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• Defying Police Unions, New York Lawmakers Ban Chokeholds

  Legislators, responding to protests over the death of George Floyd, are approving a package of bills aimed at police misconduct.

  

  Inspired by the protests sweeping the state and nation, New York legislative leaders on Monday began to approve an expansive package of bills targeting police misconduct, defying longstanding opposition from law enforcement groups, including police unions.
  The measures range from a ban on the use of chokeholds to the repeal of an obscure decades-old statute that has effectively hidden the disciplinary records of police officers from public view, making it virtually impossible for victims to know whether a particular officer has a history of abuse.

  The legislation marks one of the most substantial policy changes to result from the nearly two weeks of national unrest that followed George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, including in New York City, where tens of thousands of protesters participated in mostly peaceful marches to demand more police accountability.

  The proposals signify a turning-point in Albany. Many of the policy changes being voted on this week languished for years because of opposition from influential police and corrections unions that contribute generously to the campaigns of elected officials — a tactic that had great effect in the State Senate, which has traditionally been under Republican control.

  
  
  But Democrats assumed control of the full Legislature last year for the first time in nearly a decade, clearing the way for lawmakers to pass some of the law enforcement bills on Monday. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, said on Monday he supported the bills and intended to sign them into law.
  

  The pressure on elected officials to enact police reforms has reverberated across the nation.

  Officials in Minneapolis moved to ban chokeholds and pledged to disband its police department. In Congress, Democrats plan to unveil expansive legislation this week to combat racial bias and excessive use of force by law enforcement. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed for the first time to cut funding for the New York Police Department.

  The protests in New York, which in some cases included violent clashes between the police and demonstrators, sparked a groundswell of support that seemed unlikely just a few weeks ago, placing unavoidable pressure on state and city lawmakers who were already consumed with the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

  In one such clash, a police officer was recorded on video shoving a female protester to the ground and was heard calling her a “bitch.” The officer, who has been identified by elected officials as Vincent D’Andraia, is expected to be arrested on Tuesday and face prosecution by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, according to three law enforcement officials.

  
  

  Officer D’Andraia, who has already been suspended without pay, is expected to face misdemeanor charges of assault, harassment and menacing over the May 29 incident, one of the officials said. The protester, Dounya Zayer, 20, has said she suffered a concussion and seizures as a result of the attack.

  The pending arrest lies in stark contrast to the aftermath of Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island after a police officer held him in a chokehold in 2014.

  The New York City Council soon introduced a bill to criminalize chokeholds by the police; after a Staten Island grand jury refused to approve criminal charges against the officers involved in Mr. Garner’s death, the measure gained momentum.

  But in December 2014, as anger against the police heightened, two police officers were assassinated in an attack that many officers thought had been inspired by anti-police rhetoric after Mr. Garner’s death. Mayor de Blasio, in danger of losing the support of the rank-and-file police and their unions, threatened to veto the legislation.

  The bill, which has languished since, now has enough support to overcome a mayoral veto, and will come to a vote on June 18. It would make the use of chokeholds by members of the New York Police Department a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.The bill has been expanded this year because of the way in which Mr. Floyd was killed. It will prohibit any action that “restricts the flow of air or blood by compressing the windpipe, diaphragm, or the carotid arteries” in the effort to make an arrest.

  Another policing bill has been even more contentious: State lawmakers received thousands of emails in recent days urging them to repeal a 1970s-era law in the state’s civil code known as 50-a, which prohibits the release of “all personnel records used to evaluate performance” of police officers without permission from the officer or a judge.
  

  Under Mayor de Blasio, the New York Police Department fought in court to expand the interpretation of the law so that it shielded the results of disciplinary hearings against individual officers.

  The move to repeal the law drew forceful opposition from the state’s powerful police unions, which argued that the changes could lead to reputational harm if complaints of misconduct that have not been substantiated were allowed to be released.

  Union officials, including those from the Police Benevolent Association, which represents 40,000 active and retired New York City police officers, said lawmakers were voting with little deliberation and in the shadow of a pandemic and civil unrest.
  

  Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said law enforcement has operated under “rules they set for themselves” for far too long. “If I’ve got 20 accusations of excessive force that are unsubstantiated, that’s got to be a red flag, one way or the other,” she said in an interview. “We can no longer afford complaint after complaint built up on your record and then nobody does anything about it. That’s over.”Mr. Cuomo, following years of remaining mostly noncommittal on the issue, threw his support behind repeal, acknowledging it would infuriate law enforcement unions.

