In the debate over the “defund the police” movement, both Democrats and Republicans have pointed to attitudes in black communities about policing to support their opposition to the idea.

However, when it comes to policing and crime, black attitudes elude simple explanations. In polling, black people often express disgust at police racism yet support more funding for police. A 2015 Gallup poll found that black adults who believed police treated black people unfairly were also more likely to desire a larger police presence in their local area than those who thought police treated black people fairly. A 2019 Vox poll found that despite being the racial group with the most unfavorable view of the police, most black people still supported hiring more police officers. And more recently, a June 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey taken after the killing of George Floyd found that 50 percent of black respondents still said that “we need more cops on the street,” even as 49 percent of black respondents said when they personally see a police officer it makes them feel “less secure.”

Black people are not a monolith. Their opinions vary by age, gender, and class. These complex, seemingly contradictory feelings reflect the dilemma of being black in America. America’s political class often demands that black people decide between abysmal options — between unemployment and minimum wage, between displacement and gentrification, between peer violence and police violence.

Demonstrators march near the White House on May 25.
Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images

On law enforcement, the choice black Americans have historically faced is either suffering from the shootings, beatings, and stabbings of racist cops, or suffering from violent crime in redlined neighborhoods — again, abysmal options.

When researchers actually take the time to listen to black people, however, they find black people don’t want to choose between two bad options.

“Don’t get me wrong,” writes police abolitionist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times. “We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.”

“We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs,” Kaba continues. “If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.”

In the Yahoo News/YouGov poll, most black Americans said they were more worried about police brutality against minorities than about local crime and thought the Minneapolis City Council’s pledge to dismantle their police was a “good idea.” They also favored “gradually redirecting police funding toward increasing the number of social workers, drug counselors and mental health experts responsible for responding to non-violent emergencies.”

What this is really about is prioritizing communal safety, valuing human flourishing, and desiring policy solutions not predicated on state-sanctioned anti-black violence — consider this the third way.

The false binary of more or less policing, popular among both Democrats and Republicans, artificially narrows the possibilities for public policy.

The problem with polling

As political factions seize on favored polling positions, creating a simplistic — or even misrepresentative — view of black Americans’ beliefs, there’s an even more fundamental problem: Surveys fail to measure attitudes toward complex policy solutions because they don’t poll for them.

Surveys fail to wrestle with “the myriad ways in which American racism narrowed the options available to black citizens and elected officials in their fight against crime,” as Pulitzer Prize-winning author and civil rights attorney James Forman Jr. described it. Or, as Yale Law School professor Emily Bazelon recently suggested in the New York Times, surveys show black people supporting police hiring “partly because they don’t see the government providing other resources for making their neighborhoods safe.”

Today, however, as the Black Lives Matter movement rises in popular opinion, and policymakers reckon with racism, this more-or-less policing dichotomy starts to fall apart.

A close review of innovative research from Johns Hopkins and Yale University’s Portals Policing Project and Black Futures Lab’s Black Census Project broadly indicates that black people desire more community investment alternatives, more police transparency and accountability, and an end to police racism and brutality. In other words, they want a systemic, nuanced, and meliorating approach — not an either/or.

The optical illusion of black people’s unwavering support for police

If you squint hard enough, it’s possible to view black posture on policing as mildly frustrated but generally supportive. Indeed, review polls of black citizens, orders from black mayors, bills of black legislators, or the platform of black voters’ preferred presidential candidate and you will repeatedly find approval for the police, and requests for more policing.

This isn’t new. In 2015, even after the uprisings against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, a Gallup poll found black citizens were 20 percent more likely than white Americans to say that they wanted more police officers, and they were 23 percent less likely than white Americans to say that they had enough police officers currently.

Likewise, a 2018-2019 poll conducted by Vox and Civis Analytics found that most black people wanted more police in their neighborhood. As Ezra Klein summarized:

What that polling found was, it’s true, for instance, African Americans have a less favorable view of local police, but it’s still very favorable. So white people have a 79% favorable view of the local police, Hispanic 77%, and black people 58%. And even given that the numbers are very close in terms of when you pull the different groups on whether or not they want to see more police officers hired into their communities. So among white people, 65% say they support that and 13% oppose it; among Hispanic folks, 64% supported and 13% oppose it. And among black people, 60% supported and 18% opposed it. So it is a little bit less popular in black communities, but not that much.

This positive stance toward policing is borne out in the preferences of black elected officials like Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has become symbolic of black mayors who push back against calls to defund the police. Last week, Bowser said she was “not at all” reconsidering police funding amid activists’ calls to shift budget priorities. Likewise, Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member in Congress and a civil rights activist, said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that “nobody is going to defund the police.”

Similarly, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has the overwhelming support of black voters, opposes defunding the police and instead suggested reforms like training officers to shoot somebody in the leg as opposed to in the heart.

In a meeting with community leaders at Bethel AME Church on June 1, Joe Biden said that police should be trained to shoot “unarmed” attackers in the leg, not the heart.
C-SPAN

This backing of pro-policing policy among black lawmakers and their allies is decades old. They overwhelmingly supported President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which put 100,000 more police on American streets with more punitive policing methods. As Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, “Black mayors, including the mayors of Detroit, Atlanta, and Cleveland, pressured the CBC to vote for the legislation. They wrote to the chair of the caucus, Kweisi Mfume, urging him to support the legislation.”

Taylor writes that “In the end, the majority of the CBC voted for the bill, including liberal luminaries like John Conyers and former Black Panther Bobby Rush.”

It’s possible to interpret black people’s views of police as generally favorable. However, that interpretation would be based on the assumption that mainstream indicators of political attitude adequately and accurately capture the full complexity of opinions of black people — people who, despite Biden’s musings, typically want to be shot in neither the heart nor the leg.

Black officials are imperfect indicators of black opinion

There are many potential shortcomings in relying on traditional forms of political opinion to interpret black attitudes. Black legislative officials are shown to disproportionately underrepresent the opinions of heavily policed, high-segregation areas.

Political scientists like Emory’s Andra Gillespie have argued that the electoral constraints of black politicians for winning in cosmopolitan, multiracial districts often require neglecting “the most socially marginal members of the black community.” In her book The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America, which examines some of the tensions of “middle-class black representation of poor black constituents,” Gillespie contends that “the same forces that discouraged black leaders from addressing controversial problems in black communities also created opportunities for deracialized political candidates to gain political currency.”

