Bob Harvie was thrust on the national stage in late 2020 when Donald Trump, in an effort to find any angle to cling to the presidency, unsuccessfully sued Bucks County, a populous suburb of Philadelphia, demanding that thousands of mail ballots be thrown out. 

As one of the two Democrats on the three-member county commission, Harvie was responsible for the county’s voting procedures and he wanted people to vote safely during the pandemic. With his support, Bucks County installed ballot drop boxes and notified roughly 1,600 voters that they had made a clerical mistake on their mail ballot such as forgetting to date their envelopes, giving them the opportunity to correct it—a common procedure known as ballot curing.

“The Republican Party and the Trump campaign wanted things done a certain way, we didn’t do things the way they wanted to, so they sued us. Clearly we’d followed the law because we won all these suits,” recalls Harvie, who is running for reelection in two weeks. The race will determine what party controls Bucks County’s commission during the next presidential election.

Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019 for the first time in decades, one of five flips in eastern Pennsylvania counties with more than 2 million residents combined. The results gave Democrats near total control of the ring of counties around Philadelphia. Their new majorities approved relatively expansive voting procedures, and in late 2020 they effectively created a suburban firewall against Trump’s efforts to get officials in blue counties to throw out ballots and resist certifying the results. 

Pennsylvania leaves county officials with a lot of discretion to decide how to run elections. They have tremendous leeway in particular when it comes to deciding the modalities of voting by mail. The state provides little binding guidance on whether a county needs to have a ballot drop box, let alone how many drop boxes to have or how accessible they should be. County officials also decide whether to notify voters whose ballot risks being rejected because of a minor mistake. 

This has produced a disconcerting patchwork of policies. “You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project, an organization that focuses on boosting voter registration and turnout. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 and 2022 elections, many counties adopted more restrictive rules, including not installing drop boxes and not letting voters correct mistakes on their envelopes. The decisions did not always fall neatly on partisan lines, and voting rights organizations have targeted Democratic boards for tossing out too many ballots, including in the city of Philadelphia. But, by and large, Republican politicians since 2020 have been more likely to oppose procedures that facilitate mail voting. Even Dauphin County (the bluest county under GOP control) has not allowed ballot curing, offering a glimpse into what the voter-rich suburban ring around Philadelphia would have looked like had Democrats not made major gains in 2019.

Harvie points to the rules in place in other parts of Pennsylvania to lay out the stakes of his county’s Nov. 7 elections. 

“If Republicans are in control of the board of elections in 2024,” he told Bolts, “I don’t have any doubt that a lot of the things we put in place will be gone.” 

If the county reversed its approach on curing, he says, officials would likely reject thousands of mail ballots without first reaching out to voters to say there was an issue with their ballot. “The dangerous part is that people won’t know that their votes aren’t counted,” he says. “You’re gonna think, ‘Oh, I guess I voted, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ You wouldn’t even know that you had been denied.”

Voters in other counties will also be deciding the shape of their county governments on Nov. 7, which means that they’ll also be choosing who will run next year’s elections in this critical swing state—and under what policy. 

Republicans could flip closely divided counties like Bucks, but they’ll also test Democratic gains in counties like Chester that have swung dramatically blue since 2019 after staying faithful to Republicans for decades in local elections. Democrats, meanwhile, have some opportunities to gain ground, for instance in Dauphin and Berks. 

The results will shape how easy it is for millions of Pennsylvanians to vote—especially by mail—and the odds that their ballot will be rejected. 

“If newly elected county governments in Pennsylvania remove drop boxes, if they remove the ability for voters to cure their ballots, they’ll make it even harder for eligible voters to have the votes counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that promotes wider access to voting. 

“That could impact tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in the 2024 election and change the result of the election,” Hensley-Robin added.

The results will also inform which counties are susceptible to not certify next year’s elections. Plenty of commissioner candidates who’ve amplified Trump’s false claims of widespread irregularities advanced past the GOP primaries, often in staunchly red counties, Bolts reported in May. 

Among them are Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the two Republican commissioners who run Berks County, a jurisdiction of more than 400,000 people located 50 miles west of Bucks County. Last year, they refused to certify their county’s election results because they wanted to exclude some valid mail ballots from their counts; a state court ultimately forced them to certify the results.

Leinbach and Rivera are now facing Democratic challengers Jesse Royer and Dante Santoni, who told Bolts in separate interviews that they’re worried about 2024: They think the GOP incumbents, if they remain in control, could once again placate election deniers next year and try to toss out results.

“The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” Santoni told Bolts. “When the election is over, we accept the results. We think that that distinguishes us from our opponents. We talk about a lot of issues—roads, economic development—but without democracy, all those issues don’t mean a whole lot.” 

Leinbach and Rivera did not reply to requests for comment. GOP commissioners are also running for reelection in Fayette and Lancaster counties after similarly stalling certification of the 2022 primaries.

Royer and Santoni, the Democratic challengers in Berks, also laid out how they would ease mail voting. Both want to notify voters if their ballots have an error; Berks County’s Republican commissioners defeated a motion earlier this year for the county to provide such information to voters. “We need to make sure that people who are trying to cast their ballots are given every opportunity to do so,” Royer said.

Both Democrats also want to increase the number of ballot drop boxes set up in the county; Royer pointed out that it’s critical to make them widely accessible given that the county has poor public transportation. Both also oppose the county’s current policy, unusual in this state, of stationing armed sheriff’s deputies at ballot boxes; they warn that this may intimidate some voters, a position that Common Cause and other civil rights groups share. 

Unlike in Berks County, voters in Bucks County currently do not have to interact with armed law enforcement to cast a ballot. Harvie, the Democratic commissioner, says he wants to keep it that way. 

Harvie also worries that Bucks County could go the way of Berks County in terms of objections to election certification. He stresses that the Bucks County Republican Party is chaired by Pat Poprik, who became a false presidential elector for Trump in December 2020 and has clout over local GOP politics. Conservatives have recently taken the county by storm with major upheavals to local public schools via book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ students, and Democrats are tying these far-right gains on local school boards to the commissioner race.

The Republican candidate who is vying to join and flip Bucks County’s commission, County Controller Pamela Van Blunk, did not reply to a request for comment.

Voting rights attorneys in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they are less anxious about counties not certifying results than they are about thousands of mail ballots being tossed, since state courts are likely to intervene in the former scenario. County officials are not meant to have discretion to reject valid results, says Marian Schneider, who works on voting rights policy at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. She says that their task is merely “ministerial,” but that the ACLU will be vigilant. 

Still, Hensley-Robin of Common Cause is worried that Trump, should he be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024, would seek to weaponize delays and confusion in a replay of 2020. “When we see individual counties delaying certification or messing with voting machines, that spreads distrust in the election system, and that builds misinformation, which can result in moving to overturn an election,” he says.

Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is currently a county commissioner in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county. He holds an at-large seat that’s effectively reserved for the GOP, which makes it certain he will win a new term on Nov. 7. Should Republicans also win the unusually heated race for county executive, this would give them control of the county’s board of elections, which is made up of the county executive and the two at-large members. 

The Republican nominee for county executive, Joe Rockey, has distanced himself from Trump. But any small voting policy change in this populous county—where Biden won 150,000 more votes than Trump, double his statewide margin—would have important ramifications in 2024.