  Lawmakers will vote later this week on 50-a and on a bill that would require state police officers to wear body cameras.

  Another bill entitled people to “a private right of action” if they believed someone called a police officer on them because of their race, gender, nationality or any other protected class. The bill was a direct response to incidents of black people being falsely reported to the police, including the encounter caught on video last month of a white woman falsely claiming in a 911 call that a black birder was threatening her.
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• NY DAILY NEWS, HARRY SIEGEL
  

  Police accountability at last

  
  

  Before he was the guy posting Zen kōans and pictures of himself gazing wistfully at the horizon on Twitter, before he was the guy who Donald Trump fired and before he was the guy who put Trump in a position to fire him with his Inspector Clouseau investigation of Hillary’s emails, Jim Comey was The Man.

  Comey concluded that 2015 speech, full of anecdotes but without any hard numbers to back them up, by declaring that “We have to resist stereotypes. We have to look for information beyond anecdotes. And we must understand that we need each other.”

  And there things stood, with American policing and protest stuck in the same groove they’ve been in for 50 years or so, a forever war at home to go along with our overseas ones.

  As a plague has killed more New Yorkers in a matter of weeks than have been murdered here so far this century, it was police violence that brought people back out into the streets (and with the effective blessing of the mayor and the governor, despite their own public health emergency rules, with still unknown consequences). Police responded to people protesting the police by busting heads, in what looked locally and nationally more like cops at war than a war on cops.

  People are sticking it to The Man, and The Man has hit back with sticks, tear gas, rubber bullets and even helicopters to “dominate the battlespace,” all of that leading to more videos drawing more people out to the streets.

  The real Ferguson Effect is the end of 50-a, the despicable law that Mayor de Blasio essentially created after Eric Garner’s killing to make a state secret of police disciplinary records. It’s a statewide database in New Jersey, to keep bad cops from just bouncing from department to department. It’s cities banning chokeholds, tear gas and rubber bullets. And it’s real pressure on police departments — whose budgets go mostly to payroll and pensions — to account for what they provide in exchange for those spoils.

  This isn’t happening because the feds started collecting that information that Comey said they needed, or because of the Department of Justice’s halting attempts to reform a few local forces after particularly high-profile policing disasters.

  Instead, Washington, always reluctant to look too closely at local police practices, backed off almost entirely after Trump’s election. Until now, ignorance has been bliss from law enforcement’s perspective.

  This is happening because of the videos Comey was complaining about, on behalf of law enforcement, as elected “leaders” race to catch up with the national sentiment, as expressed in the streets and in opinion polls.

  It turns out people still respond to what their eyes show them, even when their president or their mayor or their police commissioner insist otherwise.
• The FBI director, appointed by Barack Obama, amplified talk about an alleged “War on Cops” or “Ferguson Effect,” with a “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement” as “policing has changed in today’s YouTube world,” leaving “officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime” and no one to protect the rest of us from “bad people standing on the street with guns.”
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• Minneapolis pledges to dismantle its police department

• In Minnesota, a veto-proof majority Minneapolis City Council on Sunday backed a plan to disband the city’s police department, which has long flouted reform attempts, in favor of a community-based public safety system. [Guardian / Oliver Milman]
•  
• A new model could involve community-based policing alongside a much larger system of social services that would deal with issues before they escalate into crime.
  Police would be demilitarized, removing the armored vehicles, high-powered weapons and teargas used against protesters during the outcry over Floyd’s death, and receive better training on how to deescalate situations without violence. The use of chokeholds and other aggressive methods during arrests would be outlawed.
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• The move wouldn’t be unprecedented: In 2012, the city of Camden, New Jersey, dissolved its corruption-laden police department outright and started anew with a county police department. The plan worked — violent crime rates and use of force complaints both plummeted. [NPR / James Doubek]
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• Camden made a shift to community-based policing in 2013, dissolving the local police department and using police from the local county instead. Daily non-crisis interactions between police and the community went up, training on de-escalating situations was rolled out, and firm rules on using force as a very last resort – virtually unheard of in the US – were installed. Officers are also required to intervene if a colleague breaks these edicts.
  The result has been stark – complaints over excessive police force in Camden have dropped 95% since 2014. But expanding these reforms across the US’s 18,000 police forces is a major challenge due to widespread resistance to change from pro-police legislators and powerful police unions.
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Does policing and criminal justice in the US differ greatly from other countries?

