Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

Lead poisoning causes immense societal harm: brain damage, chronic illness, lowered IQ, elevated mortality. Lead exposure in childhood has been linked with violent crime rates decades later. Extremely high lead levels can lead to seizures, coma, and death. Lower levels tend to cause less detectable harm, but there’s no safe level of lead exposure: Scientists’ current best guess is that any lead exposure at all causes harm.

Many of lead’s dangers have been known for decades. Leaded gasoline was invented by a General Motors research lab in the 1920s, and already at that time, there were people noticing that children exposed to high levels of lead suffered devastating health consequences. But Thomas Midgley Jr., leaded gasoline’s inventor, campaigned to convince the world that it was safe. (Midgley also invented ozone-depleting refrigerants called CFCs, which would end up being banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol; he’s been called a “one-man environmental disaster.”)

For more than 50 years after the invention of leaded gas, virtually all cars around the world pumped aerosolized lead into the air.

In the 1970s, though, following more research firmly establishing lead’s harms, rich countries started addressing the problem. In the US, the Clean Air Act imposed restrictions on lead pollution, and a few years later, the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that gas pumps offer unleaded gas, as the first step toward a transition away from leaded fuels.

The EPA estimates that the amount of lead used in automotive gasoline in the US fell by 99 percent between 1976 and 1989. Measured blood lead levels followed. Crime rates dropped, too. Those benefits were realized even though the lead used in gasoline (and in paint and other consumer products) before bans on its use is still widespread in our soil and dust and still posing a major public health challenge.

In 1996, the EPA completely banned leaded gasoline for on-road vehicles. Japan and Europe issued their own bans over the same time period. In 2000, China and India followed.

How the United Nations phased out leaded gasoline worldwide

In 117 countries around the world, though — largely low-income ones — leaded gasoline was still in use.

In 2002, the UN’s Environment Program (UNEP) launched a sustained effort to phase out leaded gasoline, called the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles.

UNEP Director Inger Andersen describes it as a “UN-backed alliance of governments, businesses and civil society,” and its tactics were quite flexible: convincing governments of policy bans, teaching businesses how to make cleaner vehicles, finding investment for better refineries, and in one case navigating a massive bribery scandal, when it turned out that a leaded gasoline producer, the chemical company Innospec Ltd., was fighting to keep its product legal in Indonesia by bribing government officials.

The UN’s initiative saw fast adoption in sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 countries signed on to a plan to de-lead their gasoline in 2005. It made slower progress elsewhere, especially in the Middle East, where many countries had enormous stockpiles of leaded gasoline.

In 2011, a study by Peter L. Tsai and Thomas H. Hatfield estimated the phaseout of leaded gas was increasing global GDP by 4 percent, or $2.4 trillion (counting health savings as well as social benefits from higher IQ and lower crime).

They also estimated the direct benefits in lives saved at 1.2 million a year. The phaseout of leaded gasoline has been the “single most important strategy” for combating lead poisoning, they conclude, “with the economic benefits exceeding costs by more than 10 times.”

And while there’s a lot of academic debate about the exact magnitude of lead’s effect on crime, there’s no debate that transitioning away from lead fuels passes almost any cost-benefit analysis: Poisoning your entire population is just really bad, and transitioning away from leaded fuels is one of the cheapest ways to dramatically reduce lead poisoning.

By 2014, automotive leaded gasoline was legal only in parts of Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

By 2016, it was just Algeria, Yemen, and Iraq. And now, two decades after the campaign kicked off, cars everywhere in the world will use unleaded gas.

The road ahead

The end of leaded gasoline in automobiles is a big step forward, and one worth celebrating. But the fight to end lead poisoning’s effects on our world and on the next generation has a lot further to go.

In the US, leaded gasoline in cars has been illegal for more than 25 years. But the lead from that gasoline has settled in the soil and dust, and still contributes to poisoning children today.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks lead exposure across the country. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, it found that in most states, between 1 and 5 percent of children had more than 5 micrograms per deciliter of lead in their blood — enough to potentially cause them serious health problems and lifelong harm. (Children exposed to lead in the US today are mostly exposed through soil and dust ingestion. Often, dust has lead in it because paint in old houses contains lead.)