Pennsylvania in 2019 enacted Act 77, a bipartisan law that greatly expanded the availability of mail voting, but it did not set statewide guidelines for how counties should approach vital questions related to mail-in voting, including how to deal with clerical errors made by voters. Schneider regrets, for instance, that “there really is nothing in the election code that addresses what happens if a mistake has been made on the outer envelope.” 

State courts have stepped into this void since 2020, but in ways that have only compounded the importance of what county officials decide with regards to ballot curing. 

For one, Republicans have won legal battles ensuring that mail ballots with small errors will get tossed if they aren’t fixed in time; in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the supreme court ordered officials not to count a ballot if the voter forgot to write a date, even if the ballot arrived on time. “There are new things that can disqualify you,” Hensley-Robin warns. Due to this higher standard, he says, thousands of ballots risk being tossed in 2024 that would not have been in 2020—unless voters get to cure them first.

Pennsylvanians are also electing a new state supreme court justice this fall, with the two candidates staking very different opinions on how permissive courts should be toward mail voting.

Moreover, courts have confirmed that there is no statewide rule regarding whether counties must help voters correct their mistakes. In 2022, they rejected a Republican lawsuit demanding that all counties stop the practice of ballot curing altogether. The decision was a relief for voting rights advocates since it meant boards could still choose to let voters cure their ballots, but it also entrenched the current status quo that  leaves the matter entirely to counties’ discretion.

Advocates for ballot access are deeply frustrated that the state has been reduced to this mosaic of disparate policies. Policies should not differ so starkly from one county to the next when it comes to the ease of mail voting, they say. “This patchwork from county to county really confuses voters and makes them unsure of the rules in the system,” says Hensley-Robin.

Kenner, of New PA Project, says this fragmentation also stands as a big obstacle for organizations like hers that are working on the ground to drive up turnout. 

“It gets very confusing for a statewide organization to be able to subscribe to the various rules that board of elections have in each county,” she told Bolts. “As we’re preparing to do our GOTV efforts, we have to make sure that all scripts are different for each county… It also makes it tough when we’re doing voter registration, and we’re dropping off completed voter registration forms to various boards of elections and they all have different rules.”

For Hensley-Robin, the remedy cannot just be persuading individual county commissioners throughout the state of Pennsylvania to ease ballot access. He is advocating for the state to adopt House Bill 847, which would impose new statewide mandates, for instance when it comes to guaranteeing that counties give all voters a chance to correct their ballots. 

“Ballots should not be disqualified for failure to meet a clerical or technical standard,” says Hensley-Robin. “If voters make a small mistake in terms of failing to date a ballot or put a signature or have a secrecy envelope, they should have an opportunity to fix those. There needs to be a requirement for all counties to notify voters actively within 24 hours of receipt about one of these defects so that they have an opportunity to cure it immediately.”

Without such mandates, the Nov. 7 elections have graver stakes than anyone wishes on them.

“Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you have an opportunity to have your vote counted,” he added.

The post Pennsylvanians Are About to Decide Who Will Oversee the 2024 Elections appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The battle over Safehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policing a public health crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is the first time in the history of Chicago and in the history of the United States that Black and brown people have been given a democratic option to say who polices their communities and how their communities are policed,” activist Frank Chapman said of the new police oversight body. 

Chapman, now 80 years old, led the grassroot movement that prompted the city council to pass the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance in 2021, creating the district councils.

These councils, the culmination of decades of activism for increased police accountability, represent Chicago’s boldest attempt to give residents direct input over policing practices. Councils will hold forums and monthly public meetings to hear residents’ concerns and discuss topics like police interactions with youth and undocumented residents, community policing, and restorative justice initiatives.

Each district council will operate with three positions; a chairperson, a community engagement coordinator, and a member who serves on the nominating committee for another citywide police oversight board. All members of a council must be a resident of the district for at least a year, and none can be active members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), although former officers can be elected if they left the department at least three years prior to the date on which they would assume office.

While these duties and responsibilities outlined in the ECPS ordinance are fairly clear, much about the members’ day-to-day responsibilities has yet to be determined. “We are building the plane while we’re flying it,” is how Julia Kline, a candidate for the 2nd District police council who is also a voting rights activist and former Chicago Public School teacher, described it. 

Over 100 candidates are now running for the 66 council seats. They come from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences—young people of color and Chicago Public School teachers to retired CPD officers and practicing attorneys—and many have not held elected office before. 

As the inaugural members, the winners in Tuesday’s election will likely chart the direction of future district councils and have a hand in shaping how they handle common community complaints such as lengthy response times or patterns of misconduct like stop-and-frisk. Although the practice was reined in under a 2015 federal consent decree, stop-and-frisk is nevertheless still occurring to Black and brown youth, according to at least one district council candidate. But if candidates with pro-police and reform-minded views end up on these councils, any nominations, policy recommendations, and initiatives that emerge will be contingent on the ability of these factions—who have historically been at odds—to share power. 

Most crucially, the district councils will help decide who gets nominated to serve on the seven-member Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), another accountability body with more direct and wide-ranging powers over CPD’s policies and budget. This city-wide oversight commission, which was also created by the 2021 ordinance, can also remove the head of the Citizens Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which has existed since 2017 and is tasked with conducting its own investigations into police misconduct and releasing reports and body-cam footage that result from those investigations. 

COPA has faced public criticism after the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018, the botched raid on social worker Anjanette Young’s home in 2019, and the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo in 2021. In these cases and others, Chicago residents took issue with the length of time it took COPA to release its disciplinary recommendations, and for its hesitancy to release all available body-cam footage from the incidents, not just those videos deemed most relevant.

The Commission can also cast a vote of no confidence for Chicago’s police superintendent, forcing both City Council hearings and a public response from the mayor which could lead to their possible ouster. It also gets to draft the shortlist of candidates whenever a vacancy arises.

Asked how these reforms were achieved, Chapman said, “We built a grassroots movement in the neighborhoods going door by door, block by block, district by district. And after we built up a big groundswell of support, we actually forced the city to the negotiating table to negotiate this history-making ordinance.”

But the roots of the movement extend back much further than this most recent election cycle. Calls for community control of policing trace back to the Black Panther Party and Illinois deputy chairman Fred Hampton Sr., who brought the first multicultural Rainbow Coalition together in the late 1960s around this very issue. But the reform effort failed, according to Chapman, in the face of concerted opposition from Chicago’s political machine helmed by longtime mayor Richard J. Daley. (Hampton was later killed by Chicago police, in conjunction with the FBI.)

Nevertheless, the 2012 killing of Rekia Boyd by off-duty police detective Dante Servin, and his subsequent acquittal on the charges of involuntary manslaughter, reignited calls for police accountability. It also prompted the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) and other organizers to host a meeting that was attended by around 150 community members, many of whom had previously experienced police violence, who then decided to build a movement demanding elected police councils, according to Chapman.

High-profile police killings and scandals in subsequent years have added strength to the movement and garnered significant public support for substantial reform measures—like the killing of Laquan McDonald, who was revealed to have been shot 16 times after police attempted to cover up details of the shooting; revelations about the widespread extent of police torture committed by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and his associates leading to a landmark reparations ordinance; and the still-unfolding corruption scandal involving former Sgt. Ronald Watts, which prompted the largest wave of exonerations in the history of Chicago.