The US is somewhat of an outlier in its policing and sentencing compared with other wealthy nations. Six times more people die in police custody in the US than Britain, on a per-capita basis, with American police fatally shooting around 1,000 people in 2018 compared with just 11 such deaths in Germany and eight in Australia.

US police conduct far more arrests than their counterparts in other rich nations, with black men three times more likely than white men to die in these interactions. The justice system also condemns more people to prison, too – the US has more than 2 million incarcerated people, which represents the world’s largest prison population.

Many Americans are moving on, but the coronavirus isn’t.

A Maine facility that produces tests for Abbott Labs to detect the novel coronavirus has become the site of a viral outbreak.
Tesla employees in California revealed that several of their colleagues tested positive for the coronavirus following chief executive Elon Musk’s reopening of the company’s main production facility last month in defiance of government public health orders.

Members of the D.C. National Guard who were deployed last week in response to the protests over George Floyd’s killing have tested positive, but a spokeswoman refuses to reveal how many troops have the virus. Two members of the Nebraska National Guard who were activated last week in Lincoln, Neb., also tested positive. Public health experts are watching anxiously to see if the wave of nationwide protests leads to a spike of infections, especially among the African American community that has already been disproportionately affected.

Hospitalizations for coronavirus cases have been on the rise in at least nine states since Memorial Day: Texas, North and South Carolina, California, Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Arizona. More than a dozen states, plus Puerto Rico, are recording their highest averages of new cases since the pandemic began. And the total number of new cases also continues to increase worldwide. Experts say this is not just because testing has become more widespread.

As states continue to push ahead with reopening, these are flashing red lights that we are not out of the woods, the danger of a second wave remains high and bringing folks back to work – while necessary for economic recovery – is fraught. Americans may be moving on, but the virus is not.

The United States surpassed two million coronavirus cases on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, which showed that the outbreak was continuing to spread, with cases rising in 21 states as governments eased restrictions and Americans tried to return to their routines.

Despite improvement in states that were initially hit hard, such as New York, new hot spots have emerged in others, including Arizona, where an increase in cases and hospitalizations has alarmed local officials.

Arizona has also been struggling with its bed capacity. On Friday, Banner Health, one of the largest health-care systems in the country, confirmed that ICUs in Arizona were nearing capacity. Roughly 50 percent of all those hospitalized are in Banner Health facilities. As of Monday, 76 percent of all ICU beds in Arizona were in use, according to data from the state health department.

Arkansas has reported 10,080 cases, and in 11 of the past 15 days the state’s seven-day average of new cases has increased. It has had an 88 percent increase in hospitalizations since Memorial Day. Arkansas had 173 hospitalizations reported on Tuesday, compared with 92 on May 25.
With the current spike, 12 counties in South Carolina have reached 75 percent of hospital capacity or greater, according to the state’s health department.

Some parts of the South are finally showing signs of progress. New case reports have started trending downward in Alabama and leveled off in Mississippi. But persistent growth continues in Arkansas,[above] North Carolina and Florida. And in South Carolina, there have been nearly 1,000 new cases in the last two days.

States continue to ease restrictions. “We have to stay smart because reopening resets the whole game,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said at his daily briefing on Tuesday, pointing to a spike of cases in states like Florida as they reopened. “When you reopen, when people start coming out, in some ways, you go right back to day one.”

Republicans have tentatively settled on moving the bulk of their August convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville, Fla., to ensure that they can have large-scale events amid the pandemic, North Carolina health officials declined to promise that they would allow the Republican National Committee to fill an arena in Charlotte for the Aug. 24-27 convention. “I don’t want to be sitting in a place that’s 50 percent empty,” Trump told North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in a recent phone conversation about the convention. “We can’t do social distancing.”

Meanwhile, top officials from the White House’s own coronavirus task force told governors during a conference call that they’re worried about a spike in infections because of the protests.

