Whistleblowers Soar To Record Levels Under Obama; Being Punished For Speaking Out: "Government workers speaking out in the face of security lapses and corruption have soared to record levels, while many are being retaliated against and punished by higher ups for daring to report misconduct. The Washington Times reports that The Office of Special Counsel, which oversees government whistleblower complaints, has experienced an “unprecedented rise” in its caseload. The OSC notes that 5,200 complaints were filed in fiscal 2014. That figure constitutes a 17 percent increase on 2013 cases, as well as a 30 percent rise in three years." | Nemtsov report: 220 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine battles | “Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of the cold war,” Kerry said in February. “And they have been persisting in their misrepresentations, lies, whatever you want to call them, about their activities to my face, to the face of others, on many different occasions.” - Kerry set to meet Putin in first visit to Russia since start of Ukraine crisis
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"Government workers speaking out in the face of security lapses and corruption have soared to record levels, while many are being retaliated against and punished by higher ups for daring to report misconduct.
The Washington Times reports that The Office of Special Counsel, which oversees government whistleblower complaints, has experienced an “unprecedented rise” in its caseload.
The OSC notes that 5,200 complaints were filed in fiscal 2014. That figure constitutes a 17 percent increase on 2013 cases, as well as a 30 percent rise in three years."
Whistleblowers Soar To Record Levels Under Obama; Being Punished For Speaking Out
“Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of the cold war,” Kerry said in February. “And they have been persisting in their misrepresentations, lies, whatever you want to call them, about their activities to my face, to the face of others, on many different occasions.”
Kerry set to meet Putin in first visit to Russia since start of Ukraine crisis
A report containing material compiled by slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov says at least 220 Russian soldiers died in two battles in eastern Ukraine within the past year.
BBC News |
Kerry to hold key talks in Russia
BBC News US Secretary of State John Kerry is to hold talks in Russia - his first visit to the country since the start of the crisis in Ukraine in early 2014. He will meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, but his talks with ... Kerry heads to Russia to hold talks about UkraineUSA TODAY Kerry to Meet With Putin in Russia on TuesdayWall Street Journal John Kerry and Vladimir Putin to Hold Talks in RussiaTIME The Guardian -Yahoo News all 1,187 news articles » |
The Guardian |
How Russia's opposition united to finish Nemtsov's report on Ukraine
The Guardian One evening in February the Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov went to see his friend and colleague, Ilya Yashin, to ask for help with his latest investigation: a sensitive report onRussian soldiers secretly fighting in Ukraine. Two days ... |
Russia 'lost 200 troops' in Ukraine - Nemtsov reportBBC News
New Report Questions Russia's Ukraine NarrativeRadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
Kerry to meet Russia's Putin amid Ukraine, Syria tensionsAl-Arabiya
Ukraine Today-Bloomberg-
The Times (subscription)
all 43 news articles »
Fox News |
NATO reportedly expels dozens of alleged Russian spies from Brussels ...
Fox News NATO reportedly has moved to expel dozens of suspected Russian spies from its headquarters in Brussels in the latest sign of a renewal of tensions between the western military alliance and Moscow. The Guardian reported that NATO decided last month to |
NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg Says Russia Has Violated Ukraine Cease-fireWall Street Journal
NATO: Russia has equipped Ukraine rebels to attack at short noticeYahoo News
Ukraine Rebels Equipped By Russia to Launch Attack With Little Warning: NATONewsweek
The Guardian-CIMSEC
all 126 news articles »
RT |
Russia invites Greece to join BRICS bank
RT July 15, 2014. BRICS leaders -- President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Jacob Zuma (from left to right) -- pose for a group photo in the ... Russia Invites Greece To Join BRICS Bank As Greek Financial Crisis Deepens ...International Business Times Russia Invites Greece to Be Sixth Member of BRICS New Development BankSputnik International Russia invites Greece to join Brics' New Development BankInternational Business Times UK all 18 news articles » |
New York Times |
Kerry Arrives in Russia for Talks With Putin on Cooperation
New York Times SOCHI, Russia — Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here on Tuesday morning to explore the possibility of cooperating with President Vladimir V. Putin on an array of regional crises, especially the Syrian war. Mr. Kerry will be the most senior ... John Kerry Arrives in Russia for First Direct Talks with Putin in Two YearsWall Street Journal Ukraine crisis: John Kerry to meet Putin in RussiaBBC News Kerry in Russia for planned talks with Putin, LavrovCNN The Guardian -Los Angeles Times all 1,540 news articles » |
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BBC News |
Russia 'lost 220 troops' in Ukraine - Nemtsov report
BBC News An investigation by Russian opposition activists has concluded that 220 Russian soldiers died in two major battles in eastern Ukraine. The report includes data compiled by the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in February. Russia... How Russia's opposition united to finish Nemtsov's report on UkraineThe Guardian Nemtsov Report Says More Than 200 Russian Soldiers Killed In Ukraine War |
Nemtsov report offers darkest portrait yet of Russia's war against UkraineKyiv Post
Huffington Post-Voice of America
all 131 news articles »
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Islamic State could soon execute 9/11-scale attack in U.S., analysts say - Washington TimesIslamic State could soon execute 9/11-scale attack in U.S., analysts say - Washington Times Monday May 11 th , 2015 at 1:10 PM James B. Comey - Google News 1 Share Washington Times Islamic State could soon execute 9/11-scale attack in U.S., analysts say W...
Armed Citizen Stops Suspect's Furious Assault on a CopISIS Sets ‘Honey Traps’ to Ensnare Homosexuals Monday May 11 th , 2015 at 4:45 PM Comments On: ISIS Sets ‘Honey Traps’ To Ensnare And Execute Homosexuals 1 Share ISIS Sets ‘Honey Traps’ to Ensnare and Execute Homosexuals Share on facebook 9766 Share on em...
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ISIS anti-gay atrocities is one of the confirming indications that ISIS is directed and controlled by Russian intelligence, specifically GRU, as was noted by many observers previously, since this type of anti-gay entrapment became quite popular in Russia recentlyM.N.: Are gay entrapment operations still practiced by the police departments in America? - Google Search They were, as recently as 2013: » Gay Man Arrested In Sting Operation In Baton Rouge Due To State’s Refusal To Repeal Anti-Sodomy Law / Queerty 11/...
M.N.: Are gay entrapment operations still practiced by the police departments in America? - Google Search They were, as recently as 2013: » Gay Man Arrested In Sting Operation In Baton Rouge Due To State’s Refusal To Repeal ...
FBI agent shot at Colorado hotel while serving arrest warrant | George Zimmerman wounded in Lake Mary shooting incident | M.N.: Does the war on police broaden and started to spread to the FBI? Is this the organised, planned and directed activity? Isn't this the time to look into this issue in-depth, to investigate it thoroughly and to develop the plan of action (or reaction)? The things might start spinning out of control and then it will be harder to deal with this crisis. |M.N.: Does the war on police broaden and started to spread to the FBI? Is this the organised, planned and directed activity? Isn't this the time to look into this issue in-depth, to investigate it thoroughly and to develop the plan of action (or reaction)?...
M.N.: Does the war on police broaden and started to spread to the FBI? Is this the organised, planned and directed activity? Isn't this the time to look into this issue in-depth, to investigate it thoroughly and to develop...
Skip Salman to Saudi King White House Summit - YouTubeSkip Salman to Saudi King White House Summit - YouTube Monday May 11 th , 2015 at 3:42 PM 1 Share Published on May 11, 2015 Saudi Arabia's King Salman will not be at President Obama's summit later this week and the decision appears to have a ripple effect...
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ISIS Sets ‘Honey Traps’ to Ensnare Homosexuals | Public reacts to East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office sting operations targeting gay communityPublic reacts to East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office sting operations targeting gay community Monday May 11 th , 2015 at 6:36 PM NOLA River 1 Share At least 12 men have been arrested since 2011 on suspicion of "crimes against nature," after undercover East...
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An Eastern Bloc spy, who still lives in the United States after arriving there in 1978 on orders of the Soviet KGB, has spoken out for the first time. The spy assumed a forged American identity and remained operational for a decade before abandoning his post and quietly blending into American suburbia, toward the end of Cold War.
"Obama started this war on police intentionally, right in line with his community agitating," he tweeted.
Infowars Breaks ISIS Wide Open by The Alex Jones Show
Congress using ISIS to justify domestic surveillance state.
What’s even more incredible than the latest Hersh article, is the U.S. government’s pathetic attempt to deny it.
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Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered one of the biggest lies in modern American history.
The Pakistani authorities knew whereabouts of former al-Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden before he was killed.
Government workers routinely threatened with "directed reassignment" by superiors.
More than 200 Russian military personnel have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine, according to a report based on research begun by slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
The estimated death toll is one of the main findings of the much-anticipated report on Russia's involvement in the Ukraine conflict, which was completed by allies of Nemtsov after his killing in February and released on May 12.
"This report is not sensational," insists Oleg Kashin, independent journalist and co-author of the report. "The main purpose of this report is to become a good source of correct information about war in Ukraine and to separate information from disinformation."
"This report is not sensational," insists Oleg Kashin, independent journalist and co-author of the report. "The main purpose of this report is to become a good source of correct information about war in Ukraine and to separate information from disinformation."
The report -- titled "Putin. War" -- asserts that at least 150 Russian military personnel were killed during a Ukrainian offensive in August 2014. A further 70 -- including 17 paratroopers from the city of Ivanovo -- were reportedly killed during fighting near the bitterly contested town of Debaltseve in January and February.
Families of those killed in 2014 were given 2 million rubles ($39,000) by the government in exchange for signing a promise not to discuss the matter publicly, the report claims.
It says the families of soldiers killed this year were offered similar compensation but have not received it.
Also, according to the 64-page report, Russian service personnel are being compelled to officially resign from the military before being deployed to Ukraine in an effort by the Russian government to mask its involvement in the conflict.
"We’d tried to save all Boris Nemtsov’ ideas and proposals," explained former Nemtsov assistant and opposition activist Olga Shorina. " Nemtsov himself had collected most of the data for this report. All of this was accurately preserved in our report which was written by different authors."
