plans to replace up to 400 officer roles with civilian positions, such as domestic violence advocates and workers assigned to the officer training academy. 

“Having those civilian employees amongst us, it creates a better environment for the officers,” Snelling said. “It’s officers working with civilians, so we have a better understanding of the community and the community has a better understanding of us. It shows we can work in partnership with people who are not sworn members.”

Community policing

In spite of the Community Safety Team, some prior community policing efforts have forged strong connections between residents and officers, leaving some hopeful for the future. Snelling’s earlier efforts at building connections with Englewood residents made Williams optimistic about future community policing efforts, he said. 

"He brought his tactical officers out—the ones who do a lot of the crazy stuff sometimes—he brought them out so they could get to know the community in a different way,” Williams said. “He's coming in, he's walking those streets, trying to build the relationships.”

A 2019 community policing project, the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI), emulates CAPS by dedicating a group of officers in each district to build long-term relationships with residents and neighborhood groups and coordinate city resources to solve problems in the area. Unlike the Community Safety Team, these officers don’t do the typical emergency responses, traffic stops, and patrols. 

The program has "reimagined what police officers can do," said Deondre' Rutues, a council member for the 15th Police District in Austin, as well as the Community Engagement Specialist for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative.

"We're supposed to lead the charge and tell them what we need from them," Rutues said. "It isn't a process where police just come and lock somebody up. The officers follow the lead of the community to determine what to do."

Changing police leadership, staffing shortages and the interruption of the coronavirus pandemic halted the NPI from being fully implemented, a Northwestern report found. But the success of the NPI shows that one arm of the city's agenda may be dedicated to an earnest attempt at community policing. 

But as long as the other arm is focused on mass traffic stops conducted by roving strike teams, Chicago's community policing agenda will be at odds with itself, says Rutues.

"You created the Community Safety Team to enhance relationship building...But it continues to undo everything that is supposed to be contained in the Consent Decree, and also the work people on the ground are trying to do." 

The post “I’m Just Another Traffic Stop” appeared first on Bolts.

Whitmire, a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas and state lawmaker for half a century, has made the story central to his campaign for mayor of Houston this year, weaving it between calls to jail more people, aggressively hire more police, and deploy hundreds of state troopers to patrol the city. “When I watch the crime that’s in Houston, it alarms me,” he said in a recent campaign ad where he talks about the robbery three decades ago. “You know, I was robbed at gunpoint in my garage, and I definitely thought he was going to kill me, my wife and my 9 year old daughter. And it just changes your life forever.”

Whitmire finished on top of a crowded field of 17 other candidates in the Nov. 7 election, winning 42.5 percent of the vote. He now faces a Dec. 9 runoff against Sheila Jackson Lee, the longest serving member of Houston’s congressional delegation and another towering figure in Democratic politics in the state, who came in second last week with 35.6 percent.

The mayor’s race has spotlighted the tough-on-crime politics that still dominate debate around public safety in the nation’s fourth largest city. Police in Houston have a long history of brutality and impunity, while Harris County, where the city is located, was until recently known as the death penalty capital of the world for how many people it has sent away for execution. 

In recent years, local debates and policies around criminal punishment started to shift as Democrats solidified control of the county government and as activists pushed for reforms. Throughout the two terms of Mayor Sylvester Turner, who could not run for reelection this year due to term limits, advocates lobbied him to implement police reforms, with mixed results: Turner updated policies to increase access to officer body camera footage and promised greater police oversight but he also balked at other requests. He resisted demands that the city make its contract negotiations with the Houston police union, which determine many oversight and discipline policies, a public process, as it is in other major Texas cities like San Antonio and Austin.

Heading into the city’s municipal elections this fall, advocates for police reform tried to turn the mayoral race into an opportunity for broader discussion around public safety and changes they want the city’s next mayor to prioritize. Under Houston’s “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor wields enormous power over city policy by appointing each department head, overseeing all administrative work, and setting the city council’s agenda. 

A coalition of community and civil rights groups, which called themselves RISE Houston (or “Reimagining Safety for Everyone in Houston”), developed three demands for candidates: reducing minor traffic stops that disproportionately target Black drivers, ending a controversial multi million dollar police surveillance contract that has proven ineffective, and freezing the city’s police budget. 

But when the coalition tried surveying each candidate on those issues, few responded or took any concrete positions. Neither Whitmire or Jackson Lee, the political juggernauts in the race, even attended a forum on public safety policies that the coalition held in early October—although Jackson Lee, who was in Washington D.C. at the time, spoke to the crowd virtually later in the event. 

RoShawn C. Evans, one of the activists who helped form the coalition, said the local criminal justice reform group that he co-founded in 2015, Pure Justice, had considered making endorsements for the first time this year but eventually decided against it.

“We chose not to because of the narrative around public safety,” Evans told Bolts. “It’s very bothersome that I’m watching all these candidates run to represent the city of Houston and the platform that they’re running on is a platform that is around the narrative of mass incarceration. Every dollar we put into law enforcement, every dollar we put into building a new court or hiring more DAs, it opens the floodgates to mass incarceration even wider than what it already is.” 

Whitmire, who has led in both polling and campaign funding throughout the race, helped set the terms of debate during the race with his promise to be “tough and smart on crime.” Like in cities across the country, violent crime rose in Texas’ largest city during the pandemic and remained a top concern for Houstonians surveyed before this year’s election, even as crime rates have started to fall. 

Whitmire is a rare Democrat with any semblance of power in the GOP-dominated Texas legislature. As chair of the Senate’s criminal justice committee since 1993, a position he has retained since the Republican Party solidified control of the chamber later in the 1990s, he has sat at the center of the state’s policies around criminal punishment for decades. In the 1990s, Whitmire was an architect of policies that scaled up incarceration in Texas, helping pass a legislative package that increased prison time for serious offenses and pumping $1 billion into an unprecedented prison-building boom. Later, in the 2000s, he helped expand diversion programs that reversed the trend and staved off even more prison building. 

In more recent legislative sessions, advocates have criticized Whitmire for being a barrier to change, saying the senate criminal justice committee has become a killing field for reform legislation under his leadership. He has refused to consider reforms the Texas House has passed, such as legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18 (Texas is one of only three states that charges 17 year olds as adults) and efforts to install air conditioning in the state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even reforms he claims to support, like “second chance” legislation to allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life in prison as children, have derailed in the committee on his watch. 

Whitmire, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, has defended his legislative record and insisted reform advocates have unrealistic expectations, telling the Houston Chronicle recently, “I don’t think any criticism has an appreciation for the difficulty in Austin of doing criminal justice reform at any time in the 30 years that I’ve been chair.” 

Civil rights advocates in Houston are particularly worried about one of Whitmire’s core campaign proposals, to bring in more state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to help patrol the city, warning that it will worsen racial disparities in policing in Houston. The actions of the state agency, which is far whiter and less diverse than Houston’s police force, have raised concerns about racial profiling and police brutality when troopers have been deployed to patrol other cities and along the border with Mexico. 

When Austin city leaders tried the approach earlier this year, troopers primarily arrested people of color before officials called off the partnership. When Dallas brought in DPS troopers in 2019, some local leaders criticized the agency for acting like “an occupying force.” Christopher Rivera, an outreach coordinator in Houston for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s criminal injustice program, pointed to a report the group put out earlier this year showing minor traffic enforcement already disproportionately targets Black drivers in Houston. While activists have asked for an ordinance limiting traffic stops and police encounters for non-moving violations, like expired registration, they now worry Whitmire’s proposal for DPS patrols could exacerbate the problem. 

“Probably the most concerning thing that has come up in the race has been the DPS issue,” Rivera told Bolts. “When we bring more police into the city of Houston, they just end up over policing more neighborhoods of color and low income communities.”

Rivera said local activists hope that a change to municipal government that voters adopted last week will open the door to more reform discussions at city hall, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office. More than 80 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which gives city council members more power to force the council to take up issues even without the mayor’s approval; beginning next year, any three of Houston’s 16 city council members can join together to put items on the council’s agenda.