In practice, this means ambitious black officials shy way from third-rail topics like racialized police brutality and the social ills of segregation.

President Obama famously brought Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley together on July 30, 2009. Crowley arrested Gates in his own home for disorderly conduct. The awkward conversation was later dubbed “the beer summit.”
Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images

Moreover as, James Forman Jr. notes in Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, these middle-class and “elite” black Americans often do not bear the brunt of aggressive criminal justice policy. Lower-income black people do. Therefore, the class differences often create a disconnect between the policing experiences of lower-income black people and the policy preferences of the middle-class black officials who represent them.

Taylor also drills in on this point, explaining how civil rights-era class divisions led to a breakdown in representation for low-income black people. “As more blacks entered the middle class, political demands shifted. Black elected officials were more in tune with the needs of their middle-class constituencies, black and white, than they were with the needs of the black working class.”

This is crucial because black people are overwhelmingly working class. The median household income for a black family hovers around $41,000.

Both Taylor and Forman note that black people, especially working-class ones, favor a less punitive and more comprehensive approach to crime reduction. This is what Forman describes as the “all-of-the-above strategy” that includes support for police, courts, and prisons but also fixes joblessness, poverty, and segregation — generally speaking, the root causes of crime. Despite requesting both, American public policy has acted on black support for “tough on crime” policies but not on the social welfare policies, though if they had their druthers, polling suggests black people would choose the latter.

According to the Race, Crime, and Public Opinion poll cited in a 2014 Sentencing Project report, researchers found that “white Americans are also more likely than African Americans to endorse the use of the criminal justice system over other social policy tools to reduce crime.”

“When asked how best to reduce crime, 35% of whites said by investing in education and job training (versus 58% of blacks), 10% said by investing in police and prisons (versus 1% of blacks), and 45% said through both means (versus 35% of blacks),” researchers found.

So while many popular mainstream black elected officials unequivocally support police budgets, these positions more and more can fall out of sync with the black constituents who interface with the most aggressive policing on a day-to-day basis.

What polls capture, and what they miss

Polling does capture black people’s discontent with police racism and impunity. According to a 2019 Pew survey, “84% of black adults said that, in dealing with police, blacks are generally treated less fairly than whites; 63% of whites said the same.” The survey also found that “Black adults are about five times as likely as whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity (44% vs. 9%).”

Similarly, a 2016 Pew survey found that “Black Americans are far less likely than whites to give high police marks for the way they do their jobs.” In the poll, “only about a third of black adults said that police in their community did an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ job in using the right amount of force (33%, compared with 75% of whites), treating racial and ethnic groups equally (35% vs. 75%), and holding officers accountable for misconduct (31% vs. 70%).”

Last year, the Black Census Project polled more than 30,000 black people (likely the largest poll of black people since Reconstruction) and found similar results. “The vast majority of Black Census respondents see the excessive use of force by police officers (83 percent) and police officers killing Black people (87 percent) as problems in the community,” the study read.

The polling also found “nearly three-quarters of respondents (73 percent) agree that holding police officers responsible for the misconduct would improve police-community relations, while 60 percent favor requiring police officers to wear body cameras.”

However, while polls communicate black people’s frustration with policing, their methodology and conventions limit their ability to assess black attitudes. As noted by the Black Census pollsters, their staff had to reformulate the way they conducted their survey to accommodate for mistakes regularly made in polling of black people. This included finding ways to distribute polls to people who did not have internet access, were incarcerated, or otherwise were marginalized.

These hurdles and others are why ethnographies and other long-term interviewing techniques are crucial to understanding marginalized black people, who are not regularly the focus of policymaking, and their opinions on policing.

Multidisciplinary research suggests black people wrestle with existential questions about policing

Political surveys can often be shallow. They represent a single snapshot in time. Often they fail to reach the right people altogether. As written in the Black Census Project, traditional probabilistic survey samples misstate black attitudes “as traditional methods can exclude important information about communities that are under-represented.”

More to the point, Johns Hopkins’s political scientist and sociologist Vesla Mae Weaver argues, “current research on policed population is totally inadequate to help us understand how the residents of neighborhoods like Michael Brown’s are that are characterized by saturation policing, come to understand how police authority is experienced, and how policing is shaping the political thought and action of communities where it’s concentrated.”

Weaver set out to address the survey’s shortcomings in her Policing Portals Project. Working with a team of faculty, PhD candidates, and students from Johns Hopkins and Yale University, researchers “amassed over 850 conversations across 14 neighborhoods in six cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of policing to date.” The conversations took place at the researchers’ “portals” — trailers that had been converted into art installations where community members could livestream a conversation with a resident living in another highly police-community. Over three years, 2,000 Americans discussed their experiences with the police in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, and central Brooklyn. The findings are striking.

Black citizens repeatedly expressed concerns about the political legitimacy of their local police. In the research published based on these conversations, the authors wrote that often, “participants characterize police as contradictory — everywhere when surveilling people’s everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm.” Locals also “report that their experience of government bears little resemblance to official governance or written law.”

Analyzing discussions between black participants, Weaver, along with Boston University’s Spencer Piston and Yale’s Gwen Prowse, emphasizes that “the dialogues we trace here should be seen within their broader historical context, part of the decades-long ‘stunning challenge to the legitimacy of state power in Black communities’.”

These concerns about the political legitimacy of police are difficult to capture in analyzing in polling or black politicians’ statements alone. This same sentiment was articulated by Ta-Nehisi Coates on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show.

“I think, among a large swath to a majority of black people in this country, the police are illegitimate. They’re not seen as a force that necessarily causes violent crime to decline,” Coates said. “Oftentimes, you see black people resorting to the police because they have no other option, but they’re not seen with the level of trust that maybe Americans in other communities bestow upon the police. They know you could be a victim to lethal force because you used a $20 bill that may or may not have been counterfeit, because you were asleep at night in your home and somebody got a warrant to kick down your door without knocking.”

Weaver’s research traces the origins of police abuse and legitimacy to early adolescence, noting that many black interview participants “reported being very early in their adolescents when they had their first encounter with police authority. The emotional force of minority youths’ first experience of the police baptizes them in a way supplying a visceral and lasting memory of the state exerting power over their bodies.”