Following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May 2020, thousands in Chicago and millions across the United States took to the streets to protest police brutality. This gave leaders of the police accountability movement, backed by alderpersons Jeanette Taylor, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Roderick Sawyer of the Black Caucus, leverage to negotiate the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance with the mayor’s office. The police district councils were the signature policy of that ordinance, which passed the city council with a 36-13 vote, because they extended community input and democratic control over individual police districts. 

For reform-minded candidates running for those district councils, increasing the number of restorative justice and alternative public safety interventions could pave the way to reducing police budgets. “If we can figure out how to keep each other safe in such a way that nobody needs to call the police into our neighborhoods, we will all be so much better off,” Kline, the 2nd District candidate, said. “And then maybe the police can shrivel in the way that they need to do.”

Meanwhile, some candidates have ties to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which has spent more than $25,000 backing specific candidates in these races, and supports increasing CPD’s budget and hiring more officers, according to the Chicago Reader. On February 11, the FOP endorsed 19 candidates across 11 of the 22 district council races. This move came after the Chicago FOP chapter said on Twitter that the city’s police accountability measures “support criminals over victims.”

Perry Abbasi, a FOP election lawyer who’s been accused of posting misogynist and racist social media posts, was tapped by the FOP to run in the 25th District race after they failed to find a candidate who aligned with their interests. 

Abbasi confirms that he has been paid $15,000 by the FOP since September 2022 for work getting several pro-police candidates on the ballot and for filing challenges against slates of progressive candidates in the 19th, 20th, and 24th District races. Abbasi argued that these candidates shouldn’t be on the ballot because they filed their ballot petitions as a group rather than individually. 

Per a decision by the Board of Elections and affirmed by the Circuit Court that rejected his argument, the candidates remain on the ballot. Abbasi’s argument was once again rejected by the Illinois Court of Appeals, he says, and so the slates of progressive candidates will not be disqualified.

“[Police] have a First Amendment right to participate in the political process, and they’re doing so,” Abbasi told Bolts.

By running their own slate of candidates, activists think the FOP is trying to undermine this new oversight mechanism from the start. 

“This is the height of hypocrisy,” Chapman said. “You’re not in favor of this law, so…why do you want people in the district councils? So you can gum them up, so you can block progress. That’s the only reason.”

CAARPR encouraged more than 50 candidates to run for their desire to achieve greater accountability for police misconduct and plan to explore alternatives to policing like sending mental health workers in response to crisis calls. 

Because so many of the candidates are working class, Chapman said that “they can’t afford to buy this election.” For that reason, CAARPR has been assisting them with canvassing, printing campaign materials, and other field operations.

One of those candidates backed by CAARPR is Coston Plummer, a home care worker who’s championed disability rights and is running for the 2nd District council. Plummer brings a different perspective on policing than the FOB-backed candidates as brother of a Burge torture survivor who remains incarcerated to this day, and is an ardent supporter of police accountability measures. He wants to bring an end to stop-and-frisk measures and no-knock warrants, and he sees the recent objection by the interim CCPSA to the new CPD gang database as evidence of how the elected oversight commission can influence policy. 

Carisa Parker, a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of her partner who was a CPD officer and mother of a current officer, has a complex relationship to policing in the city. She is running in the 22nd District and plans to “focus on the systemic issues that cause those disciplinary issues.”

“Are we hiring people with a military mindset and not people who are going in as guardians?” Parker asked. “​​I really see this body as being a really important piece of proactive accountability.”

Organizers from across the country have journeyed to and camped out in Chicago in the dead of winter to learn from the ECPS campaign about the district council model. They came from cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Silver Spring, Maryland, and even places as far away as Dallas and Seattle.  

They are looking to Chicago’s new model of popularly-elected councils with cautious optimism after seeing their own cities’ efforts at police accountability through civilian oversight boards stunted by lack of staffing, inadequate funding, limited powers, or a combination of constraints. In Dallas, for example, where citizen oversight body members are appointed by city council, some have been criticized for having too close ties with police. In Fort Worth, after the city council voted down a proposal for a civilian oversight board, the police chief recently put forth his own proposal for a model in which he’d handpicked a majority of the members.

Chicagoans are also familiar with oversight reforms that raise hope only to be dashed against stonewalling by the police department and foot-dragging from the mayor’s office. But the city does have a track record of success with accountability measures; COPA, unlike its peer institutions in other cities, is well-staffed, adequately funded, and conducts its own misconduct investigations. 

Additionally, the level of transparency is somewhat higher in Chicago given that the public has full access to data from Chicago police disciplinary records through the Citizens Police Data Project, which was unparalleled when first launched in 2015. Two years after New York’s state legislature repealed Section 50-a in 2020, making police disciplinary records publicly accessible in that state, the Legal Aid Society created an NYPD misconduct dashboard.

Chapman isn’t optimistic about reform efforts that focus on persuading the police of the need for change from within: “the sad news is that has never worked.” Nevertheless, he was more sanguine about putting power in the hands of the ordinary citizens: “Once we learn how to mobilize the people and demand the changes that we want…that always works.”

The post Chicago Election Puts Police Oversight in Voters’ Hands appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A year ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, activists flooded the streets of Syracuse, New York, with demands for police reform. The Syracuse Police Accountability and Reform Coalition (SPAARC) put forth “The People’s Agenda for Policing,” which included a call to remove school cops, known euphemistically as school resource officers (SROs). Students stressed that schools rely on police too heavily for discipline and cops are too often called in for matters best handled by mental health experts or social workers. The Syracuse school district spends about $1.6 million on policing each year, and activists argued that the district could use some of that money to hire alternative support staff instead.

The push to remove police from public schools is not new, but it gained traction over the last year as racial justice protests swept the country. School boards in places like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, and Portland, Maine, voted to end their contracts with local law enforcement, and in Syracuse, activists pointed to Rochester, a city just 90 minutes away, where the City Council also voted last June to remove school cops. The issue has become a focal point of local school board elections, too, like in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where some candidates campaigned last fall on promises to halt the practice of using armed police in schools.  

Research suggests the presence of cops increases suspensions and arrests, especially for young students, but there’s no consensus on whether they reduce school crime or violence. Student surveys show Black students tend to have significantly more negative perceptions of school police.

In early July, activists met with city leadership to discuss their demands. “I didn’t see that as helpful, I just saw it as a way to spill out our trauma in front of them and get blank faces in return,” said Shukri Mohamed, a leader in SPAARC and an affiliate group called CuseYouthBLM. Overall, Mohamed said she feels the school board and mayor have been very unresponsive to their concerns. “They’re very out of touch with what students are facing, even though we’ve provided them space and time and records to show what [school cops] feel like,” she said.

In light of their frustrations, Syracuse activists have their sights set on the city’s June 22 school board election. Youth have rallied behind Twiggy Billue, a longtime social justice leader and president of Syracuse’s National Action Network chapter. Billue has been pushing to remove cops from the city’s public schools for more than a decade, and in 2014 she published a book on how harsh discipline policies negatively affect students throughout life.