Progressive advocates in Houston are hopeful that they’ve retained some footholds in municipal government in this fall’s elections. Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who was formerly a top staffer with the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which has become a driving force in left politics in the state, won reelection last week. Council Member Letitia Plummer, who has advocated for changing how the city spends money on public safety, faces a runoff against challenger Roy Morales.

While Whitmire has the backing of local and state police groups in his run for mayor, Jackson Lee has garnered endorsements by more outwardly progressive organizations and leaders, like TOP and also Lina Hidalgo, Harris County government’s chief executive, who has supported bail reform and pushed back against some of the district attorney’s funding requests. While Jackson Lee has used a different tone from Whitmire when talking about crime, she has done little to carve out a competing vision around public safety and has offered few specific policy priorities on the campaign trail. 

Jackson Lee, who did not respond to questions for this story, expressed some caution about Whitmire’s plan to deploy state troopers during one of the final televised debates in the race last month. 

“I give them credit for their investigative skills, they will be used for that, but not patrolling our neighborhoods where our families are looking to those they know and those who know them,” she said, promising instead to “expand” the presence of local police.

On election night, Jackson Lee thanked her supporters and spoke in broad terms about combating gun violence, increasing mental health services, and “making sure that every corner of this city will be represented at the table of empowerment.” Across town, as he addressed his supporters, Whitmire again returned to his own brush with crime three decades ago. 

“Let anyone who can hear my voice: I don’t apologize for being tough on crime,” he said. “I’ve had to beg for my life and my wife and my nine year old daughter in our garage. That person put a gun in my face and I thought I was finished. I was worried about my daughter and my wife. But God had a plan for me.”

Correction (Nov. 17): An earlier version of this article misstated the result for one of Houston’s council seats; Letitia Plummer and Roy Morales will face off in a runoff.

The post Promises to Scale Up Policing Stir Houston’s Mayoral Race appeared first on Bolts.

Though it has been significantly overshadowed by French president Emanuel Macron’s controversial attempt to raise the retirement age, the legislation was passed in anticipation of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, for which the city expects to receive over 9 million visitors from outside the city. The law will allow artificial intelligence programs to sift through video footage collected from public security cameras placed throughout the city, in order to analyze people’s movements in real time and detect suspicious or abnormal behavior.

“That could be, for example, detecting someone running, someone who isn’t moving, who’s static in public space, a face that’s covered up, someone doing graffiti—a lot of different things,” said Alouette, pseudonym for an activist with a French digital rights group that opposes the new law, La Quadrature du Net, and who didn’t want to be named due to privacy concerns.

The law has provoked an outcry from a number of privacy activists, civil society organizations, members of the European Parliament, and lawmakers from France’s left-wing political coalition Nupes. These groups claim that it vastly expands police power, invades individual privacy and civil liberties, and paves the way for further incursions. “We have a lot of evidence that these technologies cause a lot of harm, they lead to misidentification of people and wrongful arrest,” said Mher Hakobyan, Amnesty International’s Advocacy Advisor on AI Regulation. “We have very little evidence that these technologies actually do what authorities say.” 

Organizers in Los Angeles are paying close attention to the developments in Paris, with an eye to what might happen in Los Angeles when the city hosts the 2028 games.

“This kind of surveillance technology is part and parcel of hosting the Olympic Games,” said Eric Sheehan of the group NOlympics LA. “In Tokyo, they tried to pass for years this anti terrorism law and failed because people were not down. As soon as they had the Olympics approved, they passed that law using the Olympics state of exception as their reasoning.”

These concerns around automated video surveillance are the latest in a long list of reasons why NOlympics LA and French counterparts such as Non aux JO 2024 à Paris and Saccage 2024 object to the games. While the massive international events are typically celebrated as an economic boon for host cities, they also come with extraordinary human—and, often, financial—costs, and can give politicians cover to implement policies whose effects will reverberate long after the games end. Local governments around the world are becoming increasingly wary of the impact of the Olympics, with Paris winning the chance to host in 2024 after a number of other major cities withdrew their bids. 

The French government claims that the law does not allow for the collection of biometric data, information about the physical characteristics of individual humans such as fingerprints or DNA, which Alouette, Hakobyan, and others dismiss as semantics. “They say, ‘It doesn’t allow you to identify someone,’” Alouette told Bolts. In fact, she said, AI video surveillance “can automatically recognize someone because of their physical characteristics,” that the only real difference between the recently approved technology and facial recognition is that the algorithm is focused on the body rather than the face. “To us, it is biometric technology,” she said. 

While advocates of AI surveillance technology argue that it is necessary to increase security at major sporting events—a French National Assembly member who belongs to Renaissance, Macron’s party, argued that it could have helped prevent the deadly 2016 terrorist attack in Nice—skeptics worry that it will only serve to amplify the pre-existing biases of law enforcement. Alouette says this newly legalized surveillance would come down hardest on people who spend the most time in public space, who tend to be the poorest members of society—beggars, homeless people, or migrants selling their wares in the street. 

The 2024 Olympic village will be built in Saint-Denis, a working-class area just to the north of Paris that is home to Black and Muslim immigrant populations already subject to heightened scrutiny and aggressive intervention by the French police.

“This technology is being used in a context which is already very hostile to people from certain communities or backgrounds,” said Hakobyan. “How you determine what is abnormal or problematic behavior is, of course, very ingrained and embedded in racist presumptions, but also ableist—because if a person with a certain psychosocial disability can behave in a way which from a normative point of view can be viewed as aggressive.” AI has evinced extraordinarily high rates of misidentification of people of color, for example, in some cases leading to wrongful arrests—something that was already happening long before the existence of AI technology.

“It allows [police] to hide behind an algorithm,” said Alouette, but “an algorithm learns according to the data you feed it.”

As written, Article 7, which contains the law’s video surveillance provisions, is an “experimental” measure that will expire by the end of December 2024, but two lawmakers recently issued a report recommending the use of AI video surveillance be extended beyond the timeframe of the Olympics and add in real-time facial recognition as well—which could be voted on as early as September 2023. 

All of this comes as the European Parliament attempts to significantly restrict the use of algorithmic surveillance technologies via its AI act, which represents the first global attempt to comprehensively regulate the use of artificial intelligence. European law supersedes that of its member states, meaning that France would be out of compliance with regional standards if the AI act passes. But “France is one of the most influential member states in the EU. It has a lot of say in how the act is being developed,” said Hakobyan, noting that France has also used its influence on the European Council, one of the union’s executive bodies, in “trying to water down provisions in the act, so it doesn’t go against what they’re doing nationally.” (The act will become law once the Council and the European Parliament finalize their respective stances on the act and agree on a compromise, which is expected to happen before the end of the year.)

Sheehan of NOlympics LA sees many similarities between the new French law and plans already underway for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. “The LA ‘28 Organizing Committee is excited to announce that they’re going to be using facial recognition for all tickets to the games—meanwhile, French politicians are trying to try to sneak it through,” he told Bolts. 

He also noted that a contingent of LA2028 Olympic Planning Committee officials and LAPD officers, including police chief Michel Moore, had in 2021 traveled to France to discuss both countries’ security preparations for the games with their French equivalents. “The way that it’s policed in every large city around the world is very similar,” he said. 

Sheehan, like many skeptics of the LA 2028 Olympics, foresees a repeat of the 1984 Los Angeles games, which led the LAPD to crack down on street homelessness and rapidly accelerated police militarization in the years after. “In Los Angeles, we’re already seeing evictions, we’re already seeing people being removed—literally for Olympic hotels,” he said. 