This christening of black youth is similarly noted in the research of California State University sociologist Jan Haldipur, author of No Place on the Corner: The Costs of Aggressive Policing. He says that based on a multi-year study of stop-and-frisk in the South Bronx, “sustained negative police interaction can fundamentally reshape someone’s worldview.”

“For young people, and I think this is a point worth emphasizing, negative police encounters can be extremely traumatic experiences, even when excessive force is not used,” Haldipur said in an interview. “They can be a source of stress. They are a source of anxiety. It can feel overwhelming. It can change the way you look at the state and these institutions that are supposed to protect you.”

Aalayah, 13, Aminah, 6, and Jojo Williams of Oakland attend a youth-led protest to defund the Oakland Police Department on June 10.
Sarahbeth Maney/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Clemson University football player Darien Rencher (center) leads a “March for Change” protest in Clemson, South Carolina, on June 13.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

“It’s sort of this idea of, do they really have my best interests in mind, and at a young age, it forces people to critically evaluate these systems,” he told me.

In his book, Haldipur writes that this aggressive policing erodes “faith in both local and state institutions.”

This finding that black people view poor policing as an aspect of a broader state failure to provide adequate public goods and services comports with the research done by Forman and others that suggests black people regularly demand a more comprehensive policy solution. The Sentencing Project polling finding black people preferring investment to more policing bolsters this.

As Vanita Gupta, former head of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said of her interviews during their investigations in Baltimore following the uprising:

When I went to Baltimore to investigate policing for the Justice Department, after Freddie Gray died from injuries he got in police custody, in every community meeting that I went to, folks were not just talking to me about concerns about police abuse. They wanted the Justice Department to fix the schools, to fix public transportation so they could get to their jobs more easily. Policing problems — police violence, over-policing — were often the tip of the spear.

In terms of crime reduction policy, black people often support comprehensive reforms, emphasizing the need for development, education, and more democratic control. The complexities of the lived experiences of black people, particularly those living in violent neighborhoods, might not lend themselves to simple slogans, but in broad strokes, research on black opinions paints a radically different picture from the ones Americans currently inhabit. Such a world is one in which black people have full employment, quality schools, reliable public transit, health care, and local democratic control of safety and emergency services.


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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/21292046/black-people-abolish-defund-dismantle-police-george-floyd-breonna-taylor-black-lives-matter-protest

“Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision,” Justice Thomas wrote. “The court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the legislative branch.”

“In doing so,” he wrote, “it has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this court rather than where they rightfully belong — the political branches.”

The program was announced by President Barack Obama in 2012. It allows young people brought to the United States as children to apply for a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work. The status lasts for two years and is renewable, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.

The court’s ruling means the Trump administration officials will have to provide a lower court with a more robust justification for ending the program. That process is likely to take many months, putting the administration’s assault on the program in limbo until after the November election.

It will also put on hold any plans to round up more than 700,000 young immigrants — many of whom have been living in the United States since they were small children — and deport them to foreign countries they may not even remember.

In the past, Mr. Trump has praised the program’s goals and suggested he wanted to preserve it. “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” he asked in a 2017 Twitter post.

But Mr. Trump sometimes struck a different tone. “Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels,’” he wrote on Twitter last year as the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in the case. “Some are very tough, hardened criminals.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/us/trump-daca-supreme-court.html

Some recent national polls have President Donald Trump down by double digits against former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Perhaps most worryingly for Trump, even traditionally Republican states are beginning to slip back into the toss-up column.

Take Iowa, for example, which the president won by just shy of 9.5 points in 2016. Though the state hasn’t been heavily polled since the general election matchup was set earlier this spring, a June 9 poll from Civiqs shows Trump and Biden in a dead heat there. A June 5 Iowa poll by Public Policy Polling, meanwhile, has the president up by a single point, and a Des Moines Register poll on Saturday found incumbent Republican Sen. Joni Ernst down 3 points — though still within the margin of error — on her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield.

Ohio is looking similar: Trump won the state handily in 2016, by about 8 points. Now, a recent Fox News poll shows him down by 2 points against Biden there.

In both states, as well as Arizona, the Trump campaign is reportedly worried enough about the president’s standing to spent a combined $1.7 million on advertising, according to a New York Times story from earlier this month.

The best the Trump campaign seems to be coming up with is sending cease-and-desist notices to news organizations over bad polls. Amid a chronically mismanaged pandemic and ongoing anti-racism protests, that means Trump could be in a lot of trouble this November.

Trump is losing ground in key swing states

A close race in states like Iowa is bad news for Trump, because while Democrats would surely love to pick up the Hawkeye State, which Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, this November, neither Iowa nor Ohio is generally considered an essential part of Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes. And in the battleground states that are a part of that path — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, among others — Biden is looking even stronger.

In a Fox News poll of Wisconsin conducted from May 30 through June 2, for instance, Trump is down by 9 points versus Biden, and FiveThirtyEight has Biden up by an average of 6.2 points across all the Wisconsin polls conducted from May 1 through June 11.

In Michigan, things look even worse for the president: He’s down by 7.6 points according to the FiveThirtyEight average, and a recent EPIC-MRA poll showed Biden up by 12 points in the state.

And then there’s Florida, Trump’s home state since he changed his residence to Mar-a-Lago from Trump Tower in September 2019. On the surface, things don’t look quite as bad for him there: He’s down by just 2.5 points to Biden, according to the same FiveThirtyEight average spanning May 1 to June 11. Looking at June alone, though, paints a less rosy picture for Trump, who is losing by double digits in two of the three polls tracked by FiveThirtyEight to come out of the state this month.

Even in deep-red states that likely won’t be in play in November regardless of what happens in the intervening months, Trump’s approval rating has slipped. According to a daily tracking poll by Morning Consult that was active from January 2017 through February this year, the president’s net approval rating in Mississippi has fallen by 20 points since he took office. In Oklahoma, where he will hold a rally this weekend for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, it’s the same — down by 20, though his net approval is still 14 points above water.

Those numbers don’t account for the past four months of turmoil in the US, but a more recent Oklahoma poll, which was conducted on June 3 and 4, does, and it shows Trump with a 19-point lead against Biden. That doesn’t sound like bad news for him, until you remember that Trump won Oklahoma by better than 36 points in 2016. Even Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones is on the defensive in a tough Senate race, isn’t as excited about Trump as it used to be: The same Morning Consult poll shows the president’s approval down by 8 points since he took office.

