The Cuomo Accusations and the Next Wave of #MeToo - The writer Tanya Selvaratnam discusses her abusive relationship with a former state attorney general and the harassment allegations against the current governor. - link
When the Kids Started Getting Sick - After pressure from families, Pennsylvania has launched studies into whether fracking can be linked to local illnesses. - link
Trump’s Strategy for Returning to Power Is Already Clear - The former President is positioning himself and his audience as the only true Americans. - link
The Russians Protesting Putin in Their Personal Lives - Since Alexey Navalny’s arrest, some Russians are reëvaluating their compromises, questioning whether the price of success—or merely getting by—has become untenable. - link
The Shift to Renewable Energy Can Give More Power to the People - We shouldn’t give up on the idea of democratizing energy ownership as much as possible. - link
From Vox
The problem for Paramount+ (and every other streamer)? Everyone already has Netflix. -
Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell on the set of Mission Impossible 7, which will arrive on Paramount+ 45 days after the movie debuts in theaters later in 2021. | Marco Ravagli/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Three charts that explain the streaming wars.
Paramount+, the latest entrant in the streaming wars, launches today, promising a mix of classic TV shows and movies, sort-of-early access to some Hollywood blockbusters, and some reboots of stuff you didn’t know you wanted rebooted: Welcome back, Frasier Crane.
But in some ways, the stuff that ViacomCBS’s new service offers may be less important than the timing of its launch. It comes after every other big media company has rolled out its own streaming service. Which means Paramount+ is entering a very crowded marketplace.
And that means, most likely, that ViacomCBS isn’t just trying to get someone to pay $10 a month for Paramount+ — it also probably needs them to drop something else. Antenna, a subscription analytics startup, says US consumers subscribed to just 1.5 streaming services in January 2021.
Two years ago, when streaming services still pretty much meant Netflix and Hulu, that number was at 1.25. Which means that even though we’ve seen a slew of services debut recently, most people still aren’t paying for them — and even if they do take out their credit card to sign up, they’re likely to stop paying for them after sampling.
Antenna, which says it uses data sampled from online bill payment services to assess what people are actually spending money on, has laid out the challenge facing ViacomCBS pretty clearly in the data sets below. But the easiest way of summing it up may be this way: (Just about) everyone already has Netflix.
This chart, for instance, tells us that 75 percent of people who newly got Netflix in the first half of 2020 are still paying for the service — a higher survival rate than all of its major streaming competitors. Meanwhile, only 34 percent of new 2020 Apple TV+ subscribers are still paying for the service now. (Antenna data does not include streamers who are getting free services from promotions like Disney’s Verizon bundle, or the free Apple TV+ trial Apple offers customers who buy some Apple hardware, like new iPhones.)
And yes, some people — maybe the people reading this article — really do subscribe to lots of different streaming TV services. But it’s a very small minority.
Meanwhile, Netflix customers were less likely than other streaming subscribers to pay for anything else — which presumably has something to do with the fact that (almost) everyone has Netflix. It’s the streaming starter package: You get it first and then maybe think about adding something else.
The good news for ViacomCBS, in a way, is that people who subscribed to its existing services — CBS All Access, which is getting repurposed into Paramount+, and Showtime — are already more likely to subscribe to something else too.
House Democrats just passed their massive voting rights bill HR 1 -
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during a weekly press conference on Capitol Hill on February 25, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The bill still faces a steep climb in the US Senate.
House Democrats have passed HR 1, their signature anti-corruption and voting rights reform bill, for the second time in two years. But even though their party now holds the majority in the Senate, the bill has a tough road ahead of it.
As the numeral suggests, HR 1 and its Senate component S 1 — also known as the For the People Act — are Democrats’ first legislative priority. The sweeping democracy reform bill has been top of the list since House Democrats first took back the majority in the 2018 midterms and immediately set about expanding voting rights and getting money out of politics.
There’s a lot of ground covered in its nearly 800 pages, but some of its key points are creating a national system for automatic voter registration, putting in transparency requirements for political advertising, and instituting nonpartisan redistricting commissions to end partisan gerrymandering.
Polling back in 2019 and now shows the bill is broadly popular with the public, but it went nowhere in the Republican-led Senate in 2019. Even with the current slim Democratic control (a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker), it will be incredibly difficult to pass with the required 60 votes to skirt the Senate filibuster. The politics are even tighter this time; some moderate House Democrats who voted for the bill last time, for instance, pushed more aggressively for changes this time around.
