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Law enforcement personnel stand outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting on May 24 in Uvalde, Texas. When the gunman arrived at the school, he hopped its fence and easily entered through an unlocked back door, police said.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
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Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
Law enforcement personnel stand outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting on May 24 in Uvalde, Texas. When the gunman arrived at the school, he hopped its fence and easily entered through an unlocked back door, police said.
Dario Lopez-Mills/AP
Uvalde city officials are using a legal loophole and several other broad exemptions in Texas to prevent the release of police records related to last month’s mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead, according to a letter obtained by NPR in response to public information requests filed by member station Texas Public Radio.
Since the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School, law enforcement officials have provided little and conflicting information, amid mounting public pressure for transparency. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is leading the state investigation, previously said that some accounts of the events were preliminary and may change as more witnesses are interviewed.
The City of Uvalde has hired a private law firm to make its case, which cited the “dead suspect loophole,” to deny the release of information because the gunman died in police custody. The legal exception bars the public disclosure of information pertaining to crimes in which no one has been convicted. The Texas Attorney General’s Office has ruled that the exception applies when a suspect is dead.
The maneuver has been used repeatedly by Texas law enforcement agencies to claim they’re not required to turn over the requested information because a criminal case is still pending, even though the suspect is dead.
The loophole was established in the 1990s to protect people who were wrongfully accused or whose cases were dismissed, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
“It is meant to protect the innocent,” Shannon said, but in some cases “it is being used and misused in a way that was never intended.”
In the obtained letter, dated June 16, the city of Uvalde’s lawyer asks Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to rule on which public records the city is required to release, a common practice in the state.
“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” Cynthia Trevino, a lawyer for the firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote to Paxton.
Among the 148 public records requests Trevino said the city has received, reporters are pressing for the disclosure of body camera footage, 911 calls, criminal records, emails and text messages and other information.
The city and its police department are arguing against the release of the requested records, citing the following reasons: the city is being sued, some individuals’ criminal history records could include “highly embarrassing information”; some of the information could reveal police “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” could cause “emotional/mental distress,” “is not of legitimate concern to the public,” could subject city employees or officers to “a substantial threat of physical harm,” and violates individuals’ common-law right to privacy. City officials have also refused to release more details, reasoning that it would interfere with the ongoing investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Uvalde County’s district attorney and the FBI.
It’s unclear from the lawyer’s letter which legal protections are being applied to argue the release of which specific records.
There is a slew of questions that, if answered, could help prevent another shooting or may provide some closure to victims’ families. Among them: Why did it take police over an hour to confront the gunman in the classroom where he was killing children?
Texas Public Radio’s David Martin Davies and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2022/06/18/1106017340/uvalde-legal-loophole-mass-shooting-records
For the first time, Colombia will have a leftist president.
Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime senator who has pledged to transform the country’s economic system, has won Sunday’s election, according to preliminary results, setting the third largest nation in Latin America on a radically new path.
Mr. Petro, 62, received more than 50 percent of the vote, with more than 99 percent counted Sunday evening. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who had energized the country with a scorched-earth anti-corruption platform, just over 47 percent.
Shortly after the vote, Mr. Hernández conceded to Mr. Petro.
“Colombians, today the majority of citizens have chosen the other candidate,” he told his supporters in Bucaramanga. “As I said during the campaign, I accept the results of this election.”
Just over 58 percent of Colombia’s 39 million voters turned out to cast a ballot, according to official figures.
Mr. Petro’s victory reflects widespread discontent in Colombia, a country of 50 million, with poverty and inequality on the rise and widespread dissatisfaction with a lack of opportunity, issues that sent hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets last year.
“The entire country is begging for change,” said Fernando Posada, a Colombian political scientist, “and that is absolutely clear.”
The win is all the more significant because of the country’s history. For decades, the government fought a brutal leftist insurgency known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with the stigma from the conflict making it difficult for a legitimate left to flourish.
But the FARC signed a peace deal with the government in 2016, laying down their arms and opening space for a broader political discourse.
Mr. Petro had been part of a different rebel group, called the M-19, which demobilized in 1990, and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution.
Both Mr. Petro and Mr. Hernández beat Federico Gutiérrez, a former big city mayor backed by the conservative elite, in a first round of voting on May 29, sending them to a runoff.
Both men had billed themselves as anti-establishment candidates, saying they were running against a political class that had controlled the country for generations.
Among the factors that most distinguished them was how they viewed the root of the country’s problems.
Mr. Petro believes the economic system is broken, overly reliant on oil export and a flourishing and illegal cocaine business that he said has made the rich richer and poor poorer. He is calling for a halt to all new oil exploration, a shift to developing other industries, and an expansion of social programs, while imposing higher taxes on the rich.
“What we have today is the result of what I call ‘the depletion of the model,’” Mr. Petro said in an interview, referring to the current economic system. “The end result is a brutal poverty.”
His ambitious economic plan has, however, raised concerns. One former finance minister called his energy plan “economic suicide.”
Mr. Petro will take office in August, and will face pressing issues with global repercussions: Lack of opportunity and rising violence, which have prompted record numbers of Colombians to migrate to the United States in recent months; high levels of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon, a critical buffer against climate change; and growing threats to democracy, part of a trend around the region.
He will face a deeply polarized society where polls show growing distrust in almost all major institutions.
Mr. Petro could also reshape Colombia’s relationship with the United States.
For decades, Colombia has been Washington’s strongest ally in Latin America, forming the cornerstone of its security policy in the region. During his campaign, Mr. Petro promised to reassess that relationship, including crucial collaborations on drugs, Venezuela and trade.
In the interview, Mr. Petro said his relationship with the United States would focus on working together to tackle climate change, specifically halting the rapid erosion of the Amazon.
“There is a point of dialogue there,” he said. “Because saving the Amazon rainforest involves some instruments, some programs, that do not exist today, at least not with respect to the United States.”
Megan Janetsky contributed reporting from Bucaramanga, Colombia, and Sofía Villamil and Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/19/world/colombia-election-results