Elaine Eklund holds her son as she visits the grave of her mother, Yok Yen Lee, a Walmart employee who succumbed to the coronavirus. (Hannah Reyes Morales for The Washington Post)

• “Cops,” the long-running reality show from the Paramount Network that glorified police, was canceled in the face of protests. The show’s 33rd season was scheduled to premiere on June 15. (NYT)
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• The movie “Gone with the Wind” has been pulled from HBO Max. The network said that the 1939 cinematic classic, set partly on a plantation during and after the Civil War, is a “product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.” (WSJ)

In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, last week. Pakistan, where coronavirus infections have surged, has recently relaxed restrictions.Credit...Farooq Naeem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images[

Despite Virus Infections Surging, Countries End Lockdowns

At Nigambodh Ghat, the oldest cremation grounds in India’s capital, the bodies keep coming.

One ambulance arrives with five inside. Then another. Then another, in an endless display of death.

As the coronavirus pandemic surges in New Delhi, a public health care system that was already strained might be reaching its breaking point. People can’t get tested. They can’t find a hospital bed. The situation has become so grim that government officials have proposed commandeering some of New Delhi’s fanciest hotels to turn into hospitals.

But ready or not, much of India’s coronavirus lockdown has ended, as have those in other countries struggling to balance economic damage with coronavirus risk. In many places — India, Mexico, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among others — leaders have come to feel they have no choice but to take the surge of cases on the chin and prioritize the economy.

Some of these leaders, especially those in the developing world, said they couldn’t sustain the punishing lockdowns without risking economic catastrophe, especially for their poorest citizens. So the thinking has shifted, from commanding people to stay indoors and avoid the virus and other people at all costs, to now openly accepting some illness and death to try to limit the damage to livelihoods and to individual lives.

India is now producing more new daily infections, around 10,000, than all but two countries, the United States and Brazil.

Pakistan may soon be overwhelmed, but it has relaxed restrictions as well. Outside the cities, almost no one is wearing a mask or making attempts to socially distance. In Lahore, the windy alleyways of the old city are crammed with people.

In the past week, Pakistan’s infections have nearly doubled but there’s no way to gauge how prevalent Covid-19 really is because testing has been so scarce. A doctors association has claimed that more than 2,500 health care workers have contracted the disease and 34 have died. At least five Pakistani lawmakers have also died from coronavirus.

Still, the country is opening up. Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, a millionaire former cricket star who campaigns as a populist, has called lockdowns elitist, implying that only rich people could afford to be sealed up in their homes.

In India, many people are anxious that however bad things are right now, they will soon get even worse. New Delhi and Mumbai, the two biggest cities, are overloaded with infections and experts said that the peak is still several weeks away.

As Vikas Khairwar stacked the firewood for his father’s pyre at Nigambodh Ghat, the revered cremation grounds in New Delhi, he spoke bitterly about his family’s experience with the public health care system.

After his father tested positive for coronavirus, Mr. Khairwar said that he begged for him to be put on a ventilator but the hospital didn’t have any available. His father died the next day. 

What’s different about this moment? Primarily the number of Americans supporting protests over racial injustice.

The numbers are staggering: Just two years ago, 40 percent of Americans called themselves supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, 74 percent of Americans support the protests after George Floyd’s killing, a new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds.
Even a majority of Republicans support the protests (they also support President Trump’s handling of protesters).

The Fix’s Eugene Scott asks why there has been such a big shift and came up with a few reasons:

• Smartphones. Scott writes that they have “allowed people around the world to witness virtually the violence that many black Americans have experienced at the hands of police for decades.”
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• Floyd’s death was the catalyst for this movement, but it came after a steady drumbeat of shocking killings of black people by police officers over the past few months: Ahmaud Arbery jogging in Georgia; Breonna Taylor at her home in Louisville; Sean Reed in Indianapolis after being pulled over and chased by police.
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• Finally, this is all coming as the coronavirus and its economic fallout affect communities of color more than the rest of America.

Federal Reserve predicts slow recovery with unemployment at 9.3 percent by end of 2020

The central bank plans to keep the benchmark U.S. interest rate near zero through at least 2022.

Federal Reserve leaders predict a slow recovery for the U.S. economy, with unemployment falling to 9.3 percent by the end of this year and to 6.5 percent by the end of 2021, after tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the stunning recession caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell stressed Wednesday that more aid from Congress and the central bank is likely to be needed, especially since a substantial number of Americans may never get their jobs back.