The big picture

Beyond his numbers in any one state, there are other warning signs for Trump. In 2016, he won voters 65 and older by 8 points; now, an Economist/YouGov poll that was in the field from May 31 through June 2 shows that lead down to just 3 points. And while Trump has never been strong with women voters — who went for Clinton by 12 points in 2016 — he’s now losing them by what CNN polling guru Harry Enten describes as a “historic margin,” about 25 points among registered voters.

With all of that in mind, the big picture is not a positive one for Trump: He’s on the defensive in a slate of must-win battleground states that delivered him an Electoral College victory in 2016, and formerly safe states like Iowa and Ohio are suddenly looking at least marginally competitive. As he loses ground in the polls, Democrats are also eyeing an expanded Senate map that could give them a better chance of taking back the upper chamber of Congress along with the White House in November. And all of this is occurring with a mishandled pandemic and a resulting global economic recession as the backdrop, which historically does not bode well for an incumbent president’s reelection chances.

Of course, it’s still more than four months until Election Day on November 3 — but as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias points out, things are looking better for Biden than they ever did for 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who enjoyed her own polling lead for much of the 2016 election cycle:

This Biden lead is different. If you’re up 10 points in the polls, then the polls could be off by 4 points (which would be a big but not mind-blowing error) and the Electoral College could have a 4-point skew toward Trump (which is at the upper range of plausibility but not totally out there) and Biden would still win. Basically, if you are up 10 in the polls, you are almost certainly going to win.

And right now, Biden is up 10 in quite a few recent national polls. Whether that’s still the case by November, though, is another question.


Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/2020/6/18/21291533/swing-state-polling-trump-biden-iowa-florida-michigan-ohio

India and China blamed each other for the fatal confrontation, claiming the other had violated the June 6 agreement.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with his counterpart in India, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to try and mitigate the situation. 

Both sides agreed to deal fairly with the serious situation and cool tensions on the ground as soon as possible, and maintain peace in the border areas, according to CNBC’s translation of an online statement from the Chinese foreign ministry. 

Wang added that China’s will to safeguard its sovereign territory is firm. He expressed his country’s strong disapproval of India’s actions, requesting a thorough investigation and control of troops to ensure such incidents don’t occur again, the statement said. 

On that call, Jaishankar “conveyed the protest of the Government of India in the strongest terms on the violent face-off in Galwan Valley on 15 June 2020,” according to a statement from India’s foreign ministry.

India said China “sought to erect a structure in Galwan valley on our side of the (Line of Actual Control),” referring to the de facto border. It said when a dispute arose, “the Chinese side took pre-meditated and planned action that was directly responsible for the resulting violence and casualties.” 

Still, India said it was agreed that neither side would take any action to escalate matters and would ensure peace per bilateral agreements and protocol. 

University of Sydney’s Yuan added that it is unlikely that a third party, like the United States, would be called in to mediate as both India and China have the mechanisms in place to de-escalate the situation on their own and assess what went wrong. 

CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report. 

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/india-is-under-tremendous-pressure-to-respond-to-china-academic-says.html

Restaurant owners, who have seen their business plummet, have been particularly worried that regulations requiring them to limit capacity and space their tables would make it hard for them to make ends meet. Many restaurants and bars in New York City, especially in Manhattan, do not have available outdoor space, and they have pressed lawmakers to expand their ability to serve customers outdoors as the city reopened.

The mayor said Thursday that restaurants in the city would be able to place seating on curbs and sidewalks adjacent to their restaurants, even if they had never had seating before. He also announced that beginning in July, the city would allow restaurant seating on 43 miles of streets that it had closed to vehicle traffic in an effort to provide more outdoor space to residents and prevent crowding at city parks. The mayor predicted that the expanded outdoor dining plan would save 5,000 of the city’s restaurants and 45,000 jobs.

“Outdoor dining is the way forward,” he said.

Restaurants and bars in the city have been open for takeout since the state’s shutdown orders were enacted in March. As the city began reopening earlier this month, a kind of informal outdoor dining took place, with large groups eating and drinking on streets outside businesses.

The mayor said that the city’s playgrounds, which have been shut since March, would also reopen on Monday. But team sports, like basketball, soccer and softball, will not be permitted in city parks.

On Thursday, the mayor again repeated concerns that the virus might have spread as massive protests over systemic racism and police brutality recently filled city streets. (Mr. de Blasio, who attended at least one such demonstration, fell ill on Monday, but tested negative for the virus, he said.)

Still, Mr. de Blasio said that city and state officials had been encouraged by “the trendline” of test results and hospitalizations, which have stayed flat in recent weeks, and decided to allow the reopening to go forward.

New surges of the virus in states like Florida, Arizona and Texas, which reopened more, quickly suggest the perils of letting down the collective guard.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/world/coronavirus-cases-usa-world.html

She ruffled feathers, broke rules and brushed aside diplomatic niceties. She was reprimanded by Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher for removing two senior staff members who disagreed with her views. She visited Northern Ireland, a British province and not her turf, and met repeatedly with Gerry Adams, the head of the I.R.A.’s political wing, Sinn Fein, though American policy then forbade it.

While many officials in London and the U.S. State Department believed she was exceeding her authority and regarded Mr. Adams as a terrorist mouthpiece, Ms. Smith helped clear the way for a visa that let him go to the United States to make his case for a cease-fire and British withdrawal from Ulster.

Almost overnight, he became a popular son of Ireland in America. Six months later, on Aug. 31, 1994, a cease-fire was declared. At the behest of Ms. Smith, Senator Kennedy and others, Mr. Clinton met with Mr. Adams at the White House in 1995, granting a measure of respectability to Sinn Fein.

When the cease-fire broke down in 1996 over the continued exclusion of Sinn Fein from the peace talks, Ms. Smith summoned Joe Cahill, the I.R.A. leader, and upbraided him. Sinn Fein was finally admitted to the talks, and the cease-fire was restored in 1997. Negotiations led by former Senator George J. Mitchell produced the Belfast Agreement in April 1998.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/us/politics/jean-kennedy-smith-dead.html

BETHEL, Ohio – Donna Henson sat on her front porch this weekend, as she always does when the weather is nice, and watched dozens of her neighbors walk by with bats in their hands or guns strapped to their sides.