"We’d tried to save all Boris Nemtsov’ ideas and proposals," explained former Nemtsov assistant and opposition activist Olga Shorina. " Nemtsov himself had collected most of the data for this report. All of this was accurately preserved in our report which was written by different authors."
President Vladimir Putin and the Russian military have consistently denied that Russian forces are involved in the fighting in Ukraine, saying that any Russians participating are there of their own accord.
"The most important thing is to tell the truth," activist Ilya Yashin said at the report's presentation at the Moscow headquarters of the opposition political party PRP-PARNAS.
"The purpose of this report is to tell people the truth. The leadership of our country bears responsibility for a crime. It bears responsibility for an enterprise that has victimized Ukrainian citizens and our fellow Russian citizens," Yashin said.
Kyiv and NATO say there is incontrovertible evidence of direct Russian military involvement in the conflict between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists, which the United Nations says has killed more than 6,100 civilians and combatants since April 2014.
The Nemtsov report is divided into 11 chapters, including sections on Russia's overall policy toward Ukraine, the use of propaganda, the annexation of Crimea, and the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in July 2014.
It documents the use of Russian budgetary funds to pay Russian citizens to fight as mercenaries in eastern Ukraine and asserts that the political leadership of the separatists in Ukraine is controlled by Putin aide Vladislav Surkov.
"As shown in this report," the text reads, "the Russian government provided active political, economic, personnel, and also direct military support to the separatists."
The ultimate purpose of Moscow's support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine was "to create an advantageous negotiating position with Western countries" in order to get them to lift sanctions imposed after Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in exchange for an end to hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
The report also presents information from the Ukrainian government and military about the interrogations of Russian citizens captured fighting in Ukraine. This information has been scantly and skeptically reported by Russian state-controlled media.
Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister turned fierce Kremlin critic, was shot to death on February 27 in central Moscow, yards from the Kremlin, while he was working on the report.
Nemtsov's friends and colleagues in PRP-PARNAS completed the research following his death, even though many documents were confiscated by investigators looking into his killing and many sources were no longer willing to speak to the researchers.
"If they shot Nemtsov right next to the Kremlin, then they can do whatever they want to our activists in Ivanovo and no one would notice," the report quotes an unnamed lawyer representing the families of two killed paratroopers as saying.
The Nemtsov report also estimates that Russia has spent at least 53 billion rubles ($1 billion) on the war in Ukraine and a further 80 billion rubles supporting refugees from eastern Ukraine, where the rebels hold parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
The economic part of the report was written by economist Sergei Aleksashenko, a former deputy chairman of the Russian central bank.
The report has been placed online its entirety and published in an initial print run of 2,000 copies. Organizers are collecting donations online to pay for an eventual mass printing and free distribution.
"Our audience is the entire Russian people," Yashin said at the May 12 press conference. "We want to tell people the truth about what is happening in Russia, about what is happening in eastern Ukraine. We want to catch Putin in his lies. We want to tell people that the president of Russia -- a man who controls nuclear weapons and leads an enormous country -- is lying to the Russian people and to the entire world."
VOA's Russian service contributed to this report
VOA's Russian service contributed to this report
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· · · ·
The most surprising event of this political era is what hasn’t happened. The world has not turned left. Given the financial crisis, widening inequality, the unpopularity of the right’s stances on social issues and immigration, you would have thought that progressive parties would be cruising from win to win.
But, instead, right-leaning parties are doing well. In the United States, Republicans control both houses of Congress. In Israel, the Likud Party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled off a surprising win in an election that was at least partly about economic policy. In Britain, the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister David Cameron won a parliamentary majority.
What’s going on here?
Well, there are some issues in each election specific to that country, but there are a few broader trends to be observed. The first is that the cutting-edge, progressive economic arguments do not seem to be swaying voters.
Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.
This tendency has been politically successful. Clinton and Blair had long terms. This year, Emanuel won by 12 percentage points against the more progressive candidate, Chuy Garcia, even in a city with a disproportionate number of union households.
Redistributionist progressivism more aggressively raises taxes to shift money down the income scale, opposes trade treaties and meddles more in the marketplace. This tendency has won elections in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren) and New York City (Bill de Blasio) but not in many other places. Ed Balls, the No. 2 figure in the Labour Party in Britain, co-led the group from the Center for American Progress that wrote the most influential statement of modern progressivism, a report on “inclusive prosperity.” Balls could not even retain his own parliamentary seat in the last election.
The conservative victories probably have more to do with the public’s skepticism about the left than with any positive enthusiasm toward the right. Still, there are a few things center-right parties have done successfully.
First, they have loudly (and sometimes offensively) championed national identity. In this era of globalization, voters are rewarding candidates who believe in their country’s exceptionalism.
Second, they have been basically sensible on fiscal policy. After the financial crisis, there was a big debate over how much governments should go into debt to stimulate growth. The two nations most associated with the “austerity” school — those who were suspicious of debt-based stimulus — were Germany and Britain. This will not settle the debate, but these two nations now have some of the strongest economies in Europe and their political leaders are in good shape.
Third, these leaders did not overread their mandate. Cameron in Britain promised to cut the size of government, and he did, from 45.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2010 to 40.7 percent today, according to The Economist. The number of public-sector jobs there has gone down by 1 million.
But he made these cuts without going overboard. Public satisfaction with government services has gone up. And there have been some sensible efforts to boost those at the bottom. As The Economist pointed out, “The richest 10 percent have borne the greatest burden of extra taxes. Full-time workers earning the minimum wage pay a third as much income tax as in 2010. Overall, inequality has not widened — in contrast to America.”
The British electorate and the American electorate sometimes mirror each other. Trans-Atlantic voters went for Reagan and Thatcher together and Clinton and Blair together. In policy terms, Cameron is a more conservative version of President Obama.
Cameron’s win suggests the kind of candidate that would probably do well in a general election in this country. He is liberal on social policy, green on global warming and pragmatically conservative on economic policy. If he’s faulted for anything, it is for not being particularly ideological, though he has let his ministers try some pretty bold institutional reforms to modernize the welfare state.
Globally, voters are disillusioned with large public institutions. They seem to want to reassert local control and their own particular nationalism (Scottish or anything else). But they also seem to want a slightly smaller public sector, strong welfare state reform and more open and vibrant labor markets as a path to prosperity.
For some reason, American politicians are fleeing from this profile, Hillary Clinton to the further left and Republicans to the right.
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· · ·
President François Hollande of France has called for an end to the United States trade embargo against Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro in the first visit by a Western head of state to Havana since the United States announced plans in December to re-establish diplomatic relations with the country.
“I had before me a man who made history,” Mr. Hollande was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying, referring to Mr. Castro, who wore a blue Adidas tracksuit over a checked shirt during the surprise 50-minute meeting at Mr. Castro’s home in Havana on Monday.
Mr. Hollande, making the first official visit by a French president to Cuba, said that Mr. Castro, 88, who led the Cuban revolution and ruled the country for almost half a century, had a “a lot to say,” and demonstrated intellectual acuity and alertness, according to reports in the French news media.
Mr. Castro, who rarely appears in public and has retreated from the global stage, complained to Mr. Hollande about pain in his knee and shoulder, news reports said.
The two men discussed a wide range of subjects, including climate change and the environment, and the French newspaper Le Monde pointed out that in a country with limits on freedom of information, Mr. Castro told Mr. Hollande that he did research on the Internet.
For Mr. Hollande, whose approval ratings at home are low, the visit was a chance to reinforce economic ties between Cuba and France while also basking in the reflected glory of an aging revolutionary who still inspires global fascination and some degree of adulation, particularly among some members of France’s left-wing elite.
Mr. Hollande, who also met with President Raúl Castro, noted that his trip came “at a particularly important but also uncertain time,” Agence France-Presse said. In December, President Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than half a century.
The American move, the culmination of 18 months of secret talks with the help of Pope Francis, has opened the way for warmer ties between Cuba and the West, even as there remains deep concern about Cuba’s record with human rights and democracy.
Speaking on Monday at the University of Havana, Mr. Hollande said that France would work hard to ensure that the measures that undermined Cuba’s development would be “repealed,” the agency reported.
Mr. Hollande also called for Cuba to open up its economy. “Of course, we would like to see your rules relaxed and for our companies to be able to manage their resources more freely,” he was quoted by the agency as saying.
André Chassaigne, a member of the Communist Party in Parliament who leads a group of lawmakersdevoted to ties between France and Cuba, told the newspaper Libération that Mr. Hollande’s meeting with Fidel Castro was a moment of great importance. “One can say whatever one wants,” he said, “but Fidel Castro is the last great figure of the 20th century.”
The newspaper noted, however, that the visit by the French leader could also alienate Cuban dissidents.
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SOCHI, Russia — Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here on Tuesday morning to explore the possibility of cooperating with President Vladimir V. Putin on an array of regional crises, especially the Syrian war.
Mr. Kerry will be the most senior American official to meet in Russia with Mr. Putin since the secretary of state was in Moscow two years ago.
His visit began on an inauspicious note after the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a lengthy statement on Monday castigating the Obama administration for trying to isolate Russia.
The broadside blamed the White House for the crisis in Ukraine, complained that NATO was moving its infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders and charged that the disruption in American-Russian relations stemmed from changes in the “political climate” in the United States.
A senior State Department official declined to comment on the Russian “narrative” but pointed to the possibility for cooperation on Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.
After laying a wreath at a memorial commemorating Russia’s victory in the World War II, Mr. Kerry was due to meet with Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, on Tuesday.
His meeting with Mr. Putin was scheduled for later in the afternoon. Mr. Kerry has met frequently with Mr. Lavrov, but it is Mr. Putin who is in charge and determines how much flexibility his foreign minister has when talking to the United States.
“It’s important to try to talk to the senior decision maker,” said the State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters. “We have a lot of business that we could do together if there is interest.”
American officials are hoping that the reversals of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on the battlefield will give Russia an incentive to withdraw support for the leader and cooperate with the United States on ways to encourage a political transition to a post-Assad government.