Fox News and President Trump have been together for a long time, but like a lot of seemingly happy couples, they’re not immune to relationship turmoil.

The discontent has been brewing for a while, at least on Trump’s part. And he has made it clear he was ready to pick up the propaganda equivalent of Tinder and start scrolling for a new love.

Fox “is no longer the same . . . looking for a new outlet!” the president tweeted in mid-May, after host Neil Cavuto had the nerve to knock the president’s glorification of the potentially dangerous drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus preventive. Days later he complained that “@FoxNews is doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get reelected on November 3rd.”

That’s downright ungrateful given the network’s faithfulness in promoting the president’s agenda. A Pew survey found that of those whose main source of election news is Fox, 86 percent said they felt warmly toward Trump — a figure even higher than Republicans overall. 

Then, into this roiling discontent strolls an attractive newcomer: the San Diego-based cable outlet, One America News Network.

True, its audience is small. But Trump has touted it on social media, and its White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, [above] has been given special treatment at press briefings.

It’s no wonder given the reliably sycophantic softballs she pitches.

But this week, Trump signaled just how intrigued he is by OANN. He used his Twitter and Facebook accounts to magnify an evidence-free conspiracy theory floated in the outlet’s “news report” — a generous term under the circumstances.

The theory: That 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino, who was put in the hospital after being shoved to the ground by two Buffalo police officers last week, had been trying to “scan” and “blackout” their police equipment. (The officers have been charged with felony assault.)

Trump credited his new crush:

“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75-year-old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications to blackout the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” the president tweeted.

Trump drew bipartisan criticism this week because the theory is so truly bonkers — and because he blasted it out on the same day as the funeral for George Floyd, whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police last month has sparked weeks of protest and invigorated a civil rights movement.

Although Gugino has used social media to bash the police, this portrayal strikes those who know him as pure fantasy.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous — they are just plain making things up,” Victoria Ross, who heads the Western New York Peace Center and who has known Gugino for years, told the Buffalo News.

The “reporter” on the OANN piece, Kristian Rouz, is a Russian national who also works for the Russian propaganda outfit Sputnik; and the cable outlet has said it based its report on a post in the Conservative Treehouse, a hoax-happy blog.

If Rouz’s voice sounded familiar, it may be because you managed to catch Rouz floating the notion that the coronavirus was a plot for “population control” by George Soros, Bill Gates, Anthony S. Fauci, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and China.

Say what you will about how low Fox News’s reporting and commentary can sink — and I have — but it seldom stoops this low. The network does make an effort, most of the time, to adhere to some sort of standards, citing where reporting came from and even trying to draw a line between reporting and opinion. (Granted, it was famously forced to retract its damaging and deeply flawed adherence to a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee employee, absurdly attempting to tie his 2016 death to Hillary Clinton.)

OANN, which launched on July 4, 2013, has a tiny viewership compared with the major networks, and would be utterly obscure if not for Trump’s megaphone.

After making something of a mark in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign by committing to broadcasting Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full, OANN has stayed the course. It even unapologetically described itself last year as “one of his greatest supporters.”

But even within the ranks of this reliable Trump cheerleading squad, the latest incident has caused embarrassment.

“I’m seeing how much response this is all getting on Twitter right now, and it’s freaking awful,” one OANN staffer said, according to the Washington Examiner. “I’m worried the next news director I send my reel out to will only see ‘OAN’ on my résumé and throw it in the trash.”

I’d call that a perfectly legitimate worry.

But for Trump — whose recent efforts to tie MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to a staffer’s accidental death suggest his increasing desperation to change the subject — the outlet’s lack of standards is far from disqualifying.

It’s a compelling part of the attraction.

A 20,000-ton oil spill in the Arctic

Late last month, a fuel tank at a power plant in the north of Russia spilled some 20,000 tons of diesel into a nearby river. The spill is severe enough that Russian President Vladimir Putin last week declared a state of emergency in the region. [Washington Post / Isabelle Khurshudyan] Now that fuel is flowing toward the Arctic Ocean, despite efforts to contain it. The diesel spill has already reached a nearby Arctic lake and is in danger of spilling into a nature reverse and, from there, the ocean. [NYT / Andrew E. Kramer] The spill is considered the worst in recent memory and has elicited comparisons to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Consequences have been swift: The director of the power plant responsible for the spill has been arrested, and the Russian government has opened a criminal case. [BBC] Thawing permafrost in the region may have been a partial cause of the spill, which according to local officials could take as much as a decade to clean up. However, environmental organizations and Putin have both stressed that mismanagement on the part of Nornickel, the company responsible for the spill, is “the main factor.” [Guardian / Andrew Roth]

Despite Curfews, Peaceful Protests Continue Across Nation

Curfews took effect across several cities, but tens of thousands of people staged peaceful protests and impassioned marches across the U.S.