Worldwide, UNICEF estimates that around one in three children have lead levels in excess of the 5 µg/dL line. While leaded gasoline for automotives has historically been the single biggest contributor to lead levels in population centers, there are others: heavy industry, inadequate battery recycling and disposal, decaying pipes, and lead-based pottery glazes, for example.

In the US, lead-based fuels, though illegal on the road, are still allowed in aviation and a few other specialized contexts — and there’s no real progress toward phasing them out. While they cause a lot less lead exposure than automotive leaded gasoline did, the fact that there’s no known safe level of lead exposure should still give us pause — even the smaller exposures from these rarer sources can cause problems.

The end of leaded gasoline throughout the world will do a lot to fight lead poisoning by itself, but ideally it would be accompanied by measures to attack the other ways lead enters children’s bodies. The bipartisan infrastructure bill making its way through the US Congress includes money for lead remediation measures and lead pipe replacement — but it’s probably not enough to replace all aging lead pipes in the US.

UNICEF calls for “completely removing the potential for exposure to lead in areas where children live, play and learn,” and while it would be a tremendous expense, it would have a tremendous return. Poisoning the next generation is about as shortsighted as it gets, and investment in lead protection is an investment in our future.

Celebrating — and learning from — humanity’s achievements

The UN is frequently criticized as “bloated, undemocratic”, not focused on the world’s biggest problems, and not capable of moving us toward meaningful solutions.

But the worldwide elimination of leaded gasoline in cars is a genuine achievement worth celebrating — and worth examining, to see how the world can use the tactics that triumphed against leaded gasoline to combat the other huge problems requiring international coordination that face us in the 21st century.

The team at work on it has already expanded their focus to the next crucial transition for road vehicles: a move from gasoline-based ones to lower-emissions and zero-emissions alternatives. The leaded-gas initiative “is testament to the power of multilateralism to move the world towards sustainability and a cleaner, greener future,” Andersen, the director of UNEP, argued in a press release accompanying the announcement. “We are invigorated to change humanity’s trajectory for the better through an accelerated transition to clean vehicles and electric mobility.”

They’re also at work phasing out lead paint, another major source of household lead exposure.

The road map that the UN used for the fight against leaded gasoline — a combination of technological solutions that made it easier to switch away from lead in engines, political coalition-building, partnerships with businesses, and a few prosecutions of bad actors who used bribery to keep lead in business — is a road map that can be applied to challenges like climate change as well.

And separate from all of that, it’s worth taking a moment to rejoice in humanity’s achievements over death, disease, and our own self-inflicted horrors. Leaded gasoline and its mass use was one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century. Ending it is one of the first big global triumphs of the 21st.

  1. Uyghurs — the majority of whom follow the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of four schools of thought within Sunni Islam — are by far the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, although the region is also home to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Hui (Chinese Muslims). Their culture is distinct from that of Han Chinese — the majority ethnic group in China — in many ways: Their food is largely halal, based on mutton, wheat noodles, nan, and savory pastries.

    Uyghur farmers in Xinjiang were formidable farmers, making virtuosic use of rain-fed agriculture to grow food. But a new agricultural regime would turn the land to another crop: cotton.

    Xinjiang has long been strategically central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project intended to link China globally via railroads, shipping lanes, and gas pipelines. The initiative’s central arteries crisscross the province, which happens to also hold huge reserves of natural gas. As the Chinese government has moved to assert tighter control over the region, cotton has operated as both an end and a means. In the 1990s, it was used as a way to encourage Han migration into the region. Today, it feeds the Chinese textile industry.

    Beijing’s effort to move cotton and cloth production west to Xinjiang unfolded in several phases. The Eighth Five-Year Plan (1991-1995) highlighted the region’s huge potential for cotton, and the subsequent plan specified that Xinjiang be turned into a national cotton-producing base. Meanwhile, planners also transferred textile production west, from its traditional base on the east coast. Central planners felt that China’s textile industry could become more competitively priced by being closer to the cotton fields and employing a cheaper rural workforce.