The two sides are also expected to discuss the apparent decision by the Assad government to start using chlorine gas again, and possibly other chemical agents. Russia and the United States drafted the 2013 agreement that required Syria to get rid of its arsenal of poison gas, and allegations about the use of chlorine bombs suggest that the pact was less successful than the Americans had hoped.
“We made progress in the chemical weapons,” the State Department official said. “There is more to do.”
Mr. Kerry is expected to restate the United States’ objections to Russia’s sale of the S-300 air defense system to Iran, after Mr. Putin recently rescinded a ban on the sale of the weapon to Tehran.
American officials have long been concerned that Iran’s acquisition of the S-300 might prompt its leaders to conclude that their nuclear installations would not be vulnerable to an American airstrike. That, in turn, could lead Iran to take a harder line in the nuclear talks and to be less likely to honor an accord that was negotiated, American officials say.
But Mr. Kerry’s case may be complicated by President Obama’s recent comments that Russia has the legal right to sell the S-300.
Wendy Sherman, who has led the United States’ team in the nuclear talks with Iran, is accompanying Mr. Kerry. Russia is among the world powers that are trying to negotiate a final accord to limit Iran’snuclear program, and the current state of the talks was expected to be an important topic in the meetings here.
“We’re coming into the final six weeks,” the State Department official said, referring to a deadline at the end of June. “It’s important to stay tightly aligned.”
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· · ·
Last year the vampires of finance bought themselves a Congress. I know it’s not nice to call them that, but I have my reasons, which I’ll explain in a bit. For now, however, let’s just note that these days Wall Street, which used to split its support between the parties, overwhelmingly favors the G.O.P. And the Republicans who came to power this year are returning the favor by trying to kill Dodd-Frank, the financial reform enacted in 2010.
And why must Dodd-Frank die? Because it’s working.
This statement may surprise progressives who believe that nothing significant has been done to rein in runaway bankers. And it’s true both that reform fell well short of what we really should have done and that it hasn’t yielded obvious, measurable triumphs like the gains in insurance thanks to Obamacare.
But Wall Street hates reform for a reason, and a closer look shows why.
For one thing, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren — is, by all accounts, having a major chilling effect on abusive lending practices. And early indications are that enhanced regulation of financial derivatives — which played a major role in the 2008 crisis — is having similar effects, increasing transparency and reducing the profits of middlemen.
What about the problem of financial industry structure, sometimes oversimplified with the phrase “too big to fail”? There, too, Dodd-Frank seems to be yielding real results, in fact, more than many supporters expected.
As I’ve just suggested, too big to fail doesn’t quite get at the problem here. What was really lethal was the interaction between size and complexity. Financial institutions had become chimeras: part bank, part hedge fund, part insurance company, and so on. This complexity let them evade regulation, yet be rescued from the consequences when their bets went bad. And bankers’ ability to have it both ways helped set America up for disaster.
Dodd-Frank addressed this problem by letting regulators subject “systemically important” financial institutions to extra regulation, and seize control of such institutions at times of crisis, as opposed to simply bailing them out. And it required that financial institutions in general put up more capital, reducing both their incentive to take excessive risks and the chance that risk-taking would lead to bankruptcy.
All of this seems to be working: “Shadow banking,” which created bank-type risks while evading bank-type regulation, is in retreat. You can see this in cases like that of General Electric, a manufacturing firm that turned itself into a financial wheeler-dealer, but is now trying to return to its roots. You can also see it in the overall numbers, where conventional banking — which is to say, banking subject to relatively strong regulation — has made a comeback. Evading the rules, it seems, isn’t as appealing as it used to be.
But the vampires are fighting back.
O.K., why do I call them that? Not because they drain the economy of its lifeblood, although they do: there’s a lot of evidence that oversize, overpaid financial industries — like ours — hurt economic growth and stability. Even the International Monetary Fund agrees.
But what really makes the word apt in this context is that the enemies of reform can’t withstand sunlight. Open defenses of Wall Street’s right to go back to its old ways are hard to find. When right-wing think tanks do try to claim that regulation is a bad thing that will hurt the economy, their hearts don’t seem to be in it. For example, the latest such “study,” from the American Action Forum, runs to all of four pages, and even its author, the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, sounds embarrassed about his work.
What you mostly get, instead, is slavery-is-freedom claims that reform actually empowers the bad guys: for example, that regulating too-big-and-complex-to-fail institutions is somehow doing wheeler-dealers a favor, claims belied by the desperate efforts of such institutions to avoid the “systemically important” designation. The point is that almost nobody wants to be seen as a bought and paid-for servant of the financial industry, least of all those who really are exactly that.
And this in turn means that so far, at least, the vampires are getting a lot less than they expected for their money. Republicans would love to undo Dodd-Frank, but they are, rightly, afraid of the glare of publicity that defenders of reform like Senator Warren — who inspires a remarkable amount of fear in the unrighteous — would shine on their efforts.
Does this mean that all is well on the financial front? Of course not. Dodd-Frank is much better than nothing, but far from being all we need. And the vampires are still lurking in their coffins, waiting to strike again. But things could be worse.
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· · ·
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former Central Intelligence Agency officer on Monday was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on espionage charges for telling a journalist for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. The sentence was far less than the Justice Department had wanted.
The former officer, Jeffrey A. Sterling, argued that the Espionage Act, which was passed during World War I, was intended to prosecute spies, not officials who talked to journalists. He asked for the kind of leniency that prosecutors showed to David H. Petraeus, the retired general who last monthreceived probation for providing his highly classified journals to his biographer.
The case revolves around an operation in which a former Russian scientist provided Iran with intentionally flawed nuclear component schematics. Mr. Sterling was convicted in January of disclosing the operation to James Risen, a reporter for The Times, who had revealed it in his 2006 book, “State of War.” Mr. Risen described it as a botched mission that may have inadvertently advanced Iran’s nuclear program.
The Justice Department said that Mr. Sterling’s disclosures compromised an important C.I.A.operation and jeopardized the life of a spy. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he faced more than 20 years in prison, a calculation with which the Justice Department agreed. Prosecutors sought a “severe” sentence in that range.
Prosecutors maintain that the program was successful, and said Mr. Sterling’s disclosure “was borne not of patriotism but of pure spite.” The Justice Department argued that Mr. Sterling, who is black, had a vendetta against the C.I.A., which he had sued for racial discrimination.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema gave no indication that she was swayed by the government’s argument that the book had disrupted a crucial operation, or harmed national security. She said she was most bothered that the information revealed in “State of War” had jeopardized the safety of the Russian scientist, who was a C.I.A. informant. Of all the types of secrets kept by American intelligence officers, she said, “This is the most critical secret.”
She said Mr. Sterling had to be punished to send a message to other officials. “If you knowingly reveal these secrets, there’s going to be a price to be paid,” she said.
Mr. Sterling, 47, spoke only briefly to thank the judge and court staff for treating him kindly as the case dragged on for years. Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Mr. Sterling, said jurors got the verdict wrong when they voted to convict. “That said, the judge today got it right,” he said.
Under federal rules, Mr. Sterling will be eligible for release from prison in just under three years.
The sentence caps a leak investigation that began under President George W. Bush and became a defining case in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government leaks. Under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the Justice Department prosecuted more people for having unauthorized discussions with reporters than all prior administrations combined.
For years, Mr. Sterling’s case was known most for the Justice Department’s efforts to force Mr. Risen to reveal his source. At the last minute, under pressure from journalist groups and liberal advocates, Mr. Holder relented and did not force Mr. Risen to choose between revealing his source or going to jail. Prosecutors won the case without Mr. Risen’s testimony.
Since the conviction, the case has been notable because of the stark differences in sentences handed down to leakers. Midlevel people like Mr. Sterling have been charged most aggressively. John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer, served about two years in prison. Two former government contractors, Donald J. Sachtleben and Stephen J. Kim, are serving prison time. Thomas A. Drake, a former National Security Agency official, faced the prospect of years in prison but received a plea deal on a minor charge and avoided serving time after his lawyers won critical rulings before the trial.
By comparison, the F.B.I. investigated a decorated military leader, retired Gen. James E. Cartwright, after public reports described a highly classified wave of American cyberattacks against Iran. But that investigation has stalled because investigators considered the operation too sensitive to discuss at a public trial.
Mr. Petraeus, meanwhile, retains his status as an adviser to the Obama administration despite giving Paula Broadwell, his biographer, who was also his lover, notebooks containing handwritten classified notes about official meetings, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and the names of covert officers. Ms. Broadwell had a security clearance but was not authorized to receive the information.
Mr. Petraeus also admitted lying to the F.B.I., and the leniency of his plea deal infuriated many prosecutors and agents.
In court documents filed in Mr. Sterling’s case, the Justice Department argued that Mr. Petraeus’s crimes were not comparable. “None of this classified information was included in his biography, made public in any other way, or disclosed by his biographer to any third parties.”
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Mentally ill inmates in prisons and jails across the United States are subjected to routine physical abuse by guards, including being doused with chemical sprays, shocked with electronic stun gunsand strapped for hours to chairs or beds, according to a report by Human Rights Watch to be released on Tuesday.
The mistreatment, the study says, has led to deaths, though the number of casualties is unclear in part because jails and prisons classify them in various ways. Also, jails and prisons are not uniformly required to report the use of force by guards, the study found.
Jamie Fellner, a senior adviser at Human Rights Watch and the report’s author, said the study was the first to take a comprehensive look at use of force by guards against mentally ill prisoners, to try to understand the dynamics behind the violence. Ms. Fellner said she spent more than a year interviewing some 125 officials and mental health experts and reviewing hundreds of cases across the country.
The review found that prisoners suffering from serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia andbipolar disorder, are often punished with physical force for commonplace behaviors including using profanity and banging on cell doors.
“Prisoners with mental disabilities may struggle more than others to adjust to the extraordinary stresses of incarceration, to follow the rules governing every aspect of life and to respond promptly to staff orders,” said the report, “Callous and Cruel: Use of Force Against Inmates With Mental Disabilities in U.S. Jails and Prisons.”