The bill’s future in the Senate is also untested, as then-Majority Leader McConnell never allowed it to come to the floor in 2019.
“If Mitch McConnell is not willing to provide 10 Republicans to support this landmark reform, I think Democrats are going to step back and reevaluate the situation,” Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD), the author of HR 1, told Vox in a recent interview. “There’s all manner of ways you could redesign the filibuster so [the bill] would have a path forward.”
One path that’s being discussed is partially amending Senate filibuster rules to allow democracy reform legislation like HR 1 to advance on a simple majority vote and therefore potentially be able to pass on a party-line vote. That would be different from fully blowing up the filibuster, but it still could get pushback from Senate institutionalists even in the Democratic Party like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a staunch advocate of keeping the filibuster in place.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, which will mark up the bill and move it forward, said she wants to bring the bill to the floor and see what the support for it is before she moves on to potential filibuster reform.
“We’ll go to the floor; that’s when we see where we are,” Klobuchar told Vox in an interview, saying her committee will look to see, “is there filibuster reform that could be done generally or specifically?”
Democrats are arguing that voting and democracy reforms are popular — and long overdue
Democrats are hoping the 2020 election gives them an argument for this bill. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans in many states were given more options and flexibility to vote through the mail or with in-person early voting. The results were a record 158.4 million ballots cast; 2020 presidential election turnout was about 7 percentage points higher than in 2016, according to Pew Research Center.
“We had more people vote in the November election than ever before,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told reporters on Tuesday.
HR 1, among other initiatives, would cement many of those temporary expansions. And recent polling from the progressive firm Data for Progress showed the bill more broadly is popular across parties and supported by a majority of Democratic, independent, and Republican voters. The poll found that 67 percent of national likely voters supported HR 1, including 56 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of independents, and 77 percent of Democrats.
Republican legislatures in multiple states, however, are moving in the opposite direction.Per the Brennan Center, at least 33 states have already introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills to re-tighten voting requirements, including Georgia — the state that gave Democrats narrow control of the Senate. The US Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments in an Arizona case that couldfurther weaken the Voting Rights Act, limiting protections for minority voters around the country.
Klobuchar told Vox that in past years when parties lost national elections, they’d assess where they went wrong. Republicans, she added, are doubling down on restricting voting access.
“These guys, instead of doing that, are saying let’s just make it so less people vote, that’s how we do this,” Klobuchar said.
Newly proposed voting restrictions, taken with the fact that 30 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans — compared to 18 controlled by Democrats — mean that Republicans have more power to redraw congressional maps in the 2021 redistricting process. Absent nonpartisan redistricting commissions (which HR 1 contains), Republicans can once again redraw maps to give themselves the edge in the 2022 midterms and beyond.
“If we can get this done and into law in the next few months, there will be enough time to implement many of these things in time for the 2022 midterm election, including how reforming how this redistricting is done,” Sarbanes said.
What’s in the bill
The For the People Act weighs in at close to 800 pages. Broadly, it can be broken down into three buckets: expanding voting rights, implementing campaign finance reform, and beefing up ethics laws for members of Congress.
Here are some major points in the bill, broken down by category:
Voting rights
Creates new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Requires chief state election officials to automatically register eligible unregistered citizens.
Requires each state to put online options for voter registration, correction, cancellation, or designating party affiliation.
Requires at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections; early voting sites would be open for at least 10 hours per day. The bill also prohibits states from restricting a person’s ability to vote by mail, and requires states to prepay postage on return envelopes for mail-in voting.
Establish independent redistricting commissions in states as a way to draw new congressional districts and end partisan gerrymandering in federal elections.
Prohibits voter roll purging and bans the use of non-forwardable mail being used as a way to remove voters from rolls.
Restores voting rights to people convicted of felonies who have completed their sentences; however, the bill doesn’t restore rights to felons currently serving sentences in a correctional facility.
Campaign finance
Establishes public financing of campaigns, powered by small donations. This has long been Sarbanes’s vision: The federal government would provide a voluntary 6-1 match for candidates for president and Congress, which means for every dollar a candidate raises from small donations, the federal government would match it six times over. The maximum small donation that could be matched would be capped at $200.This program isn’t funded by taxpayer dollars; instead, the money would come from adding a 2.75 percent fee on criminal and civil fines, fees, penalties, or settlements with banks and corporations that commit corporate malfeasance (think Wells Fargo).
Supports a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United.