Meanwhile, while much of the debate over the law in France has centered on Article 7, Natsuko Sasaki with the anti-Olympics group Saccage 2024 says that there are other concerning aspects as well. Article 12, for example, imposes a 7,500 euro penalty and six months in jail against anyone who enters Olympic premises without a ticket, a move that has been interpreted as an attempt to quell political demonstrations. It could build on existing French laws that are already being used to crack down on public protests against Macron’s recent increase in retirement age and cost of living hikes. “It criminalizes the actions of militants…If we do something at the stadium,” she said. “And so we can’t. We can’t allow ourselves to pay this sort of fine.” 

“Our collective says that we want to cancel the games. That’s the official line. But I’m Japanese and I saw that even Covid didn’t cancel the Olympics,” she said, referencing the 2020 Tokyo games, which were postponed until 2021, then ultimately held without spectators because of the pandemic. For Sasaki, the fight against the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint. Though Tokyo went ahead, it so soured the Japanese public on the games that the mayor of Sapporo, which had applied to host the 2030 games, recently announced that the city would delay its bid to host. “For us, after Paris, it’s finished,” she said, “but the Olympics continue.”

The post France Enables AI Surveillance Ahead of 2024 Paris Olympics, Alarming Privacy Activists appeared first on Bolts.

“We’re here today with the candidate that our movement backs,” he said. That candidate, Helen Gym, sat in the front row wearing a bright red suit. “[T]he reason that we back this candidate is because Helen Gym is someone to not only listen to us, she not only said, ‘Here’s my public safety campaign, what do you think of it?’ But rather said, ‘Hey, I need a public safety campaign, can you help me build it out?’” 

In a crowded field of nine Democratic candidates vying for office ahead of the May 16 primary, Gym is one of five with the fundraising and popular support to be truly viable. The primary is considered a de facto general election in this deeply blue city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of nearly seven to one. All of the leading candidates are pretty evenly split in recent polls, and unlike in Chicago, there are no runoffs here. So, the next mayor of Philadelphia could win with less than thirty percent of the vote. With just two weeks to go, campaigns are ramped to full speed. 

At the event in March, Gym spoke of violence tearing apart neighborhoods, emphasizing her overall public safety platform centered on investing in communities most affected by violence, bolstering trauma-informed services, and remodeling the police department.

“In the face of unmitigated violence that’s happening to our young people, to Black and brown youth all across the city of Philadelphia, it is our mission to be able to show a new path for how we’re going to save the city,” she said, “and deliver a vision for safety—and investment across Philadelphia—that does not drag the clock back on civil rights.” 

She added: “If it was about funding our police department… we should have the safest city in America.” (The Philadelphia Police Department’s nearly $800 million budget this fiscal year is the largest of any city agency and has grown by $150 million since 2016 when the current mayor took office.)

A Gym administration would be the most powerful seat held by Philadelphia’s burgeoning progressive political machine which has been strengthening since Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Since then, the left has delivered a number of blows to the typically centrist Democratic establishment in Philadelphia. The election of District Attorney Larry Krasner in 2017—and his reelection four years later—has been the highest-profile victory, but a slew of other leftists have taken office at the neighborhood, city, and state level including the city’s first Working Family Party councilperson, two prominent community organizers elected to the state house, and a number of progressives at the helm of some of the city’s numerous Neighborhood Advisory Committees. 

The next mayor has their work cut out for them. Homicides over the last few years have reached a historic high, schools are closing because of asbestos contamination, people are dying from opioid overdoses at relentless rates, and economic disparity along racial lines is on the rise. At a time when the stakes for voters are so high for public safety, public education, and inequality, the fact that Gym is a viable candidate proves how far the city has come in taking left-wing politics seriously, explained Steph Drain, Philadelphia political director of the labor-aligned Working Families Party, which endorsed Gym. “[Jim] Kenney was considered progressive in 2015,” said Drain, referencing the current mayor. “But we are now recognizing that we are able to have someone who is actually progressive and not just settle for someone who is a moderate.” 

Some local activists have expressed frustration with Philadelphia politicians for their relative inaction, for example not standing up sufficiently in defense of Krasner’s criminal justice reforms when they’ve been assailed by state Republicans and other critics. To get an ally in the mayor’s office, they say, could be a game-changer to transform the city further. “It says that the progressive movement has teeth,” Drain said.

Gym was first elected to city council in 2015, becoming the first Asian American woman to sit on council after ascending over the past two decades through Philadelphia politics, from public school teacher, to activist, to elected representative. She was reelected in 2019 with a dramatic lead over other at-large council members, winning more votes than any other candidate for city council since the 1980s. She ran as an activist councilmember and ferocious defender of social justice causes, especially inequities in the public education system. She kept this profile up as a councilmember—one time going so far as being arrested at the state Senate with other activists demanding better funding for Philadelphia schools. During her tenure, she spearheaded a number of successful initiatives such as improving monitoring of lead in public schools and installing hydration stations, establishing ‘fair workweek’ regulations, and ending contracts with troubled juvenile detention providers where staff abuse ran rampant.

Critics accuse her of grandstanding, focusing on headlines more than policy. “You can’t go to get something passed in the Senate,” said another mayoral candidate, Cherelle Parker, in a recent forum. “[I]f you’re going to roll around on the floor, use a bullhorn, shout at the senators, and tell them they’re morally bankrupt.”

But Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval, who cut his teeth as a labor organizer and endorses Gym, rejects the notion that politicians need to leave their activist hat at the door in order to legislate effectively. “People who come out of social movements as organizers have a mode of coalition building and communicating among people who may not otherwise see eye to eye,” he said. He demonstrated this concept by passing a $125 million home repair program during his freshman term in a Republican majority legislature, with allies from across the aisle. 

Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, delivering him to the White House. In Philadelphia, this moment galvanized grassroots organizations, many who supported Bernie Sanders during the primary of that election cycle, to come together and work in concert. In fact, former Sanders staffers and canvassers founded the leftist political group Reclaim Philadelphia, which has propelled several members to office, including Saval. 

“After the 2016 election, we saw the birth of Reclaim, the expansion of the [Democratic Socialists of America], empowerment of the [Working Family Party], these organizations with largely socialist ideals,” said Drain. “The momentum from Bernie Sanders delegates and voters transferred over to these political institutions. We’ve gained power.” 

Since then, community organizers have worked in tandem to support candidates who care about issues like environmental and racial justice. In 2017, over 30 of these groups formed the Coalition for a Just DA and hit the ground knocking on doors to usher Larry Krasner into office. The groups represented a wide array of communities most affected by the carceral system: LGBTQ people, sex workers, immigrant families, formerly incarcerated individuals, and victims of violent crime. That coalition has since disbanded, but a number of the original organizations are backing Gym. 

Holbrook said that the decision to back Gym was an easy one, based on history. “The relationship that she’s built with the left goes back years—to the years she was an activist in the community.” 

If she wins, Gym could govern alongside a veritable progressive flank in city council. Because so many current city council members left office to run for mayor, a wave of freshmen councilmembers will be ushered in next term. Five of the seven at-large seats up for election are open without incumbents; the race to fill them has drawn a large and diverse pool of candidates—with a distinct camp running as progressives, potentially upending the ideological balance in Philadelphia city government.

The only other mayoral candidate seen as liberal is former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, who has roots as a Wall Street banker. Without a track record on city council, it’s hard to know how Rhynhart would govern, but during her tenure as comptroller, she did take on the establishment by conducting ruthless audits of agencies such as the Philadelphia Police Department. Her office’s report revealed deficient systems of accountability, inefficiencies in operations, and made her an enemy of the Fraternal Order of Police local chapter. However, on the campaign trail, she has positioned herself more as a technocrat, deft at navigating bureaucracy, friendly to business, and more aligned with the local political establishment. She boasts endorsements such as three former mayors, including Michael Nutter, who aggressively advanced stop-and-frisk during his tenure—and continues to support the tactic—and is a vocal critic of Krasner for being “anti-police.” 

Rhynhart also supported a controversial new curfew banning unchaperoned teens from a downtown mall after 2 p.m., which opponents see as a return to draconian policing of youth. Gym, who opposes the curfew, said so at a recent candidate forum. “We cannot criminalize young people.” 