The study faulted prisons and jails for failing to offer sufficient mental health treatment; doing too little to protect mentally ill patients from physical abuse by staff members, who are often inadequately trained; and having leadership not sufficiently focused on mental health issues.
The National Institute of Corrections, a federal agency that provides funding and offers support programs to corrections agencies, said inmates’ mental health was among its highest priorities. The organization said it had hosted a national meeting in which chief mental health officers from state prisons had met “to map out directions for future movement in improving correctional mental health care,” according to the organization’s website.
Concern about how to care for the mentally ill in jails and prisons has intensified in recent years as people who may once have been sent to a hospital where they would have access to treatment are now more likely to be sent to prisons that lack sufficient psychiatric staff, the report said. There are now far more people with mental illnesses in prisons and jails than there are in state psychiatric hospitals.
A Justice Department study found that 75 percent of women and 50 percent of men in state penitentiaries, and 75 percent of women and 63 percent of men in local jails, will suffer from a mental health problem requiring services in any given year.
The Human Rights Watch report detailed the case of Anthony McManus, who was arrested in Michigan for indecent exposure and starved to death in prison in 2005. At the time of his death at age 38, Mr. McManus weighed 75 pounds.
While incarcerated at the Baraga Maximum Security Facility in Baraga, Mich., Mr. McManus, who had been found to have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, would habitually cover himself in chewed food and feces, according to the report. He often refused to eat.
The prison lacked a psychiatry department and Mr. McManus had only intermittent contact with a psychologist, usually through a cell door, the report said. As he became increasingly disruptive, the report said prison officials would cut off the cell’s water supply and limit his food, but did not allow Mr. McManus to receive mental health treatment.
Three days before his death, guards pepper-sprayed him when he refused to comply with their orders to take off his clothes so they could make sure he was not armed.
A state report concluded that Mr. McManus’s extreme weight loss and the imposition of the water restriction had been the most immediate preventable contributors to his death.
Wallace Kirby, 58, a community organizer advocate for University Legal Services in Washington, has spent much of his life in various prisons. Arrested for the first time at age 12, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia as a young adult.
During a three-year stint at a Maryland prison during the 1990s, Mr. Kirby, who was not included in the Human Rights Watch report, said he was frequently beaten by guards for failing to follow orders. Despite his diagnosis, Mr. Kirby said he received neither medication nor mental health counseling.
“I was paranoid so I didn’t want to go into the yard or to even take a shower, so they’d come in and bring in the extraction team and they’d beat you,” he said, referring to heavily armed prison security personnel.
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NEW BOSTON, Tex. — The inmate, dressed in prison whites with a shaved head and incongruously tender eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, entered the visiting room with her wrists joined as if she were handcuffed. At 31, she had spent her whole adult life behind bars, and it looked like a posture of habit.
She introduced herself: “My given name at birth was Joshua Zollicoffer, but my preferred name is Passion Star.”
A transgender woman whose gender identity has been challenged by Texas authorities, Ms. Star herself is challenging Texas’ refusal to accept new national standards intended to eliminate rape in prison, which disproportionately affects gay and transgender prisoners. Last spring, Gov. Rick Perry declared in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that Texas had its own “safe prisons program” and did not need the “unnecessarily cumbersome and costly” intrusion of another federal mandate.
Ms. Star, who says she is a victim of repeated sexual harassment, coercion, abuse and assault in Texas’s maximum-security prisons for men, disagrees.
“Look, I got 36 stitches and have scars on my face that prove the prisons are not safe and the current system does not work,” she said. “Somebody needs to be intrusive into this state’s business. Because if somebody was intruding, probably these things would not happen.”
After decades of societal indifference to prison rape, Congress, in a rare show of support for inmates’ rights, unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, and Mr. Perry’s predecessor as governor, President George W. Bush, signed it into law.
“The emerging consensus was that ‘Don’t drop the soap’ jokes were no longer funny, and that rape is not a penalty we assign in sentencing,” said Jael Humphrey, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, a national group that represents Ms. Star in a federal lawsuit alleging that Texas officials failed to protect her from sexual victimization despite her persistent, well-documented pleas for help.
But over 12 years, even as reported sexual victimization in prisons remained high, the urgency behind that consensus dissipated. It took almost a decade for the Justice Department to issue the final standards on how to prevent, detect and respond to sexual abuse in custody. And it took a couple of years more before governors were required to report to Washington, which revealed that only New Jersey and New Hampshire were ready to certify full compliance.
With May 15 marking the second annual reporting deadline, advocates for inmates and half of the members of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a bipartisan group charged with drafting the standards, say the plodding pace of change has disheartened them despite pockets of progress.
“I am encouraged by what several states have done, discouraged by most and dismayed by states like Texas,” said Judge Reggie B. Walton of United States District Court in the District of Columbia, who was appointed chairman of the now-disbanded commission by Mr. Bush.
Some commissioners fault the Justice Department for failing to promote the standards vigorously. Others blame the correctional industry and unions for resisting practices long known to curb “state-sanctioned abuse,” as one put it. All lament that Congress has sought to weaken the modest penalties for noncompliance, and that five governors joined Mr. Perry last year in snubbing the standards.
“There’s a whole kind of backlash, which is very depressing,” said Jamie Fellner, a former commissioner who is senior counsel for the United States program of Human Rights Watch. “It’s 12 years since the law passed. I mean, really. We’re still dealing with all these officials saying, ‘Trust us. We’ll take care of it.’?”
Last year, 42 governors signed a form providing “assurance” to the Justice Department that they were advancing toward compliance. But they were allowed to make that assurance without having conducted any outside audits; the commissioners protested this in a letter to Mr. Holder in November, expressing concern about “efforts to delay or weaken” adherence to the standards.
In fact, the ambitious goal to audit every prison, jail, detention center, lockup and halfway house in this country over a three-year period is far behind schedule.
Some 8,000 institutions are supposed to be audited for sexual safety by August 2016; only 335 audits had been completed by March, according to a Justice Department document obtained from the office of Senator John Cornyn of Texas; the department declined to provide numbers.
The Justice Department said it “remains steadfast in its commitment to the implementation of the National PREA Standards” — PREA is the acronym for the Prison Rape Elimination Act — and hopes for “full participation” from all states this year.
But states face only a small penalty, the loss of 5 percent of prison-related federal grants, if they opt out of the process entirely. “There are a lot of carrots in PREA, and not enough sticks,” said Brenda V. Smith, an American University law professor and another former commissioner.
Texas forfeited $810,796 — the equivalent of a minuscule fraction of its multibillion-dollar corrections budget — after Mr. Perry declined to sign an assurance letter. According to a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, this loss “will not have any effect on T.D.C.J. operations.”
The other renegade states, as advocates called them, were Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana and Utah.
Texas’ opting out was considered especially significant, however, because it has the largest prison population in the country and by far the most reports of sexual assault and abuse. Texas had three and a half times as many allegations as California in 2011, when California still had more inmates than Texas, according to the federal data.
Texas authorities attribute this to “extensive efforts to encourage and facilitate reporting.” Declining to discuss Ms. Star’s case, they said their “goal is to be as compliant as possible with PREA standards without jeopardizing the safety and security of our institutions.”
Twenty-seven of their 109 prisons have passed outside audits, they said, including the one where Ms. Star is now locked up for a teenage offense that the authorities considered kidnapping.
A Predatory Culture
In this rural area just west of Texarkana, the Barry B. Telford prison complex sits behind chain-link fences topped with coils of razor ribbon. It is where Ms. Star began her incarceration the year that Congress passed the prison rape law and where, after an odyssey through six other prisons, she unexpectedly returned at the end of March.
She is used to moving around. Born in Mississippi in late 1983, Ms. Star lived the peripatetic life of a military child, shuttling from state to state and twice to Germany before settling near Fort Hood, Tex., as a teenager.
On a summer day when she was 18, she accompanied her boyfriend, who was 23, to a Chevrolet dealership to test-drive a car. Her boyfriend took the wheel of a maroon Impala, a salesman got in the front passenger seat and Ms. Star sat in the rear.
When the salesman indicated it was time to return to the lot, the boyfriend said no, in Ms. Star’s recounting.
“I’m like, ‘Wow. What do you mean?’” she said. “And he’s like, ‘Be quiet.’ It was one of those things where keeping it real goes wrong. Where I could have been like, ‘Well, you need to stop,’ or gotten out, and I didn’t. We make bad decisions when we’re young.”
The share of state and federal prison inmates who reported experiencing sexual victimization in the past year, according to a survey conducted from February 2011 to May 2012.
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After 40 miles, they deposited the salesman on a rural road. He eventually flagged down a police car, and an alert was issued for the stolen Chevy. The couple kept driving north, even picking up a hitchhiker at one point, until, with the authorities in pursuit, their flight ended in a ditch.
Charged with aggravated kidnapping, a first-degree felony that carries a penalty of five to 99 years, Ms. Star accepted the same plea deal of 20 years as her boyfriend.
“The law applies a rule of parties, which allows them to charge the passenger with the same level of culpability as the primary actor,” said M. Bryon Barnhill, who was Ms. Star’s court-appointed lawyer. But, he added, the boyfriend (and the hitchhiker) told the authorities “they were acting in concert with the intention of stealing the car and traveling to Canada to start a new life.”
Ms. Star was 19 when she arrived at Telford, with no possibility of parole for a decade. She was quickly inducted into a gang-ruled world with an ultimatum, she said: “You’re going to ride with us, or you’re going to fight.”
“In the state of Texas, in the general population, there is a culture where gay men and transgender women in prison are basically preyed on by the stronger inmates,” she said. “They have to be the property of a person who’s in a gang, and this person is the individual who speaks for them. So basically they’re coerced into being sexually active to survive.”
Ms. Star said that after complaining fruitlessly to prison employees, she submitted to a coerced sexual relationship. She tried to leave the inmate once, she said, but he choked her in response.
The most recent national inmate survey by the Justice Department found that sexual victimization was reported by 3.1 percent of heterosexual prisoners, 14 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual prisoners and 40 percent of transgender inmates.