    Twenty years later, Xinjiang has a cheaper workforce than planners in the ’90s could have dreamed, and the reason is disturbing. From softer, coercive policies — like giving cotton quotas to Uyghur farmers that they had to meet, even if it wasn’t profitable — Beijing has turned to a policy of forcefully interning Uyghurs in massive, heavily guarded camps, subjecting them to what it has described as “reeducation” but is believed to include sterilization and forced labor. They are actions that, when taken together, constitute what the US State Department has termed a genocide. They are actions that have also been a boon to industry.

    The Chinese government dramatically scaled up its repressive policies against Xinjiang’s Uyghurs in late 2016, when Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, a hardliner who has escalated invasive, tech-driven policing and monitoring tactics in China, assumed leadership of Xinjiang. Massive internment camps, which Beijing terms “vocational education centers” — though satellite imagery has revealed that these camps are encircled with barbed wire fencing and surveilled from watchtowers — have since been erected.

    The policy of “reeducating” Uyghurs has dovetailed with a desire to keep garment production in China after labor costs there grew uncompetitive with those in places like Vietnam or Bangladesh. By 2018, evidence began to emerge of a major pipeline between detention centers and factories producing garments for US brands when the Associated Press tracked shipments from a factory inside a Xinjiang internment camp to Badger Sportswear in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger quickly moved to source its sportswear elsewhere.

    But garments stitched by imprisoned Uyghurs were quietly entering the American wardrobe through myriad avenues — much of it, it would soon be revealed, made from cotton harvested by enslaved people. In January 2021, a shipment of men’s cotton shirts from Uniqlo was blocked from entering the Port of Los Angeles by US Customs agents who believed the goods were produced in part using forced labor in Xinjiang. In July, France’s antiterrorism prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into four brands that it has alleged profited from human rights crimes in Xinjiang: Zara, Uniqlo, Skechers, and SMCP (owner of Sandro and Maje). Even after the situation in Xinjiang had become unmistakable, it was clear that the effort to remove cotton harvested by forced labor from the market was squarely at odds with the imperative to produce ever- cheaper clothing.

    Journalists face extreme restrictions in their attempts to enter Xinjiang, but I had procured a tourist visa for my December 2018 research trip to China and, following my time on the nation’s east coast, I had planned to head to Xinjiang in the guise of a sightseer, to gather whatever I could that way. My research focus was, at that time, on the ecological costs of cotton.

    I had enrolled in a formal “Silk Road” tour as a way to avoid imperiling Uyghur interview subjects, who can be arrested for something as minor as speaking to an American. Days before I was scheduled to fly out, I got an email from the tour company with the subject line “URGENT.” “I regret to inform you that we have to cancel your tour,” the email said. “It is something beyond our control.”

    Months passed before I again heard from the American employee of the Uyghur-owned tour company who had informed me of the cancellation. She was back in the US, she said, and wanted to explain what had happened now that she had access to a secure email account. Days before my tour, the family that ran the company had been rounded up and “sent to their home village” — a euphemistic way to say that they were sent to an internment camp.

    At the time, the detention of Uyghurs by the Chinese government was just beginning to be widely reported. I felt sick. I had assumed that I was being kept out because the ruling Chinese Communist Party was becoming more careful about concealing its actions in Xinjiang and didn’t want to risk even the occasional nosy tourist. This, however, was more direct, more brutal, more blunt.

    A lone worker surrounded by yards and yards of dyed red cloth.

    Since that first inkling that something was awry in the region, Xinjiang has emerged as the center of an international crisis. In March 2020, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) called on the Commerce Department to take steps to prevent goods produced by forced labor in Xinjiang from entering the US market. Even as the international outcry grew, Beijing worked to keep the region cloaked in secrecy. Journalists looking to document what is occurring in Xinjiang are forced to rely on satellite photos, sift through government budget reports, and collect footage of closed doors and high fences. In the startling glimpses that have emerged, cotton was front and center.

    In July 2020, more than 190 organizations — interfaith groups, labor unions, Uyghurs’ rights groups, environmental organizations, anti-slavery organizations — spanning 36 countries issued a call to action, seeking formal commitments from clothing brands to completely disengage from any connection to Uyghur forced labor, either through sourcing, business relationships, or labor transfers, which serve to pipe Uyghurs from internment camps in Xinjiang to factories in other regions of China. In December 2020, German anthropologist Adrian Zenz released an intelligence briefing directly linking the cotton harvest with forced labor.