They were married couples, friends and relatives, young people and old. All heading up Union Street, toward the center of town.

Henson, 78, figured they’d heard the same rumors she had, the ones about busloads of people coming to her town to join small Black Lives Matter protests on Sunday and Monday in Bethel, Ohio. Word was hundreds could be arriving from Cincinnati or Columbus or Detroit.

Henson was afraid, and she guessed her neighbors were, too. If they didn’t do something, if they didn’t show up armed and ready, the protests and unrest they’d seen on TV for weeks on far off American streets could come here, to Bethel, a village of 2,800.

“Everybody had a gun,” Henson said Tuesday, recalling the scene. “Like a cowboy show.”

A movement that had swept into much of the nation’s big cities was about to reach a small town, a rural enclave where the message from demonstrators would be heard not as a wake-up call or a rallying cry, but as a challenge to a way of life.

In Bethel, peaceful protesters would be seen by some as no different than looters and rioters. They represented chaos, the problems of other people from other places.

While the protesters called for police reform, complained about racism and criticized President Donald Trump, many from Bethel support the police, say racism isn’t a problem here and fly “Trump 2020” flags in their front yards.

“We just want it to stop,” said Brad McCall, a carpenter and longtime resident who joined counterprotesters. “We got a peaceful town. We don’t want our town destroyed.”

As it turned out, there were no busloads of protesters, no invasion by outsiders. Police estimated between 80 and 100 people showed up to support Black Lives Matter, including the organizer, a 36-year-old substitute teacher from Bethel who makes arts and crafts.

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/17/bethel-ohio-protests-black-lives-matter-meets-small-town-america/3207842001/

Brooks initially cooperated with a field sobriety test, but a scuffle broke out when two officers attempted to arrest him. Brooks grabbed one officer’s Taser and began running away. Prosecutors allege former officer Garrett Rolfe then shot Brooks in the back, said “I got him,” and then kicked Brooks as he lay on the asphalt. His partner, Officer Devin Brosnan, stood on Brooks’s arm after the shooting, prosecutors said.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/18/atlanta-rayshard-brooks-walkout/

A small Black Lives Matter rally in an Ohio village was overwhelmed by hundreds of armed bikers, disturbing video shows.

“Take the black lives s–t and shove it up your ass!” one of the most vocal rifle-carrying counter-protesters screamed at the group in Bethel on Sunday, calling them “f—–g retarded” and “f—–g terrorists,” video shows.

Expecting just 25 to show, the Black Lives rally ended up getting 80 people — but was totally overwhelmed by up to 800 counter-protesters, with at least 250 motorbikes parked nearby, village officials said.

Many were seen armed with rifles and bats in the village of just 2,800 — with just six cops on duty.

It turned ugly when the group focused on one of the protesters, Nicholas Reardon, throwing him to the ground and then marching him away to chants of “USA! USA!”

A man in a bandanna then came up behind Reardon and sucker-punched him in the head — with a cop just feet in front of them, video of the attack shows.

“Sir, I just got punched in the back of the head,” Reardon finally said to the officer.

It was not clear what the cop said to him, but the crowd cheered, with one of the counter-protesters thanking him for his “service.”

“This offense took place in the presence of a Police Officer but was not witnessed by the Officer,” Bethel Police Chief Steve Teague insisted Wednesday.

He posted a warrant for the arrest of the suspected attacker, Johnnie B. Devault, for misdemeanor assault.

Teague told WCPO his officers were completely overwhelmed, with just six cops on duty for the expected small turnout.

“It’s a little scary for us, too, because I’ll be quite honest with you, we were outnumbered many times with people having more weapons than the officers do,” he told the station.

Source Article from https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/black-lives-matter-protester-sucker-punched-as-bikers-overwhelm-rally/

Donald Trump can never, ever learn from his own mistakes — so we all have to keep reliving them over and over again. Right now Americans are in the midst of a necessary but gut-wrenching confrontation with the racism that permeates our culture and our justice system, and Trump is once again doing what he did three years ago this August, after the horrifying events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sure, the circumstances are slightly different. Instead of demonstrations in the street to protest neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” as they “defend” statues of Confederate generals, we have demonstrations in the street to protest the killing of unarmed Black men at the hands of police. But it doesn’t take a very stable genius to see that these events are closely related.

Trump had only been president for a few months when Charlottesville erupted. The sight of those alt-right fascists chanting in the streets with their torches was a frightening spectacle. The street clashes that happened the following day were violent, and the gruesome murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist who drove his car through a crowded street was the most horrifying moment of all. Nobody knew what to expect from the new president faced with this sort of cultural upheaval for the first time, particularly since the neo-Nazi demonstrators included many visible Trump fans, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, were big Trump fans.

The president was on a “working vacation” at his New Jersey golf club — neither the first nor the last! — and didn’t say a word for 48 hours. Finally, he came before the press for a photo-op to welcome some veterans and gave a perfunctory speech in which said, “I condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” (The emphasis was his.)

Trump went on to declare that the problem had been with us for a long time and called for law and order, bizarrely asserting, “No child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.” What that had to do with anything that had happened in Charlottesville was not clear. He complimented the police and the National Guard at great length.

That terrible speech did not go over well for obvious reasons so he gave prepared remarks the next day in which he bragged about the economy and claimed he had created a million new jobs as usual but then announced that he had met with FBI Director Chris Wray and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and they had decided to open a civil rights investigation into the events in Charlottesville. He said, “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

It sounded like a speech a normal president might make in such circumstances. It was one of the best he ever gave. Unfortunately, two days later Trump met with the press and turned back into himself. It was at this appearance that he made his famous comment, “You had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” and defended the Confederate statues: “I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”

That, of course, was the neo-Nazi demonstration which Trump seemed to think was populated with a lot of “very fine people” who just wanted to defend the confederacy. He said, “There are two sides to the country,” leaving little doubt which side he was on.