Protesters — raw, sad and angry over the killing of George Floyd and the disproportionately high number of black people who face injustice, violence and death — filled the streets again on Tuesday.
Mostly peaceful throughout the day, the demonstrators faced police officers, National Guard troops and other forces.

President Trump called New York protesters "lowlifes and losers," in a tweet posted Tuesday. Demonstrators throughout the country showed up, even in smaller towns such as Brattleboro, Vt., and Kingman, Ariz.

Tuesday kicks off with peaceful protests throughout the city

At the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, police vastly outnumbered the peaceful protesters who had gathered there to sing gospel songs, offer prayers, and, in the words of one organizer, “be the voice of reason” when there is violence.

 

It was a peaceful start following a violent night of looting and police confrontations that ended with more than 700 people arrested, according to police officials. Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday urged local community leaders to help prevent violence and looting that have taken place amid protests following the death at the hands of the police of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

julia carmel (beefy baby)@julcarm

 

 

Protestors by the south pool of the 9/11 Memorial are currently singing gospel songs and leading prayers

 

 

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11:21 AM - Jun 2, 2020

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At the 9/11 memorial, Stephane Clerge, the 27-year-old who founded a group that organized the event, told the crowd, “People that want peace oftentimes stay home.”

“But it’s often in the violence that you should show yourself and be the voice of reason,” he said.

In Upper Manhattan Tuesday morning, a gathering of mostly white demonstrators assembled at 145th Street and Broadway. The group had collected water and face masks and planned to distribute them to other protesters. About 40 people surrounded one of the rally’s organizers, who is white, and announced they would head downtown to Foley Square to join another rally taking place there.

 

Less than 24 hours after President Trump, standing in the Rose Garden, declared himself the “president of law and order” — then strode past a crowd of peaceful protesters who had been sprayed with chemicals and roughed up by riot officers to clear his path — thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the White House on Tuesday, with some shouting their complaints at National Guard members. In New York, protesters defied curfew for a second straight night, marching across the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn — but this time, they were turned back after a police blockade prevented them from stepping into Manhattan. In O’Fallon, Mo., just a 30-minute drive from Ferguson, a 17-year-old who had never attended a protest before organized a large march, and ended up walking arm in arm with the city’s police chief.

 

Across a country upturned by a pandemic, in hundreds of cities from coast to coast, a movement making no explicit demands other than all-out racial justice showed no signs of stopping — or even slowing down.

Gov. Cuomo said Mayor de Blasio and the N.Y.P.D. “did not do their job last night.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday sharply criticized the New York Police Department and second-guessed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the widespread looting that seized parts of New York City on Monday night.

“The N.Y.P.D. and the mayor did not do their job last night,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It was rampant looting across the city last night that they did not stop.”“Look at the videos — it was a disgrace,” the governor said, adding that Mr. de Blasio “underestimates the scope of the problem” in controlling the nightly protests that have been marred by looting and violent outbursts from participants and police officers alike.

Mr. Cuomo said the state police and 13,000 members of the National Guard were on standby. But Mr. de Blasio has said he opposes bringing in the National Guard, as President Trump has encouraged.

 

“We do not need nor do we think it’s wise for the National Guard to be in New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said at his daily briefing on Tuesday, calling it unwise to bring “outside armed forces into a situation they are not trained for.”

The mayor extended the city’s 8 p.m. curfew through June 7 and promised to take action against the “outsiders,” “gang members” and “common criminals” he said were responsible for looting and violence in Manhattan and the Bronx on Monday night.

The mayor defended the police response to the looting, and called on civic, religious and neighborhood leaders to step forward and encourage peaceful protests while telling New Yorkers to prepare for a few more days of unrest.

 

Mr. Cuomo repeatedly said he would need to “displace” the mayor in order to send in the National Guard. But to do so now, he added, could make an already chaotic situation even worse.