    When I learned about how cotton was being harvested in Xinjiang, I thought about the tour guide who had been scheduled to drive me around, talking about the silk of China’s past. I wondered if he had become one of the prisoners laboring in the fields, picking the cotton of China’s present.

    Corporations didn’t end up sourcing garments from Xinjiang internment camps by accident.

Apparel is a footloose industry, and forced labor is rampant. Brands actively seek out countries that don’t enforce their labor laws, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, “then put enormous price pressure on suppliers, guaranteeing that they’ll violate labor laws.” The companies’ public statements reveal a desire to project certainty: “Nike does not source products from the [Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region] and we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region,” reads an undated statement from Nike that also acknowledges that its supply chains are opaque, even to the company itself. “Nike does not directly source cotton, or other raw materials,” the statement continues, but “traceability at the raw materials level is an area of ongoing focus.” The company concluded by saying that it was working with suppliers and others to better “map material sources.”

Slave cotton is far from new. The use of forced labor by an authoritarian communist regime to grow cotton can — and ought to — inspire the ire of the democratic West. But “free market” cotton has generally entailed very little freedom for most of those involved in its production. There is no global cotton trade outside of brutal colonial or neocolonial relations of power. Cheap cotton has been morally compromised for several hundred years.

The history of European imperialism, industrialization, and cotton are so intertwined as to be nearly identical. Cotton textiles were among the main products for which Britain colonized India. This cotton fabric was in turn the main currency used to purchase enslaved people from Africa, who were forced to grow commodity crops in the New World. After the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the plantation’s crop par excellence in the United States. In the post-Civil War South, cotton continued to be made by unfree labor, as
systematic efforts deprived formerly enslaved people of both land and alternative means of subsistence, all to force them into cotton sharecropping arrangements. Whatever could not be accomplished by this means was accomplished by Black Codes that allowed local authorities to arrest freed people for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor.

Large Southern landowners, cotton traders, and merchants — the same actors who had benefited from the antebellum order — were so successful in their efforts to reestablish cotton growing in the American South by forcing formerly enslaved people and landless white tenants to grow cotton via a punishing system of perpetual debt, that their strategy, known as sharecropping, became a model the world over. Today, small cotton farmers in India, for example, face crushing debt.

Private companies may direct flows of garments, but they travel along routes drawn by imperial legacies and colonial armies. In the cotton field, the division between the state and the corporation often fades away entirely. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the Chinese state-owned entity that administers Xinjiang and directs the cultivation of most of its cotton, is both a corporation and an army.

As for the garment trade itself, that too has relied on the movements of big state actors, and not just a handful of errant entrepreneurs. The globalization of the US garment industry came about as the result of the US State Department’s Cold War policy. After World War II, the Allied powers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan and moved to re-industrialize it as swiftly as possible so it wouldn’t “fall” to communism. MacArthur’s first economic priority was the Japanese textile industry, which had been nearly wiped out by the war. Factories were rebuilt and modernized. The State Department even subsidized the shipment of raw American cotton to Japan.

To absorb the product of these new mills, the United States then opened up its hitherto heavily protected garment market, and Japanese cloth and clothing flowed in. The US textile and garment industries were made a sacrificial lamb, and over the next half-century, garment workers’ rights eroded, and Americans got used to spending less and less on clothing made by workers whose pay became worse and worse.

The pipeline of low-cost Asian- made clothing had been long established by the time China opened its economy and revved up as a garment producer. Workers’ rights had never been on the minds of the architects of these policies, and remained an afterthought.

In March 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart, Director Yang Jiechi, for a conversation that quickly devolved into a war of words. Yang made a thinly veiled allusion to the history of slavery in the US and suggested that with a record like that, the US had no right to lecture China. “It’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world,” he told Blinken. (This line of attack is frequently taken by Chinese troll armies, networks likened to Russian troll farms mobilized online to attack anyone posting concerns about the Uyghurs.)

Wang’s throwdown was cynical and self-serving. But it highlighted the irony of the US position. The US had emerged as a global leader in the fight against China’s oppression of the Uyghurs: It is the first government to call it a genocide, the first to ban imports of Xinjiang cotton — steps that Canada, the UK, Australia, and the EU also appear to be on their way to taking. In taking a hard stand, however, on China’s actions as a genocidal power using slave labor to harvest cotton for a voracious global market, the United States was looking at itself in the not-so-distant past.

