Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
June 8, 2020
Mask Compliance in NYC Subways is Imperfect, Mail-in Voting is Safe, Recession is Official. UPDATES.
UPDATES:
Demonstrations continued across Brooklyn this weekend as thousands of protesters again took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to decry the recent police killings of black people across the country. And after nearly three months, New York City is ready to make a comeback from COVID-19.
Protesters hope this is a moment of reckoning for American policing. Experts say not so fast.
Glimmers of hope have emerged for Americans demanding action on police violence and systemic racism in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the black man who gasped for air beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer last month.
All four officers involved have been fired and charged in his death, a far more rapid show of accountability than has followed similar killings of unarmed black people. Massive, diverse crowds have filled streets nationwide, sometimes with politicians and law enforcement officials marching and kneeling alongside. Legislation banning chokeholds and other forms of force have been passed by local governments. And on Monday, congressional Democrats plan to roll out a sweeping package of police reforms on Capitol Hill.
But there are signs that Floyd’s killing might not be the watershed moment that civil rights advocates are hoping for, some experts say.
The extraordinary facts of the May 25 incident — the gradual loss of consciousness of a handcuffed man who cried out for his deceased mother with his final breaths — distinguishes it from the more common and more ambiguous fatal police encounters that lead to debate over whether use of force was justified. And the politics of police reform that have squashed previous efforts still loom: powerful unions, legal immunity for police and intractable implicit biases.
“We have 400 years of history of policing that tell me things tend not to change,” said Lorenzo Boyd, director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “It’s a breaking point right now, just like Trayvon Martin was a breaking point, just like Michael Brown was a breaking point. But the question is: Where do we go from here?”
It’s a familiar question for Gwen Carr, who watched her son take his final breaths on video as a New York police officer held him in a chokehold and he pleaded, “I can’t breathe.” Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Thousands of Americans filled the streets for Eric Garner in 2014 — mostly black men and women — with bull horns and protest signs in dozens of cities.
But their pleas for comprehensive police reforms took hold in only a smattering of the country’s more than 18,000 police departments. Dozens of agencies adopted training on de-escalating tense encounters. Sixteen states passed stricter requirements for use of deadly force.
Not a single piece of federal legislation passed on Capitol Hill.
The effectiveness of policy changes is blunted by police union contracts that protect officers from discipline and firing for wayward behavior.
“There are so many terms and conditions in the collective bargaining agreements that insulate police from accountability and transparency,” said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “Can we know who the bad police are? Are there public records? A lot of times, that is squelched in collective bargaining.”
Even changes to training can have little effect. A growing number of police departments are providing cadets with de-escalation and anti-bias training, but once they are assigned to a field training officer — a veteran on the force — the training can fall by the wayside, according to police training experts.
One of the rookie officers who helped hold Floyd down questioned whether they should roll the gasping man over, but then-officer Derek Chauvin dismissed the suggestion and insisted on “staying put” with his knee on Floyd’s neck, according to court records.
“Seasoned officers will push away from what they learned in the academy and go to what works for them in the street,” Boyd said. “And officers will often say, ‘We have to police people differently because force is all they understand.’”
“When you give police discretion to enforce any law, it seems to get disproportionately enforced against black folk. Whether it’s curfew, social distancing,” said Armour, noting that Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill.
“Would you have put your knee on a white guy’s neck like that? Would you have a little more recognition of humanity, and when he’s screaming out, ‘I can’t breathe,’ would that have raised more concern?” he said. “That’s the deeper problem.”
The vast majority of such cases are not caught on video and therefore often go unnoticed, Boyd said. For example, Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot at least eight times inside her home by Louisville police in March, is often left out of the discussion of systemic injustice — in part because no one was there to record Taylor getting shot by officers serving a drug warrant,said Andra Gillespie, director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. All three remain on administrative leave, but no charges have been filed, according to the Courier Journal.
Even killings captured on video rarely lead to prosecution of police officers. Sterling had a handgun in his pocket when he was tackled by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store, and police said he was reaching for it when officers shot him six times.The DOJ and Louisiana attorney general decided not to file criminal charges against the officers involved. Attorneys for the officer who put Garner, 43, in a chokehold argued that he probably died because he was obese and had resisted arrest. Daniel Pantaleo lost his job after a disciplinary hearing four years later, but the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges.
Charles H. Ramsey, a former chief in the District and Philadelphia and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said perhaps the biggest obstacle to nationwide change is the unwieldy way in which police departments are organized. With every city, town, state and county fielding its own force, he said, it’s hard to standardize training and policies.
“Regionalizing them would be a solid first step,” Ramsey said. “But then you get into the politics. Every county and every mayor; they want their own police force, they want their own chief.”
Meanwhile, the FBI still hasn’t followed through on a pledge to aggressively track the nation’s fatal police shootings.
“It’s been five years since they promised to fix that database,” Ramsey said. “Come on. That’s enough time.”
As New Yorkers Return To Subways, Mask Compliance Remains An Open Question
As riders trickle back to the New York City subway system as Phase One of reopening gets underway and regular service resumes, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Metropolitan Transit Authority have said that face coverings are required on public transit. But whether New Yorkers will comply, especially heading into a hot summer, remains an open question.
At Atlantic Terminal, there were MTA staffers distributing free masks and free hand sanitizer bottled by state prison inmates.
While many were seen wearing masks across a span of two hours, dozens of riders were seen entering the station without a mask. Several wore the masks incorrectly, either failing to cover their noses or mouths.
Jose Martinez
✔@JMartinezNYC
Scorecard from a subway car on a Bronx-bound No. 2 train with 13 riders:
Interim President of New York City Transit Sarah Feinberg reported seeing, “nearly 100% compliance on wearing masks,” on the L, F and Q lines.