Passes the DISCLOSE Act, pushed by Rep. David Cicilline and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, both Democrats from Rhode Island. This wouldrequire super PACs and “dark money” political organizations to make their donors public.
Passes the Honest Ads Act, championed by Sens. Klobuchar and Mark Warner (VA), which would require Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of money for political ads on their platforms and share how much money was spent.
Discloses any political spending by government contractors and slows the flow of foreign money into the elections by targeting shell companies.
Restructures the Federal Election Commission to have five commissioners instead of six, in order to break political gridlock at the organization.
Prohibits any coordination between candidates and super PACs.
Ethics
Requires the president and vice president to disclose 10 years of his or her tax returns. Candidates for president and vice president must also do the same.
Stops members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment or discrimination cases.
Gives the Office of Government Ethics the power to do more oversight and enforcement and implement stricter lobbying registration requirements. These include more oversight of foreign agents by the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Creates a new ethics code for the US Supreme Court, ensuring all branches of government are impacted by the new law.
Democrats have a very narrow window to pass the bill
HR 1 could be a last-ditch effort for Democrats to be competitive in House races, if they can get it through Congress and to Biden’s desk.
“The president remains committed to protecting the fundamental right to vote and making it easy for all eligible Americans to vote,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday, responding to a question from Vox. “That’s why we need to pass reforms like HR 1 and restore the Voting Rights Act. It’s a priority for the president, something he’ll be working with members of Congress to move forward.”
Senate Democrats aren’t ready to blow up the Senate filibuster yet, but they’re also finding ways to skirt it to pass major pieces of legislation.
This week, Democrats are using budget reconciliation to pass President Joe Biden’s current Covid-19 stimulus bill through the Senate with just 51 votes. There’s a good chance they’ll do the same thing for Biden’s forthcoming infrastructure plan, depending on how big that package is and how many Republicans will support it.
But Democrats can only use budget reconciliation twice, and it can only be used for things that directly impact the federal budget. Voting rights and anti-corruption measures don’t fall into that category, and HR 1’s authors are under no impression it could get through via budget reconciliation. That leaves them with a narrower set of options for HR 1, and even fewer options for other priorities like passing universal background checks or immigration reform.
Even though Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have repeatedly said they won’t get rid of the Senate filibuster, some of their Democratic are hopeful they might change their minds if the party’s agenda meets repeated opposition from Republicans.
“You bring it to the floor a few times and you let them obstruct it and you see what effect bad-faith obstruction has on some members’ views about the filibuster,” Sen. Whitehouse told reporters recently. “It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t want to get rid of the filibuster’; it’s another thing after you’ve met repeated bad-faith obstruction to say, ‘Okay, this is getting out of hand.’”
That might be too optimistic. When asked by reporters again this week if there was a point where he’d change his mind about the filibuster, Manchin yelled, “Never!” according to the Hill’s Jordain Carney.
“Jesus Christ! What don’t you understand about never?” Manchin added.
Short of blowing up the filibuster, Senate Democrats will need to keep finding loopholes to pass their agenda.
The House just passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act -
Protesters stand outside a memorial to George Floyd, erected at the site of his death in Minneapolis, Minnesota. | Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
The bill bans chokeholds, and would end qualified immunity for police officers.
The House of Representatives has passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill of 2021 — legislation Democratic lawmakers believe will reduce police violence against people of color, particularly Black Americans, while also improving policing for everyone.
“At some point, we have to ask ourselves, how many more people have to die? How many more people have to be brutalized on videotape?” Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), who led the bill, said ahead of its passage. “We must act now to transform policing in the United States.”
The bill, which has been passed once before, succeeded on partisan lines: 219 to 213, with no Republicans voting with the Democratic majority.
In June 2020, House Democrats crafted identical legislation in response to the worldwide demonstrations against police brutality that were sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota policeman Derek Chauvin, and that were sustained by the deaths of dozens of other Black Americans, including Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, and Rayshard Brooks.
Since then, police violence against Black Americans has not waned. In the first few months of 2021, police have killed at least 23 Black Americans; prominent incidents of violence include an officer in Rochester, New York pepper spraying a handcuffed 9-year-old girl, and police killing 52-year-old Patrick Lynn Warren following a mental health 911 call placed on his behalf.