This isn’t Billue’s first attempt at running for the school board. In 2019, she competed against four other candidates in the Democratic primary for four spots and narrowly lost. This time there are four candidates competing for three seats. While the Syracuse Democratic Socialists of America chapter has endorsed Billue, the local Democratic Party has endorsed the three other candidates on the ballot: Karen Cordano, Nyatwa Bullock, and David Maynard.

Maynard, a former teacher and principal, said the issue of school cops “hasn’t really come up much at all” as he’s been campaigning. “It was a big issue last summer. … I believe they wrongly took a look at police officers in schools, but there wasn’t a lot of oomph for that,” he said. Maynard said his 20 years in school administration showed him the value of school police and he believes they really care about students. “They have such a complex set of abilities, and if you look at the Syracuse murder rate, violence doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door,” he said. Homicides were up 55 percent in Syracuse last year, though no data links this to violence in schools. In the 2017-18 school year, the most recent year with data available, there were 4 incidents of assault with a weapon (not including firearms or explosives) and 43 incidents of assault without a weapon.

Cordano, a parent leader, said voters have asked her about school police as she’s campaigned and says it’s “a very nuanced situation” that does not lend itself to “an easy yes or no answer.” Although she believes school police should not be used to discipline children, she says she wants to  learn how many guns and weapons they confiscate annually. “That information could change my mind in a heartbeat, depending on what the numbers are,” she said. “I feel like I don’t know enough to advocate right now, but I do think once the data is clear to me, then let’s figure it out.”

Bullock, an activist and undergraduate who is a former teaching assistant, did not respond to requests for comment.

Billue told The Appeal that working with SPAARC and the National Action Network has allowed her to look around the country and see “similarly situated” communities “finding success” in identifying school police alternatives. “We know there is potential for violence in schools but other schools have units outside of school to make sure nothing bad enters,” she said. “We also think something other than police could be implemented alongside community partners.” 

The issue of police violence in Syracuse schools came to a head in 2008, when an officer working in a high school punched a 15-year-old girl in the face and broke her nose. The cop said the student hit him first and he ultimately arrested her and charged her with attempted assault. Some parents and students defended the police officer, and others condemned his actions. The superintendent ultimately removed the cop from school, though the police chief had said the behavior was justified. About a decade later, another officer was removed when he broke a 14-year-old’s elbow during an arrest.

Some defenders of keeping police in schools point to violent incidents, like in 2018 when a teenager stabbed two students at a high school.

Most members of the Syracuse school board have been much more quiet on the issue than the candidates.

Three members—Pat Body, David Cecile, and Derrick Dorsey—are retiring, and only Body responded to a request for comment about school cops. “I voted to keep the SROs in our high schools,” she said in an email. “We want to make changes to the role.” Body did not answer a follow-up question about what kinds of changes she’d like to make.

School board commissioners Mark Muhammad and Tamica Barnett also did not respond to requests for comment. But last summer Barnett told Syracuse.com that although she’d like the board to have oversight of school resource officers, she believes they help young people establish positive relationships with police and are necessary sometimes in violent situations. “I’m inside the schools,” she said in July. “I would encourage anybody that’s really pushing for the SROs to be removed to spend days inside the schools.” Commissioner Katie Sojewicz referred media inquiries to school board president Dan Romeo.

Romeo told The Appeal that after having several board conversations about SROs, he and his colleagues have “decided that keeping them in our schools is what we would like to do going forward. There was a clear message in our discussions that we are willing to improve the SRO program and those discussions are happening.” When asked what kinds of improvements specifically, Romeo said in an email that a committee “will look at any opportunity to improve. While I am not a part of the group, I would say the [Memorandum of Agreement] with the city, job description/duties and responsibilities and personnel selection are all things that will be looked at.”

Perrine Wasser, co-chairperson of the Syracuse DSA chapter electoral committee, told The Appeal that committee members  see electing Billue as “the best chance we have at removing SROs” and that she believes some school board members could be persuaded. “I think this is what a lot of the parents want, and I think that will be clear when Twiggy shows up and has a lot of support,” Wasser said. “And she’s just the most consistent in showing up for the community and listening to what students and young people want.”

Sarhia Rahim, a SPAARC leader and co-founder of Raha Syracuse, a Muslim youth group, said she knows that even if Billue is elected “some of the other people at the table may not listen because they haven’t listened to us.” Still, Rahim said “we know where Twiggy stands … and I can’t say the same thing for a lot of the other commissioners.”

Mayor Ben Walsh is also facing a Democratic primary on June 22. His opponents, Khalid Bey, and Michael Greene, did not respond to a request for comment on school resource officers.

In an emailed statement to The Appeal, the mayor’s chief policy officer, Greg Loh, emphasized that the Walsh administration has engaged in discussions over the last year regarding the role of police, but the school board will make the final determination on district policy.  “Mayor Walsh’s Syracuse Police Reform Executive Order stated that he is committed to the implementation of a new model for school safety and security,” Loh said. “His order said the city would work in coordination with the Syracuse City School District which is governed by the Syracuse Board of Education.”

Mohamed of SPAARC and CuseYouthBLM said they’re not going to be deterred even if their goals take awhile. “We’re not stopping any time soon,” she said. “If it means we keep going for 10 years, then so be it.”

The post Syracuse School Board Elections Heat Up Over Police Debate appeared first on Bolts.

When the chief prosecutors of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, decided to stop prosecuting marijuana possession in early 2019, Portsmouth’s local judges largely went along with that policy. But in Norfolk, judges resisted prosecutors’ motions to dismiss marijuana cases filed by police officers. At the time, Ramin Fatehi, who worked in the Norfolk prosecutor’s office, made the case in local courtrooms that arrests are disproportionately harming Black residents. After a protracted fight, the Virginia Supreme Court ended up siding with the lower court judges who were intent on keeping these marijuana cases going.

Much has changed in Virginia over the last two years. A big wave of reform-minded candidates won prosecutor elections in November 2019, and they soon joined forces with Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Greg Underwood and Portsmouth Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Morales to create the Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice (VPPJ). The coalition has lobbied the state legislature to abolish the death penalty and legalize marijuana (those passed) and to repeal mandatory minimums (that didn’t), among other measures.

Soon the VPPJ will have Fatehi as a new member who has vowed to grow the group’s clout and to press for more criminal justice reforms in the legislature.

Fatehi easily won a Democratic primary on Tuesday to be Norfolk’s commonwealth’s attorney. He received more than 60 percent of the vote against two candidates. In this staunchly Democratic city, he is virtually certain to win the general election and replace Underwood, who did not seek re-election. No Republican or independent candidates are running in the general election.

Before the primary, The Appeal: Political Report asked Fatehi about his platform, how he wants to reduce incarceration, and what he thinks the VPPJ brings to the table. 

“Traditionally, Virginia prosecutors have been in favor of greater punishment,” he said, and they have lobbied for rules that “feed mass incarceration.” Where the reform-minded prosecutors in the VPPJ differ, he says, is in recognizing that crime is “a symptom of structural racism, of systematic community disinvestment, of redlining, unequal school policy, the lack of jobs, lack of transportation, a lack of opportunities, intergenerational barriers to wealth building, the disinvestment in the treatment of the mentally ill.”

Fatehi wants to see the Virginia legislature go further in upcoming sessions to end mandatory-minimum sentencing, reinstate a discretionary parole system, and enable people with felony convictions to vote, including those who are in prison. Even without changes to the law, he signaled he would use his prosecutorial discretion to implement some of these policies, including treating drug possession as a misdemeanor. 