But the governor made clear that the onus was on the mayor to get things under control.

“I am not happy with last night, and the police did not do their job last night,” the governor said. “What happened in New York City is inexcusable.” 

 

Minneapolis Ranks Near The Bottom For Racial Equality

NPR
Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area more generally, has some of the most abysmal numbers on racial inequality in the nation. Here is a snapshot:

+ The median black family in the Twin Cities area earns $38,178 a year — which is less than half of the median white family income of $84,459 a year. This income inequality gap is one of the largest in the nation; only nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin is worse. The state of Minnesota as a whole has the second biggest income inequality gap between blacks and whites in the entire nation; only the District of Columbia is worse.

Minneapolis is roughly 90 percent single-family zoning -- or will be, until the 2040 plan takes effect. Single-family home zoning was originally conceived as a legal way to keep certain neighborhoods as white as possible, and it still works today. Even now, south and southwest Minneapolis -- which have been dominated by racially restrictive covenants in the past -- are still overwhelmingly white. While about three-quarters of white families in the Twin Cities own homes, only about one-quarter of black families do.

+ Before the pandemic, the black unemployment rate in Minnesota was at a historic low, but it was still double the white rate. In 2016, the Twin Cities area black unemployment rate was more than three times the white unemployment rate.

+ According to the most recent census data, the black poverty rate in the Twin Cities area was 25.4%, which is over four times the white poverty rate of 5.9%. The Twin Cities area black poverty rate is significantly higher than the national black poverty rate of 22%, while the white poverty rate is significantly lower than the national one of 9%.

+ In 2019, the incarceration rate of blacks in the Twin Cities area was 11 times that of whites.

+ The state of Minnesota has one of the nation's worst education achievement gaps between blacks and whites. In 2019, it ranked 50th when it comes to racial disparities in high school graduation rates.

These data aren't about police bias directly. Instead, they are the persistent, troubling numbers that sit underneath the rising sense of unfairness, frustration, desperation and anger that we've seen over the last week. Keep in mind all these numbers were a snapshot of the situation *before* the economic collapse. 

 

In his first in-person address in months, Joe Biden called George Floyd’s last words in Minneapolis a “wake-up call for our nation.” Condemning Trump’s bellicose response to protesters, Biden linked the protests with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and cast himself as a leader willing to embrace the moment. Likening Trump to the segregationist police chief the president quoted on Twitter last week, Biden stood before a backdrop of American flags at Philadelphia’s City Hall and repeatedly invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Donald Trump has turned this country into a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears,” Biden said. “We must not let our pain destroy us.”

• Biden acknowledged “the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart,” saying it was “part of the American character.” He declared that it was time “for our nation to deal with systemic racism” and then followed through with some tangible commitments. He said he would set up a national police-oversight commission within the first 30 days of his presidency. He threw his support behind a bill that would ban police chokeholds. And he committed to ending the Defense Department policy of funneling excess military equipment to local police forces. (In Washington, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have begun to discuss curtailing the program.)

• Biden might have a point about that wake-up call: In two separate polls released yesterday, exactly 57 percent of Americans said the police were more likely to mistreat black people than to mistreat white people, far more than ever before on record. In both polls, about half of white Americans said so — a stark jump. In 2016, shortly after the killing of Alton Sterling, just 34 percent of the country said officers were more likely to use force against a black person, including only 25 percent of white people, according to a Monmouth University survey. In the poll that Monmouth released yesterday, three-quarters of all Americans said that racial discrimination was a “big problem” in the United States — 17 percentage points higher than in 2015
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• Steve King, the Republican congressman from Iowa who last year capped a career’s worth of racist statements when he openly questioned why white supremacy was offensive, prompting G.O.P. leaders to suspend his committee appointments, appears to have arrived at the end of his run in Congress. He was narrowly defeated in the Republican primary yesterday by the businessman Randy Feenstra, who will now represent the party in the general election. It was the largest day of elections since the pandemic swept across the country, with eight states and the District of Columbia holding primaries. Also in Iowa, Theresa Greenfield, the Democratic establishment choice, won the nomination to face Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican incumbent widely seen as vulnerable. Biden handily won all nine Democratic presidential nominating contests.

As New York City prepares to start reopening, officials debate whether socially distant subways are possible.