As of April 28, the Democratic party itself has not endorsed any candidate. “The Democratic establishment here is in this fractured state,” Drain said. “But the progressives have figured it out from the beginning, moving in lockstep while the establishment is devouring itself.”

The West Philadelphia church gathering is emblematic of that cohesion. Last month Gym announced her public safety platform flanked by Holbrook and a number of other activists. “This conversation about public safety is one that is about investing in communities and actually stopping cycles of violence,” she said.

Public safety is the banner issue of Philadelphia’s campaign for mayor. According to a recent poll by the market-research firm SRSS and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, nearly 90 percent of Philadelphians believe crime should be a top priority for the city’s mayor. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Philadelphia has seen a devastating uptick of gun violence. Last year, the city recorded 516 homicides, a slight decrease from the year before but still surpassing the previous record of 500 set in 1990. Nearly nine out of ten murders between 2020 and 2022 were committed by firearm. The violence was heavily concentrated in communities of color, which have historically been under-resourced. 

The mayor will decide who leads the Philadelphia Police Department, propose the size of that department’s budget, as well as how funds are allocated to anti-violence programs.

The plan Gym has laid out prioritizes crime prevention with ambitious measures such as universal access to mental health treatment in neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, guaranteeing job placement assistance to young people in those neighborhoods, and ensuring that recreation centers are open nights and weekends—a plan she brought up directly in contrast to the new mall curfew for unchaperoned teens. She proposed deploying mobile mental health crisis units, staffed with social workers rather than police, 24/7. The plan focuses on the root causes of violence, namely poverty and trauma, rather than a carceral response. 

Gym’s public safety plan doesn’t increase the number of police officers in the department, but reorganizes how they are deployed. She endorses a community policing model that increases the number of cops on the street in high-crime neighborhoods; her case is that it would allow officers to form relationships with community members to improve relations. But critics of this approach say it could simply lead to more arrests and harassment in already over-policed sections of the city. When it’s been deployed in other cities, community policing has been criticized for still ostracizing Black and Latinx youth, even as police prioritize the concerns of other older residents in the same neighborhoods. 

“There’s always tension when we start talking about more policing in these already over-policed neighborhoods,” said Holbrook, who is also executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “As a movement, we are going to continue to navigate them.”

Gym’s critics in the mayoral race say that the cash-strapped city cannot fund her plans for public safety or other areas. Parker called Gym’s education plan “imaginary,” and said, “What taxes will you raise? What services will you cut?”

In response, Gym’s campaign says that her plans will not be funded by extra dollars off the average Philadelphian’s back, but primarily by leveraging state and federal funding that is available, for example, expanding job training programs that already rely on federal funds, and utilizing resources such as Medicaid to give low-income citizens access to mental health care.

“Other candidates in the race have promised to cut taxes across the board while also promising things like year-round schooling, neighborhood infrastructure improvements, hundreds more police officers, and expanded workforce development with minimal details on what that would look like—notably, these candidates rarely get asked how they would fund or implement such programs,” a spokesperson with Gym’s campaign wrote in a statement to Bolts. “While Helen’s vision for investing in people and neighborhoods and prioritizing residents in neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence is a departure from the status quo, she is by no means the only candidate proposing new or different city services.” 

Gym has said that she would create a new commission to conduct a “comprehensive review” of existing tax policy, with an eye for instituting some reforms. And if necessary, reallocating city funds away from other areas to improve the services that Gym prioritizes is also on the table. “If the only way we can find money to clean a vacant lot in Nicetown is by spending less on center city or Rittenhouse square, Helen is prepared to do that,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Some other candidates’ messaging around public safety calls back to the “tough on crime” heavy-handed policing common in US cities throughout the 1990s—part of a national trend in political rhetoric that some have identified as a backlash against the historic uprisings against police brutality in 2020. “In some of these debates these candidates have sounded, if not centrist, and then somewhat more conservative than what you’d expect from a bunch of Democrats running in a big city,” Patrick Christmas, chief policy officer of the good governance group the Committee of Seventy told Bolts.

Parker has proposed hiring 300 new police officers, also with an emphasis on increased community policing. Three of the five leading contenders are open to some form of stop-and-frisk—which a judge found to be used in racist and unconstitutional ways here in 2011. The Philadelphia Police Department is still under court monitoring for its use of pedestrian searches.

“Under a Parker administration, every legal tool available, every constitutional tool available to our Police Department will be employed to ensure that we end this sense of lawlessness,” Parker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And I’m no flip-flopper about it.”

Allan Domb, a real estate magnate and current at-large city councilmember, wants to triple the department’s recruitment budget and vows to thwart what he sees as a “culture of lawlessness” in the city.

Messages centered around police reform, often boiled to the phrase, “defund the police” have become a toxic concept in this election cycle. Gym, even as she tries to ward off accusations from the right that her proposed reforms would make the city less safe, has bowed to some of their pressure. “I am not coming in to dismantle departments that I myself run,” she told Al DÍA. But her supporters on the left have made it clear that, should she win, they will work to make sure she ushers in transformational changes on policing and justice.

Drain is drawing inspiration from the left’s victory in Chicago’s mayoral election in April. “I think that we saw that with Brandon Johnson, we have these education activists who are running these elections in cities that are dominated by the establishment,” they said. “It shows that Philly organizers are making it happen and it could happen in these large cities that haven’t seen change historically.”

The post Philadelphia’s Progressive Movement Aims for the Mayor’s Office appeared first on Bolts.

Johnson is, in fact, set to become mayor of Chicago, after winning the election on Tuesday. A former teacher and labor organizer, he rode heavy support from the CTU and other unions to defeat a more conservative Democrat, Paul Vallas, by three percentage points. Lightfoot had already lost in the election’s first round in late February.

The runoff campaign was dominated by the two candidates’ starkly different visions for the future of Chicago, especially regarding crime and policing. 

Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago’s school system, ran what The New Yorker dubbed a “cops and crime” campaign; buoyed with the backing of the local police union and the Chicago business community, he focused on promises to beef up policing as a response to an uptick in crime during the pandemic years. Vallas attacked Johnson over his past statements sympathetic to reducing the police budget, though Johnson walked those back this year. Johnson, meanwhile, seized the progressive lane and vowed to increase public services and community investments in housing, public education, mental health services, and job training, and he criticized Vallas for turning to the police as a catch-all solution.

The race garnered national attention as a sort of proxy for the future of policing and safety in American cities, with many interpreting Vallas’s first-place finish in February as a demand by voters for a more punitive approach to crime. Johnson, who on Tuesday carried the neighborhoods that have seen the most violence, used his victory speech to celebrate the success of an alternative answer.

“Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people,” Johnson said. “There’s more than enough for everybody in the city of Chicago… We finally will have a City Hall, a city government that truly belongs to the people.” 

Underlying the vast differences between the two candidates’ platforms—and the proxy battle between the CTU and the Fraternal Order of Police—was also a clash between different styles of leadership best suited to carry them out. 

Vallas is a technocrat who has spent decades managing large school bureaucracies from the top down with a goal of making them operate more like businesses, often directly in opposition with teachers’ unions. In his mayoral campaign, proposals to improve city institutions—especially police—revolved around placing competent leaders at the helm. 

“They aren’t confident in leadership,” Vallas said during a recent live forum with Block Club Chicago, bemoaning retirements and vacancies in the Chicago Police Department. “So you restore morale, you slow the exodus.” 

Johnson has a background in labor and organizing and he will be the first mayor that the CTU has endorsed—and the first to come up through the CTU itself. His path into politics began with organizing just ahead of the historic 2012 teachers strike, where teachers advocated for better public school conditions and against school privatization put in place by Vallas and his successors. It kicked off a decade of activism in which the CTU got involved in electoral politics and expanded its demands to include affordable housing, mental health services, public safety, and jobs. 