There’s been a lot of water under the Trump bridge since then but the events of the last couple of weeks have proved that he hasn’t really changed since 1989, when he took out this infamous ad in all the New York newspapers:

We have seen Trump screeching about “domination” and “law and order” ever since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis drove people into the streets two weeks ago. I don’t have to relate here the horrific spectacle of the feckless photo-op and the gassing of peaceful protesters or the near-insurrection of the military over his threats to order active duty troops into the streets. His reaction to the uprising has been as tin-eared as it was after Charlottesville.

After days of criticism for his destructive comments, on Tuesday he met privately with some of the families of recent victims of police violence and held a press conference at which he signed an executive order to deal with police reform. It was ungracious and virtually free of substance, as usual. The executive order itself is thin gruel, essentially just encouraging police to promote better training and try not to use chokeholds — unless they really, really feel they need to. It creates a national database “concerning instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters, accounting for applicable privacy and due process rights” that does not require police departments to actually participate.

In his speech Trump, said a few nice words about the families, bragged about the economy that doesn’t exist anymore, spoke as though the pandemic was over (but if it isn’t, a vaccine, a treatment or a cure is definitely right around the corner) and took cheap shots at Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s criminal justice record:

All of that was lies. Trump has blindly reversed a whole package of reforms undertaken by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ferguson protests in 2014.

But the bulk of the president’s time at the podium was spent extolling the virtues of the police, making it very clear once again that he believes there are “two sides to the country ” and that he and the police are on one side, while those who see the need for the killing of unarmed Black men to stop are on the other.

After he signed the order, the photo of Trump surrounded by smiling leaders of police organizations as they received commemorative pens spoke volumes about the toughness of the supposed reforms.

Just in case his followers didn’t get the message, the president’s final words were a shrill dog whistle to the Confederate faithful: “We must build upon our heritage, not tear it down.” MSNBC legal analyst Maya Wiley called it a “victory lap on the coffins of black people.” Indeed it was. He might as well have led the group in the Rose Garden in a stirring rendition of “Dixie.” 

Source Article from https://www.salon.com/2020/06/17/donald-trumps-bs-police-reform-translated-racist-killer-cops-are-very-fine-people/

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Under fire from critics who say he is letting Florida’s coronavirus outbreak get out of control, Gov. Ron DeSantis is playing down the state’s increase in new cases in recent weeks, attributing it to more testing among low-risk individuals and saying he won’t roll back reopening efforts.

“We’re not shutting down, we’re gonna go forward, we’re gonna continue to protect the most vulnerable,” the governor said during a press conference Tuesday.

DeSantis added that “the negative effects” of shutting down again would be much worse than “any gains you’re getting.”

“You have to have society function, you have to be able to have a cohesive society, that’s the best way to be able to deal with the impacts of the virus,” DeSantis said. “But particularly when you have a virus that disproportionately impacts one segment of society, to suppress a lot of working-age people at this point I don’t think would likely be very effective.”

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/17/florida-governor-ron-desantis-keeping-state-open-coronavirus-cases-rises/3210417001/

Health investigator Mackenzie Bray of the Salt Lake County Health Department in Salt Lake City, Utah, works to contact people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus so they can get tested and quarantine themselves. Thousands of health workers around the country are doing this work to help keep outbreaks from flaring up.

Rick Bowmer/AP


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Rick Bowmer/AP

Health investigator Mackenzie Bray of the Salt Lake County Health Department in Salt Lake City, Utah, works to contact people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus so they can get tested and quarantine themselves. Thousands of health workers around the country are doing this work to help keep outbreaks from flaring up.

Rick Bowmer/AP

An NPR survey of state health departments shows that the national coronavirus contact tracing workforce has tripled in the last six weeks, from 11,142 to 37,110 workers. Yet, given their current case counts, only seven states and the District of Columbia are staffed to the level public health researchers say is needed to contain outbreaks.

Contact tracers are public health workers who reach out to each new positive coronavirus case, track down their contacts, and connect both the sick person and those who were exposed with the services they need to be able to safely isolate themselves. This is an essential part of stamping out emerging outbreaks.

To understand how that picture had changed since NPR’s initial contact tracing survey in late April, NPR reached out again to all state health departments, as well as D.C. and the U.S. territories. In total, NPR reporters were able to assemble data from all 50 states along with D.C., Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

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Many states are still planning to hire more contact tracers, reassign existing government staff or train outside volunteers. Some already have a bank of trained staff or volunteers in waiting, able to pivot to tracing contacts if a spike of new positive cases arises. Many of them are relying on the National Guard, AmeriCorps, volunteers or part time workers to fill these ranks. With the plans to hire and reserve staff, the national workforce grows to 68,525 contact tracers.

“I think it’s amazing that the workforce scale-up has gone this far in such a short period of time,” says Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a lead author of the center’s white paper on contact tracing capacity. “But I’m also — at the same time — concerned, because we’re seeing these increases in case numbers in a lot of different states.”

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden agrees that NPR’s results show some progress, but that it’s “not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough.”

Public health experts say tracing the contacts of each positive case and asking them to quarantine is crucial for allowing communities to safely reopen — those who are sick or have been exposed stay home while the rest of the public begins to return to normal life. If communities don’t have enough tracers to quickly call and investigate each positive case and to effectively follow up with contacts, that strategy to curb transmission falls apart.

In the U.S., many places are reopening before fully establishing the robust tracing system public health leaders were calling for months ago. “We’re reopening before we have the system ready to stop cases from becoming clusters and clusters from becoming outbreaks,” Frieden says.

How many tracers is enough?

To estimate how many tracers is enough for each state, NPR analyzed each state’s current need based on the number of cases in each state over the past 14 days, using the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator developed by The Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at the George Washington University.

The analysis assumes workers are calling 10 contacts per case, and that contacts are followed up with every other day. Ten contacts may be a conservative estimate, considering that many places have begun to ease social distancing measures, and when people go out to restaurants or shopping, the number of contacts can grow quickly. The analysis also assumes that tracers reach 45% of contacts, since sometimes it’s not possible to track people down — that’s a midpoint of three strategies outlined in a contact tracing workforce tool recently published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those inputs are designed to represent the real-world challenges contact tracers might have in reaching all possible contacts. “It’s hard to get a hold of people,” says Watson. “There are many other many factors that may make people unwilling or unable to do this, including its historic issues with trust in government […] I do think any amount of contact tracing does help.”