Self-reflection (or lack of it) aside, there are enormous complexities involved in trying to force the global tentacles of Western multinationals out of a forced labor industry.

According to Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium, an estimated 1.5 billion garments made with Xinjiang cotton streamed into the US market each year before the ban took hold, and there are significant obstacles to knowing how much the ban has reduced that number. “Most consumers do not want to wear clothing made with forced labor,” Nova told me. “That’s a given. And if they knew that a particular product was made with forced labor, very few people would buy it. Of course, that’s where transparency comes in.”

Rights groups have expressed frustration recently that, although the US has placed restrictions on Xinjiang cotton, it is nearly impossible to see how they are being enforced. US Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency responsible, discloses the total number and dollar value of shipments detained quarterly, but that’s it. There are some exceptions — as when the news broke about blocked Uniqlo goods — but most such detentions never reach the press. The public has no way of knowing how many of them involve Xinjiang cotton, let alone which brands are implicated.

Young girl looks through a wall of clothing surrounded by other shoppers.

Ana Hinojosa, the agency’s executive director for trade remedy law enforcement, acknowledges that in the reporting, Xinjiang cotton detentions and others “are all lumped in together, mainly because it would be very difficult for us to continually update these moving numbers.”

The federal agency “is not required to make that any of that public,” confirms Esmeralda López, legal and policy director of the International Labor Rights Forum, but, she adds, “we think that it’s necessary to ensure effective enforcement.”

It matters, said Nova, because corporations are “waiting to see whether there’s going to be aggressive enforcement before they decide whether to really exit the region.”

Garment supply chains are incredibly complex. So far, Eileen Fisher, ASOS, Marks and Spencer Group, OVS, Reformation, WE Fashion, and others have all publicly committed to follow the steps laid out in the call to action put forward by the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. These steps demand that companies engage in intensive research into their own supply chains. Without this kind of work, watchdog groups say, it’s nearly impossible to suss out Xinjiang cotton from the rest.

Cotton picked in Xinjiang may be mixed with cotton from other regions as it is spun into yarn. That yarn may be knit or woven into fabric far from Xinjiang, cut and sewn into a garment still farther afield — likely in Vietnam or Bangladesh. Brands like to point out this complexity to disavow knowledge of what occurs in their supply chains.

But rights groups argue that companies do have choices. “I don’t think that we need to accept those limits,” said Allison Gill, forced labor program director/senior cotton campaign coordinator at Global Labor Justice — International Labor Rights Forum. “A company can tell us that a product was produced in a facility that also processes sesame and nuts. They can tell us all kinds of things if they want to.” According to Gill, “Xinjiang is the central case that we will use for years to show what an absolute failure voluntary standards have been [in] the auditing approach to supply chain. I mean, all of these companies that were operating there, they were all audited, they all passed their audits.”

In Xinjiang, there are known unknowns. “If you have clear due diligence policies, and if you’re saying, ‘We don’t use forced labor goods,’ and you can’t have factory auditors go in and actually check factories,” said Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, “then you need to leave.”

The Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region is calling on brands to make public commitments to disengage from the region, but many brands have said they’d rather exit quietly because they fear losing Chinese market share if they pull out of Xinjiang openly. They’re afraid the Chinese government and nationalist consumers there will interpret any criticism of its conduct in Xinjiang as an open threat and retaliate.

That’s not an unrealistic fear. Days after Sweden joined in the coordinated sanctions on senior officials involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Youth League launched an online attack on the Swedish retailer H&M, zeroing in on a year-old statement on H&M’s website expressing concern over human rights violations in the Uyghur region. The next day, H&M vanished from the Chinese internet. Major e-commerce platforms including Alibaba’s Taobao dropped its goods, and one ride-hailing app, Didi Chuxing, did not recognize its stores as locations. The party newspaper also leveled criticisms at Burberry, Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and Zara for past statements on Xinjiang, some from as long ago as two years. Celebrities including pop singer Wang Yibo announced they were breaking endorsement contracts.