Because gay and transgender inmates are at such high risk, a prison’s efforts to protect them is seen by experts as a barometer of its commitment to eliminating rape. That is why Ms. Star’s advocates believe her case represents a pervasive problem in Texas; those defendants who filed a legal response to her complaint deny all allegations against them and contend they acted “in good faith.”
In her early years in prison, Ms. Star considered herself gay. She knew she was “additionally different,” but it would take a few more years for her to identify as a transgender woman, to adopt a “feminine alias” and to start feeling comfortable in her own skin.
“You know how penguins are?” she asked. “On land, if you look at a penguin when it walks around, it’s just an ungainly, clumsy creature. But in water, a penguin is one of the most graceful animals in the world.’’ She added: “I didn’t feel like I was in my element until, at all types of personal risk to myself, I became Passion.”
Becoming Passion in a maximum-security men’s prison in Texas was not easy. “Basically they frown on us expressing our gender,” she said. “I did at one point wear my hair longer, arch my eyebrows, shave my legs and my body and everything. I wore small, form-fitting clothes and made myself feminine underwear. But I was actually disciplined for it.”
It was only in 2014 that she learned from a notice in the prison newspaper that inmates were allowed to request classification as transgender, she said, and she did so.
But in their response to her lawsuit, Texas officials refer to Ms. Star as Mr. Zollicoffer, use male pronouns and “deny” she is transgender “as no such medical diagnosis has been made.”
“If she were seeking medical care — and she does intend to transition but until now she has been in survival mode — a diagnosis could be relevant,” Ms. Humphrey, her lawyer, said. “But whether or not she was diagnosed as transgender has nothing to do with whether or not she deserves protection from sexual assault.”
‘The Day-to-Day Horror’
As a researcher who studied prison rape when nobody wanted to know about it, Cindy Struckman-Johnson, a social psychologist at the University of South Dakota, was astonished when Congress passed the rape legislation.
“To me it was like a miracle,” said Ms. Struckman-Johnson, a former commissioner who described how she had become “persona non grata” in Nebraska in the 1990s after finding a high rate of prison rape there. “Ever since PREA, nobody can really be in denial.”
The law described prison rape as epidemic. Ideologically evenhanded, it referred at once to “the day-to-day horror of victimized inmates” and to “brutalized inmates more likely to commit crimes when they are released.” It spoke of the potential spread of H.I.V. and of the need for Congress to protect the constitutional rights of prisoners in states where officials displayed deliberate indifference.
The law, which established the commission, laid out a timetable under which the attorney general would publish the final antirape standards by 2007.
But after eight public hearings, 11 site visits and two public comment periods on draft standards, the commission did not release its final report and proposed standards until 2009.
“What took so long?” Ms. Smith said. “Resistance was coming from and still is coming from many correctional agencies. The resistance was: This is going to cost us too much money. But also, we were developing standards not just around preventing rape, but around respect and dignity and changing the culture that permitted or even encouraged rape in custody.”
It then took the Justice Department three additional years to issue final standards that were in the end “almost identical — very frustrating,” one commissioner said.
The 52 standards for prisons and jails apply to everything from hiring and staffing levels through investigation and evidence collection to medical treatment and rape crisis counseling.
State officials found some standards particularly intrusive. Mr. Perry protested that limitations on cross-gender strip searches, pat downs and bathroom supervision would force Texas to discriminate against its female officers. He said the requirement that youths in adult prisons be “separated by sight and sound” from grown-up inmates infringed on Texas’ right to set its age of criminal responsibility at 17.
Training and technical assistance related to the coming regulations began in 2004. Since 2011, the Justice Department has doled out some $31 million in PREA-related grants, and tens of millions more to set up and run the National PREA Resource Center.
And indeed, judged through a long lens, considerable progress has been made. That wardens across the country now profess zero tolerance for sexual abuse represents a cultural transformation itself. There are antirape posters on prison bulletin boards, hotlines to report sexual abuse, educational videos for inmates, and training sessions for guards. Statistics show some prisons and jails with very low or even no reported sexual abuse.
“I’m not on the top deck, I’m in the engine room with Scotty, and I see behavioral change on the yards and in the cellblocks,” said James E. Aiken, a correctional consultant and former commissioner. “This is not a speedboat; it’s a very big ship.”
John Kaneb, a business executive and former vice chairman of the commission, said he also thought “things are going well now.”
Over 500 specialized auditors have been certified, and, he said, the pace of audits is accelerating: “They’re not going to get 8,000 done in the next 15 months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had 1,000 done by end of year.”
Yet others are disappointed that the states are moving slowly and that the Justice Department declines to say how much longer it will allow governors to provide “assurances” instead of certifying compliance.
“This leaves open the absurd possibility that a state could kick the can down the road in perpetuity without ever incurring a financial penalty,” said Lovisa Stannow, the executive director of Just Detention International.
Pat Nolan, director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation and a former commissioner, said that Mr. Perry’s public challenge to the standards caused ripples of anxiety that linger.
“The fear is that if you get enough states thumbing their nose at this, the whole thing could unravel,” he said.
In the end, the former commissioners said, oversight might have to become the provenance of the courts.
“I think that’s the greatest hope, that the standards become the legal standards of care,” Judge Walton said. “If states realize they’re going to have multimillion-dollar lawsuits, that will be an incentive for them.”
A Quest for ‘Safekeeping’
At Lambda Legal’s offices on Wall Street, not long after Mr. Perry’s declaration to Washington, Ms. Humphrey started combing through letters from inmates complaining about sexual abuse.
“I was looking in our mailbag for a plaintiff who could illustrate the problems Texas was having,” Ms. Humphrey said. “And there she was.”
What Ms. Humphrey found was a thick envelope from Ms. Star containing the proposed draft of a legal complaint along with medical files, grievance reports and appeals — a meticulous record of her years behind bars.
In 2006, Ms. Star was transferred to the James V. Allred Unit in Wichita Falls.
Allred would soon be singled out by the Justice Department as one of the 10 most sexually violent prisons in the country. Five of the 10, in fact, were in Texas, and Ms. Star would end up doing time in three of them.
At Allred, she was immediately targeted as she had been at Telford, she said, but she was older and unwilling “to lay down and accept these things happening to me.”
So she embarked on what became her unrelenting quest to be placed in “safekeeping,” which is what Texas calls separate housing units for vulnerable inmates. She sought safekeeping not only because of recurrent sexual harassment, coercion and threats of violence, but also because of retaliation for reporting these incidents — from staff members as well as inmates, she said.
At Allred, when she told a prison official she feared for her life after refusing sexual demands, the official told her she would be fine because she is black, she claims in her lawsuit. Over the years, she came to believe the system’s protection program was racially discriminatory.
A racial breakdown of the inmates in safekeeping, provided by Texas, indicates she may have had a point. Of the 1,569 inmates with that status now, 57 percent are white, while whites constitute 30 percent of the inmate population. Twenty-three percent in safekeeping are black, compared with 35 percent over all, and 19 percent are Hispanic, compared with 33 percent.
In March 2007, Ms. Star was assigned to a cell with a gang member who instantly started demanding sexual favors. She informed a guard and asked for help, she said. Two days later, the cellmate raped her at knife point. After she reported the attack, he threw a fan at her head. It was the “worst moment of my life,” she said, making her feel “utterly powerless,” briefly suicidal and extremely fearful “it would happen to me again and again.”
Ms. Star said she did not know what happened to her cellmate after she went to the infirmary to be treated; under the standards, victims are supposed to be kept apprised.
A national panel, established after the rape law to examine institutions with the best and worst records, visited Allred and could find no indication that any sexual abuse claims had been substantiated. It noted that a significant number of claims had been filed by gay inmates — “whom staff members referred to as queens.”
“A question remains as to whether complaints from homosexual inmates are treated as seriously as they deserve,” the panel said of Allred.
Texas has a very low rate of substantiating allegations. Of 743 reports of sexual assault and abuse in the 2013 budget year, 20 cases, or 2.7 percent, were corroborated; the national rate is 10 percent. One prison rape case was sent to a grand jury that year.
After the rape, Ms. Star was moved into “protective custody,” a form of solitary confinement that the standards say should be used for rape victims only short-term and if no alternative — such as safekeeping — is available.
Two weeks later, Ms. Star was transferred to a third prison where her new cellmate made her watch him masturbate, she said.
“I freaked,” she said. “Immediately I was like, ‘I can’t deal with this.’ For a long time, I bounced from cell to cell, cell to cell, cell to cell. And that’s when the tag ‘snitch’ started to stick to me because I was complaining constantly about people trying to force me into things.”
She said that over the years some prison officials had called her “faggot” and “punk;” others blamed her for bringing problems on herself. One suggested, using language that cannot be printed, that she perform oral sex, “fight or quit doing gay” stuff, her lawsuit says.
In her fourth and fifth prisons, Ms. Star’s complaints of continuing abuse and assault were dismissed with “formulaic” responses, her lawsuit says.
In denying her requests for safekeeping, Texas made references to her “assaultive history,” suggesting she could endanger other vulnerable inmates. Ms. Star says that her disciplinary history “is a direct reflection of T.D.C.J.’s not protecting me.”
“I have a disciplinary history for defending myself three or four times over 13 years,” she said. “I’ve never hurt anybody. But I’ve been hurt.”
Ms. Star was also denied parole — though her former boyfriend and co-defendant was released in April 2013, something Ms. Star learned in the interview.
“Wow,” she said. “That kind of makes me want to cry.”
On Nov. 19, 2013, with threats against her mounting, Ms. Star filed an emergency grievance appealing the most recent denial of her request for safekeeping. The next morning, heading to breakfast, Ms. Star found her path blocked by gang members. One repeatedly slashed her face with a razor. This was the attack that required the 36 stitches.
After that, she was transferred to her sixth prison. The same problems ensued. Begging again for safekeeping, Ms. Star wrote in a grievance: “Just recommending that I be transferred to another unit will not ensure my safety, just as it did not after the 3-29-07 sexual assault, nor after the 11-20-13 assault with a weapon. I am an offender with a ‘potential for victimization,’ otherwise I wouldn’t be constantly victimized and threatened by other offenders.”