Johnson participated in these efforts, including taking part in a hunger strike in 2016. The CTU leadership praised his mayoral campaign, which included many of the same priorities, goals, and strategies as his organizing work, as an extension of this work. 

In the eyes of his supporters, Johnson’s background as an organizer is one of his key strengths.

“Brandon Johnson has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago movement organizations for decades,” Carlos Fernandez, executive director of Grassroots Illinois Action, a Humboldt Park-based community organization that endorsed Johnson, told Bolts. “He has marched with us, protested with us, and joined with community leaders to develop strategies to win the policies our communities need.”

Fernandez says the candidate consulted with them regularly as he developed his platform. “He also understands that solutions often don’t come from the top but with the people on the ground floor doing the work.” 

This bottom-up model is reflected in Johnson’s policy proposals, which will require his administration to garner plenty of grassroots input on individual and community needs, and which call for strengthening both public services and their partnerships with civil society and violence intervention programs. One plank of his public safety plan is to reopen mental health clinics, and support the “Treatment not Trauma” model introduced by Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez that would send mental health professionals and EMTs as the response to certain emergency calls, rather than police. In rebuffing Vallas’s proposal to add more police to the L trains, he has proposed a violence intervention strategy that involves working with organizations like the Night Ministry, which already provides medical and other outreach services to unhoused people on the CTA. 

He has also committed to funding violence interruption strategies directed at youth in particular, and cites Peace Book, an ordinance proposed last year that would create a directory of violence interruption leaders, resources, and strategies for young people to use. 

Johnson’s first big test at coalition building came during the runoff campaign. After receiving 22 percent of the vote in the first round, he needed to make up a lot of ground to catch up with Vallas, who got 35 percent, and appeal to voters who chose other candidates. On Tuesday, he largely won the predominantly-Black precincts that previously went to Lori Lightfoot, and he split the areas that previously went to Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who endorsed Johnson, last month. 

The biggest boost for Johnson likely came from a roughly 30 percent increase in turnout among young voters, while turnout among older voters declined compared to February. Turnout overall was low, at about 33 percent of registered voters, roughly the same as in February. 

Johnson now enters the mayor’s office in a heightened moment of flux for Chicago. He will preside over a city recovering from the economic effects of the pandemic, like many other US mayors. But Chicago is set for many more specific transformations. The school board is set to transition from being a fully mayor-appointed body to including some elected positions; the city needs a new police superintendent; and new police district councils were elected for the first time in February to work alongside other city bodies to increase citizen oversight of police. 

All of these changes will happen against the backdrop of the local police union declaring long before the election that it would fight the incoming mayor. 

John Catanzara, the president of the FOP, one of Vallas’s main allies, declared last month that Chicago should expect a mass resignation of police officers and “blood in the streets” if Johnson won. (Vallas condemned those comments, but Johnson was eager to tie his rival to the FOP throughout the campaign due to Catanzara’s ties to Republican politicians.)

Several progressives broadly aligned with Johnson also won aldermanic runoffs on Tuesday, adding to the council’s shift to the left Candidates supported by the CTU and other left-leaning organizations like Democratic Socialists for America prevailed, often against candidates with heavy support from the Democratic establishment, like Angela Clay and Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth in the 46th and 48th wards during the runoff. 

Desmon Yancy, the incoming alderperson for Chicago’s 5th ward covering the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods, is also an organizer who had a hand in creating the city’s new police district councils. This new effort at police accountability through community oversight was the result of decades of activism against largely-unchecked police brutality. The Empowering Communities for Public Safety coalition, which Yancy helped form, crafted the ordinance that led to the formation of 22 three-member councils in each of Chicago’s 66 police districts. These councils will hold monthly forums with members of the community, and also have a role in deciding police leadership. Chicago elected these council members in February, and many candidates who were targeted by the FOP, much like Johnson, prevailed.

“My organizing experience has been a sort of cattle wrangling,” Yancy told Bolts. “Thinking about how all these things are working for the good of the people in the community has been what my career has been centered in, so it’s a natural transition for me.”

Yancy now says he looks forward to working alongside a fellow organizer in the mayor’s office.

“I can imagine going to Mayor Johnson and saying, ‘Here’s the work we want to be doing in the ward,’ and he’s going to ask, ‘Where’s the community involvement in this?’ And having already done the work, we don’t have to explain to him how the community got here,” he said. 

Yancy hopes that a Johnson administration inspires other cities to follow suit in “having a leader who respects, and understands, and supports community voice, and having community leaders as aldermen helping to bring these honest, transparent conversations to transform our communities.”

He added, “To be in this moment today, it’s just exciting.”

The post Chicago’s Organizer Mayor appeared first on Bolts.

On a brisk and sunny February morning, 22-year-old Keyon Pass approached a microphone in a packed South Shore ballroom to tell his story of survival. “I’d always been athletic and smart, but society got the best of me for a while,” Pass, wearing matching gray Nike sweatpants and sweatshirt, said to a crowd of hundreds gathered to discuss gun violence prevention. Pass explained how he started stealing cars as a teenager growing up on the city’s West Side, and how as a young adult he had lost close friends and family in shootings that left him traumatized. 

“I found myself numb to death because it was so normal to me,” he said. “I had nothing to lose and nobody to talk to me about it.” 

Pass choked up, and the crowd clapped and cheered him on, as he described how his life transformed when he decided to become a participant in Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), a non-profit that prevents gun violence by deploying intensive services, ranging from life coaching, therapy for trauma, stable employment, and a weekly stipend of $125 to $225 over the course of two years. Chicago CRED participants like Pass face extraordinary risks of committing a shooting or being shot themselves, sometimes both simultaneously. Research shows that young adult males living in Chicago’s most dangerous zip codes face substantially higher risks of firearm-related homicide than U.S. soldiers deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

“I wouldn’t be here without [the] Chicago CRED family,” Pass told the crowd of violence prevention outreach workers, academic researchers, Chicago business leaders, as well as law enforcement and public health officials from the city. 

Crime and public safety remain top of mind for Chicago voters who will elect their next major during the Feb. 28 election. But the hardships and trauma of the city’s young people have rarely translated into effective political action that creates lasting change for the neighborhoods most directly harmed by gun violence.

In the remaining weeks of the election, Chicago’s political debate over crime and safety is caught between calls for harsher punishment and expanded policing versus addressing the trauma and stark inequality driving crime and violence. In a crowded field of nine candidates, all have given lip service to community violence intervention groups, but few have advocated for more funding for programs like CRED that have been proven to reduce gun violence, while other candidates are calling for additional funds for police. 

If none of the nine candidates win more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the two top candidates face a runoff held on April 4. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose own record on gun violence is under close scrutiny, could be the city’s first mayor to lose re-election in 34 years. 

“People who pick up a gun and wreak havoc in a neighborhood, they need to be locked up. Period, full stop,” Lightfoot told Politico in a Feb. 2023 interview.

Former CEO of Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, running to the right of Lightfoot and endorsed by the notoriously brash police union, promises to address crime by hiring more police officers to patrol the streets and prosecuting more low-level “nuisance” crimes. Candidates running to the left of Lightfoot, like Brandon Johnson, endorsed by the powerful teachers union, argue Lightfoot has failed to address the root causes of violence in the city’s South and West Sides, and says more police does not result in safer neighborhoods. 

“The root of the problem is we’re dealing with young people that are traumatized,” Chicago CRED’s housing coordinator Kanoya Ali told Bolts. “Many of them have lost 20 friends and they’re not 20 years old.” 

Violence prevention organizations, however, are urging politicians to embrace a vision for public safety that goes beyond incarceration. 

“Violence intervention programs are an important harm reduction strategy that has to be funded to scale—full stop,” Stephanie Kollmann, policy director at Northwestern’s Children Family Justice Center, told Bolts. “If you want healthy families, safe communities, and more people engaged in the legal economy, they need stable housing, quality education and healthcare, decent jobs, and good recreational experiences—those are the strongest form of violence prevention policy that we can create.” 