“Normally in our work, it’s easier to get the brands to say they’re doing the right thing than it is to get them to do it. That has flipped to a degree on this issue,” said Nova. “If their position is that their level of access to China’s consumer market is more important to them than not being directly complicit in the worst human rights crimes that are taking place in the world today, their consumers have a right to know that.”

Then there are those, he argues, that have simply done nothing. “We’ve seen nothing whatsoever from Target, nothing whatsoever from Walmart. Nothing except rhetoric from Amazon, among many others,” Nova says. (Neither Target nor Walmart replied to Vox’s requests for comment; Amazon issued a statement that read, in part, “Amazon expects all products sold in the Amazon Stores to be manufactured and produced in accordance with our Supply Chain Standards. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action and remove the violating product and may suspend privileges to sell.”)

One promising new tool in supply chain transparency is technology developed by a company called Oritain, which can analyze a cotton fiber and determine its point of origin. Cotton from different locations bears different molecular blueprints: Distance from the sea will affect its sulfur content, for instance, while altitude will impact its hydrogen. However, Grant Cochrane, Oritain’s CEO, cautioned, “We’re not a standalone service. We work with other systems: really solid traceability systems.”

Even if the US cotton ban is made airtight, to work optimally, “It’s very important that a cotton ban … be a global effort,” said Johnson Yeung, urgent appeal coordinator and campaigner at the Clean Clothes Campaign. Yeung points to Muji, the Japanese retailer, which has said it has stopped sending Xinjiang cotton products to the US but will continue to sell them in countries without the ban. In Hong Kong, where Yeung is based, Muji actively advertises the presence of Xinjiang cotton in its products — a practice it jettisoned in Western markets after an uproar in the human rights community — attempting to brand “Xinjiang” as an upscale, luxury marker.

In the meantime, for Uyghurs in the diaspora, an act as simple as clothes shopping has become fraught. Zumretay Arkin is the program and advocacy manager at the World Uyghur Congress, part of the coalition asking brands to leave the Uyghur region. “I’m not an angel,” said Arkin. “I used to shop fast fashion.” Now, though, when Arkin sees cotton clothes in stores, “I just freeze there, thinking, ‘Maybe one of my relatives made this piece.’”

Arkin’s grandmother was a retired seamstress who used to sew clothing for Arkin using colorful printed cloth, sometimes cutting up her old dresses and veils to use as materials. Arkin brought these handmade garments along as a treasured memory when she immigrated to Canada at age 10. When Arkin’s grandmother passed away in 2017, Arkin could not go back for the funeral. The risk of detention was too great. Today, long dresses like the ones Arkin’s grandmother both wore and repurposed for Arkin’s wardrobe have been criminalized in Xinjiang. Uyghur women are stopped on the street to have long dresses shortened with scissors on the spot.

Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, also finds it fraught to shop for clothes these days. In retaliation for Abbas’s activist work in the US, she alleges, authorities in Xinjiang detained her sister, a retired medical doctor, in September 2018. (Radio Free Asia has confirmed her detention.) “I’m afraid of going out and buying some of the things in the store now. Because I don’t know where my sister is,” or whether she is being forced to make products, Abbas said. Although China’s government has framed its labor transfers with the dystopian euphemism of “job training” programs, Abbas notes that “Uyghurs being held and sent to those factories to work, they are professors, writers, doctors, successful business people, elites — they’re professionals in the different fields.”

Abbas lives with her husband, who is also Uyghur, in Herndon, Virginia. His parents, both over 70, have been missing since 2017. So have four siblings and their spouses, along with 14 nieces and nephews. The Abbas family is far from exceptional in this, she said. “Me and my husband are the example of every single Uyghur in the diaspora.”

The United States’ link to the Uyghur internment camps isn’t just a matter of parallel histories.

US corporations have played a central role in creating the situation in Xinjiang today, and consumers have been their unwitting accomplices. “When you pour money into a region where there’s rampant forced labor, you’re both supporting and profiting from forced labor,” said Nova.

“Forced labor is a spectrum,” Gill said. “People in forced labor very often have agency, they are often making very hard choices. But genocide — genocide is different.”