One provision in the bill addresses qualified immunity, a legal precedent that gives government officials, including police officers, broad protections against lawsuits. Among other things, the bill would also create a national database of police misconduct, and require federal law enforcement officials to use body and dash cameras. To curtail deaths, the legislation bans federal law enforcement from using chokeholds like the one that ended Floyd’s life, and from using no-knock warrants in drug cases — Taylor was killed when police burst into her home using such a warrant in in March 2020.
Police reformers critical of the bill have questioned whether it would be effective, noting that most of its provisions make changes only at the federal level — the federal government has very little control over how state and local governments choose to police their populations.
“This legislation, while vitally important, is not perfect,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which backs the bill. “No legislation is. But it represents meaningful progress, and we intend to continue working with lawmakers to strengthen and build upon it.”
Before the bill can be expanded upon, though, it has to pass the Senate — and its success there is uncertain.
Now Democrats are in charge of the Senate. There, Virginia Democrats Sen. Tim Kaine and Rep. Don Beyer are proposing an amendment to the George Floyd bill that would track the costs of police misconduct settlements. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is “committed” to the bill, Kaine said, and Schumer recently told reporters, “I’m putting bills on the floor. People are going to be forced to vote on them, yes or no.”
Bass told reporters that Democrats have been in conversation with Scott, but whether the Democratic caucus can find the 10 Republican votes it needs to get the bill through the Senate remains to be seen. Given the difficulty Democrats have had so far in this Congress winning Republican support for nominees and Covid-19 relief, winning over 10 GOP senators may be a tall order.
What’s in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021
Broadly, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 tries to do four things at the federal level: make the prosecution of police misconduct easier, expand federal oversight into local police units, limit bias among officers, and change policing tactics.
The bill works to encourage state and local governments to adopt its federal reforms through penalties — those that don’t make changes, or that refuse to comply with the bill’s data submission requirements, would lose access to federal policing funding, and in some cases, that funding would be redistributed to those departments that do cooperate.
It is unclear whether those penalties would be enough to incentivize compliance. Some reformers critical of the bill say they would not, as most police funding comes from state and local sources: State and local governments spent about $120 billion on policing in 2018, according to the US Census Bureau, to which the federal government contributed about $5 billion.
Here’s how the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 works:
Rewriting misconduct law and ending qualified immunity
The bill attempts to make it easier to hold individual law enforcement officers accountable through changes to both existing law and practice.
For one, it rewrites the federal law on abuse of power, US Code Title 18, Section 242. Currently, prosecutors who want to convict an officer of misconduct must generally prove they deprived someone “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution,” and that officer did so “willfully” — “voluntarily and intentionally and with the specific intent to do something the law forbids.”
This is very hard to prove.
So the Justice in Policing Act changes the word “willfully” in Section 242 to “knowingly or recklessly,” essentially requiring a prosecutor prove misconduct was not done accidentally or without the understanding that it could cause some harm.
“Knowingly or recklessly sounds like legal jargon, but it’s frankly a well-established, intense standard and criminal law throughout the country,” Damon Hewitt, the executive vice president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said. “It will be game changing.”
Hewitt cited the killings of Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo as examples of the effect changing Section 242’s language might have.
“In each case, federal prosecutors declined prosecution because they felt they could not satisfy the so called willfulness standard,” Hewitt said. “It’s so rare for federal prosecutors to feel that they have sufficient evidence to satisfy this willfulness standard, beyond a reasonable doubt, that on average, only about 40 or so defendants every year are prosecuted in the United States.”
However, Philip Matthew Stinson — a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University and former police office — cautioned that changing the standard won’t necessarily change legal outcomes, pointing to how often officers are cleared in jury trials: “As soon as the officer testifies in their own defense, it’s game over for the prosecution, and you just can’t get a conviction, even in these cases where we’ve got video that just is damning.”
The other major change the bill makes is barring officers from being eligible for qualified immunity — a concept established by the courts that shields public officials from being sued. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser explains, qualified immunity “only protects government employees whose conduct ‘does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.’”
This “test set up by the courts for its application has proven to be entirely unworkable,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said. “Its application has been so distorted by courts that it’s operated to virtually ensure that police officers are held civilly responsible for even the most monstrous acts of misconduct.”
Collecting data on police misconduct
The federal government doesn’t have a much data on police misconduct; most databases — like Mapping Police Violence or Stinson’s Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database — have been compiled by private groups. There’s bipartisan agreement that this should change; the 2020 GOP policing bill called for data collection on use of force incidents.