The results of NPR’s analysis show that several states have enough contact tracers estimated to be needed to investigate their current burden of recent cases. Seven states — Alaska, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia — along with D.C., and the territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, currently have enough tracers, given local transmission. Six more states — Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Washington — have enough when reserve staff are included in their staffing count. Thiry-seven states do not have enough contact tracers, according to NPR’s analysis.

Still, many states indicated they felt they did have enough tracers to reach out quickly. With 1,500 contact tracers, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health wrote to NPR, “This is successfully meeting the current operational demand, which is reassessed daily as additional cases are confirmed.”

By NPR’s analysis, Florida would need about three times the current number of contact tracers to be able to investigate and follow up with contacts for every coronavirus case. Florida is one of more than a dozen states where cases of COVID-19 are currently rising.

Every place is different — a county with only a few new coronavirus cases a week might be able to manage contact tracing with only a few staffers tracing part time. But with a highly infectious virus, that set-up is risky, public health experts warn — a spike can happen suddenly and get out of control without adequate contact tracing.

Testing is also critical — it’s the first step in the test, trace, and isolate strategy public health leaders have emphasized needs to be in place. If a community isn’t testing enough, positive cases can’t be identified and traced.

Piecing together a workforce

States cited a range of creative strategies to staff up. Some have turned to private philanthropy, such as New York, which has support from Bloomberg Philanthropies to hire workers. Others have partnered with universities, bringing on graduate students to help. Others like California, are training and reassigning government workers who do other roles.

A number of states cited volunteers as part of their strategy for handling the workload, turning to service groups like Americorps or signing up individuals willing to help. Michigan, for instance, has relied primarily on volunteers, and hired a contractor to manage that workforce. They’ve signed up 9,500 people willing to help, and have 422 volunteers currently making calls, who are “making contact with about 90 percent of all contacts within 24 hours,” Lynn Suftin, Public Information Officer for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wrote to NPR.

Epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed has been critical of Michigan for relying on volunteers. “What we’re saying is — implicitly — we don’t value this enough to pay for it,” he says. “This is a place where you need the kind of accountability, you need the kind of sensitivity, and you need the kind of training a professional staff can give you.”

And he adds, with more than 40 million people filing for unemployment benefits, “it’s not like we don’t have the workforce available to employ.”

A patchwork system

One reason it’s hard for the U.S. to have a cohesive contact tracing strategy is that the public health system is a patchwork of different governance systems. In most states “the local health departments are independent of the state health department,” explains Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Some states have completely centralized public health departments, and others are a mix of the two systems.

In many of these local health departments, a small team of public health workers do many different jobs — and are now adding on coronavirus contact tracing. County staff in Wyoming, for instance, “do much of the work but have other responsibilities too so it’s not a simple count of staff,” Kim Deti of the Wyoming Department of Health wrote in an email to NPR. “I don’t have a number for that.”

However in Montana, where public health departments are independent and local, the state public health department recently did a survey to figure out how many staff there were across the state, and found a capacity of over 500 staff who could turn to contact tracing if needed.

Candice Chen, a professor of health policy at the George Washington University who worked on the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator Tool, hopes other local control states follow Montana’s lead, and ask, “Can we do what Montana did? And that way, can we be prepared if we start to see cases in certain counties that hadn’t seen cases?”

Another complexity: The task of contact tracing is usually broken out into several different roles, for which different degrees of expertise is required.

“The way that we think of it is it’s this contact tracing system,” explains Casalotti. There are the front line workers making phone calls to investigate new cases and reach contacts. In addition, you need supervisors, and she says, “we also need epidemiologists — not just at the state level, but also at the local level — who can then take in the data in real time” to identify possible spikes.

A call for federal leadership

The total reported by states is far less than the more than 100,000 contact tracers some influential public health experts have called for.

Part of the reason for the gap is clearly a lack of funding. A group of former federal officials who wrote a letter to Congress calling for increased contact tracing support estimated $12 billion in federal funding would be needed to pay for the hires. The HEROES Act, which passed the House last month, includes $75 billion for testing and contact tracing efforts but is not expected to pass in the Senate. It’s not at all certain whether a new bipartisan relief bill would include federal funding specifically for contact tracers.

The CDC provides staff to support local contact tracing efforts. Director Robert Redfield told NPR in April that the agency has about 500 staff currently deployed to help state and local health departments, and that it would support another 650 positions with $45 million in funds from the CDC Foundation.

It’s unclear how many of those hires have been made. In a statement, CDC spokesperson Scott Pauley told NPR, “CDC’s efforts to support state contact tracing are underway and hiring through the CDC Foundation continues,” and pointed to the interim guidance and communications toolkit available on the CDC website.

Numerous public health leaders have called for more leadership — if not funding and staff — from the federal government to support state and local health departments’ contact tracing efforts.

“We have needed a federal response on this from day one and we haven’t had one,” says El-Sayed. “We need federal funding for contact tracers and we need it now.”

“I hope that we can keep this at the top of our national agenda — to continue to increase our workforce and our commitment to doing contact tracing,” Watson of Johns Hopkins says. With rising cases in many states and social distancing measures easing up, she says, “it’s only going to become more challenging to do contact tracing going forward.”

Caroline Kelly, Connie Hanzhang Jin, Sean McMinn, Ruth Talbot, Julia Wohl and Carmel Wroth contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/18/879787448/as-states-reopen-do-they-have-the-workforce-they-need-to-stop-coronavirus-outbre

 

This story has been updated. 

Atlanta, GA —  The head of Atlanta’s police union confirmed Wednesday that officers from the Atlanta Police Department in Zones 3 and 6 walked off the job Wednesday afternoon.

Vince Champion, southeast regional director of the International Brotherhood of Police officers, said that police officers had stopped answering calls midshift, in response to charges against Officer Garrett Rolfe who is accused of murdering Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.

“The union, we would never advocate this. We wouldn’t advocate a blue flu,” Champion said. “We don’t know the numbers. Apparently we’re learning that command staff are asking outlying counties for support and aren’t getting it.”

Decaturish has calls out to public affairs officers in Gwinnett, DeKalb and Cobb counties for confirmation.

A spokesperson for APD called reports of a walkout “inaccurate.”