“We hear a lot of different arguments for basically ignoring these atrocities, one being, well, the US needs to clean up their own act first,” said Julie Millsap, director of public affairs and advocacy at the Campaign for Uyghurs. “It’s not that simple. This is also our issue. We don’t get to say that while we’re improving things … in the States that we’re going to outsource human rights abuses.”

Sofi Thanhauser is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books on January 25, 2022. She teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

But the evidence for the approach is mixed.

A 2015 review of the research, published in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, analyzed the results of interrupter programs across several American cities. None of the five studies included produced fully positive results, such as reductions in gun violence or murders. One program in Pittsburgh fared so poorly that it was linked to “an increase in rates of monthly aggravated assaults and gun assaults” in some neighborhoods.

The most famous of these studies, from 2009, looked at Chicago’s interrupter program. Comparing the sites of interrupter programs to similar areas, the study found positive effects for shootings in four of seven evaluation sites. Supporters would hope to see interrupter sites consistently perform better than comparable areas without the intervention; instead, they performed barely better than a coin flip.

The researchers also conducted social network analyses in these areas to see if they could pick up deeper changes in homicides and violence. They again found the outcomes varied widely.

“The evidence is mixed,” Butts, who led the 2015 review and subsequent research on interrupters, said. “We need to do more studies.”

A 2020 review from John Jay College, which examined various alternatives to police, concluded the evidence base for interrupters was “promising but mixed.”

Some of the studies produced positive effects. The most promising — a program in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago — “was associated with significant reductions in overall violent crime (–45%) and shooting injuries (–39%).” A survey in New York gauged propensity for interpersonal violence among men ages 18 to 30, finding it dropped across areas both with and without interrupter programs but that “the decrease was steeper in Cure Violence areas (33% vs. 12%).”

But a bulk of the studies reviewed were mixed or disappointing. An interrupter program in Richmond, California, “may have been associated with statistically significant reductions in firearm violence, but researchers noted small increases in other types of violence.” Another in Baltimore had results that “were inconsistent across several sites.”

The research also consists of largely correlational work, with no randomized controlled trials — the gold standard for evidence — on interrupters to date. So instead of randomly selecting some neighborhoods, exclusively deploying interrupters there, and seeing how those places compare to similar areas, the studies typically looked at correlations between places where interrupters were believed to be active and places where interrupters by and large weren’t.

Given that less rigorous studies tend to be more likely to produce positive results for a studied intervention in crime and justice, it’s all the more worrying the weak studies for interrupters have found mixed to negative effects.

“It’s concerning,” Anna Harvey, a public safety expert at New York University who worked on the John Jay report, told me. “It really is an example of weak evidence.”

Advocates of the approach emphasize the more positive findings in the studies, including reductions in shootings in specific areas or neighborhoods. But the same studies also often found negative or null findings.

For example, the evidence summary from the interrupter program Cure Violence cited the 2009 Chicago evaluation to claim a “41% to 73% reduction in shootings.” But the bulk of this reduction wasn’t statistically significant; it didn’t differ from results in control groups, which is why the researchers could only link the intervention to drops in shootings in four of seven study sites — again, barely better than a coin flip.

When they acknowledge the mixed findings in the research, advocates of interrupters point to a range of problems. At the top, interrupter programs face inconsistent funding and support, particularly as changes in leadership and politics prompt the people in charge to divert resources elsewhere. That makes it difficult to implement these programs in the way they’re supposed to be implemented — and could explain some of the poor findings in the research.

“Not having a result in every community on every measure, to me, is way too high a bar with half funding, irregular funding,” Slutkin told me. “It has to be done right all the time — and that requires a consistent amount of training and technical assistance on the spot.”

They also argue that the approach is particularly difficult to research. As John Jay’s report noted, interrupter programs involve working with “individuals who are disconnected from traditional institutions and systems of support and are already involved in illegal activities.” Many of these people are going to be hard to follow in a scientific way, if they agree to participate in a study at all. That might lead to an absence of evidence without necessarily meaning the approach is ineffective.

Still, this is the evidence we have to work with. And based on that, the interrupter approach is at best mixed.