This time, somebody listened. The prison’s classification committee agreed she should be put in safekeeping. The state, however, overruled it.
By this point, Ms. Star had been reaching out beyond prison walls — writing to the state-level corrections officials as well as to civil rights and advocacy groups, who report that they get more reports of sexual abuse from inmates in Texas than anywhere else.
“Passion is hardly alone but she is incredibly intelligent, incredibly well organized and her perseverance is unparalleled,” Ms. Humphrey said.
After the lawyer’s first visit with Ms. Star last summer, the inmate was moved into protective custody and spent 110 days in an 80-square-foot cell. Her lawsuit alleges that Texas officials “use confinement in isolation and the threat of isolation to deter people in custody from complaining about sexual abuse, threats, and other assaults.”
Last November, Ms. Star was transferred to her seventh prison, William P. Clements, another prison with a very high rate of sexual victimization. She immediately found herself back among gang members she knew, and encountered escalating threats of assault and rape.
In March, her lawyers filed an emergency motion asking that the court order Texas to place her in safekeeping or explain how it would otherwise keep her safe.
“I’m afraid Passion is going to get murdered — like this weekend,” Ms. Humphrey said then.
For that weekend, her lawyers agreed to let the authorities place Ms. Star back in solitary confinement while they negotiated a resolution. At that point, Texas appeared to be arguing that Ms. Star’s only alternative was to remain in isolation.
On March 20, The New York Times asked Texas for permission to interview Ms. Star.
On March 30, more than a decade after she says she first requested it, Texas put Passion Star in safekeeping. Her lawsuit, which seeks damages from the officials who allegedly failed to protect her, is continuing.
At the time of the interview, she had been in safekeeping only a couple of days, but already found the new atmosphere a relief. “Everybody’s calmer,” she said. “The tension level is extremely low. There are no gang influences that basically are threatening our lives. So it’s a change — a change for the better.”
As a reporter left the prison that day, an officer at the security entrance said, “So, did you see him-her?”
Fumbling for an answer, the reporter said yes and that Ms. Star had been “very nice.”
“For a kidnapper,” the officer replied.
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While an afterthought for many now, AOL has been largely synonymous with the rise of the Internet for the last generation, having over the years confronted issues of dial-up connection speeds, online predators, free speech and the occasional hoax chain mail.
A Cyberspace Atlas: America Online
Nov. 15, 1994Electronic Meeting Places Include Some Dark Alleys
Sept. 14, 1995America Online Blocks 'Junk' E-Mail Aimed At Users
Sept. 5, 1996America Online Moves to Placate Its Angry Users
Jan. 17, 1997Media Megadeal: America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion
Jan. 11, 2000AOL to Trim 2,000 Jobs in a Continuing Overhaul
Oct. 16, 2007AOL Buys Huffington Post and Another Crack at a Future
Feb. 7, 2011Deep Cuts at Patch, AOL's Local News Sites
Aug. 16, 2013
Verizon Communications on Tuesday said it would acquire AOL for $4.4 billion in an all-cash deal that will see today’s king of mobile phones acquire the one-time king of media.
Verizon is the largest mobile phone operator in the country, and has growing lines of business offering high-speed Internet, as well as business and streaming video services.
AOL, which acquired Time Warner for $165 billion in what is broadly regarded as a debacle and the high-water mark of the dot-com bubble, is now a shadow of its former self, managing a small collection of media and technology properties.
Verizon is billing the deal as a way for the company to expand its video offerings. Already a leader in distributing mobile video through its robust national mobile phone network, Verizon is making a push to become a leader in so-called over-the-top video, shorthand for television content distributed through the Internet.
But in acquiring AOL, Verizon is buying much more than websites that host streaming content. Along with its video and online advertising technology, AOL owns The Huffington Post, a sprawling collection of international news websites with growing traffic.
It also manages a dwindling but profitable dial-up Internet business, providing online access for those who live in areas too remote to have broadband, or who never canceled their subscriptions.
“Verizon’s vision is to provide customers with a premium digital experience based on a global multiscreen network platform,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in a statement. “This acquisition supports our strategy to provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience.”
Verizon will pay $50 a share for AOL, a 17 percent premium over the company’s closing share price of $42.59 on Monday. Verizon will fund the deal with cash and short-term debt.
“The world is going mobile, and it is going there really quickly,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, said in an interview. He will stay with AOL after the acquisition and said that by doing so, he would be positioned to help build the phone company’s growing content business.
Verizon, with more than 1.5 billion connected devices, has a vast network through which to distribute mobile content. It has been quietly building up its entertainment offerings, but until now has not made any significant acquisitions to bolster its offerings.
In AOL, it will acquire a collection of video and entertainment sites, and also advertising technology, that it can layer atop its distribution network.
“The combination will be a big chair at a big table,” Mr. Armstrong said. “We have assets that can cleanly plug in and scale on top of Verizon’s platform.”
Among the biggest assets Verizon will acquire is The Huffington Post, which AOL acquired in 2011 and which has recently been introducing international sites. “I’m the one who ran HuffPost from 20 million users to 200 million users,” Mr. Armstrong said.
Details of The Huffington Post’s business have not been revealed, but late last year Mr. Armstrong said Huffington Post sites brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Asked if Arianna Huffington, the founder and face of Huffington Post, was planning to work for Verizon, Mr. Armstrong said: “Yes, definitely.”
AOL and Verizon have been partners on several projects in recent years. Last summer, at the Allen & Company retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, Mr. McAdam and Mr. Armstrong shared a lunch. Over the meal, Mr. Armstrong said, they discussed deepening their ties, and also a potential deal.
For much of last year, the idea percolated, with each company thinking it over. In recent months, both companies engaged financial and legal advisers and made a push for the transaction.
“In the last couple months, it got more turned toward doing the deal that we did today,” Mr. Armstrong said. “It’s been a natural progression.”
In today’s frothy market for mergers and acquisitions, $4.4 billion is not a terribly large number, and 17 percent is not quite a blockbuster premium. But for AOL, which has struggled to escape its troubled past and has been the subject of countless takeover rumors, the acquisition by Verizon provides a measure of closure to its tenure as an independent company.
“Verizon is one of the natural fits for AOL,” Mr. Armstrong said. “We’ve been building media and content and advertising platforms, and they’ve been creating it on the mobile site.”
“AOL has once again become a digital trailblazer, and we are excited at the prospect of charting a new course together in the digitally connected world,” Mr. McAdam said. “At Verizon, we’ve been strategically investing in emerging technology, including Verizon Digital Media Services and O.T.T., that taps into the market shift to digital content and advertising. AOL’s advertising model aligns with this approach, and the advertising platform provides a key tool for us to develop future revenue streams.”
Verizon was advised by LionTree Advisors and Guggenheim Partners, and received legal advice from Weil, Gotshal & Manges. AOL was advised by Allen & Company and received legal advice from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
The closing of the deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected this summer.
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Christianity is on the decline in America, not just among younger generations or in certain regions of the country but across race, gender, education and geographic barriers. The percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years to about 71 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.
“It’s remarkably widespread,” said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research for the Pew Research Center. “The country is becoming less religious as a whole, and it’s happening across the board.”
At the same time, the share of those who are not affiliated with a religion has jumped from 16 percent to about 23 percent in the same time period. The trend follows a pattern found earlier in theAmerican Religious Identification Survey, which found that in 1990, 86 percent of American adults identified as Christians, compared with 76 percent in 2008.
Here are three key takeaways from Pew’s new survey.
1. Millennials are growing even less affiliated with religion as they get older
The older generation of millennials (those who were born from 1981 to 1989) are becoming even less affiliated with religion than they were about a decade ago, the survey suggests. In 2007, when the Pew Research Center did their last Religious Landscape Survey and these adults were just entering adulthood, 25 percent of them did not affiliate with a religion, but this grew to 34 percent in the latest survey.
The trends among the aging millennials is especially significant, said Greg Smith, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center. In 2010, 13 percent of baby boomers were religiously unaffiliated as they were entering retirement, the same percentage in 1972.
“Some have asked, ‘Might they become more religiously affiliated as they get older?’ There’s nothing in this data to suggest that’s what’s happening,” he said. Millennials get married later than older generations, but they are not necessarily more likely to become religiously affiliated, he said.
2. There are more religiously unaffiliated Americans than Catholic Americans or mainline Protestant Americans
The numbers of Catholics and Protestants have each shrunk between three and five percentage points since 2007. The evangelical share of the American population has dropped by one percentage point since 2007.
There are more religiously unaffiliated Americans (23 percent) than Catholics (21 percent) and mainline Protestants (15 percent). “That’s a striking and important note,” Smith said.
The groups experience their losses through what’s called “religious switching,” when someone switches from one faith to another. Thirteen percent of Americans were raised Catholic but are no longer Catholic, compared with just 2 percent of Americans who are converts to Catholicism.
“That means that there are more than six former Catholics for every convert to Catholicism,” Smith said. “There’s no other group in the survey that has that ratio of loss due to religious switching.”
There are 3 million fewer Catholics today than there were in 2007. While the percentage of Catholics in the United States has remained relatively steady, Smith said we might be observing the beginning of the decline of the Catholic share of the population.
Pew estimates there are about 5 million fewer mainline Protestants than there were in 2007. About 10 percent of the U.S. population say they were raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, while 6 percent have converted to mainline Protestantism.
Evangelical Protestants have experienced less decline, due to their net positive retention rate. For every person who has left evangelical Protestantism after growing up, 1.2 have switched to join an evangelical denomination.
3. Those who are unaffiliated are becoming more secular
The “nones,” or religiously unaffiliated, include atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe in “nothing in particular.” Of those who are unaffiliated, 31 percent describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, up six points from 2007.
“What we’re seeing now is that the share of people who say religion is important to them is declining,” Smith said. “The religiously unaffiliated are not just growing, but as they grow, they are becoming more secular.”
And people in older generations are increasingly disavowing organized religion. Among baby boomers, 17 percent identify as a religious “none,” up from 14 percent in 2007.
“There’s a continuing religious disaffiliation among older cohorts. That is really striking,” Smith said. “I continue to be struck by the pace at which the unaffiliated are growing.”