Community violence intervention groups work, in a broad sense, by inspiring hope and a promise of a better life. Research by the University of Chicago and Northwestern University shows that participants in Chicago’s violence prevention groups—like CRED and READI (Rapid Employment and Development Initiative)—experience substantial reductions in arrests for shootings, homicide, and being a victim of gun violence. And because shootings are so costly to cities, programs like READI also generate massive social savings, between $174,000 and $858,000 per participant, researchers estimate. 

“People that are involved in CRED, if they finish the program, they live longer and they stay out of jail longer,” Andrew Papachristos, professor of sociology at Northwestern University who studies violence prevention groups, told Bolts. “The program we evaluated happened during Covid and a national spike in gun violence. By any realistic, non-political standard, that’s a pretty big success.” 

“From a political standpoint, I think it should be a win, too,” Papachristos added.  

Homicides are down nearly 15 percent since 2021, the most violent year in Chicago since the crime wave of the 1990s. Still, the level of homicides remains exceedingly high: Chicago has had more than 400 homicides every year running since 1965—a 58-year streak. 

“Our goals are very ambitious,” Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, told Bolts. “We want to have an 80 percent reduction in the next 15 years.” For that to happen, Gross says that means more outreach workers, more case managers and more clinicians, on top of addressing the damage done by neighborhood disinvestment. “The difference I see in Chicago between the ‘don’t haves’ and ‘the haves’ is unbelievable,” Gross said. “It’s a man-made crisis.” 

Doctor Selwyn Rogers, the founding director of the University of Chicago Emergency Department and Trauma Center on the South Side, witnesses first-hand the brutal physicality inflicted by gun violence on human beings everyday. Rogers similarly described gun violence in Chicago as a “Tale of Two Cities.” On the one hand, gun violence is “hyper-endemic” in some communities while close to non-existent in others.

Just six neighborhoods out of 77—comprising less than one tenth of the city’s population—accounted for a third of all of Chicago’s shootings in 2021. The majority of victims, by far, are Black men and women on the city’s South and West Sides, born into neighborhoods beset by high levels of homelessness, unemployment, substance use, hunger, and crumbling infrastructure, from schools to public parks, resulting from decades of divestment and neglect. The fact that the South and West Sides neighborhoods, where violence is most concentrated, have low voter turnout also complicates the politics of gun violence in the city; research shows that the most policed neighborhoods also vote less. 

These problems, structural and deeply entrenched, touch just about every aspect of civic life, and are a result of decades of de jure and de facto racial segregation that has characterized most of Chicago’s history. But their impacts, Rogers warns, are not relegated to the past nor just these neighborhoods. 

“This is not a ‘they’ problem,” Rogers told Bolts. “This is a ‘we’ problem. Irrespective of your politics, this is all of our problem.” 

When people get shot and are brought to the trauma center where Rogers works, they receive expensive health care. “Who pays for that?” Rogers asked. “We all do.” More importantly than the financial burden for Rogers is the loss of human potential. Without addressing chronic disinvestment in these hard-hit communities, Rogers thinks there’s little chance of solving crime and violence in the city.“ How many people do we lose that could’ve done something different with their lives? How many people lose hope in the morass of violence?” 

All of the mayoral candidates publicly support community violence intervention, no matter their broader stance on crime. But few have offered detailed plans. 

For Paul Vallas, one of the frontrunners in the race, this looks like an increased role for educational systems as an intervening force, as well as more police. 

“We need to embrace violence reduction strategies like CRED, and we need to open our school campuses,” Vallas said in response to a question about his plan to address public safety. Vallas is running a “tough on crime” campaign and continuously calls to rebuild the police force and expand “community policing.”  

Jesús “Chuy” García, who also promises to hire more police officers, said that violence prevention groups are doing “God’s work,” and that more investment in community violence programs is “critical to the well-being of communities.” García, the other top candidate alongside Lightfoot and Vallas, has a public safety plan similar to Lightfoot’s, though he says the city can better implement an effective strategy under his leadership.

Lightfoot, meanwhile, has struggled to defend herself from a barrage of criticism coming from all sides. Community activists are frustrated over low levels of funding for community-based violence prevention during Lightfoot’s tenure as mayor, all while she’s increased the police budget every year since she took office in 2019. During the candidate forum, Lightfoot touted her administration’s record on violence prevention programs. “When I came into office, we were funding about two million dollars a year,” Lightfoot said. “We’re now spending $58 million a year. The money is flowing to street outreach.” (City records indicate that $52 million was allocated to violence intervention annually.)

Still, violence prevention groups only receive a tiny fraction of the funding that the police department receives. CPD’s budget is nearly $2 billion, and makes up over 65 percent of the city’s total spending on public safety. Chicago currently has more police officers per capita than any other major city except Washington D.C. 

Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson, favored by left-wing organizations, argues that the safest neighborhoods aren’t the most heavily policed. Instead, he says, those neighborhoods have robust infrastructure, from quality schools to affordable housing and public transportation. “We’re spending $5 million a day policing alone, and that hasn’t solved any of our systemic problems,” Johnson said. Johnson’s public safety plan does not include increasing the police budget or hiring more police officers.

According to a WBEZ and Sun-Times questionnaire, just two candidates—state Rep. Kam Buckner and activist Ja’Mal Green—said they would reallocate resources away from policing and toward the “root causes” of gun violence. 

 Gun violence prevention groups are now in the political spotlight, but at current funding levels, these groups are only reaching a small fraction of people who are at risk of being targeted by shooters. 

“We have to keep scaling this work. We know we’re not at scale,” Arne Duncan, co-founder of Chicago CRED, who also served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as well as US Education Secretary, said. “There’s so many men and women and teens we’re not serving yet.” 

Ali, of Chicago CRED, is skeptical of the political rhetoric coming from the candidates. “I don’t know how serious that politicians and policymakers are taking this,” he said. “What has to be said to them? These young people need a chance, an opportunity, to really grow and bring something back to the community. They are not liabilities, they are assets.”

Ali wonders how many more of the city’s young people have to die before Chicago is willing to fully commit to a holistic approach that treats gun violence through a compassionate, public health-focused lens. 

While not often associated with enhancing public safety, the expansion of Medicaid, increased access to mental health care, and a guaranteed basic income have shown to reduce crime. Mayor Lightfoot’s latest budget did not include funding to extend Chicago’s universal basic income program, which cut $500 monthly checks to 5,000 Chicagoans facing economic hardships. 

At the South Shore meeting on gun violence, the organizations presented a vision of safety that includes a role for law enforcement, but also transcends the narrow confines of policing, prosecution, and incarceration.

“This is the moment we need to reject fear,” said Gross. “You’ve already had more policing for the last 30 years. And more incarceration. We have the right to say we don’t want more of that.” 

Gross added, “We need more peacekeepers.” 

The post In Chicago Mayor Race, Policing Dominates Over Violence Prevention Programs appeared first on Bolts.

But a host of more routine decisions made by Florida officials may be undermining the health of the state’s elections as well, even when they don’t seem directly related to voting rights.

To replace Warren as state attorney of Hillsborough County (home to Tampa), DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez, a member of the conservative Federalist Society. One of Lopez’s first decisions was to rescind a policy implemented by Warren to not prosecute bicyclists and pedestrians for certain traffic charges. A 2015 Tampa Bay Times report exposed the Tampa police department’s relentless ticketing of Black cyclists for things like having inadequate lighting, or riding on handlebars, a dynamic local organizers have labeled “bicycling while Black.” The report catalyzed a Justice Department investigation which ultimately confirmed the disproportionate enforcement.

New research shows how such low-level interactions with the police can undercut our democracy by reducing the number of people who participate in elections. A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections. 

Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting  for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018. 

These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policing—including worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and health—also extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal. 

Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’  

“I think that people see police as a part of the government,” Bernice Lauredan, director of voter engagement at Dream Defenders, an organization that champions voting rights in Florida, told Bolts. “I don’t believe any interaction with police is safe for people of color–having any interactions with police gives them a negative image of the government. And it may give them a negative idea of voting.” 