The Justice in Policing Act hopes to expand access to policing data by establishing publicly accessible databases run by the Department of Justice on police use of force and misconduct allegations. The use of force database would have details on whether the victim was armed; what the officer was trying to accomplish; and what efforts the officer took to deescalate the situation before using violence, while the misconduct registry would include active and dismissed allegations as well as ones that were sustained. Beyer and Kaine’s amendment would add to these databases one that tracks the cost of police settlements.
Grants would be made available to smaller departments struggling needing infrastructure assistance to meet these requirements, and any department failing to submit this data would lose access to federal funding.
The success of this part of the bill hinges on departments complying with these new mandates — and reformers have been mixed on whether they will.
Henderson suggested state and local governments will give the federal government this data: “States should not rely on federal prodding, trying to withhold funding as the basis of their decision on whether to provide data. We think moral suasion, pressure, encouraging them to offer data, which we know they have at their disposal, is the better way to encourage them to take action.”
He also questioned the purity of any data that is collected, saying, “Lying is a normal part of policing in many places across the country. Police officers lie in in their reports. They write narratives up to justify the actions that they wanted to take or did take.”
Strengthening oversight
Beyond collecting data, the Justice in Policing Act works to strengthen federal oversight over state and local law departments.
For instance, it gives new subpoena powers to the US attorney general to investigate law enforcement groups that have been accused of having engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional conduct. It also bestows those same subpoena abilities on state attorneys general, and empowers them to fix pattern or practice constitutional violations at the state and local level. The DOJ would also be required to begin publicly reporting how many of these investigations have been launched, are active, or closed.
The bill would also charge the US attorney general with:
Developing and recommending a set of uniform standards for all state and local departments
Reviewing departments’ accreditation standards
Ensuring only departments that meet accreditation standards receive grant money
Giving Congress reports on laws that impede investigations into police misconduct and racial bias in policing
Creating a task force that would uncover allegations of misconduct, and refer them to the proper authorities
Also, the bill would create pilot programs to study how the implementation of new standards and adoption of new techniques (like deescalation practices, for instance) improve policing. And new grants would be established to help fund community organizations that work on policing; to study and promote hiring, training, and oversight; and to assist departments in developing new policing techniques and public safety protocols.
Making racial profiling illegal
The bill would make racial profiling in law enforcement illegal, would mandate that federal law enforcement officers undergo racial bias training, and tasks the DOJ with creating a racial profiling and racial bias training program.
Ideally, mandating racial bias training would change the disproportionate number of people of color killed by police, but as Vox’s Julia Belluz whether they work is a subject of great debate.
For instance, a 2020 report on the New York Police Department’s implicit bias program found it had little effect on police interactions with people of color; in fact, stops and frisks of Black residents went up slightly following the sessions — 1 percentage point for stops, and 2 percentage points for frisks. It’s a result that underscores the fears some researchers have about these trainings.
“Training can bring bias to the surface,” Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin told Belluz. “It can activate stereotypes.”
Limiting the violence police are allowed to use
No-knock warrants, which allow police to enter private property without announcing themselves, would be banned at the federal level in drug cases under the bill; the warrants would still be allowed in other types of cases.
These warrants became the subject of national attention following the death of Breonna Taylor, who police killed in her own bed after they forced their way into her apartment unannounced, looking for someone who did not live there. Arguably, this would also make police officers safer; unsure who was breaking into the apartment, Taylor’s partner — who was a licensed gun owner — fired a warning shot that police say injured an officer on the scene.
The act also attempts to directly address the cause of George Floyd’s death — officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds — by banning chokeholds and carotid holds (that pinch the carotid artery responsible for feeding blood to the brain) at the federal level, and classify the use of either technique by law enforcement at all levels of government as a civil rights violation.
To curb other types of police violence, the bill prohibits federal officers from using deadly force unless all “reasonable” alternatives have been exhausted, including deescalation techniques, nonlethal force, and at least one verbal warning. Officers would also have to ensure there’s no risk of bystanders being injured, and be positive deadly force is the only way to avoid “serious bodily injury or death,” either of the officer or someone else on the scene before using deadly force.
Federal officers would similarly be barred from using nonlethal force unless it was deemed completely necessary to apprehend a suspect, and all other avenues had been exhausted.
The bill asks that state and local governments pass laws requiring their officers to meet these same standards. As is the case with other provisions, those governments that fail to do so would lose access to federal funding.