But he stopped short of drawing the sort of lines in the sand that other reformers have campaigned on, like promises to not seek life without parole sentences or to adopt blanket policies of declining to prosecute some categories of cases—the very strategy that put Norfolk in the news when Fatehi defended the policy of declining marijuana cases.

Many of the commonwealth’s attorneys who are in the VPPJ are not up for re-election until 2023. But 24 independent cities besides Norfolk are holding elections for prosecutors this year. 

This Q&A with Fatehi has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Criminal justice reformers have enjoyed a lot of momentum in Virginia. This has included wins in prosecutorial elections and the creation of the Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, the first organization of its kind in the country. You yourself have vowed to join the VPPJ. How would you characterize the shifts in Virginia’s prosecutorial landscape in recent years? And what role do you think prosecutors should be filling to advance more change? 

Traditionally, Virginia prosecutors have been in favor of greater punishment, greater mandatory minimums—a tightening of every single ratchet available within the criminal system. And then they would turn around and say we’re simply servants of law, when they were consistently lobbying the Virginia General Assembly for laws or rules that increase prosecutorial power and feed mass incarceration.

The Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice was important. It was able to alter the balance of power in the Virginia Association of Commonwealth Attorneys. And it can affirmatively lobby for criminal justice reform bills, things like the abolition of mandatory minimums. We have been there to give credibility to progressive legislators, and to affirm that these things are not only not contrary to public safety, but that they enhance public safety. 

The common thread that binds together those prosecutors is the acknowledgement that the old system of mass incarceration is ineffective, that structural racism is real and not a myth, that minorities are treated differently in the system, and that we as prosecutors have enough power to bring justice to our communities by altering, in data-driven ways, the old ways that have increased crime or had no effect on crime. 

Can you say more about these “old ways,” and what you think they get wrong about what is conducive to safety?

The old-fashioned view about public safety was not taking into account externalities. It was focused on the idea of crime as an evil unto itself. Where I part ways is in recognizing that crime is a symptom. It’s a symptom of structural racism, of systematic community disinvestment, of redlining, unequal school policy, the lack of jobs, lack of transportation, a lack of opportunities, intergenerational barriers to wealth building, the disinvestment in the treatment of the mentally ill—all of these things are really what produced the symptoms, but then we as prosecutors are charged with essentially trying to deal with it, and then are blamed also when they perhaps increase or decrease. 

I think where those of us who are in the progressive movement diverge, is that we recognize that these externalities exist. It’s incredibly expensive, imprisoning people, jailing them, supervising them. We are disinvesting from our own community. We’re pulling human capital and dollars away from things like mental health treatment, drug treatment, education, housing contracts, and so on.

Some advocates in Virginia say that if there’s going to be an effective transformation of the state’s criminal legal system, prosecutors will have to make room for other groups in these conversations and take steps to diminish their own authority. Amy Woolard of Legal Aid Justice Center told me: “A true shift in the profession, whether from VACA or the new progressive prosecutor group, means that prosecutors will not only have to accept but advocate for a diminution of their own power.” What do you make of that goal?

I think that we’ve demonstrated that we’re prepared to work with stakeholders. We’ve worked with Legal Aid Justice Center, we’ve worked with Justice Forward Virginia, and we acknowledge that we don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. But what is unique about us is that, since there is this idea that we are the top law enforcement officer, when we stand up with Legal Aid Justice Center, Justice Forward Virginia, or other groups, some people see it as having a seal of approval from the police. It is an acknowledgment that people who traditionally were guardians of the status quo are coming up and affirming that this will protect the community, an acknowledgement from a group that is perceived to be part of the system. And that gives assurance to the people who are voting for it that it is not going to harm public safety. 

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You were involved in the current prosecutor’s office policy of dismissing marijuana charges. As chief prosecutor, are there other categories of cases that you would decline prosecuting?

I can’t think of a crime that jumps out at me at the moment that I would feel is so obvious. Marijuana was a very easy one, even as controversial as it was, because there really was absolutely no public safety explanation for why marijuana was even illegal. The cases that I would have a strong presumption against prosecuting would be cases that are criminalization of poverty: public vagrancy, public urination, public defecation; cases where people are unhoused, people are mentally ill. The Norfolk city jail is the largest mental hospital in Hampton Roads, and it should not be. 

But—and this is why I said strong presumption, but not a blanket—there are instances where the conviction may not be necessary but the charge may be necessary as a temporary placeholder until we can bail the person so we can set the person up with supportive housing, whereas a blanket policy would bar our ability to try and figure out what the next step was.

On your last point, though, the case that many reform advocates make is that the criminal legal system staying involved in those issues will detract from other sorts of investments.

I don’t want to be involved in these issues. The criminal system should not be a substitute for a public health system, for a mental health system, for a war on homelessness. These are things that should not be our purview. We as progressive prosecutors have to be shouting from the rooftops that the General Assembly has to give us the tools, that we should not have to deal with those things. 

Regarding drug possession, beyond marijuana, some prosecutors have announced they are not going to prosecute any low-level drug possession, somewhat similar to Norfolk’s marijuana policy. Oregon also recently voted to decriminalize drug possession. How would you approach other drugs?

Substance use disorder is not in itself and should not in itself be treated as criminal behavior. It requires a public health response. I think the fact that Oregon by ballot initiative has decriminalized possession of all drugs is going to be proof of concept for the rest of the United States that a true public health framework is in fact going to aid public safety, is going to save people money, is going to make fewer people convicted criminals, and it’s going to make fewer victims of all sorts—true victims measured in the criminal system and collateral victims. 

In my capacity as the deputy in charge of the drug team, I’ve implemented a new policy of a presumptive reduction to a misdemeanor, and a presumptive assumption that the person should not be on supervision. Some of it is a recognition that, empirically speaking, the threat of incarceration is a statistical non-factor in helping people get clean. They get clean at the same rate if they’re under the threat of imprisonment as if they are not. But we’re spending money, giving people criminal records, felonizing them, depriving them of the right to vote, and separating them from the community. 

So, you’re discussing not wanting to give people a criminal conviction in the form of a felony. But what’s the case then for continuing to prosecute it at the level of misdemeanor? Even with diversionary options on the table, prosecution can lead to conviction and harsh consequences.

There needs to be at least some inducement for a change in behavior that will reduce that person’s contact with the criminal system. I want the Community Services Board involved, I want treatment programs, I want all these things. But I’m not sure as a prosecutor what to do if we have people regularly coming back and coming back and coming back. So there could be a presumption in favor of dismissal, but what do you do with people who just simply cannot stay off of the radar of law enforcement? So how do we address that problem? With blanket dismissals, then, another problem is also a wasting of police resources, where they’re arresting the same person as the revolving door arrest, dismissal, arrest, dismissal, arrest, dismissal. And at that point, it’s robbing the police department of the resources necessary.

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You supported abolishing the death penalty in Virginia. Why was this an important reform?

It dehumanizes us, we become lesser human beings when we kill, essentially in anger, and premeditated anger. And this is not to minimize the really heinous crimes that people commit. It does not change the fact that we should not kill people. In the end, the fact that these people have killed in some of the most heinous and disgusting ways possible doesn’t mean that we get to become killers ourselves. 