And while millions of white Americans have also been swept up in municipal ticketing efforts, the fines and fees in Florida as elsewhere disproportionately affect Black communities.

On average, we found that the deterrent effect was smaller for Black drivers: It reduced their likelihood to vote by 1 percentage point, compared to 1.8 for the overall population. We went further and looked at when voters had been stopped. If they had been stopped in the six months before the election, stops discouraged Black people from voting more than non-Black people. But as the time between a stop and the election increased, the effect weakened. That averaged out to a comparatively smaller effect over the whole two-year period. 

We think that this counterintuitive result might be a mix of two things: on one hand, Black Americans probably have less to “learn” about government from a traffic stop, considering that Black Americans are more likely to have a family member in jail than other Americans. On the other hand, Black Americans probably know that a traffic stop is more likely to turn deadly for them compared to white drivers, which could cause “anticipatory stress” that reduces willingness to vote in the short term. 

“Black folks and other people of color are criminalized in Tampa,” Lauredan says. 

While Florida Republicans have dialed up the use of criminalization to maintain political power, deep-blue urban dwellers also face the political ramifications of policing in their own backyards. 

In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has dramatically increased police presence and encouraged police to be more proactive in punishing behaviors ranging from public drinking and dice games to carrying unlicensed firearms. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also announced plans to beef up a “hot spots” policing initiative that focuses on gun violence—quite similar to the Memphis police squad (“SCORPION”) that killed Tyre Nichols in January. Gun control policing efforts in New York could be driving a dynamic similar to the “strategic retreat” that our research demonstrated in Tampa—another study found that NYPD stop and frisk practices, which expanded significantly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have reduced voter turnout in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections.

New York City is no outlier with respect to increased police contact. In Chicago, for example, the yearly tally of traffic stops ballooned from 86,000 to 378,000 between 2015 and 2021. In addition to boosting city revenues through regressive taxation, these traffic stops also function as a pipeline for gun possession arrests (which have been steadily increasing over time, despite criticisms from local prosecutor Kim Foxx). 

The civic consequences of criminalization don’t stop at voting, either. Research also shows that Americans who have been stopped by police, arrested, or incarcerated become less likely to engage with a range of public institutions that they perceive as surveilling them. Sociologist Sarah Brayne calls this phenomenon “system avoidance,” and argues that the record-keeping practices of institutions like hospitals, schools, and banks—and the ability of state actors to surveil data from these institutions— justify why criminalized people withdraw from them. It’s an ugly realization—harsh punishments and increased carceral surveillance are causing lasting damage to the social fabric of criminalized communities. 

“The more communities are abused by the system, the more natural it is for them to feel alienated from it,” said Yannick Wood, director of the criminal justice reform program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an organization that advocates reducing the interactions between the criminal legal system and democracy in New Jersey. “They don’t feel like the system serves them, and they don’t feel like their voices are represented, or even respected.”

This is the most important takeaway from our research: American communities most likely to oppose “tough on crime” policy (thanks to their personal experience) are being pushed away from politics and from opportunities to steer policy change. 

In Tampa, ticketing practices work in tandem with an extremely harsh regime of felony disenfranchisement that drives Floridians away from politics more explicitly. Almost one-quarter of the 4.6 million Americans barred from voting due to felony convictions live in Florida. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) led the successful 2018 campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions, though their victory was diminished by subsequent state legislation requiring fines and fees payments before voting rights were restored, leaving more than 1 million people without access to the ballot. Traffic stops affect an even larger share of Florida residents.

“Criminalizing any kind of behavior can have unintended consequences,” FRRC deputy director Neil Volz told Bolts. “Voting is a reflection of our belief that we’re part of the system, that our voice matters, that we can take that past pain and turn it into something productive.”

The post A Police Stop Is Enough to Make Someone Less Likely to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

The Democratic leadership appointed Dylan Roberts, an incoming state senator who built a voting record that was often hostile to reform legislation while a state representative, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a powerful body that reviews and can kill bills that touch on the criminal legal system.

The committee will have three Democrats and two Republicans this session, putting Roberts in the likely position of a deciding swing vote on legislation that would reshape law enforcement, prosecution and incarceration. The panel, little-watched by the public and typically known for its long, esoteric legal debates, could become the graveyard of Democrats’ reform agenda.

Roberts told Bolts that he will approach criminal justice issues much like he did in the House. Last year, he was the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to vote against Senate Bill 23 to stop police from lying to children during interrogations in order to obtain information or secure guilty pleas, and House Bill 1131, which would have raised the minimum age for children to face criminal prosecution from 10 to 13. The former bill passed the Senate but fizzled dramatically on the House floor at the end of the session; the latter was gutted, replaced with a task force meant to explore the change.

The proposals were part of a years-long effort by advocates and some Democratic lawmakers to make Colorado law less punishing of young people, and the legislators who championed those bills say they’ll try again in 2023. But Roberts told Bolts that he stands by his votes. Barring substantial amendments, he said, he would not vote for either if and when they are reintroduced, which would be enough to doom them in committee in their intended forms. 

Colorado’s session opens Jan. 9 and runs until May. After gaining seven seats in November, Democrats now enjoy majorities of 23 to 12 in the Senate and 46 to 19 in the House, and so they will have many votes to spare when bills make it to the chamber floors. But they would have much less room for error in the Senate Judiciary Committee, as currently designed. Roberts’s opposition, for instance, would block the version of SB 23 that passed the Senate last year. (The other two Democrats on the committee are generally reliable progressives, while the two Republicans have seldom been open to progressive legislation.)

House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, who sponsored SB 23 and HB 1131 last session, told Bolts that she is frustrated by the Judiciary Committee’s upcoming make-up. She said she and like-minded lawmakers supported Roberts in his election to ensure Democrats held the Senate, but that feel should not have an effective veto over criminal justice legislation.

“I do think the Democrats need to have a conversation about what it means to be a Democrat, what it means that all these progressive people were just elected, and we still put all this power in the hands of a single white man,” said Bacon, a Black lawmaker from Denver.

Roberts was also the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to oppose a bill meant to raise arrest standards and lower jail populations, and the only one to not support indefinitely postponing a Republican bill to limit clemency applications, HB 1164, though he voted against passage. Last year, he was among a crowd of Democrats behind a successful push for the legislature to make simple possession of small amounts of fentanyl a felony.

Some at the Colorado Capitol say they do not believe that Roberts is inclined to behave as a one-man kill committee of progressive aspirations, but that they are unsure what to expect from him. He is clearly more conservative than most Democrats on criminal-legal issues but he has also voted for plenty of reform legislation in the past, they note. Roberts stood with his party in supporting a 2019 bill lowering criminal penalties for simple drug possession and a 2020 bill repealing the death penalty. 

Roberts told Bolts that his foremost mission is to represent the interests of Senate District 8, which covers mountain and rural communities in northwest Colorado. The district leans blue, though slightly less so than the state at large; it has a higher percentage of white residents than the state as a whole and a much lower incarceration rate than more urban, diverse parts of Colorado.

“I knocked on thousands of doors,” Roberts told Bolts, “and criminal justice reform did not come up, but public safety did. That’s something I’ll bring to mind when I approach these bills down in Denver.” He added, “We all represent our districts first, not our caucus first.”

Roberts told Bolts that, as of Jan. 2, zero Democratic lawmakers had approached him to discuss coming legislation on criminal-legal issues. “I think it’s pretty clear, when you have a three-to-two committee, that one vote either way is going to be the deciding vote,” he said. “I understand and recognize that’ll be a consequential place to be in, but I hope my colleagues use it as an opportunity to engage me and the communities I represent on those policies.”

Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno, a Democrat who represents Denver’s north and west suburbs, told Bolts that Roberts, the only attorney in the Senate Democratic caucus, was a natural choice for the Judiciary Committee—but that he did not mean to build the committee such that the fate of legislation hinges on the vote of a single Democrat.