The choice isn’t interrupters or the current policing model

For some activists, the goal of these programs isn’t just to complement the jobs of police, but to replace them partially or entirely, using both interrupters and other approaches. Advocates, like #8toAbolition (a reference to abolishing the police) and DefundPolice.org, have repeatedly cited interrupter programs as an alternative to the police. The media has played a role, too: One article in Rolling Stone presented interrupters as one idea for a “Cop-Free World.” Another in Vox posed the idea of interrupters to help “replace traditional police officers.”

When Minneapolis officials last year moved to disband the city’s police department and replace it with a new public safety agency, they looked to interrupters as one of several possible replacements for traditional policing.

In the context of the current murder increase, relying on interrupters as an alternative to police, and framing it as such, when it lacks evidence is risky. Policymakers saw that in Minneapolis, where interrupters were reportedly sidelined as demands for more police patrols rose along with violence. Some Minneapolis officials have since walked back their support for disbanding the police department.

Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
A protester hold a sign reading “Defund the Police” outside Hennepin County Government Plaza in Minneapolis during a demonstration against police brutality and racism on August 24, 2020.

There’s no reason interrupters have to be replacements to the police. There’s even less evidence for that than interrupters in general: The studies on interrupters were all done in places where police still exist, so even the most positive empirical findings assume cops are still around.

Nor is the alternative to interrupters simply accepting the status quo with police. It’s still possible to pursue reforms that tackle abuses, and adopt new practices that follow a less punitive, draconian model to policing. Some changes could explicitly embrace a public health approach — for example, deploying special teams, instead of police alone, for 911 calls regarding mental health crises.

Interrupters and police can work side by side, addressing different needs in different spaces — and they do in some cities. “They have different roles,” Slutkin said, although he envisions a world where interrupters are central to crime-fighting policy.

Other research finds strong indications that police do have an effect on crime and violence. A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that more police officers reduce homicides, particularly in Black communities. Reviews of the evidence, including randomized controlled trials, have found strong evidence that specific strategies, like hot spot policing and problem-oriented policing, reduce crime and disorder.

These approaches still represent a break from the policing status quo in many places. They aren’t necessarily punitive; some hot spot policing approaches, for example, require cops to stand in high-crime blocks and take limited, if any, action — instead acting as largely armed surveillance, deterring wrongdoers.

“It doesn’t mean police are a panacea for these things,” Morgan Williams, an economist at Barnard College who studies crime and the criminal justice system, previously told me. “But it does mean we should be very careful about throwing around interventions that we don’t necessarily know come with any important benefits or costs.”

Now, the quantity of the research is skewed toward the policing approaches — making it difficult to say if policing has better evidence than the alternatives or if it’s simply received more attention.

Policing also likely has more costs than interrupters. If a policing approach goes wrong, the unintended consequences can be catastrophic — unnecessary arrests, harassment of neighborhoods, racial discrimination, and police shootings or killings. The downside of an interrupter approach gone wrong is more an opportunity cost: The time and resources dedicated to the program could have gone to something else, but there aren’t big, negative outcomes.

In short: Policing can be effective and doesn’t have to be punitive, but it can lead to bad, unintended consequences. Meanwhile, it’s not clear if interrupters can be effective, even if they don’t appear to lead to negative outcomes.

Of course, interrupters aren’t the only alternative to police for reducing crime and violence. There’s stronger evidence for other approaches, including offering summer jobs programs, raising the age to drop out of school, greening vacant lots, installing more streetlights, providing more drug addiction treatment, having better gun control laws, and raising the alcohol tax.

But these other alternatives tend to work over the longer term, since it takes time to, say, revitalize a community by providing more jobs and safe spaces to address root causes of crime.

The evidence on policing suggests a far quicker effect — since officers can reduce crime in an area the minute they’re deployed there, just by deterring through surveillance.

Interrupters are in some ways supposed to provide the same short-term benefit by stopping conflicts from escalating as soon as they’re deployed. That’s one reason that they’ve gotten so much attention compared to the other alternatives: For policymakers and a public looking for quicker solutions to crime and murder, whether benefits come in the short or long term is a crucial distinction.

But given the disappointing evidence for interrupters, it’s still not clear they can provide the short-term benefits that policing does. And with murders going up, American policymakers need evidence-based solutions to prevent potentially thousands more unnecessary deaths, hopefully right now.

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