Reformers are also organizing against “death by incarceration,” and the propensity of the criminal legal system to hand down life sentences. Virginia, in fact, has had no discretionary parole for decades, with some exceptions, and there’ve been proposals to bring back a parole system. Do you support these proposals?

We need to bring back true discretionary, individually based, individually assessed parole. As prosecutors, we have to err on the side of safety and recommend the sentence that assumes that somebody is not going to reform. Discretionary parole needs to be there to prove us wrong; it also needs to be there to offer hope to people who otherwise would be hopeless. We need a system that is truly individualized and adequately funded to review the 30,000 people who sit in DOC, and we need an ability for input from the various stakeholders, including prosecutors. 

Thinking about people in their early to mid-20s, we know that neurologically they’re not fully adult. There has to be an opportunity for that person when they are 40, 50, 60, even younger, maybe older, to show that they are not the same person. 

Until the state legislature changes the law, would you change the practices of the prosecutor’s office to reduce the frequency or propensity at which you might seek a life sentence? 

Absolutely. I will be a personal gatekeeper. With 40 prosecutors, it is manageable to keep track of life sentences, and to ensure that we are not seeking them reflexively. Those cases also are going to be cases that either me personally, or my chief deputy are going to have to keep track of and be careful about, and we are going to need to have an individualized assessment. 

I’m not gonna rule out seeking a life sentence without parole. One reason is because, outside of capital murder, there is a provision for geriatric parole, so nobody is guaranteed to die in prison on a life sentence in Virginia. The second reason is that, especially with the abolition of the death penalty, there does need to be a question of what we do with the absolute worst of the absolute worst, where, realistically speaking, there is no possibility of rehabilitation. There are rare and exceptional cases where imprisoning somebody effectively for the rest of their lives is the only answer to protecting the public good. It’s not something that we should do anything close to routinely. It should be exceedingly rare, and when we do it, we should be very clear in our explanation about why we felt that there were no alternatives.

Another major debate in Virginia this year has been whether to repeal mandatory minimums and to what extent. Do you think there should be any mandatory minimum sentencing?

I think we should repeal all mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums tie the hands not just of judges, not just the juries, not just the defendants, also of prosecutors. There are instances where we can charge around a mandatory minimum, and a lot of instances we cannot. And sometimes prosecutors who really are going out of their way to do it are required to resort to legal fictions, which at that point puts them in a position where judges can reject what they’re trying to do. So this ties everybody’s hands. Doing away with mandatory minimums is not going to harm public safety. All it is going to do is to ensure the judges, prosecutors, and all of the other stakeholders are able to fashion a sentence that’s based on the facts of the case.

There were varying constitutional amendments debated this year that would either shrink felony disenfranchisement or abolish it altogether, including when people are in prison. Do you think people should lose the right to vote when they are convicted of a felony, and if so for how long?

Nobody should be stripped of the right to vote. Maine and Vermont have this right. We need to follow the Maine and Vermont model. Virginia has a long, dark history of voter disenfranchisement. Proponents of disenfranchisement in the 1902 Constitution, explicitly and with the use of racial slurs, said that felon disenfranchisement was designed to destroy the voting power of African Americans. And it destroys the political voice of anybody who’s come into contact with the criminal justice system and has been convicted of a felony. That simply is wrong. Our end goal for the vast majority of people who are in prison is for them to move beyond whatever they have done and be a truly returning citizen. That also means that we have a moral obligation to treat them as returning citizens. When we tell somebody that they are not entitled to have a voice in choosing their government, we are telling them that they are outcasts, that they are not part of the society. To the extent that people who are in prison are cut off from their support systems, it’s psychologically dangerous to public safety.

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It’s Election Day in Pennsylvania, and it’s a big one for criminal justice. Here’s your guide to how The Appeal has covered these elections in recent months.

Philadelphia is voting for its DA, and Larry Krasner’s reforms face a major test

Since he was elected district attorney of Philadelphia in 2017, former civil rights attorney Larry Krasner has become an emblem for the nationwide movement to upend the criminal legal system from the inside. The movement’s proponents have pointed to his victory and policies as inspiration; its detractors, which included officials in the Trump administration, have cited Krasner into one of their leading foils for progressive approaches to criminal justice.

Today Krasner faces a primary challenge from Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor whom he fired when he came into office. The Appeal delved into Philadelphia in recent months. Among its coverage is a three-part Political Report series delving into the contrasts and policy ramifications on three specific issues: probation, drug prosecutions, and immigration.

Pittsburgh is voting for its mayor, and the incumbent’s record faces scrutiny

Pittsburgh is experiencing a major housing crisis that the pandemic has aggravated. And the incumbent mayor faced a lot of criticism for his handling of the police response to protests last summer. Today those are major issues in the Democratic primary between Mayor Bill Peduto and state Representative Ed Gainey, who is running as a progressive.

Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) will also decide a referendum on prohibiting solitary confinement in jails

Solitary confinement is used in prisons and jails around the nation—plunging people into torturous conditions, often for very long periods—and it fuels the crisis of deaths in jails. To date few state or local governments have adopted restrictions on solitary confinement. (New York recently became the first state to ban its use for more than 15 consecutive days.) These abuses have led activists in Allegheny County to organize a ballot initiative to change jail conditions.

Progressives hope to make a splash in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s judge elections

Despite their tremendous power in the criminal legal system, local judges still largely escape the spotlight that has been turned in recent years on prosecutors. In 2020, though, progressive activists focused some of their energies on boosting judicial candidates who were often public defenders.  The candidates ran on reducing sentencing and avoiding bail, with some success in New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas.

Will that budding movement continue gaining strength in Pennsylvania today? In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Philadelphia, the state’s two most populous urban centers, activists have turned usually neglected judicial elections into key political battles. The Appeal covered their stakes—and explained what judges even do—in recent months.

The post Your Guide to Criminal Justice in Pennsylvania’s Elections Today appeared first on Bolts.

Andrews got into an argument with two guards and requested to file a grievance, but instead they locked her in a cell alone, causing her to have a panic attack.

“I was a kid in jail. I’m scared,” she said, recalling the painful experience. 

Andrews says her requests for help were met with suspicion, and she was told that she would go in “the hole”—solitary confinement—as punishment if the medical ward found nothing wrong.

“I was about to go to the hole because I wanted to see medical care. Because I said I couldn’t breathe, because I was having a panic attack. And I just couldn’t believe that,” Andrews told The Appeal: Political Report. 

When she was incarcerated at the jail again in 2019, Andrews was placed in solitary confinement. She says if it had happened to her the first time she might not have survived. The Allegheny County jail has a suicide rate more than 1.5 times the national average.

“Going to jail later and finding what all that really meant, if that would’ve happened to me when I was 18 and I first went to jail, I would have not made it. Like it’s that serious.” 

Now Allegheny County voters could ban solitary confinement in the jail. A ballot initiative sponsored by Alliance for Police Accountability and co-signed by over 25 other organizations, would prohibit holding people in a cell for more than 20 hours per day, with limited exceptions for health and security reasons. After receiving nearly 67,000 signatures, the initiative will appear on the ballot in the local election today. 