White Americans (24 percent) are more likely to say they have no religion, compared with 20 percent of Hispanic Americans and 18 percent of black Americans. The retention rates of the “nones” who say they were raised as religiously affiliated has grown by seven points since 2007 to 53 percent.
The Pew survey was conducted between June and September of 2014.
Want more religion coverage? Follow Acts of Faith on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.
Sarah Pulliam Bailey is a religion reporter, covering how faith intersects with politics, culture and...everything. She can be found on Twitter
@spulliam
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Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, second from left, leaves the Alexandria courthouse after he was convicted in January. (Kevin Wolf/AP)
A former CIA officer who gave a journalist classified information about an operation to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions was sentenced Monday to 3 years in prison — a penalty that is longer than what others in recent leak cases have faced, but not by much.
As she handed down the punishment for Jeffrey Sterling, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said she was moved by all that the 47-year-old had accomplished but that she needed to send a message to others: “If you do knowingly reveal these secrets, there’s going to be a price to be paid.”
She said that Sterling caused particular damage by effectively revealing the identity of a man working with the CIA — saying there was “no more critical secret” than that — and that he deserved a harsher penalty than other recently accused leakers because he had not pleaded guilty and admitted wrongdoing.
Sterling thanked the judge and her staff for their treatment of him during the years-long process and said he was especially grateful that Brinkema changed his trial date so he could attend his brother’s funeral. His attorneys said after the hearing that they were grateful to the judge but still plan to appeal Sterling’s guilt.
“In some cases, the jury gets it wrong,” attorney Barry Pollack said. “That said, the judge today got it right.”
Brinkema allowed Sterling to remain out on bond until federal prison officials determine when and where he should serve his sentence.
Sterling was convicted in January of nine criminal counts for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen in what prosecutors described as a nefarious plot to embarrass his former employer. Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys asked for a specific penalty, though they took antithetical views of the case.
Prosecutors asked for a “severe” sentence, arguing that Sterling’s illegal disclosures shut down one of the U.S. government’s few mechanisms to stem Iran’s nuclear program. Assistant U.S. Attorney James Trump argued that one “cannot overstate” the significance of the operation that Sterling effectively ended, and said that Sterling put at risk a Russian scientist who was secretly cooperating with the U.S. government.
“What he did was unconscionable,” Trump said of Sterling.
Defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. asked Brinkema to consider Sterling’s personal background — noting how he had worked hard to earn his position at the CIA and helped ferret out fraud as a health-care investigator. He said that even if Sterling was as bad as prosecutors characterized him when he was in contact with Risen years ago, he has since changed.
“Whoever he was in 2003,” MacMahon said, “he’s not that person anymore.”
Defense attorneys urged the judge to impose a sentence in line with others who have revealed classified information. They cited Gen. David H. Petraeus, who gave his mistress and biographer access to classified materials and was sentenced to two years of probation and a $100,000 fine; former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who revealed the name of another covert officer and was sentenced to 30 months in prison; and former State Department arms expert Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who leaked classified information to a Fox News reporter and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.
Federal sentencing guidelines call for a term of 19 years and seven months at the low end and 24 years and five months on the high end, though Brinkema said from the beginning that she thought those figures were “too high.” Defense attorneys argued that such guidelines were intended for spies helping foreign governments. Prosecutors said that Sterling should not be compared to Petraeus, Kiriakou and Kim.
Brinkema said that she was ultimately swayed toward leniency by Sterling’s personal background, but that he should face a more severe penalty than Kiriakou, who, like Petraeus and Kim, pleaded guilty.
“That did not happen in this case,” Brinkema said.
In a written statement, U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said that Sterling’s “attempt to leverage national security information for his own malicious reasons brought him to this sentence today.”
While Sterling’s attorneys praised the sentence, whistleblower advocates who have followed the case were somewhat more critical. Jesselyn Radack, director of national security and human rights at the Government Accountability Project, said that it was the “least worst outcome,” and that any sentence including prison time is “excessive” in light of the deal Petraeus reached.
“This breaks my heart,” she said.
The prosecution of Sterling was notable in its own right, but perhaps even more so because it spawned a First Amendment showdown between the government and Risen. Federal prosecutors initially sought to subpoena the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, who steadfastly maintained that he would never reveal any of his sources. To the dismay of many in the journalism world, the Justice Department won a victory on that front in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, but it eventually backed down and did not call the reporter as a witness at the trial.
An attorney for Risen declined to comment on the sentence.
Matt Zapotosky covers the federal district courthouse in Alexandria, where he tries to break news from a windowless office in which he is not allowed to bring his cell phone.
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After weeks of intense fighting, Hayley King’s roommates tried to kick her out of their off-campus apartment near the University of South Carolina.
When that didn’t work, they would later tell police, the roommates grew increasingly nervous about what King was doing when they were away, according to NBC News.
Suspicious that something wasn’t right after “multiple altercations,” they decided to set up a hidden camera, NBC reported.
What they found upon viewing the footage was so shocking that King could end up behind bars for as long as 20 years.
Police say the footage — taken in February — shows the 22-year-old student opening the apartment’s refrigerator and spitting in several containers of her roommates’ food. She can also be seen spraying and pouring Windex in the food; the household cleaner can become deadly when ingested.
The footage, which has been uploaded to YouTube, appears to show King methodically contaminating the food. After opening containers, she appears to cock her head and spit multiple times into the food before carefully mixing the contents.
She returns to the refrigerator moments later with a bottle of Windex in her hand and begins spraying it onto the food. She repeats the process several more times and pours some of the cleaning solution into the food containers before reapplying the lids and placing them back in the fridge.
Police say one of the roommates ate out of one of the containers before seeing the video, according to the Associated Press.
“The aftermath … caused me to fall behind in my classes,” one of King’s roommates said in a statement to NBC affiliate WIS. “I was forced to switch out of one of my courses because I was so distracted with everything going on. This not only affected me physically, having to deal with the repercussions of the incident, but also mentally from the anxiety that came along with it.”
The roommates, the station said, “did not want to be identified or talk on camera.”
After King’s roommates turned the footage over to police, investigators contacted King and asked her to come to the police station for questioning, according to ABC News. Under questioning, police said, King “confessed to the incident,” according to ABC.
She was arrested in February and charged with unlawful, malicious tampering with human drug product or food, according to the AP. The Class C felony charge carries a term of up to 20 years in prison following a conviction, according to ABC.
King was released after her arrest on a $5,000 personal recognizance bond, WIS reported.
Her lawyer didn’t respond to a request to comment, according to the AP.
The alleged criminality didn’t end with King’s arrest, according to her former roommates. Police said one of her roommates reportedly received a threatening text message from one of King’s allies.
“While Hayley is moving out don’t [expletive] with her,” the message said, according to WIS. “Y’all have been [expletive] taunting her since the semester started. If she tells me you’re [expletive] with her I will personally come and check you. You too old to try to be bullying some damn body. Grow the [expletive] up.”
King’s next court date is scheduled for June, according to ABC News.
Peter Holley is a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:peter.holley@washpost.com">peter.holley@washpost.com</a>.
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Verizon announced Tuesday morning that it is buying AOL for $4.4 billion in what amounts to a major play by the telecom carrier to crack the online video and advertising markets.
The acquisition could help Verizon make money from distributing video over the Internet — particularly to mobile devices, which account for a growing share of America's media consumption. Verizon is already one of the country's top telecom companies and wireless providers, but those markets are maturing and the company has been seeking other ways to grow.
AOL has struggled to regain its relevance in recent years, transitioning from being an online portal for consumers into a digital advertising and online content company. In 2011, AOL purchased the Huffington Post.
AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong will remain as head of the company as part of the deal.
"AOL has once again become a digital trailblazer, and we are excited at the prospect of charting a new course together in the digitally connected world," said Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and chief executive.
Last year, Verizon snapped up an Intel project aimed at developing streaming video. That business, OnCue, was widely said to be a key part of Verizon's ambitions to deliver video to smartphones and tablets over its cellular network.
Then, in March, Verizon announced it would be rolling out a streaming video app to compete with the likes of Hulu and Netflix. Verizon officials hinted that the service might not rely on subscription fees but rather on advertising. A tie-up with AOL would likely support such a strategy.
Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecom, broadband and digital politics. Before joining the Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic.
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Politico has put up a fascinating profile of Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which is the country’s largest police union.
More than anything, the profile highlights how law enforcement is politically positioned in a way that basically immunizes from criticism and oversight. Republicans have long been loathe to criticize police and police unions because they see themselves as the law-and-order party, despite the fact that deference to police ought to run afoul of their alleged dedication to limited government, and that Pasco’s group ought to animate the GOP’s distrust of public service unions.
Democrats have been playing defense on law-and-order issues since Michael Dukakis got creamed in the 1988 election. Any instinct to defend the disadvantaged groups disproportionately affected by police abuse gets drowned out by that and by the enormous influence wielded by police unions.
Consequently, a guy like Pasco can get away with saying some pretty outrageous things in defense of police officers without losing any credibility on Capitol Hill.
For example, I interviewed Pasco several years ago for an article about citizens recording cops with their cell phones. Pascoe believes this should be illegal. In fact, he supported a now-repealed Illinois law that made recording an on-duty police officer a felony on par with sexual assault — punishable by 15 years in prison.
Here’s how Pasco responded when I asked him why he thinks people should be arrested for recording police:
“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report. Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”
It takes some talent to fit so many wrong-headed notions into so few words.
Pasco later added, “Police officers don’t check their civil rights at the station house door.” That’s a pithy soundbite. It’s also wrong on two counts. First, all citizens in a public space — cop or otherwise — have no reasonable expectation of privacy. In advocating for such a “civil right” for cops, then, Pasco isn’t asking that cops be treated the same as everyone else; he’s asking for extra protections. Second, police officers do check of their some civil rights at the station house door. For example, a police officer does not have the same free speech rights on-duty that he has while off-duty.
Since I interviewed Pasco, we’ve seen countless more incidents in which citizen-shot videos have shown a cop (or multiple cops) have lied, either in a police report or on the witness stand. So the notion that a lying cop is as rare as lying DNA is, well, absurd.