MTA Chairman Pat Foye, speaking on WCBS said the agency conducted a survey last week and found out of 50,000 customers, 92 percent wore masks.
“That's an incredibly high level," he said. "We want to get it even higher. It is a requirement of state law. Compliance by our employees I think it's fair to say is 100 percent.”
Aside from relying on mask-wearing and social distancing measures, the MTA has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on extensive cleaning during the day and during overnight shutdowns (the exact figure has yet to be released).
“The tiles, the floor, and even when you go in the train system itself you can smell the complete difference,” Chad Brown, 23, an electrician from East Flatbush, said.
Brown, who was returning to work in Midtown for the first time since the pandemic began, added that he was happy with the cleanliness and the number of people wearing masks, although during the early morning there were relatively few riders.
“I really wonder how we’re going to work it out when we’re on the train and it’s rush hour and there’s a lot of people. That’s my biggest concern,” Brown said.
Platforms at several major hubs were empty Monday morning, allowing most riders to have plenty of room, with only a couple of people standing. At Union Square and Fulton, there were social distancing decals, mostly of a sneaker footprint with an MTA tread, but also others variations, including paws, horseshoes, heels, and even prosthetic limbs.
Overnight subway service is still suspended from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and Governor Cuomo suggested Monday that he doesn’t see an end to that.
To tout the return of the city’s “mojo” the Governor himself broke his more than three year streak of not riding the subway, by taking a symbolic ride on the 7 train from Queens to his office in Midtown.
Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks
A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.
The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.
Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.
Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.
Election officials and security experts said certain measures are important for preventing fraud in mail voting, such as accurate voter rolls and a method of authenticating ballots such as signature matching. Such safeguards have been put in place over time in the five states that currently run universal mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
As states move quickly to expand mail voting in response to health concerns, not all have implemented the full range of security measures.
Critics of mail ballots say they provide a bigger opening for fraud than in-person voting because state voter registration rolls contain errors and could allow ballots to be sent to ineligible voters or wrong addresses. And vote-buying schemes may be harder to detect in by-mail elections, as would voter coercion and intimidation, they note.
Current and former election officials in vote-by-mail states said their systems are designed specifically to mitigate these risks, starting with a regular stream of mail contact with voters to establish that the address listed for them on the rolls is accurate. The ERIC system, as well as regular checks against DMV, death and other records, flag voter registration entries that may need updating. Federal law also requires states to conduct basic list maintenance.
Once voting begins, the linchpin of the process is a ballot return envelope, which typically requires the voter’s signature and includes a unique bar code linked to that voter’s record. When the ballot is returned and the bar code is scanned, no other ballot can be cast by that voter for that election.
“I hear chatter a lot about Washington state mailing millions of ballots into a black hole, into the wind,” said Julie Anderson, auditor of Pierce County, Wash., which includes Tacoma. She said many people don’t understand how the envelope design prevents double voting, comparing would-be cheaters to people who purchase a single movie ticket online and print dozens of copies with the goal of admitting others free.
“When the attendant scans your bar code, that’s it,” she said. “All the tickets you gave your friends — they’re out of luck.”[ A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[
The other mainstay of election security in vote-by-mail states is the signature verification process. Election workers are trained by law enforcement agencies to detect when a signature on the ballot envelope does not match signatures in a voter’s file. Discrepancies trigger a review that could end with a voter proving his or her identity — or being reported to law enforcement for possible ballot tampering.
U.S. economy officially went into a recession in February, ending record 128-month expansion
“The time that it takes for the economy to return to its previous peak level of activity or its previous trend path may be quite extended,” the committee’s report said.
Now, as states gradually ease pandemic restrictions, the question will be whether “reopening” fuels an economic turnaround anytime soon, or whether the downturn will extend into next year as people struggle to go back to work and the nation contends with a possible second wave of infections.
That the economy had plunged into a recession was not a surprise. As economist Ernie Tedeschi put it: “It’s now official (and utterly unsurprising).”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the economic consequences of the novel coronavirus to exceed $8 trillion. It also expects unemployment to hover above 10 percent into 2021, meaning the nation could still have joblessness that is worse than the Great Recession for months.
But experts say the turnaround will hinge on controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 109,000 people in the United States.
The NBER report had no effect on Wall Street, which is in the midst of a stunning three-month rally. On Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index moved into positive territory for the year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite set a record high and the Dow Jones industrial average extended its winning streak to six days.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[
New Zealand eradicates Covid-19
New Zealand announced that it's eradicated Covid-19, and most pandemic-related restrictions will now be lifted. [New Zealand Herald / Amelia Wade]
There have been no new Covid-19 cases in two weeks, and the last treated patient was released from the hospital 12 days ago. The country had a total of 1,154 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the virus. [U.S. News / Michael Baker and Nick Wilson]
As a result, the country it's bringing its alert system down to Level 1 –– the lowest of the four ranks. Most restrictions will now be lifted: social distancing is no longer required and people can freely gather in public. Borders, however, will remain closed, and those arriving from abroad will still have to quarantine for 14 days. [BBC]
People will also have to use a government contact tracing app to scan a QR code whenever they enter a business. This will make it easier for officials to track and isolate the virus before a major outbreak occurs. [NYT / Damien Cave]
New Zealand has been applauded for its swift and drastic response to Covid-19 –– which at the time was criticized for being too strict. The country went into lockdown on March 23 when there were no deaths and just 102 confirmed cases. [CNN / Ben Westcott]
New Zealand now joins a small group of countries that have announced their eradication of the virus –– Montenegro, Fiji and the Faroe Islands –– and the only to do so with more than 1,000 cases. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Iceland, Cambodia, and Trinidad and Tobago say they have less than 10 actives cases. [The Guardian / Charlotte Graham-McLay]
Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[
A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[