“Earlier suggestions that multiple officers from each zone had walked off the job were inaccurate,” the spokesperson said. “However, the department is experiencing a higher than usual number of call-outs with the incoming shift. We have enough resources to maintain operations and remain able to respond to incidents throughout the city.”

Zones 3 and 6 cover south Atlanta, where Rolfe killed Rayshard Brooks after a June 12 DUI arrest turned into an altercation. Rolfe fired three bullets at Brooks as he fled with a taser in hand. Video of the shooting suggests Brooks pointed the taser at officers as he fled.

A protest the next day descended into vandalism and the arson of the Wendy’s restaurant where the shooting occurred. Police and state fire officials have offered a reward for tips leading to the arrest and prosecution of the arsonists.

Champion accused Paul Howard, Fulton county’s district attorney, of lying about what is happening in a press conference earlier today when Howard suggested that officer Devin Brosnan had turned state’s evidence and is testifying.

“The attorney for the officer said that’s not true two minutes later, and said he’s not pleading guilty and not offering state’s evidence,” Champion said.

Other local media are seeing evidence of the walkout.

Atlanta INtown reports, “A drive around Zone 6 indicated there was not the usual APD presence. A Georgia State Patrol unit was handling a two-car accident at Boulevard and Edgewood Avenue around 9 p.m. The APD’s precinct at Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center appeared empty. Down in Grant Park, the Zone 3 precinct was populated by Fulton County Sheriff units.”

This is a developing story and will be updated when more information is received.

 

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Source Article from https://decaturish.com/2020/06/atlanta-police-walkout-following-murder-charge-against-officer-who-shot-rayshard-brooks/

BETHEL, Ohio – Donna Henson sat on her front porch this weekend, as she always does when the weather is nice, and watched dozens of her neighbors walk by with bats in their hands or guns strapped to their sides.

They were married couples, friends and relatives, young people and old. All heading up Union Street, toward the center of town.

Henson, 78, figured they’d heard the same rumors she had, the ones about busloads of people coming to her town to join small Black Lives Matter protests on Sunday and Monday in Bethel, Ohio. Word was hundreds could be arriving from Cincinnati or Columbus or Detroit.

Henson was afraid, and she guessed her neighbors were, too. If they didn’t do something, if they didn’t show up armed and ready, the protests and unrest they’d seen on TV for weeks on far off American streets could come here, to Bethel, a village of 2,800.

“Everybody had a gun,” Henson said Tuesday, recalling the scene. “Like a cowboy show.”

A movement that had swept into much of the nation’s big cities was about to reach a small town, a rural enclave where the message from demonstrators would be heard not as a wake-up call or a rallying cry, but as a challenge to a way of life.

In Bethel, peaceful protesters would be seen by some as no different than looters and rioters. They represented chaos, the problems of other people from other places.

While the protesters called for police reform, complained about racism and criticized President Donald Trump, many from Bethel support the police, say racism isn’t a problem here and fly “Trump 2020” flags in their front yards.

“We just want it to stop,” said Brad McCall, a carpenter and longtime resident who joined counterprotesters. “We got a peaceful town. We don’t want our town destroyed.”

As it turned out, there were no busloads of protesters, no invasion by outsiders. Police estimated between 80 and 100 people showed up to support Black Lives Matter, including the organizer, a 36-year-old substitute teacher from Bethel who makes arts and crafts.

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/17/bethel-ohio-protests-black-lives-matter-meets-small-town-america/3207842001/

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Source Article from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/covid-cases-florida-rise.html

He repeatedly describes Trump lashing out at military leaders, demanding to withdraw troops from the Middle East and from Africa and Europe, too. “I want to get out of everything,” Trump said during a meeting at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, according to Bolton, as military leaders pressed him to take more nuanced positions.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-asked-chinas-xi-to-help-him-win-reelection-according-to-bolton-book/2020/06/17/d4ea601c-ad7a-11ea-868b-93d63cd833b2_story.html

Facebook has faced criticism from employees and outside groups for not blocking President Trump’s inflammatory posts.

Richard Drew/AP


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Richard Drew/AP

Facebook has faced criticism from employees and outside groups for not blocking President Trump’s inflammatory posts.

Richard Drew/AP

Updated at 3:36 p.m. ET

The Justice Department is proposing legislation to curtail online platforms’ legal protections for the content they carry.

The proposal comes nearly three weeks after President Trump signed an executive order to limit protections for social media companies after Twitter began adding fact checks to some of his tweets.

“These reforms are targeted at platforms to make certain they are appropriately addressing illegal and exploitive content while continuing to preserve a vibrant, open, and competitive internet,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement Wednesday.

“When it comes to issues of public safety, the government is the one who must act on behalf of society at large,” he said. “Law enforcement cannot delegate our obligations to protect the safety of the American people purely to the judgment of profit-seeking private firms.”

In signing the executive order on May 28, Trump said, the tech companies have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter” a large sphere of human interaction.

Trump has called for revoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law passed by Congress in 1996 that says online platforms are not legally responsible for what users post. The Justice Department said its proposal would “update the outdated immunity for online platforms” under Section 230.

“Taken together, these reforms will ensure that Section 230 immunity incentivizes online platforms to be responsible actors,” Barr said.

The department said its recommendations fall into four main categories: giving online platforms incentives to address illicit content, clarifying federal powers to address unlawful content, and “promoting open discourse and greater transparency.”

The recommendations come amid ongoing scrutiny of the power of big tech firms like Google, Facebook and Amazon by Congress and federal and state agencies.

Legal observers described Trump’s executive order as “political theater” and said it did not change existing federal law and would have no bearing on federal courts. Twitter has said attempts to erode the decades-old legal immunity may “threaten the future of online speech and Internet freedoms.”

Twitter put fact-checking warnings on two of Trump’s tweets that claimed, without evidence, that casting ballots by mail allows for voter fraud. Trump said the labels amounted to censorship. Twitter also put a warning label on a Trump tweet about protesters that the company said violated its terms for glorifying violence. The president tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Facebook has taken a different approach, allowing Trump’s posts to stand. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that while Trump’s posts are upsetting, Facebook should not police what politicians say on the platform. Zuckerberg wrote that “our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.”

Zuckerberg’s stance has drawn wide criticism from Facebook employees, lawmakers and civil rights groups.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/879150136/doj-proposes-rolling-back-legal-protections-for-online-platforms