In a 2010 USA Today article on the same topic, Pasco worried that fear of being implicated by video might cause police to hesitate before using force. That “hesitation” argument is a common one. It’s regularly invoked by police interest groups when they’re trying to undermine any policy that would make it more difficult for police to kill people and get away with it.
Here’s an example from a police chief in East Chicago, Indiana late last year:
More police officers are being killed, because they’re hesitating more before pulling the trigger to defend themselves, [Chief Mark] Becker said.That hesitation stems in part from pressure created by news media and community activists who are increasingly claiming police-involved shootings are racially motivated, he said.“There’s a small fraction of people who want to come to judgment before knowing all the facts,” he said.That public pressure is a factor as police officers make life-and-death decisions within seconds, he said. “That plays out in a police officer’s mind,” Becker said. ” ‘What do I do, what do I do?’ and then all of a sudden he’s getting shot.”
Here’s an example from March, from “use-of-force consultant” who testifies on behalf of police accused of using excessive force. He’s responding to a rare instance of criminal charges that were filed against a local police officer :
“Most often I’ve seen officers die in confrontations because they hesitated to shoot when clearly it was necessary for them to shoot,” [Emanuel Kapelsohn] said. “As a police instructor, one of the hardest things for me to try to teach and train is the balance between the willingness to fire during a brief window of opportunity when if the officer doesn’t fire, he or her partner or bystander or victim may be killed – and knowing that if she fires, this maelstrom is going to befall them.”
In late 2013, Dallas police chief David O. Brown initiated new lethal force training for his officers that would emphasize deescalation. This triggered a furious response and the following letter from the police union.
This termination was not that of just an officer but that of the foundation of police training, which is/was our Deadly Force Policy. Up until Monday, Dallas Police Officers were allowed to use deadly force when they were in fear for their life or another’s. As of Monday, Dallas Police Officers no longer know when they can use deadly force and, if they do, question whether they are going to be fired if they are forced to. This up in the air policy creates doubt and hesitation in an officer about when/if to use deadly force, which ultimately is going to result in an officer and/or a citizen getting killed. This doubt will always result in a hesitation in officers’ response times to citizen’s calls. No longer can an officer quickly drive to a man with a gun, robbery in progress or domestic abuse call because the officer no longer believes he/she can use deadly force, if it is required, without fear of being terminated.
The most recent example comes just today from Baltimore, under the headline, “Violence surges, as Baltimore police officers feel hesitant.”
“In 29 years, I’ve gone through some bad times, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Lt. Kenneth Butler, president of the Vanguard Justice Society, a group for black Baltimore police officers. Officers “feel as though the state’s attorney will hang them out to dry.”Several officers said in interviews they are concerned crime could spike as officers are hesitant to do their jobs, and criminals sense opportunity. Butler, a shift commander in the Southern District, said his officers are expressing reluctance to go after crime.“I’m hearing it from guys who were go-getters, who would go out here and get the guns and the bad guys and drugs. They’re hands-off now,” Butler said. “I’ve never seen so many dejected faces.“Policing, as we once knew it, has changed.”
So because a prosecutor has charged the six cops who illegally arrested a man and gave him a “rough ride” in the back of a police van that resulted in his death, all Baltimore cops are now afraid to use force? How does this follow? It would be logical if they were now hesitant to give rough rides — which of course would be a good thing. But what happen to Gray shouldn’t impact conscientious Baltimore cops in the slightest. There’s no connection between using force to rough up a suspect after he’s been arrested and is wearing handcuffs and using force to stop a violent person from harming innocent people. To argue that accountability in the former will lead to hesitation in the latter is to argue any accountability for any killing by a police officer will cause other officers to hesitate.
Yet examples of police groups making this argument abound. Law professor and former police officer Seth Stoughton explained in the Atlantic last year how this is all embedded in a police officer’s psyche early on in his training, and then over and over again.
There are countless variations, but the lessons are the same: Hesitation can be fatal. So officers are trained to shoot before a threat is fully realized, to not wait until the last minute because the last minute may be too late.But what about the consequences of a mistake? After all, that dark object in the suspect’s hands could be a wallet, not a gun. The occasional training scenario may even make that point. But officers are taught that the risks of mistake are less—far less—than the risks of hesitation. A common phrase among cops pretty much sums it up: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”In most police shootings, officers don’t shoot out of anger or frustration or hatred. They shoot because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they are constantly barraged with the message that that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it. Not only do officers hear it in formal training, they also hear it informally from supervisors and older officers. They talk about it with their peers. They see it on police forums and law enforcement publications. For example, three of the four stories mentioned on the cover of this month’s Police Magazine are about dealing with threats to officer safety.Officers’ actions are grounded in their expectations, and they are taught to expect the worst.
My media colleagues are to blame here, too. I’ve read countless articles since Ferguson in which a sheriff or police chief or police union head is quoted about how America is increasingly turning into a “war zone,” or how police today face threats unlike any other period in American history. But crime, homicides of cops, and assaults on cops have all been in decline for 20 years. That’s rarely pointed out in the story. Worse, exaggerating the threat to cops not only skews discussion about policing issues, it may also make cops more likely to see threats where there aren’t any, with tragic consequences.
Then, each December we get stories about how many police officers were killed in the previous year, complete with quotes from figures like Pasco about how dangerous policing is, often with statements blaming protesters, recordings of police abuse, and other “anti-police rhetoric” for the violence. We saw this play repeated just this week with the FBI’s release of data from the FBI about an 89 percent spike in homicides of cops in 2014. Of course, this spike is being compared to the safest year for police in the modern era in 2013. And even with the spike, 2014 was still the fourth safest year for cops since 1959. Again, only occasionally do these articles include this context about how policing is actually getting safer.
But let’s get back to the larger point. Few interest groups have been as successful at framing the public debate as Pasco, the police unions, and law enforcement officials. Because they have no natural opponents in politics (the way, say, teachers unions do), and because it’s so easy to stir up the fear of crime, they can marginalize their critics, claim injury at the slightest criticism, and send their critics running for cover.
Look at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He ran on a platform of reining in police abuses. He won on that platform. You’d think that would give him the political cover to occasionally criticize police officers who exceed their authority. Last year, not long after the non-indictment of the police officer who killed Eric Garner, de Blasio told a private gathering that he has instructed his son to be careful when interacting with police, and to avoid sudden movements, such as reaching for his cell phone. This is good advice: There is a long list of people shot, Tased, and killed by police who mistook cell phones for guns, including, most notably, Amadou Diallo in New York City. Moreover, it’s hard to even see what’s objectionable about that advice. It is, after all, an instruction to listen to a police officer’s instructions, to not complain, and to not do anything that might make the officer feel unsafe.
Yet the police groups went berserk. They protested by turning their back on de Blasio at a funeral for two cops who had been slain while on the job, then abdicating their public duties with a work slowdown. De Blasio’s criticism of the police was tepid at most. But it sparked a revolt in which the police department basically asserted its independence from civilian authority. That’s scary. And de Blasio learned his lesson. After some officers were accused of roughing up protesters at a recent rally, the mayor rushed to the officers’ defense.
Police interest groups have managed to frame a hopelessly one-sided debate. Any accountability proposals risk making cops hesitate before killing bad guys, they say, thus jeopardizing both cops and the public. Any criticism of excessive force by an elected official is taken as criticism of all police officers, and should some lunatic kill a police officer after that criticism is uttered, that official now“has blood on his hands.” When crime and killings of police officers are down, it means increased militarization, marginal accountability, and non-transparency are all working, therefore we need more of those policies. When crime and killings of police officers are up, it means the criminals are taking over, therefore we also need increased militarization, marginal accountability, and non-transparency, so cops can do their job of getting the bad guys.
It’s hard to think of a profession more sensitive, psychologically isolated, and protective of its own than law enforcement. Imagine if all the doctors in a city refused to treat patients because one doctor was unfairly accused of malpractice. It’s unthinkable. Police advocates say this sort of camaraderie is because cops are bonded by the threats they face. Perhaps. But the profession seems to have gotten more isolated and more protective even as the job of police officer has gotten safer. Combat soldiers also face threats, yet it isn’t at all difficult to find former soldiers who, for example, have been willing to criticize, say, Abu Ghraib or other war atrocities. You just don’t see the same tendency to defend that you see in cops.
I suspect part of the problem lies in the fact that policing has been so immune from criticism and oversight from elected officials for so long. When you’re accustomed to only genuflection from political leaders, even a mild rebuke will sting. When you’ve been entrusted to investigate your own with little oversight, or when you’ve been able to negotiate contracts that make it nearly impossible to hold bad cops accountable, it must seem like dire times people with the power to do something about it start to question whether such policies and protections are healthy.
In the end this is a political problem, which means it will require a political solution. Political leaders have long deferred to police interests because that’s what the political climate dictated. When crime was up, people voted for law and order. When crime was down, they voted on other issues. That created a ratchet effect on these issues — when voters fear crime, we escalate the powers we give to cops and prosecutors and erode accountability and transparency. But when we no longer fear crime, we don’t vote any of those policies away. No one angrily votes against a politician for being “too tough on crime.”
This has been engrained in politicians for a decade. Public opinion is turning on many of these issues, but police unions are still powerful, and crime is still easily exploitable. Most politicians believe that there are only votes to be gained by deferring to the police and only votes to be lost by suggesting that police could be more accountable.
And they’re probably right. As the de Blasio example shows, even politicians who have demonstrated that there’s voter support for reform can later conclude that the political costs of standing up to police abuse are just too high. It may take voters actively punishing politicians for refusing reforms (as opposed to rewarding politician who support them) to get real reform to happen. It may take people voting on crime with the same passion that we voted on crime in the 1980s and 1990s, only in reverse. But that would also require a strong interest in and passion for these issues by a group of voters much larger than the groups usually victimized by police brutality. To put it more bluntly: For police reform to happen, white people have to start caring.
Until that happens — until there’s an incentive for politicians to hold police as accountable as any other public service group — law enforcement as a profession will only grow more isolated.
Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces."
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