Brandi Fisher, president and CEO of the Alliance for Police Accountability, says the ballot initiative is the community’s way of addressing concerns about conditions in the jail. “The sole goal is to make sure that people are safe. Just because someone is accused of a crime doesn’t mean that we ignore their health issues and their health concerns. And Allegheny County Jail has a huge issue when it comes to being able to address people’s health concerns, and people are literally dying and losing their lives because of it.”

The jail has come under scrutiny for a range of problems, from reports of cells with frigid temperatures and cool air blowing from the vents during the winter, to COVID-19 outbreaks exacerbated by the notoriously poor medical care, to brutality and abuse. Pittsburgh’s Black residents are far more likely to face these conditions because of the jail’s racial disparities. Out of the roughly 1,700 people incarcerated at the jail each day, roughly two-thirds are Black, despite Black people making up only 13 percent of the population in the county.

Last year, the Abolitionist Law Center filed multiple lawsuits against jail officials over the facility’s lack of mental health care and the mistreatment of people who need it; 70 percent of the people incarcerated in the jail have been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

A press release concerning a lawsuit the group filed in September states that “People with psychiatric disabilities are tased, sprayed with [pepper spray], beaten, and placed in restraint chairs for several hours for minor infractions and for simply requesting mental health care. They are commonly placed in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end, often without having a hearing, in conditions universally acknowledged by correctional experts, courts and the United Nations as torture.” 

In response, Allegheny County said that “Force is not used to punish inmates; it is used only when necessary for the safety and security of the staff and inmates.”

The lawsuit alleges that in solitary confinement, people are restricted to a 10-by-7-foot cell, that they can be deprived of soap, toothpaste or a toothbrush, and that they are often restricted from programs and services.  They only receive one hour outside of their cell, sometimes handcuffed to a table. Allegheny County denied that people in solitary are deprived of hygiene products.

According to the Abolitionist Law Center, the Allegheny County Jail’s track record of brutality, especially against women, far exceeds other jails in the state.  In 2019, there were 720 reported use-of-force incidents—a per capita rate twice as high as the state average— and people were confined to restraint chairs 339 times. In 2018, the staff even used pepper spray against a pregnant woman.

People who were placed in restraint chairs told Public Source, a local publication, that they were left without food or bathroom breaks, pepper sprayed, and covered with a spit hood that affected their breathing. Some said they were even left naked and exposed.

Allegheny County Jail warden Orlando Harper did not respond to a request for comment from the Political Report.

Andrews says she has experienced the restraint chair, solitary confinement, and other forms of brutality numerous times during periods of incarceration over the past three years. She believes that the jail’s practices are long overdue for change. 

“Just because you have the power to watch over these people and basically be their authority figure doesn’t mean you can take advantage of that power,” Andrews said. “And that’s basically what happens at that jail.” 

The county jail board, which oversees the facility, has stalled on addressing these problems. And legislation to limit solitary confinement hasn’t made it far in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature. Fisher says the ballot initiative lets voters take the matter into their own hands. 

“It was a way to make change happen without permission, without the loopholes, without having to go through the institutions and structures that currently exist that we already know are rooted in racism and white supremacy,” she said. “We’re not ever gonna get the changes that we wanna see if we’re dependent on those folks to make it happen.”

Advocates for the ballot initiative acknowledge that incarcerated people could still be isolated for up to 20 hours a day if the measure passes. But Miracle Jones, the director of policy and advocacy at 1Hood Media, says that it is a place to start. “Legislation will not always be as all-encompassing as the most progressive of us want, but sometimes just the compromising solution is getting definitions that will not only allow for a referendum to be passed, but implemented.” 

Activists are rallying around other issues in this election, too. The ballot includes a Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter amendment to implement a version of Breonna’s Law, which banned no-knock warrants in Louisville, Kentucky. The amendment would require law enforcement officers to be in uniform or other identifiable clothing, record video using a body camera, and announce themselves when executing a warrant. They would also be required to physically knock and wait at least 15 seconds before entering a residence.

A high-stakes county sheriff’s primary election features former Pittsburgh police chief Dom Costa. After leaving law enforcement, Costa was elected to the state legislature, where he pushed for tough-on-crime legislation and once called people on death row “animals.” His opponent, Kevin Kraus, also has a background in law enforcement but is seen as more progressive.

In judicial elections, activists are backing candidates seeking to fill a quarter of the seats on the county’s Court of Common Pleas, where they could make a dent in mass incarceration. And organizers have brought issues like policing and gentrification to the forefront of the mayoral primary, where incumbent Bill Peduto faces a strong challenge from state Representative Ed Gainey. 

All of these races could alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and shift the political landscape toward racial and economic justice.

“Right now, we have an unprecedented moment to really rewrite and redefine what reform is and what liberation is for Black people in this city,” Jones said.

Fisher says the initiative to ban solitary confinement has catalyzed people who are affected by these issues to get involved. “It really showed people how we can govern ourselves, how we are the ones that make the decisions about our lives and our loved ones’ lives,” she said.

Andrews worked with the Alliance for Police Accountability to put the referendum on the ballot. She says sharing her story and advocating for change in the jail is part of her healing journey.

“I honestly don’t think I will be free from it until something’s done, until I make a difference. I don’t honestly think I will be able to breathe the same until everybody else can breathe the same. Because as of right now, somebody’s in that chair right now. Somebody’s in that restraint chair as we’re speaking. That’s how I look at life every day.”

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Caroline Turner wants to reform the criminal legal system from the inside out—a familiar refrain to those following the progressive prosecutor movement. But Turner doesn’t want to be a top cop. She wants to be an arbiter of justice, which is why the former public defender is running for judge in Philadelphia.

“Judges have the power of life and death,” Turner told The Appeal: Political Report. “You can throw someone in jail with little evidence, they lose everything.” She says she would instead take steps to reduce incarceration.

On May 18, Philadelphia voters will choose eight judges to serve on the city’s Court of Common Pleas, which oversees the most serious cases, and three for the Municipal Court, which deals with lower-rung cases such as traffic violations and evictions. Turner is one of 20 candidates vying for the 11 open seats, a pool that advocates say has more candidates trending leftward than in past elections. And she’s one of nine candidates endorsed by the powerful leftist political organization Reclaim Philadelphia.

“This group of candidates are a more progressive lot than last time around,” said Katia Pérez, a mass liberation organizer for Reclaim. 

Several of the judge candidates who have gained support from activists have a background in public defense and are running on platforms that stand in stark contrast to the “lock ’em up” campaigns of the past. Reducing the use of cash bail, avoiding lengthy sentences, and bolstering tenant protections in eviction cases are some of the promises they’ve made on the campaign trail.

No judge candidate is likely to be “completely in line” with the abolitionist values that Reclaim holds, Pérez says. So when it comes to making endorsements, “we want to know, do they understand that in Philadelphia specifically—the poorest big city [in the U.S.]—what comes with poverty? A lot of trauma. A lot of mental health issues, a lot of health issues. Homelessness. When we were talking with these candidates we wanted to be sure they understood who would be standing in front of them.”

This is the second cycle where Pérez and her colleagues have recruited lawyers to run for the bench and endorsed candidates. The group arrived at its endorsements after interviewing candidates and people familiar with their work, then sharing the findings with Reclaim’s roughly 600 members, who voted on which candidates to support. This approach differs from the political hobnobbing that Pérez says usually characterizes these elections. 