Limiting military equipment
The George Floyd Act would limit — but not end — transfers of military goods, like drones and body armor, to state and local police departments and require any request not made by a federal agency be made public. It would prohibit the transfer of a number of weapons and vehicles, including bayonets, grenades, and drones, although it would be possible to grant waivers for banned vehicles.
The transfers would have to be used for counterterrorism or general law enforcement work — they could no longer be used for anti-drug or border security activities. Any item once allowed, but banned by the bill would need to be given back to the federal government, as would any equipment given to a department found to have committed a civil rights violation.
Mandating body cameras
All federal officers would be required to wear body cameras, and the bill spells out how they are to be worn, as well as when they are to be used — making clear that they must be on for virtually all interactions with the public, unless an official is on private property without a warrant, is speaking to the victim of a crime, or to an anonymous source and is asked to switch the camera off. Officers who do not comply will be subject to disciplinary action that their superiors believe is “appropriate.”
The bill also requires agencies to maintain video files from the cameras for at least six months, and at least three years in certain cases, including when a recording features use of force or an interaction that a complaint is filed about. And the bill would create paths by which a member of the public featured in a given video — as well as members of their family and their legal representation — could access the footage.
Cameras will also be required in cars; and the act would ban the use of facial recognition technology in either the cameras or on the footage. Any state and local departments willing to comply with the federal rules would be eligible for grants to expand their camera programs.
Research on whether body cameras improve outcomes is mixed, and the Justice in Policing Act hopes to make its body camera program a platform for further study of the issue: The Office of Audit, Assessment, and Management would be responsible for undertaking research on the technology’s effectiveness, and would be required to submit its findings to Congress.
Criminalizing sexual misconduct
The Justice in Policing Act works to decrease sexual assaults by making any sexual contact between a federal officer and someone they are detaining illegal, and punishable by a fine, as well as up to 15 years imprisonment.
It asks state and local governments to ban the practice as well, and prohibits any government that fails to do so — and that does not submit reports on the number of officers who do have sexual contact with those in their custody — from receiving money from the COPS program. The attorney general would be required to collect the information state and local governments submit, and turn it over to the Government Accountability Office, which would analyze it and submit a report to Congress.
The full scope of police sexual misconduct is unknown — many police sexual assaults aren’t reported — but a 2015 Associated Press study found 990 officers lost their licenses due to sexual violence allegations between 2009 and 2014.
Reformers are divided on whether the Justice in Policing Act goes far enough
A number of activists, including those with the NAACP, National Urban League, and the National Action Network support the Justice in Policing Act; other reformers, however, argue that it does not go far enough.
“It’s not a few rotten apples,” Stinson said. “To some extent, I think policing is rotten to the core. And I don’t see how these bills, in some respects, are anything more than political crime control rhetoric.”
And activists like Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, believe the Justice in Policing Act is far too narrow in scope to achieve needed change.
“What if we made big moves?” Simpson said. “I’m not saying it’s bad legislation: Everything that’s in there makes sense for the most part, it’s things that people want. But is it the biggest, boldest move that we can make?”
Simpson cited the Movement for Black Lives’ BREATHE Act, as a proposal better suited to the the policing problem.
That plan would defund many federal law enforcement groups, and use the savings to fund community programs, public safety initiatives, as well as policies attacking the root causes of inequity and over policing, as a better alternative. The BREATHE Act also uses a more complex strategy to push state and local reforms at the federal level that relies more on grants and incentives than on restricting access to federal funding.
Other reformers, like a coalition of 38 groups backing proposals by the Center for Disability Rights, have called for the framework of the Justice in Policing Act to be kept, but for its policies to be taken further — that, for instance, qualified immunity be abolished for all government officials rather than only officers, or that quick-knock raids be barred alongside no-knock warrants.
Many of the activists who support the Justice in Policing Act do see it as a bold step; Henderson this bill “transformative police accountability legislation.”
“I will tell you this, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is certainly no worse than current law,” Hewitt said. “It’s far better.”
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Starship goes up. Starship goes down. But is the program moving forward? - “One day, the true measure of success will be that Starship flights are commonplace.” - link
New Nintendo Switch production to begin in June, will be 4K when docked - Bloomberg report locks down details about new OLED panel supply chain. - link
Researchers build a swimming robot that works in the Mariana Trench - New muscles and electronics setup were needed for the crushing pressures. - link
Facebook lifts ban on US political advertising - Social media behemoth had been under pressure to rescind post-election moratorium. - link
Google claims it will stop tracking individual users for ads - Google says anonymized, group-based interest tracking will be good enough. - link