He said that Judiciary could have been expanded to a nine-member committee with six Democrats, which would have created breathing room around Roberts, but that “we couldn’t find another member of the caucus that was willing to serve in that capacity.” 

The legislature’s Judiciary Committees are known for taking on intense topics and deliberating at great length, which, Moreno said, makes them unappealing to many members who may already be quite busy. He added that he approached Senator James Coleman and Senator-elect Tony Exum about joining Judiciary, “but it didn’t really go anywhere.”

Moreno insisted that Senate leadership does not want the chamber’s Judiciary Committee to be a roadblock to progressive policy. “No one member by themselves will stand in the way of making meaningful criminal justice reform,” he said. 

Still, Moreno did not specify what the leadership may do for the committee to not sink progressive legislation. Committee assignments can change mid-session, either permanently or on short-term bases, but Moreno gave no indication of a Senate Judiciary personnel shakeup; he also stressed that expanding the size of a committee would be difficult at this stage. He did not say whether leadership may route certain bills that fit in the scope of Judiciary to other committees more likely to pass them.

Republican State Senator Bob Gardner, the ranking member of Senate Judiciary, told Bolts that committee placements aren’t made by mistake.

“I think the subtext of this one is that we will see criminal justice legislation come out of the committee that is moved more to the center, if it does come out of committee,” he said. “Or, we will see things that do not come out of the committee because they’re a bridge too far. That’s my hope.”

Progressive lawmakers say they won’t amend their 2023 agendas, even as they are keenly aware of the committee’s new power dynamics. 

Julie Gonzales, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and frequently sponsors anti-carceral legislation, said the Roberts assignment “changes nothing of the bills I’m planning to be a lead sponsor on.” Those include reruns of last year’s proposals to prevent cops from lying to kids in interrogations and to raise the minimum age of prosecution; currently, eight states have set that age above Colorado’s line of age 10.

Gonzales, a Democrat who represents parts of Denver and is the Senate majority whip, told Bolts, “Senator-elect Roberts’s record speaks for itself. I look forward to working with him.”

Roberts said he stands by his votes against those two bills. “I was hearing serious objection from my community,” including law enforcement and some advocates for crime victims, he said. Police groups and state prosecutors fought the changes last year because they said it would be harder for them to gather information to solve crimes or to use prosecution to steer children to treatments. 

Tristan Gorman, a lobbyist for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said stopping police from lying to children remains a high priority for reform advocates. 

“It’s still just as important as it was last year to protect kids, who are way more vulnerable to deception than adults, from making false confessions, and, in turn, reduce wrongful convictions,” she told Bolts. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is but one example of Democrats shying from leftward policy, despite deepened majorities that leave the party in control of 69 of 100 seats in the legislature. Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee and its House speakership, among other spots of major influence, are both controlled by Democrats notably more moderate than the Democratic caucuses overall. Democrat Jared Polis, a regular impediment to progressive legislation in Colorado on issues ranging from tax policy to immigrant protections, remains governor.

Progressives like Bacon find this all clarifying. 

“Last session, we over-relied on this excuse of the election, to temper ourselves,” Bacon said, referring to some Democrats’ worry that championing ambitious criminal justice reforms in an election year could backfire at the polls. “This year, that won’t be an excuse anymore, but already we have set ourselves up to extend the beliefs of last session, and that tells me where people are really at. We’ve set up actual infrastructure to keep us from these issues.”

The article has been corrected to note that Roberts voted against passage of HB 1164, the GOP-proposed clemency bill, while joining the GOP to oppose indefinitely postponing it.

The post Committee Appointment Threatens to Derail Criminal Justice Reforms in Colorado appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Moriarty continued to assail the racial disparities in law enforcement, calling herself “angry and disappointed” over the behavior of the MPD and the prosecutor’s office. The following year, months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis unleashed a national reckoning over police violence, Moriarty was ousted from her job in what she called retaliation over her speaking out for racial justice in the county. 

Now Moriarty is heading back into a prominent public role, but this time she will take over the prosecutor’s office.

In a major victory for reform prosecutors, Moriarty easily won the race for Hennepin County Attorney on Tuesday, with 58 percent of the vote. She defeated her opponent Martha Holton Dimick, a retired county judge and a former prosecutor in the office. (Freeman announced earlier this year he would not seek re-election.)

Moriarty and Holton Dimick embraced opposing sides in a national debate on criminal justice—a progressive turn versus more of a tough-on-crime approach—that traces back to a long history of conflict in the Minneapolis region, Eamon Whalen reported last month in a joint article for Bolts and Mother Jones.

Moriarty says she was moved to run for county prosecutor after seeing the tide turn on the racial justice reckoning and criminal justice reforms that began to emerge in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. 

“I did see an opportunity for change slipping away,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones. “And I thought, people who really value public safety, and a fair and just system need to step up during this time of turmoil and really present options that aren’t the same old things we’ve had for decades, which haven’t kept us safer.”

Moriarty promised to ramp up police accountability and to institute a “do-not-call” list that would bar her staff from relying on police officers who have been shown to repeatedly lie on the stand as witnesses in cases. She also said she would seek to expand alternatives to incarceration such as diversion and restorative justice programs.

Her opponent, Holton Dimick, accused progressives of endangering public safety by criticizing police, claiming a “narrative” that police should be defunded was fueling crime. “[Defund] was basically giving the criminal element in our city and across the county, the go-ahead and commit crimes sign,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones. She has also attacked Moriarty over her background as a defense attorney.

Moriarty and Holton Dimick have circled one another throughout their career, as one worked for the public defender’s office and the other was a prosecutor under now-U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the former county attorney. The two once found themselves on opposite sides of a case where the judge dismissed charges against the person Moriarty was defending and admonished the prosecutor, Holton Dimick, for how aggressively she attempted to pursue charges against the man. 

Moriarty is one of several reformers who seized new prosecutor offices on Tuesday. Kelly Higgins, a Democratic defense attorney, won the DA race in fast-growing Hays County, Texas, after promising a “sea change” in the county; he told Bolts that he was moved toward more progressive positions by a group of activists that have been organizing in Central Texas.

Kimberly Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court, won in Polk County, (Des Moines), Iowa’s most populous county. She told Bolts in June that she was inspired to run upon hearing a podcast interview with Rachael Rollins, the former DA of Boston who was one of the flag-bearers for so-called progressive prosecutors.

Reform candidates suffered losses as well as Republican incumbents prevailed in critical races in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and Douglas County, Nebraska. In Dallas and San Antonio, Democratic DAs beat tough-on-crime challenges. Other major races for prosecutor remained undecided as of publication in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, Alameda County (Oakland), California, and King County (Seattle), Washington. 

In Minneapolis, the prosecutor race acquired special importance given the conflicts over race and policing in the months and years that have followed George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, and it morphed into a test of how Minneapolis voters—especially those living in areas that are seeing higher levels of crime—define public safety.

Last year, progressive activists championed Question 2, a measure that would have dismantled the Minneapolis Police Department, replacing it with a new public agency in charge of safety, but voters rejected it. Holton Dimick publicly opposed the measure at the time, and this year she was backed by local leaders like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey who opposed it as well. Moriarty declined to say how she voted last year, but she had the backing of prominent progressives who supported it such as Attorney General Keith Elison and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

During her campaign, Holton Dimick invoked that result as showing a desire for more law enforcement, and she stressed that the 2021 measure failed in north Minneapolis, a predominantly Black part of Minneapolis that has faced rising gun violence, as evidence that the communities most affected by crime would prefer her law-and-order message. (Question 2 also failed last year, and by a larger margin, in the wealthier wards of southwest Minneapolis.)

But on Tuesday, as reporter Eamon Whalen tweeted, Moriarty carried nearly all precincts in the wards that make up north Minneapolis. 

The post Minneapolis Elects a Career Public Defender as Its New Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.