Similar shifts are evident in a small but growing number of jurisdictions including New Orleans, Clark County, Nevada, and Hamilton County, Ohio. “We’ve seen some real progressives elected to the bench. So I think that as … people organize better and start to really focus on that place of power, there is a lot of potential coming,” said Premal Dharia, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration. “I’m excited to see the beginning of what looks like a real movement around judges.” 

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In 2018 a group of progressive community organizations, including Reclaim, formed the Judge Accountability Table to inform the public about judicial candidates. The coalition held virtual forums in March where every candidate, including some without activist endorsements, agreed that cash bail was weaponized against poor defendants. “To me it is the result of systemic discrimination and racism,” said Wendi Barish, a labor and employment lawyer who is part of the Reclaim slate. 

George Donnelly, who works for the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus and has helped Reclaim recruit judicial candidates, says that’s a big departure from the status quo. “You look at the bench now and it’s largely people from private practice and prosecutors. …  They don’t have the kind of experience working with marginalized communities, working with the accused, working with folks on cases that aren’t economically viable,” said Donnelly, a former public interest lawyer. “It’s important to have folks on the bench that understand that.” 

Winning a judicial seat is practically a lifetime appointment in Pennsylvania. After each judge’s 10-year term, voters answer a simple “yes” or “no” to choose whether that person should be retained for another term. It is exceedingly rare for a judge to not be retained. So the stakes are high in terms of longevity of the winner’s tenure and because of the power they wield. 

Sentencing is one of the clearest displays of judicial power. Though prosecutors most often set the stage for what sentence a convicted person receives, it’s ultimately up to the judge. A 2018 report by the Abolitionist Law Center found that Pennsylvania had the fifth-highest proportion of people serving life without parole sentences in the U.S., and that Philadelphia courts were driving that trend. Pérez says that several of the candidates Reclaim endorsed made clear “they did not agree with how often the sentencing of life without parole is given” and promised to prioritize alternatives. But none renounced life without parole sentences altogether.

The vast majority of criminal cases are decided without a jury, and for civil cases, judges are the sole arbiter. “In the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia and municipal court,” Donnelly said, “who is on the bench and what procedures they decide to put in place gets to decide who gets evicted and who stays in their homes, who gets to get compensated for the wrongs that happened to them in their workplace I say to folks all the time, there is no government official that affects your life more than the judge overseeing your case.”

In housing disputes, including eviction cases, landlords are far more likely to be able to afford a lawyer than tenants. During one of the Judge Accountability Table’s candidate forums, Michael Lambert vowed that he would refuse to arbitrate tenant-landlord disputes until the tenant has legal representation. He added that there are programs available to help tenants, but they need to be far more robust. “We have to have more attorneys that are available for the tenants,” he said.

Judges are also important players in the movement for progressive prosecution according to Dharia. She points to Arlington, Virginia, where Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti made it a policy to not prosecute marijuana possession when she took office in 2020. Judges balked and required that her prosecutors write a case-specific explanation for every instance—a blanket rule that was never required of prior administrations. 

Dehghani-Tafti brought the dispute before the state’s Supreme Court. Justices rejected her attempt to rein in local judges, saying they could not rule so broadly without a specific case.

“The public defenders and prosecutors in many parts of Virginia have aligned goals, at least to a degree, and it’s really just that there is resistance from the bench,” Dharia said. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner has met with similar resistance from judges, who initially chastised his prosecutors for being too lenient.

But judges are also in the position to hold prosecutors accountable for doing what they promised on the campaign trail. 

“A huge issue with these progressive prosecutors is that they have big plans and policies, but that’s not actually how it’s playing out in court,” Dharia said. 

To this end, many candidates in Philadelphia’s judicial races have their eyes on cash bail. Krasner’s office stopped asking for bail for a number of low-level crimes early in his tenure, but Turner says there are still too many people incarcerated pretrial in Philadelphia. In particular, she disagrees with Krasner’s COVID-era policy of asking bail commissioners to set an impossibly high $999,999 bail—a dollar less than $1 million, which triggers certain holding conditions—as an attempt to implement a binary system akin to Washington D.C. A person is either a threat to the public, or they are not, she says. Turner doesn’t think that Krasner’s office is making well-informed decisions about who needs to be jailed, and she supports eliminating cash bail entirely. 

Bail commissioners don’t have to be lawyers, hearings often last just a few minutes, and defendants often have little to no support from a defense attorney. Turner says that if she is elected, she will advocate for more robust bail hearings to follow this initial procedure.  

“If a defense attorney knew that I was in the Court of Common Pleas, they could file a motion to reconsider bail,” she said. “We have to keep everyone to a high standard.”

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Despite the position’s importance, running for judge can be a hard sell to progressives. For one, judges don’t have the same autonomy that an elected prosecutor does. “They can’t lobby for legislation, can’t lobby for social change movements, can’t be overtly political in that way,” said Donnelly. But he believes that judges can still have a political impact: “Judges have agendas and ideologies, whether it’s a municipal court judgeship in Philadelphia or the Supreme Court of the United States, you can craft decisions and make decisions that push a certain ideology and push a certain agenda.”

And the race itself is less glamorous and it’s harder for a candidate to distinguish themselves by their values: It is a down-ballot election that voters don’t often pay attention to. In Philadelphia, the outcomes of judicial elections have historically been influenced by two factors: where a candidate’s name appears on the ballot and whether they have an endorsement from the Democratic Party. The first is completely arbitrary—decided by a lottery which, for municipal court elections, entails picking names out of a coffee can. And the latter requires politicking in circles where public defenders and public interest lawyers are not often insiders. 

“The people that are in the trenches aren’t going to bar association meetings or these political networking events, you’re at the jail. You’re in the courtroom,” said Jessica Brand, the founder of a social justice consulting firm, the Wren Collective, and a former public defender who was an adviser to the Flip The Bench campaign in New Orleans, which supported a slate of progressive judges. (Brand was legal director of The Justice Collaborative, the predecessor of The Appeal Media.)

Money is a barrier, too. When Donnelly has tried to recruit progressive candidates, he has repeatedly found that the finances required to run a campaign were an obstacle—not just in terms of getting enough donations, which Donnelly says a grassroots infrastructure in the city could help with, but rather affording the time it takes. “They would have to take a leave from work, and do a full-time campaign for five months,” he said. For a private attorney this may not be a challenge, but the situation is different for public defenders and public interest lawyers. “Some of these folks had families, some didn’t know if their job would let them do that, or couldn’t go five months without a paycheck.”  

Pérez is aware of these obstacles; she and her colleagues are working to figure out how to help candidates overcome them. “We are very determined to make sure that we work on identifying and building a pipeline for more candidates who are of the community—the immigrant community, the Black and brown community,” she said. This includes financial infrastructure for a campaign, as well as connecting potential candidates with political power holders. 

“We’re figuring out how much of an impact we can have, the movement can have,” she said. “What we’re always keeping in mind is the long-term effects that the judicial system—the carceral system—is having on Philadelphians.”

Also read our preview of the May 18 elections for judge in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh).

This article was updated to clarify that in Philadelphia’s judicial elections only the municipal court ballot lottery involves a coffee can.

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