New York City is still working toward lifting some virus-related restrictions on Monday, despite a curfew amid mostly peaceful protests against racism and police brutality. But one larger question looms: How can the city’s mass transit system safely accommodate all the people who are expected to return?

 

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the buses and subways, and Mayor Bill de Blasio have outlined their visions, but many details remain to be worked out.

On Wednesday, for instance, Mr. de Blasio reiterated his request that social distancing be enforced by limiting seating. “It is crucial that every other seat be blocked off so that it’s clear that you never end up sitting next to someone,” he said.

The agency dismissed the proposal.

“Like many of the mayor’s ideas, this is nice in theory but utterly unworkable,” an M.T.A. spokeswoman said in a statement. “The mayor’s plan would allow us to serve only a tiny percentage of our riders — likely around 8 percent.”

On Tuesday, in an open letter to the mayor, the agency released some elements of its plan: Full service will resume across the system on Monday, though subways will still close for nightly disinfecting from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Social-distancing floor markings will be set at stations. Workers known as “platform controllers” will try to reduce crowding.

Under the first phase of the city’s reopening, curbside retail pickup and nonessential construction and manufacturing can restart. The mayor has said he expected that at least 200,000 people would begin returning to work.

But the M.T.A.’s plan said that during that phase, subway and bus service would remain for “essential trips only.”

Mr. de Blasio had also asked that trains and buses skip stops if they are over capacity and that the agency “temporarily close stations when needed during peak hours,” which could make slow commuting. The agency’s letter to the mayor did not address either request.

Trump Denies, Then Admits, Going to White House Bunker During Protest

During an interview with Fox News Radio, the president also again falsely claimed the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough “got away with murder.”

 President Trump on Wednesday first denied and then acknowledged that he had gone to a secure bunker in the White House as protesters demonstrated nearby but said he went there for an “inspection,” not because of concerns over his safety.

“Well, it was a false report,” Mr. Trump said during an interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio, who had asked if he had been brought to the bunker along with his family as protests continued.

But then Mr. Trump reversed himself, and said he had gone to the bunker. But he did not say when he went to the bunker or with whom. “I wasn’t down — I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection, there was no problem during the day.”

Mr. Trump added that he had been there “two, two and a half” times before because he had “done different things” related to inspecting the bunker.

The president’s account was contradicted by a person with firsthand knowledge who told The New York Times in a report published Sunday that on Friday night, Secret Service agents nervous for his safety abruptly rushed him to an underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks.

A second official familiar with the events said the agents acted after the White House’s security status was changed to “red” amid the protests, a warning of a heightened threat. Officials said the president was never really in danger, but that he and his family were rattled by the sometimes violent protests near the White House.

Mr. Trump’s concern over the perception that he was hiding prompted him on Monday to tell his staff that he wanted to take some kind of action to address that impression. After a discussion over whether to send the military into American cities, he decided instead to walk across Lafayette Square to a church damaged by fire the night before, but not before law enforcement officers used-riot control tactics, including pepper spray and other chemical irritants, dispersed a crowd of demonstrators to clear his path.

In the interview, Mr. Trump covered a range of other topics. Here are some of the other things the president said in the interview:

• When Mr. Kilmeade asked why he was focusing on things like fighting with the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough when so much turmoil was unfolding across the country, Mr. Trump again falsely claimed the former congressman was connected to the death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis, a young woman who worked for him.
  Mr. Trump said he “strongly felt” that Mr. Scarborough “got away with murder.” But a coroner determined that Ms. Klausutis’s death was an accident that happened when she fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died after hitting her head. The widower of Ms. Klausutis has pleaded that Mr. Trump stop using his wife’s death to attack Mr. Scarborough.
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• He suggested that religious leaders criticizing his visit to St. John’s were members of the “opposition party” and said that the evangelist Franklin Graham and “many other people” had loved the visit.
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• He dismissed recent polling showing Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger, with as much as a 10-point lead. “I have other polls where I’m winning,” Mr. Trump said, though he did not cite one. There are no public polls showing him beating Mr. Biden in the general election; a handful show the president statistically tied with Mr. Biden in some battleground states. Mr. Trump then bragged about his victory in the 2016 election.

At two points, Mr. Kilmeade tried to usher Mr. Trump off the phone, finally closing out the interview with “enjoy the rest of your day and all your meetings.”